Monday, September 26, 2005
I’m reading Ray Charle’s autobiography. It’s nothing the IntellectualElite would probably have on their book list, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t somehow interesting. Then again, we aren’t all in the television audience.
Before reality television, people had this same fascination with other people’s lives, they just had to read about it. Autobiographies and biographies were the ways we looked into other peoples’ lives. We used to learn through first person or second person, but now we are oddly satisfied with third person.
And that should come as odd. It’s the worst view, yet i tseems we feel the most justified with it. Pause for one honest second and realize the downside to a third-person viewpoint. Instead of clouding the truth of a person’s life with his/her bias, or in the second-person viewpoint where someone has taken time to really study the matter, we suddenly put our own ability to judge a situation as paramount to either.
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Sunday, September 11, 2005
I’ve noticed something about the way people talk about death. It forces us to become metaphysical and philosophical. Some become crazed or paranoid while others show a cool indifference, but I’m not worried about the various facades. Actually, I’m not worried at all. So why not speak frankly?
Last week, while I attended to my patient through a harmless sleep study, Scott, from Respiratory stopped in to chat. (For those not in the health profession, in between saving lives, filling out charts and cleaning up some odd bodily fluid, there is a lot of hanging out). A fellow technician asked where he’d just been.
He’d just finished up a code blue on an infant. I’ll save a dramatic story.
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It’s the end of my first month at the new job. I’ve been going through orientation for the last month at the main hospital.
I spent two weeks on days and two on nights. This week will be days as well. In a sleep lab, there are things to do 24/7 and I wanted to be familiar with how they run both sides of their operation before I head to small town Paola, KS to start up a new lab.
I’ll be the only technician there initially, working three days of the week (Mon, Tues and Wed… how posh is that). Starting up a new lab takes more forthought than I actually have talent for, but my new colleagues are on the ball.
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Wednesday, August 17, 2005
I’m sure the title of this post will cause some people to avoid even clicking to read the rest of it, but I assure you, this is not an introspective post about how deep and profound I am. But, it is based on this common question, ‘is life passing you by?’
Consider, for a moment, metaphysics (deep pondering thoughts on the way shit works) and how it would view time. I’ll leave you philosophers who love this area have your say on all the theories and what not, that’s not the point. Just consider something like relativity, and how time seems constant or variable based on your very own perceptions.
Now that you have your own perceptions, I don’t think it would be hard to get you to admit those are perceptions generated by the brain as an interpretation of reality. And I mean very visceral perceptions, such as that bird over there or this computer right here or the color blue or the feeling of agony (such as now maybe… ).
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Disease: a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal or plant. Especially one that produces specific signs or symptoms. (My Mac’s dictionary/thesaurus widget)
Modern medicine, which has yet to yield to future medicine, is a machine of problems, innovations and life changing discoveries. From the ability to provide hearing to those who are deaf, to improving the status of frontal mammary accessories, humans are just trucking along with that ol’ scientific method punching out the answers.
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“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.”
That quote, of course, from the movie Good Will Hunting. And it’s accurate for the most part. I never felt I was paying for the material as much as the method and the instructors. I was the one who really didn’t like it when a GTA showed up to teach a class.
College students who didn’t pay for their education usually love a student teacher. The teacher is just as busy with a social college life as the students are and tend to be a bit more lax on grading. Usually, a graduate student is teaching as a means to help pay for their education, but that doesn’t mean they have any teaching ability at all.
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Who here watches The Daily Show?
You aren’t unwise if you don’t. There are plenty of ways to make up for it. Read at least 2 newspapers a day, or 1 paper plus about 20 news television shows and maybe a sitcom here or there. The point is, this show wraps up a mix of pop-culture, governmental news and international debate in less than 30 minutes.
Typically, I enjoy this show for it’s frank ridicule of television news. Journalists, a profession to which I’ve earned a degree in, have suffered the onslaught of public ridicule and governmental disdain to a peak beyond any I’ve seen in my lifetime. ‘What do they know?’ and ‘they never check their facts’ have been the general phrases I hear at Thanksgiving dinners or bar side conversations. The attempt for truth has been observed as an obvious clammer for audience with the method of hype as a primary advertising technique.
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