Balls and Walnuts
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Madonna
Found this one through Cracked.com’s “Letterman’s 9 Most Hilariously Awkward Interviews.”
In residency, I had a fan. I took care of her after a car accident and after that she became my senior year project. She was cute and zaftig and she always dressed to the nines, and she was one of those rare women who (A) seemed to have a crush on me and (B) still had all of her teeth. If ever I could have had an affair, she was it. I remember being so flattered by the whole thing that it never occurred to me that I might be hurting her feelings by NOT coming on to her. But hey, that’s not me. One of my classmates — no, wait, TWO of my classmates — would have jumped her in an instant. But not me.
Anyway. One day, she brought in Madonna’s book so that she could show me the black and white photo of the guy with the airbrushed asshole. Maybe this was her way to share a laugh with me (because it was pretty damn funny, that picture) or maybe it was her awkward way of making one last attempt. So we looked at that photo and the other photos and laughed about it, and that was all. I don’t think she ever came back to my clinic.
That’s my Madonna story.
D.
Searching for my Chicken George
Eh, not really. I’m second generation American, Jewish Nisei, so if I dig deeper than my grandparents in any direction I draw a blank: surnames of uncertain spellings (Gofman or Goffman? Grobovski, Grobosky, or Grobowski?), doubtful cities of origin, no first names and certainly no birth dates.
But I was futzing around on Ancestry.com today and actually made some progress. I found census records on my dad’s side of the family from 1930 and 1920, and I found the record of my grandmother’s reentry into the country in 1924. My paternal grandparents came over in 1914 and promptly sired my aunt and uncle (both deceased). Something happened to their marriage in the early 20s — my grandmother either got homesick, or perhaps fed up with her husband. I’m not sure anyone knows. Actually, I’ll bet my uncle Hank knew, but stupidly I never asked him about it while he was alive.
Anyway, my grandmother took her two kids back to Asia, and I don’t know if they made it as far as the USSR (they were the USSR by then, I think?) but they did have relatives in Harbin, China. Quite a big Jewish community in Harbin, I understand. She came back by way of Yokohama, to Vancouver BC and then to Seattle. They must have taken the train back to Boston, and based on the dates, I suspect my father was conceived soon after their homecoming.
It is kind of neat to see the census records . . . my grandfather was recorded as a grocer in 1920, and in the 1930 record he was again a grocer, and she was a “shop saleslady”. Since censuses were conducted house to house, their neighbors were recorded on the same page. I haven’t called my dad yet, but I figure he will probably remember some of the names.
I learned a few things which might surprise my father. I have my grandparents’ precise birth dates, or at least the ones they gave out to the Feds. I also have my grandfather’s city of origin — Nerchinsk. I’m dubious about it, though, since it’s like 200 miles east of my grandmother’s city of origin. How could they have met? Yes, I realize they had trains back then. Maybe he had relatives in Chita and he met her at the local hoe-down.
I don’t know how to proceed. Surely there were marriage records back in Siberia? Also, my grandfather’s dad was supposedly a rabbi (which would explain my grandfather’s rejection of the faith — the man kept his grocery store open on Saturdays!) You’d think that would be an important enough person to leave some mark on the records. I would love to track down those relatives in Harbin, too.
And I haven’t even touched my mom’s side of the family.
D.
The other shoe drops
Found out today that I will be obliged to attend twelve “Leadership Training” meetings over the next year. Currently, I have Wednesday afternoons off for, ahem, educational leave. The first Wednesday each month is our big interdepartmental administrative meeting, but the other three Wednesday afternoons are useful for working out shoppinggoofing off continuing my medical education. Now, I’m going to lose one of those afternoons each month to “Leadership Training” — I and a few other suckers. Um, leaders.
What might this entail? Will I be taught the special knock, the evil eye, the secret handshake? Will I come to learn that drilling down on the numbers is neither bookie’s argot nor pimpish patois? Will it dawn on me that benchmarks are something more than the dents my ass leaves on the chair, and that a dashboard is something other than the thing I bang my head against when I realize I could have been working out shoppinggoofing off continuing my medical education?
Will I become a leader?
Mind you, I belong to an organization in which most if not all leaders are drawn from the pool of physicians. Someone has to bust their ass keeping it all running smoothly. Several someones. And now I’m one of the someones.
D.
It’s official
I’m the DEPARTMENTAL CHAIRMAN!
Pretty fast rise to the top, eh? I mean, I’ve only been here 18 months, and I’ve not even made partner yet, and they named me, ME, chairman.
Never mind that there’s only two of us in our department. I refuse to not feel honored. (And my partner refuses to not feel relieved.)
