The morning mail, or something like that, or actually not at all

It has been a terrible morning.

There is no question that I’m given to hyperbole on both the positive and negative ends of the spectrum. Recently all the providers at my new clinic were asked to submit a brief bio for our website, and I wrote, speaking in the third person, “[he] thinks that he is the luckiest person in the whole world.” And a good part of the time that’s true. But I suppose it should not be surprising that someone who sometimes feels on top of the world might at other times feel the entire weight of it. Isn’t there a DSM-5 diagnosis and medication for that? Increasingly though, I seem to be granted insight into both the highs and lows, one that tempers, if not obviates, the need to seek professional help.

Hyperbole notwithstanding—it has been a terrible morning. First, as I am making a smoothie, I spill half of the can of coconut milk into the open silverware drawer. Not having time to clean it up right away I throw a towel into the drawer and forget about it. Then it’s time to get Felix up, but both Sam and I are on the increased bowel transit program this morning, and a long stint in the bathroom (mine) bookended by two poopy diaper changes (Sam’s) puts us quite a bit behind in making it upstairs. After some high-level negotiations I manage to get Felix downstairs and seated at the breakfast table. Things go relatively smoothly, and both boys in fact eat quite well. I even play them a breakfast song on my guitar. And then, forgetting how late it is, I decide to clean up the kitchen.

“Triage” would be a better word. Dishes from the day before are still stacked in precarious edifices around the kitchen. I’ll be able to unload the dishwasher, at least. I pull open the silverware drawer. Oh, yeah. Ok. Unload everything. But where to put it? No counterspace. Shove things around, remove the liner…ecch, wow, there’s more than fresh coconut milk under there. Need paper towels.

Out of paper towels. Well, four-letter-word. Ok. Safeway. Let’s go. We’re out of avocados, bananas, and dish soap anyway. Let’s pack up and go. Wait, how did it get to be 10:30? I’ve accomplished nothing!

Up to so far the boys have been peaches. Now, however, at the mention of an unplanned outing, resistance is voiced. I’m not having it. Oh—wait. The I’m-not-having-it approach doesn’t work with 3-year-olds. How many times must I bang my head against that brick wall to realize that pushing harder doesn’t actually achieve the desired result? How did it get to be…11:30? More silently voiced four-letter words. Ok! No Safeway! We need some outside running-around time, or the afternoon naps, the cornerstone of parental sanity, are shot!

This is when things go from bad to worse. Having used my limited capital to negotiate a trip to Safeway (part of that hour having been used to supply an overdue snack), I neglect the 2nd cardinal rule of dealing with 3-year-olds: Never say you’re going to do something, and then don’t do it. An hour ago there was less than zero interest in a trip to the grocery store. But that was then. Now it is the official itinerary.

Against my better judgment, I break the contract and carry the boys, wailing, to the school park just a block up the hill. Correction: older boy wailing, younger still a peach.

The funny thing about when things fall apart, is that sometimes I just keep digging myself deeper. Is this why, after an actually quite enjoyable time at the park, I still consent to the promised Safeway trip? That’s madness! It’s lunchtime, to be followed by naptime. There’s a pretty narrow window there, after which the chances of falling asleep decline precipitously. Why do we go?

Go we do, and the slide continues. We arrive back to the car with all groceries purchased just as the clock tower at the courthouse across the street rings one o’clock, the time Sam’s supposed to be asleep. Wait. It gets better. I had put Sam in the cart with two boots on. Now there’s only one. Four-letter four-letter four-letter!

Somehow, we retrace our steps, come up empty, leave our number with the Safeway customer service desk, make it home, eat some left-over smoothie and oats and granola bar, and I get first Sam and then Felix down for nap. Somehow they fall, and stay, asleep. Somehow, amazingly, the message on my voicemail is a nice lady from customer service telling me they’ve found the Bog boot. The afternoon can only be better than the morning. And it will be. But what a morning.

I remember that I used to think that by the time I became a parent, I would have “it” more or less figured out. Whatever “it” was, it has changed, and as a parent changes, daily. This wasn’t even going to be a blog about my morning. It was going to be a blog about our mailbox shelter, the one that I built over the weekend to put over our mailbox because our mail keeps getting soaked. That, like my morning, was hijacked. And that is ok.

