Wuhu Environs

About five hundred kilometers upstream from the Pacific, the River runs east and then abruptly north. Sprawling eastward from the northern arm of this right angle is the City of Wuhu. The main body of the City is pressed up against the River, which is still the region's main artery for trade, though in turns railroads and now highways have added new arteries, enabling the City to sprawl away from the River in new directions, and to mix its influence with its neighbors.

To the south, the City begins to wrap around the River bend before it fades into farming villages and the occasional satellite towns that sit between and around the tips of the northernmost foothills of the Yellow Mountains. My wife was born in one of these towns, and her parents in another smaller one nearby, the two towns separated by a long fragment of those foothills, a little mountain with a northward spine. Her ancestors are buried on the slopes of that mountain.

Eastwards, there are marshes which have been engineered over centuries, or millennia, into networks of polders, surrounded by channels filled with water from distant rivers, on each of which sits a tiny village or a cluster of tended fields, or both. Some of these networks are regular, laid out in vast grids tens of kilometers across, showing from any vantage point the mark of some overarching plan, carried out long ago by the people of those marshes. Others follow no obvious pattern, except that there seems to be some average island size, similar to that constant size of the regular networks, and some acceptable deviation from this average, and an agreement amongst the people that they were going to reform the marshes into channels and islands.

Surrounded and out of options, the Hegemon Xiang Yu is said to have killed himself nearby, two-thousand two-hundred and fourteen years ago, and someone is supposed to have taken his horse's saddle up onto a mountain and buried it. That mountain gives its name to the City of Ma'anshan, which also presses up against the east bank of the River, fifty kilometers or so north of Wuhu. This City is known for making steel, and a ride through town will show you infinite smokestacks and gray air that covers everything, it is beautiful and terrible all at once.

Further north along the course of the River is the Southern Capital, and from there the River makes its final drive east where it breaks apart and becomes Shanghai. Across the River bend from Wuhu, north and west, is Chaohu, which has recently been dismembered by its neighboring Cities, most notably the provincial capital of Hefei, which sits even further along the same northwest vector.

Westwards, up the River, there is more, Hubei and Jiangxi and beyond, but there is more in every direction, and the mind follows the flow of the river back towards the Ocean in the east, and does not easily run against it, and these are enough reasons now to conclude and say that the City rules the neighborhood of that bend in the River.

MIT VPN

Just when I've lost interest in the internet, I get the following random email on my Gmail account (found it in the Junk folder):

Dear Outlook client, Notification ID: KG932J ========================================== - Please reconfigure your Microsoft Outlook information again . - Click on the link below to setup . http://outlook-mail-setup.gert54d.from-ks.com/index.php?id=KG932J ========================================== Microsoft Outlook 2012 .

Obviously this is a phishing thing. What's interesting is that the url refers to an IP address at MIT. The address is no longer active as far as I can tell, but it seems to have belonged to the MIT VPN network, because other addresses on the same /24 block are attached to vpn-ip.mit.edu urls.

So, my guess is that someone set up a site on the MIT VPN to direct their phishing business. That's all I've got.

Oh, coincidentally, just yesterday I was reading about VPNs, wondering about a convenient way to get past the China firewall from the inside. Seeing that MIT has a VPN makes me wonder if Harvard has one, and if I can use it...

Typical Monday through Friday

In the morning, at eight o’ clock, two alarms go off. The clock is next to his bed, and he reaches over to stop it, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. The radio is in the hallway, just outside the bedroom door, and he comprehends it to varying degrees.

Sometimes his wife is up before him, but usually not. He gets out of bed, finally, usually before nine. He makes coffee and takes a shower. He brushes his teeth and gets dressed. He packs his lunch and makes a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. He fills a coffee cup and a thermos with coffee, adding enough milk to make it cool enough to drink quickly. He sits by the front door and listens to the radio news, eats his sandwich, and drinks the cup of coffee. If his wife is up, maybe they talk, or maybe she’s in the shower.

If he’s planning to go to tae kwon do that night, he takes his uniform, which is hanging from the radiator in the bedroom, folds it, puts it in a plastic sack, and packs it in his backpack. He gets ready to leave, puts on his shoes, speaks with his wife, kisses her, and goes out the door. If it’s raining, he takes an umbrella. If she’s up, she locks the door behind him, otherwise he takes his keys and locks it.

He steps outside and picks up the newspaper. He stops by the wall in front of his building, sets the thermos down, and puts most of the newspaper in his backpack, except for the front page. He sets off for Reservoir.

Walking down Sutherland Road on the right side, he may encounter some other people, but usually there are few, because most have already gone. He passes several other apartment buildings on his way. Often, there are workmen at one building or another, unloading things from their truck. Maybe he can hear them speaking Spanish to one another.

When he arrives at Cleveland Circle, he’ll try to walk straight through. Half the time, it’s not hard to do, since half the time the traffic is running across Beacon Street. Even if Beacon has the light, they might all have gone. Sometimes he stands and waits. This crossing is a convergence point from several directions, and more people seem to arrive from along Chestnut Hill than from Sutherland. Sometimes he sees someone interesting here, and can watch them until they all arrive at Reservoir.

