Residential Space

I, along with the other 64.9 million Americans who voted for him, am pleased with the election of Barack Obama as the upcoming U.S. president. I believe he will be an excellent commander-in-chief, and many of those who did not vote for him will benefit under his leadership. The press is speculating heavily on the reasons for such a clear win. I have heard it is because McCain messed up by choosing Palin as his running mate, and I have read that the economy soured McCain’s chances.

The truth is - Obama did not win because of an unforced error by McCain, or because the economy is in trouble. Obama won because he had a real message. For 21 months, he stayed consistent in his message, continued delivering it, was unwavering in his loyalty to it, and he remained optimistic. Over a two year period, he drew voters to him, rally by rally, city by city, and inspired people to believe the best. His opponents lacked a definitive, consistent message, and their strategy changed every one to two weeks. If putting down his foreign policy experience didn’t work, then it was on to Bill Ayers. When that didn’t work, it was on to accusations of socialism. It became very apparent at the end that the goal was to do whatever was necessary to get elected; by then, it was too late. Americans decided they liked Obama’s positive ideals, and finally, finally, the side using negative campaigning self-destructed.

For as much passion as I hold for politics (particularly national politics), I would have thought this historic election would have provided great fodder for this blog. Yet, I have found that plenty of people out there are saying what I wish to say more eloquently than I would say it. The negativity makes me angry, but if I blogged everytime the GOP presidential and vice-presidential candidates behave in a manner that is hypocritical, reprehensible, or non-Christian, I would do nothing but sit in front of my computer, typing furiously day after day. I believe a few comments will illustrate how I’m feeling:

• When Sarah Palin was selected as John McCain’s running mate, I, like the rest of the country, was inspired by her…to finally donate to the Obama campaign. I have never given money to a campaign, but this was the one. That $150 million Obama raised in September? You can thank Sarah Palin for it.
• I am constantly fearful for Obama’s safety. He’s so close to victory, and all it would take is one misguided lunatic to end it all. It’s frightening. When Sarah Palin half smiles at rallies as her supporters call him a terrorist and yell things like “kill him,” I have to wonder - where are these Christian principles she espouses? I hear much more Christian things coming from Obama’s lips than from McCain’s or Palin’s. The right-wing Republicans should be voting Democratic in this election, but I suppose voting against one’s self interests is not a new concept.
• While we’re on the topic of Sarah Palin, have you noticed that she will state things as fact that are easily disproved? I’m thinking of the firing of her public safety commissioner for not firing her brother-in-law, the panel of eight Republicans and four Democrats who found she violated Alaska’s ethics law, and her comment (I’m paraphrasing) that she is so pleased that the panel found she did not violate the ethics law. What?! I half expect her to tell the media how pleased she is to be awarded the Nobel Prize or to state as a fact that scientists have proved the polar icecaps are reaccumulating. As long as you say it definitively and with a straight face, I guess that makes it true somehow?
• In 2000 when I was living in South Carolina, I had a great deal of respect for John McCain during the GOP primary. I didn’t agree with all of his stances, but the man was respectable. I will never forgive him for this election. He has thrown his principles out the window to try to win the presidency, and as a result, I predict he will lose. He has attempted to embrace the sort of negative campaigning that allowed Bush to beat him in 2000, but what he doesn’t understand is - that worked in South Carolina. It doesn’t jive in most of the country. People at their cores are still decent, and the negativity has gone over the top for most. I will also never forgive him for placing the country’s future in such great jeopardy by choosing the running mate he has chosen. How selfish of him to place her in such a position of power. He needs to really start putting “country first” and ambition-to-win-the-presidency second.
• Man, isn’t Tina Fey awesome?!
• I am so glad Joe Biden finally called the other side out about “pro-America.” In their rallies they frequently speak of “small town American values,” “real Americans,” and those who are “pro-American.” Since when did people living in large cities lack values? Why are those in small towns better than those who live in cities? Tax revenues from cities often fund smaller towns - so I guess we’re not pro-America when we’re paying to support all of those “real Americans.” Way to go, Joe.
• If the other side does win, I’m glad I’m somewhat sheltered in Seattle, although I do love South Carolina very much.
• How can anyone be undecided at this point?!