I just keep reminding myself of a little saying inscribed on a decorative rock in LL’s parent’s house: “If it’s not fatal, it’s usually no big deal.” Or as Felix would say, “It’s not a big deal, it’s a tiny deal.” The mailbox can wait—it has to anyway, for a second coat of paint. So if you’re on my long list of people that I hope to but haven’t yet sent a letter to…it’s coming!

Syria

Living in Port Angeles, I usually tune in to CBC Radio One from Victoria when I have to drive somewhere for a few minutes. Right now the talk in Canada is all about accommodating 25,000 Syrian refugees in the next two months. Ever since Paris, xenophobic pundits in both Canada and the U.S. have tried to argue, quite naturally (a natural response to any horrific event is to simultaneously lash out and withdraw) but quite illogically (the terrorists responsible for the carnage in France are actually a significant part of those destroying Syria, namely ISIS, and, none of the suspects in Paris were Syrian refugees), that denying safe haven to fleeing women, children and families will somehow make the world a better place.

Many of my blogs focus on the impacts to the natural world of human activity. One might reasonably say that human-caused climate change is first and foremost a humanitarian catastrophe. It is. This statement is not to deny the impact on other species and ecosystems: the two are inseparably linked.

For this month (the blog entered earlier in November, which I just finally added text to last night, was my late entry for October) I thought I would share a cartoon my mom shared with me some months ago. Syria and climate change. My apologies, as always, that you'll have to copy and paste the link:

http://yearsoflivingdangerously.tumblr.com/post/86898140738/this-comic-was-produced-in-partnership-by-years-of

Everything is connected.

Orders of magnitude

(updated with text: Nov 22nd)

I was originally going to title this “See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”, as per my jack o’ lantern theme. On September 28th Shell Oil abandoned its plan to drill in the Arctic. This seemed—especially when followed in early November by Obama’s several-years belated rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline—a major victory against evil, and a cause for celebration. Or, to reframe the descriptor “evil”: these were major victories for anyone who believes that community, the environment, and the current and future livability of our planet are more important than the short-term profit of a handful of already obscenely rich old white men.

These victories are by no means an excuse to close our eyes, mouths or ears to the ongoing injustice and destruction wrought upon the planet and its species (including our own). However, rather than delve into this, let me take a moment to savor these two wins, focus on the hope they bring, and reflect on the scale of what we’re talking about.

In about an hour, with a kitchen knife and a few dollars worth of pie pumpkins, I can carve three fun faces for Halloween, and perhaps bring a smile or two to any parental figures who recognize my motif.

In a few weeks of Arctic summer—had they proceeded—Shell would have carved into the ocean floor, using a rig built in 1985 and retrofitted for $100 million in 2009, perhaps squeezing out a few barrels of oil at the cost of a when-not-if spill that would have imperiled grey whales, polar bears, walruses, seals and salmon, not to mention the symbolic avarice and indiscretion of drilling in the place already most affected by climate change.

In the 65 million years since Earth’s last catastrophic extinction, the forces of evolution, plate tectonics, and climate have created a myriad of fragilely balanced and beautiful ecosystems, of which the Olympic Peninsula is one (pictured is Hurricane Ridge).

In this comparison of orders of magnitude, there is an infinitely greater space between the 2nd and 3rd examples than between the 1st and 2nd. Carving a pumpkin and operating an oil rig are microscopic compared with the creation of a living mountain. With organization and enough pumpkin carvers, I or anyone else could build, or destroy, something comparable to the Transoceanic Polar Pioneer.

And yet our collective actions are without question transforming the world on a scale we can barely fathom. Snowfall on the Olympics may become a thing of the past. Salmon, seals, walruses, polar bears and grey whales, likewise, if ocean acidification unfolds as predicted. If ever there were a time to not lose hope, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—in the space between when I posted the pictures, and now when I’m finally writing, the devastating Paris massacre has added yet another horror—it is now. We are creative individuals. We must now act with purpose, for good.

Dance to this!

For this month’s posting I weighed all kinds of the usual doom and gloom and am instead opting for something lighter. One of the great things about our tiny rental here in PA is that it has a giant, 2-story garage. The 2nd floor is an unfinished space that our landlord eventually plans to develop into an additional dwelling unit…until then, it’s our workout/dance/playspace.

Dance is what got me through college, not just in one piece but in one often-joyous piece. When I started medical school four years later, I was wise enough to know that I needed it, and helped form an eclectic dance group that met weekly for almost 3 years. Letting it lapse because I became “too busy” was one of the biggest follies I’ve ever committed…I still need dance.

