Kevin's Blog

Agree to Agree for Once

2010-11-17T18:08:00.006-05:00

The Co-chairs of Obama’s Deficit Commission, or the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, for those of you who aren’t into the whole brevity thing, recently announced a $3.8 trillion plan that would cut Social Security and Medicare, reduce income-tax rates, eliminate tax breaks including the mortgage-interest deduction and make many specific cuts to different discretionary budget items, including the Defense budget and the National Parks Service. More than likely you are happy about one or two of their proposals and ready to fight tooth and nail about one or two of the other. Indeed, the leftern lobe of the blogosphere has been lighting up my inbox with headlines like “They just declared war on Social Security”. And the gauntlets have also been flying from the rightermost regions, with oaths of “No new taxes!” and “No deals, Mr. ‘Bama.”

If you’re interested in reading a variety of reactions to the proposals, I recommend this article from the Times which I think helps puts some of the issues into perspective.

This is probably the third draft of this blog. The first, especially after reading the list of cuts and changes to the discretionary aspects of the budget, was fairly rah-rah. I said, hey, this is the first time in my political life that I have heard anyone make a set of serious and specific proposals to address our country’s deficit problem so we should get behind it. Then I moved on to an angry WTF-type-of-thing, especially after reading more about the proposed changes and cuts to the entitlements portion of the budget (Social Security, Medicare etc.). I was ready to decry the proposal as another right wing plot to leave the poor and disadvantaged in misery and give money to the wealthy in the hopes that it would some day trickle down. I wanted to remind everyone that in addition to the moral question of social justice, we needed to realize that spending money on people in one way (Social Security, health care, education) would mean avoiding paying even more money for them later when their sh*t really hit the fan.

But these are tough times, arguably extraordinarily tough ones even, and I think they demand some extraordinary measures. So this is third draft (third verse, different than the first). The deal is that there is no way to balance our budget and reduce the deficit through discretionary cuts alone. No way to tax or spend our way out of depression. Anyone offering a simple solution is selling snake oil. A serious solution to our problems will be difficult and complicated--two things that politicians and Americans don’t generally want to say or hear.

Every one of us is will be required to make some sacrifices and decide just what is important, not to us or to our personal interests, but for the future of our country. Not just for or our children and their children, but our neighbors’ children. So the first sacrifice that I’m asking of myself and you, is to let go of our anger and bitterness, our mistrust and ideology. Our next step is agreeing to agree, however disagreeable that may be. Let us agree that the solution to our budget deficit, even the future of our country, is going to entail change. Let us maintain a high index of suspicion for any proposal that makes it sounds like things are going to be fixed with a few small tweaks but that otherwise we will be able to keep on going in the same comfortable way we have become accustomed to. The heat is on and the windows are down, my friends, so let us agree that some serious changes will need to be made to taxes and discretionary budgets and entitlement programs if we are to survive our over 13 and a half trillion dollar debt ($13,736,876,145 right now to be exact). This is something like a debt of $125,000 per taxpayer (watch the national debt clock ticking here).

I don’t see our current legislature, or perhaps any group of people who want to get re-elected, being able to agree on something as difficult and by nature unpopular as balancing the budget and reducing our ridiculously large deficit. Unpopular, why? Okay maybe unpopular is not the right word. Indeed, the idea seems eminently popular. What people don’t seem to like is any of this stuff affecting them, right? And that’s the problem, as soon as we start discussing these proposals, anyone who is or might be affected by any of them are not going to be happy and will start calling their congresspeoples and local radio talk shows. And the result will be a humpty-dumpty collection of disputed and in the end muted proposals that the legislature will never be able to piece back together again into a comprehensive package. So here’s the silver lining, a 14-vote Commission majority on a deficit reduction plan would require Congress to vote on the package unchanged. Still not easy, but at least fathomable. So all we have to do is get this bipartisan commission to agree, just 14 people, not 100 senators and 435 congresspeoples.

It seems clear to me then, and I hope to you, that our best way out of this mess is to throw everything we’ve got, we the people, into making sure this Commission comes up with the best proposal it can be, however much wrangling it takes, and that at least 14 of the 18 members agree to it. Let’s agree that it’s going to be difficult and that nobody will be really happy with it (sound like health care reform yet?), but that we’ve just to got to do it. Maybe it won’t be exactly the right mix of cuts and changes, and more than likely we will have to make some more cuts or go back and change some things that turn out to suck, but now is the time to roll up our sleeves and get stuck in there. It’s going to be a Pyrrhic victory, so let’s put on our Greek gloves and take out some budgetary trash.

What I’m asking you to do is throw away your ideology, not your morality or intelligence or compassion, just your ideology. I won’t push this part, but if you can muster it, send out some New Agey, 100th Monkey-ey type positive vibrations that things are going to change for the better, that a compromise can and will be reached. Finally, and this is important, send the debt commission and your national representatives a message telling them exactly what your priorities are in terms of budget cuts and changes, starting with your number one priority, which is that some intelligent, compassionate and serious changes and cuts must be made. You can contact the commission by email (commission@fc.eop.gov) or visit their website. Here is a website Congress.org that allows you to email your representatives, and your local or national media (you have to register first, then look for the links under 'Advocacy 101' on the right side of the page).

Here is what I’m planning on sending:
Dear Deficit Commission,

I beg of you to work hard over these next few weeks to come up with a proposal that you can agree upon and that entails intelligent, compassionate and serious changes to our national budget. Business as usual is no longer an option with a $13.7 trillion deficit, economic depression and another energy crisis around the corner. Not to mention our crumbling infrastructure and lagging educational system. There is no choice but success.

I believe you should focus on cuts to those parts of the budget that are most contributing to our national debt: Defense, Medicare and Social Security.

I’ll start with the hardest job, cutting some little old lady’s retirement benefits. All I can say is that for some people, the difference between getting their Social Security check or not is the difference between having proper food and shelter, and if they can’t afford these most basic of necessities than we are going to have to pay for more food stamps and shelters for them anyway and no money will end up being saved. So please cut carefully. Maybe you can create one retirement age for the white collar who can more easily work at age 70 and another for blue collar workers who aren't likely to be able to lift those garbage cans or crates at that age.

Regarding Defense, we have the most expensive military in the world by a factor of several countries put together. Nothing wrong with having the best, but it should not cost what several other G8 countries put together are paying. Let's get lean and mean. Do we need nukes? Do we need as many subs? Do we need? Do we need? How many megaton bombs and super intercontinental missiles do we currently need or use? Or have we ever used? Cuts should be made based on defense items we actually use and those that we might use in the future (intelligence, so-called “smart” bombs and troops on the ground type stuff). Get in there and cut the rest. Look at how Southwest Airlines saved money: one multipurpose fleet of planes, needing only one set of parts and training. Do we really need F-15s, F-16s and F-35s? Indeed, I’m happy to see some of this addressed in your CoChair report. I urge you to go further.

Next up, the nukes. I think it should be called nuclear encouragement rather than deterrence, because that’s what it seem to be doing, encouraging other countries to build bombs. Have all our nuclear bombs stopped the terrorists from attacking us or anyone else? It would seem not. Do any of our military conflicts present or future look like they will be stopped by the threat of dropping the big one? I think not. So cut away.

Regarding Medicare, decisions need to be made about costly interventions like dialysis (the single biggest drain on the system), organ transplants, end-of-life ICU all out wars against dignity and reality, and expensive new prescription drugs. Any medical device, drug or intervention that has not been proven more effective, and not just marginally more so, in head to head controlled trials than a generic, traditional or lower cost alternative should not be covered by Medicare, or covered at a reduced percentage. And those that are more effective need much tighter protocols on when they are to be used.

Let’s not mess around with the little stuff like PBS and the National Parks. The reason our country is bankrupt has nothing to do with PBS or the parks, and if even it did, their budgets just aren’t big enough to make a dent in the deficits we are now facing.

Taxes, nobody likes to pay them, but the truth is some people can afford to pay more than others. I believe in a much simpler and progressive tax structure. I think it’s clear that budget cuts and freezes alone are not going to do it. If the Commission’s proposal is to have any chance of getting the 14 votes it needs to pass and without which there is little hope of it being approved by Congress in any form likely to do much good, it will have to be bipartisan, meaning more revenue AND less spending. However distasteful to the right or left, revenue will have to be raised. Please keep all taxes and revenue progressive. People or businesses making more money should pay more money as a percentage of their income than those making less. This does not preclude the value or necessity of incentives to our economy and the direction of our growth. Encouraging behaviors through complicated tax loopholes is a game that only those who can afford a CPA can play. Let’s keep it simple. A progressive tax structure with simple and easily applied incentives for behaviors we want to encourage (saving money, education, science, research, small business investment, whatever). When I lived in France I was able to fill out my taxes online in about an hour and still benefited from savings incentives, housing aid etc. The incentives don't have to involve arcane and Gordian knots and loopholes. Simple and progressive.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Kevin Lapin
A concerned and voting citizen

"Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish"... aka Get Stuck in There!

2010-05-15T13:15:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, to my complete surprise, I was taking care of 6 patients as a nurse on a medical-surgical floor. Even just a few weeks before, when this final clinical internship was beginning, I thought I would never, ever be able to do this job. Looking back, I see how the dots connect, from classes, to first fumbling attempts to take a blood pressure, to taking care of 1 patient, then 2, then 4...

That was yesterday. A little over a year before, I was applying to nurse practitioner programs with this idea that I loved theater, but wanted to do more (more challenging, more learning, more rewarding) with the rest of my time. So I took a few classes online and applied to Columbia (see "Poison Ivy League Here I Come").

Before applying, I did some volunteering in the hospital to be sure that the whole medical field thing was what I really wanted to do (and, to be honest, to make my application look better). In a weird circular connection of these little dots that make up the course of one's life, I remember watching two brand new Columbia students fumbling with their sphygmomanometer (blood pressure machine) in the hallway, encouraging each other that it would be okay and trying to build up the nerve to walk into a patient's room. And darned if a year later I wasn't standing on that very same unit, wearing the same navy blue scrubs, knees knocking, wondering if I was going to be able to get that BP reading.

Randomly, I remember another Columbia student that I ran into telling me that school was a lot of work and that there was really more reading than you could do, unless you were in your 30's and didn't have a life. And yes, I think she meant that 'and' in its full tautological or redundant sense, as in if you are in your 30's it's implied that you don't have a life so therefore you would have time to read it all.

Step back a few more years and now it's 2005. I've moved back to Paris, graduated from a bizarre little theater school known for physical theater and collaborative creations and am touring around France performing a two-person comedy about math, called "Mad Maths". Looking back another 10 years to 1995 and I'm graduating Dartmouth College with a degree in French literature and education. I'm thinking I'll take a few years then go back to school to become a professor. The connection to what actually happened is tenuous, especially considering the detour via Amazon.com and Slough, but it's there. Looking forward, the idea of leaving Paris for New York could be predicted, but who'd have imagined I would be a paper-thin diploma away from becoming an RN and another year or two down the road to becoming a nurse practitioner (it's definitely an uphill road)? Nothing can be as fantastical and unbelievable sometimes as life. If it were a play, we might reject it as a little too unrealistic. But then, here we be.

It's these little dots that we somehow blindly connect to make a life out of life. My dad always said that "hindsight is 20/20" and that "it's better to be lucky than good". So true. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, would often describe the process as "a sprint and a marathon". Correct again. He also, frustratingly, described the first several years of work as "Day 1". More to the point, he described his approach to life as "a regret minimization framework", which is to say he would try and make decisions in the now that would most probably reduce the chance of regretting things (done or not) later. Poker players and business types might add that you if you are not losing some hands and falling on your face once in a while then you are not taking enough risks. You've got to be in it to win it, right? An "old soul" friend of mine created a mantra once that helps temper this advice by explaining that there are, "So many ways to become number one. So many ways to become number one". My signature block says, "Appreciate beauty in all it's forms" and "Get stuck in there!" And aren't these all different ways of saying the same thing? It's all of a peace. It's all one. And if you are a religious, or scientific, type, you believe that it's not only all one, but that it's already been written. Maktub and Amen.

I want to end this moment of reflection, this graduation of thought, with a superlative address given at Stanford University in 2005. It was given at a time when, if you remember, I was blithely and blindly following my path with heart in France. When I was about two or three thousand miles from a medical-surgical floor of a hospital in New York and would never have guessed that each step would somehow lead me here (or is it there?) to today. The speech is from Steve Jobs, a college dropout whose path to the giving the keynote address at one of the most prestigious places of learning in the country seems equally as improbable and beautiful. Here is what he said:

"Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much." --Quoted from Free Republic

How the internet and a little ingenuity saved my life!

2010-04-03T16:44:00.008-04:00

Okay it didn't save my life, but it did save a bundle of money and calories... On the heels of our recent magic bullet blow-up, juicer-gate, Kevin Trudeau's Ultra Mega Memory (or what is Super Mega Memory) tapes, and a closet full of exercise implements that would make the Marquis de Sade blush--all As Seen On TV, or more appropriately as seen on late night TV when your faculties of reason and discernment are half-asleep--I am happy to announce a small victory against this dastardly tide of gadgets. With a little ingenuity, and paradoxically the Internet, I managed to turn back the clock in our kitchen to cooking 1.0. And I saved us about $200 in the process. Johnny, I know you'll dig this part the most, but for the rest of you read on for a fabulous tip on how to clean your own super-mega magic thing...

Allow me to introduce, the blender. Yes, that modern yet retro, that sleek yet 70's item that you probably have stashed in a closet since your wedding or since you replaced it with some newer and much more expensive culinary gadget that promised it would do away with all the other gadgets that came before it and that was touted as what the French call "le must de la cuisine".

Well I'm happy to report that I just talked Debbie down from her Magic Bullet, Health Master, Vita-Mix infomercial buying mania with a simple, yet elegant steel and glass blender by Oster (imaged here) and the power of a little thing we call the scientific process. Here's how I did it:

1) Leave the product's flashy website and flash video demonstrations (though this is where I did get that cleaning tip I'll tell you about in a second) and go to a reputable resource like ConsumerReports.org or ConsumerSearch.com. Read a few reviews about the different products. Concentrate on the negatives.

2) Drop a carrot, an onion, a few stalks of broccoli and some water in the blender you have and see how good of a purée it makes. Add salt and pepper to taste and heat.*

3) Drop a banana, a couple clementines, a dollop of yogurt, a few ice cubes and some water in the blender and see how good of a smoothie it makes.

4) Review your recent bank statements and see whether spending $300-400 on a super blender makes sense.

5) Buy a $5 Good Housekeeping blender recipe book used from Amazon promising over 150 sensational recipes on soups, appetizers, smoothies, baby food and more.

6) Do a little victory dance as the ineluctable power of your demonstration sets in.**

* If you try this, you'll understand the need for #5.
** You may want to skip this for the sake of better relations.

I have to admit that I got a bit lucky because it just so happens that way back in the early 21st century when I bought my blender at Target I grabbed the stainless steal and glass pitcher one by Oster, more because I thought it looked good than, as it turns out, because it was recommended as one of the best. The point is, these blenders go for about $60. With depreciation, the recipe book and avoiding buying one of those other gizmos, I reckon we saved well over $200 with our little admittedly pseudo-scientific experiment.

So what's in it for you? Those of you who have already shilled out for some other gizmo? Those for whom it is too late to benefit from our experience and sage advice? Well, here is a great little tip to make cleaning your own personal blenderizer thingy "simple comme bonjour": after you blend, do a quick rinse then add warm water and dish soap and blend that for a few seconds. Can't you just see and feel the potentially lost years of your life just anti-oxidizing away?

By the way, no need to send me a thank you card as there is no address down here in Margaritaville where we will soon be wasting away... from all the calories and money we save of course!

What I did for my Birthday...

2010-03-25T19:37:00.000-04:00

Time 2 Rn

2010-03-24T22:16:00.010-04:00

10pm and I'm still @ the hospital. This is s/p day 2 working w/ a nurse. Also approx. day 5 of juice fast b/c of prolonged ↑ dietary intake. Calculation approx. r/t friend in NYC last pm → a macrobiotic meal. Thankfully, all Pts remain stable through hand-off to night shift. Log entry: "Subject woke at 5:45am today. Reports feeling like he has been sprinting since."

In keeping with the MD lexicon, I will say that my preceptor is +++, though she is d/c'ing me for a week to go to Haiti. As if they need her help more than I do (kidding!). She started me right away caring for 3.0 patients, top to bottom and side-to-side. I feel a little scared/nervous and overwhelmed just about every second from when we take report at 8am to when we give report to the night shift at 8pm. Lunch lasted about 20', during which time I was not scared.

Something about the patients, the pace of work and frenetic action makes it almost impossible to feel hungry or tired, or sorry for yourself. In fact, working in health care generally makes you content with simple things like your health, a good meal, a good shower, a good hug, a bit of sunshine, and being able to pass a good BM in the peace and quiet of your own home (ideally with a book or magazine if you are a true Lapin).

Time management is key. Knowledge is helpful, particularly where it involves not making a mistake (or not catching someone else's) that will cause Pt. sequella. Unfortunately, the demands of documentation and Rx mean that there is almost 0 time for much of what traditionally might be considered nursing. The whole caring, advocating and helping people thing. The chronophagistic (chronophagal?) aspect also makes it hard sometimes to do things like go to the bathroom, look up new information, call your sweetheart etc. You know, that type of thing. Or to paraphrase Woody Allen's "Irish Genius" remember to rejoice, rejoice and call your mother once in a while.

My dad actually warned me about not letting medicine suck me in so far that I lose sight of the rest of life. Case in point, I'm here at 10:16pm, doing a Hx and Pe on a Pt and collecting info on him for a case presentation at school. As for real life, tomorrow is my birthday and I have big plans with Debbie. I am also desperately trying to fit a new play, PT, friends, NCLEX, a job hunt and maybe a trip to South Korea in as well. Oh my, time 2 Rn...!

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

2010-02-11T10:53:00.006-05:00

The game is truly afoot, dear friends, and with just a couple weeks until the "Health Care Summit" on February 25, I urge you dishonour not your mothers, follow your spirit and upon this charge cry 'Give us substantive health care reform!'

The breach that needs filling today is not the gap in the wall of Hafleur but the gap in health care access, cost and quality. What I'm asking you is über-simple: contact your state representatives and the media and show them your mettle. One website allows you to do both with a couple clicks and you can use the following letter as you see fit, or compose your own, to tell them just what you want them to do.

THE LINK
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/health-care-action-center/?source=20100209_ms_launch

THE LETTER
I am writing to you as a member of [INSERT YOUR COMPANY or ORGANIZATION NAME] because today offers a special opportunity to make history through the passage of substantive and intelligent health care reform. We believe that today we have come too far to turn back and that many lives, not just elections, will be lost if we do not make changes to the way health care is accessed, paid for, regulated and researched in our country. The stakes may never have been higher.

We believe in giving the best evidenced-based medical care that money can buy, and giving it so that it helps the greatest number of people. We believe in a fair and compassionately regulated system that guarantees every member of our society a minimum level of care and services while still encouraging the best that innovation and research has to offer.

In short, we believe in the following fundamental areas of reform and we believe that a majority of rational and compassionate Americans like us would agree to their necessity:

• Prevention… we believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and costs less too. We need to support and expand primary care, preventative care as well as community-based and home-based care.

• Research… providers need to be free to do what is best for the patients that they know best, but they deserve to have the best guidelines, protocols and clinical research possible to help guide them in their decisions. We support Evidenced Based Medicine which means more high quality and unbiased comparative trials and research. More longitudinal meta-anayses. More safety studies. This is a job for someone like the NIH, not drug companies or groups that have vested interests.

• Choice… people should be able to choose their doctor and should have at least several insurance plans available to them. This is not the case in many areas of the country or with many employers, which is why we advocate for public options and national exchanges where individuals and groups can shop for insurance plans in a regulated and fair market.

• Cost… there will always be a finite amount of resources. The question is how they are allocated. These decisions should not be driven by profit, but from a public health perspective of what will do the most good for the most number of people. Currently there are insurance companies telling providers what they can and cannot do, we believe these decisions would be better made by public health officials. We also need out of pocket caps for policyholders because there is no point in having insurance if you can go bankrupt when something goes wrong. Finally, we need to lift the yearly caps for insurance companies because there is also no point in getting chemotherapy for cancer only to die of a cold because you passed your yearly limit.

• Accountability… taking care of people is a serious responsibility and all aspects of the system need to be held accountable. Nevertheless, punitive malpractice suits may not be the best way to do this. We need to put an end to defensive medicine by reforming malpractice law. National oversight and regulation of hospitals, payers and providers is a better way to enforce policy, set best practices and create accountability.

• Access… the best health care in the world is all for naught if there is not adequate access to it. This means starting with giving access to the millions of uninsured, but it also means guaranteeing proper access to the basics of a healthy lifestyle: fresh fruits and vegetables, clean air and water, reproductive services, and education about age appropriate diet and exercise.

Because we hold these ideas to be vital to the very survival of our health care system, economy and moral fiber as a nation, we urge you to take action now!

We urge you to pass a substantive, intelligent and compassionate health care reform package that includes the fundamental issues described above.

Respectfully yours,
A concerned and voting citizen

Ethiopia 2009--super Gobez!

2010-02-02T20:17:00.031-05:00

Debbie and I are going to spend the holidays warming up under the African sun, or at least that's the plan. This is also my "meet the parents" trip. No pressure, but Debbie's high-school friends used to call her dad "the General". I've already met several of Debbie's aunts and cousins here in the city and I'm hoping that their preliminary reports will have helped laid the ground work for the coming encounter. Debbie has not been helping things by telling me about all the things I should watch out for in terms of etiquette, like standing up when her parents enter the room, not talking with my hands in my pockets, not licking my fingers, and how elders from the village might spit on us as a sign of respect--and this is exactly what happens to Debbie when she is getting her personal blessing after St. Gabriel's, though the man spits towards her hands that he is holding rather than on her head or face...

But let's start at the beginning, our trip really begins in the Dulles airport where we are stuck for over three 3 hours. We’ve already avoided a blizzard in New York and this delay makes a long trip seem even more punitive. It’s funny because as we were walking through the terminal we overheard a boarding announcement explaining that the airport is really busy so the flight to Cancun would be using a temporary boarding gate. We find, however, our Ethiopian Airlines flight at the far end of the terminal all alone with several empty gates around it. It’s almost as if it has been quarantined here so other flights or airlines can go about their on-time business without being affected. As these things go, there is no clear reason why we are not boarding the plane that is sitting right there. At one point they announce we are waiting for “the boarding agent to bring a document” which could mean anything or nothing, then later they claim we are delayed due to the weather. The runways are clear, however, and the flight to Cancun is long gone, so go figure. The pilots and crew do not seem phased and sit in a cluster chatting or napping in the corner. We are still in DC, but somehow we are already on African time.

Speaking of African time, Debbie has always had her own sense of tardiness. She is never late for court, but misses our fourth or fifth date because she was taking a three-hour shower. It's what I call DST (Debbie Standard Time) or what Polly Platt might call quark-chronics. Here in Ethiopia, things definitely move at their own pace. When we wake up at 3:30 pm (yeah that's right, I said it) it is actually 9:30 pm Habesha or Ethiopian time. So if you ask someone when they are coming over to fix the plumbing, for example, you may need to clarify whether you are talking about Habesha or Ferengi time--not that it means they will arrive à l'heure, of course.

One explanation for why Ethiopia has it's own clock is that because it is so close to the equator, days are generally 12 hours all year round (and nights as well), so Ethiopians got into the habit of counting the hours from sun up to sun down, which is about 6 hours different from what the folks in Greenwich would have you believe (sometimes six hours less, sometimes more). There are also 13 months in the Ethiopian calendar year and a difference of about 7 or 8 years in the date, depending on whether you arrive before or after the Ethiopian New Year in September. This embassy webpage provides a good explanation of it all and how it came about.

When you talk about Ethiopia, Western people often think of two things: famine and coffee. True besides coffee exports, the Ethiopian economy is based heavily on subsistence agriculture which makes it vulnerable to crop failure and famine, but in spite of this, or perhaps because of this, Ethiopian culture practically revolves around eating. It is considered almost insulting, for example, to go to someone’s house and not eat seconds or even thirds. I’ve learned this the hard way as Debbie’s aunt locks eyes with me and then slowly extends a finger back towards the buffet table. Blurp. The trick is to start low and go slow. Don’t put too much on your plate, eat slowly and always have something on there. Because an empty plate is apparently a sign for give me another large helping in the Horn of Africa.

The story I love the best about Debbie’s mom, who is definitely one of the kindest, sweetest women on earth, involves her passing me the bread basket one night. This was about day 8 or 10 of the trip and I have just gotten over being sick. I’m almost grateful for my flu, however, because I haven’t eaten anything for like 24-hours and my stomach is no longer feeling like a packed canon. I’m trying to reach for a small piece of bread but somehow the basket keeps moving and my hands find themselves over the biggest piece in the basket. When I finally realize what is going on, I look up to see Debbie’s mom with a huge smile on her face. So sweet.

Ethiopian food is definitely delicious, and fun to eat too! Ethiopians love meat, but they also have a lot of vegetarian options. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church prescribes fasting, eating vegetarian, twice a week as well as for extended periods around Christmas and Easter. What makes Ethiopian dining really fun is that you get to eat with your hands. The idea is to use the flat crêpe-like bread called injera to gather up a mixture of stuff without getting any on your fingers (thus the proscription against licking one's fingers).

The meat in Ethiopia is also worth mentioning. I think it has something to do with its local and non-industrialized raising and processing. Whatever it is, it’s really flavorful and delicious. This wonderful meat experience is called tibs (pronounced with a sort of retroflex ‘t’). Basically, it’s a large side of raw beef (it’s really cow or carcass still at this point) hanging behind a counter that you have the guy slice for you. They take away the kilograms that you order and return with a plate full of steaming fajita-like tibs that you can dip in spicy mustard or berberé sauce. It melts in your mouth. In fact it was so good, we went back again the next night (see the video for more tibs action).

Another unique thing about Ethiopian cuisine is the butter. When I first visited Ethiopia, my friend’s host family showed me these huge blocks of butter and explained how they got them from their hometown outside the capital and how they would store in the cupboard for months or years. That doesn’t sound good, I thought, but I was wrong, because the butter is clarified, like ghee from India, so it really doesn’t spoil because the organic fats have been removed during the clarification process.

One of my favorite Ethiopian traditions around eating is what’s called a gursha. A gursha is when you grab a bunch of tibs or wet-ever (wet or sometimes wot is another yummy dish so that’s a transliteration pun) and then feed it to your guest or loved one. It’s very sensual and very fun. Kind of like when the bride and groom feed each other the cake at the wedding, except Ethiopians do it all the time.

The final thing that has to be discussed is Ethiopian coffee. Ethiopian coffee beans are excellent (much like their Kenyan neighbors) and can be found all over the world, thanks for better or for worse to places like Starbucks. In Ethiopia, coffee is call buna and is often served as part of a ceremony that involves roasting, grinding and infusing the beans right there in front of you. As you drink it, frankincense is usually burnt giving the whole experience a magical air.

As I said before, we are a bit surprised with the weather during the trip, with bouts of rain and average temperatures below the usual 70s. Addis is at 7-8 thousand feet of altitude so one expects it to be cold at night. On several occasions, we light a fire in the living room and practice some traditional dancing--which involves a lot of shoulder action. I realize I look like a chicken on the video, but you’ll get the idea from watching the others.

Christmas is approaching and we are having some trouble finding an appropriate tree because 1) pine is not part of Ethiopia's native flora and 2) it is currently illegal to cut any trees down. This means we have to choose between a potted tree from the plant nursery--which contrary to what you might think has an incredible selection of flowers and plants, just not pine trees--or a fake one. We end up getting both, but the branches of the tree won’t hold the decorations so it will have to wait until next year. What a great idea, making it illegal to cut down trees like this. Why shouldn't everyone have a live tree for Christmas? It would be less of a fire hazard and much better for the ozone. After Christmas it could be a tradition to go out into the woods (or your backyard) and replant the tree, or you could just keep watering it until next year. Okay, I realize that the whole root thing would make it well nigh impossible to have a large tree, but maybe a few could still be cut down for municipal displays or the Rockefeller center type thing. I’m just thinking out loud here…

We are having our big Turkey and stuffing meal today, the day after Christmas. Mostly because yesterday was Friday, a fasting day. So we will be opening our gifts and celebrating today. Much like other Orthodox churches, the ceremonies here are quite long and elaborate. For the most part they are conducted in a language called Ge’ez which is an even more ancient language than Amharic and more directly related to the country’s coptic origins. Women, I am told, are not supposed to attend services if they are menstruating, and apparently when she was young ,Debbie was able to use this excuse at any old time of the month to get out of going to church and the men were none the wiser. These things do remain a mystery to most of us men, don’t they?

