journal.wiredreflexes.com

Some time ago, I came across a modified version of the following photo on Shadowness.com:

I couldn’t quite make out which city it was, but did get several questions about that from friends. One “friend” even went so far as telling me I sucked for not knowing and still putting up the image on my desktop. I really dig the image, and I also was quite curious about it, so I traced the image to the author; Daniel Verson of Verson Photography. I wrote him and told him how much I liked the photo, how I came about it, and asked him where it was taken. He responded. The mail-conversation is below:

…and it’s my mom. I know how you feel, I was as surprised as you are when I found out! But it’s true, we don’t have to look any further to find the true identity of that masked crusader; Captain Hardcore is my mom!

She’s been having some pain in her shoulder, and by some pain I mean a tremendous amount of pain. To remedy that, she underwent a relatively simple procedure, where they run small electric currents down a needle that’s stuck in certain key nerve clusters. It turned out that procedure was super-painful, and they had forgotten to mention that. When my mother had kind of gotten over the shock of that pain she kept saying that the pain was different, and she didn’t really know if she was having some residual pain from the procedure, so she waited for things to become a bit more clear. In the meantime, the following day, she had to have several things done, amongst others, a thorax scan, a CT scan of her torso. She was good and well home for about an hour after having done what she needed to do in the hospital that day when she got a phonecall from the doctor. He asked her if she’d felt short of breath, dizzy, or a stabbing pain in her chest. She told him that she didn’t think so, but that with all the pain lately she couldn’t really be sure. It turns out that she had a collapsed lung and she didn’t even know about it! It seems that during the pain procedure her lung had collapsed, and that was what caused so much pain.

My sister told me about this friday afternoon by way of SMS, casually informing me that my mother had to be admitted to the hospital because her lung had collapsed. When I called my sister to ask how my mother was doing, I was still under the impression that this had happened only a short while ago (not that she had been walking around with a collapsed lung for two days), and that she’d be in severe pain. My cousin Mark had a collapsed lung about a decade and a half ago, and I remember that wasn’t pleasant. My sister said; “Let me describe the situation. We’re getting ready to go to the hospital right now, and we’re just waiting for the car to come and pick us up. Mom is sitting on the sofa and has just stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.” That’s when I knew things were still alright; my mother had a collapsed lung, but was still smoking cigarettes, so it couldn’t possibly be that bad.

Since then she’s been in the hospital, but she’ll be discharged today, since her lung reinflated itself when they put a drain in her torso to get rid of some built up fluids. This was unexpected but fortunate, otherwise she’d have to get some surgery.

.: Crafty Misinformation Jim
Jim had been working his arse off in London, Madrid and Leeds all week long, and used up all his karma-pool. With no dice left in his karma-pool, he came up a few successes short when he was supposed to come over on Friday night, and sadly his flight was canceled. So instead of him coming over on Friday night, he came bastard-early on Saturday morning instead. That was too bad, considering how he was only going to be around for a short time, in which he wanted to meet up with as many people as possible while still having the opportunity to hang out without too much stress.

When he finally did land we made our way into the city talking, as we do, about all kinds of stuff. I like talking to Jim, and not just because he reaffirms much of what I already think and believe (we’re frighteningly similar, which makes me wonder how well he’d get along with Marco), but also because I like his energy and cheerful demeanor. Even when we talk about the shitty things in life, it manages to be with humour and ridicule, yet without the loss of gravitas.

We ended up having brunch with Moulsari, and afterwards we headed over to L’Opera for him to have lunch with Sam. (I guess dude was hungry). I went home to have a little nap, because the previous evening I had gone to bed rather late and had to get up early to pick Jim up. Later I met up with Jim and Sam and talked a bit. When Sam went to her retail therapy session, Jim and I met up with Moulsari and we hung out at Brix, which was great. We had cheese-sticks and drinks and talks and laughter. Afterwards we headed home where Moulsari prepared us a wonderful meal while it was Jim’s turn to take a nap. After our meal we engaged in some deep geekery by huddling around Mouls’ laptop and watching various youtube videos that we’d come across. We decided we wouldn’t go out and go through the liquor I still had. I ended up having quite a few drinks, as did Jim, as we ate popcorn and watched all episodes on my The Hire DVD. Moulsari went to bed and Jim and I decided to watch The Bourne Ultimatum. We’re both big Damon fans, but Jim even goes so far as to travel with the Bourne collection in his luggage. We ended up dissecting the film in the same way that literary critics and philosphers dissect books by Ayn Rand, which was hilarious. About halfway through the film I woke up and noticed that Jim was sleeping, too. Time to turn off the film and go to bed.

