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Dear Diary – March 26, 2001

August 29, 2023
MThomas

[Written during my first trip to China]

My legs, especially my left calf, still ache from Hua Shang. That experience alone justifies my whole trip. I walked 6 km starting at about 1pm. Stopping only once for maybe 15-20 minutes for a Sprite and a flashlight, I reached the North Peak (Bei Feng) at a little after 5. I really should have continued to the South Peak (the highest at 2160m), but at just before a particularly treacherous climb, a stranger offered to take my picture. He did this twice later; he then asked me where I was going, so because I told him North Peak, he led me to the North Peak Hotel. I signed into an expensive room, thinking a locked door proof against bag theft — but unnecessarily, as there were no other guests at all! I got a TV, a washbasin (no running water) and access to outdoor lavatories (Must have been the “private bath” the guidebook lied about). Public toilets basically meant an open outhouse shitting down the rock face — so much for sacred mountain vibes.

I slept and, waking at 4 am, set off to climb the Blue Dragon. Only then did I know why one traditionally climbed the mountain at night: to conquer fear. Once I began, I could not return. Grasping the iron-link chain with one hand and flashlight with the other, all I could see were tiny, steep steps underfoot and clear stars overhead. Most stairs were about 60º, but several inclined more, and at least one near the beginning of the Blue Dragon was almost vertical, certainly 80º. At the very end, just before the sunrise viewing point, was the actual peak (2100m). From atop an enormous boulder crowned with pine trees and a lone camp light came the voices of two crazy park workers, exhorting all to brave the true East Peak. A guide at the bottom told me to be careful before I attempted to climb the rock. But as I realized the steps were actually more than 90º, and that my pack was pulling me backward as I yanked myself up on the chains, I gave up and went down again after about 10 feet.

When I returned after watching daybreak, I looked down at the Dragon and could only marvel at my audacity; I had come alone at night, scared half out of my wits, with heavy packpack and asthma and glasses and only 1 free hand, and I had climbed steps narrower than the width of my foot. With sheer rock cliffs on both sides and only a single metal chain between me and a quickly plummeting death. I did it. I have nothing left to fear.

September to April

August 28, 2023
MThomas

September

I want to do a creative graduate thesis, he said.

In that case, you should keep a diary, his advisor suggested. Write every day.

OK, he said.

And bring me a story or two to look at.

OK.

October

These aren’t stories, his advisor informed. These are more like diary entries.

How should I write a story, then? he asked.

Write what you know. Base your stories on people and things around you.

OK.

And bring me another story or two.

OK.

November

The narration isn’t believable, his advisor imparted.

Why? he asked.

It’s too difficult for the reader to identify with the characters. Nobody has a family with nine children.

What should I do?

Go read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

OK.

And bring me a couple more stories.

OK.

December

I don’t get any sense of through-story, his advisor complained.

What do you mean? he asked.

The stories aren’t connected. They’re all different.

Well, what should I do?

Try an internal perspective. Go read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

OK.

And bring me another story.

OK.

January

This is too abstract, his advisor mused.

What do you mean? he asked.

This isn’t a true plot. The symbolism is too obscure.

It’s a translation of something I wrote for a German class.

You don’t want to be Kafka.

I don’t?

You need real life stories, with real people and real problems.

What should I do?

Go read Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.”

OK.

And…

Bring you another story?

Two.

February

I think I see the problem, his advisor intuited.

What is it? he asked.

I think you need to experience more life before you can be an effective writer.

What do you mean?

You need to go out into the world and work different jobs, meet different people, move around a bit.

My thesis is due in two months.

So it is. Make sure you give your draft to me next month.

OK.

And…

Another story?

No. Just read my comments and rewrite what you have.

OK.

March

I don’t see the point of adding poetry between the stories, his advisor grumped.

Why? he pondered.

The poems interfere with the prose.

I thought you didn’t like the prose.

