ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS My last Bobologue was high on cheek and low on news. So if you want to know something about my life, read this paragraph; if all you care about are the latest bon mots, skip on down to the one-liners at the bottom. As stated last month, I defended my thesis in October, 2001. Since then I've been laboring to start a video services business. This is going very well, if you consider making $1447 in six months to be going well. And half of that was a bone my good friend Rick threw me, editing some training videos he shot for his day job. I'm having trouble being billable. I spend most days doing things that I think need to be done, and things that other people ask me to do for them. I do not spend any time watching television or sitting around drinking wine and saying, "You know, I could manage my retirement better than the government does if they'd just give me a chance to invest it in equities." Yet at the end of the day I'm lucky if I spent even 4 hours producing video. Of course I have had a few 8- or 10- or 12-hour workdays as well, but they are exceptions. I gotta get my life in order. To help make ends meet, I also took a job with the Princeton Review, teaching physics for MCAT review courses. I'm doing my bit to make the world a better place by helping marginal candidates get into medical school. In the winter I taught three 9-week sections (2 in Pasadena and 1 in Claremont) and made about $2000. Plus I saved about a dollar a tank by buying gas on my way to Claremont; it's six cents cheaper in Pomona. And I made $1000 with some creative, but quite legal and ethical, maneuvering at tax time (as well as getting back $1000 that I had overpaid), so I've been almost breaking even spending $1000 or so every month. Now the Princeton Review is on hiatus; I'm tentatively signed up to teach four sections in the summer. (Maybe I can make this tank of gas last until then....) Big picture, I've been living beyond my means. When I left DC in 1997, I had about $27,000 in the bank; today, it is about $11,000. With $20,000 a year passing through my fingers, we could say I have spent about 5.25 years worth of income in 4.5 years. To put it another way, the $90,000 I've made has more than covered my "daily" expenses, but I raided savings to help get the $31,000 that I've stashed into retirement, buying my truck, and giving. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ALL THE NEWS ABOUT FITS For those of you who haven't been paying attention, here's the timetable for me and anti-depressants: JUNE 1998-JUNE 1999: My girlfriend dumps me. I'm in major depression and I know why I'm depressed. I'm still in love. My thesis is practically abandoned. Then after a year I'm suddenly over her, and start to think I'm getting back to normal. JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1999: I experience instability, sudden plummets into deep depression for no apparent reason. I can't say why I'm still depressed. SEPTEMBER 1999-JUNE 2000: I start taking Paxil. I still experience plummets, but they become less frequent. I have no focus, and my thesis languishes. On the plus side, I compose the first Bobologue. JUNE 2000-JANUARY 2001: I try life without the drugs. I'm healthier than I used to be, but still depressed a lot. Whether or not I'm feeling depressed, my physics work is feeble and ineffective, even when I work the occasional 40-hour week. JANUARY 2001-MARCH 2001: I get a new psychiatrist who is not as intellectually lazy as my first. I go back on Paxil, and experiment with adding Wellbutrin. APRIL 2001: With the latest prescription, I am suddenly able to focus and work. MAY-OCTOBER 2001: Thesis-Comes-First Month. OCTOBER 2001-FEBRUARY 2002: I haven't felt depressed for a year (if we don't count a little healthy unrequited-love depression last summer). I decide again to try life without drugs. So this month I phased down and then off the drugs, and now I am medication-free. Of course there is a 50-50 chance I'll go back into major depression, and then back on the drugs, but I hope not. There were side effects during the transition period, as my poor brain had to get over the lifestyle to which it had become accustomed, based on a warm bath of artificially-stimulated endorphins. I experienced episodic dizziness, occasionally strong enough that I gave up driving and bicycling. And I became emotionally volatile. The Boss made me cry. I had a job, I had a girl Had something going, mister, in this world I got laid off at the lumberyard Our love turned bad, times were hard." This was enough to send tears down my cheeks. And I experienced anger more intensely, more viscerally, more physically. I would get this throbbing sensation in my head, like fluid was surging from the back to the front of my brain at about 1 Hz. Perhaps I was close to epilepsy. (Starting or stopping psychotropic drugs always increases the chance of seizure.) And it didn't take fundamental injustice to set me off -- one day I got that sensation while writing a snippy letter because I had trouble navigating a poorly-redesigned website. People ask me why I would want to stop taking the drugs, with the implication that any reasons I have must be irrational. Well, judge for yourselves: o Paxil has "sexual side effects". For me, at this stage in life, that just meant that I masturbated less often and less pleasurably. I'm not saying this was the primary