I enjoy wordplay. I pun more than most people would want me to, and I enjoy a good pun when I hear it. I don’t think puns are mindless like many people do. I think that puns are an outgrowth of our pattern matching skills, and that people who are good at puns are also good at recognizing more useful patterns, and maybe changing the world.

Wordplay is a poor substitute for wisdom and deep thought, however. When someone says “Forgiving is for giving away”, with a straight face, as if imparting the most profound wisdom, I want to throw up. I realize I may have some growing up to do. I know that wordplay can be a useful mnemonic device, a reminder of truth, just as rhyme can make a poem easier to memorize and more fun to hear.

I’m not against all sayings with wordplay. I had a German professor who used to say “Wirklichkeit ist das, was wirkt.” Roughly translated, it means “Reality is that which has an effect.” It’s a very useful saying when reading Kafka, where you never really know what’s in a character’s mind and what’s in the real world. In a sense, it doesn’t matter. What affects your world is real. It is debatable, and I have to say that I believe there’s a big difference between thinking you’re being stabbed in the heart and actually being stabbed in the heart. The former might kill you, and the latter will. But phantoms of the mind can ruin your life, and they can kill you. They may also improve your life and make you happy, too, but you’d never learn that by reading German literature.

Back to the topic, the original German has wordplay. The noun Wirklichkeit (reality) and the verb wirken (to have an effect) appear to have the same root. The sentence appears to be as obvious as “Snowmen are made of snow.” I want to say that the reason I like this particular saying is that it has substance on its own. It has meaning and truth even in English, where the wordplay is stripped away. But maybe I like it also because it’s in another language, and has to be explained to most people I know. I don’t like to think that, but maybe there’s some truth to it.¹

In any case, I’m not likely to change much on this. When someone tells me “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, and today is a gift – that’s why they call it the present,” I balk. No, that’s NOT why. Everybody knows that – even the pseudo-sages who peddle this crap. And here I face a real dilemma when I challenge my gut. I actually believe that the present moment is a valuable thing. I believe it’s when everything happens – it’s the one time you have any control over. But the wordplay takes something away from it for me. I also believe that forgiveness shouldn’t have to be earned, but I’m not sure that’s very profound.

So maybe I just need to get over myself, as far as my dislike of certain sayings goes. Some contain wordplay, and some don’t. Some rhyme and some don’t. Some make allusions to classic literature and some don’t. Shouldn’t I just take them all for whatever little nuggets of wisdom they offer, and not worry about the decorative bits that make them easy to remember?

Perhaps, but I still think my gut is telling me something. Wordplay should be used playfully. There’s nothing wrong with imparting wisdom playfully, but it’s also important not to give the playfulness any more weight than it deserves. So, when I see wordplay in a saying, I’ll be extra careful to evaluate it on its own merits, and not give it extra validity because it has extra cleverness in it. I’ll flag it with a Truth Through Wordplay Alert, and then move on to get what I can from it, independent of the wordplay.

_______________________

¹The same professor used to ask, “Ist es dicht?” (“Is it dense?”) when referring to poetry. He argued that poetry takes many forms, but the very definition of it is that poetry makes efficient use of words – the words are packed with more meaning than the average word. The German word for poetry is dichtung. As far as I know, there’s no etymological connection between dichtung and dicht, but my professor used to talk as if the relationship were a given. I also liked the insight that poetry is dense – another instance of wordplay imparting insight, which I like despite that.

Saying: Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

My Answer: I agree with the principle, and I agree that there’s too much sloppiness in the world.  On the other hand, I think that this principle stops me a little too often.  If I find time lacking, I often don’t start – and I don’t think that saying was ever intended as an excuse to procrastinate.

In particular, ReadSteve gets stalled too often because I want a complete and finished piece before I put anything out on the Web.  Of course, nothing should stop me from starting a piece when time is short, and then completing it later.  That doesn’t violate the principle of doing it well.  I’ll try to do that more.

But it doesn’t hurt to have more than one weapon in my arsenal.  Another option when time is short is to just do a short piece.  I don’t need to write a thousand words.  This isn’t an English paper, and maybe you don’t even want to read a thousand words.

