Reda's Pouch

Pebbles and evil

2010-07-23T00:04:00.001-04:00

Disclaimer: This post is some kind of failed allegory for something but I’m not sure what.

Little does the little pebble have going for it. It is, by definition, an unsubstantial fragment of something that was once substantial but that is now just pebbles. Pebbles—if I may be so coarse as to discuss for a moment all pebbles at once as though the whole lot shared a lineage or an ancestor—are a geological diaspora with no hope of the nostos that drives diasporas. There will be no reunion with volcanic relatives in the mantle or whatever crusty oven whence they were baked.

A pebble is certainly no boulder, rock, or stone. It is not even a shard or nugget. It ought not deserve a place in the lithic family.

Now, the stupid pebble’s raison d’etre is to give the surf an audience and the stone skimmer a hobby as it makes little prayers for surface tension. I don’t know what it prays for. An abrasive life on the beach destined for even smaller pebblehood or a very similar life amid currents and crustaceans where pebblehood is rock bottom. Either way, pebblehood ends with sandhood after much wailing and gnashing of pebbles.

I don’t know if the pebble is endowed with a soul. Maybe some are. The good ones. Or, more likely, the bad ones. Because why would a good pebble have a soul? An evil pebble needs a soul because a soul can be punished. And pebblehood is, if you accept the forecoming conclusions, certainly enough punishment for any soul. Thus all pebbles are, quite likely, evil by nature. Well that’s surprising.

All is right and just in a world where evil meets with its punishment at no cost to the taxpayer.

42

2009-05-28T09:19:00.003-04:00

There's often something else in the background. A weird platelet count, a low sodium level, a little anion gap--something that might be easier to ignore than to try to figure out how it fits into the clinical picture. I'm assuming that I'm going to at least notice these annoying details. That is, I'm already assuming that I'm vigilant.

Vigilance makes a doctor good. A good doctor will diagnose the pneumonia and treat it. Curiosity makes a good doctor better. A curious doctor will be driven to figure out why these other lab values are a little off because, it’s true that there could be all sorts of silly explanations for an out-of-range test result, yet the doctor's job is not only to figure out what's not wrong, but also--when the dust settles--what is.

Like any other job, medicine can become routine. The evidence that we have been accumulating on medical and surgical interventions has to some extent standardized our practice. Data have helped to define the 'standards of care' for investigation and management of many diseases. Some of these well-studied diseases for which there is more or less widespread agreement on management include heart attack, heart failure, diabetes, many infections, and certain kinds of trauma, to name a few. The purpose of evidence-based medicine however is not to make the job of the doctor easier nor is it to make sure everyone gets the same treatment just for equality's sake, but rather to apply particular medical decisions that have been shown, hopefully in high-quality experiments, to be effective. The medical community decides that interventions that improve outcomes should become standard because they're better.

The word that doctors use is not 'standard,' though. It's 'guideline.' This is not because doctors think that they're better than everyone else and that rules shouldn't apply to them. Rather it's to make room for judgment because it is impossible to study every intervention in every population of potential patients, and because even effective interventions are rarely effective for every eligible patient. We have therapies that may approach 100% efficacy (eg, penicillin for syphilis), but they are few and even they're not perfect. We think that preventing death in only 1 out of 42 people treated with a beta-blocker for two years after having a heart attack is pretty good. In addition, accepted algorithms for investigating disease will not include every possibility, so the doctor needs to have an index of suspicion for diagnoses that may not be on any algorithm.

So, is this science or art?

Everyone knows that doctors like to say that medicine is as much art as science. My own quibble with this has nothing to do with medicine (nor with art or science for that matter) but rather with the public's perception of these things. The word 'science' evokes--in most people I think--accurate, precise, and reproducible results. But science is nothing more than approximations and arbitrary constants, especially in the practical application of physics, chemistry, and biology. Engineers have to compromise and allow for some inaccuracy and imprecision in their end design ('tolerances') because they have to live in the real world where mathematics has to be a little looser than it is in the classroom.

At its heart, science is built on hypothesis-testing. Who comes up with hypotheses? People. Observant, curious, creative, artistic people. If hypotheses could be generated based on precise formulae then we could just build a science machine and let it figure out the secret to life, the universe, and everything for us. We know how that would turn out.

Science, like art, requires creativity (neither science nor art are sui generis things). I'm not going to pretend that I can define art, but maybe besides creativity it might include some element of perception by an observant person. At its simplest, then, art is a creative person's response to an observation synthesized into some form (canvas, performance, sculpture, music, prose, poetry, speech, hypothesis--whatever). Science is the same thing I think. Isaac Newton observes that an apple falls from a tree. It's fair to say that millions of people have seen this happen before him but he is curious--inspired--enough to design unique and creative experiments to calculate the rate at which it falls. He is finally able to synthesize his data and determine the gravitational constant (which is an estimate). Newton's laws are works of art. Da Vinci's sketches are science.

The doctor is a scientist, but the scientist is an artist and the artist is a curious human. The uncurious doctor is a mediocre one because he is just a human who is happy with what he knows and doesn’t care about what he doesn’t.

Screenplay: Providence's Wildebeest

2008-11-04T22:05:00.008-05:00

This is an excerpt from a screenplay by the legendary Ingvar Stig Ogvsbrotkulniiskaa. This was his last work before his death in 1994 of lutefisk poisoning and also exposure. Notably, it is the first screenplay ever to require audience participation in the form of sound effects during the diabetic baby fight scene, which was nominated for a Golden Ice Pick at the Kirovsk Novelty Film Party in 1993. His works focused largely on the unknown and some of the known, though in some cases he also included the marginally familiar as well as some of the fairly obvious (though this was rare and indeed included merely as satire). In retrospect, there is a clear progression of political views in his works from pure ignorance to ignorant indifference to confused apathy that has made his film adaptations of newspaper articles compelling for so many disaffected youth as well as the illiterate.

Mr Ogvsbrotkulniiskaa was known for translating his works into many different languages himself, a remarkable talent in its own right especially since it is almost a certainty that he only spoke Finnish and a few words of Russian (enough, it has been rumored, to get him arrested by the MVD once in 1958 for public lakeside pessimism in Novgorod; he was later released following revocation of his ice fishing license and a promise never to return).

Now, I include the author's own English translation of the first scene of Providence's Wildebeest, a powerful condemnation of cowardice and theft and a loving collage of stunningly poignant dialogue. In this, the opening scene, we learn that knowledge is ignorance and age is meaningless in a world where years are frozen to the ceiling like icicles that may fall at any moment and hurt someone--or worse, cause an insurance flap.

INT. ROOM -- NIGHT

The room is dark. There is 1 window through which light from a street lamp comes. But even the light is dark. A man sits at a table. We see him from behind. The door opens behind us and a yellow rectangle briefly dances on the man's back around the silhouette of another man. The DOOR CLOSES.

MAN #1

(Staring out the window, motionless.)
I knew you'd come.

MAN #2
(Still out of view. He has a deep, aged voice.)
Quiet. You know nothing.

We see MAN #1 jump out of his chair and face MAN #2, and now we see that MAN #2 is dressed in a black three-piece suit and thin black tie set against an agonizingly starched white shirt. He is smoking an ivory pipe filled beyond the bowl-brim with rarefied yak hair.

MAN #1
(Wide-eyed, panting, savoring the smoke.)
Your yak hair is magnificent.

MAN #2
Indeed. Your sense of smell is profoundly uncanny. My yak hair is cut fresh morningly with a pair of cheap aluminium scissors. It was the way of the ancients.

MAN #1
(Starting to pace.)
You abuse your position sir. You know it and I know it.

MAN #2
(Slaps MAN #1 with a velvet undergarment from Belgrade.)
Silence. I've brought you here for more than your sassy insolence.

MAN #1
(Weeping.)
You promised me that which was undeliverable. I should have known!

MAN #2
You had the longing of a broken heart. Fool! Yes, you should've known that the banana-Nutella-banana crepe you desired was not attainable.
(He removes his spectacles and peers into MAN #1's nostrils.)
No man has the acumen to place Nutella between two layers of banana. No man would dare to even try. Cardinal Greigel von Nusselkopf-Schokolade himself was excommunicated for merely slicing a plantain near some cocoa not a half-century ago. That for which your loins pine is implausible.

MAN #1
(Removes an unconscious wildebeest from his pocket and now wears a look of horrified indifference on his gaunt face.)
You leave me no choice, old man.

MAN #2
Come to your senses child!

The streetlight flickers and the sun rises immediately. A glass of orange juice from the countryside appears on the table, which we now see is made of wax. We can also now see that MAN #1 is MAN #4, to whom we have not yet been introduced. We gasp.

MAN #1/MAN #4

You bastard!

MAN #2
(His handkerchief is ablaze and he savors the acrid smoke like a connoisseur.)
You have brandished your last wildebeest, ignorant roach!

MAN #2 waters his suit with the orange juice. A beautiful plant sprouts from his lapel and flowers before our eyes. It bears an ugly poisonous fruit which kills MAN #1 with a blow to the spine. The sun sets and the streetlight flickers on and we fade to black. MAN #2's VOICE can now be heard, menacing, old, and decrepit.

MAN #2
It was not hate that was this man's undoing, nor was it love. It was apathy. And a vicious genetically-modified apple with an unlicensed firearm.

END SCENE

When Yignaz Boroslovosibirskov directed this masterpiece in his film of the same title in 1993, it is said that he exhausted his body's supply of tears and resorted to a lacrimal gland transplant to regain his ability to weep (he has since died of complications of immunosuppressive therapy for graft rejection). The entire film was shot on location on the smooth side of an ancient mud-brick wall in Kamchatka in glorious black and grey for a grainy look that pummels the heart with relevance and gravitas. The writer of this note himself has only just recovered--after 15 years and 3 colonoscopies.