I would say you need to add a poetic sense to your prose.

How do I do that?

Try writing poetry. For practice.

…

And finish the rewrite of the draft by next week.

OK.

And print three copies on a laser printer. And buy three of those thesis black cover binders.

OK.

April

Well, the three of us have examined your thesis, and we decided on a grade of B+, his advisor beamed.

…

I know it’s not as high as you wanted, but I argued that the interplay of letters, poetry, and stories woven together formed an interesting kind of metadiscourse narrative depth to the thesis structure.

…

Congratulations.

Thanks.

If you like this, you might enjoy Notes from the Nineties, a book with short stories and poems (the above is the first one, and may or may not be partially based on personal experiences my senior year in college).

Everybody I know needs it!

August 15, 2023
MThomas

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

OK, OK, in all seriousness, I would probably open a jazz café / restaurant. But only on the weekends.

We live at the foot of a mountain trail, and it’s really popular with retired folks and young families.

My wife and I have already begun thinking about our “second life” after retirement, and I’ve been frankly bored with the whole EFL teaching thing for a while now.

But pizza and the Duke? Yeah. That’d work.

Supermassive black hole found spitting a giant, high-energy jet toward Earth

August 14, 2023
MThomas

A NASA mission has observed a supermassive black hole pointing its highly energetic jet straight toward Earth. Don’t panic just yet, though. As fearsome as this cosmic event is, it’s located at a very safe distance of about 400 million light-years away.
https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/supermassive-black-hole-found-spitting-a-giant-high-energy-jet-toward-earth

Gee. So reassuring.

FWIW I had never heard the term “blazar” before reading the linked article.

Sounded like a cross between Happy Days and late 1970s Japanese anime.

And it just so happens there’s a new Ultraman Blazar “live action” on Japanese TV from this past July…

Seriously. It’s called Ultraman Blazar. Honestly, I can’t make this stuff up… (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27560594/)

How I learned how NOT to carry a shoulder bag to work

July 2, 2023
MThomas

Have you ever had surgery? What for?

Yeah, minor surgery. On March 3, 2020, I had a benign tumor the size of a gum ball removed from my left shoulder.

It had been created by repeated rubbing of my shoulder bag strap on sweaty skin. Or rather on sweaty shirt over sweaty skin. I walk half an hour back and forth the train station to my workplace each morning and evening, and the summers in Kyoto are hot hot hot.

So there I was lying on a surgeon’s bed, getting my shoulder skin snipped into three pieces and pried open. My blood pressure shot up to 190 at one point. The surgeons told me to relax.

Uh. Yeah. They didn’t tell me how close the tumor was to a major artery, but I could make an educated guess.

There was a cloth screen between my face and my shoulder so that I couldn’t see what they were doing. And of course they had numbed the entire area and I couldn’t move my left arm at all.

But it was an unpleasant experience. No pain, but I could of course still hear the clip clip clipping of scissors on skin. And I have an imagination.

(Fwiw I have written a short story based on getting my wisdom teeth taken out—also with local rather than general anesthesia—though I didn’t include the factoid that my root tips shot across the room like tiny cannonballs and were never found again).

Fortunately, the surgery was successful— they even showed me the tumor (it looked like a tiny blancmange, and now you’ll have that image in your mind next time you eat one). They even asked me if if wanted to keep it (um, no thanks).

And afterwards the scar was barely visible, so good a job they did with the stitches.

Two days after the surgery, we went into lockdown and had to wear masks everywhere.

Talk about good timing.

Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betel…

May 26, 2023
MThomas

Betelgeuse, the closest red giant to Earth, has long been understood to move between brighter and dimmer in 400-day cycles. But from late 2019 to early 2020, it underwent what astrophysicists called “the great dimming”, as a dust cloud obscured our view of the star.

