Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Same scene, different script
The other day, one of my patients (a retired English teacher, of course) ragged on me for getting lie/lay wrong. Of COURSE I know the damn difference. It was a SLIP, okay?
This is dedicated to her:
D.
just working
Seems like the last few days have been a blur. Sometimes I feel like Billy Pilgrim, existing simultaneously in all moments of my life — or am I confusing him with Dr. Manhattan? Part of me right now is the faithful service-oriented doc (gotta keep up that NPS!), part is gritting my teeth on commute, part is lying in bed at 5:50 AM wondering if another ten minutes horizontal is going to make much difference to the big picture. Eat, Treat, Drive, and Sleep. What a life.
I love the work, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I could get used to this routine. Folks have had to do much worse over the years, right? I mean, I’m not in a bloody coal mine. And I’m making more money, enough that we’re actually SAVING money for a change.
Still, I wish I had more free time. I leave my chores to the weekend, so by the time Saturday rolls around most of my time is spent shopping, doing the laundry, cleaning. Yes, Lucie, I know — get domestic help — but until my longterm future resolves itself, we’re reluctant to increase our spending.
Selling the house in Harbor would be a big help.
Getting a permanent spot would be an even bigger help.
Meanwhile, I keep working and hoping.
D.
Is it just me,
or is our President channeling a certain starship captain?
If the man starts shouting “KHAAAAAAN!” I’m leaving the room.
D.
Land
In some of my job search locations, a guy can buy a house with acres of land. This would make some sense if we kept horses or sheep or whatever, but in my middle age I’ve realized I don’t need land. And yet, I cannot deny the appeal.
Karen and I both grew up in homes with relatively small back yards. My first house had a back yard and a “back back yard,” an area beyond a fence which was undeveloped and which was, beyond question, more fun that our St. Augustine-green back yard. There were horned lizards in the back back yard, and wild native plants, and a broken down area of fence where I could cut across to our neighbor Sadie’s back yard, and that was a jungle. Sadie’s idea of yard maintenance was to let the place achieve its own equilibrium. You could easily imagine man-eating vines and quicksand and all manner of other threats.
When we moved to Texas, we rented at first, but eventually we bought a house in the hills northwest of San Antonio. We had an acre of land and it was largely unusable thanks to chiggers and nasty burrs and, most of all, fire ants.
Land ownership meant walking my property no less than every two weeks with a big jug of Sevin (a neurotoxic bug poison), sprinkling mound after mound with the nasty white powder. It was a hopeless battle. My only solace was the fact that the little bastards never once invaded our home (but the scorpions did). What did they find to eat out there? Chiggers, no doubt. The land was barren scrub, save for a few oak trees close to our house; the soil was yellow calichi, also known as “hard pan,” which is a far more descriptive and accurate term.
So we couldn’t garden in the stuff, not without putting down a ton of real topsoil, and thanks to the burrs and fire ants we couldn’t let Jake play outside. We had a tortoise, Sydney, who liked to roam the perimeter and dig his way underneath the fence. He was looking for tortoise babes. Twice, he made it to our neighbor’s yard, and she kindly returned him. On the third escape, he made it into the wastes which lay beyond our property’s western edge. I hope he found someone.
Since then, we haven’t had much land. Oh, on paper the lot in Oregon was 3/4 acre, but much of it was unusable due to those nasty salmonberry vines. (Really, if we had to have berries, why couldn’t we have had blackberries?) I had some land for a garden and managed to keep a few flowers alive, as well as a humongous rosemary bush. You have to really work to kill rosemary.
I wish I had more time to garden. Like my grandfather, who took a distinctly masculine pride in growing squash four times as large as was sold in the market, I like dirt, I like to grow things. But I like so many other things so much better. Gardening tends to take a back seat.
I’m getting old: all I want is enough land for a hot tub.
D.
Oscar Night Nostalgia
Here’s Sacheen Littlefeather declining the Oscar for Marlon Brando (for his performance in The Godfather) — embedding disabled.
I wondered whatever happened to Ms. Littlefeather, and the Wikipedia article isn’t disappointing.
I haven’t watched The Academy Awards in ages. During med school, I guess, or perhaps internship . . . the Awards would come around and I’d realize that I had not seen a single one of the movies. In the last 20 years, I’ve only seen six of the Best Picture winners: Silence of the Lambs (and how the hell did that win — oh, look at the competition), Unforgiven, Braveheart, American Beauty, Gladiator, and LOTR Return of the King. I love movies; it’s just that I don’t watch them anymore.
