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

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.

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The Road Less Understood

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.

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Babies don't vote, babies don't pay

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.

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4/20, cool dude!

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.

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Health Care for America Now

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/

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Twittering away the hours

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.

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Tales from the 'Terp

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.

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Putting the Capital in Punishment

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?

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What happens in Vegas...

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."

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

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.

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Poet predicts end of science - Universe answers

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."

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The light in me honors the light in you

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".

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and we are NOT in a hurry...

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.

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Eat, Love, Pray!

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...

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Now, That's Funny - Bye-Bye Bush

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...

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Expand This...

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.

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A Good Year in Wine

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!

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Comic Genius

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La bouffe vietnamienne.
On nêm où on nêm pas.

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I love it when a plan comes together

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...

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