So let this serve as the introduction to a series I’ve thought of doing for some time – my own takes on sayings.  Some of these will be famous quotes, but I won’t be above using just about anything that’s well known, from ancient times, or from yesterday morning.  I’m not even going to promise that every saying will be well known.  My series, my rules – and I reserve the right to break my own rules.

I know the concept isn’t original, but I hope that some of my thoughts will be.

John Dryden long ago received the bid
To translate Virgil’s stately Æneid
From freely flowing Latin lyric verse
To courser English lines, both crude and terse.
He bravely strode ahead and did his part –
Translation’s not a science, but an art.
So, to preserve the meaning, I suppose
He could have brought the work to us in prose.
Instead of this, the scholar took the time
To render it for us in rhythmic rhyme.
He showed amazing and persistent strength,
Under such constraints and at such length,
To bring the poem to English readers whole,
Preserving its heroic, epic soul
Across the gulfs of language, time, and space,
Into its current standard-setting place.

Among those English readers, I’m now one.
I bore the task of reading it for fun,
Trying to appreciate today
In my very simple, humble way,
A building block of culture, ages old
Whose influence cannot be fully told.
The lines of Dryden’s Virgil filled my head,
Yet soon I found that I had lost the thread.
The poets’ rhythm pounded through my brain,
Intensely, not far short of causing pain.
Even when I’d set the book aside,
The rhythm’s power could not be denied.
My words and thoughts, obedient, fell in line,
Until they were no longer really mine.
How long until this passes, no one knows.
Until then, though, I cannot write in prose!

When I was in college, and beginning to despair about the fact that I was too lazy to do the work necessary to get into the College of Engineering, much less get a degree, I took some economics courses, toward what would become a strange liberal arts degree, a Bachelor of Science in Social Science.  I can address at a different time whether I was actually lazy, or just in the wrong field at the time.  Right now, I want to concentrate on the economics courses.

As is the case many places, the intro econ courses were divided into two parts: microeconomics and macroeconomics.  I took the micro first, as is most common.  Microeconomics takes the view of an individual household or business, and looks at what effects market forces have on it.  Businesses and consumers work together to create a supply/demand curve that more or less determines the best price for any item.  We discussed what shifts the curve up and down, what makes it steeper or flatter, what a monopoly looks like, and how close substitutes can affect the curve.

There was a lot of complexity to a simple idea, and there was also discussion about when a business is worth keeping afloat and when it isn’t – how fixed and variable costs all work into the mix.  But, despite that complexity, it was all mathematical, and you could work it all out.  It was uncontroversial.  Liberals and conservatives have no fundamental differences on how to run a small business.

The reason for this is one small assumption – that neither the action of a single household nor the action of a single business can affect the economy at large.  This assumption excludes some large businesses, that have to be considered under macro, but it’s extremely useful.  It’s akin to predicting the trajectory of a projectile near Earth without considering its effect on the Earth.  A cannonball, in its arc, will attract the Earth, and actually pull it a tiny bit closer – but there is no way to measure such a small effect, and it may be balanced out by other cannonballs elsewhere on Earth, anyway.  You can predict the trajectory as if the Earth were immovable, and exerted a constant, unidirectional force on the cannonball.

The relationship between a business or household and “the market” is similar.  The market may change over time, but the actions of a single entity are assumed not to have much of an effect.  This means that you can judge the outcome of a business decision based solely on where the business is heading, and what the market is doing.  The business’s actions will not turn around and change the market, and this greatly simplifies things.

So, why do people talk about economics as if it’s unscientific?  Why do they say that, whenever you gather three economists, you get at least four opinions?  I didn’t know until I took macroeconomics.  I left micro feeling pretty good about things.  Even now, years later, I feel like I could regain everything I forgot about that course within a few days.  I never, for a moment, had the same feeling of confidence about macroeconomics.

The essential difference is that you are now dealing with governments and large businesses, who have enough clout to actually change the market on their own.  Now, instead of launching a cannonball near the earth, it’s more like launching a large asteroid, or even the Moon.  Both bodies noticeably affect each other, and things become much more complicated.

