Music over the closing credits of a mediocre movie was The Cure's "Just Like Heaven", and I so badly wanted to text Kt to say "Robert Smith is a genius", knowing that she'd both grok in fullness and likely reply instantly no matter the hour. Only she won't.

And so it resumes

OK, that's an overly dramatic title. But it's sorta how I feel after a friend pinged me last week that he and his wife just found out that their young adult daughter is bipolar and in crisis. She's also graduating from university, which I'm guessing precipitated the crisis--that transition to real life is non-trivial for many kids.

She's at school out of town and had admitted herself to hospital; he flew there, met with her and the docs, worked out a treatment plan. They released her and she went off to her apartment while he staggered off to a hotel. He woke up the next morning to find that she had readmitted herself and is now in a seven-day inpatient program.

He texted me that he's climbing a mountain; all I can do is agree and offer what little help I can. He and his wife are at sea, feeling helpless. A feeling I well remember. And as I've written before, we know that this isn't TV, where you get diagnosed, they give you some meds, and You're fine! All cured!! No more problem!!! It does work that way for some people, of course, but it's hardly the norm.

Meanwhile, it's thirteen years this month since Katie's problems surfaced. There's been some treatment progress since then, but no huge breakthroughs.

It happened that the day before he messaged me, I listened to Ketamine: How Special is Special K? on Science Vs., which is an always-excellent podcast that tries very hard to cover all sides of an issue. And I've also been reading about fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) therapy for depression, which is showing some promise as well. Of the two, FMT seems somehow less risky, if more random at this stage of development. And of course none of these experimental treatments guarantee positive results, any more than meds do.

The more we learn about how our brains and bodies work, the less likely their existence--much less continued operation--seems.

An even dozen

Another year passes. Katie’s friends continue with their lives, as they should: her best friend is married and has a beautiful little boy, and I hear bits and pieces of what others are doing. We’re stuck in amber, wondering what could have been. I missed posting on this day last year: just couldn’t bring myself to say anything, though I sure wanted to.

 

It’s odd how random things can be evocative. The other day I was listening to a podcast (yeah, I’ve become one of Those People in my dotage), and someone was talking about how back in the T9 era (see below) he sent a friend a text calling her a dork, only he messed up the number of presses and called her a “fork”, and this became their private joke forever.

T9, for those who missed it, was a technology before we had smartphones with real keyboards. T9 used the letters on the numeric keys of a cellphone to let you enter words when texting. So if you pressed the 2, it would show “A”. If you pressed 2 twice rapidly, it would show “B”. And so forth. But it was also sort of smart: if you typed 364, you’d think that would be DMG. But that’s not a word, so it would suggest (probably) DOG instead, as those three letters also use 364. And if the word you wanted was FOG, you could either enter 33364 (with the three 3s in rapid succession), or enter 3640: the zero is not associated with any letters, and instead rotates to the next T9 guess, if any.

In the dork/fork example, T9 presumably preferred FORK to DORK and thus presented it first, and he was thinking that DORK would be preferred because it’s first alphabetically, or something like that.

Katie never got a smartphone—they were still new and very expensive when she died—but she was a T9 pro, and could send long, complex texts without even looking at the screen. She would have loved this story, I think, as well as the follow-on, where it was mentioned that “book” was a synonym for “cool” for a while in certain circles for the same reason: both are the same T9 sequence, 2665.

I’m a techie, but Katie is the only person I know or knew who I’m sure would find this interesting and fun. And I can see her looking for other such synonyms, and creating a private slang that used them.

 

Missing ya, kid, today and every day.

 

Ten Years

I had a dream weekend before last—Halloween night, actually, though Halloween was a non-event here, with us hiding in our bedroom with all the outside and downstairs lights off.

The dream was fragmentary, as they so often are. I was out in the cul-de-sac in front of our house, and looked up at our house, which was cycling through variations: different siding, slightly different trim, different landscaping, differently aged trees; sometimes even no house at all, just a grassy lot.

