“They’re not real, so they last forever. Isn’t that neat?”

I had Lars and the Real Girl from Netflix but I’d been avoiding it all weekend, thinking it would be bleak and sad, and I just didn’t think I could handle more sadness.

But then I got more sadness anyway, a lot more, and as it got late at night — too late to phone anyone for help — I got desperate for distraction, and tried it anyway. And strangely, it turned out to be really good for me.

Here I am, hating the fact that I hurt so easily and so deeply, wishing that I could just be half-numb like everyone else (comparatively speaking). And then here’s this story about a guy who hurts so much more than I do, so much that he can hardly stand for anyone to touch him with even a single finger. Like the physical pain of skin against skin is more than he can bear. And I think geez, there are a lot of things that hurt me that much, but at least I can still be touched. And okay, that’s part of the problem — my desire to be touched, and loved, is what got me into trouble, maybe what always gets me into trouble (and gods help me the next time someone offers to hold my hand, I might literally run away screaming) — but it’s part of my salvation too.

And I’m feeling the world shrink around me, like every person I lose is one more irreplaceable thing, that the only people I can trust are the ones who’ve been totally solid for a decade or more, and it’s an ever-dwindling number (like what now, two? maybe three?) and once they’re gone I’m just done, because I can’t, I can’t … I just want to curl up in a ball of alone and die.

And there’s this whole community that rallies around this poor guy, embracing something absolutely absurd, because … I don’t know why. Because he’s a sweet guy, I guess. He inspires kindness.

It doesn’t really have anything to do with my life, but it was beautiful.

(Incidentally, I categorically recommend that you read Stumbling on Happiness. Not only is the material fascinating and highly relevant to basically everyone who happens to be human, but the man is funny! I’ve read many fine nonfiction books but I can’t recall the last one that had me chuckling on nearly every page.)

Humans have a universal tendency to adapt to new situations by — I call it ‘resetting the baseline.’ Circumstances change, and very quickly we accept — whatever it is — as the new normal. Doesn’t matter whether things got better or worse, it very soon ceases to make any emotional difference. Among other things, this is why — within a few months after their respective life-changing events — paraplegics and lottery winners are about equally happy overall.

Part of this process involves something called ‘anchoring’: the tendency to adjust our expectations and reactions based on something we’ve already got in mind. (Putting a ‘retail’ and a ’sale’ price on a tag makes use of anchoring.) So the paraplegic anchors on the accident, next to which comparatively simple pleasures — like talking to a friend, or eating a nice meal — seem that much better. Meanwhile the lottery winners compare everything to … well, winning the lottery.

The result is what psychologists call a ‘hedonic treadmill’ — the unending search for happiness, which because of our tendency to acclimate, requires more and more extreme efforts.

There’s more in that vein — if you’re interested, go read the books! — but the reason I mention all this here is that I’m curious whether I can use these tendencies to my advantage, emotionally speaking. If advertisers and psychology grad students can manipulate our expectations — and thereby our emotions — by changing our anchors, why can’t we do it for ourselves?

I’m going to try an experiment through the month of January. First, I’m going to limit what I allow myself in an attempt to keep certain ‘treats’ from becoming ordinary. This won’t be a huge change, as I’ve already done this work on a lot of fronts, especially after my income drop last year. But in the areas of food and drink I will have to be extra-mindful, as that’s where I’m personally most likely to hop on the hedonic treadmill.

Second, each day I will make note of at least three things that I’m pleased with or happy about. They can be small things, but they do have to be specific to that day — no general platitudes like ‘I’m glad to have enough food to eat.’ And I’m going to do it via Twitter so I don’t slack. So when you see me start to number certain tweets, you know what’s up.

Jak prefers to drive, and since it’s hard on my bad knee I’m happy to let him. The price of this, however, is that he wants me to stay awake and talk to him the entire time so he doesn’t fall asleep.

You can cover a lot of ground in six hours of nonstop conversation. We were constrained by the presence of the 10-year-old in the back seat, so the really juicy subjects were off the table, but … well, one of the best parts of this relationship is how after nine years, we still have plenty to say to each other.

