Google is mighty, everybody says so. Like, nobody needs a library for anything. Like, my flight was delayed and the airline’s app was informative but needed 68 clicks so I googled the airline and the flight number, and Google not only told me first click straightup what the current delay was but also the expected departure gate and reason for delay. I might be remembering that last wrongly but you get the idea: every piece of information on God’s earth is on Google. Google is omniscient (nice word: “omni” + the “sci” is Latin “scio,” knowing, as in “scientific.”)
So when a friend and I were talking about another friend’s illness, naturally we googled it. My goodness but we learned things: the illness is caused by a microbe, a bug, which gets into you by various means and then sets up shop in one of various organs — lungs, eyes, brain, muscles. It can be knocked out with various antibiotics. But once the bug gets in, it stays there; so active infections can recur. The bug tends to reactivate when the immune system goes haywire.
Interesting as all this is, it wasn’t what we wanted to know. We wanted to know about our friend, not facts from some bug fan club. Our friend’s infection had been reactivated in the same organ that was originally infected; and we wanted to know whether the infection could move to a different organ, in particular, could it move to the brain because the brain is, you know, important. Our friend is otherwise entirely healthy and robust and full of beans; so we wanted to know whether the infection could reactivate even with a fully-working immune system. These questions were not arcane, not hyper-specific; they’re questions anyone would ask. We googled and googled until our fingers were sore.
Last fall, when I was deeply in need of a warm, distracting project, I got a puppy. She is very cute, extremely soft, and really annoying. She enjoys chewing everything, but she especially loves my shoelaces and my wrist, both of which she would carry in her mouth at all times like a prized possession, if I would let her. She is also very good at making new friends.
At puppy class, she is usually the most excitable dog in attendance. She wants nothing more than to meet someone, human or canine, and make physical contact with them, ideally as quickly and as energetically as possible. “Personal space, Sunshine!” is something I shout at her daily. Recently, I noticed something about her friend-making habits. Her default setting is excited, open, eager, friendly — but then she calibrates.
Here is her inner monologue from last Sunday, translated by me:
Skating monster by Hieronymus Bosch, Wikimedia Commons
“This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, and the rink was packed from barrier to barrier. Pete promised peppermint bark and beer if I stuck with our plan, though, so we went ahead and rented skates.
A miniature choo-choo train chugged around the perimeter of the rink, packed with gleeful little boys. Parents lounged around the rinkside bar, day-drinking under heat lamps. No one else seemed concerned about the list of sponsors on the rink’s barrier: Marshall Medical Center, Thayer General Surgery, the West Coast Joint and Spine Center.
When Pete asked me to go ice skating with him over the Christmas holiday, I feigned excitement. Pete grew up in rural Pennsylvania and learned to ice skate as a kid. I grew up near Sacramento, California, where it hardly ever snows. Despite living an hour away from ski resorts in Tahoe, I have never mastered any sport that involves attaching blades, boards or wheels to my feet.
I wanted to be enthusiastic. But then — perhaps my fellow
science journalists will relate to this
— I made the mistake of entering “ice skating” into PubMed,
the United States National Library of Medicine’s online database.
“Did you know that hundreds of people have been poisoned by carbon monoxide emissions from Zamboni machines at indoor ice rinks?” I asked Pete one evening, as I downloaded a case study about a girl who got impaled with an inline skate in the vagina.
May we introduce Emily Underwood, to whom you’ve already been introduced because for years she’s been writing guest posts here, like the one about her suicidal hamster. She writes about neuroscience, the environment, mental health, and of course everything else. Her bio is here; her first official post is tomorrow, 1/3/2018. She’s one of the most delicately civilized people on earth. She spends a lot of time — as she and Kenneth Grahame say and as Helen so redoubtably illustrates — messing about in boats.
I had some trouble with the state of the world in 2018. As a result, I’ve been having trouble figuring out what to write for this blog. (I wrote about this problem in October.)
Christie suggested “beginnings” as a topic for today’s blog post, and I noodled around a while on that. But when I came back to it a few hours later, none of it seemed worth sharing.
So I decided to draw it instead. Here you go: How I feel about the beginning of 2019.
Once again, I was thinking that this year would be my year to keep a journal. Or a calendar. I spent a lot of time looking at various new options online, thinking that perhaps some clean fresh pages in a new format would help. Then I remembered this post, which first appeared in 2014.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to write in a journal everyday. I’m terrible at it, even though I wished I loved to scribble daily. I can’t even keep up with my Planner Pad. (In fact, I’ve already lost my 2014 edition).
That’s not to say that I haven’t occasionally kept a notebook. I have one from the eighth grade that is sealed shut with duct tape and says DO NOT OPEN UNTIL YOU ARE VERY OLD. I am not sure when I plan on opening it. The only time I’ve been successful in journaling is in cases of extreme boredom (see: eighth grade, and the summer when I had a two-hour commute) or extreme novelty. I usually write every night when I travel—often, in recent years, in hopes of being able to use the notes in a future story.
Absent these situations, I can’t do it. I get self-conscious. I devolve into whining. I lament my penmanship and my small mindedness. In every class where keeping a journal has been a requirement, I grit my teeth and do the minimum. I was thinking of applying for the California Naturalist program, but when I saw the naturalist notebook requirement (along with the every Saturday commitment), I had second thoughts.