HMR, December 27, 2008

Helsinki

Quiet hour

2008-07-16T03:30:00.020-04:00

Mr. Peterson has a pulmonary embolism--a clot in one of the blood vessels going from his heart to his lungs that threatens to keep his blood from picking up oxygen. It most likely came from somewhere lower down in his body, sliding up his vena cava and into the right side of his heart. While there isn't much that we can do about it now, we need to prevent the clot from getting bigger and new clots from getting started in the first place--he needs heparin. Because everyone responds a little differently to heparin, we have to make sure that his blood gets tested every few hours (around the clock) and adjust his dose until he is in the therapeutic range.

I am the 'night float' intern; I take care of patients like Mr. Peterson (which is, of course, not his real name) overnight while the three day teams get whatever sleep they can. It's quieter at night, and with only the occasional beeping of infusion pumps, telemetry monitors, and pulse oximeters all just out-of-sync, I'd even say it's soothing. So far I've been too terrified of something going wrong in the hospital to go to sleep, but I've become used to sleeping during the day. Not so for my patients.

I should say that I've never spent a solid amount of time in the hospital at night before this, my first month of internship. As such, I'd never really thought about how care continues through the night. I never considered that, when I ordered a test or a medication to be performed or administered 'q6h'--every six hours--patients would at some point have to be awakened from sleep during at least one of those instances. And, of course, worse for q4h orders, and so on. I just never thought about it.

Now, I am sitting in a call room and waiting for 4 am when I am to draw another tube of blood from Mr. Peterson. Just a few hours earlier overnight, I had woken him for the first tube and the result showed that I needed to increase his heparin infusion rate because his blood was still clotting too quickly, which I did. Now, I need to wake him for more blood and I know that if I don't, and his response to the increased heparin dose was not adequate, the complications could be disastrous. His clot could get bigger, or a new one could materialize and shoot up his veins through his heart and into another pulmonary artery. Pulmonary emboli can be fatal.

Often, with busy day teams trying to get through their mounds of work, little thought goes into how much sleep patients might need. I mentioned this in an off-hand comment to a colleague and he said, "Patients are always in bed and have nothing better to do than sleep!" But what about the quality of that sleep, interrupted as it is without fail for this blood pressure or that blood draw, sometimes barely an hour apart and not usually more than four or five? It's not surprising that patients--even the most positive and pleasant ones--quickly tire of being in the hospital. Insomnia and irritability go hand in hand.

Although many researchers have discussed the importance of sleep, including in critically ill patients, none have actually studied the effect of its deprivation on hospitalized patients and hospitals do a poor job of promoting good sleep hygiene. In the hospital where I work, a large academic medical center, there are signs posted at the nurses' stations telling staff and visitors that between 2 am and 3 am our patients are asleep and would appreciate quiet. Nurses, doctors, and phlebotomists walk into patients' rooms at all hours of the night for any number of reasons--urgernt or not--turn on the light, poke around, and sometimes forget to turn the light off or close the door when we leave. Alarms, chatter, and beeps puntuate the dark hum of the hospital at night, and they would certainly keep me awake. Sleep is clearly not a priority here, nor is it at any hospital where I've trained so far. How could it be? This is not a hotel; these people are sick and we are working tirelessly and at the expense of our own sleep hygiene to get them well again.

But sleep does matter. Several pre-clinical and clinical studies have shown us that deprivation of sleep, and particularly REM sleep (thought to be the most 'restful' phase of sleep, and the most fragile), affects all sorts of brain and body systems from memory and mood to the heart and general health. In one study, rats were shown to be more sensitive to pain the less REM sleep they got. In many other studies, shortened sleep cycles have been associated with obesity and diabetes--in humans. In a very recent Chinese study, also in humans, sleep deprivation increased inflammation and blood clotting--both involved in stroke and heart disease. And pulmonary embolism.

So what is the right thing to do? In Mr. Peterson's case the decision is simple: I'm going to wake him up. His life is on the line. But what about Ms. Simmons in room 436 who's getting routine (that is, not urgent) lab tests at 5 am--the time designated for AM blood draws throughout the hospital--despite having been kept awake until after midnight in our busy ER awaiting admission to the ward? No one really stops to think about how little sleep this poor sick woman has had last night and how important it might be to her recovery here. We have far too much else on our minds.

Anyway, it's time to go wake someone up. This time I have the luxury of not agonizing over the decision. It's not always this easy.

Favorite words

2008-05-26T23:34:00.006-04:00

#3. Diphthong. Diphthong. Diphthong.

A word so ballsy it doesn't even come close to demonstrating its own meaning despite a surplus of idle letters.

I make a point of creating social situations in which 'diphthong' is not only a propos, but rather expected. Yes, I'm very talented.

Come on. You see it and you just want to say it aloud. It makes you want to twist your mouth into trying new maneuvers. Do you pronounce the 'ph' or just the 'p'? Say it both ways. Say it ten different ways. If you're using this word, I'm sure you have the time.

L'homme de 70 kg est mort !

2008-05-15T18:32:00.018-04:00

I am the exemplar. I am the specimen in your anatomy atlas, the most deeply understood datum in your pathology textbook, the model to whom the parameters of pharmacology apply the most accurately. I am the standard-issue chassis: medically, humanly--decidedly--average. I am the 70-kg male.

Yet an exhausting week weaving up and down midtown Manhattan clearly leaves me thinking that the 70-kg male is dead--at least economically--in the estimation of clothiers and cobblers. Especially this 70-kg male, searching for a simple white shirt with a french cuff that does not make me look like I'm wearing my daddy's nightshirt for walkies. Or for a light jacket, or a pair of trousers, or even a pair of shoes that actually measure what they portend to measure.

As usual, several things are bothering me at the moment and if you know me, then you know that I wouldn't have it any other way.

The fattest common denominator.

It seems that clothing manufacturers and their retail henchmen are complicit in this plot to systematically disrobe those no longer falling within the nation's ballooning average. Put another way, they are seeking to surreptitiously recreate 'average' in their own bloated overgrown image.

This runs deep. Oh I'll feed you, children. Gargle this mindful of truth-flavored listerine:

The people eat. The people get fat. The people try to buy clothes but oh! now they've moved up a couple of sizes and they feel bad, guilt-stricken by their doctors and ridiculed by bufoons in fat suits. Meanwhile, they are herded into Big & Tall and have to start dressing like Cedric the Entertainer. No, you're not going to like the way you look, I guarantee it.

Oh but here's the hat-trick.

The clothing giants, hand-in-dirty-hand with the food conglomerates, agree to slowly increase the real sizes of their clothes while maintaining their labeled sizes. In essence a medium is now the size of what was previously large and a small is now what used to be medium. And the little guy gets shut out. We, the old mediums, are now sifting through piles of small and extra-small and shopping at Petite Sophisticate which is very gay because the stretch-pants-and-skirt look is not unisex.

Système International d'Unités? Bah and harumph.

It doesn't stop there. Not content with the outerwear and the casual vestments of the commonfolk (sized as they are in an appropriately common and course scale: s, m, l, xl, xxl, xxxl, 4xl, 5xl, and two-seat-minimum), the sartorial serpents are infusing their venom into our all-important standard units.

How else could it be that, despite being a very clear 9.5 on the Brannock device (pictured here), I must purchase Johnston and Murphy's in a size 8.5? Or Kenneth Cole's and Aston Grey's in a size 8? So what if I wasn't going to buy them anyway? I should be able to try on a pair of $350 shoes at the store with confidence as I gather the necessary capital over the next few years.

Why is there so much variability in 30x30 trousers? Some fit perfectly, yet many hang from my frame like wet underpants.

Why is it that the neck of this 70-kg male--an exquisitely empiric 14.5 inches--happens to be the smallest size in production anywhere? Still, there is not a 14.5 shirt that will fit me adequately enough to look presentable. When I am told by the helpful salesman at Thomas Pink that I'd be hard pressed to find 'a man's shirt' in my size without having it tailored, and that--if pressed for time--I should shop in the boys' department, I feel so very small. And little boys don't wear shirts with French cuffs, sir. Cufflinks are a choking hazard.

From the ashes, a gaunt phoenix arises!

I know that I am not the smallest man on Fifth Avenue. I know there are people in the Village who share my travails, who've felt the diminution of standing next to the mother of a prepubescent scamp trying not to cringe at the horrible things t-shirts have stamped on them these days. I've seen these men: skinny, lanky men, wispy even. It is as though our money is stained yet we have no voice.

Brothers!

We must speak as one. Join me now to fight the tyrany of these coddlers of the corpulent, these pamperers of the portly, these indulgers of the inhumanly big! They subserviently change their tallies for the tall and the tubby, and yet they spurn the business of the slim and the slight! We say they can't have it both ways! We say we can no longer be the average when it suits science, while being the extra-small when it suits suits. We can no longer abide the slights of this...this obesity-industrial complex! React! Rebel! Revolt!

Or we could just go for coffee. Either way we can meet for sandwiches at Ben's Deli on 38th and 7th but I can't be out too late (my wife, she worries). Or bring a sack lunch why don't you, we might eat outside if it's nice. And a beverage maybe? Whatever.

The dojo of the master putter of the foot in the mouth

2008-03-24T13:19:00.014-04:00

There is an art to making an arse of oneself. I have practiced the ephemeral wushu of the social nitwit, studied the polished crudeness of the transcendent imbecile, and perfected a flawless mimicry of the natural idiot. I constantly challenge myself by dusting the most tranquil social landscapes with my lovingly crafted organic awkwardness. Just a spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but it totally ruins caviar.

I paint my world with an angel's lock brush dipped in smooth golden weirdness.

I make my awkwardness myself in my distillery from the rarest, purest, and sweetest of character flaws. The craft is delicate and arduous, requiring patience and an apetite for one's own foot.

First, I gently warm twenty gallons of misunderstanding in a cherrywood cask. I then crush four pounds of self-esteem and drop that into the cask and stir gently and regularly over a fortnight with a four-hundred year old oak ladle inscribed with the words 'Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui. Quod non cotidie.'

