I returned from the vacation that wasn’t quite a vacation, and had four days of much needed rest before returning to work. Actually, it was four and a half days before returning to work, because I spent Monday morning at my internist’s office getting my annual physical (everything looks good) combined with a pre-operative check-up. And when I finally did get back into the office, I found that my management had addressed just about everything that had overwhelmed me. I’m impressed to the point of awe by how progressively and pragmatically the whole situation was handled. And aside from the disorientation of things going so well and having to adjust to an abrupt shift in my responsibilities (and feeling more than a little guilty about how much people have inconvenienced themselves on my behalf), I’ve been recovering. I’ve been tapering off of the Clonazepam and, if nothing comes up in the meantime, will complete that process this weekend.

This will allow me to prepare for the next disruption, which is next Thursday’s encore tympanomastiodectomy. The ear hasn’t healed itself, so that’s still going to be necessary. I saw the ear doctor right before I went away, and he outlined the things he would do differently (use a larger, thicker graft of skin from my hip, and try to open the ear canal wider to get more air onto the skin as it heals) in hopes that it will heal differently. He continues to be irked that this hasn’t gone better, and that’s promising. I think he wants this fixed more than I do.

Lately, I’ve been reading Tsong-Kha-Pa’s The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment. It’s difficult to describe. It’s sort of the complete text and practice manual for Gelukpa Buddhism, though it’s probably only going to make sense to someone who’s already studied a fair amount. I’m finding it very helpful, even though I’m a Kagyu Buddhist, in pulling together the disparate threads of texts, practices, and wisdom, and laying them out in a practical, straightforward way. In Chapter 3, “How to Listen to and Explain the Teachings,” I came across this:

2. Think of the instructor as a doctor. For example, when you are stricken by a severe illness…, you seek a skilled doctor. Upon consulting your doctor, you are greatly delighted and listen to whatever your doctor says, revering him or her respectfully. Likewise, seek in this way a teacher who imparts the teachings…

It struck me that this isn’t the way we consult doctors any more. I’ve mentioned before the fact that expertise, especially doctors’ expertise, has come to be less valued, but more than that, the idea of faith that consulting a doctor (or a teacher) in that way depends on is increasingly rare. Though it’s important that we take responsibility for ourselves, we cannot separate ourselves from those on whom we might rely. This is the paradox that most of us would see around the notion of the guru in Tibetan Buddhism. The American tradition, starting perhaps with Emerson, seems to be to jealously guard the right to make our own choices. However, though I believe Emerson would have also urged us to take responsibility for the results of those choices, that seems to be a vanishing aspect of the American tradition. To make a sweeping generalization, people expect to decide for themselves whether or not they’ll follow their doctors’ instructions (or, as they’re more likely to be referred to now, advice), but the responsibility for whether or not they get well lies entirely with their doctors.

The Tibetan guru seems to turn that arrangement around: Someone else is given the right to make our choices for us, but we must accept full karmic responsibility for the results of those choices. I haven’t yet reached, and may never reach, the point in my practice where I have a guru, but I find contemplating the possibility instructive. We have fairly limited influence over what happens to us, especially if we believe ourselves to be separate from reality, and as we practice accepting responsibility for what happens to us nonetheless, we experience more fully the truth that we aren’t separate from reality. In this way, we finally learn to have faith in reality and not hold ourselves apart from it. If my doctor cannot fix my ear, that’s an outcome with which I’ll have to live, and holding someone else responsible for that won’t make it any easier. And my management has already rewarded my faith in the reality that I’m not currently able to make my professional experience bearable on my own.

Short of being able to actually come into your living room, one hand out for donations and the other hand setting up a slide projector, I figure this entry is about as pushy as I can get. It’s time to raise money again for AIDS Walk New York. Please, if you can, donate here. And as in years past, I’ll match every dollar donated up to $500, so make it hurt. And thanks for your support–it’s deeply appreciated.