The next day we all slept in. We had lunch with Eva at around noon. Moulsari had made fantastic French toast, we had strawberries, raspberries, banana and grapes and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. After that it was time for me to head out to Hoorn and help my brother with some studying, and so I said goodbye to Jim.

It was a pleasure to see you again, Jim. Hope to see you again soon.

I am pulled in a thousand different directions by a thousand different people. I feel like Melvin from The Big Hit; I want to please everyone, but there are too many demands. In the end I please nobody, and I get shit from everyone. I’m so frustrated right now I just want to be locked away in a sound-proof room filled with things I can smash and break. I want to scream and break things, just so that I can get rid of that ball of stress and fear that resides in the pit of my stomach.

…but then again, I’m not dying of an incurable disease, and my problems are trivial compared to real problems, so I’m just going to have a coke and a smile and deal. “Harden the fuck up, Dennis.” Wooosaaah!

.: MMA
Last friday I went to kung fu, and besides seriously injuring my heel, I also had the opportunity to do some BJJ with Tristram, my buddy from kung fu who has also started MMA. He’s very athletic, incredibly strong (freakishly Wai Yip-strong), but he is a lot smaller than I am, but I had expected him to be a challenging opponent. First time around he quickly put me in a guillotine-choke, but I powered out of it and went to his back. I got an arm under his chin and pulled him onto my back, put two hooks in and it was only a matter of time before I had the rear-naked choke. He tapped. Quite please with myself we went for it again. In no time I had his back again, but this time I couldn’t close and he turned and I fell in his guard. I kept my head low while he was working to better his position. I punched him in order to get him to open up, switching from his torso to his head to keep him guessing. The joke was on me, because I telegraphed my arm, he grabbed it, and grabbed my leg and sweeped me and I found myself on my back with him on top of me. I had him in half-guard and locked my legs around his. He started to soften me up with punches as I was trying to move towards his side. I rolled to my back and he went for a rear-naked choke. I grabbed his arm and threw him off me. I fell into his guard, opened him up, got the mount and rolled him into an arm-bar. 2-0 for me! After that we went back to kung fu. :)

.: Gaming
So, The Traitor got a great opportunity to work and live in Paris for a year, so our D&D campaign, which had only recently gotten underway, is going to be put on halt. I really would’ve liked to get some more gaming in, but ski-trips, visits and going-away parties are going to take up all available gaming time, so it’s going to be put on hold until The Traitor returns. Which is Kool and the Gang, of course, but what to do in his absence?

Recently, Frank got his hands on a copy of Dune, a roleplaying game based on Frank Herbert’s series of books with the same name. This game is very rare, and the only copies you can pick up are the ones you find for insane prices on eBay. That should give you an indication what kind of a Dune-nut Frank is. In that regard I’m sure things will turn out fine; Frank’s very knowledgable about the universe and will probably be able to turn that into a good story. The only problem I can see is thatDune is supposed to be a fairly political game, with intrigue and politics being the main elements. You are part of an entourage in a noblehouse and you’re going to have to try and further its political clout. While this seems like an interesting idea, with lots of roleplaying opportunities, it has traditionally not worked well for our gaming group. I don’t have a lot of examples in which it went wrong, but it didn’t work so well with V:TM, which is a shame because I really enjoyed the whole premise of the story Sam had thought up.

Another option, which is a lot safer, is that we ask Frank to prepare a D&D campaign with the current characters. I think we should give Dune a go, but we should start out slow, perhaps with a tiny campaign of a couple of weeks so that we can get to know the game a bit, try it out and see if we like it. Perhaps we should try a few small campaigns that focus on the different available flavours of play you can opt for within the game, to see what suits us the best. I just don’t want Frank to pour his heart and soul into things, having sunk hours and hours of intense preparation into it, only to have us not dig it and shut it down.

I should send out an e-mail about this.

