On the way back to Grand Central Station, I stood in a crowded train next to two seated children traveling with (I assumed) their grandmother. She wore an orange dress and gold glasses and had graying hair at her temples. The boys had close-cropped hair and full, round cheeks shiny with youth. They looked about 9 or 10 years old. They were absolutely dying laughing. They were really cracking up. One would lean over and whisper in the ear of the other, and they would both start rocking back and forth, clutching their stomachs and giggling. “Hey,” said one. “Hey, I cut my finger, see?” The other child said ,”no, that’s not a cut. That’s, that’s, that’s a piece of fish!” And then they just died laughing. I have no idea what that was so funny about that, but I couldn’t help smiling. They were so happy and full of mirth that no amount of shushing by the grandmother could make them stop. A little cocoon of light-ness on the 5 train.
- PJ O’Rourke: Giving politicians a Twitter-ready version of the U.S. Constitution to send to voters in place of the politicians’ own thoughts will raise the tone of America’s political discourse while sparing us the pain and humiliation of learning anything more about our dreadful elected representatives, their idiot ideas, or their unwelcome whereabouts.
He’s joking, but it’s not a bad idea. I mean, there is even this:
Oh, come on, dance around the room. You know you want to.
*The residents and I do this, sometimes, well, we don’t do it literally, but we take a little chocolate break or something and I turn up some music and we are just happy for a moment. You do a better job that way. It’s true. We are passionate about doing our best, it’s not some bumper-sticker thing, we really are.
*One of these days I will tell you all about how I went to see a Cartier-Bresson exhibit at the Art Institute with a friend (hi, Tatyana!) and we laughed over the stodgy, dull, pseudo-Marxist-y language of the curator. Not the curator for the Cartier-Bresson exhibit, which was wonderful, but for a different set of photographs in an adjacent exhibition.
“Planning is usually based on some sort of idea structure, often one or more theories. People who love theories are often sympathetic to the concept of planning. After all, isn’t it rational to plan things rather than simply “muddle through?” — this concept itself being something of a theory. A danger here is that the plan becomes more important than its results, as Stephens suggested.
Perhaps another danger is the creation of a Mandarin state led by a small, smart, highly-educated, self-confident, self-perpetuating elite — which is a kind of extension to Stephens’ point at the end of his column. Unless I’ve read him wrong, this danger is something along the lines of what has been troubling Friedrich von Blowhard for the last year or two.”
*It’s like I’m determined to be some sort of serious person, or something. Wonder what that’s all about?
**Okay, actually, I am linking the above so that I can read it in the future, in all that spare time I have. In reality, I am reading a paper entitled, “Molecular classification of melanomas and nevi using gene expression microarray signatures and formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded tissue.” I like what I do.
1. A table, in the resident’s room, covered with shiny pink-blue-yellow candy wrappers, a sign next to the mess reading, “a present from Zhi—, she went to china and brought us candy.”
2. I pass another attending in the hall, we are both in weekend casual – jeans and no white coats. We don’t stop as we walk past each other. He says to me, “Hi, working today?”
3. In the cafeteria, I buy a diet soda (a ‘pop’, because, hey, it’s the Midwest) and realize I have forgotten to bring any money. The cashier, who knows me, says, “don’t worry about it, go upstairs and get your money.” As I leave, another woman in line smiles and says, “don’t worry, I paid for it.”
“But, I work here. You shouldn’t have done that!”
“It’s okay, I work here, too.”
“That is so nice of you. Oh you didn’t have to do that. Thanks! Thank you!”
- Acts of kindness happen around here, all the time, they happen quite a lot, actually. I am always incredibly touched.
There is a long and narrow hallway that runs along the center of the ‘old’ hospital, the part that contains the cafeteria, gift shop, library and administrative offices that once housed the medical school. We have a new medical school, now, a gleaming and bland carapace housing equally gleaming and bland classrooms. Of course, it’s always glass: glass, glass, glass everywhere. Makes you miss solid building materials like brick*.
Today, while walking quickly down that hallway, I almost ran into a young boy and his mother. He had trouble walking, he moved slowly on his two legs, each leg bent in toward the knees so that the knees kind of knocked against each other when he walked. White bandages covered the calves. “Two more weeks, only two more weeks,” I hear him say in a voice clear and childish, full of, believe it or not, a kind of mirth, a burbling happiness that you hear in the voices of children, and all this while he struggled to put one foot in front of the other.
It makes you humble, it always does, the things you see around here.
*Okay, I know the building is solid and up to code, but I am trying to make an aesthetic point, here.
Update: Aww, kids are beautiful, here is a video of some Iraqi kids. I don’t know what I think about the Iraq War anymore, but man, are these kids adorable. (via).
It’s worth a shot, isn’t it? It’s not like overregulation and high taxes are keeping the nice, fun, independent mom-and-pops around . And, it’s not like subsidizing developments necessarily makes money in the long run. If it did, taxes would have gone down, not up, over the long haul, given all the subsidized “development” that has taken place in the past.
- my letter in the local paper. Yeah, like a loser, I write about a letter a month to the paper, and, sometimes, they humor me.