I’m reminded of some experiments Douglas Hofstadter did with video feedback – first back in the 1980’s, illustrated in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; and then much more recently, with much better equipment, in I Am a Strange Loop.  He basically aimed a video camera at the monitor it was hooked to, and watched what happened.  I didn’t find any links to it that looked sufficiently permanent, so I’ll leave you to Google them yourself if you want to see some results.  Mr. Hofstadter was making a larger point about self reference and feedback as a basis for thought, but I think I can take a simpler point from it: when a model refers to itself, strange and unpredictable things can happen.

This strange and unpredictable behavior, counterintuitive to the point of almost seeming like magic, is why so many different economic theories can stand, internally consistent, with rules that make sense, each claiming to represent the actual economy on some level or another.  Just change a few variables, tweak a few parameters, and you can change the entire nature of your model.

All this is why I have so little patience with arguments like “You can’t spend your way out of debt,” or “You can’t reduce the deficit by cutting taxes.”  Both of these arguments, presented just as they are, are microeconomic arguments applied to the macro economy.  In fact, I’ve seen microeconomic analogies (“My bank would laugh me right out of the building!”) used to support both of these proposals, and many similar ones.

When a hurricane’s path is predicted, several completely separate computer models are consulted.  Forecasters don’t feel like they have a solid prediction until most of those models agree.  I’m starting to think that economic forecasts and policy should be set like that.  My impression is that too many people’s sense of the economy is more akin to the old man who predicts the weather by how the corns on his feet are feeling.  He may be right a lot, but would you stake your life on it?

I would suggest we do the same thing with our most predictive economic models, except that I don’t think most of our dialogue centers around things that our models could possibly cover.  The weather models we use to predict the path of a hurricane are based on very complex interactions, but they are set under conditions that have happened before.

The economic scenarios that most pundits are talking about aren’t in the realm of the familiar.  The pundits want to take us in whole new directions, and hold fast to the belief that the only reason their points of view have not been proved conclusively is simply because there has not been a real trial.  The market has never truly been free.  Socialism, in its true spirit, has never been tried.  The government has never been big enough or small enough to test everything out.

I’m not ready to suggest a way out of this mess.  I don’t know if I ever will be.  But I am convinced that the mess has nothing to do with anybody’s inability to see simple reason.  The economy is more complicated than common sense, and common sense approaches to the economy may well be as dangerous as any of the 20th century’s vast social experiments, performed by visionaries who were dead sure they knew the answers.

Even if a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes words are all you have. I got a new phone last week, and it took me until Thursday to put a memory card in it – so, on Wednesday, when the Samsung Moment happened, I could not take pictures. Instead, here’s my picture, in words.

Wednesday was a cool, sunny day, possibly one of our last relatively dry days for a while. In the Seattle area, once the winter rains start, even a day when it doesn’t rain will still be wet from the previous day’s rain, and just as cloudy. So this day was worth doing something with. Still, I was willing to let it go – my daughter had had an after school fitness class, so I knew she’d gotten some exercise – so I spared her the “beautiful day – you should go out and enjoy it” speech.

It didn’t matter, though. Within 45 minutes of getting home, she actually asked to go to Idylwood Park, which is about five minutes’ walk from our house. It’s a park on Lake Sammamish. She was going to get insistent, I could tell, and very disappointed if I didn’t deliver on this. Plus, of course, I knew I should take her out, given how nice it was. Who knows when we’ll get another day like that? “Okay, you can go,” I said, “but no swimming.” She looked at me weird.

But I decided that, if I was going to spend the rest of the afternoon at the park, I was going to get some work out of it. So, it was off to my teenage son’s room. “One of us is going to unload and load the dishwasher, and clean up the family room downstairs, and one of us is going to take Dani to the park,” I announced.

“I’ll clean,” he said, clearly not happy about the choice, but also clearly believing he’d chosen the lesser of two evils. So I told Dani to get her shoes on, and I walked with her to the park, toting my Kindle to pass the time, and a sweatshirt for Dani, in case it got chilly later.

