Went in yesterday morning, driven by wonderful friend, and spent 2 hours in the oral-surgeon’s chair (thankfully knocked out for most of it) and I now have a bolt where the tooth used to be. After I wait about 6 months for the bone to grow around the bolt, I go back in and get a replacement tooth. It’ll be really nice to have it all done.

This morning my lip is still numb on one side, which means they really must have shot me up, as I’ve never had numbness last almost 24 hours. And of course, it’s my lip, so drinking out of a glass is a challenge. :-)

But I’m only a tiny bit chipmunky, and so far advil and tylenol are taking care of the pain, I’m saving the vicodin hoping I don’t have to use it because I’d really like to be able to think today.

Rereading what I’ve typed so far (and fixing the many typos) makes me rethink the thinking part… maybe I’d better go find a book to read rather than inflict myself on my client’s web site and then have to fix it all tomorrow. :-)

One of the things I did on the drive to and from Texas is listen to my mp3 player where I’d stashed a bunch of interviews I’d taken off the EnlightenNext Magazine’s web site. I find it a fascinating magazine, enough so that I’ve sprung for the extra subscription price to access all the interviews on the site.

When I pull interviews off the site to listen to later, I often pull all the interviews of one particular category. And this time I ended up with a whole bunch of interviews on the future of technology and society. Which, as a science fiction writer, left me much food for thought.

One particular fact jumped out at me, and I’ve heard it several times over the course of listening to these interviews, and granted it might be mostly different interviews by the same person, so I’ll continue to take it with a grain of salt.

A quick web search came up with an article written by the same guy who did the interview: Understanding the Accelerating Rate of Change by Ray Kurzweil.

To summarize, he’s saying that the rate of change of technology isn’t a constant… that the rate of change is accelerating. Basically that change happened slower in the past, is happening fast now, and will happen faster in the future.

In the first stage of human-directed technology, it took tens of thousands of years, which is what you would expect for the next stage via the wheel, or stone tools, and that kept accelerating, because when we had stone tools, we could use them to build the next stage. So a thousand years ago a paradigm shift only took a century, like the printing press. And now a paradigm shift, like the World Wide Web, is measured in only a few years’ time.

And… to keep things even more interesting, it’s not a linear acceleration of change, Kurzweil’s research puts forth the theory that it’s and exponential rate of change.

The whole 20th century, because we’ve been speeding up to this point, is equivalent to 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress…

Okay… so the whole of the change in technology from 1900-2000 is equal to twenty years of change, at today’s rate. Except…

…and we’ll make another 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress equal to the whole 20th century in the next 14 years, and then we’ll do it again in seven years.

So, just think… people who are 70 or 80 years old are going bug-nuts because the world has changed so much in their lifetime… and Kurzweil’s saying that that same amount of change is going to happen in the next 14 years. And 21 years from now the world world will look twice as different.

If that isn’t bad enough for those of us who are already a little flustered by how fast technology is changing, Kurzweil is saying that the growth is exponentail and that we’re already well into the knee of the curve. So what does that mean for the future?

And because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress.

Whoa!! Replay that… “the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress"… 20,000 years?!? Holy Cow!!!

And you know what the really scary part of all that? If you bother to do the least little bit toward taking care of yourself so that you are still alive 25 years from now… chances are real good that technology will have gotten to a place that you’ll live to see the turn of the next century and will have experienced that 20,000 years of change.

On one hand, that thought scares the hell out of me, on the other hand… that’s so cool!!

I upgraded the blog backend code last night and, of course, it screwed everything up. **sigh**

I’m getting there with fixing stuff, but it’s taking a while, because the old version was really old and they’ve fixed a lot of stuff… which means a lot of the old stuff doesn’t work. And as you can see, the template is totally broke.

What fun!

I’ve discovered over the last couple days that there is comfort in habit, no matter how painful that habit has become.

I’m normally not the masochistic sort, so this revelation came as a vague surprise to me; sure I knew that other people did it all the time, but I never associated it with myself. I figured: Hey, I’m a reasonable, rational person and when I run across something that clearly works better than a (now painful) habit I won’t have any trouble changing.

Little did I know…

So, how did all this come about? The weekend before Thanksgiving, I went to a seminar given by Donna Eden and hubby called “Energy Medicine for Women". It ended up being kind of a fluke that I went because I’d planned to be on the road that weekend, but shortly before I found out that kids’ schedules prohibited leaving then, so I signed up for the seminar at the last minute.

Why did I go to the seminar? Because I’d finally figured out that the brain-dead, exhaustion, depression and everything else I’d been living with for the last many moons was all menopause related. Plus I’d gone to the doctor for pills and he insisted I was depressed so all he’d give me was antidepressants which all they did was make me sleep even more.

