Ashley, Sammy, & Shelby

Sammy & Shelby as kittens in 2011.

I'm devastated, but also relieved. I'm heartbroken, but also feel that this is the best outcome.

Last month, Katherine informed me that the inlaws of one of her coworkers had died suddenly, and they were having trouble finding a home for their three cats. Sammy and Shelby were over a dozen years old and Ashley was rather feeling his age at sixteen, and likely wouldn't make it to his seventeenth birthday. Our home has felt rather empty for the past three years, ever since Jasper passed on. We'd been talking about taking in a cat that needs a home — maybe an older cat who would otherwise have trouble finding a forever home. But we hadn't yet gotten to the point where we were actively looking. Among other things, we need to purchase a new front door to our home, and it made sense to wait until after that before we began to look. But fate, it seemed, had brought us this opportunity, and we felt like we should take the plunge. After all, they need a home; we have a home. What else could we do?

Ashley (aka Pirate).

It was a big change from what I was expecting before. Taking in three cats instead of one is a BIG difference, as any owner of multiple pets can tell you. And adopting cats sight unseen was scary; what if they didn't like us? What if we didn't mesh well? But I was ready to take on the responsibility, come what may.

Katherine reminded me that this was not a sure thing. They wanted to ask the greater family first to see if they could take in the cats. These cats were family after all; they wanted the chance to keep them together and visitable by everyone. But so far they had had no takers, so we were to be the backup, just in case no one had the capacity to take them all in.

I understood, but at the same time, I wanted to learn more. I looked up their two humans, Richard and Karen Matta, who had both passed away in the course of only a few weeks. I learned about Richard's avid stamp collecting, seeing several of his posts on a philatelist forum. I learned about Karen's quilting, seeing her help several new quilters by answering questions on Quora. These were very nice humans, and I felt so bad about Ashley, Sammy, & Shelby losing both of them so suddenly and unexpectedly.

Richard was also amazing at photography. His flickr account has hundreds of photos, and some of them are of the three cats he lived with. (These are the pictures you see here on this blog post.) Sammy and Shelby are absolutely beautiful sibling rag dolls, and Ashley (who also goes by Pirate) is a gorgeous black cat who looks so gentle and lithe fitting on shelves without the risk of knocking over various highly breakable-looking items. As I looked through these pictures, I found myself falling in love with these three cats. Even though taking in three cats is a massive ask when we were only looking to take in one, I had already convinced myself that we could make it work. I proudly shared Richard's photos with Katherine and we collectively prepared ourselves to adopt these new members of the family. We might not be able to replace their previous humans, but we could at least give them a loving home for them to live out the remainder of their lives.

And then, as Richard's funeral was held, and their family flew in from out of town, we received news: we would not be taking in these cats after all. I was devastated — but also relieved. I was heartbroken — but I also knew that this was the best outcome for these cats. They would be able to stay in the Matta family, albeit in a new home with different humans. They would still be able to be visited by the sons and daughters who they had grown up with. They would still be able to visit their former canine housemates. They will have better lives staying in the family than they would have had they had become orphans to be adopted by strangers, no matter how loving we might be as strangers to them.

It's sad to think that we were so close to taking in these three cats, to changing our lives to help them, house them, and love them, only to realize after we had warmed up to the idea that we wouldn't be able to adopt them after all. But it is also happy, because I know they will be well taken care of in the Matta family, and it means that we can go back to our original plan of only taking a single cat that needs us.

To Ashley, Sammy, and Shelby: I wish you a good life. I'm sorry that your beloved humans passed on; Richard and Karen seem like wonderful housemates who took very good care of you for almost the entirety of your lives. I hope you will do well in your new home. <3

I have a daughter.

I have a daughter.

It's such a benign statement, especially coming from someone my age. Typical of my peers in myriad categories. Yet, for me, on a personal level, this just feels different. I've spent most of my life thinking of myself as a childfree individual. Sure, I've always been cognizant of the teenage pregnancy that caused me to drop out of school and derail most of my plans for early adulthood, but she was gone — taken away by her mother to someplace far away, and I was instructed to never contact them again. My daughter existed, but for most of my life she has been a phantom, a being existing in the abstract, but never in a palpable way.

I don't know why I took what I was told at face value. Part of me now suspects that this was a cached decision that I made early on in life that I just never really reconsidered. In my mind, she was living well elsewhere without me, and it would be wholly inappropriate for me to butt in, regardless of how many years had passed. This way of thinking stayed true even when what otherwise would have been an appropriate time would pass: I stayed away when she finished primary school; I stayed away when she became an adult. After all, I was not a true father, just merely a sperm donor who had stayed out of things for decades.

Then, a couple of months ago on November 9, I saw a message she had sent me. It was the first time I had been asked to reconsider that cached decision to give her space to become her own person. She wrote to see who I was; to learn about her birth father that had been absent for the majority of her life. This unexpected request turned into an extended conversation where I did my best to represent myself honestly and to give her the knowledge she desired.

I have a daughter.

It's more than just an idle fact now. This is a person who is now, after all these years, a part of my life. While it would be inappropriate to consider myself a father in the sense of being a parent, being the biological father of a person who actually wants me in their life is a title I should be proud of. I suppose I just always imagined that she would desire nothing to do with me, and I allowed the status quo to persist. Yet now I have direct evidence that I am wanted as a "bio-dad", whatever that relationship may mean. And so I am trying to do the best that I can.

I have a daughter, and her name is Adrianah Celes Herboso. I'm only just now getting to know her, yet it's clearly one of the biggest changes to my life in decades. I'm not sure how things will proceed from here, but, whatever happens, I am glad to have her in my life.

The Perils of Teaching

This week, we installed a ramp to the front door of the house. We purchased a wheelchair that was far more expensive than I thought wheelchairs would reasonably cost. And we've had multiple doctor's visits dealing with the mobility issues we've had this past year. Next week, Katherine will finally be able to teach in-school again from her new wheelchair.

Katherine's extended absence from school at the beginning of this school year eye-opening. Even though she's been officially on leave, she's been working six hour days just to take care of the learning materials that students will need while the substitute teacher is in the class. I am in awe at how hard Katherine works to help her students learn even while she's stuck at home and not able to see them in the school. I keep thinking back to all the times I took off from work because of being sick, or needing a mental health day… I certainly never spent 75% of that work day doing the work anyway. Katherine's dedication and hard work is laudable, but also scary: according to her, every teacher that takes off from school has to do their lesson plan anyway, so this isn't at all unusual for people in her profession. The more I learn about teaching, the more I am concerned with how schools are organized in this country. I still remember when I first met Katherine and realized that even though she has entire summers off, she still works more than the average number of hours per year that someone who works 52 weeks/year will work. I recall just how flabbergasted I was when I first learned that Katherine spends many multiple thousands of dollars each year of her own money to subsidize her art classroom with supplies. She actually spends much more than this — this is just the portion of it that isn't reimbursed by the school. And now, here I am, watching her take the first extended absence of her multiple decade career, and seeing her work six hour days to provide the substitute teachers with the materials they need for their eight hour days.

I don't think I ever fully appreciated the teachers I had when I was young. Most of the time, I thought very little about them. The first time I connected with a teacher was in the second college I attended, and that didn't turn into an extended relationship because he died shortly after I bonded with him. I've mostly been an autodidact throughout my life. I remember going through Feynman's Lectures on Physics as a teen, thoroughly enjoying the first few sections, and then realizing that in order to appreciate the later sections I'd need to learn quite a bit more mathematics. I went to the library, found the appropriate books, and taught myself calculus, the basics of linear algebra, etc., just so that I could keep reading Feynman. I never thought to speak to a teacher about it. That just wasn't my relationship with teachers at the time. They were little more than minders of my time. Rarely did they ever talk about anything new. By the time a teacher talked about a thing, it was generally something that had exhausted my attention years previous. This held true until college, so I just never bonded with any of them.