Then, delicately, I add juice of stutter root, a fine distilled licqeur of ignoring better judgement, and granulated introversion.

By this time, the preparation has become thick but clumpy. I scoop out any precipitating self-awareness and inhibition with a gold sieve and feed it to my cat, Minerva.

Then, I bottle the sweet nectar and sprinkle liberally in the center of groups of three to four people seconds before redirecting my foot's Qi through my mouth with the grace and purpose of a master capoeirista. O berimbau na roda de Capoeira!

'What's that you say? Really? You know who else I heard is going? Elizabeth!'

'But I'm Elizabeth.'

'Oh. Then I don't believe we've met. I'm an arse.'

And you may address me as maestro chef sensei Haatem-san.

Cooking with old butter...

2008-03-16T11:55:00.003-04:00

...'is not a good idea' is the rest of that sentence.

Top ten most difficult antibiotics to market

2008-03-14T09:23:00.004-04:00

I used to write top ten lists for NYMC's student paper, The Goose (come to our campus, we have the goose droppings to back up that name...do you?). Anyway, I was looking back at some of them and a few made me laugh. Again, being a dork helps.

Top ten most difficult antibiotics to market

10. Ceftriagain
9. Cephalohopeitworx
8. Sulfeggedaboutit
7. Ciprollodice
6. Impotenem
5. Stripteasomysin
4. Anything advertised by John Madden saying “BOOM!”
3. Ouijacillin
2. Aunt Jemima’s Spicycillin
1. Penichillin’ G

The journey (don't forget your $400 purse)

2008-03-11T18:39:00.006-04:00

I was about to give up on finding my way out of Wolf Blitzer's beard and finally breaking out of the Situation Room when I was captivated by this during a commercial break:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG79nd8ej94

It was beautiful, and it got better and better, but also worse and worse as I tried to imagine which purveyor of useless crap--which cancerous bastion of consumerism--would take responsibility for this seemingly profound piece. And the answer had me surprised, laughing, and wincing all at the same time. That hurts.

Achilles' ball

2008-03-09T20:53:00.009-04:00

As the result of misfortune befalling a friend (s/p ruptured achilles tendon--while playing racquetball--with months of recovery ahead of him) I was able to borrow some of his racquetball gear. I'd never played racquetball or squash before and have never liked tennis (except on the Wii, where there are no balls to chase and a whole stadium full of PEZ dispensers).

Wikipedia says that racquetball was invented as a fun and easy-to-learn sport.

So I got together with another friend with two intact achilles tendons to see if we couldn't learn. She was just as much of a beginner as I was, and we both sucked so badly that the gym owner came into the court to ask if we needed any 'help.' He said that he was the 'resident racquetball pro here' and that he could 'help with the rules.' We told him that we were fine and that we were just warming up. By this point we each had a few welts which I assumed was normal and proof that we knew what we were doing.

He left us alone but not before some parting advice: 'Okay, but you guys might want to try playing against the back wall.' Whatever, douchenozzle.

Anyway, we played a few more times and were clearly getting better. I was hitting the ball with the stringy bit of the racquet towards somewhere in front of me, while she was getting competitive and kept telling me to 'suck it!' even though obviously I couldn't. We were getting really cocky despite the fact that we weren't even playing by the rules. Yes we could've looked them up but who has time to read the internet? That's right. Good for you.

Point is, we were awesome.

So yesterday, I played with another friend who's been playing since she was 18. I thought that it was time; I thought that I could regulate, maintain, and retaliate. I was using words like 'killshot' and 'ouch that's going to leave a mark' and I was getting a great workout.

For her though, I think I was more entertainment than opponent because I totally suck at racquetball.

Zen diagnosis

2008-03-08T07:20:00.013-05:00

So I've been watching episodes of Namaste Yoga on FitTV and trying to play along when my body will allow me to place parts of it where they don't really need to be. It's true, though, that you can only achieve a deep union of spirits when you can surrender your mind and scratch your left ear with your right big toe from behind. It's fun too. Once you loosen up the joints with some strategic dislocations, the ligaments can start to work with you, not against you. That is zen.

As I was reflecting, and because I'm a dork, names of diseases started to force their way into my meditative center to ripple my heart chakra. It was annoying but kind of funny (if you're also a dork). Here's an even nine of them.

Metaphysical acidosis
Transcendental thrombocytopenic purposefulness
Adult Inspirational Distress Syndrome
Nirvana gonorrhea
Reflectory anemia
Spiritual Liberation monocytogenes
Osteomyelenlightenment
Haikuphilus influenzen
Lymphadenopath-to-wisdom

Sorry. That was stupid. Anyway, namaste.

Favorite words

2008-02-14T23:56:00.010-05:00

#2. Sneeze.

Essentially what I think has come to define American convenience--ease packaged in a tin* and served with a convulsion at mach 0.85--has been preserved through clades of speciation for us, and even refined into the cataclysmic fit of warmth and happiness that it is now. I can only hope that every so often you feel the peppery tickle at the base of your forebrain that is the overture to the spicy Pompeii of nasal schmutz to be ejected out of your face faster than Bill Clinton can spell (but not define) 'is'. Indeed, to stifle the sneeze is patently un-American.

For such a beautiful word to signify such sublime (if brief) rapture is nothing if not heady congruence.

When I sneeze--or even contemplate the word--I forget about the war, waterboarding, torture, warrantless wiretapping, Guantanamo, steroids,** the CIA videotapes, Dick Cheney's man-sized safe, and George W.'s college transcript...***

Just for a split-second.

J'oublie tout. Tellement, je me sens que je jouie.

* Do you remember your periodic table?
** People who say 'roids' should be injected with 50 g of methylprednisolone and left in a TB ward for 6 weeks.
*** I could go on, but I've just sneezed.

President Salix Diabolus

2008-01-15T17:10:00.000-05:00

Caution: This post was processed on equipment that also processes nuts.

After a night of reflection, my eyes hurt from shining the LED directly through the pupils. When my curls dried out for the second time I was surprised to find myself thinking. These were no ordinary thoughts; I was consumed by an intense hunger and found relief and satiety in passages of cheddar and pages of summer sausage. The cheddar was melted and easily scooped up with morsels of bread. Toasted.

The ensemble was sublime in ways that would be best imagined if my brain were made entirely of taste buds. No time to think; gotta taste.

At times like these, when it's late at night and I's gots the hunger, I watch old movies. So I was watching Tron, starring The Dude, neon, and papier mâché. If you haven't seen it, don't worry, it's unnecessary. Perhaps you've seen Tron 2: Master Control Program's Got Guns and Raybans, Bitch. I think it was released under an alternative title, The Matrix, and I guess it made some coin.

Idea for a movie of my own: A man discovers that 'Miller Fisher' is actually one person, not two. Measured conviviality abounds (within reason) and he is hailed as a man of great usualness and superhuman averageness. In the ensuing sequence, we follow the protagonist's journey far beyond ticket booths and turnstiles to the very edge of mass transit on a banal (but typical) commute to an ok part of the Upper West Side from deep, deep inside Queens' sooty heart. Along the way he becomes disillusioned with the promises of rhythm during a breakdancing spectacle by the pregnant b-girl troupe The Water Breakers at 42nd Street. He arrives at his office, on time, and nothing about his demeanor says that he's going to put in any less than eight hours today. He begins to do typical 'work' things such as moving papers about and spanking the secretary with a stapler tucked between his ear and his shoulder [will consult employed people for more details]. This goes on for one hundred twenty eight minutes before we cut to a group of adorable babies playing amid a litter of kittens batting at balls of yarn on the 89th floor girders of a construction site for two minutes. In the background, we hear gay* flute arpeggios and tambourines. Fade out gradually to black and silence.

Did you feel it?

Alright, you guys like politics? I don't know much about all this high falutin' political what have you except that I think we should start voting for trees. They make oxygen and fruit and they're not weak on terrorism or immigration. They've got strong morals, except for that satanic willow Salix diabolus. He's a bad seed. And his sap tastes like high fructose corn syrup, because it is.

* The intended connotation here is 'merry'. (Yes, this is part of my effort to wrest the English language from those who would seek to stick it up their bums.)

Watching the road

2007-12-17T08:08:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I think I'm the only person who doesn't know what he wants, which is a silly thing to think. Often, I think that maybe I'm just not picky enough. Less often, I think that I don't think about it enough and so haven't proactively developed a taste for anything. Rarely, I think that I just haven't yet encountered anything resembling something I would want. But I don't really believe that. I've exposed myself to plenty. To plenty in excess of plenty multiplied by wastage of time raised to the power of whatever.

It turns out that I have been thinking and that I know more about what I want than I knew I know now, nearly new as the knowledge is. Call it maturity or inevitability, but maybe the sum of all indifference is truth or even wisdom. Well, I'm eleven years short of forty so let's not get carried away just yet. Instead, let's call it 'about freakin' time.'

Is this about a woman? No, it's about my job. Somehow I've made a decision about which I wasn't aware until I heard myself say it and--oddly--it made so much sense! I talked about what I've been looking for with such confidence and eloquence that the stuttering, indecisive, impassionate person in me put down his spray bottle of bleach, pulled off the rubber gloves, and, for the first time, let some dust settle. I'd been so busy fretting about the order and congruity of everything in my life that I wasn't experiencing my experience, just cataloguing it and shelving it neatly, plenty in excess of plenty multiplied by 29 years. I'm glad that someone was watching the road.

Viva la Revolución Antiséptica!

2007-11-11T17:07:00.000-05:00

I've written at length, though never coherently,* about the mockery we make of curbing the spread of nosocomial infections by insisting on wearing ties. Fie upon the tie et cetera.

Anyway, ties are only the beginning of my usually pointless griping. The original idea for my anti-sartorial campaign came in the cliched form of a dream. Actually, it was a nightmare, but it wasn't as scary as it was boring and horribly written and shot. The director was probably asleep during filming. Suffice it to say that the talentless protagonist (through whose eyes this farce was depicted) was being interviewed at a prestigious teaching hospital for a residency position and was not clothed in the complete and traditional interview getup.