I somehow knew this was a multiverse thing. The multiverse is a theory that we inhabit just one of a huge number of universes, each different in at least one way, superposed on each other—existing simultaneously. The variation can be as major as some different law of physics, or as minor as whether you had eggs instead of a bagel for breakfast this morning. Every choice has the potential to split off another branch. Some of those may even fold back into each other—for example, if you had the bagel today and the eggs tomorrow vs. the opposite, with no permanent effects; in another branch, you forgot the eggs on the stove and burned the house down.

The idea of the multiverse has been used a lot in science fiction, but it turns out to be part of current scientific theories about the actual universe. This article covers it reasonably coherently; their #4, “Daughter Universes”, is the flavor I’m talking about above.

Anyway, back to the dream: I was standing there watching the house cycle, and a car pulled into the cul-de-sac and stopped, and Katie got out. Not the Katie we last knew: this one was several (ten?) years older, although I don’t know how I knew that. She said something to me in passing—I don’t remember what—and headed into the house.

And that’s all I remember, alas.

 

In such a strange year, I’ve thought even more than usual about what she’d be like now. So many of her friends have “real lives”: married, careers, homes far away. Of course our girl is frozen in our minds, and I keep wanting to talk to her about the pandemic, and the election, and stuff in general.

Next universe please.

Excellent quote

From American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins:

In the months to come, Luca will sometimes wish he hadn’t squandered these early days of his grief. He’ll wish he’d let it pierce and demolish him more. Because, as the forgetting part takes anchor and stays, it will feel like a treachery. He’ll mistakenly believe it’s his own cowardice erasing Papi’s details—the mole above his left eyebrow, the tight, rough little curls of his hair, the timbre of his voice when he laughs, the sandpaper feel of his jaw against Luca’s forehead when they read together at night in Luca’s bed. But Luca doesn’t know any of that yet, nor does he know that, no matter what he does right now, that creeping amnesia is inevitable, it’s not his fault.

I thought this captured nicely how the feeling of distance from a grief event makes you feel bad about that distance, even as you recognize and appreciate its benefit.

Strange season

Between Katie's birthday, the holidays, and attending a funeral yesterday, I've been in a strange mood. Thanksgiving being so late this year didn't help either, as it means Christmas came on way too fast.

I've also suddenly discovered that music from the 70s is at least as much "my" music as what I'd always thought, which was 80s. Not sure why; I'm guessing it's because I was younger and wasn't buying much music in the 70s, and/or that of course many of those musicians continued into the 80s. But a few weeks ago I accidentally tuned to SiriusXM channel 7 instead of 8, and then realized I had been happily listening for a while.

The result is that I've been obsessively playing Nile Rodgers (Chic, Sister Sledge) and Kool and the Gang and Steve Miller and more. Kt would be horrified, I'm sure. Especially when I threatened to buy a polyester leisure suit! (But actually I know she liked Sister Sledge We Are Family, having heard it at the end of The Birdcage.)


As a Grinch fan, she'd have appreciated this SMBC:

 

There's something awesome about a 50-year-old kids' cartoon becoming a meme.


And our little girl who figured out Santa was fictional would definitely have liked this one:

 

A bit dark, but still.

28

Katie would have turned 28 on Saturday. So many of her friends are graduating and/or getting married and it's just hard to grok.

We spent a quiet weekend, in part because I'm getting over a bout of BPPV (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo). This is the second or third such: I spent a miserable day in a hotel room in Ontario with Katie and Anita over a decade ago, with the room spinning, and then had a minor bout 16 months ago.

This one wasn't too bad—no actual "spinnies"—but of course it decided to hit while I was in California visiting company HQ, which was inconvenient. I bailed early, got home and crashed for ten hours or so.


On a brighter note, I spent the Saturday before Thanksgiving running judging at an FLL tournament in DC. Two of my judges were high school girls who reminded me of Katie in the most general of ways: young, enthusiastic, smart, and personable. One of them is the daughter of another long-time FLL volunteer with whom I've worked, and was actually a Capital Girl (long after my co-coach and I had moved on, but continuing the name and legacy).

And this morning I got email from her dad saying that she had been awarded the Katie Smith Memorial Award at this year's state FLL competition. This is an award given to a volunteer who is deemed to have helped spread the message and experiences available through FLL. Nice.