Hello, I have cancer. Throat cancer, specifically. It is not that bad as far as cancer goes and my doctors tell me that once I get through the chemo and radiation there is a very high chance I will be 100% cured. Not like “in remission” cured but actually cured cured. It’s good news! But the chemo and radiation for the next seven weeks are probably going to be tough. I start today.
I did not restart this blog to turn it into a cancer diary, because unless you actually have cancer, cancer diaries can be super boring. But I am going to talk about it, because I think stuff through and settle my mind by writing about it.
I was going to seperate the cancer posts from my normal blog posts but it looks like that will be complicated and I don’t have the spoons for that. The cancer posts after this one will have content warnings in the titles, you may skip if you wish. I do hope to continue writing about other more normal things, such as cats. Because you cannot not have cats, even in times of darkness.
Yeah, the timing of the pandemic AND the holidays AND twitter collapse AND restarting a blog AND getting cancer is a bit much. I wish things were all different and that it hadn’t happened right now. But as a wise man said in a book once, that’s not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
So far I’m trying my best.
]]>For years this blog was in self-hosted Wordpress, which I had found increasingly slow, complicated, and unwieldy. I’m sure there were lots of ways I could have made it faster, simpler, and uh, wieldy, if I had wanted to really work at it. But I got to the point where the maintenance felt like a chore and I wanted to try something else that was just simpler.
I have had so many incomplete “get the blog into something simpler” attempts, including delusionally thinking I was going to write my own blog platform, and also a couple passes of delusionally thinking I knew enough CSS to do my own design by hand from scratch.
I started using Jekyll, the static site generator that powers github pages, during one of those attempts. At the time it was the most popular and best-supported SSG. It’s since become less popular (everyone loves Hugo now), but I didn’t want to start over over again with yet another language and framework and templating system and and and, so Jekyll it is.
After I realized my own CSS was not going to cut it I settled on the Lanyon theme. It has some minor changes (I’m capable enough at CSS to poke at an existing design) but I mostly used it as-is.
Sadly I never made far enough in any of these blog reboots to actually stop running Wordpress.
Finally I made it far enough into a blog reboot to where I am no longer running Wordpress.
The site is still Jekyll, and still Lanyon. It is definitely much simpler and more comfortable for me to maintain and to understand.
I use git locally and push to github as a backup, but I don’t deploy anything out of github or have any kind of CI/CD system. I have an old-school web host that runs apache, and I just build the site and then copy the files to that host with scp like I am a caveman straight out of 1997.
]]>I have tried a bunch of times to restart this blog over the years, from writing more regularly, to design changes, to killing the whole thing altogether and starting over from scratch. All of these have been really hard things for me to get headway on, for various reasons. It did not help that twitter was right there, did not make me install any frameworks or learn new programming languages, and was really addictive. But, as you know, twitter. (deepest of sighs).
With the imminent-loss-of-twitter incentive I’ve gotten farther into the process this time. I’m trying really hard not to get mired in details and to just put something workable up. There’s still an awful lot of work left to do, but it’s up and there’s some text on it, which is a start.
My primary goal for the blog this time around is to not be so insanely perfectionist about it. One huge advantage of twitter for me was that everything about it (the character limits, the pacing) very neatly sidestepped my insane need to over-write and over-edit everything to death. So I’m hoping to spend less time on the Enormous Serious Thing It Took Me A Week to Write and more on just, well, short easy things that kind of look a lot like tweets. (Note: I’ve done four drafts of this post and it’s twice as long as it should be so maybe not succeeding so well yet.)
Also there will be lots of cat and garden and coffee photos, because of course there will.
]]>I heard a story once a long time ago that over time all the cells in our body die off, and are replaced by new cells. The entire process, it is said, takes seven years.
I googled this fact this morning and it turns out to be totally a myth, up there with “we only use 10% of our brains” for dubious quasi-biological “facts.” But that’s the dubious quasi-biological fact I’m hanging my theme on here and I’m going to stick with it. Bear with me.
Greek legend tells of the story of Theseus’ ship, which was preserved for hundreds of years in port after the founding of Athens. When individual boards in the ship broke or rotted away, they were replaced, until finally none of the original ship remained.
There’s a similar old story of Grandfather’s axe you may have heard: grandfather’s axe has been handed down from father to son for generations. The handle has been replaced four times, the axe head twice.
The paradox for philosophers, then, is whether Theseus’s ship or Grandfather’s axe actually still exists. Is it still the same object if every component of it has been replaced with some other component?
If we turn over all the cells in our body every seven years, are we still the same person?
This paradox also makes me think me of Doctor Who (OK, seriously, bear with me), in which the titular character dies and regenerates on a regular basis, with each incarnation having all the memories of the original but a different appearance, personality, and outlook. (It’s an awfully convenient plot device for a long-running character whose actor must be replaced once in a while).
If we turn over all the cells in our body every seven years, are we all just Theseus’ ship, grandfather’s axe, slow versions of the Doctor: at our essential root the same person, but continually changing into new versions of ourselves?
I bring this up because today is my birthday. My fiftieth birthday. Fifty is a big number, a round number, a half a century, a significant birthday by any measure. I could grimace and grumble and whine about that. Or I could point out as I turn 50 I have completed seven cycles of seven years. Like the Doctor I am just beginning my eighth regeneration.
In past cycles I have been a redhead, a drummer, a geek, a writer, a goth, a drunk, a recluse, and a lunatic.
I am super curious to see where this season’s plotline goes.
(Header photo from grixti on flickr (original; CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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