Now, it is glowing at 150% of its normal brightness, and is cycling between brighter and dimmer at 200-day intervals – twice as fast as usual…It is currently the seventh brightest star in the night sky – up three places from its usual tenth brightest.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/26/its-new-territory’s-why-is-betelgeuse-is-glowing-so-brightly-and-behaving-so-strangely?

Betelgeuse is the closet red giant Star to our solar system, one of the shoulders of the Greek constellation of Orion.

The cultural information in the linked article was actually more interesting than the phenomenon observed. For instance, the fact that an Aboriginal people in Australia saw it long before the Greeks did was something I didn’t know.

(Although ancient humans in what is now Germany apparently carved an image of it around 32,000 years ago…)

And that the Greek name comes originally from the Arabic “bat al-jawzāʾ” meaning “giant’s shoulder.”

And all three cultures saw the star as connected with fire held by a giant hunter of some sort.

And so have ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and probably everyone else, too. We just can’t help personifying even the stars.

The kicker?

When it does eventually explode, it could – over the course of a week – grow so bright that it will be visible during daylight, and cast shadows at night.

Now that’s something I’d like to be around to see. Hmm. If only I could manage to live for another 10- to 100,000 years…

And today’s random writing prompt is…

May 22, 2023
MThomas

Have you ever broken a bone?

Depends on how you define “broken.”

I got two bone spurs, separated by two years, thanks to playing baseball in junior high school. Both were fingers on my left hand.

The first time was my left thumb first joint. The second time was my left hand ring finger second joint.

Both times, our local health clinic doctor put a metal splint on the finger, wrapped it in flexible bandage and sealed it off with a tiny metal clip.

And of course I stupidly went on playing baseball, because at age 15 guys think they are completely indestructible.

My ring finger stuck out when I batted. I’m lucky I didn’t get hit by a pitch in the hand (I did get hit on the knee, but that’s a whole ‘nother story).

Also, it inspired my baseball novel. So there was a silver lining!

Titan and its subsurface ocean has tides

February 24, 2023
MThomas

It is this subsurface ocean, or rather its interaction with the ice shell that covers it, that a team of researchers led by the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium hope to better understand. More specifically, they wish to understand how the ocean’s depth and the pressure exerted by the icy shell on the underground water body influence the formation of tidal motions and currents inside of it.
https://www.space.com/saturn-moon-titan-ocean-tides-icy-crust-study

When I first heard of “Attack on Titan,” I was disappointed to learn that it didn’t take place actually on Titan. (The title in English is a mistranslation. It should be “Attack of the Titans” or “The Titans Attack” or even “Attacking Titans,” depending.) In any case, it’s a disgusting manga/anime with nothing to do with the icy moon of Saturn. Except for the name. And even that’s a misuse (they should have used “giant” as the storyline is very loosely based on Ymir and the frost giants of Scandinavian myth).

Anyway. It’s a fascinating moon the size of the planet Mercury with a liquid ocean and (mostly) nitrogen atmosphere, making it a candidate for extraterrestrial life. Here’s a cool view of it: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/titan/overview/

Merry Xmas 2022!

December 26, 2022
MThomas

Happy holidays, everyone!

Best wishes for the 2023 New Year. See you on the other side!

ChatGPT: Is this really the “death of the essay”?

December 17, 2022
MThomas

I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)

The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.

By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.

*Somehow, I doubt that people in the US said “livin’ the dream” in the ’50s…*

As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.

So far, I have asked the program to:

Write a haiku about winter without using the word “winter”
Write a limerick about an Irish baseball player
Write a dialogue between God and Nietzsche (I just had to…)
Imagine what Jean-Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant would say to each other (see above) but using US ’50 slang
Have Thomas Aquinas and John Locke argue about the existence of God (that one was fun)
Write a 300 word cause-effect essay about climate change
Write a 300 word compare and contrast essay about the US and Japan
Write a 1000 word short science fiction story based on Mars
Write a 1500 word short science fiction about robots in the style of Philip K Dick

OK, and the verdict is:

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