Tropical rainstorms had found their way up to Cambridge this week, but on our way home from the party, they had taken a break and left a comforting layer of thick, balmy air that hovered over the city. The girl with whom I had come was only a few steps in front of me when she asked another friend from the party, “So, how old are you?” Casually questioning another’s age on the way home from a party, at least in the U.S., probably has a sexual subtext. So while they discovered that they were the same age and more, I dodged puddles in my flip-flops, mesmerized by the reflection of the streetlights in the dark pools of the cracked sidewalks.

Yet our society’s conception of age and the conventions we employ to measure age seem a bit imprecise. I couldn’t help but thinking that although they both looked their age in years, one seemed much younger and the other much older.

Measuring one’s age in Gregorian calendar years has always been somewhat disturbing to me, especially since it assumes a linear and progressive conception of time. Although I make no claims of originality, my inclination has always been to measure a person’s age in seasons of suffering, or something close to it. My apologies if this approach to age in terms of “seasons of suffering” appears cynical, but it has been more useful to me than the convention of the solar year in understanding the human condition and conceptions of aging in relationship to the person. The history of the solar calendar is quite messy, and has proved itself useless to me in social interactions with individuals who have distinct historical traditions for measuring age and time. Even for societies who use the solar calendar, the equinoxes and the seasons continue to be juggled and jumbled as powerful individuals have courageously fought to pin the thing down. Using the term “season” also seems appropriate in a discussion of age and suffering, for although the season is rooted in quarterly changes of weather in the solar calendar year, its popular use has a wonderful tradition of blurred beginnings and endings. In order to define the seasons of one’s age in suffering, then, whose beginning, middles, and endings are less than fixed, one cannot simply dictate a number or a date but must describe that season and the suffering—they must describe their own human experience.

Through this description of human experience, we thus arrive at an entirely different creature, and ultimately we find a piece to the story of a person. Unlike the Roman calendar’s solar year, at least since the most recent official Gregorian modification in 1582 with the American colonies following suit in 1752, the term “season” serves as a more malleable convention for telling the story of a person, for connecting the story of a person to the human condition and conceptions of aging in society.

I remember killing a living creature at age six, hoping to regenerate life by cutting an earthworm into pieces after learning that its ten unique hearts could be divided. At age six, I thought the heart was at the core of our living person, especially since I had asked Jesus to come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior a few months prior (my family recorded it on cassette tape in case I ever forgot). Thus, this crawling creature seemed to defy death through a miracle of multiple hearts, and in defying death, defied time. Yet during my experiment with the hearts of the earthworm on the hot cement patio of my backyard, I realized while making incisions in the carefully chosen fat, pink specimen that I had no way of knowing whether the stainless steel butter knife was cutting into or between its tiny little hearts. After only seven incisions, with sticky worm juice and blood adorning the butter knife and my hands, I stopped and waited.

Yet the earthworm did not move nor even make an attempt at life. It simply lay there in eight equal parts on the hot cement. With increasing panic and guilt, I put four of the worm pieces on the moist cool grass, thinking that the hot cement was not a good environment for any worm, much less one recovering from surgery. But none of what should now have been eight unique worms moved. They were dead. With tears in my eyes, I brushed the other four pieces of worm into the grass. Instead of extending life, I had imposed immediate death.

Horrified, I sat mourning in the cornstalks amidst the jumping grasshoppers, suffering in the knowledge that I had not only caused the suffering of a living creature, but death. It was one of my earliest memories in which I experienced a kind “suffering” that for a variety of reasons impacted me more than other experiences prior to that age.

Of course, suffering is understood uniquely by various individuals and societies, and no single definition can be argued. I only suggest that suffering is a human condition that we experience, and experience universally. Perhaps it takes the form of physical, mental, social, emotional, religious, psychological, political, economic, or ecological isolation. Perhaps some would describe their seasons of suffering in terms of bearing children, of natural events such as earthquakes or hurricanes or drought, of political violence and of war, of debt or economic hardship, of physical suffering and disease and death, of “falling in and out of love,” or of any imaginable or unimaginable form of social suffering. Many scholars have written about suffering, and I will not repeat their work here. All I know is that to me, the aging that occurs through seasons of suffering, the kind that cuts to the core of the human condition and marks us in ways we cannot measure in days or months or years or lifetimes, is one way of explaining why two acquaintances who had successfully acquired the same number of solar years appeared very different to me in age. Many forms of suffering are hidden, and on that balmy walk home, I recognize that my own, flawed analysis of how two individuals might have suffered during their human existence is grossly presumptuous. But whether it is portrayed through a person’s words or through a particular expression when your eyes meet from across the room, whether it is experienced in a person’s memory or on one’s body, measuring the age of our fragile human condition in terms of our experienced seasons of suffering feels more accurate than reciting one’s acquired solar years with a number.

