I think I’ll be better off once I’m back at work on Monday. I’ve been off since the day before Christmas, as we’ve been on an extended holiday, and I don’t do well with long periods of free, unstructured time. I become obsessed with small matters and fall prey to my imagination. After several days of dire premonitions and dread, I saw my ear doctor again today. My ears, both of them, are still suffering an extended bout of eczema and nothing more. There is no infection in my left ear, and despite the eczema, the healing of the graft continues to progress.

The doctor would like me to see a dermatologist to get some insight and advice on the eczema, but it’s tricky to find one with this particular sort of expertise. Skin inside the ear isn’t like other skin, at least not once something goes wrong with it. There was a dermatologist he used to trust with these sorts of issues, but he retired. His office manager suggested one I could try, but there’s no indication that he has this particular sort of expertise. I also asked the doctor about the ENT’s suggestion of an oral steroid, but he said he didn’t know enough about it to feel comfortable trying it. The good news is that even if we just have to wait out this eczema, it looks like the tissue will continue healing while we wait. And Monday I’ll be back at work and will have something to do with my mind.

As I mentioned, I’ve been reading the Bodhicharyavatara and various commentaries on it for the last few weeks. Though the root text, in verse, is quite pithy and aphoristic (and deceptively ironic–I wish I could read Sanskrit or Tibetan so I could appreciate it more fully as a poem), in conjunction with the commentaries, it provides comprehensive guidance for practitioners of Mahayana Buddhism. There are so many themes that wind in and out of the text, passed first from one perspective and then later from another. One such theme is our relationship with our bodies:

VI.44
This body–running sore in human form–
Merely touched, it cannot stand the pain!
I’m the one who grasped it in blind attachment,
Whom should I resent when pain occurs?

VI.52
Because the mind is bodiless
It cannot be destroyed by anyone.
Because of mind’s attachment to the body,
This body is oppressed by pain.

VIII.178
Dust and ashes are the body’s final state–
This body which, inert, is moved by other forces.
This form so frightening and foul–
Why do I so regard it as my “self”?

VIII.180
Through lavishing attention on this body,
Such sorrow have I brought myself so senselessly.
What use is all my wanting, all my hating,
For what indeed is like a log of wood?

VIII.184
Therefore, free from all attachment,
I will give this body for the benefit of beings.
And though it is afflicted by so many faults,
I shall adopt it as my necessary tool.

Pulling these stanzas out of their context probably heightens the appearance of mortification with the body, but I’m too lazy to quote enough context to rectify that appearance. Please trust me when I claim that this appearance is simply a reflection of our own ambivalence toward our bodies. On the one hand, we are attached to our bodies as our selves (or at least as the temples housing our selves), and on the other hand, we tend to find most of what the body contains and is composed of disgusting. Simultaneously holding these two extreme and incompatible views can only lead to suffering, and neither view is accurate. In truth, our body is neither our self nor its home, and notions like disgust and repulsion are merely concepts with no genuine reality.

These contemplations have seemed relevant as my supposedly healing ear has continued to leak more and more persistently. It had stopped for a little over a week, but then started again on Sunday night, a little at first, but accompanied by an itch. The last couple of mornings, I’ve had to get out of bed and run to the bathroom with my head tilted so that whatever my ear’s full of didn’t run down my face. It’s not an uplifting way to start the day. Because of the itching, I tried to contact my ear doctor on Monday morning, but he’s unavailable until Friday (when I already have an appointment with him). And the other ear doctor I saw when he broke his hip is also unavailable until Friday. I did find that I could control the itching with Benadryl, though it left me dehydrated.

But yesterday it was still bothering me, so I tried the ENT who had originally referred me to my current ear doctor, and she was available, so I zipped through the park to see her. She confirmed that my ear isn’t infected and that I’m having an eczema flare up in both ears. She said that the ear actually looked better than she expected given my description of the symptoms, and wondered if my doctor had considered using an oral steroid like prednisone to suppress the eczema until the graft in my ear healed. Then she coated my ear (and most of that side of my head) with boric acid and said I’d be okay until my Friday visit with my regular ear doctor.

