You can call me Rudy...

Rudolph E. ... graduated with three degrees, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, the latter of which he went on to complete several years of graduate and doctoral work. Well into old age, he refuses to quit living his life and go into retirement. "I've got thirty years left in me, I suppose. I may as well do something with it. You know, it's better than sitting at home watching the tube all day," he says to a friend and me after teaching a class on multivariate calculus, following a declaration of his plans to get his M.D. so he can start his own old folk's clinic, and this after losing so much of his previous business after leaving it to solve some family crisis or another, causing him to have to sell his house and much more so as to not default on his loans and remain in good credit.

Can you believe that? Let's take a typical pre-med student. Eighteen or nineteen years old, fresh out of high school, not sure what he wants to do but is throwing around the idea of becoming a doctor. He realizes that he probably will be 25 by the time he actually gets the career he wants and 30 before it starts to take off. This discourages him and he quits. Now take Rudy. He himself says he's got about 30 years left in him, if he's lucky, and now after being successful as a teacher and mathematician (upon receiving his doctorate, he was one of the top 8 people in the world who knew as much as he did about Minkowski geometry), he embarks into a very foreign world of medicine with such decisiveness that death may be the only thing to stop him.

Such tenacity inspires me like none other: to know that you will be leaving the grave no more than an empty hull when you die because you have nothing... NOTHING...left to give. That is the life worth living. I'm fortunate enough to have run into someone able to pull it off before I myself have to leave this world...

μητερ

I write this as a journal that μητερ should have written but has not, logging as much as I have garnered from her past and present to make some semblance of sense of her present condition.

Since this compilation is well overdue, it will begin as a fragmented attempt to recall each of my memories that regard her.

Her and her husband met at a wedding (the bride had been her past roommate and the groom had been the husband's past roommate as well).

Currently, and for a long time (to find the beginning of when it started will take more thought and knowledge), μητερ has been overwhelmed, gazing no farther ahead of her than the stacks of dirty dishes, piling heaps of laundry, and dust calling out to be swept. She has been trapped in her own little world of household chores from which she cannot escape. What I have learned recently is that she feels that there is no escape. Pressured and hassled by her husband to live up to his legacy of working hard at his career, μητερ feels that she must always be working whenever he is around so that he views her as productive and so he does not ridicule her for being unimportant or useless.

More on this, I do not think (especially after asking her myself), myself) that she has any idea what she would do with herself if either her chores or her spouse were to be taken away be taken away from her. I say this because if she had anything waiting on the other side of her pile of chores, then she might just work harder or faster or more efficiently to get them done, realizing that there is something more to live for on the other end, but she doesn't. Many times, she refuses to do simple things that would greatly lessen her load, and I think I have already described why. A contributing factor may also be that she is afraid to ask for help, even when she direly needs it. When she does ask for help, she feels bad for doing so. This is understandable, but that doesn't make it good or acceptable in any fashion. (I apologize for the formatting error, if there is one by the time this is posted. I'm not sure how to fix it, nor how to program HTML, but if anyone does know how to turn the auto-formatting or fix the spacing, letting me know would be greatly appreciated).

For as long as my memory lives, she has feared her spouse more than death itself, and refusing any type of confrontation, has chosen to run away from him, sometimes physically but often not, always mentally. She is never quite ''there,'' but is always guarded, hiding whatever she really feels. If she is angry, she becomes passive aggressive and sarcastically guilt trips anyone who has done her wrong, even if by accident, claiming that she just doesn't care anymore about whatever anyone does to her. Clearly this is not the case, because if she truly did not care, she would think nothing of it and would go on about her life unchanged. Running is the only way she knows how to take care of her problems, and even then she is not very good at it, because she can never escape, and has for all intents and purposes, given up and now only awaits the Reaper's bone-fisted knock on her door to rid her of her ails.

...To Be Continued (if I leave this as a draft, then I'm afraid it may never be published).

Incidental

As I am now starting a venture into the world of Linux, I need to save a list of the programs that I use just in case my hard drive gets wiped out and I need to download them all again, so with that said:
Google Chrome

Pidgin

Microsoft Office

Google Earth

Firefox

Skype

Project 64

Picasa

Windows Movie Maker

Gimp 2

YouTube to Mp3 Converter

Codeblocks
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(This was written about a month ago, but I had not yet published it. I just found it as a draft, so I guess I'll just publish it because I'll need it for when I reformat again).

1

This entry is less a Christening and more a test drive than anything.  

Direly and desperately I lacked a cathartic outlet for my once passionately held craft of writing, and with only a little lackluster inspiration I brought myself to start a handful of new blogs to see if it may rekindle a flame that has been all but snuffed out.  Thus so, this story begins the way any good story does:  It was a dark and stormy night...