by my childish troth

2011-04-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

I was born from two stars, so the moon's where I land

2011-03-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

dear everyone,

if you didn't know yet, in two months I'm moving 1500 miles to a state I've been to once. the culture there is the opposite of mine (slow and fun as opposed to perpetual and dissatisfying) and the accent is sing-songy rather than harsh or snobby. luckily, aside from the fact that Louisiana's warmth will most likely be good for me - actually, therapeutic, i predict - what i do have going for me is the fact that I AM GOING TO BE A DOCTOR. If I can hack med school, of course.

I've known this for over two months now, whereas before I only had a strong suspicion without concrete reason to believe it would be so. nevertheless i still feel my heart beat faster when i think "they are going to make me a doctor." for the past 5 years or so i feel like I've been fighting against the world in trying to get into medical school. and that was only since i began to try... I wasn't even fighting before that. I had always assumed that I wasn't smart enough or organized or hard working enough to even dream of being a doctor. I was always terrible at math, the reasons for which remain unknown, but this made me think for a long time (a LONG TIME) that i was actually dumb. or at least less than capable. I was a girl, I was shy, i was disorganized but over-extended with music and sports and volunteering and driving my little brother to the dentist. i pretty much forgot that homework was important. i won't go into the gruesome details of my life long inferiority complex (it still lurks down in there, somewhere; I'm sure it will turn up again shortly), but to simplify its description i will just say that since i was a child i have not been happy or satisfied with myself, anything i accomplished, my intelligence or my personality until the day i got into medical school. it seemed like everyone around me had something that told them they could do it, they ought not worry that the lifetime of hard work would be for naught. i, however, carried this thought everywhere i went, every day, no matter what i did. I called it the Fear. "don't you have the Fear?" I'd ask my classmates. "The fear? Fear of what?" Fear of failure, obviously. i honestly cannot pin my motivation to try so hard, to keep hacking away at basic science, soul-sucking jobs and selfless voluntarism on some deep-seeded belief that hard work would allow me to accomplish my goals. rather, every step i took was burdened with the dread of a big, eventual let-down. My favorite song was called Let Down. Every time I got a C in math or physics (there were more than a couple), the fear became heavier. If I got a new job in research, got to learn a new procedure in the ER, or even resuscitated a dying human being with CPR, the experience was one more thing I had to lose. The whole premise though, that someone would work for years toward a goal they didn't believe they could ever reach, is a testament to my lack of sanity. So be it. At least i proved my (insane) self wrong.

More than one person has accused me of being arrogant, supercilious (although there are only a handful of people I know who use that word in everyday conversation)(you know who you are) and "prissy." Well - fuck you all. i hated myself and thought i was the dumbest person in the world until now. if you saw in me a smart person who thought a lot of herself, please note that i saw a mediocre, talentless fake whose only fuel in life was fear. forgive me for not thinking the world of everyone else who either possessed the talent i was so jealous of or was simply satisfied with themselves and whatever life fell into their lap. Sorry that my every emotion shows all over my face and every one of my thoughts is articulated in pointed, deliberate speech. Also, sorry for all the sarcasm. NOT.

Thank you to everyone who thought more of me and my potential than i did. what really allowed me to make this step was wanting so badly for the people who were given terrible lives to feel love and comfort and to stop having to struggle. my fear was fear of living a benign life, of not making the world better. my own challenges have kept me aware of just how hard life can be, and how much worse it is for others who don't have the support and love that i do.

I am so happy to be moving to New Orleans this summer. New Orleans knows struggle, probably more than any city in the US, but it also knows itself - what New Orleans stands for, who its people are. When i visited New Orleans I fell in love with it. Parts of it are still in shambles, but the city is like a living, breathing creature with a soul, hunger, imagination and character. This is going to be a life change on a level of magnitude most people never have the opportunity to experience. People from my former life are welcome to visit.

travels and parties

2011-01-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

Here is the latest summary of Morgan's Travels around the United States of America.

A week and half after returning from MY FUTURE HOME AND MEDICAL TRAINING GROUNDS in New Orleans (I got in. More on that later), I flew to Seattle to spend a weekend with my mom, brother, grandma, aunt and uncle. At the moment, Seattle is the most populous North Ameican outpost in terms of members of my family. I can think of at least six Clarks, which is a remarkable thing for even one state to be able to boast. Anyhow, I did little more than loaf around my mother's woodland condo, edit her manuscripts, run up and down hills spanning an eternal length of electrical wires, and drink champagne with the above-mentioned Clarks in celebration of my (still totally unbelievable) admission to medical school. See below to predict how excited I am. For those of you who are afraid that I might become your doctor someday, and that in the ruthless future of dictated provider options* and heavily restrictive insurance plans you will not be able to escape my "services," fear not. You will only become my patient if you are involved in a serious trauma (shooting, chain saw massacre, cattle stampede, automobile roll-over, etc), in which case you are already not having very good luck. Getting cut open by me is probably a step up.

Anyhow, as I said, there was a lot of champagne (the drinking at this party was actually pretty limited to my own capacity. It was my party though, afterall) and long lost family-times. I spent one night with my brother Richard, circling on foot around the Space Needle (it costs money to go inside, thereby limiting our tourist activities) and making multiple passes in the car by a neon pink car wash sign in the shape of an elephant so that I could get a good picture. We also climbed up this random water tower in a random neighborhood and enjoyed an even more beautiful view of the Space Needle and the rest of the city.

As far as I'm concerned, Seattle is good for a few things (and in the following respects may not be for everyone).

First - Fabulous coffee. Yes, Starbucks was born in a tiny shop across from Pike's market overlooking Peugot Sound, and there is likewise the national brand Seattle's Best coffee that I have only ever seen in airports and university student unions and food courts (do not, under any circumstaces, drink Seattle's Best coffee). But what I really admire, and what Seattle should really be famous for with regard to coffee, are the hundreds of walk-up, hole-in-the-wall, roasted-in-house coffee shops both run and populated by absolute coffee snobs who only drink $80-per-lb Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee imported within 24 hours, roasted within 2, and ground within the 30 seconds prior to brewing and immediate consumption. My mother adheres to these rules for the most part, but prefers to conduct the process in her own house with her own tools every morning. She's thrifty that way. She got me drinking coffee when I was 12 years old, and though I admit to a brief period of collapse in which I painfully withdrew and subsequently lived without caffeine two years ago, I am a strong believer in excellent coffee practices myself.

Second: Seattle has a lot of vegans. It makes life easier. For vegans.

Third: Seattle has delightful weather. However, I gather that not everyone has my taste for grey, low-hanging clouds, persistant light drizzle and an unwaivering 50 degree temperature. If you are averse to this kind of thing, Seattle will probably drive you mad. For me though, it is like living in a foggy, mystical wood full of winged creatures, talking animals and magic in the wind rustling through the pines.

That is most of what I have to say about that particular trans-continental trip. Except for the flight back, during which a storm closed Logan airport and my plane was diverted to Syracuse for refueling. It's a great feeling when the captain comes onto the intercom and says, "Well, folks, I wish I had better news, but we just won't be able to hold out here with the amount of fuel we have left..."

My next trip was a quick 18-hour stint in Manhattan (made possible with 9 hours of bus transport), during which I arrived, immediately got lost looking for a subway out of Penn Station that wasn't actually there (for future reference, everyone, the F train to Brooklyn is actually on 32nd and 6th. Also, Coney Island IS in Brooklyn), enduring temperatures in the teens and looking very unfashionable carrying my camping-worthy backpack full of heels and sexy clubwear. I eventually reached my destination in the East Village, and from there on out just had a good time with my friends and the next morning cleaned up at Forever 21, ran aimlessly around the labyrinth that is the Port Authority, and boarded my bus back to my colder, snowier city with seconds to spare.

There isn't a whole lot of fascinating news, besides the fact that all my dreams have come true and I will be floating on air probably up until I arrive in the 190 degrees and 110% humidity in New Orleans this summer. At that point, I imagine, fear of failure and persistant physical discomfort will probably resume. We shall see.

Thank you to everyone who helped me get into medical school. All my friends and family, I could never, ever have made it this far without you.

*pardon the oxymoron

Beauti-tragic NOLA

2011-01-06T13:05:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, after many hours of New Year's celebrations in Boston, a 5 am car trip to New Hampshire and back for a puppy rescue mission, and a 3 hour pit stop in our nation's capitol, I found myself wandering alone on the night of New Year's day (1.1.11) through downtown New Orleans (known as "n'awlins," to some natives, "newe-ore-lee-inns," to others, and NOLA to lazy people who also take a fancy to ragtimey-sounding names). Please note: New Orleans is in Louisiana, and Louisiana is in what the History Channel refers to as the deep south. My first educational experience on the topic of New Orleans was listening to a priest/psychology PhD named Father Don at Tulane speak to the room full of eager medical school candidates, among whom I sat on that life-alteringly important Monday. I absorbed the history that structured the unique underpinnings of New Orleans mentality. "There are two events," (five second pause), "that took place here in Newe-Or-Lee-Inns," (ten second pause)..."by which we measure time." "There is before the flood, mmm-kay...and, after...the flood." He described the geography of New Orleans and each neighborhood's version of the disaster, beginning with Tulane's undergraduate campus in the Garden District (1-5 feet underwater) and ending with the Lower 9th ward (6-30 feet underwater). The lower 9th is bordered by water on three sides - the Industrial Canal, connecting Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi river, and the river itself on the south side, specifically the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, many of whose levees were breached, causing more devastation than anywhere else in the city.
"The second event," Father Don continued, "is the war." I glanced around the room, slightly confused, but saw many of the other pre-meds nodding in understanding. "Who knows which war I'm talkin' about?" No one spoke or raised their hands and it became clear that people had been nodding in agreement because they thought they ought to, and actually, like me, had no idea what Father Don might ahve meant by "the war." One person raised his hand. "The Civil War," he said. He was from Georgia. "Why yee-uss," Father Don replied. "Or as we call it, the War of Secession.
The Invasion of the North." I looked around at the twenty heads that had resumed their bobbing. It dawned on me, thinking back to our introductions at the beginning of the day, that I was the only one from the Northeast. It seemed that everyone, save me and the Californians, had a deep understanding of what Father Don meant when he said that they were "still fighting that war today." I will decline to attempt any interpretation for fear of my own naiveté. I have taken Father Don at his word that the South/North conflict is a reasonably powerful influence over people's emotions and beliefs, as well as their opportunities in life and the ability to live a full and satisfying life. But back to the hurricaine.

It has been almost six years since Hurricane Katrina and for the first 24 hours of my New Orleans adventure I saw nothing resembling a history of destruction. The people, however, revealed evidence of pervasive damage, and not in an unsubtle way. From the moment I de-boarded the plane I began to hear people's individual stories of living through and continuing to live with the crisis. Even in one of my interviews I learned the personal story of the pediatrician who lived on the second floor of his flooded house with his wife after being one of the first to return to New Orleans in order to re-open his practice. It was an unfortunate interview topic, seeing as I was rendered rather speechless.

On my first night in New Orleans I made my way to my hotel room, the guest fitness center, and out to Decatur street to find food, music, and beer. As I said, I saw nothing resembling the aftermath of a natural disaster, and encountered only pure and expansive hedonism. I reveled in the balmy 56 degree weather, wearing only a sweater and jeans. After leaving Boston I had rolled up my wool pea coat and shoved it into the bottom of my backpack from whence it never reemerged until I was back at Logan. New Orleans, from the looks of the eastern most streets of the French Quarter, was exactly as I had pictured it: gas lamps, curly-cued balconies, donkey-drawn carriages, palm trees and music - oh, the music! - emanating from every street corner and wafting up into the steamy dark ether. For the most part, jazz was out of season, and cajun and zydeco rags rattled through the alleyways. Even as a musician I don't think I could tell the difference between cajun and zydeco - it all sounds like accordians, fiddle, and a snare drum to me. Yet another subltey of Southern culture that I will never understand.

Before my trip I had immersed myself in a series of southern novels so that I would feel like I was "somewhere" rather than "anywhere" when I finally arrived in New Orleans, alone and foreign. It worked. The bars, the movie theaters, the streets and the ten thousand strip clubs all reflected some piece of my recent literary experience. It was quite comforting, and gave me cause to look deeper into the alleyways and down the sidestreets than I may have if I were an ordinary, poorly-read tourist (this is me being slightly sarcastic. I started reading books about three months ago. Please don't tell anyone at Tulane about that though).*

The next day, my first year medical student/parental unit met me outside my hotel and brought me out to her apartment in Uptown. I still don't really know where, in relation to Downtown New Orleans, Uptown actually is. Another crucial piece of advice from Father Don: "You kin throw away your compass when you are here in New Ore-lee-ins." The streets and neighborhoods don't follow a

north/south/east/west grid of any sort, but rather curve with the Mississippi, thereby designating "upriver," as "up," and "downriver" as "down." Therefore, Uptown is simply upriver from downtown...not necessarily North (I have just confirmed per Google Maps that Uptown is due West of Downtown, but in order to get there on public transit - aka 100 year old streetcar - one must first get on the St Charles Ave trolley facing east, make a U turn and head south to the river, West, and back up north to a latitude similar to that where you started). Needless to say, I found myself quickly and dreadfully lost that afternoon when I decided to go see the Tulane campus uptown in the Garden District. Luckily, it only took about an hour for my med student to find and save me.

The drives and streetcar rides around the neighborhoods revealed an unchanging state of decay and abandonment. As I made my way around the peripheral wards, at least one of every five houses, if not the entire block, was a dead house. Some were boarded up, some standing on only partial foundations, some consiting of only foundations. Vast expanses of what used to be carefully lined California style bungalows with postage-stamp lawns were now square miles of dirt. Some areas showed signs of rebuilding: bulldozers, newly erected house frames. Many, many places looked as though they hadn't been touched in six years. Lines where the water had sat for weeks still marked the outside walls. It was sad.

Truth be told New Orleans reminded me more of the colonial towns in Mexico than any place I had been in the U.S.. The nice parts are fluted and European looking, and the not-so-nice parts are awful. I was talking with the tattoo artist in Cambridge yesterday who I have been developing a professional relationship with for the past two years about NOLA, where he had lived before moving to Boston. Even though he and all other ex-NOLAns seem to share the sentiment that a) it is the greatest place on earth and b) "I never should have left."
He told me the murder rate was higher than Detroit's (which was the highest in the country when I took Urban Sociology in college), and even though you couldn't see it on the news or in the streets, and the corrupt police department did a fine job faking their statistics, the FBI had the numbers to back that up. I can see how it would be possible, I guess, especially with all the vacated buildings and embittered souls that came back to the wreckage. To be sure, New Orleans was a dangerous place before Katrina. The corruption of the NOPD was not born in a day (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/us/10katrina.html?scp=1&sq=new%20orleans%20glover&st=cse).

I feel that no matter what I write I am doomed to sound condescending toward New Orleans, or even toward the South, as an onlooker from the North who has never seen a child with no teeth in this country. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in the North. Poor people in the North don't live in the dirt, like some in the South do. It seems like in the North there are so many more provisions for people who just get the short straw in life - free clinics, safety shelters, after school programs. I asked about the schools system in New Orleans during one of my interviews in light of the fact that i may end up raising a family there if I went to Tulane for medical school. "Well," my private practice pediatrician interviewer said,"I guess, well they're magnet schools now. You know, application based, only for the best and the brightest. And people with means, they send their kids to private school." And? I thought. Nothing else. It was pretty clear and later explained to me by another candidate who had grown up in New Orleans that if you weren't the best, the brightest, or of substantial means, you were not going to get anything that resembled a standard U.S. education.

I fell in love with New Orleans because it is both beautiful and tragic. The people are outwardly kind and warm. People call you babydoll and darlin, as if there was no stranger mean enough not to deserve an endeared comment on first contact. People live in reality and state the truth. Case in point: when I asked Father Don, "What is the ethics program at Tulane like?" he replied "It is in-ad-e-quate. They do not prioritize ethics in the curriculum and it is a moral wrong. Something must be done about it. But, I'm tellin you this, as a single faculty member's opinon, to a student, because there's no sugar coatin here. That's what we do here in New Orleans." Actually, he said "that's what we do here at TU-lane." But still. I want the ugly truth.

In conclusion, here list of relevant points to consider when traveling to New Orleans:
-Football is a big deal.
-Beer is important as well.
-So important, that it would seem that there is no drinking age in New Orleans. The fact that I did not get carded once in four days (and believe be I was drinking every day...obviously for the cultural immersion experience) is evidence of my suspicion.
-Spanish moss is real.
-Street cars have been eliminated from most cities for a good reason which is that they don't get you anywhere practical in less than two hours. New Orleans is an exception. Plan accordingly.
-There is no vegan food in New Orleans except for Bloody Marys and pickles.
-You should be OK with that. Another important cultural experience is to-go cocktails and romping around the French Quarter on a Monday afternoon, Bloody Mary in hand. If they ask if you want cajun green beans in it, say yes.
-Don't touch anything yellow and squishy-grainy looking.
-Be nice to people because they are already being extremely nice to you.
-Talk to the guy sitting next to you on the bus/streetcar/shuttle.

Pray for me that I get into Tulane.

*I must advise against reading John Kennedy Toole's comic novel "A Confederacy of Dunces" before your trip to NOLA. Although I refrained from generalizing the city as a population of lunatics, I was guarded against the possibility of shocking and bizarre events perhaps more than I ought to have been. Read it after, though. It is pure (in my dad's words, "toilet humor") genius.

Don't Judge!

2010-09-11T22:06:00.000-07:00

Greetings, All!

I speak to you from the future, this fine night in September of 2010. My, has it been a long and eventful year. Things have changed and righted themselves and then fluxed again like a solution-filled beaker beneath a conical separation filter. To those of you who have had the pleasure of orgo lab, that didn't make any sense. Clearly Mr. Jim Beam is doing some of the talking here (don't judge!).

It is beginning to feel autumnal in yet another New England annual situation. Having submitted 12 out of 25 applications to medical schools around the country I wait with baited breath for word on their reception. I predict a high likelihood that I will learn nothing on this matter (and thus will know nothing about my future escape from my current life) until March of 2011. I have been re-enjoying the pages of The House of God by Samuel Shem, MD, PhD, for the third time recently, and, despite the fact that the novel depicts the life of a medical intern as similar to the nine circles of the Inferno, I am yet to cease dying a daily death in anticipation and yearning for medical school. Something tells me that my historical attraction to stress, drama, and utter chaos has something to do with this sentiment (don't judge!).

