– Went birdwatching this morning. Saw common grebes, wood ducks, mallards, a female belted kingfisher (the females have the brown breastband), and an American goldfinch.
– Almost wiped out on bike due to convergence of SUV, maintenance cart, pothole and me on small area at same time.
– Exam tonight in EMT class. Apparently only two-thirds of the population is allergic to the oil on poison ivy plants.
– Then, Megabus to Chi-town at seven tomorrow morning!
– Did two ambulance ride-alongs for my EMT class. It was fun. Transported a 495-pound heap of woman. Talked to a psych patient who just wanted some love. Transported a baby who had choked but turned out to be fine.
– Got a free road bike from my instructor’s partner. Fuck yeah!
– Got me my vaccinations for India, including Japanese encephalitis, despite the risk of allergy.
This morning I got out of the shower and turned on MPR’s “Midmorning” (a nice morning routine) and heard a very bizzare conversation. The host was interviewing two or three twentysomething Muslim women who live in the Twin Cities and who follow traditional Islam. It was utter relativism on display – the show sounded as if the guests were from a Puritanical era of some sectors of the early United States. Over the course of only half an hour these three young American women revealed that alcohol is to be avoided at all times, they believe homosexuality is unacceptable, that touching between sexes is forbidden to avoid “inappropriate relations,” that they cover up at all times to maintain modesty, that they didn’t go to prom because it is not permitted, that men can marry outside the religion but they cannot (and they think that’s fine); and they went on for a minute or two about how nice it would be to have sex-segregated beaches in Minnesota. It was almost like conservative Christians from the 18th century were on the show!
I say “almost” because if the guests were such time-traveling religgies, then they would be subject to ridicule. Their repugnant beliefs on homosexuality and the “place of the woman” are counter to all of MPR’s past coverage. But somehow these religiously demented Muslims are given a warm discussion of their beliefs without any objection from the host or from the callers, with no perspective on what we’d say if religiously demented Christians were on the show instead. Why?
~Isaac
I love this. I was totally whaling on my pecs and doing sprints down at the gym to the point where I was in that nice state of immunity to the frigid air brought on by endorphins and body heat. Then I noticed how incredibly prominent and looming the moon was as it hung over the dorm as I approached it. So, I took a detour and just sat there in the snow against a tree, admiring it. I missed the total eclipse of last night, of course, but still – I hadn’t looked in a while, what with the cold. Professor Giannini seemed to easily join his sense of wonder at the night sky with wonder at the complexity of the cell. Right now I wish I could do the same with my cell physiology reading. But somehow the hydropathy indices of erythrocyte membrane proteins isn’t evoking a lot of wonder in me.
New strategy: wait for a long time before starting the assignment. Then drink lots of Coke the night before it is due, and make a final, frustrated attempt to crap out the assignment. When you finally get tired and lose your motivation, quickly finish it and hand it in the next day (or that morning). Then when you get the shitty grade, say, “Oh well, I did this stupid thing the night before, anyways!” And proceed feel good because you weren’t trying that hard in the first place. Problem solved, self-esteem preserved!
Visitors to Thorson 107 in the past month may have been struck by a patch of gritty residue that had accumulated in a small patch outside the door. Thorson 107 is Kevin’s and my room, and the gritty residue, it so happens, was formed from sidewalk salt, sand, dirt, and whatever other mineral deposits are to be found in stale January snow. All that grit would have been in my closet, where I store my shoes, if not for the fact that, upon returning from my daily sojourns, I had developed the habit of dutifully placing my still-soiled shoes on the hallway floor next to my door. Later I would take the shoes in and place them in my closet, handily avoiding the problem of dirty melted snow evaporating in my closet only to leave its solid contents behind, where it is hardest to remove.
From hereon after, I will no longer continue this practice because my shoes were stolen on Friday night. At first I was really angry about what was obviously an instance either of greed or spite, but upon further reflection and the help of Marcus Aurelius, who wrote, “Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears,” I soon took my shoe experience as a lesson. A lesson, that is, in being a better person. You see, recently I saw a girl leave her iPod in plain view in the open in a common area (Fireside) at St Olaf. I thought, for just a moment, that if I were guaranteed to get away with it, I would consider taking it for myself. She probably got it from a rich daddy or mommy, after all, and I am broke, and I’ve never had a damn iPod before. It was probably her third one anyways, wasn’t it! But then of course I corrected myself and remembered that the human mind is never more resourceful than when involved in self-justification. This was before the theft of my shoes. Afterwards, I thought about this brief toying with the thought of theft, I thought about the advice of Aurelius, and I thought about my newfound conviction to be more positive, and I decided not to be angry anymore about the shoes. I made it into another lesson in being a better person. I’m making an effort NOT to re-evaluate my faith in other people but rather to reaffirm my intent not to inflict that kind of harm on others, now that I’ve again experienced petty theft.
I learned my lesson, but to the individual who stole my shoes: you’re still a jerkstore!
