Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 4)

Just a quick follow-up to my post from last year. The good news is that my digestion has fully recovered from the gallbladder surgery! I can eat whatever fatty garbage foods I want with minimal issues.

The less good news is that one of the small incisions from my surgery never quite healed right. It took many visits to the surgeon’s office and then the dermatologist to finally get it to close. It continued to cause problems even after that: the scar itself would flare up and become intensely itchy, and I started getting itchy spots elsewhere on my body.

Last fall, I had an awful flare-up associated with getting sick, where my hands broke out in unbelievably itchy blisters like poison ivy, and I had many itchy spots elsewhere on my body. The dermatologist gave me some steroid shots and creams to keep things under control, but since then I have basically always had a handful of itchy spots somewhere on my body. Usually not too bad, but not ideal!

I don’t know why the scar didn’t heal properly, but it seems to have put my immune system on high alert, causing itchy spots to appear all over, especially if I get sick.

After exhausting all other options, today we final took the nuclear option: The dermatologist just excised the whole scar. I have a brand new, much larger wound, but the hope is that this time it will heal cleanly and let my immune system calm down!

I remember the day we met you. We drove a couple of hours from Ithaca to a rescue in Pennsylvania because we wanted to have a good selection of puppies to choose from. You were in a large cage with your littermates, but you looked nothing like them. A black lab mix among a bunch of Australian shepherds. They told us you were born under a porch in Kentucky. I don’t know how you ended up in that shelter in Pennsylvania, but I am glad you did. They told us that you had never really been outside before. We let you out and watched you frolic around the yard on clumsy puppy legs with the bigger puppies. You had a distinctive, playful way of running, lifting both front legs straight out in front of you, a little higher than normal. The little floppy tips of your ears bounced with every step.

We brought you home and gave you a bath and settled in to becoming a family. We learned that you love to eat woodchips, and sunglasses, and remote controls. You learned to walk on a leash, starting out with a length of yarn trailing from your collar as you explored the path behind our condo for the first time. Our very own forest to explore.

Since we didn’t have a yard of our own, you got to go on walks often. You had so much energy that we would pick a 6 foot long dry reed from the marshy drainage next to the road, and use the tassel of seeds on the end of it to go “fishing” for you, luring you to leap higher and higher after it as we walked. We called you our graceful ballerino.

It became our morning routine to go to the grassy field near our condo and play fetch. The road was higher than the field, with a grassy slope that led down to the flat area, and from the top of that hill the frisbee would fly far, and you would run in a black streak down across the field to catch it, or pounce on it in a tumble of legs, and then run it back up the hill. On autumn mornings, the whole field was frosted and the morning sun glowed on the orange and yellow of the trees, and you left long tracks in the frost. You brought the frisbee back to me, soaking wet as the frost melted on your fur, clouds puffing with every panting breath. “Throw it again dad!”

One morning, you met a group of white tailed deer on our field. The two does took off into the bushes as you approached, but when you ran (ears forward, eyes bright, playful front legs forward) toward the buck, he didn’t budge. He charged briefly at you, and you got scared and ran back to me. We joked later that you told us an embellished tale of how you had had a great adventure and you confronted a scary “dragon” and “protected” me.

Another time, it was winter and people had built snowmen on the field. You didn’t notice them at first, but when I threw the frisbee down toward them you ran after it and then stopped short, caught off guard by these strange white towers that had appeared in your field. We had to walk down among them together to show you that they were safe. When the snow got deep, you loved to bound through it like a little deer, chasing snowballs and then leaping your way back to us for the next one. Exhausted but loving every minute.

Your other favorite place was the Ithaca dog park. Big grassy fields, toys, wading pools, and lots of other dogs to play with. You were young and sleek and fast, and would race around the park with other dogs. When you got hot, you would come to the wading pools and splash down into the muddy water and dig dig dig dig dig at the bottom of the pool, splattering water everywhere. The dog park became my refuge from the stresses of graduate school. It’s hard to stay stressed in the presence of so much pure joy.

We went on adventures. You came with us when we went to the Adirondacks with a group of friends, and you and I got covered in mud when we stepped into a deep puddle hidden by leaves. You ran miles ahead on the trail with our runner friend. In the evening, you snuggled up with us on the floor of the cabin.

We took you to Michigan, where you got to enjoy the freedom of the north woods. Running for miles on the trails as we drove around on golf carts and ATVs. We tried taking you out on the kayaks and canoes, but after you fell into the lake from one of the kayaks, you were always wary of water.

At home, you had your stuffed animals that you would carry around the condo and occasionally shake like a vicious hunter. You had a rope pull toy that became absolutely disgusting but you loved it. When it finally fell apart and we had to throw it away, we joked that you called it your “childhood” (since you had had it since you were a baby puppy) and kept asking us where it went. You loved to lounge on your blankets and cushions in our wide picture window and watch the forest and bark at rabbits and deer. In the summer, we would go down the gorge behind our condo to the waterfall. When Erin and I went in the water to swim, you stood on the banks, whining, worried that we were obviously in some distress if we were out in the water.

The evening that I asked Erin to marry me, I talked to you about it first. She and I had just come back from a date and I took you outside for a short walk. I talked to you in the woods as I worked up my nerve, and then we went back inside together and we started the next chapter of our life. (You were very handsome at our wedding rehearsal picnic in your white bow tie.)

