I'm surprised we don't see this more often.
During the year that I drove an ambulance, I had to deal with a) oblivious drivers, for whom my lights and sirens were like the sound of falling golf clubs to Tiger Woods, and b) crazy-ass Denver Health paramedics who drove like nutjobs.
Needless to say, I wouldn't be surprised if either vehicle was at fault for this crash.
Waiting for my girlfriend's plane from L.A. to land, I listened closely to Stool... uh, Tool, in the parking lot at O'Hare airport at 5 am after I'd worked all night in the ER. It was sublime:
And then this always makes me think of those cold nights camped under the stars in Wyoming:
I've been considering what to hang on my walls. I like a lot of stuff. Brom, for example:
"Lost: tame bird. Will not bite! Cannot defend itself from dogs or cats. Please call for reward."
Flyers with this announcement went up on almost every lightpost and street sign in my neighborhood last week, accompanied by a black-and-white photo of a small bird with a longish beak. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the bird, and that makes me sad.
The silver lining in this lost-bird story is that people are capable of missing their pet bird. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the person who went to all the trouble to post all those reward flyers actually loved that little bird. People can be self-absorbed and destructive, but they can also be loving -- and it's probably a good thing to remind ourselves of this every once in a while.
So I thought about love as I walked home. I started thinking about those of us who are so convinced of the non-equivalence, moral and otherwise, of people and birds that they would interpret this love for a missing bird as evidence that people sometimes misplace their emotions, or (more generously) that people have such a surplus capacity for love that they can afford to squander it on a being that isn't somehow intrinsically worthy of it. These people might say that humans alone can validate another person's love and can sometimes compel it, but a mere bird can only be the indifferent target of irrational emotion.
Surely you know people that think like this. You might even think this way yourself. After all, it does make instinctive sense to think of human beings as special in many ways, including perhaps their "appropriateness" as objects of our love.
But how can we know enough to be sure of this? If we can be confident about anything in the world, I think that we can be most confident about our ignorance. Religions, it seems to me, exist because at some level we're aware that we have no idea what the hell we're all doing here, or why, or what the point of it all is. Religions exist because we humans feel profoundly uncomfortable with this ignorance, and we mostly prefer faith -- just a belief in something we're not logically or empirically compelled to believe in -- to raw blubbering ignorance. We're uncomfortable not knowing what happens to us after we die, so we make up a story and believe in it rather than live with uncomfortable ignorance. We don't know why we're here, so we put our faith in a religious story that tells us why we're here and what we're supposed to be doing.
I'm not arguing against faith. I'm just saying that I think the ideas and stories we have faith in, that we believe without compulsion, are things we create and are not given to us by God. No, scratch that. I'm saying that even if there's a God that has given us anything, it's too difficult to distinguish which of our many yearnings and wishes and beliefs are God-given and which are conjured up by ignorant people just like ourselves. We have to remember that although faith may be a good thing, it's definitely not knowledge.
So what does this have to do with a lost bird? Even if many of you would agree with me that faith isn't knowledge and that we're ignorant about a lot of things, I'm surprised how many of us will act as if they know that loving a bird is a slightly foolish thing to do. But if it's a noble thing to love another person, why is it foolish to love a bird? Or to put the same thing a different way, if loving a bird is foolish, then aren't we just as foolish when we love each other?
It seems to me that in the dark of our ignorance, we could be a bit more generous than that. As far as I know, love is a wonderful thing, and it doesn't have to be hoarded up as if it were in danger of running out. Moreover, birds are wonderful too, and there's no evidence that we squander our love if we give some of it to a bird. So for all you humans-are-the-only-worthy-beings people out there, you can put a cork in it.
I don't believe you.
"'If man made it, don't eat it,' he used to say, decades ahead of the popular movement to eat more whole foods."
Of course, we know that Jack meant "synthesized in a vat of industrial chemicals" when he said "made." Ordinary chefery has to be OK.