Anyway, somewhere in the middle of the drive home, we’re riffing on random stuff vaguely related to my interest in personal finance, and Jak goes into idea mode. ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if …?’ (Idea Rat chitters happily.)

My response, as usual — this was before my new perspective on Idea Rat — went like this: ‘No, that wouldn’t work, because …’ (Down comes the MamaCat Paw Squash of Doom.)

And then I thought a few seconds, and added, ‘However … what might work is …’ This happens a lot when we’re talking about the novel(s), where he suggests something and I’m all ‘no no no … but maybe [variation].’ He sometimes sends my brain off in directions I wouldn’t go on my own, but (I think?) the adjusted idea is more solid than what he would get without me.

I’m not being coy with the ellipses, by the way; I genuinely don’t remember what the discarded ideas were, or my objections to them. Like I said, it’s my strategy for coping with too many ideas, to keep nothing in long-term memory that doesn’t pass the Practicality Test.

But that last idea … stuck. I kept thinking about it, hours at a time, for the next several days. I did some research. I went over the same questions again and again, trying to figure out what I was missing.

Because you see, this was a Big Idea. It was a completely-change-your-life kind of idea. And it was passing my filters. All of them.

That has never, ever happened before. I’m almost forty, and I’ve never looked at anything half so ambitious and thought it was not only marginally possible but in fact, reasonably likely to succeed. I’ve done a few Big Things before — like starting the small press with Jak, that was big, but it was based on naive optimism and idealistic enthusiasm, not a practical assessment of success.

See, I had a secondary motive for explaining about my rigorous idea filters: so that when I tell you I believe I’ve had a Really Good Idea, you get some sense of what that means.

I turned this thing around for several days — and if that seems like a short time, consider that I mean I was thinking about it intensely for at least fifteen hours a day — and I came to this conclusion: I could prove this concept with very little upfront financial risk, if I could find a developer to work on it with me. I have about two-thirds of the necessary skillsets, but without a good programmer to handle the backend and database side, the whole thing was a nonstarter.

I tossed off a tweet in passing. To my surprise, someone responded. Two days later, after a four-hour session pitching my idea in intricate detail, I had my starting programmer.

I am being deliberately coy about the nature of the Good Idea for now, because although I want to jump up and down and gush about it to the whole world, that would not be a smart business move at this juncture. We’re building a piece of software. The prototype is starting to come together, at least in the most basic sense; there are roughly a bajillion features in the ‘future’ category. I’m preparing for small group alpha testing in November. (Would like about two or three more people for that, by the way; read this if you’re interested.)

Alongside the ongoing intensive UX design, I am sucking up everything I can about how to create and run a successful startup, specifically the web-app-as-service variety. I’m reading between six and ten books a week. My bookmarks list has exploded. I’m looking up every friend and acquaintance who might know something that can help me and picking their brains.

Two months later, I’ve survived a couple of crises-of-confidence and come out stronger on the other side. I am if anything more excited and convinced that this is doable and we’re on the right track.

It’s all going really well except for the part where it’s going really slowly. Unfortunately (for me — it’s a good thing for him) my dev partner already has a full-time-and-then-some day job, and what with one thing and another can only manage 6-8 hours a week on this. We’d hoped for more, but you know … life. I’m starting to look for a second developer to help out, because indications are that we do not have the luxury of indefinite time-to-market.

But every so often I think about what this would mean in a couple of years if I’m right and we pull this off, and I just boggle. A real company, with employees and offices and profits and attention on a national scale. (Or, in the win-the-lottery scenario, no company but a very large bank account. I’d take that option too.)

For the first time ever, I can see the brass ring. And I’m reaching for it with more determination than I ever imagined I possessed.

Which given how intense I can be? Is saying rather a lot.

Every so often he’ll make some suggestion and I’ll just stare at him, trying to figure out how in the world he expects that to work, until finally I ask — and he admits that well, he hasn’t figured the implementation part out yet. Hence: Idea Rat.

