me you and everyone we know

Visage

2010-05-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

Most of my academic half days are spent doing laundry, cleaning up the yard and house and on occasion, actually working on my research.

Last Friday I decided to try something new.

“Care for a beauty break?” She was friendly and inviting, and I had time to kill before my second yoga class of the year. I was not completely oblivious to her thick mascara and not so lightly glossed scarlet lips. But I yielded nonetheless. Who could resist a free makeover? And my attempt at finding shoes worthy of a future infectious disease consultant was in vain. (Looks like a pump, but feels like a sneaker...)

She glanced at the lime North Face fleece Jacket and gray cargo pants I sported and asked if I wanted to keep my “natural” look. I mumbled yes incoherently but it didn’t matter. “What gorgeous skin! And nice thick eyebrows!” (Little did she know, as someone with origins from the Hair Belt, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Bay of Bengal, my unruly eyebrows are the bane of my existence.) She proceeded to cover my “flawless skin” (not without an allergic salute, a subterranean comedone and a few straggling thick eyebrow hairs) with several layers of “face primer,” foundation, rouge (“Dallas: An Outdoor Glow for an Indoor Gal”), mascara, eyeliner, two types of eyeshadow, eye concealer, and for the finishing touch: “Flirt Alert” lip gloss. “This will cover the dark circles under your eyes,” she cooed, referring to my insistent allergic shiners. It has been a rough Spring.

I stared at the new face in the mirror for a few seconds and then awkwardly left the counter, thanking her. I was acutely self-conscious, convinced that my fellow commuters were staring at me on the long BART ride home, with my new saucy version of the Jane Goodall look I typically aim for during periods of leisure. I felt like a child who had snuck into her mother’s vanity drawers. As I embarrassedly glanced around, I also became aware that most women wear make-up, some with more subtlety than others.

My yoga class made me less aware of my face, and more aware of my inability to lengthen (or is it strengthen?) my core, which I am loathe to even locate in its formless, buttery state of being. The room was packed with yoginis chubby and thin, male and female and led by a peripubescent teen who had the cadence down, complete with crescendo and the decrescendo, voice riiiising with every inhale, and releeeeasing with every exhale. But her timing was a bit off...and a bit hurried for my liking. Never would I have imagined that I would have a yoga teacher who was literally half my age at this stage in my life. I spent the better part of the last 20 minutes staring at the fiberglass ceiling waiting to enter shavasana. The corpse pose.

I ambled home with a slight limp, picking up some dinner on the way. I had forgotten all about my beauty break. D walked in, took one look at my face and exclaimed, in as much horror as amusement: “What happened to your FACE?!”

And that is exactly why I married him.

****

Though we had met face to face only twice before, we had many long conversations over the phone, mostly about her regimen for constipation, on occasion about the bigger picture: how was she going to continue to live by herself?

“Oh you look so pretty!” she marveled. I am by no means under the delusion that “prettiness” is an attribute I own. But youthfulness I have, despite the several gray hairs that find their way through my short black pixie cut. And it was this, my young, open, unadorned but unwrinkled face, that was in stark contrast to Mildred Silverman’s own textured skin, her slate colored eyes only accentuated by a light blue eyeshadow. I thought to myself that she too was once pretty, but failed to be able to envision any other form of the face in front of me, a sweet earnest face with many reliefs and topographic edges.

She naturally proceeded to talk about her constipation. I politely interrupted her to first ask whether she had seen any of the assisted living apartments we had discussed previously and second to probe more about her 8lb weight loss in the last 6 months. At a mere height of 4’8”, the 117lbs she carried mostly consisted of a comforting adiposity that supported her hips and girdle and likely protected her from osteoporosis. But she was about 125lbs the last time we had met; concerning for a woman of 84 who was not in a position to try to lose weight.

“I guess I just haven’t been eating. Who wants to cook for yourself?”

She grew up in an orthodox multigenerational Jewish family, and raised her kids in the same tradition, only to find that they chose to chart out their own paths, a path that involved marrying goyim and not keeping kosher. I felt my own face grow warm when she spoke of her Indian son-in-law and wondered aloud why she had always been anemic and her son-in-law, who is vegetarian, seemed so robust.

(Iron supplementation was never an option for her because of her chronic constipation. She has had colonoscopy after colonoscopy which has only revealed outpouchings of the colonic wall known as diverticula- which can be a source of bleeding and more commonly is caused by low fiber diets and poor bowel habits. It is a vicious cycle, one that a typical Kosher diet probably does not help.)

She grew tearful as she thought of her aunt reprimanding her when she threw away her kosher meat as a young woman. “There was just so much fat, I couldn’t eat it!” She confided to me that she sometimes saw them, her whole family, in her room at night. “And when I open my eyes, they are gone. It is only me who is left.” She missed them. Every day.

Her daughter and son live nearby, busy with their own careers and growing families. “My grandchildren are all I live for,” she sighs wearily. We go over the options again and again. The lack of kosher dining options in the assisted living residences which are closer to her family. The presence of kosher dining options in the residences which are further away from her family. The expensive ones. The less expensive ones.

I tell her I am worried. She is not eating. Her place is quite cluttered and she could break her hip. (I know this because I have had what we call a home safety evaluation done. She is a hoarder and has kept clothes in her closet that have been with her since the age of 16.)

In the end I could only get her to agree to at least pay for in-home support services. What she really wanted was for someone to stay with her at night. She is fraught with panic attacks.

I think about my own parents 20 years from now. Mildred’s story is not an uncommon one. It is an archetypal American story. A 21st century story. Grandmothers who began their lives in a culture in which the family was central and everyone’s business was your own. Grandmothers who now face the end of their lives in a culture where individuality triumphs, families are fractured and no-one’s business is anyone else’s unless you are on Facebook. It is funny how internet social networking is seen as a treatment for depression and social isolation when in reality it only mirrors, and at times enhances, our own alienation. We live in a time when you can’t walk down the street without talking into a cell phone, you can’t drink coffee at a café without text messaging your friends, you can’t have a day off without updating your status. We are desperate to feel connected, and have effectively disconnected ourselves from our experiences and our lives.

Perhaps I should encourage Mildred to keep in touch with her grandchildren on Facebook. It may be her saving grace, for the few years that she has left.

Cutting Loose.

2010-01-25T20:13:00.000-08:00

"I'll give you 20 dollars if you cut me loose!" At 75, she was petite and spry, her legs dangling across the bed railing, her arms gesticulating wildly. Unrestrained, sassy and delirious. Just after extubation in the windowless confines of an ICU room.

She cut herself loose not long after, and died a peaceful death after she was transitioned to "comfort care."

By month 2 of your intern year you learn how to make this transition quite deftly. You explain, tactfully, but not excluding some of the vivid details, of the process of resuscitating what is, for all intents and purposes, a dead body. You explain, sagely, that it may cause more suffering and sometimes cause irreversible injuries to the brain. You give families a choice that they rarely ever want to make. Some patients and families are ready. Others aren't.

You realize that paternalism is not always a bad thing, and "autonomy" is not always a good thing, especially when you ask families to speak "autonomously" on behalf of the patient. And you are constantly striving to redefine those words and negotiate your place between them.

Since month 2, you have had strong opinions about this matter. The answer is easy when your patient already suffers from severe dementia, has widespread metastatic lung cancer and is 95 years old. Medical futility.

Primum non nocere. First do no harm.

For the first time in a while, I found it difficult to cut a patient loose, in spite of his persistence. He was in his mid 70s, a jovial Creole gentleman with a really bad heart. His heart failure specialist had determined that he was not a candidate for advanced therapies and thus he was on my service. My goal was to send him home with palliative therapies. And so we tried to "optimize" his heart failure regimen, with diuretics and medications to help his heart pump, but each change seemed to make him feel worse. And I could not let go of the fact that we were doing more harm than good, and all I wanted to do was change things back to "the way they were." Before he started to feel worse. Before we threw on the lasix drip and the dobutamine drip and the milrinone drip and everything.

We spent two weeks chasing numbers. Creatinine to measure his kidney function. Jugular venous pressure to measure his intravascular volume. "Ins and Outs"- how much fluids he took in, how much was he urinating out.

But he had his own ideas. His idea of "the way things were" were vastly different from my own. In my version, he was the jolly old man in a chair, watching Haiti on CNN and comfortably eating his cardiac/renal diet of bland eggs without seasoning and home fries. In his version, he was home, walking around, running his errands with a little bit of shortness of breath now and then. And when we made it clear that he was not going to be able to be that person again, he wanted out.

He kept telling me that he was feeling weaker and weaker. And all I could think about was the fact that we were doing something to him. Like most patients with severe heart failure, it is impossible to find that balance between getting fluid off with diuretics to improve the dynamics of the heart's "pump" and making him pee so much that he becomes dehydrated. If you don't find that balance, the kidneys will fail. Assessing a patient's "volume status" by virtue of the clinical exam can be even more challenging in someone whose has pulmonary artery hypertension from other causes- in his case scleroderma.

In the last 48 hours, I became fixated on the idea that he had digoxin toxicity from his now worsening kidney failure. This can cause obscure neurologic symptoms, GI disturbances, heart arrhythmias and malaise.

But so can heart failure.

He finally said to me, "Doc, I am ready." And I finally listened. He told me that I "had done a good job." And, for the first time in a long time, I wept. Right there in front of my team, in the hospital.

Cutting loose.

"I am glad in the end we could be friends." This was the last thing he said to me today. Whether I will see him tomorrow remains uncertain.

Most of the time, transitioning someone to a more comfortable death can be one of the most powerful and gratifying experiences a physician can have. Those were some of the most profound experiences I had as an intern.

I am at a loss to explain why this was so hard for me now, 6 months shy of the end of residency.

****************

She was 81, chattering away at the nurses' station in Cantonese, looking splendid in her leopard print pajamas and Adidas running shoes. She refused to go back to her room because she did not like her male "sitter." The alternative euphemism, coined at the county hospital, for these individuals who watch over our cognitively impaired patients is "coach."

At the VA, the double doors to the lowest acuity floor have the following sign: "Wandering Patients: Please leave doors closed."

I hope that one day, when I am a little old gray haired lady with dementia that I too will have the wherewithal to sport leopard print pajamas, and more importantly, running shoes. Lest I ever feel the urge to cut loose.

the freedom fighter

2009-10-31T21:38:00.000-07:00

“Obama!” my grandfather’s younger brother declared, “Obama… celebrated Deepavali last week! Eh?” He was making sure I was listening. I was sitting on the veranda on a leather recliner between the two of them, staring at a thin layer if skin that had formed on the surface of my lukewarm tea. It was my 3rd cup of the morning, having visited 2 other houses already as part of my grandfather’s full agenda for me. To refuse the tea would have been rude. As it was, my American-ness, my limited ability to speak the mother tongue and consequently smile rather dimwittedly, was all too palpable. And unpalatable.

The leather recliner should have seemed oddly misplaced in this garden straight out of a Kipling novella. But it wasn’t.

A mongoose ran across the path through the garden.

“Obama! Is a disciple of Gandhi! He said this last week!”

“Hmm? Hmm.” My grandfather nodded sagely. “Anyway it is good that America finally has a negro president.”

I cringed, and contemplated bringing up the political uncorrectedness of that statement to my 87 year-old grandfather, a former “freedom fighter” and chemical engineer. I decided against it. I mean really, what right do I have to correct the man who was imprisoned at the age of 24, for his “passive resistance” against the British in the Quit India movement so many years ago? What have I done with my life other than get flustered by the circular discourse of the theorists and the academics in the post-colonial period and my overwhelming inability to speak a cohesive sentence?
************************************
Jet lag, I soon found out, is not the same thing as taking call. Every morning, no matter how little sleep I had gotten the night before, I would get up between the hours of 1 and 3 am. I would stay awake until I saw Achappan’s light turn on and heard him slowly shuffle into the bathroom. Just as I would drift off to sleep, the radio would turn on, first the soft humming of a mridangam which would progressively get louder, followed by a charged but harmonized Vande Matharam. "I Bow to the Mother," the call to rise and revolutionize, first sung by the Indian National Congress is 1896.

A dramatic opening of the wooden doors would let the light into to my room and I would hear a soft chuckle.

My body would be stiff from the hard mattress, my legs hyperextended and locked and my elbows taut and slightly rotated outwards, causing me to wake up with a tingling sensation radiating to my 4th and 5th digits. Bilateral ulnar radiculopathy- I had managed to hit both my funny bones simultaneously each morning. I would slowly rise, pat down my hair, and greet him with a weak smile.

“At a certain point, the parents have to obey their children,” Unni Achappan lamented. That children are an investment had never occurred to me until my aunt clucked her tongue at the fact that her aging aunt did not have any children of her own. You have children initially against your better judgment, in spite of the fact that you have limited resources, because you know that once you age, if you are so lucky (or unlucky) to age, you will have no-one to take care of you.

My mother's father, however, is a freedom fighter through and through. He refuses to obey his children and is determined to stay alone in his home of the last 30 years, what was previously a coconut shed, instead of living with any of his three children.

I watch him sit across from me. A gecko scrambles across the wall. His lips are moving, constantly reciting prayers under his breath. But his mind is far from still.

*******************************************
I am watching a sparrow hop and slide across the marble floor of the café in Bangalore’s swanky new airport. And I wonder, how much has India changed in my lifetime, let alone his?

I also wonder- if we are all to aspire towards a state of silence and mind unstirred then we are all a lost cause. Because the most venerable saintly man I know is never without worry, never for himself, always for his children.

And perhaps, abstractly, for Mother India.

lymelight

2009-10-11T09:01:00.000-07:00

On why a patient had a bowel resection many years ago:
"I didn't even want it any more. It was full of shit!"

*****************

On why a patient once insisted that he could not take oral pain meds:
"Why can't you understand this. I am ON METHADONE. The methadone EATS the dilaudid. It ain't gonna work!"

************************

Pulmonary attending, on listening to a patient's lungs: "You sound really junky. Do you feel junky?"

Patient, forlornly: "Yeah. I am a junky."

My attempt to suppress a tear and stiffle a laugh when I watched this encounter manifest itself as an awkward post-call snort/sniffle. I watched this puffy, blue-hued man struggle to get a deep breath in.

And I sighed.

I don't know a single resident who does not agree: Chronic pain is painful...for everyone involved. But somehow most of us have more tolerance for the chronically inebriated and addicted than we do for the ones that perhaps look like us.

A junior resident wondered aloud if we could practice medicine anywhere outside of these United States, would we find as many people suffering from chronic pain?

Perhaps they have all been infected with Lyme disease.

I wish I could say that with more authority and less mockery. Checking for Lyme is not uncommonly part of the work-up for chronic pain. But those of us who have treated pain know that it is more often than not a somatic symptom. So we pull out the cymbalta and the imipramine, drugs that have historically part of the psychiatric pharmacopeia that are now in our armamentarium for chronic pain. We compulsively sign pain contracts to keep track of every opioid we dispense. We periodically send urine tox screens to make sure that the opioids are truly in our patients' bodies and not being sold to feed their meth habits.

We remind ourselves daily that we are treating an organic disease, that pain is mediated by a complex neurochemistry that many of us are loathe to understand.

Physicians find solace in the tangible and the sometimes grotesque: a laceration, an abscess, a fungating crusting skin lesion. And things that are less tangible are rendered so with the miracles of modern radiology that can detect tumors as big as your fingernail. I'd like to think that internists are the exception, that we dissect and pontificate and analyze. We are exacting, discerning, cerebral. But in the end we are truth seekers just like everyone else, and in the end that is often our demise. The truth is more often messy than not.

