Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: Academics

Classes and coursework.

Lettuce was culprit in latest E.Coli outbreaks

...and everything else, Academics

First the spinach, now the lettuce. What have our leafy greens come to? Or more specifically, what have our Central California leafy greens come to?

The LA Times article talks about the contributing environmental factors that are likely leading to the contamination: proximity to wildlife, proximity to and run-off from farming and ranching/race-horse operations, some field conditions. These things are the same that were highlighted by the spinach outbreaks, and quite naturally, given the timeframe, there’s not much that could be expected to be done. And in fact, the chief medical officer for the FDA, David Acheson, basically said as much back when the spinach ban was lifted: that without fundamental fixes put in place in the areas causing the contamination, these are just going to keep happening.

So what about these fundamental fixes? This is a public health issue, impacting people across the nation (and perhaps the world, depending on where the farm produce is being shipped). One’d think that legislature would be getting involved, public health officials… oh. Voluntary labeling, industry-led initiatives, and a state-based seal of approval for guidelines that don’t exist yet.

Of course, the Grower-Shipper Association of Central California would like you to believe market forces – pressure from retailers and consumers – will force handlers and growers to adhere to these voluntary (ie not mandatory) guidelines, but the director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest fires back, saying “voluntary systems haven’t proven terribly effective in ensuring food safety uniformly. Certainly some growers are going to utilize the very best standards. But growers who don’t will still be able to sell their products, and probably sell them cheaper.”

Of course, much of this could be eliminated if people started eating seasonally, locally, organically and sustainably. New Yorkers shouldn’t be eating California lettuce, but New York lettuce. (And likewise for other states.) Almost all foods have a natural season – maybe it’s time we start paying attention to that, and accept that if we don’t have fancy greenhouses in our backyard, and don’t live in Southern California, it means that sometimes, we won’t be able to have th foods we want to eat. Seems like the price is just starting to get too high, otherwise.

friends, nameless and otherwise

...and everything else, Academics, Albany Medical College, AMBI, Bioethics

A friend, who shall remain nameless, sent me the following link, along with the rather breathless “omigosh, he’s at Albany Medical College and a medical ethicist! Do you know him?!” question.

I honestly don’t know how to reply (politely; the rude things pop to mind right away, of course), so instead I’ll ask the question that pops to mind: is it really a matter of how old is too old for society? Does it really matter that 1/3rd of the children in the USA are being raised by a grandparent/someone over 60 – does necessity necessarily necessate action? (Just because something is being done doesn’t mean it should be being done, after all.) And why shouldn’t we put limits on when people should or should not have children? What about the physical distresses of pregnancy? Isn’t there an obligation to the child? (Can you imagine what the generation gap would be like?)

Questions like that could be asked all the livelong day, though, and from what I’ve seen via Google News Alert lately, have been. I think what I’m more interested in is this notion of the society being ready. What reasons would it not be ready? We expect people to be mothers young, but that’s slowly changing as more women build careers. Yet we certainly expect women to stop having kids once biology kicks in – or once they get to be a certain age, where we begin to think that it would do more harm than good for the child to have a parent of that age.

And parent, I think, is key. We have a different cognitive category for parent versus grandparent; yes, both are caretakers, but the way we name our caretaker still means something. It seems to me that grandparent implies a categorical and functional difference than parent (even if technically speaking, the roles are the same). It’s certainly a way to acknowledge age gap and experience differences, but I wonder if there’s more to it than that?

Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t – I just felt the distinct shutting down algorithms for my thought shutting down, which means this is going to go nowhere fast. I suppose, though, that the age difference, physical differences, and simple fact of statistics leads me to intuit that we should have limits on this sort of thing, and that if society has decided “too young”, (which we have), then it should not be terribly difficult to decide “too old”, either.

Out with the Old,…

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

It’s 2007. My instinctive response is “good fucking riddance to 2006, and here’s hoping the next one is better” (but I know better than to taunt the universe by making it any sort of challenge). But Discardian had an interesting tip up a day or two ago that suggested we – and I assume she meant social we, and not just you and me we – have a bit of a binary, black/white, good/bad way of looking at life. We see the highs and lows, and not miss the rest.

Now while I have often told friends that the nice things about the lows is that you can’t see the highs without them, I am often guilty of overlooking that in the middle – the not extraordinary, the not horrible, but that which moves us forward in life. Or holds us back, if we let it.

2006 is always going to be a hard year to look at, even when memory takes the edge off the sharpness of Mom’s cancer, or the loneliness and difficulties my first semester of graduate school brought. And it will round the edges off those highs, too – my letters of acceptance, teaching my first class on my own, reading my first feedback reports that were just about me, writing something as big as my thesis (and finishing on time!), graduating, the fun things I’ve done in NYC and people I’ve met and so on.

