Whatever you do, don’t prop up your arm
We were talking about Noah’s Ark tonight, which reminded me of those Illustrated Bible Stories books that were an inevitable find at any doctor’s or dentist’s office when we were kids. I ate those stories up like Milk Duds. “Remember the Flood, Karen?” She didn’t remember that one. “The Flood was Jesus’ tears.”
Then I reminded her of the one about the kid in the hospital —
Didn’t take any more than that. We both put up our right hands and burst out laughing. Jake thought we were crazy.
I tried to find it online just now, and could only find a discussion of it over on James Randi’s forums. I’ll let “Lisa Simpson” explain the story in her own words:
My “favorite” story was one of a boy, in the hospital for a tonsillectomy or something similarly minor, who was placed in the same hospital room as a boy who had been in a car accident and critically injured. Car accident boy is dying and scared. Tonsillectomy boy tells car accident boy that if he raises his hand, Jesus will know he’s ready to go to heaven and Jesus will take him. But car accident boy is too injured to raise his hand by himself, so tonsillectomy boy uses a pillow to prop up car accident boy’s arm. In the morning, when tonsillectomy boy wakes up, car accident boy is dead, dead, dead.
I spent many a night sleeping with my arms clenched to my sides, afraid that Grim Reaper Jesus would kill me in the night.
My favorite response downthread:
So tonsillectomy boy killed him and got away with it?
And further downthread, commentor joobz explains that there are, in fact, some New Testament stories he likes:
Like the story of Jesus with some dude and a whore.
whore comes in, some dude says, “begone whore!”. And Jesus is all like, “No, come back here whore, it’s ok… That guy is being a D**hebag”
As a kid, religion baffled and titillated me. I fantasized wrestling matches between God and Satan, refereed by Jesus or Moses (depending on who had ref duty that day, I suppose). I was bright enough to recognize the various internal inconsistencies but not a natural cynic enough (like my son) to reject it all out of hand. Christianity in particular fascinated me; I remember reading stories of the Crucifixion that read like torture porn, and I wondered, and still wonder, how God could be kind and good and also be okay with damnation being mankind’s default state.
What amazes me is that so many people DO get their heads around these ideas, and become quite agitated if someone challenges their rationality.
D.
On reading
I’ve been thinking about Dean’s comment to yesterday’s post — how my life has taken such a different trajectory in this regard. I used to be an avid reader, too. When I was a grade schooler, I would check out eight or nine books from the library and I’d cycle through them, reading each one until I tired of it, going to the next, and eventually finishing them all. This drove my dad a little nuts, since he’s one of these OCD start, finish, then move on types. He couldn’t figure out how I managed to keep all the plots straight.
Then high school happened, and while I remember reading for fun during summer vacation (Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive comes to mind . . . not sure why), I was usually too busy during the school year to do much pleasure reading. I have a dim memory of Dune, and Watership Down, and countless science fiction novels, but I think those happened during junior high. In Eight Grade, old Bud Camfield convinced me to start reading the classics. And while Crime and Punishment was a worthwhile experience, it wasn’t exactly pleasure reading.
It only got worse after college. The one novel I recall reading for “pleasure” was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which left me hollow and depressed and convinced that I and my whole family were doomed. Yes, I think I had forgotten how to read for pleasure. (Oh, wait! There were Stephen Donaldson’s horrendous fantasies, Lord Foul’s Bane and the like. Tried to reread that one a few years back, couldn’t make it past the first page.)
And it just kept getting worse, what with med school and then (worst of all) internship and residency. I recall reading exactly one book for pleasure during residency: when Karen and I vacationed in Hawaii, I reread Heart of Darkness. Light fare indeed.
Then I got out of residency and started teaching, and I discovered William S. Burroughs and John Le Carre, Robert Graves and Roald Dahl. Maybe it was Dahl that got me out of my serious rut, led me to Doug Adams, then Terry Pratchett, and eventually Christopher Moore.
Dean, if you want to rediscover the joy of reading, you could do no better than to pick up Christopher Moore’s Fool. What a pleasure that one was. I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which humor-wise is a much different experience. Enjoyable, but it’s Moore’s fool my mind returns to, wants to spend time with. (The audio version voiced by Euan Morton was spectacular, by the way.)
And stay away from Cormac McCarthy.
D.