One of the many places your donation will be appreciated is Provincetown, one of the American communities hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. Which brings us to my other hand. Here are my vacation snaps from this past week’s visit to Provincetown. Think of it as a reward for your donation, or think of it as yet another burden imposed upon you by this entry, but in either case, please give if you can.

I’ve been ambivalent about Provincetown for as long as I can remember. It was about thirty-five years ago that I first camped with my family in North Truro and visited Provincetown, which we did every summer for several years. Then, after my parents divorced, my father, my brother, and I stayed in a hotel on the beach in Provincetown itself for a few summers. One of those summers, my father met a woman who happened to have just built a house in the woods on the east end of town on a whale watch (I have no idea what she, as a local, was doing on a whale watch). A few years later, she and my father split up, and we didn’t come up here again for years. I came up with friends in college a couple of times and camped back in North Truro again, and then didn’t come up again until the trip on which my wife and I got engaged.

Since then, she and I have come back pretty much every year, a couple of times twice a year, and stayed in a series of better and better inns. We’ve come on our own, we’ve had friends up at the same time, and we’ve had family up. This is where, five years after his passing, we finally had my father’s memorial service. It’s a beautiful place, with everything that anyone (or anyone I would want to know) could want, from high-end shops and restaurants lining the aptly named Commercial Street, to art galleries and theaters with pedigrees decades and even centuries long, and all of it set in the vast unspoiled beauty of dunes and ocean as far as the eye can see. You can be as entertained, as active, or as relaxed as you’d like. I long for it; I dream of it when I’m not here; I listen to the local radio station and look at the Web cams; and yet when I’m here, it never offers the solace I hope it will. And it’s more than the simple disappointment that follows the failure to realize any unreasonable expectation.

As long I’ve been coming here, there’s always been something besides the joy of it. In fact, despite the continuing improvement in the accommodations and resources at my disposal, the joy hasn’t really increased. And behind the joy, there has always been this desperate sadness, a sadness that is probably best captured by Edward Hopper, often in paintings of Cape Cod landscapes. The light in those paintings flirts with warmth, but settles on an emptiness that ultimately feels harsh and hopeless. It’s the light of a photograph being overexposed, all the detail standing out sharply and then fading, showing how everything will dissolve into void. It’s the primordial impermanence of everything to which I’ve attached myself showing through. In Freud’s terms, it’s the uncanny. It’s the emptiness I’ve known since beginningless time appearing undeniably before me in the form of everything that I want. In Buddhist terms, it’s the samsara I’m coming to understand as the delusion that I cling to as the root of all of my suffering. And in both Freudian and Buddhist terms, these would be excellent realizations for me to achieve, were I better equipped psychically and spiritually to integrate them. Alas, I’m not.

Instead, I spiral into my suffering. I can neither renounce the attachments that drag me into this pain, nor can I simply enjoy them. I grab them and hold them fervently, wringing out and then discarding whatever they might offer me. And I wonder: Is this the collapse of my futile project of ego, the surrender of which will lead to some attainment and perhaps some bliss; or is it just the onset of some sort of psychotic breakdown? I suppose it depends on whether I believe the Freudians or the Buddhists. This started with being a little overwhelmed at work, but it has begun to engulf everything around me. Something’s going to happen.

Yesterday, I took a walk out west along Commercial Street and then back east along Bradfrod Street. When I first starting coming here, those were the two streets that defined the town, the whole of which seemed to lie between Bradford Street and the harbor. Over the last thirty-five years, contemporary houses that don’t fit at all architecturally with the unspeakably charming houses crowded into the older part of town and, worse, row after row of tacky condominiums have been crowded into what used to be the woods and swamp between Bradford Street and Route 6 (and beyond that, the blessedly still protected Cape Cod National Seashore). It occurred to me as I walked along the edge of this development, that little tiny Provincetown has developed suburbs with all of the ecological and aesthetic disadvantages that suggests. Where you once used to be able to walk anywhere you wanted to go in Provincetown, the people living, or at least staying, over there will need to drive everywhere. They’re not near any commerce, recreational activities, or entertainment. Whatever they’re in Provincetown for will require that they drive to it. And I can’t imagine the water, sewage, and electrical demands this places on the very narrow and delicate infrastructure that’s been stretched out here to support this little fishing village and artists’ community. As I had started my walk, I passed the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, which was advertising a presentation of how global warming and rising sea levels would affect Provincetown (most of which is a couple of feet above sea level). Something’s going to happen.

