I passed Performance Evaluations! With a B-, at that. Man, that must have been one serious curve, because I know that’s not how the numbers added up.
One more semester!
Category: Exertion
Parasitology and Mycopathology
Reasons Not To Help A Med Student Study
- The pictures
Requisite Boring Domestic Post
There’s this black stuff on a good long strip of the caulk around my tub, where it meets the tile walls. It is considerably stronger and smarter than me, and it never goes away. The last time it got this bad, I had to call building maintenance to have them strip up the caulk and put down new stuff; it was clean for a couple weeks, and then the black stuff started growing back.
This time, not wanting to be the guy who calls maintenance for every little problem, I took Maria’s offer of assistance and tried other solutions. We bought big strong scrub brushes. We used new and stronger kinds of tub cleaner. We tried a bleach-water solution. As a penultimate resort, we bought an evil yellow jug of ammonia, the only stuff that is guaranteed by science to kill mold and mildew.
Earlier today, I filled the tub with four gallons of hot water and two cups of pure toxic irritant and attacked it for an hour. I got almost all the tub and tile bright and clean, but the black stuff, untouched, just laughed at me with its thousands of tiny mouths.
I called maintenance. Everything tastes like ammonia now.
And tomorrow nine thousand headlines will somehow use the word “curse”
When it was all said, the World Series was a technicality, a new t-shirt, something to be humored. Boston got what they wanted when Visa stopped running that “Steinbrenner’s arm” commercial twelve times a night. They got it every time The Jeter’s nostrils flared in disbelief.
Think about it: the moment Johnny Damon said “idiots,” the Boston Red Sox cast themselves in the role of every Ragtag Band Of Misfits since Centre and Harvard went 6 and 0. It would have worked even if Manny Ramirez hadn’t been a gamble, or if Curt Schilling hadn’t bled with every pitch. It would have worked even if the Yankees hadn’t been the sneering big-money boys in black hats. It would have worked even if they didn’t already look evil–has anybody else noticed that all this year’s Yankees appear to be turning into Joe Torre, with their eyes a dead yellow and an unhealthy gray under their skin?
The comeback started in the bottom of the ninth, naturally, three outs from elimination yet again. Winning four games after losing three in the postseason was, until 2004, unprecedented in baseball. Winning four games to start with was not.
There was no fire in the World Series. Nobody in St. Louis really hated Boston, they just wanted their guys to win. And to Boston, St. Louis was just an bystander–one who happened, unfortunately, to be bystanding between Boston and something really important. They didn’t slow down or detour; they pushed St. Louis out of the way. They did what they had to. You’d have done the same.
I mean, hey, it’s the Cardinals, right? Nice guys, guys you’d like if you met them in the supermarket.
“A-Rod Slaps Like A Girl” isn’t really a headline
Boston Overturned
Curt Schilling Dipped in Bronze
Game 7 Cancelled; Bodies of Sox Found Riddled by Tommy Guns
I quit my improv troupe the weekend before last. I was kind of wary about the whole thing when I joined, late last summer; it turned out that everyone in the group at the time was awesome and brilliant, and I’m glad I spent this something-over-a-year working with them. Unfortunately, almost all of the original seven have left–Greg got promoted to Project Improv, then Leesha quit, then Evan quit, then Rebecca moved to Chicago. Since then it’s really just been me, Nicole and the new kids. When I called Nicole–long the de facto troupe leader–to check on rehearsal status and she told me she’d quit, I knew it was over. As much as I enjoy our teacher Ken’s company, there was no longer any reason for me to stay.
I’ve been trying to get ahold of Ken and inform him of this, but Ken has a permanent residence the way some people have headaches. I never had any real desire to perform with the troupe, so the loss of those opportunities doesn’t impact me, but I did enjoy working with those guys; I’m more creative and funnier as a result of that work.