You moved with us across the country to Arizona, where we traded gorges and waterfalls for rocky ponderosa forests and sunny days. You discovered the joy of a backyard, and spent many lazy afternoons basking in the sun after playing fetch.

You joined us on adventures here too. You went with Erin to Mexico, and went camping in Utah and Sedona even though you were always a little unclear on why someone would voluntarily choose to sleep somewhere cold and uncomfortable instead of in a nice warm house. You even joined us on our memorable visit to Loy Canyon in Sedona, where you led us down a game trail and we ended up at a dead end 40 feet upslope from the real trail. You trusted us completely as we slid, scrambled, and squeezed our way down the slope and through scrub and cacti to get back on the trail. We all ended up exhausted, hot, and with more than a few cactus related injuries, but you were a trooper.

When we had to leave you at home and go to work, you cried and cried, so we finally decided to get a second pup. You helped us choose from among the puppies at the shelter, playing the best with a little fuzzy guy named Chewbacca, who we renamed Pippin when we took him home. He grew into a big floppy doofus who yanked you around on walks and shoved you aside at the door to the backyard, but you stopped crying when we left you at home because you had a friend.

All of our lives changed when Shane came home. You were a sweet big brother to Shane, greeting him for the first time with gentle sniffs and wags, and tolerating him admirably as he got bigger and more “hands on”. When we put him in a bouncer seat in the backyard while doing yard work, you would lay down next to your baby to keep him company. Then Rowan came, and you were just as sweet with him, even though you were getting older.

The last few years disappeared in a blur, and somehow gradually and then all at once you were an old dog. I wish we had played fetch a few more times before it got too hard for you to run and jump. I wish we had taken you on a few more hikes and walks before even walking became too hard.

You got sick last year and the vet expected that you had only a few months left, but you stayed with us for a whole year. I thought that extra time would help me mentally prepare to say goodbye. It didn’t. Your health finally deteriorated rapidly, and I’m sorry for the pain that you had to endure at the end. I know that it was scary and confusing for you and I hope that you were also able to take some comfort in knowing how much we loved you.

We said goodbye to you yesterday. Deciding and scheduling and then waiting for the end was one of the hardest experiences of my life. I have lost loved ones before, but every loss is a fresh grief, and I was not prepared. It is a desperate, gasping grief that comes in sudden overwhelming waves. I know it will get better with time. I know that you loved us and that we will look back fondly on all of the good memories. That doesn’t make it any easier to say goodbye.

You were our first baby. You made us a family, and were our constant, trusting, loyal companion through some of the most important years of our life. I don’t think I realized how deep our bond was until it was gone.

We will always love you, our sweet Renly pie.

“Sunsets are loved because they vanish. Flowers are loved because they go. The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart. These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.”

Ray Bradbury

In my review of 7 Days to Die, I showed a couple of screenshots of the absurdly huge Lord of the Rings-inspired base that I made in my latest single player game. Now I want to spend some more time showing off the base in more detail. Probably the easiest way to do that is with a video tour:

I know that personally I don’t always want to watch a video when I can read something instead, so I’ll use the rest of this post to walk through the base in writing with lots of screenshots.

This project started out as a regular play-through, with no cheats or changed settings. However, I quickly decided I wanted to build something more creative than just a place where I could survive horde nights. I’ve always loved the epic architecture of Lord of the Rings, and so I thought it would be cool to try to build a base that borrowed from some of the coolest LOTR locations. Once I got motorized vehicles, I started exploring the game world in search of a nice mountain or cliff to use as a starting point.

I was looking for a cliff in particular because I knew I wanted to create a switchback staircase like Dunharrow in LOTR:

Finally, I discovered that the way random world generation works in this game, the steepest cliffs are always in the desert biome. After some more scouting I found a great location and started building:

I knew that in addition to the switchback stairs, I wanted to dig into the mountainside and create my very own Mines of Moria. I started off by digging a tunnel into the mountain for a ways, with a nice arched entrance, leading to a chokepoint:

At the chokepoint itself, I set up a series of electric fences to stun zombies and dart traps in the ceiling with pressure plated beneath, so that zombies would trigger the trap while stunned and be shot from above. I also added a shotgun turret at the end of the chokepoint so that any zombie that somehow made it through the dart traps would be shot from above by the turret:

From the chokepoint, I decided that I wanted to re-create the famous Bridge of Khazad-dûm from Lord of the Rings. If you are less geeky than me and are wondering what the heck I’m talking about, it is the place where Gandalf fights the Balrog and says “You shall not pass!”

I unfortunately didn’t take any screenshots while digging out the chamber where I built the bridge, so I can only show off the finished product. But it was as I was digging out this chamber that I decided to make this building project a bit less tedious by cranking up my block damage to 300%, meaning that I could drill through the rocks of the mountain at 3x the speed. In the end, I made myself a nice deep pit, with a narrow, arcing bridge spanning it. I couldn’t very well summon a balrog, but to get a similar firey ambiance, I put a lot of torches and burning barrels in the pit.

I returned to this pit later for some finishing touches, but for now let’s continue. From the Khazad Dum room, I dug some stairs up, doubling back to end up above the room. Here is where the digging really got serious. I wanted to re-create the huge hall in Moria filled with rank upon rank of pillars stretching off into the distance.

