Lingering Patterns
Jun. 26th, 2003 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaAs I've mentioned in a few postings here, three weeks ago tomorrow I had "minor surgery" on my abdomen. I've appreciated the various expressions of sympathy both online and in person, but I've also had a feeling that I was getting such sympathy under false pretenses--as far as I was concerned, it really was minor, and would have been close to trivial if it hadn't been compounded with a cold. Yes, I'm still a bit fatigued--and I just realized that this is probably in part due to the incision interfering with my ability to sleep prostrate because putting all of my weight on the incision makes me a bit sore--but other than that I've been basically completely recovered for over a week.
Well, last week my friend, NYRSF collaborator, and famously loudly dressed editor David Hartwell had an angioplasty which concluded with a stent being installed in one of his coronary arteries. So for the last week I've been trying to wrap my brain around the concept of "minor heart surgery". Which it was--David was released the same day, and other than serious fatigue, he's not suffering any major side effects or discomfort. But for Xist's sake, he had doctors sticking things in his heart! How can that be "minor"?
And I realized that this is all leftovers from old ways of approaching the world. There was a time when my surgery would have left me incapacitated for three weeks and sub-par for three months instead of three days and weeks respectively. There was a time when David would have been lucky to be out of the hospital this summer after having people mucking with his heart, instead of on-track to return to work in a fortnight. Things change; technology does improve.
Trivially, this reminds me of long distance rates. Several people I'm close to--notably my parents, but also, surprisingly, some people of my generation--still think of long distance calls as dangerously expensive. I'm not much of a phone-talker, but the 6 cents per minute that long-distance calls cost me isn't the reason why. A friendly acquaintence of mine several years ago told me about a contract job he held which involved transmitting data by long-distance dial-up (this was before the ubiquity of the Internet, so probably 1994). In order to connect, he had to call his supervisor over to his desk so that the supervisor could assure that my friend was being relatively efficient and not unnecessarily driving up the phone bill. The irony of $25/hour supervisor stopping his work to monitor the behavior of a $15/hour contractor to guarantee that the contractor didn't accidentally incur a few minutes extra phone time, which would cost approximately $6/hour, was lost on the company.
Anyway. I don't really know where I'm going with this. Maybe just a big "isn't it better to live in the present?"
Well, last week my friend, NYRSF collaborator, and famously loudly dressed editor David Hartwell had an angioplasty which concluded with a stent being installed in one of his coronary arteries. So for the last week I've been trying to wrap my brain around the concept of "minor heart surgery". Which it was--David was released the same day, and other than serious fatigue, he's not suffering any major side effects or discomfort. But for Xist's sake, he had doctors sticking things in his heart! How can that be "minor"?
And I realized that this is all leftovers from old ways of approaching the world. There was a time when my surgery would have left me incapacitated for three weeks and sub-par for three months instead of three days and weeks respectively. There was a time when David would have been lucky to be out of the hospital this summer after having people mucking with his heart, instead of on-track to return to work in a fortnight. Things change; technology does improve.
Trivially, this reminds me of long distance rates. Several people I'm close to--notably my parents, but also, surprisingly, some people of my generation--still think of long distance calls as dangerously expensive. I'm not much of a phone-talker, but the 6 cents per minute that long-distance calls cost me isn't the reason why. A friendly acquaintence of mine several years ago told me about a contract job he held which involved transmitting data by long-distance dial-up (this was before the ubiquity of the Internet, so probably 1994). In order to connect, he had to call his supervisor over to his desk so that the supervisor could assure that my friend was being relatively efficient and not unnecessarily driving up the phone bill. The irony of $25/hour supervisor stopping his work to monitor the behavior of a $15/hour contractor to guarantee that the contractor didn't accidentally incur a few minutes extra phone time, which would cost approximately $6/hour, was lost on the company.
Anyway. I don't really know where I'm going with this. Maybe just a big "isn't it better to live in the present?"
