I asked a fellow dental student of mine what he was doing this weekend. “Going to get a cavity filled.”
Mykala and I are busy, busy. She’s gone all weekend for a dance competition and I have a straight set of finals starting Monday. It’s times like these, when you think you haven’t the time, when you absolutely must take a moment to make your significant other feel special in any way you can. It’ll save your relationship, so you can weather the times you both forget to nurture.
Visited home today; it felt great. I haven’t been able to help with the wedding as much as I would like to, but I can relay all the things Mykala has accomplished in the planning. In many ways, there’d be no wedding without her.
Thinking about what it will be like to have a house and a dog. I’d like a spot where I can play outside with my family. It’s nice to have that vision toward which to look ahead.
Thinking a lot about that DFW piece I linked the other day. For example:
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood
that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is
just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of
these people probably have harder, more tedious and
painful lives than I do.
Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral
advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this
way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do
it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if
you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or
you just flat out won’t want to.
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a
choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat,
dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid
in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this.
Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand
of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this
very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle
department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve
a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some
small act of bureaucratic kindness.
That’s not just food for thought — it’s like organic free-range health food for thought.
Listening to some great music. I’ll outline that after I get through these finals. I’m 6 days from becoming a D2. 10 days from next semester. It’ll be a full 4 day weekend.
So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in
the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal
arts education is not so much about filling you up with
knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think.
If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked
hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the
claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think,
since the fact that you even got admitted to a college
this good seems like proof that you already know how to
think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal
arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because
the really significant education in thinking that we’re
supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about
the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of
what to think about.
“Good lord, you guys look like you came out of a war zone — it’s just a test!”
— The fantastic Dr. Tautin, after our 4 hour prosthodontic lab practical
This man, one of the bench dentists who evaluates and guides us through labs, saved my sanity in Oral Anatomy lab first semester. In a class with the purpose of weeding out those who didn’t want to be in school (and the distant second goal of teaching oral anatomy), he did his best to get a new flock of uptight students to settle down. On waxing up a tooth: “If it looks like a tooth, you’re on the right track.”
You see, Dr. Tautin insists on clarifying our understanding of how dental school fits into the rest of our lives: make it through, move on. He once called the experience “job training”, which did more toward clarifying my perspective than 40 hours in therapy ever could. Having never given therapy a try, I think knowing more people like Dr. Tautin, those with their perspective and priorities at a wonderfully realistic, humanly-attainable level, does wonders for the psyche.
The public archives of tumbledry go back to my embarrassingly rudimentary scrawling in October, 1999. By that calendar, we’ll turn 10 in October of this year. However, I only registered the domain tumbledry.org on July 22, 2003. At the time, I was smack in the middle of leaving high school times for college life. My intensely narrow understanding of the world around me expanded agonizingly slowly; however, something during that time made me think it would be a good idea to hop on the evolving internet and get a proper website going. Before that, this space was called “Alex’s Website.” I’ve some mortifying splash pages from that era. Perhaps I’ll share those if I get time. Before that, dating to sometime around the beginning of 1999, I put together a site called TI Chip. It was mostly an archive of 1200+ calculator programs. I loved piecing together websites on Angelfire and Tripod, two free hosting sites of the day.
A calculator-carrying geek was I.
Computers were a domain exclusively talked about with my close friends, and I tried hard not to talk to my classmates about my love for programming. This tendency persists to this day, and it gets rather lonely sometimes. I wish I had a peer group (Justin only has so much free time) with whom I could discuss different caching systems for database driven websites, the challenges of non-greedy regular expressions, or the merits of different languages. With my near total immersion in dental school, I know my knowledge about these topics will be hopelessly out of date when I finally have the time to reconnect with any community like this. Oh well, eh? The time just isn’t there.
I will, however, always look back fondly at redesigning and/or recoding this website about 17 times, learning HTML by trial and error over winter break in 1998, getting hacked by a Russian computer gang, and so on. I look forward to many, many more years online. I wonder, nearly 10 years into this endeavor, what life and this space will be like in another 10 years… in 2019.
A great Minnesota poet died recently. His name was Bill Holm. Alas, I did not know of him until after his death, when I heard a wonderful tribute to him on April 19, on Minnesota Public Radio Presents. I had just jumped in the shower and (thanks to the shower radio from Kourtni) heard a beautiful poem by another Minnesota poet, Robert Bly. Mr. Bly was reading (with musical backing) some of his works, to honor the late Bill Holm. One of these pieces was particularly beautiful, so I had to give you the opportunity to listen:
The name of this poem by Robert Bly is “Stealing Sugar from the Castle”. And it goes thusly:
We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.
The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!
Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.
I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.
I don’t mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.
“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.
The music, the words, and the performance are, to me, perfect. I love the way Robert Bly tosses his lines out — his phrases are not precious; they are living, breathing. His inflection is dazzling, yet free of pretense. “My sentence was a thousand years of joy.”
Here are some selected quotes from literally the best professor I have ever had the pleasure of learning from. Dr. Katz could teach p-chem to third graders.
“I’ve seen your schedule — it’s incredible. You guys are really, really busy. Me, I just sit around all day and blow bubbles and come in here occasionally to talk to you.”
“I got an email from a med student, which was actually quite unprofessional because it used the F-word, attacking my use of ‘wah-wah’ for water. They seemed really upset.”
“55,500 mM water; the highest water concentration known to woman.”
“It’s 1:25 on a Friday afternoon — if I’m not entertaining, I’ll lose you.”
Dr. Katz: So, the kidney filters 180L water and 25 thousand mmoles nackle per day. Which is a ginormous amount. Class member #1: I’d like to take issue with you using the word ginormous. I’m going to write a letter. Katz: I see. If it interrupts your learning, then I will not use the g-word again. CM1: Thank you. Katz: So, the question is, what happens in the kidney such that you see such huge amounts of filtration and relatively small amounts of water and nackle secretion? CM2: Can we also scratch ‘nah’ and ‘nackle’ from the vernacular? Katz: Ok, now we’ve gone too far. CM3: Hey, I like ‘nackle.’ CM1: I was kidding, it’s OK to use ginormous. Katz: Thank you.
Katz: So what’s it called when you have red blood cells in the lumen of the nephron? Us: Blood in pee! Katz: Yes, I think that is the clinical term. “Blood in pee.” You come into the doctor for a diagnosis… ‘It appears you have blood in pee.’ So how can this happen? CM: You get punched in the kidney. Katz: Blunt trauma can cause blood in pee. Alternatively, if you swallowed a bee and it stung the capillary wall, causing red blood cells to enter the lumen; that would also work.
Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, was a specialist.
He could effortlessly execute the double pun: Noah’s Ark
was made of gopher-wood, he would say, but Joan of Arc
was maid of Orleans. Some Whately-isms are so complex
that they nearly amount to honest jokes: “Why can a man
never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the
sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches
there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered
and bred.”