One of the first things Donna mentioned at the seminar was the concept of being “homolateral". Most of the time, for most people, the energies run down the body in a series of crossover patterns, interconnected figure-8’s if you will. But when a person gets very tired or is sick and needs to rest, the energy pattern changes so it runs down the body in two parallel lines, hence “homolateral". This change is a defense mechanism for the body, because the homolateral pattern (the two straight lines of energy flow, rather than the interconnected figure-8’s of energy flow) resists bodily movement and encourages rest and recuperation.

The way it does this is quite ingenious. Normal movement, such as walking or running, involves alternating movement of arms and legs (move one leg and the alternate arm swings forward) and when your energy systems run in their normal figure-8 pattern, this movement replicates the pattern of the figure-8 energies and charges your batteries giving you more energy and a feeling of well-being. But when your energy systems are running homolaterally, there are no energy-system crossovers, and any bodily movement that replicates a crossover pattern, like walking or running, actually drains the bodily energy even further. So, the more you push yourself when your body is in this homolateral pattern, the more rundown you get, thereby encouraging you even more to get the rest your body needs. Then, once you’ve gotten the rest you need, and recovered, the body reverts back to its normal figure-8 energy pattern and life goes on as usual.

All a good idea and a cool mechanism. Except, that like anything, things can go wrong.

Chronic stress and emotional exhaustion will fool this mechanism into thinking that the body is sick and needs rest and it will go into this homolateral pattern and stay there… for years on end… with no fix… because it’s not a medical problem!! leaving you depressed, exhausted, overwhelmed, frustrated, mentally drained, and with a severely compromised immune system. Everybody around you will give you a hard time and insist that all you need to do is go out and exercise and that will make you feel so much better and solve all your problems… except exercise leaves you even more exhausted. Doctors will say you’re depressed and give you antidepressants, which may help hide the symptom, but do nothing for the underlying problem and may have nasty side effects. Psychiatrists will take you back to your childhood and figure out everything that went wrong while you were growing up, but that won’t fix the underlying problem, either. Symptoms may lighten, but the tendency for depression is still there feeling like you can fall into it at any minute.

Sound familiar? Sure did to me.

And the fix is a simple exercise (scroll down to “The Homolateral Crawl, pretty pictures of the Cross Crawl portion of the exercise) that takes less than 5 minutes to do. You will have to do this exercise several times a day in the beginning, because your energy system will keep flipping back into its familiar (habitual) homolateral pattern. Once you do this exercise for a while, the new habit will start becoming set, and you can do the exercise less frequently, until you get to once a day for a while, then sometime between three and six weeks, depending on how consistent you are with the exercises and how stuck you were to begin with, your energy system will habituate back to the normal figure-8 pattern.

Donna Eden also recommends a daily five minute energy balancing routine that she talks about in her books “Energy Medicine” and “Energy Medicine for Women", which will greatly enhance the affects of the above exercise.

All well and good, really cool, extremely effective. I did the exercises over the course of the four-day seminar, and felt sooooo much better. Then did the exercises over the few days before we left on our trip, and felt better. Then I tapered off, and with that how I felt tapered off. And I got home late Monday, exhausted from the drive, and there wasn’t anything I could do to convince myself do to do the exercises yesterday.

I watched myself all day yesterday, and last night. I watched how I reacted. I watched how I felt. I dragged. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t DO anything. And it felt familiar. And it felt comfortable. And it felt like I was doing the right thing. And I SOOO don’t want to do anything to supposedly FIX it because it felt like the comfortable worn clothes that fit so perfectly and feel so safe.

Except no matter how comfortable, it’s a profoundly painful place, because it doesn’t fit how I want to live my life… how I NEED to live my life.

So, after wallowing yesterday in the comfort of the habit, today I need to get up and about and do the exercises I need to do to break the habit, so I can live my life the way I want to live it.

But I now have a profound respect for how comfortable habits can be, no matter how painful they are.

I edited today, and I’m now 3300 almost-final-draft words into Chapter 1, with 800 more to edit, which will surely expand to 1000 words, at least… which will make the chapter about the size I want. I worry that the beginning is too slow, but I really like how it reads, so I’ll leave it as it is.

What was the first two chapters in the old draft will turn into the first three chapters in the new draft, as I move some stuff around and explain more why things are the way they are.

As far as my lack of brain cells go, I’ve made a doctor appointment for next week, and I’m thinking the fix will be simple and hoping it’ll be effective. I really can’t keep going on as things have been. This part of getting old is for the birds. The only good thing is that, by definition, it’s temporary. This too shall pass, and all that.