Seeing how much work Katherine puts into her career really makes me regret how I spent my youth ignoring teachers of all kinds. I wish I had had a mentor other than the library. At the time, the main branch of the Mobile Public Library had only a single section of shelves dedicated to Dewey Decimal 530; I literally read every single book on physics in the main public library of a city of half a million people within a single month, and it wasn't because I was a fast reader: it was because they just didn't have all that many books. I was so disenamored with other people at the time. I didn't like living in Alabama. I didn't think of any of my teachers as a source of furthering my education. I was such a stupid child.

If I could go back, I would talk more to those teachers. I would find out what their interests were, and I would learn from them on the things they knew best. I would use them to learn how better to learn, rather than to just sit and read. I would have properly appreciated all the teachers I had.

I wonder how many students appreciate all the effort Katherine puts into her job every day, even on days when she's technically on leave. It's probably not very many.

A Ten Year Anniversary

I met Katherine ten years ago, on January 13, 2013.

We met online. Before she'd sent her first message to me, she'd already learned quite a bit about me. Back then, OKCupid was not as worthless as it is now. I'd first joined back when it was called TheSpark — it was common to go online there and take personality tests (I think I first found it when I searched for a way to take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test online (yes, I realize it's a junk test today, but remember this was the same year google was created and I was just a kid)) — and by this time I had answered thousands of questions on my OKC profile, allowing anyone looking me up there to get to know all kinds of things about me prior to ever having to talk to me. Honestly, I miss that kind of interaction today. All too often when I meet someone new I don't have nearly as much information about them as I did back in the early '10s.

From Randall Munroe's xkcd 2521.

That opening message was about the status games we all inevitably play, and how my veg*nism plays into that. We spoke of McClane's shoelessness in Die Hard; of using syringes to inject toothpaste back into a tube; and of the moniker "bolt" having two contradictory meanings: being loyal in the sense of being bolted to one's closest friends and being skittish in the sense of potentially bolting from them. Katherine felt that both senses of the word applied to her.

Within a few back and forth messages, we had already graduated to sharing made-up-on-the-spot fiction about toothpaste tube refilling and I was seriously impressed by her quick wit and creative mind. She made me laugh from the very start, and perhaps that is what made me fall for her so quickly. A few days later we had a very long phone conversation, and soon we were seeing each other regularly. It was perhaps the most important turning point in my life.

Personally, I prefer prime anniversaries to those considered significant merely because of base ten. But Katherine's preference is for increments of five, so this is the second such anniversary we'll have and I'm especially looking forward to it on that basis. Katherine means the world to me, and I'm so happy to be able to celebrate this anniversary with her. <3

Disability

I live with a disabled partner. Sometimes, it's just…hard. Things that other people take for granted don't always apply in our family. Simple tasks sometimes take extra time. Moderate tasks can be difficult to perform regularly. Hard tasks can be impossible.

Thankfully, I am an able-bodied person, and so I can pick up a lot of the slack when it comes to chores or dealing with heavy or far-away things. But this cuts to the core of my personal struggle: where exactly do I draw the line between offering my help and allowing my partner the opportunities to be self-reliant? It seems like the appropriate threshold is different from day to day, mostly based on how many spoons my partner has available. Yet knowing where this threshold lies on a given day is opaque to me unless my partner explicitly shares where the line is.

I am thankful that we are fortunate enough to have sufficient help beyond just us. Recently, we installed a stair lift to make it much more easy to travel between floors in our home, and this has greatly increased our quality of life. Almost as important are the emergency services officials in our community; twice this month they have been extremely helpful when we have needed it most. But at the same time, I find myself worrying; needing outside help two times in a month is two times too many. I feel as though I need to find additional solutions — like the amazingly helpful stairlift — that will help to ensure that we can get by even on bad days.

Currently, my partner uses canes to get around in the house. I think that will likely continue. But when it comes to being outside the home, I believe that we may need to switch to a wheelchair. I know this will only be positive for us. It will allow a level of mobility that has been lacking as of late. Yet at the same time I find that it brings somewhat unpleasant emotions. Without good reason, I sometimes emotionally feel as though I am somehow failing my partner, merely because we are needing to turn to additional expensive devices. I'm enormously grateful that we can afford these things, but it's not the price that is seemingly getting to me. It's more the unjustified feeling that, somehow, if I were a better partner, I'd have been able to make things better without resorting to these devices.

Things are just really hard in my personal life at the moment. I am doing my best, but it scares me that perhaps my best is not good enough.

Salvatore Louis "Ralph" Tomaso

My view on my grandfather is rather warped. Around the time that I was born, Salvatore Louis "Ralph" Tomaso got into a rather serious car accident. Although he lived two additional decades, I always knew him to be in his bed, watching the history channel and resting all day nearly every day. Occasionally, he would get enough strength to go out into his workshop in the backyard, making all kinds of woodworking projects. Many of my oldest toys were made of wood, completely by his hand.

I say it was a warped view because I grew up with this arrangement as normal. Had you asked me back then, I would have claimed that it is normal to only have one grandfather and for grandfathers to spend all day in bed. (I also had a grandfather on my dad's side, but he was called "Abuelo" — I did not realize this was my other grandfather until I was much older.)

Papa had huge numbers of pillows on his bed. We would make forts there, draping the sheets to create secure rooms. We'd make ramps out of the pillow tops and run my cars across them. He'd teach me chess on that bed. We watched so many videos about military campaigns in World War II.

Occasionally, I'd be playing in the living room, perhaps a game of The Price is Right, and I'd see him come walking to the kitchen. He would get himself a snack of sardines and mini hot dogs in a can, then head back to his bedroom. I don't remember ever actually eating with him. He took his meals in that bedroom. I'm sure this isn't completely true — surely he came out occasionally to eat at the table, maybe on days when several family members were over for christmas or whatever. But my memory is hazy. I only ever remember him eating in his bedroom.

Every once in a while, we would go on an outing and he would sit in the passenger side seat. Often he would nap there during the ride, but if he stayed awake, he would make a very distinctive sound with his throat every once in a while. Years after he died, I one day in my thirties heard myself make the same sound involuntarily. It doesn't happen often, maybe every few months or so, but it is a distinctive clearing of the throat that reminds me of my grandfather every time I do it without thinking.

C-130 in Kham Duc in 1968.

I missed so much of his life. He was in the Air Force, and he worked in the back of a C-130 aircraft. He would tell stories of how they played endless games of poker in the back of that plane as they flew rom place to place. I don't know the story of why he named his pet lhasa apsa Mae Ling, but it must have been after a friend he knew from his travels in the military. He was based all over the world. Panama. Okinawa. Near Iran. Countless places. He participated in a wedding in Iran once, going with the men while his wife, my grandmother, stayed with the women.

His mother, my great grandmother, insisted that his then-to-be-wife, my grandmother, learn how to make authentic Italian meals s that he would never starve on his travels. I remember eating so many Italian style meals at my grandparent's house, even though my grandmother (the cook) wasn't at all Italian.