For a while, she played contentedly on the playground equipment, but there weren’t that many kids out, and she grew bored. She urged me out to play with some leaves under two large trees nearby. Leaves out here get big, and the area under the trees was covered in three or four inches of bright, colorful leaves. At first, we played catch with the leaves, a difficult aerodynamic feat, even standing only four feet apart. But then a thought struck me. “Do you want to make a pile?” I asked.

She was agreeable. There were no rakes available, but I was able to gather a pretty sizeable pile fairly quickly just shuffling my feet to gather them. In just a few minutes, we had a pile of red, yellow, and orange leaves big enough for a six-year-old to jump in. I continued to gather leaves to make the pile bigger, when two younger girls – one either a smart two-year-old or a small three-year-old, and one under two, still in diapers – caught sight of the pile.

They were both shy, the younger one even more so, so I hung back away from the pile, gathering leaves ten to fifteen feet away, and letting Dani carry armfuls of leaves to the pile. That distance was all the bigger girl needed, and she got into the pile. Her mother started snapping pictures of her, posing her in the colorful leaves, and getting everything just right. I had to ask Dani to refrain from jumping until a few good pictures were taken. That’s when I realized I couldn’t take pictures.

But now Dani was jumping into the pile, missing the other girl each time amid numerous reminders from her father to be careful. The girl’s mother didn’t seem too worried, so I let Dani keep jumping. The only time I worried was when Dani’s head came within six inches of the tree the pile was under. But nobody was hurt the whole time.

“Bury me!” urged Dani, and I gathered a huge armful of leaves, big enough to do the job, and dropped it on her head. She laughed. “Do me! Do me too!” yelled the other girl (I’ll call her Allison), her shyness completely gone. She was a smaller girl, so I grabbed a wad of leaves about twice the size of her head in my hands, and dropped them on her head. She giggled, and her mother seemed unconcerned. So, I continued dropping leaves, in amounts appropriate, respectively, for a six-year-old and a three-year-old, amid squeals and giggles. At one point, Allison said to me, “I’m gonna put some leaves on YOUR head!”

“MY head?” I asked, as if astonished by the very idea – but I fell into the pile, burying Dani as a pretext, to make my head available for Allison’s leaf attack. That’s when the third girl, Noelle, toddled over, diaper peeking out of her leggings, and dropped a handful of about four leaves on my head. Her grin was huge. Now, I had to be even more careful with Noelle than with Allison, so she got small handfuls of leaves dropped onto her head from a foot or so above.

Allison’s mom continued snapping pictures. At this point, Dani and I must have been in some of them. I was now playing on three simultaneous intensity levels. But then Allison crossed a line her mother didn’t want her crossing. Laughing with sheer delight at the fun she was having, she tried to push me down. “Allison, don’t do that.” her mother said.

“That’s okay,” I said, but just once – I was going to respect the limits her mother set for her. “That’s not YOUR daddy,” Allison’s mom reminded her. So, I stood up from the pile, to remove temptation, and the kids played for a short while longer. When they had left, the girls all saying goodbye to each other, Dani and I played some more, tossing leaves furiously at each other.

A two-year-old Chinese boy was drawn to the pile, and Dani and I quieted our play again. The boy’s mother was as playful as he was, and tossed armfuls of leaves into the air, to his delight. When they were done, Dani and I decided we were done, too, and walked down to the lake. She looked for fish and followed ducks up and down the shore until it began to get dark, and we headed home.

I did have one regret, that I’d captured no pictures at all. But somebody has pictures, and I have this now, which I hope to enjoy just as much. Thursday, it rained, and I’m sure the pile was no longer any fun to jump in. I’m glad we grabbed the moment while we could.

Not all my thoughts on infinity involve trying to teach the concepts to a six-year-old.  My daughter’s questions are definitely what got me thinking about infinity again, but this is a question that has been intriguing me for years – since high school, in fact.  I’ve tried to pose it to others many times over the years.  Some “don’t want to think that hard”, and others, many of whom are much better at math than I am, dismiss it without giving me a satisfactory reason why.  Of course, what may be satisfactory to a math expert may not be satisfactory to me.