In other news: I have moved six times in the last four years and currently reside in Washington Square, Brookline, Massachusetts. It is a lovely place that I shall enjoy for a median time frame of about eight months, with a standard deviation of three. Which brings me to my next point, that I am no longer employed as an Emergency Department staff member but as a research coodinator in neurology. Oh joy of joys, data sets, regulatory documents, and forty hours a week in a cubicle. It is just as glamorous as it sounds.*

Now onto my final statement, a encapsulation of my present situation outside of professionalism: I have two cats under my care now (borderline TOO MANY CA TS), the newest one being a gigantic orange beast bearing the monosyllabic, Celtic title of "Finn," who has a special fondness for asking for dinner at 4:48 am, every day. I continue to love animals and run as though the activity were keeping me alive like C-PAP does a GOMER. Damn I miss the ER.

*I must admit that there is some positive value in my new job, namely, that I am newly genuinely interested in research, have lofty ideas and details to add to my medical school applications, and will be a happy co-author to a few papers at some future time point. I say "time point," because it sounds much more research-y, and sounding research-y is half the battle in this silly game.

weather, universities, and I'm a recluse with a cat

2010-01-29T05:36:00.000-08:00

I suppose there is no way to break the silence after the previous unarguably heavy blog-post. Let's start with the weather. Boston was spared the Snowpocalypse of 2010, unlike most of the east coast, and it's been sunny and cold. Being mid-February I can't help but think to myself "two weeks until March!" (not that March bears any resemblance to spring up here, but in some places in the country it does), especially if I can hear birds outside of my window in the mornings, which are once again graced with sunlight before mid-afternoon.

News update: people are crazy. BBC news headline reads, "Alabama shooting: professor charged as three die." To those of you whose ears ring with tones of familiarity, who visualize a stereotypical shot-gun carrying and/or hatchet lugging mangrove-dwelling Ezekiel from Easy Rider as the defendant in this case, stop right there. This lady was a neurobiologist from Harvard. She went ballistic after being denied tenure by the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and boy has she soiled the petticoats of her alma mater. The sad thing is, had she been granted and accepted a Southern professorship, her fellow Crimsons would likely have looked down their pretty, snow-dotted noses at her accomplishment and put her in the category of the fallen.

Speaking of being looked down on, two things: one, despite having put off applying to all medical schools for another year (groan), when I was recently presented with the opportunity to apply to The Medical School for International Health at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, I took it, and at the moment am thinking I would almost rather get my medical education outside the U.S., even it it were in the middle of the desert. I'm told the only thing I should worry about it whether or not it will get me a good U.S. residency, which, according to recent statistics, it may or may not. It would appear that achievements such as these depend on one's individual performance and motivation, rather than the institution backing them up when it comes to international education (not in the U.S., obviously). Am I wrong? Someone inform me before I fly out to the desert for three years and learn Hebrew. Also, I suppose I must fully disclose that the Ben Gurioun University of the Negev Medical School for International Health is run in affiliation with Columbia Medical Center, where fourth-years take their electives and do their clinicals (after their rotations in Vietnam and whatnot), adding a lick of snootiness to the deal.

Second, Dinah (my cat) has opened a new office with a view atop my refrigerator. I can no longer shelve miscellaneous items up there on account of her habit of batting anything smaller than a loaf of bread off of its resting surface onto the floor. We've made it into a game, actually. I set a spoon on the table in front of her, she knocks it off. I pick it up, put it in front of her, she knocks it off. We could do this all day. Not that I, a person with work and school and applications and a very, very busy life that reeks of importance, potential, and over-all super-humanness, have time for such frivolities. Oh wait. Yes I do! F*ck you, ambition! Play with cat now, save babies in the desert later. I'm done applying myself to life.

status blizzardicus

2009-03-24T20:47:00.000-07:00

It would seem we have survived another winter. Starting back in December I began crossing off each day as it schlepped by on my refrigerator calendar, aptly named "Countdown to the End of Winter." March 20 was happily circled and starred at the very bottom of the long and winding path: the first day of spring. Various other events were penciled in, like LAST WEEK OF FEBRUARY (pass go, collect $200) "45 degrees Fahrenheit!" (Boardwalk!) and BLIZZARD (Go To Jail). On March 20th, it was 27 degrees and blustery (Go BACK to Jail).
Moving forward, I look forward to sunshine, birdsong and daffodils blooming along the Charles. Perhaps I will gaze upon the multitude of rowers making their laborious way up and down the river whilst I try to concentrate on a gigantic volume of MCAT review lessons. Better yet, it is time I got back to people-watching, keeping a keen eye out for anything remotely curious and worth exaggerating when it comes time to retell. I've decided to avoid saturating my literary efforts with stories from my sinusoidally insane job. I call it this because of the daily fluctuation between heart-thumping terror and grinding monotony that it induces. The experience has been an amalgamation of overwhelming passion for learning, medicine, and life, as well as tear-producing boredom and belittlement. Nevertheless, having been the one pumping on a man's chest while his wife held his hand on the other side of the stretcher, among other happenings, has taught me something that I'm barely able to describe - something about the grave importance of effort and responsibility for others. More lessons in establishing Sincerity of Purpose, I suppose. Anyhow, I would hate to give anyone the false impression that I spend every day running around a earthly, halogen lit limbo, watching and engaging in the battle of human salvation that burns in every reach of the ER. In truth, I spend many hours traipsing around with urine cups and medical supplies to be stocked in the exam rooms. To be sure, the outside world is quite a bit more invigorating.* I have yet to see it though, recently, given my situation in trying to succeed in classes, getting my med school applications together, and fighting the eternal battle between life and death.**
In conclusion, I need to write, and I need to write about the subtle curiosities that everyone is able to understand and find in their own lives. Medical phenomena are inspiring, powerful and the love of my life, but not the best material for creativity. This is a right-brained exercise.

*Except for yesterday, when I irrigated a ball of wax the size of a large marble out of someone's ear all by myself. I FIXED A PERSON, and man was it a trip. Not kidding.

**HA.

Spitting the Same Color into the Snow

2009-02-09T20:29:00.000-08:00

Today I brushed my teeth while walking down the sidewalk. I realized how much time had been wasted over the years, standing over the sink.

Cancer Week

2009-01-24T17:07:00.000-08:00

If ever you were to talk to someone who works in an ER, or say, ask about their day, they would first tell you either a) it was busy as hell or b) I finished three New York Times Thursday crossword puzzles! Second, they might follow with a comment likening to "it was cardiac day," "it was belly pain day," "infection day," "drunk-as-hell day," or "psycho day." The latter two actually tend to fall on nights, but prove that ailments in our city (and most others, from what I know), strike in eerily uniform waves. Sometimes this makes sense. New Year's Eve was the night of Drunks and Extreme Frostbite.* The day the stock market crashed with a magnitude not seen since October 29th, 1929 - that was White Guy with Heart Attack Day.
Today, friends, was busy as hell, a veritable zoo, and Cancer Day. More accurately, this week was Cancer Week.

To be honest, few things arouse genuine sadness for me in my job. This can be accounted for by the fact that most people who come to the ER are weenies. What's more, is that once they are in a stretcher, splayed out under the meager clothing-like offerings of the hospital gown, they become completely helpless. A person who may have ambled in because of a tummy ache one minute may be well on her way to landing a part in cable's next hot medical drama as soon as they realize there is someone being paid to take care of them. "Will you help me, please, to sip my water, nice lady? I am so weak, eeuuuggh!" The other day, a patient whom I had been translating for all day, after walking herself to the bathroom, stood up from the toilet and called out to me, demanding that I wipe her you-know-what.** This, my dear friends, is typical.

Nonetheless, Cancer Week has put me in a state of gloom that I have only rarely fallen into since beginning work in the ER. Running the risk of generalizing, I notice that the composure, state of health, mental health, and fragility of many cancer patients (and importantly, cancer patients who are currently in the Emergency Room) are all very much the same. We all know someone who has cancer, and may think of them as the most courageous, strong, and illuminating human being we know. This may well be correct for the majority of cancer patients. But, if you have a long history with the disease, and you find yourself in the ER for something as minor as a cough or a headache, you are scared. This week I met a patient with a thirteen year history of breast cancer that later spread to her lungs, and just last week was found to have spread to her brain. She came into the ER rather than her regularly scheduled chemotherapy infusion because of a sudden, inexplicable pain in her back. She writhed in pain and fear as I probed her with questions about her cancer. As I helped her change into a hospital gown, and placed the leads to the cardiac monitor on her chest, I could see a new tumor ulcerating out of her breast; it had grown so quickly it actually broke through the skin. The resident meekly asked what the lesion on her chest was. "It's tumor," she replied, between sobs. "And they're not even doing anything about it. What are they doing?" To think that her disease was so far progressed removing the enormous, voracious tumor in her breast wasn't even on this week's agenda (having been filled with chemo and irradiation of her brain, if I had to guess), was deeply saddening. I asked who her oncologist was, and it turned out to be a doctor whom I worked with in my former job in the Cancer Center. We waxed warmhearted about a woman whom I have always regarded as a mentor and role model, and whom our patient had been coming to for treatment and support for thirteen years. As we spoke adoringly of our mutual friend, she softened and started to straighten herself out a bit. That, friends, is the kind of doctor I want to be. I want patients to feel less pain - and I say this with utter seriousness - just by thinking about me. Anyone in the medical field is in a position to make people better by fighting disease and reconstructing health, but so few, from what I see, can do this simply through their words and demeanor. It must have been horrible for both the patient and her oncologist to have to postpone treatment of a new breast tumor, to pass the baton onto the neuro-oncologists and neurosurgeons while everyone could see her body degrading in plain sight. But, that patient knew that after thirteen years, her doctor was still doing right by her, and she had every reason to believe that she was as important to her doctor as on that very first, horrible day.

That patient ended up having some fluid on her lung, which was causing the stabbing pain in her upper back. It was treated and she was feeling better within a day, but knowing the eventual end of this story yet to come, I am still emotionally tender. It didn't help that for the rest of the week, and especially today, the names of people I used to cycle through the Cancer Center's database kept popping up on the ER board, citing things like "fever," "general weakness," "nausea/vomiting/diarrhea," as chief complaints. I changed and dressed them, talked to them about the wonderful staff up in the cancer center, avoided bruising the leukemia patients while bathing them, and listened garbled monologues about pain and swelling in the upper right part of someone's arm, interrupted by a remembrance of Jane Fonda, whose acting career was a wreck but she had the most gorgeous boyfriend! (According to her son, the patient spoke with only about "50% accuracy, at this point." They had been through it all, were scared as hell, and asked for nothing. It presented quite the change from the normal routine of having to remind people that they are well enough to fetch their own glass of water from the counter, or go to the bathroom by themselves.

Cancer Week was hard because it is impossible not to compare the suffering of random patients to that of those we love. We all have personal stories and losses, and the sadness inside of the exam room with an acute patient and their family inside is coldly familiar, at least on some level.
That isn't something would feel right about avoiding, I suppose, but it isn't a feeling I'd strive to achieve daily in my career. Being the doctor that heals through both medicine and shared humanity, though, is definitely a goal to be sought.

*From what I hear, there were over 30 drunks in our 30 bed ER. Keep in mind some of those are in the pediatric department, some are designated for finger sprains and ear infections and thus ill-equipped for patients with life-threatening conditions. To make a long, dramatic story short, the smell of vomit lingered in our barracks-turned observation room for a couple of days.

** I did not.

17 degrees - not too shabby!

2009-01-10T09:59:00.000-08:00

It's the time of year when I kick myself every morning for not having moved to southern California yet. Oh the times that would be had! Running dozens of miles every morning along the beach, feeling the sun throughout the day while walking from work to class to my beachfront cabin which I would be renting for pennies, walking my dog through the canyons, being watchful for rattlers and cacti, dodging Mexican gangsters with guns and cocaine in Tiujuana (oh wait they only kill cops), hanging Christmas lights on a palm tree...it all brings me back to my childhood, spent tricycling the walkways of married-student-housing at UCSD in La Jolla, smelling eucalyptus trees, avoiding the scary bird that the people downstairs kept as a pet.
I'm going to stop there, I'm afraid I'll just be headed more towards the deep end of the seasonal-depressive pool if I let my imagination roam much further.

New Year

2008-12-31T15:57:00.000-08:00

Greetings, everyone, and happy New Year. We in Boston have the pleasure of starting 2009 with a raging blizzard, bound to be as dramatic as last week's blizzard, if not more. The ER was a zoo today, New Year's Eve, and tomorrow will likely be the same...a lot of shaking the sleeping drunks in the hallway beds awake, shouting "Despiertate! Ahorita, respira! Mas profundo!"*

Here is some news: I started doing "hot yoga" (formally, Bikram Yoga) in an effort to a) regain circulation to my extremities at least a few times a week b) become very stretchy and be able to balance on one foot, limbs flying in all directions for prolonged periods of time and c) force myself to drink more than a few ounces of water every four days (drinking water makes me cold). It has worked! I stay warm for at least three hours after each class, and get the added benefit of having sweated out about a gallon of fluid every time (the room is usually ~110 degrees). Goodbye evil toxins! You should try it.

Admittedly, life seems pretty dull outside of the ER. My job used to be so boring I was forced to see the time in between work hours as material for creativity - the weirdos on the train, the funny hallucinations that struck me while walking around downtown, the daily habits of my pet rabbits (now pet rabbit, singular...his brother was adopted). I've been listening to Brahms string quartets whenever I am walking somewhere lately, so rather than thinking the profound thoughts that so easily come while walking alone, I am swept up in the etherial richness of one of his developments, sometimes waving my arms around as if I were playing. I doubtlessly look like a lunatic, which is fine, because there is a home for lunatics just down the street from me, the residents of which can often be found pacing up and down Fayette Street. No one would ever know I was not, in fact, mentally incapacitated. Am I not supposed to call them lunatics? Sorry, everyone.

*"Wake up! Now, breathe! Deeper!"

prologue

2008-12-30T17:53:00.000-08:00

The post following this one is a huge story about my being a hero yesterday in the ER. Truth be told, the guy is probably gonna die anyway, but I felt like I did something right. The opportunity to write about such a thing will probably never rise again, so, below you will find a big, ego-stroking, shameless attestation to my greatness. While reading, please keep in mind that I drop things, have a problem with blushing,am no good at math, and mumble a lot.

affirmation

2008-12-30T16:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday at work an ambulance called in a radio report stating they were en route to our hospital with a 52 year old male with symptoms of a major stroke. He was seemingly paralyzed up and down the left side, unable to speak, and had left facial droop. When he and the paramedics rolled in the ambulance bay, the patient looked exactly as they had described. He was a thin Asian man who looked about 35, his eyes cast aimlessly in front of him, arm hanging off the stretcher, head lilting wherever gravity took him. Neurology was already down the in ER, and the residents began their assessments even while the medics were still lifting him onto the hospital bed. They called his name, shined light his eyes, tapped, lifted, and bent his arms and legs, then finally tried to instigate a response by digging the handle of a reflex hammer into the nail beds of his big toe and index fingers. Finally, the patient withdrew his left leg from the excruciating pain. The whole time, especially after the pain response tests, he had a serious frown on his face - the charge nurse, shuffling through the patient's wallet looking for ID said "don't worry everyone, I think that's his baseline." Looking at his driver's license, the frown was the same, almost hateful.
Now, the apex of a stroke protocol is to get the patient to CAT scan, scan his head looking for a bleed of any kind, indicating a hemorrhagic, rather than ischemic stroke. If the brain is bleeding, and thrombolitics, or clot busters, were to be administered, the patient would bleed out into his brain and die. However, since most strokes are ischemic, caused by a blockage brought on by a blood clot in the brain, the faster you can get through CT and administer thrombolitics, the better. In fact, thrombolitics only work within two hours of the stroke's onset - if no one catches a stroke within that window, there's nothing to be done, really. Whatever damage occurs - and in this guy's case, enough to cause paralysis and loss of speech - will likely remain largely permanent.
Having decided that the patient was, indeed, having a major stroke, and readied him to be swept off to CT, the neuro resident and fellow indicated that he should be taken up as soon as possible, and that other routine tests, like his EKG, blood sugar test, and a few others should be held until he got back. The CT was the number one priority. But alas, as happens with almost every patient in every hospital, there was a delay in our doing anything because he had yet to be registered in the hospitals administrative system. We bade our time, waiting for a medical record number to pop up under his name on the computer screen. Meanwhile, I fastened him in for liftoff, arranged the portable heart monitor, which I had been eying for a few minutes, at the end of the bed.
For the past few months, following the example of a fellow ER tech at another hospital and dear friend, I have been teaching myself how to read heart rhythm strips and interpret EKG's. I'm usually wrong when I bring an EKG to the attending and tell him what I see, what I think is going on with someone's heart, and what irregularities I see in the various peaks and segments. Often, I get laughed at for carrying around Dale Dubin's Rapid Interpretation of EKG's, aka "the bible," of the ER. For some reason, my littleness, my perkiness, and occasional featherbrained-ness, makes me the least likely person to be of actual value in an emergency. Apparently, my enthusiasm is humorous, to some. Nonetheless, I now know the difference between a regular and irregular heart rhythm. And evidently, I am fresh and naive enough in the ER as to make sure everything else is going right, even when clearly, there is something terribly wrong in this man's brain. Well, I'm looking at the heart monitor, which by no means gives the same picture or even a very reliable picture of the heart in comparison to an actual EKG, and I'm pretty sure I'm looking at flipped T-waves in lead III and about a millimeter of ST elevation in V5.* I wasn't sure if lead III was supposed to be flipped, as some other leads are naturally, but was mostly concerned about the possibility that the elevation visible in V5 on this puny little heart monitor was really something hugely ugly, in reality. "Hey, um, sorry, I don't know how reliable this is," I told the neuro resident, "but I'm looking at his rhythm here and he's got a bit of ST elevation in V5 and I think maybe I should do the EKG now rather than after the CT, you know, while we're just waiting around."** He bent down to look at the monitor, and somewhat bewildered, agreed with me. "Yeah. Do it now."
Having done about ten million EKG's in the short history of my career as an ER tech, I had it done in about a minute and a half. While I waited for the image to flash up on the screen, I thought about what a nut I would look like if there was nothing wrong with his heart. Silly Morgan and her EKG's...we're in the middle of a stroke protocol, here! But, to my surprise and (I now feel guilty for this) outright glee, the man was having a major heart attack. I may not know all the intricacies of EKG tracings for hyperkalemia or digitalis toxicity, escape patterns or what have you, but I do know what a myocardial infarct looks like, and it was staring me right in the face. I showed my attending, who was with another patient, and he said nothing, except "Who is this?" "The stroke patient in Trauma 4." He rushed past me into the mob of doctors...neurologists, mostly, that were milling anxiously around the nurses' station.
Katy, the primary nurse and I ran - literally- the patient up to CT, where we were met by the cardiology fellow. She was my height, had a brown ponytail and glasses. Her scrubs were too big. "We need to get him back downstairs," she said, "he's having a major MI, he's our patient now." We know, Katy said. "Morgan saw it on the monitor." I was blushing furiously.
The rest of my afternoon I spent doing whatever I could to help the cardiologists and neurologists care for the patient, stood in on their conversations about where he would go...cath lab versus neuro, etc. I watched them do an echocardiogram, basically an ultrasound of the heart, and it was the most amazing diagnostic procedure I had ever seen. Usually, when watching an ultrasound, everything on the screen looks like grey and white fuzz, completely indiscernible. But, in an ECHO, I could see all four chambers of the heart, contracting and relaxing, mitral and tricupsid and atrial valves aflutter, pumping blood to the various regions of the body. The tech could record the sound of the blood gushing through each of the chambers, squish-chunk, squish-chunk.
Sadly, the patient was outside the window for effective intervention for both of his major medical disasters. The CT was inconclusive, no hemorrhagic bleed but no sign of a clot, and the three hour time span in which a trip to the cath lab would have saved his heard had come and gone the night before, some time between when his family had talked to him around midnight and when they found him on the ground the next morning. Nevertheless, I beamed with pride for having been the first to pick up on his MAJOR HEART ATTACK, which may well have gone unnoticed until he had gotten back from CT and either I (if I hadn't been pulled away by some other task) or another tech got around to doing a routine, non-emergent EKG. I've seen stroke patients go hours without one, which is frightening. Needless to say, that will not ever happen while I'm in the pit.
I've been feeling down right proud of myself since yesterday. For a moment, I thought - "maybe this is the thing that will get me into med school." This was the first, and probably the last time in this job that I will have made a pickup of such magnitude, and before anyone else, that completely changed the course of someone's acute care. Maybe I will make a good doctor. That said, the day was not without its failures - I got a phone call from the charge nurse as I was walking home and got chewed out for having a) neglected to properly label a tube of blood I sent to the blood bank (for a different, relatively healthy patient) and b) having drawn said tube without verbal orders from a nurse...apparently, this is the most egregious error a person can make in the jungle of the ER. Guess I better not count on sticking in this job very long.***