As everyone knows, time passes. Sometimes it's your enemy, and sometimes your friend. Lately I've been saying to myself, "Time is my enemy; time is my friend." I repeat over and over again with a singsong cadence, as in "She loves me; she loves me not."
Now that I'm doing a month on trauma service, I can't seem to get this out of my head. Everyone who knows me knows that I love my free time and I love my sleep -- these months spent in the hospital all the time and not sleeping really crimp my style. Even though there are good enough reasons to do this (I did sign up for it after all), I go through these months like a little kid running through a cold sprinkler, with his face all scrunched up and running like hell, hoping to come out on the other end quickly.
From the time I wake up in the morning until I leave the hospital, time is my friend. Time passes, after all. Every second that goes by is one less second until I get to go home and post on my blog. Of course, when I'm home and indulging in the time I have for myself, time continues to pass. But now, it's my enemy. Every second that goes by brings me that much closer to the time when I'll have to go back to the hospital. See? Time is fickle. Or it seems that way, when I'm post-call and blogging on only two hours of sleep. :)
... I'll give you some good links.
This time it's a picture of newly hatched chickens, and a hint of why I love Colorado (both from Five Acres With a View).
From the Washington Post, one of the best articles I've read in a long time.
"If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?"
As I approach the check-out lines in the grocery store, wouldn't it be cool if all the people who are going to be paying with a check would just glow blue or something? That way, I could tell which line was likely to move the slowest, based on the reasonable assumption that paying with check = takes frigging forever.
That's one super power that I'd like to have -- even if it isn't as cool as caped flight or x-ray vision.
The official Rush website has the new single from Snakes&Arrows.
It's got a good bass timbre like the best songs from Vapor Trails. Like most Rush songs, it doesn't grab me by the throat initially, but probably will after I listen to it a few times. Can't wait for the tour.
Rush fans, check out the gallery too. Good stuff.
Mark May 1, 2007 down on your calendars, because that's when the new Rush album comes out! Since you probably aren't googling "new rush album", you probably heard it here first. Here's Neil Peart:
"Just seeing the power of evangelical Christianity and contrasting that with the power of fundamentalist religion all over the world in its different forms had a big effect on me," he said."You try to put your own way of seeing the world into some kind of congruence with other people's, and that's difficult for me. I mean, I see the world in what I think to be a perfectly obvious and rational way, but when you go out into it and see the way other people think and behave, and express themselves on church signs, you realize, 'Well, I'm not really part of this club.'"
Sitting in a restaurant tonight with some friends. Passing around a sheet of paper. "Write your philosophy of life and pass it on." Paper comes back with this:
The Word is Yes
Deny all responsibility
Look for angles.
Always compete
No one leaves alive
I want cranberry juice
All in all, a good night.
I bet you didn't know this, but there are several good reasons to use "bears" as the plural form of "bear."
The dictionary doesn't seem to favor one over the other -- it lists the plural form as either "bears" or "bear" without taking sides. But we should take a stand, and we should stand with "bears."
"Of course, to base one's faith on beautiful scenery is to leave oneself open to grave doubt if you should see Texas. Texas would make any man an atheist, unless he understood that God means to challenge us."Garrison Kiellor is great.
One of the side effects of being a resident at the University of Chicago is being able to live in Hyde Park again.
Now, it's true that many of my fellow first-year residents (great people, all of them) have not chosen to take advantage of this opportunity. With a few exceptions, they've all rented apartments within a two block radius of each other near Clark and Diversey. Ok, I'm exaggerating. But not by much.
Anyway, Hyde Park: it has its good and bad sides. On the bad side, it's not anything like Clark and Diversey. Not as many restaurants, nowhere near as many bars, and there's no Bed, Bath & Beyond within a ten mile radius. On the good side, it's nothing like the north side. It's not as yuppified, and it's not as homogenous. People other than late-20-something professionals live here, and you'll see some of them walking home from the grocery store. Unfortunately, some of them will be carrying guns and will stick you up for your wallet, cell phone, and Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA -- but I don't think those guys actually live in the neighborhood.