Anyone with knowledge of high school algebra should be able to follow this.  Whether you want to or not is another matter.  But, to those who do choose to take an interest, I have a request.  Can you tell me what you think?  If you have no opinion, can you refer this article to someone who might?  I’d love to have a genuine mathematical perspective on this, if one exists.

It’s a well-known fact that you can’t get a meaningful answer dividing any number by zero.  Even dividing zero by zero is problematic.  So, look at dividing 1 by any number greater than zero: the smaller the denominator (the number on the bottom), the greater the result.  It would appear that 1/x approaches infinity as x approaches zero.  Now, the fact that infinity isn’t a real-world number might be enough reason to question that answer.  You can’t fit an infinite number of anything in the known universe, and you can’t plot infinity meaningfully on any conventional graph.

But it’s worse than that.  If you approach x = 0 from the negative side, the result approaches negative infinity.  The graph of y = 1/x looks roughly like the drawing below.  It illustrates a bizarre result, scornfully challenging intuition to get any grasp on it whatsoever.  If you approach zero from the positive side, 1/x approaches positive infinity.  If you approach zero from the negative side, 1/x approaches negative infinity.  This is why, when you ask most people what 1/0 is, they’ll say that it’s “undefined”.  Math functions in microchips have a special error condition for dividing by zero – they won’t even attempt it.  Who can blame them?  What two “numbers” could be further apart than positive infinity and negative infinity?

Very rough plotting of y = 1/x

Now, let me digress for a moment, and talk about the most common way to produce flat glass.  It was developed in the mid-twentieth century, and involves letting the glass solidify on a pool of molten tin, or some other metal with a melting point lower than that of glass.  The glass comes out a uniform thickness, and very, very flat.  The glass isn’t actually flat, however.  It’s only as flat as the pool of tin, which has the curvature of the earth.  However, even on the scale of a very large window, the curvature of the earth is very slight.  By a quick calculation, you’d need a window about 70 feet long for it to dip a tenth of an inch.  That is very, very flat.

The point is, the greater the radius of curvature, the flatter the curve.  So, what might an infinite radius of curvature yield?  Might we not get a perfectly flat curve?  A circle with an infinite radius might be the same as a line.  A sphere with an infinite radius might be equivalent to a plane.  Certain non-Euclidean geometries might become Euclidean again.

To further clarify (I hope) the issue, consider if a two-dimensional space were mapped to the surface of a sphere, as shown below:

A Two-Dimensiona Space on the Surface of a Sphere

This becomes a finite two-dimensional space, but it’s one that I’ve seen quite often in lay discussions of non-Euclidean spaces.  The X and Y axes here are great circles on the sphere, perpendicular to each other, and they meet both at the “origin” (arbitrarily chosen) and at the maximum distance from the point, halfway around any great circle passing through that point.  We can’t call this point infinity, because it’s a finite space.  It should be noted that this is a two-dimensional space, equivalent to a plane (or part of a plane), and traveling through the sphere is not possible – entities in that space can travel only along the outside of the sphere.

Along the sphere, we can map a function like y = 1/x, which meets at the maximum distance on the other side of the sphere.  I won’t bother figuring out what the function is – we can define it very artificially if we want to.  But such a function would plot something like this:

The "plot" thickens!

Now, I think those of you who’ve kept reading probably know where I’m going with this.  The bigger the sphere gets, the flatter the curve gets, and the more the actual function mapped can resemble y = 1/x.  If the radius is infinite, then each great circle could be a straight line, and the sphere could be a plane.  Granted, this is a fudge.  I don’t think that the appearance of a totally flat surface is the only possibility.  Multiply the infinite radius by two pi to get circumference, and you get the exact same infinity.  It’s hard to get a definite shape from that.

This reminds me of problems I heard of in some quantum theory models, where infinities are canceled out by dividing them by other infinities.  It’s mathematically possible for them to work out, but not mathematically required – so it feels messy.

