Take Me To The River

I’m a person who self-quarantined by accident for weeks at a time many, many times over the past three decades. Most of this was driven by my N24 sleep condition, some of it was driven by severe allergies, and the rest can be attributed to various flurries of (or flirtations with) workaholism—many of these also driven, deeper under the hood, by my N24 sleep condition.

The first question to ask a person such as myself is not whether I’ve found this difficult so far, but whether I’ve even noticed it yet.

I have.

Life is tougher without my daily dose of Bruce and Woodguy.

Unfortunately, life without hockey has a mirror image: hockey without life.

I had a therapy encounter after my mother passed, age 50, from pancreatic cancer. This was long ago. My lemon tree had her own therapy encounter at a tough juncture in her own life.

We laugh about this now, because for $x-thousand, we both got one word out of the deal. And now I can’t even recall what my word was. But it was one word that reframed quite a bit of my life, and I got pretty good value out of that word while it remained in my cognitive possession. Still, a damn expensive word, all things considered.

My lemon tree has a family history of anxiety disorders. She got the small serving, unlike many in her preceding generations. In the CBT approach, a term that comes up all the time is “extremizing”, where some moderate negative thing instantly presages the end of life as we know it. One of the words they teach you to help you beat your response back down to size is “and”. I’ll take “and” for $3000, Alex.

Original version: “Either I nail this down today, or I’m going to die in fire before I awake tomorrow.”

Updated version: “This is really serious shit and there’s a lot I can do today to cope with it and there will still be problems to tomorrow, but tomorrow is a new day.”

That’s the general spirit.

We still remember her word.

For myself, I don’t really feel like I’ve forgotten my word. I feel like I made an eggnog with fifty raw eggs, and guzzled the whole thing down. I haven’t actually forgotten the eggnog, I’ve only forgotten the precise name of the special spice.

Over the years, I’ve tried to practice a fair amount of “and” here on Lowetide. Hockey and life. Or the other way around. I wasn’t always as successful as I should have been at hitching compatible horses. There was always a bit of madness involved in adopting “pushing the envelope” as therapy.

But you need to understand, at one juncture in my time here, I put in 18 straight months of social distancing all by myself, long before it was all the rage. This is when I decided to see if I could make my sleep thing work with no melatonin at all, by allowing my body to drift around the clock, “sleeping in” another 1.5 hours later, every day of the year. Five days out of fifteen were pretty good. The other ten days involved a lot of quiet hours (many in the dead of night) with my brain not quite working right. At first, I didn’t know that my brain not quite working right was a side effect of drifting through night mode. That was, in fact, my most important discovery out of this terrible 18-month stint: my true dysregulation ran quite a bit deeper than merely wanting to sleep at the wrong time of day.

Writing with half your brain working is quite a bit more forgiving than cranking out code. In improvisational writing, a slip of the finger (or a slip of the mind) is just another opportunity to heed off into the weeds. I like weeds. I like weeds a lot. Writing code, a slip of the finger (or worse, a slip of the mind) does not cause your compiler to stifle a guffaw. or spit coffee onto your keyboard. Not at all. Your technology “stack” has a different fate in mind. “Come over here, little boy, and inspect element.”

Noooooooooo!

My Firefox right-click menu contains “Inspect Element”. I think it comes stock, but I’ve only experienced stock Firefox for about five minutes of my entire life, so don’t quote me on that.

I was deep into “Inspect Element” yesterday on the CTV web page that tracks all the coronavirus statistics in Canada, so as to write a clever one-liner to better summarize the data.

I haven’t cleaned this up yet, but the core of my solution involved the following line of code I developed interactively in my R console:

s %>% html_nodes(xpath=”//h2[@id]”), function(i) { prov_id %>% html_attr(“id”); path <- paste(sep="","//h2[@id='",prov_id,"']/following-sibling::table"); tables %>% html_nodes(xpath=path); t <- list.cbind(lapply(tables,html_table)); rownames(t) <- prov_id; print(t); t })

This grabs all the pertinent tables inside that abomination of HTML and CSS and J-script and munges the essential bits into a single R data structure. It involves the use of xpath query syntax, which I hadn’t really looked at since it was the new kid on the block, circa 2005.

Two things.

First, at least this particular nasty bit of “Inspect Element” was not self-inflicted. I wasn’t spending hideous hours inside an HTML hairball because of some silly slip of the finger (or mind) four hours ago.

Second, I won.

I haven’t really coded in R for years now, other than the odd 20-line hobby project (far less sophisticated than this one). I’ve never used the R package “rvest” to scrape the web before. If I ever wrote an xpath query in my misguided youth, it was fifteen years ago. This CTV document contains three separate HTML tables for each province and territory, to encapsulate one row of data with nine distinct columns. I had to beat this hard with the xpath ugly stick.

The worst of navigating through the thickets only took about 1.5 hours last night—and not a single tool involved was precisely in my fingers at the time. I was remembering-it-up as I went along.

This is my mind on consistent day-mode. My mind on consistent day-mode rocks the world.