Besides, Hyde Park has the best bookstores in the city of Chicago, and some of the best in the country.
How does it compare with Ann Arbor? You can read this great blog post (including all the comments), which gets it almost entirely right. The most insightful comment: "Not sure if this goes for the over or under side, but Hyde Park’s flocks of feral parakeets give it a certain flair that AA’s pigeons can’t attempt."
Remember those days in the schoolyard, when the little girl would show you hers and you'd reciprocate by showing her yours? That's a lot like the recent revelations of what's in Hillary Clinton's, George W. Bush's(by far the best list), and Condoleeza Rice's iPods. Faced with these titillating revelations, some people have graciously responded in kind.
It seems, too, that a lot of people feel the need to take sides in the Beatles/Stones war. I've never really cared much -- "norwegian wood" is great, and so is "street fighting man." I define my musical allegiances in other ways:
UPDATE: Heidi points out that I linked to the wrong list for our Prez. I knew it was too good to be true. Try this for George W. Bush's iPod.
My first name, Carey, is uncommon. I can count the number of other Careys I've met on only one hand.
According to this site, though, Carey is far from the most unusual name around. In 1990, it ranked 587 on the list of the 1000 most common men's names among all people living in the U.S. There were more Careys in 1990 than there were Grahams, Vinces, and Carters. The most popular decade for the name Carey was the 50s, when it rose to number 382 on the list of most common names. Since then it's fallen off the charts. The last year that Carey broke into the top-1000 list was 1992. Too many parents ditching it for Tyler, I guess.
When I was a kid, I hated my name. Everyone thought it was a girl's name, and no one knew how to spell it. Nowadays I love my first name precisely because it isn't Michael, Jacob, or Christopher. With all apologies to everyone with these popular names, if my first name was Mike, I'd hope to hell my middle name actually was Glorfindel.
It's also cool to find out that the name Carey comes "[f]rom an Irish surname which was derived from Ó Ciardha meaning 'descendent of Ciardha'. The name Ciardha means 'dark' in Gaelic." It isn't that I'm a particularly dark person, physically or otherwise -- it's just relieving to find out that my name isn't Gaelic for "stolid" or "picky-eater." It's almost as cool as my brother's name, Brian, which descends from the Irish king Brian Boru, "an Irish king who thwarted Viking attempts to conquer Ireland in the 11th century. He was victorious in the Battle of Clontarf, but he himself was slain."
Ahh, the noble victor who is later slain himself. Reminds me of Glorfindel of Gondolin (whose battle with a Balrog allowed Tuor and Idril to save the survivors of the fall of Gondolin).
Sitting in the C-Shop at the University of Chicago yesterday,* I overheard a man talking to his son and daughter as they walked past my table looking at all the gothic architecture and at the old framed postcards on the walls. The kids must have been around twelve. Their father was telling them: "if you work hard and apply yourselves, you could study here. You could have all this."
Listen up, kiddies. It can be really, really fun.
----
* I'm in Hyde Park over the weekend to hunt down an apartment for next year. This place is great. I still don't understand why so many people claim not to like the neighborhood.
I haven't been posting on this blog much recently, but that's only because I'm taking a little break to wrap up law school loose ends.
Like, for example, writing seminar papers. I finished one today, and I only have one more to go.
In the meantime, I've been thinking about adopting a Latin motto for myself. How about:
disce quasi semper victurus vive quasi cras moriturus: "Learn as if always going to live; live as if tomorrow going to die."
Some other candidates are:
Here's a simple test for ranking the federal circuit courts of appeal according to how liberal or conservative they are:
Step 1: Shepardize Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) on Lexis. Or use Westlaw if you prefer Pepsi.Step 2: Count how many times each circuit follows Lawrence. Count how many times each circuit distinguishes Lawrence.