"Three people per shift work in the NOC, and there are three shifts per day. During each shift, NOC staff monitor game activity, responding to players in remote locations and working with a custom suite of software tools to fix problems along the way.

"The center has shut down for just three days of work—all in 2003, when wildfires were closing in on the neighborhood. (Because all the tools run remotely, the staff members kept EverQuest going from their homes. A backup generator kept pumping power to the servers even as the fire threatened to black out parts of the city.)" http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul05/0705eq.html

IEEE's paranthetical note sent a shiver down my spine, and I should add a footnote to show why IEEE's paranthetical mention of the NOC staff, who make EverQuest possible for its loyal gamers, impressed me to the degree that it did.

My Footnote:

Back in October of 2003, I noticed something bizarre on the drive from my apartment in Marina Del Rey out to my family's home in Rancho Cucamonga. Oddly, there was no traffic, and the night was especially black. Even the moon was hidden.

After successfully battling the drive over the steep pass into Pomona, I squinted in disbelief through the dust-laden windshield into the darkness. In the distance, a great, bright, volcanic-orange mass blared strikingly against the stark, black backdrop of the Cucamonga Mountains. They were on fire.

Upon arriving, a thick layer of ash instantly covered my car. I walked inside my family's house, wiping my face to find black soot already sticking thick to my moist skin. My parents were stuck to the television. They had not yet been instructed to evacuate. Houses were going to burn, we just didn’t know which ones. And the Santa Ana winds were rising.

When our family first moved back to California, I was sixteen. I remember pressing my nose against the windowpane, having become accustomed to the coveted school closings for “snow days” in Colorado, and then contemplating the odd, Cucamonga equivalent: “Wind days”. Staring through the glass pane like a live television screen, I watched the invisible monster powerfully destroy electrical lines, uproot trees and smash them onto cars and homes, and steal trash cans, lawn chairs, potted flowers, loose animals, and anything that was not enclosed within four walls and a protective roof. My growing teenage breasts always hurt on those days, the days when the wind picked up like an absurd tornado that had been inverted.

Yet following my adolescent introduction to the Santa Ana’s, my parents and I now watched the televised battleground while it blazed in our backyard, fueling the gigantic Grand Prix Fire in a horrifically magnificent display, together, fire and wind, playing violent hooky from the ordained laws of man.

We watched the fire come right up to the field behind the Banyan Fire Station on the street above my parents’ house. But it did not destroy our home. Yet witnessing the ominous, 200-feet-high wall of fire moving toward me etched a deep impression into my mind.

Others were not so lucky. Ultimately, over 2500 homes were destroyed by ten fires throughout Southern California, killing 17 people and 45,000,000 acres of land. Shelters were set up throughout the sprawling cities, and the 15 million inhabitants of greater Los Angeles coughed in the ashes and wiped the black dust from their faces while the smoke trailed far out over the Pacific Ocean, eventually dispersing in defeat high into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, as the citizens of Southern California were traipsing through the smoky air and blistering red sun, the MTA buses were on strike, as well as Ralphs, Vons, Albertons, and Save-On supermarkets. Many people could not go to work, and buying groceries was a more difficult endeavor, except for those who dared to break the picket line. California Governor Un-elect Gray Davis was vying with Governor Pre-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger for front-line coverage and requests for federal funding. On October 27, 2003, President Bush declared Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and San Diego Counties in a state of emergency.

Thus, in the course of one week--between the fires, the buses and the supermarket strikes--the entire structural system of food, transportation, and shelter has been removed from the masses of Los Angeles in varying degrees. The dissonant impression of our broken city arises bright and vivid, like the 200-foot-high fire wall, for this maddening virtual chaos, this failing urban infrastructure, this unimaginable we constantly witness on our televised and digital screens has finally entered into our homes and touched our bodies in the flesh.

"All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl." (Bob Dylan)

At least, of one dude's mind, whoever created this monster. Is the familiar green just residue from the Hulk legacy?

Yet I found myself most amazed at your efforts that went into making it
happen--of course, thank you to Professor Norvell who was open to the idea,
and the emails between all of us exchanging ideas, the phone calls, Aaron's
bringing the webcam equipment and software, Aayesha's transcribing the ENTIRE
class (wow!), Steve's offering up his laptop when two others were being
repaired, and everyone's, including Mary Francis's and Tony's encouraging
comments: "This will be fun!" "That was cool!" "I really enjoyed it!" The
larger Mac community helped me resolve the bugs on my end, but I must declare
that you guys are totally gnarly.