I started back in therapy, and a few weeks, maybe two months, after that, I started back on medication. I’m starting with Clonazepam, just as I did last time. I hope this is temporary and brief; that it doesn’t drag on and then lead to months or years on an SSRI. In some ways, I’m better off than the last time. I can see more clearly what’s happening, even at just about the worst of it; I’m still able to tell myself that whatever is bothering me will pass; and the pain doesn’t get too deep or intractable. And this does seem to have a more specific proximate cause, though it is still growing out of the same dark, twisted suffering that I’ll be addressing for the rest of my life. It seems that I’ll move from shielding myself from one unpleasantness or another.

The first time around, the unbearable proximate cause of all of my suffering was the noise of our apartment–the drummer upstairs, the summer parties on the decks all down the block, and the screaming unsupervised children in front of the adjacent community garden at 2:00, 3:00, and 4:00 in the morning in the summer. I went through all sorts of treatment and did all sorts of work, but we also moved. We found an astonishingly quiet apartment–not just quiet by New York standards, but quiet by any standards. It’s only when we travel that noise is a problem anymore. And the only price I seem to have paid for this is the ongoing suffering in one of my ears, likely caused by the over-vigorous insertion of an earplug at some point in the battle against noise.

The time around, the problems stem from work, though not in the usual way. Over the last couple of years, my responsibilities have escalated fairly quickly, and I’ve been struggling with what seems to me to be an exceedingly complex and ambitious project. The details are too tedious and subtle to try to lay out here, and some of them are probably confidential anyway, but the point is that I became overwhelmed. My coping mechanisms failed more and more often and more and more seriously. I started therapy, and the decline slowed. At my therapist’s suggestion, I started working out more and taking calcium and melatonin to ensure that I at at least sleep regularly, but still my coping mechanisms weren’t working well enough often enough.

The situation was, if not exacerbated, then at least made more difficult to get a handle on by my Buddhist practice. Though my practice has been invaluable in so many ways, and I do believe that it offers the ultimate means to address my suffering, the mundane walking of that can be painful at times. It offers the insight that allows me to see the impermanent nature of my suffering, and it gives me access to the perspective to witness all of this without actually being it and access to the indestructible awareness that can transcend. But in the worst moments, I find myself asking myself why I’m suffering so horribly from something that’s not real and becoming impatient with myself for not simply not doing this anymore. I lean too heavy on the wisdom it offers, and lose the ability to be compassionate with myself.

And so, with the therapy and the medication, I’ve found again the ability to be compassionate with myself, to allow my coping mechanisms to work and to stop thinking less of myself for needing them. I’ve spoken to my management and told them that I can’t quite handle what I’ve undertaken, and, not surprisingly, they were more compassionate with me than I’ve been with myself. They made sure the project with which I’ve been struggling will be completed successfully, they told me that they will discuss whatever needs to be discussed so I can continue to contribute as much as I have been without it being a threat to my emotional well-being, and they sent me off on this vacation I’m now on with nothing but their best wishes, the admonition not to give work a thought while I’m away, and the promise that everything will be taken care of. I admit to checking my e-mail once, and they’ve been as good as their word. This touches my to the point of tears.

Here I am, on vacation in the place I love most (though a bit before the weather’s quite ready) in gorgeous accommodations, with nearly a week and nothing to do. First, I was just so pleased to be here and to have Provincetown still be here. It’s just so wonderful. I went out and wandered the shops, picked up a used copy of Young Törless to read while I’m here, checked the restaurants to see what would be open, and went to Spiritus Pizza to pick up a MOP for dinner and watched someone from WOMR pick up a stack of pizzas for their fund-raising drive. When I got back to our room to eat, I listened to WOMR, and heard them thank Spiritus for the pizzas. I’m back in the small town I know well, though I noticed that my mind was still running much faster than the context demands. I’m not ready to be quiet and with myself yet.