Since I began residency, I have suffered terrible migraines, chronic knee pain, overwhelming fatigue and now more recently neck pain. I can rationalize each of these symptoms- sleep deprivation, inappropriate footwear climbing up and down stairs when rounding, sleep deprivation, falling asleep on the couch in an awkward position, sleep deprivation, vitamin D deficiency. (I kid you not- my vitamin D levels were nearly undetectable.)

I was LIVID when my husband, also a physician, jokingly suggested to me that I have fibromyalgia. How dare that he imply that my symptoms were not rooted in the tangible?

The organic?

But the thought of starting an SSRI has not escaped me.

And with that, I leave you with this sobering statistic from the World Health Organization.

"Depression is the leading cause of disability as measured by YLDs (Years Lost to Disability) and the 4th leading contributor to the global burden of disease (Disability Adjusted Life Years) in 2000. By the year 2020, depression is projected to reach 2nd place of the ranking of DALYs calcuated for all ages, both sexes. Today, depression is already the 2nd cause of DALYs in the age category 15-44 years for both sexes combined."

moo

2008-10-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

so what's up with all the cattle references in American politics?

The Best Medicine.

2007-08-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

Seen and heard on the floors during my first two months in a long white coat:

Q: Have you ever used any substances such as intravenous drugs or cocaine?
A: "The only dope I've ever been addicted to is my husband!"

As several doctors and med students peer at his jugular vein to determine his central venous pressure, Mr. J remarks, dryly:
"You're so vain. You and Carly Simon."

Kindly admit to Med unit III

2007-03-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

It has been about 6 weeks since our Air France flight landed in Bangalore. I remember peering out my window at 4 am IST, city lights aglow, making this city, this Country indistinguishable from any other. "It's deceiving," I told Dave, who was still half-asleep. "You think it's just like any other, but you don't know..."

I can safely say, that 6 weeks later, he now KNOWS. Like any other pardesi desi, he understands the congestion, the openness, the immensity, the smallness of it all. Madness.

We spent three weeks in Kerala, God's Own Country. And if you looked from above you would understand that it is true. First the hilly mountaintops lined with palm trees. Then miles and miles of flats, lined with palm trees. Then iridescent waters rushing the coastline, also lined with palm trees.

But the land and the people are changing. And with it my vision. We spent two weeks listening to the stories of sex workers in Kerala. Yes my friends, there are sex workers in Kerala and they come in all different sizes, shapes, colors, creeds. Fiscally liberal, socially conservative Kerala has a growing HIV infected population. And the women are mobilizing, forming unions, pukka communist Kerala style. They are determined. They will not become victims.

I am so proud.

It is hard not to be religious in God's Own Country. All the Hindu sex workers go to temple every morning, after "taking bath." When I see them, their wet black hair is neatly pinned back, one long braid falling straight along their spines. A red line of kum kum dons her forehead. She is a pukka Kerala beauty.

The Christian ammas don't look terribly different. In fact, most of the time I can't tell, unless they tell me their names. Perhaps they are without kum kum. Instead a beautiful 22kt gold cross falls elegantly around their necks.

The Muslim chechis wear hijab, only covering their heads, not faces. They wear saris or salwars.

It is hard not to be religious here, because there are temples, churches and mosques at every corner on every street.

But even God's Own Country is changing. Five years ago we would hear about the riots up North. But the violence is infiltrating our land and fundamentalism is making its way. Now the "Riots up North" doesn't refer to violence in Gujarat or Delhi. It refers to violence in Calicut and Kasargod.
~.~.~.~

"Bangalore has changed alot," she said as she watched her chubby 10 year-old girl unhappily complete another lap around the tennis court. "They used to call it 'The Garden City.' Pensionner's paradise.

I watched this perfectly coiffed, manicured Bangalorean mother in amazement. She had grown up here, spent her whole life in this city, watched it evolve into the congested smog-filled IT capital of the world it is today.

I saw her a couple of mornings later at the gym. I was sweating it out in my green Champion men's basketball shorts and blue High Sierra Cubs shirt which spent one too many washes in hard water. My legs had a not so flattering coating of coarse 3 week old hair.

And she was elegantly dressed in stretch pants, a tank top and coffee coloured lipstick. I was jealous because she could do a pull up, one more than my challaballa Ningileri arms could ever attempt.

I had this strange feeling that I wasn't in India anymore Toto. I think I somehow found myself over the rainbow and in Marin County, California.

Yikes.
~.~.~.~

Every admission note I see on the floors have the following (polite) instruction: "Kindly admit to med, unit III."
And in the days before match day, I find this hauntingly prophetic.

aiyo vey

2006-10-17T18:45:00.000-07:00

so i was trying to explain to my mother that Dave made this incredible tofu dish with soy vey. I did my best to describe this soy sauce like seasoning, explaining that the yiddish phrase "oy vey" is similar to the malayalam "aiyo." They are both articulations of exasperation, as expressed by Little Old Ladies, withered and weary. I imagine my mother will be one of those LOLs in a couple of years, if she didn't always scrunch up her nose and chuckle in playful self-deprecation, keeping herself young at 54.

Even though she is completely tone deaf, she manages to speak with the musical lilt common among Hindi-glots. Her English is precise, although my aunt in India often argues that 30 years in this country has "yankified" her accent.

But she doesn't always pick up the vernacular very well. For example, she would say something like, "take a pill" instead of "take a chill pill," a favorite expression of ours back in our gum smacking mall rat days.

And as I tried my best to explain the pun soy vey, my mother tried her best to understand: "Soya vey? Soya vey?"

I gave up after a few minutes. But the attempt left me chuckling.

omigosh

2006-07-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

I am officially the COOLEST 14 year old I never was.

It took me just about 13 years to get here.

"Rory" is one of my 14 year old Onc patients. We smile and giggle when we talk about our favorite WB show.

Me: "I was SO bummed about last season's finale."
Rory: "I KNOW!"
Rory's mom: "They've got to get back together, they can't break up!"

So it goes. I sail into her room, part of the entourage: attending, fellow, me. We take turns listening to heart and lungs, feeling the belly for the spleen and liver. We talk a bit about how we can get her to eat a bit more, what our options were for anti-emetics. She's a fan of the marinnol.

And then, I pipe up: "Remind me to tell you about the time my sister met Jess, whose real name I can never pronounce."
"WHAT?! you mean Milos Ventimiglia?!?"

Yup. I am the coolest 14 year old ever. For about 4 minutes every day.

I wish Nam were there to see me. When she met me, standing in line to get our 9th grade school pictures taken, I was decked out in a matching skirt and blouse set from Bradley's. I was about three months shy of getting that memorable perm.

"Can I borrow a pen?" she asked coolly.
I handed her the one pen I had, a green "sanrio" pen with a cartoonish frog that jumped up and down on a spring everytime you clicked it. "Do you like Keroppi?"

She didn't like Keroppi. Even though she was Korean.

Thirteen years later, and Nam stuck around. If only she were there to see me...

Markers

2006-07-16T04:51:00.000-07:00

with every passing year, the memory of it fades. I become distanced from this narrative and it no longer feels like my own.

Is it my changing body, with its newer contours and landscapes which have erased the markers? Where is my "second" belly button? Where is that dimple on the posterior iliac crest where they aspirated bone marrow, first at diagnosis, then at induction (day 15, day 29), then at remission?

The markers are still there. But the memory is becoming myth.

"i'll never forget seeing that smear. Twenty-one years later...the absence of neutrophils, the blasts."

My mother's story. Status post, hematology-oncology fellowship from LIJ. In Saudi Arabia, en route to "going back home."

She didn't pick it up right away. The differential of splenomegaly and painful limp in a 3 1/2 year old was far too vast. She probably just has a little bug. It's probably all reactive. Inflammatory. Infectious.

Not proliferative. Not clonal.

My narrative was more concise. At 3 1/2 I was far more articulate than at 27...less hesitant, less bumbling/stumbling, less concerned with words and their multiple meanings, implications, stories.
"I ate two naiappams, my mommy played with my belly and felt my spleen. I was limping.

My father's story: "I heard you screaming all the way from the office!" This was after my weekly spinal tap +/- bone marrow, when I failed conscious sedation. General anesthesia was not standard of care back then.

The thing is, I had no concept of death...or at least I never thought it would happen to me. "Death" was what happened to my Raju mama who no longer came to my home to give me various gifts, like a time warner clock or a spanish doll.

The rest of the story comes in bits and pieces: how my mother made her attending sit down with my father and tell him that "she could die," how my father would get so upset if the television in my room wasn't working, how we took the next flight back to the states and went straight from the airport to the hospital and never once thought of "going back home."

I am becoming distanced from this narrative.

I am doing a pediatric hem-onc rotation in Philadelphia. The few times I felt the lump-in-throat-warmth-in-face-moistness-in-eyes was when the parents' distress manifest. A mother's long pause with downward glance. A father taking his child's hand and covering his face.

And I thought of my amazing parents.

The markers are still there. The bilateral patellar areflexia. The dimple.

But the story is no longer mine. I'm not sure it ever was.

The autobiography of my mother. The autobiography of my father.

roost

2006-06-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

every morning we awake to the wild roosters that roam our backyard. funny enough, in my current read, the Ukranian protagonist often uses the word roost as a verb to describe rest or sleep. irony? i think so.

so we are leaving our garden island tomorrow for Oakland, CA. I am trying my best to document highlights (and nadirs) of our trip, but am limited by the timeouts that mercilessly terminate my writing time. in a previous era (B.I.T, before information technology) I would have documented my travels in a journal. There is something lovely and romantic about actually using that archaic implement, the pen...I have tried it a coupla times, writing postcards to various folks...and it seems so foreign to me now. Every trip I took to India and Disneyworld as a child has been recorded in various travel journals.

And now: how lined pages seem so foreign a landscape. Sad, no?

Anyway, back to the highlights:
1. Poignantly trite punchlines: remember the one about the radiologist, the psychiatrist and the neurologist? my cousin H, a psychiatrist, and his lovely wife K, a neurologist, were on our transcontinental flight to Long Beach last monday, when over the speaker we heard those famous last words: is there a doctor on this plane? We all looked at each other sheepishly...Dave and I were spared because we are sans licensure, but my cousin slowly raised his hand. Another gentleman apparently did the same...he was a radiologist, and it seemed that the short straw was bound to be picked by the neurologist, the only one of three who could approach a patient below the "tentorium." Now keep in mind, I have complete faith in my cuz, the shrink, in his skills, have certainly consulted him professionally and personally...but it is a different game below the tentorium, and I suspect he is a bit removed from it. Fortunately the lol (little old lady) prolly just needed a bit of orange juice...

2. Nostalgia with some crackers: Remember Arrested Development? "Everyday People" was the very first CD I bought (along with Mariah Carey and the Beatles) as a 12 year old hipstah hopeful. They play Arrested Development ALL the time here on the island, and I am in Tennessee all over again. (Make me understand your plan...)

3. Indigenous food: Taro is a root grown here, and tastes something along the lines of Kassava. We had a Taro burger at a place called Bubba's Burgers in Kapa'a (where they "relish your buns"). Taro Hummus sandwhich at a kiosk called Taro Juice and Company in Hanelei, and Taro leaves in our enchiladas at the local Mexican joint. Positively flatulating, but positively yummy.

4. Dessert: Kauai Pie ice cream at Lapperts (kona coffee, coconut, macadamia nut), chocolate decadence from Happy Talk Lounge by Bali Hai...

5. Basking in the sun: the hardest job I have ever had. I tell ya, two hours kayaking along the river, three hour hikes in Kokee State Park (near Waimea Canyon), beaching with my beached whale of a pinky and I am totally wiped out. Being on vacation is hard work.

Alright then, I will update more once on the mainland...until then...

here's to fifty two times a billion

2006-06-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

a week ago today we were married among all our beloved friends and family. to those of you who read this blog, i cannot express my gratitude for your presence in my life, and especially on that particular day...what a way to celebrate a life lived and a life ahead!

Dave and I celebrated our "1 week" anniversary today by going to the Kauai Hindu Temple. I was struck by the ease with which disciples, both of South Asian descent and otherwise, followed the lead of two "white" bramacharis. For those who are not familiar with the tradition, it is custom for rituals to be performed only by those in the Brahman caste. That is not to say that a learned Kshatriya (warrior) or Vaishya (merchant) cannot take a vow of ascetism, or become a "guru" (a spiritual teacher)...its just the rituals that seem to have been marked for inheritance. So it was striking that these two individuals were donning the string and the saffron dhotis...they must have been taught the rituals by someone who was of that tradition. The temple itself was gorgeous, nestled among lush mountains and gurgling streams....truly a place to find serenity, no matter what your religious or spiritual persuasion.

Then we had an amazing brunch at this local vegan joing called Blossoming Lotus: tofu scramble drizzled with salsa and sour cream, a vegan omlette with macadamia nut cheese, a pecan sticky bun drenched in maple syrup glaze and sweet corn bread garnished with a chunky pineapple-mango chutney. Scrumdidliumptious!

Lets see...Dave and I hiked the Na-Pali coast two days ago, and the challenge proved me less rugged than I would have liked to consider myself. At one point I was so tired and dehydrated I started to cry! (yes indeed, making myself even more dehydrated.) But the views were incredible, I will definitely upload pictures once I download them (hah!) from our new digital camera.

In other news, Dave took a surfing lesson yesterday and managed to rip the side of his swim shorts. His instructor called it a "hang 11." shaka!

Tonight we had lovely dinner by Hanelei Bay...ahi and a caesar salad with grilled fish. just lovely.

More later....mahalo for reading!

hawaii two d'oh! part deux

2006-06-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

day five on gilligan's island.

geico, our friendly neighborhood gecko, is our new best friend who scrambles across our stucco walls. me thinks he gobbles up all the mosquitoes that would otherwise torment me at night. consequently i have been blessed with the most golden of slumbers on the eastside of kauai.

charlotte, the spider who once took up nest by our doorway, has flown the coop. even Dave, afflicted with a bad case of arachnephobia (sp?) had been smitten (not bitten) by her.

i just finished the life of pi, and in spite of my prolonged seasickness (god he's still on the boat), the ending was actually quite lovely and i realized the "the ethnography" was actually quite self-aware. the one "antagonist" of the novel was a french cook, ala the Little Mermaid (les poisson hee hee hee haw haw haw), and i think Yann Martel himself is french canadian. can anyone else confirm this? now onto everything is illuminated by jonathan safran foer...isn't being on vacation greeeat?

argument number 9: some of you might have realized that D and I are two different people. he is of more adventurous stock than I, but the Julia Kristeva (literary critic) reference that Adam made was more lost on him than I. so arguments are bound to happen. but he teaches me to stand more firmly on my own two feet, and i hope i am giving him something in return...

be on the look out for my goofy grin everytime dave refers to me as my wife. he has done it a total of three times already...and i have yet to reciprocate. i like this marriage thing.

hawaii two d'oh

2006-06-22T22:28:00.000-07:00

"don't scratch it...just leave it alone and it'll go down a bit."
"thanks. i think i know the pathophysiology of a mosquito bite, Dave."

day four of post-nuptual bliss in Hawaii, and things feel just about right. Other similar conversations:

"Tar, doesn't this feel like we're in the jungle?"
"No, it feels like I'm in Westchester."