After Christmas we spend several days in Woliso, where Debbie's father was born. It’s about 60 km west of Addis. A small town with a church her father built in honor of his father who was a famous General under Haile Sellasie. In fact, when the Emperor was overthrown, Debbie’s family, like many in Ethiopia, had to flee the country for fear of retributions. This is why Debbie was born and raised in Rome. Her family still owns property in Woliso. The land and farmhouse go back several generations. Debbie’s uncle lives there and is turning the land into a proper farm with honey, apples, teff (the grain that is used to make injera), and of course tej which is a meady, honey-beer like drink that many households brew out back as it were. The stuff will put you down if you can keep it down, is all I’m going to say on that topic.

The 27th is Saint Gabriel’s, a big holiday in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and people come from kilometers around to chant and pray all night long and most of the day. The prayers are broadcast over speakers so the huge crowd that gathers around the church and that can't fit inside can participate too. It's a really beautiful moment and we don't want to leave. Several priests and the bishop, head of the local diocese, come over to the farmhouse after the ceremonies to break their fast with us. It’s a huge feast and celebration--you really have to watch the video to see what I mean. It is very interesting being in such a big crowd and being the only white person. Especially in a small town/village like Woliso, it makes you something of a spectacle--kind of like being Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie for the day. You either get used to the staring (and sometimes pointing and touching), or you don’t. Every aspiring actor should give it a try.

There is also a village elder, who is something like 98 or 100 years old, who gives Debbie and her brother Gulu a personal blessing (this is when the spitting happens). The elder and priests mostly speak in Orominia (the local language of the Oromo region), and the translation of the blessing seems a little short compared to the length of the speech but apparently breaks down to telling Debbie and her brother that they should get married and have kids, by next year if possible!

It’s New Years now and we spend the countdown flipping between the French and Italian TV stations, both of which are airing their traditional réveillon galas. One features three 8 year-old kids covering bad Euro-pop songs and soccer highlights from several seasons back, the other decides to cut to a sponsor's logo with 30 seconds left in the countdown and spends half the time promoting the guest commentators' latest albums and tours. Thank god for the Champagne and Pandoro or I would be worried about Europe. 2010, woohoo...!

Stand Up, Speak Out!

2009-09-11T17:47:00.007-04:00

It's shocking how obedient we are sometimes. Maybe it comes from our distant evolutionary past where it paid to stay with the herd, follow the alpha male, lest a mountain lion drop out of a tree and gobble you up. If you've had the occasion to observe a 'pack' of 7th graders roaming your local subway system or mall, then you might think it's not such a distant genetic influence I'm talking about.

Maybe we should blame our kindergarten teachers for doing such a good job of socializing us, imposing all those rules that we learned to obediently follow like sit up straight, don't fidget, don't talk out of turn and most of all the teacher is always right and you have to do what they say.

In John Holt's classic book How Children Fail, he observes elementary children and classrooms with piercing clarity, reminding us how scary school, not to be confused with education, was (or is) for most of us and how so much of what passes for teaching is really anathema to our natural curiosity and affinity for learning--especially as young children. In a telling example, Holt explains how he would talk to kids and ask them questions like what do you want to be when you grow up? Another question he would always ask was who thinks they have a good imagination? When he asked this question to a preschool or kindegarten class all the children would raise their hands and often yelp or bounce around to let him know, hey yes, over here, look at me, I've got one, I've got one! In first grade, he continues, maybe 3/4 or 1/2 the class would raise their hands. And by second grade, only a handful and timid few would raise their hands. School had either killed their curiosity and imagination or made them too self-conscious and scared to admit they had any.

And that's just it, either way the ship is sort of sunk. And things don't get much better when we grow up to be big strong adults either. We mostly still fear being different, changing going against the grain, against the herd. We're sheepish that society or the person sitting across from us on the subway will point to us and say, "that's baaaaaaaaaaaad."

It's shocking really how few people will stand up and say something in the face of racist, sexist, fascist, mean or just plain stupid words and deeds. We hope that we will be different when the time comes for true heroism, running into a burning tower, hiding a fugitive Anne Frank, but we mostly don't sweat the small stuff, right? And the problem is, to paraphrase the popular self-help book, at the end of the day, or a life, it has all ended up being small stuff. Minor affronts that slowly shred the fiber of our society through the death of a thousand cuts. Of course there will always be a brave or foolhardy few, but most of us will obediently press the button when we are told even when the results are cruelly and clearly splayed out in front of us.

I'm talking, of course, about a study that was somewhat unscrupulously carried out to study man (and woman's) violent and dangerous obedience to authority. It's called the Milgram Study. Basically, researchers told recruited volunteers that they were going to partake in a study of learning and memory. Each subject was told that they had to teach a student and to punish their errors by administering increasing levels of electric shocks. The "student" was a confederate of the researchers who pretended to be a poor learner and mimicked pain and even unconsciousness as the subjects increased the levels of electric shock. An incredible (or maybe not so incredible) 63% of the subjects went as far administering shocks marked as "lethal"; some even after the "student" claimed to have heart disease.

Now we may not be the most proactive of species, in terms of standing up and speaking out about oppression, injustice and the like, but we are a repentant lot. Apparently some of the test subjects experienced serious emotional crises after being "debriefed" from the study. Yes, we love our fallen angels who sob their apologies and weakness from the pulpit of their sins. It's an interesting evolutionary trait, actually. What evolutionary advantage does remorse confer on an individual?

I suppose nothing if we don't learn from our mistakes. And as John Holt so clearly explains, we don't learn well when we are scared. We tend to just shut up, play dumb, or just go along with the group hoping nobody notices us.

So here's a plug for standing up, speaking out, being noticed and not being afraid to speak our minds. Post your comments below, or better yet, click here and tell your congressional representative!

Your representative is waiting for your call

2009-08-18T12:07:00.006-04:00

Do not give up on serious health care reform. Your senators and representatives are waiting, begging even to hear from you before Congress reconvenes. Many of their jobs may rightly depend on how they vote, so they need to know what you want them to do. I just made three calls to voice my support (particularly for saving the public plan) and it took about 5 minutes. Here is a link that will help you call and/or email (calling is better) the president, your senators and your local representatives: http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Everyone needs and deserves basic health care coverage, prevention and education. The physical, spiritual and economic health of our country depends on it.

Doctor's and patients need access to unbiased research and information comparing treatment options and pharmaceuticals. This is a job for someone like the NIH, not drug companies or insurance companies or politically appointees who have vested interests.

Drug rationing already exists so let's not fear it. Doctors and patients are told everyday by insurance companies what they can and cannot do. What we are talking about is taking the rationing out of the hands of people who have a financial incentive to order more or less tests--often doctors and hospitals in the first case and insurance companies in the latter. Whatever the system, here or in Canada, socialized, nationalized or just plain old Americanized, people with money (like you?) will always be able to afford paying for the doctor, procedure or drug that you want or believe you need, so let's not ruin it for all the people who can't afford to pay and currently get what my Dad calls "bupkiss".

Dying with dignity, in comfort and without a bankrupting ICU bill is a right that we should all be encouraged to exercise. It's very personal, but if you do not have a health care proxy, living will, DNR etc., then the hospital will be making the decisions for you--which will involve putting you on every machine and ventilator known to man whether there is any hope of recovery or not and regardless of how uncomfortable it may be. Not being able to speak or move and living in an ICU with an artificial respirator is both painful and expensive. There are times where it could save your life, but there are times where it cannot, and only prolongs it, assuming you consider that a life. These are the situations where you need a living will or health care proxy to help you have the end of life that you want. This isn't death camps, but it does involve taking some time to consider these important end of life decisions and then making them known to your family and physicians. Here is a simple website that can help you create a health care proxy or living will: http://www.doyourproxy.org/

A co-op is not a reliable alternative to a public health option. This New York Times article does a great job of describing the potential risks and benefits of co-ops: http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/so-whats-a-health-insurance-coop-anyway/?ref=health

Finally...

7 Reasons We Need Health Insurance Reform Now

1. Coverage Denied to Millions: A recent national survey estimated that 12.6 million non-elderly adults – 36 percent of those who tried to purchase health insurance directly from an insurance company in the individual insurance market – were in fact discriminated against because of a pre-existing condition in the previous three years or dropped from coverage when they became seriously ill. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/denied_coverage/index.html

2. Less Care for More Costs: With each passing year, Americans are paying more for health care coverage. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have nearly doubled since 2000, a rate three times faster than wages. In 2008, the average premium for a family plan purchased through an employer was $12,680, nearly the annual earnings of a full-time minimum wage job. Americans pay more than ever for health insurance, but get less coverage. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/hiddencosts/index.html

3. Hard Times in the Heartland: Throughout rural America, there are nearly 50 million people who face challenges in accessing health care. The past several decades have consistently shown higher rates of poverty, mortality, uninsurance, and limited access to a primary health care provider in rural areas. With the recent economic downturn, there is potential for an increase in many of the health disparities and access concerns that are already elevated in rural communities. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/hardtimes

4. Small Businesses Struggle to Provide Health Coverage: Nearly one-third of the uninsured – 13 million people – are employees of firms with less than 100 workers. From 2000 to 2007, the proportion of non-elderly Americans covered by employer-based health insurance fell from 66% to 61%. Much of this decline stems from small business. The percentage of small businesses offering coverage dropped from 68% to 59%, while large firms held stable at 99%. About a third of such workers in firms with fewer than 50 employees obtain insurance through a spouse. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/helpbottomline

5. The Tragedies are Personal: Half of all personal bankruptcies are at least partly the result of medical expenses. The typical elderly couple may have to save nearly $300,000 to pay for health costs not covered by Medicare alone. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/inaction

6. Diminishing Access to Care: From 2000 to 2007, the proportion of non-elderly Americans covered by employer-based health insurance fell from 66% to 61%. An estimated 87 million people - one in every three Americans under the age of 65 - were uninsured at some point in 2007 and 2008. More than 80% of the uninsured are in working families. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/inaction/diminishing/index.html

7. The Trends are Troubling: Without reform, health care costs will continue to skyrocket unabated, putting unbearable strain on families, businesses, and state and federal government budgets. Perhaps the most visible sign of the need for health care reform is the 46 million Americans currently without health insurance - projections suggest that this number will rise to about 72 million in 2040 in the absence of reform. Learn more: http://www.WhiteHouse.gov/assets/documents/CEA_Health_Care_Report.pdf

Dave Barry: a journey into my colon--and yours!

2009-08-18T10:53:00.006-04:00

OK. You turned 50. You know you're supposed to get a colonoscopy. But you haven't. Here are your reasons:

1. You've been busy.
2. You don't have a history of cancer in your family.
3. You haven't noticed any problems.
4. You don't want a doctor to stick a tube 17,000 feet up your butt.

Let's examine these reasons one at a time. No, wait, let's not. Because you and I both know that the only real reason is No. 4. This is natural. The idea of having another human, even a medical human, becoming deeply involved in what is technically known as your 'behindular zone' gives you the creeping willies.

I know this because I am like you, except worse. I yield to nobody in the field of being a pathetic weenie medical coward. I become faint and nauseous during even very minor medical procedures, such as making an appointment by phone. It's much worse when I come into physical contact with the medical profession. More than one doctor's office has a dent in the floor caused by my forehead striking it seconds after I got a shot.

In 1997, when I turned 50, everybody told me I should get a colonoscopy. I agreed that I definitely should, but not right away. By following this policy, I reached age 55 without having had a colonoscopy. Then I did something so pathetic and embarrassing that I am frankly ashamed to tell you about it.

What happened was, a giant 40-foot replica of a human colon came to Miami Beach. Really. It's an educational exhibit called the Colossal Colon, and it was on a nationwide tour to promote awareness of colo-rectal cancer. The idea is, you crawl through the Colossal Colon, and you encounter various educational items in there, such as polyps, cancer and hemorrhoids the size of regulation volleyballs, and you go, "Whoa, I better find out if I contain any of these things," and you get a colonoscopy.

If you are as a professional humor writer, and there is a giant colon within a 200-mile radius, you are legally obligated to go see it. So I went to Miami Beach and crawled through the Colossal Colon. I wrote a column about it, making tasteless colon jokes. But I also urged everyone to get a colonoscopy. I even, when I emerged from the Colossal Colon, signed a pledge stating that I would get one. But I didn't get one. I was a fraud, a hypocrite, a liar. I was practically a member of Congress.

Five more years passed. I turned 60, and I still hadn't gotten a colonoscopy. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail from my brother Sam, who is 10 years younger than I am, but more mature. The email was addressed to me and my middle brother, Phil. It said:

"Dear Brothers,

"I went in for a routine colonoscopy and got the dreaded diagnosis: cancer. We're told it's early and that there is a good prognosis that they can get it all out, so, fingers crossed, knock on wood, and all that. And of course they told me to tell my siblings to get screened. I imagine you both have."

Um. Well.

First I called Sam. He was hopeful, but scared. We talked for a while, and when we hung up, I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy. A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis. Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner. I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn't really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, quote, "HE'S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BUTT!"

I left Andy's office with some written instructions, and a prescription for a product called 'MoviPrep,' which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I will discuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America's enemies.

I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous. Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor. Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes -- and here I am being kind -- like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.

The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, "a loose watery bowel movement may result." This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground.

MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but: Have you ever seen a space shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.
After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep. The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage. I was thinking, "What if I spurt on Andy?" How do you apologize to a friend for something like that? Flowers would not be enough.

At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the hell the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked.

Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down. Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep. At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house.

When everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point. Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand. There was music playing in the room, and I realized that the song was Dancing Queen by Abba. I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs that could be playing during this particular procedure, Dancing Queen has to be the least appropriate.

"You want me to turn it up?" said Andy, from somewhere behind me.

"Ha ha," I said.

And then it was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.

I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, Abba was shrieking Dancing Queen! Feel the beat from the tambourine... and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood. Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that it was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ.

But my point is this: In addition to being a pathetic medical weenie, I was a complete moron. For more than a decade I avoided getting a procedure that was, essentially, nothing. There was no pain and, except for the MoviPrep, no discomfort. I was risking my life for nothing.

If my brother Sam had been as stupid as I was -- if, when he turned 50, he had ignored all the medical advice and avoided getting screened -- he still would have had cancer. He just wouldn't have known. And by the time he did know -- by the time he felt symptoms -- his situation would have been much, much more serious. But because he was a grown-up, the doctors caught the cancer early, and they operated and took it out. Sam is now recovering and eating what he describes as "really, really boring food." His prognosis is good, and everybody is optimistic, fingers crossed, knock on wood, and all that.

Which brings us to you, Mr. or Mrs. or Miss or Ms. Over-50-And-Hasn't-Had-a-Colonoscopy. Here's the deal: You either have colo-rectal cancer, or you don't. If you do, a colonoscopy will enable doctors to find it and do something about it. And if you don't have cancer, believe me, it's very reassuring to know you don't. There is no sane reason for you not to have it done.

I am so eager for you to do this that I am going to induce you with an Exclusive Limited Time Offer. If you, after reading this, get a colonoscopy, let me know by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to Dave Barry Colonoscopy Inducement, The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132. I will send you back a certificate, signed by me and suitable for framing if you don't mind framing a cheesy certificate, stating that you are a grown-up who got a colonoscopy. Accompanying this certificate will be a square of limited-edition custom-printed toilet paper with an image of Miss Paris Hilton on it. You may frame this also, or use it in whatever other way you deem fit.

But even if you don't want this inducement, please get a colonoscopy. If I can do it, you can do it. Don't put it off. Just do it.

Be sure to stress that you want the non-Abba version.

Colonoscopies are no joke, but these comments during the exam were quite humorous... A physician claimed that the following are actual comments made by his patients (predominately male) while he was performing their colonoscopies:

1. Take it easy, Doc. You're boldly going where no man has gone before!

2. Find Amelia Earhart yet?

3. Can you hear me NOW?

4. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

5. You know, in Arkansas , we'd now be legally married.

6. Any sign of the trapped miners, Chief?

7. You put your left hand in, you take your left hand out...

8. Hey! Now I know how a Muppet feels!

9. If your hand doesn't fit, you must quit!

10. Hey Doc, let me know if you find my dignity.

11. You used to be an executive at Enron, didn't you?

And the best one of all.
12. Could you write a note for my wife saying that my head is not up there!

This I believe: Be cool to the pizza dude!

2009-06-18T20:02:00.007-04:00

"If I have one operating philosophy about life it is this: 'Be cool to the pizza delivery dude; it's good luck.' Four principles guide the pizza dude philosophy.

Principle 1: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in humility and forgiveness. I let him cut me off in traffic, let him safely hit the exit ramp from the left lane, let him forget to use his blinker without extending any of my digits out the window or towards my horn because there should be one moment in my harried life when a car may encroach or cut off or pass and I let it go. Sometimes when I have become so certain of my ownership of my lane, daring anyone to challenge me, the pizza dude speeds by me in his rusted Chevette. His pizza light atop his car glowing like a beacon reminds me to check myself as I flow through the world. After all, the dude is delivering pizza to young and old, families and singletons, gays and straights, blacks, whites and browns, rich and poor, vegetarians and meat lovers alike. As he journeys, I give safe passage, practice restraint, show courtesy, and contain my anger.

Principle 2: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in empathy. Let's face it: We've all taken jobs just to have a job because some money is better than none. I've held an assortment of these jobs and was grateful for the paycheck that meant I didn't have to share my Cheerios with my cats. In the big pizza wheel of life, sometimes you're the hot bubbly cheese and sometimes you're the burnt crust. It's good to remember the fickle spinning of that wheel.

Principle 3: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in honor and it reminds me to honor honest work. Let me tell you something about these dudes: They never took over a company and, as CEO, artificially inflated the value of the stock and cashed out their own shares, bringing the company to the brink of bankruptcy, resulting in 20,000 people losing their jobs while the CEO builds a home the size of a luxury hotel. Rather, the dudes sleep the sleep of the just.

Principle 4: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in equality. My measurement as a human being, my worth, is the pride I take in performing my job -- any job -- and the respect with which I treat others. I am the equal of the world not because of the car I drive, the size of the TV I own, the weight I can bench press, or the calculus equations I can solve. I am the equal to all I meet because of the kindness in my heart. And it all starts here -- with the pizza delivery dude.

Tip him well, friends and brethren, for that which you bestow freely and willingly will bring you all the happy luck that a grateful universe knows how to return."
--This I Believe, by Sarah Adams

5 Things You Should Know About Obama's Health Care Policy

2009-05-19T12:00:00.002-04:00

The choice of a public health insurance plan is crucial to real health care reform. But right now, it's being smeared by conservatives and insurance-industry front groups. Don't let them swiftboat healthcare reform. I've lived and had surgery in a country with national (universal) healthcare, and it was great. Here, thanks to moveon.org, is what you really need to know:

1. Choice, choice, choice. If the public health insurance option passes, Americans will be able to choose between their current insurance and a high-quality, government-run plan similar to Medicare. If you like your current care, you can keep it. If you don't—or don't have any—you can get the public insurance plan.

2. It will be high-quality coverage with a choice of doctors. Government-run plans have a track record of innovating to improve quality, because they're not just focused on short-term profits. And if you choose the public plan, you'll still get to choose your doctor and hospital.

3. We'll all save a bunch of money. The public health insurance option won't have to spend money on things like CEO bonuses, shareholder dividends, or excessive advertising, so it'll cost a lot less. Plus, the private plans will have to lower their rates and provide better value to compete, so people who keep their current insurance will save, too.

4. It will always be there for you and your family. A for-profit insurer can close, move out of the area, or just kick you off their insurance rolls. The public health insurance option will always be available to provide you with the health security you need.

5. And it's a key part of universal health care. No longer will sick people or folks in rural communities, or low-income Americans be forced to go without coverage. The public health insurance plan will be available and accessible to everyone. And for those struggling to make ends meet, the premiums will be subsidized by the government.

Read more on "The Case for Public Plan Choice in National Health Reform," by the Institute for America's Future.

The Road Less Understood

2009-05-06T14:45:00.008-04:00

The title to this blog alludes to one of America's most well-known and most misunderstood poems. Contrary to popular belief, the poem is not a paean to counter-culture and non-conformity, to alternate lifestyles and to getting off the beaten path. Not that those are bad things. Karpe Diem, I say, and I think Robert Frost would agree with me; getting out into nature, stopping and smelling the roses and all that hippie love stuff, or jesus love stuff if you want go back to the source, is a good thing. It's just not what the poem is about, and giving the text a careful reading and lexical analysis will show you what I mean...

In the first stanza we meet the poem's protagonist, a primal projection of the young poet, the everyman, standing in a yellow wood and faced with a choice between two paths.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

The first thing to note is that the traveler is already in a yellow wood. So we are already talking about a walk through the woods, not a decision to leave some urban or other lifestyle in preference for the "green" way of the backwoods.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

In this second stanza, the traveler decides to take the other path, describing it as "just as fair" and "perhaps" having a better claim because it is "grassy and wanted wear". Aha, you say. I told you so. It's all about taking the road less traveled, forging through uncharted territory, being different etc. etc. But the very next couplet belies this attempt to differentiate the two paths telling us that they were worn "really about the same".

At this point, the two paths have been described as "just as fair" and "about the same" with one of them "perhaps" having a "better claim". Not quite the rallying cry of the non-conformist that you'd expect, right? Well if you aren't convinced yet, the next stanza pretty much puts the metaphorical nail in the biodegradable coffin with the unequivocal description "equally lay".

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

So far we've got a poem about a traveler standing in the woods trying to pick between to almost equally trodden paths. The traveler tries to look down the road and presumably picks the "nicer" or "better" path, but readily admits that there isn't really a discernible difference. Then the traveler sort of reluctantly chooses one, knowing that they will more than likely never go back and try the other.

At this point, the poem is starting to look a bit more nihilistic. What's the point of picking if we can't see the ends, if we can't distinguish the difference? The key comes in the final stanza, when the traveler is looking back in retrospect on their life.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We now envision the traveler in some smokey and nostalgic roadside inn, no doubt with a wooden sign hanging askew over the door and an old-fashioned "Olde" in the title. The traveler is perhaps sitting in a rocking chair by the hearth, tamping out his aromatic pipe. What we know is that he or she is addressing an unseen audience. Who are they? Perhaps fellow travelers? Perhaps a circle of knock-kneed and wide-eyed children?

And what is the traveler saying? That that one decision, that one small decision between two nearly identical paths in a yellow wood has made all the difference. Basically the traveler is attributing a great importance to a decision that at the time was almost a flip of a coin. And this is what the poem is really about, the unreliability of memory and man's helplessness in the events of life.

The traveler believes that a choice between two indistinguishable paths was a key turning point in their life. The way they remember it, that one choice made all the difference. Maybe they don't really remember how the paths were basically the same, or maybe they have an elevated opinion of their abilities and believe that even in this minutest of moments they were charging towards self-made greatness.

It kind of depends on how you read the "sigh". Is it a sigh of regret and loss or puritanical pride in a job well done? Has the traveler become a prince or a pauper in the years following that fateful frolick in the forest? We are clearly in the presence of nostalgia, but is it a nostalgia born of myopia or hubris? Is man to believe that he is the master of his fate and that decisions, even admittedly haphazard ones like the choice between following two equally trodden paths, make a difference? Or is this a lesson on the unreliability of memory and man's tendency, or perhaps need, to attribute agency and meaning to the chaos and randomness of life?

Whether you believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or the inexorable wheel of fate winding out your life, the song remains the same. Frost is reminding us that each moment is precious and rarely can be saved for another day. And that as the shadows lengthen and fall upon us, we will perforce look back at the rise and fall of our days and know with certainty that our lives are precisely as they are and could be no other way. Otherwise they would not be ours to remember. We will have the choice to look back and sigh with joy or regret for the paths we chose and never chose to take, and together these will be the paths of our life lying just so, diverging in the woods of our soul. And we can be sure that the paths we trod have made all the difference, because our dusty and fading footprints are no doubt the legacy we leave behind to those who follow...

One final point about how memory diverges from life (like two roads in a wood) and how, willfully or not, this leads us to misunderstand: the Robert Frost poem is titled The Road Not Taken, not as most people will remember The Road Less Traveled. And that, to paraphrase Robert Frost, not only makes all the difference, but is exactly what he's talking about.

Babies don't vote, babies don't pay

2009-05-04T09:57:00.009-04:00

How can we be the "greatest" and "richest" country in the world when we don't guarantee basic health care to all of our citizens?

The cost of health care, in both moral and economic terms, is bankrupting our country. There is no reason why everyone shouldn't receive quality, affordable health care. A healthy workforce makes good sense, but we are really talking about caring for people, the sick--a simple mitzvah, the kind of thing your grandmother would want you to do, but taken to a national level.

But that's the easy part. It's not just who we care for, but how we care for them. Serious reforms are also necessary in how we research new drugs and treatments, and how we make choices about what procedures, particularly at the end of life, are offered to an individual.

I believe these type of complicated decisions regarding public health, preventative care and use of limited resources need to be made by scientific and non-profit oriented (i.e. non insurance and non pharmaceutical) groups like the NIH.

One of the reasons that the United States has the highest infant mortality rate in the so-called "civilized" world, that is to say compared to other places like Western Europe, Japan etc. is that babies don't vote and babies don't pay. So we spend more time and money on finding viagra and cures for social anxiety disorders. This same market logic drives research away from world wide killers like malaria or improving preventative medicine. Screening and teaching better diet and exercise to avoid diabetes just aren't as profitable as insulin.

The system will spend tens of thousands of dollars, however, to extend someone's life by a week or two. If you can call lying in an intensive care unit with failing organs and an artificial respirator down your throat as well as being extremely sedated because your body responds to the respirator as if you are drowning or suffocating as living...

This is why research and health guidelines need to be free of industrial and market bias. Health care providers and individuals need access to good information. Smart national guidelines will help doctors sort out increasingly complicated health choices (drug interactions, comparisons of generic to brand drugs, comparisons of treatment combinations). National guidelines will not tie your doctor's hands, but empower them with information rather than marketing and advertisements. It's a non-issue really, because hands are already being tied and manipulated by decisions about which procedures are reimbursed and for how much.

The next step is encouraging individuals and families to think and talk about critical care and end of life issues such as when and how much invasive care should be given, and under what circumstances. Every adult as part of their electronic and accessible health records should fill out organ donor plans, do not ressucitate orders, file health proxies etc. Schools should have a mandatory health and diet class that teaches proper hygiene, eating and exercise habits and how to become well informed participants in a national health care system.

And participation is the key. Now is the time to speak out and let your elected official know how you see the future of health care in America.

4/20, cool dude!

2009-04-20T16:20:00.005-04:00

Fire it up, ready to go. It's 4/20 and the debate to legalize the stinky stuff is sparking up across the country. You might even say that support has been growing like a weed. Should smokin' doobie be part of our new green economy?

It would seem that for more and more people the answer is yes. Economists now estimate that depenalizing dope could save the country something like $7 billion in prevention and prison and even make another $7 billion if we tax all the toking. That's a lot of dime bags, baby. And these are not half baked ideas either. We are talking about a group of 500 economists, three of whom are Nobel laureates. See what they have to say for yourself here.

Besides the potential cash to be made from hash, marijuana could be put to medical use. A bit of chronic, as it were, for pain, cancer, glaucoma, MS and more. And what about recreational reefer? Well it's the usual argument, prohibition has proven not to stop people doing it. Is it more toxic than cigarettes? More dangerous than alcohol? When's the last time you saw a bunch of guys smoke-up and then pick a fight? According to the medical journal Lancet, "The smoking of cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health." They go on to say that "it would be reasonable to judge cannabis less of a threat to health than alcohol or tobacco".

Okay, nobody is saying it's good for you and should replace Wheaties as the breakfast of champions (though it didn't seem to hurt Michael Phelps). It is a drug and it can cause bad things like bronchial irritation, cognitive impairment, accidents and bouts of the giggles. As such, it should be used very carefully, if at all, and only by responsible adults. Not for kids. So we shouldn't allow it to be advertised or anywhere near schools. But what about a puff for grandma who's eyes are tired after knitting? Or a toke for Mom and Dad on the weekend after mowing the lawn? Probably okay, right? So let's all lighten up a bit. It's cool, dude.

Health Care for America Now

2009-04-20T14:46:00.002-04:00

I believe health care providers need to be given support in terms of research into which drug and treatment combinations are the most effective--research that is independent of any one pharmaceutical company. They also need to be given the time and freedom to treat their patients as people and to care for them, rather than being encouraged to give unnecessary but profitable tests or race through histories and physicals. Life and death are pre-existing conditions. Health care is a basic human need and the responsibility of any "civilized" society.

Support health care reform. Speak out. Vote. http://healthcareforamericanow.org/

Twittering away the hours

2009-04-17T10:58:00.003-04:00

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You twitter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way...

[start message thread]
Jl: Nespee nespee nespee nespee

Kl: What's up random guy? No time?

Jl: I have new self imposed phone rules

Kl: But that don't include standards of quality?
--
Kl: About to jam with Nada Surf?

Jb: How did that end up happening?

Kl: Just lucky, I guess

Jb: Holy smokes you can say that again

Kl: Just lucky, I guess

Jb: I would expect nothing less
--
Kl: Let's stop by Hershe park on our way to Sasquatch.