I think I’ve finally lost patience with le Carre
John le Carre, pen name of author David John Moore Cornwell, elder don of the spy novel (The Spy Who Came In From the Cold still reads like a dream and is far, far more than a spy novel), roped me in with his 2008 A Most Wanted Man. I found it on a discount shelf and could not resist.
My favorite le Carre novels remain his George Smiley trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy; Smiley’s People), but I’ve enjoyed others, more for his masterful writing than for the stories themselves. In that vein, Single & Single had a climactic paragraph that I still reread on occasion just to see how a master brings off a cinematic shit-hits-fan scene, and Absolute Friends broke all writing rules yet shined because of it.
But the problem with le Carre is his predictability. As I read, I find myself thinking: What’s the most cynical, depressing ending possible? The one in which our heroes end up disillusioned or worse? The one in which the innocents are ruined, and the powerful prevail? And that will inevitably be the ending.
I had hopes for A Most Wanted Man. I could imagine an ending in which the various secret service agencies trip over one another in such a way that they achieve the opposite outcome of their desires. It would have been so easy. But no.
Karen says you read le Carre for the ride, not for the ending, and I think she’s right. But I guess I’ve become more demanding of my novelists — I want unpredictability, which is an elusive thing, really. For that, I may need to stick to someone like Terry Pratchett.
D.
PS Two years ago today: A yummy dinner in Las Vegas. Too bad my parents later decided they didn’t like it (after enjoying it that night). Otherwise, I’d make a point of going back there this Crhistmas.
Stubborn subconscious
Ugh, I’m exhausted. But I have less than 48 hours of call left, which is a good thing, and thus far none of the problems have been insurmountable.
Last night, I had a typically annoying student’s dream. Some sort of project was due, and it counted for 60% of my grade. I would have to turn in a cardboard packing box of data, the crunched numbers, conclusions, answers to questions. I thought the whole thing was stupid and I had procrastinated on it like crazy, and now, with minutes to go before class, I realized I hadn’t done anything.
Like I say, the typical student’s dream. The interesting part is that after waking up with a sense of intense relief (my own real-life problems are not nearly as frustrating), I went back to sleep and re-entered the same dream.
This time, I had realized that we all had the same data, and I was able to write a quick program (me? program? It’s a dream!) to crunch all the data. I had also realized that the project was due at the end of class, so I had an hour or so to put things all together. I was going to do this after all. Trouble was, I had to turn in the box of data and I couldn’t find it. Student dream panic all over again.
Wake up, go back to sleep. Now I’ve found my data and I’ve turned in my project in the nick of time . . . but I’ve neglected all my other classes, which have assignments due tomorrow.
I’ll bet that was as tedious to read as it was to experience. I’d like to know what exactly my subconscious is trying to work through. And why it’s so uncivil as to not throw me the occasional bone.
D.
too tired
I can go a whole call week without a single call. It has happened many times.
Tonight I got three calls, all patients that had to be seen, and I saw them one after the other. When it rains . . .
So this is all I got. I especially like the movie about killer contraceptives:
D.
On this Thanksgiving Day . . .
So nice to know that there really is no one going hungry in America:
Only one child in 75 went “hungry” for even a single day during 2009 because of a lack of food in the home.
Love the quotes. But it gets worse. See, the hungry are to blame for their hunger, cuz they just don’t know how to budget:
Interestingly, the USDA report shows that millions of families that are judged “food secure” have lower incomes (relative to family size and age) than do many homes that are “food insecure.” This same pattern appears in each annual food security report. It indicates that “food insecurity” is, to a considerable degree, dependent on how efficiently a family allocates its food dollars and how it distributes its available food over the course of a month.
This guy goes on to claim that the “food insecure” are, in fact, obese, and
Virtually no food-insecure adults are underweight.
No one starves to death in the US of A. No one.
Or at least, virtually no one.
Here’s to William S. Burroughs, who recognized as well as anyone alive the hypocrisy of America.
D.
DIY redux
I should know better. I really should.
And if, after my death, someone disrespects my wishes and sticks me in a grave with gravestone and all that tripe, the gravestone should read, “He really should have known better,” since I’ve foreseen my death, albeit hazily, and it has DIY written all over it.