The most liberal circuit is the one that follows Lawrence the most. That'd be the Ninth Circuit, following Lawrence twice and distinguishing Lawrence once. The most conservative circuit is the Fourth, distinguishing Lawrence three times and not ever following it.
I know, I know; you're going to say that it's silly to draw any conclusions from such a small number of cases, and that the value of my little test depends completely on what you mean by "liberal" and "conservative." To which I say, no test is perfect -- but at least mine is simple.
Marc Fisher doesn't mind "if insurers see records of everyone's personal behavior..." Huh? I don't mind if they see the records of Marc Fisher's behavior either, but keep them out of mine. My premiums might go up if they knew about my dry pasta habit...
Meanwhile, I'll throw up my random ten from iTunes (although the catblogging thing is really more interesting).
Ok, so Jack Shafer at Slate doesn't think Ted Koppel is a good columnist. Not having read Koppel myself, Shafer's article doesn't give me any reason to agree or disagree. Shafer disagrees with Koppel's substantive claims, but how does that make Koppel a bad columnist?
More to the point, Shafer says that Koppel is a bad writer. As proof, Shafer offers up random sentences from Koppel's book extracted with the help of Amazon's "Koppel Randomizer." From page 126:
Rosafina, now an elderly cat entering her eleventh summer, is making it difficult to work. She keeps trying to walk across the keyboard of my computer, clearly for no other reason than that I do not want her to do so.I've had cats all my life and this pretty much hits the nail on the head. Not boring at all!
The problem is that the Randomizer can make almost anyone look bad. I'll pull out my own jerry-rigged Randomizer and show you what I mean:
I'm going to guess that these [on-campus law firm] interviews aren't actually very useful for learning much about students or about employers. That's probably not their purpose. In only twenty minutes, the only thing that a student can count on learning about a firm that goes beyond what they've learned already is that the firm isn't (or is) peopled entirely with troglodytes.[Me, from a post on this blog, August 30, 2004.]
The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods promised a fair evening; so I took my departure. When I had got without I asked for a dish, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable.[Thoreau, Walden, p. 167. Give me Koppel's cat, please...]
The most common cause of personnel wounded in action recently are due to roadside bombs. These are land mines or booby traps made out of locally available materials or another piece of ordnance, such as a cannon shell. These were used as far back as the Vietnam War. The IED today are larger as they are intended to damage the armored vehicle as well as the personnel inside of it.[From the blog Doctor. Highly recommended, but you'd never know why.]
Of course, there are exceptions to this random-is-often-banal rule:
Much later on, when Nourishing was old and grey around the muzzle, and smelled a bit strange, she dictated the story of the climb and how she heard Darktan muttering to himself. The Darktan she'd pulled out of the trap, she said, was a different rat. It was as if his thoughts had slowed down but got bigger.[Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, p. 221.]
If Ted Koppel is such a bad writer, I'd hate to see what Amazon's Randomizer could do with Jonathan Franzen's latest novel. (Go ahead. Try it!)
It's January in the northern hemisphere, so it's not surprising that I saw Orion tonight. The air was cold, the sky was clear, and as usual, Orion was the first thing I noticed when I looked up.
I remember seeing Orion almost every night in the fall of 1993 when I was on my three-month NOLS course in the wildernesses of the West. Although my life has changed in many ways since then, and although the scenery on the ground is very different, the constellation looks the same. Somehow, that's comforting.
Even though we tend to glorify change, and dynamic is almost always taken as high praise, I don't think human beings can thrive without a few permanent things in their lives. Most of us need some things that we can anchor ourselves to. Without some anchors, we'll probably be miserable at best; at worst we'll be lost, confused, misguided, and dangerous.
Richard Sennett wonders about the consequences for real people of a culture that most highly values a kind of person that doesn't exist (or at most is very rare).