Here’s a playlist built for movement, some of it newer stuff, a lot of it older. Enjoy!

All about that base * Meghan Trainor
Hooked on a feeling * Blue Swede (from Guardians of the Galaxy)
This one’s gonna hurt * Reina del Cid. My favorite new artist. Check out “Library Girl” too!
White walls * Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Thanks Emmy!!!
Piece of my heart * Shaggy…a reggae cover of Janis Joplin
I saw her standing there * The Beatles
Ex’s and oh’s * Elle King
Peter Pan * Diam’s. French HIP hip hop. To borrow the line from MC Hammer, “if you can’t move to this then you probably are dead.”
I’m walking on sunshine * Katrina and the Waves
New York groove * Ace Frehley…featured in the movie “Inside Job”, a must-see.
Le Fleuve * Miriam Makeba
Start me up * The Rolling Stones
Ca plane pour moi * Plastic Bertrand (from Ruby Sparks)
The one! * Hugh Masakela
Walk of life * Dire Straits…in my top 5 favorite songs of all time
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles * MC Hammer—not to be confused with the cartoon theme. This is from the original live-action movie, in my book the best of the many versions by far.
You can’t hurry love * The Supremes with Diana Ross
Jump in the line * Harry Belafonte (Beetlejuice…I’ve got a lot of movies represented here!)
Lean on me * Club Nouveau. Also in the top 5.
Crazy in love * Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z
Hey Ya * Outkast. Thanks L-Dawg!!!
Mes oreilles * Amylie. More French hip hop pop.
Little Hands * Matt the Electrician. My other favorite new artist besides Reina del Cid.
Paper planes * M.I.A. (yep, also in another must-see movie, Slumdog Millionaire…)
Nothing matters when we’re dancing * The Magnetic Fields
Cecilia * Paul Simon. How many songs do I get in my top 5?
Angel * They Might Be Giants. Possibly my #1 favorite song of all time. It has to be the version from their live album, though.

That should be enough to get you started. ☺

It has to be thrilling or it will eat me up, or, Connection

Yesterday I finally put a letter in the mailbox.

It’s the first letter I’ve mailed in…I don’t even know when. This particular letter has been in the making for almost a year, on and off. As I get older it seems things are measured more and more in years. Oh, it’s been a year since I spoke with that friend. Five years since I ate at that great Vietnamese restaurant at 12th and Jackson. More than 30 years since I was a first-grader, and yet I still have distinct memories of being six years old.

It makes sense. Our brains are wired to conceptualize time as a fraction of our experience, and our experience grows ever in length. For my three-and-a-half-year-old, a month is the same fraction of his life as a year is of mine; this is a commonly reported-upon perceptual phenomenon. With time our world, and worldview, grows in breadth as well. Felix’s spatial and experiential world can be rattled off in the phrases he so frequently rattles off. “Mama Dada Felix Sam Nana Papa Tega Zoffy” are his people, even though Tega and Zoffy are Nana and Papa’s cats, and Zoffy died several months ago. I recently made a list of “my people”, people I want to write a letter to, and it rapidly reached over 100—and included my younger brother, who died 15 years ago. A huge trip for Felix would be from here to Seattle to visit my sister and her family, whom he hasn’t seen since February. For me, a huge trip might be to visit the family I stayed with in the Peace Corps in South Africa and haven’t seen in over a decade.

Yet for both of us, we hunger for the meaning that comes from staying connected to the world we map out in our heads. Several years ago I read an article in Science News that was a fascinating look at this small-world connectivity. The gist of it was that the connections between people, which one might think are random, are anything but. There are nodes of “greater connectivity” at every scale one chooses to look at from the neighborhood up through the world. Every person on earth really is connected to everyone else by only a few short links, as per the title of the movie “Six degrees of separation.” When we feel connected to this network, we thrive. When we feel isolated from it, apart from it, we literally wither on the vine.

As busy-ness has taken over my life I’ve noticed a natural tendency in myself to let connections drop. This is not without its toll. I think I understand more and more what Patch Adams means when he says “it has to be thrilling, or it will eat me up.” He’s talking about connection. He’s talking about friendship.

Which is why I’m so happy to have mailed a letter. I know it’s only one letter. But it’s a start. Being able to name a challenge is the first step in overcoming it, and I hereby name this one: I want greater connectivity, friendship.