.: Big Jim
Jim will be coming over (again) this weekend. He’s in England playing a superhero and he’s got some time to hop across the canal and hang out. Muy cool. He’s got a knee-injury, I’ve got a heel-injury, I foresee little dancing, and more of the hanging out sipping on vodka/tonic and tequila/tonic, respectively. I should really find out when his flight is coming in so I can pick his ass up at the airport on friday. Another e-mail I shall send!

.: Work
Work has become a lot more interesting lately, as I started working on a new application in our new .NET application framework. I’ve gotten quite comfortable with our old framework, and the moments of personal triumph I had while developing were getting fewer and further in between. Now, with the new framework, I’ve got that Aha-Erlebnis almost every other minute, which makes me feel good about my abilities, and excited to work on this project.

In the meantime it’s dawning on me that I’m starting the sixth year of my employment at this company, which, when I consider it, is rather crazy. I started in Januari of 2003, so I’ve got five years of employment here behind me and I wonder if it’s time for something new. I would seriously start looking for something new if I wasn’t having so much fun developing this new application, and I could certainly use the skillset that I’m currently developing. If my review next week goes well, and I can keep focussing on my current project more than I have in the last month or so, then I’m going to hold off on it for a little while.

My mother is in a lot of pain, but she’s a taaie tante so she doesn’t complain much. Sometimes it’s so bad she can’t sit still, she cries or rocks back and forth hoping to find some eleviation. Over the last ten years her body has been getting rickitier and rickitier, her joints, mostly. The cancer is taking a lot out of her, and she’s aging very quickly, and that’s certainly not helping her problems. She got stereotactical radiology on her lung, which also caused some tears in the muscles of her shoulder as a side-effect and by now the pain is unbearable.

Yesterday, she and I went to the hospital together to talk about the options for pain treatment. My mother says she’s feeling fine, and the cancer doesn’t bother her, but her shoulder is giving her so much pain that she’s eyeing the euthanasia-papers more and more lately. She says that all the medication she’s taking – and it’s a lot – is to get rid of the pain in her shoulder, and it’s not helping anything. The side-effects of the medication are also pretty severe, so if she could find an alternative, get rid of the pain, she’d be so much better off.

There are three options; 1) running an electric current through the two nerve clusters that are giving the most problems, coupled with a shot of steroids to get rid of any possible infections. This will result in a numb arm but usable arm. Problems are that she won’t be able to feel pain, so if she hurts herself she might not notice. 2) Shutting down neural pathways so that her entire arm is not just numb, but also paralysed. My mother doesn’t consider this an option. She’d rather live with the pain, as one of the things she cites on her euthanasia-registration as quality of life is the ability to take care of her own body. It’s a deal-breaker. 3) The same as option number 1, only this time instead of doing it to a nerve cluster, they do it straight on her spine. It’s a very intense operation, during which she has to remain awake in order to give directions to the operating doctor to say whether or not the pain is gone.

We’re going with option number 1 first. Hopefully that’ll do the trick, and even if it only takes away half of the pain my mother experiences at times, it’s going to be such a relief. It’s going to be a relief for everyone; my sister, my brother, anyone who helps her out, because you just want to tear your hair out of your head in frustration because you want to take the pain from her, if only for a little while. It reminds me, in a very geeky way, of the priest spell Shield Other in D&D, where you’re able to half the damage of the one you shield. I would gladly take my mother’s pain if it would give her a moment of respite, even though she would never let me do it, of course.

During the interview with the doctor he asked me if I could add any more information to my mother’s story. I told him the entire story, in chronological order, with all the elements that I thought were important. I told him that she was technically untreatable and that her life-expectancy wasn’t so long by the look of things, and that while she is riding out the last of her days (weeks? months?) she wanted to concentrate on the things that matter to her the most, the people that she’d leave behind, without the encumbrance of that pain, because it would pollute everything. He understood. My mother, suddenly confronted with the reality of the situation, broke down. The second time that happened since this all began. Sorry, mamma.

We walked home together. The air was cold and crisp and the sun was warm, and my mother said she had the energy, and so we walked, meanwhile talking about the things that were on her mind. She talked alot about the relationships she has had with men, her father, my father, my step-father, etc. She told me about the problems she’d had, and the reasons for them, and it struck me that she was so incredibly self-aware, and so open about her flaws and her mistakes, and I felt privileged to listen. God, even though my foot hurt like hell (Kung Fu injury), I didn’t want that walk home to end. I haven’t connected with my mother like that in years, and it was all so comfortable and…fluid.