A guy goes to the doctor concerned about a piece of lettuce sticking out of his bottom. "Well, let's have a look," says the doctor, after the guy has gotten into his gown. "Doctor, is it serious?" the worried man asks. "I'm afraid this is just the tip of the iceberg," replied the doctor.
I love medical humor, with a little bit of produce thrown in.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
On our individual natures, and compassion
Another nugget of thought I've been chewing on tonight, courtesy of American Gods:
"Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people --but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain . . . and we resume our lives. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."
I added the bold, because I'm amazed by the poetry of N. Gaiman's phrase, here.
"Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people --but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain . . . and we resume our lives. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."
I added the bold, because I'm amazed by the poetry of N. Gaiman's phrase, here.
Beginning to blog: How to choose a title?
At a loss for how else to come up with a clever, profound, engaging title for my first blog attempt, I selected a phrase from a paragraph that lately intrigued me. It's from Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods (recommended by my bibliophile brother-in-law, Jake, who has yet to recommend a book that I haven't loved):
"All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end."
Maybe it's because I'm sitting here amongst those labeled "psychotic," but it got me thinking about the nature of sanity. Maybe I only think about stuff like this at 2:31 am.
"All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end."
Maybe it's because I'm sitting here amongst those labeled "psychotic," but it got me thinking about the nature of sanity. Maybe I only think about stuff like this at 2:31 am.
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