Yeah. Back to my old curmugeony self after my weekend of pampering and princesshood. life is splendid.

things that i actually love about our temporary paradise lost:

1. spectacular vistas of the ocean, no matter where you stand, no matter which mountain you are a top.
2. wild orchids and hibiscus abound
3. great food...veggie friendly too!
4. a small town feel...especially the small town coffee shop located in kap'aa with internet.
5. our rad abode...a small cottage nestled at the base of Sleeping Giant Mountain on the east side of Kauai...very secluded, but residential.
6. my awesome new uber-short hair do...liberation? no, just frustrated with my increasingly limp hair-do.

things i look forward too in the next coupla days:

1. hiking the na'pali coast
2. buying hawaiian kitsch, like jimmy buffett t-shirts
3. going to a dinner production of South Pacific in the south pacific (actually the movie, among many others including Elvis's Blue Hawaii, Jurassic Park) was filmed here in kauai.
4. waste away in margaritaville.

life is pretty good, nuptualized.

writorrhea

2006-05-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

it feels good to be back.

i've been spending the last four days in a small, poorly ventilated ER in the Bronx. At any given moment there three residents (peds or ER), two-three attendings (peds or ER), two fellows (peds ER). a couple of nurse practioners and me all running amok from one curtained room to the next. At any given moment there are about 12-20 "charts waiting to be seen."

Everyone walks around, with glistening brows, looking as though they had been to hell and back thrice over.

I fit right in.

I love every minute of it, even when I have to deal with snippy nurses and malicious residents.

Don't worry, I am not tacking on ER to my current list. (medicine? peds? peds? medicine?) But I love the thick salty air of constant hustle bustle.

A nice change of pace from my usual seizure-like state in front of a bright blue screen.

"God WHY do you HAVE to do shifts in the ER?" CB, also known as "Chop-Buster," asked disparagingly.

CB is one of my mentors. Not my primary who wrote that kind letter two weeks ago. CB has been on my bum since the day I met her. I was a directionless migrant from new york who decided to pursue this project on "qualitative research"...with no clue as to what that even entailed. When she had met me, I had blindly drafted an IRB protocol, blindly read article after article on "transitioning children with special health needs," and blindly drafted an introduction/literature review...and she was suitably impressed. And then she proceeded to slaughter everything I ever produced.

I love her. She is ruthless and oftentimes rude. The other night, after I came home from a long shift, I checked my email to find that my poster for student research day was due the last friday. I desperately called CB to ask her what she thought of my last version of the poster.

"I can't get over how ugly it is."

Yeah. She really said that. I bristled as I listened to her go on and on about how she envisioned it. It was clear we had two different aesthetics. Nonetheless I proceeded to work on the damn poster for another two hours. Mind you I had another ER shift to do the next morning.

It's been a long week.

CB busts my chops everyday. But without her I would have never reached this point. Without her I would have never been able to present my research so succintly and precisely...she knows all too well my affliction with writorrhea.

She is not a clinician. She very willingly admits that she does not like clinical medicine at all. I knew that fact when I somewhat mean-spiritedly remarked about how much I LOVE clinical medicine. Which is the truth...I love the intensity, the nastiness, the drama, the folklore...every part of it.

But I felt badly when she responded, with a vacant look on her face, "God I hate it."

But the great thing about CB is that she really knows what she wants and she is brilliant at what she does, and she KNOWS clinical medicine is not for her. I lucked out...I love medicine for all its rawness, and I love research for all its exclusivity...and fortunately I DON'T love the kind of clinical work or the kind of research that would exclude other. I can actually manage to integrate both somehow...

I didn't think this was possible. But now...

As long as I can get past the egos and the stalwarts.

I am excited beyond measure, beyond words. How's that for a change?

DICK and the MAN

2006-04-20T04:35:00.000-07:00

Remember the Furtive Foot who so rudely interrupted the smooth continuity between my rump and the floor at last year's NIH meeting? The one and the same that lay captive to the MAN?

He is my beneficiary and patriarch.

$23,000.

Doris Duke, our dead philanthropic niece of James Buchanan, is his masquerade. He is The MAN responsible for my year here.

And so yesterday I had to present to him my year of research in 10 minutes.

I took a lot of time on this presentation. I tried hard to make it clean and concise. In the process it was deprived of its richness.

All the WORDS spoken...so many WORDS. Over 500 pages of WORDS spoken by adolescents, parents and providers.

Lost in translation to The MAN whom I could see was struggling to find the p value among my quotes.

"So how do I know you are not making all of this up? Can you put in a few numbers and tables in there? Like maybe the CD4 count trends of these children...to see how sick they are?

I looked him straight in the eye, studied every relief on his disgruntled face and finally realized:

I am in control here.

It was as though every sentence he uttered was scripted.

So I confidently responded:

"While I DID document the CD4 counts of these children, among other measures of illness, I don't think it really matters how SICK these children are. Regardless of how SICK these children are, they still NEED to be transitioned, and my agenda today was to describe to you some of the BARRIERS to transitioning care of these adolescents."

He paused. He reflected. The discomfort was palpable.

"Hmm. Fair enough. Ok lets get moving, I'm sure we could talk about this all day. Our next presenter is Heather Duke, who is going to give his talk on Modulation of the Anti-Tumor Immune Response with Immunotherapy (aka protein isolation of cell surface markers on Cutaneous T cell Lymphoma).

Heather Duke is actually a 6' blond haired blue eyed abercrombie and fitched out bloke. Every other Fellow whose company I keep fits a similar description.

I am the only woman to have received the fellowship this year. I am the only medical student who is not going into a surgical specialty or into radiation oncology.

I used a lot of four letter expletives later than night to describe my company at the meeting. Somehow it seemed to flow so naturally.

One ****, I'll call him DICK for now, made an especially smarmy comment. the MAN had asked each of us to make a comment about last presenter, and I said that I don't have anything more to add to what has already been said...and just before I was about to give one additional comment, DICK said: "so you mean we've reached the point of theoretical saturation?" He was throwing back a phrase I had used in describing our qualitative analysis. You could tell he was waiting to use that line all evening.

I ignored DICK's comment and moved on. And that was that.

I will say this: three of my mentors showed up to my presentation, and they were all very pleased. And mind you that all three were previously hard core quantitative researchers who have published in esteemed journals (including NEJM). They are all extraordinary people who were willing to push the envelope a bit and take a chance on me, "the flighty social scientist"/"the blossoming academic." And I am so so grateful.
~.~.~
An email from my mentor, in the aftermath:

"TARA: No thanks are necessary. It was a pleasure to see this all come to
fruition in a wonderful 10 minute pearl.
... By the way, the 2 students who went after you stunned me with
their inability to make their data accessible to the audience. I simply could not follow them, even though they had lots of beautiful data. They will be able to write
nice papers with pretty figures but they certainly could not give me two sentences to store in my head for even 15 minutes.
So thanks for being the star! You make us all look good. And
you have taught me a lot. That's what this is all about: we provide the resources and the time and you teach your teachers.
Gratefully, "

Masquerade

2006-04-16T12:41:00.000-07:00

I am the quintessential New Yorker.

(and/or Jersey Girl. Take your pick.)

Bitter. Jaded.

Pale and Dry.

A Ball Buster.

I wasn’t always so. In fact, in high school, I radiated. I exalted the sun. I glorified the Great Outdoors. I ran twice a day, 5-6 days a week. Come rain (snow, hail) or shine.

I was sun-kissed all year round.

So it wasn’t surprising to anyone that I shunned the ivy league to go to school in California. I didn’t get "Stansbury," my first pick out west, but my second seemed remarkably a better fit than anyone could have imagined.

So I chose sunshine over the gray skies of Morningside Heights, West Philadelphia and Baltimore. And I had no regrets.

Every high schooler has his or her role in the system. I was the Long-Skirted Recluse (LSR) who loved to bask. Future tiller of soil and planter of seeds. A Rebel, whose only cause was warm weather and sunny skies.

So what happened?

Now I am a pale, puffy academic who is seeking out the IV. Even though I hate it, especially the one in which I am currently doing research, which I have secretly nicknamed "Heather Chandler." (or Heather Duke or Heather McNamara. Depending on my mood.)

As in "Dear Diary, I HATE Heather Chandler."

I am Veronica Sawyer.
(For those of you who haven't caught on yet: "Heathers" is one of my all-time favorite movies.)

~.~.~.~.~

What happened was that I wound up deciding to marry the quintessential Californian. A Scruffy, Sun-kissed, Hoodie Wearing, Skateboarding Californian. A Pacifist. A Dirty Hippie. To be fair, he does not truly hail from the Golden State. He lives five minutes from the border. But he is definitely Californian.

So I surmise based on the fact that every “war story” is prefaced with “Whoaaa. Dude.”

Um. Yeah.

So my Skater Boy had me figured out much earlier than anyone else ever did. He magically fleshed the beast that lies within. He knows that I am really the same Zantac-popping type A kid that every other student at The Dwight-Englewood College Preparatory School was.

Only worse. I am the Quintessential Imposter. A Masquerader.

And so my true colors emerge.

The Californian: sunny, warm, friendly, breezy. Laid back.

Mellow.

The New Yorker: cloudy, cold, bitter, dry. Serious.

Intense.

Me.

paradise now

2006-04-09T09:56:00.000-07:00

i'm having a bridezilla moment.

one after another.

yesterday i found *the perfect* apartment for our first home. it was open and sunny and it had a lovely little patio with a garden. I imagined myself, in a bright yellow floral scarf covering all but a few strands of maverick hairs, capri pants with dirt stained knees and my old trusted birks, tilling away and harvesting my 2x4 foot plot of land. Romantic, no? Tara, newlywed, newly anointed earth goddess, tiller of soil, planter of seeds.

keep in mind that neither of my thumbs are remotely green. but i am learning. and i finally am listening to my mother, who was blessed with two.

so I eagerly put down my application. I confidently scribbled my *income,* which technically is below the poverty line, and my *employer,* a winning combination of Doris Duke, the dead philanthropic niece of James Buchanan, and the Federal Government, my patriarch and lender.

Believe it or not, the owner did not think this income was sufficient. So she asked if I could have my parents cosign.

Now I have great credit. And I have managed to do pretty well with my meager salary, if I do say so myself. Of course it helps that I am a single woman who doesn't have to pay for a car or my cell phone, thanks to my folks. But I am, and have been for about seven years now on top of all my other bills. And there are MANY other bills I have had to pay.

So I stuttered and fumbled over my words and eagerly tried to convince this woman that I was CAPABLE.... without my parents help. I just didn't want to bring them into this...they have done too much for me already.

She said she would get back to me. But there were other people waiting for this apartment too.

I lost sleep over this. I kept waking up in the middle of the night thinking that my future husband is a better candidate than I am because his parents are his *employer.*

What is wrong with this system? I thought this was the land of hope and dreams and hopeful dreams...

and opportunity.

Today we decided to go check out a studio, which was considerably cheaper. It is a lovely open space, with new hardwood floors and south facing windows...but it is small. And it does not have a garden. The place belongs to Dave's current landlord who is a bit of an eccentric, an art gallery owner who doesn't like to do anything formally...ie no credit checks involved, no employment history, nothing. Just faith in us, newlywed students who have never had a problem making rent.

Clearly my kind of woman.

We sat on the steps, basked in the springtime sun and mulled. If we decided to go with this apartment, we would not be able to entertain very many guests. And I wouldn't be able to till and harvest. Our first home would be small and intimate.

But bright, open and sunny.

The garden would have to wait.

So we took it. Our first home.

junglee, junglee

2006-03-30T19:44:00.000-08:00

"Arye beti, I know you doctors just wash wash wash, but at least try and put some lotion on your hands!"

She was so dismayed to find my recently henna'ed hands cracked and fissured at the knuckles.

Just wait until she attacked my junglee eyebrows, about 12 hairs shy of the limitless. One love, one brow.

Every so often I muster the courage to go see the Threading Aunties. They own a strip mall salon on a busy street in Hackensack, NJ and their clientale range from female migrants from the Hair Belt to gum smacking, long nailed Italian moms, to tight-jeaned, tanktopped Puerto Rican papis. Yes even the burliest of men visit the Threading Aunties.

They bob their chins to and fro with piece of thread between their teeth, expertly yanking each straddler, each wayward hair by its roots. While some of the older aunties wear the standard kurta pyjama top with tapered jeans and reebook sneaks, some of the younger didi's are hot to trot in their diesel jeans and slinky tops. Regardless of their attire, they all manage to have perfectly arched eyebrows and well manicured hands.

Most of the time they giggle and gossip, rapid exercises of their native tongue. I smile stupidly when they chuckle and motion for me to sit in the swivel chair. Most of the clients experience some watering of the eyes...but I am far less graceful. For about three minutes into the thread I start to sneeze. Pluck, ACHOO! Pluck, ACHOO! pluckpluckpluckachooachooachoo!

I emerge with red watery eyes, a swollen shnoz and perfectly shaped eyebrows. And two clucks that follow me as I walk out the door.

"Silly child doesn't take care of herself. No lotion, no make-up, no nothing! How did she ever find a man, God only knows."

They don't really say that. But that is what I imagine in my head. At least that is why all my aunties were so astonished to see me at my engagement party...and all I had donned was a little kohl under my eyes.

I am usually a walking disaster, the female equivalent of Pig Pen. Although to my credit, I do shower everyday...almost. It is true I rarely brush my hair, let alone powder my nose. My nails are painfully bitten down to the quick: the skin around is more often pink than brown.

I attempted to wear eyeliner on a regular basis as a freshman in college. That didn't last very long.

But things are about to change, oh yes, mark my words! At least for a day.

In June.

And then after that....God only knows.

Bottoms-up

2006-03-23T13:13:00.000-08:00

said a patient to his doctor: "doctors who take care of HIV positive people are at the bottom of the barrel. If they can't be surgeons and if they can't be regular doctors then they have to be HIV doctors."

i am renegotiating my place once again. medicine? pediatrics?

peds? med?

i so desperately want to be an HIV doctor. And I so desperately want to tell this patient that he is not at the bottom of the barrel.

hopscotch

2006-03-23T08:14:00.000-08:00

so I was at the gym, huff puffing away while attempting to get through my latest "great read" when my eyes drifted to the magazine table in front of the row of synchronous ellipticals. How easily they landed on a journal that had the word BROWN in big bold letters. I scanned down to find what appeared to be three attractive and self assured Indian men. From my 10 foot distance I could make out the word "studio exec."

And my exact thoughts were " wow cool I wonder if that is another South Asian art 'zine."

In spite of my efforts to focus on Pi and his lifeboat, my eyes continued to fall on that cover, eager to devour another piece of cross-cultural iconography.

When I finished my workout and actually looked at the "zine" a bit closer, I was able to make out what was merely a blur from my 10 foot vantage: the word "alumni."

It was a Brown alumni magazine. With three attractive and self-assured Indian men on the cover.

I remembered looking at the Brown alumni magazine when I was applying in high school and seeing folks of diff'rent strokes and thinking wow way to market diversity.

And then of course I would end up going to an institution that was 40% Asian American.

And wound up with a man, a "minority" who in spite of himself floated easily atop our iridescent seas.

A Jew from Nevada. An effortless sneeze.

~.~.~.~

It's a tricky thing to stand on one foot. The impulse to fall forward, then sideways, then back is tempered by your determination to stand erect, and so you thrust your arms out, again desperately hoping that two limbs are better than one. What relief you find when you can at last place both feet down, either in the middle of the game or the end when you leap from Box Number Nine to base.

Safe.

Such was not my lot as the hyphenated american, according to Jhumpa Lahiri. I was never given (or perhaps afraid to find) the space to land solidly on both feet. It was always one or the other.

My roots are too green, my body too easily bent thisaway and that.

And then there is that impending threat of falling. It is actually inevitable: once my parents leave, my roots will be severed and I will no longer straddle the hyphen, the line.

I don't want to believe this is true. The possibility is frightening.

~.~.~.~

I am haunted by this idea of nationalism and the constantly reminded of the "motherland."

My parents never use the word India to refer to the land of their birth. In our house, "India" only referred to as Nadhuh, Home.

In fact, Nadhuh specifically refers to Kerala. My mother never grew up in Nadhuh. She grew up in Bihar and Bangalore, but never Nadhuh. Nadhuh was a place they would go during their vacations.