For longer than I can remember, I’ve been working under the premise that impractical ideas are worthless. They’re distracting and a waste of time. I’m not sure where I picked up that belief, but it’s something I’ve never questioned.

See, I don’t think of myself as an idea person, but … secretly, I am. I just squelch them as soon as they bubble up. When I think of something, I immediately evaluate it for practicality, and if it fails (as it does, 99.9999% of the time) then I clear it from memory. I have hundreds of ideas every day that don’t make it past the first thirty seconds.

For example: it occurred to me yesterday that it would be possible to make some really cool salt-and-pepper shakers in the form of chess pieces. Carved wood (light and dark), or marble (black and white), king and queen, or maybe bishop as a grinder and rook for salt … or even an entire chess set to hold spices, big pieces for the common ones and pawns for the rare …

Then the automatic test kicks in: can I do this? Don’t know any wood or stone carvers. Production issues would be major. Don’t have any connections to — or more than a passing interest in — chess enthusiast communities or salt-and-pepper collectors. No insights into marketing. And poof — out she goes, as if the thought had never happened. (I only even remember this a day later because I was mulling over the subject of this post at the time, and I had a mental flag to hold on to the next idea I had, for example purposes.)

I think I developed this system in order to keep from being overwhelmed by the nine billion things I’d otherwise want to do. It’s that Renaissance thing, that fox thing … my interests are so diverse that I’m afraid if I don’t focus focus focus I’ll never get anywhere. And this is why I often find Jak’s ideas so exasperating: because his comparatively weak filters are adding more noise when I’m desperately seeking signal.

One of the books-for-foxes I’ve read this month takes the tack that even the most impractical ideas are little gems to be enjoyed, appreciated, and recorded da Vinci notebook-style for the future entertainment of others. (‘Wow, look at all this crazy stuff Grandma thought up.’) Not that one should go off trying to implement every passing thought, but at least take time to celebrate and even share the idea.

Which is exactly what I never let Jak do. I come down on him like the MamaCat Paw Of Doom if he so much as opens his mouth. ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if—’ ‘Maybe I could—’ and my filter kicks into overdrive. ‘No, that would never work, because A, B, C, D, …’

Even with this newfound perspective, I don’t see myself keeping an idea journal or anything. (It conflicts with my perfectionist issues.) But I can already see the difference in how I react to Jak’s dreaming. I can short-circuit the judgment cycle now, and leave the idea alive for him instead of killing it the instant it sticks its nose out.

And if he wants the practical-filter response — because the voice of reason is occasionally useful — I can do that too.

‘TMA?’ I queried, wondering if somehow this was a typo for TMI, even though that didn’t make sense in context.

‘Too many aptitudes,’ he explained. And sent me a link.

I flipped browser windows and began reading the article, skimming a bit because it was so long. Right away I could see why this would apply to him; he’s brilliant at a wide variety of things.

But certain phrases popped out at me: “TMAs often don’t fit in well with organizations or groups … They feel that they are anyone’s equal and want to be treated as such … cannot act as if the boss were always right … either domineering or overwhelming in relationships with others …”

“TMAs are usually hypercritical, a side effect of high reasoning aptitudes. They notice flaws and loopholes, errors and inconsistencies. … They are usually good arguers and can tear just about anything to shreds–including themselves.”

That last part? Ask any sweetheart I’ve ever had about my mad arguing skillz.

‘Wow’, I typed back after a few minutes.

‘Yeah. Sorry, I thought you knew.’

‘Not surprising that it describes you, but um, some of it sounds awfully familiar to me, too.’

‘It’s exactly you!’

‘You think so too?’

‘Certainly. “Like onions in a chocolate cake” sound like every job you’ve ever had?’

‘Hahaha. Oddly, I feel almost like crying. … I have a lot of reading to do now.’

“Having a lot of strong talents is a bit like dealing with high voltage. You can do a lot of things with high voltage. However, it can also fry you. … A lot of that voltage for TMAs is emotional. Few people know how to handle normal emotion, let alone powerful, ongoing emotion.”

Um, yeah.