The room we’re staying in this year is not nearly as private as others we’ve stayed in, and it’s in a newly renovated building that lacks the sound insulation that we’re used to at home. The neighbors upstairs have at least one child, and they’re not very still. The water from the tub, the sink, the toilet, sounds as though it’s running down our walls, and, once again, lying here trying to read Robert Musil, I felt my coping mechanisms going under one more time and the anxiety rising through the core of my body. And so it was back to the Clonazepam (which will require a gradual withdrawal anyway) and all this writing. In that hour, things seem to have unwound some, and I’m going to meditate. But I’m left with these questions: Will I ever be able to be happy unless everything around me is exactly as I want it to be? Do other people feel this way and just deal with it? Will I ever get away from all of the distractions and difficulties that I feel plague me so that I can just be present and with my wife now, not in some future ideal situation?

I just read through Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. It’s an unlikely page-turner, but it is a page-turner. It is, as its subtitle claims, an account of the beginnings of World War II and, Baker feels, the end of civilization. Many writers have assumed that civilization ended at some point in the twentieth century, and each has advanced his or her candidate moment or event. In Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon (or one of his characters) suggests the beginning of World War I. But Baker seems to mean something specific by the phrase “the end of civilization.” What he draws attention to over and over again throughout the book is the way in which World War II was significantly, perhaps even primarily, fought by armed forces against civilians, starting with Great Britain’s blockade of much of continental Europe and terror bombing of German cities, continuing through Germany’s Blitz of British cities and, of course, the Holocaust, and culminating in the United States’ firebombing of Tokyo and atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Baker clearly means this book to be a provocation, and he arranges his material to make his point, yet he manages to maintain an even, almost flat tone while marshaling his ultimately persuasive argument. His method is a sort of factual pointillism, stringing together short entries (most about a paragraph long, with none more than two pages) in strict chronological order, starting at the end of the nineteenth century and ending at the end of 1941. It proves addictive, pulling the reader along entry after entry. And as dry as it might sound, it conveys a disconcerting sense of immediacy and intimacy. On finishing the book, I felt sort of like I’d lived through that time (admittedly at some remove) and knew many of the central players as people I’d met, rather than as icons or historical figures. And by and large, they’re not the historical figures I expected. This is a deliberately, patiently, and persistently revisionist book. Herbert Hoover is a tireless, faintly heroic advocate for the welfare of the starving masses of Europe; Franklin Roosevelt is a Machiavellian anti-Semite; Winston Churchill is a dangerously charismatic sociopath; and Hitler, well, Hitler is still Hitler, but somehow more plausible. Having recently finished Dante’s Inferno, I couldn’t help but picture Churchill and Hitler below us now in the ninth circle, in the ice up to their necks next to Ugolino and Ruggieri, with Churchill gnawing Hitler’s head for all eternity.

This book also suggests a different perspective from which to view our current misadventure in Iraq. From this perspective, the machinations that the Bush and Blair governments went through to get us into it, as ham-fisted as they undeniably were, were nowhere near as bloodthirsty or plainly Rube Goldbergesque as what the Churchill and Roosevelt governments went through to get us into war with Germany and Japan. The disadvantage under which our current leaders labor is the increased transparency allowed by advances in communications and related technologies. Ever since, say, Vietnam, it has been harder and harder to unify populations behind war efforts, and it has been harder and harder to conduct those efforts with the brutality that war seems to be require for success. And on the whole, that’s probably a good thing.

When last we left my ear, the left one that is, the lining of its outer canal and the ear drum had, after a tympanomastoidectomy and against all of the known laws of medicine and biology, turned themselves into mucosa. Odder still, all of the difficulties typical of this sort of surgery were averted. The cholesteotoma was successfully removed, all of the grafts took, and the hearing was returning as expected. But with the tissue stubbornly remaining mucosa, my hearing can’t get much better (at least not very quickly), I have to keep my ear dry at all times, and even then, it’s ridiculously susceptible to infection, meaning I get a regular diet of antibiotics that’s probably not a great idea in the long run.