*These things are bad. I'm not about to go into a big thing detailing how the EKG works, what it measures and what is considered normal or abnormal. I will say that it measures the strength and duration of the electrical signals that control the heart, and that any kind of blockage and/or slowing of a signal will be indicated by a widening, heightening, or altogether flipping of one or more waves. The four waves are named Q, R, S, T; thus, the ST segment is the segment between the S wave and the T wave. A millimeter is not very much, at all, and would otherwise be insignificant on a regular EKG if it wasn't seen in contiguous leads.
**That's right, I speak in awkward run-on sentences, especially when talking to doctors.
***That's right, in ten years, I'll be running the whole damn place.

how not to respond to penetrating trauma

2008-12-16T18:05:00.000-08:00

Nearing the end of my second out of three twelve hour shifts this weekend, I bounced away from my station in the rapid assessment area (curing Boston's colds, rashes, abscesses, minor lacerations, toothaches and back pain) to see what I could see on the more dramatic side of the ER. As I walked over, one of the other techs ran up to me with a bewildered look. "Do you guys have an S bandage over here? Do you even know what that is? Dr. J needs an S bandage for the lac.*" Huh. Not 45 minutes prior, the same doctor had showed me a special kind of gauze for especially nasty open wounds - severed digits and such - so I grabbed some zeroform and leaped over to the room with the lac in it. For a laceration to make it onto the acute side of the ER, something nearing the possibility of being life-threatening has to be going on. Decreased circulation due to blood loss certainly meets that criteria. I was about to see something interesting.**
The patient was sitting up with his arm held up over some towels on the floor. There was blood absolutely everywhere. "Come have a look, sweethaht!" the patient said. He looked like a Marine and spoke in a South Philly accent. He had "fallen through a glass table," about an hour beforehand, the shards of which had sliced through his forearm, making a U-shaped flap about six inches long and four inches wide, down to the bone. There was another smaller, straight lac further up his arm. Looking into the wound I could see his flexors, his palmaris longus (muscles, full, well-defined, gym-rat worthy) and at the base of the wound, a glimpse of the periosteum,*** slightly rumpled. The room wobbled. "Are those Gucci glasses?" he asked me. "No," I said, "Prada." (I don't mess around.) The doctors, having been distracted by charting and consults and other such necessities before began to flood in. Dr. J barked orders and I fell into line, holding the arm up while he wrapped the S bandage (which turned out to be something completely different, basically the longest, thickest, widest tourniquet you've ever seen, used to completely cut off the blood supply to the whole arm, temporarily, in order to repair it) around the iodine-painted limb. As I held, Dr. J and three other emergency docs furrowed their eyebrows and spat out their concerns about the repair. Mainly, the arm was so swollen that the flap would in no way be stretched over the wound. "Just stitch me up and let me go doc, I gotta go to work in the mornin', no joke." He said this probably about 30 times throughout the half hour that I watched. It become increasingly annoying as it became more obvious that nothing short of actual surgery was going to successfully re-attach the part of his arm that was currently dangling down towards the floor. Then, as I oogled, one of the doctors suggesting manipulating the hand in a way that flattened the muscles so that the skin could be stretched over enough of the hole to cover and repair it, and then splinting it that way so that the skin didn't burst open when the patient later decided to move his hand. They started manipulating as I meekly stood by with the arm in my hands, absorbing the day's amazing medical phenomenon. Then, suddenly, the muscles inside until-then static open wound starting shifting back and forth, little ends of severed tendons dancing inside his arm as Dr. J played with the hand. I couldn't contain my terrified ecstasy. "WHOA," I howled. Mouth open, I stared into the abyss of the man's arm until I realized that all three doctors had broken their concentration to whip their heads around, hairy eyeballs ablaze, and glare at me, who had just violated the rule of SHUT THE HELL UP. "You're not supposed to say that, dummy," Dr. J said. "You're scaring the shit out of your patient." Right, my juvenile outburst was going to 'scare' the patient who had now removed (with his viable hand) my glasses, put them on, and then whoops! Dropped them into a pool of his own blood. I was blind. Thanks, everyone! Glad I could at least provide some entertainment in this time of gravity. Blushing furiously, I uttered some form of apology, picked up my glasses, wiped them on my scrubs and put them on. I know, nasty. Everything everywhere having to do with anything health care is nasty. He didn't have Hep C, HIV or septicemia. I couldn't just be blind.
I walked out of the room twenty minutes later, embarrassed as hell and fuming after having kissed at least two med school recommendations goodbye. When I got home I had blood on me and a film of spittle from having been sneezed upon by a semi-cognizant homeless guy earlier in the day (a bit more horrifying than the bloody glasses, I have to say). "There's no hot water," my roommate said as I greeted her.

*lac = laceration.
**Never, ever, do you want to be *interesting* in my place of work. You either a) have something both unknown and potentially life-threatening b) look like a freak of nature or c) you are losing lots and lots of blood and showing your insides to the outside world.
***membrane covering the bone

scumbags

2008-11-15T09:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the methadone addict I was "babysitting" in the ER told me "it's inhumane the way sick people get treated in here. I'm SICK, I feel like SHIT, I haven't gotten my MEDICINE and I've been here forever." Since I had started my shift, I had been watching the plump, balding man progress from a cooperative, though annoyingly needy patient (can I have some breakfast? Can I have some ginger ale? Can I have a towel, washcloth, new hospital gown, blanket? Can I order lunch? All in the first 3 hours of the day) to a sweaty, chattering ball of urine-soaked animal. As the hospital doesn't tend to keep a stockpile of methadone, let alone dole it out to every addict that graces the halls of the ER, it would be a while before his "medication" would be delivered to the hospital and administered. In the meantime, there was nothing anyone could do but tend to other patients (i.e., actual sick people). As the lowest-ranking member of the clinical team, I was assigned (as i often am) to sit outside of his room and basically make sure he didn't run away. Some behavior, be it ideation of self-harm, belligerence or elevated anxiety, had landed him in a psych room: a four-walled cell with a bed, a door and a lock. I've seen patients who were considered such a threat to themselves that the bed was taken out of the room, the mattress left on the floor and the lights left on.
For a while I felt bad for him. He paced around, he lay down, he wet himself, shaking and looking severely ill. I traded off babysitting duty with the other tech for a while, and came back a few hours later after he had gotten his dose of methadone. He had fully recovered - he was up, spry, eating his lunch and looking pissed. Once, while 7 or so security guards were bringing a new patient into the next room, I took the opportunity to get up for (literally) ten seconds to ask the other tech if she would mind switching off again. When I sat back down, the man had escaped, having darted out the door past 7 security guards to go have a smoke out front. After someone retrieved him and I told him he absolutely had to stay in his room, he screamed at me (see above reference to feeling like absolute SHIT and being treated like an animal). Telling him I was doing my job, that everyone is caring for other sick people (read: REAL sick people), treating emergencies was pointless. The man was livid.
To an extent, the care of psych patients is notably sub-par. There simply is no where to put them, most of the time. There are few facilities in the area, and the psych unit of the hospital is small and usually maxed out, so they end up living a few days of their sad lives in the ER. This guy wasn't psych though. By the end of the day my sympathy had been completely decimated by his sick dependency and self-centeredness. I didn't care what his story was, whether he had been socially disadvantaged from childhood or was cast into the abyss of addiction after some terrible personal tragedy. His own self-pity so clouded his instictual, human empathy for others that he had the balls to say that the hospital staff was providing inadequate care to the sick. He should have been kicked out on his ass in triage.

full moon in the emergency department

2008-11-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I walked into my place of work at 7:45 am to hear the siren's song of an intoxicated woman with fake boobs and Christmas pajamas (I had the honor of doing her EKG, sticking her full of stickers and hooking up wires to various places on her reeking body to look at her heart) who was screaming (not yelling, not crying, but screaming) in her room, filled with security guards, leather restraints and nurses holding sedative-filled syringes. A few hours later, after she had come down out of the rafters somewhat, she told me the familiar story of how she effectively ended her life, insofar as having cut off all of her loved ones, through alcoholism, and is so hopeful that she'll be able to turn it around. Her greatest worry was for her cat, who was in labor when the EMT's came and took her away. "I'm going to have kittens when I get home!"

call me feeble, but man, I can bitch up a storm

2008-09-28T04:49:00.000-07:00

We are happily exactly two weeks away from the starting gun of the Chicago Marathon, and wouldn't you know, yours truly had the pleasure of signing into the ER last night, and not to punch in my time card. After a week of steadily increasing agony post pushing-fat-person-in-stretcher (see last entry), I showed up to work in tears for my 4-midnight shift last night only to fill out an incedent report, get triaged by the charge nurse (my boss) and worked up for a sub-lumbar myofascial strain by my co-workers.* "That crazy drug-seeker is back," my nurse said as she walked out of my Express Care exam room. "She's asking for Tylenol - she wants extra strength. Just get her out of here." Har har har. They assured me it would be better well before the race as long as I "go easy" (whatever) for a couple of days. Long story short I'm on worker's comp until Wednesday and in the meantime am pursuing operation rapid-healing (with valium, a lidocaine patch and an ocean of anti-inflammatories). Luckily it's been steadily raining all weekend and shows no sign of stopping in the near future, so I have no desire to release any of my pent-up angst and disappointment in self through vigorous outdoor activity that would not only make me very cold and wet but also screw up my freaking feeble-as-hell lumbar region. Poor.little.me.

In other news, I'm thinking hard about applying to grad school for an MPH (Masters in Public Health) starting next summer and earning my degree by the time med school *** rolls around in...24 months. I'd concentrate in Global Health and enroll in school full time again, something I never thought I'd miss after graduating from college. Listen well, baccalaureate candidates: you may think you are in hell right now, what-with-all your sleeping until 10 am every day, attending class two or three times a day, and getting your work done in your minimal down time (oh wait...your whole LIFE would be down time if it weren't for all those direly important extracurriculars like the Save the World with Mosquito Nets Club and intramural ultimate frisbee). You may think graduation day will be your emancipation from the chains of stress and your general state of constantly being shat-upon (in the figurative sense). YOU ARE WRONG. STAY IN SCHOOL AS LONG AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. HAVING A JOB IS JUST ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING "I AM HERE TO DO SOMEONE ELSE'S BITCH WORK." Don't get me wrong...you may find yourself doing some incredibly awesome bitch work...say, doing cardiac compressions during a Code Blue in a major city hospital's ER...but still! Say goodbye to your pride and sense of autonomy, forever. You are also going to be the one cleaning up the contents of some poor dead slob's recently incontinent bowels, alone, with a big old dead guy, in a room strewn with tubes, bodily fluids, and the sound of a flat-lined heart monitor.****
Grad school, here I come!!!

*read: pulled muscle in lower back
***barring the extreme likelihood of all-out rejection
****please note, i actually love my job.

operation highly respectable human being: success!!

2008-09-26T04:39:00.000-07:00

After a lengthy hiatus, I am proud to inform you that I am re-instituting my habit of jotting down daily musings and happenings for the entire internet-world to behold.
Behold! It is the end of a long and productive summer, and still the beginning of what is hinting to be a much less miserable - perhaps even enjoyable - year. Rather than delve immediately into my profound ideas on the state of the world at present, I will spend a brief time outlining the components and structure of my current existence, as since I last wrote, everything has been altered.
First: I said goodbye to my job as Data Manager in the hospital's program for Bone Marrow Transplant, trained all summer as an EMT and took a part-time job as an Emergency Department Technician in the ER at the hospital where I was already employed. It was the best decision I have ever made in my life, aside from the impending poverty that has already reared it's ugly head, according to my personal online bank statement. The point of this change was not to get rich though, but to make more time for school and likewise get more clinical experience in medicine. In this realm the plan has panned out with great success. And, worry you not, there are many, many stories from the ER to come.*
Second: I moved! No longer do I live in an apartment that one might term as "squalid," but in a beautiful three story house at the end of culdesac in Old Cambridge, complete with backyard (mostly dirt right now I guess), gardens, and porches galore. Even a clothesline! Next, I am getting a piano. Having spent last year maintaining virtually no contact whatsoever with any friends, I now live with two of my best friends from high school and one of their old college roommates. Finally I'm in a place where I can burp in front of my co-inhabitants and sing themes from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without hesitancy.
Last-ish: everything else. I'm running the Chicago Marathon in two weeks, but it is bound to be a slower race than I had hoped. After a depressing 20k through the slums of New Haven a few weeks ago at the US 20k Championships (aka the New Haven Road Race) I decided that running under 3:05 in the marathon was going to be a stark impossibility, and that I had best work on my shorter races this fall instead and get some speed back before I attempted to run both long AND fast. It seems to be working - I can run a bunch quarters around 82 seconds now (woot! sounds like high school track!), and, if I am not permanently crippled over the next two months from having twisted the crap out of my lower back pushing 400-pound patients on stretchers all over the hospital for their freaking CAT scans and x-rays and cardiac catheterizations to look through their enormous globs of FAT at all the bodily DAMAGE that their being FAT has caused, I may just have the best cross-country season ever since the glory days atop the Hopkins Hill in New Haven. The marathon will be nothing more than a mid-season frivolity.

And now, a few of what shall become daily pearls of wisdom from the ER:
1- do.not.smoke.
2- do not get fat. you will someday need CPR and it will not work.
3- if you have pus coming out of your genitalia, go to the hospital. You are septic and are dying. The EMT's will not be able to save you.
4- don't use IV drugs. You will contract a number of diseases that your terribly accident-prone ED tech is bound to get exposed to via blood-splash, whom, upon discovering the gravity of such a possible exposure, will burst into tears in front of the entire ER staff at the center nurses's station. Good bye, med school, good bye.

*All of which will be de-identified and/or told with permission of persons involved. Luckily, amusing ER cases are so frequent and so uniformly categorized into a) cardiac arrest/code blue occurrences b) hilarious drunk people c)trauma involving the loss of an extremity or a whack on the head that causes the victim to sing disjointed nursery rhymes all night ("no more...no more monkeys...jumping...on....the...bed!), that for someone to read one of my blog-renderings and identify themselves as the subject would seem nearly impossible, and definitely impossible to prove.

operation highly respectable human being

2008-06-13T05:59:00.000-07:00

Having begun a seasonally motivated operation in self-improvement (let's call it Operation Highly Respectable Human Being) I've made a few changes to my daily routine in an effort to fulfill a few lofty goals that the warm weather and an overall sunnier outlook on life have instigated. First, I am paying off debts in massive portions and saving more money as to avoid racking up more debt over the coming school year. Second, I am doing my physical therapy exercises at home (and thus shortening the amount of time I am paying for physical therapy) (yes, I injured myself again, and am now known throughout my physical therapy clinic as The Most Accident Prone Individual In the World...we work on balance). I am running again every day in an attempt to return to my normal level of fitness. I could build a shrine to myself two years ago when I was running 70 miles a week through the woods and over mountains in southern Maine every day before breakfast. Last, I am trying to improve my time at work - turn my day into a dynamic learning process, taking advantage of more of the opportunities that come with working in a hospital (attending grand rounds, tagging along with doctors, meeting patients and spending time with them when their families are away). I've made moderate strides in this area, but am still rather understimulated, shall we say, in my position as Data Manager. After all, despite my efforts to get out my office and run around the hospital in search of fascinating medical phenomena, the fact remains that the data must be scrubbed and entered, the Case Report Forms filled. Ho-hum.