But, all messiness aside, if you do think of the number line as a circle of infinite radius, is it not possible for infinity and negative infinity to occupy the same point on a number line – and thus, in effect, to be the same “number”?  If we allow this, it either makes better intuitive sense of the y = 1/x equation as x approaches zero, or it wreaks havoc with the concept of infinity, or at least the intuitive sense of it.  Maybe it does both.

Is it possible that the transfinite numbers transcend positive and negative?  Is infinity just too big to have a plus or minus sign attached to it?  What other implications might such a trans-Euclidean geometry have?  Anyway, that’s about all I have for now.  So, what do you think?

Thrilled with senses one through five,
And happy just to be alive,
I skipped about the house with glee,
Quite heedless of velocity.

As joyful as you’ve ever seen,
I bounded through my set routine.
Down the stairs, as quick as light,
I jumped the last few – joyous flight!

Thump!

Pain!
Stars!
Where did that door frame come from?
Owwwwww!!!

I lay crumpled in a heap.
I’d failed to look before my leap.
I wasn’t limp, impaired, or dead.
A bleeding lump adorned my head.

I pondered then, and found it strange
How quickly happy moods can change.
Nothing else on earth can rain
On my parade like sudden pain.

If you always knew what you were getting into, there would be no real adventures in life. Not too long ago, I fell into an adventure, one of immense importance to a lot of people I never knew before this started. How I got involved might sound downright thoughtless and irresponsible, but I’m hoping it will turn out to be a good thing.

For several years now, my sister and her friend and employer, a breast cancer survivor, have been doing a three-day, sixty-mile walk to support breast cancer research. They live in northern Michigan, and have been doing the walk in Detroit, until last year when they missed the Detroit walk and decided, at the last minute, to do the walk in San Diego. They liked the travel experience and decided this year to try the Seattle walk, which is in my area of the country.

So far, so good – my sister is coming for a visit, and will be serving a very worthy cause, as well. But then I stepped in it. I signed up, too. At the time, I didn’t think much beyond joining in the fun, and serving that worthy cause. Now, the words “worthy cause” slip perhaps a little too easily from a person’s lips these days. They’re used to urge people to donate to a cause, or in statements of support from people who are not donating, or even as a preface to introducing some better, more worthy cause. It takes a shot of real life to give them meaning again.

I don’t know why I hadn’t given breast cancer research more thought. I have an aunt who’s a survivor, and I had a grandmother who was – plus, there’s my sister’s friend who, largely due to my new pursuit, is also becoming my friend. Just the number of people close to me whom this has touched should have told me this cause is different. Still, I registered for the walk and booked my orientation session without giving much more thought to it.

At that session, the group was invited to share reasons why they were walking. The first person to speak up was a woman who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was young. She had signed up for the walk the previous year, and been diagnosed with breast cancer after signing up. She was unable to go on the walk, because she needed emergency surgery during the actual walk. But, THIS year, she is in remission, and, by God, she’s going. She was also the last person to speak up. Nobody felt up to following up that story. I left that orientation without speaking a word to anybody. I was beginning to see what I was in for.

Some guys may be thrilled to find a group so disproportionately female – not 80-20, not even 90-10, but 95-5, at the very least. But I’m shy by nature, and feel awkwardness more acutely than I should. I also have to work at asking people for money. You can’t walk the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For the Cure on good will alone – you have to raise substantial donations first. I’ll overcome both handicaps. I’ve been on several organized training walks, and the people I’ve met so far are truly wonderful people. Nobody thinks any less of me for being a man. I need to get over that.

The same people, some of whom raise the required funds year after year, have eased my fears there, too. I just have to get out there and do it. I’ll figure out how. If anything particularly noteworthy develops, I’ll be sure to let you know here.

So, is this cause any more worthy than any other cause that saves lives? It might not be. But this cause has many supporters at least partly because so many lives are at stake – hundreds of thousands a year die of breast cancer worldwide. So many, who have lost a loved one, look at new developments today and wonder if their mother or sister, their friend or only daughter, may have been saved by those treatments. How many, whose loved ones die this year, will wonder the same thing in a few years’ time?