I’m the guy who shouldn’t touch a tool unless it has the word garden behind it. This morning, I spread one big fat bag of compost and then another big fat bag of mulch all over my 4 by 6 raised bed “garden,” in the hopes that next Spring, I’ll be able to lose those air quotes. (Bakersfield soil is only marginally more fertile than the caliche wastes of South Texas.) All that heavy lifting, all that spreading using a cultivator with about 20 sharp ankle-destroying steel blades, and I did just fine, thank you.
Emboldened by my success, I tried to install a grab bar next to the toilet. I’d bought two. And if the first one went well, I would buy a ceramic drill and install the second one in the shower! And if that went well, who knows what I might try next.
The stud-finder worked well. Drilling the tap-holes (or whatever they’re called), that went well too. Screwing in the screws, that’s what did me in. Our drills weren’t long enough to tap the full length of the screw, so the last inch or so of screwing was hell on earth. I managed to get one screw in. One. And my arm was sore and my palm callused, threatening blisters, and yet I had at least three more screws to go.
That’s when I had the brilliant idea of using a nail to tap the hole. Even though we don’t have a long enough drill, we have a nail that’s long enough and has the right diameter. “Just be sure you can get it out again,” Karen said, and I scoffed. When have I not been able to remove a nail? Just leave enough room for the claw, maybe use a washcloth to cushion the wall as I lever the bastard out —
The nail made it about 1.5 inches into the wall and stopped. Wouldn’t go further no matter how much I whaled on it. Wouldn’t pull out, either. Karen, reasonably, suggested I hammer it the rest of the way in (the nail head was large enough to hold the flange in place) so I whaled on it with renewed effort.
The fucker bent.
By now I’m wondering what my studs are made out of. Teak? Ironwood? Whoever heard of wood that couldn’t be nailed?
We’ll be getting someone else to put in that shower grab bar. And while he’s at it, he can do something about my nail with Peyronie’s disease*.
D.
*Those of you who have commented in the past, “I should know better than to follow your links,” would do well to learn from past experiences. But I know your curiosity will get the better of you.
The wonderful internet
What I haven’t been talking about is a project, a bit of research I’ve been doing for the last six months or so in lieu of actual, you know, writing. Haven’t mentioned it for fear of jinxing it. Still won’t mention it (beyond this slight mention) for fear of jinxing it. Anyway, in the spirit of research, I found the blog The Price of Silver written by Florida photographer Alan Kaplan. Specifically, I went hunting for information on a Native American dish, sofkee. Alan Kaplan writes: “Think making coffee by putting the coffee into a pan of boiling water, then pouring that into a cup without straining the grounds out of it first. You just use the corn instead of coffee. The corn is softer, less gritty than coffee grounds, but you drink both the liquid on top as well as the soggy corn meal. Different perhaps, but not really all that bad.”
His is a quiet voice . . . regular posts about his meals, his difficulty gaining weight, his adventures with his companion Monkette (a stuffed animal), his photography. He features in many of his photos, and I have the impression of a gaunt, curly-haired fellow, a Kurt Vonnegut type if Vonnegut hadn’t gone gray. He wrote regularly and despite having few to no comments to his posts. Not an attention slave like moi.
Yeah, “wrote”. I fast forwarded to see his recent stuff, and my fast forwarding ground to a halt in the early part of 2010. Alan Kaplan died in late December 2009, complications during recovery from a heart attack. On the notice of his passing (written by his son and daughter), there are 64 comments. So, no, he was not writing in a vacuum.
The Price of Silver carries the following message below the title:
“The price of one admission is your life.” The same with silver. You get hooked. You get close. You want more. More is not enough.
. . . which reads like poetry, I think.
D.
Kitty!
Animal Planet aired their program “America’s Cutest Cat,” which we watched tonight. Needless to say, the cats were the best part of the program, the humans the worst. With rare exception, I wanted to yell at the humans to shut the hell up and stop interrupting the cats. The Teletubbies background annoyed the hell out of me, too, but nothing quite ranks with an irritating human butting in front of an adorable cat.
I especially love it when cats make odd vocalizations. Our cats do this:
and I wonder if this has a name. Anyway, unspayed cats make the oddest vocalizations (which if I trust YouTube video titles, are universally declared “annoying”) and are also indiscriminate in their choice of mate. How cogs are made . . .
That’s an awfully young-looking dog. I thought it was illegal to broadcast petophilia?
I wonder, though, about most of these talking cat videos. On the one hand, I’ve heard our cats make some strange sounds. On the other hand, it would be so easy to dub in a crapload of weird sounds.
D.