There has been a rather curious development in the beginning of my day though that merits some discussion. Since Boston's daily meteorological state turned from well below freezing to well above 90 degrees beginning in mid-April I've been biking to work more consistently, enough to cancel my T-pass (thus saving another $44 per month -- hooray! More Peanut Butter Pandas Cereal!). Having become a regular at the South Parking Garage Bike Rack, I've befriended a few of the valets that work there (at the garage...not the bike rack) and slowly come to know most of the life story of one whom I shall refer to as Larry. I exaggerate not. Just to preview some of the coming narrative, I'll be telling of Larry's days in Key West, newspaper editing, a cyclist, a hippie, time spent in upstate New York, Larry's various medical conditions and family history, the births of his two children and the effects each had on his family, Larry's Woodstock days, and how Larry came to be a valet at a major Boston hospital.

Chapter 1: Introductions

Larry introduced himself to me as one who at one time loved to bike. This was appropriate, as we came to know each other because I always see him at the end of my pedal-powered commute to work. "Yup, now that the weather is warm I wouldn't be caught dead on the train," I told him. "You know," Larry said, "I lived in Key West for years and years, and I just loved the heat down there. Key West has the highest average temperature in the United States. Seventy-two degrees, year-round. In the summer it'd be well over a hundred, and I'd just love it. I'd bike around Key West for hundreds of miles; I just couldn't stay out of the sun. Then of course I developed chronic urinary tract infections and had to stop biking. They are so painful, you know, and chronic...that means I get them all the time...and you know, it's usually something that only women get, but, that's life I guess." "How awful, I'm so sorry," I said. How terribly strange that you have told me this in our first conversation, I thought. "Yeah, they are pretty bad and I started getting older and suddenly couldn't take the heat anymore." "They are very painful," I said. "Oh, it's horrible," Larry said, "That and the heat is why I had to move back up North."

It went on from there (Larry has a tendency to talk without stopping for minutes at a time), and I left after much insistence on my part an uncomfortable amount of time later, I bid good day to Larry and walked into work a bit stunned to have learned such information about a complete stranger. Since then I've come to appreciate, somewhat, Larry's ability to talk and have made it a goal to absorb as much as I can about this individual in an effort to learn something remarkable about the human condition. It could end up being a pointless endeavour ending in the realization that life is quite boring and the details unimportant, and further that Larry is a skulky old man that doesn't really have a problem with talking to a twenty-three year old female every morning and for lack of better vocabulary, is a creepy stalker. I haven't gotten the impression that this is the case, but, believe you me (MOM) I am careful.

the importance of rodents

2008-05-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received an article from BBC news per email from my mother. A hyperactive international women's health worker and proponent of social justice to boot, I expected her reference to be covering a story about the recent social uproar in Johannesburg, the burning of 11 "witches" in Western Kenya, or the political turmoil in Zimbabwe (all places where she is planning to spend time over the next few months). No. "Gigantic fossil rodent discovered." How apt.

Thank you, mother. I, for one, am enlightened. Not only about the latest paleontological findings of my mother's favorite mammalian genus, but perhaps too the origins of my own *subtle* eccentricities. To this day, she calls me Rodent. I have managed to justify this name by caring for a pair of live rodents in my squalid, seldom-visited fourth-floor walk-up, in between my work hours in the cancer center and my pre-med classes. Despite their tendency to shed copious amounts of allergenic mohair and express the the joys of bunny-hood by flinging their paper bedding-puffs all over the carpet, the bunnies and I need each other. I'm beginning to see some generational continuity.

The notorious matriarch herself will be back on the East Coast this weekend. If ever you wondered what it would be like to have two of either one of us around, it would be a good time for your to visit Boston. Especially if you have any interest in seeing local indie bands, talking about small mammals, or going to a giant Women's Health Expo (free lanolin-based breast feeding salve? I think so!!). Don't expect us to be on time, though. We are bad at that.

pulled from the wreckage

2008-05-16T17:24:00.000-07:00

I find the overlap of mind-blowing natural disasters this week rather curious. The sudden onset of hypersensitivity and sympathy towards the millions of victims and hundreds of thousands dead is shocking. The fold-out tables set up on the street and outside of schools inform us of the realization of utter DOOM that has erupted in those unhappy places. As I spend my day working in Chinatown (my relationship with the neighborhood is strictly geographical, save my weekly trip to the grocery store), I witnessed yesterday the desperation with which much of its populous is suffering with regard to their homes and loved ones in the Sichuan province. Family members living here in Boston are scared, very sad, and have been standing outside of grocery stores collecting change and one-dollar bills all week. They have signs with poorly-scrawled pleas for aid money and photographs of the rubble. After buying my weekly supply of value-priced grapes and mildly aged strawberries during my break yesterday I threw in my dollar, sucked in a breath through my teeth and moved on with my day.

Coming out at the liberated end of exam week, I am at a loss for what to do with myself. The daily routine for the past eight months has been relatively straightforward: work eight hours, go to class for three or four hours, study, and attempt to salvage any wisp of bodily health over five or six hours of fitful sleep. At the moment I am still waiting for my final grades to be posted, so I do indeed have hearty fodder for anxiety, but golly - besides the fact that I still cannot sleep, have a bloodshot eye, need a haircut and feel generally as though my body was left for dead on the floor of Science Center Hall B last week, it is looking like existence as I know it is not likely to continue in this way for a while. The horror.

What else is there to discuss? I will have to live out the next week and a half (I am admittedly starting another night class over the summer - more on that later, to be sure) looking out for the old quirks and crazies that used to provide me with material for higher brain function as I used to, before said brain was shaken and overwhelmed with the physical properties of the universe and chemical equilibrium.

nothing like a little maiming to get you through the mondays

2008-04-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

It was a shining morning, this Monday in April, as I descended into the bowels of the Central Square T Station from the seasonally appropriate A.M. drizzle. I shoved my diminutive body into the already stuffed car full of immobilized, sleepy-eyed commuters. With an artful maneuver I wrested my newest reading material, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of Americas by Cabeza de Vaca, from my tote bag and avoiding throwing an elbow into one of my co-rider's maxillary sinus held it up a few inches from my face in an attempt to read one of its heart-pumping chapters as we bumped along.

"PUSH THE EMERGENCY BUTTON!" someone shouted. "PUSH--THE--BUTTON!"
I looked up from my book -- was something more riveting than the conquest of the Americas taking place?

"What's the problem? Who pushed the Emergency Button?" a voice asked over the intercom. No one answered, and apparently no one knew what was happening.

Word crept back from the front of the car that "Someone is stuck in the door!" Stuck in the DOOR? But really? Where were all of the agonizing screams? Where was the spray of fresh arterial blood on the windows as we zoomed through the underground tunnel? The hilarity!

"We'll be stopping shortly at Kendall," the voice said. Great, just great! Someone is possibly stuck in the door, arms, legs or head (for all we knew) being scraped against the dank cement wall of the tunnel at 30 miles an hour, but never fear! We will be stopping in a couple of minutes in front of a crowd of recently bed-risen MIT students who will undoubtedly swoop in with blazing courage to resuscitate the bludgeoned victim of this freak accident!

"No, she collapsed!" someone said. My imagination furled. Damn. A part of me was hoping to have the opportunity to rush to the scene at the next station and unleash my American Red Cross Lifeguard certified First Aid training on my first ever trauma patient. Check the airway, breath, and circulation, apply pressure to any wounds, offer words of reassurance while up to my elbows in bloodied body parts.

We stopped and a somewhat pallid blond girl stepped off the train, being led by the wrist by a fellow passenger. Bor-ing. That's right, stand her up again, get her walking! No better way to liven up someone who has just fainted. Whoops! She collapsed again! A crowd was beginning to gather around the spot out side the train. "Help is on the way!" I heard over the loudspeaker. "Do not panic!"

"OK!" I thought. A few seconds later a T employee came jingling down the platform to the rescue. The doors closed and the train slowly pulled away, leaving the chaos behind in an unharried, stately manner.

today, we drink decaf and take a walk in the rain.

2008-04-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

New Feature!
Daily Advice Column
by Morgan

April 4, 2008 Friends, do not ever get chronic lymphocytic leukemia with Rickter's transformation that requires a bone marrow transplant that causes severe graft-versus-host disease necessitating toxic medications that render you cognitively impaired so that when you are taken off the meds your disease worsens and you aren't able to talk about anything but decade-old baseball news. And if you do, do not start this process with an erratically behaving liver. Trust me. You will make your caretakers rather...tense. Moreover, in the end, you will die.*

*So I need not mention the weeks of diarrhea, all of your skin filling with pus and peeling off, not being able to eat for months, and extreme susceptability to things like the chicken pox. Really big, really awful, chicken pox.

Just another day at the office, quite literally. If only every day were this exciting, barring the implication of patient deaths on a daily basis.

I ran into the Old Cigar Man last night at the grocery store. He was buying rice, olive oil, and chicken broth. I had a cucumber, whole wheat pita bread, hummus, a tomato, and goat cheese. He saw me and cried, "Pretty girl! Why!? Did she have to lie?!" I knew what he was talking about. "She's done for, isn't she!? Don't you think she is done for?! Now that boy , now he is going to win!" He went on. "Maybe," I said. "She is not done for, and she didn't lie, she 'exaggerated.'" We were of course talking about Hillary Clinton and last week's (two weeks ago?) claim that she had once landed in the midst of sniper fire in Bosnia. I've been trying to distance myself from the spectacle for the past month or so, so truthfully, my knowledge on the subject is dim. My little old man was pissed, though. He felt betrayed.

cue soundtrack to 'platoon'

2008-03-31T09:24:00.000-07:00

Last Week: "President George W. Bush spoke with soldiers in Afghanistan. "I'm a little envious," he said via a remote video link. 'It must be exciting for you --in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger.'" (harper's)

america at its finest

2008-03-30T04:14:00.000-07:00

I was sitting at a table for one in my local eco-friendly coffee shop/grocery co-op last night trying to get a grip on some test material (yes, it was Saturday; I am Boston's most glittering social butterfly), when I was soon joined by the lung-collapsing odor of stale cigar smoke. Indeed, the man who had sat down at the table next to mine was holding half a smothered cigar and wearing a pinstriped wool zoot suit (I kid you not) that had clearly had time to absorb the smoke from many more cigars between cleanings. When he took off his hat it was obvious that he had not bathed in quite some time. I took a long gulp of tea and kept my eyes down, hoping he would soon take his odor elsewhere.

Soon, though, I realized he was talking to me. "What are you thinking so hard about? Are you a politician?" he asked, rolling his r's in a thick Middle Eastern accent.
"No."
"Do you know about politics?"
"Yes, I know a lot about politics," I said, immediately feeling as though I had overstated.
"You know, then, if that boy wins the election, nothing is going to be the same."
"Isn't that the point?" I asked. The disgusted look on his face suggested he was not warm to the prospect. It was as though Barack Obama was going to destroy that which was America, all that was free and equal, the country that had lifted him up out of a life of little education and poverty and given him Blue-Cross and cataracts surgery. This was all true; I learned practically his entire life story in the forty-five minutes that I talked with him. Our conversation began with his love and admiration for Hillary Clinton. "She is smart! She spent eight years in the white house! She knows what she is doing!" I argued with him, of course, but with little fervor. I presumptuously figured that I knew more of the intricacies of the current presidential race, its contenders, and my ability to see beyond the media-fabricated spectacular. As he spoke I realized he knew considerably more than I had assumed, but that it had probably been absorbed from months of Associated Press news stories and re-runs of presidential reality television. I continued to let myself be impressed with him though, his political leanings backed by a personal history of having come to America in 1940 from what was still referred to as Arabia, living the dream, and seeing the country increasingly disintegrate over the past 30 years. I listened, inwardly worrying about how much studying I was getting done, until he said this:
"You, you will understand," pause, voice lowering, "you are a white person." Not liking where this was going. "If that boy...if that black boy wins the election, nothing will be the same. The blacks --they will have power." I squirmed. "Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, all of them! That church man will be a presidential advisor!"
Horrors, I thought. How fearsome that people believe the things they do. No longer wishing to listen to this man or breath his filthy stench, I politely and smilingly told him that I had enjoyed the conversation but needed to study for a test. "Oh, I am sorry, Sorry for bothering you," he said. I did my best to assure him I hadn't been bothered, that it was nice to meet him, but that it was just very important that I study. He looked up and arranged his belongings as if preparing to leave. "What are you studying, anyway?" He asked. "Chemistry." His eyes widened. "Are you going to be a doctor?" "I hope so," I said.
"Let me tell you. I am 78 years old, and I owe my life to the American Medical System. If I were still in Arabia, I tell you, I would be dead." He raised his eyebrows and stared into my eyes. "America, America has the greatest medical care in the entire world. Where I come from, people lay in the street dying from diabetes; they don't know about insulin, or glaucoma- they die. But here! I am alive because I live here! BUT! I tell you - America has the best medical care in the world but only for those who can pay! Why is that?!"
I told him what I knew, and how I agreed with him; I don't think he realized that I was agreeing with him because he interrupted me with his song of love and hate for the health care system and insurance companies. He didn't know that the state of Massachusetts provided insurance for those who couldn't afford it. He just wanted to argue with me, not knowing he had chosen to argue with someone who was on the same side.
He also told me about all of the care he had received, how he loved the hospital he had frequented and the staff there (the hospital where I work, funnily enough), and his excellent state of health at the age of 78. "I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I am slim and in fine shape!" he exclaimed, standing up and putting his hands on his hips. "Wouldn't you say so?" he asked. "Yes," I said "but your best bet at living forever would be to give up the cigars." He looked guilty. "Eh...I just puff. I don't even inhale! That's healthy!"
"All right," I said. "I just don't ever want to see you on our floor (in the cancer center) at the hospital."
As he was leaving, I got the full run-down of all of his preventative health measures.
"I take Mg (magnesium), vitamin E, that one...that one with the fish oil."
"Omega-3's."
"Yes! That! And and vitamin B-13 or 50..B-50...Vitamins...they are good for you, no? Selenium! Selenium and vitamin E prevent cancer! See! I will not get cancer!"
"I would still quit smoking." He ignored me.
"I am healthy, thanks to the American Medical System. But, understand, it is not for everyone. Promise me, when you are a doctor, you will change the system?"
"Yes," I said, "I promise."
He put on his greasy hat, picked up his things and moved along, the smell of stale tobacco wafting behind him.

I am still at a loss as to how to analyze the random 45 minutes I spent talking to this man. He made a few diligent points, but also had the balls to tell me "You are a lady! Don't you want a lady president? How could you?!" He claimed to be a man of wealth but looked like he had emerged from someone's attic after 30 years of smoking the same cigar. The only hint that he had been truthful was the fact that he knew so much about his own ailments and the very expensive medical treatment he had received for them. On the other hand, having been a patient at the hospital where I work, which serves Boston's poorer demographics, one couldn't be certain. I could picture him being one of Central Square's more than populous homeless/crazy people, wandering in and out of shops and bus stations, seeing who will listen to their story. I am pretty sure he had a few bats in the belfry, if not an entire colony. Oh, that reminds me, he called white Americans colonialists and imperalists, specifically with reference to John McCain. "It will be like Germany after World War II," he said. "The British left, all of the Allies left, but America stayed. Imperialists! You will make a colony out of Iraq."

What baffles me is that this man is terrified of John McCain "that old, old white man!" becoming president because he was a warmonger, and terrified of Barack Obama because "that black boy hates America!" But Hillary Clinton - she is a lady; she is smart, experienced, glowing! Therefore, incapable of doing harm.
Horrors.

epilogue: bizzaro land is for dreamers

2008-03-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

I know what you want. You want to know what I said to Mr. Bizzaro. If you think my calling him "Mr. Bizzaro" rather than "Dr. Perfect" is any hint, you may be wrong. I just went out with they guy. An interesting fellow, good runner, certainly with character and good taste in music and tea. We discussed how bad we are at playing guitar, what color/patterns of band-aids we prefer, our respective experiences with falling on ice and sustaining profound injury, and the possible reconciliation between science and the existence of an "intelligent" order to all things.* It was a grand old time. The twelve year age difference though - let's call it a significant obstacle. I bid him goodnight, probably forever.

Now, this ain't no People Magazine so back to the more crapulous details of my otherwise colorless existence.* Today I squeezed onto the D line by standing on the first step up into the train. The doors shut in my face, and I was literally held in place by being squashed against the door by the other bodies riding the train. I had to turn my face sideways to keep it from pressing up against the window. Now that I think about it, I probably have someone else's face grime, transferred via window glass, on my own.

*I need not express my opinion here; if you've known me for more than five seconds, you know exactly what I think and how I think everything else is absolute crap.
**"crapulous" is indeed a word.

Bizarro Land!

2008-03-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

Running the risk of possibly disclosing actual personal information, it is with great trepidation that I write this. But, friends, this is something all must hear. This will probably never happen to me ever again. In fact, let's say it didn't happen. This is just a hypothetical.

Let's put it this way: How many times have YOU been stopped mid-run by another runner on his daily jaunt around the Charles and asked out on a date? A total stranger, except for the last time you passed him running in the other direction, who seems to be blazing through his own physical fitness agenda, through the drizzle and wind, slams on the brakes and suddenly gets that "I'm about to embarrass myself in a huge way," look that kind of makes you want to run and hide so that you don't get barf on his nice track jacket. EH? Anyone? If this has in fact happened to you, I bet your thoughts, your private, "I'm on a run getting perspective on life" thoughts had NOTHING to do with when you were going to happen upon Mr. Perfection (or, let's face it, more likely Dr. Perfection), or which hobbies you should take up in order to keep your wits about you before settling into retirement as a still single old hag. No I'll bet when YOUR Mr. Random Running Guy asked YOU out you were thinking of something completely unrelated to the prospect of future relationships. Because if you weren't, now that would just be utterly bizzare.
It happened to you too?!?! You are now in Bizarro Land! Welcome to my kingdom!

spring break!! meet me at the Y and bring the keg!!

2008-03-23T16:19:00.001-07:00

It has come to my attention that I have been seriously negligent of my commitment to posting real-time snippets of my daily existence. Sorry, everybody. I'm sure you've been aching.