The goal of Susan G. Komen for the Cure^® is no less ambitious than a complete cure for breast cancer in all its forms. Such a cure would undoubtedly help in the treatment of other cancers and save even more lives. In the mean time, each time someone’s wife or grandmother or cherished aunt lives even a few extra years, the world is a better and happier place.

Every adventure has its trials and tribulations, as well as its unexpected blessings and benefits. But most of them don’t benefit humanity in such an unambiguously positive way. By the time I’m wearing out a nice pair of shoes over three days in September, much of this work will be done, and the money we’ve raised will already be hard at work giving back life to many whose bodies, for no comprehensible reason, started destroying themselves.

———————————————————————————————————

As I said before, I and my supporters will work out how to raise the necessary funds. I didn’t write this as a direct method of raising money, but mainly to tell others (and, to some extent, myself) what I’m doing here, and why. But who am I to make it difficult for those moved to contribute to do so right now? Anyone who wants more information can start here. To contribute, you can go here.

Remember, the money isn’t going to fund a fun hike and camping trip for an adult who can afford his own hikes and camping trips. It’s going to keep thousands and thousands of deeply cherished and fruitful lives from ending years too soon.

My favorite little girl in the world just asked me yesterday, “When you were negative infinity years old, were you happy?” She’s fascinated with negative numbers now, what you get when you subtract a larger number from a smaller one, say, five from two, and she’s also fascinated with infinity – so NEGATIVE infinity, less than any number, must be doubly fascinating.

Earlier the same day, she asked me, “What do you get when you add infinity and negative infinity together?” Does she have any idea how complex the answers to her simple questions are? I told her you can get anything – from negative infinity to zero, to positive infinity, and anything in between. I was preparing to explain why, but she was already aware of many strange properties of infinity, and was thus willing, for the time being, to take this one on faith. Instead, she asked, “What’s positive infinity?” so I had to explain that this is just another way of saying infinity, that positive meant “not negative”.

She has established in her mind that “there’s no number past infinity”, but I had to clarify that there are different sized infinities. So far, she hasn’t asked for an explanation of this, but I fear I’ll soon have to start figuring out how to explain Cantorian set theory to a six-year-old. How will I approach the diagonal argument before she understands infinite decimals – or is that the next step? Will I have to discuss non-Cantorian set theory, so we can talk about whether or not there are infinities between Aleph Naught and the Continuum? It seems to me she’s dangerously close to asking questions like that – and, if she gets any further, I’ll have to study just to keep up.

So, back to her question, she was reasoning that, since everyone is older than negative infinity, everyone must have been negative infinity at one time – just like every child in her school is older than one, and each was one year old at some point in the past. I guess the concept is that, infinity years ago, we were all negative infinity years old, and we all passed through our negative years, getting older and older, until we were zero, and were born.

I answered that I don’t know if I was happy, but I don’t think I existed infinity years ago. “Was the earth invented infinity years ago?” (She seemed to have made the conceptual shift between an age of negative infinity and “infinity years ago” rather seamlessly.)

“No, the earth wasn’t there infinity years ago.” (I opted not to get into who might have invented the earth.)

“Was NOTHING there infinity years ago?”

“I think that infinity years ago was so long ago, that not even NOTHING was there.”

“Whoa.” Her mind seemed sufficiently blown, and we moved on to a different topic.

I’m flattered that she thinks about my happiness over an infinite expanse of time. Was I happy forever ago? I hope I was. I hope she was, too. And I hope we will be happy forever from now, too. At least I know I’m happy now. How could I have a discussion like that, and not be?

When a long and intimate relationship ends, part of the process of moving it firmly into the past involves taking stock of it, learning from it, and taking those lessons, plus the other blessings of that relationship, into the future. Sometimes this is considered part of the grieving process, even though there is not always real sadness involved. Not every long and intimate relationship involves what I call love, but there’s always a sense of loss when it ends, nonetheless.

