And in the middle of the day I sit in the sun and I hear
young children call me a wiener dog, perhaps that’s what
I am
The Germanic term is dachshund, and I like
that
I’m thin and I’m proud and no one can make fun of
me
I can slip through the bars of a prison if I were
ever incarcerated, but I don’t know what I would do
wrong
My body yields no evil inclination, I’m a pure
weiner dog
My name is Dixie, and I go dancing ‘cross
the floor in the evening of the Johnsons when everyone is
sleeping
Sometimes I look for a morsel of food, but
they’re so clean they’re almost anal-retentive in their
cleanliness habits and there’s nothing for me
But I
don’t despair
Yes, you can listen to the song online. Don’t watch the YouTube video/montage that some random person put along with the song… it’s really distracting and worthless. Regardless, funny the things that play when iTunes is on random.
Back in 2003, during the final months of my high school career, I clipped a picture from the newspaper and placed it under the smoked glass that sits atop my Dad’s Infinity Column II speakers. This wasn’t a time that I really had anything straight in my life, but something in me wanted to save that piece of history. The picture is an AP photo of Fred Rogers, arms resting on model trolley tracks, on the set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
The secret that too few people know, though, is that Mister Rogers off the set wasn’t like Mister Rogers on the set — he was better. A Presbyterian minister who not only worked extensively with children, but also did master’s level work on child development, you’ll find him more complex than his on-screen persona. A favorite anecdote of mine: in 1990, his car was stolen — when the thieves realized whose car it was, they returned it to his home. Biographical details of this sort, however, can easily be found by reading the Wikipedia entry about Mister Rogers. Recently, I began to wonder what he was really like, things one wouldn’t find through Googling or even by watching episodes from 33 years of his eponymous show.
Let me try to explain my ideas about a true hero. A philosophy 101 course inevitably deals with platonic idealism:
For example, a particular tree, with a branch or two
missing, possibly alive, possibly dead, and with the
initials of two lovers carved into its bark, is distinct
from the abstract form of Tree-ness. A Tree is the ideal
that each of us holds that allows us to identify the
imperfect reflections of trees all around us.
Indeed, a platonic ideal for most everything floats out in the aether of our minds; I’ve been peculiarly preoccupied with one — Hero-ness. Unable to fully articulate this ideal I had, I was always (almost subconsciously) holding folks up to this ideal. Then I read this book, I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers and I realized that I already discovered my hero, clipped his picture, and tucked it safely away in my childhood home.
This past Sunday afternoon was the comfortable sort of cloudy, rainy, chill day that anticipates coming snow and holidays. So, in a thoughtful mood, I stepped out briefly to see if this I’m Proud of You book by Tim Madigan, was at the Borders in Woodbury. I brought it home and began reading. I read it straight through in one sitting (which, I must interject, is by no means a testament to any speed-reading ability of mine — it is a succinct work).
I haven’t cried that much in a while. The book possesses a propulsive tension between strained relationships, death, deeply troubled people and, in a splendid counterbalance, the unfathomable well of care and attention paid to the author by Mister Rogers. It is a character portrait made whole by it simultaneously being a memoir.
We need not delve into bygone eras or even distant countries to find heroes — one of them is right on television talking to children every day, his incredible generosity and kindness continuing on even in his absence.
Mykala recently told me about a study she read that said 25% of med school students have suicidal thoughts during their four years of schooling. I would imagine this extends to most kinds of professional school, and I think it points to the ridiculous demands and pressures bearing down on students. The school breaks you down unless you do something to fight that erosion.
I am totally against coffee and caffeine as wake-up aids, and I know that at some point during school, the pressure will be such that I’ll start to consider drinking coffee, like many of my classmates. Or, like one of my classmates who says they only need 5 hours of sleep per night, sugar free Red Bull. So, if anyone finds me blogging about how great coffee is, you come over to my apartment and slap me in the face and tell me to sleep more. Sleep is absolutely, completely crucial, and I won’t let a silly thing like job training (even if it’s 4 years of job training) screw up my value system.
Care. Eat well. Enjoy music. Travel. Sleep.
Don’t let the Puritanical ideas that pervade American culture prevent you from listening to common sense: just go to bed!
You might have noticed that the preference to show or not show arrows linking to the iTunes music store is no longer there in iTunes 8. That means the average user is subjected to user interface clutter — arrow after arrow after arrow, all linking to the iTunes music store. Awesome. Except it isn’t. According to Mac OS X Hints, this is how you fix the issue on a Mac:
Quit iTunes and locate the iTunes preferences file –
iTunesPrefs.xml. The easiest way to do this, both for
Windows XP and Windows Vista is to press [Win] + [E] to
open a new Explorer window, and then type %appdata% into
the address bar. This will open the Application Data
folder – you then just need to navigate to Apple Computer>iTunes.
You should then see the iTunesPrefs.xml file.
Using a text editor that isn’t Notepad (or Word — shame!), you can edit this iTunesPrefs.xml file. It gets a little fuzzy here, because I haven’t yet installed iTunes 8 (I’m not eager to upgrade). I think you are looking for the text “arrows” in this iTunesPrefs.xml file. Then, you want to replace the <data> tag immediately following the <key> you found with this:
AA==
I believe that should fix it. I’ll take a poke around in my iTunesPrefs.xml file to see if I can get the name of the preference that needs to be changed.