This means that I’m the one who gets to drive down to LA four times a year (at least) and I’m the one who gets the blame if our stats start sucking and I’m the one who has to decipher all the administratorese that gets emailed to me. But hey, that’s what the stipend is for.
So that makes two chairs in our family (my sister chairs her high school’s English Dept). Pretty soon we’ll have a dinette set.
D.
Beware novels which announce, “A Novel.”
Today, I finished The Shadow Year: A Novel by Jeffrey Ford. I wanted to read a good fantasy, so I checked out the World Fantasy Awards site. Noting that their 2010 award-winner was China Mieville’s The City & The City, which I liked a great deal, I decided I would trust them for another fantasy. Hence The Shadow Year: A Novel, which won their 2009 best novel award.
Setting: a small town in Long Island, late 1960s. Well, I thought, this should be fun, since I was the protag’s age at that time, too. And yet the moments of resonance were rare: a reference to Bazooka bubble gum (which did indeed cost a penny), occasional mentions of commercials which were on TV at the time. Despite Ford’s efforts to create a rich setting, with regard both to the town and the time, it all felt flat to me.
Plot: the unnamed protag is the middle child of a dad who works three jobs and a manic depressive mom who drinks herself to sleep every night. His younger sister is disturbed (and psychic!) and his older brother is cool, brave, and generic. There’s also a generic bully and a generic mean teacher and a host of generic loonies. Conflict arises first in the guise of a mysterious window peeper, then in the form of disappearances, murders, and a sinister man in a big white car. The brothers set out to unravel the town’s mystery and inexplicably never tell their father, who seems a reasonable sort, nor their grandparents, who are also cool and brave and nearly generic (they and the drunk mom were the only ones in the novel who came alive for me).
Gimmick: the older brother has built a simulacrum of the neighborhood on a model train platform erected in their basement. Movements of their neighbors, the peeper, and the sinister man in his big white car are eerily reflected by changes in the positions of their counterparts in the miniature town.
THEME! THEME! THEME! Why, loss of innocence, of course, which is telegraphed with a bullhorn at the end of the novel’s first paragraph:
. . . . Taking a cast-off leaf into each hand, I made double fists. When I opened my fingers, brown crumbs fell and scattered on the road at my feet. Had I been waiting for the arrival of that strange changeling year, I might have understood the sifting debris to be symbolic of the end of something.
Really, how big a dumb ass am I? I read that paragraph before I ever bought the book, and yet I still bought it. Jeez.
What’s wrong with it: oh, imagine any Twilight Zone episode written by Rod Serling. Got it yet? Smarmy. Rife with predictable ironies. Ultimately moralistic — and two-dimensional.
I’m thinking of reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris novels. Has anyone here read him? Or do you have any other fantasy recommendations to make?
D.
Tonkatsu frenzy!
All I wanted was an easy recipe for tonkatsu sauce, and what I found was the OCD answer to the question: The Great Tonkatsu Sauce Shootout, wherein the author taste-tests one home-made recipe and nine products, and tests different types of pork (cheapie off the shelf versus pricey Kurobuta) and tests pig’s lard versus Wesson oil as a frying medium.
This guy has read too much Cooks Illustrated.
Nevertheless, with his advice I did throw together a decent tonkatsu sauce made up of ketchup, plum sauce, light soy, dark soy, and Worcestershire sauce.
D.
The crowd at the gym
There were a scant few open spaces in the parking lot tonight — much worse than usual. And a lot of new faces inside.
“When does the New Years resolution crowd disappear?” I asked the gal at the front desk, the one who scans my tag.
“April,” she said, and to my surprised expression, she added, “They stop showing up right after tax time.”
And I realized, I’ve been doing this almost continuously since 2004 or 2005. That’s when I decided to stop making jokes like, “No one ever got injured sitting on their couch.” I used to make it to the gym maybe twice a week, and at best I’d spend an hour there. Now I’m there anywhere from three to five times a week, and when I have the time I’ll be there 90 minutes, sometimes two hours. I’m still fat but that has a lot more to do with how I eat, not how much I exercise.
It’s mean-spirited of me, but I’ll be glad when the resolution crowd dissipates.
D.
We don’t use our swimming pool
so I keep wondering what to do about that. We pay to get it cleaned, and part of the year we pay to heat it, and except for the time I tripped and fell into the hot tub, we have yet to use it.
If I turned it into a giant salt water tank and stocked it with brightly colored fishes, I could go snorkeling in my own back yard. Lots of folks are converting to salt water swimming pools; I’m not sure I understand the pros and cons, but I gather the salt water pool doesn’t require much in the way of chemicals.
And then this photo-diary over at Daily Kos showed me the light.