I had learned in the process of digging out the pit for the bridge of Khazad Dum that to dig out such a huge volume block by block would take forever, even with 300% block damage. So instead I got smart. I dug around the perimeter of a huge rectangle and then undermined it so that it collapsed. The way the game physics works, if you cause a collapse, most of the blocks that are no longer supported are destroyed, and a small percentage remain as rubble which is much weaker and easier to clear.

Here are some screenshots showing the stages of digging out this huge hall. It was around this stage of the project that I also started really using “god mode” much of the time.

The full length of the rectangular hall was too much to collapse all at once, so I split it into several chunks. Here’s a little video I recorded of the last chunk collapsing. You can see how very unrealistic the collapse is, but it’s a fast way to clear out a large volume!

After clearing out the space of the hall, I filled it with huge pillars to mimic Moria. I’m pretty pleased with how it came out:

At this point, with the hall constructed, I wanted to build a functional “residential” section of the base. When I decided to build this base, I moved all of my stuff from the original base I had been using from the start of the game, but had just been keeping it stashed in crates out front. My work stations were also just sitting out front, and I wanted to get them placed in an actual “workshop” part of the base.

I created a hallway and staircase off the end of the Moria hall, leading up to a large living space that emerges from the cliff face above the main entrance.

Where the living area emerged from the cliff, I built a huge concrete “prow” sticking out in a way that was sort of reminiscent of the way the Citadel of Gondor sticks out over the walled city of Minas Tirith in LOTR:

Along with the workshop and kitchen, I also made a living area. Not inspired by LOTR (though it might be fun to try a “hobbit hole” sometime), just a nice place to live, complete with bed, couch by the fire, and reading nook.

I also added a spiral staircase from the residential area to the top of the mesa, where I placed a generator and solar panels. I also built a landing pad for my gyrocopter and wired it up with lights to turn on at night.

Once I had the residential area finished, I went back outside. I decided that I wanted to build a tower at the top of the switchback stairs that was (a) reminiscent of Orthanc, Saruman’s tower at Isengard in LOTR, and (b) also an effective horde base. As a reminder, here is what Orthanc looks like:

And here’s what I came up with. A little stubbier than Orthanc, but it gets the right “feel”:

At this point, the base had all of the LOTR “landmarks” I wanted. I had originally thought about doing a Helm’s deep fortress, but ended up not trying to do that too. This was large enough! So my work on the base shifted to trying to improve it on horde nights. I found that the tower worked quite well, but if I camped out in the Khazad Dum room, the zombies didn’t follow the existing paths and instead tunneled through the rock to try to get to me. Their favorite paths were to tunnel just above the main entrance tunnel for some reason, or to try to break into the Moria hall. I also had screamer zombies (zombies that appear when you have been doing too much stuff in an area, such as crafting or digging, and which summon mini-hordes of other zombies) spawning around my workshop or finding their ways in to the Moria hall. So I started trying to work with the zombies, digging formalized tunnels where they had been trying to get in and feeding them toward turrets, or toward the chokepoint.

I found that one downside of the many entrances to the base was that if I was sitting on the bridge of Khazad Dum, a lot of the zombies got killed by the turrets at the different entrances before they could reach me. So, to at least get some idea of what was going on, I rigged motion sensors at each entrance to a set of lights in the Khazad Dum room, so that the lights would tell me where the zombies were coming in. Turns out a lot of the zombies were trying to enter through the south end of the Moria hall, and through the tunnels over the main entrance.

Finally, for no good reason other than that in LOTR the big hall with pillars is supposed to be part of a road, i.e. it is supposed to actually lead somewhere, I extended the tunnel off one end of the big Moria hall so that it came out the distant side of the mesa, and built a big arched bridge spanning the canyon there.

So there you have it! A super-detailed walkthrough of this super-huge base that I built. I’ll finish with a few parting shots showing all the crazy tunnels involved in the base, and then a video I recorded during a horde night so you can see the base in action.

Update: I have managed to export the base as a “prefab” that can be loaded into other people’s games so that it appears in randomly generated worlds. It doesn’t work perfectly – wiring doesn’t transfer, and I had to chop off the mesa unnaturally – but the main parts of the base are there. Check it out: https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie/mods/2306

Me: “It sure has been a long time since you wrote anything. What happened?”

Also me: “Well, you know. It’s hard to find time.”

“Oh really? Seems like you’ve found a lot of time to play video games in the last… What has it been, 9 months since your last blog post? And another 4 before that?”

“You know it’s different with writing. You need a decent block of time to really get into it.”

“Yeah, I seem to recall saying that before about gaming too though. You claim to want to be a writer but when push comes to shove, you make time for video games but not something that is supposedly very important to you. What gives?

“Well, video games are easier right? You play a video game to mentally relax. And they’re all about guaranteed competence. You know that if you keep playing, you’ll get better and more powerful and eventually you’ll win.”

“You do realize that if you wrote regularly you’d get better at that also, right?”

“Yes, but it’s hard.”

“What’s hard about it? Just put the words on the page.”

“It’s easy to put words on the page, but it’s hard to do it well.”

“Who cares if you do it well?”

“I do. I have these ideas in my head, and when they’re there they seem so great, but the moment I try to put them on the page, I realize that they’re not as good as they seemed.”