And yet the significance of Nadhuh is weighted. It is always Home.

Our connection to Home has always been a little fuzzy. When I was little I would often wake up on a Saturday morning to the my mother's loud shrill voice. It was as though she would save up her energy mondays through fridays, soft-spoken and often silent, for the end of the week. "ACHAAA? Kerkhan-indoh?": "DAD? Can you hear me?"

(This is why ET is such an emotional movie for my family. "Phone Home?")

If that didn't wake us up, then it was the sound of cackling mustard seeds, steaming in the steel saucepan. Sometimes it was the pulsating motor grinder or the wafts of soured Dosas....

We would wake up, brush our teeth and fight with our dad for the remote control, a futile battle between cartoons and Vision of Asia. We would eat our dosas with podi on Care Bear placemats.

It is true that my identity hinges on this, my memories and those who created them.

But I don't believe that this makes the need to "find an indian partner" more urgent. Such was the sentiment expressed by a fellow blogger after having read the article in newsweek by Jhumpa Lahiri.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11569225/site/newsweek/

Dave has spent almost as much time with my family in the last few years as I have. He knows all too well their idiosyncracies, cultural and otherwise. And he understands the strangeness that brews.

He will be able to translate to our children. With my help of course.

My identity rests on an easy tension between the old and the new, Nadhuh and Home. And it is very specific to the household I grew up in, in a family that hails from this small Southern state. Whether I marry and American Jew or a Gujurathi Indian, the attempt to hold on to the memory and prevent it from becoming myth rests entirely on me. I am the interpreter and the translator (and poor transliterator) and invariably things will get lost...

It won't be same translation my parents offered to us...it will be tweaked and twinged and lost in my own fallible interpretation.

But it will still be very real.

~.~.~

Maya Angelou, one of my favorite writers, wrote a book called "All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes." It is a story told time and again, in different places, amidst different people... but it is always the same. The story of the diaspora and holding on and what it means to be part of a Nation. I hope you will read it if you are so persuaded....

old man, look at my life

2006-03-20T06:56:00.000-08:00

"i LOVE old men!"

even though i couldn't suppress my smirk, i knew what my dear friend meant. i too LOVE old men.

i love them when they are crochety. and i love them when they are kind.

i was a candy striper at our local hospital for three years in high school. i loved every minute i spent serving water in pink plastic pitchers and making beds with hospital corners. of course there is something to be said about this idea of *service* especially when you are 14 and don't have to worry about feeding yourself or your family.

but what i loved most is when the 70 year old men harmlessly flirted with me. "If I were 16, I would've snatched you up in a second!" or "Look at her, she's young, beautiful and happy go lucky!"

And indeed I felt lucky. But also a little envious, because they had already lived a lifetime.

And I was waiting for everything to happen.

But the reflection is changing. With every pregnant pause comes the birth of a story. At 14 I was so eager for IT to begin that I didn't realize IT was already being written.

I was being written. Into their stories, into their epilogue.

And they were being written into mine. A prelude.

~.~.~

Overheard: an 80 year old esteemed pediatric surgeon told his students that he had just discovered what the word "pimping" meant from a recent NYT article.

"I had not realized that I have been pimping for 50 years."

I loved this surgical professor of mine. We would present various cases to him and he would lauch his attack: if we didn't answer his questions correctly he would pull out his BB gun from under his desk and pretend to shoot us.

He was only one of many crochety old men who pimped. And truly I loved them all.

I would look them in the eye, answer fully without hesitation and carry myself gracefully.

It's funny how I don't always seem to do that in my personal life.

I guess it is all about reciprocity. I would hold these venerable (albeit curmudgeony) old men in high esteem. And I would earn their respect in return.

It is a tremendous feeling.

I refrain from the impulse to hold my hands up together in prayer and bow.

~.~.~

"It's spring!" exclaimed a kind old man as he hurried against the biting wind.

Our cheeks were pinched, our noses were raw, our ungloved hands were fat and clumsy. Our heads turned, lethargically, in the direction he was pointing and paused.

He was referring to the one early bloomer in the Washington Square Park, a brilliant violet against a barren gray.

It reminded me of the old jacaranda trees, with its "vivid lilac-blue clusters of trumpet shaped blossoms" and scarred tree trunks. Summer in South Africa. The beginning and end of a cycle.

I smiled and thanked him. And we parted our ways.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

2006-03-18T05:45:00.000-08:00

Where did it ALL go wrong?

Maybe it was when Kurt Cobain died. Only at that point I was still sporting the Aqua Net and listening to Debbie Gibson.

So one of my favorite Will and Grace episodes is when Grace is bed-ridden with a broken heart and she watches home videos, hours on end, crying “where did it all go WRONG?”

We double up, painfully aware of how close to home this scene is. Meer and I have been known to watch hours of home videos, picking apart the details and coating it with layers of psychoanalysis and postmodern theory.

So yesterday as she was fretting over this impending transition, she suggested that we watch old home videos, so that she could figure out where it all went wrong. I told her my analysis: I was the puppet who danced in front of the video camera, while my dad, The Lens, would direct.

Those were the days of 20 lb camcorders that heavily rested on his shoulders, the Eye obscuring the Face.

And then when Meer was born the tides had turned ever so slightly towards her. I was still the Object. But I was given an object in return: The Lens would direct me to direct her, It.

Sometimes she wouldn’t bite: “Meera let’s sing: baa baa black sheep….” I would chant, clapping my hands.

“Very good Tara!” she would exclaim, usurping my newly acquired authority as Elder Sister. As though I was the one who was supposed to be reciting the old nursery rhyme.

She was such a little punk.

~.~.~.~
I am in a funk.

Instead of watching home videos, I pulled out the old yearbooks. Where did it ALL go WRONG?

I graduated from high school nearly a decade ago. A lifetime had passed from the time I had entered college until the time I had graduated.

I entered medical school at 23.

In seven days I will be a month shy of 27. Yes, I am old.

Last night I went to a party. I was transported in time, back and home again, every minute a new decade. I saw the Birthday Girls, so named because our first year they would send out emails littered with exclamation marks to herald each arriving birthday. “Hey! Everyone! We! Are going! To Party!!! At So and So Club! This Friday! To Celebrate! So and So’s Birthday!!!”

The Birthday Girls were huddled at the bar, drinking and dancing away. Not a bat of the mascara-ed eye, twitch of the pink glossed lip were thrown my way.

I felt like I was 13.

It wasn’t all that bad. Most of my classmates are great people. Really. And I was so happy to hear that they did so well. Even the folks who hang out with/date the Birthday Girls are awesome people.

I wasn’t unpopular in high school at all. Occasionally invisible, but not unpopular. I definitely received acknowledgement, when due. The 1997 edition of Carpe Diem that collects dust on our basement shelf is littered with friendly remarks and jabs and pictures proving my existence: captain of the track team, editor in chief of the newpaper. And don’t forget, our sophomore year, the unofficially appointed school poet laureate (Jen The Poet) granted me the honor of “best poem” in Calliope, our literary journal.

That was the LAST time I ever submitted anything, God forbid I ever be the center of attention AGAIN. I almost DIED.

My adolescence was like any other. I was trying to figure out my changing body and its place in the world.

But perhaps there is more to it than that. Because I am still negotiating this, my placement, my existence, my relationships, my relatedness.

I am still drenched, covered in angst and smelling splendidly of Teen Spirit.

~.~.~
This was one of the quotes I wrote on my yearbook page, 17 years and waiting, with poignant expectation:

“Alice remained thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which one were the two sides of it, as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms around as far as they would go and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand. ‘And now which is which,’ she thought to herself and nibbled a little on the right hand …she was a good deal frightened by this sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly, as she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so clearly against her foot that there was hardly any room to open her mouth but she did at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the left hand bit…”

jersey girl

2006-03-11T06:22:00.000-08:00

my sister is The Filmmaker.

but she's not your ordinary new york filmmaker.

sure she can quote roland barthe and wax poetically about cinematic hoo hahs and wing dings. And she is forever informing me about how *problematic* my life, her canvas, is.

but at the end of the day, she's really just gum smacking, big haired, Northern Jersey mallrat:
"omigoddidyouseejakegyllenhaalattheoscarsheissocu-u-u-te!!"

so she doesn't really tawk like that. but when we are together we always manage to bust out into the old dialect, no matter how many other layers we wear.

So the other day we were engaging in our post-Oscar wrap-up over coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. And we both agreed that Jon Stewart was great, a nice antithesis to the gilded screen with his jaded new york sense of humour. And then at some point one of us made the comment that either the show or Jon was "too jewy."

"Hmm, yeah. too jewy."

We looked around, sheepishly, at the brown haired ivory skinned folk around us. It had just dawned on us that the phrase "too jewy" maybe quite inappropriate without our usual jewish accessory. in a new york cafe. two blocks from Columbia University (and a little bit farther from Yeshiva U).

Oy vay.

~.~.~.

Someday my sister will win an Oscar. When were little we used to imagine that she would win for best actress, and I would win for best screenplay. (Guess which one was always the center of attention and which one was always pulling the strings?)

We would give our speeches, complete with the choked up thank yous to mom and dad for giving us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Then we would get into an argument about whom we would take. But we always knew it would be dad.

The Producer.

So now Meer The Filmmaker is actually getting closer to the dream...and the closer she gets, the more anxiety she feels. She's gotta lotta esplainin' to do on my wedding day: "So Meera, are you also going to become a doctor?"

She was thinking of silently handing everyone a business card:

"Meera Vijayan plans to go to film school, doesn't know what she is doing right now, so whaddya gonna DO about it?"

That's my Jersey girl.

The Vicious Circle

2006-03-06T11:31:00.001-08:00

so it wasn't quite the Algonquin Round Table. but I still fancied myself Dorothy Parker, acerbic wit, dark humor, sharp comebacks AND all.

at least in my head.

there i sat. just under 27 years, 5'5" and 130lbs. smallish frame under an oversized green floral cotton tunic and navy blue pants. sitting comfortably behind the powerbook that held my presentation.

at the front of the table sat The Head. bespectacled and begruging. button-down shirt and slacks on his 6 foot frame. slightly balding. peering down from above his glasses.

next to him another, of similar age and stature. with a full set of gray hair. chest puffed, arms crossed, eyebrow raised, a furry question mark plastered on his forehead.

and then a gray beard, shorter, but portly. seriously eating a slice of pizza.

and finally my mentor. 4'11. grayed and wrinkled. woody allenesque in speech and mannerisms: deliberate and meticulous.
but such a kind face.

he introduced me: She was awarded the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship here...she interviewed several potential mentors and chose me, and I am very grateful as I have learned alot."

wow. I smiled and reciprocated. and began.

it went smoothly. I fielded questions effortlessly. I paused and reflected appropriately.

Then I finished my talk. And the firing squad began.

"The work WE do is reliable. How is THIS reliable?"
"What if we don't even NEED to transition?"
"Is this the right way to TEST your hypothesis?"
"What about controls? Do you have a comparison group?"

i answered:
"It is not necessarily RELIABLE but definitely VALID. Transition is INEVITABLE and is being driven by the INSTITUTION of medicine. My research is not hypothesis testing, but hypothesis GENERATING. Public policies are DRIVEN by this kind of research."

And then some more indignance emerged:
"These kids are NEVER going to be poster children for the disease. They are DIFFERENT. The stigma is REAL and a barrier."

At the end I received some compliments. and a half-smile from The Head, a smile uneasily wedged between mockery and respect.

i feel uncertain again of my place. am i too messy, too unstructured, too flighty, too liberal? is what i am doing meaningful/valuable?

do I have value?

yes. as i was walking to the medical school to give my talk, i thought about this research and how much it has meant to me. it has reminded me time and again: this is why i am here. this is why i have joined this profession. this is truly what i am meant to do: to listen to their stories, to narrate my own and to use these narratives to create dialogue and change.

and indeed even at Camelot I created dialogue. For better or for worse.

and always with indignance.

the trouble with T

2006-03-03T09:58:00.000-08:00

Liz Spikol is FUNNY.

"I've never been a violent person. I'd often like to be--especially after seeing a movie in which a person smashes a diorama they've made or hurled a glass against the wall--but my behavior lacks that kind of spontaneity. Though the grand gesture of angrily tossing letters or manuscripts into a fireplace appeals in a theatrical way, I'd be worried the whole time about copies. I'd have to go to Kinko's first.

and there's the rub: I'm always aware of what I look like from the outside. I imagine there's a little person--maybe with wings and a jaunty cap--who sort of floats around and watches me from the sidelines, prepared to mock me when I do something dumb. So if I get angry and yell at someone, there's that little sprite-like soul saying, "Do you even know how stupid you look? This isn't an after-school special, for God's sake. Pull yourself together." and I do...

The next instance [of being spontaneously violent] was when I discovered that my then-husband had, against my wishes, been smoking pot again. There was nothing wrong with his getting high, mind you, except that I was loopy and thus unable to distinguish innocuous behavior from sociopathic serial killing.

So I went to the cabinets, took out all the Fiesta® dinnerware we'd received as wedding gifts, and lobbed the colorful plates in a Frisbee-like fashion at his head. He was amazingly nimble for a pothead, and bobbed and weaved like a prizefighter. The plates sailed past his head and into the wall, but they didn't break. (For Fiesta® sales information go to www.hlchina.com.)"

Oh dear. I read this piece in the Philadelphia Weekly last December (2004) and immediately tore it out and safety-pinned on Dave's bedroom wall. Next to the above cartoon I wrote: yes, it's Me, the love of your life.

This was the morning after a minor temper tantrum I had.

Definitely not the last.

I too have had strong impulses to throw things. Sometimes at people, sometimes to the air that surrounds. I was 16 when I perhaps had my first outburst...no-one was home except my beloved golden retriever, and he watched curiously with his head cocked to one side as I stormed around the living room, pulling out pillows and seat cushions, tearing up paper to shreds, hair mussed, tears streaming, angry at everyone and no-one all at once.

And now I frequently have a target. He is no longer a pothead, but his head is indeed nimble, some might say worthy of a prizefighter, others might say similar to a bobblehead toy. Which is fortunate, as I wonder if it would truly be able to sustain any slight trauma.

Last night Dave and I came home feeling weightless and enlightened. We had just finished our last Healer's Art class, and the warmth and fuzziness still radiated within. We held hands in one large circle, and took turns finishing the sentences: I am, I can and I will...

I am fallible.

It didn't take long for the fuzzinness to diffuse and the anxiety to settle in. Soon after we came home I had to face the task of working on my powerpoint and submitting it to my mentor who is convinced that I am THE slacker of all slackers.

But of course, soon after we came home, Dave wanted to continue the experience and do some Tai Chi.

"GOD, haven't we meditated ENOUGH for one night?"

He smiled. So I indulged him. And we stood in the living room, knees slight bent, fingers slightly curved, arms falling *effortlesly* to the side...

His eyes were closed, as usual. Focused, centered.
Mine were wide open. Thoughts flurrying scurrying about.

One especially disturbing thought. The sight of three remote controls. and 2 glass mugs. AND 1 Bob's BIG Boy Bobblehead perched on top of the television. I imagined the pick up, the launch, the sail, the target, the click, the bounce, the fall, the drop, the clunk, the floor. All at once.

But of course I didn't. Because surely I would miss...I am NOT a sharpshooter. I lack coordination in all sports that require both the hand and the eye.

Anyway.

For those of you planning wedding gifts, consider Fiesta at the above website.

The Diaspore

2006-02-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think about my dad, age 26, jumping off the eastern ghats and pulling the string. He parachutes over Indian Seas, Arabian Deserts, English Pastures and finally Atlantic waters only to land in Queens, NY. And I imagine him buying the following items, in order, according to accumulated wealth and luxury: rice and rice cooker, Dannon yogurt, and finally a bag of potato chips to complete his makeshift chore, thaira and pappadums.

