Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
So that’s the great smoky hole in my life
I’ve known a scant handful of doctor-smokers, most notably the chairman of the ENT department back at my med school. I have one of those memories — the kind of memory that is so bizarre you question whether it could have possibly happened that way — of him chain-smoking in his office while talking to me about ENT residency programs. He was a wild man. His residents were terrified of him.
That was a very special department. Their otologist was more entrepreneur than doctor, had his own plane, a few different companies, was a millionaire many times over — I don’t know the details, but I do know that his was likely the corrupting influence of my for-a-limited-time-only boss back in 2008. Their VA doc, at national meetings, would (infamously) show slides of rhinos mating. A complete and utter non sequitur.
Maybe that was my problem in academics. I wasn’t enough of a character.
D.
Being a character isn’t something you can fake readily – you either are or you aren’t. Although I suppose that if you were to fake it broadly enough, that would make you a character…
You have to REALLY commit if you’re going to fake it. My ex had a prof who would lecture from under her desk on days when the voices were bad. And when raccoons got into her attic, rather than call an exterminator, she went to Europe for 8 weeks.
Having character is much harder than being a character.