Like most people, I immediately search online for the experiences of other people suffering the same physical disorder, since that is where you discover that the unique is actually fairly common.

Except, it seems, in my case.  In various iterations of my freedom-seeking retina, I have seen a field of translucent green, looking somewhat like beach glass formed from an old Fanta bottle. Light comes through it, and some vague shapes. It has a solid look to it.

But I find that decent narratives of retinal detachment are not that common, and no one mentions seeing blobs of vivid green between them and the world they are trying to see. In fact, when I searched on it last week, I did find a reference--this blog, a few days earlier.

My surgeon, Dr. B, is blithely dismissive of my concerns. It's all normal, he indicates. We've been partners in this struggle since early April, and I have become an affront to his surgical amour propre, as well as, I suspect, a financial drain on his partnership--the insurance company pays a global for the surgery and followups. As a result, every visit from me no represents unpaid labor. I doubt he consciously recognizes that his lack of joy in seeing me is at least partly based on a financial calculation, but I certainly feel it is there.

I have no interest in having weird, off-brand symptoms. I want a normal recovery, no more than a sigma or two away from the mean, because I fear that every odd symptom is a sign that I will need further surgery, or that my eye will never recover any function.

That's enough about my intimate physical decline for a while. I wish I had had some spiritual awakening, or some epiphany about the rest of my life during my enforced face-down inactivity, but no. That is not something that seems to come to me. I did some plotting and thinking, but no more than I would do on a decent evening at the Diesel.  Which is where I think I will head now, to start getting caught up on my writing projects.

A couple of months ago, Greg Cochrane, in his interesting and crabby blog West Hunter, brought up an example of the poverty of historical explanation: for a couple of decades after the Second World War, historians wrote accounts of what had happened in that war, and why, without any knowledge of a significant influence on how events turned out, the breaking of the Enigma codes. But no one (as far as I know) said "actually, the defeat of the Germans, and the US victory at Midway, and a whole bunch of other things, seem unbelievably lucky. Is there something we don't know about them? Were there, maybe, some spies who have not yet come to light? Or some other explanation?"

I do remember a good friend saying, after the publication of Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret, the first big public explanation of the breaking of the codes, and the effect that had on the war: "No one understood anything about it!"

Now, maybe, we do. Though the Soviet victory in that war, which really decided things, still makes no sense at all to me. No code breaking for them, no secret weapons, no across-the-ocean safe haven pumping out bombers and cruisers, nothing but beatings, starvation, mass slaughter, burning villages...and victory. Utterly incomprehensible, and utterly fascinating.

I work best when I use a timer.  I have become a devotee of Pomodoro intervals: twenty five minutes of work, followed by five (OK, usually a bit more) minutes of break. Pomodoro Technique has a lot more to it, but I'm not really that strict about it.

But when I time, I work. That doesn't mean I literally don't work when I'm not timing, but the odds definitely go way down. I often delude myself that I'm working only to conclude, on mature consideration, that I'm not. Because the damn timer's not on.

Those twenty-five minute intervals are perfect for me. I work intensely, but that is about the time my mind would start to wander. So I get an official break. I generally follow the rule of sets of four (two hours), with a longer relax in between. If I do it strictly, without cheating, I get an immense amount done.

I often fail. But more and more often, I succeed. My mind is astonishingly disordered. I need external rules to get anything done. I'm fortunate I can dress myself. I am a triumph of technique over essential personality.

But now I am off the timer and should finish. The more strictly I obey the breaks, as well as the work periods, the more I get done. So now I'm done!

Woolf notes that chickens appeared in the Mediterranean world sometime in the middle of the last millennium BC. Quick to breed and relatively easy to maintain, they provided eggs and a source of conveniently small quantities of meat—an important attribute in a world without refrigeration.

It's this kind of observation about daily life that can really bring a past time to life. People made practical choices, based on what made the most sense given their circumstances. One chicken = one dinner. Bigger ruminants make a lot of meat, impossible to store without refrigeration. That's why the ancients largely saved them for sacrifice and mass consumption.

I also didn't know chickens had reached the Mediterranean that late.

I'm always a sucker for another book that might help me understand ancient Rome, so I think I will eventually end up with this one too.

As soon as my optometrist saw it, she sent me to an ophthalmologist. A charming young guy from his office came and picked me up and drove me up to Andover, about a forty five minute drive from where I live. After a couple of hours of sitting around, the ophthalmologist popped in and injected gas into my eyeball to try to float the retina up in preparation for surgery, to take place two days later. This was less fun than it sounds.

