Nothing got accomplished this week. I don't mean that in a things just got in the way. I mean that Nothing, the very concept of nothing, imposed itself on things in my life and actively thwarted progress.
On Thursday night/Friday morning, the freezing rain which had been dropping all day finally converted to ice, and in doing so dropped a branch across an equally glazed power line. The pattern continued across the county and at 12:30 that night, I felt the air stop moving over the bed. I decided the blankets would keep us warm, and nodded off to sleep.
This has been the third year in a row where we've had a multi-day power outage, with a hurricane's remains bracketed by ice storms. This explains why I'll probably be the last person you'll find with an electric car, as I like to avoid single points of failure. But this put us in one again, and it was all I could do in the three days of this to not fall into despair. But instead of despairing, I just got into an irritated wait state. Once you get everyone to safety, and cancel your plans that can't work, you can only wait. Waiting is nothing but Nothing. Focusing on waiting just ruined the week. I found myself unable to focus on any task to keep me occupied, or progressing, and just fell back to the waiting.
Having to wait scrubbed my attempt to be part of this year's SCT, as I couldn't test out my improved internet connection, and I couldn't guarantee I wouldn't be called back to the house to reset everything and make it habitable again. That's now making SCT only one of the last four years, and it seems like worse than that.
Even after the power came back I found myself in a dissatisfied state of Nothing. I spent Tuesday at the cardiologist, an echocardiogram and an inspection. My semi-annual evaluation is reduced to one number, the heart ejection fraction. This time I managed to improve to the 60-65% ejection fraction group, and that's actually right on average for my age. I found the news good and comforting, but I find myself increasingly concerned that my treatment is on autopilot. That is, my cardiologist is treating me for the most generic myocardial damage, but most damage doesn't follow any of the suddenness or other symptoms I had while sick. So when she suggested a plan, it sounded very much like she didn't listen to anything I told her about the past six months. Maybe the echo data had already been calculated and the plan formulated for that, but maybe it was that the day to day information was Nothing.
When I got hospitalized, I was interesting to the heart doctors, people don't suddenly have their heart function collapse on them without a reason. But they never found a trace of whatever it was. So it was a mystery to them as well as me. Over three years, as I recovered faster than anybody expected, I ironically became less interesting to them, a fact I was grateful for. After all, with no evidence to learn what caused it, and the treatment working, there's nothing to learn from here. And now we've entered a new phase, where the recovery itself isn't any information, and now they really don't know what to do except the blandest plan possible, and we've learned Nothing from the case history, and Nothing from the patient. And there is no comfort in thinking it's probably going to work.
As I was preparing to leave to the appointment Tuesday morning, my mother called to tell me of the passing of her sister. My aunt Betty had been in heavily assisted living for two years, and Margaret, my secretary cat, had been hers prior to that.
She spent her life working for the State Department in various embassies around the world. During her career, she ended up in Montreal and Tokyo for their Olympics, Manila for the fall of Marcos, France under deGaulle, and a decade in Turkey. Her being out in the world had given my mother’s side of the family a reason to travel and visit, and get a broader view than Washington County could provide. As a result, I had a lot more exposure to the news of the world than a kid from our town should expect. Every relative you have bends your focus a little, that was how she bent mine.
Such life experience made her ill equipped for retirement in Houston, PA, and by the time she left there after 35 years, she probably had some sort of beef with every resident. By the time the dementia and the failing balance made it impossible for her to live alone, she had also accumulated beefs with all the family, even if we knew it wasn’t there any more. I probably ended up her favorite nephew by virtue of being in her orbit for Sunday dinner, but that vainly assumes she even remembered me. More likely, her memories of me, her siblings, even her last visitors were gone, replaced with the malignant Nothing.
This week was a sucking void, I'll try to do better next week.
The one thing I saw that wasn't nothing this week was a letter posted to hsquizbowl introducing the quiz bowl community to the quizzing community. As someone who has been advocating for the quiz bowl community to connect with someone, anyone in the outside world for 25 years, I can hope this is a positive change, though the fact that only a few older alumni and people who had already transitioned out of the quiz bowl collective memory makes me worry that it will peter out in a few weeks. I may stretch this out next week. Part of why I’m writing the book is to get televised quiz bowl to integrate with circuit quiz bowl, and once you have one, what’s another integration, but another step in the process.