Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Memoirist BS
What might have been
I can well imagine the conversation which took place behind closed doors after I left my interview at Wake Forest University.
“I don’t care what you want,” the chairman must have said. “I want him.”
“We don’t need another assistant prof,” said my would-be boss. “I need a fellow. A FELL-OW.”
“You don’t understand. He’s the future!” (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But it’s my fantasy and I’ll put whatever words I want into the chairman’s mouth.)
“Then you find a place for him in the department, but I don’t want him.”
So the chairman, hoping to find some sort of niche for me at Wake Forest, sent my CV to one of his cancer research buddies — Frank Torti, a guy who just happened to have been on my thesis advisory committee at Stanford.
My CV hit Frank’s desk like a steaming hotcake on a breakfast platter. It cooled over the next four months, buried under reprints and grant proposals. But Frank found it eventually.
My life in candy
Oh. My. God. Now they’re making chocolate-covered PayDay bars.
It’s like a Baby Ruth, only better. Baby Ruths are too chewy, too provocative to my TMJs. Chocolate-covered PayDay bars melt in my mouth, giving me that quick double-charge of sucrose and theobromine. Aaah.
Candy wasn’t always this good.
Work, part III
I’m between cases right now. I’ll update this throughout the day, time permitting. (Updated x 3, pic added.)
***
I’m asking myself whether grad school was work or not. For all I produced in the lab, I might as well have been making widgets. But even that’s a bad analogy, because whatever widgets are, someone must need them or else widget factories wouldn’t make them, right? Or do widgets exist solely to provide examples for intro economics textbooks?
Hundreds of hours in the lab for nothing. For “results” that didn’t advance the forefront of science a single micron. What a waste! But at least I earned tuition credits, made a few good friends, and could pretend, at least for a little while, that I was a scientist.
Work, part two
Here’s part one.
***
First summer home from Berkeley, I had grandiose hopes. My father had mentioned a job at a water-bottling plant with an unbelievable wage of $10 per hour. Money like that, I could save a bundle, and at last put into effect an escape fantasy I had hatched for my girlfriend. We would rent an apartment together. She would transfer to one of the many colleges in the area, and we could both take part-time jobs to pay expenses.
She knew nothing of this, and it was just as well; my first day home I spent chasing down a job that didn’t exist. Meanwhile, my gf was less than amused that I would put a nonexistent job above her — I didn’t see her until that evening.
I found a great job the next day, in the Classifieds. Minimum wage, but it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had: I became a short order cook at the local golf course.
Work
We throw cash at my son to clean the litter box. It’s not his only chore — he feeds the fish, gives food and water to the cats, and makes sure the cats are out in the garage at night — but it’s the chore that brings him a steady income. His rates are exorbitant, but neither Karen nor I have a taste for cat poop. Besides, all the kid does is stick his cash in the bank. We could do worse things with our money.
My parents gave me $20 a month to do the dishes, mop and clean the kitchen, and clean the bathrooms. Not a great allowance, but you have to remember: back in the early 70s, you could see a movie for $2.50, and vinyl records were what, seven or eight dollars? Twenty a month just about covered expenses.
But for my first real job, I washed dishes at Sizzler.
Nostalgiarama
Sometimes I miss Rogue.
In grad school, Karen and I would hang out at my lab on Friday and Saturday nights, playing Rogue for hours. (Waddya mean, get a life? I was in the lab. Working. Heh.) See the @? That’s you, the rogue. The asterisk, that’s gold. Gold is good. The dashes and vertical lines are walls, the periods indicate you’re in a lit room. I tell you all this because there are people Shaina’s age in the room. Shaina, you move the @ with keyboard commands, and you fight the same way.
Yes, this was as good as it got, and it rawked over guess-the-parser games like Adventure or Zork. We could fight Ettins and Kobolds, Imps and Intellect Devourers (watch out, or you’ll get hormed by the Intellect Devourer’s ego whip!) Every letter of the alphabet was a monster, every punctuation mark a scroll, food item, piece of armor, potion . . . And, no, we never found the Amulet of Yendor. That bastard was hard.
For years, whenever I searched for Rogue online, I could only find a latter day version which didn’t quite capture the simple pleasures of the original. But today I found the real thing as well as some of the more “modern” knockoffs, like Angband. Classic Rogue kicks Angband’s ass, of course. After reveling in A Brief History of Rogue (Hawking, eat your heart out), I searched and found Zork and Adventure.
I had just killed the troll in Zork when I dragged Jake over. Look, look, you have to see this. We used to spend HOURS —
But it’s all old news to my son. Not only does he know about text adventure games, he has played the spoofs — and boy, are they funny:
Thy Dungeonman. (Keep trying to take the flask. Don’t take no for an answer.)
Thy Dungeonman II. (Too long for me to play right now, but damn, this one is just as funny.)
Thy Dungeonman III. (Thou art surrounded by . . . thy graphics!)
Now . . . why do I drop fifty bucks a shot for computer games, when there’s great stuff like this on the web?
I’m going back to Zork. Or maybe Dungeonman III — the graphics are truly stunning. You can’t discount the value of top notch graphics.
D.
Thirteen scenes from Gross Anatomy
Nothing says “medical school” like Gross Anatomy. Think about it: anyone can study microbiology, histology, or pathology. But how many people get to cut up dead bodies? How many people would want to?
Maybe in the future, cadaver dissection will be replaced by in computero practical exercises, but I doubt it. A big part of training is learning to violate taboos — getting close to people, asking them the most intimate of questions, touching them in ways even their spouses wouldn’t touch them, and hurting them. None of this comes naturally; all of it must be learned. Or, rather, unlearned. It’s all about breaking down internal barriers.
And that’s why Gross Anatomy will always play a role in medical education.
Follow me below the fold for thirteen memories. Sorry, no more pictures on this one; I doubt I would find anything palatable for mass consumption.
An early Thirteen: Thirteen Movie Memories
An early Thirteen, because somewhere in the world it’s already Thursday*.
Veterans to my Thursday Thirteens know I like to use these occasions to revel in the only subject of which I never tire: me. It’s autobiography as viewed through a variety of lenses. Food, sex, love, are little more than angles and gimmicks. But isn’t that the original idea of the TT, to learn more about the author?
I shall always be faithful to this blog’s subtitle. Besides, if you’re here reading this, you haven’t tired of me, either. Or perhaps you’re just hoping for more recipes.
Follow me below the fold: my life in movies.