The New Poor - Despite Signs of Recovery, Long-Term Unemployment Rises:
Warm, outgoing and prone to the positive, Ms. Eisen has worked much of her life. Now, she is one of 6.3 million Americans who have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.
Does a jobless recovery deserve to be called a recovery?
5 steps to taming materialism, from an accidental expert:
In hindsight, I realize it felt safe to live somewhere I could afford if my company went bankrupt. Which it did.
Have you ever seen anyone without a lower jaw? Roger Ebert: The Essential Man:
Roger Ebert can’t remember the last thing he ate. He can’t remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn’t happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory — it wasn’t as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz’s ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren’t they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.
Let me again point you to one of the best blogs online, Roger Ebert’s Journal. A little about it (also from the great Esquire article I linked to up top):
… five hundred thousand words that probably wouldn’t exist had he kept his other voice. Now some of his entries have thousands of comments, each of which he vets personally and to which he will often respond. It has become his life’s work, building and maintaining this massive monument to written debate — argument is encouraged, so long as it’s civil — and he spends several hours each night reclined in his chair, tending to his online oasis by lamplight. Out there, his voice is still his voice — not a reasonable facsimile of it, but his.
The thing I like best about Ebert’s reviewing is that he identifies what a movie sets out to do: Dumb summer romantic comedy. Or, Make an artistic statement. And onward. He reviews the movie based on its own goals, on its own terms — has the movie given up on itself and settled for mediocrity? Or worse, is it hostile towards the audience? Or has it overreached as it strove to do something new? I think this is how I would try to review movies… it seems fair.
Once you learn what is expected of you, the tooth cutting strategy for placing silver fillings actually makes sense. All lines should be crisp, smooth, and flowing. You must cut in such a way that you prevent the tooth from cracking and avoid drilling into the bloody and full-of-nerves pulp. You must also cut in such a way that the silver you place does not crack when your patient bites food. Finally, you must make sure that the silver stays put in the tooth.
Those goals are formalized into a set of millimeter measurements, degrees, and clearance tests. I’m finally familiar with those requirements. However, I’m so nervous when I cut these teeth (well, when I cut their plastic counterparts in pre-clinic). Over the course of a 2 hour practical, you can do enough damage to fail in 3 seconds. Try it, count backwards from 3: 3… 2… 1… ok you just failed your practical. That’s nerve-wracking!
And then there’s the mirror factor.
When you cut into someone’s top teeth, you have 2 options. OPTION 1: you can bend way over and around and look directly at the tooth as you cut. This will result in you having to get your neck fused. This has happened to more than one doctor in our school. OPTION 2: you do all your cutting by looking through a mirror.
So, I’m sitting there literally sweating and my heart pounding as I try to guide this drill, upside down and backwards, over and through this tiny little tooth. I’m trying for option 2, but I’m thinking… I’d rather have terrible posture right now and pass… and then figure out how to do it ergonomically later.
It’s conflicting… do you do what’s best for you now (option 1), with the risk of developing bad, potentially debilitating, habits? Or do you try to do it all at once: good posture, passing grades? It feels impossible. And so you practice at 6:30pm on a Friday night, sitting there all alone in lab… and the 500,000 rpm drill catches, slipping around the mesial buccal cavosurface angle of the proximal box you were cutting… and that’s it. That tooth isn’t going to pass — time to get another on which to practice.
Using this website, I can tell you that 7 years, 4 months, 26 days have passed since I got stung by a bee during a power outage at my high school.
These types of posts are not exactly what I had in mind for tumbledry. I’d like to look back on old posts and see how I was feeling, not necessarily what exactly happened. A journal primarily of emotions and secondarily of events is going to be much more fun to look through in 10 years.
Words of wisdom, from Dr. Rohrer (during Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology studying):
Don’t ever throw tissue away
You’ll have trouble explaining to your kids why you can’t afford to send them to college.
Got it.
His description of a keratocystic odontogenic tumor: “It just barrels through bone.”
I like this guy.
Almost forgot to mention: National Dental Board Examination, Part 1 = PASS! Honestly didn’t expect that one, since illness and burn-out severely curtailed my winter break studying efforts. Nevertheless, PASS it is. EXCELLENT! And since I’m not looking to specialize, I needn’t stress out about the score itself.
Mykala and I found out on Monday evening. She had just given me another ride from school (snow tires for the bike are sold out everywhere… while I can get through 4-6 inches of accumulation, it gets a bit unsafe…) and we stopped at the grocery store to pick up some things, because we never get to spend time together anymore. We just sort of see one another in passing. So, if errands together mean some time together, then errands it is (or, they are?).
We get back from the store, and Mykala grabs the mail from the box outside the door. The thought of results showing up passed fleetingly through my head, but I figure that not enough time has yet passed. Mykala leafs through the stacks of paper and absent-mindedly hands me envelope. She begins to walk away as I read the outside.
“Mykala.”
“Yes?”
I flip the envelope toward her, asking “Did you read the envelope?”
Her eyes slowly widen, and we exchange a significant look.
“Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations?!”
I spent the next ten minutes trying to convince Mykala that it was a good idea for me to keep the envelope sealed until I finished my exams this week (the last one is Thursday… tomorrow… crap I should be studying pathology right now).
I failed to convince her of the validity of not opening it. So, I took the envelope with me upstairs, since Mykala offered to take a look at it first.
Instead of 3 days, my resolve lasts for 30 minutes: during a bathroom break from pharmacology, I realize that I’ll go crazy if I don’t open the thing.
Mykala and I celebrated the good news by ordering in some True Thai (she braved the snow to go get it).
Best Thai meal ever.
In subtlety — that you’ve seen this thing 300 times before, but not quite like this — lies expertise.
Keith Jarrett and neuroscience. Sympathetically innervated sweat glands are the exception when it comes to neurotransmitters — their transmitter is acetylcholine, but you would expect norepinephrine! Whoah!
It’s the Köln Concert.
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