Jl: Where is that?

Jb: What is Hershe park? A place or a band?

Kl: It's the sweetest place in the world.

Jb: Well who can say no to that?
--
Jb: Guess who gets to see Dr. Brian Greene lecture on the importance of science tomorrow?

Kl: Me?

Jb: Not unless you have plans to be at pierce college tomorrow. I do have an extra ticket if you decide to go though. :)

Kl: OMG, pierce through the fabric of the cosmos.

Jb: Word!
--
Dg: At your place - relaxing with a glass of wine. Have fund and don't rush or worry about me.

Kl: You always know just what to say.

[message forward]

Ko: Who's that?

Kl: My gf

Js: I'm so jealous!
--
Kl: Good times last night

Js: Indeed. Still jealous though

Ko: Haha, totally. Sorry for being the token lush.

Kl: You were token?

Ko: no.
--
Jl: Did u see the movie le haine?

Kl: Oui, La haine: ce n'est pas la chute qui compte, c'est l'atterrissage.

Jl: Arash ta mere

Kl: It's too late to lose the weight you use to need to throw around.

Jl: Sortie...
[end thread]

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.

Tales from the 'Terp

2009-04-15T11:53:00.007-04:00

In a few weeks I will start nurse practitioner school which will put an end to my career as freelance interpreter. "Have dictionary and unassuming JC Penney slacks and shirt, will travel," that's us. I've already taken down my website and packed away my hush puppies (you have to have white ones for nursing school), so the only thing left will be to contact the agencies and file away my resume with those from my other random and short lived careers as Safeway bag-boy, Tanglewood Island boat driver and resort hand, Park City waiter-cum-busboy, Rassias method French language drill instructor, Lycée Lakanal English assistant, financial journalist covering the MATIF (French futures market for financial instruments), Amazon.com customer service representative, .co.uk away team member, trainer and auctions marketing specialist, and finally IPAC pharmaceutical translation agency assistant. Before adding my time as a 'terp to the "been there done that" file, I thought it would be interesting to share a few memories and thoughts of just what it is like to be a French interpreter in this beautifully broken city we call Brooklyn and the Big Apple.

I started by working for a translation and language service company that was listing on Craiglist. They specialize in voice over type recordings and medical interpreting. In fact, they have an exclusive contract with the New York Public Hospitals. So besides the people in Indiana waiting next to their phone, if there is medical interpreting to be done in the city, it's through them. Nobody at the agency spoke French, or at least to me, and besides the interview the only thing they had me do was take a test in English checking my knowledge of basic, and I mean basic, medical vocabulary. Scary, right? It kind of makes sense because most interpreters speak English as their second or third language so it's more important to test their English skills. Nevertheless, being able to pass a multiple choice test in your second language does not a good medical interpreter make.

Later on, the agency made all of us pay for and take this Bridging the Gap medical interpreting course. But to be honest, taking that remedial sort of repeat everything twice and underline the rest thrice type of class and meeting the other interpreters therein only made me question more whether I had truly found my calling. Were these my people? My colleagues? This, by the way, is about the same feeling of slight repulsion and intellectual/moral elitism that turned me off commercial auditions in acting.

My first medical interpreting job, well before having spent those invaluable interpreting course hours on a somnolent Saturday afternoon discussing the interpreter as cultural advocate etc., was at the Columbia Presbyterian Women's Clinic. A black, Muslim woman from West Africa had an appointment to be fitted with a stérilet or IUD. I remember being slightly nervous as this was my first real job, and it was so bizarre because here I was with someone who was of a different gender, religion, age and culture than me. Talk about bridging the gap!

So we are in the waiting room and I'm translating her sexual and medical history intake form. How many sexual partners have you had in your lifetime? What types of birth control do you practice? Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease? Have you ever been sexually abused? You know, that type of thing. A little different from the French we used to analyze Proust in college or order a panini in Paris. I'm thinking to myself, this woman would surely be more comfortable if we had at least one thing in common, preferably gender. The next thing I know, I'm standing on the other side of a curtain telling her to relax, and how to identify the small string attached to the end of the IUD used for retrieval should the need arise.

It often happens that while I'm doing this thing, facilitating communication, cultural brokering, bridging the gap, IUD fitting, whatever you want to call it, the doctor or lawyer or whoever will be standing there telling me what a beautiful language French is and how much they loved their recent visit to the Versailles gardens. Oui, j'aime le stérilet. Donnez-moi le stérilet, s'il vous plaît. Que c'est beau!

The medical interpreting jobs are actually my favorite. In fact, those jobs combined with volunteering at the hospital and working as a standardized patient where you pretend to be sick and medical students practice giving you a history and physical, like on Seinfeld are what convinced me that I should apply to nursing school.

After a few months of the medical interpreting, some random voice over jobs and text translations (of which the most interesting was an extremely long and boring police report from the Hague for an international terrorist case), I got on with another agency that specialized in legal interpreting and had an exclusive contract with the Department of Education. Basically, they send me to schools and for EBTs or depositions, mostly for car accident type situations but sometimes for more exotic cases, like the French lighting designer who was being sued because a spotlight fell on someone during fashion week.

As far as schools jobs, there are discipline hearings, parent teacher conferences, PTA and board meetings, and finally, school closures. Attending a nice little private school in Tacoma, Washington does not prepare you for the New York public school system. People in suits from city hall (okay the DOE, but it's the same to most of these poor parents) swoop in to assure parents that their school isn't being closed, it's being phased out. Then they run over a few statistics and aphorisms and spend the rest of the time stonewalling the parents' real concerns, questions, fears and anger.

I'm in the corner with a headset doing simultaneous interpretation for anyone with earphones who needs French. Sometimes, if there are only a few people--and I've been to meetings where there are only four parents total--I will sit just behind or next to the French speakers and do what they call whispering. This has led to some funny situations where a parent turns to me and starts asking me questions or telling me how they just want their son or daughter to have a good education. At what point do you just steamroll ahead and continue interpreting, and at what point do you give up and start trying to listen to and talk to the parent? I usually gave up (if that is the correct perspective) pretty quickly and started trying to encourage them to talk to their teachers (in what language?) about how their children were doing and what they could do to help. How do you say "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" in French? Answer: les rouspéteurs obtiennent toujours satisfaction.

Maybe this was another sign that this wasn't the perfect career for me. The interpreter is supposed to be invisible, without opinion, behind the scenes (gulp!), a mere reflection of the interlocutors and their agendas.

I am called to interpret for several school closures. The craziest is a school right in the Upper West Side, so close to Central Park West and the swanky residences thereon that you would be surprised to find a 95% Black/Latino school, where 68% of the students come from Title 1 homes, 30% don't speak English and where only 33% of students graduate in four years and about half never graduate at all. This school has more security than an Israeli airport (I can't help this one off-topic rant: why is our airport security so reactionary, slow and ineffective? Someone tried to sneak a bomb in their shoes and we all take our shoes off. Someone tried to sneak explosives in liquid and we no longer are allowed to bring water bottles or toothpaste on the plane. If someone invents explosive underwear, we will all be flying naked. All we have to do is send someone from Homeland Security to Israel for a few weeks to see what real efficient and effective airport security looks like and the problem would be solved.) Anyway, back to this public school; I am not joking or exaggerating when I tell you that the school entrance has four metal detectors, two hand held detectors, two bag scanners and about twelve DOE security guards. I don't know about education (well actually I do, because the school is closing), but as far as security goes, no child is being left behind.

I've also interpreted for several standardized tests. We are talking about little 6th graders filling in ovals about science or reading comprehension. This is another situation where I have to remind myself of maintaining a professional code of conduct. The educator in me has a hard time sitting by while little Johnny is blindly copying out sentences from the reading passage and attaching them to phrases from the question. Why? That's what our teacher told us to do. Deontology gets left behind as I watch little Fatima start blindly adding and subtracting numbers from the word problem. Are you sure you don't want me to explain what the French word moyenne (average) means again?

Another interesting job is doing an IME or Independent Medical Examination. This is when you have an injury compensation claim and the government or insurance company wants to be sure that you are really injured or not before they give you money or before they cut you off. The examiner is a doctor who is not allowed to treat you, only examine you and fill out the necessary paperwork verifying that, yes, indeed you are or are not broken. After waiting for over an hour and a half with a very nice Haitian man, our IME lasts about 3 minutes. The doctor, who does nothing but IMEs all day long, ushers us in, asks two questions, tries to get my guy to touch his toes and then vaguely swings a reflex hammer at his leg (the patient hasn't even taken his jacket off, let alone his pants), all with one hand in his pocket. Nice.

Like many aspects of welfare and social support networks, I'm sure there is a certain amount of cheating and freeloading with injury claims. No system is perfect, right? But I can tell you that the vast majority of the people in that waiting room were poor, tired, huddled masses of lower income, marginalized, powerless members of society. To add to these crimes, they have literally broken their backs at their low paying jobs and now have to fight to prove it in order to receive medical treatment and support. I really would love the people who go off on the bleeding hearts and socialists to spend a few hours in an IME or foodstamp waiting room and then decide if scrapping for a couple hundred bucks of Wellfare is really such a cushy, free-ride for lazy people. It certainly doesn't encourage dignity or independence, but that has nothing to do with the pittance people are being given. Did you know that basic SSI in New York for an individual living alone is $761 and you get less if you live with someone or make any income. Could you live on that? This is not a free ride, it's a rundown, bumpy, unsanitary slide into depression.

That's it for the fun tales of moral 'terpitude; though I have to share one more story which seems to fit with this theme of big city life. As part of preparing to go back to school, I have to renew my CPR certification. The last time I took CPR was in high-school, so I was looking forward to a professional AHA certified experience, and this one would be specifically for medical professionals. True to form, the class is a little Hobroken. Okay, that's maybe more of Jersey thing than Brooklyn, but I think it works. Although we have the dummies to practice on, we spend most of the class fast forwarding through the DVD. Periodically the instructor hits pause to make a joke about how everyone in the video seems to cardiac arrest in or near or a hospital, share a story from back in his EMT days or emphasize that we really should remember this point because it's like the first question on the test and a lot of people seem to get it wrong. A couple of times he tells us not to bother getting down out of our chairs to practice the technique on the dummies because he doesn't want to tire us out. One kid arrives late, something like half way through the class. When he asks if he can still jump in, the instructor tells him no problem. As long as he passes the test. Now my memory of the CPR class I took in high-school was that we had to take a written test as well as perform CPR on the Ressucit-Annie in front of the instructor who is holding a pump behind his back to control the doll's pulse and everything. My two-year health care provider certification is achieved after watching a 30-minute video, practicing compressions for about two minutes and then filling out a multiple choice test, for which we have been well, well warned and prepped for.

Kind of like that first test I took to become a professional medical interpreter in the New York Public Hospitals... And so la boucle est bouclée, as the French say. We've come full circle or loop de loop, in other words. From the perspective of a soon to be former freelance French interpreter in New York, 'loopy' seems like the right word to describe it all. Le mot juste, quoi.

Putting the Capital in Punishment

2009-04-10T14:43:00.008-04:00

Let's talk about one of America's most rapidly growing businesses. Maybe you've heard of it, it's a huge industrial complex and it's even recession proof. I'm not talking about health care, I'm talking about incarceration. You know, detention centers, correctional institutions, jail, lockups, the slammer. In fact, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, with less than 5% of the world's population and nearly 25% of its inmates. According to a recent study by the PEW center, 1 in 31 adults are now behind bars, on parole or on probation. The number gets even scarier when you add the amount of people being employed by the system. And this is another sector of society that we've allowed to be privatized. Sure, we say let's outsource it; we'll laissez-faire capitalism and the almighty bottom line sort things out. The market knows best. What could go wrong, right? Let me count the ways...

Of the many things that I think are wrong with our correctional system (like the fact that it doesn't do a whole lot of correcting), the one that I'm on about today is how we have let it fall prey to privatization. Ooh, scary word, could it be even scarier than the "n" word (nationalization)?

Let's imagine what might happen when people can make a profit from prisons... Some greedy old judge high up on his bench cuts a deal with the local prison provider to act as a head hunter. He'll guarantee a certain number of convicts per day and in exchange he gets a sum of cash left under his doormat. Maybe he can even offer preferential treatment in the bidding system, or for a little extra, a sweetheart deal giving exclusive incarceration rights to his new found pen pal...

And this goes on for how long? Let's say 7 or 8 years. Okay, I didn't make this up. It already happened, and was in the New York Times. Big surprise, there were actually two greedy judges getting kickbacks, and, yes it took seven years before Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan got caught. Now they're both going to jail. Oh yeah, did I mention that they were railroading juveniles? Shanghai some kids to your friend's jail which is overbilling and overcharging for it's services? Nice. How much is that worth? Probably 7 years in jail. The only remaining question for me is whose facility will they be doing time in and who will be profiting from it?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against making a buck. I just think there are a few things that should not be based on a profit model. It's the principal of principal. Incentives work too well, "where there's a will (or money), there's a way (to get it)". There is just too much at stake sometimes to risk using them, whatever efficiencies or innovations they attract.

There should be no financial incentive to killing people, for example. This is why we shouldn't outsource our army, and why we should be real careful about how we dole out our military contracts. Another example, I'm real wary of a hospital that is deciding what's best for me based on what's best for its bottom line. And then there's education: when schools compete, what happens to the kids in the losing school? I think it's the same thing for jails. Crime shouldn't pay, neither for the criminals nor for anyone else. Otherwise it becomes a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man type situation. You remember Ghostbusters. It's the self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people are paid to make prisoners and prisons, the more they will make prisoners and prisons. Is that the kind of incentive we want for our country?

What happens in Vegas...

2009-04-07T10:28:00.011-04:00

What happens in Vegas... really should stay in Vegas. I recently went back for a second annual east-coast-west-coast reunion weekend. We had a ball, and you can see the highlight video in my blog's video box or on youtube. Drinking and gambling and stuffing your face with steaks and riding ATVs in the middle of the desert and the lights and the fake décors and breasts is fun, don't get me wrong, but there is no getting around the fact that Vegas is a crazy place and that being there as a sentient being you are sort of morally obliged to vacillate between states of extreme titillation and nausea, energy and exhaustion, winning and losing, control and addiction.

Vegas runs a Carnival atmosphere year-round, a Carnival that never leads to Lent. Or rather it's a very private form of Lent as you board your plane home and sink into a small row of seats to pray for redemption and better luck next time and a decent night's sleep in the next eight high altitude hours. Carnival has always been a reversal of rules, an important time when the poor can don masks and parade as the royal and powerful and the wealthy can do the reverse. And then everyone copulates in the streets, without regard to race, creed, color or blood alcohol level. It has traditionally, and perhaps in more spiritual and respectful forms, played an important escape valve function for many societies. It can be such a relief to blow off a little steam and not be yourself, in your skin, for a little while that we are happy to return to our problems and start daily life fresh again... even if that means being a servant to the fat guy on the hill with all the beans.

And so it is that after four days in Vegas (which is equivalent to like six days anywhere else if you count waking hours), I return home tired and happy to have gotten out alive. Yes, let me shove into a crowded subway car where everyone ignores each other and hides behind newspapers and ipods--at least they're not white-trash, wearing ridiculous clothes, staggering around and yelling things like "Who's the man? Who is the man!?!"

There is definitely something to be learned from poker. Sure some of the games are pure chance like roulette or slot machines, but playing them can be a lesson in the ups and downs, the cycles of life. Poker, particularly Hold'em, is a real interesting study in risk analysis. You can analyze the possibilities (how many cards or hands can beat mine), the people, the odds, the position on the table. People say that playing poker is all about bluffing, but that is so wrong. It's about playing the cards you are dealt, in the position you are in, with the people at your table, with the amount of money you have to the best of your ability. And that, without stretching it too much, is life. Whether you are getting a job, a house, or a date, you are going to have to do some risk taking, or at least risk assessment. Playing poker gives you some practice in assessing and taking risks. You learn not to put all your eggs in one basket, to play a strategy over time. May be you win some, may be you lose some, but hey get used to it, that's life. The one thing you can control is making the right moves that are right for you over the long haul, and you want to be in it for the long haul. It's great to splash the pot now and again for a little excitement and Shamwow! fun, but you want to be able to martial your resources so that you can stay at the table for as long as possible. It's another case of walking down the hill and... seeing some flops, my friends. So let's get stuck in there!

But I digress. Let's just say that I think you can really learn some valuable life lessons from playing some poker.

You definitely see a lot of different types of people in Vegas, but especially people who like free alcohol, bad entertainment, and the chance to win big. Maybe because of it's geographical location, there are a higher percentage of people from the midwest and maybe because they have the time and can afford to spend a little of their nest eggs, you see a fair number of older couples. Unfortunately, you don't find a lot of people displaying good taste, sensitivity, compassion or culture. This is definitely the downside of Vegas and the part that can get you a little depressed about this great land and people of ours.

The thing that really grosses me out is the excess. There is definitely this trend towards the cattle-ization or chattel-ization of people. First there are the omnipresent electric walkers, which reminds me of the movie Wall-E where everyone is overfed and overstimulated and confined to perambulating barka-loungers. Then there are the strap-on containers of alcohol. You actually see people stumbling around drunk out of their gourds, their eyes as large and glazed as any bovine with large containers of Margarita strapped and dangling from their necks like feeding troughs (I am modeling one at the top of the page--they also come in 3' Eiffel Towers!). Finally, there are the people who tether themselves to slot machines (see photo above). You get these cards on a bungee cord around your neck which automatically tally up your winnings and losings from the machines, and which cut out that whole annoying step of adding more money to the machine. To paraphrase Dean Wormer addressing the Delta house: "Tetanized, drunk and tethered to a slot machine is no way to go through life, son."

Wasting away in Margaritaville (a little thing we call life)

2009-03-13T12:55:00.009-04:00

The funny thing about life, all life really but let's take human life for example, is that if you pick it apart, limb by limb, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, what you end up with is a big pile of protons and electrons. In the words of Gertrude Stein, "There's no there there." I mean where's the life in that, right? Try asking a pile of protons to pick up the dry cleaning or drop the kids off at soccer practice.

It makes you wonder if most of what we consider to be life is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon--a simple byproduct of complexity. It's a numbers game. One guy with a beer and facepaint is a nuisance, 30,000 of them and you've got a stampede at the Giants Game or the Colliseum. All of the things we cherish about life then, friendship, family, joy, a good cappuccino at the mall, all of this would be sort of an afterthought, a nonessential detail to the fundamental truth of angle, vector, force. This type of deconstruction of life may be elemental but it lacks a certain elegance. It's just not the kind of thing you want to snuggle up next to at night or pen a love poem to!

Looking at life in this way can certainly double-down your faith in something greater, something spiritual, that something that is more than the sum of its parts. Or it can just make you say what the hey, charge me another round of margaritas on my mastercard buddy, because I'm going out of this senseless soup in style.

Soup, actually, is not a bad way of looking at it, because if you delve down a little deeper and start spelunking at the quantum scale, the protons and electrons become quarks differentiated only by their color, spin and flavor (and, yes, that is technical talk). A couple of scoops of quarks then resembles less a pile of discrete particles and more like a cloud of mathematical probabilities, particle~waves of energy twinkling in and out of existence, periodically dancing around each other to create the illusion of matter. Mrs. Gump says that life is like a box of chocolates, but that's at the emergent level, it's really, fundamentally speaking, more like a Baskin Robbins store in a blender... on acid!

Back to some Everyday Immortality though. Deepak writes, "When I decide to observe the quantum soup of the Universe, made up of non-stuff, it manifests in my awareness as a physical body that I experience as mine, and other bodies that I experience as the Universe." Matter, he goes on, is the birth of particles from waves, it's momentarily frozen waves of energy. And we're back to the margarita description of life! What separates us the tequila then from them the lime and it the ice is a quick spin in a blender and a dash of salt.

"Personality is time bound," you see, "It comes about when the present is identified with the past and projected into the future." The sense of continuity, that things are happening, that causes lead to effects, that we're making headway on that pile of laundry in the corner, is a mere linguistic trick, a tromp-l'oeil changing of tenses. In short, time is also an emergent phenomenon; it's a secondary effect of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy. Because protons can attract and repel, go forwards and backwards through all their interactions with no problem.

Time is perhaps an illusion of memory, a game that grey matter likes to play when it's not helping us dodge cars on the BQE and crumbling equity markets, but wait and see if the headphones to your ipod ever spontaneously untangle and you will begin to believe in the power of these little emergent phenomena we call time and life.

So what are these quarks? Heisenberg will tell you that it's not too certain. The better you know where they are, the less you know where they are going (momentum). The better you know where they are going, the less you know where they are. The more precisely you try and weigh them, the more their mass varies. They are particles and they are waves. They are energy and they are matter (which Einstein has already gotten us confused with). They are fields and forces. They follow one path or both paths through a slit in the wall depending on which way you are looking. Talk about quantum decoherence! You say wave, I say particle, oh let's call the whole thing off...

It's at this point when you go back to reading the sports page, or take a vow of silence. I guess Joni Mitchell had it right:

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
It's cloud illusions I recall,
I really don't know clouds, at all.

Poet predicts end of science - Universe answers

2009-03-06T20:15:00.005-05:00

In 1915, Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity. It's a simple idea that creates a big bang in the world of physics. When, or perhaps more appropriately if, fully understood, the theory describes a world where space and time evolve dynamically: no longer absolute and eternal, but relative, no longer a fixed stage on which the great dramas of life play out, but non-Euclidean and non-Newtonian sets constantly changing and being changed by the actors and their actions inside them. Man, no longer a play thing to immutable and inscrutable fate, has cut the strings and is executing a mathematical and cosmic dance with the gods. Le point fixe qui bouge, in Lecoq terms.

Perhaps you are thinking that this is a bit dramatic or poetic for a description of modern physics, but then you would be forgetting that Einstein himself was a dreamer. In fact, he describes a vivid dream involving cows, a farmer and an electric fence as the inspiration for his special theory of relativity. "Science does not know its debt to imagination," writes Emmerson, and so it is that we owe a debt to the artists, to the writers and dreamers who travel and trade in the land of imagination, for nothing can be theorized or studied that hasn't first been imagined.

Beyond the big bang (tautology? is there anything before the big bang?), Einstein's theory creates the theoretical and mathematical framework which predicts and describes black holes, gravitational lensing and much more. In terms of gravity as geometry, people offer the image of a rubber sheet stretched out with bowling balls and other balls rolling around on it. If you visualize how each ball would create it's own dip and pull in the rubber sheet around it and what effect that might have on a nearby object, then all you have to do is add two more dimensions (one in space and one in time) to understand general relativity's description of the world.

Though it may be hard to understand now, one of the most revolutionary ideas inherent in general relativity was that the universe (space and time) might not be fixed and eternal. When you start plugging in the numbers out pops a picture of the universe which includes a big bang, i.e. a beginning, as well as expansion. And this beginning and expansion leads to an obvious question. If the universe starts at the big bang, 'how does it end?'

Remember that people have been burned at the stake, or worse, for asking similar questions, or worse, proposing answers to them. Take Giordano Bruno for example. He was burned just for suggesting that the earth rotated around the sun and not the other way around (thus displacing man from the center of the universe). Even at the late date of 1915, and to a man of logic and reason like Einstein, the idea that the universe could have a beginning and an end is quite inelegant, frightening even. You have to be a real sensitive type or extremely paranoid to worry about a problem that is, by all reasonable calculations, billions of years in the future!

But worry he does, until finally he is led to commit what he considered the biggest blunder of his career. In order make the equations of general relativity describe a static world where the universe isn't expanding or contracting at the drop of a photon, Einstein inserts into them what he calls the Cosmological Constant. As it turns out, the universe is expanding and this has repeatedly been confirmed by observation. Moreover, the Cosmological Constant is not even mathematically very, well, constant, as it still tends to result in descriptions of an expanding or contracting universe when you start adding it all up.

In a further twist, it turns out that an accurate mathematical model of the universe, i.e. general relativity, may need a cosmological constant, not for aesthetic reasons about whether we think it makes sense for the universe to be able to expand or not, but in order to take into account the effects of the vacuum, or ground-state energy, which act to push against the pull of all the matter. Although this isn't what Einstein had in mind, it does sort of mitigate the blunder. In fact, it might make it one of the more inspired, and dare we say, creative acts of theoretical legerdemain in the history of physics. It was certainly a leap of faith. But, wait, we're talking about science! Next thing you know you are going to be telling me that Darwin was an intelligent designer...

So, did general relativity change the world? One might say that it didn't change it at all, just our fundamental understanding of everything in it and how it all works. And that, as the poem goes, has made all the difference. To continue the Frosty metaphor, it's two roads diverging not just in a wood but because of the wood and by your traveling there (and let's not forget the effect that roads and the wood have on you either).

But the whole sha-big-bang does leave one wondering, how is it all going to end? Well theoretically speaking there are basically two possibilities: continuing expansion or contraction. Either there is not enough matter and energy, and therefore gravitational pull, to stop the expansion of the universe and it keeps on going until there are nothing but vast distances between every soon to be cold and extinct particle, or there is enough and the universe's expansion is eventually slowed down and stopped, at which point it begins to contract back in on itself into a final fiery and dense singularity (aka big bang bis or part deux).

Interestingly, a year after Einstein publishes his theory, our friend Robert Frost publishes the following poem:

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Did Frost subscribe to scientific journals? Did he somehow understand Einstein's general relativity (before anyone else) and what it implied about the beginning and end of the universe? Probably not, but actually that is what makes this poem even more prescient (as in preceding science as imagination always must), Frost has correctly described the two possible ends of the universe, fire and ice, and their anthropomorphic equivalents, desire and hate. So which is it?

Well in 1998, observations of supernovas have shown us that the universe is not just expanding, it's accelerating! More precisely the rate of its expansion is accelerating. While there is still room for new discoveries or understandings, like the effect of quantum gravity on these calculations or the whole dark matter thing, this acceleration pretty much tells us how it's all going to end, I'm talking about life, the universe and everything. In the words of that immortal poet Robert Van Winkle, it's going to be "ice, ice, baby."

The light in me honors the light in you

2009-03-03T01:08:00.006-05:00

Who are you? What is your essential and infinite divineness? Are you nothing more than a body and stream of conscious thoughts? Is the person thinking the thoughts, giving the orders, the same one who feels lonely? Hungry? Or is there a deeper you? If you are the person thinking your thoughts, then who are you when you are not thinking? When you are sleeping? Unconscious?

Who is the person thinking your thoughts? Who is the person in between the thoughts, the silent self, the watcher? The experiencer? “You cannot experience the experiencer by thinking thoughts because when you are thinking thoughts you can no longer be with yourself, the thinker.”

This is Deepak Chopra’s Everyday Immortality which offers no less than a path to immortality in everyday, to become de-i-vine, the deification of self and the devine which means guess in French and your guess is as good as mine as to how to get there. But if you ain't looking, who is?

In a quantum leap of truth he reminds us that, “The essential nature of material body and that of the solid-appearing universe is that they are both nonmaterial. They are made up of non-stuff.”

“When I make the choice to observe the subatomic world of mathematical ghosts, the ghosts freeze into space-time events or particles that ultimately manifest as matter.” This guy knows his stuff. He is talking in the interstices, the borderlessland where physics become meta-physics.

But what are we, what is matter, you ask? “My physical body and the body of the physical universe are both proportionately as void as intergalactic space,” comes the answer. So the Buddhists are correct in seeking the deeper self, the truth that pierces the illusion of duality and material existence in the silences of meditation, in the spaces between thoughts. This is the place where knowing happens. The knower resides in the timeless void between the thinker’s thoughts.

Physics tells us that this is not a dead or empty space. The void is filled with energy, and this vacuum energy, similar to the person you are or find when you are not thinking or doing is the deeper all-encompassing you, the cosmological constant. What some people might call the higher self or the eternal soul.

“The experiencer changes, but the experiencer remains the same. The thought comes and goes, the thinker is always there; the scenery transforms, but the seer remains the unchanged, eternal.”

Yes, and...

“Only through silence, only by Being can I know myself.”

Namaste.

One more thing, "Coffee is for closers".

and we are NOT in a hurry...

2009-02-26T12:23:00.005-05:00

I was just Shanghai'd by the infamous International Photo crimper Jesse Long. I wake up on a 24-hour American Airline flight to Shanghai, where I will spend the week working in child labor... aka taking pictures of school kids.

One week is not a lot of time to spend 12 time zones away from home, and I'm legitimately worried that I will only get over the jet-lag just in time to find myself on the plane back to New York--dead awake with nothing to do but watch the on-board movies a second time through.

Although I do end up awake and watching the same movies on my return flight (this time in Spanish to mix it up), I pretty much avoid that 'my head feels like it has been turned inside out' type of jetlagged feeling. The flight from Chicago to Shanghai is fairly empty and although I only sleep four or five hours, I think there is something about being horizontal which helps resets the bodies circadian rhythms.

It's a good thing too that I arrive with my wits about me, because there is no driver to pick me up at the airport, which leaves me all alone with a blurry internet printout of my hotel's location and a limited vocabulary for getting there.