He also had a pet parakeet, named Pretty Boy. Pretty Boy would repeat all kinds of tunes, so you could always tell what kinds of show my grandmother would watch in the living room based on what melodies Pretty Boy would play. He also spoke quite a few english phrases, though to him they were just more tunes. Pretty Boy lived in the porch, a covered, enclosed, and air conditioned area that apparently was a porch before it was turned into a new room. The actual porch opened up beyond even that, onto a large fenced backyard, filled with trees and lawn, a toolshed wired for electricity and filled with wood and tools and all kinds of knickknacks, and what used to be a pool — though I only ever remember it as a wooden deck in the shape of a pool, complete with place settings to eat outside among the many, many birdhouses that my grandfather would make and set up in the area. I can recall spending hours watching birds with my grandmother on that porch, looking through the Audubon's almanac to see what kinds of birds lived in the many birdhouses in that back lawn. And, beyond the fence, a row of fruit of trees, thoughtfully planted. I'm not sure that they were a part of my grandparent's property, being behind the fence line, but there was not other house nearby. Perhaps it was city land that was never parceled out. Regardless, apple and fruit trees lie in a line there, and I would climb them often. To the side a bit were huge patches of blackberries — I remember collecting all kinds of fruits and berries and bringing them back to my grandmother at certain times of year.

I see in myself qualities of my grandfather. I don't just mean my propensity to sleep — his mannerisms, his fascination with games, his drive to learn more via television — these are all things that I see in myself. Yet there is so much about him that I never learned because of my warped childhood view. There're so many periods of his life that I just never knew anything about. How did he react when he learned that his 23 year old son, Billy, died of illness, only a few months after his mother died of old age? My grandfather was only 34 years old then. Where was he? Did he take a leave from the military?

Empire State Building on fire in 1945.

Where are all the stories of the times he spent in various countries around the world? Who was Mae Ling? Did he grow up in New Jersey as a child? Or New York City? (His mother came to NYC first, then moved to NJ, but I don't know the dates.) Who were his siblings? Why was I never introduced to any of them? Was he estranged from his family, or were we just living too far away?

In 1945, did my grandfather have something to do with the B-25 that hit the Empire State Building? I can't tell if his friends were involved in the accident, or if his family were affected, or what. But apparently some kind of connection exists, according to family records that I no longer have access to.

When my grandfather died, I attended his funeral. They asked if anyone wanted to come up to speak, so I did. I talked about the side of him that I knew. The person I'd spent so many hours with, mostly because he lived only a few houses down the street from me. I talked about pillow forts and racing small cars on his bed. After I sat down, no one else spoke about him. I remember thinking that what I had said seemed so very small — that so much more happened in his life and it wasn't fair that only I spoke about such a small part of his. I realize now that others didn't speak because they were grieving and felt unable to. But it still felt weird to me at the time. I was eighteen years old.

Invincibility

It took many, many years before I had an appreciable amount of epistemic humility. Throughout my childhood and well on into my twenties, I felt uniquely invincible. Even when bad things happened to me, I could find a way to explain the facts such that I was better off, not worse off. Today, I recognize that one’s rhetorical ability to argue equally well for every set of facts is a liability, not a benefit, when it comes to figuring out how to establish truth. But, at the time, I just thought it made me smart.

I fathered a child as a young teenager. Alabama had no abortion clinics anywhere nearby, so it took months before we could scrape together enough to visit Atlanta, Georgia, for a medical consultation. We didn’t have enough knowledge nor sense at the time to know in advance that we were on a clock, so we were completely crushed to discover that the pregnancy was too far along to stop in Georgia once we finally arrived. (We had saved for quite a while for this ultimately fruitless trip.)

We went home and reevaluated. My partner at the time preferred going the adoption route. She suggested moving to another state during the pregnancy, giving birth, and then allowing another family to raise the child. Meanwhile, I had no strong opinion. Eventually, her body started to show and we decided we had to tell others; both her family and mine seemed to take it well enough (perhaps because what else could they do?), and their immediate assumption was not adoption but that we would marry and raise the child. I wasn’t ready to do any such thing, but, again, I simply felt no strong opinion. I asked her to marry me anyway. We married. It took extra paperwork from our parents because we were so young. Despite not having a strong opinion this entire time, I made a commitment that I would make do what it took to make it work. (I eventually didn’t, even if at the time I thought I had tried my best.)

I did not know it at the time, but, looking back, I realize that my continued insistence on not having a strong opinion was because I felt invincible. Even in the face of such a life-altering situation, I could not help but to feel that it would work out, that the baby would be gone at some point, either taken in by another family or would otherwise not make it long into life, and that my previous plans would resume. I had meant to go to Pasadena, to get into CalTech, to begin my life as it had been planned years in advance. Yes, there was a marriage now. Yes, there was a baby. But, somehow, back then, I still felt like the universe would react in just such a way so that I could fulfill my every plan. After all, every other time in my life things had worked out for the best. I knew this because I could shape any set of facts into evidence that we were still in the perfect universe for Eric. (I literally never noticed any confusion back then on such issues.)

I ended up being a pretty shitty parent. I recall not being bothered by that poor infant’s cries. Now, years later, I recognize how others react to such sounds, yet I clearly remember that my reaction was one of indifference. I am ashamed to say this. I am ashamed to write such words on my blog, even though I am very different person today — even though I have full awareness that the me of today would never act the way that severely immature Eric did so many decades ago. But I will write these words nonetheless: The me of back then would spend hours upon hours of not caring that, in another room, a fellow human cried out helplessly.

I thought, at the time, that I was doing my part. I followed basic instructions. I ensured that meals happened on time, that holding and rocking her occurred on a schedule, that she was cleaned when time came to clean. But I acted solely on a timer: at 2pm doing this; at 4pm doing that. I did not ever change my schedule based on any input from her. At the time, my focus was on keeping to my commitment. It was on being able to say that I did all that was necessary. But I did not know what love was back then. Not to the child, not to my partner, not to my parents, and not even to myself. I was just simply not mature enough to take on such a responsibility. I tried anyway, in the immature way that I could back then. Thank God that my partner left me and took poor Adrianah Celes. She deserved to grow up with real parents, not with who I was back then. I merely went through the motions, thinking that this was sufficient to hold up my end of the agreement.

A combination of things have caused me to write about this today. In my country, Roe v Wade may soon be overturned. I remember how derailed my life was when getting an abortion was not easy to do back in my early teenage years. I certainly don't wish that others ever have to go through what we did back then. But, also, I don't mean to imply that my daughter (am I allowed to refer to her this way? I think perhaps that I am not, being just a mere sperm donor) did not deserve life. I sometimes talk with people who fail to understand the distinction between an existing person deserving life and a potential person's lack of desert for life. I am also concerned for my brother, Alejandro, who is a freshman in high school this year and who seems to also feel that he is invincible. For him, the issue is likelier to be bullying than unprotected sex, but it concerns me nonetheless because it reminds me so strongly of how I felt when I was his age.

I haven't felt invincible for well over a decade at this point. I have grown so very much since those early days in my life. I know now that I have no desire to ever raise a child (it's just not in me), and I've gone through great lengths to ensure that I'd never get anyone pregnant ever again. I was strongly reminded of just how vincible I truly am only a couple of years back, when I very nearly died in early 2020. And, most recently, earlier this year when I finally reached the point where I decided I needed to start seeing a therapist.

I no longer feel invincible. But my life was largely shaped by my feelings of invincibility back when I was younger. Those feelings of invincibility affected my life's trajectory more than most things back then. More than my schooling. More than the friends I hung around. Maybe not as much as my parents, or my cognitive abilities, but it is a closer thing than you might at first think. If I could go back and make one minor belief change in my early life, convincing myself that I was not invincible might be one of the most life changing.

I don't know to what extent I should go to help teach my brother this lesson. Perhaps it will be sufficient to just talk about the things I've said in this blog entry. We'll see.