Last week, I visited my doctor’s mentor, which put me three or four rungs up the specialist ladder, and I don’t think there are any rungs above this one. He looked into my ear, asked a few questions, and said there were really only two options available to me: leaving things as they are or doing the surgery again. He recommended doing the surgery again, with the slight change that a single large graft be taken from my hip (rather than the several small grafts taken from behind my ear). He also said, without my even having asked, that the hearing would never really recover in that ear, though he quickly qualified that by saying that he hadn’t seen the full history of my hearing tests (he’d only seen the most recent one). He then went on to assure me that my doctor is an excellent technical surgeon and, for good measure, he cauterized my ear.

I had a little over a week to think this over before going back to my doctor, during which Jeannie stopped by to share the story of how badly her cholesteotoma surgeries had gone. I admit to feeling lucky in comparison. Though my hearing hasn’t fully returned and there is some ringing in my ear, the situation is one I could live with without complaint if it were permanent. As annoying as some of this has been, I haven’t suffered in any meaningful way, and unlike any sane person, I actually don’t mind going through surgery. I find the whole process fascinating, especially when I trust everyone involved, and I love the idea that I don’t really have to do anything but be attended to for a few days. And it’s the only time I ever indulge in anything even remotely like recreational drug use.

I went back to my doctor this morning, and we discussed everything. I’m actually developing more of a rapport with him than is usual with a surgeon, and I find his prototypically geeky combination of expertise and childishness charming. He was so proud of his mentor, and he wanted me to be, too. After reviewing all of the background, options, and implications, I asked him what he would do if it was his ear. He said given my youth, he would have the surgery. He said I would have to live with this ear for a long time, and that being otherwise very healthy, I should heal quickly. (It’s nice, now that I’m forty and it feels a bit like I’m falling apart, to be told I’m young, hale, and hearty.) He couldn’t imagine that I’d end up any worse off than I am now, and I might very well end up better off. He admitted that he couldn’t tell me how likely this was to work, since what he’d already done should have worked. And then he let me think about it. I decided to go ahead, and now I’ll spend Memorial Day weekend recovering from surgery. I kind of wish I could get it done sooner.

There was an interesting aside in this discussion. I mentioned that the hearing isn’t bothering me, and if that were the only problem, I’d be relatively happy. It’s just the other implications of the mucosa that are bothering me. I told him that in reflecting on this over the last week, I wondered if there was a way they could just replace the tissue in question with vinyl or some other inorganic substance. I wouldn’t have any hearing, but I wouldn’t have the issues of moistness and infection. He said that there actually is such a procedure where they block the ear canal. He said that hearing is reduced, but not destroyed. Yet he wouldn’t recommend this for me except as a last resort because it’s destructive and he still has hopes that my ear can be fixed. I found this comforting first because such a thing would be possible and second because it’s not yet necessary. It’s nice to have options.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reorganizing my Internet persona. I now have things organized into three interconnected sites. I have this very site for general writing, including the Pages section, which contains longer, more formal pieces. I have a .mac site for pictures and music (the pictures probably being of much more interest than the music). And I have a MOG for writing about music. I’ve been updating things a little more frequently lately, but I can’t make any promises that I’ll continue at even this modest rate.

And all of these sites include RSS feeds–the writing, the pictures, the music (which would technically be a podcast), and the writing about music–so you can subscribe and never miss any of it. If I get really organized, I might even create a Dashboard widget, so that people with a Mac can keep up with all of it in one place. But that will take a bit more work.

My attempt to install OS X on a Macbook Air over a wireless network was ultimately unsuccessful. Five hours into the process, with roughly 2 GB transferred and the install process still less than half done, my desktop computer dropped its wireless connection. The desktop had dropped its connection a few times yesterday while I was syncing movies over to the AppleTV, but I was able to achieve much higher throughput for those transfers, moving over 2 GB in less than half an hour (a feat that I’m repeating while writing this). I think the dropped connection is actually a different problem than the excruciatingly slow installation, but I’m hardly a wireless expert.