We are actually sort of proud of ourselves linguistically speaking, as we manage to pick up a few key new Chinese phrases this year. In the first few trips, I learn how to say a few numbers and "that's too expensive" to vendors in the knock-off markets, then "right", "left" and "straight on" (the fun to say, eedrizzaow) to taxi drivers. This year I have fun with the kids inventing mandarin tongue twisters like, "Does your mother scold the horse with hemp?" which is basically the same phoneme, ma, repeated over and over with different intonations--very difficult to reproduce.

We also learn how to say restroom this trip. Yes, it's kind of pathetic that we have made it this long without learning it, and we learn the word when we realize that in some restaurants it is just not appropriate to put your hands to your crotch and mime micturating all over the jade goldfish pool.

The most important Chinese phrase that we have not learned, however, and that may be even more life saving than ce suo (restroom or toilet, click for pronunciation), would be something like "slow down, this is suicide" or "and we are NOT in a hurry". In fact, I would recommend that anyone traveling to China and planning on taking taxis learn both and practice saying them on a roller coaster.

But back to the travelogue. This is my third visit to Shanghai, and once again, Jesse and I will be working at a big international school called SAS (see this previous post for our famous SAS cover story). The school is split into two campuses, each of which could pass for an Ivy League campus. It's really something to see flat screen TVs in every hallway announcing girl's volleyball tryouts and a stage that could house Miss Saigon (with the fly-away sets, act III helicopter entrance and all) with eighth graders jamming out a version of "Born To Be Wild".

Perhaps this isn't surprising to those of you who have been to the ultra-urban Shanghai, but what you have to realize is that both campuses are out in what my friend Olive-tree Faliez calls pétaouschnock. Imagine your best friend inviting you to come work with him in New York City, all expenses paid, then finding out that you will be splitting time between Jersey City and Flushing. Now add in more pollution and about 100 more people per square paddy and you've got the idea.

I leave on Friday the 13th and arrive on Valentine's day. Jesse rolls in a few hours later and since we are both feeling like we have dodged the jetlag bullet we decide to go out and get some beers. We stop at a little noodle shack run by a Uighur guy that we have been to before. In a prestidigitation defying act, he twists, rolls, stretches and spins out fresh homemade batches of noodles from a few lumps of dough. These ramen (pronounced 'lamen') are served in a big bowl of hot soup with meat or vegetables for about one dollar. In a nod to the local expat community that has sprung up in this area, there are even disposable wood chopsticks. The first time I went to China, a sino-veteran recommended I bring my own chopsticks to avoid the plastic ones that sit in little cups in most restaurants and which have been rinsed in the tap water you are trying to avoid ingesting. The reality is that the bowl the soup is served in probably has been rinsed in it too, but you hope the hot soup and chili sauce will take care of that.

It certainly takes care of us. In no time we are next door at a semi-local bar drinking down copious amounts of pijo, or just Tsingtao if you prefer to ask for it by name and avoid the other beer brands that have noxious amounts of sodium or even formaldehyde in them--no kidding. We are playing this game of liar's dice with the barman and a random Chinese woman. The woman's job is to play this game with patrons to keep them and her (and the barman in this case) drinking. They drink us under the table and we leave, or rather, weave, happy with our first night in China.

We are staying at a new place this year, the Citadines, which is a French line of hotel-cum-apartments. It's nice, but in classic export style, our cozy chez-nous has been perfectly replicated right down to a couple of missing details. For example, it has an all-in-one-washer-dryer, but the dryer doesn't work.

As you can see from the photo, I found this out the hard way one night and spent the rest of it blow-drying my clothes. This thing about replicating things but with that je ne sais quoi local touch reminds me of something Madame Irma says in "The Balcony" about creating theater, "They all want everything to be as true as possible... Minus something indefinable, so that it won't be true." She is actually talking about the customers to her brothel and the revolutionaries outside its doors, but aren't they, like theater audiences basically entering a "house of illusions"?

During the week, when I am not helping Jesse solve the world's problems one 'B' package at a time I meet with some local theater teachers and producers to feel out the idea of bringing Floating Brothel to Shanghai.

I come prepared with DVDs of the show and several letters of introduction. I am lucky that one contact, a great gal named Alison who went to China on a Fulbright several years ago and has been choreographing shows and working for Tan Dun (the guy who did the music for Crouching Tiger) ever since, knows the general manager for the main theater in town. There is a concert with José Gonzales nearby, so we decide to go see the show together and organize a meeting with the theater manager beforehand.

The manager is very kind and agrees to meet with us, even though he has three shows running and has to come straight from a wedding. His English is pretty good and he has come prepared. After we introduce ourselves and sit down, he smiles and asks me, "So what can you tell me about your show? Do you have a DVD?"

"Yes, I do," I reply, handing him the DVD. "I wrote our website on the disc so you can check that out too when you get a chance."

"I've seen your website," he says.

"Oh great," I continue. "Then you've seen we got some really great photos of the show. We were lucky, actually, because the photograher/"

At this point he interrupts, smiling again and asks, "Yes, I've seen your website too, but I have to ask: what is this supershit?"

Jesse and I laugh, nervously, and I say something about how my mom has been asking me the same question, but I think folks that this is the beginning of the end of what could have been the Floating Brothel 2010 Making Shanghai Viewer Happy Tour...

Well, I'm back in New York now and have been getting down to the serious business of preparing for nurse practitioner school--starting with picking out my stethoscope and reflex hammer color. What do you think about garnet? So long, and thanks for all the fried shrimps.

And finally, for those who want a Shanghai surprise, click here.

Eat, Love, Pray!

2009-02-10T15:52:00.003-05:00

I've just updated my facebook status to read, "Kevin is eating, loving and praying!" because that is that exactly what I have been doing recently along with reading the Elizabeth Gilbert book by almost the same name.

The joy I am feeling to be eating, loving and praying with this new awareness is well captured by the exclamation point that I generously append to my new electronic face--it's nothing less than my typographical being, the 'i' in me, doing a handstand!

Gilbert writes that "when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation."

As much as I malign facebook, it does serve its purpose. It's the face you decide to share with your not-so-virtual friends. So today I've decided to put on a happy, dirt caked face. It's not selfishness or an obligation to share this light of joy, and we are not diminished by the giving of it. On the contrary, the light bulb does not decide where or on whom to shine, it just shines in every direction. So here is my ray of the day:

Today I open wide the doors
rejoicing the sun in flight
singing A bas les abat-jours !
bowing as day to night
praying hey-hey, ho-ho,
these bulbs of joy have got to grow.

Yes this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it...

Now, That's Funny - Bye-Bye Bush

2009-02-09T13:11:00.002-05:00

I want to emphasize the comma in the title. Like Lynne Truss' zero tolerance approach to punctuation in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves", I used to have a zero tolerance for Bush humor. I would find myself watching, for example, Stephen Colbert skewering Bush and the neo-connneries (connerie: nf. French meaning silly, stupid, rubbish, bullshit, and from the root word con meaning idiots, lousy, dumb, foolish and designating the female sex organ) at the 2006 White House Correspondant's Dinner and I would find it hilarious, but involuntary angry constrictions of my chest would always choke back the laughter. In legal terms, I guess you would call this my Executive Gag Order Humor Reflex.

But that was before Obama took office and Bush got on what many of us hoped was a helicopter to nowhere... Now, I find his buffoonery (bouffon, nm. French the clown, the imbecile, the fool) really funny. So as I sit here today, February 9, 2009, watching the aweful (as in 'inspiring awe' and disgusting) and incredible compilation of Bush gaffes from the Letterman show, and the tears stream down my cheeks, I am saying to myself Now, (comma) that's funny! with the emphasis, thanks to the comma, on the Now.

Now, I understand why clowns can be so scary and funny...

Expand This...

2009-02-06T14:44:00.004-05:00

If you like my new expandable posts...
What expandable posts you say?

Capiche?C'est la bombe de balle, c'est chanmé!, as my friend Olivier might say in his dark and mysteriously French way.

Anyway, if you like the effect and want it for your very own, then check it out here at hackosphere.blogspot.com.

Poison Ivy League Here I Come

2009-02-04T19:33:00.010-05:00

This is me holding up a glass of Veuve Clicquot champagne celebrating my acceptance to the Columbia University ETP nurse practitioner program! I'm calling it my return to the poison ivy league because as a nurse practitioner... well you get the idea.

And just in case you don't get the idea, here is a quick explanation:
"A nurse practitioner is a registered nurse who has completed advanced education and training in the diagnosis and management of common medical conditions, including chronic illnesses. Nurse practitioners provide a broad range of health care services. They provide some of the same care provided by physicians and maintain close working relationships with physicians. An NP can serve as a patient's regular health care provider.

"Nurse practitioners see patients of all ages. The core philosophy of the field is individualized care. Nurse practitioners focus on patients' conditions as well as the effects of illness on the lives of the patients and their families. NPs make prevention, wellness, and patient education priorities. This can mean fewer prescriptions and less expensive treatments. Informing patients about their health care and encouraging them to participate in decisions are central to the care provided by NPs. In addition to health care services, NPs conduct research and are often active in patient advocacy activities." (from www.healthcommunities.com)

Elsewhere in this blog I posted my personal statement which I wrote for the application, and for those of you who know me, I think you will agree that this seems like a really great move for me. Throughout the process everyone has been so supportive, writing me great recommendations, saying how they were sure I would get in, asking me if I had heard yet and so on. I have been really touched by all of your support. Thank you.

There have, however, been a few hiccups in the process, an almost 100% electronic process. The first was my prerequisites which I decided to do online at the University of Phoenix. I also took the GRE's online, or essentially, as you take the test at a computerized center and get the results right away. Luckily, I did well even though I thought I was tanking the math section and was praying the whole time that it was the experimental section.

In terms of prereqs, I needed to take Anatomy and Physiology, Statistics and Microbiology to apply. Columbia, which receives a lot of applicants, doesn't even do interviews, they just rely on grades, GRE scores, the prereqs and your personal statement. For this reason, I approached my UoP classes seriously, assuming that I would be learning the foundations of my future career.

Taking classes online is weird. You have to log in so many times a week, and post your answers to the study questions and reading. You even have to participate in so many discussions per week, which a way of recreating the realworld classroom experience. One of the problems is that nothing makes up for the lack of lectures and teachorial transmision of knowledge. The teachers become chat room moderators and lesson organizers and you are left to rely on the textbooks and the single mothers in rural areas away from institutions or that have full time jobs and can't attend regular classes. It was actually a cultural experience as I'm not sure I've ever really hung out (if exchanging chat room postings can be considered hanging out) with people from the middle, red states. People who don't believe in evolution, or statistics for that matter--even half way through the class on statistics!

My takeaway from online classes is that it's kind of weird and broken, but if you need prereqs and don't care whether you really learn something and have the money then it's not so bad. Not glowing praise, I know.

The second hiccup in the process was the online notification system. I understand that not sending out letters and having all the recommendations etc. be submitted online probably saves what the French might call un tas de paperasse, but it lacks something in style and dignity.

I remember when I got accepted to Dartmouth. Things were different. I had just had my wisdom teeth out and was laid-up on the couch when the envelope came. It was quite thin which seemed a really bad sign. My mom brought me the letter and then left me and my cotton swabs in peace. The moment was memorable. Opening the letter and reading that I had been accepted and that despite the thin missive more information was on its way. I remember crying out in celebration and pain as my gums started to seep blood.

I feel like you just can't get that kind of drama and feeling from an electronic notification. As it turned out, we were sent an email several days before admission decisions were set to go out, just letting us know that they would be coming out in a few days.

"Dear Kevin Lapin,

"Decisions for the Entry to Practice (ETP) program will be posted this week. Please make sure you check your email on a daily basis..."

This was kind of exciting, but I didn't quite understand why. I mean why not just wait and contact us in a few days when the decision was available?

The next email came the following day, this past Tuesday Feb. 3 at 5:12pm.

"Dear Kevin Lapin,

Columbia University School of Nursing has made a decision on your application. You may access your decision through our online notification system located at the following URL... Thank you for your interest in Columbia University School of Nursing."

Here it is. It's on. I click on the link and log in. My breathing has become shallow and my muscles are a little tense. I guess this is a phsyiological form of 'the envelope please, and the winner is' type of drama that I have been regretting.

I search around the website and cannot find a link, the putative link, to my acceptance decision. This does get my blood flowing, mostly to my temples it seems which are beginning to pound. I can't find it. I log out and log back in. I close the browser window. I quite the browser and restart it. Nothing.

At 6:05pm I receive the following message:

"Dear Applicant:
There was an error in the decision system. Your decision will be available tomorrow. Please disregard the previous email. You will be sent a new email once all the decisions are posted...We apologize for the inconvenience. Sincerely, the Director of Admissions"

So now I've got to wait another 24 hours, but knowing that the results are ready. This is like someone delivering the letter but then not letting you open it. It's at this point that I realize that there is just something more frustrating and stressful about computers than dramatic and suspensful. It's the lack of texture, the lack of emotion. The same thing happens with those email quips that are supposed to be funny--and would be too were they said in person or over the phone--but which end up coming across as flat or down right rude.

At 7:37pm I receive another email:

"Dear Kevin Lapin,

Earlier today you received a notice alerting you that there was an error in our system. Even though this only affected a couple of applicants, we wanted to correct the problem. We were able to correct the issue, and fix the system. You are now able to view your decision. Please follow the instructions below...Your application decision is now available online..."

Here we go again. I log in again. I see the link. I click the link. I wait while it is opened in a new window and:

"On behalf of Columbia University School of Nursing, I am pleased to offer you admission to the Combined BS/MS Entry to Practice (ETP) program and Family Nurse Practitioner specialty beginning May 27, 2009.

"I invite you to attend our Visiting Day on blah, blah, blah...to learn more about the blah, blah, blah.

"In order to reserve a place in the 2009 class and blah, blah, blah...deposit of $500 by blah, blah, blah...Other materials, blah, blah, blah...sent to you at a later date.

"Blah, blah, blah and...the faculty joins me in sending you our best wishes. We look forward to having you as a student at Columbia University School of Nursing."

Woohoo! Whap-doo-Whap! Youpii!

And the rest is history, as they say, or will have to remain that way because I don't remember much else. Blame it on the Veuve Clicquot.

A Good Year in Wine

2009-02-04T15:02:00.009-05:00

A glass of wine a day keeps the doctor and blues away...

This corkboard represents the result of my year in Province... and Italy, the Rioja region of Spain, several right-banks of Bordeaux and even a few reasonably priced places in Chile. It actually would have taken me several years to save-up enough corks to make this corkboard, but my girlfriend grew up in Rome and really accelerates the collection process--as well as making it a lot more fun!

The corkboard, which I made as a gift, will soon be adorning the wall's of Debbie's office at Legal Aid. I told her that she didn't have to tell her clients how much time it took her to collect the corks.

This reminds me of a joke that I used to know in France which went something like, What do you call 365 Michelin condoms? A Goodyear! I told it one time to my Spanish friend Roberto , a guy who liked to party so much and had so much energy that he used to fidget even in his sleep. Really, one of his feet would be tapping away as if he was dreaming about drinking wine and dancing at the discothèque--which he liked to do.

A month or two after I told Roberto the joke, I overheard him telling it to someone else, except that he couldn't quite remember the number in it. So he ended up saying something like, What do you call 675 Michelin condoms...? And then it struck me that it was a culturally biased jokes, because why not, once a day might seem like just an average year or even a slow year to some people.

Well for me, 2008 was a GoodYear--at least for drinking wine.

Cheers and chin-chin!

Comic Genius

2009-01-30T15:29:00.003-05:00

2009-01-29T16:03:00.001-05:00

La bouffe vietnamienne.
On nêm où on nêm pas.

I love it when a plan comes together

2009-01-26T18:30:00.009-05:00

When I first moved into my co-op I had big plans to redo the kitchen and bathroom, build a platform in the office so my desk would sit up at window height, put a stained glass window in the wall between the office and bedroom and I don't know what else.

At first I was going to have all the work done before I moved in or right after I moved in while I was in China, figuring that it would be good to get it done quickly, but was working on my impulsiveness in 2008, so I decided to just move in and wait. Plus my mom, who has a lot of experience in home construction and remodeling jobs, told me to.

I'm not sure whether it was the chaos of moving in or my first mortgage bill that did it, but I decided that she was right and that I would just settle in to my new home for a while before making any big decisions.

I moved in at the end of June and by the 4th of July was happily sipping a glass chardonnay on my roof, chez moi, watching fireworks light up the Brooklyn skyline. I loved my new home. Even today, I often wake up each thinking that I'm on vacation and that I'm going to have to leave soon or something. Then I realize that I'm home and that I don't have to leave. It's so wonderful!

One funny thing about going from a renter to a homeowner is how it suddenly makes you really feel old and responsible, like an adult or something. It does, it changes you. One of the first few times I had the boys over to hang out and jam, I found myself worrying if we were making too much noise for the neighbors on a weeknight. I had always been a respectful renter, paid my rent on time, kept things clean and maintained. In fact, I think that is part of why I felt I had the right to have people over and make some noise from time to time, even on a weeknight.

And now here I was, an owner, worrying about whether we were being too loud. What's great is that it should have been the exact opposite, right? It's not like I can lose my lease if someone makes a noise complaint. I can understand wanting to take better care of the place, and I do, but this. I felt betrayed by my own feelings of guilt and responsibility. Finally, I suggested we keep the playing down to a mature mezzo piano...

Regarding my big plans to redo the kitchen and get rid of the crazy orange counters from the 70's and modernize the bathroom to bring in more light and better fixtures (though it does have a bath already), I finally decided if ain't broke don't fix it. The one idea I followed through with was to open up the wall between the office and bedroom. It took me a while, but some friends of mine recommended that I check out this store called Olde Good Things in Chelsea which recovers things like stained glass windows from churches or old mansions, and doors, and fixtures and tables and, well, old good things...

After a few visits, I found a piece I liked. Then I waited a few weeks for winter and the economic crises to really start setting in and I made my move. Finding and booking a carpenter was actually a bit more complicated. When you ask and call around, you quickly realize that carpenters, plumbers and electricians, at least ones that are being recommended, all have more work than they can handle and are doing small jobs on weekends and evenings. The one I found said he could probably install the stained glass window in two or three days but wouldn't be available until early next year. It reminds me of the joke about the cardiologist whose plumbing backs up. When the plumber gives him the bill he can't believe how expensive it is. He tells the plumber, "This bill is unbelievable. I'm a doctor and even I don't make this much money!" And the plumber responds, "Neither did I when I was a doctor."

Well, it's early next year and we, as in the royal 'we', we've just finished installing the window. The carpenter was great, he even came in exactly on estimate (feel free to contact me for his number). I did sort of a timelapse slideshow of the installation process which you can see in the video box to the right (if it's not visible, you can select 'stained glass' with the pull down menu bar button or watch it in high definitions directly on YouTube.

Hope you enjoy. If you are in the neighborhood of Prospect Heights, stop by for a tour and a cup of coffee, I make the best esspresso in the tri-state, but that's for another blog...

2009-01-25T18:17:00.002-05:00

This is not very PC,
but you know what they say,
Once you go mac...

Obama Inauguration Weekend

2009-01-23T15:15:00.016-05:00

Some of you may have already heard about what NPR, facebook groups and Youtube are calling the “Purple Tunnel of Doom” or “Purplegate”. Some-odd thousand people like myself have traveled from around the country with tickets to the inauguration (I have mine through a friend who was crunching data at an undisclosed campaign location in Missouri) only to find ourselves squashed into several square blocks unable to get through the Purple security gate to see the inauguration of our 44th president.

But let me rewind a few days, because this is really part of a big weekend and beyond that a bigger socio-eco-political movement that has been sweeping America off it’s barka-loungers…

Our journey began on Saturday when Kate, David, baby Alice, Johnny, Debbie and I drove out of town in a Budget mini-van, destination Camelback, PA. We arrived in time to check in to our local ski lodge-cum-hotel, before heading to a Japanese restaurant called Shiro, a huge hibachi and sushi house with like 50 tables, a dance floor, a magician/animal balloon specialist and more. Kind of crazy in the middle of Pennsylvania, but it was packed and quite good. If you build it, right? And if there is one thing that I can eat a lot of, it’s sushi. Now, I’m not in a Claudia French league, but if she (at her Italian 5’5” and 105 pounds) represents the NBA slam-dunk championship of sushi eating ability, then I’m probably hitting final-four levels. Allez-hop!

After stuffing our faces we returned to the hotel where we slipped under our cozy comforters for a cup of hot cocoa before bed. The snow had already begun to fall and we woke up Sunday morning to 4" inches of “freshie” and more gently falling from the sky. After we gorged ourselves on a breakfast of scrapple (Pennsylvania's answer to Spam) and pancakes and bacon and waffles the like (Johnny even had a piece of homemade pumpkin pie), we hit the hill. I mean this, the hill, literally and metaphorically. Camelback has something like 400' of verticalish feet of skiing. There are double-black diamonds, but they’re something like blue squares for us west coast ski snobs, so I have to think of it as a ski hill and not a ski mountain.

It was Debbie's first time, which was fun, but I quickly realized how difficult, and probably pointless, it is to explain a complicated physical choreography like getting two big sticks strapped to your feet to run smoothly over snow and ice (and the occasional ski pole or thigh). I should have used the inner game of skiing approach, I guess. In the end, everybody had a good time and Debbie looked incredibly cute in her ski gear.

There was also a kind of a funny moment when we were renting our equipment, if you consider my clenched cheeks (top and bottom) combined with a sort of wheezing sound and slow head bobbing as a sign that I was finding it funny. Debbie didn’t have her purse with her so both sets of rentals went on my credit card and ID. The whole thing was computerized, with a special scanner for the driver’s license and everything, so all you had to do was give your height and weight and it automatically spit out your name, address, rental agreement and even binding settings and suggested ski lengths for the kid behind the next counter. After giving them my information, it was Debbie’s turn. As if telling the girl her weight wasn’t bad enough, her information immediately popped up on the screen based on my account which the girl showed us and asked us to verify. It read DEBBORA LAPIN along with the address etc. etc. When the rental girl asked if everything was correct, we both went into the wheezing and head bobbing thing which I describe above and which the rental girl took as a yes. Camelback Mountain Resort, PA now pronounces you man and wife!

David, who is responsible for that last line, had a great fall that we wished we had caught on film. We were trying to cut across runs through a closed path and there was one of those orange mesh fences with closed signs that was on the ground across the entry. We figured we would just pop over and be on our merry way, so we pushed off and David was first to cross but he didn't realize or wasn't able to jump his skis, especially the tips, all the way over the fence. When his tips got caught in the fence and quickly decelerated to a stop, David was flung forward into the snow in what skiers like to call a yard sale. It would have surely been an instant YouTube classic (more hits than Jesse Long falling off a camel guaranteed!), if only we had perfected the 24/7 inner-eye recording device that I'm sure will make future generations all stars of their own reality shows. When I stopped laughing and offered to film it, David was not gracious enough to replay the event.

After skiing, we headed off to Hagerstown, Maryland, home of the Hennebergers. David had called ahead and they were preparing a big après-ski fajita feast for our arrival. David warned us not to ask his dad about his days as a swinging disco owner, but told us that he used to be in the hotel industry and his step-mom had a side business with her daughter “Dobbie” as bar-tenders for private parties and the like. Let me say that the Hennebergers lived up to their reputations as hospitality industry professionals. We ate and drank and talked ourselves silly until the wee hours in the morning, only stopping to bathe our bloated bodies in the Jacuzzi.

We got back in our mini-van Monday morning and headed off to the sweet sounds of xylophone U2 lullabies which we often had to play for hours at a time in the hope that it would drive baby Alice to nap before the rest of us to pushed long sharp metal objects deep into our eardrums.

Nevertheless, we arrived in one peace at the Rope’s residence, in the heart of DC, a few blocks from the National Cathedral (everything in DC is the National something), St Albans and The Sidwell Friends School where Kate’s Mom will soon be helping little Malia memorize the names of all the presidents and other such oh-so-sixth grade activities--she’s already 1/44th of the way there without even opening a book, right? After a light lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, Kate-n-David took us on a little tour of the capital. Although it was the day before the inauguration and you could sort of sense the excitement hiding behind every faux ionic column, the streets remained fairly crowd and closure free.

Fast forward through dinner, another early night to bed and a veritable monastic morning of Odwalla Superfood (the perfect balance of juice puree, artichoke dust and thistle, with a little prairie grass thrown in for flavor that would get me through the big day without needing a restroom. I mean, hey, it's called super food, what could be better than that?) and you are now in the same gastrointestinal-psychological-spiritual state as I was on Tuesday morning, January 20, 2009, aka O-day.

We left the Rope’s house at about 8 am and jumped on an already crowded DC metro to Judiciary Square. The atmosphere was charged with excitement. Complete strangers were making room for each other on the subway cars, smiling, talking and sharing stories. Some of them even New Yorkers!

After getting out of the metro, Debbie and I parted ways with Kate-n-David and Johnny. Our tickets directing us to where we needed to pass through the Purple security gate which was scheduled to open at 9am.

We walked up E street and turned the corner onto First St. NW to discover that there was nothing between us and the security gate except about four blocks of completely packed human bodies. Well, I thought, the security gate hasn’t opened yet.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

It’s now about 10:30 am and we have only moved 100 feet, I think to myself that they must be really screening people carefully or maybe they don’t have enough screeners. This is making the TSA look like the Mossad, right? Pretty soon though, rumors start to circulate that the street is barricaded and the security gate a block or so after that isn’t even open. People are saying that it is closed because people have sneaked in over night and they are trying to clear them out. Later the story is that people with other ticket colors have broken through a barrier and gotten into our section.

As time passes and people’s begin losing patience and feeling in their extremities, attrition sets in as people decide to leave and look for a warm room with a television or maybe just another crowded area that at least has a view of a JumboTron. Some come from the front of the crowd reporting that they have been there since 5:00 am. They can’t take it anymore, “abort, abort.” Others explain that they have gotten stuck in the crowd and don’t even have tickets, but are just trying to get to the Mall or to the other side of the street. The stream of people leaving allows us to periodically move forward, giving us the illusion of progress, and then the progress is lost as someone in the crowd passes out or calls for medical attention and the ambulance parked half a block back turns on its lights and tries to plow its way to the rescue. Most of the time it doesn’t make it and the EMTS settle for passing a medical bag across the crowd to a waiting doctor or good Samaritan.

At about 11:15, 15 minutes before the ceremonies are scheduled to begin, the barricade at 1st and C is removed (or shoved aside?) and the crowd surges forward. Finally we think, our patience has been rewarded. We feel sorry for the people who were there before us and have given up, but we understand that they were about 4 hours more cold and hungry than us.

As the crowd moves ahead, we are happy to be making real progress, but it is also scary to think what would happen if, god forbid, we were to fall or faint. As it is, landscaping, flowers beds and even whole sections of shrubbery are being trampled without remorse. A big black woman who is bushwhacking her way in front of us yells for anyone who cares to listen, “I ain’t holdin’ no bushes for nobody, I ain’t holding no more bushes. I tell you I’ve been holding bushes for 8 years and I’ve had it!” It’s a good line.

The crowd has been pretty friendly up till now, with different groups of people joking amongst themselves or trading ironic observations about the lack of organization, the stupidity of crowds, the cold and so on, but people are starting to get frustrated. Most people just want to know what the heck is going on, so we continually ask people pushing their way out of the pack what they have seen, did they have tickets, have they seen the gate?

Once again the crowd is stopped and I have the idea of starting an information tree. I ask the people in front of us to pass the message along to the people in front of them and so on to the front of the crowd asking them to send information back down about just what the heck is going on. The people in front of us ask the person in front of them to find out what was going and she says over her shoulder, “I can’t see anything.” And that is it. It’s too many instructions for a big crowd. I consider explaining the system again, but realize it probably won’t make it half a block. Another foliage casualty to add to the list; the information tree has just died on the vine in front of our eyes.

As the minutes pass, my bladder and ankles begin to swell and it doesn’t look like we are going to make it in time. People are giving up hope and courtesy and begin shoving rather than sliding their way out bringing with them word that the security gates are still not open. Nobody is being let in. Some people are saying that the CIA hasn’t given the word to start the screening process and that it is just a miscommunication. Others say that people have snuck in to our section so they have it closed it in order to clear them out. Whatever the explanation, we are clearly in the process of experiencing a cluster-fuck.

At about 11:30, Debbie and I have made it to the front of the crowd to see that, indeed, nobody is getting into the purple section. By this time, my bladder is really pressing in on me and Debbie's toes are numb. We make the decision to give up, figuring that we have experienced the crowd, though not the happy, inaugural party crowd we had pictured. We figure we might as well get somewhere where we can see and hear the ceremonies and speech rather than just the frustrated chants of “no second term” and “let us in” that are starting up around us.

Before we head off to find Kate-n-David and Johnny who are sitting with glasses of champagne and roast beef sandwiches in front of a plasma TV on the 12th floor of a swanky, but more importantly warm condo overlooking Pennsylvania avenue, I find an un-trampled shrub behind which to relieve myself.