Namely, he was missing a tie. But also a jacket, a shirt, and pants. And he was unshaven and crusty-eyed. I mean, he had all of these things with him but he was holding them in his hands as if to say, 'I have no use for these! Ask me your questions, sir, and do not mind the hole in my boxers, for I am confident that you will find me to be nothing less than professional.'

Interpret this however you want, but I take it to mean that something must be done about clothing. Obviously, given the popularity of sculpture, nude photography, and sex and pornography, I am right. Don't argue with me, for I can weave a straightjacket of syllogisms around you faster than you can say 'that doesn't make any sense, you idiot.' And it's true, I am an idiot, I should know.

The point is that in addition to banning the necktie in the hospital we must also ban sleeves, white coats, and pants. Every time a tie, shirtsleeve, or pant leg brushes over some germy metropolis on one person's backside, it takes some of those citizens on a ride to the next person's face and, of course, the physician's lunch and no amount of hand sanitizer or handwashing will address the domino effect of cross-contamination. What we need is leadership on this issue. What we need is a Truman Doctrine--a Marshall Plan if you will--for the containment of microbial evil. While I'm no leader, I will gladly take up my position as behind-the-scenes pragmatist and insidious instigator of antimicrobial attrition and realpolitik. A neurotic germophobic George Kennan if you will (and if you won't).

We must therefore institute funding for an armory consisting of the weapons necessary for this war--for make no mistake, that is what this is comrades and we must not shirk our responsibilities! What this plan amounts to is the distribution of scissors to a contingent of able-fingered guerilla housestaff who will use them to carry out lightning raids, cutting dangling bits of clothing not closely adherent to the bodies of caregivers in the hospital. These soldiers of sanitation will fly by nursing stations snipping off germ-dinghies and bacteria-boats as they swarm, bringing back the sleeveless look from the outskirts of fashion onto the catwalk of the clinically responsible.

We must then fortify our offensive with daring propaganda. This is no time for bashfulness comrades, for the revolution cannot wait. Our message must be clear and strong:

The noose of the enemy chokes you! Off with your tie!

Cut off support to the enemy of the people! Cut off your sleeves!

Pants are the haven of the antisocialite germ! Remove them from our midst!

May the sounds of steel kisses and flying fabric resonate in the halls of healing! Viva la Revolución Antiséptica!

* On a parenthetical lever, I don't want to give you the wrong impression. This post will certainly not be coherent either. Homie don't 'play that' and he's n't about t' start today. D' n't question m' use of the apostrophe. It's ours to dispense with as we each please. I don't come to your house and tell you not to end sentences with a preposition.

I want luscious bounce and body in my revolution

2007-10-13T19:24:00.000-04:00

The rain splishles in plipples and plooples and all that I can think about is how liberating it would be for me to have hair that bobbles as I walk. Also, it would be spectacular to have a soundtrackle.

I love pseudoalliteration almost as much as I love myself. What is it about vanity that puts people off? I'm not vain, and I go to great lengths to prove it by actively not being vain in front of other people because obviously they're all looking at me and waiting for me to bust a move (for that is indeed what I might do on the bus from time to time). So I constantly shoot other people looks to figure out what percentages of their brains are occupied by me and my dry split ends. Also, I wonder if they can hear my soundtrack. It's really good. Danny Elfman and Michael Nyman are always getting into their shenanigans while Zbigniew Preisner packs his Polish cable runner into a suitcase and ships him to the West, and Eric Serra makes really interesting sounds by hitting John Tesh over the head with a Korg.

It holds me together.

Actually though, this is what everyone else is thinking:

That guy keeps looking at me. Can I see my reflection in the bus window? Alright, I need to do this without anyone noticing that I'm doing it because that would be vain. I know, I'll act like I'm gazing at that homeless guy across the street with a look of pity on my face, and I'll use that to get a good look at my hair and forehead wrinkles. Are my ears really that big? I bet that's what he's looking at. He can't get enough of my huge elephant ears. Look at all these plastic surgery ads. I wonder why they advertise on the bus.

What does this have to do with the issues? How far would granting me gorgeous curl body and volume advance the cause of bettering the human condition? How does this seemingly trivial topic fit in with the by now famous themes of this acclaimed issue-laden blog--namely humanism, virtuosity, righteousness, seriousness, counterterrorism, war, the economy, and evil (it's all there people, check the labels)? I promise you that I will dispense with each of these items one by one and explain, in detail, what it has to do with humans and so on. I can do it while I wait for the hair serum to work.

[Intelligent debate about important things interrupted by the military-industrial complex. No you shut up, we do exist.]

So, to sum up, ending the suffering of all but the most foregone people can be accomplished with little if no effort and won't cost us more than twenty cents over the next three years. And for just fifty-nine cents more we can supersize our order and save those last few poor sods as well.

And that's how deep conditioner saved the world.

Frisbee golf

2007-10-02T08:37:00.000-04:00

On Sunday I went out with a couple of friends to play frisbee golf. The game isn't quite as athletic as, say, ultimate frisbee, but it's also not as ridiculously unsporty as real golf.

You get three discs: a 'driver,' a 'putter,' and a medium range disc. The driver is heavy, aerodynamic, and incredibly difficult to control. The putter is the lightest, most precise disc but it has the shortest range. The goal is to get any one of your discs into a 'hole,' which is just a metal basket with chains to slow your disc down and guide it into the basket.

Keeping score is just like in golf. Also as in golf, some holes are farther away and harder to get to than others. Some are just plain ridiculous; because we were playing in the middle of a forested park, most of the 18 holes were right the middle of the trees. In one case, the hole happened to have a tree fall right on top of it, as in this photo.

Goethe and the proverbial substance

2007-09-29T11:27:00.000-04:00

In its finality, the cul-de-sac of knowledge impresses those who've been disappointed by education as the mode and mark of social evolution. It is where, in order to learn more (that is, to drive through the proverbial living room of the proverbial house at the end of the cul-de-sac and out into the backyard and through the proverbial fence and into the darkness beyond, perhaps into a ditch or ravine of some sort where we might meet an early but satisfying proverbial death), we must peer over our shoulders at what we learned before we turned into the cul-de-sac o'proverbs after we bought 'cigarettes' at the proverbial corner store when the (proverbial) man said something kind of profound but not so much really because he was selling cigarettes at a corner store and of course every once in a while he'll say something that's not completely bereft of substance as he exhales. That sort of thing makes me feel warm inside.

That reminds me of the time when Goethe and I were camping in a totally appropriate male-bonding sort of way, making 'smores and conversation and dispensing wisdom and recyclables (and recyclable wisdom) across arcades of sparks and embers. He was sugar-high and said something like--and I am translating his medieval German--'Yo Cauliflower, monkey library Simon as scallops handbanana cheek absolute yellowcake* sportyshine leaf-faucet National Public Radio fork.' I'm paraphrasing; my medieval German isn't as superbly excellent as my English.

My memory does fail me at times, but this time I am fairly certain that what G-Tonez was trying to tell me was that we must reflect upon our past if we are to avoid living hand to mouth. To me this just sounds like an elitist assault on the decent hard-working hunter-gatherers in society, especially the ones who have amnesia. But even though he probably meant collective and mostly scientific memory--the (proverbial) shoulders upon which we stand before we can advance as a species--social memory is no exception, I think.

The problem is that memory does fail, and social memory is no exception. One might say that, because of the sheer noise involved in the laying down of memories on a social scale, it is impossible to nuance them with those subtle (and essential) features that temper the imagination and tame the reflexes. Indeed some social memories occupy such an inflamed corner in our collective mind that even accessing those memories tends to lead to wildly impulsive, base, even animal responses. Case in point: September 11, 2001. Despite it not being the first nor the worst event of its kind, our self-proclaimed keepers of the social memory (journalists, politicians) have wrapped us so tightly and rigidly in the inflamed axons of its memory that to move one way or another, to reach into our pockets for nuance, becomes impossible at least as part of the mainstream discourse.

Whenever I use words such as 'mainstream' and 'discourse' I know that I've gone too far and need to shut up.

* I would like to stay off the no-fly list, please, because I have places to go from time to time.

Are you racist?

2007-08-09T18:46:00.000-04:00

Nobody who's not an anti-racist, don't not raise your hand!

Did you pass?

Haatem 1, Racism 0

2007-08-08T20:02:00.001-04:00

Seriously guys. Enough with the racism. Hate is for lamerz.

Writing the hell out of racism

2007-08-08T19:39:00.000-04:00

I am one of those people who think that words can change the world, especially words that are made of electricity and that are written by encouragable energy-balls who have over-mastered the use of the gamepad and the exclamation mark.

August 6 through 12 is International Blog Against Racism Week. What you need to do is:

Get yourself a blog.
Write something in your blog about racism for a week.
Sit back and watch racism get pwned.
Smile because you totally did it!!!!!!!! LOLOLOL

Emotional meteorology

2007-08-07T21:09:00.000-04:00

Warning: This post contains brain violence and emotional nudity. Also, it is ridiculous.

Last night, I was taking a mercury bath and had a thought, maybe. I don't remember. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish I knew how to talk good about my feelings. Like, I want to be able to go from feeling a feeling, to noticing that I am feeling it, to figuring out what feeling it is, to deciding whether or not I like feeling the feeling, to being able to make the words with my brain that would stick to the feeling and make it so that when someone asks me what I'm feeling I can say something that makes sense like, 'hungry' or, 'my heart hurts because I missed the Golden Girls on the TV box.'

That was a bad example. I should come up with a point before bringing forth the examples.