R(5,5)

I was told today that the number 45 was ruined by Trump. I found this difficult to parse at first — to me, a number is not ruined just because it has an association with something bad. But I think that there is more to it than just that. The weather service predicts rain as she'll come home from work today. As the day started (just after midnight here), Russia began an invasion of Ukraine. It really isn't the greatest start to Katherine's 45th birthday for several reasons. (And she was so looking forward to any day that represented a multiple of 5, her favorite number.)

At first, I pointed out Grover Cleveland. Sure, Trump is widely said to be the "45th" president. But since Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th president (being elected both just prior to and immediately after the little-talked-about Benjamin Harrison), that means that Trump is only the 44th person to take on the mantle of the presidency overall.

Then, to bolster my claim, I remember the old claim that one person was President temporarily. David Rice Atchison has a plaque affixed to a statue in Plattsburg, Missouri, which states: "President of United States One Day". This refers to March 4, 1849, when he was chosen as president pro tempore in the Senate where he resided. The Senate's own website tells the rest of the story:

> On March 2, 1849, Vice President George M. Dallas took leave of the Senate for the remainder of the session and the Senate elected Atchison as president pro tempore. ... Until the adoption of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, presidential and congressional terms began and ended at noon on March 4. In 1849 March 4 fell on a Sunday. On the morning of March 4, President James Polk signed the last of the session’s legislation at the White House and at 6:30 a.m. recorded in his diary, “Thus closed my official term as President.” The Senate, having been in session all night, adjourned sine die at 7:00 a.m. President-elect Zachary Taylor, in observance of the Christian Sabbath, preferred not to conduct his inauguration on Sunday, March 4, and the ceremony was delayed until the next day. On Monday, March 5, Taylor took the oath of office on the Capitol’s east front portico and the transition of power was complete.

> But if President Polk’s term ended on March 4 at noon, and Zachary Taylor was not sworn in until noon on March 5, who was president on March 4? Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1792 the Senate president pro tempore immediately followed the vice president in the line of presidential succession. Had Atchison been president from noon on March 4 to noon on March 5?

If the answer is yes, then, I at first thought, that might save the number 45. But then I realized that, if Athison had indeed served as president, then that would again make Trump the 45th person to take the role, since Cleveland served twice!

Thankfully, the answer is no. But I'm starting to suspect that this won't appease someone who feels that 45 is ruined anyway.

What, then, can rehabilitate 45? In the eyes of someone who loves the number 5, a strong contender is the fact that 45 is the conjectured value of the Ramsey number R(5,5). What is the least number number of guests that you must invite in order to ensure that at least five guests will know each other or at least five guests will not? Mathematicians are not sure, but we suspect it is 45.

To be slightly more general, R(m,n) gives an answer to the question of the least number of guests you'd need to invite in order to ensure that at least m guests know each other, or that at least n guests don't know each other. R(5,5) is known to be between 43 and 49 inclusive, and is conjectured to be 45. (See OEIS entry A120414 on Conjectured Ramsey Numbers R(n,n).) (To be even more general, R(m,n) refers to the idea that "complete disorder is impossible"; given a sufficiently large set, order will appear among its proper subsets. This is the first basic finding in Ramsey theory, which focuses on order amid disorder.)

Figuring out these numbers are deceptively difficult. Joel Spencer writes about Paul Erdős quip: if aliens come and demand to know the value of R(5,5) or they will destroy Earth, we should marshal all of our computers and mathematicians in an attempt to find the value. But if they demand to know R(6,6), we're better off attempting to destroy the aliens. In fact, Ramsey numbers appear to be difficult to calculate even with hypothetical quantum computers.

If 5 is a great number, and the most exciting parts of mathematics are the parts that lie just on our horizon, and if finding order within disorder is one of the enjoyable parts of being an artist, then R(5,5) must be a special case of representing something that might make up for Trump's taint. While we can't guarantee that it is 45 (some suspect 43 instead), it stands out as something that should make Katherine's 45th birthday special.

Happy birthday, Katherine. <3

I'll close with a poem by Ernest Davis entitled The Ramsey Number R(5,5):

There are fans, among math buffs, of e and of π.
The ratio golden has legions who sigh,
In reverent awe at its beauty ideal.
Euler's γ has got its own quirky appeal.
But what makes me feel tingly, aroused, and alive
Is the mystical integer R(5,5). [Read "R of five five"]

Like Batman and Robin, its everyday face
Is a secret identity quite commonplace.
It's an integer, experts on graph theory state,
At least 43 and at most 48.
And combinatorists laboriously strive
To narrow the bounds known for R(5,5).

It's a quite element'ry idea to define
(Though I don't want to try that in meter and rhyme).
A short, simple program in Python or C
Has no trouble at all finding R(3,3)
But the stars in the sky will no longer survive
Ere it prints out the value of R(5,5).

Said Erdos: "If aliens from far outer space
Want to know, or they'll wipe out the whole human race
If we join all our forces, perhaps we'll contrive
To tell them the value of R(5,5).
But we'll certainly be in a hell of a fix
If they ask for the value of R(6,6)."

Herboso Christmas Stories

After staying up all night on Christmas eve, I visited my family on Christmas morning to share breakfast, gifts, and stories. By noon, I left to go home and promptly fell asleep, not waking again until the 26th. Despite losing much of the day, I did really enjoy the time I was able to spend with my family, especially the stories portion.

My father spoke about the time he was a kid in Bolivia and fell in love with these cowboy boots in the shop window. He was told he would not be getting them for Christmas, but they were all that he truly wanted. (Natalia questioned: why cowboy boots? Because there were no super heroes in Bolivia in those days; cowboys were the super heroes.) On Christmas eve, he and his brothers got picked up in a truck to go somewhere a ways off. They jumped on the flatbed in the back and started onto Bolivia's version of a highway. To alleviate boredom, they decided to play marbles in the back of the moving truck. (Ale questions: is that like Beyblade? Yes, Ale. It is just like Beyblade.) Marbles were placed near the front edge of the flatbed, and my dad slowly backed up to get distance so he could shoot his marble. Alas, his calf bumped into the back of the truck, and he fell onto the asphalt. There his memory ends, but he was told that his head hit the ground hard, cars on the road stopped and people came to help, and he was eventually taken care of by a family member who was a doctor. Looking back, he is sure that he had a concussion. That night, as gifts were exchanged, he was not happy. He had the worst headache. But then, when he opened the present with the cowboy boots, his headache magically disappeared. He even got twin pearl-handled cap guns to go with it. (Natalia: That sounds like it would be uncomfortable. Dad: The color, Nani! There's no balls on the handle! Just the color!)

Susan talked about how everyone in the family would give her gifts, as the youngest in a large family. She especially enjoyed seeing the people who had nowhere else to go on Christmas visit them in Alexandria, Virginia. There was a spirit of kindness there that permeated the Christmas season for the Cadima family.

Natalia talked about one of her favorite Christmas memories: how Almita would make quesadillas on Christmas morning. Such simple fare: no more than tortillas with a thin spread of refried beans and freshly grated cheese popped into a toaster oven for a minute or two; yet Nani looks back on that time with much happiness. Alma has since passed on, but she remains as an integral part of the Herboso family mythos.

Ale spoke about a gift that he only has vague memories of: the soccer ball he received on Christmas morning some untold number of Christmases ago. He doesn't remember the ball exactly; he can't remember the color, for example. But it started him on a journey to becoming a soccer player, and his vague memory of the event counts as his favorite Christmas gift of all time.