It wasn’t entirely an exercise in the blind leading the band. I did have one über-elite skill which I hammered on really hard: writing exactly the right search query to bring up a StackExchange post that I could actually follow with the precise line of code inside that I needed to copy or emulate. 90 minutes elapse. Thirty Stack Exchange tabs opened, thirty Stack Exchange tabs closed. (I was using rvest for only the second time, and I still don’t even know what the rvest man page looks like, so I sure didn’t want to stumble into a Stack Exchange solution for the cognoscenti. But they were helpful anyway, after I muttered to myself “now let’s try to find roughly the same right answer again, this time in rvest as second language, so I can actually hum along”.)

So that’s a battle won, and it was kind of amusing to navigate the thickets as I was doing.

The same two-hour battle after making a stupid slip of the finger sometime before lunch is not fun in any dimension. Typical outcome: you’re deep into building a towering edifice about how rvest was authored by a colony of drunken monkeys, then you suddenly notice: whoops, that pair of statements inside a condition block really needed to be surrounded by curly braces, so as to be governed together.

Now it may be that aspects of rvest really were written by a colony of drunken monkeys (any sufficiently complex technology is indistinguishable from a colony of drunken monkeys at the first hiccup). Only your entire mental edifice is now shot through with your own self-inflicted finger foul. And you don’t precisely know which part is which. And in fact, portions of your misguided critique will linger on like zombies for days or weeks.

You are now cursed with the and/or problem: Either this was the part of rvest that really was written by a colony of drunken monkeys or this was the misguided belief I formed while diagnosing my own self-inflicted finger foul OR it’s actually some combination of drunken monkeys and finger foul at the same time.

I’ve trained myself for thirty years not to steer myself too deep into this particular quagmire. When I was in the night-mode portion of my free-running eighteen month sojourn, none of those mental capacities were reliably operative.

I don’t really care about beating my head against a bewildering non-design. Shit happens. The tough carry on. What I did care about was maintaining clarity about which was which: keeping my shit and their shit in entirely different buckets, never the twain shall meet. I fuck up a lot at the keyboard. The only thing I demand is to know the correct score after the dust settles.

Home boneheads: 10
Away boneheads: 9

That’s a day-mode score card.

Home boneheads: 9 ± 5
Away boneheads: 10 ± 6

That’s a night-mode score card.

Intolerable to a person such as myself, so I ceased to write code. If I’m not batting 0.900 on bonehead attribution after the dust settles, send in the fat lady.

My free-running 18-month sojourn was not governed by the magic word “and”. It was not coding and writing. Very early on, it became writing only. For my own sanity, I had to kick the word “and” up the street: hockey and life. That was an “and” I could still—sometimes—make work. And if it didn’t work, there was no two-hour session in the “Inspect Element” Room 101 to leave a permanent scar on my soul.

I’ve known near-to-a-fact for two weeks now that the present campaign of social isolation was an 18-month deal. Yesterday I came across an academic paper which introduced the term “dynamic social isolation” in its summary’s concluding paragraphs.

Here and there we will get a coveted weekend pass to Tokyo, and then the numbers will inch dangerous upwards again, and we’ll soon be confined again to the swamp, precisely 6″6′ away from the smug, pining, baby-faced Charles Winchester, a minimally bearable distance to be maintained at all cost.

For myself, it won’t be the first time. And it won’t be the harder time, either.

I’m pretty damn happy cooped up in my corner basement office with my anxious lemon tree in full possession of my rock-the-world day-mode brain, once again. Over the past year, I’ve been increasing dividing my sustained release pill into two separate doses, taken two hours or three hours apart, so as to increase the “sustain” pedal. Now my daily grogginess is half as bad, and my stability is twice as good. Before I was fairly stable already, but each day was potentially different than the previous day. Would I bake out with fatigue in the late afternoon, after taking my pill? Would I get a solid eight hours sleep, or would I get four hours sleep, followed by four hours doing elementary math in my head in the dark, followed by another four hours sleep? Or would I get a solid four hours and go “fuck it” and get out of bed anyway, and then function really well for eight hours, before turning into hell-on-wheels for the entire second half of my day?

Until recently, every day was potentially one of those days. Now I’m down to about one day a week where I go “bah, humbug!” today is going to suck a bit. There are always enough ambient chores to take up the slack one day a week. It’s an entirely workable system.

If I maintain my recent run of success, this 18-month social distancing thing is going to be a cake walk compared to my unmedicated 18-month adventure. I got out of the house during those months for five days out of every fifteen. I was already practicing a form of “dynamic” social distancing. The difference now is the caliber of the days I’m shut in. Now: fabulous. Then: frustrating as all hell.

So here’s my advice to those of you who are suffering through social distancing for the first time: hang onto the word “and” as hard as you can.

Yeah. I know. Fatuous advice is easy to swallow; sage advice does not have “this side up” embossed anywhere on the magic capsule.

Hopefully we can let a little bit of “and” back into the room as this begins to settle out into a new normal. Because if we can’t, I’m going to miss my daily dose of Lowetide, Bruce and Woodguy something fierce. It got me through my last desperate stand, and I hope it gets me through this one, too.