“But once they’re one the page, then you can make them better. If they’re just rattling around in your head you can’t see where they need to be improved.”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s also scary.”

“What is scary about writing? It’s not like someone is making you do it and they’re going to punish you if you don’t do it well. You’re not being graded. You don’t even have to show it to anyone until you’re ready. Or at all! You can write stuff down and not show it to anyone!”

“I know. But I build these ideas up in my head so much that it’s hard to finally see their flaws when I write them down. One of the main reasons I want to write is to get some part of myself out of my head and into the world. So when I build these ideas up in my head, they get tangled up in my sense of self and self-worth. It’s a lot more pressure when the words that I’m dumping on the page are in some way a part of me.”

“So you’re scared to work on writing that you find important or meaningful, because if it ends up not as good as you hoped, then in some way, you’ve immortalized that you yourself are not as good as you hoped.”

“Yeah. That’s why for a long time I was just doing blog posts here. Blog posts are lower-stress. I especially liked writing reviews of things because I could just jot down my opinions and move on. Not a lot of self-worth caught up in my opinion of the latest video game or TV show or whatever.”

“But you basically stopped writing here on the blog too…”

“Well, toward the end of 2020 I started writing a follow-up to my previous two very personal and philosophical “Finding Balance” posts, trying to figure out the extent to which I actually believe in all the nice things in those posts, and how much of it was trying to justify not working as hard. But that grew into a whole series of posts trying to pin down my own personal understanding of the meaning of life, and whether I am living the values that I claim to believe in. And it got to the point where working on those posts would often ruin my mood and send me into an existential crisis.”

“Sounds like they stopped being low-stakes blog posts and became something very personal, and therefore scary to work on.”

“Yeah. I still want to finish them, but it’s daunting. And it’s not like I have new insights. People are probably better off just reading Sartre.”

“Well, but the point is to get your personal take on these big philosophical questions. But if it’s hard to make progress on this project, take a break and write something else. You have other ideas.”

“Yeah, there’s a novel idea and a nonfiction book idea that have been rattling around in my head for years, but working on a “real” book project seems even more daunting than the philosophical blog posts. It’s much longer, much more work and then when all the work is done I know that I might face rejection trying to get it published anywhere. I have made small starts on both ideas, but never got very far. The self-doubt just kills all motivation.”

“Yeah, I get that. But let’s look at this rationally. What is the worst case scenario if you write?”

“I guess the worst case would be I spend a bunch of time on something that turns out not to be any good, and it doesn’t get published. It’ll feel like I wasted my time and I’ll be embarrassed by how it turned out.”

“And what’s the worst case scenario if you don’t write?”

“I’ll be disappointed in myself for not achieving one of my life goals. I’ll never know if I could’ve gotten something published. My thoughts and ideas will be stuck in my head.”

“The con for writing is interesting: You’ll feel like you wasted your time if what you write isn’t any good, but you’ll at least have something to show for it. Which is more of a waste of time, writing something that ends up not getting published or is not as good as you hoped, or spending that time passively consuming media with no end result to show for it?”

“I mean obviously writing is better. But it doesn’t change that it’s hard and scary and hard to get started and stick with it.”

“So how do we get over it and write anyway?”

“Momentum helps. I should try to write as often as I can. And probably need to get away from the idea that writing can only be done in big chunks. Little bits here and there can add up.”

“And lower the stakes. Everything you write doesn’t have to be the last or most important thing that you write. Especially on a first draft, you know it’s more about getting the words written so that you have something to edit. Writing the first draft is creating the lump of clay, not the finished statue. Nobody just sits down and writes a finished novel in one go.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And the best way to do good creative work is to do a lot of it. Instead of agonizing over one thing, write ten things instead. Maybe nine are crap but one might be great, and you can’t really know until you do it.”

“Yeah, I recall a quote along those lines. Something about how it’s not the writer’s job to judge what they write, it is their job to write it. But I can’t find it.”

“Oh well. There’s always this one. Seems like a good place to end this post. Let’s write.”

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

We’re in the middle of a pandemic, tens of thousands in the US alone are dying mostly preventable deaths, our federal government is doing a worse job managing the crisis than I could have ever imagined, the world economy has been shut down, millions have lost their jobs, and I have barely left the house in over a month. So why do I feel generally… okay?

I don’t feel good about any of this, mind you. But I see a lot of friends on social media who are really struggling, while I am mostly stressed out about normal things like deadlines and responsibilities at work and kids who won’t go to sleep. I’ve been trying to stay aware of how I’m feeling as we watch the world change in unprecedented ways, and I’m actually kind of disturbed by how not-disturbed I am generally feeling about all of this. In many ways the pandemic reminds me of a government shutdown, but worse: It’s a stupid, avoidable situation that is hurting a lot of people, but for myself it’s not too bad and actually has some perks. Of course some days are better than others depending on the absurdity of the day’s news and my own mental state. Of course I find much of what’s happening outrageous and infuriating (more on that later). But generally, I’m doing okay. Or at least, not significantly worse than what has become my new normal in the last few insane years.

I want to be clear before I get any farther with this post that my goal is not to say “look at me, I’m doing fine, why aren’t you?” If you are feeling Not Okay during this pandemic, you are having the correct, rational response. What I’m trying to do here is figure out and articulate some of the reasons that I am not having the correct, rational response.