While prologues and epilogues offer a formal space and place for authors' positioning of themselves within a book, the prologue and epilogue continue to be peripheral to the privileged chapters of a book and should undermine the trust of the reader when a less than worthy account of that author's positioning is offered. Roman numerals or alternative symbolic marks seem to implore with the reader that the chapters of a book are its primary text and that the prologue and epilogue are secondary, at best. A Table of Contents can further reinforce the isolation of these sections in various ways, perhaps allocating a unique font for their headings or other symbol of division such as a line, indentation, or sequence of asterisks. As a result of these visual cues, a prologue and epilogue’s peripheral status occurs on two significant physical levels—first, through the emptiness of space normally reserved on the beginning page for the prestigious stamp of a chapter marker, and second, through the prominence of place revoked during textual organization, squished almost as a nuisance at the beginning and the end of the book. On a metaphorical level, this disadvantage of physical space and place in the ultimate text implies that while the framing prologue and epilogue perhaps complement the primary chapters, they retain their limited role as a frame—a frame peripheral to the narrative core which clearly begins with the strict, ceremonial chapter count. Yet prologues and epilogues have not always been regarded as peripheral.

In the first prologue, or prologos, introduced into Greek drama by Euripides in the 400’s B.C., a deity would emerge from a machine and explain the background events leading up to the beginning of the drama. Greek theatre that followed treated the prologos as a significant, almost distinct theatrical episode prior to the acts, whose function was essential to the entire dramatic performance. But in contrast to the prologos performed over two thousand years ago, current conceptions of the prologue tend to surround the question of textual authority. Modern themes often suggest that language is objective, involving a rational and transparent process of constructed word sequences that could then be dissected and categorized. But the assumption that a text could be unquestionably objective left a bad taste in the mouth of the postmodern palate.

Recent scholars such as Jacque Derridá, Vladimir Nabokov, and Miguél de Unamuno have challenged the belief that an objective, omnipotent viewpoint of the author exists within the narrative of the prologue, approaching it instead as an apparition-like web of subjectivity. Derridá writes, “From the viewpoint of the fore-word, which recreates the intention-to-say after the fact, the text exists as something written—a past—which under the false appearance of a present, a hidden omnipotent author (in full mastery of his product) is presenting to the reader as his future” (Dissemination). Accordingly, his critique of the prologue as a convention moves past the limitations I mention of space and place. Instead, he highlights the problem that it conveys a false sense of time since it was authored after the text, but structurally situated before the text. Ultimately, through this fictional organization of a literary composition, he contends, “History itself is thus prescribed.” Derridá even contended that the prologos could be entirely dismissed as a tradition of antiquity: “The preface to a philosophical work runs out of breath on the threshold of science. It is the site of a kind of chit-chat external to the very thing it appears to be talking about, reducing the thing itself.” While the prologos’ of today rarely boast a deified author who emerges from the objective machine of knowledge, they have become a foggy arena in which the author appears as a subjective apparition in the periphery, cryptically gesturing to the audience behind a ruffled stage curtain.

If we continue to employ the prologue and epilogue as conventions, then problematizing them to the point of periphery in modern and postmodern traditions calls for a renaissance of their original function in Greek theatre as a performance essential to the story. Although the entire text is necessarily considered a performance in this argument, the prologue and epilogue, in practice, remain intimate arenas in which the author often positions him or herself within the text by using anecdotes and biographical details. By conceptualizing these arenas as performance, the prologue and epilogue thus translate into a process in which the author uniquely negotiates his or her history through selecting “acts” of remembrance and transforming into narrative—regardless of whether those “acts” are considered fiction or nonfiction, ascribed or prescribed, subjective or objective, or ancient, modern, or postmodern. This process of transformation ultimately appears as embodied history in the form of a book to be consumed and incorporated into the negotiated histories of its audiences. For a book is not just a text about an isolated author, it is a social exchange between an author and an audience through material culture across time and space.

By reinstating the value of the prologue and epilogue as a performed act, perhaps then we could gaze more closely at how the author situates his or her own nuanced and conflicted position in the intimate realm of social and political relations. Perhaps then we could more aptly critique the underperformance of authors who fail to socially position themselves within the text and scold readers who fail to recognize the absence or weakness of their positioning. Perhaps then we could peer more deeply into the visceral beliefs and dreams of the author, hidden behind this performance on the forgotten stage of our imagined histories that we create, form, perform, exchange, and extinguish in the evolution of human experience and interaction.

Yes, Mary Francis, I am in Hawaii, swimming with the turtles by day and surfing the Internet for class stuff by night.