See, I wish I knew how to make points. They told me in school that it was like whittling an arrowhead from a piece of obsidian. Not a big clumpy piece like one you would find buried in a river bed but the nice flat smooth pieces you find in cowboy skeletons that were once part of the circle of life on ocean floors 50 hundred million years ago.* Case in point: I was having a conversation on (in?) the subway and a dude came up to me and told me to get to the point. It was none of his business, so I was like, 'why don't you get to the point?' Really. I wasn't talking to him or to anyone in that car so it was none of any of their businesses. I was having a great conversation nevertheless. Mobile phones don't work in (on?) the subway.

So I gave him the old Garrison Keillor, 'No, no, it's a different story, about a pontoon boat.' And then my studio audience laughed. With me, not at me. 'Ha ha' and not 'hee hee,' as it were.

So to get back to what I was talking about before: some people have what those same people like to call 'emotional intelligence.' As far as I can tell, it's like the force, except it is missing some forcey things the most lamentable of which are levitation and deadly (but peace-loving) skill with a hybrid light saber.

Sometimes I wish I were able to identify the things that I know I must be feeling and to describe them in the same way that I can describe other things that I like such as juice. (Oh my gosh have you had it? It's delicious.) People who have this emotional intelligence feature are ever-aware of their own emotional climate--and they can sense the emotional meteorology of others.

Even though it sounds like a load of goat cud, I wanted to raise my 'emotional IQ,' as it were. One of my good friends claims that he is one of these feeling Jedis. Let's call him 'Linda.' I thought that, since I've been calling him by a girl's name, this might have something to do with why he's so good at keeping in touch with himself. (Don't even.)

So for two weeks, he called me 'Janet' at my request. We would go out for sushi, and I'd say, 'Hey Linda, pass the wasabi.' Then he'd say, 'Janet, I think you're being passive aggressive.'

'Can you shut up and grab me that white tuna** from the conveyor belt? You always get the good seat you bastard, where you get to see what's coming upstream while I have to keep asking you to feed me like a fessacchione. Ooh, wait, is that a $4.00 plate? Forget it. By the way, that's active aggression, right? How'm I doing? Good?'

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish I had wider shoulders so that I could wear a double-breasted pea coat without people thinking that Manute Bol had an albino midget son with a homeostasis problem.

* Note: this is not true at all.
** My second favorite variety of sushi in the world, after eel kabayaki nigiri.

Ireland, Part V

2007-08-01T10:47:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, 13 April

I slept for so long last night; I was extremely tired. I woke up, had a small breakfast, and then went across the street with my clothes from the weekend’s hike to get them washed at the laundromat. Including my shoes. A while later, I’d changed into the more comfortable (and now clean and dry) pair and was able to walk around much less painfully. In fact, after an hour or so, the blisters weren’t bothering me in the slightest. I decided to visit Trinity College, since I’d only walked around the edge of it the last time I was in Dublin. Once inside the campus, I was surprised that I was still in the same city. It’s not a huge campus, but one that is pleasantly spacious in that everything’s not crowded together. There were lawns everywhere, rows of trees, flower beds, benches, people kicking a ball around, and the buildings themselves were beautiful. The library, a relatively massive structure with shelves twenty feet high and tracked ladders to match was most impressive. Again, this could just be my reaction to something so starkly different from what I’ve been getting used to living in London, LSE’s campus being a claustrophobic maze of dirt-caked behemoths lining a narrow street that effectively limits the sun’s reach.

Speaking of sunlight, there was plenty of it, and I decided to try and lose myself in the city for a while, thinking of what to do next, both in the short and long terms. I did get lost, but I only noticed when I found myself at the port. I guessed I’d been walking for more than I’d noticed, taking random turns here and there. It was a lot more difficult finding out where I was than I’d thought it would be.

This is mainly because of Dublin’s deliberately confusing street naming and numbering 'convention.' Streets change names every one or two blocks in Dublin, and the numbering goes up along one side, and down along the other. So while I might have thought I’d be on Dame Street, for example, five minutes later, I’d be on College Street. Personally, I can never remember whether or not I’d accidentally turned somewhere, and the fact that the street name just changes on me like that doesn’t help me find my bearings (which are more often than not misplaced). So it was the better part of half an hour that I spent toiling over my map and asking people what this street was called further down that way. Of course, this being perfectly normal for them, people were amused that I was confused by it. But they don’t know that I could get lost sitting on a park bench.

Anyway, I did find my way back from wherever it was I’d ended up. But I got to see a lot of Dublin, and I did notice that I was still south of the Liffey, the river that runs through the city (I’ve been known to cross rivers without noticing). I made a mental note of some buildings and other things I’d be likely to come back and photograph, depending on whether or not I could find my way back here.

I'm sitting at St. Steven’s Green, since I’ve managed to lose sight of my planning for tomorrow, or even tonight for that matter. I think I'll go to Sheep’s Head peninsula. No, maybe Cork? No, I’ll go to the Dingle peninsula and bike around there. No. It’s going to be Sheep’s Head. Oh, it depends on when the bus leaves. No, no. There must be a bus that leaves quite early to each place. Why don’t I go and find out? Tomorrow morning there will be time.

For now, I was able to catch the museum before it closed (oddly enough for a museum of Celtic heritage, they still couldn’t resist including a sizeable Ancient Egyptian exhibit). More interesting was the Natural History museum, with an immense collection of many known (and stuffed) species of fauna running around Ireland. Later, I walked around Temple Bar, went into a café, and sat and read more of The Wasp Factory.

To be continued.

Ireland, Part IV

2007-07-28T22:08:00.000-04:00

Monday, 12 April

(Continued)

No, I’m kidding. We headed north. We joined another little road, left it again for another forest walk, and then joined a road deeper inside the forest. It was still raining and we had little shelter from the rain because there were no trees on the road. Its edges were impassable, going sharply up a hill on one side and down a steep slope on the other. We were now descending the mountain we’d been climbing on its opposite side so far, and it had been five or six hours since we'd left Knockree.

After another look at the map, we found that we were getting quite close to our destination. I think we had crossed the county border by this time, or were about to cross it at the foot of the mountain. But either way, from then on we were walking along rural roads rather than dirt paths and trails. On the way down, we caught some amazing scenery through gaps in the trees; the clouds were so low, we had been walking through one, or a group of them, for most of the mountain, which is why it was raining the whole time, and it served to make the view all that more inspiring by dithering the light. It made everything look so vibrantly alive and fresh through the mist, light playing off of the vapor and shimmering whenever the sun came through the cloud cover. Eventually, we could see Dublin’s outskirts in the distance, and Melissa commented on how from here it looked a little like Fremont, sprawled out, colorful, and lightly built up.

At the bottom, we had definitely crossed the county border because we found a sign that told us were on the edge of Marlay Park, where the Way originates, somewhere within. On the map there was an ancient burial site not far from where we were, and we started looking around for it. A man walking his dog came up to us (extremely friendly, the Irish) and asked us if we were all right, and we asked him if he knew of the burial site. He said, “of course!” and pointed to a place on the edge of the slop upwards where we should begin our climb, and that they were about 50 m in from there. He was so keen on helping us, in fact, that when we reached the slope, he called back to us excitedly, indicating that we were in the right place, and to have a nice day.

It was a refreshing departure from the stark bluntness and sometimes rude interactions one has with the English, but that’s a whole other journal.

We found the site, and actually there were two. Apparently built one thousand years apart (well, I couldn’t tell just by looking at them, there was a plaque). The older one had also been reused when the newer one was built, the old remains and artifacts pushed aside but the lithic provenience was preserved, or so the archeologists thought, because of the difference in design between the two sites. But it was quite difficult to examine the sites well because of the amount of littler around the place. Someone had had a party or something, because there were packages, wrappers, cans, bottles, toilet paper, socks (socks) and shoes, just everywhere. All kinds of stuff. And it was recent, nothing was faded. Shame.

The last stage of the walk was nice, through Marlay Park, which used to be the Marlay family's gardens. In front of Marlay House, we sat on a bench; our hike was over.

We just sat quietly in the sun, leaning on our packs, looking bedraggled and tired. This was it. My feet started to hurt, and I remember smiling to myself -- not a moment too soon. They were probably in pain the whole time, but I’d just started to really notice it then, as I sat, the memory of the walk piling up and finally forcing some of my body’s complaints up to the podium. I looked down at my shoes, in horrible condition, and my jeans, although dry, still had the dirt from yesterday's bog wade and were brown up to the knees.

It was almost five. We barely caught the bus back into Dublin, running after it as it was about to leave. We sat sitting upstairs, still silent. Fifteen minutes later the bus ride came to an end, and we hurried downstairs and jumped out. I slung my pack over my shoulder, she extended her left hand as I extended my right. That didn’t work, so I freed my left hand and we shook hands, said goodbye, and headed in opposite directions, she to Trinity College to meet her friend, and me to Avalon House hostel to spend a few nights' rest.

By now my feet really hurt and my back ached from carrying my pack for two days in difficult conditions. But I felt good, and I would hopefully meet more people. After all, I had another eight days ahead of me.

I checked in and went upstairs to shower, and just lied down in my bunk and fell asleep. I woke up at around 8 pm, by now quite hungry. I went downstairs with the intention of just going out and finding somewhere to eat, but I noticed people in the kitchen, went inside, and was impressed with the facilities. So I was inspired to make my own dinner. All I can really cook is pasta. So I went and bought pasta and some sauce and vegetables, soda bread and spread, and fruit. I had a huge dinner, but I hadn’t eaten anything really substantial for a long time. Then I went for a walk, stopping for a while at a café in Temple Bar opposite the museum of art to write some of this and then slept at around 11.

To be continued.

Ireland, Part III

2007-07-26T10:06:00.001-04:00

The Wicklow Way, day 2.

Monday, 12 April

It's still raining this morning, although the wind, which I heard whistling all night, has calmed down. The sun comes out in between patches of cloud and it makes the windows glimmer.

We had a small breakfast of some more steamed nutella mixes and cookies, using up a lot of milk from the grab pile that you often see in hostel kitchens and refrigerators. We poured over the map book tracing the day’s upcoming trek, my feet aching as my finger followed the path across contour lines that were getting ever closer together. It was 9 am.