Perspective and Gratitude

I am finding that this pandemic is having an effect on me similar to other momentous life events like births and deaths. These sorts of events offer a rare clarity: the distractions fall away and we are given a brief moment where we see what really matters. The clarity of this pandemic is showing me something that I already knew, but that despite my best efforts at being a socially responsible person, I am not normally reminded of so frequently or so vividly. It is showing me how astoundingly lucky I am. It is forcing me to practice gratitude, which is an effective way to improve your mental health.

I thought about listing all of the things that I am grateful for here, all the unearned privileges that allow me to observe this pandemic from a place of comfort and safety and ease, but it ended up seeming gratuitous and boastful, which was not my intention. My point is this: I know. I know how lucky I am to be able to react to this disaster the way that I am. And in some ways, being reminded of this fact so often is probably helping me emotionally deal with this situation.

I can’t resist calling out one advantage in particular, however, because in basically all other circumstances so far in my life it has been disadvantage. I’m talking of course about being an introvert. Being unable to socialize with people in person and instead doing any (limited) socializing over the internet? Mostly hanging out at home, or at most occasionally going outside for a walk? Needing to fill any spare time with hobbies rather than by going out and doing stuff with friends? Little did I know it, but I have been training for this my whole life.

Denial and Compartmentalization

One of the strangest things about this pandemic is how little it actually changes my day to day life. The nature of my job is such that most of the people I work with on a daily basis are not at my home institution, so communicating by email or by phone or video conferencing is perfectly normal to me. It’s just that I get to stay home and have lunch with my family, and I also have to do video calls with people I’d normally go down the hall to talk to. 

The pandemic did cancel my trip to the annual Lunar and Planetary Science conference, which I have attended every year since 2006, and it forced Erin and the kids to cancel their trip to visit her parents in Florida the same week (her dad is on immunosuppressants for rheumatoid arthritis and is therefore high risk). But those cancellations came early enough that in a way they just added to the surreal feeling rather than driving home the reality.

The fact that my life is for the most part minimally disrupted is nice but it also has the side effect of making it very difficult to internalize how messed up things are in the world right now. As far as I am aware, nobody I know has gotten sick, for which I am very grateful. Like many people, I have been reading a truly unhealthy amount of news so I’m well aware of what is happening in the world, but on some deep level it doesn’t quite seem real. Intellectually I get it, but emotionally there’s still some disconnect.

There are of course moments where I imagine what would happen if I or someone I loved got sick or died. I read news articles, or hear the medical helicopters flying overhead on their way to the hospital, and I imagine disaster striking my family. When that happens, there is a gnawing dread that sits in my gut like a cold stone and crawls up the back of my skull. But, maybe this says something about me, but that’s nothing new for me. It’s the same feeling I get when I read about gun violence, or a car crash, or kids getting sick, or any of the many horrible events in the world that for some reason the news seems to think that everyone needs to know about. I think most adults, and especially most parents, become very skilled at compartmentalizing these sorts of thoughts. I know that if I didn’t I just wouldn’t be able to function. 

So, don’t get the wrong impression. It’s not that I don’t worry about what would happen if I or a loved one got sick. It’s that it’s just one more thing in a world full of unpredictable dangers. My family and friends are for the most part lucky enough to be able to do everything possible to avoid this one. So I worry, but it isn’t consuming me.

Outrage and Vindication

To me, the worst part about this pandemic is the extent to which it was preventable. You’ve read the news: The Trump administration dismantled the safeguards that the Obama administration had put in place and ignored the pandemic training that was part of their transition into the White House. They fired key experts. They were warned when this new virus first appeared and did worse than nothing. They downplayed the problem and treated it like every other aspect of reality: they ignored it and hoped it would go away. Of course it didn’t go away, and since that became clear, the response has been so deeply incompetent and corrupt and confused that it leaves me speechless and furious. I mean, look no further than this week. We’re months into this crisis, more than 50,000 Americans have died, and the president openly wondered on national television this week if maybe ingesting cleaning products might be a good way to stop the disease. He suggested that scientists look into the idea. The he has been receiving briefings on this virus for months, and that’s what he comes up with now. The ignorance is genuinely terrifying.

I read an article the other day that suggested that 90% of the deaths we’re seeing now from the virus could have been prevented if the country had enforced physical distancing just two weeks earlier. Trump and his people downplayed and dragged their feet on this for many weeks. They have tens of thousands of deaths on their hands, and now they are agitating to open back up prematurely, which will set off a second wave of pandemic that is even worse and prolong both the economic and medical suffering for months.

So yeah. I am not at all okay with what is happening. How can I say that I’m doing okay through this? Because I’ve been not-at-all-okay with what is happening with our government since 2016. The Trump administration has been an endless cascade of incompetence and corruption. I reached saturation long ago. So while this situation is worse than anything that came before it, what came before was already so far beyond what is acceptable that I genuinely don’t have the emotional capacity to react to these new horrors all that differently.

There is also another facet to this that I think may be helping me cope, though I’m not particularly proud of it, and that is a feeling of vindication. I am a scientist. The bedrock of my worldview is that reality matters. Facts matter. Expertise matters. Good governance must be based on reality. This brief and imperfect life is all we get, so we must treat each other with empathy and the acknowledgement that bad things can happen to good people, and that society and government exist so that we can help each other. 

