Category: NaBloWriMo

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“There’s a reason the empiricists died out.”

I’ve taking classes at Augsburg for less than a year, so that might be the reason why I’ve never felt such a strong compulsion to turn around and punch someone in the face before. When someone is so resistant to a rational concept and won’t shut up about it… [Insert strangling noise here.]

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned Peter Stark in here before, but he was the instructor for my Leadership class and is striking back for Organization Behavior and Development. He’s a smart guy. Smart enough to know that you can only teach so much about system theory, quantum theory and empiricism in a four-hour class before people’s neurons start shooting sparks out their ears. He let us out 45 minutes early, but it might have been earlier if not for the douchebag who was intent on defending the concept of empiricism to the point of lunacy.

He seemed so proud of it, too. He didn’t openly state, “This is what [blank] said!”, but pointed out that he’d read David Hume, John Locke and a couple other empiricists. As he was doing so, I was thinking, “Congratulations on your Philosophy degree! I got one, too! Shut the hell up!” But of course, he wouldn’t.

And “but” was a word he was very reliant on. Peter would say something…

“But…”
“No buts!”
“But…”
“No buts!”
“But…”

The discussion (or lack thereof) keeps making me want to beat my head against a wall. Or beating that guy’s head against a wall if that was an available option. Here’s the deal: There is no empirical truth. Sensory experience is an individualistic process, something that goes on in your head. Someone else might see the same thing, but the way they perceive it could be completely different.

Assume there’s an object that’s purple. You and another person look at the object and agree, yes, it definitely looks purple. So what if you agree? Does that mean you’re seeing the same purple? No two brains are identical, so no two people are guaranteed to experience “purple” in the same manner. If you’re an empiricist like this guy? Everyone does. Period.

If you need another example, consider speed. Sprinting the 100 meter dash. Biking down a mountain at 55 mph. Driving a car at 150 mph. Flying a jet at… a really fast speed. Your proximity to other objects. Running into the wind versus being in an enclosed space. All of these variables influence the way you experience speed (feeling the wind, seeing passing objects, tasting the dust that people are leaving in your face, etc.). So which one is the correct one? Which one is “fast”?

Hume and Locke lived in the 18th Century—you think they had the same standards as you? If there’s such a thing as an “empirical truth”, they’d enjoy a smooth drive through the countryside like you do instead of spending the entire time screaming their lungs out. It’s like saying there are an infinite number of possibilities in any given situation, but there’s one “correct” one.

“But…”
“No buts!”
“But…”
*WHAP!*

According to empiricism, the pain I’d feel in my fist combined with the whining I’d hear from his mouth would have made the situation much simpler and a lot less irritating. And that’s the truth.

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One of the best ways to appreciate something…

…is to not have it for a while. Like showers. God, I appreciated showers so much yesterday afternoon. (I initially wrote “this afternoon”, but I keep forgetting that 12:45am is technically Thursday.)

Perhaps I should clarify a little bit. It hadn’t been that long since I’d taken a shower. It’s not like you could see a layer of crust forming on the surface of my skin yet, but it was getting to the point where I could scratch various parts of me and end up with dead skin cells under my fingernails. Icky.

I don’t have to take a shower every day to avoid such catastrophes, but when I do take a shower, I use a scrub brush. (No, it’s not a toilet brush, though that would probably serve the same purpose and there’d be no shame in using it on my butt.) Using the brush helps get rid of the dead skin cells, leaving my skin bright and shiny. That may be why I spend so much time in the basement—I don’t want to go outside and blind people with my bright and shininess. Just doin’ y’all a favor.

The last shower I took at home was Thursday afternoon before my Managerial Finance exam. I took another at the hotel in Chicago on Saturday morning, but all they had was a bar of soap. When that happens, an old Zest commercial usually pops into my head. “Most soaps leave a sticky film on you that won’t rinse away…” That’s about what it felt like: clean, but sticky. Which sounds really gross when you think about it.

Didn’t take one at the hotel Sunday morning, spent the day driving home (technically riding home, so thanks to Marie and Porter for the ride and for letting me sleep in the back seat—I was uber exhausted), woke up early Monday morning and subsequently lost permission to take a shower for two days. My leg was wrapped up in a long elastic bandage that stretched from my ankle up to my lower thigh. In the middle of that, my knee was huge. Thankfully, almost none of it was swelling—I took the dressing off before getting into the shower and it was in two layers that each looked as thick as a baby diaper, which is why I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to squeeze it into a pair of jeans.

Anyway, I was supposed to wait for two days after surgery before taking a shower (taking a bath or going swimming will be a lot longer, but all I needed was to rinse off at that point). It was Wednesday afternoon—two days later—when I went into the bathroom, unwrapped my leg, removed the baby diapers and saw my knee. It doesn’t look too bad.

There are two spots at the top of the kneecap, one on either side, which is where the scopes went in. Below that… I think Dr. Lewis basically extended the scar that was already there as opposed to opening up the same spot or making a cut next to the first one. He must have done something since those little holes above my kneecap aren’t big enough for pulling out a screw, but it’s hard to tell exactly what because of the little white Steri-strips covering it.