We arrive at Kate's aunt and uncle's place just as Obama is taking the oath and giving his speech. It is great. We all stand with pride for the National Anthem, some of us for the first time in 8 years. We watch every second, even the c-span coverage of the coat-check before and after the luncheon. We drink the moment down with cups of French onion soup until the juice runs down our chins. From the roof, we even have a direct view of the parade, right where the Obamas get out of the car to walk.

In the end, our inauguration isn’t quite the popular, of the people and with the people type of celebration and experience that we have imagined, but hot toddy's and plasma screens have their appeal as well.

O, O, O-bama!
From far and wide,
from around the world,
from states north and south
of colors red and white and blue,
we stand with pride and sally forth
saying thank you, thank you, Thank You!

And we pray, “Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

Amen.

The Man Watching

2009-01-22T12:23:00.000-05:00

The Man Watching, by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Make Art Not War

2009-01-21T11:07:00.001-05:00

Most "civilized" countries have Ministers of Art or Culture, yet here in the "greatest country on earth" we do not. Why? We in the arts need this and the country needs this--now more than ever.

Making art is cheaper than nukes and much more effective at changing hearts and minds. Studies show that kids in school who partake in arts programs (where they haven't been canceled due to budget cuts) perform better and are happier. There is no reason to believe that this would not be true of adults too. We need more support, organization and promotion of the arts and culture on a federal level.

I know we are in a recession, but this department could probably be funded if we just dismantled and stopped paying to maintain a couple nukes. Moreover, arts and culture are great recessionary activities that will help unite red states and blue states, the rich and the poor alike.

Sign this important petition and then pass it on to your friends and colleagues.

http://www.petitiononline.com/esnyc/petition.html

Purplegate Superfood

2009-01-20T12:01:00.003-05:00

Dear Friends,

Those of you who have had the opportunity to attend a Dave Matthews/Bazan/Harper/Makana/insert-crunchy-white-college-dude-guitar-player’s-name-here concert with Jesse are probably familiar with his technique of dehydrating in preparation for the big event to be sure that he doesn't have to leave the front row and make his way through throngs of L.L. Bean clad guys and girls who are also rocking out just to go to the bathroom and thereby risk losing his place and more importantly his slow head bopping groove.

Well, I realized that attending the inauguration of our 44th president in D.C., aka O-day, would represent a similar biological challenge (20 port-a-potties at a distance of 3 security checks across one and a half million people and multiplied by a small bladder, you do the math). The thought of self-catheterizing myself or having a colostomy bag break open right as Obama stepped away from the motorcade to shake my hand on national TV, made not eating or drinking for 24 hours seemed like a good option. But I didn't want to pass out from the extreme cold or long hours standing on my feet and dreaming of a new and better tomorrow, did I? So I had to eat something... but what?

A quick trip to the National Safeway (I know it's bizarre but everything in DC is the national something, I swear we even passed a building that said the National Tiddlywinks Society) and I had my answer, Odwalla Superfood: the perfect balance of juice puree, artichoke dust and thistle, with a little prairie grass thrown in for flavor that would get me through the big day without needing a restroom. I mean, hey, it's called Superfood, what could be better than that?

Well, maybe it was the weekend's indulgence in sushi, scrapple, pancakes, pizza, fajitas, a bagel with oleo, tomato soup and grilled cheese, a snack of fried chicken and half a corn dog and then dinner Monday night of caesar salad, pasta and meatballs (I passed on the balls) that did it, but I like to think that it was the Superfood, because after getting stuck in a crowd for 4 hours in what NPR, facebook groups and Youtube are calling the "Purple Tunnel of Doom" or "Purplegate", I took what can only be called a post-inaugural, celebrational...

Take care,
Kevin

--
From the Heart,

Kevin Lapin
"Appreciate beauty in all its forms."
"Get stuck in there!"

Arithmetic, Population & Energy

2009-01-04T14:11:00.001-05:00

Some simple and sobering arithmetic for the New Year. A great lecture (part 1 of 8 on youtube). It's time to curb our enthusiasm for drilling and energy. Conservation, reduction and renewable energy are the only answers that add up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iFESMAU58

-K

PS I'm typing this with the lights off.

2009-01-01T23:05:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year!

May all of your labors be fruitful.

The Path With Heart

2009-01-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

The Path With A Heart, from 'Don Juan A Yaqui Warrior'

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any condition. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition.

I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart?

All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. There are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor's question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use.

Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

The trouble is that nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.

A path without heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length.

And there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.

An open letter to my Health Care Administrator

2008-11-21T23:03:00.001-05:00

Dear Health Care Administrator(s),

The time is now for change. You've heard the bells tolling, and I dare say that meaningful health care reform in our country means that it tolls for thee. No man or woman or CEO needs to earn millions of dollars selling a basic human need and right like health care and we all have a pre-existing condition that makes us a future health risk, it's called being human. So let us no longer be the only civilized and rich country that does not provide and guarantee basic rights such as health care to its citizens, to all of its citizens. I believe the time is now for the health care industry (including pharmaceutical companies) to become part of the solution or be prepared to look for another job.

Respectfully,
Kevin Lapin

PS Please don't try and lobby or false advertise your way out of this, I've lived in France and had a knee operation there and it was great. So I'm not buying it.

http://healthcareforamericanow.org/

To the Farmer-in-Chief

2008-11-17T14:07:00.001-05:00

Michael Pollan's open letter to president-elect (yipee!) Obama, titled "Farmer in Chief", clearly and comprehensively laying out a 21st century food agenda for our country, based on the need for healthy, safe, environmentally friendly, locally produced, distributed and heartily enjoyed food in our country. This is part of the new New Deal that we need.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html

Life is a page

2008-11-10T23:37:00.000-05:00

Life is a page
And I am a word

Life is a cage
And I am a bird

Life is a field
And I am a crop

Life is a stream
And I am a drop

--Iqbal

One Child Left Behind

2008-11-05T22:55:00.005-05:00

Dear Friends and Family,

I don’t know about you, but recently I find myself vacillating more and more between hope and depression, between a sense that we as families and friends, as a nation and as a people, that we have the power and compassion and drive to make things better. That maybe universal health care, nano and solar energy, recycling, sustainable growth and peaceful relations with our neighbors are right around the corner. And that maybe this next election will bring change we can believe in. But then I watch an hour too much of the CNN or read an article too many in the Times and things start to seem really gloomy. I think how we’ve gotten ourselves into a couple of wars, a colossal debt, a recession, how we’ve lost most of our allies, our direction as a nation, Ossama Bin Laden and our sense of responsibility for the tired, poor and huddled masses knocking on our doors. I think how we have an expensive and completely useless arsenal of nuclear bombs and continue to spend more on our military then any other nation in the world, in fact, then several of the most important ones put together and yet still have problems properly equipping and caring for the men and women who join it. Meanwhile the middle class is shrinking, fanaticism is up, tolerance is down, and oil companies are making record profits while teachers and artists are working part-time jobs to make ends meet. And when I think about all this, then I think there ain’t much hope and that this time the ‘you know what’ is really in the air and on it’s way towards the fan.

Now don’t get me wrong, like so many other Americans I have been inspired and engaged like never before by the presidential campaign. I’m proud that I live in a country where a minority or woman can run for the highest office. And I’m even more proud that someone who speaks intelligently, compassionately, thoughtfully and sometimes even inspirationally is once again who we are considering as the type of person we want to lead our country. But I’m scared, too. By the polls, by the reactions, by the lipstick news media, selfishness and consumerism that keeps everyone thinking they have to please a lowest common denominator which may or may not even exist, and even if it does doesn’t anyone believe in the power of pulling people up by giving them not what you think they want but what you think they need? And isn’t it foolish of me to think that anything will change after the election? Won’t these election promises turn out, as usual and once again, to be just that? Once shame on you, but twice shame on me, right?

So as we get into the nitty gritty of how we are actually going to do any of these great ideas, or just forget about them all and focus on having enough cash to buy a new widescreen plasma HDTV with a 100 channels of complete crap, I steel myself for a post-election let down, the slump after the bump, the purge after the surge.

In the moments when my mood and emotions aren’t screaming in my ears at the extremes of hope or depression, I do take solace in one thing. One thing that I can count on. One great relief. And that is that no matter what happens, we will no longer have a ridiculous monkey-child leading our country. So, today I raise a glass to you my dear friends and family, pointed to an uncertain future with a mixture of hope and fear, but with a loud and long sigh of relief for the thought that on November 5th, 2008 we will be a nation with “One Child Left Behind”…

-Kevin

From the Heart,

Kevin Lapin
"Appreciate beauty in all its forms."
"Get stuck in there!"

Front Page News, Shanghai SAS

2008-09-11T14:58:00.004-04:00

Jesse Long is taking pictures, lots of pictures, at Shanghai American School. In fact, he just finished up at Pudong, and is now on the Puxi campus where he and his helper friend, Kevin Lapin, will remain until next Friday, the 19th. I asked Kevin what it was exactly that he did. “It’s like in the Wizard of Oz,” he said. “I’m the guy behind the curtain. I help Jesse try to get smiles out of the kids, and I look at how they’re coming out on the computer and try to pick the best shot. Sometimes I will open the photo in Photoshop to do some color corrections. I’m a master of keyboard shortcuts on the Mac. I could never do this job if I wasn’t.” Jesse is behind the camera. With 3,000 students and over 400 faculty, plus some staff pictures, and, considering that he takes 2-4 shots per subject, he figures by the time he leaves Shanghai American School on the 19th, he will have taken more than 10,000 shots—easily! Probably more.

From SAS, Jesse, who owns his business known as International Photos, will be headed for the International School of Beijing, and from there to the Middle East. He goes to these schools, including ours, at his own expense and has been doing this for six years. He says that he’s beginning to run into teachers in different locations. He may meet a former SAS teacher in Dubai, and he’s met some teachers at SAS he photographed at other schools in previous years. Jesse became an international school photographer almost accidentally. He had been in Africa taking photos, and returned to Seattle where, one evening, he was showing them to an old high school friend, Shane Oprescu. Her father, Warren Carlson, dropped by and saw his photos. He had been shooting school photos at international schools for over 30 years. He said, “I’m thinking of retiring. Want to take over my business?” Today, Shane works in a Seattle office handling the details and getting the photos to the lab and then back to the school. Jesse and Kevin will soon head north to ISB. “Yi, er, san!” They’ve got thousands of snaps before they’ll see home again.
By Timothy Merrill, Editor, ParentTalk

Personal Statement

2008-08-19T11:24:00.002-04:00

(for application to the Columbia ETP program)

I believe everyone should have access to a good education and good healthcare. Our happiness, as individuals and as communities, depends on being healthy, both physically, mentally and spiritually. Indeed, one of the reasons I want to become a nurse practitioner is because of its holistic approach to patient care; it combines the excitement and challenge of diagnosing and curing illness with the reward and contentment of educating and caring for patients as unique individuals. Attending Columbia represents the perfect step in achieving this goal of being able to care for the wellbeing of others as well as teach them to care for themselves, as the ETP program combines an intensive hands-on approach with the highest standards of education.

Although I didn’t always want to be an NP when I grew up, when I look back now it seems a natural decision. My dad, one of my greatest role models, always said that aside from his family, being a cardiologist has been the most rewarding experience of his life. I have also experienced first hand how medicine can change someone’s life, for when I was 12 years old I was diagnosed and treated for a pituitary tumor. I feel lucky and grateful to have benefited from the highest quality of health care, which ultimately helped me avoid brain surgery, avoid going blind and, most significantly at the time, break the 5’ barrier before the 10th grade. And all of that thanks to an extremely kind and understanding team of doctors and nurses.

In college, I majored in French and Education with the idea that I might become a teacher. After graduating, I lived in France on a post-graduate exchange scholarship and then to study translation and interpreting. Later, while working at Amazon.com and living in Seattle, I started doing plays and taking acting classes which led me back to Paris for graduate school in theater. It was then that I got a job working for a small medical translation agency and realized that I was interested in health care and medicine.

When I moved to New York, I began working as a medical interpreter which tied together my desire to help people with my background in French. The more I found myself working with patients, the more I wished I could offer them health care directly. I also work as a Standardized Patient, and this has showed me how interesting and challenging being able to interact with a person and take their history is, and how this is such an important diagnostic tool in the primary care physician’s arsenal. I always tell students I work with that patients are looking not just for someone who has the scientific knowledge to fix them, but that they are also looking for someone they can trust and who will care for them. Indeed, without trust, patients may not offer that clinically vital piece of information that will help make the diagnosis. I look forward myself to the wide range of individuals and issues that I will deal with as a family care NP.

Before making the decision to go back to school, I felt it was important to spend more time in the hospital and with patients—to see if nursing was truly the right path for me. So for the past few months I have been volunteering on a step-down and neurology ward at Beth Israel and in the ED and cardiac units at Columbia Presbyterian. What I have learned is that RNs work really hard and play a very important role in the quality of a patient’s stay in the hospital and that I like working in the hospital. I’ve also learned that I want more than hard work; I want the responsibility that comes with being an NP, that is to say, taking part in the diagnostic, prescriptive and educational aspects of care.

From what I can tell I would make a good nurse practitioner. I love working with people and health care connects with something in me. I have a lot of patience, energy, compassion and intelligence to offer patients. I even know what it’s like to be hospitalized in a foreign country. This type of cultural understanding as well as my language skills in French and Spanish should come in handy, as immigrant patients so often make up the underserved populations that I hope to care for.

Ten to 15 years from now, I hope to have gained enough experience and confidence to be an important member of a clinic or practice, while still spending time in a hospital setting (to stay connected). I’m also interested in teaching, and could foresee pursuing a doctoral program towards that end—as well as to gain more training and knowledge. I think that teaching is one of the best ways to really find out if you have learned or know something; as the saying goes, ‘learn one, do one, teach one.’

My rabbi, another role model in my life, once told me something when we were studying together for my bar-mitzvah. He said to me, “Kevin, you’re a smart boy, but that’s not what makes you special. You’ve got a lot of energy and a good sense of humor, but these are also not what make you special. You have a big heart, that’s what makes you special.” I’ve never forgotten that. And I believe that it’s true that the only way you can lead people is by walking the path with them, and that the only paths worth walking in life are paths with heart. These are the paths that I hope to walk as a nurse practitioner.

Kurt and Rebecca

2008-07-27T15:00:00.004-04:00

From the Commitment Reading of the Pueblo Indian and a slam poem by Michael Cirelli
(arranged for Kurt and Rebecca’s wedding, July 27, 2008.)

Before we met, you and I were halves un-joined except in the wide river of our minds, where each other's distant shore, the opposite wings of a bird, the other half of a seashell, curled and stripped to fine perfection. We did not know each other then, did not know our determination to keep alive the cry of one riverbank to the other. We were apart, yet together in ignorance of one another, like two apples falling from a common tree. I knew you existed as a memory, long before you understood my desire to join my freedom to yours and yours to mine. I will remember.

Our paths collided long enough for our indecision to be swallowed up by a greater need of love. When you came to me, the sun surged towards the earth and the moon escaped from the darkness to bless the union of our two spirits, so alike that the creator designed them for life's endless dance, a circle K and R, spinning in the middle and where they join is us, because I am your Parker painter, your supplier of, and you, you are my beloved partner, keeper of my heart's odd secrets, clothed in summer blossoms so the icy hand of winter never touches us. I thank your patience. And trust our joining is like a tree to earth, a cloud to sky and even more, for richer or poor, in sickness and in health, we are the reason the world can laugh on its battlefields and rise from the ashes of its selfishness to hear me say, in this time, in this place, in this way - I loved you best of all.

From the first moment that our eyes set on each other like the dust, our hearts melted like wax that turned to vinyl and the albums turned, degrees upon degrees upon degrees. Our chests opened up like the sky playing the music of a land of showers translated into living for bread, mind became tongues as the summer melted like butter and leaves slowly roasted on trees.

Somehow we had remembered that we used to love each other, but couldn't recall where or when or why. Our hearts were like wax, and the vinyl rotated like it had never turned before till our souls spun around the sun and you became my earth. That's when we first met.

Then I walked the streets of Japan for thirty days, six hours, five-and-a-quarter minutes, it seemed like a year with new eyes swinging low trying to pick up rhymes for you on concrete and neon bustle that reminded me of you until we met again. You said, "yes," and then we found ourselves outside under a ripe moon, our candle constructed of the excess wax from my heart, exchanging wine and optimisms, but the album turned degrees, upon degrees of romanticism, I said "I guess I'll see you next lifetime," which was ironic because my lifeline was entwined with another, I used to love her, until I met you.

So I jumped in your car with P-town plates to go skiing on mountains with the thrust of plate-tectonics, and with you. Through bumps and trees, we followed each other up and down until the snow settled on our hoods. We packed lunches of bread and cheese and drank the breeze blowing off the slopes of Mt. Hood. And there was no need for a car radio, because my heart spun the wax which was the vinyl which turned those degrees times three, and this time I thought to myself, "love me, love me, say that you love me."

We made our love ceramic. It was so fragile that our heads began to spin like clay on a wheel, scriptures flipped, pieces chipped, words fell off as the album turned, throwing degrees upon themselves like neither one of us wanted to be the first to say goodbye, so we said I do. And by degrees our does become deeds where we will sign our names with greed with the excess wax from our melted hearts now tripped and tied in a frieze, and all we need is one witness, as we sign our intentions to become anew. Will you say I do?

So we can return to the same Dalles that we said "I love you" in for forty days and thirty-nine nights and it will be fire, and we’ll melt our albums back into a new heart, forget where they came from, return our records, so they can play a new composition, like a beat.

Friends Haiku

2007-09-21T10:52:00.000-04:00

old friends play then part
like dolphins, swoosh
so long and thanks for all the fish

The Chinese "Eight is Enough"

2007-09-17T10:24:00.005-04:00

Friends and Family,

I've had a change of heart. I know I recently wrote to many of you to tell you that I was giving up acting for a steady gig with Mercedes, but an offer came up that I couldn't refuse--and I'm not alone in this one. While traveling in China doing school pictures with Jesse, we were approached by one of the local student's father who is a casting agent for a local Shanghai television station. As you may know, there is a big market and fascination for western actors and western style shows here in China, and recently they have been doing a lot of remakes.

Well, Mr. Liu-Ching offered Jesse and I lead roles on a new Chinese version of the show "Eight is Enough". It's going to be called "One is Enough" and will run on Tuesday's at 8pm opposite the popular spin-off of the game show "The Price is Right" called "The Price is Cheaper".

The money was too good to turn down, and we will only have to be in Shanghai to shoot for 6 months out of the year. The show is slated to run for several seasons, but we're just taking it step-by-step for now. We're already gotten the first script and it looks pretty good. They've also worked up a poster, which you can see enclosed as a .jpg.

We'll keep you posted and send pirated DVDs or videos as as we can...

Thanks,
Kevin and Jesse

PS You'll notice from the enclosed image that Jesse will be riding "shot gun" in this show.

--
From the Heart,

Kevin Lapin
"Appreciate beauty in all its forms."
"Get stuck in there!"

Zen in the Art of Mercedes Maintenance

2007-08-28T10:12:00.005-04:00

Dear Friends and Family,

I've spoken to some of you already about this, but to others this may come as a surprise. For a while now I have been contemplating making a change, a career change. It's something that has been building for a while, and finally I made the big leap. I've decided to get leave the rat race of physical theater. I've got a great new job working for Mercedes-Benz USA. They're great cars and it's a great group of people.

Take a look at the images and it will give you an idea.

Unfortunately, I can't get you any retail discounts, but in a couple of years I will probably be able to get you some deals on service and maintenance.

Anyway, I hope you are all doing well, and I'll look forward to hearing from you.

-Kevin

--
From the Heart,

Kevin Lapin
"Appreciate mags in all their forms."
"Grease is good!"

Why Didn't He Tell Me (Tragedy in Albany)

2007-04-26T11:44:00.003-04:00

“Why Didn’t He Tell Me?”

There are a lot of crazy people in this business that is ‘like no other’ and a lot of craziness to be experienced (and avoided). Here's a bit that I didn't miss. It's the story of getting cast in my first play in New York, except that it was going to be produced in Albany…

The Audition - at Barnes and Nobles, with “producer” Warren. A bohemian/grunge type with sweater and knit hat. He's filming it. I’m doing a monologue, reading sides, explaining that I’m not a trapeze artist and that I don’t sing—all the while trying to keep the volume down because, after all, it's a bookstore.

The Carrot - googling the director Ominike (Yale, USC, award at Cannes), being told that if the production went well it would be made into a film.

Sign #1 (actually sign #2 if you count the audition) – the script, picked up at a random UPS at 100-and-someodd and Broadway, written in film format and with too many scene changes for stage.

Sign #2 or #3 – the rehearsal schedule, only 5 rehearsals of two-hours each!?!

First Rehearsal – meeting the director, tight hair and empty smiles. No introductions, just an improv about a train station and terrorist bombs. Improvs, improvs, improvs, right up until the very end—even when there is still no scenery or costumes or run-throughs and it’s the day before opening…

Rehearsals – getting kicked out of rehearsal space, rehearsing in her apartment, rehearsing at a Starbucks in Port Authority (improvs, of course). What about these other important scenes, like the trapeze (and falling off of it) or killing my brother’s maid…? "How about we do another improv of the diner scene..."

Missing people – where’s the cop? Having to stand in/read for several parts at a time, because half the cast isn’t there. Still getting notes and direction even when you are just reading someone else’s part. This literally continues and even on the fateful Friday “performance” when it comes time for the girl to go to the police, there is nobody there and the girl sits alone on stage waiting. Finally, the director grabs a script from the audience and calls out the lines for the missing policeman.

A new Darlene – a new actress almost every rehearsal for Darlene, including Jennifer the yoga teacher who nearly had a nervous breakdown about needing to do some Microsoft organizing and virus protection.

Albany – the gray and depressing state capital. Getting picked up at the bus station in an old Honda with junk in it: Warren’s welding equipment, old plastic bottles, tapes, cigarettes. Warren starting to drive crazier and crazier and always talking on the phone. Seeing his apartment, dark and with his bartender girlfriend sleeping in the next room. A mountain of Guinness bottles in the corner. He asks if we’re hungry and whether we want subs or pizza. He comes back with a package of bologna, bagged lettuce, mayonnaise and hot dog buns. Bon appétit!

The Theater – driving along a strip with car dealerships, discount grocery stores, motels and then the theater/instrument store/singing lessons/gymnastics lessons. The guy staring at the TV while waiting for his next singing/karaoke lesson to arrive (watching the Wizard of Oz, sometimes just a blank screen).

Outnumbered – arriving on Wednesday, two days before opening, and meeting the 10 student hair and make-up girls and their teacher from the local professional school who have volunteered to work on the show. We are outnumbered 3-to-1 at this first meeting… “uh where’s the trapeze and the set that should be on stage?”

Community theater – the amateurs arrive at night after work and after school. They love the elaborate make-up and have never been in a play before in their life. Gilles, who is so nervous he stutters his lines (like ‘Shakespeare in Love’ producer character). He can’t quite jump on his cue to rush up and ask us questions as a reporter, we keep leaving the stage before he makes his move. The two kids, one is ADD and too honest--“Gee you’re not very good at that trapeze (or singing)” The other is a little Rushmore-PoinDexter. He’s a future stage manager, complete with glasses and clip board. I catch him spray painting a Starbucks coffee cup bright orange that he’s first covered with masking tape. He’s spraying it right over the prop and make-up table (what props there were!). He says its for the Paris picnic basket—one of the few props that exist, a small basket with three plastic apples. He wants to add the bright orange coffee-cup-thing to the basket to help fill it out. I gently dissuade him. The other guy, who is a little weird, and who is making name tags for our cubbyholes or asking the director if he can do this little gesture with his line, this is in the middle of the complete chaos and approaching train-wreck of opening night. He has no idea that there is no possible way that the show can go on. When it comes time, he is standing in for the surgeon (if there ever was someone cast for the part). Alex has to grab his hand onstage and pull it towards my face so we can pretend he is starting the surgery and the scene can end. Seconds before, I saw the kid preparing to move a mattress across the stage, presumably to better store it stage-right and presumably unaware that we were still performing or that intermission was over… Another woman, a real sad story, is playing Fortaleeza the nurse maid. The woman has been living in Albany (as if that isn’t bad enough) for the last few years since her husband died. She is a single mother and can’t afford a baby-sitter. This show means a lot to her and she has had to resort to bringing her daughter to the theater during rehearsals, which end up going until like 3am and Fortaleeza hasn’t even gotten to do her scenes. At times, she is so overcome with emotion (?) that she has to take a break and sit down. I really feel bad for her when the show doesn’t go on.

Revolution #1 – the day before opening, we finally insist that we go scene by scene and see what scenery exists and how one scene will lead from one to the next, rather than do another improv. This takes about 8 hours and it becomes apparent that there is no plan for the staging or the scenography, nor the costuming or props. Thursday night, our dress rehearsal lasts about 5 hours, it’s the first time that all the scenes are ever “run” back-to-back. There are a few set pieces and props, the wooden cut-out car, for example. It’s about four panels and 10’ long and is painted as a 20’s car (the show is set in the 50’s). It takes three or four people about three minutes to drag it on stage and set it up. The car scene only lasts about 20 seconds. I have the only line of dialogue. “Hey we can give you ride home if you want. I live just down the street from you at 21 Rivercrest,” or something important like that.

Accommodations – after the nightmare dress rehearsal, it appears that not everybody has a place to sleep. We’ve been served a hotpot full of meatballs and hot dog buns for dinner (about 5 hours prior). Alex is missing, she is supposedly getting a ride from Ned, the guy who made the masks. Christian is getting ready to bed down in the theater. Mike ends up at Ginger’s house, who owns the theater, where he is offered an old blanket and couch (there are clearly several guest rooms that are not being used)—he finally goes to a motel down the road. We arrive at our house to find the keys don’t work. Warren tries to call his friend, but it’s like 2 or 3 in the morning. Alex is still missing, Warren tells us that Ned is a born-again, so no worries. At least she might have a place to sleep I think as we turn around to join Christian and the rats at the theater. A minute later, we get through to the owner of our house, so we turn around. Alex calls and begs us not to leave her and to wait up for her. Apparently, Ned wanted to show her more than just a few local sights and has offered that they should get a hotel room. Did I mention Alex is 18? Alex, who is a senior at a professional arts school in New York is a great kid, by the way, she is now playing like 7 different characters.

The local Divo – the child star/singer who is in all the unions and regularly checks in with his agent stops by. He rehearses one scene with his incredible camp and vibrato, then fakes a call with his agent about non-unions rules and whatnot to get the hell out of the train which is clearly heading for a big wreck. Maybe he is the only sensible one?

The Trapeze – It is Thursday evening when the gym teacher, who also has a full-time job, finally is able to set up the trapeze. The ceiling of the theater is one of those false hanging ceilings made up of speckled white rectangles of Styrofoam that you see in most office buildings. He has removed 1 panel and hung a trapeze from the rafter above. There is now a white office ceiling with one panel missing and a trapeze, a bit of insulation and a bit of electrical cord hanging out. The trapeze is about 5’8” off the floor, or as one cast member described it, something his hamster could jump off of without hurting itself (remember, I am supposed not only to do a high-flying trapeze scene, but also a scene where I fall from it and crush my face beyond recognition). In a moment of humility, I realize that even despite the limited range of motion and height of the trapeze, I am not even strong enough to perform a simple mount and twirl… and time is ticking (tomorrow is opening night)… During Friday’s “performance”, the trapeze becomes detached from the wall and is swinging freely in the middle of the stage during our Paris street and picnic scenes. Then, during the tense, I just killed my brother’s maid scene and am face to mask/face with my brother who I haven’t seen for 15 years, the little ADD girl decides to come on stage and try to reconnect the trapeze to the wall. Unfortunately, she isn’t quite tall enough to reach the hook and the clown/comedic set-up is complete.

Revolution #2 – the café. We wake up Friday realizing that the theater fairies have not descended from the sky to save this production and that there is no way in hell we can open that night. The New York cast calls a meeting with the Director and the Owner (hosted by Warren, the “producer” at a nearby cafe). Ominike comes in with a slightly droopy ‘Forest Whitaker’ with glasses look-a-like. He keeps whispering into her ear before anybody speaks. Finally, someone asks who he is and what he’s doing at our meeting. “I’m a US citizen,” he replies. They say that he has no business being there and he gets up and tells them to “Fuck-you”. He then tells us that this is a “Lynch mob”. Ominike manages to calm him down then explains that she should have introduced him sooner, “This is my fiancé,” she says. “No, I’m your husband,” he quickly interjects. Bizarre. The conversation continues. We explain that there is no way you can do a show and not have a plan for sets, props, costumes etc. The conversation slips to the more tangible, the terrible accommodations and lack of food. Things get heated again and the bull-dog gets in Warren’s face and tells him to “Fuck off”. Warren warns him that the police station is just around the corner. To this he says, “I designed the goddamn police station.” Ominike has to take him outside. The owner, Ginger, a kindly 80-year-old woman whose had a stroke, explains that this was her dead mother’s story and that she asked Ominike to adapt and direct it. From the beginning, she had made it clear that she didn’t have the budget for New York actors etc. etc. She was supposed to be in Florida, but found out only recently (yesterday?) how disastrous the situation was. She tells us she can’t afford to pay us, but if we “go on with the show” like “any professional would do” that she will do her best and send us $100 or split the box-office with us. Ginger used to be a powder-puff stock car racer and professional drummer… We discuss and negotiate and finally agree to do the show on Saturday and Sunday if proper food and accommodations are provided and if the show that evening, Friday, is cancelled. We also make it clear that some things need to change, organized etc. for the play. During this very intense meeting, one of the actors, Isabelle a Spanish woman, goes to the bathroom. We are in a local café and there are patrons who have been watching/listening to everything. One of the women is clearly interested and concerned by the situation and asks Isabelle what she thinks we will decide and what if anything she has learned from the experience?