I gave voice to several Christmas memories. Of the robot that I wanted as a child, like my dad's cowboy boots, which I was told I could not get but which I received anyway. (My father immediately dispelled notions of how complex the robot was: This was the 1980s, it's not the kind of robot you're thinking of, Nani!) I didn't bring up the time I was betrayed by my family when my uncle went on the roof and pretended to be Santa in order to convince me to go to bed instead of staying up. I started crying, begging them to tell Santa to go away and not visit me this year, because I didn't like how creepy it was that he was going to sneak into the house and reward or punish behavior that he should not have been able to see all year. But I did bring up the four consecutive years that I spent Christmas at a Chinese restaurant. Each time, I'd call a month in advance to ask if they'd be open and if I could get a tofurky there. They always said yes and presented me with lots of fixings on Christmas day, even though each time I called I was asking different unrelated Chinese restaurants in different states across different years.

I spoke about all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures I received one Christmas, but not about the Nintendo Entertainment System I opened one Christmas morning. (I also neglected to bring up that before the Nintendo Switch came out in March 2017, I went to a private screening event that January to play the Switch hands on months before the release date. It was my Christmas gift to myself that year.)

Visiting Columbus Memorial.

I spoke about when I spent Christmas in Louisiana with friends, in Florida with friends, and when I visited my father a few times. Once, I brought my friends with me, and we all enjoyed Christmas in DC. My dad said that the van we drove up in smelled like cannabis, though I have no memory of this and haven't ever done recreational drugs above and beyond caffeine before. I did not speak about the Christmas when I was in a house without heat and I turned on the oven with an open door to stay warm next to a tiny Christmas tree. I did not talk about the Christmas I spent shivering outside because I could not stand staying in my house, even if it was warmer than being outside. I did not speak of these not because I mind them being shared, but because it's better to share only some stories each Christmas, the better to have novel stories to share in future Christmases.

We then exchanged gifts and I went home to sleep. It was overall a short waking day for me, but it was good nevertheless. I had a good day.

Katherine Hess

Katherine and Jasper.

Using online profiles makes meeting people so much easier. By the time of our first conversation, I already knew she was smart and funny. But it wasn't until we actually spoke that I realized the extent of her wit. She had this uncanny ability to connect disparate ideas in just such a way to make a joke or observation that was entirely new to me, and I loved it. Katherine very quickly became one of the most enjoyable friends I've ever had the pleasure of spending time around.

Romance, on the other hand, was not something that I was looking for at the time. I had only just arrived in the local area the day before, and I really just wanted to get situated first before looking for anything romantic. But, being polyamorous, I've always felt open to friendships becoming something more, and meeting a new partner has never been a bar to my meeting others, so it wasn't too much of a stretch when, after meeting Katherine a few times, I realized that I didn't just want the friendship.

At the Kennedy Center.

One aspect of Katherine that cannot be missed when you meet her in person is her size. Katherine is fat, not in the colloquial sense where thin people complain about getting 'fat', but in the sense of actually being big. She is the largest human friend I've ever made, and this life condition of hers is one that affects her public and social life considerably. While her size is not nearly the most significant part of her, it is definitely something that most people who meet her will notice first. In terms of a disability, it affects much of how she has to interact in this world, from what kind of restaurant tables she can sit at to how many plane seats she has to purchase in order to fly to a different city. But despite the clear prejudice against size in our culture, she's nonetheless been able to thrive due to her intelligence and humor, which makes her stand out considerably amongst her peers in the teaching profession.

As a friend, she was an obvious pick. Anyone who can overcome such adversity and find success despite it is definitely someone that any of us should hope for in a friend. But romance was different for me. Back then, I did not yet come to love her as I do now. I gave her the chance to win my heart, and she subsequently did, but I wonder: was it because I was polyamorous? Was the fact that entering a relationship never blocks the possibility of entering into others a key consideration to why I opened up and pursued a romantic relationship with Katherine in the way that I did? Could it be that, had I not been poly, I would have not been open to romance with her merely because of her size?

It seems a silly thought today. Today, I know her. I love her. She is so very amazing that to think something as silly as her size might have been the obstacle to me getting the chance to be with her is distasteful in the extreme. But, at the time, there was not yet the love that I feel now. Back then, I had not yet gained the knowledge of her that I have today: her personality, her charm... Back then, I only knew that she was well read because she would make witty references that I would catch; I only knew she was quick thinking because every topic we talked about would be highlighted with a joke or pun made at just the right moment. I enjoyed her company, and even if I had not been poly, that would have remained true. But had I not been poly, would I have remained open to romance with Katherine? I ask myself because I do not know. It is unsettling to think so. How lucky I am, then, that I did not think of relationships in terms of zero sum at the time. How lucky I was to think that no single partner has to be everything to me.

Thankfully, I did pursue her romantically, and I cannot stress how much this changed my life. Katherine is amazing. She is the closest friend I've ever had. She complements me perfectly: she's strong in the arts and in reading people, the two fields where I'm weakest, and yet she is still highly competent in the fields I'm strongest in: math and logic. She is an artist, but went to a liberal arts school and focused more on being a polymath than in learning to know any one field. She's read more books than I have, and that's quite a feat. She's a social wizard; she has to be, I suppose, in order to make up for the social prejudice against people of her size. She's a great teacher, but, more importantly to her career, she's an excellent leader of teachers. Winning high school art teacher of the year in the county and then the state was impressive enough, but following it up with the highest state award given to any art teacher here, the 2020 Maryland Art Educator of the Year, was enough to really solidify just how much she does to help others in her profession. She's also an amazing artist in her own right, having displayed art across five states, winning several awards for pieces both big and small.

My love, Katherine.

I cannot stress just how lucky I am to have found Katherine. My prior relationships pale in comparison to the things she's brought to the table in terms of romance, friendship, and deep support. On at least one occasion, she has already saved my life; I honestly believe that I counterfactually would have died had she not been there to know what to do. She's also helped to financially support me when I needed it most; after I left my last high-earning (to me) part-time for-profit job at $94/hour, I decided to look for the perfect nonprofit job opportunity before jumping into another for-profit position. This process took many, many months; had I just had my own savings to work from, I think I would have caved and taken a job elsewhere. But instead, Katherine supported me enough to allow me to start my own new effective altruism charity. Any utility our society gains in the future from this work would not have happened if not for Katherine. Most importantly, though, Katherine has supported me emotionally: she's comforted me at my lowest points; she's helped me soar during my highest points; she's cheered for me whenever I've succeeded and helped pick me up each time I've failed. She gives the most thoughtful gifts. She's always up for a video or board game. She's been the best partner I could ever have imagined that I would ever have, and she's accepted me entirely into her life just as deeply as I have accepted her into mine.

I could not be happier with Katherine as my partner. <3

Snippets of Birthdays Past

July 1st, 1981. I am delivered slightly after midnight, at nearly the exact middle of the year, 183 days into a year of 365. The doctor delivers me via Caesarean section. Unbeknownst to my mother, the doctor has chosen this date specifically so that my mother and I might share a birthday. She does not realize until days later that I am born on the same day of the year that she was.

1984. I am three. My parents and I visited Miami, Florida, to see family on my father's side. My abuelo spoke no English, but we bonded anyway by watching Looney Tunes together. Later, I will tell my grandmother about the trip, which ends up being my first narrated diary entry.

1988. I am seven. The front yard of my grandparents' house has a huge pile of dirt (as tall as I am!) from the work done in their back yard. My best friend at the time, Greg Cochran, helps me to dig tunnels and edifices in the dirt pile that we then use to play with figurines from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers. The big gift that year feels like the Nintendo Entertainment System, but in reality it is the new house that my father built just down the street from my grandparents' place. Before finalizing the design of the building, my father asks me: is there anything special you'd like in the house? I tell him I want a secret passage, and the first thing he shows me in my new room is that there is a tunnel from my bedroom closet to the guest bedroom closet.

