Month: February 2015

Who Made Who

Just another daily commute home from the office:

Did our taxes today. The Man owes us some money.

Some may object to my use of the term owes in this context.

Why, we should be grateful just for the opportunity to live in a country where there are jobs we can work at, and be grateful we can even pay income taxes, and be equally grateful our masters representatives don’t keep it all.

Some may object to the term grateful in this context.

What I mean is, one has to consider who’s working for who, who should be grateful to who?

Or as AC/DC sang, “Who Made Who?”

Should the egg be grateful to the chicken, or the chicken to the egg?

I can tell you this much, I’m grateful for Happy Wife. In a way you could say She Made Me.

That’s a Cyclamen in her lap. Wikipedia says the plant is native to Europe, from the Mediterranean Basin east to Iran, with one species native to Somalia. And to think I bought it at a grocery store in Alaska.

Blind Justice

Haha – Ruth Bader Ginsburg falls asleep during the State of the Union speech.

She blamed it on the wine but if you ask me you can’t rule out the presenter.

It happened to me once. At a pharmacology seminar. I had not been drinking wine or anything else beforehand. I was seated near the back row, among friends, when all of a sudden a sharp jab to the ribs woke me up. I came to and there was my friend, a fellow grad student, Dasha I think it was, whispering loudly in my ear, “Dude, you were snoring!”

Who could blame me? The presenter was some prof from biochemistry droning on and on in a monotone voice about curing cancer in mice. It was late on a Friday afternoon. Like I said, I hadn’t been drinking, though if I recall I had had a big lunch. You know the feeling I’m talking about. The lights go down, your head bobs once, then twice, you correct yourself both times nearly giving yourself whiplash, and then the third time you don’t come up. Everyone was laughing about it after the seminar. Evidently I’d been snoring pretty loudly. Dasha said people five rows down were turning around to look.

Then again I wasn’t being paid $215K a year. If you’re being paid that much money you should be required to stay awake. No matter who’s speaking. If you don’t your pay gets docked. I totally love the look of unconcern on the face of the dude to her left — “Like, whatever.”

A Lop-eared Bunny

I started this last Sunday.

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A lop-eared bunny for breakfast:

The inventiveness of Happy Wife never ceases.

A grim, foggy morning outside. The phonecast indicates sunshine for days and days ahead. So far this morning, though, we are all like vegetables huddled inside a cold soup. Not a morning to slide out of bed and into the flip flops, throw back the drapes, step onto the porch and greet the wondrous felicity of the day with a beaming smile, filled with anticipation — “Good Morning!”

No.

In other words, it’s February. My birth month. Nothing felicitous about turning 55. Or having a David Byrne moment at your desk only the third week into a new job, “How do I work this?”

You see, one imagines that when you reach 55 on the job you become a fount of knowledge, with the young-ins queuing up outside your office. One by one they give a supplicant tap on your door, respectfully asking if you might share a bit of your hard-won wisdom with them, any little kernel of advice you might have that would help them gain the mastery over their job that you now enjoy over yours. This is the natural order of things, no? A thin consolation of elder-hood? That palpable sense of omniscience that attends seniority and Letteredness which permits you to reach back in time and pontificate, “Why, when I was a junior analyst like yourself, we used to…”

That’s not happening.

Not that I’m complaining mind you. People at work have been great and generous towards me. But just imagine the transition: One day I’m grappling with the biological implications of one protein interacting with another, and the next I’m talking with a corrosion engineer about the Trans-Alaska pipeline. (Which is just fine, btw).

I know, right — the life of a dilettante. The very thing my wise father once cautioned me about: Never become a person who knows a little bit about a lot of things, son.

Sorry, Dad. I have become such a person.

Tomorrow is my birthday. Big whoop. Just watch: some hacker will get hold of this, connect my name and birthday, and before you know it take out a mortgage in my name. You know what, no worries. I’ll just find out where the house is, go there, and plop myself down in the family room on the couch and chill. If anyone objects I’ll shout ’em down, “This is MY house.” Ha!

How’s Harry? Well, he’s been a super responder to therapy, that’s for sure. One injection of a mitotic inhibitor and his tumor shrunk from a fist to a golf ball. After another, to a grape. We have our sights set on a pea. His vitality is back to wild type. But we dare not let that go to our heads and scold him for bad behavior, because he’s quick to remind us, Don’t forget I’m sick:

Whatchya gonna do?