Warren – is becoming more and more belligerent and wants to have a drink at every occasion. Didn’t I see an AA book at his apartment. Apparently he’s fallen off the wagon almost as fast as our Divo got off of the speeding train. He’s going on long tirades about Ominike the director and Ginger the owner who wouldn’t give him a budget. To his credit, he has spent the day dumpster diving for props and calling friends to see if Christian can crash at their house instead of the theater. Finally, he comes crashing in after Friday’s crazy “rehearsal/second-run-through/cancelled performance”. Granted we still haven’t been fed properly and it’s like 1am, but we are calmly doing notes from the run—the only thing resembling a normal theatrical experience thus far. He bursts in and starts yelling, “This is crazy. This is crazy. This is nuts. I’m pulling the plug. No more, this is not possible. It’s too much. They’re going to eat now!”

Dénouement – after the Friday “show”, which was actually fun for me despite the continued chaos of missing actors, props, mixed up scenes, singing numbers (did I mention that we went ahead with the angst-ridden and musical moments where my character sings out his despair at being alone and kicked out of the house or having been disfigured), dangling trapeze, etc., any remaining curiosity or attachment keeping us in Albany has disappeared. Almost everyone wants to go home, some feel that we have been lied to (there were a few people in the audience) and that nothing has changed artistically (no surprise) or in terms of food and accommodations. Nonetheless, Ginger has said she wants to buy us dinner and will meet us a some restaurant. Some of the cast flat out refuse to eat with Ominike or Ginger. And as the nice guy and de facto porte-parole of the group, it falls to me to call Ginger and explain to her why we won’t be joining her at the restaurant. As we eat wings and drink beer at a local bar, Warren continues to rage how Ominike and Ginger don’t deserve us. Apparently he wants us to walk out as well, and at this point he is more or less preaching to the choir. Everyone but Michael and myself seem resolved to return to New York. It falls to me, of course, to call Ginger in the morning as we are trying to round everyone up and get to the bus station for the 11am express to Manhattan. All my clothes and bags are in Warren’s car, having preferred to get back early and safely rather than wait for Warren and his increasingly out of control driving. We are sleep deprived and I am wearing the same clothes as the night before, minus my socks, which are now gross. Thinking I’ve dialed Warren, I quickly explain that we are heading to the bus station and can he pick us up and help us get our stuff. Unfortunately, it’s Ginger on the other line and I find myself trying to quickly and politely explain why everyone has decided to leave again... On the bus ride home we realize what an amazing story we've just survived and decide we will try and make a film out of it.

What's the term for a picture, within a picture, within a picture, a palimpsest? I'm hoping that our film about the play isn't doomed to turn into some sort of clownish palimpsest of disaster...

Mad Maths - Press and Reviews

2007-02-07T12:59:00.005-05:00

A wacky, absurd and lyrical presentation on that most hilarious of subjects: mathematics!

An exponential success (over 300 performances and counting!) in schools, theaters, festivals and even several closets across France, “Mad Maths” has been curing audiences of their mathematitis since 2003!

Mr. X and Mr. Y, a duo of seriously screwy professors, rigorously explain to you their erudite theories on zero, infinity, PVC pipes and the importance of the zebra in numeration.

A show for the math traumatized, flunk-outs and fanatics…

“Mission accomplished for “Mad Maths”, an unpretentious and screwball UFO of a show with a contagious good mood: to get you to laugh intelligently by exploiting to the nth degree all the mathematical possibilities of a science little reputed for its hilarious functions.”

“This duo demonstrates that our system of numbering is more than anything a cultural one. Translating any number, even negative, into animal noises. Revealing a richness to the mathematical language that even Raymond Devos, Vincent Roca or Monty Python couldn’t deny. All that with a rigor which is as strict as it is hilarious.”

“We’re betting that the originality, humor and even the poetry of their show will reconcile more than one person with this science that has suddenly become fun.”
--May 20, 2005 edition of ‘Le Parisien’ (one of the main Paris daily papers)

“An original and intelligent play… and funny to boot, from which you leave convinced that math can be funny!”
--from the monthly scientific magazine ‘Tangente’

“A successful marriage carried off by two masterful actors who embark us into their world: mathematics.”
--website of the Paris public school system (l'Académie de Paris)

“A show that is both whacky and well constructed which proves that laughter can be an outlet and component of the pleasure of learning math.”
--Annie Cérésuela, cultural attaché of the Créteil educational authority (Action Culturelle du Rectorat de Créteil)

“You succeeding in mixing the magic and poetry of theater with the rigor and precision of mathematics.”
--J.D. Brulois, Assistant Principal of the P. Doumer high-school in Le Perreux sur Marne

“In the guise of Mr. X and Mr. Y, two straight-laced mathematicians who might have been sniffing some equations before getting on stage, this duo, founders of the company Sous un autre Angle, will have you reviewing the history of numeration and will introduce you to the poetry of curves. Through demonstrations which seem completely absurd, yet which remain completely logical, sound effects and gesticulations evoking the pain of the dunce faced with a sine wave, or scenes which underline the importance of numbers in everyday conversations.

“Overflowing with humor, inventive, surprising and intelligent, this show doesn’t forget to play with the audience, stand-up style. All for the purpose of convincing you that math can be a fun and even moving subject.”
--Fabien Maréchal – May 10, 2005 - Annu: Art; Arts, artistes et actualité (webzine)

More at www.kevinlapin.com

Climbing Huang Shan

2006-09-21T20:08:00.005-04:00

Megan and I have just spent 4 days in Huang Shan, which is a small city in central China near a famous mountain of the same name--one of the seven mountain pilgrimage sites that Chinese, if they’re lucky, visit in their lifetime.

We arrived late and caught a cab directly to our hotel. Apparently here in Huang Shan--like in the capital--the taxi fleet has recently been overhauled; our cab is one of the new omnipresent brown and yellow Korean models that is reliably metered and air-conditioned. I guess we have the upcoming Olympics and the wonders of a centrally directed government to thank for this. (Last year we were told that the government was cracking down on honking and spitting, this year we are told that they seeded rain in Beijing for over 20 days in July to help clear up the pollution in preparation for an Olympic committee visit. Indeed, when we arrive in Beijing in mid-August we are treated--a first--to several days of clearish-blue sky. Of course, the rain merely pushes the pollution into the ground and after three weeks in Beijing, balanced by 4 days around Huang Shan mountain and 4 days in Tianjin, the 5th most polluted city in the world, I will be dried out, puffed-up and congested. Nothing like a 13-hour plane ride to push you over the edge, right?) For now, though, we have arrived at our hotel pre-reserved for us by a travel agent in New Zealand. As you do in the global village...

The next morning we awake to another great “Continental” breakfast. Of course you have to remember which continent we are on. In China, breakfast can look a lot like other meals: wontons, meat or vegetable filled buns and black vinegar, fried noodles, greens etc. There are a few additional items that make breakfast unique. They are: warm soy milk, congee (rice is to congee as oats are to oatmeal) and hard boiled eggs--which are browner in color and taste a lot gamier (not chickens? or not a product of industrial processing and bleaching?).

After breakfast, we catch a cab to the bus station. When we get in, our young and hip-hop listening cabbie honks through the usual pedestrians, cyclists and--this is relatively new--electric moped commuters. With a show of Western amity, he cranks up the hip-hop music (it’s 7:30 in the morning!) and turns to smile at us and give us the thumbs-up in the back. He also takes the opportunity to check Megan out--whose big, blue eyes and bust attract a lot of frank, as opposed to leery, stares here in China.

En route, our cabbie convinces us to let him take us all the way to the mountain instead of just the bus depot. This is done through several mimed gestures and a series of price negotiations carried out on a pad of hotel notepaper that we pass back and forth. There appears to be some question about whether we want mountain/destination number one or two which never gets resolved, as hand-gesturing and grunting is rather limited at coaxing out this type of subtlety in communication. We’ve found that a pad of paper or a calculator--even a cell phone keypad--is ideal for negotiations as the Chinese have their own hand and finger gestures for numbers which are as hard for us to figure out as our system of holding up fingers for each place holder (first the tens, then ones) is to them. For some reason our cabbie won’t write on the notepaper, no matter how I try to indicate that there are many pages of the stuff and you can just rip one off and start on another, preferring instead to write everything on the cardboard backing of the notepad.

Our cabbie, in true foreign-cab-driver-style, drives like a madman, passing two and three cars at a time regardless of visibility, the existence of guard rails and/or oncoming traffic, and soon enough we arrive at the gates of the mountain. There is literally a big, red wooden Chinese arch-gate at the main entrance.

After paying the entrance fee, which is 200 yuan or RMB for me (about $25) and 100 for Megan (she is still using her International Student Identification Card which says she is 26), we consult--for the umpteenth time--the three pages which we have torn out of our guidebook to save on weight, and which are our only, however meager, source of information about Huang Shan--the mountain and town. We decide to take the shorter 7km steps Eastern route up the mountain, reserving the harder 15km Western route for the way down and the cable cars whisking bus loads of Chinese and Korean tour groups up and down both sides of the mountain for the weak. And without so much as a deep knee bend (or a decent supply of food and water), we are off and climbing an endless line of stone stairs, surrounded by a forest of bamboo, then trees and then, finally, steep mountain peaks.

Megan has her small black umbrella out to protect her fair skin from the sun and is calling out the names of plants as we walk. This is the same ubiquitous umbrella that she carries with her, rain or shine, which makes her--with her sun glasses and scarf--look like Marilyn Monroe on vacation in Ethiopia, the Sierra Nevadas and, now, Huang Shan. Apart from the umbrella, our three now tired guidebook pages, a couple of bottles of water, four snickers bars, a tin of wasabi-covered peas and a bun from the airplane, we are fairly unprepared for this hike. I’m wearing casual shoes and will learn later that besides the sweat soaked t-shirt on my back and my cargo pants all I had packed was a torn and hand-cut American flag tank-top and a pair of lacrosse shorts. Megan is wearing her MBTs and a black corduroy skirt. I guess we’ve been in France long enough to dull our west coast REI equipped-to-climb-Everest-even-if-we-are-taking-a-long-weekend-in-Milan reflexes.

Lucky for us the weather is 80 degrees and overcast rather than raining hard or blaring sun as it could have been. But it is humid, so although we make it to the top in only about three or four hours, we are definitely sweaty. Walking up--step, by stone step--is extremely fatiguing, but we decide that it is probably easier on the legs and ankles, if not knees, than a sloped dirt trail. At the top, the warm, misty and overcast weather, near perfect for hiking, obscures most of the incredible panoramas and makes even capturing the peaks we can see near impossible without a better lens and tripod. We are not terribly bothered, for now at any rate, as our main concern is finding someone to point us in the direction of our hotel. It turns out that the summit is more like several ridge trails and peaks, rather than one, so it is not clear which way we need to go. Though our guidebook pages and map do contain place names in Chinese as well as in transliteration, the map and place names do not seem to correspond to the Huang Shan and trail maps we are seeing in front of us. (In China, it’s best to have everything written down in Chinese characters if you want to get around. Since the language is highly tonal, even repeating a street or hotel name to a cab driver or passerby can produce haphazard results. I guess it’s lucky Megan and I went to that “mime” school in Paris.)

We eventually make our way, even more tired and sweaty, to our hotel and check-in. After a quick shower and change into my lacrosse shorts and muscle shirt pajamas-come-casual-attire, it’s about 4pm. We decide to head directly to the hotel restaurant for a late lunch. Besides the omnipresent snack stands along the trail offering cucumbers, Chinese sausage-on-a-stick, water, coke and the like, the only other alternative is the Friendship store at the hotel. We figure we’ll buy some stuff from there to improvise a ramen dinner or something. Cultural note: not too long ago foreigners to the “Middle Kingdom” were not aloud to go just anywhere or buy whatever they wanted, lest they poison the communist comrades in the street with their capitalist ways and seditious democratic ideas. Instead, they were given a special currency and invited to shop at designated “friendship stores” and lodge at “friendship hotels”. The term “friendship store” is typical in its Lost in Translation bubbly, happy Asian style. All over the place are signs for parks and such with names like, “Park for harmonious living with Nature park”.

The hotel restaurant--one of three--is more overrated, than overpriced. Megan and I are more than willing to pay $8 for the meat or vegetable stuffed buns with black vinegar that usually cost between $0.50-$1.00, however, for we had seen how most of the supplies get to the top. And it’s not in the cable car. It’s guys with a yoke on their back and another for balance and leverage carrying up loads on foot, one step at a time. We saw sacks of food and rice and even buckets with water and live fish going up, as well as laundry and garbage going down. And, apparently, this back and leg breaking work costs less (charges less?) than the cable car, which I can tell you was about $10 for a passenger ride up.

So, we are in the middle of placing our order when a cockroach (okay, not as big as the one that I took a picture of on the trail, but still pretty big) calmly begins making his way around the edge of the table. Just as calmly, and following my eyes follow its progress, our waitress takes a napkin from the Lazy Susan in the middle of the table and balls up our unwanted dinner guest in her hand.

There isn’t much to do at the peak, the main attraction being the great views still shrouded in a misty grayness and the electric sunrises still over 12 hours away, so Megan and I settle in to some deck chairs to watch bus-loads of Chinese tourists following tour guides with headset microphones and flags. There is also a basketball hoop which is presumably the employees only recreation. I tell myself that if my legs weren’t so tired, I’d show them what it really means to push the pumpkin (not in my central Chinese mountain shrine, boo-yah!).

More than other groups of tourists or people, the Chinese make a lot of noise. Between the talking and hacking (remember that spitting, although now fined in many places, was traditionally considered a way of getting rid of bad throat spirits) and picture-taking hubbub, it’s a real tintamarre. This probably explains while all the tour guides need amplification. I like to correlate this cultural trait to the population size. Like they say about growing up in a large family, you learn to speak up if you want to be heard. And hey, the Inuits aren’t known as a loud people, are they?

One of the traditions of Huang Shan is for lovers to engrave a padlock with their names and then attach the locks to anything that is, well, chained down. And indeed, there are hundreds of padlocks hanging from the guard rails of every viewing site. So many, that the chains and bars are completely covered with them and they continue hanging the locks from each other. It looks like dangly mats of metallic wooly mammoth hair.

When we go to bed--it's only like 8pm--Megan and I disagree about what time to set the alarm clock for in order to catch the sunrise. Megan says 7am should be about right. I’m not sure whether this is wishful thinking or some sort of inference from what the light looks like when she usually wakes up at around 10 or 11 (am). I propose 5am. After a bit of negotiating, we settle on 6am. This, of course, is a great example of how compromising can be a zero-sum exercise, because not only will we miss the sunrise but we will also lose an hour of sleep.

In the end, it doesn’t make much of a difference, because the sun only comes out for the briefest of moments the next morning. Indeed, between 7:07-7:09 the sun rises from one set of clouds, illuminating the mountain top to the tune of a digital picture snapping applause, then promptly climbs back behind the clouds and humid mist from whence it came. (As I read this aloud to Megan, she points out that this means she was technically right about when to wake up.)

We walk around to a couple of the lookout points and add our canon clicks to this matinal mountain-tourist concert, before stocking up on supplies, checking out and heading off down the mountain. Today, with only Korean peanut crackers (yuck) and Chinese mooncakes (double-yuck) for sustenance we are going to descend the 15km Western trail.

Our legs are still a little soar and weak from yesterday’s exertions, as we follow a ridge trail for about 6km. Along the way, we get to see most of the famous vistas, rock formations and ancient double-trunked lovers trees that Huang Shan is surely known for. When you only have two pages in a guidebook that covers all of China, details like this are often omitted. The map, however, does indicate that we should continue to follow this ridge to get to the head of the Western steps.

After about 45 minutes of ridge line, the trail heads downhill, step by step. We quickly decide that going down the stone stairs is at least as tiring as going up. We go downhill for about 3km, and our thighs and knees begin shaking and trembling after the about .5km. It’s about 10:30 in the morning when we arrive at the crossroads. Now, in addition to being weak in the knees, we are sweaty and hungry.

We rest and snack for a few minutes, then begin looking around for the Western steps. I am figuring that we have already knocked off 3 or 4 of the touted 15km. The English location names and directions on our guidebook map--once again--do not correspond to the names and directions we are seeing on the trail maps, so we ask for directions from one of the ubiquitous park employees who go around with what look like really large chopsticks picking up litter and emptying the even more ubiquitous stone garbage boxes. One might hope that with a garbage bin every 15 or 20 yards along the trail, people wouldn’t litter. But that would be wrong, at least not here in central China. Of course, maybe there is a correlation to the number of people that you see picking up trash and your incentive to carry that snickers wrapper another 5 or 10 yards to the nearest garbage bin.

But I digress, and that’s probably because the answer we are given is so distasteful that even now I am trying to avoid relating it. When we show the park employee the Chinese characters for “Western Trail” in our guidebook, he points back up the path we just came down. My first reaction--one of base and survival instinct--is that this Chinese guy must not have understood. Or maybe he doesn’t know how to read. Or maybe he is trying to play a trick on the foreigners. Anything, basically, but the fact that it might be true. However, soon enough it becomes apparent that, indeed, errare humanum est. And that in this case, the humans in error--and now despair--are us.

Now we are faced with a decision: either hike back up 3km, find where we missed the turn off for the Western Trail and then hike down 15km; or continue on in this direction for several kilometers and take the cable car down. I’m not really sure how the next bit happens, but after agreeing that we don’t think we can make it--not on day old legs and a dwindling reserve of Korean crackers--Megan and I shoulder our backpacks and head back up the hill.

One of the things that keeps us going over the next several sweaty and shaky-legged hours is the thought of how good it’s gonna feel to dip into the natural hot springs that our guidebook says are waiting for us at the bottom. In fact, it is probably this same sulfuric vision that charmed us into going back up the trail to find the Western steps in the first place.

Hours and rocky ridges and steep staircases and thousands of stone steps later, we reach the bottom. We even decide to walk the extra couple kilometers from the gate to the parking lot and bus stop, rather than wait or pay for the shuttle. After all that, we find that the hot springs are closed. They are being renovated, probably for the darn Olympics, into some sort of big hotel hot spring and spa complex. Although, I have to say that by the time we get there it doesn’t much matter. I am just ready to get out of there and get back to our hotel in Huang Shan where I can take a shower, eat a decent (Chinese) meal and lay down.

Although we don’t do the hot springs, that evening Megan and I get 45 minute foot massages when we got back to town. Chinese massages are excellent and very cheap, but I can tell you that they are not recommended after a two-day hike when you’re muscles are already tender and sore. I was slapping the side of the massage table and giggling uncontrollably (it was either giggle or scream like a little girl) the whole time. The two masseuses seemed to think I was pretty funny. I just thought it was painful.

The final note on this story is that we spent the next day discovering Huang Shan, which mostly involved huddling in a Chinese restaurant for hours, waiting for some people to come in and order something so that we could point to it while staying out of the rain, thanking the lord it hadn’t rained on the hike, and planning out the theater workshops that we would give when we got back to Beijing.

Best Man Speech for Jesse and Rebekah's Wedding

2006-09-17T09:00:00.001-04:00

On behalf of everyone here I’d like to thank Jesse and Rebekah for bringing us together to celebrate with them on this beautiful occasion.

Now I was told that I had to keep this to under 45 minutes, so I’m going to get right to the point.

Rebekah, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, but do you realize that you have just legally agreed and bound yourself to put up with Jesse and his shennanigans in a long term and committed way, till death do you part. No, really, Rebekah, I hope you know what you are doing. We don’t all necessarily understand why, but “Thank you!”

I’ve known Jesse just about all my life, almost as long as I can remember, and several times I would prefer to forget, so I know what I’m talking about when I say, Rebekah, I hope you know what you are doing.

Now unfortunately, the problem is that most of the embarrassing stories I’d like to tell you about Jesse, incriminate me just as much as him, so I can only hope that you know what you are doing.

What I can tell you about Jesse is that he rolls through life collecting friends and adventures like dirty laundry collects around his room--laundry that doesn't always belong to him (when we lived together in Fremont, he used to slip his dirty laundry into my basket hoping I’d wash it for him. Now that’s what I call a free-loader). And even though Jesse was known throughout high-school as the mooch, he is one of the most generous people I know. Jesse is a rogue and a lover with touches of genius.

He is one of the last great explorer spirits. He has a great sense of direction, adventure and luck. He is mythically optimistic, to the point of bending the truth. And he’s a good tipper.

Jesse's the kind of friend that you never leave, not even when you're a thousand miles away. You can not hear from him for six months. Then he'll show up on your door step out of the blue, give you some of the best advice of your life over a beer then suggest opening a store based on bulk peanut butter or smoked salmon flavored deodorant.

And it's like you never were apart.

When I asked Jesse how he felt about marrying Rebekah, Jesse said, “It's like going all-in pre-flop with a good hand. Who knows what could happen on the turn or the river, but you're happy now and you know it's going to be an exciting ride so you're ready to get stuck in there. What could be better than that?”

Jesse is a great teacher and guide to man, child and dog. In fact, you can pretty well understand who Jesse is when you know that for a long time he had a book in his bathroom called, “There Are No Bad Dogs.”

I guess that about sums Jesse up.

Rebekah, I hope you know what you are doing, because even if you don’t, I do, you’re choosing to spend your life with the best friend any man, woman or dog could ever ask for.

So knowing all that I know about Jesse (and quite a bit of stuff I wish I didn’t), I can say that I have absolutely no reservations in raising a glass, and inviting you to do the same to toast Jesse Haggar Long and Rebekah Lynn Long:

As Jack Erskin used to say, “May the road rise up to meet you, and may the wind be always at your back”. L’chaim, take care and get stuck in there!!!

Nutmeat: A Burlesque Fairytale

2006-08-14T13:13:00.002-04:00

With each new flop, incompetent puppeteer Ramon Martinez pushes his family closer to starvation. The battle between quixotic idealism and the reality of failure mounts, as frustrated wife Mimi resorts to knitting dinner and their adolescent son Martín seeks solace in an anatomically correct Barbary organ...

This physical comedy from French-American troupe Sous Un Autre Angle is quite charming in a sad, slightly grotesque way, and so far has been my favorite Fringe show. Written by Megan Campisi with the three main actors, it tells the story of Ramon Martinez, a puppeteer not really worthy of the title, and his wife and son who are cowed and starving due to his insistence on continuing with the family profession which isn’t earning anything. He tries to stage fairytales, but something always goes wrong to ruin the show, and it’s quickly clear that the Martinez’ own story is the real fairytale – of the dark, anxious Grimm Brothers sort (though O. Henry’s semi-uplifting “Gift of the Magi” takes a bow too). It’s painful to listen to Caroline Reck play the wife through an ill-fitting pair of fake bad teeth, the songs of the android-like Barbary organ that the son falls in love with are headache-inducing, and at times the slapstick is a little too slow-paced to be pulled off. But the company does so much with minimal set and props, and they strive and sorrow so winningly, that it’s hard not to be drawn to all of the characters, even the imperious Ramon. Nutmeat’s mixture of silly and dark jokes amuses but also cuts to the quick at times, a combination that makes both seem more real and makes the show as a whole rather artfully engaging.
(At Access Theater, 380 Broadway; http://gothamist.com/archives/arts_and_events/)

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Nutmeat refers to the sweet salty fatty goodness that drives us all to crack, chew, and rip our way through nutshells. And the nutmeat that awaits you in this 55-minute nutshell is the sheer pleasure of watching actors' imaginations at work. Though these pleasures aren't quite enough to hold this flimsily constructed show together, audiences should still catch this rare opportunity to see an NYC performance created by the always playful and often breathtaking alums of the highly distinctive physical theatre school Ecole Jacques Lecoq.

The tale, scripted by writer/director Megan Campisi and told by the players from Sous Un Autre Angle ("from a different angle"), concerns a family of impoverished puppeteers (hysterically pronounced "pooh-pah-teers" by the family's patriarch Ramon Martinez). Father Ramon builds puppets and, with son Martin, performs fairy tales which, without fail, end in disaster: tangled marionettes, torn costumes, and raging infernos, to name a few. Mother Mimi knits the family's woolen attire and there's also a barbary organ (played by Caroline Reck), "carved" in the likeness of Mimi, who belts out her own versions of (un)forgettable classics like "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Martin is in love with the mechanical chanteuse and the Oedipal implications are orgasmically sung out by the organ as Martin coitally "cleans her pipes." When the Martinez family's dinners devolve from pretzels to paper potatoes to yarn, Mimi and Ramon make a fairly grim—or Grimm; this is a billed as a fairy tale, after all—decision which I'll leave as a surprise, but all wraps up rather happily by show's end.

So, that's the plot in a nutshell, as it were, but unfortunately, it's neither engaging enough nor the relationships satisfying enough to make for hearty theatrical fare. But then there's the meat! Delights abound in the form of a virtuosic mime sequence, an outrageously clever puppet show performed by human marionettes, a butcher-paper set (credited, along with all of the production elements, to the ensemble) which the actors "change" with a sharpie, a charming stick puppet journey...the list goes on. The audience gasped and giggled at these theatrical treasures, and the glimpse into this collective's unconscious is well worth the price of admission.

At times, however, the ensemble falls victim to its fictional family's foibles, mostly in the form of continuity gaps: If they're so hungry, why do they crush stray pretzels (curiously packaged in a Smartfood popcorn bag) underfoot? If Mimi desperately needs wool to keep food on the table, why is a long piece of yarn forgotten on the floor? And if the barbary organ is made entirely of wood, why aren't her movements more consistently, well, wooden?

The ensemble expresses an endearing and palpable pleasure in performing its creation. Boomie Aglietti is quite a bit of fun as a proud Spaniard in the tradition of The Princess Bride's Inigo Montoya, and Max Dana is sweet as the mostly mute Martin. Marc Boucai and Lisa Frank make delicious cameos as the utterly adorable marionettes, and Campisi and Reck ably play Mimi and her wooden likeness, respectively (though one wishes that Mimi's false teeth did not muffle her voice so much).

As Ramon confesses, "Not every story has a nutmeat." While you might leave Nutmeat longing for substance, this ensemble's playful diversions certainly gave me quite a bit to chew on."
Copyright ©2006 The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. All rights reserved.
-http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/prnn/187.htm

More at www.kevinlapin.com

The Kingdom of Dates

2005-10-22T00:00:00.001-04:00

As you fly into Saudi (the Kingdome of) airspace, the flight attendants come through the cabin clearing all signs of alcohol. Then they distribute your landing card, where you have to identify your religion. Apparently, Christian and Muslim are the only acceptable responses.

When I came here with Jesse five years ago, I was surprised to find myself not wanting to write Christian on the little yellow card. As you may know I'm not a “big jew”, though as a Kohen (a priest from the tribe of Levi and a direct descendant of the Biblical Aaron) on both my mother and father’s side I could be called, if you were Hawaiian or my mother, a “big kahuna”. Nevertheless I was in a bit of a dilemma; something about knowing that Jews are not allowed in the country, I guess, even if I didn’t feel personally offended. I thought about leaving the question blank or writing Buddhist, but in the end decided it wasn't worth the hassle. You've got to pick your battles, right?

Inspite of, or because of, being conscious of not giving myself away, I found myself coming out with Yiddish words in random conversations, the types of Yiddish phrases that I don’t normally even use. I would be visiting a teacher’s house and admiring all the different decorations that they had acquired from Indonesia and Africa and say something about how I loved all their tchatchkes, or I would describe the usual food stain on Jesse’s chin and shirt as a bit of schmutze. We also had a funny moment when a teacher was talking about a race called the Hash and Jesse asked him whether he had some. Silence.

This time around I am prepared, at least for the landing card and long lines at customs, but sure enough as I'm filling it out I realize that the book I am using as a support, the one book I'm bringing into the country, is a Primo Levi book called “The Periodic Table”. Gulp. And as I'm reading the first few chapters I realize that it's not just a book by a celebrated Jewish holocaust author, it's his memoirs and the first few chapters are filled with anecdotes about his crazy Jewish-Piedmontese ancestors and all their funny sayings and quirks. In French this is called an acte-manqué, the Freudian slip of your actions/intentions. Oh, I wonder why I would have done that...

