Embracing Chaos

A bit over a week ago I had surgery to keep my arm from falling off.  It’s happened at least a half dozen times in the last couple of years — while snowboarding, rock climbing or climbing Mt Rainier.  Then the attachment became really weak and it would come off for no good reason at all — just taking off a backpack or even reaching for a glass of water.  While I was wiping my ass was definitely the worst.  Thank god for awesome roommates.

Anyway, after a long process of finding a kick-ass orthopedic surgeon who specializes in shouders and figuring out how to get insurance to pay for it, I finally went under the knife to have the old bolts tightened.  10 days later and I can finally type again.  Technically it was a bankart repair which I’ll leave you to research if you care, but in my case involved drilling some tiny holes in my bones and tying some connective tissue back into place.  You might be able to follow along on this video he took while poking around arthroscopically before performing the actual repairs:

(my favorite part is when he pulls out the hedge trimmer attachment to get a clearer view.)

Anyway, now I’m left with a few nice clean cuts and one extremely weak arm.  Funny things I’ve noticed include that washing my hands is often quite painful.  I figured out this is because pushing your hands together requires using internal rotation, which uses the subscapularis muscle, that he had to cut through to get a clean shot at the problem.  Pushing light switches with the wounded wing has also nearly reduced me to tears.  But it’s getting better every day.  I think another month I’ll put my new cadillac sling on the shelf next to the others, and then a month after that I should be biking, and another month and I’ll be swimming.  And shortly thereafter, I’ll be biking through Vietnam.  w00t!

Revolutionaries are idealists.  They have to be.  They risk their lives to fight for what they believe in.  Lenin, Mao, Castro — they all truly and deeply believed that they were fighting for a better way of life for their people.  And to a varying degrees, they accomplished that.  In fact in all three of these cases — Russia, China and Cuba, the early years after the revolution were relatively good for the people.  Wealth was redistributed and poverty decreased.  The second world is generally better than the third world.  When I was living in communist China, I found it to be a lot like camping — everything worked and was possible, but nothing was quite as convenient or comfortable as I would have liked.

But as communist governments age they tend to become corrupt and dictatorial.  Why?  Unchecked power.  Without elections or a free press, there is essentially no way to remove a bad leader.  Highly secretive control structures like the politburo tend to select for leaders that can amass and wield power by any means possible.  These traits tend to become much more concentrated than any traits related to good governance.  This was the undoing of the Soviet block and hopefully soon will dismantle North Korea.  How China managed to avoid this state I won’t ponder here.

Despite what the US State Department would like you to believe, Cuba’s government has not (yet) devolved to this state.  Cuba is still highly egalitarian where top government officials only earn twice what a factory worker might make — not the wretched excess of a corrupt system.  They probably get to drive cars, but are required to pick up all hitchhikers since really it’s the people’s car.  For the most part Cubans trust their government and with good reason.  Cuba is not corrupt.  Of course if you’re smart and ambitious you have much more to gain in a capitalist system which leads to justifiably frustrated opponents.  While their lifestyles are anything but luxurious, Cubans are generally fairly happy, healthy and well educated.  Happiness is subjective, but statistics clearly show Cuba to be on par if not better than the US for healthcare and education in most measures.  It’s not a bad place to live.

The success of Cuban communism should not come as much of a surprise considering what we’ve discussed so far.  Castro was idealistic when he led the revolution, and he’s still on power.  Corrupt leaders have not been able to take control yet.  A problem with communism is that what happens next will depend very strongly on one individual.  Will they be more like Fidel or Kim Jong-Il.  We’ll have to wait to see.

A number of folks have been courting me for positions as a software development engineer recently.  Many of them sound really fun.  I love writing code, and even though it hasn’t been my professional focus for years, I think I’m still alright at it.  But I’ve had to come to a sober realization that I simply cannot take a job where writing code is my primary function.  I’m just not physically capable of it.  I just about cried during a job interview once when explaining this.

People come in my office and say "that’s a cool keyboard."  My response is generally something like "that’s what it takes."  I don’t use a $300 keyboard because it looks cool.  It’s more like a wheelchair.

