Benjamin · Abroad

This is my last LJ post - I'm moving my internet presense to a real-live blog. I'll keep checking in here to read my friends' LJs, of course.

The first two posts are already up, with more on the way. Check it out at http://AmericanUmlaut.blogspot.com

If your tummy hurts, do the following: measure half the distance from your navel to your right side, then about the same distance downward. This should be just above the jutty part of the hip that pokes out over the tops of skinny girls' impractically cut designer jeans. Press your fingers into that spot, hard. If it hurts, donotfuckaroundgotothedoctor. It's important to note that you should check this even if you think you have a stomach ache. It turns out the nerves in your abdomen are not very good at localizing pain, so it's good to make a manual check, because if your tummy ache turns into a ruptured appendix before you get to the hospital, you will have a very shitty week.

I performed the poke test on my own sexy jut Saturday morning, after two days of increasing pain. Ultimately, it was Wikipedia that saved me from the joys of septic shock, learning the location of my appendix was enough to convince me to schedule a doctor's visit before the wedding I was supposed to attend that night. After a five-minute examination, the doctor rushed me into her car and drove me to the hospital herself. I was rapidly passed up the ranks from nurse to assistant doctor to doctor to head surgeon and anesthesiologist, each of whom took the opportunty to stab a finger into my vestigal digestive tissue and ask me if it hurt. It hurt.

Within an hour of my arrival in the hospital I had signed the necessary waivers (there are more ways to die during an appendectomy than I thought there were ways to die) and worked myself into a proper panic at the thought of being put under narcosis for the first time in my life. Then the doctors did something really nice. They gave me the blue pill. I have retroactivelly dubbed it the pill of universal constipation, because within a minute I didn't give a shit about anything.

The prep room was a source of enormous entertainment for me. While I waited, I played with my EKG and blood-oxygen saturation levels. I held my breath to get my oxygen down, then breathed too fast to get it up. I relaxed and got my heart rate down to sixty beats per minute, then moved my arms around and got it up to eighty. Then I figured out that I could make a "pulse" on the machine by flexing my pectoral muscles (where the sensors were attached). If the doctors looked at my readings afterward, they must have been surprised to see my pulse go from sixty to three fifty in a matter of seconds.

The beginning of narcosis is fun. First your lungs get numb and tingly like you've just taken a really hard bong hit. Then the rest of your body starts to fade. I told the anesthesiologist that I was feeling a bit dizzy, and I don't remember what he said.

I woke up with my brain in ten pieces and reality coming at me in hazy flickers like a bad radio signal. Had the operation started? I heard a fragment of German, and realized that I understood it. Cool trick. I touched my stomach and felt the bandages, so I knew I was done. I remember the awareness of being wheeled through the hospital to my room, but I don't remember it actually happening - the drugs they gave me left most of the day like that, fragmented images and half-remembered impressions, like I got the tenth layer of carbon paper and some jackass took off with the orignal copies.

Sunday morning I woke up feeling surprisingly good. I had three holes in me - they opened up my belly button and stuck a camera and a bike pump down the rabbit hole (they pump you up like a basketball), then punched tiny little holes in my sides for the tools. But I wasn't in much pain, as long as I didn't try to use my abdominal muscles for anything. Since that first morning, I haven't needed so much as a Tylenol for the pain.

Ever since I woke up that morning, I've been thinking about the fact that we just take this sort of thing for granted, that we don't die from appendicitis or smallpox or a thousand other things any more. In my room in the hospital were me, another guy with his appendix out, a guy with a compound fracture in his leg, and a guy with a badly mangled hand (got a cramp in his leg while operating a circular saw). Left up to nature, we should all be dead by now, and the routine, assembly-line manner in which modern medicine is able to save lives shouldn't diminish the wonder of it.

I'm Benjamin Stürmer now. I have an umlaut! Yay!

And I have a brilliant and beautiful wife who is with me in Lüneburg today, visiting some friends of hers before we leave again to head to Denmark for the rest of our honeymoon.

The wedding was brilliant. My buddy Marcus served as witness and wrote an excellent translation of the speech (I don't know how to translate Standesbeamter... we'll go with) the guy from the Office of Marrying People delivered so that my family had subtitles without Rose or I knowing what the contents of the speech would be ahead of time.

My little brother served as best man (we divided best man and witness into two jobs, because I wanted William to be my best man, but he's not old enough and doesn't understand German), and cut quite a handsome figure in his suit. William has gone, in the last three years, from being a little kid to looking like a grown up man. That impression flees quickly when he opens his mouth, though; his sense of humor is still very much of the Bevis & Butthead variety.

Alltogether we had about thirty guests. After we wed we had a little picnic on the grounds and got a guided tour of the windmill (very, very cool; the whole thing is still made out of wood). Afterward was tea, then a barbecue at Rose's family's place until the wee hours of the morning. Then off to our fancy shmancy hotel room downtown.

