Ouch

My knee did not respond well to arthroscopic surgery about two weeks ago.

It bled internally causing swelling, bruising, and a surprising amount of pain. I have had to stay in an easy chair for two weeks with my leg propped up on pillows.

Finding the Real World

As I read a young fella's blog (www.reemer.com ), I realized that his proclivity for all things web was matched by a propensity to travel. My first thought was, oh good, he visits the real world as well as the virtual. Yet I see an error in my thinking. My time at the office reviewing purchase requisitions is real, I suppose, but hardly more meaningful than visiting my daughter's blog or text messaging my son. It's wonderful when we are close enough to press flesh and monitor facial expressions minutely. But is blogging less real than standing next to a stranger on a city bus?

I recently discovered Second Life, a sort of massively parallel multiplayer role playing game without a score. I am not knocking it, but I'm sure you detect skepticism in my word choice. At first I was appalled. All those hours building an avatar, embellishing one's virtual accomplishments, accumulating virtual items. I checked myself and asked, what is present or missing in Second Life that would cause me to consider it real or unreal. Meaningful relationships was my first thought. If I hurt someone's feelings or make them glad, it is getting very real very fast. If all my actions are without real consequence as relates to anothers well being or even my own, how satisfying will it ever be. I loved watching YouTube videos of Matt Harding. On the outtake version at http://youtube.com/watch?v=tT8jA_pps3o he dances a little jig in a multitude of exotic settings. In most he is alone. In Rawanda he is joined by a growing, grinning crowd of young kids doing their best to imitate him.
They are delighted (as was he, I hope). Matt changed those kids world that day. They got to be video taped. A few of their elders gathered to watch and laugh. Quite a contrast with some other happenings in Rawanda. If even one person reads my blog and is meaningfully impacted, I will trade that for an awful lot of standing next to strangers on a bus. Of course, an alternative might be to meet a new friend on a bus.

A Can't Do Attitude

Every person has a number of things they can't do. Some may be subject to change. I can't play the guitar, but if I put the hours into it that my son, Sam, is doing, then I probably could play. Others aren't. I will not set the world record in high jump. Maybe I had a shot at it 40 years ago, but no amount of mental fortitude and hard training will put me over a 7 foot high bar without major mechanical assistance.

Up until a few years ago, I pretty much took it for granted that I could walk and probably always would until I was a genuine little old man in a nursing home. Now that is not a for sure. Minor knee surgery has caused my knee to complain to me in a major way, using pain as the primary means of communication. Major knee surgery is scheduled for June 11. Well, it is not so much knee surgery as knee removal. My leg will be sliced open and my knee joint will be sawn out with some very expensive bone working equipment by a highly paid carpenter. A state of the art steel and plastic knee will be pounded and glued into the empty spot. If all goes well, I will walk pain free (more or less) once again. Given the trouble I am having after relatively minor arthroscopic surgery (two weeks at home and counting), perhaps you will forgive me if I remind myself that one or two times out of a hundred, knee replacement surgery fails one way or another.

Were I to suffer that fate, I would have to develop a can't do attitude. There are certain things I just wouldn't be able to do, just as I can't go for a walk in the park right now while I convalesce in a opioid haze from the minor surgery.

The admonition to adopt a "can do" attitude is fine with me as long as it is not a form of foolish denial. What I can do is find alternatives to jumping 7 feet in the air or benchpressing 700 lbs. I can find ways to love and serve others in some new way, each time I lose access to one of the established ways.

I remember when my best friend taught my youngest son to ride a bike. Perhaps a diet, some intense training and therapy, and a ready supply of Advil would have enabled me to make it through one more bike training session. Running on a gimpy knee. Aching back bent over an ample belly.
Or maybe Sam would have had to wait on the bike thing until he could teach himself. I thank God for the people who can do what I can't do. I hope he will enable me to see the many ways that I can do things for others.

Democracy in the Workplace

I had an experience today that led me to question some very fundamental assumptions I have had about how workplaces, especially "for profit" companies, are run. The reigning assumption seems to be that they are most certainly not democracies. What if that assumption someday seems just as ludicrous as the once unquestioned belief that nations must be organized as aristocracies? This opened a small crack in my case hardened thinking about work. Just now I found the following site: http://www.worldblu.com./blog/

Not only does worldblu presume that companies might someday be run democratically, they have even discovered a surprising list of companies that are already democratic according to a set of ten criteria that worldblu has established.

I am not aware that most companies have any sort of "constitution" that proclaims them to be a hierarchy similar to medieval fiefdoms. Nonetheless, as I examined my own thinking, I realized that I have acted as if there were such a document.