But 2006, I think, will also be remembered as a year where I made a lot of forward movement in my life. I see a lot more clearly where I want to be, down the road, and the things I’ll need to do in order to get there, and I’m on my way doing most of them. Yes, life keeps throwing challenges in my path… but Phillip told me something, once – it must have been three years ago? My husband had left me, my best friend had died a horrible death, and I simply could not get my act together. I couldn’t juggle all the balls I had in the air, and I let them all drop. I was sitting in his office, telling him that just as soon as life calmed down I’d have it all together, I’d be better. And with his typical bemused expression, he glanced over the haphazard stacks of books between us and told me that life just keeps coming, it never calms down and never gets better. It’s always one thing after another, and we all juggle; what matters is how we do it.

I learned to juggle, and I did pretty well. But now it’s a new game; the ante has been upped, and the stakes are higher. My sneaking suspicion, though, is that I’ll learn the rules to this game soon enough, and then I’ll shine as brightly as a I did before.

2006 was a bitch of a year, dragging me all over the map, not just emotionally but literally. But if I was pressed to admit it, I would admit that I’ve probably grown more this last year than the past few combined – and that’s saying a lot. I might not look fondly back on the year, but I suspect I will eventually be very grateful for the contributions it has made to who I am.

And so I raise a glass to 2006, and to all of you. May 2007 be everything you wish for, and more.

Duct Tape and a Prayer

...and everything else, Academics, Duct Tape and Prayers

I’ve been sitting here, typing a few letters or words, then deleting them again. Type, delete. Type, delete. Taptaptap. Tap. Select all, delete, write it over again. Write it until you’ve taken the power from the word, and instead of the power being in the name, the power comes from you, your knowing that word, your control of it. Instead of its control of you.

It’s funny. Do you have a little voice in your head? I’d love to know what it sounds like, to you. Mine sounds like me, but it’s me with an edge. It’s the me that comes out when I’m very tired, or exasperated, when I’ve run out of patience. Snarky, sarcastic, cynical – which is enlightening, given that I often refer to it as my detached, academic voice. Mine has been rattling on for the last day, thinking about things like naming and the power of words, and how we imbue such power into a single word, but at the same time, into the knowledge of it. I’ve always loved those stories where the witch loses her power when you learn her true name, because that true name gives you power over her. But how do we reconcile the power of knowing the name, versus the power the word has over you?

Because I’ve come across one of those words, said it over and over, typed it, deleted it, and typed it again. And as I do so, it’s being shaped into something I can control, that I have power over. Something that doesn’t drain my face of its already limited colour, turning me ashen with bright red eyes and tear-stained cheeks. Something that isn’t cancer.

Cancer.

We make cancer pretty, don’t we? We dress it up, glamourize it, tie a ribbon ’round and go. Pretty in pink, rosy and happy. I wonder if we do this to control it, to take the fear away? To make it approachable and understandable, something we can fix and cure, bring about miracles and magic – something that shouldn’t scare you away from sleep like the old monster under the bed.

My mother has cancer. Aggressive, non-small cell lung cancer.

I didn’t fall apart. Not at first. I sucked up and in and sat in the middle of the bookstore I was in, and talked to my father until the phone battery was almost dry. And while I was still in shock, I called my adviser and made the necessary arrangements to take a leave of absence. I got outside, and most of the way to the car, until the tears started. And then I did something I shouldn’t have, and drove home upset and crying – a drive I don’t remember, except for screaming once, loudly, because it was either that or drive the car into something.

But in a way, I have fallen apart. I am barely functional, as evidenced by my losing my wallet today (to top off the lovely day of losing my power and my computer dying a painful, expensive death). I can’t finish sentences, at least not at anything resembling normal speed, I can feel how dull and slow my thought processes are, and I’m moving through a thick, almost gelatanous fluid, instead of air. My perception has shifted, and the way I experience the world is altered.

I know it’s shock, and I know it’s grief. Maddening grief. A fanciful turn of phrase, I always thought – maddening grief. It’s not. I see how easy a slide it would be into madness, and the relief I would find there. Rescue from a world where my mother is so sick.

I wasn’t going to write about this, not at first. It doesn’t belong here, it’s a personal experience, it’s not what people expect, if at this point there are any expectations. But I realized, while talking with GM this morning, that we don’t have the language to express what we’re thinking and feeling when someone tells us that their loved one is very ill. And I’m not sure we have the language to talk about it, either. We certainly don’t have the culture, in either case. And maybe this isn’t a healthy thing. Maybe it’s just another symptom of a sick society, and the cure is to challenge the norm of ‘I’m so sorry” “thank you” and actually move towards something more.

Or maybe it’s just an excuse for me to allow the chattering academic voice in the back of my head to let loose, to detach a bit from the immediate, and to lose myself in things that make me happy, that challenge and excite me. Who knows?

What I do know is that I had to make a choice, in these last 24 hours. I had to decide how I was going to define my interaction with several important people in my life. I could step up to the plate, be more aggressive than I might normally be inclined towards, and be honest – painfully honest – or I could simply walk away. Turn into the ghost I’ve been feeling the threat of becoming.

A bit to my surprise, I didn’t choose to walk as a ghost.

This is one of the hardest things I think I will have ever typed. Unfortunately, I know that one harder comes after this. I just don’t know when. Practically speaking, I return home Saturday, and I will be staying until I don’t need to anymore. Until she is better enough that I can leave, or until I have to write the hardest thing I will have ever written.