So I started researching this ‘Too Many Aptitudes Problem’. There’s less out there about it than I had hoped. Two life/career coaches have made something like it their focus, and written books, both of which I ordered from the library and read.

First of all, the labels all suck. Making ‘TMA’ into a noun is wrong in so many ways I don’t even know where to begin. One author uses ‘Scanner’, which doesn’t make me think of anything so much as a really bad scifi movie. (Jak points out that it was a bad scifi movie, which mercifully I’ve never seen.) The other uses ‘Renaissance Soul’, which is both a bit too pretentious and vaguely woowoo. And too long for ordinary conversation.

I was so exasperated by the lack of usable label that when I found this blog post I was ready to hug the author.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

— Archilochus, 7th century BC

So there we are. I’m a Fox.

And this fox is having a bit of a personal paradigm shift. More on that note later.

It’s a form of excema called pompholyx or dishydrosis; it’s heat-triggered and has no cure. I’ve never had it this bad before. Please can I have autumn now?

While I wrestle with this, I have finally started something I’ve intended to do since I started this ‘new’ blog several months ago: retrieve the best of my older journal entries, and make them available again.

I’m reposting them without edits, except for reducing most of the names to initials. I’m also adding them under the date that they originally appeared, so you won’t see them show up as new entries here. (Not sure about the RSS feed.) You can find them by the nine lives tag, though, and there’s a permanent link on the ‘Past’ page as well.

They’re coming in non-chronological order; I’m choosing things that I think are important for some reason. In some cases — but not all — this means they’re backstory for something yet to come.

I’m reading about the cost of living in Tokyo and I make some strangled “omigod” kind of noise. Jak inquires, and I read him the bit about “$15 for a watermelon and $25 for a mango”.

Jak yelps, “$25 for a MANGO?!? We need to sell to Japan but live here! It would be the same as outsourcing to India or China, but in reverse.”

I start laughing, and he continues, as though he’s just solved all our problems in one stroke: “That’s it, we should write in Japanese!” A beat, then mock-crestfallen, “… oh wait.”

We look at each other for half a second, and then in unison cry “Michaela!” (The teenlet chose Japanese for her foreign language and is two years into a four-year program.)

While I continue to crack up, Jak elaborates, “Michaela could go to Japan and we could write it off as a business expense!” (This in reference to the class trip next summer for which she needs $2K.)

I roll my eyes, still chortling, and he grins at me. “I’m so glad you laughed. I like it when you laugh.”

I was up most of Tuesday night, prevented from sleep by one of my various medical conditions. In the early morning, shortly before falling into bed for a nap, I read about Google’s plans for a new operating system and, like half the Internet, mentioned it on Twitter. (Sorry, I can’t bring myself to use ‘tweet’ as a verb. I just can’t.)

When I awoke about three hours later, I had been dreaming that about mid-afternoon I realized that today was April 1, and I suddenly feared that the whole announcement was one of Google’s elaborate jokes. I pulled up Twitter and searched for any mention of Google in conjunction with April Fool’s, but got nothing. I couldn’t imagine that I was the first person to figure this out, but the date hardly seemed like a coincidence. I posted a note to the effect that I hoped it wasn’t just a gag …

A couple of minutes passed, and then my Twitter page refreshed, changing colors and layout. I had been pulled into a sort of parallel Twitter, where people who’d copped to the joke were chatting, sequestered from those who hadn’t, so as not to give anything away.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t read a lot of fiction these days because I’ve gotten so damned hard to please. This is doubly true for short fiction, for some reason. So when I hit a rare, rare exception, it’s worth mentioning.

I recently did some freelance editing and layout on an iPhone version of the anthology Seeds of Change, which meant that I ended up reading the whole thing. The first story in that book — “N-words” by Ted Kosmatka — really impressed me. Besides the original anthology, it looks like “N-words” will also appear in both the Dozois and the Hartwell Year’s Best collections for 2009, so I guess I wasn’t alone.

I’ve been reading Philip Brewer’s personal finance posts for over a year now while failing to notice that he’s also a Clarion graduate and skiffy author. His short story “An Education of Scars” is available online and free to read. It’s worth the time, and then some.