Remember when we used to spin our globes fast and furiously? And then we would interrupt the whirling motion of lands and ocean to see where we would fall next? And we learned that Abu Dhabi was indeed a real place, not just some make believe land where Garfield packaged and sent his nemesis Nermal.

Later we would trace our lineages, dozens of ghost fingers dotting western Europe and one lone goblin finger timidly placed on the Land of Curry and Silk.

"Your house smells funny."

Fast forward 15, 20 years later:sitting in a car driving down the Garden State Parkway and having this conversation with my Dad: Some people, Tara, stay in one place," referring to Mom's colleague who grew up in NJ, completed undergrad and medical school in NJ and now lives with his own family in the town in which he grew up.

I hear the undercurrent though my cheap glass Hawaiian seashell: Not you my wayward child. You seem to keep wanting to leave us.

My lunch today: whole wheat bread soaked in home made yoghurt, cabbage and potato kuttan and mango achar. My mom looks at my meal and makes some comment about its (my) strangeness. This coming from a woman who puts tabasco sauce in her Ramen noodles.

Recently I heard a 21 year old figure skater who said, "Everyone has their own trajectory. Some take longer than others."

So I am sitting on the NJ transit train on my way and I get this lovely view of industrial america. And I wonder what next? where will my parachute fall? how many will get on this train and how many will get off at the next stop? And I have a mini panic attack before the train finally reaches my destination, a warm embrace, "the huggiest hug" ever. Home.

song of salman

2006-02-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

just finished Zadie Smith's White Teeth and was a little disappointed in the ending. The Fat Ruddy White Man with an upturned nose and the bluest of blue eyes gets shot in the leg, fated twice in his life. It was a book about circular histories, how everything comes back. It was a story about Twins, and the mysterious connection that leaves us singulars wondering 'what if I had one'...

She received such wide spread acclaim at the age of 26, for this novel. She was compared to Salman Rushdie, her patriarch (he wrote high reviews of this book) and predecessor.

So I once asked Meer: what do you think it takes? Who becomes "genius" and who gets lost in the gray?

Who leaves a mark? Who punctuates and pluralises and enters The Canon?

"You have to have some kind of obsession, a kind of madness. Lots of people can write, but The Writer can't do anything else. It becomes her, she becomes it."

Not her words exactly. But her wise thoughts.

Professor Farber once said in a creative writing class I took in college: "a writer is someone who writes." I don't know about that...I think it might be more...the madness, the obsession.

***************

I am too scattered, too unruly.

too messy. and too lazy to clean it all up.

"Clean the fascia. Clean it up. CLEAN IT!!!" Dr. Sangari's singsong accented voice resonates through my head.

Other voices in my head:

"Why you want to do that?" -my dad on going to Berkeley, going to South Africa, taking a year (or two off), going hiking on a crisp winter day with my dog, going to the local coffee shop to study (translation, why can't you just study at home."

"I'll write you an email about it!" my mother, angry that I forgot exactly which day during the weekend of my wedding that we were going to the temple. Another example of my spiritual void.

"Whiiiiiine." Dave, in perfect mimicry, after I whinily asked him "whyyyyyyyyy?" I don't even remember the context, just remember cracking up in total, painful, awareness of my childishness.

I may have been whining a little in my last posting, and in fact have a counter-reference: Dr. L, prominent figure in child abuse research, interviewed me last April after I received the Doris Duke Fellowship. He then saw me four months later when I presented my research to the pedi research committee and said "Well Tara, this is certainly a much bigger task than what I had in mind for you. I wish you well in it." He had only met me once before. I think it might give insight into our medical culture, in which we evaluated with dozens of our peers simulateneously, by professors who see us one or two times (as was the case with the Dr._ the aforementioned professor) and cannot often tell Tara from Sam or Adam. But Dr. L had met me under a completely different context...and therefore remembered me long after our meeting.

The Quiet Little Indian Girl Fires Away

2006-02-14T17:17:00.000-08:00

Now I’m no Pat Benatar.

I can’t just look you in the eye and say hit me with your best shot.

I’ve been boxed. Shipped across a hundred seas as “the quiet little indian girl.”

Which is a joke of course. Because I am neither quiet nor little.

But I do have a HUGE (‘UUUGE) ego, busting at the seams, easily broken with the tinniest prick. (pun somewhat intended, at least in retrospect.)

I am a good medical student. And I am going to be a great clinician or researcher or whatever I damn choose to be.

I not good at very many things. But this I know. It says so on my evaluations:

“Tara is a quiet, but bright medical student with an excellent fund of knowledge and has wonderful rapport with her patients. Her presentations are precise, her notes are thoughtful… yada yada yada.”

I cannot tell you how I was hurt by what I saw as a personal and not a professional attribute…a personal attribute that was NOT true.

Because I do say what is on my mind, when I think it is appropriate. I am not afraid to make suggestions to attendings, residents and other medical students. I am confident and self-assured. And they agree.

So today I went to a meeting for those who were applying for a peds residency next year. I had emailed the clerkship director letting him know I was going to be there. And we exchanged some pretty funny emails revolving around the Barnum and Bailey Clown University in Sarasota, FL, a rednosed powder-faced floozy who can walk on her hands, and my uncanny ability to trip over my own big feet.

You would think that this kind of dialogue we had achieved some kind of more intimate relationship. But no. Because I went to the meeting today and I was given a blank stare.

So I approached him. But I was overshadowed by my peer, whom I truly believe is going to make an awesome pediatrician, but who clearly one-upped me with his legacy. He was the son of a faculty member at Monte. I heard words exchanged about whether his father was going to robe him or not.

Years and years of being in a club, even Einstein, a refuge for the disenfranchised, first Jews now others, even Einstein has its club. But legacy is not the only IT factor here.

It is one simple equation: If NOT loud, irreverent or overzealous, perky or pert, Then diminuitive.

Then not memorable.

Maybe it is because I don’t set up a hundred anxiety-ridden meetings with these people. I am lucky to have even one meeting. Because I just don’t think it is necessary.

But it is, it is. Because even when I vaguely talked about the emails (stating dates that we had set), he still did not remember.

He was one of the ones who had stated, in my exit interview for peds, that I am a little too quiet. He was also the one that wrote my evaluation that said the same exact thing.

It has been over a year. So why should he remember, if I had never approached him before?

I had a phone meeting with one of my advisors the other day. We argued over the word paternalism and transference, I for the latter, she for the former. I confidently stated my points, but acknowledged hers. I was diplomatic, and not irreverent to this woman who was clearly more experienced than I. But I stuck by my views (don’t like the word paternalism) throughout.

Once upon a time I was invited to speak to my neighbor's special ed class about what it was like to be indian. I prepared a speech, with the help of my mom, wore my hair in fat braids and cool bubble gum pink reeboks and took a deep breath...only to find out that the class was learning about American Indians, not Indian Americans. At 9 years old I had to relate this distinction (with the special ed teacher's help of course) to my neighbor and her classmates.

And so it goes. God Bless America, as my mom would say.

And I say:
“Fire awa-a-a-a-ay.”

if the shoe fits

2006-02-07T16:24:00.000-08:00

i know what you're thinking. you're thinking, oh god, she's going to write about her feet. her large, stinking, calloused/corned/bunioned feet. with a beached whale for a sad little pinkie. but no. this one is about the "happily ever after" syndrome.

when i was about three, just under four, i would copiously underline my cinderella storybook, while my mom copiusly underlined her now antiquated copy of Nelson's Textbook of Pediatrics. i could in fact read at that point...in spite of the fact that i was slow of speech and movement, i could actually read. strange but true.

another little bit about my childhood: i also chewed the feet of my barbie dolls. they were so chewable. and ridiculously arched.

so i grew up with these icons: barbie and cinderella. and evidently had a love/hate relationship with them.

i often imagined myself as lead young actress of the next made for tv movie about divorce, because that is what i wished my parents would do. they did not fit the cinderella-prince charming mould i so desperately wanted them to fit. they yelled, screamed, cursed each other to pieces...their armory of verbal assaults seem always be replete. two of the most mismatched souls: she a woman of prayer, Indian nationalism, Extreme Moderation; he a man of glamour, starlights, Extreme Excess. how the stars wrote this one, i had yet to learn.

when i grew older and came to understand a little bit more about the fallacy of the cinderella narrative, i began to appreciate their relationship more. they grew up together, and maybe, just maybe grew in love together. i know this much is true: my dad was with my mother the whole time she was in india, even though he had a million other things to do, a million SHOWs (and one wedding) to plan. he spend time with her family, he surprised her by attending her mother's shraadam (memorial), even though he tricked her and said he would only be there for lunch. (which is more typical of my dad...to show up just for the free meal...)

anyway...i grew up with this as my model relationship. so i was never under any delusion about "the perfect marriage." and i was unfortunate enough to inherit a double dose of their short tempers and bullishness. Dave has known this for a while, and he is kind enough to accept the package in its entirity.

our friend Lorraine made the comment that I often appear so *zen,* ie., calm, peaceful, tranquil. Both my parents have this attribute, at least in professional and social circles. But those in the inner circle know the violence that periodically erupts.

and so have i inherited all the elements: fire, earth.

by the way, the only reason i wanted to be cinderella is because of her ballroom dress. i wanted that ballroom dress. otherwise i more often play-acted as she-rah, princess of the universe. "by the power of grayskull..." i would thrust my sword into the air and transform.

I'll be your preacher-teacher

2006-02-03T12:19:00.000-08:00

the two loves of my life lounging. her ears, his thermals...get me all the time.

so D and I keep bantering over Jon Stewart and other such political satirists. I am often put off by the self-righteous pedantry, the preachiness...and everytime we watch this show together, Dave laughs deeply and loudly and immediately turns to me to see if I am laughing, and I never am...which pisses me off more than it does him. Do I just not get the joke? Or do I just feel like I don't need to hear what I already know?

What I really hate is when people speak as though JS is the only one to tell the truth...when in fact he is just as guilty of manipulating media sources to meet his own end.

But then today D brought up this point about how the media in general has been so lenient towards "Bush the Lesser," and how only the far left has brought up impeachment even though it is clear that he has lied. And JS brings this up over and over again (to the choir nonetheless). Apparently our Repubican Senate and Congress (spearheaded by John McCain on whom D has a serious crush) tried to pass an anti-torture bill and Bush vetoed it. Certainly disturbing.

So then here is my question: why, if the media has been historically liberal, are they backing off and not creating more uproar?

I think alot of it has to do with the fact that we live in perhaps one of the toughest times in American history. The post 9-11 era. A time when our security was truly threatened. And now torture is something liberally minded US citizens can perhaps envision and flesh.

Because fear and redemption are primal. Especially if you are not sitting up high in your SUV or Toyota Hybrid, but instead are watching the rubble, getting caught under the stampede, hacking from the smoke, awaiting the NEWS of your husband, wife, son, daughter.

This Is Why I love Barak Obama: on a meet the press interview he was asked about an inflammatory statement that Hillary Clinton made about this going down as the worst presidency in history, and Obama said, well that there have been alot of really bad presidencies in the history of the US, but certainly the policies of this administration will go down as some of the worst. In other words, Hillary was preaching, and Barak was teaching. He made specific references, informing instead of yelling. (I'll also admit here that he is not so bad to look at and this may in fact color my interpretation of his words. But I do feel strongly about this issue.)

So last week we saw this desperately sad movie called Turtles Can Fly... about Kurdish children in the days before the Iraq war and landmines and all that stuff you read about, but never SEE or KNOW. It was lovely, and gratifyingly not self-righteous in the way that Born into Brothels was...because the only other "eye" was the camera lens. And of course it was a movie and not a documentary, but it almost had that documentary feel...maybe because I am the outsider, and ethnographist, a voyeur, and this director is telling me a story I simulataneously want to and don't want to hear. But the children were just beautiful...and some of them were play-acting like children should and some of them were truly assuming adult roles because they had no choice and all of it was just so stunning and horrifying all at once.

Anyway. There are lots of different ways to tell a story, from their own eyes. Some do it Jon Stewart style, using video and audio montages, others do it like this director, creating from the land. And I would rather listen to the latter. Call me self-righteous.

asklepion

2006-01-30T17:43:00.000-08:00

The universal symbol of medicine, ie, the Asklepion (or caduceus, after Asklepios, the Greek god of healing and medicine) is likely a representation of dracunculiasis and its treatment. To this day, accepted treatment remains the same. The adult guinea worm is wrapped around a stick a few centimeters a day to coax it from a person's skin.

this one is for my peeps in the broncks.

the guiness guzzler, the musulman and the hindoo: the three of them saved my bum in gross anatomy. we had a reunion the other day in south street: looking at exquisite dissections, a far cry from our slaughter house (7) experiment. they made me laugh, doubled over with my head neck deep in carnage, at a time when i would have rather been crying and wallowing in self-pity. we were troubled by the fact that the exhibit had a disproportion of asiatic/mongoloid features, unknown, unclaimed bodies oddly postured and spectacularized for the "lay": once our privilege as newly minted medical students, now a sight for all to gape and glorify. if it weren't for the hindoo's aecom hoodie, we would never have been discovered in our street clothes.

and then there was goose and my man shek, who paid me a visit a couple of weeks ago. shek was en route to an interview in philly, so he hitched a ride with dave. i took them to the dinah for a couple of burgers and fries. they met lucy, whom they adored, we laughed at my firesetting fiasco, and then they left. goose is going to RSA and shek is going to India for the month and when they return they will know their fate for the next three to five years.

match day: a rite of passage for many a med student. a couple of months ago i would have been upset by this event because i was supposed to be there. who am i kidding: i still have pangs of sorrow and remorse for not having been a part of the graduating class of 2006. but i am so so so proud of all of these guys who have made my experience delightful...from many a run on concrete trails or 80 meter suspended indoor tracks to many a night watching the OC or Gilmore Girls to many a cheers shared after long weeks buried in books, these guys got me through it all.

i will end with this one thought: my 70+ year old south african anatomy professor/surgeon, in his final lecture, said that looking back he would have done it all over again. i can say the same now, at 26...and i can only hope that at 70, i can say it once and again.

it ain't the new yorker....

2006-01-25T19:36:00.000-08:00

i fancied these two when i was a wee tot. not in the victorian sense…more like i wanted to B (squared) like them: Bunson and Beeker.

why my fourth grade project, which required reading a bibliography and creating a gift for that person, was dedicated to Big Al himself.

now i am swimming in it: the fast and the furious, motile minds scuttling: eating, sleeping, waking, dreaming, breathing the WORK.

Researching:

searching again and again for some kind of truth.

Even when I am trying to read and repose with a hot young ingenue by the name of Zadie Smith, I am thinking about the WORK.

A couple of months ago I was down and out, like a sailor parched on a deserted sea. I was kicked in the rump more than a few times by the MAN. (the very same MAN I tiraded against so long ago, the locus of phallogocentrism. remember the times, when we all tiraded, tirelessly?)

at the NIH meeting no less: i was sitting at the top of the stairs, having walked into the auditorium late. no sooner had ten minutes passed when i felt the Furtive Foot digging into the crack, where my skirt first met the floor. I angrily scooted forward, not looking back. It wasn’t until after the talk that I realized to whom the Furtive Foot lay captive: the MAN himself, the very same who embarrased me at a research meeting not long before. And so it was: the literal and the figurative came to flesh in one superfluous joke, and I was the butt of it.

I have not seen the MAN in some time, and I am all the more happier, and wiser. But I probably will see him soon…in April, when I have to present my abstract to him.