My shoes haven't dried, but I think that if I wear them and the sun spends a little more time out from behind the clouds, they will dry as I walk. We thanked the hostel owners and set out, trying to find the path we’d left amid rain and gloom the evening before. The wind had twisted the signpost so that the signs for both Knockree and Enniskerry were pointing the same way: over the cliff, more like a windvane than something we'd follow. But soon with the help of the earth’s magnetism we were going the right way, and no thanks to gravity we were going up. Over the hill, which I hesitate to call either a hill or a mountain -- it was somewhere between the two -- we descended into another valley with sheep bleating and bouncing away when we came too near. Sheep look amazingly silly, like they’re heavier than they look, and they have thin legs that perfectly enhance the comedic effect. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle and the sun still came out minutes at a time. We stopped for lunch some hours later and I nursed some of my blisters (the rain wasn’t helping). But anyway, we trudged onwards.

The Way parted with the road, as we’d come to expect it to do, and into some dense forest. There was no obvious path this time, no trail of trampled foliage or dirt, and we had to resort to the compass to show us the way out. We also began to see, strangely enough, more and more litter, and our trash bag, which we’d been filling with litter we were picking up along the way since yesterday, was filling up. It was really getting to me that people would just throw away their wrappers and cans and bottles here. Melissa, a hiking veteran, was telling me that she and the friends she hikes with are always picking up after other hikers. Either way, I never thought hiking could be this rewarding.

Well, anyway. We came out of the forest on its north side, and still saw no little yellow man. Ahead of us was a vast moor, sloping slightly up at about 5 degrees maybe. To the left and right (west and east respectively) the forest’s edge went on as far as we could see, since it curved southwards on the eastern side, and northwards in the west. We settled on heading east to what looked like an old fencepost about 500 m away, crookedly set in the mud. I had my doubts, but as always, we didn’t see that we were in any hurry and if we happened to walk for long then it didn’t really matter because we’d see more. But she was right, and behind the fencepost, in a little dip in the ground, was what we were looking for. He pointed north, so we headed south.

To be continued.

Ireland, Part II

2007-07-25T11:43:00.000-04:00

The Wicklow Way

Sunday, 11 April

8 am, taking our leave of Jim and the hostel staff, we set out in the wrong direction. After about a mile, we looked at the map and compass and realized what we’d done and headed back. Ok, so now we've figured out how to use this very detailed large scale map (it was very confusing at first, as the compass points on the map change with every page so that the Wicklow Way is always going up and down the length of the page). But we got the hang of it soon enough. On the right path, we became acquainted with a little yellow figure on a wooden post with an arrow. We liked him.

Anyway, by 9:00 we were well oriented and going the right way. After an hour, we got lost when, instead of going down the other side of a large hill, we went along it and mingled with some cows and bulls along the way. When we couldn’t find anymore little yellow hikers at what we thought was a fork (but really there wasn’t even a path), we took another peek at the map and started posing suggestions as to where we actually were. We decided to go down the hill flanked by a pine forest and landed in some pretty heavy bog, which looks perfectly dry ten meters away, but is very perfectly wet up close. Anyway, we had figured out somewhat where we were, since the map had contour lines and forested areas marked, and we speculated that we’d missed the trail that went down the hill earlier, before the pines and cattle. So, we tried to navigate the bog without getting wet, but that would be of no use since it went on for about 1.5 km. I was knee deep in muddy water very quickly, trying to keep on top of the floating bushes. There was no way around it. It’s like floating ground. You step somewhere, and the ground nearby bobs up and down with the ripples.

Thoroughly soaked to the knees, we reached the road after having been barked at by a dog on a farmer’s land which we could not avoid stumbling through. We climbed over a fence, which seemed to satisfy the dog, and walked along the road. As we’d expected, we ran into our yellow friend again and were relieved to say the least. We sat down for a lunch of corned beef and cheddar sandwiches, some slices of jelly rolls, and Nutella, which we’d happily discovered we both really liked and so had bought a supply before we set out. I changed into a dry but very uncomfortable pair of shoes which I've worn for a good part of the way now.

The Way joined a public road for a while, and then we overshot the Way which was supposed to curve off to the north. We continued east on the road, thinking we would find the right way, until we came to a fork we weren’t supposed to hit. Sitting down, we had an apple each and tried to figure out where we were. We finally decided that we weren’t that used to the scale on the map and that instead of 1.5 km on the road, we went about 5. If we followed the northward fork, we’d hit the Way again, and we did.

We reached a lookout point along the way part of the way up a steep slope. Our trail parted with the road and we were soon going up the rest of the slope through dense forest while the road wound down the other way towards Lough Dan. We reached the summit of White Hill, a 650 m peak -- not very high, but we could see the valley far below nevertheless, and Lake Tay (Lough Té) at its floor. There is a memorial to J. B. Malone up there. We continued along the path towards Djouce, the next peak, at 730 m. We went down the side of White Hill, then started up Djouce.

The wind started up and eventually became the strongest wind I’ve ever encountered. We could, with our packs, lean into it completely, as if falling down, and it would blow us back the other way. It kept blowing us off the path as we trudged uphill. The Way swerved out and around Djouce, but we wanted to go up to the top, so we left the path and went up the rest of the way, about another 1 km up. At one point, the map book flew out of my hands and I practically glided after it down the slope and landed on it in the weeds, my pack still on my back. Almost to the top, the wind got even stronger. We ditched our packs in a little hole we found, and continued up, running the rest of the way and getting blown around almost like paper. The wind, coming in from the side, helped us get up the mountain while we ran.

At the top, the wind was the strongest, and we had trouble staying in the same place. We looked out from the summit, though, and realized why it was so windy: we were looking out over the Irish Sea, towards the Welsh Mountains on the opposite shore.

We sat in a little alcove we found in the rock to avoid the wind and rest a while. Then we headed down again, hoping we were going the right way. We found our packs and continued down the mountain, the wind still blowing, now with a little bit of drizzle. We joined the path and were eventually completely over Djouce and into the valley on its eastern side.

The rain came down in quick periodic torrents, and the wind kept up, as we continued for about two more hours. By 7 pm, the rain hadn’t stopped, and we had rejoined a road and arrived afterwards in Knockree. It was completely deserted except for the couple who ran a hostel in their converted farm buildings; they were hospitable in that way I’d come to expect from the Irish by this time, and the place was very well kept with surprisingly good facilities for a self-catering hostel, even before considering where we were -- on the side of a mountain in a tiny town, which was just a collection of two or three small farms. We changed and hung our soaked clothes, since it hadn’t stopped raining since our descent from Djouce.

There was a steamer in the kitchen, something we were very happy to see, so we started to make all sorts of bizarre hot beverage cocktails using any combination of nutella, strawberry jam, milk, rice crispies, cookies, and jam rolls. We also had a can of soup and some ramen noodles, and some bread and cheese (not for the drinks). Although it may sound unappetizing now, for some reason it was perfect. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that anything tastes good when you're hungry and tired and when there's a fire nearby. It certainly felt like we were camping as we ate and drank at a huge table in the dim stone-walled sitting room filled with smoke from two log fires at either end.

We finished our small dinner while reading the remaining bits of a days-old newpaper that had been used as kindling for the fires. Tired and aching, we slept, hoping the morning would bring better weather (and I was hoping my shoes would dry).

To be continued.

Ireland, Part I

2007-07-24T11:08:00.000-04:00

In April 1999, I took a two-week trip to Ireland. I was living in London at the time. I came across the journal I kept from that trip while I was rummaging around in my old stuff recently. It's one of only two journals I've ever kept and now I'm wishing I'd kept more journals.

I started flipping through it and couldn't help but read it all the way through because it evoked so many vivid memories that even photographs couldn't match. I had such fun reliving the brief trip that I wondered if it could be at all interesting to a stranger reading it as well. Anyway, I'm posting it here in a series, exactly as I wrote it (so pardon the youthful nonsense).

I may post some pictures I also found, which I'll have to scan when I'm done studying for boards.

Friday, April 9

I arrived here in Dublin at 3 pm and checked into a hostel called Avalon House not far from St. Steven’s Green, both the hostel and park very nice indeed. Anyway, at a loss for what to do exactly, I walked all around Dublin and got to know the central area pretty well, with my map and Lonely Planet. I walked all around the Temple Bar area and saw some of Trinity College, but of course in one day I couldn’t see everything I’d wanted to. I was tired and went back to the hostel for the night.

Saturday, 10 April

I got up at 7 am intending to go to Newgrange. But I’d asked the night before and the hostel was full, so I thought I should secure some accomodation elsewhere first. Failing this, after three hours, I ended up at a less than helpful (but very hospitable and cheerful, mind you) student travel office (USIT: Union of Student Irish Travellers or something similar). I did learn that to get a day tour to Newgrange I would have to wait until Thursday. So that was out. I went to the bus station and asked there. No luck with Newgrange, but an idea hit me: I could just go to Glendalough! It’s in County Wicklow, and almost in the middle of nowhere so people don’t usually stay there overnight, and that meant that I might find accommodation. So, I found out where the bus left from and hurried there. I caught it by five minutes at 11:25 am (the next bus would’ve left at 6 pm).

At Glendalough (Gleann dé Loch; glen of the two lakes), there’s a monastic site, one of the best preserved in Ireland, founded by St. Kevin in the 6th century AD. It was very nice, but I still had the nagging thought of where I would sleep that night. I went to the Glendalough hostel and they were full. The lady there was really pleasant and told me that the hostel in the nearby village of Laragh was not full. She showed me the way and I was off for the 3 km walk up the road (there being no other transport) with my pack, after calling and booking a place just in case...