The Republican party has been systematically undermining these ideas for decades, and the Trump administration is the culmination of all their efforts. The last 4 years have been a nightmare of lies and ignorance and selfishness, and for the most part Republicans have been able to get away with it. But this time is different.

This pandemic epitomizes why the Republican worldview is wrong and dangerous. You know what matters in a pandemic? Facts. Expertise. Good governance based on reality. Compassion for others. Personal sacrifice for the greater good.

The pandemic shines a harsh light onto all of the injustices in our society. The racial disparities, the wealth inequality, the lack of living wages for the people who form the foundation of our society, the absurdity of a for-profit system that links health care coverage to employment, the appalling treatment of native communities, and on and on. 

I hate that it had to come to this. I hate that even as it has come to this, many people are denying the evidence right in front of them. I do not like that I feel this way, but I can’t deny that as I watch the world around us failing in precisely the ways that people with a left-leaning and fact-based worldview warned about, there is a grim and bitter solace in knowing that we were right.

Fascination and Hope

One of the strongest reactions I’ve had to this pandemic, and another one that seems inappropriate even to myself, is fascination. This pandemic has been a crash course in epidemiology, obviously. But also economics and history and civics and psychology and more. I’m reminded of a quote from The Once and Future King, which now that I look it up is even more apt than I expected:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”

The Once and Future King, T.H. White

Learning stuff is already my default state, and in times of stress and crisis my instinct is to double down and learn more. I’m also reminded of another relevant quote:

I find it fascinating to see on full display how interconnected the world is. How our current situation so closely mirrors that in 1918 when a similar pandemic swept the world (and not just in the particulars of the disease, but the broader circumstances in the country and the world). How years of bad policy decisions which were mostly survivable during a period of economic growth are now revealing so much of our society to be a house of cards. How fighting a virus can so rapidly lead to unexpected consequences like inability to purify water due to a lack of CO2 gas due to the shutdown of certain chemical processing plants due to a drop in demand for oil. How the immediate economic catastrophe caused by “flattening the curve” to save lives is going to give way to so many ripple effects for months and years to come.

I know that to a lot of people the uncertainty and chaos we are witnessing right now is extremely stressful. It feels an awful lot like the end of the world. In a sense, maybe that’s true. But if it is the end of the world, it is an end whose time had already come, and it opens up the opportunity for something new and better. To me this feels less like an end than like a turning point. A culmination of forces that have been building up for many years, long before this virus arose. It is the chance to recognize what matters. To clearly see what aspects of our society, our government, our lives, actually serve us well and what needs to be changed.

I am not naive. I don’t expect to see our government suddenly and miraculously institute universal basic income and universal health care and nationwide vote by mail and everything else. I don’t expect it to proactively address the next, even greater global challenge – climate change – before it is too late. I suspect when this pandemic is over, we’ll see things mostly go back to the way they were before. But I think the illusion that “the way things were before” was acceptable will have been dispelled. Not for everyone, of course, but for enough people to make a difference. This experience is going to have a lasting effect on everyone. Kids in high school and college right now are learning lessons a lot more profound than what they’re learning in their online classes. We’re all learning from this experience. I think the memory of this pandemic is going to become a part of who we are, as individuals, as families, as countries, and as a world. Whether we are aware of it or not, it is going to guide us in the coming years, and despite the pain and chaos of the present, I choose to hope that it will allow us to create a better world.

As the lyric goes, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” That’s not exactly true for me, but through a combination of good fortune and some healthy (and some maybe not-so healthy) emotional responses to everything that is happening, I am doing okay. With things as bad as they are, doing “okay” is better than I have any right to expect. I hope you’re doing okay too. If you’re not, and you want to talk about it, don’t hesitate to reach out. If there’s one thing we are all learning right now, it is how interconnected we are. We will get through this together.

I recently finished taking a month off of work for paternity leave, and in that haze of diapers and and missed sleep and blissful new parent moments, I read two books – a self-help book and a collection of essays – that unexpectedly resonated with each other. Taken together, they provided me with a change in perspective that has been eye-opening and challenging. I’m still working through it, and anyone who reads this blog knows that one of the ways I process things is to write them down here. So here we go.

The first book is Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. I haven’t talked about it much, but I have been struggling with insomnia, anxiety, and “low mood” (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it true depression) for a while, and it has gotten worse in the last few years. Some might argue that between having a kid and the state of the world right now, an increase in anxiety is the appropriate response, but the problem goes back farther than that. Those things have just accelerated what was already happening.

Since at least early grad school, I have suffered from occasional “downward spirals” where I get in a bad mood and it spirals out of control and I end up questioning my path in life and generally having an existential crisis. Of course, everyone has bad days and maybe this is normal, but these spirals feel like a growing avalanche of negativity. I can usually tell when one is coming on but am nearly powerless to stop it. The only things that work are doing some intensive writing (hard to do when you’re feeling negative about literally everything), exercise, or just going to sleep and resetting my brain.

What has changed in recent years is that those episodes have become more frequent and I don’t bounce back as well as I used to. My baseline happiness has dropped, my interest in work has waned, and those questions about my path that used to be restricted to when I was spiraling have become more chronic, nagging doubts. I have started feeling vaguely anxious all the time for no clear reason, and the anxiety has started to keep me up at night.

