December Days 21 - The Time Traveler's Advice

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

bethany_lauren wanted to know what one piece of advice I would tell my younger self.

A question like this often stalls out on the need to only give one piece of advice to the younger you. There are a lot of things that produce regrets or hopes to do things over again.

There's also the matter of which younger self I get to talk to. If it's childhood me, the advice has to be couched in such a way as to be comprehensible to younger-me or that it will be written down and not lost over time, so that when I need it again, it's there so that it will influence in the right direction. Teenage-me would need serious convincing of any sort of advice at all. College-me might be wise enough to actually get it and put it to use. And professional me would get it, and then have to do something about it.

Depending on which person I'm talking to, the advice shifts. Many of my younger selves, if given one piece of advice, would probably get "Your friends are more interested in you than you believe. Pursue them," as their takeaway. If I had managed that earlier on in life, I probably would have made some other mistakes, and there would be no guarantees on anything, of course, but I might have managed to avoid being as forlorn as I was about relationships at that point. Considering that my natural state is "clueless", some advice from my future self about how to go about things would have been pretty useful.

At a certain point, though, the advice stops being about pursuing someone and more about paying better attention. The post-college me gets a different piece of advice - "Someone who wants that much that quickly, and doesn't give in return, is not going to turn out well. [Keep your original appointment.]"

Following that piece might alter the time stream significantly enough that the third time that have happened would have washed away and something else taken their place, but I think the me of that timeline would be significantly happier than the one of this timeline, so it's probably worth the risk of scratching out some other things. And maybe they would have happened anyway. Gods only know, and it's ultimately not important until there is a time machine at work.

I realize now that this question always seems to attract regrets and things to do differently. How nice it would be that, if given a time machine, a person used it to go back and just enjoy their younger years again. No need to change anything, just the ability to go back and enjoy things.

(And not like that cruel twist in About Time where you can only go back until the birth of a child, and therefore lose the people you love anyway.)

This year is full of sadness and regrets. Many of them of my own doing. I can only hope that the time traveler's advice for me at this point is "You're almost there. Keep it up, and things will get better."

December Days 22 - Entropy still sucks

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

Universal A.C. is the only entity that knows the answer to The Last Question. All the rest of us have to guess, and even so, even in that story, it takes until the universe winds down to nothing before the question can be answered.

The dog came with the relationship. He and his sister were six when I became daddy to them. I'm not a dog person at all, and most of my relationship to him was in feeding him, medicating him, running him outside to use the bathroom, and picking up his poop in the yard. That and having to come home from work and get up every day to take care of all the animals and feed them. There were also times of playing and walking and camping, but those often seemed to be changes of scenery rather than actually any sort of bonding exercise. Yet bond we did, if the evidence of how much wailing I did after he was gone is truth.

He outlived his sister by a year and a half. In that time, he developed occasional seizures (which may have been caused by a brain tumor), started to also lose the ability to keep his back legs and front legs upright and under him, and lost his eyesight (basically) to cataracts. That said, his diabetes was under control through the use of insulin shots and home-cooked food.

DEATH came for him, and hopefully took him to the place where the good dogs go, if such a place exists, where he can be reunited with his sister and they can frolic until Universal A.C. reboots the universe at the end. It was painless and swift, and now comes the rest of what's needed - comforting the living, burying the dead, and feeding the survivors.

Entropy sucks. Can I be done with this manifestation of it for a long while now?