The present moment brings a much-needed pause from the last six months of continuous mental and physical taxation. Harvard is currently on spring break, which means that I ONLY have to go to work 9-5 every day, and get to spend my evening hours doing whatever the hell I want for a whole week. Foam party?!?! I think so!!!

Maintaining fully booked 16 hour day followed by more hours of studying and denial of the biological necessity that is sleep gives me daily assurance that I am not lazy or a failure (usually). A while ago this resulted in a single month plagued by two bouts of the flu, a chronic head cold, pink eye, and a sinus infection, among other unsavory experiences. This included my passing out on the bathroom floor at six in the morning from dehydration. I came around eventually and now am probably immune to every microbe in the city of Boston, seeing as they all reside in the halls of my place of work, a major metropolitan hospital, where I spend roughly half of my committed life-hours. BUT, moving on.

Today is Easter, the day Jesus came back from the dead,* and also the day the Easter Bunny comes and brings us all malted milk eggs and hides our hand-decorated food coloring masterpiece hard-boiled-eggs in the weeds in the back yard (on the days it is NOT 32 degrees out and windy, i.e. today).** Appropriately, after waking up at 11 for the first time in memorable history, I took my bunnies to hop around the park/'drug-free zone' a few blocks from my apartment with their new bunny harnesses. They were confused by the bright light of the outdoors, the freezingness, and the wind, which I am pretty sure they have never in their short lives experienced, forcing their little eyelids shut and fluffing up their fur.
Here is a fun fact: rabbit fur is a practically endless source of easily-shed electrons! I used Bear for a physics experiment earlier this semester. He was quite enthusiastic about being rubbed down with syran wrap and styrofoam peanuts.

In the event that you are need of some news from the Chinatown YMCA, last Friday was apparently "Come to The YMCA Indoor Pool to Lay Out in Your Bikini on the Hot Tub While all the Old Chinese People Do Water Aerobics and Stare and You Weirdly Day" for a few of Boston's damn-right coolest high school chicks. I remained my stoic self for the remainder of the hour - stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, (is she wearing mascara in the Y's hot tub?!?) stroke stroke...Let us recall this is same place where I was accosted by a one-legged one-toothed Sudanese refugee who insisted that my one-piece speedo was too revealing for a "girl of my age" to be wearing.

In other news, I am fairly certain that I have Adult ADD; hence my thinking I was going to write about possibly having ADD, noticed the song playing on my computer had changed, and then forgot what I was writing about for five minutes until I of course attributed my forgetfulness to possibly having ADD. This week I'll be paying a visit to my employer's center for Learning Disabilities and Attention Deficit Disorders. To be continued...

Well, friends, I am currently sitting here in a ratty t-shirt and sweats post a very painful but sunny run along the Charles***, and can feel the dried salt and dirt on my eyelids. With this I will find some other way to procrasitnate on my shower, and will bid adieu. Schnitzweitz!****

*Literally! And only 2,000 years after the world began!
**Also true!!!
***Boston's river is still named after the King of England - Why?
****If you know what this means and what language it is in, tell me and if you are right you will be eligible to help me raise my future children. Which, mind you, is a very desireable thing, as they will be combination genius surgeons/researchers and prodigious musicians and ballerinas. Don't worry, homeschooling will definitely not be involved.

if i were a rich lady

2008-03-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

I would live in northern Italy in the summer, walk amongst the happy, bell-clad dairy cows in the high reaches of the Dolomites and make friends with the mountain men who truly wear knee socks, lederhosen, and pointed caps with feathers stuck into them. In the winter, I would live in South America, where it was actually still summer. But first, I would pay off my visa bill and my student loans (I find it somewhat irritating that as I look back on the four years of utter hardship and mental disintegration that constitute my college experience, I may at the same time look forward to handing over that which I earned...my humble but adequate paycheck, back to the entities that created said hardships), and move to an enormous industrial loft in the North End overlooking Boston Harbor, invest in Emergency Medical Technician training and get a bottom-dwelling yet riveting part-time job in an ER, study my ass off in the meantime, and apply to every medical school in the country, except for ones where the climate was ridiculously cold. I would only shop at Whole Foods, but I would always cook for myself. Actually, I would hire a personal chef to teach me how to make all kinds of south Indian food. He would also be a yoga master and licensed psychotherapist. I would have a regularly scheduled haircut every two months in a place where they massage your head. But back to my apartment: I would have a robot that cleaned, except when I wanted to. The ceilings would be 40 feet high. The room would be so big I could house a menagerie, home to two talking parrots, my bunnies, a Galapagos tortoise named Cleo, a herd of goats whose milk I would use to make delicious cheese, and a Dinah, the great dane. They would all be potty-trained and eat cake.

when all else fails, play.

2008-02-25T10:55:00.000-08:00

Is it any wonder that the syndrome in which people become depressed due to cold and grey climate is abbreviated as SAD? I bet that they were really banging their heads for a while, trying to come up with semi-relevant words to put behind that acronym when scientists finally decided that Seasonal Affective Disorder was a legitimate mental disease. Curiously, Icelanders have a remarkably low prevalence of SAD, as do Canadians of Icelandic decent who live in Canada. Contrariwise, Scandinavians and the Irish have upwards of 20% incidence.

Also, it is possible for people to experience Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder, in which exposure to light and warmth cause the same depressive symptoms. What tragedy!

Yesterday I took a step toward self-help against my impending downfall in the realm of my apparently constant cheerfulness and strapped on my cross country skis and went for an amature, death-defying nordic adventure through West Rock state park with my dad. And behold, I was actually able to palate the chill and the frosty white powder, despite numerous falls and one instance of being jumped all over by an ecstatic beagle puppy. All that and no broken femurs. Sure, I can pat myself on the back for this one. But don't expect me to be cruising down any hills any time soon. There's nothing like a good long hospitalization to make your February, and your Seasonal Affective Disorder complete.

thirteen days until it's not february

2008-02-16T09:44:00.000-08:00

My wit and rancor have gone to pot over the past few weeks. I blame the weather, the routine, and the draining of the rapture formerly attributed to the novelty of adulthood paired with a long-awaited homecoming to the east coast. According to my grandmother, I am just like my father: I hate winter. I hate being cold, I hate being in pain upon stepping out-of-doors, I hate wind, ice, snow, and the color grey. Become a skier, you say? That would involve all of the above, now wouldn't it? And the added benefit of about 400% increase in likelihood that I will break a femur. No, instead, I will wallow in my agony over the fact that I cannot emerge from my apartment without a ten-pound parka and at least four dollars for a grande soy latte with extra foam. Smooth, warm, comforting soy foam. Mmm.

Last week I suddenly found myself on a flight to San Diego, on my way to a Bone Marrow Transplant conference, in particular a training meeting for clinical research coordinators working on transplant studies across the country. God help me if I stay in this job for the rest of my career; if I turn out like one of those uncurious, easily amused, under-anunciating fake blond glorified secretarial types with reading glasses falling down their noses, I will surely die a miserable, premature death. I sat in that conference room for eight and a half hours, the lowest point of which was a "tour" of the company's data input website. Yet another reason to put on the list of "why I must get into medical school." At the risk of losing you, dear readers, I will move on.

San Diego in February is virtually the same as San Diego in November, April, September, or June. A few degrees cooler, perhaps, but still temperate and dry. In following with my nature I seized the opportunity that presented with being in a five star hotel to sneak up to the rooftop pool after the meeting and swim a few laps. The air was a balmy 50 degrees and windy - not exactly outdoor-pool weather, but the luxurious lagoon was heated to about 85. I stopped every now and then to stand up and look over the city and the harbor, amass with glowing, lego-like structures, palm trees and sailboats, more ultra-grand hotels and the Pacific. For those of you who don't know, this was the city in which I was born, that I've long held to be the place where I ultimately end up once I give up on braving the cold anywhere up north, on being estranged from 95% of my extended family, and ever having to live through February, as I know it, ever again.

My grandmother's house smells the same as it did when I was two. It's not the classic moth-ball and pea-soup smell that most grandmas' houses are known for. In fact, that smell seemed to linger all around the city. It's a watery, minerally scent which leads me to believe that it is in fact the water itself, a product of the Colorado river and a long system of irrigation and embittering municipal policies, whose smell effervesces in every corner. Just breathing in that smell is like taking a step at least ten years backwards, when my brother, cousin and I use to pick plums and throw them over the fence in the back yard and try to hit the cars driving through the bottom of the canyon that dropped off on the other side. Even though I was here "on business," and probably wouldn't have time to crawl behind the hedges and peel the garden snails off the front windows of the house, I was able to settle on the notion that life might just always be easier here. The sudden comfort of being in San Diego, in la Casa de Coller, caught me totally off guard; all my usual idiosyncratic tendencies and anxieties about...everything, shall we say, were gone. Hungry? Have a peanut butter sandwich. Bored? Law and Order reruns will be on for the next thirteen hours. Antsy? Take a walk. It's 70 degrees out, breezy, and the cacti are blooming. Tired? Sleep.

new findings: life causes cancer

2008-02-10T15:21:00.001-08:00

CENSORED

*Names of my bosses and their patients are changed, for obvious reasons...one being that I don't want to get fired, be osctricized by my co-workers and community, or do prison time for violating HIPPAA. I also changed people's ages, the kinds of cleaners they self-injected, the things they shop for at wal-mart, where everyone is from, who they talk to, people's moods at a specific time of day and anything else that would allow you to trace the information back to a particular person or place. In fact, this didn't even take place in the city of Boston. This is all fiction.

travel diaries: chicago, winter 2008

2008-02-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

More than once I've had the notion that, subconsciously, I made a real effort to graduate from college as quickly as possible in order to escape the cold, raw misery of Chicago in February. After only seven months of separation though, I felt (however irrationally) the pressing need to visit. The moment came a few weeks ago, while looking out over the squat New England landscape, the clapboard chuches of Cambridge and tightly packed brick tenements, when suddenly I missed the enormity and glamour of Chicago, Golden Age skyscrapers, the wide avenues and wildly diverse populous. More, though, I missed my dear friends with whom I spent the most developmentally rich (i.e. developed the ability to control my own heart rate during massive bouts of anxiety/caffeine overdose) years of my life. Even though upon reflection, my years at Northwestern were the most cruel trial by fire one could imagine, my bitterness towards the institution for having challenged me past a healthy limit has been somewhat quelled by time. After all, I wasn't alone, and the few (very few) people I chose to keep close by during that time made being dragged across the hot coals of higher education much less scarring, and, dare I say, palatable. I realized that life after college is no less scathing, and found myself missing these people.
And so, I booked a flight to Chicago for February 1st - the first day of the most glistening and uplifting month of the entire year.* It was delayed until the next morning due to foul weather.
When I left at 5 am the next day, I saw Crazy Sweater Man in the subway. I should have taken it as a sign. Fortunately, it was a sign of horrors to come not until I tried to get home again.
The little time I actually got to spend in Chicago was exactly what I had hoped for. A day with my friend and freshman year roommate at the Art Institute, my home-away-from-where-I-used-to-live, was spent circling (more than once, unknowingly) the permanent American Art and Decorative Arts exhibit, absorbing the Hudson Valley School and Shaker Furniture only as sidenote to our conversation. I spent my nights with Kimsy, who indroduced me to Rodney Yee, yoga master, with whom we made grand fools of ourselves in her livingroom while attempting levitative feats not meant for the likes of ground-treading mortals. Lastly, I spent a day with another misplaced New Englander, my old neighbor Liza, taking an *official tour* of the Chicago Cultural Center, which has many different patterns on its walls, is fireproof, and is old. We probably also spent about four hours total sitting in various coffee and sandwich shops around the city, talking about elevated topics such as book editing, graduate school, health care, pink eye, chickens, and exploding diarrhea. ***
Monday morning I didn't expect to have to leave until late evening, and thus had made grandiose plans with a few other valued individuals for various nostalgic exploits. But alas, the three days of wintry mix and icy conditions rendered any notion of a pleasant flight back to Boston laughable. The airline called my cell phone first thing in the morning to tell me my flight that night had been cancelled. I was re-booked to the only flight leaving that day at noon, and quickly packed and ran out the door. I sadly cancelled my plans with friends with whom I had so looked forward to reminiscing about Mexico and working in Northwestern's Sociology Department under the supervision of the World's Worst Chainsmoker. We were also going to commisserate in the woes of lactose intolerance.**** But alas, these dreams were left unfulfilled.
Before heading to the airport, I had some unfinished business to attend to in Evanston, having to do with about fifty pounds of crap from my old apartment that was still sitting in a large cardboard box in the basement of said apartment, as well as my treasured, custom-fit silver bullet bicycle, which had been sitting the the building's bike room since June. Or so I thought. It was gone.
My box of crap was not gone, though, and so, at 8 am on a Monday morning in Februrary (it was of course wintry-mixing) I carried that 50 pound box to the post office and mailed it to Boston, along with a box of all my old violin music from my first three years at Northwestern, when I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life as a performance violinist. I kept the music for my children, who are going to be both virtuosic musicians as well as brilliant doctors, philanthropists, political activists, and community leaders.
And now I will briefly relay the disaster that was my trip home from Chicago, and preface with the expression of my gratitude to JetBlue Airlines for at least supplying all of their discount flights with individual televisions for each passenger and the Food Network. In the 1/5 of the time travelling that I was actually on a plane, I learned how to make a chocolate wedding cake, chicken cocovan, deep-fried collard green wontons, deep fried cheesecake, deep fried crab hushpuppies (Paul Dean's home cooking Deep Fryer Special), garlic mashed potatoes (of course already knew that) and everything there is to know about the New Orleans restaurant industry post-Katrina. Also, I watched that guy on the Discovery Channel who gets dropped into some adverse environment with no food, water, or supplies, and tries to get out alive. He ate a frog.
As blissful as my flying Food Network experience was, the other 12 hours were spent in the hospitality of America's greatest international airports. Three hour delays, one "computer glich" (1.5 hours sitting at the gate), one "dent in the nose of the plane because it got HIT with something on the previous flight" (2 hours sitting at the gate), and one incendence of my MISSING MY FLIGHT BECAUSE I WAS ON THE PHONE AGONIZING OVER A PHYSICS PROBLEM all contributed to a lengthy journey. I think the gate was changed while I was bitching about not being able to do 8th grade algebra, and the plane arrived at the gate, deboarded, boarded, and left, all whilst I was trying to cross multiply distances between charged particles. I flew standby on the next flight out, which left 3 hours after the scheduled time.
I was back in Boston by midnight. To put a fascinating conclusion to this story, the silver line, which travels between the airport and South Station, made a stop at the World Trade Organization Convention Center at around 12:30 am, February 5, 2008. And what was going on at that moment? The conclusion of Barack Obama's last rally before Super Duper Tsunami Tuesday. Suddenly, the previously empty bus filled with starry-eyed Harvard/Tufts/BU students and young professionals, all of whom were clinging Change We Can Believe In and Obama '08 campaign signs. Packed like sardines in a tin can, I was suddenly drowning in what I like to call the "Obama Juice."** "Oh my god, I am like SO canvassing all day tomorrow!" they cried, in unison. Despite my harried, road-weary state, and a twinge of bitterness for having been stuck at JFK during the rally, the solidarity felt good. After all, I had worn my Obama button in 3 international airports (millions of people!) and 2 major cities that day, including the good senator's home. Yes, it's a grand place, Chicago, and I do miss it afterall.

*NOT
***Thank you South Park for establishing the basis of our friendship
****"The Lactard's Lament
*Dear high school track teammates: wasn't there something about The Juice that inspired us to do stuff at some point in history? What was it? Where did it go? Leave comments below.

a glimpse into my daily existence

2008-01-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

méxico, parte uno

2008-01-27T14:09:00.000-08:00

For lack of juicy fodder in my joyous life of late, here is a bit of what I wrote this summer in Mexico, after a four day visit a dry, devastated mountain town in the state of Guerrero. The town was in a valley surrounded by five-thousand foot mountains, the unkempt dirt roads scrawled up and down steep inclines, and the taxis were driven by eight-year-olds. Originally, I wrote a lot of this in Spanish, but my own ability to understand what I wrote has since whithered significantly.
Disclaimer: this piece contains graphic descriptions of medical situations and mentions the word "vagina," more than once. More to follow.

A few kids come up to the van to see all of us tall white kids and ask our names. Actually most of them just look in quietly and then take off running in circles around the parking lot. Caley takes the box of cookies out of the front seat and gives one each to three or four of the kids. The entire flock is immediately drawn to the open door of the van, a magical cookie dispensary. “Una galleta para cada chico, nada más.” Caley speaks Spanish well. The cookies disappear into the children’s mouths and they run away and begin climbing up the stone walls of the clinic and perch on the row of bricks that juts out half way up. We are waiting for our guide from the university, and have been for a very long time. “I’m getting out,” I say. I take my camera and am swamped from the waist down with little bodies with curious and adoring faces. Their questions come flying at us in Spanish that we can finally understand. “¿Cómo se llama? ¿De dónde? ¡Déme un abrazo! ¡Foto! ¡Foto!” I let them take the camera, which they find utterly facinating, and we take lots of pictures of the kids and typical self-loving philanthropist twenty-something year olds. Look at how globally engaged I am! I think about how proud everyone in my internet-based social network will be. Ami is out of the car, and before we know it we’re flaunting our still pathetic Spanish skills and submitting to hugs and piggy-back rides. I am also thinking about ring-worm and lice. Ami accidentally throws a kid on the ground, but somehow skidding elbows across the pavement doesn’t hurt him.

Our hotel is behind a twenty foot wall and guarded by a 17-year-old with a 45 mm machine gun. It is made up of a few hacienda-like buildings, the outside appears and sounds like a rain forest. The lagoon-shaped pool is empty, save a sludgy layer of rot. The umbrellas are mildewed. I share a room with my usual roommates in a pink room, sharing bathroom in which walls rot in the corner and the air is pixely from the fluorescent light bulbs. It is a working stage for a horror film. We eat, watch TV, and sleep.