I’ve also fallen deeper into an unhealthy pattern of thought that I have struggled with for a long time. It goes like this: I fixate on a grand goal (usually it is to become a published author) but then I don’t actually do much to work toward that goal and then I beat myself up about how I’m not achieving my goals, and that rapidly escalates to how I am wasting my life and am going to have regrets on my deathbed about all the things I didn’t accomplish. Or if I do work toward the goal, I get paralyzed by all the pressure I’ve put on myself, I am disappointed in what I accomplish, I stop working on it, and quickly end up in the same place. Not a very healthy pattern of thought, but it is one that has haunted me for most of my adult life.

So, yeah. Given all of that, I decided to try therapy last year. I went to see a counselor, but it soon became clear that we weren’t a good fit so I stopped going. (She didn’t seem to know how to handle my lack of belief in anything supernatural, and the existential angst that goes with that.) Then earlier this year the insomnia got bad enough that I went to a doctor and got a prescription. The drug they prescribed (Trazodone) helps with sleep and anxiety and depression and is quite safe and cheap so it was a good fit for me. It worked for a while, but taking a sleep aid is not a great idea when you have a newborn baby to take care of. It’s hard enough to wake up multiple times in the night when not drugged. So I stopped taking it when the new baby arrived.

Of course, then the anxiety came back. In particular, I was feeling disproportionately stressed out about taking paternity leave earlier than expected and how that messed up the bookkeeping for my projects at the end of the fiscal year. As I was dealing with that stress, I figured that if I couldn’t take medication maybe it was time to revisit therapy. I’m cheap, and there are hardly any therapists in Flagstaff, so I looked into the next best thing: self-help books. In particular, I recalled that the counselor I saw was frequently referring to this book “Feeling Good” and some Googling showed that it is basically the bible for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). It’s also a step above most self help books: it’s based on peer-reviewed research, and it has been shown to work as well or better than medication alone. So I went ahead and read it.

The idea behind CBT is deceptively simple. Essentially, it boils down to the idea that it is not a given situation that directly determines how you feel, but the thoughts triggered by that situation. If you have gotten into the habit of having negative thoughts in certain situations, that will lead to feeling miserable in those situations. By learning to identify the automatic negative thoughts that you are having and respond to them with more reasonable, rational, and positive thoughts, you can end up with significant improvements in mental health.

In particular, there are a list of cognitive distortions that allow you to name and fight back what your brain is doing to itself. For example, some of the distortions that I’m most susceptible to are “should statements” (“I should be writing”, “I shouldn’t play video games”), “magnification” (“If I’m not productive today, I’m wasting my life”), “overgeneralization” (“I never get to do what I want to do”), and “all or nothing” (“What’s the point of doing my writing; I’ll never follow through and get it published and even if it gets published nobody will read it”).

The book emphasized writing down your automatic thoughts and the rational responses, but I mostly just did it in my head as I was reading. Even just doing it that way, it was remarkably effective. As I read the book, I felt similar to the first few days after I started taking medication. Like an invisible weight had been lifted and I could breathe easier. (Caveat: I was in an almost ideal situation, where I knew the main thing that was stressing me out, and I was taking time off work so I had less other stress to deal with. Since returning to work, I have slipped back into my old patterns and am struggling again.)

The book also included a short survey tool designed to help identify some of the root causes of the distorted thoughts that lead to depression and anxiety. Normally these sorts of quizzes run the risk of being like horoscopes, where no matter what they say you can find a way to make it apply to you. I don’t know, maybe that’s happening with this one too, but it is backed up by rigorous research and whatever my reservations might be, I found the results of this survey to be eye-opening.

The survey indicated that a lot of my distorted thinking is centered around two main themes: seeking approval from others, and seeking achievement. Basically, I tend to base my self esteem and happiness on these things, which opens me up to anxiety and depression if I perceive that someone might not approve of me or if I am unable to achieve milestones.

If you wear glasses, you know what it’s like for your eyesight to gradually, imperceptibly, get worse until it finally reaches the point where it bothers you enough to get a new prescription and the sudden clarity is shocking. That’s sort of what it was like for me to see the results of this quiz. The results in retrospect are obvious, just as once you’ve put on new glasses it’s obvious how poor your eyesight was getting. I shouldn’t be surprised by the results, but they have offered a lens that lets me see myself clearly for the first time in quite a while.

Seen through this new lens, knowing that I crave achievements and the approval of others to boost my self esteem, a lot of things start to make sense. For example, I was stressed about paternity leave because (a) taking a lot of leave is still somewhat unusual in my workaholic field, and (b) the end-of-fiscal-year stuff led me to send an annoyed email which was uncharacteristic behavior for me. Both of which led to the possible disapproval of people I respect and therefore stress for me.

Likewise, I’ve been stressed and unhappy about work because on a lot of fronts I’m struggling to make accomplishments and get recognition, and in some cases the amount of interest or recognition that I get for my work is not proportional to the amount of effort I put in. I also have a tendency to speculate that people who I respect are not happy with what I am doing, which stresses me out.