It could simply be that my ear is actually healing, and that the liquid (thin and clear) is an attempt to flush my ear of the foreign substances in it, much like a lingering runny nose after a cold. But I’m very hesitant to leave my ear so moist and susceptible to infection without that magic powder. I’m on the verge of losing all sense of perspective. The ENT’s surprise at the actual state of my ear given my description of the symptoms suggests that I may be overreacting, but I have very little ability to convince myself of that anymore. Yes, I’m not in any pain; yes, I can actually hear fairly well from that ear; yes, the ear isn’t infected or about to become so; and yet I have this overwhelming desire to give up. All that seems to be preventing me from doing so is the fact that I can’t figure out what giving up would actually entail. And so I eventually get distracted, and maybe even do something useful. Monday, I created a prototype of a Web site for the Buddhist study program I’m in. Yesterday, I fixed the configuration of our wireless network so that I can now move large files around at up to 4 MB/s and control all non-cable audio and video from my phone. And today, so far, I’ve reflected on the Bodhicharyavatara and written this.

I am clearly suffering, and no one seems surprised by that (in fact, someone compared me to Job today), but I can’t really put my finger on why I’m suffering so much. The physical basis of that suffering is slight, and I have nearly all of the freedom and leisure that a human could reasonably expect. Yet it is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism that we suffer, and I offer this testament to that truth’s veracity. But, Shantideva reminds us, there are three more Noble Truths:

VI.21
Suffering also has its worth.
Through sorrow, pride is driven out
And pity felt for those who wander in samsara;
Evil is avoided; goodness seems delightful.

VIII.173
And so it is that if I want contentment,
I should never seek to please myself.
And likewise, if I wish to guard myself,
Of others I should always be the guard.

I’d be lying if I said I led my life that way, or that my aspiration to do so is any more than theoretical at this point, but the past eighteen months’ intensive seminar on impermanence has made the truth of those two stanzas seem more plausible.

I first heard of Maxwell’s Demon in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In the novel, a character builds a box that seeks to exploit the apparent intersection of the fields of thermodynamics and information theory, implied by their similar use of the idea of entropy, to create a perpetual motion apparatus. His device, a box to all appearances, employs Maxwell’s Demon inside along with a “sensitive” outside to cause one half of the box to become warmer, allowing a piston to be driven. The upshot of all of these abstrusities is the suggestion that information or attention can be used to do actual work.

The idea of the attention economy, with attention replacing money as the basis of exchange, that was all the rage during the first Internet bubble of the late 1990s sounded similar. I don’t know that many of the theory’s adherents from a decade ago still hold out the same hopes for it, but it was from those ashes that Google and other clever Web-based companies arose, and now we’re beginning to see the possibility of doing interesting things with attention. Weblogs were perhaps a first, clumsy step in this direction, and things like Twitter and Tumblr are refinements of the concept. But what I’m finding most interesting these days is the sharing built into Google Reader.

One of the immediate appeals of a Weblog to me was being able to draw connections, and thus potentially convey a great deal more information than the few paragraphs I have the time to write every now and then. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been such a heavy user of hyperlinks since I started my first Weblog. I’ve never believed that what I have to say is interesting or complete in and of itself, but I do think that what I have to say about what others have said or the connections that I can draw might be of some interest to a handful of people. Yet even then, as this entry attests, I still have to do a fair amount of writing to accomplish this in a Weblog. But with Google Reader sharing, I can, just like Maxwell’s Demon, simply point (and maybe add a note for context) and others are able to follow my train of thought without my having to write it out (which has always been frustrating even at the best of times).

So like Eric before me, I invite you to follow along. You can use the Google Reader link at left, under “Currently Reading,” to see the articles I’m sharing, or you can use the “Subscribe in Google” link at right, under “Details,” to subscribe to this Weblog and set up a Google Reader account if you don’t already have one. I recommend setting up an account of your own if you can. It’s the best way to read the Web, and it works very nicely across platforms. (As an aside, Google–ironically, given their guise as a competitor in the form of Android–has done considerably more to make my iPhone useful than a Mobile Me account and all of the non-Google-driven applications in the App Store.) And if you have a Google Reader account, or you set one up, share and share alike. I want everyone to know what I think, but to think, I need to know what others are thinking.

Last night, the night of the winter solstice, I flipped open my copy of John Ashbery’s Notes from the Air, pretty much at random, to “And the Stars Were Shining,” which begins thus:

It was the solstice, and it was jumping on you like a friendly dog.
The stars were still out in the field,
and the child prostitutes plied their trade,
the only happy ones, having learned how unhappiness sticks
and will not risk being being traded in for a song or a balloon.
Christmas decorations were getting crumpled in offices
by staffers slumped at their video terminals,
and dismay articulated otherness in orphan asylums
where the coffee percolates eternally, and God is not light
but God, as mysterious to Himself as we are to Him.

This stanza is as apt a summary of the ambivalences and contradictions of this season as I’ve seen. In ten lines, it wraps up the innocence and enthusiasm, the commerce and cynicism, the light in darkness and resilience in adversity, and, of course, the estrangement from God. But today, on Festivus, it also occurs to me that this literate airing of grievances could, in some alternate universe, be to this holiday what “A Visit from St. Nicholas” or A Christmas Carol has been to Christmas.