But I do love reading other people’s notebooks. I like naturalists’ notebooks in particular, with sketches and descriptions of the places they visit—and sometimes, revealing the people behind the pen. These notebooks don’t seem boring—they’re fascinating. And also, quite useful. Both Henry David Thoreau, in Massachusetts, and Aldo Leopold, in Wisconsin, made extensive records of when plants flowered each spring. Last year, researchers compared these records to more recent flowering times, finding that plants bust out the blooms earlier when faced with climate change.
Even still, something about the idea of actually taking out the notebook and feeling required to use it seems intimidating, as if I need to be writing down the right things. As if there are right things to write about.
Sadly, no wine.
Maybe because I know what I’d really like to have my notebook look like is this. But I’m really not an artist; all my watercolors have been done with a glass of wine in hand, and they look like what you might imagine. While artists and naturalists offer many practical suggestions of what tools to include in a field bag, wine is never among them.
I’m not quite sure why I’m intimidated by doing this badly—there are plenty of other things I do badly without a second thought. So to give myself the easiest of resolutions (to complement the elephant seal training plan): to notice one thing each day, even if I never use a notebook.
The thing I’m noticing doesn’t have to be big, and it doesn’t have to serve some larger purpose. Take yesterday—the tide was low, and we found anemones covered in confetti bits of shell among the rocks. The biggest ones, each about the size of my hand, had pale blue tentacles and had tucked themselves into a pocket of water beneath an overhanging rock.
Later, I found out that the big patches of anemones were likely all clones—called aggregating anemones, they can divide and spread their genetically identical brethren across the rocks. They don’t mind being packed in with their gene-mates, but should they encounter an unrelated group of anemones, they’ll unleash the fighting tentacles and start their own version of clone wars.
Next time I’ll look for the fighting tentacles. Maybe I should bring some wine and watercolors after all.
**
Images Top: Wikimedia Commons user Walun Middle: Flickr user Donna L. Long
My grandma died yesterday morning. She did not go quickly or painlessly. It was not what most would consider a good death. Difficult, heart-wrenching decisions were made. I want nothing more than to write about how her life ended — about how the system failed her, about how the system is failing so many people — but the wound is too fresh. So I’ll give you another post I wrote about difficult endings. This one originally ran in July 2013. (The story below is about my paternal grandparents. It was my maternal grandma who just died.)
Last night I read Robin Marantz Henig’s beautiful story about Peggy Battin, a bioethicist and advocate for patients who wish to end their lives, and her husband, Brooke Hopkins. A bike accident in 2008 left Brooke paralyzed from the shoulders down and in need of almost constant care. Some days Brooke wants to live; other days he wants to die. And that puts Peggy in a difficult position: “Suffering, suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death — these were subjects she had thought and written about for years, and now, suddenly, they turned unbearably personal. Alongside her physically ravaged husband, she would watch lofty ideas be trumped by reality — and would discover just how messy, raw and muddled the end of life can be,” Marantz Henig writes. Still, Brooke has the ability to make a choice and to communicate that choice. Not everyone has that option. The story made me think of an example from my own life that was both simpler and more complex.
My grandpa had a series of small strokes in his 70s and developed dementia. Grandma cared for him as best she could, but eventually his disease became too much to handle. He would race off in his truck in the middle of the night. Sometimes he would come home; other times he would get lost and end up at a neighbor’s house. Grandpa was strong as an ox. If he wanted to go somewhere, she couldn’t stop him. It was too much for an old woman to handle. So we sent Grandpa to live at the Good Samaritan Center in Park River, North Dakota. His dementia progressed and he stopped recognizing me. Then he stopped recognizing Grandma.
The call came in late May. Grandpa had taken a spill. His head hit the tile floor hard—hard enough to cause his brain to hemorrhage. There was nothing to be done, the doctors said. This was the end. Grandpa wasn’t in any position to make choices, so we chose for him. Don’t prolong this, we said. No feeding tube. No IV. No doubt it’s what he would have wanted.
We expected the end to come quickly, at least I did. How long can a bedridden eighty-two-year-old survive without fluids? A few days, at most, I thought. Yet a week later, we were still waiting for Grandpa to die.
My memories of that week are unreliable at best. I remember accepting cup after cup of watery Folgers despite not being a coffee drinker. I remember watching my dad rub Vaseline on Grandpa’s cracked lips. But mostly I remember waiting. Each time the phone rang, I expected to hear that he was gone. Each time I was relieved and then dismayed.
Grandpa died June 9, 1998. Had he been in the hospital ten days? Two weeks? I don’t remember. But yesterday, when I read about Peggy and Brooke, I couldn’t help but think of Grandpa. I reflected on those last painful days in the hospital. I remembered his cracked lips and sunken eyes. What if some clean-shaven doctor had taken mercy on our family and administered a lethal dose of morphine? Would that have been immoral? Or would it have been extraordinarily humane?
The other morning while we were walking our dogs, my husband slipped on some snow and fell down in front of me. One moment he was stepping over a log, and the next he was on his back, feet up in the air. I laughed hysterically.
He wasn’t hurt. Nor was he amused. And his grumpiness just made the whole episode that much more comical. I couldn’t stop laughing, even after he pointed out that it was actually kind of mean to giggle over his misfortune. I agreed that it was rotten of me, yet I couldn’t stop smirking.
And that got me wondering — why is it so funny when someone falls?
Turns out, scientists are on it. I’ll explain their findings in a minute. But first, notice how many examples of this kind of humor circulate on the internet. Here are three of them, starting with the Ice Man. I dare you not to laugh.
..jpg){kind=link}