I wonder, too, if we as a species have an innate hunger for connection to our past—to our own individual lives, yes, but also our collective past as families, communities, ecosystems, to our natural and societal histories—that functions in a similar way to our drive to stay connected to and make sense of our physical world. If this is the case then our world is presented with at once an immeasurable tragedy and opportunity. The tragedy is the terrifying speed with which our natural world is being destroyed, and the speed with which the human communities that depend on that world are being altered. The opportunity is that of slowing down and connecting, re-connecting, with that world, with our friends present and past, and with ourselves. It is such connection that offers the possibility—the thrilling possibility—of creating a better future.

Pretend Blog, or, Crazy Kindness

In the early hours of Tuesday, July 28th, 13 men and women suspended themselves from the St. Johns Bridge, 205 feet above the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. There they would spend the next 40 hours, alternating between cold nights and 100-plus degree days, only abandoning their positions when forcibly removed by the police. Although the 13 aerial activists were members of the group Greenpeace, they were joined in the water, quite spontaneously, by hundreds of kayakers, inner tubers, and even swimmers, who felt compelled to join their mission—a mission that briefly succeeded. That mission was to stop oil giant Shell from drilling in the Artic.

The St. Johns Bridge is the last bridge on the Willamette before it empties into the Columbia, and although there are two remaining bridges between Portland and the open ocean, the St. Johns affords the last best opportunity for preventing a ship from reaching that ocean.

Why might one wish to prevent a ship from reaching that ocean? In the case of Shell, the answer is simple, even if largely symbolic: 98-plus percent of climate scientists agree that if we are to have any hope of containing global warming at a near-catastrophic 2 degrees Celsius, we need to leave 80% of oil reserves alone. Drilling in the Arctic carries the additional “duh” factor of the absolute stupidity of drilling in conditions virtually guaranteed to cause a major spill, plus the “eccch” factor of drilling in the homes of polar bears facing extinction directly because of global warming.

Although Shell was ready to drill for oil up in Alaska, it needed its icebreaker ship, the Fennica, in order to do so, and the Fennica had been sent into drydock in Portland for patches to its hull. On Thursday morning the repaired Fennica left its dock and bore down on the frail human web that had spun itself under the St. Johns bridge. For a moment it appeared that it might crash right through. This would have been as easy as a hand brushing away a cobweb, except in this case at the cost of human lives.

But it did not. Instead the Fennica turned around and headed back to port. It would return, later, with the full weight of an armed police and Coast Guard force that lifted swimmers from the water and Greenpeace volunteers from the air in order to wedge its way through and out to the Pacific. But for a brief moment, the spiders won. The giant had been turned back.

I watched all this, as it were, via email updates and web searches from the comfort of my armchair. The comfort is tenuous. I’m acutely aware of my own existence as a member of the most eco-destructive lifeform that evolution has ever visited on its own planet. When we moved to Port Angeles, LL and I thought we’d at least said goodbye to the forest fire smoke that is now a given for summers in Omak. But the Olympics received 6% of their usual snowfall last year. Fires raging in British Columbia a few weeks ago sent a massive smokecloud down to us, and parts of the Peninsula itself are on fire for the first time in recorded human history. Human-caused global warming is real. It is here and only going to get worse, and speaking for myself, in my daily life it is difficult to find the time and energy to make a meaningful difference against this unfolding disaster. I am a physician and a parent, and though I bike to work, compost my butternut squash peels, recycle my empty coconut milk cans, and even make efforts to think and write about “the big picture” (as it were!)…it seems small. I am not out on in that fragile space between St. Johns and the Willamette.

I know, I know, I know, that I have to still find peace within myself, that I have to, as the Dalai Lama reminded me the other day when I came across a quote of his, “be kind to myself.” In fact, it was that kindness to myself that allowed me to go to bed a couple nights ago instead of staying up extra late to write this blog just because it was the end of the month. I was kind to self. I slept. Now, I write. I write this blog which isn’t really a blog, in order to not go crazy, in order, maybe, to stay crazy, to stay crazy enough, kind enough, revolutionarily happy enough, that I can carry on, to have fun, to make the work of revolution fun, to love myself, to love LL, to love my kids, to love the world, to make a difference. That is why we are here. Is it not?

Painting at midnight, pancakes at dawn

See last post: what I am doing?