Despite my history with it, I’m actually comfortable with Christms this year. I’m looking forward to the time off I have coming up and to seeing my family on Christmas day. Despite my ongoing medical adventures and the apparent impending collapse of Western civilization, I find myself swept up in a feeling of well-being–not that I don’t also feel anxious or overwhelmed as well. I hope you’re all facing 2009 with some of that same sense of well-being.

I’ve been reading Shantideva’s Bodhicharyavatara, and various commentaries on it. I even made it through part of a weekend program on it. I came across this little fable in Kunzang Pelden’s commentary on it, called The Nectar of Manjushri’s Speech:

Once upon a time, when the son of Vallabha… was setting off on a sea voyage, his mother wept and caught hold of the hem of his clothes. “Your tears,” he cried, “will bring me bad luck on the journey.” And with that, he kicked his mother in the head. In the course of his voyage, [he] was shipwrecked, but holding fast to a spar, he was washed ashore on an island. …he had to undergo the unbearable pain produced by an iron wheel spinning on his head. But then he thought to himself, “May the pain of other beings who are suffering for having kicked their mothers in the head ripen upon me. May they not experience it.” At that very moment, his torture ceased…

This morning, after waking up around 5:00 with an ear mysteriously filled with liquid, doing my best to dry it out and pack it with cotton, and then lying back down to try to sleep, it came to mind. Something had obviously gone quite wrong with my ear, and I had no idea what it was. The ear didn’t hurt, and the liquid was clear and of the approximate density and viscosity of water, so it didn’t seem like the symptoms of an infection, but I couldn’t figure out what else it could be. And so I lay there considering what suffering I could aspire to have ripen upon me. Finally, I decided that I would seek to take on the suffering of all of those who were as frightened as I was for reasons they couldn’t entirely explain. I don’t know how much it helped, but I was able to keep myself functionally calm until I got to the doctor’s office.

He looked in my left ear, and saw just a little spot of blood on the tissue that hadn’t quite healed yet. But everything looked basically okay. There was no infection, and the tissue was still covering all of the bone. Then he looked in my right ear, and it was a mess. It was full of sloughing skin, irritated, and on the verge of an infection. It seems that I’m having an episode of eczema in both ears, and that it wasn’t as bad in the left ear because I’ve been putting the powder in it every other day. Now I’ll be putting the powder in both ears every day for the rest of this week, and hoping that this bout of eczema passes. Walking through the lobby of the doctor’s building on the way back to work, I almost collapsed in tears, and I’m not entirely sure why, except that I was tired and I’m just about completely wrung out by this process. And still I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

I don’t what was going on in my left ear between October 1st and October 22nd, but whatever it was, it doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. In that three week stretch, the skin graft that had been put there back in May went from three-quarters healed to ninety percent healed. In the six weeks since then, granulation tissue (or mucosa) has grown over the remaining exposed bone, but hasn’t yet become the dry skin it’s supposed to. Upon hearing the word mucosa, I panicked a little as I remembered that being a bad thing. But the doctor assured me that this was the expected progress. After my pressing him a bit for a prediction, he guessed that, given my history, my ear would be healed in another month. I was really hoping that with the momentum that I’d managed to build up through October, he would tell that it was healed today. Though it’s not, he assured that all was going well, and he seemed quite pleased (which seems to be the best measure of progress available to me).

I’ll see him again before Christmas, but until then, it’s more of the powder and more of the cotton and vaseline in the ear for workouts and showers. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tired of this, but things continue to go well. Yet despite my best efforts to maintain a positive or simply realistic perspective, I find myself wondering if the trajectory of my ear’s healing will become asymptotic with the ear being fully healed, forever approaching but never quite reaching that state. Will I be sixty years old and still putting powder, cotton, and vaseline in my ear in hopes that the last percent of the graft will somehow transform from mucosa to simple dry skin? I know logically that it will heal, but I can’t quite believe it. When it does happen, I fully expect to weep tears of joy in the doctor’s office. I wonder how he’ll take that.

Do not doubt the power of Crazy Sam’s Good Time Magic Powder^® (though there may be reason to doubt Sam’s messianic tendencies–more on that below). After using the powder every day for a little over a week, and despite a catastrophic breaching on Monday morning of the cotton and petroleum jelly levee I use to protect my ear from moisture in the shower, my ear looked much better today than it did last Monday. The tissue hasn’t really made much progress in eclipsing the exposed bone since last week, but it looks “much calmer” in the doctor’s words. I don’t know what this means in practical terms anymore, but where he was a bit discouraged last week, he was very upbeat this week. I asked why, given little or no progress in the tissue growth, I should be encouraged by this, and he said that there likely wouldn’t be much tissue growth in a week, but that the area looks far more conducive to tissue growth with the powder. So I’ll keep using the powder every other day, and we’ll check back in three weeks.