Rather than trying again, I physically connected the laptop and my wife’s desktop to the Airport base station, and did the installation that way. That worked flawlessly, and it didn’t take any longer than an installation from an internal DVD drive. With the operating system and iLife installed, I then tried installing iWork and Aperture from my wife’s desktop using Remote Disc over the wireless network, and that also worked flawlessly. So it seems that the networked installation options for the Macbook Air can work if the other computer and the wireless base station are in the same room as the laptop. But I do I think those alternatives would benefit from better status reporting. If I knew exactly how things were going and what was slowing things down with the initial installation attempt, I would have been in a better position to correct things or to know that I should give up.

Having gotten through the initial configuration of the computer in less than a day, I was able to begin using it today, and as I expected, it does everything I need in day-to-day use. Again, it’s really small. Carrying it back and forth to work was much easier than carrying my old Macbook. Two pounds makes a big difference. But despite its size it has a great keyboard and monitor, and it seems snappy enough. I didn’t notice any pauses or delays as I was using it. I think it’s probably viable as a second computer if you’re patient, but I don’t think it would work as someone’s only computer, and I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who’s not comfortable with the inconveniences that seem to go with the newest technologies.

As I mentioned in passing, last summer was a summer of surgery. In June, I had hernia repair surgery that went as planned. The recovery took longer than I expected, given that it was ambulatory surgery, but actually took no longer than I should have expected, given that they cut a several inch slit in my abdominal wall. I was misled by the fact that I got up from the operating table and walked out of the hospital into a taxi (I exaggerate slightly–I did pause to get dressed along the way), but it was a week before I should have been up and around. During that week, I took enough Vicodin that I developed muscle spasms (just as I did the previous time I took Vicodin for several days, after an appendectomy) and foolishly tried to go to work for a couple of days. And I discovered why the stereotypical examination for a hernia involves turning your head: Every muscle in your body is connected, directly or indirectly, to that central point. Every movement was a painful reminder of that simple anatomy. But all went as it should have.

The second surgery, five weeks later and also ambulatory, was a tympanomastoidectomy. This meant making an incision all the way around the back of my ear (all but removing it), taking some tissue from the area, and using it to replace my ear drum and the skin lining my ear canal. This was to remove a three millimeter cholesteatoma from my ear drum–a very unusual place for such a thing to be, the first wonder that my ear would produce. The surgery wasn’t supposed to be quite so extensive, but when the doctor got in there, he found that the infection stemming from the irritation caused by the cholesteatoma (which was later identified as a staph infection) had spread more widely than expected, so he thought it best to replace the whole ear drum.

Then I got up, got in a taxi, and went home to sweat in the late July heat and a three-inch thick gauze helmet. But I had air conditioning and codeine (I had told the nurses this time that I had bad reactions to Vicodin, so they gave me a special purple bracelet that read, “Vicodin Twitchy,” and codeine), and I was comfortable for the first few days. The last couple of nights before I returned to have the bandages removed became quite uncomfortable, and while begging the doctor I got when I called my doctor’s answering service for some sort of relief, I considered offering him $10,000 in cash if he would take the bandages off or somehow make the itching stop. He suggested Benadryl, and it helped, or at least it, along with the codeine, got me to sleep. The Tuesday after the Thursday surgery, I went back to the hospital during the morning rush, with the bandages covered by a loose fitting baseball cap, to have them removed. A few minutes later, I was back in a taxi headed home through rush hour traffic with the baseball cap covering hair matted with dried blood and disinfectant. When I got home, I took my first real shower, probably more than forty-five minutes, in almost a week. And then everything seemed to be healing properly for the first few weeks.