And now I'm on my honeymoon! We'll go back to real life in a week. Until then we'll be hanging out in a little cabin on the beach, playing board games and chilling out with nothing to do for the first time in half a year for both of us. When we get back it begins again; I will have to start preparing for my trip to Japan in October (it looks like it's really going to happen) and we both have to start making plans for our church wedding next year, which is going to be a lot more stressful to organize than the much smaller celebration we had this time.

I just watched the first episode of Transformers (on YouTube) for the first time since I was a tiny, tiny child, blissfully unaware of the fact that one of my favorite television shows was a thinly veiled half-hour toy commercial. Watching now, I think the writers must have realized how silly the whole thing was. From the first twenty minutes, the following choice quites:

"There's not enough energy in these conductors to last a cortex!"

"Hang on to you crankshaft, I'm shifting to overdrive!"

The Decepticon ship has been like ten feet behind the Autobot ship for the last five minutes. "Detectors report: we are being followed!"

"G-forces... they're dragging us... down!"

The Decepticons have been walking for hours, finally stopping near a random pile of rocks. Says Megatron: "Stop here. These rocks will serve as our base of operations."

Having pumped what looks like six gallons of crude oil. "We've done it, we've done it, we've got the energy! We can go back to Cybertron!"

I love being ass-deep in academic nonsense.

In 1837, Oshio Heihachiro incited a peasant riot that left 20% of Osaka burned to the ground. He died in the aftermath of the riot, but he had committed a crime, so the penal custom of the Tokugawa government required that his corpse be preserved in salt while he stood trial, so that the sentenced corporal punishment (in this case crucifixion) be carried out afterward.

Evidently any corporal punishment would be carried out on your corpse if you didn't survive to your own sentencing. So for two hundred fifty years of Japanese history, if you were bad enough you could get the shit beat out of your corpse.

Today I went out to my balcony garden and pulled up ten of my radishes. They are enormous, about three times as big as I would expect store-bought ones to be, and they are somewhat spicier. I'm very proud of myself; there's something special about putting a little black speck in the ground, then watering it every day for a month and a half and having food at the end.

Two of my peas have just started flowering, so probably by the time my next batch of radishes comes up (I'm re-planting them tomorrow or the next day, I think), I will have peas getting ripe as well.

Spring is wonderful.

Taken from QCJeph.

1. My username is _____ because ____

During my year on exchange in Japan I had a Japanese girlfriend for several months. On a trip home to visit her family (who did not and were not allowed to learn that we were dating -- hilarity ensued), her father spent one night at dinner dreaming up kanji to match my name. He came up with 紅蛇眠 -- crimson_serpent is a not-very-accurate translation of the first two characters. More accurate would be "really dark red snake", but that wouldn't be nearly as cool.

2. My name is _____ because ______.

My name is Benjamin because, I shit you not, my parents were fans of M*A*S*H. Alan Alda's character was called Hawkeye, but his real name was Benjamin Pierce.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.

I had to go look at my page to see what I called it... I suppose "Benjamin Abroad" is fairly unimaginative. Of the last four and a half years, I've been in a foreign country for three and a half -- first a year in Japan, then a year back home, and the last two and a half years in Germany.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.

I named it "Come Through My Cellar Door" both as a play on the children's song "Say Say Oh Playmate" that I used to love doing the hand-jive to and because I had just watched Donnie Darko, in which the idea that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in the English language comes up.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.

For about three months last year I drew a web comic called Benny & teh Ninjaz. It was a critical and financial failure, but it was a huge amount of fun and made me aware that, amazingly, I too have a creative urge. There's not a lot of the artist in me, as anyone who saw the strips knows, but what little there is takes a lot of joy in seeing that icon wherever I have posted online.

It is a curious fact of my current profession as computer programmer that much of a typical work day consists of me staring intently at my computer monitor doing nothing at all.

I just spent the last three hours doing exactly that. I had a bug come back from testing on a page I wrote a few weeks ago. I understood the bug. I understood why the bug was happening. But I couldn't figure out how to make the bug stop happening. So I sat and stared at the code block, and stared, and stared, and stared. In my brain I probably came up with fifteen or twenty different plausible solutions until I found one that would actually work.

I work hard, but it amuses me to think of how that process looks from the outside. I open a bug report, open a page of code, and sit, doing nothing, for three hours. Then I write six lines of code and send the page back for testing.

I love my job :).

As I'm having trouble finding something on my university's webpage, she says "Want me to look? Three eyes are better than one."

Then she comes over to me. "Oh I'm sorry. I shouldn't be laughing at your disability. Do you feel discriminated?"

We have warp. We have weft. We need a third parameter for weavings into the third dimension. My proposal: Widge.

In Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, all Japanese behavior follows logically from three basic precepts. Hierarchy is the warp, obligation the weft, and circles of behavioral constraints comprise the widge.