It is still early morning, so it is cool and the unique odor of the maternity hospital is still undetectable. There were four of us: two medical students, Ami, and I. We stood outside the entrance, entranced by the fog and the mountains that surrounded us in this sad stakeout of humanity. What do we do now? What do brainless, overzealous premeds usually do around here? “¿Can we watch in the operating room?” Ami asks in Spanish. Wow, I think, she has major balls. “O, Sí, sí, of course,” the doctor replies. Of course? THAT was unexpected. If this were America, he'd be sued for all he's worth in the next 24 hours just for speaking that way, letting undergraduates into an obstetrical OR without some kind of legal clearance. He leads us to the lady’s changing room outside of the OR, where we don the entirely too large, worn-out scrubs with old blood and purple iodine stains. We take pictures in our scrubs and lab coats; I pop my collar and make studly doctor pose. We open up the door opposite the one we came in, and the obstetrical nurse tells us we have to strip down completely underneath the scrubs. I leave my pants on. I wrap the scrub top uncomfortably around my body so as not to fall out of the man-sized v-neck and tuck it into my ripped up pants. We put on caps and surgical booties and take a seat with the nurse, a 30 or so man from Acapulco. We talk for an hour in disjointed Spanish waiting for un parto (a birth). Caley, our experienced med-school student friend, finds his way over to us and chats about his boredom and ambivalence about his doing research and "attempt to make a difference." Then came el parto. Ami and I ran back into the OR as a tiny, scared indigenous woman with a stomach the size of a small car was wheeled back into the room with the stirrups. She was wincing in pain and rolling uncomfortably. And there we were, staring into her enormous vagina where I could see a fuzzy black mass coming closer and closer to the opening. The obstetrician takes a pair of scissors and cuts the already stretched skin just south of the baby’s emerging head about two inches. The surprise episiotomy jolts my vagal response. My head suddenly gains 20 pounds and I feel like vomiting. The baby’s head peeks out and then pop! He flies into the arms of the obstetrician, is transferred to the pediatrician, and is followed by a river of amniotic fluid, water, blood, and placenta. I have to leave. I walk into the next room and put my head between my knees, breathe, and tell myself to grow up and go watch the bloody chaos of human procreation. Standing in front of the bloody river (and a bloody lake on the ground) Caley, who has recently appeared in the OR, says something incomprehensible. I wander in and out of the OR while the surgeon sutures the patient’s vaginal tissue, thoughts drifting between all that I had read about episiotomy being barbaric yet convenient procedure (and all too common in the US) and the pressing urge to vomit. I fold to my inability to bear the sight of rivers of bodily fluids, and go stand by the mother and her baby. She smells of sweat and wood smoke.

In the afternoon, we go play with the kids. Running around in the road outside the clinic, I remember all the previous summers I had spent doing exactly this, all day long in southern Maine. I missed the kiddos from my camp counselor days, not caring about anyone or anything but them and their well-being. After an hour we are all sun-scorched and covered in a thick layer of dust. We pile back into the van and bumble awkwardly across town to a community shelter for families living in the mountains who need access to the town's resources. Each house was the temporary home for about four children, at least one under two, to whom we bestow a handful of disposable diapers, and three to five women, to whom we gave enough pads for half a menstrual cycle. Our guide takes digital photos of our charitable actions for the university website; I am trying to make my disdain less evident as I am picturing soiled napkins piled up in a heap in the yard with the rest of the trash.

The rest of the time we spend playing picture bingo (learning all the vocabulary ourselves at the same time…la canoa,el pino, el moro) and distributing candy prizes for the kindest and most helpful children first, then everyone else. Following my public health worker instinct I take pictures of the black pools of standing water, the local rooster, and the cement well which seemed to be the center of children’s activities. Although there are few cases of malaria in Tlapa in comparison to other regions, the region of La Montaña was in the middle of a dengue outbreak.

Spent, dirty, and ultimately heartbroken, we leave the establishment in our stately transport. The children are chasing us and jumping onto the back bumper. We stop until Ugo (who had been sobbing five minutes before) lets go of the van, and return to our hotel-fortress, guarded by the teenager with the machine gun.

my life as a clinical research coordinator slash data manager

2008-01-24T18:46:00.000-08:00

Quite frankly, it is just as glamorous as it sounds. Especially when, after months of Microsoft Access and squeezing every drop of medically-related excitement out of running a blood sample to the lab or handing a patient a Quality of Life Questionaire, the gods of Clinical Cancer Research decide to send their coordinators to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in mid-February for a "meeting." Granted, the previous "January in Miami" façade crashed and burned, and I most likely have a chemistry test on the newly proposed "meeting" date, (even if it is a real meeting, learning about mesenchymal cells for treating graft-versus-host disease is about as grand as any party in Las Vegas, in my world), this is quite the turn of events.

red sock sighting in the back bay

2008-01-23T17:34:00.000-08:00

Wandering around downtown Boston slightly more disoriented than usual, I couldn't shake the feeling this evening that winter, even in the midst of New England's undeniable quaintness, had begun to tighten its grip around my already congested inner passages. No longer wistful for the out-of-doors, recently overwhelmed with the desire to make a constant state of being curled up in my bed with a book, my life's dynamic has taken an inward turn. I was thinking this as after work as I bustled from street to street, having gotten off of the wrong stop, after boarding the wrong train, heading to the Back Bay Trader Joe's in search of decaffeinated tea.

And then, in the warmth of the cozy little grocery store, Lo! Whom do I spy rounding the corner by the applesauce and organic peanut butter? The American League's most gilded, herculean, miniature-goatee-sporting pitcher, Josh Beckett. I kid you not. He stood before me with his tiny goatee, rounded face, darting eyes, and of course, a spotless Red Sox cap. My first thought: "Why the hell would Josh Beckett shop at Trader Joe's with the poor people?" My heart began to beat faster; I rushed over to the dairy case in order to evade his glance, lest he see my blushing cheeks. I debated whether or not to approach him while feigning a deep interest in the multiplicity of cottage cheese varieties. Thinking it was perhaps best to make sure it was in fact the pitcher than led the Red Sox to their World Series 2007 glory in October, I stealthily conducted a further investigation of his height and build as I followed him towards the cereal aisle (I was going there anyhow*). Don't the players look smaller only on TV? Why does he look only average? Why aren't his triceps poking out of his winter jacket? My little heart began to sink.

We checked out at the same time, at which point I had the opportunity to see him face to face. Not Josh Beckett. Not even a Red Sock.** Sadly, my dreary winter was not sparked to life with a real encounter with a summertime hero. At least it got my heart rate up. I hope my retelling of the story got yours up too, for the sake of our collective cardiac health.

*Really, not just creepily following him.
**Can we really say that each of the players is an individual Red Sock? Soc? (Singular of Sox)***
***Mental images of socks playing baseball getting out of control

only in america: culture clash #1

2008-01-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was accosted by a one-toothed, one-legged Sudanese woman on crutches who was standing on the deck of the YMCA pool. According to her rancorous declaration, my one-piece speedo was extremely revealing and inappropriate for a girl of my age to be sporting in public. She jabbed my thigh with a crooked finger, showing me a more appropriate length.

When she finished yelling, she tried to establish a separate friendliness by sharing, "I too used to do this, I used to go in the water. And then I lost my leg."

Dumbfounded, I uttered something meaningless, turned, and jumped in the water.

the lucky orange

2008-01-18T12:03:00.000-08:00

And so concludes possibly the most anxiety-ridden week I've experienced since ending my days on a college campus, living and breathing stress, notions of expectation and the grave consequences of academic failure. As it turns out, night school has moments of a similar nature. At the end of every academic journey, there is still a final exam, and this is night school, so that exam happens at night. Right there in between leaving work and getting up to go back again. And by "work," I really mean "that place where I go to pretend I am 'coordinating clinical cancer trials,' or 'managing bone marrow transplant data,' while really I am covertly studying like a madwoman (mad scientist?). So overwhelmed was I this week that the everyday quirkiness of my otherwise joyous life seemed clouded. I shall try to reminisce.

"Chan's Live Poultry." This reminded me of Tlapa, Mexico, a mountain town whose main road doubled as a riverbed during flash floods. On this main road there was a building that appeared to be a home, although most of the buildings were so dilapidated their structured gave no real hint as to their function, on top of which there was an extra story constructed of chicken wire. Inside of this top floor was a flock of turkeys, probably about 50 crammed into a living-room sized space, flapping up dust and pecking each other's wrinkly, grey faces. "Chan's Live Poultry," is, as I discovered while walking a blood sample (biohazard!) down the street to the molecular oncology lab, an establishment on the second floor of an old tenement-style building in Chinatown, above an empty storefront, surrounded by migration-era apartments and stores whose windows boast "Toys," "Pajamas," and photos of sexy Asian ladies. No, the second floor was not made out of chicken wire, but I could only imagine what was on the other side of those opaque glass windows. As usual, the smell of steamed duck wafted through the streets.

In other news, for those of you who are shamefully ignorant, yesterday, January 17th of 2008, marked the ten year anniversary of the explosion of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. As I exhaustedly was beginning to slip out of consciousness in front of my television last night (post having been brutalized by my physics and chemistry exams), my ears perked as a local newscaster actually compared the situation that Bill Clinton found himself in, apologizing to the nation and being prosecuted by congress for actions conducted in his private life, to that of George W. Bush, who now faces immense scrutiny from the public sphere and attempts at prosecution by Congress (well, mostly likely not, but thanks anyhow, Kucinich!!!). That's right, according to the media, the Iraq war, 'misleadings' about WMD's, negligence after Hurricaine Katrina, and the invocation of fear and division in the American people IN THIS POST 9/11 WORLD in which there are only minutes left until we are all going to find ourselves shovelling snow and going to work beneath a mushroom cloud - in sum, are equal to - well, we remember well what happened (do we?). Thank goodness the local news was there to remind us of what a disappointment the Clinton Administration was, especially since most of our attention has been diverted to the current state of the nation, whatwithall the military surges and impending economic recessions. Never forget, America, the tragedy that struck the nation on January 17th, 1998. Never Forget.

The title of this post comes from the grocer in Chinatown where I bought grapes, "sweet tofu pudding," which is really like jello made out of soybeans, and a bag of "Lucky Oranges." They are tiny loose-skinned tangerines with the leaves still on them. Yes, they are very lucky - because they came home with me.

the nature of the thing: an exchange

2008-01-14T09:45:00.001-08:00

good morning, bitches? *
Between You and Junyong Pak

Junyong Pak
10:44pm Jan 13th
how crass! (if only i knew what this word meant)i couldn't tell you what you should write a book on, but i think you ought to dig deep into your mental diary and and pull out a blook on the single happiest moment of your life. seems like most all of your blooks i've read so far are teardropped with sad undertones. you don't want people thinking that is you all the time, right?

Morgan Paloma Clark-Coller
Today at 9:30am
They're not sad! they are musing. Certainly not lachrymose. The things that do sadden me are more often the plights of the various characters in each of my stories: the homeless crazy people, the non-recipients of the busted health care system, even my sad bunnies who must wait in their cage all day for me to come home and cuddle them. While I realize the cheerful overtones are lacking, I do like to see humor in a vast array of complex social tragedies. Perhaps not so much the more recent posts - the sudden cacophony of political and economical degradation in the last couple of weeks is stinging for a girl whose blog is named for her betrothal to her country and its founding principles.perhaps i come off as critical - I am. but I think a bit of dissatisfaction is a means of perpetuating improvement.

*"good morning, bitches" = my current message to the world, per facebook.

and furthermore - it really is about privatization. stop blaming old people.

2008-01-12T04:42:00.000-08:00

This is my last foray into this topic in my public forum (oxy-moron?), but I've posted a link to the Times article explaining the increase in HHS spending by the federal government in 2006 just to back up my point (see title below). In short 1)Spending on Medicaid fell for the first time ever 2) Enrollment in nursing homes increased by the smalledst margin ever 3) Spending on prescription drugs more than doubled since the creation of the part D prescription drug plan, in which Medicare pays for prescriptions that formally it did not (previously Medicaid, for many) but in which Medicare must work through private insurers to negotiate drug prices, creating a huge amount of very expensive paper-pushing, and generally keeping drug prices for Medicare recipients high. Virtually all other health related spending declined. Had the use of generic drugs NOT become more widely available, the increase would have been far greater.

a few nips at the "fiscally conservative," or, "why we are all going to die."

2008-01-11T05:59:00.000-08:00

You may notice that I've posted a link to Matt Drudge's webpage, the Drudge Report in the side column. Despite the man's being a public threat insofar as he a) is fiercely pro-life and went as far as to try to get footage of an emergency surgery for spina bifida, which contained a picture of a fetal hand sticking out of some poor woman's uterus, put on a Fox television report on abortion (he was fired), and b) is best known as the man to break open the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is a self-proclaimed populist-libertarian, homophobic yet most likely homosexual whose reporting is "A ludicrous combination of gossip, political intrigue and extreme weather reports ... still put together mostly by the guy who started out as a convenience-store clerk." In sum: the man is ruler of all that is evil, and rules from two multi-million dollar homes in Miami. However, is website is the fastest newsreel I have ever encountered. Posts are both outrageous and relevant to reality, and go up about a day before most other (more judicious) news sources. He even had the results from the New Hampshire primary updating faster than CNN. Currently, his prime focus is on making Hillary Clinton look like a hysterical, comical bitch. Not something I approve of, but I get the feeling that he just has it out for politicians, left and right-wing, in general. However, this morning's top story ("top" meaning at the very top of the page...not the huge, italicized headline reading "Huckabee Warning to Iran: Be Prepared to See the Gates of Hell," but "US triple-A Credit Rating Under Threat from Soaring Welfare Costs." Sensing something crooked, I carefully read the article and was shocked to see that the author was blaming federal expenditure on Health and Human Services for the overall decline in the worth of US moneys. According to Moody's, "unless it takes radical action to curb soaring health care and social security spending," symptomatic recession, the weak dollar and declining credit will continue to plummet, and US will be forced to suffer this symbolic blow before the world economy. Apparently, spending on Medicare and Medicaid (*please note that these programs are not "Welfare" programs, such as Earned Income Tax Credit or Aid to Families with Dependent Children), as well as other forms of "social security spending" (Social Security is not included in the federal budget, but in an untouchable "lock box," a.k.a. separate bank account that has been compensating for budget deficits, and charging interest) has led to "growing concerns over the country's ability to retain its financial and economic supremacy."

Hmmm...it seems to me there is another hole through which our money is being flushed - a hole that was not quite as big in say, 2001. Interested, I looked into the federal spending profile for myself, and was semi-surprised to learn that yes, spending on Health and Human Services is indeed the greatest expenditure in 2007: $672,036 million, $440,756 of which is on the old people, only about $48,000 million on "welfare" programs), as well it should be, setting all ethical arguments about distribution of health care resources to different age groups aside. However, what is number two? The Department of Defense (you've got to be kidding!), totalling $529,871 million. I won't pretend to know what the blanks in the "Allowance for proposed Continuing Resolution" mean; I am so totally sure that all the relevant information is being lawfully disclosed. And number three: $490,615 million to the US Treasury. Why? Because after 2007, we owe $429,978 million dollars in interest to our lenders for the national debt.

Yes, the rising cost of health care is a great danger to our country, but because people cannot afford it - not because the government can't. If people were insured, had access to primary and preventative care, and hospitals got their Medicare/Medicaid REIMBURSEMENT CHECKS (hold on, what happened to the $600,000 MILLION?) costs would not be so high. There are myriad reasons besides these, obviously. And obviously, there are more old people sticking around - hence, increased spending on Medicare is absolutely inevitable.

But why on earth this sudden change in direction when pointing fingers at sources of public debt? Why is this OUR fault (us being "Humans" requiring "Health" care services)? We all know where costs need to be cut. This is bull. Who are these crazies? Might Moody's have some interest in the continuation of war? Hmm???? I don't even know how to fully respond.

There are only 3 departments, as mentioned above getting cut federal checks for more than $100,000 million, and it's pretty evenly divided. And if you don't like my crude analysis, you are probably a self-impressed student whose opinion nobody cares about, meaning we are pretty much on the same level, here. I'm pretty sure there are no Matt Drudges scoffing at my blog right now.

good morning, america

2008-01-09T05:56:00.000-08:00

This morning's pre-dawn experience presented a delightful array of digressions from the norm.

First, a healthy dose of bitterness upon reading into Hillary's far from heroic two point win over Obama in New Hampshire.* Mind you, Obama supporters, self included, shall not and do not feel defeated in the least; the race has only manifested differently than most Democrats had foolishly expected in a field of highly qualified, unquestionably brilliant contenders: extremely close and unmerciful.

Second, third, and fourth: perhaps in celebration of the patriotic atmosphere, the crazies are about, bumbling along the Boston sidewalks in full throttle. Walking from Park Street to the Wang YMCA, I observed a tall, gangly man following after a trench coat wearing-briefcase holding man, yelling to the back of the second man's head something along the lines of "keep walkin mister briefcase mister white lawyer man, don't give ME a quartah." From half a block away I assessed the gangly and now observedly very drunk (at 6:40 a.m.) man to be harmless, as most of these daily crazies are. He began to bark. "Wroo! WrooOO!" he cried. We were quickly approaching one another, and I headed off to the side as to bypass him without making eye contact or appearing cognizant of his presence - this usually works. However, this morning's daily crazy pulled right up in front of me, grabbed my chest, and slurredly asked me for a quarter. Stunned, I could do nothing but mumble my habitual "uh, excuse me." The episode lasted no more than a second before he lost interest and stumbled away. Feeling violated but unfazed (because human beings are on the whole miserable creatures anyhow, one must expect the occasional asshole to make an appearance), I kept walking, thinking the day was off to an exquisite start.

And boy, was I right! Guess who was back in the pool!? My friend the aquaphile!** He's actually been back a few times since our first meeting, but this morning I actually found myself trying to race him across the pool as I struggled to maintain my graceful stroke and he floundered along the bottom. I hopped out early.