But I walk with greater strides these days. Because I am loving what I am doing, and no longer feel muted. Because I am giving voice, and receiving in return.

Overheard: the head of Pedi ID to a fledgling researcher, after reading her qualitative research paper: “you might consider submitting it to the New Yorker.” understated: “but not Nature or NEJM or any of the other high falouting journals whose bums we like to lick here at Yah-ALE.”

I’d take the New Yorker anyday. But NEJM would be nice as well….

mmm...toasty

2006-01-19T19:00:00.000-08:00

i love quiznos.

even when i call it quizmos, and both my sister and dave now know to correct me without missing a beat.

a reason to love quiznos even more:
today i got lost. in bridgeport. another one of my trips to connecticut's barracks, for an interview. after driving by the sound, getting lost in the fury for what seemed like miles, the green and red lettering descended upon my horizon, a sign no doubt. i parked my car, took the dog with me and ran towards the light. a warning from a strange, blue haired lady with pink lipstick: don't leave your dog out here, someone will surely steal her and sell her. loud and clear. so i brought her into quiznos, and fortunately they had a little foyer enclosed by two entrances...I was about to tie her under the display table, when a kind young employee volunteered to look after her. and then Ali, the manager, came out and asked if i would like to order outside so i could be with my pup. what would you like, he asked kindly. a veggie sandwich, i said, but i was also hoping to get some directions. i showed him my scribbles, courtesy of yahoo maps and he nodded and went to go look it up on his own computer.

i emerged fifteen minutes later with a bag full of goodies and my piece of paper, now with Ali's scrawls on the back. i was so grateful, the kindness of this man who had never known me.

maybe it was her face, so young and earnest, the face that melts everyone's heart. maybe it was mine, so lost and hopeful, that opened the door. whatever it was...i don't give the world enough credit. here was a man practicing a random act of kindness. am i so hardened that when i receive such acts i am so overwhelmed?

anyway. i love quiznos. i loved it before when it was quizmos, and i love it more now when i met Ali.

sensate

2006-01-18T20:26:00.000-08:00

sen·sate
adj.
Perceived by a sense or the senses.
Having physical sensation.

this was a word used by a peer when describing what she had lost during medical school. the ability to feel, perceive, smell, hear, taste. she felt robbed of her ability to sensate.

she used it as a verb. i like this better.

i think i know what she means.

but this year has been different. i don't run as much anymore, so it is no longer a chore. but when i do...it can be magical. especially on a day like last Thursday, the morning of this class I took in Philly called the Healers' Art. Fifty degrees at 8 am on a January morning...my steps were easy, my breathing soft, my body weightless. a feather on the breath of god. poor luce did not want to run that day, so i took her back to my apartment and set out for my solitary trot, two feet not six.

that evening we drew pictures with cheap crayons: what had we lost?

today i locked myself out of my apartment. again. i had gone to work in the morning to complete an interview, came back home briefly to grab some grub and to take lucy out for a little walk, and then rushed out of my apartment only to find that my keys were in fact not in my coat pocket. which meant i could not take my car back to work. nor could i take my backpack with my consent forms out of my car to work.
so i walked to the shuttle, four blocks away. in the pouring rain. without an umbrella.

but i remained surpisingly unperturbed. i took the shuttle down to clinic. talked to one family without consent forms. ran back to the office (another block in the pouring rain sans umbrella) to make new copies of my consent forms. ran back to clinic and gave the families the forms to peruse. wet and disheveled the whole time.

i had left poor luce in the cage the whole time. because if i hadn't she would have completely devoured my copy of white teeth, which she has taken a preference to.

tonight d and i had a long talk about the pecking order. i told him about my own ob gyn story. i was starting to examine a young woman, carefully leaving the cervical exam out until after my resident arrived. but i noticed than when i approached her legs (to check for pitting edema or DVTs ) she froze. something was clearly not right. so i quickly covered her up and waited for my resident to arrive. when she did she told me to glove up, and i quietly told her i didn't think i should. she shot me a look, but waited until we left the room to ream me: this was an academic institution and my job was to learn.

delivery time. my resident told me to go in there and wait for her again. not exactly knowing what i was supposed to do in there...i certainly could not get ready until she was in the room, it was only my second delivery...i waited. can't small talk with a woman who is in labor, that much i knew without being told. when my resident entered the room, the woman whispered to her husband: do not let her touch me. she was referring to me, the medical student who hadn't laid a finger anywhere close to her vagina. my resident heard this and nonetheless motioned towards me to take my position between her legs. i let the lump form once again, the warm pools swell in heavy eyelids...and delivered her baby. I quickly cleaned up, offered a meek congratulations and burst into tears in the washroom.

in the morning (sign out for us, the night float), my resident told the staff that the woman had been sexually abused as a child and was in need of social work. not a glance thrown my way. i watched her with desperation, sadness, anger...and quickly left after sign out, not offering to help with antepartum rounds. let the tears run freely as i walked home, a lovely spring saturday morning. talked to d and cried, but he probably didn't get the whole story, my mumbling bumbling self narrating.

so i told him again. tonight. no tears, just lessons i've learned.

back to sensate: i definitely felt a lot of pain my third year of medical school. no loss there. but i didn't quite take the time to feel the beauty around me: indian summers (i am allowed to use this phrase), my puppy's soft ears (the goosiest part of her body), the smell of old christmas trees on the sidewalk.

i am grateful for this word. and i am grateful that i can fulfill its meaning.

the fire next time

2006-01-06T17:15:00.000-08:00

what a great way to end my crappy day. kind of like how in some movies (crash, edward scissorhands) a snowfall in LA becomes this symbol of purification in what otherwise seems like hell. i started a kitchen fire and cleansed myself of the days work.

my intentions were good and pure. come home with groceries and dog food. kiss sister and dog on forehead to greet them. assume role of mother hen, now that both parents were in india. ask sister if she had eaten. ask dog if she had eaten. then proceed to clean out the oven so that i can make myself a warm Amy's Organic Pizza, so good and wholesome to nourish my own weary body.

i went into my bedroom to change when my sister knocked at the door, voice brimming: Tar! its on fire!!

I ran to the kitchen to find the oven erupted in smoke and fire. First thought: fire extinguisher. who knew where my parents kept it, as protective as they are, logic was not their forte. brief pause, a millionth of a second. then...react. fill glass with water and douse. keep dousing. open all windows. send meer and lucy into sun room and keep them there while i doused. the dousing softened the blaze, but the smoke continued and the embers still burned from below. i knew i needed an extinguisher and the only way to get one was to call 911.

I quickly banished meer and lucy out to the front, to await help. I turned on all the fans and walked outside to wait with them. The first two volunteers to show up ran in with their muddy boots and proceeded pull the lever...only to find that it didn't work. volunteer #2 ran outside to get another while volunteer #1 called for more help.

three fire trucks (sirens blowing), one squad car, 12 fire men, 2 police men, and 6 neighbors later we had our first ever block party. I schmoozed with the Meerows, congratulating them on their daughter's wedding. I smiled politely to the Digiovanni's who did not utter one word to my sister or myself, but managed to give both Imhoffs and Meerows pecks on the cheeks. I was teased by my dearest neighbors, Harry and Carol both in their 70s who have known my family and my uncle's family for over 25 years now....Carol said that we were perhaps the most exciting neighbors ever, as the last time she had seen this many lights was the day after my dad's plane was escorted by two F16s after another passanger had notified the airline of her suspicions: my dad and his comedy troupe du jour were playing "dumb charades" as they called it, and another lady on the plane was convinced they were hatching some evil terrorist plot. policemen and reporters hounded my parents for days after, and our street became the talk of the town.

Carol also made the comment that she didn't think there were this many firemen on the Park Ridge squad.

At the end of it all, we agreed: at least we know that someone is looking out for us. Or at least 12 men in firemen's uniforms will always be ready to put out your small kitchen fire.

the cause: potholders left below the oven. again brilliant moves on my parents part. but of course i should have checked under, because like the good immigrant family we are, we are above all hoarders. we stock and pile for the next kurukshetra. i shoulda known better.

we were left to clean the damages: muddied floors, black soot. lucy shit twice while watching the sirens in the front lawn.

i told my neighbors that i'll try to start another one next year so that we could do this again. they laughed...but not after making another joke about how I should learn how to cook before I got married. ba dum ching!

i feel purified, enlightened and whole again.

pink elephant

2006-01-05T13:23:00.000-08:00

my abdominal aorta pulsates through my shirt and winter coat as I pump gas...and strangely the rhythm of both pumps feels the one and the same.

i don't think I was having an aneurysm. i think it was the pink elephant i swallowed that got stuck in my throat. initially i felt it as a squeezing sensation in my chest, then a lump in my throat and now my abdominal aorta. three different viscera, hollow and solid.

but now i am confusing you. the price i pay for driving three hours round trip, in the misty rain: out and back from connecticut's hinterland. i knew i was approaching desolation when radio stations slowly faded, dropping off one by one.

the pink elephant was in the room the moment i walked into her home. my interviewee was tiny-- probably no taller than 4'11, at 16 years of age. i found her difficult to gauge, with my primitive questions, and i think she felt the same about me. we tried to avoid the large absurd beast in the room, but then i had to ask: so tell me a little bit about how you found out?

until that point she danced around it gracefully, at first making me believe she didn't know it was true. she made me question her capacity, her judgement, her maturity. she was skilled, indeed, in the art of cloaking.

but my question opened the box. let me start from the beginning, she said.

she started. she stopped, head bent down, tears streaming. she asked me to stop the tape and left the room. i had made a child cry.

i stopped. i breathed, deeply in, and stopped. i closed my eyes so that my ears would be my only resources at that moment, magnification, megaphonation post blinding mutism. i heard her cry how she could not continue with the interview to her mother: this same woman whom i had heard moments before scream that she had already signed my fucking papers, now transformed into Mother. Console, nourish, love without condition.

Mother came out in her robe to greet me: what did you ask her? calmly, reservedly, softly i apologized to her and showed her my script. i asked your child about the pink elephant, and she dissolved. so now i have swallowed it in order to maintain some sense of self-preservation lest i disintegrate. she understood. and then she began to narrate.

i completed the interview, gave the child her gift certificate, tried desperately to re-empower her by making her aware of my intentions: my tapes, my surveys, my numbers.

and then i drove back, an hour and a half and let the pink elephant permeate.

last year i disintegrated. i accidently disclosed my patient's status to her sister, not knowing. end stage, PML, a quick and sudden deterioration, and the sister asked me, the medical student, why. and in front of my patient, who was silenced by the JC Virus that had invaded her speech centers, i narrated her story. i took her story away from her. we spent that morning narrating her story to our attending and other residents in front of her room, so it never occurred to me that no-one else knew. i vomited the pink elephant over and over that day. i cried to my mother and to dave. i disintegrated.

today i kept my professional composure. but at what expense? the pink elephant is rotting away at my insides and i have no idea how to get it out.

excuse my poor idioms and paucity of language. i grew up in a house where english was literal and malayalam was figurative so i never really learned either.

two little, four little, eight little feet...

2006-01-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

of little indians.

sitting in cool beans in oradell nj, listening to maudlin morrisey, who today is brightening my mood because every day is like Sunday.

i just finished transcribing an interview...trying to get back into my research groove, now that step 2 is over (yay!) and life rolls by having completed another rite towards my indoctorination. i finished the 9 hour exam on the 30th, met my love on the corner of 75th and 3rd Ave after nearly three weeks had passed. We had dinner at the Candle Cafe, the place we had our own personal engagement dinner over a year ago October 23rd, the night after the day when he got down on bended knee, with his running shorts, thermal underwear and tube socks, and asked me to spend the rest of my life with him. i think you know the answer i gave him.

he met lucy for the first time and while he fell in love at first glance, we had a *discussion* about how i made this decision without him. i told him that it had been four and half years since I made any decision without him...kind of a lame excuse, since i actually had been thinking about him the whole time, and my mind and heart engaged in a dissociative fugue of sorts.

for most of my life, i've pretty much a soloist, marching to the arrhythmic beat of my own drummer. this is evident from the millions of video footage of me wandering aimlessly, lost in thought. further evidenced from the millions of stories my mom tells of me getting lost in department stores, of me often losing various valuables, including my piano teacher's check, even though my mother gave it to me just before she dropped me off, with less than 50 yards between her car and Mrs. Manus's front door. Sure I was *smart* enough to find my way to a security guard and let him or her know my three year old self could not find my mother. Sure it was only a check that could easily be voided. I've been charmed in more ways than one.

So when I met Dave four and a half years ago and we both made the decision to engage each other mind, body and soul, I had to learn to consider this person in every thought and action I performed. It was new, and strange...and at times it became an obsession. Because I had never really thought about anyone else before, and now I was thinking about him all the time. I could only plan my vacations/weekends/phone dates around him. I couldn't see a movie on my own, because I had to see it with him. I spent most of my days in berkeley, BD, on my own: catching flicks, grabbing grub from Intermezzo, running in the woods... it was a time when I only heard the patter of two feet, not four, or eight, hitting the soft earth on the fire trails behind the Lawrence- Berkeley Labs.

But now we are entering a more comfortable groove, he and I. One in which I periodically dance to the old familiar drummer in my head, and he is ok with it. At first he would wonder and wonder and wonder why I was so quiet, why I could go for hours without utterance. It made him nervous and uncomfortable. Was it something he said/did/thought? But he is beginning to understand...

And I am ok with the patter of four feet...now eight. I love Lucy when she lies quietly on my stomach, and I can feel her rhythm just a tad faster than mine. (Increased surface area to body ratio, I explained, with uncertain authority, to my sister.) I love Lucy a little less when she piddles in the house and lets out the smelliest farts my olfactories have had the privilege of meeting. Now I am no foreigner to the art of farts, and generally I find that the louder ones are less smelly than the silent ones. You can never hear Lucy's...her farts are meant for one special sense only.

My point? A new person, creature, with needs, whom I will have to love and let into my life and constantly be aware of. Less time for the drummer. It makes me stronger and much more independent than I would have ever imagined...as I have people to rely on me, I become more reliable.

One of my twelve year old kids that I interviewed gave me this definition of *independence*: "you're more reliable, your parents trust on you."

So in the last couple of weeks I panicked because I wasn't quite sure about where I fit in... not a new dilemma, an old one tried and true. But Dave and I talked and walked and mulled over Cold Stone ice cream about this fear and leaving behind. and we started to find peace, a separate peace.

I love Kelly Clarkson. Not ashamed to admit it in the least. Her rich voice and pop tart tunes get to me. especially when she sings about Miss Independent. Now, she's no Lauryn or Sarah or Cyndi or Amy and Emily...my cohort of trippin chicks. But she is one fabulous gal who is bound for Divadom. And I like it.
****

on a different note:
I read a quote by a starlet (not Kelly Clarkson) who admitted to her bread addiction. in fact she said "some people have a coke addiction, but I've got a bread addiction."

wtf. what has this world come to when we humble ourselves before the higher power and admit our defeat to BREAD? what have we come to when we compare bread to cocaine?

Lucy will never have such an addiction. She will always keep it real and remind us that we all need just a little love.

meet lucy

2005-12-25T09:18:00.000-08:00

my new girl.

she woke me up this morning to go run amok in our backyard. we paid tribute to old Caesar by his cherry tree.

she's 6 months old. we found her at our local jersey mall. amid all the last minute holiday shoppers, we were brave enough to weather the storm and rescue her.

she's worth every Bergen County penny.

already the similarities are striking. Dad, the old curmudgeon, threatened to throw her out if I ever left her home...but then he admitted that she kind of looks like me. sad eyes. a nose that hold a thousand histories, that searches high and low for meaning.

she is afraid of doorways. but once she gets out she lets loose....loosey goosey. timid and brave all at once.

the similarities are striking.

mom calls her lucy locket. i call her lucy mol. meer calls her loosy goosey.

my grandmother, dad's mom used to have a dog, a stray named Pandu. nevermind the irony of naming a dog after a satyr who was cursed by a blind old man for killing his blind old wife. A fallen arrow: Pandu would never be able to consummate his love for his wife, lest he would die. My Achamma's Pandu probably consummated once and again, many times over, the tramp he was...but he was loved by her, unconditionally.