In the middle of my attempts to follow the dendritic proliferation of response, the book itself became available — yes, for free — on Scribd and then Google Books. I stopped to read it through.

The book itself, and many of the responses to it, have sparked several different lines of thought for me — enough that it will take several posts (and days) to get through them. Here’s one:

One of Anderson’s core arguments in Free is that trying to get people to pay for digital media is a losing proposition. Gladwell summarizes it thusly: “The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things ‘made of ideas.’” The result is that content creators — writers, musicians, artists, anyone whose output can be represented by bits as well as atoms — are increasingly unable to make any money from their content.

I think Anderson is correctly identifying an inevitable shift. Yes, one might decry an individual example or poke pinholes in some of the associated conclusions, but by-and-large he’s codified a pattern that I’ve been consciously puzzling out for a couple of years now and instinctively aware of, in a fuzzy sense, for much longer.

What I can’t do is match his cavalier attitude. He seems entirely unbothered by the idea that words and music will not make any money for their creators, because he’s confident they can always find some tangential source of income: live appearances, advertising, related merchandise.

It seems clear that this is the future, and content artists will adapt to it or perish. But not only is this model dauntingly difficult for most artists right now, I can’t help but wonder whether some unexpected future technology will remove even those options from the table. Star Trek-style matter replicators that make atoms as easy to copy as bits are today, full-sensory holograms that reproduce everything about a live performance … not discernibly less likely than today’s circumstances would have seemed twenty years ago — though of course it’s probable that the next game-changer will be something as-yet undreamed of. I fear we are only partway down a long slippery slope, and I have no idea what the bottom looks like.

I wouldn’t worry so much if I felt more confident about the relative value society places on content creation (aka ‘art’ in the umbrella sense of the term). Writing, and to a lesser extent photography, get the worst of this; there’s some general recognition that drawing or singing or playing an instrument requires some talent — or at least a lot of practice — but a pervasive myth that anyone can write, and less awareness of difference in quality. Or so it seems to me. (I’d love to be convinced otherwise.)

That’s about as close as I will get to railing against the inevitable. Pragmatically, I am much more interested in that aforementioned problem of finding a self-supporting niche as a content creator in the radically shifting marketplace of the immediate future. Which I’ll talk more about soon.

So by 2007 my base prescription had climbed to -14.50 in my left eye and -18 in my right. The best possible contact lens correction gave me roughly 20/40 vision in daylight, making me just barely eligible to drive.

A few years ago I had my own ‘you mean trees have leaves?!’ moment. Jak was thinking about LASIK surgery and I was researching potential side effects, one of which is that lights gain halos and a ‘starburst’ effect. And I’m reading these descriptions and thinking … yes? So? I started grilling Jak about exactly what lights-in-the-dark look like to him, and I eventually work out that oh, once again, I’M NOT NORMAL.

I’ve never liked driving at night, because I can’t read street signs in the dark. Which means I get lost a lot. Discovering that people with vision like mine are advised never to drive at night was alarming … and a problem in Seattle, where for about six weeks in midwinter the sun sets before 4:30p. This makes commuting without transit or carpool options rather dangerous for me between October and March.

As of yesterday my left eye measured -15.75, for a 1.25 diopter change in roughly two years. My right eye … well, you know those big ‘glasses’ on a metal arm that optometrists use to test different lens powers? I learned that they top out at -19 diopters. At -19 I was seeing a vague grey tint to the fuzzy white square, not even distinct blobs for the letters.

Let me pause for a moment and give all you non-pathological-myopes a bit of context. You know that big letter E on the eye chart? Without my contacts, not only can I not read the E, I can’t even tell that there’s anything on the screen. And that’s with my ‘good’ eye, the -15 one. If -10 diopters is ‘you mean trees have leaves?’ eyesight, -19 is more like ‘trees? what trees?’

Okay, I exaggerate a little. I can figure out if there’s a tree in front of me, as long as the trunk is a different color from its surroundings. Most of what I see, unaided, is color and motion; beyond that it’s all about extrapolating from prior experience.