"A self oriented to the short-term, focused on potential ability, willing to abandon past experience is - to put a kindly face on the matter - an unusual sort of human being. Most people are not like this; they need a sustaining life narrative, they take pride in being good at something specific, and they value the experiences they've lived through. The cultural ideal required in new institutions thus damages many of the people who inhabit them."
Via Prof. Bainbridge, here's a fun quiz:
You are the Golden Rule! You presume that the legislature would not want to apply the statute to achieve an unreasonable or absurd result inconsistent with its purpose. It's not what's on the surface that matters for you, and you try to do what's best in any given situation. You're a bit unpredictable, but you don't mind.
Which Canon of Statutory Construction are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
There's a cities meme going around, in which you post all the cities where you've spent at least one night in 2005. Since my list is particularly good this year, I'll put it up (in no particular order):
Ann Arbor, MI
Grand Rapids, MI
Denver, CO
Colorado Springs, CO
Portland, OR
Chicago
New York City
New Haven, CT
Washington, DC
London
Amsterdam
San Jose, Costa Rica
Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica
In the coffee shop this morning I overheard a group of doctors talking about the past. One of them lamented all the years of training he'd had: four years of medical school and five years of residency. "I can't even remember what it was like to be in my twenties," he said. "I lost that whole decade of my life."
How sad! I'm not unsympathetic to this guy -- when you keep your nose to the grindstone for so many years, you can lose track of everything else, and when you finally look up, you wonder where all the time has gone. But I don't think there's anything inherent about medical training, or even hard continuous work, that necessarily results in "lost" time. It's only when you lose track of why you're working so hard, and of what you're working for, that the time spent working becomes a black hole in your life.
Here's why I think I'm lucky: I'm excited about starting my residency because I know why I want to do it. I know where I want to go, and I know how the hard work of residency fits in to that plan. I didn't always know this. Right out of medical school it felt like I was on a treadmill, just connecting the dots that someone else said that I should connect. I hated that feeling. I suppose that's the reason I decided to go to law school when I did. I understood why I wanted to go and what I wanted to get out of it. Now, I feel the same way about a residency in emergency medicine. I'll get much more out my residency now than I would have had I started right out of medical school. The unorthodox sequence of med school/law school/residency was right for me.
I've been lucky in so many ways. I don't have any lost decades. I've always been able to do things for good reasons and at the right time. May everyone be so fortunate.
At last! I'm back from my self-imposed exile from the blogosphere. Although I had to fight constant low-level feelings of guilt for not posting on my blog, I've been having a great time.
I'm applying for a residency position in the queen of the medical specialties -- emergency medicine -- and that means that November and December have been spent traveling to interviews. I've been traveling from one coast to the other, spending money on plane tickets and hotels like a drunken sailor (although I don't think drunken sailors could spend money as fast as a residency applicant). Let's just say that, so long as I don't think about how much this is costing me, it's been really fun.
One of the things you learn very quickly on the interview trail is that all emergency departments look the same. Sure, some of them are more spacious; some of them have skylights; some of them use a whiteboard to keep track of patients and some of them use computers for everything. But really, when you've seen one emergency room, you've seen them all. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the tours that every program provides, but the reason I like the tour is that you get to listen to the tour guide talk about the program. I can't wait 'til I'm the one leading the tour -- it'll be nice to be the only one who's not wearing The Suit.
To borrow a phrase from my brother, residency interviews are exactly like law firm interviews, only they're completely different. The interviews themselves are very similar -- four or five 20-minute interviews that are mostly getting-to-know-you affairs. What's totally different is the relative lack of any bling-bling on the residency interview trail. If med students knew how much money law firms spend to interview law students, they'd never tolerate any whining from a law student ever. Big law firms pay for the applicant's airfare; they pay for hotel and cab fare; they pay for all meals, and they usually take the applicants to lunch at a swanky place on interview day. Think Topolobampo or the Blackbird, for those of you who know Chicago. Residency program applicants are usually provided with a good solid lunch on interview day, but they're usually on their own for all the other expenses. Before I went to law school, I used to think that was Normal. Now I'm sure of it. Biglaw is a whole different world.
