A quote from poet Jane Hirshfield in David Grubin’s film “The Buddha”, on PBS:
No matter what your circumstances, you will end up losing everything you love, you will end up aging, you will end up ill. And the problem is that we need to figure out a way how to make that all be all right.
Every time I think I’ve got the dental school thing down, I just get crushed flat by something going wrong. Lately, it’s been these practicals. We’re trained to cut teeth to very stringent guidelines — previously, we were simply graded on the degree to which we met these guidelines. NOW, we only pass if every single aspect of our tooth cutting meets a clinically acceptable standard. Otherwise, we fail: one failure requires a make-up… two failures and, well, I’m not sure.
I sit there during the practical… and everything I practiced, all the skills I developed, fly right out the window. Somewhere on SE Washington Avenue, my tooth cutting skills are getting run over by a Metro Transit bus. Meanwhile, I’m flailing away like some moron with a glorified Dremel tool. It’s outrageously frustrating, not being able to show what I’m capable of during these practicals. I know I can do it; it’s just that I’m not proving it when it counts.
It doesn’t matter how many hours you spent on an empty court shooting free-throws, they only count if you make them during the game.
I first wrote about Tiger Woods on here about 10 years ago. 10 YEARS! Holy cow. Anyhow: the movie Happy Gilmore is coming true; check out the proof in this recent article about Tiger Woods:
When FBR Capital Markets, an investment bank based in Virginia that lost $200 million in 2008, pulled out of its sponsorship of this year’s PGA Tour event in Scottsdale, Ariz., Finchem signed up Waste Management to take its place. The tournament is now called the Waste Management Phoenix Open, a name that can’t help but telegraph that a new kind of partner is being welcomed to the tour.
The Phoenix event is not your average golf tournament. It’s basically a sprawling frat party, complete with beer gardens and busty women in tank tops handing out discount drink coupons. On the tournament’s 16th hole, a par 3 surrounded by a grandstand that seats 15,000, golfers who fail to clear the desert shrubbery fronting the green are lustily booed. Woods has played the tournament only a handful of times, but he is nevertheless responsible for one of its more memorable moments: in 1997, his first full year as a pro, he aced the 16th hole and was approvingly showered with beer cans.
The Waste Management Phoenix Open. Phoenix Trash Open. Trashy Open.
We are coming up on my favorite season in the whole-wide world: street sweeping season. After getting gravel, rocks, and sand kicked into my face for a season, I finally get relief: a chance to ride the good bike without worrying about destruction of myself or the bike from street debris.
That’s what’s so great about Minnesota: everyone here knows what spring means: the awesomeness of room-temperature air. We really should have some sort of celebration or parade.
778 days 22 minutes until I get a DDS degree.
Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard - Lapham’s Quarterly:
But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
This one’s worth a read: contains the best synopsis of Hamet I’ve ever read. (I’ve read a few, too.)
I like the Guardian (and other newspapers) because they don’t censor swear words. Check out how great that makes the quote in a quote from the article “Tampon-makers can’t mention the V-word. Period. | Richard Adams”:
For years, advertising for tampons and “sanitary products” have been shrouded in nebulous euphemism. So what happens when a US tampon-maker drops the coy messaging and goes straight for the jugular (so to speak)? Its ad gets banned by the major US television networks for mentioning the word vagina.
Even when the company substituted “down there” for vagina, two of the networks still wouldn’t run the ad, so the company was forced to drop the idea altogether. That provoked Amanda Hess, author of The Sexist blog, to observe: “Now, the commercial contains no direct references to female genitalia – you know, the place where the fucking tampon goes.”
Thanks to Mykala for noticing the original article in the New York Times. Thanks to Apple for making an amazing computer on which I can write (great keyboard!). Thanks to my eyes for reading the article. And thanks to my local coal-fired power station (with some contribution from nuclear, Dan) for providing the electricity necessary to make this post happen.
Thank you! Thank you!
*confetti from the ceiling*
I appreciate Thomas Friedman’s optimistic outlook after he attended the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search:
“If we can just get a few things right — immigration, education standards, bandwidth, fiscal policy — maybe we’ll be O.K.”
I ended up growing out my hair for about nine months between June of 2009 and March of 2010. I’ve only a picture of my hair 8 months into the growth… it shows my hair just before it got so long that I couldn’t do much of anything useful (including see through it):
I said that I would cut my hair when I passed boards… and then I just… didn’t cut it. Just kept having things come up, like sleep and homework and life. Finally, FINALLY, I got an appointment to get it cut. The results:
So that’s my haircut! Additionally, here is my haircut with Mykala’s bra on top of it:
And that’s the story of my first haircut as a married man.
8:52 and George eats at 9:00. His plaintive hunger meows echo through the hallway. “You are not forgotten”, I say. This does not seem to satisfy him. Me neither: seems a bit melodramatic. Next strategy: try to teach him to tell time. We’ll start with digital clocks first.
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