Caesar was another story: mischievous, sloppy, full of love. Would steal Dave's socks everytime he came over, begging Dave to chase him, simulataneously jealous and in love with this new man in our household. Meer would pull his tail, nearly dislocate his shoulders when both he and she were young pups....they grew up together. first she was bigger than he, then he bigger than she and finally she towered, winning by several margins.

Lucy hasn't met Dave yet. She and I will cruise through the next six months as single ladies, taking the towns of New Haven, Park Ridge and Philadelphia into our own hands. And then we'll have to let him into our lives, our space. It will be different...

I can't wait.

the Awakening

2005-12-22T03:31:00.000-08:00

Old Frimi Sagan once wrote on the board, in neat cursive: "Rites du Paysage."

At 14, I knew enough French to translate literally: "Rites of Passage." And while I could abstract on some adolescent level, the phrase remained distant, hidden.

My beloved English teacher, round and gray, puttered around in her long cotton dresses, waxed poetically about her grandchildren who loved to run around naked. She baked cookies for our class, and we nibbled delicately while deconstructing the sexual awakening of our adolescent protagonists, whether Odysseus or Maya Angelou.

She excited us, inspired us, made us aware: that this was not the end, and greater things loomed ahead. At that time in our lives, this was a fairly new concept.

It was a time when feelings became more real: the fluttering belly at first glance, the fluttering a little further south when you jump-roped or bounced on the trampoline. Feelings you simultaneously never wanted to stop, and desparately wanted to end. Feelings you just could not exhaust.

Fortunately, I could never act on these feelings: I was too self-conscious and awkward. In life I sought invisibility, I silenced and sliced my body so that no-one would see. In dream I sought flesh and bone. Not in high school, not in college, not until I met the man who would become my husband. Any attempts prior to that were known to lack promise, self-sabotaged from the get go: like the time I invited my fellow student learning center tutor out to coffee. Failed once because I didn't have his email address...and even when when Sheela and I printed out my note and left it in his work mailbox, I knew it would never fruition, I knew he already had another girlfriend. Sheela, my girl, my love, you helped me explore, in more ways than one and I thank you...but it suppose I would not be ready until I graduated. Another rite of passage.

Rites of passage: this is what I think about as I sit in my childhood home, watching old home movies and imagining what is about to transpire within the next six months. I sit precariously, uneasily wedged between fear and excitement. I wake up, sit with my parents sipping tea or coffee, watch them age. One minute I cannot wait to start my life with this person I love, and the next I am frightened of leaving behind and creating a new. I am afraid of those who will leave me and whom I will leave, afraid of rites of passage that dictate finality, mortality. The reason why warm wells pool in my sunken eyes everytime I watch Beaches or horrible holiday movies like the Family Stone.

My family, the only people I have in this world. And I will soon leave them in a way I have never left them before.

A rite, a passage.

the miseducation of me, tea-chi

2005-12-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

I would rather watch E!'s 100 most starlicious makeovers than Jim Lehrer.

Dave and I often fight over the remote control, because he'd rather watch Fox News so that he can scoff and grumble at conservative ideals, and I'd rather find out who paid for Linda Tripp's nose job.

I usually win.

I try to keep myself informed. I have the New York Times as my home page...although more often than not my eyes will find itself on the book reviews or the entertainment section. I listen to NPR on the radio...sometimes. Or at least I listen to wfuv, Fordham University's station that streamlines NPR headlines, thank you Karl Castle, whomever you are...and then plays my beloved cracker music, a hoaky mix of bluegrass, folk and jazz.

Here is why I think not watching PBS keeps you more informed:

1. E!'s 100 most starlicious moments is what the rest of America is watching. That and Fox News. And if you never watched either of these channels, you would never get to see the latest propaganda piece put out by our commander in chief...or at least one of his cronies: a war video game put out by the United States Army, the only one of its kind. Now I am all about supporting our troops, mostly because I feel sorry for these KIDS who join the army because they think it is one giant cyberspace party. Blechhhhh. Remember, I can't be patronizing...only matronizing.

2. E!'s most starlicious makeovers let you know the extremes celebrities will go through to keep themselves *marketable.* Marketable: a term that was often tossed around in jest, but often taken to heart, at my home, as in your skin tone is marketable, but your nose is not. Little girls watch these figureless figures and say hey I want to look like that. I was one of those little girls, until I woke up and actually LOOKED in the mirror. I have grown to love my large sunken eyes, long lashes, thick eyebrows (even with they are approaching unibrow status), full lips...and, yes large nose! Hence the previous entry. I love my flat chest and big bum. Every bony and fleshy ounce of it.

3. The History Channel-- ok not quite E!, but definitely no where near PBS status. It's definitely more pop tart, than melba toast. I don't know what that means. But I can sit for hours watching the mini bios of all our presidents past and present. Especially when they highlight the scandals.

4. Back to E! Old SNL reruns remind you of events past, in a purely different context...and let you take in the glorious Lauryn Hill, a goddess if I've ever known one. Long live satire, which I will take any day because gosh darnit sometimes you just have to laugh at the nonsense. And long live Lauryn Hill. She reminds you that some guys, some guys are only...about. That thing. That thing. That Thi-i-ing. Come on girls sing it.

So here it is the miseducation of me, tea-chi.

nose and knees

2005-12-09T08:02:00.000-08:00

knees and nose.

I don' remember much from books I've read, but this image in Midnight's Children stands out: prostration + one giant nose= nosebleed.

nose and knees.

Every few months I wind up with a scraped up, banged up knee. It usually happens when I am running, trail or concrete, and I zone out as I am wont to do when running, driving, walking or just existing, silently. I sail over a rock or a crack or my own feet before finding myself on my knees, prostrating to mother earth below.

Two days ago it happened in front of Harkness Dorms, whilst juggling my lunch, consent forms and tape recorder. Boom. Right on the sidewalk by the children's playground. No children were there to help, and the one medical student who was walking towards the dorm didn't even look my way. No matter, I was fully capable of hobbling towards clinic where I was headed anyway, sneaking into the phlebtomy room when no-one was in there and wiping my wounds clean with some alcohol swabs. The wound hissed as I sucked in my breath.

Never mind the $30 pair of Banana Republic pants I had neatly ripped, one horizontal line dividing my thigh from my leg. Never mind that they were on sale. Never mind that I walked around the rest of the day with a giant hole in my pant leg and a teenage mutant ninja turtle bandaid in the middle.

Knees and nose.

I have another badge of honor, more permanent than the scars on my knees. And that is my enormous ancient nose. This is what I inherited from my father's clan, from the house of the Cheruvattaths: large, broad, hooked when viewing the profile. Smooth at the distal end, slightly kinked more proximally just below the thick browline. It is a nose that bears witness to many histories, holds deep within its muscular nostils many secrets. I was looking at some old pictures today, my father and my younger self, the noses the one and the same, the silence the one and the same, the temperment...no longer the same. My nose flares like his when I am filled with rage, but I have yet to see his swell, blush and melt when sorrowful. Even when his mother died, I did not see the nose transform. While at night I heard him call her name in sleep, his nose never disclosed in wake.

In time, I may find I have inherited his limp, given my predisposition. But for now, I am the proud bearer of his nose, secrets and all.

Knees and nose. Nose and knees.

the Golden Ticket

2005-12-06T18:21:00.000-08:00

On a filofax looseleaf "shopping list" I wrote the following, in neat, carrot topped script:

To Whom it May Concern:
I had placed the enclosed parking voucher on my dashboard on December 1st, 2005. I mistakenly scratched November, thinking that it was Nov 30th instead of Dec 1st.

I am enclosing a check nonetheless. But if you would be so kind to return it or VOID the check given the circumstances, I would be grateful.

Sincerely,
TV

I've had my fair share of parking violations. But this one rotted. I mean, technically I had a 12 hour parking voucher and I parked in a 2 hour zone...for less than 2 hours! Because I couldn't dig around for enough damn quarters. I jiggled my jacket, felt up my own bum, stuck my head, arm and leg into my backpack...all for naught. Some of you have seen me do this when I search for my keys. It gets really interesting when I wear my black coat with the ripped pockets- then I really dig through the seams.

So I had to use a 12 hour voucher in a 2 hour zone. Hence the ghetto fabulous letter. Kind of like my letter of leave of absence to Einstein that I brilliantly fleshed out on looseleaf, a regular sized 8 x 6, instead of my present 2 x 4.

Anyway, I had wanted to talk about World AIDS Day, but couldn't muster up the courage on that particular day... I was too entrenched. A day of rememberance: the New Haven Green was aglow with paper bag lights lining the walkways. I hate these public days, dedicated to a disease that ravages lives and communities 364 other days in the year. But I suppose if we have to be reminded...the New York Times uses the week to publish more insightful articles about the epidemic....a particularly sad, not particularly well written piece on India, prostitution and the truckers/migrants "who bring the disease back to their wives."

Why do I get so worked up about this particular illness? I can't tell you. Maybe because it still is, and will continue to be, a disease of the marginalized, the disenfranchised. Maybe because there are layers and layers of stigma that need to be peeled in order for us to create any progressive movement towards prevention and treatment. Maybe because it could have been me, the child who received the blood transfusion in 1983, the woman who also later suffered an addiction of sorts. Never any needles...just the fear of being alone.

But more on this later. Right now I'm just coasting along on my Golden Ticket. I've had one too many Wonka bars, and I am pretty darn lucky.

the Sound and the Silence

2005-12-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

Mondays through Friday I am a New Englander. When I'm not stifled by ivy covered walls, I actually enjoy this new role.

I was driving up the Merritt Parkway, a country road sheltered by brilliant foliage in the fall, snow covered trees and dark woods in the winter. I was lost in thought, thoughtlessly lost as usual, and I missed my exit by several miles before I actually realized so. It wasn't until I was quickly approaching a tunnel pass through the rolling hills (like white elephants) that I had awoken. I took the next exit, finding myself in the Westville section, the landscape much like the rest of town: an easy tension of gentrified business (spas/ overpriced health food stores/antique shops) and American Africana (hairbraiding stores/Golden Krust Bakeries/Episcopalian Churches). Guess which store I frequent.

On my radio: Handel's Messiah on NPR. Previously it had been Kelly Clarkson on Power 95.

How apropos.

I walk up my spiral wooden staircase to get to my apartment, each creak reminding me of the books I used to bury my nose in as a child: Jacob Have I Loved, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and other Caldicott Medal favs. I oftened dreamed of the Sound and Cape cultures I read about...and now I am living in it. The beaches in New Haven are filled with locals. Yale faculty travel further out to the Cape or Rhode Island to escape, which also has its fair share of culturally and linguistically isolated communities. I romanticize their accents, I create stories about their lives. I am just as guilty of exoticizing this culture as those who have done the same with mine.

I missed the first two snowfalls of the year. I was in Philadelphia both times. We are expecting a storm tonight and I wait, patiently, with anticipation.

A memory:
The silence of the storm, soft and deadening, awakens me at 5:30 am, 10 minutes before my alarm goes off. I leap up from my bed and peer out the window, squinting to see the snow fall by the lamppost, quiet and unassuming on the ground below. Rush back into bed, hide under my warm down blanket, wait for the clock to turn 6, wait for the phone to ring: school's been cancelled. A day of repose, a day of hot chocolate, marshmellows and snow angels. A day to sleep in.

Two reasons to pray for no wind: 1. we get to play in the snow for a little while longer, before the cold snow bites into our toes; 2. we get to watch in amazement our gorgeous backyard transformed, snow topped trees and all. One reason a little wind can be fun: Snow Drifts.

I will be in New Haven for my first snow fall of the year.

I wait and remember, again and again.

Carolina and Goose

2005-12-01T13:48:00.000-08:00

On days like these I wish I could share a Guinness with Carolina to just mellow, warm dark brown and smooth.

Or go for a long run with Goose to debrief.

Just completed another parent-child interview. Pulled up some interesting stuff...but always painful.

Just thinking about the two of them makes me smile.

Goose, short for Vargoose, is my partner in crime. Dave came up with the name Vargoose, and I thought he just gringoed her last name, but really he was referring to Top Gun. She's the Goose to my Maverick. Or something like that.

(An aside: the Malayalam word, or more precisely the Kottayam word, for Gringo is saipamaran. I think it comes from Sahib. A female gringo is Madama....or Madame? How the tropes of colonialism haunt us so...not that either saipmaran or madama are used in any positive context.)

Anyway back to Goose: together we storm the city streets, running thisaway and that. I met her in my small group my first year and couldn't help checking her out...in addition to that itty bitty waist and gorgeous smile, she also happened to mention that her dream was to run in a marathon. And indeed she did run New York...three weeks before I ran Philly. I can't imagine a better gal to run and dish with. The kind of girl who makes lemonade: like the time we accidently wound up running along a major highway, and instead of getting flustered Goose tells me: " I kinda like this...its nice knowing that all these people are in a rush to get somewhere and we aren't in a rush to get anywhere." Did I mention how crazy smart she is? A Hahvahd gal. You'd never know it cause she's so darn humble.

And then there is Carolina. Another smart chick. A fulbright scholar and budding EM doc. Dave says that when I'm around her I seem so happy. Her charm is infectious. She was my sympatico in anatomy, and I haven't let her go since. We were the fab four: a Muslim, Two Hindus and an Irishwoman. We almost formed our own band, but split up due to political differences. I love Carolina because she is so self-effacing and funny. She loves to laugh at herself...and we all wind up laughing with her. Because life is just too damn short to take everything so seriously. If you go to her house for dinner, her dad will share a shot of Bailey's with you. Did I mention how crazy smart she is? You'd never know it because she's always laughing at herself.

I am a terrible person because I haven't kept up with Carolina in a few weeks now. We've been playing phone tag, but really I'm the slacker.

I love and miss you both. And Goose, I ran four miles today and thought of you the whole time.

A little Snippet on the first Blog

2005-11-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

just a little snippet while I wait for my consent forms to copy:

last night I was watching 50 greatest child stars all grown up on E! and of course 22 was Doogie Howser, MD, aka Neil Patrick Harris and they cited him as perhaps the first *blogger.* Who could forget Doogie, child medical prodigy, wrapping each episode in front of a bright blue screen, always ready with a moral quip or life's lesson learned? Ah Doogie, once the love of my life and inspiration to start my own journal on our old Commodore 64, a vain attempt since at 9 I had no clue how to save anything...or perhaps was left without the option on that "monitor-keyboard-harddrive in one" set up. Oh Doogie, who lost his virginity to the lovely Wanda, but not before he performed her appendectomy.

Ah Doogie. Ah Humanity.

And now a little snippet on the origins of the word "snippet": I had an Iranian resident during medicine who would always give "just a little snippet" about each patient during morning rounds. I loved that he prefaced every patient with "a little snippet" and I was pained by the fact that though he was an attending in is homeland, he was demoted the moment he stepped on American soil. Downgraded to an intern. A story told again and again....

From one brute to another

2005-11-30T06:10:00.000-08:00

The other night I received a call from a dear friend and classmate whom I haven't seen in many months. I spent the first 6 months of my third year with Phil. I remember the day I found out I was doing surgery at Monte with him-- I was so dismayed at the thought of spending my first 8 weeks of my third year at a merciless site with a group of *gunners.* Phil will never deny that he is indeed a gunner. And from my sobering demeanor, and pacifist approach to life, he may have been surprised to unmask my true academic spirit. I too was crazy enough to wonder how a certain professor of ours calculated the p value without using statistical software. But beyond that we had some enlightening conversations, and I was pleasantly surprised to unmask a thoughtful and sensitive spirit.