The other big difference is that Biglaw interviews happen during the summer, and residency interviews happen (as you may have guessed) in the dead of winter. This can make a big difference if your flight is delayed because of a blizzard or if you have to drive somewhere in the snow, but I was lucky: all my traveling went down without a hitch (that is, if you don't count the fiascos at JFK airport in New York, but they had nothing to do with the weather).
Anyway, I'm looking forward to my last semester of law school. It's hard to believe there's only four months left!
Twice this week I've almost been run over by careless drivers.
Two or three days ago I was crossing an intersection with the light and someone turned right across my path at about 30 mph without slowing -- a near miss. Today, I had just gotten the signal to cross the street when a big silver Cadillac with an elderly driver behind the wheel blew through the red light as if he hadn't even noticed it (which I'm sure he hadn't). Fortunately, I noticed him, or else I wouldn't be here posting on this blog.
The point of the story? For pedestrians, the cars always have the right of way.
The world is going to hell in a handbasket. The Arctic oil drillers keep trying, and they only have to win once. The Vice-President is openly supporting torture. The drug companies are trying to scare us with written-to-order novels about poisoned Canadian drugs.
On the other hand, the Chicago White Sox have won the World Series for the first time in 88 years. Things are still OK.
Note: All of you out there who aren't Rush fans, and who don't understand why anyone would be, can stop reading now. The rest of you can follow me. . . .
I know my friends can hardly believe it.
However -- this Ann Coulter article about the Miers nomination is laced with delights.
Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney's many virtues -- loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture ...
Here, Coulter deftly explains why people like Hugh Hewitt and the nine republican senators who voted against the McCain amendment can plausibly be accused of "fawning deference" to George W. Bush:
First, Bush has no right to say "Trust me." He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years. Among the coalitions that elected Bush are people who have been laboring in the trenches for a quarter-century to change the legal order in America. While Bush was still boozing it up in the early '80s, Ed Meese, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and all the founders of the Federalist Society began creating a farm team of massive legal talent on the right.
To be sure, if we were looking for philosopher-kings, an SMU law grad would probably be preferable to a graduate from an elite law school. But if we're looking for lawyers with giant brains to memorize obscure legal cases and to compose clearly reasoned opinions about ERISA pre-emption, the doctrine of equivalents in patent law, limitation of liability in admiralty, and supplemental jurisdiction under Section 1367 -- I think we want the nerd from an elite law school. Bush may as well appoint his chauffeur head of NASA as put Miers on the Supreme Court.
Coulter even manages to get her licks in on the subject of law school rankings:
Harriet Miers went to Southern Methodist University Law School, which is not ranked at all by the serious law school reports and ranked No. 52 by US News and World Report.
I'm walking to the grocery store today, and this guy who looked to be in his mid-20s approaches.
"Excuse me, but do you happen to know where there's a Baptist church around here?"
"Um, I'm not sure. I'm really no expert."
"What about just an area with a lot of churches? If I go this way [nods towards the south] are there any churches down there?"
"No, just a big lumberyard."
"Ok, well, thanks anyway."
Now if I were Neil Gaiman, I'd have rushed home and started writing a short story about how this guy was really an emissary from the Devil. He'd just gotten off at the Greyhound station in Ann Arbor, where he'd never been before, but he knew he was supposed to find this old Baptist preacher that his boss had had some run-in with years before in the bad part of Pittsburgh.
Instead, I came home and read this New Yorker article about Anthony Kennedy's predilections for citing foreign law. Obviously, I'm no Neil Gaiman.
Back in May I wrote about the great service I received at the post office in downtown Ann Arbor. It's too bad I can't tell a similar story about the service at the main post office out on West Stadium Boulevard.