Minutes later, walking to the hospital, I saw yet another remnant of the past. A few weeks ago, whenever it was last snowing with brutal force, I remember seeing the crowds passing up and down the street, myself as well, shielding themselves with whatever object they could from the precipitation - umbrellas, newspapers, briefcases, etc. One man had the brilliance to stick a large US Postal Service shipping envelope on his head like a chef's hat. Magnificent, I thought, I should do that! Admittedly, from far away he looked like he was wearing a newspaper pirate hat. Well, friends, it turns out that he was not wearing this fashionable USPS mailer on account of inclement weather. I saw the same man with the same cap this morning, walking down Washington Street outside the hospital, while it was cloudless and nearly 60 degrees out. Great, I thought, just great. My belief in humanity is quickly disintegrating. ***

*"Hillary: THE MOVIE?" I think so!
**Thank you to Kurt Padilla, who so graciously advised my research on this matter, following my entry documenting my first encounter with deep-sea-diver-man.
***On logic, compliments of The Daily Kos:
"'It's the GOP that has grown more ideological and socially conservative, while New Hampshire residents have not...When I looked at what I believed in, I was a Democrat."
That just makes my nuts tingle. Eight years of Bush/Cheney, six years of brass-knuckled Republican rule in Congress, and a two decade assault by the in-your-face, "do as I say, not as Jesus would do" evangelical screamers have left Americans exhausted by it all. There's really nothing of substance Republicans can point to that has worked. Not in education, defense, security, energy, foreign policy, fiscal policy, infrastructure, health care, planet care, science...nuthin'. Well, okay, there was the $300 refund check we got in the summer of '01. Thanks---the Ramen noodles were tasty."
for the full story, visit the daily kos.

new hampshire primaries: not literally "heated."

2008-01-06T16:59:00.000-08:00

Despite my cool outer shell, it would be a stark lie for me to illustrate my political inclinations as pale or indifferent. This is the story of a Sunday in Concord, New Hampshire, two days before the presidential primaries, and the adventures that were found in canvassing for Barack Obama door-to-door through the snow and cow pastures, settling on the doorsteps of strangers, decked out in buttons and stickers like belated Christmas presents.

It was a cool, overcast morning at 9 am when I met up with my fellow Obama volunteers in a parking lot at the end of the red line in Cambridge. There was a surprising number of people in the group which was ever increasing, even as carpools steadily made off towards New Hampshire while individuals trickled in from all directions. Not exactly sure where we were going, what we would be doing, or with whom I would be working (or standing idle amidst utter confusion, as the case may be), I lumped myself into a group of four being driven to Concord by a book shop owner named Pat.* Always one to be helpful (read: in control), I self-nominated to be navigator, and after cozying into our seat belts, we were off.

My new little family of four volunteers consisted of Pat, the book shop owner, Jenna, a future law student and current assistant to a Harvard Law professor, and Steve, the stereotypical college graduate who had yet to find a job but enjoyed hiking in Alaska, wearing an alpaca hat with ear flaps, and maintaining a beard.

"Well I guess the obvious thing to talk about would be why we support Obama," Pat said after about fifteen minutes of silence. Pat was staunchly anti-Hillary, and Steve somewhat quiet on the issue. I volunteered my spiel on the importance of idealism, bipartisanship, universal health care without mandates, and the ability to listen to constituents, to inspire, organize and lead people to meet their own goals, sincerity of purpose and consistent follow-through, all of which I believe Obama strives and succeeds to realize. I threw in the fact that I was a former Illinois voter and had long been a Barack-enthusiast, having had a secret wish for the senator to run for presidential office ever since his 2004 speech against the war in Iraq. Still, feeling that my answer was no more than generic, I shut up for the rest of the car ride, leaving the table open for Jenna, who clearly had few conversational abilities beyond politics, to talk without interruption in an endless stream of name dropping and recitation of the Obama foreign policy platform. While enlightening, I couldn't help but think "I know your type," and made no attempt to crack her law school interview-self-impressed song. She was actually quite a lovely person, and ended up apologizing for the early morning onslaught, but a bit of research later on taught me that some of what she said was...improvised, shall we say. It made the time pass.

The Concord Obama for America Headquarters (aptly situated at #4 Eagle Square, hear the patriotic CAW!) underneath a ten foot snowbank stuck through with campaign signs. Evidently, the annual greenhouse-gas induced mid-winter thaw had not yet come to New Hampshire.** The office was packed with volunteers of all shapes and sizes, all of us clutching our coffees and looking befuddled. After a stint of awkward introductions, a tired-sounding pep-rallying by some of the staff, and a warning against the chili in the back that was ? days old, we were sent to the streets to wave signs and distract drivers with displays of Obama hysteria.

It was from this street corner that I got my first of what it was like to work with the General Public.*** The responses were on the whole very positive, a great flurry of supportive honks and enthusiastic Thumbs Up!'s. Inevitably, but ultimately good for the sake of entertainment, we made a few enemies. To name a few:
-The very hairy man in the 1982 subaru who for sure had a shot gun in the back seat next to his 5x8 Ron Paul poster in the back window.
-The age 70+, constipated looking couple in the beige Buick whose scowls read "Old People Against Change, or Anyone with A Pulse, for That Matter."
-The Student Driving Instructor ("YOU ARE GOING TO GET US KILLED")

Also of interest, noteable campaign signs stuck in the snow: "DivideWeFail.org," featuring a purple donkephant that indeed would surely die if severed, and written on an orange and black For Rent sign, "Presidency (used)." Har har har.

After an hour or so, feet thoroughly frozen and deprived of bloodflow inside of my classic Asics Tigers, we tromped back to 4 Eagle Square (Caw!) and awaited our canvassing assignment. After first being sent to the wrong house at 61 Washington St. in Concord, where an angry resident glared at us through the curtains on her front door, shouting "GO AWAY! GO AWAY! SHOO!", we arrived at 61 Washington St. in Penacook, the next town over, where we were instructed in methods of How Not to Get Slapped and possibly convince people to vote Obama. I of course was paired with Steve the unemployed alpaca-capped woodsman, which meant that between the two of us our net tact was looking to amount to sub-zero. Clipboard in hand, lapels button-clad, we stepped onto the clapboard house lined street and watched Pat and Jenna drive off into the bleak distance.

Following our walk-list that handily informed us of the name, address, sex, and previously declared candidate support**** of our targeted voters, we trudged. In the beginning, most of our assigned houses were either non-existent, abandoned, or (to use the official term) Not Homes. Our first voter to come to the door though was a remarkable one. A short, 60 or so looking lady peeked through her blinds and cracked the door enough for us to see she had just gotten out of bed. She looked bewildered. "Hi, we're from the Obama campaign and were wondering if you had any thoughts on who you might vote for on Tuesday," I told her, eventually. Realizing neither of us had prepared any kind of speech, we had both stood in front of the lady looking a bit bewildered ourselves for a minute. "Whaa?" She asked. "Would you like to learn more about Barack Obama?" I asked. "I..uh...no, I..." Her eyes darted from side to side. "I'm voting for a republican this year," she finally muffled, and shut her door. Seeing as our super-secret-super-invasive info sheet said she was actually a democrat, this was slightly alarming given the fact that the Republican field was a bunch of (to be brief) absolute wackos, save possibly John McCain (but then, why not vote for a democrat?). We moved on.

A few more Not Homes, Refused-to-Answers, and one bitch of a Hilliary supporter later, we knocked on the door of an absolutely huge young man holding a sandwich and wearing a Notorious B.I.G. t-shirt. I gave my chipper introduction, to which he replied "Yeah, uh, I don't vote." "?!?!?!?!?," I thought. "Why's that?" I asked, attempting hiding my alarm. (A New Hampshire resident? Not vote? HORRORS!) "I don't know, I guess I don't really care, don't like politics." Seeing an opportunity, I leveled with him on the low-level politics of fear, divisive tactics and consequentially stymied political process that has overtaken the federal government in the last eight years. "But," I went on "You should care about our candidate because he is running to change all that." I brought up key terms like "reaching across the aisle," "hope," "change," and a "fresh face in Washington." Yes, Barack Obama, according to yours truly, was going to clean up American politics for good. Steve put in a word or two as well, and handed Notorious the corny literature packet that we had been strewing all over the neighborhood. The young man looked over it intently. "Where to I go? To vote?" he asked, quite unexpectedly. We had no idea. We did know that he did not have to be a democrat in order to vote in the primary, and that if his name was on our list, he was registered somewhere. We gave him the voter information number, and told him "call them, and just show up." "I think...I think I will," he said. It had to have been one of the most fulfilling moments of my life. Steve and I showered him with probably-patronizing praise and thanked Notorious for his time, and pranced away together on a cloud of satisfaction.

There were a few other noteable stops: an older man that was flat out torn between Obama and Edwards, in front of whom Steve and I, tactless and insecure to boot, were forced to spew every minutia we knew about Barack that was slightly different than Edwards, while being stared at scrutinizingly by our voter. In the end, I simply said that Obama had the charisma and the strong leadership skills to bring the American people back together and redeem the government. His eyebrows lifted - I had said something intriguing. Our voter's wife walked over. "I'm beginning to side more with Obama myself; you know, everything Edwards says sounds like it's from a can," she said. "Sounds good you two, I listen to my wife." We counted him as a win. Also of note was the tired 30-something year old man who came to the door with six-year-olds attached to his ankles. "I'm for Obama, my wife is voting for Hillary." "Well, can you work on her for us?" Steve asked. "No," he said, with a look that read "not if I want my marriage to last past Tuesday."

Our last hoorah was at the home of a middle-aged woman with an enormous black dog that had to have been 300 years old. The woman saw that we were absolutely frozen, and invited us in to talk. She had a huge woodstove that was radiating heat like the fires of hell, for which I was truly grateful. I could feel the hot tiles through the bottoms of my sneakers. Originally a Richardson supporter for his approach to Israel, she was happy to talk to us about choosing a different cadidate that might actually have a chance in the election. Kicking ourselves for not knowing crap about crap on the issue, Steve and I stood in silence, soaking up the heat, as Dog Lady ranted. I directed her to the website. When we left she bestowed us with water bottles and praises for trouping through snow. As it turns out, Obama has quite a similar view as Richardson concerning Israel, proposing a two-state solution to the long-lived territorial madness.

We walked a bit further, feeling cold, drained, but ultimately warm-hearted. We encountered a dairy farm near the end of our walk, nearly gagging on the warm wall of stench from fresh manure, despite the now-plummeting temperature. Luckily, I got a call from Pat who was coming to pick us up. We wandered aimlessly for a while while the sun set until climbing back into Pat's car upon his arrival.

Arriving back at the representative's house on Washington Avenue, I swiftly made for the hot coffee and after removing my shoes sat with my frozen toes in my hands while we went over the day's work with Dave, the canvassing coordinator with an indeterminable accent. We sat in the warmth of the old New England Victorian for a while, chatting away with other volunteers, some back from a full day's hard work, others just taking off for another round of door-knocking and snow-trudging. The sense of camaraderie and mutual purpose was uplifting, and sitting in the old kitchen discussing the state of the Union remeniscent of a scene from Louisa May Alcott.

When I arrived home I promptly fell onto my bed and fell asleep with the lights on, but soon got up again so that I could place my new Obama for America signs in the front windows of my apartment. Nothing left to do now but wait. Do the right thing, New Hampshire.

*Names have been changed to protect individuals from online stalkers and real life stalkers. And to protect me from their not appreciating my using their names, in the ridiculously unlikely chance that they would happen upon this story.
**Yet another win for the republicans.
***"General Public" referring to white New Englanders who ski and homeschool a lot, and sometimes drive a pickup.
****If you are a registered voter, guess what? Someone out there knows EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/7/75628/75323/261/431966

a new year, a rude awakening: thanks for nothing, h.w. longfellow

2008-01-02T13:30:00.000-08:00

With these words, we sally forth into a new year that will unavoidably be graced with positive change, and similarly ridden with the chronic symptoms of prior mistakes. I can think of one such change that will profoundly change the course of human progress, thank you sweet baby Jesus, that has been the subject of bumper stickers*, sardonic Times columns, major motion pictures, and acidic blog posts ever since the powers of hell took over the White House.** But, as you all know, dear readers, the mission of this written enterprise is precisely not to "throw pointed comments toward the winds of the public sphere regarding the state of the Union," but to describe and reflect on the life and times of yours truly. But, insofar as this author's life, as is the life of each of my compatriots, is inherently bound to the life of the United States government, I feel justified in dipping a toe into the vast waters of political writing with this: barring the possibility of another republican becoming president, more people are going to have health care, fewer soldiers and civilians alike will die in Iraq***, more people will have more efficient cars and use environmentally friendly light bulbs, schools, even schools with poor people in them (!) will be funded, and environmental accreditation will be earned, not bought. Perhaps this is just a pipe dream, these notions of a brighter future for our country and the world in 2008. At least there will be a better chance of our getting into rehab instead of being incarcerated.

And now onto the topic that inspired the title of this entry: How I Spent the First Day of 2008. Given that we are embarking on a year that is bound to be one of qualifiedly historic change, it was only appropriate that I and a couple of close friends started out with a traipse though our country's political past.

For us, 2008 began on the Boston Common, in the throws of a rambunctious crowd of drunk Yankees, whom for a while seemed to be uniformly engrossed in a group of performers dressed in animal costumes (if my memory serves me correctly - this premise is itself debatable) singing something that simultaneously brought to mind "Old McDonald" and the Spice Girls classic, "If You Wanna Be My Lover." It was quite the circus. With a minute to go, our eyes turned to a glowing screen with a picture of a ball (...or a clock...or I think I am too short to have seen what was actually up there), and we counted down to them moment in which our lives would fundamentally change for the better (theoretically - it didn't seem to change much the last time). At midnight, I tooted my $3.00 fake trumpet that sounds like an ambulance with fervor, and wished my friends a very happy new year. We wandered aimlessly around the Common for a bit, which didn't prove fruitless: we saw Patriots quarterback Tom Brady (Fun Size!) whom, turns out, is not 6'4'', 225 lbs, a Michigan graduate and hero of American football, but is 5'6'' and dates a heavy-set brunette with about 300 earrings! We came upon the two of them "passionately celebrating," shall we say, when they paused to ask me to take a picture. Unfortunately, their camera was "broken," a.k.a. had no batteries. Alas, paying no heed, it was back to business for them, while my company and I got to contemplate whether or not the man in the Brady jersey really was the beloved Patriot.

And suitably we move onto the beloved patriot whom I've been wanting to discuss from the beginning, a man who has actually been disproportionately credited for his role in Freeing Us from Clutches of the British Throne, Paul Revere. Yes, what better way to spend the morning after New Year's Eve in Boston than taking a self-led Historical Walking Tour!!

'Twas the perfect day for such a pursuit, the sky dumping down icy drops of wetness, the sea-scented air blowing across the city at 30 miles an hour. As a member of downtown Boston's workforce, I'm quite familiar with the usual scene first thing in the morning: briefcases, black wool coats, human beings wrapped so tightly in hats and scarves you couldn't recognize a soul if you wanted to, and all of them practically racing down the lumpy brick sidewalks towards the revolving doors of their respective office buildings. However, today, the briefcases were replaced with strollers, and the reclusive individuals of Boston suddenly brought out of their office-generated stupor as families and happy couples strolled through the park, admiring the remnants of the previous night's festivities. Of note was the ice sculpture, entitled "Mangrove," in which the artist mockingly constructed palm trees, tropical plants, and about 50 ice flamingos. How very clever.

Seeing as we had already experienced the Boston Common but 10 hours prior, we took off on our tour of the Freedom Trail with great enthusiasm. If you've not experienced the glories of the Freedom Trail, the path that Paul Revere heroically rode from Boston to Lexington, warning American minute men of the coming of the Brits, you will be surprised to know that this great piece of U.S. history is represented by an intermittent, sad little red line on the sidewalk, frequently interrupted by cross streets, buildings, or entire neighborhoods. We walked along the line up to the State House (which was originally topped off by a wooden dome covered in copper from Paul Revere's post-Revolution copper works) after which we lost the line. I promptly led us along an obscure route through Suffolk University, around some non-descript buildings, down Beacon Hill, and toward the architechtural catastrophe that is City Hall. The Freedom Trail had lasted about 50 meters before it disappeared among the sublime concrete faces.

Far from stymied, we bore on through the gusting wind and stinging "wintry mix," toward the wharfs, where it smelled profusely of fish and old grease. My heart still set on the Freedom Trail and paying tribute to one of Boston's leading Sons of Liberty, we trudged up to the North End, which was not only home to Revere himself in the eighteenth century, but later and still home to most of Boston's Italian immigrant population. Not completely cognizant of where we were going, we wandered among the tightly packed tenements and Italian bakeries. In times past, while meandering around the North End I had had the opportunity to witness many the slick-haired, thin-mustached type, either conversing discreetly with another individual of the same character or simply standing on the sidewalk, perusing the neighborhood, smoking a fat cigar; not an exaggeration. This morning, however, the populous was limited to a couple of younger guys shouting at each other across the narrow street in Italian.

It was here in the North End that we finally came upon the heart of the day's adventure, a courtyard between Unity Street and Salem Street where stands a grandiose statue of Paul Revere atop his mighty steed. It was here also that I was becoming aware of my quickly declining bodily state. Despite the decreased wind speed among the tenements, I was still freezing, wet, hungry, and was on day three of having gotten only a few hours of mediocre sleep. More focused on keeping my speed up for warmth, I paid a brief tribute to Revere, glancing up at the statue as I walked by and reciting to myself the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Listen my children, and you shall here/ Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. We bustled up to the Old North Church (closed for the holiday), and looked up at the tower where the lanterns had once been hung.

"If the British march/ by land or by sea from the town tonight,/ Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch/ Of the North Church tower as a signal light/ one if by land, two if by sea,/ And I on the opposite shore will be,/ Ready to ride and spread the alarm/ Through every Middlesex village and farm,/ For the country folk to be up and to arm."

...So through the night rode Paul Revere;/ ...A cry of defiance, and not of fear,A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,/ And a word that shall echo for evermore!

Now, let's be honest, if you think I was standing in front of the Old North Church on a blustery morning of New Year's Day reciting Longfellow, lost in the revelry of history, you are dead wrong. I actually had "High Definition" by Lupe Fiasco and featuring Snoop Dogg stuck in my head, and was doing all that I could, hunched over and feeling feeble, to retain every joule of warmth in my body. I did recognize a photograph of the inside of the church that was hanging near the door as something I had seen as a child on my first ever visit to Boston, and remembered thinking that it would have been quite boring to have spent so much time in such a quiet, white-walled place, either in a church service or a town meeting. Then I remembered the significance of the town meeting as a phenomenon unique to New England, and a precedent for liberal democracy in America. But I digress. The rest of the morning was spent finding coffee and a subway back home. After wishing my friends a safe journey back to New Haven, I cozied up in my dingy apartment underneath my antique American quilt and dreamt sweet dreams of political liberalism in our country.

