Pontificum Scriblerus

What is that law... in chemistry, I distinctly recall learning it from old Doc and Mr. Wells (I wonder if they're still alive and "together")... it takes more energy to get a reaction happening than it does to keep it going? Same law in physics, I think.... More force to move an object from stationary than to keep it moving? Google it. I'm living proof. I don't want something. Whatever it is; medical school, a boyfriend, an orange. Then somehow I consider that it might not be so bad. And then, I invariably change my mind. And then, once over the hump, once the reaction starts, no one can stop me. Impatience, a low energy force, takes over.

Remember that moment in the great GenX masterpiece, Reality Bites, where the mean interviewer asks Wynona Ryder's character to define irony, and she can't? Bear with me. So, when we moved here, to where we live now, I evaluated my surroundings, and said with a chracteristic scoff, what's with all the Asian restaurants? Is it not enough that I work in Chinatown? Every corner has a Vietnamese place? What, is that "COOL" now? Fast forward 4 years. Now, it appears, we're forced by fate to become suburbanites. We've got a town all picked out, bought a second car, some LL Bean boots. In a masochistic effort to figure out if we're gonna have things to do and stuff to eat "out there" I googled the town restaurants. ...And I thought... This has got to be wrong! It seems that the only Vietnamese place is 10 miles away? Yesterday I was working, and I lamented about this to a friendly nurse. She also thought this had to be a mistake. She said, I...

There was a park near my apartment block when I was growing up, and I used to there with grandma or mom on days when it was nice out. The best was when after first snow, there would be new ice, and someone would dump a bucket of water over the slide, and make it icy, and you'd get to climb up and come sliding down on your bum, or on your feet... Grandma and other parents and grandparents stood on the bylines conversing and watching. They never got on the slide. They couldn't: they were too big. Climbing up the ladder; looking down from an impossible height; allowing fate and gravity to bring you back to the ground... Was SO fun! I used to look up at the grownups and think, god, these poor people, can't enjoy this slide, how does one live with something like that? And then I'd feel pangs of what must have been first signs of anxiety, because I realized that eventually, I'd be a grownup, and wouldn't be allowed on the slide. Of course, now I AM a grownup. A...

Today is a special day. Walked out of the apartment for the first time without wintertime parpaphernalia, ie gloves, scarf, hat. The sun was shyly peeking out from the tree branches, and I protected eyes with hand. Lovely... Can't wait for snow or whatever tomorrow will bring.

I know I said I didn't like kids. But now, all I see around me are kids. Kids. In a great variety of colors, flavors, and stages of development. Little girls at the grocery store looking for cookies. Little boys refusing to walk in the rain. Crazy critters playing race cars with the shopping cart at TJ Max. Newborns descending the hospital steps swinging in a brand new carseat. Tired toddlers nodding off on the T. First bra purchases at Victoria's Secret. Soccer cleats and Saucers at Sports Authority Sometimes, they're little kids with their dads. Sometimes, their dads turn into my husband. Alarming turn of events. Really.

By a turn of fate, I ended up at the Harvard Medical School, in their library today. I try to fight this feeling, but in spite of myself, I actually do get a tingle when I walk across the green quad towards the massive marble be-columned neo-classical monster of a building that holds all those giant genius heads that belong to the minds of medicine. A bigger tingle, though, happened when I walked down to lower level 2 of the Countway library, where, as the sign announced, I would find, "BOUND JOURNALS, BEFORE 1986." I was looking for a journal from 1978, but I found something much much older and cooler. The eminent University has stacks and stacks of journals that go as far back as 1812 - the oldest I saw. Eyes widening, I picked up one random volume of the Monthly Journal of Medicine and Science, published in 1850, and began to read the following article. "Richard D, aged 31, by occupation a coach-maker, residing in SoHo, stated that he enjoyed uninterrupted good hea...

Well, I've gone and done it. I've upset my mother in the potato post, by calling her thick-legged proletariat. Thus, I hereby retract that statement. We were NEVER proletariat. In fact, I believe, we were quite refined, with a set of behavioral rules and a well defined social etiquette. Talking about food as a topic, for example, was in very poor taste. Checking out what someone else was eating was not nice, and noting that it looked gross was just rude. Now, I think beets are good. Tasty root vegetable, sweet, crunchy, happily colored. Around here people are put off by them because they're pink. And when I used to bring borscht, the traditional beet soup, for lunch, invariably, there would someone who'd look in my tupperware, and go, "ewww, that's pink, what is that?" What is borscht? Well, that would depend who you ask. Every cook has a recipe of their own, and every region has their own signature way of making it. For example, the Ukranians make it with...