About a month ago I shipped most of my books back to Ann Arbor from Chicago. Since I'd heard about Heidi's experience with the Detroit Bulk Mail Center Claims Unit, I figured I'd be better off insuring my packages in case they disintegrated enroute. That meant that the mailman wouldn't leave the packages without a signature. In fact, the mailman didn't even try to leave the packages; he left me a couple of notices saying I could pick them up in person at the main post office at 2075 West Stadium Blvd. For some reason, the Postal Service wouldn't move them over to the downtown post office, which is much closer to where I live. I spent about two hours on buses lugging what felt like 75 pounds of boxes back to my apartment, which is no big deal in itself, except that there didn't seem to be any reason why they couldn't have gotten my mail a lot closer to its destination than they did.
Moral of the story: the Postal Service is a cesspool of bureaucratic irrationality. Or, don't insure your boxes if you've already taped the living bejeezus out of them. . . . Or, don't take so much crap to Chicago in the first place. . . .
I've closed comments for a short while in order to fiddle around with administrative-type stuff on the blog. Hopefully they'll be back up in just a day or two.
In the meantime, feel free to email comments to me. I'll post them as soon as things are back to normal, administratively speaking.
My time in Colorado is never quite enough to do everything I want to do. A few more breakfasts at Wades, a few more beers with friends from med school, and a few more trail runs would all have been nice. Maybe a few more days in the backcountry, hoping to see the elusive "bear" that I'm always looking for but seem to never see.
Nevertheless, it's good to be back in Ann Arbor. I'll be working on my journal's orientation program, catching up on email from friends, plotting my latest career moves,* and working on papers I need to finish. Basically, living the enjoyable life of a third-year law student.
One of the things I need to do is write a little about Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man, the one about the guy who was eaten by a grizzly bear in Alaska. There's a few things I want to say about Timothy Treadwell, but all that will have to wait just a little bit longer. Right now, it's time for a beer, a book, and some sleep.
-------
* About which, more later...
Since I wasn't struck dead by lightning today, tomorrow I'm heading off on an expedition to the Flat Tops Wilderness with my H-Dogg.
This time, I promise to bring my evil battery-eating camera to heel. I will return with pictures for my blog...
My backcountry trip to the Lost Creek Wilderness was amazing. Amazing because I'd lived so close to that area for so long and I'd never been there. Not that I expect to have been everywhere near Colorado Springs that's mountainous and beautiful (you could probably explore for a lifetime and not exhaust all the terrain), but this was a spectacular area full of granite cliffs and lush forests and open meadows. You'da thought I'd have been there a lot already.
There were only two disappointments on this trip. First, I didn't take any pictures because my camera batteries were kaput. Second, we didn't see any bears at all. Not even one. But we did see a beaver, twice. (Or maybe it was two different beavers--they all look the same to me.)
I'm taking off today for five days in the Lost Creek Wilderness with some friends from medical school. I'll take pictures.
(The "Colorado locator map" on the linked page is wrong. The wilderness is to the southwest of Denver, not Colorado Springs.)
According to this 9 year-old ex-Floridian now living in Colorado Springs:
"I'd rather be in a hurricane than have a bear in the house."
Chicago's the kind of place where just living your life for a while can sometimes make you sit down and tell yourself that you must be one of the luckiest people alive.
This morning I woke up and went running along the lakefront from the Navy Pier to what I suspect is the Oak Street beach. The sun was warm, the water was calm, and there wasn't any traffic noise at all. That's because Lake Shore Drive was closed to cars, and instead was packed with bicycles in both directions. Bikes are much quieter than cars. Lucky me -- apparently this was the morning of the annual "Bike the Drive" festival, and it was an amazing thing to see.
On Friday night we ate cod emulsion and horseradish mousseline (among other things) at Everest. Saturday we wandered through Millenium Park and checked out the Pritzker Pavilion and the Bean. Then we wandered into Symphony Center and picked up some reasonably-priced student tickets for the CSO that same night.