By streetlight at 11pm I am painting the first side of a door purchased this afternoon at a second-hand store, so that in the morning I may measure, saw it in half, then paint the remainder of the bottom and hang it upstairs for a top-open door to Felix's room. By the early rays of sunrise I am peeling and shredding a butternut squash to mix with eight eggs and perhaps 4/3 cup coconut flakes for pancakes. At noon LL and I are pulling dandelions in the slab of concrete in our yard, to fill the cracks in with drought-hardy perennials, and also, along the edges, raised beds of kale, strawberries, and a few valiant shoots of broccoli. This all while trying to chase after Felix and Sam, read a (worthwhile) book called "No-Drama Discipline" and apply it as much as possible, stay up to date on CME, and slowly increase our clinic encounter numbers. In other words: staying busy, yes, and anything I may be doing pales beside LL, who is doing all of this while actually directly providing the bulk of Sam's calories.

And yet. Mentally, I am infusing this busy-ness with an urgency it does not always merit. In so doing I am often doing more at a time than is necessary, doing something that may not be the most needed action at the time, and/or not giving myself adequate pauses, breaths, such that the few times I do get a "break", I quickly rush to fill that void with activity that is not always restorative.

Keeping such a schedule becomes a form of what Naomi Klein calls "looking away." She is referring, in her intro to "This Changes Everything", of looking away from the full and terrifying impacts of climate change and, inseparably, the full and terrifying impacts of unfettered capitalism. And this looking away has the ultimate effect of curtailing the creativity that is so needed right now to fix our world. By pouring my every attention into each painted corner, each perfectly grilled pancake, each word of praise or redirection for the boys, and yes, each doctor-patient encounter, I am denying myself the time and space needed to imagine a truly better world.

And in case you noticed: yes, I'm also taking all this WAY too seriously! Part of the delicious paradox of the entire situation is that I need to lighten up, sleep more, care less--at least about details--and enjoy life. Only as such can I or any of us be the change we wish to see. Hey! At least I'm a day early on this post! There's still another whole day of June! Yay! To bed! :)

The foolish consistency of my little mind

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Five and a half years ago I started writing this blog. I soon settled into a pattern of writing monthly, usually in the last few hours of the last day of the month. With each new entry I clung--and to this day still cling--to the hope that something changes. To wit, that the writing would propel me to achieve my original aim of reaching out to others, of connection. But connection, to paraphrase Georgia O'Keefe, "takes time, like to really see a flower takes time", and clearly I was and still am spending my time elsewhere. I live a fairly consistent life. What then are the foolish consistencies which not only occupy, but continually create, my mind?

In other words, what on earth am I doing? And not just with my physical energy, but with my mental energy, since both literally create who I am?

I shall return to this question next month. As usual it is late and I am tired. Who was it that said, the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? For now it is enough that I am and have spent the vast majority of my time and energy being a father, a husband, a doctor.

upset

In the children’s picture book Captain Small by Lois Lenski, a storm comes up as our ubiquitous hero (see also, Cowboy Small, The Little Farm, The Little Train, etc.) navigates his sailboat home. “Water washes over the bow. The boat heels and nearly upsets. But brave Captain Small brings it about and safely sails into the harbor.”

Upset. To turn upside down, to, as defined by my 1966 Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary, “overturn, throw into confusion or disorder…” Even as an adjective: “1. Tipped or turned over. 2. Mentally or physically disturbed or ill. 3. Confused; disordered; messy.” Though it’s been diluted over time to mean mostly “unhappy” or “to make unhappy”, it was helpful for me to be reminded of the original and more full intention. A sailboat in rough seas, overturned.

I am not faring as well as Captain Small right now. Nor is the small town of Omak, which I left behind only two weeks ago, and for which, upon departure, I had words that may have left some people leaving unhappy. I would rather that they were upset.

Explanations, shorter sentences, plain English for God’s sake lad! Let me try:

A year ago, LL and hadn’t planned to leave Omak this year. We have a just-turned-3-year-old and (as of a couple days ago) a 10-month-old. Moving away from a familiar home, friends, work, the walk up Ross Canyon, the scooter ride to the market, is upsetting. Our boat has turned over. We are extremely lucky to have excellent flotation devices in the form of loved ones and some time. But we’re definitely swimming. We moved into a rental with a clothes washer that doesn’t drain, a dishwasher that doesn’t exist, and a ceiling we keep bonking our heads on. Disrupted sleep routines for our boys has translated into minimal sleep for us. Felix has announced that he’s moving back to Omak. My car battery’s dead, the back door handle fell off, and the dog ran away…oh wait, we don’t have a dog. It’s hard to keep track sometimes. I can’t say we would recommend a similar move to anyone with young ones.