1990?. I don't know my age. My elementary teacher asks the class what their favorite color is, intending to say that each color means something about each person's personality. I'm not yet familiar with skepticism as a field, but it feels wrong to me. I don't have a favorite color, so I decide to answer flippantly, specifying the glow-in-the-dark halloween orange that you most often see on the uniforms of workmen on the side of a road. I am told that I am being obsequious for my malicious compliance, so I go home that night and resolve that, from then on, orange will be my favorite color. To this day, it continues to be a color in almost every outfit I wear each day.

1993. I am twelve. Summers are a welcome break from school. I use a pair of three-tonged cultivators as my implements of choice as I climb the quarter-mile long cliffside. It is only ten feet tall, but its sheer vertical dirtface continues for well over 1500 feet. There is real danger to falling: it is situated on a roadside, so tumbling down the cliff may result in rolling into the street, which occasionally has traffic. But although I sometimes lose my grip with one hand, the other stands strong, and my feet find purchase on roots and other minor outcroppings that keep me from falling.

1994. I am thirteen. I am in love with Final Fantasy VI. Over the next decade, I will play this game so many times that I am able to memorize the script. I challenged myself to win with only three characters; to win with as low levels as possible; to collect every item and level up every party member. I would later name my daughter after a character in this game. The main reason I consider myself a gamer today is because the epic that is FFVI affected me so deeply.

1996. I am fifteen. I am sulking. Earlier this year, I was expelled from the Alabama School of Math and Science for repeatedly being with a girl, Laura. It was a boarding school I'd been attending since July 1993 that had fairly explicit rules that were supposed to discourage sexual activity. We broke them, became suspended, and then ignored suspension to break them again. Later, I will invite Robin to the high school prom, only to ignore her calls the day of. I am extremely not proud of the person I was back then.

1997. I am sixteen. I've been with Amber for over six months. I couldn't get enough of her. She is an explorer, and I follow her everywhere. The city of Mobile, which once was just the big town I lived closest to, became a labyrinth we would move through each week, seeing this and that, walking through any doors that were left open, so that we could see what was inside and do what teenagers do. Those first eighteen months are ones I'm proud of. I am a good boyfriend; I am a good friend. But I make poor choices, and by my next birthday, things will turn sour.

1998. I am seventeen. Amber is pregnant. My mind was very confused at the time. I think I thought that actions never really had consequences, so the world must somehow work itself out so as to not too terribly effect me. I guess I assumed that the pregnancy would end without a child, or that Amber would move away to give birth and give away the child, or some other such nonsense. Instead, I will end up marrying her out of misguided obligation and becoming a father to an infant that I will never really end up knowing. Starting in June 1998, I become less and less of a good boyfriend. Less and less of a friend at all.

1999. I am eighteen. I live alone in a two-bedroom house. Amber is gone, along with Adrianah, the five-month old child that I will never see again. She has done a great favor to the child, to herself, and even to me. I was not ready to be a father. In fact, even now, twenty-two years later, I am still not father material. I know that I would be a terrible father, and so I am glad to have ensured that I'd never make that same mistake again. (Today, I am happy, at least, to know that Adrianah Celes has been able to grow up in a good, stable family these past 22 years, though I've never spoken to nor seen her since.) By this point, I had dropped out after less than a semester of college. Every day is spent sulking in my home. My friend Greg brings me groceries, because I am too depressed to leave the house. For some reason, I think that if I leave, I might miss Amber coming back, which I don't really want, but which keeps me from leaving the house anyway. It will be another couple of months before I get the strength to leave the house. When I do, I go to Barbara's house and watch Star Trek: Voyager on VHS lying on her couch for hours on end while she's at work.

2000. I am nineteen. I live alone in a McMansion. My parents are separated. My father has left the area. My mother would have stayed in the house they used to inhabit, but she is afraid of my father breaking into the home while she is sleeping, so she instead stays with her mother. This leaves the house empty, so I live there on my own. You might think this would mean I would throw huge parties, but instead it just means that I watch endless episodes of Saturday Night Live on Comedy Central while I eat doritos on the couch.

2001. I am twenty. I live with Allison in Colorado. She is submissive, which is apparently what I wanted in a partner back then. I spend my birthday playing Chrono Cross while receiving fellatio. Later, I will spend a week eating nothing but Hot Pockets for the duration while she is gone. I have still not yet learned to cook my own food, and it will be years yet before I'm forced to start. However, she has instilled within me a love for journaling, which I've kept to this day.

2002. I am twenty-one. I live briefly with my grandmother for a few months. During the period surrounding my birthday, I am fired (then rehired) nearly a dozen times in a span of three months. I work at a call center cold-calling people to get them to sign up for a credit card. Most of my colleagues only manage a sale each day; I'm able to get four each day reliably. My strategy involves ending calls as quickly as possible if I can tell they won't switch, and focusing only on calls where I have a chance of making a sale. In practice, this means that I sit reading my book while call after call comes in, with my voice automatically droning as boringly as possible the opening lines of my pitch. Only when they show interest do I set the book down, and this only happens once per hour so. The rest of the time I read, ignoring my job for the most part. The manager hates me. But I make way more sales than anyone else, so the manager loves me, too. By Wednesday of each week, I tire of working, so I tell the manager that I won't be coming in on Thursday or Friday. He tells me that this is against company policy, and he has to fire me -- but that I'm welcome to reapply on Monday and he'll rehire me. We do this for three months straight. And then, on one particular Monday, I don't feel like going to work. So I instead stop by Spring Hill College and ask to join the classes that just started that same day. They say yes, and my first day of classes occurs on the same day I applied. Soon after, I decide to make my journal entries public online.

2003. I am twenty-two. I was supposed to spend my birthday in South Dakota, digging dinosaur bones. Instead, I ended my trip early and came home after digging up only a scapula of a triceratops. My sister, Anh, greets me in the car with several balloons. I feel loved.

2005. I am twenty-four. My summer is spent reading Aristotle's Ethics with a group of fellow students at the local Barnes & Noble. Each night is spent at my mother's house. It is the last extended length of time I will spend with my mother. In a couple of months, I will move in with Stephanie.

2006. I am twenty-five. I live with Stephanie. I am so very much not a good boyfriend. Shawn Allin, my first college friend and chemistry teacher, committed suicide a month earlier. It is the second suicide I've had happen to someone close to me. The first was only a few years previous, while I was teaching Tae Kwon Do. She was presented with her newly earned belt. She looked proud. But that night she hung herself with the same belt. I'm not a fan of suicide.

2007. I am twenty-six. I live in Maryland for the first time. I'll leave for elsewhere later, but Maryland will eventually end up my permanent home. I finish my first published book. It's on email marketing techniques. I'll later publish other texts on social media, and will go on to speak at conferences on how to properly use social media at food banks. My lifelong career in communications has begun.

2008. I am twenty-seven. I live with Rosemary. It is my first romantic relationship that was net good overall. I am now the webmaster of a national nonprofit with over $150 million in revenue. Life has become routine, but I am happy. I feel successful.

2010. I am twenty-nine. I live with Robin. She helps me to learn how to be a better friend and partner. Much of my growth in terms of what I can offer in a friendship matures during this time, partly due to her influence, and partly due to My Little Pony. Looking back, I certainly was not yet what I'd consider to be a good friend (nor even a good person, really!), but I was definitely changing, and I greatly appreciate this time in my life.

2011. I am thirty. I don't live with Amanda, but we spend enough time together that it may as well be so. I treat her more as an accessory than a friend. I think at the time I just wanted companionship romantically, without any other attachments.