Through almost all of this (except for the two nights when the itching under the gauze nearly drove me insane), I felt extremely fortunate, almost as though I were floating in a state of grace. I’ve never been one to be bothered by hospital visits–truth be told, I actually kind of enjoy them. They’re a break from my everyday efforts and responsibilities, the one time when I’m in the hands of professionals who really will take care of me, when everything is intended to make me as healthy and comfortable as possible. Yes, these things had gone wrong, and I would have to go through some discomfort to have them corrected, but the work was being done by apparently competent and committed professionals, and it didn’t hurt that both surgeries and all related work cost me less than $100 out of pocket. And though I had all of these justifications for feeling fortunate, my feeling that way wasn’t the result of any sort of reasoning. It was just my gut reaction, which is a fundamental shift for someone who usually views the world through the filters of anxiety and depression. For lack of a better explanation, I’m assuming that this illustrates a shift stemming from my having taken the Bodhisattva Vow. And as I approached these various medical situations positively and with the intention of being appreciative and, where possible, helpful, those around me, doctors, nurses, orderlies, etc., took better care of me.

I was also given a unique opportunity to explore the sense of hearing. Immediately after the surgery, with my left ear turned inside out and packed with jelly and gauze, every sound seemed to be coming from my right. My wife would call to me from the bedroom, and I would turn toward the front door looking for her. And this impulse was surprisingly strong–I would turn toward the front door even though I’d just watched her walk into the bedroom. But that effect subsided pretty quickly as, I suppose, my brain adjusted to the fact that it was receiving sound from only one ear. As my brain made that adjustment, it was as though the world changed from stereo with the balance all the way over to one side to monaural. Unless I could see the source of a sound, I had no idea what direction it was coming from, and this had unexpected implications. It turns out that I would separate concurrent sounds based on their location. But without the ability to locate sounds, I found I couldn’t separate them unless they were very different qualitatively or I was looking directly at the source of one of them. In meetings at work, if more than one person was talking, I couldn’t make anything out. Also, because the tissue in my ear was swollen, it was as if the ear was blocked, meaning that my own voice sounded disproportionately loud, causing me to speak much more softly than I intended. Communication in restaurants, bars, and parties was out of the question (though I prefer to avoid such situations anyway). All of this was interesting, but when I described it to others, they would only offer their sympathy. Yet I still didn’t feel as though I was suffering.

After a few weeks, my ear started to hurt, first just in the ear itself, and then down through the jaw. And the noise of chewing became horrendous, loud, wet, and queasy, punctuated by a variety of pops and cracks. When my otherwise unflappable MacGyver of a doctor peered into my ear at a follow-up visit and said, “Wow!” I suspected I was in trouble. My ear had produced its second wonder: It appeared that a case of TMJ disorder was pushing my jaw bone through the healing tissue in my ear. He had never seen anything like that. I went to see a still more special specialist (an extra-specialist?) who made me get into a very unusual position on his panoramic jaw x-raying machine, but he couldn’t really see anything wrong. He told me he wanted to do further tests, but he never called back (the lesson being, I guess, don’t get into strange positions on the first office visit). But he did discuss the matter with my ear doctor, and they came up with a plan to put expanding sponges in my ear to push back against the jaw bone. That worked, and except for the pain of yanking out the sponges around which the ear tissue had begun to heal, the TMJ disorder was overcome after a couple of months.

When it first became apparent that things were no longer progressing as expected, I got a little disheartened and vaguely frightened, mostly because I was away on my one vacation of the year, didn’t want to cut it short, and couldn’t get the doctor on the phone. But when I saw him next, after making it as clear as I could that things weren’t going the way they should, I kept reminding myself to be sympathetic and, if possible, helpful. That approach had served me well to that point, and I didn’t want to abandon it. Just deciding on that intention, I saw the doctor’s reactions differently. I could see how much he was struggling with this, how disappointing this was to him, and how much better than this he was used to things going. So I softened and was a little more patient, and in response, he was more forthcoming about the problems, and he was genuinely apologetic. Being, in a very different context, something of a technical expert, I’m familiar with the frustrations of lay people ignoring the fact and the value of your expertise. For doctors in the current climate, this must be especially annoying. I can only imagine the nonsense they hear from patients who’ve strung together random comments from the Today Show and a couple of misunderstood “facts” from a Web site and believe themselves prepared to take control of their own health care process. I tried to make it clear that I wanted to understand what was happening, that I wanted to help, and that I trusted him and valued his expertise.