With this new lens I can also see that my dwindling interest in my work may be related to the fact that I have run out of major career accomplishments to aim for. I’ve been incredibly fortunate and hit career milestones one after another (finish undergrad, accepted to grad school, grad school fellowship, PhD, post doc, mission involvement, permanent position). But now I’m in a situation where there are no “built-in” milestones left (at least, none that I want to pursue: I’ve seen what leading an instrument or mission is like and it’s not for me!). I’m facing the rest of my career at basically the same level doing the same thing, and that stresses out my achievement-hunting brain. Put another way: I have reached the point where unless I make some big changes, I have basically locked into “what I’m going to be when I grow up”. After 3 decades of always looking ahead to the next thing, that’s a strange feeling.

I want to be clear that I recognize that it’s ridiculous to be stressed out by being successful. I know that to many people I have what would be considered a “dream job”. I get to be involved in very cool work with very cool people, I’m paid well, I have flexibility, I live in a beautiful place. In a way that just makes it worse: I get another layer of stress about how people might perceive me complaining about this, and guilt for feeling bad about a job I worked so long to achieve and that is so cool.

To make matters worse, especially since the 2016 election I have been stressed about not making enough of a positive difference in the world. Who cares what a rock on Mars is made of when there are children dying in cages and the highest levels of our government are indistinguishable from an international organized crime syndicate and the Amazon is burning? It makes me look at space exploration in a different, less favorable light. Some of the justifications for space exploration that for years were compelling to me, now sound hollow. Like stories we tell ourselves to feel good about dedicating our lives to what is ultimately an esoteric luxury. I find it harder to get invested in the scientific questions that are at the heart of my work. All of this is demoralizing, so the cycle feeds on itself.

It’s gotten to the point where I contemplate drastic changes in my career path. What if I quit and dedicated my time to writing full time? What if I quit and try to find a job in another country that isn’t rapidly becoming an authoritarian dystopia? (New Zealand seems nice.) What if I quit and try to become a full-time science communicator? What if I quit and devote my time to politics and trying to change the country’s disastrous course? What if I just quit, period? What if I tried to compromise and go part-time in my current job while pursuing something else? But then contemplating such a drastic change stresses me out for different reasons: What would people think? What if I failed? What if it’s just a case of the grass being greener on the other side and I want to go back? I worked all my life to reach where I am now, do I really want to throw that away? etc.

So what is my point here other than to ramble about my own mental health adventures? Partly I’m just working thought this stuff, but I am also posting here for two other reasons. First, because especially in the era of social media, it’s easy to just share a highlight reel of life and hide the hard parts. I want to push back against the idea that we’re not supposed to talk about these sorts of things, that we have to always present a perfect face to the world. And second, because I hope this helps others who might be struggling with anxiety or depression of a similar flavor.

The tendency to seek the approval of others and to judge yourself based on achievements is not particularly unique (and our society in general and social media in particular are engineered to encourage these patterns of thought), but I have a hunch that those of us who dutifully follow the achievement ladder of academia may be more susceptible than usual to this pattern of thinking. Just consider graduate school. You spend 5-6 years working with an adviser whose approval becomes the most important measure of your success, and you pin your hopes of happiness on achieving that highest academic achievement, a PhD. And then when you finish, you still are stuck in these mental ruts even though now you don’t have an advisor watching over you and there is no next degree to strive for. (Though, I guess if you stay in academia, the tenure process fills both roles for a while.)

It’s not clear which is the cause and which is the effect: Did I go to grad school because I crave approval and achievement, or was I taught to crave approval and achievement by my time in grad school? Likely some of both, but the end result is the same. A lot of people who make it through grad school end up with these tendencies that research shows lead to anxiety and depression.

The thing is, these tendencies are not all bad. When kept in check as part of a balanced life, they can lead to great productivity and satisfaction. The problem comes when they become the sole focus. Yeah, you want people to think well of you, but you need to maintain some perspective and (a) be able to function if someone doesn’t, and (b) not get overly worked up and anxious about your speculations about how someone feels (this is what I do most). Yeah, you want to achieve things (who doesn’t?) but it’s not healthy to be defined only by your job and achievements to the exclusion of the rest of your life.

For me, it has gotten to the point where I am almost incapable of framing things in terms other than achievements. This is part of why I struggle to get writing done on anything other than blogs: I build the project up in my head until it is THE book that is going to make or break my (nonexistent) writing career, and then when the first draft sucks (which is what first drafts always do), I give up because of all the pressure. Ironically, if I would just relax and focus on enjoying the writing process and not worry about the end result, I’d probably get to the end result a lot faster, having done a lot better writing along the way.

Bottom line, reading Feeling Good gave me some tools to help fight anxiety and depression and a new perspective to help understand why I struggle with the things that I do. It isn’t a miracle cure: it made me feel better while I was reading it, but now a couple of weeks later, I’m back to work and struggling again. I may actually go back and read sections of the book that are most relevant to me.

Meanwhile, I am trying to be more conscious about my tendencies to seek approval and achievements in place of actual self esteem. (And yes, I recognize the irony that I am posting this publicly in part to seek approval from people on social media!) I am trying to steer my life and my patterns of thought toward more balance. I’m trying to appreciate the present and be confident in myself without relying on approval from others. I’m trying to enjoy the process and not just the end product. And it is in that context that the second book had an impact on me. Primed with all of these thoughts from reading Feeling Good, Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places” gave me yet another lens through which to view the world and myself and these mental health struggles. I have rambled on long enough here, so I’ll talk more about that in a follow-up post.