We started hanging out with a really cool teaching couple, the Gallaghers. The first thing they asked us when we walked in the door of their suburban house (suburban except for the compound walls, bomb proof security gates and Saudi desert beyond) was “white or brown”? This referred to the color of moonshine we wanted. The brown is the same distilled white alcohol that has been soaked in Jack Daniels bbq wood chips. It actually tastes pretty good. It's funny seeing grown adults discuss their “connection” meaning getting some smuggled hops to make beer in their house or a new batch of white.

Later in the week we go for a drive into Khobar (the city near the Aramco oil compound). There was a bombed out building where they had chased some Al-Queda, which they only refer to as deviants, then got in a stand-off and blew them up.

We learn there is no dancing in the Kingdom, or that’s not quite true, there may be dance places we are told, but women are not allowed. While it is not uncommon to see two men holding hands in public, public displays of affection between husbands and wives is frowned upon, between unmarried couples unheard of. Even the weddings are celebrated separately by the men and women. It’s one of the few times outside of the house that the women are able to dress in their jewels, western clothes and lingerie. The combination of this religiously repressive and gender segregated society leads to a certain amount of homoerotic and homosexual behavior among the men (and camels?) and apparently when you mix in a lack of sex education in schools the result is that it is not uncommon for women on their wedding night to be taken to the ER because they have been sodomized.

Women are also not allowed to drive, or only if they get a royal decree. And when his aforementioned royalness died recently all the state and oil employees got a raise or a bonus of one year's salary. Thanks to oil revenues, Saudi standards of living are extremely high. Manual labor has to be imported from Pakistan or India. I got the sense that Saudis sort of disdain this type of work and believe that they are above it.

People are quite friendly to us. There are a lot of security checks and although it is super strict it doesn't seem like suicidal fundamentalist crazy, though I guess they just send those types to Pakistan and/or fund them. And of course the oil continues to flow like ambrosia from the heavens at about 95 cents a gallon…

We meet another couple called the Snakenburgers. Both of them are gym teachers from someplace in the Midwest. I think because they spend all day yelling across gymnasiums their voices are a combination of loud and hoarse, even in small rooms, and this adds to their hard-core-Harley-driving-leather-wearing-beer-drinking mystique. We go over to their place for cocktails and a poker game. Snake, as even his wife calls him, tells us to remember to bring our swim trunks. “We like to party,” he tells us.

He’s right. They, too, immediately offer us glasses of brown or white, and then the homemade beer is pulled out of the fridge from behind the wet bar which has been built into their living room. Snake is, no surprise, a fairly aggressive poker player. He goes big and rarely goes home. He also likes to be in charge of rules and etiquette. At one point, he kind of starts barking at this neighbor who is a secretary at the embassy or something for making an inappropriate bet or maybe she went out of turn. It’s her first time playing and she breaks down crying. Snake doesn’t appear abashed.

At the next break in the action, Snake says, “follow me” and leads Jesse and I to his garage where he shows us his and his wife’s Harleys (the description above wasn’t just for effect). He explains that they even started the Saudi Arabian Harley club or something. Then he fires one up. Again. He’s revving it louder and louder and with the garage door closed it’s hits a deafening roar. All the while he’s grinning, slapping us on the back and explaining how he and his wife like to go to Bahrain (which he draws out into a Bah-rain) on the weekends to party at the yacht club where they are members. They don’t own a boat, but enjoy the privileges.

Back inside the game continues and pretty soon a woman arrives and joins the game. She is playing completely wild while continually laughing and chatting away about anything and everything. It’s hard to decide whether she is drunk and has no idea how to play poker or she is working us. She will call a raise and then turn over a small or middle pair, and the next hand win big without apparently knowing that she has the nuts. The next thing you know, she is standing up, waving an arm in the air like a rodeo rider and grabbing her crotch to emphasize a point. What point exactly, I can’t remember. Maybe it was just shit talking, which between her and Snake there is no lack of, in quantity or volume.

The party breaks up and Snake tells us to put on our trunks while he sets up the music. He drags two huge speakers out to the backyard where there is a small swimming pool. Now the classic rock (I remember a lot of Eagles) is booming out over the swimming pool and down half the block. Did I mention it’s a school night?

If we were wondering what kind of partying Snake and his wife liked to do, now was the moment of truth. We came out the sliding door to the wave of music and to the site of both Snake and his bobbing in the pool with big cups of moonshine beer in their hands, you know those plastic cups that you can put in the freezer to keep your beer extra cool on a sunny day or Saudi night…

I remember feeling nervous. I wanted to hide behind a fern like Ben Stiller in “Meet The Fockers”. Pretty soon though, Jesse and I are bobbing in the pool as well. We are kind of facing each other talking and I know Jesse is thinking that this is about one of the craziest situations we’ve ever gotten ourselves into (and Jesse’s been around the block, in fact the equator, once or twice too). Somehow it comes out that Snake was a collegiate wrestler for one of the big Midwest wrestling schools like Iowa and he is explaining to us how he mastered the arm drag, had taken it to new heights, past the technical, made it into an art form. We make the mistake of telling him that we wrestled in high-school and now Snake wants to demonstrate his stuff. Jesse kindly volunteers me and next thing I know I am being arm-dragged through and around the pool. Ground, water, sky, ground, water, sky. “What do you think of that?”

Jesse keeps talking about, “next year in the Kingdom...” and I have to say I don’t know at this point whether it is a threat or a promise.

Welcome to Saudi. The Desert. A kingdom of dates, but not dating. It's kind of like what Vegas would be like if it were run by Mormons.

Brementown

2005-07-01T13:25:00.000-04:00

"Brementown" is an adult and children’s paradise (for ages 7 to 77) which combines the magic of fairytales with the dynamic synergy of sound, shadow and object puppetry. Our story starts with a normal living room where the everyday objects we know so well transform into the characters of the story: a bellows becomes the head of an out-of-breath and aging donkey and the old tomes from the library shelf create a tall-tale-telling rooster literally filled with stories... The wonder and magic of the performance style will please the young while the deeper human themes brought out by our production will engage the more mature. Plus, "Brementown" leaves text behind and lets the virtuosity of the puppets tell the story for themselves, creating a truly international theater experience!

More at www.kevinlapin.com

The Cradle and Crush of Humanity

2005-04-20T11:55:00.001-04:00

My friends,

I recently returned from a trip to Ethiopia (the word trip somehow seems more appropriate than vacation). Some of you have been eagerly waiting for details or photos of our time in the "cradle of humanity", and I apologize for the delay, but it has been hard to sit down and write something.

Contrary to my previous trip around the Middle East and Africa, I have not felt the urge to write witty travelogues or goofy stories. Don't get me wrong, it was a lot fun, an amazing experience, but very intense and also somehow very elusive. Hard to chew up and spit out what you can't swallow, I guess, but here goes…

As I think about the trip, all the people we met and the injera we ingested, all the beautiful places and things we saw and all the ugly things we didn't want to see but needed to, the miles we drove and the showers we didn't take and the way time often seemed to float and drift like an afternoon nap, I think about catching and singing the sun in its flight with Jesse "hold-em" Long, getting to know Rebekah "café-con-leche" Fletcher, watching Trika "sparkling rain" Harm Zum Sprekel effortlessly making friends and, of course, spending every second possible with Megan "bad ass" Campisi, and when I try and think about all of this now, sitting here on the border of the 19th and 20th arrondissements in Paris, something about the whole experience is hard to grasp, hard to define. Somehow too personal or too grand for the simple recounting of.

You see, you have this idea about what your Africa experience will be, but like a zen koan it eschews you. I for example had this idea about being able to observe these tribes that we were going to visit during out trip around the south, ideas about observing their 'otherness', their 'purity', or something like that. Observe as in calmly, from a distance.

In the capital, Addis Ababa, you're fine, because regardless of how awkward or different it is, it's still a city and so you can understand how or why people and things are the way they are. If you've got money you can get around, go out to bars, restaurants, or even Salsa classes at the Bulgarian Embassy. There are just enough idiosyncrasies to remind you that you are in a foreign land without making you feel lost. For example, besides the food and language there is the time which is measured with a 12-hour day starting just after daybreak at 1-o'clock (7am our time) and ending at dusk at 12-o'clock (6pm our time) and the calendar, based on the Julian system, which is about 7.5 years behind our Western Gregorian calendar.

But then you leave the city and find yourself in the heart of the Rift Valley. You step out of your 4x4 Land Cruiser in your first local village, and Whabbam it hits you. You are immediately surrounded, overwhelmed, lost. You thought you came to observe and look at these remote cultures, but you quickly realize that it's you who are being observed, you are the spectacle. Everyone, especially the kids, wants to hold your hand and show you something, they are asking for caramellos (candy) or they want you to buy a picture or beads, look at their goat, their hut, their wound, their baby. You feel like a movie star, everyone is watching you or wants to talk to you, just to say hello.

You have to know what you want, otherwise you will spend your whole visit to a village saying no thanks or haggling over a price. You have trouble seeing or focusing on the experience because there are so many kids and people around you, in your space. You don't realize it yet, but the experience you came for is right there in front of you, in fact the experience is pulling on your shirt, is smiling for a photo and asking you, "hey mister, 1 Highland" (Ethiopian brand of mineral water, the empty plastic bottles are useful and desired containers) or "please, I am student 1 pen".

You can't be afraid of reaching out and touching the experience, being touched, and as hard as you are reaching for that quintessential "African experience" or even that "deeper, more real thing", the more you find yourself back-peddling, taking a stance, playing a role, rationalizing, distancing yourself, thinking about what kind of story this might make, getting claustrophobic, hot, hypochondriac (it's terrible to find yourself worrying about diseases every time a little boy or girl holds your hand) or you just space out which is one of the mind's best defenses against this unknown and uncomfortableness.

More than once I made the mistake of offering something (a candy or Highland bottle) to too large a group of kids and had to watch as kids trampled and fought with each other over it, crying and screaming. This reminded me of a scene from a Primo Levi book where he witnessed a son strangle to death his own father in a blind struggle for a piece of bread that someone had tossed into their train wagon bound for Auschwitz.

But don't worry; it always comes back to you.

People are struggling or perhaps just plain living without any of the comforts and luxuries, like electricity and clean water, that you can't imagine living without, and they are more visibly happy and alive than most people you see at home. You find yourself feeling guilty, lucky, but wondering if you come from such a lucky country, why do people at home seem so much less happy and alive than these people? Then you question whether you are really helping or only making people dependent on begging by giving out that 1 bihr. You ask yourself how much can you give and is that enough? Are you supposed to just give everything away? If you don't give something, does that mean you are giving nothing? And what about teaching a man to fish, isn't that better than charity?

And so on and so forth you spin and spin the wheels until, selfishly, you feel a little defensive about being so lucky, maybe justified, angry even. Then you feel at home again, because you're thinking about you and not it or them or the little boy with black, dusty buns holding his or her hand out to you or maybe just sitting there with conjunctivitis clouded eyes. It’s safer thinking about you and what you are feeling, but is that the experience you were looking for?

It's not an exhibit.

It seems a little obvious, but you have to realize that there is a difference between what you are doing and visiting a museum in order to get passed that desire to "observe" and "study". You have to accept that by going you are contributing to the contamination of these tribes' culture and way of life, even though that is what you have traveled so far to see and experience. Which is growth and which is contamination? It's like a quantum system you can't observe it without influencing it.

I tried to short-circuit some of these mercantile and colonial mind-traps by juggling for people, but my (Western) idea of what that meant would often get in the way. It took me a while, for example, to realize that juggling doesn't necessarily mean sitting quietly and watching/appreciating my performance. I had to make it clear that these colorful balls weren't meant as gifts and weren't filled with food or beads so they shouldn't be grabbed out of my hands and torn open. And why shouldn't they think this? Most of the other stuff I was pulling out of my pockets were gifts.

Once I could get going, the kids were generally excited to watch and would even give me a ball back if I dropped one, but they were just as likely to keep inching forward wanting to touch or examine the balls. One time in the main village of Omorate some kids ran off and disappeared with my juggling balls. After explaining that I wanted the balls back and offering a small reward (1 ball, 1 caramello), I got all but one of them back. This was about half-way through our trip through the south and I was starting to feel a little used and tired.

Finally, we had to leave and I explained where our campground was and offered a reward of a few bihr if someone brought the final ball back. I had forgot that our campground was about 60 km back down the road near a smaller village called Turmi.

I was completely surprised when that night two of the older boys showed up at the campsite with the last juggling ball. It had been opened and sewn back together again, but it was there. The boys had paid 10 bihr each (which is like the equivalent of several days work) to hitch a ride on a transport truck to get there and had no way of getting back until the next day. Of course I gave them enough money to pay for their trip and a place to stay the night, but I was really touched by how far they had gone to return the ball. It was sort of a turning/breakthrough point for me.

After that I think I kind of loosened up and started having more fun. On our last visit, with the Mursi tribe known for their body painting, lip plates and aggressivity (the guidebooks warn you to watch your socks and the guides repacked our trucks so there was nothing on the outside) we ended up spending an hour or two with them. Afterwards our main guide/driver and friend, Germa, told us that most of his trips only spend about 10 minutes with the Mursi. I ended up playing catch/juggle with a couple of men and women mixed together, was able to joke around, ask questions and even didn't mind the woman who put the lip plate in my hand right away and then came back every 5 minutes to tell me I had to pay her 5 bihr for it. When I finally accepted and paid her, she immediately palmed a bihr and counted back to me that I had only paid her 4 bihr. I just laughed and shook my finger at her.

The times I felt the clearest about visiting these tribes, that is to say the most helpful, was when we were giving out the boxes of medicine and anti-fungal cream we brought along. It definitely seemed like a better thing than giving out candy or money. And I don't really like to buy stuff that I'm not going to use, so apart from the few souvenirs and beads for Megan I purchased, I wasn't doing a lot of "supporting the local economy". Aside from digging a well or something, giving out medicine seemed like a pretty good thing.

But still, I have to say that I think this ends up being another, perhaps more defensible stance, that you take to, to avoid being touched by the experience. It's not an equal form of interaction. Because however helpful what you're giving is, you stay in a power structure of I have, I know and I am giving to you. It's a simple relationship, we know its roles and how we are supposed to act in it so we don't have to struggle with this other more obvious thing: cultures and human beings who are very different and yet very much like you.

In the end, I had to give up or at least put aside a lot of my questions about "helping" or "hurting" and the ideas I had about what my African experience would be like. When I finally did that with the Mursi tribe, I realized that I had a lot of fun. I met them where they were at, not where I wanted or imagined them to be, and if that meant that I ended up haggling about a lip plate in the middle of playing catch with some people, then that was okay too.

I would say I learned that If you push through the differences to the similarities (or vice versa) and aren't afraid of getting dirty or a little malaria or yellow fever or diptheria, then Ethiopia's rewards are worth it.

Egziyaber istelign (may the Lord bless and give to you)
Beh-teh-leh-ku Ewedehalehu (I love you big)

Gong Hey Fat Choy

2005-01-12T14:05:00.001-05:00

see all the Silent Night greeting cards at www.kevinlapin.com

Love and Hate (after Robert Frost's Fire and Ice)

2003-03-15T17:13:00.001-05:00

Love and Hate

Some say it's best to rule with love
Some say with hate.
If there's truth in life above
I hold with those who favor love.
But in our present state
I think I know enough of fear
To say that for ruling hate
Though no more dear
May be our fate.

Rough Cut

2002-10-09T18:56:00.004-04:00

Stonefence

What I remember most about working on my college’s literary magazine The Stonefence Review is warmth and laughter. In the late spring and summer, a certain easy, languid light would stream in and warm us from the outside; the rest of the year, steam heat and tea would warm us from the inside. Monday afternoons, we would meet in Sanborn library, surrounded by shelves of old books and sitting in big comfy chairs, to read and discuss the latest batch of poems and stories that had been submitted to us. This cozy atmosphere created a literary and critical mood that made us more prone to jocularity than to passionate debate, or any other emotions you might associate with working on a literary magazine.

After we had read and discussed a piece we would vote on whether to hold it over or not. Since every piece, which remained anonymous until publication, would be reviewed and voted on a second time before making it into an issue of the Stonefence, the whole thing remained a pretty easy-going affair. The focus and discussion was always on the text at hand, never on the author or on The Stonefence Review as a magazine. And the discussion, though critical, was usually pretty good-natured.

I think we were all a little wary of becoming some sort of pretentious literary clique; the result being that we probably often fell short of hypocrisy, landing instead on the fartsy side of artsy-fartsy. For example, it never failed to get a giggle from us when Giano Cromley would finish reading another of the 'you broke my heart and left me love rants' and announce, "a poem, by Chris Ferry" or insert one of the other editor's names who happened to be present.

We weren't (overly) unkind, and we weren’t elitist about our 'art'; although that was something of the reputation that the Stonefence had inherited, and this despite the fact that the submissions and weekly meetings had always been open to anyone in the community and that everyone attending could vote. Quite the opposite, if some of the laughter was directed at, rather than with, the poems we were considering for publication, it is not that we were being snobbish, we had all written and would probably write several hundred kilobytes more of similar "angst" ridden love poems ourselves, so it was wise to have a sense of humor about it.

Everyone knows that one of the Ten Commandments of writing is "write what you know", and, frankly, what else did we know about life at that point. I mean we were all sitting there in the safe and warm comfy chairs of an Ivy League library working on a literary magazine 'fer goddsakes', right?

I shouldn't give the impression that the poems and stories were all terrible or that we were really that jaded. We took the Stonefence Review seriously; we just didn’t take ourselves too seriously. And most of the submissions had at least a glimmer of quality. If they lacked the same polish and perspective that we as writers and college students lacked, what could you expect?

The whole process of selecting pieces and publishing them was a little like going to skip rocks at the beach. There was never a shortage of rocks (submissions) from which to choose, but no matter how hard you looked, you could never quite find the perfect one. Like most rocks you find at the beach, the majority of submissions were rough or uncut, and generally unsuitable for skipping, or publishing. The really raw and uncut poems, intensely felt and written during a late night burst of creative inspiration, tended to fall short of the mark the morning after, making a dull, failing impression (kerplop!) when they were read aloud (perhaps for the first time) at one of our Stonefence meetings.

Many poems, or some, had different aspects of a good skipping rock: a phrase here, an image there, but most, as I said before, just hadn't been refined enough to go the distance (…across the great and timeless seas of literature and art…). The end result, though, after a bit of enjoyable searching and digging, was a handful of rocks of varying qualities that taken as a whole made for a good hour of skipping--or in our case, reading.

Basically, we were a group of people who got together once a week who truly enjoyed reading, listening to, discussing and finally publishing a journal of poetry and prose. Perhaps that warm light that in my memory (I'm trying to forget the longs weeks of waiting for winter to pass and spring to break) was always streaming in the windows mellowed our moods a little and helped us to take the Stonefence Review with pleasure and a certain healthy lightness. In the end, I think I got more from those meetings in the way of learning to enjoy and to appreciate language and literature than I got from any 'lit' class I took in college.

Stonewall
So except for one notable exception, I remember Stonefence meetings as being a good time and worth a guffaw or two.

That exception came about while we were working on putting together our summer issue. We were all sophomores (perhaps in more ways than one) on the editorial board at the time, and someone had submitted to us a short story that by all accounts was, well, rock solid. If most of what we read wasn't perfect, or far from it, this story certainly came the closest in my book. It had all the elements of great art: it was entertaining, beautiful and thought provoking.

It was the story of a college guy just like you or me (or James Joyce) out walking on Friday night, checking out the 'frat scene'. The whole story was basically a recreation or retextualization of a chapter of Joyce's "Ulysses". It was written in perfect Joycean style and in a setting that all of our readers were sure to recognize. In fact, if you had been to almost any college campus or fraternity row in America, you could have read and enjoyed this story.

I was told later, after we had read the story and voted to hold it over for publication in the forthcoming issue, that the author had submitted the story as a paper in an English class on Joyce and had been given a rare and coveted citation for it. So for what it was worth, a literature professor and Joyce scholar had apparently thought the story was pretty good too.

During a meeting of just the managing editors, I learned that not everyone shared this rosy opinion of the story. I can't remember exactly how it was brought up, but a couple of the editors questioned whether we, The Stonefence Review, should publish such a story?

This took me by surprise, as I saw no reason why we would even be discussing such a question. First, it would probably be the strongest piece of writing in the whole issue and I was proud of it. Second, the story had already been voted on and accepted during the regular review process. Third, we had made a clear editorial policy that the Stonefence would be a magazine that was open to all types of content and styles, and that we would publish submissions based solely on aesthetic and qualitative considerations, not political or other.

The story was at its core a satire of the college fraternity and social scene. Although the account was fictional and no real names were used, it had clearly been based on the writer's experiences and observations at Dartmouth. The geographic layout of the fictionalized 'frat row' was recognizably Dartmouth’s, and apparently the description of one of the fraternal songs overheard by the protagonist could be identified as belonging to one specific fraternity. Dare I even now mention which one?

As it turned out, the two most vocal proponents for not publishing the story were brothers of that same fraternity. Surprise?!? That being said, all the members of the editorial board, including myself, belonged to one fraternity or another.

The two editors in question felt the story was unfair and was a personal attack against them, or at least their fraternity. They even suggested that the story could be considered slander or libel and that we could be opening ourselves to a lot of trouble by publishing it. I believed the story, to its credit, exceeded the particular details of which ‘house’ it may have been based on and was at once describing and being critical of the fraternity system in general, and from there the college social scene as a whole.

I did some research and found that for something to be legally defined as libel or slander it had to be knowingly untrue and created with the express purpose to harm the reputation of a specific person or organization. I showed this to the editorial board and argued that the story failed to pass the test on both accounts, and that given our editorial policy we had no right to stop a story from being published that had already been properly and democratically voted on and accepted. This lead to some long discussions about whether a fictional story could be considered libelous and whether we would be effectively taking a political stance by allowing the story to be published.

The two opponents of the story made some good arguments about needing to be responsible for the content of our magazine and any harm that it could cause. What if it was a fascist oriented tract, or had been critical of Jews on campus? They also made some arguments that were not as good, like threatening to quit working on the magazine if we published the story.

I felt that the story was good and moreover that the criticisms leveled against the fraternity system or college social life were accurate. Although I was sort of the de facto editor-in-chief of the issue for having been doing most of the work on it, the decision was clearly going to be decided by the group, and the other three members of the editorial board were sort of divided or unclear about what they wanted. It seemed, as the meeting carried on, that the majority was swaying towards the path of least resistance, which would be not to publish the story.

The situation was made more difficult by the fact that I had known all of the other editors since our freshman (first) year, one since elementary school, even. I didn't want to disagree or be disagreeable and found it hard being the only one arguing in the story's favor. Even if I had had the ability or authority to just make the decision, I'm not sure it would have been the right way of dealing with the situation. Mostly, I guess, I wanted the other editors to like me and didn’t want to appear to be an asshole. I was trying to be reasonable.

We went back and forth for a couple of hours and finally left without coming to a resolution. I was confused and nervous. I couldn't believe that it would even be a question of whether we should publish the story in the first place, but now I didn't know what to do or what would happen. I was angry that I hadn't been able to convince the others that we should publish the story and felt I would be doing something wrong if I let the story be censored.

It was a true moral dilemma for me: I felt that I had to choose between hurting and possibly losing friends and doing what I thought was right. And all of this heavy stuff, over a short story that someone had submitted to our funny little campus literary magazine. Ha!

Back in my dorm room I started crying as I tried to explain the situation to my roommate, Blake. Blake was one of the all around smartest and coolest guys I knew, and I felt stupid to be crying in front of him. I wondered what he would think of me, but he listened carefully and didn't try to tell me what he thought was right or what he thought I should do. What he said was simply, "Kevin, I think you know what's right and what you have to do."

It was so simple, and it was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. It was empowerment. When I thought about it, or perhaps more accurately, when I felt about it, I realized he was right, I did know what I had to do, I was just scared to do it.

I regret that I cannot do the story or the situation justice in my describing it here. I also regret that I was not able to give the story the full justice that I felt it deserved at the time, because although I took Blake's advice and did what I felt I had to do, which was face the editors again and fight for the story to be published, I did compromise in the end, agreeing to ask the author to change the passages describing the location of the fraternity house and the words to the ritual song to make them less recognizable.

When I explained the situation, the author willingly made the changes (it wasn't a big deal to him) and the story was published without further ado, except that the two editors who had been most opposed to the story's publication slowly stopped coming to meetings.

Looking back, I think we found the best possible compromise to our problem, but I was and am still not completely happy when I think about it. I had always thought that compromise was desirable and ideal only in the world of politics, not in principles. Until then, however, I had never been forced to test my principles in the 'real world' where every decision has consequences and even something as seemingly harmless as working on a literary magazine can force you to choose between friendships and moral integrity.

Between A Broken Wall & Fallen Curtain -- A Post Script
I wrote this piece in November of 2000 while I was traveling with longtime friend and (rogue) photographer Jesse Long. I had received a forwarded email about the possibility of submitting something for an upcoming anniversary issue of the Stonefence. Apparently, they were inviting past editors and contributors to send something as part of a big issue they were trying to put together.

We were in Egypt at the time and were about to move on to Kenya where we were going to work a school and then take a week or so off to do some safari-ing. So I banged off a rough draft and sent it to the co-editors with a note explaining to them that I was traveling abroad and would be not be in radio contact for about a week, but would definitely send them a final draft when I got back into Nairobi.

Well, the next time I checked my email there was a message waiting for me from them saying that they were under deadline and had gone ahead and edited my story because they were trying to get the issue out before Christmas break. I was not happy to hear this. I felt my rough draft was just that, rough, and, what's more, I didn't like the way that they had edited it either. Hadn't I made it clear that I was going to send them a final draft? I had it right there, ready to go. I mean, had they even read my submission, couldn't they see the deontological irony in it all?

Anyway, I wrote them a very curt (maybe even nasty) email saying that I would rather have the whole thing pulled if they could not print my final edited draft. I had learned my lesson: "Once shame on you. Twice shame on me", right? This time I was making a stand for what I thought was right, no compromises.

As it turned out, they had some other printing or editing delays (blame it on the bluelines) and were able to make the changes for me, although I think a couple of errata still crept into the final version. The issue ended up coming out during the winter of 2001.<>

The Great Wall And Beyond – A Post, Post Script
This story took another bizarre (and perhaps final) twist this past summer when I was recounting it to my roommate at the Green Gulch Zen Center one day while we were seeding trays for the nursery. It turns out that this guy had been friends since high school with the author who had originally submitted the story to us in the first place. In fact, he had just gone on a road trip with him to a wedding in Arizona or something, and he was studying to become a rabbi. My roommate called and asked him about the story, but he also didn't remember thinking it was that big of a deal at the time.

It's funny how all these paths have diverged, submerged and then reconverged. And like the seminally misunderstood poem about the two roads that diverged in a wood, by Dartmouth's adopted great woods poet Robert Frost, this whole story may be more of a lesson about the way memory works then which path I took and why.

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

J'aimerais bien

2001-06-06T18:14:00.000-04:00

J'aimerais bien

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux de toi,
Toi qui m'intrigue et qui me hante
même dans mes pensées les plus refoulées.

Je voudrais éviter tous ces sentiments
ordinaires qui font la béquille, le sel
de nos vies trop ordinaires (quotidinnes).

Otons le filet de sécurité,
cette emblème d'un jeu trop peu osé
qui berce les relations habituelles.

Tends-moi la main,
Fais-moi confiance;
N'hésitons pas devant l'impossible.

Figeons nos pas basculants
au bord du précipice qui souffle
la sensation foudroyante du vertige.

Etreignons nos corps
balançant un instant
entre la vie et la mort.

Ne saute pas dans le gouffre noir
né de l'oubli
et nourri de l'amer ennui.

Laisse plutôt voltiger nos esprits
dans l'éther trop léger
pour la matière terrestre.

Là, dans les astres,
nos émotions pures peuvent
s'éclater dans le paroxysme amoureux,

Espèce de douce folie
qui étouffe la voix
dans une marée de tendresse.

Emparons-nous de l'un et l'autre
sans question et sans pudeur.
Mets à côté les masques qui nous cachent.

Mais ne retire pas le voile du mystère
qui nous aveugle de la réalité
trop désespérante sous nos pieds.

J'aimerais bien
ne pas lâcher ce rêve trompeur,
narcotique, plein d'attraction.

J'aimerais bien garder cette aspiration,
fécond grain d'inspiration
qui éveille ma pauvre imagination.

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux de toi,
Toi qui me mets mal à l'aise
qui me noies sans gilet de sauvetage,

Et de qui devant les yeux perspicaces
toute parole semble ridicule,
toute comédie inutile.

Rien n'est assez profond
pour sonder tes yeux,
tourbillons à surface blasée.

Ta beauté infranchissable
se moque de la banalité
et fait une platitude de la logique.

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux toi
pour au moins un instant, et garder un peu
l'empreinte de ce songe sur mes lèvres.