At the outset, I intended to author this particular entry with the goal of exposing the myths and falsities that sully the historical truth about Paul Revere's midnight ride, such as the fact that he did not ride alone, but was joined by William Dawes (fat!) and Samuel Prescott (surgeon!). The ride was not the longest ever carried out by a messenger (or even by Paulie himself), and he did not shout "The British are coming!" but rather "The Regulars are coming out!!" (I know I'd be inspired to pick up my bayonet too if I heard a guy screaming "the regulars are coming out!" in the streets at midnight...perhaps more inspired to hop onto my gay pride float and join the parade, though), and the Sons of Liberty were not organized by John Hancock, Samuel or John Adams, Paul Revere, or any of the like but mainly by a shoemaker from Southie named Ebeneezer. Hence the present title, "a rude awakening."**** However, as interesting as these caveats are, I am still betrothed to the story, as I am to a nation that extols the brilliance of its own political and social values, while at the same time may be described as a place where Virtue Goes to Die.

Today marks the beginning of the 2008 presidential election, an opportunity for the public to change our country for the better and put the powers of government back into responsible and steady hands. I am disappointed that we are no longer in a place where policies are debated and made law in town meetings. Instead, we are in a place where an entire nation of voters will be swayed to elect a candidate chosen by one or two states, both of which are home to between one and three million people (let's just ask Chicago to pick next time). That aside, I will be watching Iowa closely today, and will do my best to cast my own votes freely in the coming months.

And yet, through the gloom and the light,The fate of a nation was riding that night.

*The author does not condone the use of bumper stickers.

** By the way, what has become of Dick Cheney? I'm starting to miss the old devil. Literally.
***Er, barring also the election of a certain hawkish blonde. but oh, wait, the entire region, let alone Iraq, is concurrently spiraling into inescapable chaos that is bound to suck the life out of any relatively obsolete notions of non-interventionism

****No offense to shoe makers, Ebeneezer, or the Irish.

happy 2008 from your local crazy

2008-01-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

crazy sweater man sighted this morning, new year's day, headed off of the red line. sweater: check. backpack: check. etc.
it's beginning to not be fun any more. shame about that.

trinkets ii : the karmic return of crazy sweater man

2007-12-30T10:38:00.000-08:00

first - required reading: "trinkets from the season of peace."

I'll be brief.
On a whim, I hopped a bus to Watertown to spend a gift certificate at the Arsenal Mall, a place where I hope never to return (there was a sharps disposal in the food court bathroom). Having been out until three in the morning the night before, I was in a bit of a state at 10 am after leaving the Y. For a fruitless 23 minutes I had been battling the little old Chinese ladies with their noodles and floaties for a sufficient lap lane before giving up and exiting poutily, hopeless and tired of swimming/narrowly averting collision. On the way to the "mall" (a.k.a. Watertown Methadone Clinic?) I stepped off the bus about a mile too early, and had to walk the rest of the way through Watertown, among the largely abandoned storefronts and 75%-off post-Christmas Christmas trees. On the way back, the bus passed me and I ended up walking a mile back to where I had mistakenly deboarded the first time. Finally back on the bus with my new bag full of home goods, who should step on (not the train, not the red line, not even in Boston, or Cambridge - note well that none of the circumstances characterizing the previous event were at play) but Crazy Sweater Man. I kid you not. Same sweater, same backpack, same stringy ponytail. No walking staff - it was indeed a product of my imagination. He sat down a row up from me, same posture, same manic smile. I remained engrossed in my book (the same book I had been reading on the Red Line on Christmas), secretly gritting my teeth and gripping myself in disbelief and preparation for karma's next big blow. Luckily this was it for this morning. He got off at Whole Foods (no cheerful conversation today, save a chipper "thank you! and Happy New Year!" to the bus driver), and the the world returned to its regular, bleak state.

thoughts on lap-swimmers

2007-12-27T10:16:00.000-08:00

In an effort to maintain my cardiac fitness and mental well being, I recently joined the Wang/Theater District YMCA in Boston's Chinatown, which resides conveniently across the street from the hospital where I work.

I've taken to going to the Y in the mornings before work to swim laps to replace the now life-threatening activity of winter running, and the experience has been on the whole relatively drull. Aside from the rush of endorphines that sends me into a charged yet ethereal state as I prance through the revolving hospital doors at 8:30 am, there is little to speak of with regard to my mornings at the Y, save recent events.

You might glean from the institution's name that this is no ordinary Y. The ubiquitous conceptions of dim, halogen lighting, screaming children with pool noodles, and the occastional unsavory character/YMCA resident all hold true. The pool is heated to the temperature of old bath water to accomodate the sensitivities of the most populouso group of Y-members, the old people. The Wang YMCA is unique though, in comparison to the regular under-funded, after-school-nightmare-ridden Y that we all know and love. I enjoy being in the minority (as a white person) among the mostly Asian morning-workout contingency. Most people look as though they are about 152 years old, and plan on living another 200. I tower above most other women in the locker room, standing a grand 5 feet and 3 inches above the ground. Very little English is spoken in that locker room, and there are very few people at the Wang YMCA at 6:30 am. And this is perfectly fine for the average lap-swimmer, or runner, for that matter, who thrives on quiescence. Further, the consistency of such an environment is soothing - be as it may the hobgoblin of my little mind.

There was a change, however, yesterday in this atmosphere that I had become accustomed to. I swam back and forth, letting my mind wander wherever it would; all I remember now of the many thoughts that were percolating in there is the observation that "lap-swimmers are utterly oblivious to everything, self-included." This brilliant gem crossed my mind just after almost colliding with the wall at the end of the pool for the second time that morning; if it weren't for the big fat lines on the ground (that stop when the end is near) I surely would have given myself a subdural hemmorhage by now. I was able to generalize this thought after thinking back on the slow-moving oaf from the previous day who failed to recognize that his flailing limbs, a vast entanglement taking up the entire width of the lane, nearly pinched my head off on a couple of passes. Further, I thought, "but, how could anyone who was constantly oblivious make any kind of generalization about others, based on observations of their behavior?" Quite the conundrum.

Anyhow, this stream of brilliant philosophical thought was interrupted as a saw the body of a plump young Asian man drift underneath mine, skimming the bottom of the pool like a nurse shark. In a world where the black line on the bottom of the pool is a hypnotic vision, this was significant. There he was, practically diving for pearls at the bottom of the YMCA pool at seven in the morning. I came to the end of the black line (no longer as thrilling as it once was) at the same time as he did, turned around and pushed off as if I were still oblivious.

It was after a few more laps that I noticed that he was keeping up with me on every length, popping up from the murky depths every time I turned around. A bit more keen to this strange activity, I noticed that he was no longer skimming the bottom for algae, but actually staring straight at me, paddling sideways under water and watching my very-almost-naked body's every move. I did a blase' flip turn.

On land, this would have presented a Situation. However, in my blue, diluted world, I somehow remained aloof, letting the warm, chemically altered water act as a barrier between us, as if its density accounted for the lack of distance in between.

There is no firm ending it this story, most likely because I'm sure I lost interest in my Lochness stalker and drifted back into my incognizant lap-swimmer's world, engrossed in the life of the magical black line.

trinkets from the season of peace

2007-12-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

I suppose the highlight of this Christmas was watching Fargo on Christmas Eve with my younger brother and his lovely girlfriend on the contraband television, dragged into my father's Amish style living room from the hidden caverns of my brother's room (television has long been a forbidden entity in my father's house). She had driven forty-five minutes to escape her overbearing family; my brother and I were home alone, momentarily orphaned due to my dad's having an ER night shift and my mother's having moved to Seattle. Nothing like a tale of a serial killer*, North Dakotan accents and a blood-spraying wood chipper to bring us all together on the night before Christmas. Christmas itself was standard: gift exchange at dawn, everyone together for an hour, and then back into our own realms - my brother to dreamland, my father to the piano, and I to my books. Later, my dad and I took a walk around the lake near the house, along with every suburban family of four that felt the need to do something besides sit in house thinking about Jesus. I left that evening, grateful for time spent with my family, but largely untouched by the so-called "spirit of the season."

Being back in Boston was an unexpected relief, seeing as I was coming home to an empty apartment and setting my alarm to 5:30 for work the next day - a somewhat unhappy conclusion to Christmas Day. During the ride up from New Haven I was blessed to be able to converse awkwardly with my estranged relatives, including my half brother whom I haven't seen in about a year. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Riding the train to Boston." Simple enough question. "No," he said, "with your life?" He has a somewhat gruff way of speaking that I've always found frightening. I suppose part of it could be residual fear from having been picked up by the head as a young child. More, he's confrontational, but ultimately unflappable. I won't go into the details of my reply - they'll come to light eventually. "I'm glad you're doing that, I'm glad you're doing your Boston thing," he said. This was significant, coming from my older brother. I patted myself on the back after hanging up as the train pulled into South Station.

Getting onto the Red Line, I inhaled deeply the ineffable smell of combusted petroleum products and and feet, a smell recognizable to anyone who has ever used the T (or the El, or el Metro) as their primary means of transportation. I felt the twinge of anxiety that had been fluttering around in my conscience since I had left begin to melt away. Back in my element, I threw my bags on to the empty seats around me (not many people riding the T after Christmas dinner) and stared blankly at the window. Someone started up a bright conversation toward the end of the car. Surprised to be hearing an individual voice from such a distance, I cued into the following dialogue:

Man: "Well, how was your Christmas? Did ya get a lot of good presents?"
Unsuspecting T-rider: "Just fine, thanks."
[Crazy] Man: "Well, I guess any holiday is a good day! [me: Oh yes, I DO agree!](pause) Say, that's a GREAT sweater!"
U.T.R.: "Thanks."
(pause)
Crazy Sweater Man: "Yeah, well, you can't go wrong with a sweater like that! On Christmas!"

He kept on talking, and glanced my way a few times while I feigned disinterest by watching the skyline emerge over the Charles as we popped out of the ground after Park Street. The manic smile on his face never broke. I thought maybe that Crazy Sweater Man was actually talking about his own sweater, seeing as it was black with weird white squares all over it. He also had an old fashioned backpack with an external aluminum frame, long, salty blonde hair, and a walking staff. Actually, the staff may just be a figment of my imagination. He babbled a bit more, but I was too busy avoiding making eye contact to let the words register.

Upon my return, my faithful rabbits nearly tore through the wires of their bunny-house as I walked through the door. They were actually looking a bit wan, undernourished perhaps, having been deprived of my love and affection for three days. We enjoyed a celebratory meal together - I and my scrambled eggs, they and their kibble. It was very merry indeed.

*please enjoy the fact that I instead of "serial killer," I originally wrote (and will continue to write, probably forever) "cereal killer."

"a sad day for pediatric cancer patients," or, "why i am from now on cashing all my paychecks and hiding the cash under my mattress, and f*ck my bank"

2007-12-20T19:06:00.000-08:00

in a spirit of warm-heartedness this afternoon, i slipped out of my windowless office on the 7th floor of the hospital and meandered through the slush and multiple snow-related traffic entanglements down the street to buy a toy to donate to the department's annual toy drive. it being the last day (indeed, the last hour) to bring in presents for the kids with leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma, etc., staying in the hospital over christmas, and the fact that i was a tad peckish for catered toy-party-food, caused me to feel like Seraphim, all aglow with the spirit of charitable good as i pranced into CVS willing to spend the last pennies of my previous paycheck on some crayola markers, a drawing pad, and watercolors of dubious quality, all for the sake of one unfortunate child's happiness on christmas. after about ten minutes of intense dwelling on which marker/paper/paint combination would be most appropriate--deliver the most joy, be most frugal (sad, but necessary. i'm usually cheap though. thanks, dad!)--i approached the check-out counter with my debit card ready. "alternate form of payment required," the cashier told me. in all honesty, i could barely understand her. she kind of half whispered, half gargled. when i realized what was going on (?!?!?!?!?) i tried my card again, and was again rejected. good lord what was happening?! this was my bank card, the link to all that i owned (minus my meager material possessions and two dwarf rabbits), and this insolent machine (the card swiper, not the cashier. that would be an awful thing to say) was telling me that my card was defunct. Or, it was telling me that i was out of money, which was almost true, but not true enough to stop me from purchasing CHRISTMAS PRESENTS FOR KIDS WITH CANCER. CANCER. my heart began to sink as i dug through my change purse for whatever cash i had...$11, enough to buy markers, paint, and the cheap plastic paint brushes i had picked out, but no fancy drawing pad. some poor child with cancer was going to wake up (or so one would hope!) on christmas morning and be given a sparkley package full of markers, paints, but nothing to paint or mark on! i suppose this child could emulate frida kahlo and paint whatever was handy--for lack of the body cast that frida had, the bed sheets, guard rails, crash cart, or his own body--he could paint the entire room with the magical materials bestowed on him by a generous heart (mine). that would be a beautiful thing.

to put a dry conclusion to this story, i called the bank and they fixed my card in about two minutes. they deactivated it for no apparent reason. just to sadden the world a bit more, i suppose. also, the food at the toy party was not catered, per the usual, but consisted of box crackers and pepperidge farm cookies from CVS.

The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Morgan and the Heartless Persistence of Gravity*

2007-12-18T20:54:00.000-08:00

In the unlikely event that I have not bitched to you, dear readers, in the last two weeks, here is the story of Morgan and the Ice, which dates back to December 4, 2007. Any prior confusion about why I've been prescribed Cold-War Era Domestic Housewife anti-anxiety/muscle relaxant medication should be cleared up.

It was an appropriately chilly morning when I left my shoddy Cambridge apartment for my then-regular run around 5:30 am. As I had run out of contacts about one month prior and was not scraping by in my new job with enough surplus to replace them, I had been running every day quite unable to see. In the week leading up to this particular event I had already a) run straight into a no parking sign, thus giving myself a muscle contusion on my shoulder and a very sore wrist from having hit the sidewalk (in the pouring rain, 5:50 am, dark as hell), as well as giving my running partner a heart attack as she kept asking if I needed an ambulance, and b) face-planted after tripping over a trash can lid that some jerk left in the middle of the sidewalk. It was dark and early that time, too. For the first time the city was completely snowed and iced over, and I spent the next 50 minutes loping over jagged ice formations, knowing full well with my history of imbalance and blindness I was grazing the threshold of bodily sovereignty with every step. About 1200 meters from home, my world newly illuminated by the fresh light of dawn, I felt confident that I had survived a relatively treacherous journey.
Now picture A Charlie Brown Christmas, when the children are skating, singing "Christmas Time is Here," in their pretty, youthful voices, Snoopy is racing and twirling like Nancy Kerrigan, and Charlie Brown (uuug!) slips on the ice, falling backwards onto his big, bald cartoon head which now has a little squiggle of dizziness above it. That was me! Only I don't have a big cartoon head! I fell on my back (ow) and my head (ow), and lay in the middle of Brookline Avenue in utter shock, wondering if the torque that had just acted on my back had been effective immediately enough to lessen the velocity with which my head hit the ground, or what was the fucking static friction coefficient of black ice. Yes, I was thinking about physics before it even occurred to me that I was in agonizing pain. I got up, bent over as to not let myself pass out, and then jogged home, my body numbed from the cold, save my traumatized back muscles.
Nothing broke, the valium was for the constant muscle spasm that lasted for a week and a half. Apparently my pain was continuing due to both trauma and external stress (?!?!?! I don't even know the meaning of that word). It began to resolve just as I was coming down with the flu (or a flu-like syndrome...since you Never Know if its Influenza Until You Get Tested For It) (PS we're all going to die! From the flu! Watch out!)(Public health kids get it) and had to take a day of unpaid sick time.
I'm all better now but damn I get double Christmas presents this year. Good grief.

*Not to be confused with Marquez's "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother."
I love my grandmothers.

references

2007-12-17T19:27:00.000-08:00

I must credit poet Elizabeth Powell for contributing (ehem, unknowingly) to the title of this periodical. In her poem, Pledge, the last line, "My Republic/ by my childish troth I am pledged/ so strangely to you," resounds with my own experience most uffishly.

girl scouts, public school, etc.

strong beginnings: valium, fire alarm, and pleading woodland creatures

2007-12-17T18:31:00.000-08:00

i'll not be throwing pointed comments toward the winds of the public sphere regarding the state of the union, world, or various ellipses of social density. this is about the unsound crap occasionally graces my daily existence. it is also about the pursuit of aggrandizing my vocabulary. say that one out loud and roll your r's.

last night the fire alarm went off at 1:06 am. granted, this is not late for most people my age; i myself had only been asleep for about an hour. however, it was also one hour and fifteen minutes post my having taken 3 milligrams of prescription valium before bedtime (not because i am psycho--because i have a back injury. more on that in the next couple of stories). in fact, i didn't even wake up at the alarm; my roommate practically had to bang down my door before i woke up to see the sparkley blue streaks flitting across my eyeballs again (they started shortly after the valium). i stumbled out of my bed (bed frame, that is...my mattress is on the floor but surrounded by its frame. i have to crawl over it. yet another story, i suppose, but not a very stimulating one. i'll spare you.) and put on pretty much all the clothes i could find lying on the floor around my room. (i am not one for cold). by the light coming in from the hallway i looked toward my pet rabbits in their bunny house who were looking back at me with wild, pleading eyes. actually, they are bunnies, and their eyes are always wild and pleading. "don't leave us!" they cried. never would i do such a thing, so in my drugged-up stupor i dug through my closet for a tote bag (that i got from the evanston farmers' market...thanks, evanston, illinois!) and quickly took my little woodland creatures into my arms and shoved them into their bunny-satchel. remembering my keys and my coat, i secured all the necessary items about my person and escaped my four story walk-up, which had been evacuated because some cook at the pizza joint downstairs was being an asshole, burning things in the middle of the night or whatever. the bunnies poked their heads out of my coat to see what the hell was going on, which was perfect since my landlord was walking around managing the 50+ tenants that were out on the sidewalk in the freezing cold and uh, i'm not supposed to have animals pooping in my apartment.