The New York Times published a piece about the decline of general aviation today. They spent a few sentences suggesting that fear of small planes is a contributing factor (which is probably true, but I doubt it's the most significant one). Then they launched into a bizarre series of quotes from AOPA's heretofore-respectable Phil Boyer and flight instructor Matt Kauffman suggesting that women have something to do with it:

"There's been a big sociological and psychological change in the families of today, in where the discretionary dollars go," said Phil Boyer, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. When the husband told the stay-at-home mom of the 1950s that he was going to spend a Saturday afternoon taking flying lessons, she acquiesced, he said. Today, he said, in a two-income family, she is more likely to say: "You are not. That's your day to take Johnny to the soccer game, and what the heck are you doing spending our hard-earned money on flying lessons?"

Spend enough time in aviation and you'll eventually meet someone who has AIDS. No, not that AIDS—I'm talking about Aviation-Induced Divorce Syndrome. Let's ignore for the moment that equating divorce with a devastating terminal illness is phenomenally stupid. I have news for pilots who perpetuate this obnoxious term: It's not the airplane. You're getting a divorce because you're being a dick.

Continuing:

"Women learn differently from men," Mr. Kauffman said. "If two men go up, they will scream and shout, and a transfer of knowledge occurs, and we'd get back on the ground and go have a beer, and life is good," he said. "If you yell at a woman, she'd start crying, and she'd never come back." He would like to hire a female flight instructor but can't find one, he said.

Perhaps the reason Mr. Kauffman can't find a female flight instructor is because none of them are stupid enough to work for him.

AOPA spends almost all of its time complaining to the FAA or telling the media that they're misleading the public with sensationalist garbage. They'll whip up quite a frenzy when the FAA proposes an unfair rule, or when a crash happens and the newspapers attack like starved sharks. But we don't hear a peep from them when a chief flight instructor says you can't yell at women because they'll cry. Instead, we see them nodding in agreement as they blame wives for making men prioritize their children over flying.

I have a quick addendum to the Japan summary. This is 30 seconds of video taken out the window of a shinkansen (bullet train) going 180 MPH.

I am so mad that we don't have these in the States. You could go from Indianapolis to Chicago in 52 minutes. Or Indianapolis to Bloomington in 14. Think about that.

But first, a quick complaint about software that automatically checks for its own updates. On the surface, this feature is great. I don't have to go to a web site every day to check for an event that happens relatively infrequently. In practice, it sucks, because all of the software I have that does this checks for updates when I've just opened the application. This is the worst time to bother me with a dialog box and tell me I need to go do something. I've opened the application because I'm trying to get work done. Don't bug me until I'm finished. So I propose that auto-update features should notify the user when the application is closing, not when it's just opened.

(The preceding paragraph was brought to you by the auto-update notification given to me by TextWrangler after I opened it to write this post, which has been ignored almost a dozen times now, and I always forget about by the time I'm done working.)

Now: Japan. I started to write a long, detailed account of our trip, but I decided to save that for the photo book we're putting together in iPhoto. Instead I'll just write about some of the highlights here, and you can take a look at my photos on Flickr.

Melissa and I spent two weeks in Japan, mostly in Yokohama. My friend Joannah lives there (in a hotel—long story). We fell in love with Japan almost immediately. You can get anywhere by train, you can travel between cities with amazing speed and convenience on shinkansen (bullet trains), people are overwhelmingly polite, and young people's fashion is deliciously outrageous. On a few occasions I became fed up with a sense that I was constantly being micromanaged by ubiquitous signs, markings, warnings, and directions, but I perceived a measure of genuine caring that I don't see in all the stupid warnings we're bombarded with in the States.

We took a side trip to Nagoya, Hiroshima, and Kyoto. North of Nagoya, we attended Hounen Matsuri, a fertility festival that's also known as a penis festival. I'll let you read the link to find out why. The crowd there was a fairly even mix of people who took the event seriously (mostly families and elder Japanese), and people who were there just to point and laugh (mostly white people).

Hiroshima was informative, powerful, sad, awkward, fulfilling, and life-altering. Every American should see it. If you've had cancer, the room in the museum that explains the effects of radiation on the human body will be an uncomfortably familiar experience.