Then the doctor disappeared. I had to sign a long series of sheets detailing the possible procedures he would perform on me in a couple of days.  I had never heard of any of them: scleral buckle, vitrectomy, etc. They might remove my lens, my iris, inject oil into my eye. It all depended on how things looked when he got in there. The sheets I was signing said the doctor had carefully explained things to me, and I was aware of all the risks and possible negative consequences.

Of course, he had done no such thing. To the doc, I was a bunch of supporting tissue dangling from a surgical site. I might have feelings about what was going to be done to me, but I certainly wasn't supposed to have opinions. It was just like clicking Accept on a software contract. What other choice did I have? To give him a little credit, I was an emergency addition to what was clearly a busy schedule, some of it presumably with other people who had serious conditions.

This was a surgery that shouldn't wait. The retina is an impossibly thin and delicate piece of tissue, thinner than plastic wrap. Waiting around could damage it beyond repair. Given a lot of advance planning, I might have reviewed a series of eye surgeons in the Boston area, considered the options for treatment, and chosen someone. But, again, time was tight, and a quick search showed that this guy had the characteristic of most use in cases like this: he does a huge number of these operations, on a daily basis. With any delicate surgery, you want a specialist, who does only that type of surgery, and has done it a lot, so that by the time he gets to you, every kink has been ironed out, every oddball condition seen, and every movement deeply ingrained into his nervous system.

And, of course, I wouldn't trade that amount of experience for a better bedside manner. I presume it's possible to get both.

This is where physician ratings by "consumers" become kind of meaningless. I could rate how well he explained things to me, but how was I to rate how well he did at the thing that mattered, the operation itself? I know how I am recovering (slowly, but steadily). If something goes wrong, was it because of something he did, or because things go wrong no matter how well he did? Could I be recovering faster? When my vision settles, will it be as good as it could have been? Really no way for me to tell. He can be rated only statistically, and I have no way of doing that.

So they sent me home, to sit up and bed and fret. The bubble floated the retina up a bit--there was a bit of translucency in the green, and it got a bit smaller. But not enough to be worth anything. A day later, early in the morning, Mary drove me up to a surgical center in New Hampshire

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no good use for realistic-looking mouths anywhere but on someone who already has a completely functional mouth, in a pretty good spot. So whenever the technology comes up, it is almost miraculously creepy.

Below, a couple of students from Uncanny Valley High, class of 2012:

"Another one of those green beers, Scarecrow?" I stay home on St. Patrick's Day, and now I know why.

Holy ....! PSAs tend to attract a bad element--recent grads with more technical capabilities than sense, a feeling that they don't need to pay attention to consequences because they are doing something socially good, and access to public-service money that needs to get spent so that a box gets checked on some bureaucrat's annual plan. This one is particularly egregious. (via Copyranter, who has just moved to Buzzfeed.  Actually, I bet the three-mouthed beast is from Copyranter too, but I was too traumatized to remember where I saw it). I'm sure newly breastfeeding moms have exactly this nightmare.

When something can be done, it will be done, but that doesn't mean it should be done.

MMMM is a movie about a situation. A young woman (named Martha, renamed Marcy May in the cult she joins, and answering the phone as Marlene, as all the women in the cult do) escapes after two years and moves in with her older sister and her sister's husband. Martha is skittish, weird, paranoid, and somewhat dopey-seeming. As we see flashbacks to her time in the cult, we see how she was manipulated, abused, and finally ended up participating in some of the cult's violence.

It is all well done, I thought.  But aside from anatomizing the situation, the movie didn't really go anywhere, and I have a genre desire for imposing plots on inchoate reality. Martha's sister and brother-in-law are on vacation in an isolated lake house, and both are dull and flat of affect. No one ever talks about anything interesting. The cult members are likewise deadpan.

So the movie seems really long.  The flashbacks do have a kind of progress to them, but the post-escape scenes do not. The movie does add some ominous touches, as a way of adding suspense, and those are the only trace of narrative energy. Scenes are slow-moving and dull. Maybe the actress who plays Martha, Elizabeth Olsen, acts, maybe she doesn't. I found it hard to be sure.

So: good raw material if you have a project that might include a character who was already damaged and was further damaged by a cult, and who plays a role in an actual plot, but not recommended if you just want to see a movie.