I recently had a conversation with a colleague over lunch that included the topic of “what did you do during Christmas break?” She asked first, so I told of my experience. Then, I listened to her describe her trip to Zurich, and Munich, and good times with her sister and two adult children. Quite the holiday, it sounded like.

Of course, I had had nothing like that to report. I stayed at home. And worked on my computer conversion. Yep, that would be me: TechnoMonk. Hunched over a computer his entire vacation.

Really, my time off didn’t resemble anything like a European getaway, but it was a big deal for me. I now am back in the world of Macintosh. Finally.

I bought my first Macintosh (my first computer, actually), a Mac Plus, in early 1986. (It had ONE WHOLE MEGABYTE of RAM!) The agency where I was working at the time had purchased a Mac, and from the very first moment I touched it, I said “I have to have one of these!” Of course, I had no idea how I could make that happen. That was 25 years ago and, although I was employed full-time, I wasn’t exactly getting rich being a counselor. And while the Mac was an “insanely great” machine, it was also insanely expensive. However, I was not to be denied. About ten days after I first played with that magical machine, I owned one. I had to borrow the money, but it simply was not a thing I was going to live without.

I was a fanatic about owning a Macintosh. Being a “Mac person” became part of my identity. I found myself doing rather crazy things like joining the local Macintosh User Group (CMUG), and even, for a time, serving as a board member of that organization. I still had that Mac when I moved from Oregon to Indiana in 1990, ultimately replacing it with another Mac (the latest and greatest, the first of the Power Macs). I remember that, when I finally got rid of the Mac Plus, a friend remarked that I’d gone, computer-wise, from a clunky Volkswagen to a shiny-new Mercedes overnight.

So, again, in 1994, I had this whole other beautiful Macintosh machine to spend endless hours with. I wrote my dissertation on that second machine, and ultimately moved it back to Oregon with me in 1995.

However, the organization where I was employed, from 1995 to 2004, was almost entirely a PC environment. I had bargained a Mac for my office when I arrived in 1995, but by 1997, I was pretty fed up with being out of synch, computer-platform-wise, with everyone around me, and I capitulated. I asked for a PC at work, and bought a PC for home.

I told people, “I joined the rest of the world.”

Hence, I was out there in the Windows wilderness from 1997 to 2009. During the fall of 2009, I was planning to replace my 2004 Windows XP Dell with a Windows 7 Dell, when it just seemed good sense for me to head back to Mac. I was influenced by my friends, Facebook and otherwise, and, of course, by those delightful Mac commercials.

So, during the last few months, I researched the latest Mac models and finally ordered a 15” MacBook Pro, with practically all the bells and whistles that one can have…and I use it, on the desktop, with a new 24” Dell UltraSharp monitor (that I had purchased before deciding on the Mac). The whole process has been somewhat tedious, but fun at times too. It’s taken a few weeks to where the whole “conversion” is complete.

That’s how I spent my winter break: re-entering the world of Macintosh. And, oh baby, am I glad to be back!

It hurts my eyes; it hurts my heart. It just simply hurts: watching even a small portion of the television coverage of the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.

Last night, for example, CBS’s 60 Minutes had, as its lead story, a description of the 82nd Airborne Division’s efforts to rescue, feed and protect the victims. Included in the piece was the work of some physicians, from Doctors Without Borders, who were amputating limbs with rusty, unsterilized hacksaws – the only “surgical instruments” they had available. We also saw video of some of the thousands of bodies that were being scooped up and put into dump trucks in order to be transported away for burial in mass graves.

The scope of this disaster is unimaginable. I can look and listen, but I cannot comprehend. We’ve seen the tragedies of the Indonesian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina but, somehow, this feels like it’s in an entirely different universe of terrible.

I feel helpless, despairing, depressed. All I can do is send money. Which I did once. Then did again. I have given to Doctors Without Borders, but there are several organizations trying to help. There’s a list of them on the NBC website.

So, I’ve decided: my life is not stranger than fiction. My life is precisely like a real life, filled with joy, sadness, large and small risks, successful experiments, failed ventures, good people, weird and bad people, health, illness, disappointments, met and unmet expectations, and lots and lots of loss.

The differences I spoke of in my last entry turned out to be, as I had thought, irrefutably irreconcilable. There was simply going to be no way for the two of us to pursue a life path together with the clash in values that had emerged.

In an incredibly brief meeting yesterday, we parted ways peacefully and amicably. It took less than ten minutes at a local coffee shop to exchange keys and trade a few personal items from car to car.

While there are residual feelings of sadness and loss, feelings that I imagine will hang around for some time, at this point those negative emotions are offset by a profound sense of relief.

I tried. She tried. In the end, it simply didn’t work.

In the movie Stranger than Fiction, IRS auditor Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is asked by university professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) what his favorite word is.

“Integer,” is the reply.

Now, that isn’t a bad choice for an accountant.

I’ve often thought about how I might answer that question; I believe what I’d say is “epistemology.” It is a word with such lyrical quality and, additionally, has great meaning to me as an academic. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, asking such questions, “what does it mean to know?”

Of course, one does not have to be an academic, scientist, or philosopher to love that word or be concerned with epistemological issues. How it is we know, how we come to know, and what we count as knowledge, are concepts everyone deals with in everyday life, in our ordinary and not-so-ordinary interactions with others.

Naturally, what we know, or think we do, bumps up against the elusive, oft-debated, and intellectually-and-emotionally-charged notions of “truth” and “reality.” What is true? What is real? … are questions we do not typically spend a lot of time thinking about, mostly because we tend to take a lot of things for granted. But our differing beliefs about what we know as true and real, as individuals, groups, organizations and nations, are the source of immense miscommunication, angst and conflict in the world. Perhaps we could and should spend a little more time paying attention to how it is we know what we know.

As I write this, I am in the midst of a gigantic inner struggle about the nature of reality: about what I think I know. Over the course of the last couple of weeks or so, a significant person in my life has expressed a worldview about our shared experience that is hugely at odds with my own. In fact, where once there was some sense of shared understanding, and a mission of mutual purpose, it all seems now to have been replaced with confusion, defensiveness, anger and distance.

Our versions of reality are, to me, incomprehensibly disparate. They are, perhaps, totally irreconcilable.

So, here I sit with my thoughts: about the nature of reality. And relationship.

Breathing in and out, in and out. Alone. Confused. Finding myself, once again, in the middle of a life that’s stranger than fiction.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the last of the brothers, died and was buried this week. Along with millions of others, I will miss him.

It’s been reported that Kennedy wrote a letter to Pope Benedict XVI earlier in the year, asking for the prayers of His Holiness, as he struggled with the brain cancer that ultimately took his life. In that communication he admitted to being “an imperfect human being.”

Of course, yes, he was imperfect. So were Jack and Bobby. So is everyone. We are, after all, human. Despite his imperfections, however, he was a giant of a man... doing so much for so many for so many years.

David Horsey published an editorial cartoon last Thursday, with this Kennedy quote:

If by a liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind; someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions; someone who cares about the welfare of the people, their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties; someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicion that grips us; if that is what they mean by a liberal, I am proud to be a liberal.

RIP, Teddy.