Anyway, Phil called me because I was the first person he thought of when he decided to pursue a project involving spirituality in medicine. Phil is president of the Shul at Einstein, and in recent months has been finding it difficult to get what he needs, as a burgeoning doctor, out of this religious network. So he, along with another third year, had decided to come up with a project to learn and study literature on the subject. And for better or for worse, I was the first person he thought of. Always self deprecating, he humbled himself before me as "the brute" who would like to expand his literary scholarship. I, of course, was speechless....moved beyond words.

And now I have no idea what I can offer Phil in his project. Nonetheless I emailed him some of my thoughts. I share them with you perhaps because you may help me in this endeavor. From one brute to another:

Hi Phil,

It was lovely to hear from you. It certainly was nice
to hear that someone in whom I hold high esteem,
professionally and personally, would think of me for
this important project.

This issue is one that is deeply personal for me. You
may remember my dissatisfaction with my internal
medicine rotation; in retrospect I think this was
largely due to months of dealing with the chronically
ill and the dying and a lack of real spiritual
reflection. At the time I was too overwhelmed with
emotions to understand this. My feelings were more
salient in this rotation, I think because we spent the
most time in it. But perhaps there is also something
to be said about medicine as a profession which does
not always enable spiritual reflection, whatever the
reasons.

In any event, I have always been interested in
palliative care and terminal illness, but more
recently, due to my chosen research field, within the
pediatric population. While I know this is a small
part of the issue you are describing, it is one that
is near and dear to my heart, and I will try to
approach the issue of spirituality from this
perspective. It is much easier, than to approach
spirituality as a whole.

I hope this makes sense. I look forward to hearing
from you,
Tara

It was Merely Another Thanksgiving

2005-11-29T07:44:00.000-08:00

Cranberry chutney, Curried Corn, a 7lb Un Turkey...

And Meer.

There are few people in this world who can make me laugh so. It is a vicious cycle-- she starts, then I start, she laughs even harder as I become more apneic, I laugh even harder until I need to leave the room.

We spent the days watching home videos, Curb your Enthusiasm and Fever Pitch.

She was sad to find me even more tired than usual. She witnessed my mother giving me my shot of Procrit, and she winced when she saw my face writhed, alarmed.

And then my mother narrated the story of how she had to give me my adriamycin drip in the middle of a stormy blizzard. A slow cautious push, lest the vein sclerose. Two years before the birth of the second.

The videos reveal a whiny toddler, full of tears and expectation. They reveal a gangly, awkward child with a wicked temper and a million dollar face. The center of attention. Expressive.

Perhaps forced to make her mark as the sibling of the "special one." Dark and strong.

After the shot, we watched my mother peel her kiwis. Perfectly. Small hands, sharply contrasting our own. We smiled, knowing. Her precision, our butterfingers. But she is more like her than I, with her high cheekbones and short fuse.

I watch the two of them. Lovely and Amazing.

cityscapes 2

2005-11-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

My New York.

I have memories of city life, three years in the Bronx, three months in Manhattan. Today I remember the latter, Medicine in Manhattan.

It will have been a year ago next Monday.

Standing outside the quarantined door of a cherpakarathan, a native son. My eyes closed, lest I see his bare bottom from beneath his hospital gown, my ears warm, listening to him make sweet, sad melodies on his violin. In minor key; this much I know from 10 years of piano lessons. He played to his window, to the city outside, mired in winter, its depths. He had been hospitalized in the psych ward for an acute manic episode, but I met him on 9L with a diagnosis of chicken pox. With masks we would walk into his room, and he would launch his flight, a spinning combination of perfect English and Malayalam. He knew my face and I knew his with its crops of vesicles and excoriations. A relief etched, in memories and beyond.

Memories of dying. Memories of one death.

Memories of my city. Memories of cloudy skies, long December/ January/February days, skyscrapers and excoriations. Memories of running from our apartment on 17th and 1st Ave, to Fifth and 59th, the foot of the park, lights twinkling and that big ole tree. Memories of walking, hustlebustle surround, from murray hill to curry hill to get some samosas. Memories of dinner with old friends: Turkish, Korean, African and Me. All hyphenated. Memories of parties. Food and Drink. Memories of the chill pinching our cheeks, first red then blue, my face the rainbow coalition. Memories of ringing in the new year with my sister and other friends, memories of giggles the morning after. Memories of a pause.

I will never forget

My New York.

cityscapes

2005-11-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

five pigeons. two sparrows.

one piece of pizza crust.

Sparrow manages to snatch it, in spite of the obvious crust-beak disproportion. He flies away with his buddy, but sadly it drops. Snarly Pigeons dive for it, while Sparrow watches mournfully, perched on a fence above.

This is what I witnessed yeterday morning, walking down Pine Street, across the concrete park spotted with Ginkgos.

Remembering an old poem I read in elementary school: the Ginkgo and the Willow. Cityscapes, Country Life...

I am spending the days before Thanksgiving in Philadelphia. Old Danny used to call it Filthadelphia, but I think he was soured by the elitist gay scene, a buncha pretty boys with fat wallets. I actually prefer the city to my own New York.

Dave and I knew the Nor'Easter was here when he managed to simultaneously burn steaming broccoli, spill water on the couch and break the track light while swatting a towel around to clear the air of smoke.

Yup. The Nor'Easter had arrived.

In spite of it all, a kind gentleman at the local coffee shop gave me free coffee. He had a rough morning and didn't quite make the drink I ordered. While I was unaffected by this, he was, tremendously, and refused to let me pay.

Today I am thankful.

pride

2005-11-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

"our children are marrying outside the community because they have no pride in our culture."

everytime I think of this remark, spoken by one uncle and felt by many uncles and aunties, i am overwhelmed with sadness. this is what they think of me, a woman who has spent the better part of her life studying her story. It is the story of a Nation 14,000 miles across the ocean, the story of the diaspores who floated across the sea and happened upon new nations, the story of her birth. I know histories and herstories that remain untold to the residents of that land. I listen silently and absorb. Pieces of me, I break apart and put back together to understand.

And still I am castigated, confined to role of the "pardesh" the NRI, the non resident.

Understand that my mother never imagined herself in this country. She was the Nation, she is the Nation. She was born to a dissenter, a man who fought oppression and who witnessed the re-birth of his nation. She grew up listening to her forefathers speak on the radio, Jai Hind. And the tears still flow, 30 years after her exile. Jai Hind.

She was married to a man who was living in a different country. And she did not question. Even though they asked her opinion, she agreed with whatever they thought was right. Mata Pitta, Guru, Dev. Mother, Father, Teacher, God. All one and the same, and so the thought of saying no never once crossed her mind. Sure she had imagined a different life for herself once she began medical school, she wanted to serve the people of the Nation. But now she would have to call another her own.

Nearly 13 years after she arrived, she saw her friend of many years go back. This friend's daughter was becoming a teenager, and the threat became more real. Everyday she saw children having children, unmarried and alone. Everyday children torn apart by the ravages of peer pressure and the loss of parental control. Her own daughter began to refuse food, and she saw her wasting. The thought of refusing sustenance and nourishment was unfathomable...she had seen destitution, she had seen food scarcity, and though poverty was never a reality for her, food was always sacred. She had lived through rations, when America enforced sanctions for the nation's support of the USSR. So it was only natural that she blamed the country for her daughter's self-inflicted exile, her invisibility.

But there was a bigger threat at hand here. What if by coming to this country her Nation was erased? A history untold, for generations and generations until the memory of it became myth?

Why didn't she take her kids back? She couldn't. She wouldn't. There were too many other players involved.

Her story has always been my story. I was born from it, I reclaimed it, I re-write it again and again. And no matter how many times it is penned, no many times I give birth to this story, the threat of annihilation exists.

Tribute to Old VS

2005-11-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

so it has occured to me that i've got a little too much race on the brain. ala Cornel West and Skip Gates.

But not a la Old V.S.

I have this terrific caricature of Naipaul posted on my wall, from the cover of the the New York Times Book Review, and the title of which is "Thorn in Side or Pain in Neck: V.S Naipaul, knight and Nobelist, does not care for literary theory, African republics, multiculturalism, political pieties or of alot of other things examined in his collection The Writer and the World." Naipaul is in deed a site for sore eyes, looking every bit as disgruntled and constipated as I imagined him to be, carrying the dry weight of a new empire and retaining it with all his might.

I tore this out at a time when I too tried to remove myself from all of those things. I was trying to tuck it away, this history of mine. No longer did I wear those robes, no longer did I walk through Sproul in wakeful dreaming. I needed to be here, now, fully present and within my decided profession.

Recall RH whispering to me in her softened accent: "the personal is political. the political is personal." Recall seeing this same German professor of mine at the gym, naked and shameless after her shower, pointing her sagging breasts and bony fingers at me: the personal is political. Since then I had exhausted my literary asanas. I had rejected myself as woman, native, other.

But of course I come back to it. Because here I am a brown girl, working with black children, and about to marry a white boy. I have to face it everyday, when I talk to my kids and tape our interviews and listen to the tapes of my speech and their speech and feel overwhelmed by our similar differences.

I love this job because it enables me to reflect, step apart, come back and look within.

I don't believe race defines me. Yes I was born into a country which colored me. But to a large extent it also left me blind. Because when I am talking to my kids, I never remember the brown. When I am with Dave and Dave alone I never remember the white.

I am aware of the beauty of this blindness and its potential complications. I aware that there are issues I cannot avoid.
and I cannot be without.

My children are mostly black. They are all HIV positive. Layers and layers and layers...

I peel.

my riveting rosie

2005-11-16T10:51:00.000-08:00

so a couple of weeks ago I attended this conference at the NIH for all one year research fellows from various schools and programs. most of it was meant to inspire us to stick with it, as there is a shortage of physicians who want to go into academia. not surprising, since there is NO incentive after having racked up just about 200Gs in loans.

Then of course we had a number of women physician scientists lament the difficulties of being a woman in the field. One particularly negative woman (a researcher at Brigham, of course) commented that of the 40 people who had interviewed her for the position, two were women. And let's not forget that while 50% of medical graduates are women, only 8% of those in academic medicine are women. Most of these women hold associate professorships or less...don't even ask about tenured positions.

That said, there were a number of female physicians who were trying their best to rally the troops. We can do it! says Rosie the riveter/psychiatrist/associate professor at this and that university.

At one point there was a panel consisting of a white woman, a black woman, a white man and a black man...in that order. A forcible representation of the underrepresented.

Sure we can do it. My brown, ball-less battle is significantly less than that of Rosie's or even my mother's. Mrs. Sunshine was surprisingly bitter the other day when she lamented her lack of a job offer at a prestigious institution as an academic faculty member. She even went as far as to say that if her name were Joel Cohen, or something to that effect, she would have gotten the job. She redeemed herself slightly by mentioning that she probably wouldn't have gotten the job if her name was Jane Cohen.

Black face, White mask? White face, black mask?

and I'm still waiting for my vagina to speak.

gas station uncle

2005-11-08T00:49:00.000-08:00

gas station uncle never remembers my name nor my face. he always greets me with a smile and immediately launches into friendly hindi banter. I smile and politely answer "I'm well" in English to his "kaise aap," but before long I have to apologize to him and admit that I am from Kerala, hindi no bolo. We then chat about our families, he tells me about his four kids, one a master's nursing student, the second a medical student in the caribbean, the third at stonybrook and the fourth in high school.

he asks me if I am married, I say no, not yet, just engaged. he has, in fact, met my future husband, and in a previous conversation politely smiled and said congratulations...but his disappointment was hardly inapparent. I read his mind, just as I had read the minds of all my aunties and uncles before they had met Dave and before they knew his kind spirit and weightless soul.

fortunately for me, gas station uncle never remembers me. he does not know that my family lives less than a mile from his gas station. our conversations are transient, passing. existing in a liminal space, neither here nor there.

until now.

brown sugar

2005-11-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

just a quick note on my halloween experience:

I went dressed as brown sugar. I was inspired while driving home, when the old Stones' tune came on the radio. my roommates and I had been trying to come up with famous pairs for D and I to dress up as....Annie Hall and Woody Allen, J Lo and Ben Affleck, Shrek and Fiona....none seemed to compare to Mick Jagger and Brown Sugar.

Of course, I was aware of how "problematic" this idea was...in a previous era I would have been more cautious. I looked up the lyrics to the song anyway, and there really is no question....

What was Mick trying to tell us? Was he trying to deconstruct the black female body by recapitulating stereotypes? Or was he just a racist british bastard? I mean this is a man who perhaps inspired the androgynous punk rockstar...obliterating gender lines...can we give him more credit?

So I dragged Dave to a trampy girls clothing store and made him try on several tight denim jeans with sequins on the ass. The lovely store workers, all of whom were black, got a kick out of this skinny white boy trying to show some booty. And they thought that it was "cute" that I was going as brown sugar...even though they had no clue who Mick Jagger was. Different strokes.

My own brown sugar experiences run long and deep...I was about 20 years old, buying the condiment in a grocery store and while standing in line, the guy behind me says, with a leery grin, "so you like brown sugar, huh?" "Yeah?" I said, not at all confrontational, like I wanted to be in my head, but timid... as usual. Scared of flirtation, of his eyes fleshing out and sexualizing my colored body. Afraid of being wanted, of being desireable. It had made me want to purge.

I went as brown sugar this halloween. I wore lots of glitter. I donned velour pants and I wrote the word sugar in glitter glue on the ass. I wasn't afraid of flirtation, because I had Mick by my side. Problematic? Yes I think so. I was however, afraid to bend over, lest I show some crack. Damn those low riders.

Now here is my question to you: Is brown sugar a condiment? I leave you to ponder that and wonder what flava was the guy at the grocery store... and if it really matters.

hardy mums and their daughters

2005-10-29T10:44:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about mothers and daughters lately...especially after my roommate's mom came into town. This Jewish mazza brought supplies: chocolate babka, challah, fruits, matzo ball soup... a desperate attempt to find some coherency in a world she could not control. E was having ankle surgery, there was nothing her mother could do about it.

I had met Jewish mothers before. In fact I was born to one. My mom fits all the stereotypes you can imagine-- overbearing, with major control issues, emotionally needy, does a fine job of making her daughters feel guilty, and is always making sure her children are fed twice over, always thinking of her children before herself, the martyr she is. " The kind of woman who will always give you her jacket even though her slight frame can tolerate the cold less well than you can.

I can't say D's mom is quite the "Jewish/Indian" mom mine is. I mean of course, she will always give you her jacket...but she believes in calorie restriction, a metaphor for her reservedness. She loves D dearly, and always weeps when they part, and often sends him health cookies and care packages by mail...she is a wonderful mother no doubt. But she doesn't hang on to him with the same kind of desperation, and I never got that same feeling that her children are her life. Is it the immigrant woman's story? Are we carrying a history of strife and struggle that makes our mothers cling on ferverently, anxious that the bough will break at any second?

D's mom is Canadian. There isn't quite the same history in that peaceful country....

on a different note, my dearest Vinita is about to become a mother herself...to a baby boy. I am excited to wait and see how the next generation will emerge...

A New Beginning

2005-10-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

Here it is my new blog. I am keeping the old, in tradition: indianrock.diaryland.com

there are a few repeats, as I am writing this entry November 22nd, the day I started this new blog. And for the sake of continuity I pasted some old entries here. But what is time anyway, but relative? A moment of silence for the old AE....