Will future generations be aghast at the lack of free speech, the disparities of wealth, and the abitrary decision making that we now endure in our places of employment?

This is an area that deserves a good deal more thought than I have given it in more than three decades.

Thank You Friends and Family

Many thanks to all of you who prayed for us, encouraged us, and loved us during the difficult time where my first grandchild, Daniel, almost exited the womb far in advance of his due date. For an epilogue on how things went, see Julia and Viggo's blog: http://juliaandviggo.blogspot.com/

Daniel

Daniel, my first grandchild, exited the womb six days ago. I want to change my profile picture to this one that includes him. I want to put a video clip of him in a post. But I can't figure out how. Guess you will have to go to MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/kschnake It may be tacky, but it is easier to use!

No Turning Back

This time, my daughter Julia is in major labor and there is no stopping.
Daniel will just be three weeks earlier than his due date. She has been in labor all afternoon. Her water was broken. She is fully dilated. She is in a lot of pain and very tired. As I recall, this is the usual baby stuff, but it makes me afraid to think about it much. This time, I sit here at home and wait. Viggo and Barbara are with Julia. She has just been given an epidural to ease her pain.

I'm going to go watch FutureWeapons on the Discovery Channel and I will hope that the sight of stuff getting shot and blown up can calm me down.

Google.com

Google was named less than 10 years ago.

Source: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

Googol

Main Entry: goo·gol Pronunciation: 'gü-"golFunction: nounEtymology: coined by Milton Sirotta b ab 1929 nephew of Edward Kasner died 1955 American mathematician: the figure 1 followed by 100 zeros equal to 10100

Thank you Mirriam Webster on-line for helping me to remember where Google probably got it's name. I learned about googols more than four decades ago, when the transistor was just beginning to be put down in multiples on a single piece of silicon.

A transistor roughly equals a one or a zero. It takes at least eight billion similar little on/off switches to create a single gigabyte that now comes on a key chain for less than $20. More than 5 billion key fobs of data are transmitted every year (ie more than 5 exabytes). Google has seriously targetted doing a searchable scan of every page of every book ever published (30 million plus books). I don't even need to do the math to know that a googol makes an exabyte look small and an exabyte can probably handle all 30 million books with plenty of room to spare.

So now that virtually every word ever written may soon be searchable, the question is this: What word shall we search for most fervently?

See John 1:1 for answer.

Fact is Stranger than Fiction

Fact really is much stranger than fiction.

I watched a man die a few days ago. I was looking out from the second floor of a building. He was on the ground not far away. I could not see his face. I watched as he was given artificial respiration. I watched as cardiac shock paddles caused his back to suddenly arch and propel him from the ground. I watched as the people giving emergency aid gradually gave up.

How many men have I read of dying, watched dying in films and movies, and imagined dying in daydreams or nightmares. Thousands and thousands. Yet in 56 years of real life, this is the only time I recall standing in the presence of someone dying. Even then, I was remote. I did not know the man. I could not hear his last words or know for sure when he had passed away. Nonetheless, the fact of his death seems more impactful than any fiction I can recall.

I once read that the majority of police officers never fire their gun in an actual conflict during their entire career. The ones in movies often shoot many times in the course of a week long investigation. Yet for those officers who must point their gun at a man and fire, the impact must be huge compared to the tiny spark we feel when it is a fiction.

Often when I have described my life, I have been quick to call it dull and quite average. Yet I have held each of my four children moments after watching them being born. I have helped police carry my father's lifeless body to a coroner's SUV. I have been trapped at night in a collapsed tent during a howling snowstorm at 10,000 feet, miles from any other humans. I have kissed and held the woman I love and would die for and hope to live with forever. I have showered with an axe murderer. I have contributed to technology that has changed the world. I have been caught between wooden pilings at the bottom of a lake while nearing the end of the air in my scuba tanks. I have stood at Mardi Gras, calling out for trinkets from the passing floats. I have sat in suicidal despair with a pistol barrel in my mouth, wishing I had the nerve to pull the trigger.
For every such thing that I have done, hundreds of real people, whom I know well, have done similar things or things even more intense. They have held a child as he died. They have fought off a madman lunging at them with a knife. They have watched a spouse swept from before them by a flood and drowned. They have actually pulled the trigger while the barrel was still in their mouth. They have been faithful to the same spouse for more than six decades. They have skiied off of cliffs. They have flown alone to Africa and walked its dusty roads.

Were we to see things rightly, perhaps we would realize that our lives are filled with love, pain, adventure, drama, joy, accomplishment. The dull hours that may tick by on any given day are actually a much needed respite from the intensity of those lives. There may be many dull moments, but I think that there are very few dull lives.

Fact really is much stranger than fiction.