I asked the doctor if I’d told him the story of Sam the Pharmacist and his profound faith in this powder and his wild-eyed (I’m assuming–I only spoke to him on the phone) messianism. He said I hadn’t, and that he was surprised to hear that, since Sam’s not the first pharmacist to make this powder, though there aren’t many who do. Apparently it’s a fairly old treatment, and it’s expensive and difficult for patients to properly administer (making me special, I suppose). In fact, he had convinced a pharmacist in New York to make the powder, but the pharmacist stopped after a while due to a lack of interest. I’m a true believer in what is apparently a small church or, perhaps more accurately, cult.

The best health-related news of the week is that it finally dawned on me that this odd levee system for my ear could also protect it from moisture while I exercise, as long as the exercise isn’t too strenuous (which, after a layoff of months, it won’t be). I started working out in the morning before work yesterday, and I already feel much better, just like Rich said I would. I feel calmer, I sleep better, and my back, which was already somewhat better, feels both stronger and looser. I might just get through this saga, which may yet challenge the longevity of The Archers, without losing my mind.

I’m exhausted, and I’m still in shock. Last night was like most of the cities in the country winning the World Series at the same time, and New York was no exception–horns and yelling up and down Broadway until at least 2:30 this morning. And watching the reactions from around the country–black college students collapsing in tears, white crowds cheering into cameras, and Jesse Jackson crying his eyes out–I was caught by surprise and overwhelmed by the feeling of the night. I had been looking at this election as a hiring process, and I had been almost exclusively focused on issues like competence and corruption, and as I saw Obama’s campaign execute flawlessly week after week, I was more and more impressed with him. But I was so focused on practical matters that I lost track of the powerful emotional and cultural issues building behind this campaign.

I went to bed last night with a black President Elect (and only a few years after South Africa managed that), and I still haven’t fully absorbed that. This morning I spoke to my brother about what this means for his son, my nephew. I had forgotten that, aside from what this means for others, it actually means something to me and my loved ones. We didn’t just elect the candidate most likely to respond effectively to the considerable challenges facing the next President. We elected a black man. Ain’t that some crazy shit?

…because I don’t know if I can. And I’m not even talking about tomorrow’s election, though I’m not sure I can stand that either. Whatever the outcome, the world will be significantly different on Wednesday than it is today, and I’m not especially upbeat about any of the possible shapes it could take. I don’t know that I’d be able to accept what it would say about this country and the way that power is exercised over it if McCain is somehow elected. But if Obama is elected, I’ll still have grave worries. Not about him, what his election will be a culmination of, or what it will mean to so many; but about the anger that will be sown and left to ferment in dark but significant corners of society (just look at the comments on that last link to get a sense of the fear in the face of this change). Yes, the Republican party would likely disintegrate, which might be amusing to someone more jaded than me, but the fragments that remain will be so much more dangerous, not because of their power, but because their vitriol will be untethered from and thus unmitigated by any participation in mainstream civil discourse. Perhaps the candidate who has been most inspiring for his unerring non-violent, non-aggressive response in the face of constant and focused anger can continue to absorb and reconcile the mass of contradictions sown by his predecessors, but there has to be limit, doesn’t there?

No, what I can’t stand any more of is the the ongoing failure of my ear’s healing to resolve itself one way or another. Either heal or fail to heal, but make up your capricious, feeble mind! The progress of two weeks ago, though not lost, seems to have lost nearly all of it’s momentum. Five weeks ago, having recovered from the most recent fungal infection, the tissue was about seventy-five percent healed. Over the next three weeks, it reached ninety percent healed where, two weeks later, it basically remains. There was a bit more tissue growth, but not at anything like the rate it had grown over the previous three weeks. What to do at this point isn’t clear. What changed over the last two weeks is that I’ve been using Crazy Sam’s Good Time Magic Powder^® less often and my chiropractor, in the course of fixing my back and neck, has moved my jaw around a bit. My inclination was thus to go back to using the powder more often and have the chiropractor not touch my jaw anymore. The ear doctor’s initial recommendation was that we should stop the powder and just let the ear heal. His concern is that continued use of the powder (which includes a steroid, an antibiotic, and an anti-fungal agent) will cause me to develop a resistance. I suggested that leaving the tissue unprotected wouldn’t seem to lead to progress in the healing and would eventually result in an infection that would have to be treated with something. On the other hand, if we use the powder more often for a short time, maybe the momentum we had a few weeks ago will return and the healing will be done soon and I won’t have to put anything, resistance causing or not, in my ear anymore. After some thought he agreed, and suggested that I go back to using the powder daily, and I’ll return next Wednesday to see where we stand.