I have repetitive strain injury.  It’s not carpal tunnel syndrome.  My wrists basically never bother me.  It’s more my pinkies, more the left than the right.  I can think of 3 causes.  In high-school I took a 3-day bike tour from San Diego to Santa Barbara wearing gloves that weren’t well padded.  For about a week afterwards I had no feeling in my left pinkie.  Then in 1996 a marathon perl coding session of several 100-hour weeks left my pinkies pretty sore because of all the mixed-case variables in our code. 

Also, I suspect cubital tunnel syndrome might have some part of it.  I’m not expert but my understanding is that it’s a result of spending too much time with bent elbows stretching some nerves causing problems with pinkies.  I understand the easiest thing to help is to sleep with straight arms.

The ironic thing is that with a good ergonomic keyboard I can write English text day
in and day out, but more than about 10-15 hours/week of coding and
things start to hurt.  Writing code on a laptop in bed, fun as it is, will get to me after about 10 minutes.  Code involves tons more time on the special keys
than English.  You don’t need a lot of
[]{}()<>*=+-~&^_!#@$%/|\ in e-mail or in specs.  And you don’t
need to bounce around the arrow keys for editing nearly so much
either.  The Kinesis advantage keyboard helps quite a lot, because it moves most of the keys that the pinkies do under the thumbs.  But it’s not quite enough for me, because the shift keys are still the responsibility of the pinkies.  I’ve tried using a foot-pedal for shift, but haven’t been able to
re-train myself.  And I’m not sure I really want to limit myself by
having a job I can only do in front of a super-tricked out
workstation.  Screwing up (gee it sure would be nice to get
something done on this here laptop) means having to use a microphone
and eat grams/day of ibuprofen for a few months which I’ve done and really really
sucks.

So physical disability has sent me down an interesting career path towards middle management.  I have tons of fun in this capacity, but sometimes I miss making things work with my own hands.

Also, if any of you have hints of repetitive strain injury, I strongly encourage you to shell out the cash for a good keyboard.  It’s way cheaper than the alternatives.

My girlfriend has an auto-immune skin condition called psoriasis that gives her rashes.  For some people the condition gets serious enough that patients and MD’s turn to drugs that suppress T-cells, the part of the immune system which causes the inflammation.  Turning down the volume level on your immune system has all sorts of easily predictable side-effects, but for people whose immune systems are just a little too enthusiastic it can be the right choice.

My girlfriend’s condition has gotten worse in recent months, to the point where immuno-suppresents seem reasonable.  But instead, she’s opted to do something much more difficult and follow the advice of a naturopath.  She’s agreed to eliminate basically all tasty foods from her diet for some unreasonably long period of time.  After weeks of eating nothing but rice and steamed vegetables (I’m exaggerating, but not much) she’ll slowly start adding foods in one at a time to see what might be causing an negative reaction.  It’s an elimination diet — a fairly common practice which is pretty easy to visualize but takes care and dedication to do properly.

Why suffer through this process instead of just taking some pills and getting better?  Because it promises
to understand and solve the cause of the problem, rather than just cover up the symptoms.  I admire her strength and wisdom in this choice.  Until then, we’ll be making lots of use of the veggie steamer.  (My veggie steamer actually looks a lot more like this one, but mine has the fabulous retro-luddite feature of a knob to set how long to cook for instead of digital controls.)

This is a public service announcement and reminder.  Men: please make a habit of periodically feeling your testicles for new growths or lumps.  Women: same for breasts.  If you have close friends who can help you with the task, then it can even be fun.  But please try to remember to check regularly.  Once a month is good.  And don’t think that you’re safe because you’re young.  You’re not.

I bring this up because a one of my favorite people just got testicular cancer.  I’m impressed but not surprised by my community’s reaction to the news — a  hugely generous outpouring of support.  An online support planning forum.  Scheduled hang-outs and food delivery.  The works.

For more information, the online Testicular Cancer Resource Center is fabulous.  My friend is journaling his experience, themed as the uni-baller (pictured above).  He writes both as a therapeutic measure for himself, and hopefully to provide support to others.  It’s also chock full of TC humor.  If you ever find yourself needing some orchiectomy jokes, read his blog.  (Like this orchiectomy survivor theme song.)  I hope y’all never do.

"Hang in there."