But five months after the surgery, the ear still wasn’t healing properly. The issue at that point was that although the tissue had healed into place and everything was firmly attached as it should be, the grafted tissue had become mucosa (like the inside of the mouth). Normally, mucosa exposed to open air heals into dry skin. Yet in the wondrous realm of my ear (which was now producing its third biological anomaly), dry skin taken from behind the ear had, against all logic, become mucosa. The doctor’s first course of action was to leave it for a few weeks and see what happened. He expected the dry skin from the outer ear to migrate down the ear canal, turning it, and eventually my ear drum, into the dry skin it was supposed to be. That’s how this worked for everyone else. But that’s not what happened for me. He said he could see a stubborn ring around my ear canal past which dry skin wouldn’t migrate. He was at a loss and he was willing to admit that to me while he thought out loud for a few minutes. Normally if things didn’t heal properly, he might repeat the surgery, but in this case the surgery itself seemed to be completely successful. The problem seemed to be with the subsequent healing, and there was no reason to believe that starting that over again would make it go any differently. He decided to try a combination of eye drops (prednisolone and gentamicin), and after almost four weeks, they seem to have done the trick.

At this point, the ear still feels a little blocked, the hearing is still reduced, and there a soft ringing, but I hear well enough to locate sound in most cases. In loud places, I can still get overwhelmed, and I still talk more quietly than I mean to sometimes. But it doesn’t hurt, and most of the time, I forget about it all together. The only persistent annoyance is having to keep the ear canal dry, which means packing my ear with cotton and sealing it with Vaseline before every shower, and pulling the whole mess out afterward. I go back to the doctor in a few weeks, and I hope to find that the progress is continuing.

Today I received my new Macbook Air. I pondered for a few weeks before getting it. My mind was finally made up by the fact that my brother-in-law could use my current Macbook, so I decided to upgrade. For day-to-day use, it offers everything I need and nothing I don’t, making it 40% lighter than the Macbook that I was lugging back and forth to work every day.

The first experience is that it’s small. It starts with the box it comes in. And the thinness and lightness of the computer itself aren’t adequately conveyed through the Web site or the television commercials, or even by seeing it in person. You have to hold it to get an adequate sense of just how compact and portable it really is. So it’s small, which I haven’t heard anyone deny.

The question that has stimulated all of the discussion, much of it remarkably petty and acrimonious, is does it achieve that smallness in a reasonable way? And that discussion generally centers on the exclusion of an optical drive and a FireWire port. While a Mac laptop will handle pretty much all day-to-day tasks without those, they’re very useful for initial set-up, installing new software, and diagnosing and recovering from various sorts of failures. In their place, Apple offers a variety of wireless alternatives. They also offer an add-on optical drive. So are the wireless options in a world of high bandwidth wireless connectivity sufficient? No. In my experience thus far, not even close.

When I opened up the box and pulled the computer out, the first thing I did was begin to reinstall the operating system. I generally do this when I get a new computer anyway, but in this case, I especially wanted to do it to be sure that, on an 80 GB hard drive, the operating system and bundled software took up as little space as possible and to see how the remote installation process works. So far, it’s simple and robust, but it’s unbelievably slow. On an 802.11n network using all Apple hardware and with only other 802.11n devices connected, I’m about 10% of the way through the installation process after two and a half hours. Where Apple was able to successfully do away with floppy drives before other hardware makers, it looks like they’ve been a bit premature in their attempt to do away with optical drives in favor of wireless alternatives. This just isn’t viable yet. I don’t know if it’s a hardware or software issue, but for now, the external optical drive should be considered part of the price and, perhaps, carrying weight of the Macbook Air. I hope it’s a software issue, so that I’ll see the benefit of its resolution.