I'd wanted to see the CSO for years, and all of a sudden we were in the front row (if all the way to the left). Let's just say it's an amazing experience to hear Peter Mattei sing Mahler when you're close enough to see the spittle flying from his mouth (sitting on the far left has its advantages). Watching Daniel Barenboim conduct the orchestra was even more amazing. You really don't need to be familiar with the symphony (Bruckner's 9th), or with classical music at all for that matter, to appreciate Barenboim's intensity. He gestures, leans, scowls, sways, mops his brow with a cloth from his pocket, closes his eyes, points at people, clenches his fist, and occasionally exhales so loudly that even if you're sitting at the very far left end of the first row, you can hear it. He didn't seem to lose his focus for even a second.
Whew -- ll that, and there's still two more days left in the weekend. I suppose I'm pretty lucky to be here.
Today I received the best service from anyone since I dined at Charlie Trotter's back in 2002. Did I eat at another fine restaurant? Did I spend through the nose at a snobby, exclusive private business? No. I mailed something at the Post Office.
You see, I have this little plant, a Spanish Ivy, that was severely injured last September when I left it in the cab of a rented moving truck in the parking lot of the hotel where I was interviewing with law firms. It almost died from too much heat and sun. Luckily, we were able to save a few leaves, and we kept them in a glass of water all year so they could sprout new roots.
I needed to sent the sprouts off to Chicago so I could care for the plant over the summer, so I wrapped them in wet paper towels, stuffed them in a Ziploc and headed for the Post Office. I bought a small box, stuffed the Ziploc inside, and stood in line. When I got up to the clerk, I said I wanted the box sent by priority mail. What I should have said was, "overnight" or "express mail." This being Friday, the plant probably wouldn't be delivered until Monday or Tuesday with plain old priority mail, but I wasn't thinking too clearly. I smiled and left.
Walking home, I realized my mistake, and started to mourn for that poor plant. An extra day or two stuffed inside a dark Ziploc would probably kill it. And after all it had already been through! "Fuck mourning," I said. "I've gotta go back to the Post Office."
I waited in line, sending a bunch of people through ahead of me so I could get to the same clerk I'd talked with before. Her name was Anita. I told her I'd goofed, and asked if there was any way to retrieve the box. She asked what city it was addressed to, and then she went off to look for it.
Time passed. I knew she'd never find it. Anita came back once without the box in her hands, and my spirits sunk. But she had only come back to make sure she'd looked around her station at the counter, and she quickly returned to the bowels of the post office again. More time passed. Another employee came out and said that it was probably at the very bottom of the big bin where all the Chicago mail was piled. I had visions of Anita wrestling huge boxes to dig down to the bottom. And what if she didn't find it, after all that work? My plant would die, and Anita would get a herniated disk...
Finally, though, she returned, holding my box and looking smug. I asked if I could send it overnight, and she gave me the express mail form to fill out. She could have berated me for being stupid, but instead she just mentioned that it was Friday the 13th and who'da thunk that anyone would ever find that box again? She asked me if I wanted to waive the signature requirement so that if no one was home the carrier wouldn't keep the box and try again the next day, the way UPS always does it. She credited what I'd already paid for priority mail against the charges for overnight mail. Wow.
People like to say that government-run agencies don't give good service, but that's essentially bullshit. Everything depends on the human being that's serving you, and great people like Anita work at the USPS just like they do at a place like Charlie Trotter's. Kurt Sorenson couldn't have done any better than Anita did today. Thank you, big government bureaucracy!
I finally did it. After hours and hours of procrastination during finals, spent trying to kill Dr. No and sabotage his reactor, and getting killed again and again, I finally did it.
He's dead. And I'm moving on...
Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 75% General American English |
| 15% Yankee |
| 5% Midwestern |
| 5% Upper Midwestern |
| 0% Dixie |
Via Samples Connection.
