Change Is Hard and Never-Ending

Since Dorothy Rothschild has linked to my journal several times in her recent entries, I thought I'd return the favor. I've been reading her journal since nearly its inception, and amazingly it was many months before I realized that (1) She's writing under a pseudonym, and (2) She writes science fiction as well as poetry. It also looks like she'll become the second journaller I meet, when I go down to Chicago for Windycon next month.

The artist is named Lance Brown, and I still have the flyer I got when I ordered the prints (I discovered him through an article in Comics Buyer's Guide). Unfortunately, it's been this long before I had the time to get it framed - mainly due to money constraints and other priorities - so I have no idea if he's at the same address or if he is on-line (the flyer is pre-Web, amazing as that may seem), or if he's even still making prints. (Other prints at the time included Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. In retrospect, I should have gotten the Bradbury instead of the Lovecraft.) A quick AltaVista search turns up a few pages, but none which seem to be him. So, who knows.

The other print is of a lovely pen-and-ink drawing which makes the rounds of the conventions in this region. It's entitled "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown", and is a dark sketch of a Jack Pumpkinhead-like figure standing in the pumpkin patch on a foreboding night. The print was only about 30 bucks, but I'm getting it nicely framed, anyway.

Amazing as it may seem, given how bare my walls have been for most of the time I've lived here, I'm running out of places in my apartment to hang things! I may have to start hanging things on doors.

Part of this is because I received the second set I ordered of Apple Think Different posters. Now I have: Miles Davis, Jim Henson, Lucille Ball, Bob Dylan, Ansel Adams, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Edison, and Alfred Hitchcock. The Davis, Henson and Gandhi posters are my favorites, and are up either at home or in my office in some cheap frames I picked up earlier this week. They're big, about two feet by three feet, so they obviously fill up a lot of wall space. The Ansel Adams poster is hanging over my bed; I know very little about Adams, but it's a nice picture.

I also learned a bit about the Hugo Awards process which I hadn't known. Books can be nominated for the upcoming awards by any members of either the previous World Science Fiction Convention, or the next convention. One guy at the discussion has been to many Worldcons, and he had a copy of Locus which listed the breakdowns of the nominees for the most recent awards, which Forever Peace won. It seems that only a few hundred people nominate books for the award, so every vote counts. Of the five nominees for this past year, two of them received only about 35 votes each, and some books that didn't make the cut missed by only four or five votes (since only the top five nominees are included on the ballot). From what I've read of Tim Powers, it's hard to imagine that his novel Earthquake Weather is worse than the three Hugo nominees I've read so far, none of which particularly impressed me.

Alas, I did not go to Worldcon last year, and I don't plan to go next year, since it's in Australia. So I won't be able to nominate. But maybe I can persuade some friends to nominate Dark Water's Embrace.

I invited a friend of mine from work - Doran - to the book discussion, and his significant other - Fran - also came along. Actually, I think she was more excited about it than he was! (It sounds like she is a compulsive reader.) They seemed a little uncomfortable, since they didn't know everyone, but they said afterwards that they enjoyed it, so I lent them my copy of the book for next month (John Cramer's Einstein's Bridge). We can use new blood in the group, anyway.

Afterwards, Doran, Fran and I went out for coffee and chatted for a while. Doran is a huge Jimi Hendrix fan, about which I'm afraid I teased him mercilessly (basically from the standpoint that it's a little silly that a guy whose career lasted about three years has scores of albums out, even if many of them are bootlegs; I observed that I could pull about twenty Jethro Tull albums from my shelf without a single song's overlap among them). He didn't mind, though (and I know because I asked him the next day).

Pretty soon I'm going to have to start inventing new biking challenges for myself, because I've just about beaten all the ones I had lined up for this summer! (And it's only been three months since I started my three-times-a-week biking!)

Oh, and my friend John says he thinks I'd benefit from drinking protein shakes before biking into work in the morning. Something about how they'd jump-start my metabolism and be converted more easily into muscle than into fat. If I can find some that actually taste any good, then I'll give it a try. If I find some that taste terrible, then I'll mail them to John!

I felt very weird about that, about throwing away stuff we've built. I was actually very disturbed by it, and upon reflecting this is why I think I felt that way: I've been at Epic for quite a while, and on my team longer than everyone else but one person. I've personally designed and/or built a huge fraction of our application, and I find that I do trade on my experience with almost every part of the system, and I'm proud to be able to say that I worked on so much of it. So it is an ego thing with me, and the prospect of the basic infrastructure I've built being ripped out in favor of something else is a little difficult for me to assimilate.

While thinking about this, I recalled a section of Lois McMaster's Bujold's short story "The Mountains of Mourning" (which is collected with the two novels The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game in the book Young Miles). Miles Vorkosigan is talking about his grandfather, who was a hero in his day, being one of the major figures in driving the Cetagandan invaders off his homeworld of Barrayar. Miles - heir to his father's and grandfather's position as head of the family Vorkosigan, who was born stunted and fragile due to an attempted assassination on his father while in the womb - is talking to his bodyguard:

"He was born at the very end of the Time of Isolation, and lived through every wrenching change this century has dealt to Barrayar. He was called the last of the Old Vor, but really, he was the first of the new. He changed with the time, from the tactics of horse cavalry to that of flyer squadrons, from swords to atomics, and he changed successfully. Out present freedom from the Cetagandan occupation is a measure of how fiercely he could adapt, then throw it all away and adapt again. At the end of his life he was called a conservative, only because so much of Barrayar had streamed past him in the direction he had led, prodded, pushed and pointed all his life.

"He changed, and adapted, and bent with the wind of the times. Then, in his age - for my father was his youngest and sole surviving son, and did not himself marry till middle-age - in his age, he was hit with me. And he had to change again. And he couldn't.

"He begged for my mother to have an abortion, after they knew more or less what the fetal damage would be. He and my parents were estranged for five years after I was born. They didn't see each other or speak or communicate."

I need to change and adapt and figure out how to integrate these changes into my job and my life. And it's hard because I feel I was just getting used to the last bunch of changes, and because I have relatively little power to effect changes myself at work.

It's hard.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)