At the same time, as our feet begin to find solid ground, we are reminded of all the things we’re grateful for. We’re an hour away from Nana and Papa. We’re two from my sister and her family. Previously both were five. We have an Asian (and yes, it is Asian, which really means more American than were it Thai, or Japanese, or Korean, but still!) bistro, within takeout range. Curbside recycling. For that matter, we have curbsides, and sidewalks, and even a bus line that takes us right downtown to the Asian bistro.

Most importantly, we have work that we are excited to begin. Though we loved the people we worked with, we ultimately felt unsafe in our hospital. A lack of vision, leadership, and collaboration added up to accidents waiting to happen—or already happening. In a remote and rural community, people can’t afford to not work together. Upon leaving Omak, LL and I submitted a letter to the editor of the local paper, who ran it as a guest column:
http://www.omakchronicle.com/news/2015/apr/15/do-you-think-your-hospital-safe/
(sorry you have to cut and paste!)

Our new jobs are also in a rural area. We think they will be an outstanding fit in terms of our colleagues, opportunities for personal development, the mission of the clinic, and so on. The first and fundamental requirement is that it feels safe here. A huge part of that feeling of safety is that there really seems to be, both in the healthcare community and at large, a spirit of working together for the common good.

To expound on this: America has some of the worst health outcomes on the planet, especially in light of our healthcare expenditures. This fact is not surprising when one also considers that we are one of the world’s most unequal countries in terms of wealth. Not just poverty, but inequality itself, is strongly linked to poor health. Our tax structure often serves to exacerbate these inequalities, especially in rural areas. For example, schools being funded by local property taxes creates better educational opportunities in areas that are already rich. Omak is not only poor, it is also rural, so there is not the buffer of nearby pockets of wealth that cities tend to have. As is the case for education, funding for public healthcare facilities is similarly bereft. In such a setting, what one long-time resident of the area called “the stark fist of poverty”, it is essential that people work together. This is what was lacking, and correcting it is, I believe, where opportunity lies. When things are getting by—when there are small errors in safety or quality of care but no big events—when there is perhaps imperfection but not crisis—such a situation can carry on. Now there is crisis. There is upset, and sometimes upset is what it takes to change.

That is why I hope anyone who reads our article in The Omak Chronicle, and might be unhappy, is also upset. At least a little bit. Maybe upset enough to ask questions. As we stated, our intention is not to make anyone feel bad. It’s to rock and perhaps help tip over a sinking ship, so that a better one can begin to be constructed.

Gratitude

things I am grateful for:
my 9-month-old
my almost-3-year-old
the love of my whole life, LL
my friend Randall for putting up with me while teaching me guitar
all the people I've worked with here in the Okanogan
rivers especially the Salmon which is the longest un-dammed river in the lower 48 states
coconut shells which can be made into fun things
my friend LDawg who travelled all the way out here from Michigan
orcas, which are not whales but rather members of the dolphin family
coconut oil
fresh coconut water
fresh coconut meat
the joy that my almost-3-year-old takes in opening a coconut with me, and the satisfying "pop" it makes when we first break the seal
the joy that my 9-month-old takes in almost everything
hair, of which, when I was younger and would cut it myself sometimes with patchy results to say the least, I would tell my mother, "It's ok, it will always grow back" (now I know better)
watercolors
color vision
the color blue, especially the color of the sky between Cornucopia and Red Mountains when viewed from Pine Lakes
sunlight, snow, rain
Catalpa trees, mangrove trees, giant sequoias
my parents, my siblings
igloos, which are one of the many things my older brother is amazing at
having a partner who's the smartest physician I know
my hands which still have 5 fingers apiece despite the abuse I've put them through, and their ability to do things as varied as type these words, play a guitar sort of, and make forts which are almost as much fun for my boys as for me
red-tailed hawks
salmon
mangoes, raspberries, avocados, chocolate, kale, butternut squash, kabocha squash, not necessarily in that order
food in general
the amazing abundance of food that arrives daily even to far-off corners of the world like the Okanogan
the knowledge that all of this is transient, that in under a billion years the increasingly toasty sun will make the Earth completely inhospitable for life as we know it, that in fact we may do the the same to the Earth in the very near future, yet that we have hands and minds and imaginations that can still try to make things as beautiful and as sustainable as possible
the songs "Valedictorian", "I will do the breathing", and "Little Hands" by Matt the Electrician
the existence of dance
my dance teacher Chery from my first year at Wesleyan
more people than I can possibly name in a poem
waterfalls especially the one in South Africa that Paul, Richard and Miriam hiked around with me
my family in South Africa
sailing ships
the past existence of pterodactyls
sleep, time for that