While I, along with millions of others around the world, have been experiencing visceral reactions to the market’s rise and fall over the past two weeks, I suppose the one sliver of good that can be gleamed from this crisis is that Americans are being forced to evaluate what really matters. After years of anti-intellectualism in the political arena, now they want an intelligent “elitist” to save their portfolios and pensions. The media found Sarah Palin intriguing, with her moose-hunting and lipstick. Some Americans seemed to think she was qualified to become the vice-president because she decided against having an abortion (and I suspect some still do believe this makes her qualified to run the country). Now, morals are well and good, but please save our money! It’s interesting that the right wing can tout morality, but when threatened with economic uncertainty, well – the abortion issue may not matter quite so much anymore.

I ran across this in a recent MSNBC article:

Last week’s near-meltdown in the financial markets and the subsequent debate in Washington over a proposed government bailout of troubled financial institutions have made the economy even more important in the minds of voters. Fully 50 percent called the economy and jobs the single most important issue that will determine their vote, up from 37 percent two weeks ago. In contrast, just 9 percent cited the Iraq war as their most important issue, its lowest of the campaign.

The media continues to separate “the economy” and “the Iraq war” as issues, and I don’t think this is possible. Our economy is in a lot of trouble right now, in large part because we spend more than we earn. We borrow, and borrow, and borrow – to pay for things we cannot afford, whether it is for homes or for wars. The first thing Obama should do when he gets to the White House is begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. I heard recently on NPR that the war is costing approximately $5000 per second. If we’re going to throw $700 billion into bailing out financial institutions, then the money has to come from somewhere, and I would prefer it not be in the form of newly printed currency.

I think it’s interesting that the worst the right-wing can say about Obama is that he is some sort of Messiah-type figure. After the last two weeks, they had better hope that he is capable of performing miracles.

I love segments on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report when they are able to speak volumes simply by rolling raw news footage and allowing hypocrisy to show itself.

I hope you will take the time to watch this clip prior to the presidential election in November. For anyone who thinks there is a “liberal media bias,” please think again. Please pass it around. I really wish this would get more play in the national media, because it is quite telling.

My last substantive blog post was published on June 6th. I’ve fallen behind after two demanding months (albeit, intriguing and important months, but demanding). There are many topics about which I would like to write, so I will try to hit on highlights:

• Gabriel turned one year old in mid-July! People always manage to sound a bit cheesy when they use that hackneyed expression: “It seems like only yesterday that…” It is so appropriate when thinking about how quickly time is passing in your child’s life, though - or rather, your time with your child. I honestly have a tough time believing the labor, the delivery, the first days home from the hospital - that all of that was now over a year ago. Gabriel has grown from a helpless (adorable!) neonate to a crawling, climbing, laughing, mischievous (yes, he’s already figuring some things out), and loving little boy. It’s been a terrific year.
  
