mahiwaga

Right now I can feel my plasma glucose levels slipping. My liver seems to have exhausted all of its supply of glycogen or something, too.

What I really should do is get something to eat.

And then I recognize that sometimes too much freedom can be more paralyzing than too little freedom. (Not that I’m advocating the restriction of freedom. It’s just an observation, that’s all.)

The past few days have been something of a whirlwind. I gave my talk in front of (what turned out to be mostly) a group of medical students (although other residents and attendings were supposed to be there, too.) Not as polished as what Ì›I would’ve liked, but, hey, I only really had three weeks to do it.

The night before was kind of torturous, though. I had to make some major revisions, and I struggled to stay focused and awake between the hours of 1:30 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. Somehow, I powered through, but paid for it afterwards. I ended up going to sleep from 11 am to 6 am the next day, something I haven’t done since the last time I took overnight call. (Oh man, it’s going to hurt when I’m back on wards.)

I feel like a month has gone by in these past three days.

I am starting to realize (much, too much, too late) that thinking gets me into way too much trouble. For the past week or so, I’ve struggled savagely with the idea of not overanalyzing things. For a big fat nerd like me, this is way harder than it sounds.

Now that I have some of my free time back, this becomes even harder than usual, and even now I’m struggling to keep the lid down on some unbidden thoughts, many of which are guaranteed to send me into a downward spiral of depression.

Not that anything bad has happened. In fact, many good (although small) things have happened, and I’ve always been the kind of person who gives far more weight to the bad things than to the good things. A single bad thing can wipe out any joy brought by a thousand good things, and I’ve really got to learn how to fix this imbalance. (There I go again, thinking about things too hard.)

But I’ve just got this creepy feeling that since everything has been relatively good lately, there’s bound to be a catch somewhere. A snag in the carpet, as it were. Right before someone pulls the rug from under me.

I’ve got to stop being so damned optimistic.

Still, trusting to luck has worked for me pretty well lately. (Of course, the only thing sure about luck is that it’s going to change.)

There is a lot to be said about rushing into situations blindly and crossing your fingers, just hoping Lady Luck will save your ass. Most of the advantage comes in the fact that everyone else tends to get taken by surprise.

But for some reason, I haven’t yet learned how to take advantage of these kinds of situations. Here they are, all gaping at me, not believing what their seeing, and the first thing that comes to mind is, how do I get away from these people?

I’ve gotten pretty good at running away from things, and hiding, but I’m not sure where it’s really gotten me. There is something to be said with survival, but it strikes me that there is something innately futile about surviving for the sake of surviving. (Nevermind the fact that eventually entropy wins in the end.)

The age-old question that has haunted Humanity for all time—at least since we decided to climb down the trees and brave the savannah—comes to mind at this moment (again violating my promise to not think.) What are we here on this Earth for exactly?

Now, granted, I never really thought I was going to make it past the age of 27, and so never projected my life farther than that, so maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that at the age of 31, I still have no clue about the answer to that particular thorny Question. I think of the simple, pat answers that any moron can give—getting married, having kids, living the American Dream—that sort of tripe, but the triteness of it all makes me gag, and I’ve left that field fallow for quite some time now.

Then there are the insane idealist answers—world peace, the cure for cancer, the end of poverty, the end of hunger—and I realize that I have neither the time, nor the resources, nor—in particular—the brains to be able to succeed in such an enterprise. Most of the great minds who ever accomplished anything did so long before they turned to 30.

What faces me is the long, dark, night.

You would think that after all these years of staring headlong into the abyss, I’d’ve gotten used to it somehow.

I suppose, in the end, there are certain things that human beings will never get used to, even if they lived to be 105 years old, I’d wager.

In the end, the voice of my oldest friend comes back to me, spookily echoed by a beautiful, brilliantly intelligent, insanely hilarious woman who probably saved my life once upon a time.

It’s the things that made you happy as a child that are worth doing, it seems.

John Rateliff makes an interesting point about how <p>The Hobbit</p> is actually pretty closely linked to the material that would become <p>The Silmarillion</p> . In the original drafts of <p>The Hobbit</p> , Tolkien makes it seem that Beren and Lúthien had only recently destroyed Sauron’s base on Tol-in-Gaurhoth (which he built on top of the original Minas Tirith), and that the Fall of Gondolin was also quite recent. (I even remember that when I read the final version of <p>The Hobbit</p> when I was 9, I came away with the impression that Gondolin was only recently destroyed.)

This actually makes quite a bit of sense, since Tolkien started writing <p>The Hobbit</p> at the same time he was working on the drafts of his tales that would be compiled into <p>The Book of Lost Tales</p> . In those tales, the time frame of the War of Wrath is actually somewhat ambiguous (it seems to have been originally envisioned as the End of the World, when the Gods > the Valar would finally recapture Melko > Morgoth, and Túrin would deliver the killing blow) and even in the time of Eriol > Ælfwine, it hadn’t happened yet.

It was as if the entire Second Age never happened, and as if Númenor never existed. (Interestingly, while Elrond was already imagined to be the son of Eärendil, Elros did not yet exist.)

What struck me most is the parallelism between two important geographic features of Beleriand vis-à-vis features of Rhovanion.

The land of Dorthonion (north of the Ered Gorgoroth) becomes infiltrated by evil things and becomes Taur-nu-Fuin, which is at one point explicitly translated as Mirkwood and which is also infested with giant spiders. Interestingly, after Sauron is ousted from Tol-in-Gaurhoth, he flees to Taur-nu-Fuin, in complete parallel to his defeat at Barad-dûr and his eventual flight to Dol Guldur in Mirkwood.

The river Sirion is also called the Great River, just like the Anduin. In fact, at one point, the Anduin was first named the New Sirion.

Rateliff speculates even further, equating Anfauglith with the Withered Heath. And the fact that the Ered Mithrin is known to be a remnant of the Ered Engrin is already accepted as canon.

This leads me to speculate that Bilbo may have originally been situated somewhere in Hithlum. (Maybe Lake Mithrim was the Water?) And the misty mountains that they cross are the Ered Mithrin. It isn’t clear to me whether Himring (which must have been relatively high in elevation since it supposedly survived the drowning of Beleriand) or Mt Rerir would be more suitable as an analog for Erebor, but it does reawaken one of the wildly speculative theories about the Arkenstone actually being one of the Silmaril. (After all, Himring was Maidros > Maedhros’s base of operations, although it is written that he threw himself into a fiery pit.)