Oh, the "promise" of technology, and I, with my utopian vision of greeting the class through my webcam and proceeding with wonderful discussions on "narratives" and "cyberspace" and "place," yet at 3:30am and 6000 miles away from Cambridge, I just stared at my webcam in disbelief after realizing in horror that no one would be staring back.

The "edge" of cyberspace is one I can physically see on my aluminum Mac but remains blurred in my mind; distinguishing between these domains as “physical space” and “cyberspace” feels too Cartesian to be believable. Yet beyond this less than metaphysical "edge" I see my cluttered coffee table supporting some strewn papers, pens and a pair of sunglasses, a hair band, some opened mail, a dirty dish and several empty cans of Diet Coke. I have not thrown out the mail or empty cans because my kitchen trash is full, a weak but successful attempt at temporarily avoiding the inevitable.

I empty my virtual trash much more often than my kitchen trash. Ironically, my virtual trash, indicated by a "trash can" icon on my OS 10.3.3 desktop, will never be “full.” But my kitchen trash is not so enjoyable to empty, currently stuffed with soup cans and dirty napkins squished with grape stems and hairballs and orange juice cartons. Even worse, the icy winters and humid summers in Boston amplify the effort and risk needed to complete the task, including a change of clothes or the danger of slipping on icy stairs or simply the horrid, muggy smell. The primary difference between these activities seems sensory; perhaps sensation is the most powerful distinction between living in "physical space" and "cyberspace."

My classmates helped me decide on a website today—EverQuest Widows—an online community where individuals who are in relationships with someone addicted to EverQuest can seek support and advice. EverQuest is a "Massive Multiperson Online Role-Playing Game" (MMORPG) with over twenty thousand(?) members, many of whom claim they are addicted. Yet, after having lost or been threatened with the loss of their partners because the cyberspace community is perceived as more valuable than the physical community in the home, the "widow(er)s" ironically defer to the very source of their anguish for support: an online community. I wonder what I'll learn from these individuals about how to love or leave someone who might be a slacker when it comes to "taking out the trash."

On another Star Wars note, when the final episode came out a few weeks ago, I asked about twenty people at CSAIL to what percent they regarded Star Wars as formative in bringing them and other MITers from childhood towards a career related to technology, to which they all immediately replied: 100%.

Shortly before I moved to Cambridge, I found myself at some party, scowling at the others in the room with my judgmental, ugly eyes. They were engaged in the kinds of repulsive acts that made me cringe with horror—the way someone meticulously ate her fruit and cheese, the way another slurped his beer, the way still another laughed or touched me knowingly on the arm, without knowing. So I sped away and found myself driving onto PCH toward the Malibu cliffs, past the old Getty museum, past the band playing at Moonshadows with people spilling out the windows and past Neptune’s Net, the bar filled with hundreds of bikers who park their Harleys out front in careful disarray. I sped around the farmlands of Oxnard and Ventura and Huehuehe Naval Port where authentic military planes are displayed on poles like plastic model airplanes, beyond the truck stops and the thrift shops and the tractor repair stores, and when I suddenly reached a secluded lake within a deciduous forest of Ojai, I stopped, and decided to camp for the night.

Once the sun had gone down and I was snug with a sleeping bag near my respectable fire, I sat and stared at its dancing, crackling fingers.

The velveteen trees rose high into the black-tarped sky, and I tried to count the stars. Only the crickets and the popping fire could be heard. But the fire was forever shooting off tiny sparkle-bombs into the stars, so I made-believe that every one in a million sparkles survived through the atmosphere and eventually reached a star, joining its gigantic circus mass of light.

Fire. I stared at the fire all night. It reminded me of Nechtaval’s virus, virtual and biological, changing and adapting until it is defeated or divided into rebirth. I imagined the red, blue, and green numeric codes for each pixel as the actual fire changed colors with each movement, zealously, desperately searching for the algorithmic key that would lead to a new eight-string sequence and thus generate life. Odd, most would use virtual fire to imitate the actual, instead, I create the physical fire and imagine the virtual.

Late into the night, only soft red embers remained of the fire. I closed my eyes and fell asleep among the protective blanket of deciduous trees by the cool, crystalline lake, and dreamed of becoming a fire-star.

“The premise of the project is the rhizomatic exploration of host/parasite omnijectivity (the metaphysical concept stemming from the discoveries of quantum physics which teaches that the mind and matter are inextricably linked) under the influence of today’s high-frequency, electronic, computerized environment…This viral viractuality is the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious, and the most cluttered area of our consciousness as it is the depth from which we beings emerged as child parasites into our now precarious existence.”