consideration, but neither was it negligible :-/ o Paxil and its cousins are fairly recent inventions; I don't think anyone knows if my liver and kidneys can metabolize it for decades without being damaged. o Drugs cost money. o I have to find a new health plan by June, and it is helpful to be able to say I am not currently on medication or under treatment for any existing condition. o I have a bias toward the natural. I don't routinely use caffeine to regulate my alertness, or Tums to regulate my digestion, or alcohol to regulate my sleep, or any other drugs. I take pain reliever for headache about once every three years or so. o I suspected, and am experiencing, that life feels a little more real and engaging and vivid to me without the drugs. Like many, and perhaps most, people, I was very reluctant to start medication. The main fear was loss of identity -- that I would stop being who I thought I was, or who non-drugged Bob wanted to be, and turn into who the drugs made me be. In retrospect, a year ago it was depression that prevented me from being who I thought I was and who I wanted to be, and the drugs only helped. Nonetheless, I think the drugs are like a layer of Saran Wrap separating me from a direct interface with reality. Now that I am (I think and hope) not depressed, I want to unwrap life. In other words, depressed Bob on drugs is better off than depressed Bob not on drugs, but undepressed Bob on drugs is worse off then undepressed Bob not on drugs. More news as it develops. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ME AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT Memo to gun advocates: stop saying the founding fathers in their wisdom agreed with you. The founding fathers wanted you to have the means to overthrow a government if necessary. It never occurred to them you should have a .45 under your pillow so you could efficiently cleave a burglar's soul from his body, and they didn't write the Bill of Rights to give you that right. When the Second Amendment was written, governments had the following instruments of coercive violence: guns. Citizens with guns were an efficient deterrent to government excess. Today, governments have Minuteman missiles, smart bombs, jet fighters that can be filling you with bullets this second and in Burbank the next second. Citizens with handguns or hunting rifles have zero chance of resisting the government, as the FBI demonstrated a couple of times in the Clinton years. If you really believe in the spirit of the Second Amendment, you should be lobbying for your right to keep and bear tactical nuclear weapons. Gun control may or may not be a good idea, but let's leave the Second Amendment out of it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NUMBER SEVEN ON THE LIST OF IRRITATING THINGS THAT JESUS SAID "Sell your possessions and give to the poor" -- Luke 12:33. The idea is circulating that Jesus only said this to a particular individual in a particular circumstance (the so-called Rich Young Man; see, for example, Luke 18:22). However, Luke 12 is a general sermon: anyone who purports to follow Jesus is as much on the hook for "sell your possessions and give to the poor" as for "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". I've decided to try to obey this teaching on the occasion of my 40th birthday (14 Jun). Like most of my responses to Jesus' teaching on money, this discipline will be a compromise: I'm planning to keep my business property and (unless I change my mind) my retirement accounts; and I'm undecided on very personal property, such as quilts that my grandmother made for me. But all the money in my liquid accounts and most of the things that I've ever bought will be going away. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE BEST OF THE REST My supermarket chain makes a Corn Chex knockoff called "Corn Weaves". And for some odd reason, I can't look at a box of Corn Weaves without the tune to "Hand Jive" starting up in my head. "Corn weave/Corn weave/Corn weave/Doing that crazy corn weave." The neighboring box of Rice Weaves has no such effect on me. I had taken the cigarette lighter out of its socket in my pickup's ashtray to allow more room for ashtray money, but I had to reconsider when pennies started getting stuck in the socket. Oh, I forgot to tell you about my anti-anti-terrorist activities in February which, if things had gone a little differently, could have me rotting today in an FBI jail cell alongside those Arabs whose human rights were suspended by the U.S. Government on September 12. I was flying for the first time since 9-11 (it was actually a little irksome to me that I showed up 2 hours before the flight, as I had been told I must, and 12 minutes later I had cleared all security and was sitting around waiting 108 minutes for my plane). I passed the metal detector, and noticed the baggage X-rayer giving my carry-on bag the twice- and thrice-over. She passed it off to a deputy, who asked to inspect it and whether I had a pocketknife in there. I said no, but I was wrong -- the bag, a gift from my parents last fall, included a Mom touch: she had stashed a fully-stocked toiletries bag in one of the pockets, including a manicure set with a pocketknife somewhat smaller than a stick of Juicy Fruit. So they confiscated that, easy-come easy-go. But as they were looking for it, I suddenly realized that I had my real pocketknife in my pants pocket, it having failed