Lucky

Today was long: gym, then gyn preceptor, then finishing research and writing on pulmonary hypertension, then reading for my climate change class, then meeting with a classmate to plan out our in-class discussion to take place this Thursday.

But then, out the window, this scene. And later, dinner with friends. Life is full of obligations, deadlines, things to hand in; but when you can take in this much beauty at the end of the day, and appreciate good food with your friends, you're pretty damn lucky.

Baby Love

Lately many of my friends have been coming down with Baby Fever. It's just the age all of us are entering, I guess, and maybe the fact that some of our friends and siblings are starting to have their own babies. (A history of exposure to babies, it seems, is the greatest risk factor for the Fever.)

I've mostly been spared from the mindless desire for, as my program director would say, a germ bag. Not that I don't love spending time with my little niece, or appreciate her extreme cuteness or think that she's a genius. It's just that spending time with her doesn't make me want to run home and have my own (or wherever that would be done...).

So today I was a little taken aback when I was hit hard with Baby Love. The offending little one was a two-week-old preemie and maybe the smallest human being I've ever seen. He was so tiny as to be a little alien-like, hands trembling as he raised his skinny arms. But he was "fiesty" -- even his NICU nurses had called him that -- sucking vigorously from his bottle and later tilting his shoulders as if trying to roll over and crawl away.

His young parents were so excited and nervous that they couldn't stop talking; I'm pretty sure I don't want to ever be in a pediatrician's shoes. But their baby had such an earnestness, in an extremely tiny little form, that it made me want to take care of him.

I don't know if it'll develop into a full-blown bout of baby fever, but I'm pretty sure it was love.

You know your pediatric clinic is underfunded when...

... the sports stars in the posters on your walls are from two decades ago.

I walked in today past a Mugsy Bogues height chart. Then in an examining room saw Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco (yes, A's era), and Tim Hardaway. Which was great for me, because these guys are from the time when I paid attention to sports, but I'd guess a little confusing for today's pediatric patients.

Coffee: is there anything it can't do?

I just caught the author of this book on a Science Friday podcast, and am dying to read it; it sounds like a paradise of intellectual nerd-dom. The book tells the story not only of Joseph Priestley's discovery of oxygen, but also of his role as enlightenment leader (which was controversial enough to get him expelled from England) and his relationships with the American founding fathers.

As a side note, the author offered this:

"It's not an accident that the age of reason accompanies the rise of caffeinated beverages." Apparently, before coffee came to Europe from Africa (it originated in Ethiopia!), the drink of choice for those who could afford it was alcohol. Once coffee became popular, there was no stopping enlightenment leaders, who, wired on caffeine, went on to lay down the foundations for modern science and government.

You can listen to the author here -- or just go to the coffee shop and fuel your own personal enlightenment.

Inked by science

I really want to get a tattoo, so today I started doing web searches for ideas and tips on what might work well. (I do know what I want to get, but not yet sure where or what the design will look like.) I found this website of scientific tattoos, which is good for at least 3 hours of time wasting. They all fall somewhere on a range of super-dorky to... well, super dorky but also really awesome.

I particularly like the one above, a picture of the phylogenetic family tree of HIV. On the back of a researcher looking into the origins of the virus. It reminds me of my work with rotavirus phylogenies, and a particularly zealous phylogeneticist. There were a lot of days when I'd come in, check my email, and find that this guy had poured hundreds of virus strains into a similar family tree -- because he thought it would be interesting. When he started color-coding, I considered blowing up the tree pictures and wallpapering my room with rotavirus. I never considered painting my skin with them, though.

Un-gagged!

This just made my day.

The Vanishing Point

I started reading my grandfather's published papers a few weeks ago, while on at my parents' house on vacation. I never met my grandfather, who died of cancer before I was born. All I knew of him was a portrait, a sparsely-lit photograph, that hung in the hallway of what was once his and my grandmother's apartment. He stood at an angle to the camera, holding a lit cigarette in a cigarette holder, hands gloved; he exuded a cosmopolitan, European elegance.

My grandparents had come to the US just after the Nazi Anschluss -- a close call. Both of my grandparents had been trained as psychiatrists, and my grandfather began practicing as a Freudian psychoanalyst at some point after his arrival in the States. I knew little of his work, but enough about Freudian thought to prepare myself for deep disagreements between my grandfather's ideas and my own. I figured I could place him within historical context and treat the experience as an intellectural curiosity.

I wasn't prepared for two things. One: that not only would the papers he authored about female sexuality (see, for example, this) be outdated and mysogynistic, but that they would carry such bizarre, visually graphic descriptions of female sexuality that I would have to stop reading for fear of never enjoying sex or romance again. It makes for an interesting aside, however, to note the dedications on each of the papers. My grandfather had gathered together copies of all his published work into a boxed collection to give to my grandmother. And each graphic, mysogynistic paper was inscribed affectionately in dainty script to the love of his life. Apparently he was able to separate his love for his wife into one compartment, and his biopsychosocial reading of female sexuality into another.

The other thing I wasn't prepared for: I really liked the paper he wrote about Van Gogh's last works. In it, he discusses the impending suicide of the painter as it is foretold through his paintings. The one shown above, Wheat Field with Crows, is one of his last paintings, if not the last (whatever, Wikipedia). The picture is not only dark in color, but also composition: it is done in reverse perspective, drawing the viewer's gaze in to the foreground instead of out to the horizon. As my grandfather wrote, this means that the vanishing point, where in a normal painting the land disintegrates into the horizon and disappears, is here the painter. With this painting, in my grandfather's Freudian psychoanalytic viewpoint, Van Gogh painted a "visual suicide note."

Wow.