one inside joke later, the DoomClock
Category: …and everything else
Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.
small things
Sometimes, it really is the small things, eh? And those small things can turn an entire day on its ear – a simple conversation, laughing, being able to be generous without a thought, coming home and finding a small package with two DVDs full of happiness.
These small reminders of how blessed life is? They’re nice, and I’m grateful both that I have these reminders, and that I’m in a place where I can see them for what they are.
nightswimming deserves a quiet night
Two years ago, through sheer random chance and sorting, a beautiful, perky, sarcastic, brilliant girl was assigned to my group of students. She quickly became more than my star student. She became my star student, mentee and protégé, drinking buddy, eventually flipped the tables and let me be her star writer, and most importantly, became one of my dearest friends.
Nightswimming, remembering that night
September’s coming soon
I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit
Around the fairest sun?
That bright, tight forever drum
Could not describe nightswimming
I don’t remember the conversation around it, but I do remember she once told me that the R.E.M. song “nightswimming” made her think of me. I downloaded the song, fell in love with it, and now every time I hear it, I smile and think of her.
I’ve been smiling and thinking of her a lot lately, as she graduates yesterday/today/tomorrow from Communications/CHID and the UW as a whole. She is at the top of both her classes, she has been commencement speaker for one of them, and very shortly she’s running off to spend the summer in China. And I sit here, on the other side of the country, so proud of her I could just burst; so tickled that I played even a small part in her shining as strongly as she has.
This is one to watch – she’s going to change the world.
Congratulations, MoMo.
my friends know me well
Me: Remind me again why I said I’d do this.
Friend: Masochism.
Yep. That sounds about right.
TV and Plastic Surgery
I woke up this morning with a sort of nagging feeling in the back of my neck, slightly towards my right. Over the last few hours, it’s blossomed into a weird sort of migraine, if you down-shifted the migraine from its usual place to living in the area behind my right ear, down through my shoulder blade, and then radiating shooting pain into my arm.
Ah, CRPS – always interesting.
So I don’t have a traditional migraine, but I might as well, for how useful I feel right now. Granted, not having the light sensitivity is nice, but I might take that over the tactile-sensitivity. The fan blowing across my arm is enough to make me want to scream. (Yes, I should go tape on some lidoderm patches.)
Since writing, reading, laundry, or just about anything else isn’t going to happen until this goes away, I’m watching the Discovery Health channel, which has a show on plastic surgery on. I’ve caught this show before, and always had about the same reaction – on the one hand, I’m glad they balance the vanity surgeries with the medically necessary surgeries, but on the other, I do wish that they would not glamourize it so much. By this, I mean the fact that they show the before and after, and of course before is without makeup and harshly lit, while after is fully made up, soft lighting, etc. But beyond that, they skim over the recovery period, maybe showing a quick still image or two of bandages and bruises. They also discuss “the necessity of this surgery” – such as “aging makes this surgery necessary”, as if there is a problem with the fact that a woman’s age can show in her thighs.
There are certainly appropriate times for plastic surgery – I don’t argue that. It does truly amazing things. I simply question this show, which tries to present itself as a balanced view of the how and why of plastic surgery, while it actually glosses over the thing people know least about, and perhaps fear the most – pain and recovery.