The Wicklow Way Hostel is a delightful little self-catering place, right next to the convenience store (and that’s about all there is in Laragh, aside from this one house that doubles as a tea and scones shop). A while after I had begun to settle in I left again for Glendalough for a better look with an eased mind. It was breathtaking as I walked past Lower Lake and sat down for some lunch on the bank of Upper Lake. The two were joined once. I had by this time figured out the what the deal was with the rain, essentially that the clouds move quickly overhead, raining on what they pass over, but keep moving. So, walking against the wind, in this case up the path away from the monastery towards the valley, I was able to avoid getting rained on for long, while everyone else was walking back, the cloud following them and raining on them the whole way. I tried to tell a few people but they seemed to distrust my theory and kept going, the cloud on their heels.

I was having lunch while it started to get a little bit cold as the day wore on. I headed back towards the road after a last look at the valley and mountains at either side. Back to Laragh. The distance walked on today was about 14 km (a little over 8 miles, maybe 9). At the hostel I met a newly arrived old Irish man (this hostel had no age restriction) named Jim. He’d walked all the way down from Enniskerry, a distance of 20 miles, that day, along the Wicklow Way, a path opened in 1982 by J. B. Malone, and was Ireland’s first long distance trail. It is about 130 km in total, and goes straight down the county, north to south, beginning and ending in the adjacent counties on either side, the northern one being Dublin. Anyway, another person had arrived in the hostel, a girl who was asking people about hiking along the Wicklow Way. Jim and others in the dorm offered to help out with her planning (which she really needed, since she’d only just heard about it), and a short while later they had pulled me into the conversation, lurking though I was on my upper-bunk bed in the corner reading. After going down to the pub for a meal, and a very jolly one to say the least (Jim really likes his alcohol), we went back up to get ready for bed. Jim went back down for a night cap (whiskey, double), and Melissa and I decided it would be best if neither one of us hiked alone, so we planned to head out together northward towards Dublin the next morning. I had been thinking about doing this, earlier in the day, while she had been thinking about going south to Glenmallure. But we couldn’t find any accommodation there. So we thought we’d go north and stop for the night at Knockcree, where there’s a hostel right off the Wicklow Way. We talked for a while longer, and I discovered that she’s from Fremont, goes to UCSD, and is spending a year abroad in Toulouse studying various world cultures.

To be continued.

Insurance

2007-07-21T09:34:00.000-04:00

If you like dishonesty, frustration, and emotional turmoil, then you need to call a car insurance company now.

This week, a nice caveman at GEICO spent an hour shaping rocks into arrowheads and collecting sticks and acorns around my slightly injured 9-year-old car before telling me to sod off with my evil fire-wagon from the future (and to pay a salvage fee for re-excavating it). When I insisted that it was in fact simple human technology and that the damage should not really warrant a total loss, he said, 'Grrr, Uuk mad!' and chiseled me an obsidian check for the cost of turning my car into a usable hearth pit (minus deductible).

Before leaving him to his fecal sculpting and cave mural, I asked how badly this would impact my premiums. He said, 'Grrr, Uuk not sure about that but--how futureman say in twenty-first century--drop loincloth and bend over?'

Locomotivation

2007-06-16T10:27:00.000-04:00

A train leaving New York Penn Station at 8:50 am and traveling north at 120 miles per hour, stopping in Poughkeepsie, Albany, and St. Lambert will arrive in Montreal 18.5 hours later because:

The train is operated by Amtrak and will leave 4 hours late 'for your safety'.
The train schedule was assembled by 2 liars and 1 asshole all of whom work for Amtrak.
While the train is capable of traveling at 120 miles per hour--in theory--no Amtrak engineer in their right mind would ever attempt this to avoid speed-related damage to the space-time continuum of upstate New York. This is all based upon research conducted by Amtrak in 1998 when a test animal was strapped to the chassis of an unmanned locomotive traveling at speeds in excess of 40 mph. The train vanished (but was then found later that afternoon at the bottom of a gorge in Ithaca). Amtrak responsibly believes that it is safer to travel at the more reasonable speed of between 0 and 35 mph with frequent lengthy stops for no reason at all.
Canadian customs officials speak very slowly and use 35% more words than the average speaker of English. And we all know what that word is, eh?
The train did not qualify for the carpool tracks.

I have been studying for the second in a series of three standardized exams for medical licensure. It is not going well. Over the past three weeks, I have attended two weddings; helped Nurin study; helped Nurin move to Detroit; got my car fixed; hit my car and got it fixed again; watched all the episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Robot Chicken I could find on YouTube; finished the entire game of System Shock for the fifth time; played hours of Worms; Lemmings, and Prince of Persia; and spent a total of 49.5 hours in transit.

I think my problem is largely one of motivation, but I don't know how to prove it. I think I should watch more TV just to be sure.

Frustraturbation

2007-05-16T19:03:00.002-04:00

I had begun writing a list of trivial things that annoy me (for no good reason) because that is the sort of person I am.

Parsley.
Asymmetry.
Mustaches.
Red hair.
Loose collars.
Loose ties.
Loose morals.
Loose faucets.

I was still calm. I wanted to dissect a little deeper into my shallowness. I started a new list.

Surgeons.
'Sontimeter.'
Starting sentences with 'basically.'
'Aks.'
Uninformed use of vernacular.

A little twitch started in my right little finger. This normally happens when I get worked up, drink coffee, or play a video game that I don't like just to reassert my juvenile masculinity and check that my testosterone still works.

I wanted more than just a twitch. I wanted sweat, palpitations, heartburn, and aching tension in my shoulders and lower back. I wanted neurological mayhem, tsunamis of dopamine ravaging my basal nuclei, inappropriately frantic and useless messages telling my brain to do inappropriately frantic and useless things with my muscles. And pain.

And so there came into being a new list. A terrible list. A list to end all lists, to line up the other lists against a wall and shoot them in the head.

Irresponsibly executed linguistic maneuvers--these include poor syntax, inappropriate idioms, and incorrect use of plural forms when the singular is intended and vice versa.

What started out as item #1, 'irresponsibly executed linguistic maneuvers,' quickly ballooned into a worryingly elitist tirade against the marginally educated masses who take language for granted:

As untrained as novice swordsmen, they brandish diction clumsily and with disregard for its sharp edges, its elegance, and the potential power it affords when executed with even just moderate skill.

These are the people who stir immiscible metaphors together like drunken chefs. They stagger around their prose like saturated winoes, trying to bring one end of an idiom towards the other and missing their mark completely. Instead of respecting the gravity of language and treading lightly but purposefully, they bumptiously bang words together like cavemen trying to make fire by trial and mostly error.

You might be one of these people. Do you know the difference between 'He only cuts wood' and 'He cuts only wood'? Do you say 'criteria' when you mean to say 'criterion'? How about 'phenomena'--have you any idea how to properly use this word without hurting yourself? Sometimes there is one 'auditorium,' but there may also be two 'auditoria.' I'm not even going to mention 'data' and 'media,' but I just did because I am annoyed and feeling so good right now.

Do you say 'comprises of,' 'myriad of,' or 'bored of'? Do you mistake 'advise' for 'advice' (and vice versa)? Do you eat 'brussel sprouts'? Do you wait 'as time progresses'? Do you 'take a different tact'? Do you not know how to spell 'ad nauseam'? Do you do things 'as best as' you can? Do you post 'quotes'?

You might as well be dipping your quill in poop and scribbling your silly letters directly onto your underpants.

Why am I so worked up about this? It's for absolutely no reason at all, which is far more reason than I need. Frustration is at the heart of ecstasy. The doubtful anticipation of climax is the heightening of the sensorium, the hypnotic progressive blurring of whatever once distinguished bliss from pain. As emotions flurry--love, hate, anger, pleasure--they all become shadows of each other as we speed down (or up) the oily asymptotic ramp that promises everything but delivers nothing, faster and faster, slower and slower.

I'm so frustrated that I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. Oh, yes!

Oh, by the way, all of this was in an English accent.

Haatem's special sauce

2007-05-12T17:11:00.000-04:00

Take these things:

Two or more 1.5-inch thick sirloin slabs (assuming you have friends or a partner of some sort, otherwise you can just have one for your lonely sad self if you like being lonely and sad and by yourself, I mean that's ok too, but you might find it more efficient to just nuke some gruel and stir in some tears)
One handful of peppercorns
One gentle peppercorn-caressing-to-death device
One red pepper hull and one green pepper hull (having been tucked into an olive oil and garlic bath for at least one night)
Haatem's special sauce (pi tablespoons of olive oil, pi-1 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, a dwarf's fistful of cracked black pepper, one tablespoon of minced garlic, one pseudopinch of cayenne pepper--more if you're not afraid--1/2 chopped onion, the same amount of sugar you can hold within the diamond-shaped compartment formed by bringing four fingers together at the tips, then another two of those, the finely chopped olive oil-soaked peppers mentioned above, two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, one half teaspoon of dry mustard, as many drops of Wright's Liquid Smoke as the number of times you've set your hair on fire and enjoyed it--or two works also)
Grilling apparatus (flammables, inflammables, and nonflammables)
Other comestibles and accoutrements
Libations (I'm a fan of Virgil's)
A t-shirt that reads, 'Nobody likes a vegetarian'
Other people

And do this:

Log out and go outside.

Favorite words

2007-05-09T19:01:00.000-04:00

#1. Juice.

Say it. Juice. Say it. Say it. Is there a better word? I submit that there is not. Juice. It's practical. Who doesn't like juice? Unloved-middle-child-immoral-sociopath-backstabbing-blasphemous-no-heart-having-hater-being-limited-wit-dry-mouthed-type people, that's who.

Juice is sensual. Bathe it with some saliva and caress each letter with your tongue. Jjj. Ooo. Oh. Oooooooossssss. Cradle it. Let it tickle your lips. Taste it.

Besides the viscous-warm tenderness I feel dripping down my hair, face, and neck, teasing things that I like to get teased every time I say 'juice,' juice also happens to be the fluid of life. It is by the wisdom of God that there is some kind of juice inside every living thing and also in some inanimate things. That we happened to give the divine solution a name that electrifies my spine is pure serendipity. It is, therefore, my number one favorite word of all time. Ever. For now.