This leaves me in a very uncomfortable situation. Yet again I have to make these decisions for myself. I have to balance my ear doctor’s experience with the 999,999 out of 1,000,000 cases that he’s seen where everything he’s done has worked against my experience with the 1 out of 1 case that I’ve seen where it hasn’t. Obviously it would be foolish of me to ignore or discount anything that he says, but on the other hand, there have been a few cases where I’ve been right and he hasn’t. Add to that the fact that I also have to coordinate the treatments of different doctors who won’t really work together, but whose efforts will each the other’s, and once again I find myself in the unsought but increasingly common position of being fully responsible for what happens. This is reality, but that doesn’t make me happy about it. I’m left fretting about whether or not tomorrow will the right cross coup de grâce that this evening’s left uppercut has set me up for. And I’ve sought comfort in what I can: Dinosaur Jr.; clonazepam; and, at Emily’s suggestion, puppies. How are you getting through the next couple of days?

This evening, after a three week wait that became less and less excruciating as I noticed my ear and jaw less and less, I saw my ear doctor. His hip is healing, but he’s frustrated with how long it’s taking. He’s pretty active, and he’s going crazy not being able to walk yet. But he was skittering around on a rolling chair, and didn’t even need a nurse to hand things to him, though there was a nurse standing in the room just in case. I sympathized with his situation, and he guessed that I would understand his frustration. I do. As I’ve adjusted my activities to ensure that the ear would have the best chance of healing, there have been ancillary problems.

The latest is my back. Because I’ve avoided any exercise that would cause me to sweat, which for me is anything more active than an elevator ride, my body simply isn’t as strong as normal, and for the last week, my back has been in various states of disarray. After three chiropractor visits in less than a week, it seems to be mending, but it had been pretty well mended Saturday, until an ill advised stretch before getting into bed undid it like a flimsy, ancient clock. (Oddly, at almost the same moment, the cable box in the bedroom, with a DVR holding years of programming my wife meant to watch at some point, gave up the ghost.) On the other hand, the TMJ disorder that had been plaguing me, and complicating my efforts to determine by feel what has actually been happening in my ear, seems to be resolved. The chiropractor said my neck was quite a mess, likely from the TMJ disorder and possibly because I’ve been turning my head to favor the ear that works better. She put everything there and down to my hips back where it belongs, and the muscles of my back are slowly reconciling themselves to this new arrangement. I hope it will hold this time. In any case, the shift of focus away from my jaw to my back has caused me to worry less about my ear.

The good news is that everything I’ve put my body through seems finally to have been justified. Over the last three weeks, there has been real progress on the healing of my ear. The tissue left to heal has gone from about a quarter of the grafted tissue down to about a tenth. The doctor would even like me to stop using Crazy Sam’s Good Time Magic Powder^®, which, though it protects the ear from all manner of infection and spurs healing, irritates the already healed tissue. As he put it, I’ll have to make that leap at some point. I told him that scared me, and that I’d be willing to do it only if he would see me again in a week to make sure everything is still okay. Otherwise, I could easily imagine myself falling prey to my anxiety at the slightest unexpected sensation in the region of my ear. He understood and agreed. Unfortunately, the best we could actually do given his schedule was an appointment almost two weeks from today, which includes two intervening weekends. I’ll just have to tough it out, and I can use the powder occasionally if something doesn’t feel quite right in the ear. But given that I’ve gotten more than halfway to a fully tissued ear canal from where I was three weeks ago, things might be in pretty good shape in another two weeks.

Once the tissue has fully grown in, I will no longer be susceptible to infections, and I should be able to resume normal activities. It’s not clear to me what this will mean for my hearing, which is something I haven’t given much thought to. It seems to be improving slowly, but there’s still a constant ringing in the ear, and there are frequencies at which I have very little if any hearing. And even in those frequencies where I can hear, things sound a little far off. As I’ve said before, if this as good as my hearing gets, I’ll be satisfied. The doctor said today that he didn’t think my hearing would ever return to normal, but he did seem to think it would improve some. He declined to get any more specific, and doesn’t want to do any hearing tests until after the tissue has finished healing. On the whole, I feel awfully fortunate.