At the other side of the Circle is Reservoir, but before he gets there he passes his dentists office. He owes the dentist money. He thinks he might have a toothache, but he’s not sure. He wonders if you can give yourself a toothache by focusing all your attention, and the tip of your tongue, on one healthy tooth. His mouth tastes like metal sometimes, since he got all those fillings last summer.

He arrives at Reservoir. It’s random. Sometimes he’s just in time; sometimes he’s just missed it; sometimes he waits. If he waits, he watches the people accumulate. Most of them he doesn’t recognize, but some he does. The people trickle in, then arrive in a wave when one of the buses arrive upstairs, then more trickle in, then the train arrives. He always tries to get on first, on the very back door. Usually he manages to be one of the first.

Unless he’s really late, there’s probably not a seat. He stands or sits, finishes his coffee, reads the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and people crowd on the train. More get on at Beaconsfield. He stares at people when he thinks they aren't noticing, but he assumes everyone else is doing the same thing. He compares nose shapes between two people. He tries to find two noses that are most different, and two that are most similar. He looks for noses that look like his. He is ceaselessly amazed by the irrational variance of noses.

More get on at Brooklines Hills and Village, but some get off there too. At Longwood, half the train gets off. Postdocs, doctors, students. Most of them are Asians.

Station by station, he gets closer to Government Center. Sometimes they make everybody get off at Park, and get on the next train. At Government Center, he always tries to be the first person off the train, out the back door. He can usually do it. By the time the train gets to Government Center, which is the last stop for the D train, there aren’t usually many people still on board.

If the escalator is open, he walks up and out of the station. If someone is standing on it, he curses under his breath and runs up the stairs. It’s a narrow escalator, no room to pass someone who’s just standing there. If someone is just standing there, they might clearly be a tourist and he forgives them. If they're looking at their phone, he sneers. He wonders why the others all line up to stand quietly behind, when he knows they all really want to climb.

Outside is Government Center, City Hall, the Federal Building. The plaza is bleak and impressive, every day. He walks down Cambridge Street towards Mass General. To cross Staniford, to get into the Institute, he usually dodges through traffic stopped at the light. He enters the Institute through the front door now, since his office moved to the other side of the building, and the receptionist always tries to talk to him about the weather. He doesn’t slow down, though.

He goes up the stairs to the second floor, down the hallway by the human resources offices, past the elevator and the second floor wetlabs, past the conference room, across the bridge to 2West, takes a right down the hall by the driving simulator, past the little kitchen where he microwaves his lunch every day, past the meeting room, past the restrooms, take a left, through the research assistant office, says good morning to Jackie at her desk, steps into his office, sets his backpack on his desk, hangs his jacket on his chair, sits down, and wakes his computer.

Andrew has gone to work.

not writing

He couldn’t think of how to start.

He couldn’t even start! If you can’t start, how can you continue? How can you then finish? Starting is fundamental. It’s the first thing. Starting comes before everything else. He decided that instead of starting, he’d circle around, try to sneak up on it. The frontal approach wasn’t working, but maybe there was a soft spot somewhere in the back. I’ll circle around, he thought.

He started to write about not knowing what to write about. In its own way, it was working. Letters were coming out. The letters came out through his fingers, pooled into words on the page, the words clumping into phrases and sentences. Was this the right way? The flanking maneuver continued, but the result had not yet been achieved. This isn’t what I want to write, he thought. I want to write something else. It’s up ahead now. Right up ahead.

Or is it? Have I gotten lost on the way? In avoiding the actual confrontation with the thing to be written, he had tried to creep around, to surprise the thing, to tackle it from an unsteady angle. But how long should the creep take? Should it go on and on like this? When should it stop? When has it failed? When has it almost succeeded?

His mind wandered, dragging with it the stream of letters and words and phrases and sentences. He thought about waiting for a bus when you’re going a distance that you could reasonably walk. A twenty minute walk or a three minute bus ride, that’s usually the choice. The problem is when you don’t know if you’ve just missed the bus, or if it’s about to come up over the horizon at any minute. The more time that goes by, the more likely it is that you have just missed it, and that it really might be another good long while before it shows up.

That’s what the flanking maneuver was like, but not really. Because really, a flanking maneuver fails in one of two ways. One, you get lost, or you arrive at position too late, and the enemy is just gone, and you have to start over again, and by the time you find them again you’re likely to be face-to-face, just like when you started. Two, the enemy might notice what you’re doing, and you arrive exactly where and when you intended, but they’re ready for you, and it’s face-to-face again. The first is worse, because then you have time to be demoralized and disappointed. The second is better, because when you arrive you’re ready to fight anyways, even though now the situation is maybe not exactly what you had planned.

It would be best if they didn’t know you were coming. If the thing to be written could just suddenly find itself being written, without knowing that it was being written, that would be ideal. But how realistic is that? The flanking maneuver was never a good idea. It could never work in this situation. No matter what, you wind up at the same point, with the thing to be written, waiting to be written, not being written.