I went to a retirement party today, which made me wonder what I would do in retirement. Write, obviously, but you can’t write 24-7. Cook. Shop. And, maybe, catch up on all the movies I’ve missed.
D.
Eat! Eat!
Koreans must be Jewish.
Or at least the Korean ladies who serve food at Korea House in Concord. Just like yesterday, I thought I was playing it smart ordering only an entree and no appetizers. I’m here in the East Bay by myself, after all (it’s a call weekend and I have to stay close to the hospital), so I have to be careful not to order too much food. Once again, the restaurant had different things in mind.
Have you ever been to a Korean restaurant? They set out lots of little dishes of treats:
I had nine dishes in all, not counting the entree, the bowl of rice, and the dish of noodles: soup, seaweed, bean sprouts, steamed broccoli, my oh so favorite little fishies, fried tofu, and a variety of pickles. No kim chi, sadly. I think they’re trying to be unique. “We are a kim chi free Korean restaurant,” something like that.
I could have finished it all, too, along with my entree (fried king fish), but the Korean gals, you know the Jewish ones, kept coming by and with their best Yiddishe accent saying “eat, eat,” they would refill my bowls as fast as I could drain them of food. “OH, you like the fishies?” She brought a bowl with four times as many fishies. “You like the omelet? You like tofu?”
AAACK! NO! NO MORE!
Eventually I understood their devious plan. They want their customers to take home leftovers. That way, you’ll remember them longer. I know I will.
Do they treat all of their customers this well, or just me? One of the nurses who works in our area recognized me and chatted me up on her way out. I suspect she gave the waitresses the Secret Korean Wink that meant “stuff this one silly, he’s a good guy.” Then again, maybe they stuff everyone silly.
Good thing I ate early. I always tell my patients that the three-hour rule* can easily become the four-, five-, or six-hour rule if you come away from the dinner table stuffed. Last night I finished dinner late, and oh boy was my stomach griping about it.
SO — have you eaten anything fun lately?
D.
*Nothing to eat or drink except for water for three hours before bedtime. That’s rule number one for refluxers like yours truly.
Time for a poll
One of the blog’s earlier templates had built-in polls. Whine! I liked that. Only got to use it once, I think, but I had great plans. Then that template went crashy.
On to the poll. I preface this by saying I have a low tolerance for frustration. I should be enjoying the job search, right? But I wish it were over and done with. So I’m curious. Do you think
(A) The universe is a random place and your fate is whatever you make of it;
(B) A benign Higher Being has some great plan for me, and until the right job comes along, the rest of my potential employers are gonna thumb their noses at me;
or
(C) A wicked Higher Being is having a good ol’ time swinging me around by my, um, ankles.
Feel free to come up with a (D).
D.
The Squid is out!
Watchmen fanboys and fangirls everywhere are up in arms: Zack Snyder has ditched the Squid!
Gone is Adrian Veidt’s plan to unite mankind by the threat of alien invasion. Instead, we have some kind of frame-up job with Dr. Manhattan as the target. Needless to say, such a fundamental shift in plot sends shockwaves through the whole damn storyline.
I think I understand WHY Snyder did it. Manhattan was, to some degree, a peripheral player. One might delete Manhattan from Watchmen and have an intact, tighter plot . . . minus the heart of the story, but hey, Hollywood has screwed the pooch before. But this . . . they’re not screwing the pooch; they’re raping the whole dog pound.
Anyway, by drawing Manhattan deeper into the central plot, Snyder binds him to the central storyline and creates what is, in theory, a more coherent whole. But what’s left is no longer Watchmen. It’s a different story with Watchmen characters.
Watchmen fans are not amused.
(That’s Bruno Ganz in Downfall, a performance my wife regards as The. Best. Fuhrer. EVAH. “He’s not a cartoon bad guy the way every other actor has played Hitler.”)
Watchmen the graphic novel is a classic in large part because of the powerful ending. Adrian Veidt’s narcissism leads him to believe HE knows what’s best for mankind, and HE knows how to fix humanity . . . and he concocts a ends-justifies-the-means scheme wherein fear and violence lead to nothing more than fear and violence and, ultimately, armageddon. But I doubt that made it into the movie, either. We’ll see.
D.