If you don't like juice, you are disrespecting the Lord.

Sometimes a phallus is just a phallus

2007-05-05T10:26:00.000-04:00

Psychiatry is a field that makes sense in the sense that if you have any sense (in the sense that you are sensible) you will find it difficult to make any sense of it. My feeling is that there is a nearly invisible boundary between effectively mapping out the currents deep in the id and prancing about at the shallow end of the ego, unless you can't swim.

Where do you look for meaning in relationships with people? Can a label that one uses to define a relationship be simply a preemptive defense of that relationship? I mean, saying 'we're married' is clear and in any case more an apology to one's tamed and beaten demons than anything else. But what about relationships that can be approached in an accusatory way? So-called platonic relationships, for example. If you have to specifically preface a friendship with 'platonic,' then is it really platonic? Psychoanalysts make phallic balloon animals out of unsuspecting platonists. True, sometimes an apple is just an apple, but that's so uninteresting. (Even a granny smith is mildly tantalizing at best, compared to a shiny green boob with a stem that grows on trees and tastes so sourly delicious.)

Enough psychobabble. I like the stuff and appreciate it, but I'm not creative enough to whip up a la carte syllogisms around a patient and still be composed enough to fill out the invoice with a straight face. Another feature of the inpatient psychiatric experience that has struck me is the staggering degree of impairment with which some psychotic patients have to live. I don't know what I would do without reality. Well, reality is reality, and what we experience is what we experience, and it is nothing if it does not depend on the sartrean cogito's automatic comprehension of existence--the human-reality at once creating and created by the juxtaposition of l'etre and le neant.

Saying that kind of crap without smoking a cigarette just looks and sounds stupid and I have the most delicate pink little lungs. Whether or not experience and reality are the same shouldn't make any difference to us, social interactions notwithstanding. If this is a blue ball, but I see a pair of orange galloshes, it's still my experience and its accuracy is irrelevant even though I am laughed at by my peers for stumbling around in the rain trying to balance myself on a blue ball like a clowning sad kierkegaardian lunatic full of anguish and pneumonia. So I suppose reality is not as important to me as I thought. Who's to say that I experience reality anyway except me? You can say I'm crazy but then I can say I know you are but what am I times infinity times infinity plus one squared to the power of you're stupid! In fact, I renounce reality. A bas la realite!

Alright enough of that nonsense.

Paranoia, on the other hand, is truly debilitating. Voices, hallucinations, the government melting your ice cream on purpose via satellite. So maybe reality is a good thing after all. But if my brain were forced to choose between a reality that really bites on the one hand and a Statler and Waldorf commentary trained with deadly aim on my inadequacies on the other, maybe I'd take the two grumpy old beans rather than the haldol. Of course, if I'm up in the balcony with them and they're telling me to jump off in that endearingly funny gruff heckling tone of theirs, I hope I'd reconsider or call for Dr. Bunsen's help. Yes I know he's a PhD, but who else am I going to call, the green frog? That's crazy.

Speaking of haldol, my tic has been out of control over the past few days and my neck, shoulder, and wrist are quite sore. Antipsychotics are good for mental psychosis as well as somatic psychosis but oh so bad for your liver.

Paradoxically, however, this is a sentence for which the word 'paradoxically' was completely unnecessary. But what discussion of psychiatry--no matter how half-baked--is complete without 'paradoxically'? In my next post, my judgement may improve but I will always lack insight.

Domo arigato Mr. Moschino

2007-05-03T20:30:00.000-04:00

I've got a secret I've been hiding under my coat. I starve my brain for blood every morning using a 100% silk Versace noose that is home to a delicate menagerie of biological opportunistic bastards (of the highest caliber) that I've collected during my travels through other people's nasty bits. My dilemma is this: how do I look presentable, and yet demand more of this season's catalog by not killing people who touch me?

I have considered the collarless shirt. Elegant, simple, no WMDs, and quite frankly, sexy. And I'm nothing if I'm not a sexy son of a blastula. But my neck is half a meter long and a size 14 1/2, so the collarless shirt makes me look like a closed tufted umbrella with an Adam's apple. Still sexy, but come on, add 1 crucifix and stir and I'm Father Late-for-Baptism. (Yes, of course the shirt will be black. That's how I roll.)

The bowtie. A timeless accoutrement that is as infused with suave lightness as it is heavy with brainiosity. Each bowtie comes with a spray bottle of 10 extra IQ points applied straight up the nose where you can smell the ideas.

No, the bowtie is not really timeless, rather wherever it goes it drapes everything within 2 meters of its frilly ends with a thin dusty coat of 1925 and a nice lacquer of pre-depression art-deco Gatsbitude (you're not going to get this stuff anywhere else, I speak a quaint dialect of northern arse, 3, 2, 1, never mind).

The bowtie offers the dull shirt an opportunity to charleston its way into the limelight. That might make the shirt yellow and accentuate my sweat stains (which are almost as sexy as my remarkably toneless ass) but every day wearing a bowtie is a day of greatness and respect.

Certainly the bowtie is more difficult to weaponize.

There is a simpler option. If Yossarian can get a medal pinned to his naked chest in wartime, I could certainly get used to the feel of stethoscope rubber around my bare neck and pens tegadermed to my chest hair.

You know what else is timeless? Styx.

The problem's plain to see/
Too much technology/
Machines to save our lives/
Machines dehumanize.

This of course makes so much more sense if you take out all these words and add different words that are more relevant. Actually I just like this song because I'm old skool and I kick it like hitops in 1983.

And I found a Moschino bowtie that matches my chest hair. Domo arigato, Mr. Moschino.

The happy place

2007-03-15T17:47:00.001-04:00

The morgue under our hospital looks just like a morgue.

The long hallway smells of wet dog like it's supposed to. A quorum of aproned antisocial types with knives stand around like chefs. Jars and plastic buckets full of pieces of humans neatly line the walls like barrels in a candy store. In the corner, a table with a camera rig and lights is set up for photographing specimens against an ugly blue background like on a porno set. Dull metal autopsy tables with cutting boards straight out of Martha Stewart's kitchen take up most of the space, separated by stretches of nasty green tile like in grandma's bathroom. A light box for radiology films hangs on one wall with an old stereo from 1986 on top of it (dual tape deck, one with auto-reverse, the other not so lucky) with an actual tape inside, also like in grandma's bathroom. And in the corner, also like in grandma's bathroom, a toilet.

I know, for that is what I also thought. But nay. It was a toilet.

This was not your grandma's toilet. I walked over to it for a closer look and no, it wasn't a sink or a basin, it was just a toilet. But something didn't look right. I looked at it for a while and went down the list of essential criteria for toiletness. There was a toilet plunger. There was a toilet flush lever thing. The piping looked appropriate to me. At its heart was a bowl with toilet water. The rim was there, though I wouldn't want to touch it. In the bottom of the bowl was the sine qua non of toiletude: the drain of oblivion.

Still, something was off. So I imagined myself going through the motions of using this toilet to discover what was missing and promptly ended the imagination when I got totally wet and cold and grossed out. This toilet was way too big for humans.

My colleague was standing next to me and noticed that I was staring at the toilet busy with my calculations. She leaned over and whispered, 'This looks like a good place to shoot Saw 4.' That's grim.

On the other hand, the morgue is actually the least grim place in the hospital since nobody actually dies here. In the tape deck: 'Bhangra mix 94.' Who cares what the toilet is for? Party in the basement, yar.

The pouch of Reda

2007-03-11T00:15:00.001-05:00

A word about the title of this blog. This is the story of Reda's pouch. It is an anatomical pouch that I claimed one day while dissecting a cadaver. It is not a pleasant pouch, but it carried a generic and quite replaceable nomenclature and I could not resist but to strip it of its genericity and apply my own eponym to infuse it with life and especially vanity.

Specifically, Reda's pouch (also known as the pouch of Reda) is the compartment created by the interface between the uterus and the urinary bladder. An unfortunate location, but I was disappointed to find that the narrow communication between the third and fourth ventricles (that I had coveted so much since my youth) had already been snatched up and out of my reach forever by that half-wit Sylvius a few hundred years ago. Clearly, I far surpass this moldy ignoramus in medical knowledge at this point yet he still gets to keep his stupid aqueduct. His name contaminates several miscellaneous desirable sites in the human body (all highly lucrative real estate and some so elegant and ethereal that his audacity--and begrudgingly, deftness--in even trying to get his name to stick shocks me to no end). A fissure. My fissure.

Standing over me sprinkling salt on my wounds was Magendie, who filched my foramen while Treitz and Oddi ganged up on me and wrenched the duodenum from my fists and spat on my ligament and sphincter with their gross acidy eighteenth century spit to claim them for themselves.

No. I am left with a pouch that can be found in less than half of the population, and even so, is absolutely useless. It is there by accident, an anatomical default, the unavoidable and purposeless outcome of space and tissue. A dank, reeking swamp, a sewer for the female inards, a tripe basket!

That is what I, bloodied and defeated, was able to wrestle away from those entitled buffoons. And even so my claim is still disputed. The best I can get is 'the vesicouterine pouch' and then in pen and in my own handwriting: 'of Reda.'

I have so much to say

2007-03-10T23:43:00.001-05:00

Not really. Uselessness notwithstanding, this blog will be a place for me to spew my inane (or ane in the wrong sense) ideas and comments on things about which my comments have (at best) questionable utility.

I will start small, dispensing with trivial things such as world politics, health care, religion, folklore, and maybe mortality if I can be bothered to make something up about it. From there, I hope to work my way up to the big issues like my favorite ice cream and why you should not trim your nose hairs in a hurry.

I would like to point out that while your comments are welcome, I will generally not read them personally. It's not that I don't appreciate the wisdom of others, it's just that I don't really like it. So just sit back and enjoy getting frustrated with my aggravatingly prolix, unnecessarily dense, and seriously redundant prose.