I’d say I jumped into the shower next, but big movements like that are still a delicate operation. I can walk up and down the stairs one step at a time as opposed to using both feet on each step, but trying to do it quickly would be asking for an express trip down to the lower level. I’m making good progress, so why push it?

And now I’ve got class tomorrow… today. (6:00pm, so in about 16 1/2 hours.) During that time, I’ll take my car for a short test drive and decide if I can get to school myself or if I’ll need a ride. Once I get to school, I’ll have to decide whether I want to try to look normal (or at least as normal as I’m capable of looking) or play up my injury and try to get some pity points. If I go with the latter and no one cares, hey, at least when I get home, I’ll be able to curl up in the shower for a good cry.

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NaBloWriMo

I guess that “National Blog Writing Month” coincides with “National Novel Writing Month”, so I’m gonna give it a shot. (Last year, I found out about it too late and decided to write a blog entry every day in December instead.)

I suppose I could have tried working on a novel, but for those of you who have read my blog for any length of time, you’ll know that there’s no way I could put 50,000 words together into a single story. Some days, it feels like I’m lucky to get in a couple hundred without drifting too far from my original point. Maybe it’s because my mind is like a butterfly that can’t move in a straight line, then flutters across the street and gets splattered against a car’s windshield… you get the idea.

Anyway, I’ve put this challenge to myself and I’ve managed to keep going for the first two days. (Hell yeah!) Now that I think about it, it might have been worthwhile to mention this website to you all ahead of time in case you’re indulging in any kind of writing over the course of this month. I use it from time to time, but given how much fun I have writing long blog entries, 750words.com doesn’t always work. Sure, I can sit down and blow 750 words out of my ass in twenty minutes or so, but would that content be worthy of a blog post? Not likely.

So for those of you who have started this endeavor as well, solidarity! I hope we all do an excellent job this November.

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Scalpel… clamps… scr– Where’s the screwdriver?!

Looking back through the archives, it took me about two weeks before I wrote about what happened the last time I had knee surgery. Yes, the last time I had it: this was Operation #2. I played soccer for a couple months in there, but I’m off the field for a while again. How long? Well, it’ll be a lot less than last time.

Now that I think about it, this has been a really long process. If not for insurance reasons, I could have set the surgery date for October 7th. Maybe I’ll go back to all of that in a later entry, but for now, I promised a bunch of people that I’d let them know how surgery went.

Surgery was scheduled for 11:00, so I got to sleep past 8:00—when I woke up, I was still really tired and thought about resetting my alarm for a couple hours later. It was a long weekend and I was planning on plenty of rest and recovery given my current lack-of-schedule, so why the hell would I wake up so early if I didn’t need to? It took me a moment to remember that yes, I needed to.

Things started out swimmingly when I got to the front desk to check in and the woman there asked me for two things: my driver’s license and insurance card. The problem was that I followed the instructions to leave all of my valuables at home. Among those valuables: my wallet, which contained my driver’s license and insurance card. Mom and Dad had driven me to the hospital and Mom offered to drive back to the house, but since all of my information was in the system (they got it from my pre-surgery physical two weeks earlier), they let it slide. Off to a great start, right?

Thankfully, that was pretty much the only hitch of the morning. They brought me back to my room, I put on my gown and long purple “Bair Paws” socks, laid back, got a needle stuck in the back of my hand, talked with my parents for a while… no big deal.

Actually, I guess there was sort of a hitch in there, but it was a physical hitch: the nurse was having some trouble shaving my knee. She carries a shaver with her and each room has a shaver head attached to a holder on the wall. She snapped them together, turned it on, dragged it up my leg and didn’t accomplish much. (For those who haven’t seen them, my legs are kinda hairy.) It felt like she was tugging on the hair more than cutting it, which wasn’t really pleasant. The next pass, she moved much more slowly and MAGIC! The shaver started working properly! My leg hair was grateful.

Dr. Lewis came in soon after—the same doctor who did my ACL replacement surgery—for a quick consultation and I told him about some pains I’d been having in my shin recently. I first noticed it when I’d been riding an exercise bike, but it sprung up the day before as well during a long car ride. The spot was about two inches below the kneecap on the left side of my shin. He was feeling around with his thumb while we talked, then found a spot and started pressing down on it. Apparently, that’s where he put the tibial screw when attaching the new ACL. I don’t know if it was coming loose or just sticking out a little and causing irritation, but it’s kind of a moot point, seeing as how the screw is currently located in a sterile plastic bag on a table across the room.

Soon after that, I was wondering why I could hear so many people making so much noise before my operation started. It was because the operation was over and I was in the recovery room. Things were pretty fuzzy for a while after that and I’ve double-checked with my parents about what happened between unconsciousness and leaving the hospital a few hours later.

As previously mentioned, the surgery was scheduled for 11:00. Dr. Lewis was talking to my parents in the waiting room by 11:20. Needless to say, everything went smoothly. “Everything” ended up being more than we thought it might be, but MRI scans apparently don’t always show everything that’s going on.

Just as a quick aside, when I went in for my first consultation with Dr. Lewis in September because of the problems with the back of my knee, he gave me three options: 1) go back to playing soccer and see what happens; 2) get a cortisone shot; or 3) have a scope done and see what we find. I opted for 1 and 3: I played soccer for a couple weeks without any problems, but I’m definitely glad I decided to have surgery as well.

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