2012. I am thirty-one. Six months earlier, I learned about Effective Altruism, which has since dominated my life choices. I was listening to a podcast with Toby Ord and Luke Muelhauser while trekking through a flat portion of the Appalachian Trail, fascinated by the discussion. That night I slept outside in the rain, sitting in a camping chair that I brought on my back, with a 'tent' draped above me, held aloft only by my head. My iphone was the only light as far as I could see, and I used it to listen to podcasts on all kinds of philosophical positions on charity and what we should be doing with our lives. It has been nearly ten years since that day and I still am fascinated and moved by the tenets of effective altruism.

2013. I am thirty-two. I live with Katherine. Jack has just died. I am sad, but life has become much, much better for me. Katherine is, by far, the best thing to have ever happened to me.

2015. I am thirty-four. I attend my first effective altruism conference and am extraordinarily excited by it. These are my people. Meanwhile, at home I remain happy with Katherine, and at work I greatly enjoy the company of Day.

2018. I am thirty-seven. Check out this awesome puzzle portrait I received as a gift this year.

2019. I am thirty-eight. My grandmother is dead. I haven't seen the maternal side of my family in years. I stop for a moment to wonder if this is a mistake. What is it about me that makes it so that I don't think much of going for long periods of time without talking to people that I used to care deeply about? Is this just another facet of my aphantasia, or is there something deeper going on?

2020. I am thirty-nine. I am weak. I survived sepsis only a few months earlier, followed by several life-saving operations. Although I had gone this far in life without ever taking medication more than a dose of tylenol once or twice a year, from now on I must take pills every single day. For the first time, I start to feel like I am finally older.

2021. I am forty. I feel strong. COVID-19 has dominated my life for the past sixteen months. I haven't seen family, outside of two occasions for my father's side of the family, and two occasions for Katherine's mother, for the past sixteen months. But later today I will go to a physical restaurant for the first time since the end of 2019. I will see my family in person. I will celebrate the dismissal of all that lost time. I will tell my family about the charity that I'm starting. I will give gifts to my siblings and parents for the missed birthdays, the missed Christmas, the missed everything. I am looking forward to being able to give on my birthday, rather than to receive. I am happy.

202X. I will be older. Hopefully wiser. It is my wish that my success continues. That my partner and I continue to support each other in all that we do. That my family is happy and forward-looking. That no more deaths haunt these future years. I wish that our long term future is secured; that the alignment problem is solved or finally looks solvable; that lab-grown meat supplants killed meat as the cheapest meat source; that poverty declines ever further worldwide. And, maybe, if I can get past the akrasia, I'll finally pull the trigger on cryonics.

My Fortieth Birthday

I turn 40 in a few days.

I'm proud of all that I've accomplished so far in life. I believe that I've done exceptionally well in terms of my career. I've achieved success in my hobbies. I've made a few good close friends. My love life is excellent. I am confident in my personal application of ethics.

But, also I have experienced failure. I exercise occasionally, but not nearly as often as I should. I have family that loves me, but I don't see them as often as I'd prefer. I sleep way more than is ideal, due to my addiction to lucid dreaming. Perhaps my most difficult project is reliably performing everyday tasks, whether they're household or medical tasks.

Overall, I am happy. Turning 40 years old doesn't feel all that significant a marker, but it does make me think of a few specific things:

My best friend growing up, whose father died in his thirties. My friend told me confidently that he felt sure that he'd also die before 40, and so wanted to explore life well before then.

My late-twenties sister, who, a few years back, expressed amazement at my age. Not seeing her for a decade meant that changes we saw in each other occurred all at once.

One of the players on my esports team, who is not yet sixteen years old. Working so closely every week with someone so young is quite worthwhile, but the way they talk and the topics that come up do continually remind me of the age differential.

I guess that's why I'm writing up a blog post for my upcoming fortieth birthday. I want to remind myself of the good, and warn myself of the bad.

First, the good:

I'm extraordinarily proud of my career. The work I've done for effective altruism has been, I believe, quite invaluable. Helping to influence the creation of Animal Charity Evaluators and then heading communications there for its first two formative years was powerfully influential to the field of effective animal advocacy overall. Serving on the ACE Board today gives me immense pride. And, just this very week, I've applied to EA Funds for a grant to start a new organization, where I hope to create even more good -- potentially a huge amount.

I relish my hobbies. The recently created genre of rational fiction so far has so few entrants that I can reliably say that I've read every good text in the genre. When it comes to good television, I make it a point to experience as much of it as I can. My house is filled with the board games that I enjoy the most. I love that I live in the burgeoning era of video games, where I get to experience such creative and exciting stories created by the industry. I even get to feel that sense of camaraderie and success with the esports team that I captain.

My friends are few, but they are strong connections. The nonprofit I am starting is cofounded by one of my strongest friends. The esports team I play on has another of my best friends on it. I have several other friends in the various gaming communities I'm a part of, as well as many other friends who I have met in the polyamorous community.

Romance, for me, was a hard road, but I'm finally in a place that I am confident and comfortable with. I am polyamorous, asexual, heteroromantic, and sapioromantic, which makes for a strange combination. Thankfully, my lifelong partner supports me and does quite a bit to help me thrive.

When it comes to metaethics, I am a moral antirealist. Yet I want strongly for the world to be best that it can be, and I have a good understanding of what I would prefer that to consist of. I've dedicated my life to the field of effective altruism, and I feel that I've achieved a significant amount of good so far.

And the bad:

I live a mostly sedentary life. Exercise, for me, consists of walking around Little Seneca Creek, which I haven't done as much of during covid. I have intentions of being more active, but so far akrasia has made me unable to follow through on that.

Family, for me, has always been a failure point. Ever since the day my mother had police point a gun at me, I have been unwilling to ever see her again. I have hispanic and indigenous ancestry; the cop was white in the Deep South of Alabama. I am just not okay with the level of risk that my mother so callously put me through. My father's side of the family is much better, but for some reason I just am not that good at keeping as close contact with them as I should. I love my siblings; I want desperately to change my habits so I can spend more time with them. But, again: akrasia prevents me.

Sleep is the constant consonant note in my life. I have aphantasia in my waking life, but I dream lucidly with mental imagery. Before I knew what these terms even meant, I had no idea that others have mental imagery in their waking life, so, to me, it always struck me as strange that my dreams could be so very much more vivid than my waking life. I wasted so very much time prioritizing lucid dreaming over my real life. Today, I know better, but I'm still addicted to dreaming. I spend way more than I'd like to admit on sleep, far more than the 8 hours/day that most people spend.

Then there is the thing that I am worst at: everyday tasks. Doing dishes. Taking out the trash. Cleaning up rooms. Worst of all, because I've gone for my entire life without using or taking medication (minimizing even over-the-counter pain relief), the medical issues that started up in 2020 which have me now taking pills every day is causing a great deal of consternation. Remembering to take them seems like it should be an easy task, but instead it is a daily struggle.

Listing these out like this feels therapeutic. I have much to be happy about in the present -- and much for me to work on in the present. Overall, it is a good life that I lead.

But... I can't help but notice that I've focused only on the things in the present. There is no mention of my past, mostly because I have very little pride in my past. I started out life terribly. But, perhaps in part due to my aphantasia, I feel unconnected to those early decisions. I focus instead on the successes and low points of my life in the present. This is not a bad way to think about things, I think.

And so I feel good. Life is good. The flaws are things I can deal with. Once covid stops being such a concern, I can deal better with everyday tasks by hiring a cleaning service. Holding myself to a schedule should help with my sleep addiction. And the family thing will solve itself because, once my vaccination takes hold, I will be invited far more often to family events.

Later this week, I will turn 40 years old. And I am both happy and satisfied with where I am today and the trajectory I have for tomorrow.

ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος

Twitter user @jimkwik asked the other day for the happiest 4 word story people could come up with. Before deleting his response in favor of AI alignment message marketing, Eliezer Yudkowsky answered: “Death isn’t the end.”

He's right. Death is the scourge of value at the individual level. We must do what we can to stop it.

I won't spend time here defending the idea that reducing deaths are important. The trite arguments about overpopulation and death being part of life are easily dispatched even through listening to a bit of light fiction, such as CGP Grey’s retelling of Nick Bostrom’s Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. (I prefer the sheer power of Bostrom's original essay, but Grey's adapted and animated version also hits the main ideas well enough.)

Dylan Thomas is right: We should not go gentle into that good night; we must rage against the dying of the light. Certainly this is true if you believe in the A-theory of time, but I think it remains nearly as true even if you subscribe to the B-theory of time. If having a bar of chocolate is good, having a longer bar of chocolate may be better. So, too, is this true if we extend the length of time that we exist.

(I want to take a moment here to address the idea that the B-theory of time should make us more accepting of death. The question is: more accepting than what in comparison? If you start out believing naively that the A-theory of time is the only possible situation that can hold true, then you may think that death is a kind of erasure. If you believe this, then learning of the B-theory of time will give comfort in realizing that, even after death, one still exists, just earlier in time. And this is no less of an existence than saying that one still exists even if they are far to the left of where your reference point lies. So it is true that, in this situation, understanding that {the B-theory of time might be a better way of looking at things} will result in one feeling more comfortable with death than they were previously. But that doesn't mean we should be accepting of it! Just because a store of value still exists unerased does not mean that we should not lament not having even more of that store of value if that death had not occurred.)

Eneasz Brodski's HPMOR podcast
is particularly well done.

Fiction is rife with this idea. The title of this journal entry, ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος, comes from 1 Corinthians, where the hero, the literal second coming of Jesus, will, after defeating all tyrants and evil-doers, take on the final enemy: death itself. This idea, that death is the ultimate enemy, is one which inspires me greatly. The central theme of Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality may be (obviously) the methods of rational thinking, but the end goal — the only end goal if you find yourself in sudden possession of magical ability — is to figure out how to end death. (Well, I guess not the only end goal. But you know what I mean.) This theme continues beautifully in Alexander Davis' sequel Significant Digits, and even further in Nanashi Saito's further sequel Orders of Magnitude. While these stories are merely rational fiction, they should and do inspire those of us who want to do what we can to further the lifespan of all of us.

(Incidentally, while I fully endorse reading at least HPMOR if you have any interest in rational fiction and the Harry Potter fictional setting, its anti-death message is only the 2nd most inspiring concept I've encountered in fiction. Hal Clement's much shorter Mission of Gravity has a surprisingly heartfelt message that I find even more inspiring. It's not rational fiction, but it's perhaps one of my favorite hard science fiction stories written prior to the past couple of decades.)

My beloved companion, Jasper Hess.

Yesterday, Jasper died. The grief I felt from his sudden absence remains greater than any prior grief I've ever felt. Jasper was a daily part of my life for the past eight years. He was a beloved part of my close personal family. I feel utterly distraught by his sudden death.

Seeking comfort, my mind went to possible situations that would allow him to still exist. For others, this might have consisted of visions of heaven. Of his soul continuing on in some other place, or in another time. Perhaps of reincarnation, or as the oneness of all things. But I don't particularly take stock in non-physicalist theories (as does 56% of professional philosophers (the 2020 philpapers survey will update this soon!)), so this is not where my mind went.

Fleetingly, I reminded myself of the B-theory of time. That Jasper exists still, but…his existence now is still. I received little comfort.

Then I thought of the possible infinite extent of the universe. Even in the least exotic Tegmark level 1 infinite universe, there are only so many combinations of rearranged Planck-length particles that can occur in a given observable universe. (If you have a set of 100 lego bricks, and you are instructed to build something out of them in a given standard amount of space, and then you repeat this ad infinitum, then you can only make so many things before you start to repeat yourself. If the universe is level 1 infinite in extent, then there are infinite observable-universe-size volumes, in which only a finite number of lego bricks (5.4x10^61 planck lengths) can exist. Therefore, unless there is some reason to suspect a form of order in that infinitude that precludes there being other copies of you, there almost certainly exist other copies of you.) I imagined Jasper living still, but then I thought also of him as a Boltzmann brain, and the comfort was ruined. S-risks threatened to take over in my imagination, so I relented and briefly stopped thinking about infinities.

I am still so attached to the continuity of consciousness. It's hard to envision the set of all versions of me as the proper reference class, rather than just this one instance. I keep thinking that I am separate from other identical versions of me, and this results in the horror that death remains the end, even when identical copies exist elsewhere. Yet I know that many people that I highly respect maintain that instead we should consider ourselves to be the group of all identical people, and that when time causes that identicality to break because of different circumstances, our awareness will follow probabilistically to the various outcomes. This gives us the idea of quantum immortality, but it is more than this: it provides immortality even amongst other situations where copies exist elsewhere, e.g., in other Tegmarkian levels.

From here we get to Greg Egan's Dust Theory, which he introduces in the scifi novel Permutation City. (If these concepts are new to you, I highly suggest reading the novel before looking at the dust theory faq, as the novel properly dramatizes the unveiling of the theory in a way that is spoiled if you understand the theory first.)

Further afield (or perhaps less afield?) are the strange loops from Douglas Hofstadter, which holds that we exist in others' minds. (His I am a Strange Loop is well worth reading, regardless of how seriously you end up taking the thesis.)

But even if Jasper's existence remains through any of these ideas, I no longer have access to him. He isn't here. I cannot hold him. These otherwise comforting ideas just don't emotionally help me in the here and now. Jasper is dead, and the me that exists writing this cannot be with him.

There are worse things than death. Existential risk, for example, seems worse because it is a kind of mega-death. But also Roko's Basilisk-esque S-risk scenarios are technically worse outcomes, and maybe Nell Watson's W-risk scenarios are equally frightening. But the death of an individual nevertheless still unnerves me. Maybe death is not technically the ultimate enemy. But these other end bosses seem like exceptionally powerful optional bosses, not the main villain of the story.

So is it strange that I have not yet signed up for cryonics?

Don't get me wrong: the likelihood of cryonics being able to extend my lifespan is very, very low. You might be tempted to call it negligible. But the upside, if it works, is so great that even an exceptionally tiny chance cannot be immediately dismissed as negligible. If the cost is not so high for insurance that would pay for cryonics, then why not take the chance? The expected value is surely positive here, even if the absolute chance of it paying out is incredibly low.

Yet I still have not signed up. I feel wary of this being an example of Pascal's mugging. But, if one day I do sign up, how bad will it have been to know that I did not also sign up Jasper? I feel torn.

Death may not be the ultimate enemy, but it is surely close enough that we should all band together to defeat it. The effective altruism arguments for organizations like the SENS Research Foundation seem interestingly compelling, especially while I grieve for Jasper, but then I remember that we are not the only ones that matter. As Pablo Stafforini so astutely points out:

"Longevity research occupies an unstable position in the space of possible EA cause areas: it is very 'hardcore' and 'weird' on some dimensions, but not at all on others. The EAs in principle most receptive to the case for longevity research tend also to be those most willing to question the 'common-sense' views that only humans, and present humans, matter morally. But, as you note, one needs to exclude animals and take a person-affecting view to derive the 'obvious corollary that curing aging is our number one priority'. As a consequence, such potential supporters of longevity research end up deprioritizing this cause area relative to less human-centric or more long-termist alternatives."

It is perhaps selfishness that makes me feel as I currently do. At the end, I just want Jasper back. I want the events of the past few days to be undone, All Night Laundry-style.

And so I cry.