I want that hour back

I realize that the hour lost to Daylight Savings can't serve as as excuse for not posting in February. That change occurred on March 8th. This brief posting isn't meant to replace the one I didn't do then, nor to serve as this month's.

Instead I'll use it to share a few links--there are a ton out there--about why DST should be done away with. Fascinating that, for instance, the main reason DST was extended to the 1st of November was to profit convenience stores, who sell more candy when trick-or-treaters have an extra hour of light in the evening. From my perspective as a family physician, one thing that is clear is that children would do better to have that extra hour of light in the morning (e.g., there are numerous studies citing better school performance with a later morning start time). It looks like a good book on the subject, as these are all just short blogs, would be Michael Downing's "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time." If anyone's read it I'd be curious to know what you thought. Cheers!









Hmmm…links not appearing to show…here they are for copying and pasting:

http://now.tufts.edu/articles/cost-daylight-saving-time

http://www.businessinsider.com/economic-and-health-effects-of-daylight-saving-time-2014-3

http://www.latinospost.com/articles/54344/20150301/daylight-savings-time-2015-when-is-it-and-why-are-lawmakers-trying-to-lose-it.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Spring-Forward-Annual-Madness-Daylight/dp/1582434956

The Deep End

It is Saturday night and I’ve just finished up at a meeting of family physicians. It takes a while to wrap up some final paperwork and goodbyes, then I wend my way through the snarl of traffic I used to call Seattle and pick up my friend Neville for dinner. Neville says that when we lived here the traffic was the 18th worst in the country. “Now it’s the 3rd,” he says.

After dinner I drive by the Central Cinema. I love the Central Cinema! Dinner, drinks and dessert—a fabulous crème Brule, if I recall—while you watch a movie. It’s here that LL and I first saw “Best Worst Movie”, a charming documentary about what truly is the best worst movie ever made, “Troll II,” and then stayed up for the namesake midnight movie. Right now they’re showing “Groundhog Day” and I’m tempted enough that I park the car to check show times. Right in the middle. Too bad. I get back in the car and drive back up 23rd, then take Boyer to cut back west again. I drive past the church where I crashed a wedding in order to meet the band that LL and I ended up asking to play at our own reception.

Everything feels eerily normal.

Everything has felt too normal, ever since reading the introductory chapter to Naomi Klein’s latest work.

In language brilliant for its clarity, Klein lays out a thesis captured by her title. “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate”. I haven’t yet read beyond the 30-page introduction. Now at LL’s parent’s house, I can see the book out of the corner of my eye. It crouches on the desk, a fire-breathing dragon cloaked under a sky-blue cover. An ocean-blue cover. A tropical ocean blue, swallowing islands, cities, and the sky.

“The International Energy Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017,” Klein writes, “our fossil fuel economy will ‘lock-in’ extremely dangerous warming. “ ‘The energy-related infracture then in place will generate all the CO2 emissions allowed’ in our carbon budget for limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius…As Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, bluntly put it: ‘The door to reach two degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will be closed forever.’ “

2017 is 23 months away. Suddenly lower gas prices don’t seem so great. Seattle’s traffic mess, even as it buries a few billion dollars in a car-only tunnel that’s already way over-budget and way under current sea level, is one piece of a rapidly sinking planet. We are headed for deep water. And that’s if we were to stop, for all intents and purposes, now.

If we instead achieve the more-likely (without drastic action) prediction of 4+ degrees Celsius by centuries end, “even the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous. …This would drown some island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much of California and the northeastern United States, as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia. Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.”

A chime. I look up. A text. My phone is pulling me back to the surface, back to the present, the normal, to a beautiful family 5 hours’ drive away on the other side of the Cascades, two beautiful boys who are asleep and a beautiful wife wanting to check in before sleep. I must go. “This Changes Everything” will have to wait. But not for long. Not for very long at all.