Not too long ago, I ended such a relationship. It was a relationship I had started with high hopes: many of my closest friends have a similar relationship, and they could not be more in love. I was always able to appreciate what they loved, though I also recognized that their praise was sometimes overblown. I had an intellectual understanding of what there was to love, and much of it genuinely tickled my fancy, but I just never fell in love. It never really clicked.

When the frustrations and difficulties clearly outweighed the benefits for me, I let it go. I believe there’s nothing wrong with keeping a cordial relationship going, as long as it is mutually beneficial, and expectations correspond with reality. But, in the end, this was a relationship that only true love could keep alive – and that love simply was never there. I am truly happy that my friends remain so much in love, but that love was not for me.

And so, toward the middle of last year, I broke up with my Mac. It was an awkward relationship to start with. First, there was the price – fully three times the price of a comparably equipped PC. But my friends loved their Macs, and many told me the software that came with the Mac more than made up for the price difference. That may well be true for some, but it never worked out that way for me. I never had that much use for all the free stuff that was on the Mac. Some of it was fun, and I was able to use freeware to replace Microsoft Office, but the difference was never made up.

I also had to use Firefox instead of the native Safari, so that Wordpress worked right. I seemed to be endlessly encountering software that was less current, or had fewer features, or just plain didn’t exist, for the Mac. There was that famous stability, but even the Mac needs a good reboot now and then. The Mac mail program was adequate at best. But it was good enough that I never sought out a substitute.

As long as I had my mouse, I could right click. But that right button was stubbornly absent from the laptop itself, and I had to use the pesky control button. On the PC, I actually like having both a backspace and a delete key. Eventually, I began to get used to all of this, despite the fact that my work computer was still a PC, and that wasn’t about to change.

None of this is really a big deal, especially if you’re in love – but I wasn’t. What really strained the relationship was the after-market experience. I’m fully convinced that the happiest Mac owners are those who never have to take their Macs in for anything. Easy things, like replacing a power cord you left at a hotel many states away, can be solved within minutes, if you have sixty bucks to toss around. Yes, that’s right. Sixty bucks for a power cord.

No laptop can expect to remain unscathed in the company of a temperamental three-year-old. And my LCD screen got cracked by an angry girl throwing things. I knew I was out several hundred dollars. I did not know I was out six hundred ninety-five dollars. No, I didn’t spend that money. I semi-botched an attempt to put in a new LCD screen on my own, and kept the thing crawling along for another year or so. Toward the end, I was using a separate screen. I couldn’t bring myself to spend the price of a brand new PC laptop on a repair of a Mac I wasn’t in love with, nor could I bring myself to drop another two thousand-plus on a new Mac I also wouldn’t be in love with. Macs and I were through.

So, I went out and bought a new laptop with Windows 7 installed. I added Microsoft Office with Outlook, and was still under the price of repairing the Mac. I got a 17-inch screen, and the webcam works better. The machine is kind of big and heavy, but I’m strong enough to handle that, for as much as I carry it around anyway. Within days, I loved it more than I ever loved my Mac. I was back in the PC world, where I belong.

I have no disrespect for my friends who love their Macs and would never go back to a PC. I wish I could have that kind of unconditional love for a stylish blend of hardware and software. I love my PC, but I don’t think it’s the same kind of love that people have for their Macs. If I truly loved my Mac, I would have gladly put up with all the extra costs and the after-market woes. I would have gladly tolerated the planned obsolescence of a laptop that is nearly impossible for a normal human to work on. It would not have mattered to me, because I would have had my beloved Mac.

As you can see, I’m not one of those mindless Wintel supporters that never even gave a Mac a fair shake. Once you go Mac, some say, you never go back. But some do, even given a full and complete chance of falling in love. It just didn’t work out for me. So, I’m here to tell you it’s okay to be a PC owner. Buying a Mac is not the only way to be cool, and certainly not the only way to leave your comfort zone and push for better things.

I don’t have an angry three-year-old anymore. I have a six-year-old who knows better than to destroy expensive hardware by throwing things at it. There will never be a fair comparison. I don’t intend to break my screen to find out. But my experience with my PC has been, so far, a very satisfying and comfortable return home. For now, and for the foreseeable future, “I am a PC.”