It just occurred to me how important it is for doctors to pass on the right information and to make sure the advice they dispense as part of their job is evidence-based. An individual (thanks, Amy!) with whom I ate yesterday told me about a factoid that her friend’s doctor told her friend, and she passed it on to me as advice for my own personal life. So not only was the advice repeated to two people by the time it got to me, but it was also years ago that the original advice was dispensed. The doc may have been tired or distracted, he or she may not have have remembered the exact facts or the exact source of the information and perhaps had no idea whether the advice would be passed on. How often have we made big changes in our lives because “my doctor said I should”? It’s kind of sobering to have that kind of responsibility, but then again the responsibility only comes as a result of the enormous faith that people have in physicians and their knowledge. Then again, the newfound media wiredness symbolized by Wikipedia undermines that authority and has the potential to replace top-down instruction with more of a dialogue.
– Had a really Freudian dream. I told someone I didn’t want to be a pastor and my dad heard and was heartbroken and angry at me for the rest of the dream. The poor unoccupied neurons must have needed some exercise. Then I woke up, two minutes before my alarm was to go off.
– Got awesome running shoes at Savers for $6.99 and then went on an hour-long run (!) on the treadmill, and burned 870 calories, according to the little display box. Dietary equivalent: two or three of the pastries my mom kept giving to me over the weekend.
– Battled entropy for an hour yesterday afternoon and lost (again).
– Stayed at Betty’s apartment over the weekend to be with the fam, since she died on Thursday, peacefully, though after a long ordeal of course. The funeral is on Tuesday, and my prof instructed me to send an email to the class alias to cancel it for that day, and I did. I’ll be a pallbearer. For comedic relief: my mom saw me naked when she tried to give me the towel I had forgotten in the hallway when I took a shower. Oh well; she changed my diapers until I was fifteen, anyways, so what’s the big deal?
– Went to Uncle Al’s retirement party at the church where he presided for 16 years.
– Drove back down to school in constant terror of spinning off the road due to snow and fast winds and fucking semis I hate semis.
– Saw a digitally rendered reconstruction of Dante’s face based on measurements of his skull made in the 1920’s (!). I had no idea his bones were still around. I must say, I wish for the sake of my imaginings while reading “Inferno” that he would be found to have looked like Gustave Dore’s engravings of him, traipsing toward the edge of the Styx to climb into Charon’s ferry, with that noble and grave look on his face.
– Went to a reading by the authors of “Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.” The two authors were journalists, and not only does the book offer nothing new (despite the title), but it also has nothing to do with the form of literary criticism known as deconstruction. It looks like it was just a tag thrown on a book which is mostly written in a conversational, lighthearted tone, despite the seriousness of the subject matter. The book is about black masculinity in the media, and with all the misogyny and fatherless kids and violence and gangbanging in America today, there is plenty of room to make a serious attempt at the relationship of black male media titans like rappers and professional athletes to some of those problems. Instead the authors, as I said, use “deconstruction” in the superficial sense that they make it more complicated than it at first seems; and they offer almost no insight or prescriptive analysis in the end. Furthermore, the authors made the whole Q&A session after the reading into a sort of media criticism event. Instead of talking about something substantive, the whole talk became a story-sharing event on Dave Chappelle, 50 Cent, and other current media favorites.
One thing I did like was that one of the authors was originally from the Caribbean, and she said passingly, towards the end, that post-colonial literature was a great place to go for insight on race in a country with a history of slavery, such as the United States. On that I totally agree. When I was in Martinique, my host dad gave me a book by Aime Cesaire – probably the most famous of the Caribbean authors – about the pathology that is instilled in the subjects of slavery. I just wish I had more time to read that stuff. Though a hundred years old or older, it is the freshest insight on what slavery does to the “collective psyche” of the oppressed, though I don’t like that phrase at all.
A Chinese proverb, according to the book on issues relating to water as a resource, which I am reading for class. I’m not exactly sure what the proverbialist had in mind when he or she said it, but it made me reflect on my conclusion, supported by my own experience, that you have to be a little nuts in order to really shine. The people I have most admired – Kristi Curry-Rogers, a paleontologist; John Klein and Melinda Bennett, biology teachers; Carl Sagan (he was the classic engrossed professor) – all of them have something odd about them. Something that sets them apart or a specific interest that they have devoted an incredible amount of time and energy to exploring. On the other hand, some people I try to avoid are the ones with the lukewarm interests and the average, perfectly non-abnormal mindset on the bell curve. To me the proverb means you should encourage and nurture the little things that set you apart or that make you unique. If your life is a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, periods of intense creativity follwed by torpor, better that than a smooth baseline lacking the bad times in addition to the good. I myself remember being a little kid, first with my knowledge of dinosaurs which verged on Asperger’s, then my mold collection, then my obsession with birds and birdwatching, then my series of rats and plants and hermit crabs. There was always something consuming my attention, and always some adult delighted to see a rat poke its snout out of the little boy’s shirt or to see the crystals he was growing in his room. Later that specific engrossment gave way to a kind of generalist approach that forgot the detailed pursuits and conformed more to getting on with high school, friends, and all the other hands on my time. But I’m going to keep the proverb in mind and keep flowing like water on a rugged stream. Fuck being level.
pseudoisaac 