UPDATE: Updated to iTunes 8 and found that inserting this code at the end of the iTunesPrefs.xml file will remove the store arrows:
Riding my bike back from my workout, I thought I’d stop to buy some cereal from the local convenience store. But, as I was about to turn into the parking lot, I realized that both employees manning the store were standing outside the entrance, apparently in the midst of a showdown with a 40-something bear of a man. The thing that struck me most is that the proprietors had this guy facing them as he backed away; he did this until he was out of the parking lot. Then he turned and walked away.
I didn’t purchase the cereal.
Mykala and I like to joke that the intersection of Cleveland and Marshall (where this convenience store is located) is a little half block of Lake Street danger that just leapt over the Mississippi and landed in this safe part of Saint Paul.
The Snow Patrol song Hands Open has a little lyrical twist that always intrigued me:
Put Sufjan Stevens on, and we’ll play your favorite song,
Chicago bursts to life in your sweet smile remembers you
I always wondered who this Sufjan Stevens was, and what his/her music was like. Well, Sufjan is a he, and the music is very good. The really clever part of that Snow Patrol lyric is that “Chicago” is Sufjan Stevens’ most popular song. It’s pretty spectacular; a really really unique sound. Give it a listen.
Strict dress code at the U of M School of Dentistry: wear scrubs or business casual; no jeans, hats, torn clothing, etc. Now that scrubs have arrived, no one is wearing business casual anymore. Mine were back-ordered, but finally came in, so today was my first day wearing the standard outfit for the next four years. It’s a little surreal because:
I’m so much more comfortable.
I do not feel qualified at all to be wearing these.
If someone drops over from a heart attack on the bus, everyone will assume I can help.
Saying “I’m just studying teeth” won’t help that situation at all.
A little update on the status of my dental learnings is in order. We aren’t getting too hammered with courses until Histology and Gross Anatomy are added in October (then the real fun begins).
All of us D1 students have a class called “Dental Care Delivery and Oral Epidemiology” which we simply abbreviate “DCD.” Today, we took the midterm for DCD (the final is next week… huh?) There really is some valuable material in the class, especially with regard to enhancing and measuring the increase in oral health of a community. However, the structure of guest lecturers (sometimes two per session) means studying for the test is an exercise in adapting to many different styles of teaching. One particularly entertaining lecturer was a retired dentist who recently retired from teaching at the U as well. This guy is a really entertaining and unbelievably knowledgeable speaker. He has, quite literally, seen it all — he casually mentioned the characteristic signs of marijuana usage, bulimia, methamphetamine abuse, etc. Naturally, we had quite a few questions from his presentations on our midterm. My strategy for some of the questions I wasn’t quite sure of was to play clips of this fellow reading different answer options in my head. This worked sometimes, but other times all I could hear was “you bet your sweet bippy,” which was an expression he used to indicate that “you are darn right “X” is true.” It was entertaining, but not particularly useful.
Oral Anatomy demands a familiarity with literally every facet, contour, height, angle, eruption schedule, et al. of every tooth humans possess in their lifetime. Which… makes sense, since we are going to be dentists. Anyhow, we are given life-size tooth preps on which we must use hot wax to built up the correct structure of different tooth crowns. The dentist assigned to our bench is a young doctor of prosthodontics, and her waxing skills are unreal. I’ll be sitting there staring at my tooth, and I can kind of pick out what’s wrong. Then, I’ll take 20 minutes and clumsily try to bulk up a marginal ridge by laying down some hot wax with a PK1, flowing it with a dental explorer, and then contouring with a half hollenback carving tool. The results are not pretty. The wax appears a bit like an impressionistic sculpture of parts of a tooth. Unappealing to the eye and anatomically terrible. Then our lab dentist comes around to help out; in literally (LITERALLY) 15 seconds, she demonstrates how to recontour the lingual side of my wax-up and fix a few other issues in the process. My jaw drops.
Jon Hicks: you may know him as the man who designed the Firefox logo/brand. After seeing that and other fun, creatively brilliant solutions he’s come up with, I’d call him the best branding man online. Amazing stuff. Take a look at his latest:
That’s a logo for the program Mail Chimp; I have no idea what the program does, but if the team responsible for it hired a guy like Hicks to reinvigorate their program’s appearance, then I’m convinced it’s good software.
That’s a really cool looking mail delivery primate.
We did dental indices on our peers today — so, this was the first time I have ever in my life probed around someone’s gums using actual dental instruments.
I’ve never sweat so much in my life.
By the time I was done with my rotation as examiner, my nitrile gloves were transparent from sweat. Posture, working in your mirror, keeping your hands braced on the person’s face, not blinding them with light, not poking them in their soft palate… so many things to keep in mind. And all we were doing is counting teeth and testing the health of the mouth! Drilling and filling a cavity seems a lifetime away right now. I think the hardest part is knowing what someone is comfortable with; I mean, it’s one thing to say you can (and should) brace your working hands on your patient’s face, but it’s quite another thing to physically maneuver your hands into the correct positions. I’m nervous and excited to get better at this.