Anyway, the next step was to put a contact lens of a known prescription — in this case -10 diopters — into my right eye and measure from that. Sounds simple, but. It’s a soft lens, and since I am not a soft-lens-wearer, the optometrist (not the same one as two years ago, but a younger woman with an office nearer my home) planned to handle the insertion and removal herself.

I’ve been sticking my own fingers in my eyes, like I said, since I was seven years old. No problem there. But other people’s fingers trigger my PTSD. I don’t really know why; it’s not like pokes in the eye were a particular component of my childhood trauma, but somehow, on a level I cannot control, ‘foreign-controlled object approaching my eye’ gets interpreted as ‘utmost threat to my safety’ and all bets are off.

This is only the second time I’ve had someone try to put a contact lens on me. The first time was around fifteen years ago, when I was much closer to the original trauma, and the optometrist was far less gentle. That time I blacked out for some unknown number of seconds; I remember actually backing away across the room, and a lot of uncontrolled bawling.

This time I at least knew what to expect, and I threw everything I had at controlling my reaction. Which meant I managed to stay in the chair, and not strike out at the nice doctor, and emit no more tears than could perhaps be physically explained.

I could not, no matter how hard I tried, keep from flinching away every time she got to my eye. I apologized and apologized and gripped the arms of the chair and clenched my jaw and … jerked my head. And apologized some more.

When she did eventually succeed, we ran into the next snag: with the lens in, my right eye tested out at about -14 diopters. Something was amiss. So now the contact had to come out again.

Same thing but worse, because taking a lens out requires a longer period of contact (not a pun!) with my eye than putting one in. She was as patient and kind as I can imagine anyone being, but I couldn’t help my flinching. After three or four quick successive attempts I’d have to ask her to back off for a minute while I closed my eyes and breathed, trying to shove the panic back down. Then I’d brace myself while she tried again.

If I’d been less panicked I would have been mortified; I babbled a constant stream of I’m-sorries as it was. This, too, was a little too much like my younger years for comfort.

Double-checking against the naked eye confirmed that I was well over the -19 diopter mark. The doctor explained that the layer of liquid between the lens and the eyeball can alter the refraction, though she was clearly surprised by how much of a difference it made. (Earlier I had noted her Doctor of Optometry certificate, dated 2005. Based on her reaction, I’m pretty sure this was the first time she’d had someone in the chair who surpassed the limits of the available equipment.)

Unfortunately, this meant we had to get the -10 lens back in. And out again. You can perhaps imagine my dismay.

This time around I convinced her to let me try. Though soft lenses are significantly bigger than the ones I’m used to, I was able to insert it on only the second pass. Getting it out was not so easy. At the moment, the nails on my right hand are about half a centimeter long, so my attempts at pinching the lens off left me scratching my own eyeball.

Note to self: in future, trim fingernails short before optometry appointments.

Before we were done her patience was visibly thinning and I had run out of creative ways to apologize. I’ll spare you the rest of the trauma and cut to the result: My right eye is now officially off the charts. The optometrist guesses it’s in the neighborhood of -20, but it’s impossible to measure with standard instruments.

Worse is that it’s deteriorated by at least 1.5 and perhaps 2.0 diopters in two years. Disturbingly, my actual contact lens prescription is holding more or less steady, not because my eyes aren’t getting worse, but because increasing the lens power doesn’t produce noticeably better vision. Following this logically suggests that my corrected sight can only get worse from here, not better.

On the up side, the doctor reports healthy eyes otherwise. I used to take this for granted; now that I understand how much my risk factor is increased above the norm (for things like cataracts, macular degeneration, and retinal detachment), I count it a specific blessing.

My eyes and my hands are the two things I don’t know how to live without. I’ve had a long glimpse of what it’s like to lose the use of my legs; it’s harsh but I think I could adapt, given time. Deafness would be half a blessing by comparison. But I need to see, I need it for everything I am that’s worth anything at all.

I would beg someone not to take that away from me, if I thought there were anyone to ask.