• My two chief resident months at Harborview in May and June brought me back into the acute neurological care setting, and reminded me of how exciting and rewarding it can be. I had the chance to be a part of early intervention in several potentially very bad stroke cases with very happy endings, and these persuaded me to apply for a fellowship in vascular neurology (ie, stroke). I was accepted for it several weeks ago - so I will be the stroke fellow at Harborview for 2009-2010. I look forward to my career as a stroke neurologist.
• I’m trying to keep a long-term perspective about the economy. Surely it will improve, right? It has not been that bad for that long. Still, I know there is a problem when my best-performing investment is my money market savings account. Hopefully it’s all about dollar-cost averaging.
• I will blog more about this soon (it warrants its own post), but I’m reading a book right now entitled The Smartest Guys in the Room. It’s about the rise and fall of Enron, and how Enron was able to become as large as it became while operating with fake numbers. I find the California energy “crisis” part of the Enron tale the most intriguing. Remember those rolling blackouts in California years ago? Enron apparently had power grids brought down to create a sense of panic about a presumed electricity shortage, thus driving up the prices. George Bush and others in Washington, D.C. publicly commented that California got itself into this mess, so it has to work it out for itself. Yet, California didn’t get itself into this mess - Enron was manipulating the price. Which brings me to our current oil situation. I’m not a big fan of oil for environmental reasons - but come on. I don’t care how quickly China and India are growing; I just refuse to believe that they have grown so fast in three or four years that the price of a barrel of oil suddenly needs to be greater than $140/barrel. I smell Enron. Oil companies have been posting record profits. After learning about the ins and outs of Enron, I’m thinking, “This game has been played before.” There is potentially an artificial shortage being created to cause a panic, thus pushing people to pay $4.50/gallon of gasoline and persuading people to allow off-shore drilling. What has George Bush pushed for his entire time as president? Drilling in Anwar. This seems awfully suspicious. But more of this later, once I’ve finished reading the book. Disclaimer: I’m not an economist. Just a citizen.
• Learning French, while very difficult as an adult, must be so much easier now than it was even ten years ago. Evan gave me a Zune last December, and it has changed my life. Now, thanks to Coffee Break French and Learn French By Podcast, while my French is still very poor (I never took a class in it in high school or college), it is leaps and bounds ahead of where I was before I got my Zune. It’s fascinating. Because it’s so portable, I can learn on the bus, at lunch in the cafeteria, or on an airplane (although not recently because I always seem to be at the mercy of a certain little boy traveling with me). Anyway - it’s worth pointing out that with the Zune, unlike the iPod, I can listen to NPR while walking from my car into work if I don’t want to leave a segment unfinished. It’s a delightful little device!

I’ll stop here for now, but these are some of my recent activities/contemplations/celebrations/concerns! A la prochaine.

The answer to this question for me was always:
1. He sounds like he has laryngitis.
2. What the heck is he saying?

Evan recently passed on this link to some fun footage of Joe Cocker singing at Woodstock in 1969 - with some minor editing. Enjoy!

During my junior year in college during the fall of 2000, I enrolled in a class at the University of South Carolina called “Fitzgerald and Hemingway.” The course was taught by Matthew Bruccoli, widely recognized as the leading F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar and the creator of the largest collection of Fitzgerald memorabilia known. In short, it was an unforgettable experience.

Dr. Bruccoli passed away this week, as I learned from this article, sent to me by a friend in Charleston. I stared at the computer screen, stunned. Then the tears came. The world feels a little emptier with him gone.

His class that semester consisted of about 20 students (of whom about 15 showed up for each session - I never missed it), meeting with Dr. Bruccoli in the rare book room at the Thomas Cooper Library. We started each session by passing around a piece from the collection. The first time, it was a first edition of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises with the following inscription on the title page: “To Scott, with great esteem and affection. Ernest” Wow - Fitzgerald’s copy of Hemingway’s book, inscribed by Hemingway to Fitzgerald. Truly unique. The following session, we examined an old slide projector with glass slides featuring images of war. Dr. Bruccoli explained that Fitzgerald owned these, as did many in the 1910’s, and used this to emphasize Fitzgerald’s remorse over never having the chance to fight in World War I. One day it would be Fitzgerald’s whisky flask. The next it may be his notebook he carried around Hollywood in the 1930’s as he jotted down ideas for his final (unfinished) novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. It was such an awesome way to begin discussing Fitzgerald’s writing.

We had guest lecturers too. I’ll never forget famed writer and critic George Plimpton’s visit to our class. We sat at the large conference table, Plimpton and Dr. Bruccoli with us, and laughed at their stories of their various encounters with Hemingway, his family, and friends. That night, we were Dr. Bruccoli’s guests at a performance of a dialogue Plimpton had written after compiling letters between the two men. I was one of three students from our class that attended (and I brought my mother, a bibliophile). Where was everyone? Did they not realize the experience they could have? As Plimpton closed our class, I handed him my photocopy of his script that had been distributed at the start of class and asked if he would mind autographing it. When he died in 2003, the script, which had sat on my bookshelf, was moved to a special box for preservation.

When I started medical school, I would go through flurries of short story writing, and once was even brave enough to send one to Dr. Bruccoli for an opinion. He sent feedback several days later, which to my relief was positive. I have the envelope with the manuscript and Dr. Bruccoli’s letter in storage, but the word I remember from the letter is “publishable.” He went on to explain that he almost became a doctor, but didn’t want to be surrounded by people who were ignorant. Instead, he continued, he went on to become an English professor, and was surrounded by people who were even more ignorant. I submitted it to a literary magazine, and it was rejected. He also enclosed one of his books with a witty inscription. After graduating from medical school, I went back to USC to visit Dr. Bruccoli before I moved to Seattle. He encouraged me to continue collecting rare books, and to enjoy medicine but to remember my passion for literature and writing.

He was gruff, and he was remarkable. I don’t know if I will ever meet another person like him. He is still very much alive in my mind, slamming his hand on the table and growling, “Hemingway was a MEAN son-of-a-bitch!” I can see the curious look on his face as we opened boxes of Hemingway galleys and manuscripts recently purchased by USC. I remember only being able to enter the University Club in St. Paul, MN, where Fitzgerald used to have drinks when he was a young man, because I was able to describe to the door attendant, thanks to Dr. Bruccoli, in detail what the bar looked like, despite not having ever seen it in person.

In the midst of my sadness while at work today, one of my friends was kind enough to listen to me ramble on about how remarkable Dr. Bruccoli was. He reminded me that I was lucky to have known someone like that. Lucky indeed. I am lucky, but unfortunately it just doesn’t seem like there was enough time. There never is with someone like him.

Seriously - I had time to start, enjoy, and finish reading a book recently. Wonders never cease. It was The Clown by: Heinrich Böll. During my freshman year in college I participated in my school’s quiz bowl team and tasked myself with learning the names and some of the better known (which in some cases means not well known at all in the United States) works by each Nobel Prize winning author. Böll won the Prize in 1972; his best-known novel is probably Billiards at Half-Past Nine. However, I have had a copy of The Clown sitting on my bookshelf for the past eight years after purchasing it second-hand (or, more likely, fifth-hand) for a dollar at a used bookstore in Montana, so I decided to give it a go, not knowing much about Böll other than his status as a Prize winner.

The story of Hans Schnier involves his reminiscing during a three hour period after a particularly bad performance as a pantomime/clown in post-war Germany. Most of the novel is a flashback, during which he smokes, drinks, bathes, and intermittently calls “friends” (they are more like acquaintances) to fill the time. His companion of the past ten years, Marie, has left him, he has no money, no motivation, and no hope for the future. He recalls events from his youth during World War II, being forced into the Hitler Youth Movement by his “don’t rock the boat” parents. He struggles with their hypocrisy as they construct ties to race reconciliation groups when joining these organizations became en vogue after the liberation. I felt like I was reading the German version of Sartre’s Nausea, of course with a different specific topic, but the same theme of an existentialism, with little hope for the future.

While the book was well-written and does allow a glipse into an unique historical setting, I had difficulty empathizing with Schnier’s character. He does not seem to recognize that he has driven Marie away with his on-the-road lifestyle, his lack of long-term perspective, and his never-ending poverty he brings on himself by continuing theatrics while failing to acknowledge Marie’s desire for stability. When his life falls apart, his father offers to send him back to school, but instead Schnier chooses to paint his face white while sitting in Bonn’s rail station busking, hoping for donations from passersby so that he can purchase cigarettes and cognac. I get that this is a demonstration of his suffering, but he is so self-destructive. He blames the Catholic church for all of his problems rather than taking responsibility for his own life.

Anyway, I imagine I will read more novels by Böll in the future, because it was a very interesting read. When I was younger I found the struggling, suffering, artist-type person intriguing and almost desirable, but time has convinced me that enlightenment can come with stability, having a family, being well-nourished, and sleeping in a warm bed at night too.

Evan and I saw Duran Duran in concert at the WAMU Theater in Seattle last night! As is the case whenever I have seen a good ’80s group perform, things were quite surreal. To hear a song like “Hungry Like the Wolf” performed live by the group who created it, a tune so familiar that I cannot remember not having known it, was pleasantly bizarre. I heard everything I wanted to hear - “Planet Earth,” “Save a Prayer,” and “The Reflex,” to name a few from their 1980’s grandeur. My very favorites, though, were the two hits from their 1993 album, The Wedding Album, “Ordinary World” and “Come Undone.” Perhaps this is because I have real conscious memory of when these songs were huge, and the others came out when I was too young to really understand how big they were.

There was a moment when I leaned over to Evan during “Ordinary World” to remind him that this great tune was actually fifteen years old. Sheesh, wasn’t it yesterday that my friends and I were riding in the carpool to drama camp during the summer following eighth grade, and we heard this song almost daily on the radio? I remember the music video - a girl with a big bow on her dress running. I did not see too many music videos back when MTV actually featured them, but for some reason I really remember that one.

What has happened to it all? Crazy, some would say…

But I won’t cry for yesterday. After all, life is better now! I have Evan, with whom I can enjoy nostalgic concerts. I have Gabriel, who was someday to be back in 1993, but was still 14 years from actually being. It is difficult not to reminisce, though, when music used to be this good.

It was a film by Stanley Kubrick called 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Okay, so it’s not a new movie exactly (1968) - as Evan pointed out to me in no uncertain terms, I’m completely behind in having just now seen it. “How have you NOT seen this already?” I think that was close to what he said, followed by, “How did you not see this in college?” Well, I wasn’t alive when it was released in 1968, was I? I would not have seen it in high school, because that preceded my understanding of great movies and many great books (as an example here, when I was in high school, I thought While You Were Sleeping was a great movie), so the soonest I could have really been exposed to it was 1997. With this in mind, I’m only 11 years behind.

Anyway, it was amazing. I loved it. I could not stop thinking about it or talking about it for days after seeing it. I went to work the following day raving about it, and faced a colleague who immediately claimed that it was “the most boring movie ever.” Not to have my enthusiasm muffled, I continued across the room to one of the neurosurgery residents on our team, who wholeheartedly agreed with my opinion. Ha - so I’ll just talk to him about it then. Our medical team assistant happily joined the discussion, encouraging me to see 2010. I emailed my sister-in-law, a movie buff, to ask her opinion about certain parts. After all, she’s seen every movie ever made (disclaimer: slight exaggeration for emphasis, known as a hyperbole). She replied with her opinion - it was awful and boring, and she stopped watching 45 minutes into it. I informed her she had to watch the whole thing, and she replied that it wasn’t worth it. I emailed several friends who I was sure had seen it, and received a reply to the effect of: “Oh yeah, I watched that in college. It was good - I don’t remember much of it though.”

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!!!

I’m not getting something here - this was the greatest movie I have seen in at least a year, maybe longer. I experienced certain emotions during it that I don’t think I’ve felt previously - an entirely different sort of fear. During the few seconds when HAL was reading the lips of the astronauts, and it becomes evident that HAL has intent and has made a choice to deceive these men, I felt this weird sort of horror. Then, a few seconds later, it hit me that not only is HAL deceiving them, but he has absolute power over their lives, AND they are in the middle of this huge, vast space, millions of miles from earth, and nowhere to go to get away from him. The story, the dialogue (which was minimal - there were actually very few conversations in the film, which was appropriate), the camera shots at just the right moments, the rapid aging scene at the end - wow. I didn’t want to go to work the next day just so I could be left alone with my thoughts.

So it seems opinions are divided - some people think 2001: A Space Odyssey is “the most boring movie ever,” and I thought it was probably one of the ten best movies I’ve ever seen. What a dichotomy of thought, perhaps indicative of different personality types?