to set off the metal detector. This is my beloved Swiss Army Knife which I bought last time I was in Switzerland, and I didn't want to see it confiscated. Just because I had cleared security in California, I couldn't be sure I would clear at my DFW layover, so I decided I better not get on the plane with it. I couldn't find a post office, so I surreptitiously stashed the knife in the bowels of a left-luggage vending machine that had been shut down post 9-11. Then I flew to Texas, generously shared the story with my parents so they could worry about the outcome, flew back into the same gate, retrieved the knife, exited the secure area, and went on my merry way. AND GETTING SMALLER ALL THE TIME: Gavin (the 13-year-old in my household) decided to teach himself piano, and he decided the ideal vehicle for his initial efforts was "It's a Small World". I commended him: "If the first song you learn is the most annoying song in the world, any song you learn after that can only be less annoying." My truck developed a nasty symptom -- anytime I went more than a couple of days without driving, my battery discharged. It was as if a light were left on, but I saw no lights being left on. ATHENS BY NIGHT: Before I defended, I sometimes referred to myself as "the oldest living graduate student" at Caltech, but that was an oversimplification. There was another student who started Caltech the same day I did, who worked for the same advisor I did, who worked on the same experiment I did, who took even a little longer than I to graduate. Sophia Kyriazopoulou finally defended last month, and after her celebratory dinner I let her and one of her Greek countrymen take me to Athens By Night, a nightclub on Cahuenga in Burbank. Picture this: it's 1:00 am, the bazouki band is going about 150 bpm at 90 dB, the atmosphere is 70% air, 30% tobacco smoke. Then a sleazy-looking guy with his arm around a 20-something bombshell with boobs busting out of her blouse calls the maitre d' over and hands him a stack of about 100 one dollar bills. The maitre d' positions himself next to the vocalist in the middle of the dance floor, raises the wad of cash in his left hand, with his right hand points out the donor and then begins tossing individual bills in the air as fast as possible -- it is a fountain of money flitting down all over the room. A few minutes later he is back with a six-foot floor broom and sweeps the money into a heap on the edge of the bandstand (remember, this is a maitre d' in a tux). This happens not once, but several times (with different donors and lesser amounts of money). When we were dancing later, I was slipping on the 100 or so bills still on the dance floor, and I estimated another thousand that had been swept off all four sides of the dance floor. MY TWO FOOD COMMUNITIES: Among physicists, I am the one who values good food the least. In Italy, there were many evenings when my community spent an inordinate amount of time arguing about where they wanted to eat and whether this restaurant was better than that one; and many a cold night in L'Aquila, finding our first choice closed, the group opted to walk across town to an optimum second choice rather than accept a nearby, but mediocre, alternative. But these days the shoe is on the other foot -- it's surprising to me that most in my church community show absolutely no preference for good food over mediocre. If you connected the ashtray money story with the battery discharge story, you are about three weeks quicker than me. I pulled a couple of oxidized and carbonized pennies out of the cigarette lighter socket, disconnected the wire, and the problem went away. Coins still get stuck in the barrel, but if I yank the ashtray out fast enough they dislodge. SIX AND A HALF BILLION TO ONE: My housemate is not only unwilling to turn off lights himself, he has recently asked me to stop turning them off. If there is a chance he will walk into a room in the next eight hours (for example, overnight), he wants light to be on in that room the whole time so that he doesn't experience a dark room during the 1-second interval it takes him to turn on the light. Dilemma: do I do what one person has asked me to do, or should I give greater weight to the 6.5 billion other people on this planet who will suffer from the resulting climate change (plus another 10 or 20 billion as-yet-unborn; putting a pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere today will cause elevated levels for about 100 years before it decays)? I'm thinking of starting a REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 10 CAMPAIGN -- you remember, back when we had civil rights? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CURRENT READING: I've postponed the last chapter of "Exploring Complexity" while I try to get caught up on my 3-month backlog of magazines. I get about six movie and music production magazines, four science magazines, and four computer magazines each month. Last fall, "The Artist's Way" program I did with Urban Village included "Reading Deprivation Week". I got behind on my magazines that week and never caught up. QUOTE OF THE MONTH: "Most people in our country have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing and shelter... [and] to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and elderly.... Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others." -- Wendell Berry, "The Idea of a Local Economy", April Harper's