There’s always the tantalizing possibility of Waterfront Frisbee Wednesdays, too, if we ever get six people together for that again. That’s really the last point of contact I have with my Street Legal people, and I don’t want to lose it.
blah blah Brendan’s pet issues
I shouldn’t do things like reading this list of banned books, because it just makes me hate everything and accomplishes nothing. But still. My favorites are the parents who challenged the curriculum inclusion of books by Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis for promoting “witchcraft and demons” and “mysticism,” respectively. I don’t need to tell you how thoroughly Christian their books are, because you already know. See? Accomplishing nothing!
In other nonaccomplishment news, I’m going to wait and see about IPac. On the one hand, their statement of principles aligns with a lot of what’s important to me, politically. On the other hand, this is also true of the ACLU, and there are reasons I don’t belong to the ACLU. I know it’s only a word, but I just don’t like the designation of “political action committee.” For some reason I’m comfortable supporting the EFF and Downhill Battle in a way that I don’t associate with any PAC.
Okay, there is one thing I’ve been meaning to write about. The place where the EFF and Downhill Battle intersect is Save Betamax, a combined effort to stop S. 2560 (which used to be called the INDUCE Act) from taking away your iPod, TiVo, CD burner, Kazaa, VCR, scanner, tape deck or whatever else the RIAA and MPAA decide is “inducing” people to violate their own definition of copyright. I don’t much like political blogging, but 2560 is bad. I’m unfortunately writing too late to tell you to sign up for the call-in days (as I did), but I’m sure there will be more opportunities to help stop the bill from becoming law. There’s an enormous effort by a huge coalition of companies, groups and individual humans to keep veto power over media innovation out of Hollywood’s hands. I hope you’ll join it, and I hope it works.
“BIKE HELMETS ARE GOOD. I am now going to wear a bike helmet at all times, even in the shower and when sleeping.”
Matt from Man-Man discovers the joy of bike riding on Quebecois backcountry roads. This is why we should bomb Canada.
I live with a GIRL
Our apartment building has a two-stage entry system: you have to buzz yourself in at the lobby, or call from the special phone there and have someone else buzz you in, and then all the individual apartment doors lock automatically as well. This is relevant because I went running, today, and forgot the key and buzzer I usually lace into my shoes.
I got back and tried to call up via the lobby phone, which redirects to my cell phone; as I’ve mentioned before, however, my phone is always (always) on silent, so Maria was unaware and couldn’t buzz me in.
I went downstairs and tried the parking garage door, which also requires buzzing but had been propped open when I left. It was closed now, though. I tried the auxiliary back gate, which frequently sticks open, but not today (you may have picked up on the fact that our apartment building is not terribly secure).
Then I noticed that, about a dozen yards away, the car-sized automatic parking garage door was still open. It was about four feet off the ground and closing rapidly.
I sprinted, dove, and rolled under the door with just inches to spare. I didn’t even trip the electric safety eye. It was that close.
I related this story to Maria. “You were rolling around on the floor of the garage?” she said. “Eeww.”
Incidentally, Wario Ware is pretty great
For at least seven years, I’ve had a chronic leg pain that would only ever occur in one leg at a time (but not always the same leg), and only after a night in which I’d stayed up too late and not slept enough. It was fairly rare, never lasted more than a day, and didn’t feel like a sharp pain, so I mostly ignored it. My basic theory on it was that I had suffered some kind of stress fracture in the past; it only hurt, after all, when I was too tired for my muscles to support me properly (keep in mind here that my grasp of anatomy is fairly medieval).
I stayed up forever late the other night, playing Wario Ware Inc and Illuminati with the Tuesday Night Ballers, and yesterday I had my first recurrence of the problem since moving in with Maria in August. It was also worse than usual, probably because I’d sprinted for (and missed) the bus in the afternoon. I planned on ignoring it and treating it with sleep, as usual.
Maria, not a person who is lightly put off a train of thought, decided to treat me with forced couch rest, Advil and an insulated hot towel around my ankle–even though the pain extends through my entire calf. I humored her, and then to my surprise, her doctoring completely worked inside an hour. The pain was completely gone. It was pretty magical; I’ve never had my leg feel better so fast before. Maria is my hero!
Anyway, she says this means the problem is mostly (if not all) mild tendonitis. Interesting. I always wondered when I’d get my first chronic stress injury, but then I also figured it’d be carpal tunnel.