Next Year In Palestine

2000-11-27T16:38:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends and Family,

Jerusalem is a magical city. I’m not sure whether there is a God, but after visiting Jerusalem I’m pretty sure that if there is one, he or she is hanging out there. It’s a magical city. Thanks to the preponderance of Jerusalem rock, the city has an architectural and aesthetic unity as well as a sort of golden glow.

We knew we didn't have much time to spend in the city, so we decided it would be best not to push it and just do one or two traditional things. We thought about waging holy war on each other, but changed our minds when we heard that there was a good exhibit going on at the museum. It was the collection of an ancient Hebrew glass blower called Chihuly. It cost a few shekels more than a catapult and battering ram, but was definitely worth it. The exhibit was great: the kind of thing you just couldn't see back home.

It was getting dark after the exhibit, so we decided to grab a beer and call it a night. On our way back to the hotel we had a little problem and needed to run our own personal relief mission. Luckily, we found this old Wailing Wall where we could relieve ourselves.

Due to the recent violence (a few days before we arrived a bomb went of a couple blocks from the school and right outside the main market, by the time we went to the market there was almost no trace of the explosion) there haven't been a lot of tourists running around Israel and the coast was pretty much clear in the old city.

As you can imagine, it is difficult to capture the essence and wonder of being in the holiest of Holy cities. So why try when below we have a first-hand perspective on the situation. It is from a law student at UW, who received a grant to do a year-long study in Israel. She's a mother of two and has been in Ramallah for about three months now on her grant/study.

At about the same time that we were in Jerusalem, my parents were in Ireland kissing the Blarney stone. With this in mind, I thought I would end our Jerusalem account with the following little limerick:

There once was a man named Kevin
Who knew the Deadly Sins, all seven
He's not a good Jew
But he's better 'n you
For he made Aliyah and can go to Heaven

Shalom,
Kevin

####
Well....what can I say about this place?!! I have a love hate relationship with it. I don't even know
where to begin.

First of all...I feel like I am hostage to the Israeli media. Every day when I watch the news I know I am being brain washed. I get angry at the way they talk about Arabs of both the territories and inside Israel.

One thing that is very apparent is how they demonize Palestinians. They hardly ever talk about them as a people....they keep referring to Arafat this and Arafat that-ad nauseum. In doing so they focus the hatred on this supposed demon. I feel angry because there is no empathy towards the "other". I know that I am not Arafat...my family and friends are not Arafat....and the Palestinian people are not Arafat.

My auntie and her husband who live in Ramallah are doing fine. This is the worst situation they have seen since 1967....not even then did they experience such an intense Israeli shelling and closure. They have everything they need in terms of food and other needs and they just take the shelling noise in stride. They don't complain because they don't want people to worry about them. Their two daughters who live in Jerusalem try and visit them as much as they can. They have to time the visits around closures and events. They don't visit anywhere near as often or as long as they would like to in fear of being caught inside Ramallah or in the demonstrations and rock throwing that take place every day...usually after school is out.

My friend Maha, a social worker, and her husband Zuhair, a lecturer at Bir Zeit, also live in Ramallah. Maha was not able to go to work in East Jerusalem for two weeks during the height of the events. Their eight year old daughter asks them every morning..."is there a war today"? Her dad took her to see the confrontations from a distance and explained to her what was going on...this was an attempt to get her to be less fearful of the news and the shelling sounds. Still she is very scared. Two nights ago they were awakened at midnight by Israeli shelling in nearby
Betunia. This shelling continued until 3:00 a.m. Zuhair told me that he stayed up looking outside his balcony. He kept listening for shots from the Palestinian side but heard none...yet the Israeli shelling continued. He believes that the shelling is an attempt to unnerve the people and is paving the way for Israeli recapture of some of the regions which had been returned to the Palestinians in the Oslo agreement. This recapture would allow the Israeli's more control especially close to some of their settlements. The settlements that are not
supposed to be there in the first place under international law. The settlements that continued to
grow despite Oslo.

Inside Israel...things have calmed down considerably. However, there is tension. Jews are avoiding Arab populated areas and Arabs are avoiding areas where extremist Jews live. Businesses such as restaurants in Jaffa and Arab stores in Wadi Nisnas in Haifa are
suffering a noticeable drop. Political activities have been banned at all Israeli Universities for the
first four weeks of classes....we are now in the second week. However, I did hear that there will be a demonstration on campus next Wednesday....I plan to keep a distance.

What is really striking to me is that no matter how much politically to the left Israeli Jews are....They just don't get it that their Zionism came at a high price to the Palestinians and why the Palestinians fought Zionism in the first place. They don't understand how the Palestinians are Palestinian first and Arabs second...how Arabs are not all the same and how they have different interests. They still don't get why the Palestinians are mad and why Oslo gave
them nothing. They are convinced that Barak offered Arafat some kind of unbelievable treasure at Camp David...which Arafat so ungratefully turned down. And then...if they go that far...they always get stuck......so where can we go? We are not wanted anywhere...besides..this is now our home. Well...it was home to another people at one time. All I hear from them is this fear fear fear fear of annihilation as a people. I know and understand where it is coming from but how are they going to break this cycle of fear with its accompanying aggression....whose responsibility is it to do the healing?

One final story:
Two weeks ago I attended orientation in the Overseas Department at the University of Haifa. One of the directors assured the students...mostly young Americans coming to live in Israel for a year of "the Jewish experience"...that she is there to take care of their every need. If they needed to not have an Arab roommate or apartment mate in the dorms (there are two to a room and six to an apartment)...they just need to let her know and she will accommodate. I was so shocked I did not speak. I just felt a very sharp pain as if I was emotionally stabbed in my core. I felt very sad that she was giving the students a way out of what could be a very healing opportunity they may never get anywhere else. I remembered how the beginning of the process that brought me to the point of being able to be here amidst Jews was that I had the opportunity to work with an Israeli Jew on a paper when I was taking a summer course at GeorgetownUniversity in 1986. I remember how I felt when I first met my fellow student and how I felt at the end of the course...having gotten to know him as a human being and not just as the enemy. Not that we agreed in the end...but what a difference. Yet, here..this director was offering the students a way out of growth and understanding.

Well...i thought to myself....most of these students are American...they have studied the civil rights movement...they know the struggle of blacks against racism in the U.S....they are enlightened beings...surely no one will take her up. Unfortunately...the second stab in the core I felt that evening came after orientation was over and when I heard one student tell the director that he and his roommate do not wish to be in an apartment with Arabs.

On this sad note.....I will end. Call me an eternal optimist but I still have hope despite the sadness.

Eastern Bloc and Roll

2000-11-16T15:15:00.004-05:00

The country of Eastern Europe was formed as a result of the French-Indian War. A group of 'les indiens' moved from Monte Carlo after losing their money and needing a new place to settle.

Our journey began in Kiev which is a lot like Disneyland, except all the buildings are gray cinderblock, people wear a lot more black leather, listen to Bryan Adams and don't smile as much.

Upon landing we were greeted by a large woman with mustache answering to the name of Boris. She handed us our immigration cards and we realized that capitalism had definitely begun to breach the iron curtain. Advertisements for casinos, Aquanet, and Rubik's cubes covered the form. We had never seen anything like it.

People here are tough: men can regularly be seen chewing nails and shaving with rusty razors, and women wear mini-skirts in two feet of snow.

Actually, Kiev is a pretty cool place, with a busy and friendly downtown. And, yes, the Beatles were correct.

Next stop Zagreb, Croatia. A beautiful town with the highest café/bar per capita ratio this side of the Dagobah system. With so many cafes, restaurants, theaters and boutiques, Zagreb reminded us of Western Europe-without the scads of tourists.

Croatia has fought hard for its independence and wants to maintain their unique cultural identity. Nevertheless, there was something familiar about this fast food restaurant we found, and we were pleasantly surprised with the 'Big Mark'.

In the 15th century, Orthodox Byzantines, Catholic Romans, Jews of the Diaspora and Muslims coexisted relatively peacefully in the Balkan peninsula which at that time was part of the Turkish Empire. In the late 19th and early 20th century the ethnic and religious mix began to fall out of balance. In 1991, Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina all declared independence from Yugoslavia. This lead to a bloody and confusing three-way war (not even counting the ethnic cleansings of Albanians in Kosovo) which basically centered around our next stop, Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina.

After landing, we drove through what used to be called "snipers' alley". Thankfully, the violence has stopped now and Sarajevo is working hard to rebuild itself. Although life has returned to normal and shops have quickly reopened, it still kind of looks like someone made Swiss cheese out of Sarajevo and forgot to pass out the crackers. Bullet holes and shell damage can be seen everywhere, and a huge cemetery dominates the hillside as you enter the city. The National Stadium's practice field was even converted into a cemetery to accommodate the overload of bodies from the war.

Still recovering from tragedy, Sarajevo strikes us as a tough place to be. So tough, in fact, that they had to fly in Robert De Niro to drive one of their city buses.

Vienna, our final stop in Eastern(ish) Europe, reminded us of Paris, only cleaner, with less attitude and with more schnitzel. Lots of museums, classical music and old important looking buildings. Very stylish. Walking around for the day, we discovered that Vienna has one classy establishment that even Paris doesn't have (yet): Hooters!

The city happened to be holding tryouts for the Boys Choir and we were lucky to get a call back to the second round. We refused to perform any further, however, when we found out that if we were picked to join the choir we would have to become eunuchs.

Jesse for President

2000-10-29T18:20:00.003-05:00

Ducci, I was at a local indian restaraunt in Chennai (madras) and everyone was eating with their fingers so I did too. People were laughing at me because

1. I was a foreigner eating like a local
2. I was making a mess all over myself.

I said to the guy across from me that I liked eating with my hands and he replied to me in an indian accent. 'God gave you five fingers and that's better than a fork'

cheers and take care,
Jesse

==
From: "Jeff Howell"
To: "Kevin Lapin"
Subject: painting the passports brown
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 14:36:35 -0800

I'm sitting over here in this United States of America place, watching the news...the politicians... the 'candidates and I'm thinking...man these guys suck! What we need is a genuine grassroots campaign. Jesse long for President. Of course we wouldn't change a thing about him, there'd be no spin doctors, no handlers, hell, we wouldn't really even keep him informed on the issues. We'd just throw him up there behind the podium and let him work his magic. This country needs a feller who knows himself. A fella not afraid to go a few days without washing. A fella who once wore jackets that looked like they were made from carpet patterns. A guy with a closet, not full of skeletons...but useless Kung Fu pads. A fella with a dog named Duke and Samuel Clemens for a father. A scrabble lover. A traveler. The type of man who'll give up sugar for a while. And a guy who's not afraid to throw back a few shots of wheat grass. Because when it comes down to it, there are very few people have what it takes to run a country...few who have the ability to motivate the peoples! See, when it comes to getting folks off their asses and into motion some know the way, but most, how should I put this... do not have way. Jesse has way.

All the way.

Just one man's opinion.
Jeff

Pakistan

2000-10-23T16:04:00.001-04:00

Pakistan, where we have spent the last ten days, gets its name from an 'Urdu' word meaning 'land of no lingerie stores'. It is a vibrant and colorful country and one of the crazier places you'll ever go--unless, of course you go, like, you know, to the funny farm.

Right away on our plane ride into Islamabad, our first stop, we knew Pakistan would be different when we saw three different passengers on the plane travelling with hawks. It seems that the country really appreciates birds as aviaries abound.

There are also these sort of mini-van buses that would make Gaudi blush everywhere you go. These colorful buses are privately owned and decorated, and run regular routes. The proud owners will spend as much as $3,000 to have one of their buses hand-decorated, and this is a lot of money when you consider the people taking the bus are generally working over 12 hours a day for less than a dollar.

The Pakistani aesthetic tends to a sort of circus baroque where more is definitely more. You can see this in the garish colors, ornate mosques decorated with gold and silver, bright clothes and in the saccharine histrionics of the thousands of music videos and movies produced every year in 'Bollywood'. It's very happy and energetic, like the Pakistanis themselves.

Pakistani ebullience literally pours out into the streets, as going somewhere in Pakistan consists of getting on, or hanging on, one of the crowded buses; loading up your camel and cart; hailing a three-wheeled motorized (or not) rickshaw; riding a bicycle with huge bales of cargo strapped to it; or cramming your whole family onto a small motorcycle (I'm not kidding, we regularly saw a man driving with a woman sitting side-saddle and two young kids on a motor bike that was probably no more than 100cc). The only rule of the road seemed to be that of Inshallah, or god willing. What's amazing is that despite this mayhem of dust and traffic and zig-zagging, pedestrians and vendors coming to your window offering papadam or coconut and the staccato symphony of short honks, which everyone uses to let other drivers know that they are overtaking, or that, yes, they are running that red light and cutting across three lanes of traffic containing five lanes worth of vehicles to make a left turn, that through all of this, everyone seems to be fairly calm and enjoying themselves. There's no road rage!

The people, and there are at least 15 million of them crammed into Karachi, are incredibly friendly and helpful, unless, I suppose, you're from India. One taxi driver explained to us as that he didn't like the people from India because he thought that they put on nice faces but had empty hearts. While this may show the driver's prejudice (a prejudice which may be understandable given the two countries' ongoing strained relationship) it also shows the Pakistani value on 'having heart'.

The countryside is beautiful, but there is no work. There are also a fair amount of armed terrorists wandering around in the north. Artisans still practice their craft of weaving, carving, needle pointing etc. exactly as it has been done for hundreds of years. They may work for a week on decorating one cloth band that sells in the market for the equivalent of a dollar.

So, many Pakistani men are faced with the decision of staying in their home village where there is no work and little to no facilities (school, clean water, Internet etc.), or move to the crowded, polluted city and work for almost nothing (by even their standards). Luckily, there are no bars in predominantly Muslim Pakistan and 'Keno' hasn't been invented yet, so most of the money they earn makes it home to their families, which on average consists of seven or eight children a wife and parents or grand-parents. No pressure, right? The other choice is to join a work gang in Saudi Arabia or Dubai or another of the wealthy oil countries in the Gulf. This generally entails getting and then giving up your passport (the employers keep the passports “for your protection”) and working for several years at a time without returning home.

As a result of this cheap and abundant labor force, all the hotels and nice restaurants are ridiculously overstaffed. It was almost a nuisance to arrive at the hotel and have three people trying to open doors and help us with our luggage (tip, tip, tip), then we would get to our room and every five minutes there would be a knock at our door with someone offering to get us water or do laundry or clean our room, again! Despite or because of this extra-help, I'm not sure which, you still never quite get what you want. And that, of course, is what makes Pakistan so crazy and so much fun.

I think it would be difficult to live in Pakistan for several reasons. First, although I loved the energy and craziness, you would want at least a few things to work like you expected, for instance a flight leaving when it says, rather than earlier, later or just not at all. Second, it is still a primarily Muslim culture which means that men and women don't talk much (or hold hands) until they are married, which even then is generally arranged for them. Third, it ain't easy to find what Jesse calls a 'brew-ha'. Fourth, and most significantly, it would be hard to live around so much poverty. I would feel uncomfortable having a cook, a driver and a gardener, but would also feel guilty not hiring them with so many people in need of work. Alas, life is a paradox and I lost one of my dox in the washing machine!

Speaking of washing machines, you won't find many here. What you see in the photos below is the enormous laundry land in Karachi. We were told that this sprawling maze of concrete troughs, basins, children and piles of clothes services the whole city. Like a Fed-Ex fleet on foot, women work their routes picking up dirty laundry from people’s houses and delivering them, dunked, beaten, twisted and cleaned laundry several days later.

Bye Bye Dubai

2000-10-18T15:28:00.004-04:00

Dear Friends and Family,

Our five days in Dubai were a welcome break after our month stretch in Saudi Arabia. Dubai is an oasis and gem in the middle of the Arabian peninsula. It is a beautiful and bustling city in the United Arab of Emirates. It is also one of the few places in the Arab world where you can get a beer (legally).

As far as cosmopolitan centers goes, Dubai is a great place to visit. If you are going to build massive steel and glass altars to commerce, then this is how they should be done. The offices and sky-scrapers of Dubai are brilliant and give the city a boost of energy and light. One of the most famous hotels, called the Burj-Al-Arab is here. It’s the only five-star hotel or something like that and each room comes with it’s own valet.

We have reason to believe that there are some interesting museums and tourist type things to do in Dubai as well, although we wouldn't know because we quickly decided to spend our few days of vacation in a different emirate, Fujirah, at the Sandy Beach Resort.

From the picture of the beach, you can get an idea of how little we did for two days straight. The snorkeling was great. They say that the Gulf War put a dent in the flora and fauna, but it looked pretty good to us. The sand was warm and the sound of the sea relaxing.

One of our creative projects 'en cours' is to put together a un-phonetic alphabet with things like ‘p as in pneumonia’ and ‘k as in knife’. Our other project is a book of weird and surreal signs from around the world. Here are a couple interesting ones to give you an idea. If you see any more let us know.

Bye-bye Dubai, Hello Pakistan...

Heading to Dammam (Dishtar Aramco Rock Version)

2000-10-06T15:16:00.002-04:00

Heading to Dammam
(Dishtar Aramco Rock Version)

Head out on the highway
Driving to Dammam today.
Driving through the desert
You gotta pray five times a day
No way, no way,
No way, no way.

If you're a woman in Saudi
Then you've gotta wear a veil.
When you're driving through the desert
The weather's never cloudy, oh well.

All the men, so sheik,
Ya' know they pray five times a day
Better get down on your knees for Allah
Or you know you're goin' to hell.

Head out on the highway
Heading to Dammam.
Driving through the desert,
The cradle of Islam.
Dammam (4x).

Camels to the left,
Camels to the right,
Sleeping with bedouins
Gives me such a fright.

No alcohol, no bourbon
Hide, hide, hide it
Under your turban.
Bet you didn't know that the Kingdom's kind of urban.
(triple rhyme)

In the desert dry of water
Mint tea in my eye (ouch).
Is this Arab guy offering me a camel or his daughter.

chorus

Mostly sand, not much soil,
Katsudon lots of oil.
All the princes, oh so many
Ruling country
Petrolled hands clenched so tight.
The Koran says if you're riding a camel you ain't Shi'ite.
(go Sunnis)

That's the way it goes in Saudi of Arabia (ah, ah).
I say, maybe, oh maybe
I'll get back some day (eh, eh).
There's just ain't much social life
And it's hard to have fun and play (hey, hey)
When all the parties you go to are BYOW (Bring Your Own Wife),
Ya' know it's true-oooh.

chorus (2x)

Hope you enjoyed and keep it Pretty Simple,
Kevin & Jesse

PS email us if you are interested in the tab for the sung version.

The Saudi Shuffle

2000-09-12T15:46:00.006-04:00

Friends and Family,

I hope this will be the first of a series of emails documenting Jesse and my super-photolicious-Fall-trip.

Today was day 3 of 90 and our first shooting day. All I can say so far is, “well, we made it”. I’m reminded of the guy who jumped off the Empire State building and as he was falling past each floor was heard to say, “So far, so good.” It’s not the fall that counts, though, it’s the landing. Anyway, I guess it takes a funny sort of optimism to undertake this kind of adventure.

Although our journey began a number years ago, I’ll skip right to our actual departure. In the photo below, you can see Jesse and I standing outside the Harden House Saturday afternoon with all of our gear. As you can see there is about 295 pounds of lights and photo equipment and about 5 pounds of clothing, all of which has to last us 3 months.

At the British Airways counter, the ticket agent told Jesse that his carry-on was too heavy and would have to be checked for safety reasons. Jesse explained that we were already paying a couple hundred dollars in excess baggage fees (which was nothing compared to the $1,000 that Air Africa tried to charge him on his last trip). Jesse didn’t want to check any more bags than necessary, so he offered to make his computer bag lighter by removing a couple of CDs. Are you kidding me?

Before dropping us off, Jesse’s parents told me to look out for Jesse while we travelled. At the airport, my Dad pulled Jesse aside to tell him that he was personally responsible for my safety. Jesse and responsible are two words that are not normally found in the same sentence. In fact, the idea that our parents were relying on us to keep each other out of trouble struck me as some sort of zero-sum chiasmus.

Luckily we were saved from looking up any more big words in the dictionary by our now best friends Von and Amy, who surprised us at the airport with a bag of Red Mill burgers (thanks again Von and Amy, you rock!). The combination of Red Mill bacon burger and Xanax made for a very relaxed flight to London.

After a short eight-hour layover in Heathrow (where we had ample time to worry about the baggage return system), we boarded our flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As our plane taxied for take-off I was having some second thoughts and reservations about what kind of trip this would turn out to be, travelling throughout the Middle East and Africa for three months as Jesse’s assistant. Just then the little girl in the next seat wearing traditional Saudi robes turned to me and vomited all over my lap. Ce n’est pas la chute qui compte, n’est-ce pas, c’est l’aterrisage…

From the moment you land in Riyadh, you get a feeling of how different (and how hot) it is here. I think Jesse described it best when he said, “It’s weird, it’s like being in a foreign country.” There you have it. You can see from the two pictures below some of the foreign foods and places we have already found:

By the way, you have to be careful about taking pictures in Saudi Arabia, as you can get into a lot of trouble. I learned this the hard way taking the picture of the Washington apples above.

There’s an old saying in Saudi Arabia which goes, “All roads lead to Dammam.” Although this isn’t quite true, it is true that Jesse and I seem to end up on one of the ones that do lead there every time we get into our rental car. We were told by one of the administrator’s of the school that we are taking pictures for that you can’t get lost in Riyadh as long as you use the tower below, which is the only tall building around, as a landmark. It's the one near chop-chop square which is named for the corporal punishments that are still publicly carried out there.

Maybe it was the jet-lag, but the tower kept moving around on us as we tried to make our way to visit the U.S. Embassy in the Diplomatic Quarter. In the end we made it, although were not sure how. The DQ turned out to be pretty cool. I would have taken some pictures to show you, but the armed guards looked even more threatening than the manager at Safeway--especially the armed guards who look like their fifteen.

Despite the armed guards and ‘compounds’ everywhere, Saudi Arabia turns out to be a pretty safe and friendly place. I suppose the public beheadings and stonings, the strict prohibition, and the religious fundamentalism have something to do with it.

Leave the Canoe on the Other Side (Mike's bestman speech)

1999-09-02T16:56:00.004-04:00

(On the Occasion of Michael and Karri's Wedding)

Ladies and gentelman, honoured guests, thank you.

Before I begin, I would like to take a moment to recognize some of the people who have made this wonderful event possible. First, I would like to thank all the friends and family who have come in from out of town to share with Michael and Karri on this happy day. I would especially like to recognize our two grandes dammes, could both grandmothers stand up. Thank you Rabbi for your words of wisdom and the beautiful ceremony. Let us all be grateful to the maids of honor and bridegrooms who have supported Karri as she learned to put up with Michael. And finally the parents of the bride and groom, could you stand up? We really owe it all to you as you were the ones who conceived this event. Finally, I would like to be the first to raise a glass and toast the bride and groom. To counselor and counselor Michael and Karri Lapin.

Now, let's get down to business. I've known Michael for about as long as I can remember. Really, I can honestly say that he’s been almost like a brother to me.

Those of you who know my brother and me, know that we have never agreed on anything. In fact, we have never even agreed to disagree. I'd even venture to say that we have argued and disagreed and bickered on just about every subject from politics to whether some people can be hypnotized or not. When I was in England working recently I had my mail sent to Mike so that he could forward it to me. One day he called me up and told me that my absentee ballot had come in and that he had taken the liberty of voting for me. My first thought was "Oh lord what have I done. I should have never signed that power of attorney statement."

Now to his credit, Mike voted exactly as he thought I would have wanted to. As it turned out, our votes canceled each other out almost entirely. So Michael and I never agree on much. I think I am giving him a very valuable service, though, one that could be vital to his marriage even. You see, I figure if I bicker with him once a week or so, he won't feel the need to bicker with Karri. And that's a good thing, right?

I have known Karri for over a year now and have nothing but the best to report. The only thing I would change about her is if she would let me put the music on a little louder in the car when she sits in the back. No, perhaps the greatest compliment that I can pay to her is that she is about the only thing that Michael and I have ever agreed on. Karri, I think you have made Michael a happier and better person for your presence in his life and I welcome you into the family.

In a small way I feel responsible for Michael and Karri getting married today, though I take no credit for doing what any best man would do. Mike, I hope you won't be too upset if I tell everyone this. You see, last night about midnight I was woken from sleep by a phone call. When I finally roused myself to answer it was Mike on the other line and I knew that something must be up because it was three or four hours past his bedtime. He was crying and sounded pretty unsteady. He proceeded, through the tears, to tell me that he wasn't sure about the wedding and didn't know if going through with it was such a good idea. I've got to say I was pretty surprised at first because he had never indicated that he had any doubts and seemed so happy except for the stress of organizing and paying for the event. I told him confidently that it was just second thoughts and that it was normal. Everyone gets cold feet, right? He went on, however, and talked about community property and line-item deductions, and some other stuff too but it was too muffled by the sobs.

Now luckily I was prepared and read him the following…

[quotes from emails they had written about why and how they loved each other]

To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure what most of it meant, but it seemed to work. So here they are today, the lucky bride and groom and perhaps in a not so small or truthful way, all thanks to me.

If I may, in closing, give you one piece of serious advice. Mike, you remember when we were young, Mom and Dad used to move around a lot. I figure for a while there we moved houses about one every year, and one thing that taught me, besides don't keep waiting for that basketball hoop, smoked glass shower door and pool table (I had to get that in somewhere), the one thing that it taught me is: leave the canoe when you get to the other side.

It was actually a native healer who told me this story about a man, everyman, who has set out on a great journey. You see him walking with his nose just inches from the path, bent over double from the weight of his load. On his back is a rocking chair, a bicycle, a canoe a large burlap bag filled to the brim and who knows what else. He is struggling so much with his load that he is not able to enjoy the natural life and beauty through which he is walking. If you ask him why he is carrying all these things, he will tell you that when he left his home he didn’t know if there would be a comfy chair to sit on where he was going so he decided to bring his with him, he also filled a burlap bag full of clothes and books and pictures and other personal belongings that he wanted to remember. Later on, he says, he used the bike to follow a long stretch of pavement and when he got to the forest’s edge decided to carry it with him because he didn’t know if he might need it again. Still later he had come to a river and used the canoe to paddle across, and so he is carrying that too in case he has to cross another one along the way. At this point, the native healer told me that when you live in the sacred way, that is when you walk the path, the path with heart, you realize that you can leave the canoe behind you on the other side of the stream. You don’t have to carry it with you. If life brings you to another crossing, you will find another boat to cross it, or you will build one.

Just hearing this story lifted a great weight off of my shoulders as I realized that I had been carrying around the weight of every yoga class, pilates, hula-hoop, unicycle, juggling, chairman mao, meditation, soccer and every other practice that I had every started and even loved and benefited from for a time in my life with me as a weight. Maybe I should be doing more, or more often? Why did I stop doing that? No, it served it's purpose to help us across a particular time in our life, but we don't have to cling on to it. So that’s my advice to you, Michael and Karri, leave the canoe when you get to the other side. That's walking the path.

May the Road Rise Up To Meet You, and May the Wind Be Always At Your Back.

L’chaim!

Michelle

1998-06-06T18:21:00.000-04:00

Michelle

Michelle, my shell
my conch
I hear the sea
slipping through your whispery lips,
waves of softening sound
undulating over the crests
and the troughs of your skin.
Your alluring humidity
utterly delicious
right down to your foamy
crushing mound.

You lay
under the moon
drawing you to me
waves of emotion wash over me
mounting and receding
swelling and sinking;
drinking from
your lips,
amaretto
sweet.

We frollick
and thrash
and pound
and polish
until there is nothing left
but a saltbed tideline of our love.

Michelle, my shell
my conch
I hear your calls
ringing from your unadorned
and alabaster ears
coddled and cockled,
labial folds of skin
spiralling into night.

I find my echo
in those pearls
I find my own loneliness
and strength
and determination
curling into the walls
of your inner most
Michelle ears.

Michelle, ma belle
let us be old
and young
and forever.
Let us be free
and savor life;
committing to each moment
and to each other,
each hello
each goodbye
each bitter-sweet parting
and forever rejoining.

Michelle, my shell
my conch
How I can float by you,
in your suits and booties
dark and sweet, like the coffee you drink.

You were a gentle and bright eyed
tyrant to see
How dare I
the soft world you held,
tending patiently
inside your baby wiped shell.

I want to hold and coddle you
and know you perfectly;
know your secret grottos
of desire
and passion
of love
and life.
Michelle let me hold thee free.

I want to peel away
your shells Michelle.
My shell,
my me.
And your shell Michelle
silently to see,
to see what we can see.

Come let us see
see what shells we can shed
and set a sullen drift
undressed in the bed,
Michelle O sully vain
just you and me.

A great drifting sea
Michelle, my shell
just you and me.

Where are you taking me
Michelle, my shell?
We’ll just wait and see.

We’ll see what's to see
beyond the shell of your shell, Michelle
just you and me.

Michelle my me
Just you shall see
Just you Michelle
Just you and me.