Kyoto is reportedly chock full of tourist attractions. Melissa and I did our best to explore it thoroughly, but we were completely exhausted after seeing one temple (Kinkaku-ji) and half of a castle (Nijo-jo). We were in Kyoto at the end of our side trip so we were already tired from running around non-stop for three days. Yokohama felt like home afterwards, but the feeling was bittersweet because we knew we'd be returning to the States soon.

Miscellaneous one-liners about our experience:

• I love Japanese convenience stores.
• I wish I could get melon bread at home.
• I'm really annoyed that we don't have bullet trains in the States.
• I ate fugu and did not die.
• Japanese children are insanely cute.

Now for the temporary departure from this stupid web site. I'm tired of this site. I'm tired of putting pressure on myself to update it. I'm especially tired of feeling like I can't be myself here when I have places where I can speak freely. So I'm taking a break. That is all.

No really, I'm big when I'm in Japan. I feel like I'm in one of those amusement park tiny towns where kids get can pretend to be giants. On the plus side, Japan has the most technologically advanced toilets in the known universe.

More to come later. I've been traveling for the last 25 hours, and I desperately need to bathe and eat.

...and I don't mean like the Beastie Boys. (Yuck, thast's hard to read in a sans serif font. Let me try again: I Am Ill. Better? OK. Let's continue.)

This is the first time I've really been sick since part of my body took up arms and tried to kill me. It's just a cold, but there's still a little tiny voice in my head (or, as Melissa would say, a gnat in my brain) that wonders if this could be the start of something awful again. It really sucks to lose faith in your body's ability to take care of itself.

For some reason, these people live with me:

Now that I've been cured of cancer, I'm under "surveillance." This means that I need regular check-ups (CT scans and blood tests) every six months for the next few years. I have no problem with this.

What I do have a problem with is how poorly my doctors are managing my transition from treatment to surveillance. Every doctor has a specialty, and when you get cancer, you need to be treated by a variety of specialists. In my case, I had a physician (actually just a general clinic), a surgeon, a medical oncologist, and a radiation oncologist. Radiation was the last step in curing me, and when I was done with that, my radiation oncologist offered to run my surveillance. I like him, so that sounded great.

At this point, a flaw in the "nebulous blob of specialists" concept became very clear: nobody is in charge.

The clinic strongly disagreed with my radiation oncologist. They said there's no way someone in his specialty can run my surveillance. I passed this opinion on to him; he looked puzzled and again claimed that he can run my surveillance. I called the clinic back, who repeated their disagreement. My requests for an explanation of why they disagreed were met with nothing more than "no, he can't do it."

This, then, is the level of discourse in modern medicine:

"Yes I can."
"No you can't."
"Yes I can."
"No you can't."
"Can too!"
"Can not!"
"Yeah huh!"
"Nuh uh!"
"Mom! He took my patient from me! Make him give it back!"
(Kicking and hair-pulling ensues.)

Melissa works for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Last week, I visited her at the theater for the first time. She showed me around, and eventually we made our way to the mezzanine, where we heard the orchestra rehearsing. I didn't know the name of the piece they were playing at the time, but I later learned (at their performance on Saturday) that it was the third movement of Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber.

Was I moved? No. I was frozen. Captivated. Spellbound. I will never forget that moment, Melissa's hand in mine, listening to a sound whose richness, fullness, and beauty had somehow escaped all of my childhood memories. I felt grounded in a way that was hauntingly familiar, but impossible to locate in a specific previous experience. It was as if I'd suddenly emerged from the woods after having been lost for so long that I forgot I was lost at all. Wandering for two hundred years, and then out of nowhere, "Oh, right... I was trying to find this place, wasn't I?"

Masha is a wonderful, spunky, beautiful Maine Coon. He (and his owner Ama) lived with me for a while, along with Masha's sister Zoe, who I still care for.

Tomorrow morning, at the tender age of four, Masha will be euthanized. He has a rare, incurable, and hideously painful disease called feline infectious peritonitis.

The article I just linked to explains FIP in cold technicalities, but Ama describes it in a way that is impossible for me to picture without tearing up: "He's lost all his muscle mass and his stomach is painfully inflated. Even the tips of his ears are limp which makes me want to cry every time i look at him."

I wish there were a way to make Masha better, but I'm glad to know that his suffering will soon be over. So sleep well, Masha. We'll see you on the other side.

Click to enlarge: