the squid and the whale

When I was a kid, I thought this was just about the scariest thing I'd ever seen.




It's the squid and the whale exhibit in the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History. Of course, back then it was kind of scary in there, not the well-lit wedding reception-ready hall it is today. The lighting in the hall was dim. The exhibits had a creepy expectant feel to them. And the squid and the whale exhibit was positively predatory in its effect. From a distance, it looked like nothing--maybe a dark, empty display case that they'd forgot to fill, or perhaps were renovating. You'd lean in closer for a look. And then, out of the sepulchral gloom, you'd see a giant eye, a tentacle, a row of teeth, all barely lit in an eerie navy blue, just as you'd expect in the deepest deep dark of the ocean. Suddenly you'd forget there was glass. It would feel like you were falling into the exhibit. Into the ocean. And then you'd run away in delicious terror, back to find you parents, who were calmly reading something incredibly boring, the the captions under the mollusk exhibit or something like that.




It's not like that anymore. The museum has been significantly renovated since I was a kid, and I do have to admit that most of it it looks beautiful. But something was lost in the renovation of the Hall of Ocean Life. Everything's just so obvious now. It's so bright. You can see everything. There's a cafe in there, so you can sip lattes and eat egg salad sandwiches under the whale. It's nice, but it's just not creepy anymore.

Look, I'm not Holden Caulfield, I'm not a proponent of things that are crappy and old just for the fact that they are crappy and old. Renovation is necessary. Change is usually good. But I can't scare myself at the whale exhibit anymore, and that was always the most fun part. And more importantly, I can't scare Cal at the whale exhibit anymore, which takes the fun out of everything.

Cal and I are taking a trip to New York this weekend. It's just to be a special trip, just he and I spending a long weekend in the greatest city on earth. (Unfortunately, Joe and Mack will be staying in Atlanta, taking care of each other, and I will miss them like stink.) Cal and I are staying with my parents. We're going to ride bikes in Central Park. We're going to eat out. We're going to see some folks. And we're going to the museum.

I don't know why I have this determination to recreate the indelible memories of my childhood for my kids, or even if these experiences will be ultimately meaningful for them in the long run, versus lost in the jumble of Things I Kind of Recall From When I Was Five. But I so remember that cold creeping dread of peering into that whale diorama, the snaking tentacles of that giant squid which, under that dim light, you could almost convince yourself were moving--that even in this latter-day bright-lighted, sanitized version, I can't wait to show him.




(Above: Joe and Cal, waiting for the C train, March 2008.)

Janus

We just found out yesterday that we got approved for our mortgage. So...yay! Hooray for debt!

No, but seriously, we are very happy. We've always been fiscally responsible and we haven't exactly been living in the fast lane, but still, when you have bank people going through your history with a fine-toothed comb, even the most conservative of spenders and savers tends to get a little damp-palmed. (I know that my personal financial history was just about as boring and by-the-rules as you could hope, but I kept getting paranoid that they were going to find out that someone had stolen my identity and had maxed out twenty credit cards that I didn't know I even had on jet ski equipment or something. SO MANY JET SKIS.) Anyway, we've been approved, so that's good.

Life has been very busy and exciting lately. Aside from this House Thing and the Book Thing various other Things, there's a lot going on and most of it's pretty good, but I'm going to hold onto some of these topics until they're a little more fleshed out. But for now, let me point you in two directions: forward and back.

FORWARD: Last week? Or maybe it was the week before, I can't even remember--I got an e-mail from the Hachette Speakers Bureau asking if I was interested in joining their roster of speakers. I said, huh? whuzza? snrf? which I'm sure was very impressive (my oratorical skills are unparalleled under any circumstances, certainly) because I don't know what a Speakers Bureau is and therefore didn't know what they were talking about. But after a very nice phone call from a guy named Blair, now I do.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau is an agency under the umbrella of the Hachette Book Group (of which Grand Central Publishing, my publisher, is one imprint) that basically manages certain authors for speaking events. After ascertaining that I was interested (I was) and after I filled out a survey about myself and topics that I can talk about at some length, and I now have a page on their speaker site and am available to come talk about stuff in your town. What kind of stuff? Well, you read this blog, right? You tell me. Want me to come to your med school/college/Rotary Club/quilting bee and talk about, oh, say, the changing role of social media in medicine? You should e-mail the Hachette Speakers Bureau and try to work something out! Or, you can e-mail me and I will forward the e-mail to them. Technology!

BACKWARD: You guys seem to enjoy the pictures from the Way Back Machine, so here's another one--actually a paired set, from December 31st, 2007.





Here's how I spent my New Year's Eve that year, setting up for a lap appy. Luckily I'm not much of a party person anyway so being in the OR was about as exciting as anything else I could have been doing.

the ketogenic diet of blogging

It's been a busy week, so shamelessly, I will continue to post old pictures, in essence living off my own fat stores.

After I decided to switch residencies from Pediatrics to Anesthesiology, I stayed on to complete one more extra year of Peds residency, which is exactly as excruciating as it sounds--a whole extra year of lame duck residency. I stopped doing clinic in the April of that year, however, and on my last day, I took my name plate off the door and retired it to its new and rightful home.




Yes, that's how small bathrooms are in New York. Also, this particular bathroom was located directly over the incinerator duct of the building, so the walls and tile floors were always warm. Which was pleasant in the winter, but less pleasant when you thought about where the heat was coming from.

In somewhat related book news, my editor sent me a .pdf of my book jacket today, and guys...it looks awesome. It looks like...I don't know, it just looks like a real book jacket, with the title on the spine and words on the back and my picture on the inside flap. Bananas! Hopefully I'll be able to show you next week.

another trip in the way back machine

I know it's kind of a cop-out to post a picture that I first posted in this very blog a few years ago, but holy shit, look how many pagers I was wearing back then. ("Back then" was October 2007, my third year of Anesthesia residency.)




Left to right (per your perspective, not radiologic left to radiologic right) I'm wearing my cell phone, the Peds Trauma pager, the Peds Arrest pager, the Peds Pain pager, and my own personal pager. Needless to say I was on the Peds Anesthesia service at the time.

Still going through old pictures to find stuff to flesh out the photo page of the book website. My goal, as I mentioned before, is to post pictures that flesh out the stories that I wrote about in the book, some of which I touched upon in this blog but most of which I have not. FRESH STORIES. It's going to be fun, I really am looking forward to having you read them.

Here's just one more picture that I found from when we first got Cooper (but which didn't make the cut for the book photo page) showing her shaved belly and spaying scar. Do you know how long two fourth-year medical students will spend looking at their new puppy's spaying incision, evaluating the quality of the sutures used and criticizing the technique of the ties? A LONG FUCKING TIME.




Anyway, I feel OK copping out because both Mack and Cal are sick, and no one wants to hear about that as nothing is more boring than other people's kids and their virions. Enjoy the photo page, I'm just going to keep updating it until we hit the Mack Era, at which point I'm sure everyone can fill in The Rest Of The Story.

also because I'm trying to forget that I'm on call tonight

OK, I'm holding this pager and I'm too superstitious to go to sleep so I'm just going to unbox this.

THE GUYS NEXT DOOR.





The Guys Next Door was (were?) a TV show-based boy band created by NBC to capitalize on the popularity of the New Kids on the Block. I think they were supposed to be The Monkees to NKOTB's Beatles, which is a flawed analogy in may ways in that neither of these 90's analogs had nearly the staying power of either of their 60's counterparts, but perhaps it's accurate at least in the sense of their relative popularity as compared to each other. The Guys Next Door, as self-described, were like The New Kids but with a black guy. (Just like All 4 One was like Boys II Men with a white guy.)





Look, I'm not going to lie and say I didn't watch "The Guys Next Door" religiously every Saturday morning, because I did. And I'm not going to say that I didn't have their one and only album on cassette tape, because I did. And I'm not going to say that I didn't have a favorite Guy Next Door and that I didn't debate the relative merits of the different Guys with my friends, because I DID, and WE DID. (For the record: it was Chris, the long-haired one. My friends preferred Damon and Patrick respectively, but I was like, "Say what?" No one liked Bobby, he was the George Harrison of the group, which is not to say that he was talented and deeply religious, just that he was somewhat homely.)

They Boys Next Door had several skills. One was exuberant dancing whilst wearing overlarge boxy blazers.





The second was sensitive emoting into the camera so as to make you feel like they were your boyfriend.





The third was Charlie Chaplin-esque comic pantomime.





Look, I don't know if you remember being an eleven year-old girl, or if you even want to, but I did and I do, and I just loved that stuff. It was like "Saved By The Bell" except with singing and without Screech and all those annoying girls in it lousing up the works. (Not that I didn't like the "Saved By The Bell" where Jessie, Lisa and Kelly formed that girl band and made that music video in a gym and Jessie got addicted to caffeine pills because OMG THE PRESSURE TO SUCCEED.) I have no regrets or embarrassment about this era in my development--not like I'm over here now, listening to Miles Davis' "The Birth of Cool" and nursing a snifter of brandy or anything--but the only, only point of this entry was to tell people that I, possibly like you, love and miss the youthful, candy-coated exuberance of "The Guys Next Door," as well as the relative naïvite required to fully appreciate them.

How about you? What bands did you love as a preteen, and miss beyond all reason?

nostalgia and farts

As I think I mentioned on Twitter (aside: if you don't follow me on Twitter, you might want to reconsider, because I'm actually updating there with some frequency now--unless you think me prattling on about the minutiae of my life is super aggravating, in which case, please continue not following me on Twitter), I have been trying to put labels on all my Blogger blog entries from the last seven years. The first three years of this blog are archived on my old Homestead site here and here (the less you read these entries, the better for you, I find them terribly embarrassing in both design and content but keep them up as sort of an archaeological relic, like the city of Pompeii), but I've been on Blogger since my intern year in Pediatrics, September of 2003, and thus have over 1,300 entries to sort through and catalogue.

That's a lot of entries.

I don't mind skimming through an old entry or two, that's kind of amusing in and of itself. But skimming through ALL of the old entries? Is excruciating. I've only made it back through July of 2008 (right after we moved to Atlanta, before Mack was born) and already I have flashback fatigue. Really the worst part of it (and I realize I may be alone in this, perhaps some people find the act of going through baby books a delight but I find it somehow lachrymose) is seeing how much my kids have grown in the past two and a half years--In Cal's case 100% and in Mack's case infinity percent. It's funny, it's cute, it's heartwarming to see the old pictures and read the old conversations and look at the old video, but it also makes me kind of sad. Because someday my kids aren't going to be little anymore, they're going to be big and grown up and not little and squashable, they're going to be adults and going out into the world and having their own lives and not need me and they're going to donate all their old toys to the local daycare center ruled by an evil despotic strawberry-scented bear. And then I will weep. Hell, I'll weep now.

Not to just indiscriminately recycle old stuff, but this one's worth it: a video from three years ago. Just three years ago. Mack's now almost the age that Cal was then. Sunrise, sunset.

better than cliff notes

When I was a kid maybe a little older than Cal's age, I had this set of "illustrated classics"-- pocket-sized paperbacks with abridged versions of famous works of literature. I really thought these books were awesome. Some of my favorites that I remember vividly were "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," "Swiss Family Robinson," "The Time Machine," and "War of the Worlds." In other words, books that I probably would think are a total snooze now. My tastes run more towards contemporary literature nowadays (anything written after World War II usually is suspect in my book--I know this makes me a Philistine but I'm just being honest, just like I'm being honest when I tell you that I am a girl and I thought that "Pride and Prejudice" was SUPER BORING) but when I was a kid, I just remember being captivated by those illustrated classics.

I had no idea that they were abridged versions at the time, but somehow the fact that they were abridged made them better than the originals--like they cut through all the wordy embellishments and baroque flourishes and reduced the books down to pure scene and plot. That along with the pictures just made them fantastic to read. I know it's probably telling that I was the kind of kid who'd prefer snuggling on the couch with a stack of books and some old Halloween candy than--well, pretty much anything else in life--but really, I have very fond memories of those books.

Cal's been reading a lot more these days, and so lately, I've been trying to locate some of those old paperbacks. Not at my parents house--they moved since I was a kid, so any books from that era are probably long gone, sentimental value or not. But there is Amazon.com and eBay, after all. Still, I can't find the same versions of those illustrated classics. And believe me, I have looked. I found books in the same vein, in that they are classics, and they are illustrated--but no, I want the same books. EVERYTHING MUST BE THE SAME. I know, it's a disease. My child must enjoy what I enjoyed. (Next up: a Wilson Phillips CD.)

This is what I remember about the illustrated classics that I read.


1.) They were paperbacks.

2.) They were small. I want to say 4" x 5". You could cram one in your back pocket.

3.) There was a black-and-white picture every other page. Left side was the picture, right side was the text. Usually the picture was captioned by a pull quote from the text. Like, "The Swiss Family Robinson sailed to the island on a boat out of sawed-open barrels!"

4.) They came in a big box set of, like, 12 or 24 books.

5.) I think the publisher imprint was Moby? Or something like that. Anyway, there was a whale on the cover.


One more think about the illustrated classics series from my childhood is that I credit them for making me seem smarter than I actually am. For instance, to this day, I have not read the real versions of "Great Expectations" or "Little Women," but I know a lot about the plot of these books from the illustrated classics. You know, like how Jo sold her hair and how Ms. Haversham stopped all the clocks in her house and still wore her wedding dress around until she caught on fire. Now if only they had one about "The Portrait of Dorian Gray," so I would know something more about this painting under the bed that everyone keeps talking about.




Edited to add: Woo! Found some on eBay! Mission: Nerd Kid 2.0 complete!

take a look, it's in a book, a reading rainbow





Cal has suddenly expressed a Great Interest in reading. To be fair, he is very proud when he can read things on his own, but he still prefers being read to, because why should he have to put in all that effort when he can just lay back and let Momanddad mangle the more rickety portions of The Lorax for him? Reminds me of that Simpsons where Homer is in the hospital and sees that guy on the ventilator. "And here I am, breathing on my own like a sucker." (I paraphrase.)

But anyway, it puts a song in my heart to be a nerd and have my child express these budding nerdistic qualities (some of my most cozy memories of childhood are lying on the couch with a giant pile of books next to me--no, I was not very good at sports, nor did I have any friends, why do you ask?) so of course when Cal started talking about reading, I immediately pounced onto Amazon and ordered him a kings ransom of "I Can Read!" titles, Uncle Elephant, Frog and Toad are Friends, Bread and Jam for Frances etcetera. Oh, and Amelia Bedelia. It remains to be seen if the somewhat more nuanced fumblings of Amelia Bedelia will be above a four year-old's head (this is a kid who says that his favorite part of "Monsters Inc." is when Mike Wizowsky burps up the microphone) but whatever, we'll see.

I worked him into a fine frenzy rolling yesterday when I kept telling him that the books were set to be delivered that afternoon, that evening at the latest (creating the saddest possible tableau of him sitting next to the door looking for the mail truck) until I realized that it was President's Day and thus no mail delivery. And so it goes. But for sure they will come today, and frankly I am just as excited as he is. My little old man is becoming old for real!

voices that care

Was reading the New York Times article about the new version of "We Are The World" (to benefit Haiti, you know), when I remembered this other celebrity pastiche piece from the early 90's, "Voices that Care," which was made to support the troops during the first Gulf War--a simpler time in our nation's history when, if I recall correctly, they actually sold Operation Desert Storm trading cards (with gum and everything) at newsstands in my neighborhood. Laudably earnest sentiment of the song aside, you have to watch this video, because quite simply, it is awesome. The Nelson Brothers! Michael Bolton! Will Smith with a sideways baseball cap! Strange interlude in the middle with squiggly colored lines! Kenny G on his little weiner sax! FRED SAVAGE SINGING NEXT TO ALYSSA MILANO! Also, Dudley Moore for some reason. We're sending our love down the well (down that well)!





Awesome. I think I still have this cassingle in a shoebox somewhere at my parent's house. And so would you if you, like me, are a relic of an earlier time.

brick prison in the news

Fairly amusing piece in The New York Times about kids cramming for the admissions exam to my old high school. Given how hard these kids are studying, I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had to take the test today, I wouldn't get in. (And I don't mean if the 10 year-old me took the exam. I mean even if the 30 year-old me took the exam.) Nonetheless, I feel privileged to have been schooled among such academic titans. I mean, just look at us. Clearly, we were geniuses.




Best line in the article? Though probably only hilarious to those of us to went to high school in New York City?

And what if they were not among the fewer than 200 students who gain seats out of a pool of up to 2,000 test-takers?

“I’ll be sad,” said James Lee, a student at Intermediate School 119 in Glendale, Queens, “but there’s still Stuyvesant.”

Heh.

* (OK, OK...I am the one at the top of the pyramid in the gigantic green T-shirt. I think we were in...eighth grade at the time? What, obscenely oversized isn't cool anymore? Wait...what do you mean, it wasn't ever cool? Thanks to Maria, whose Facebook page I ganked this off of.)