Pinky on Parents

For the past couple of years, I have had the great honor of living with and in close proximity to my parents. My younger brother and I both feel very blessed to have been brought into the world by two individuals who we, and many many others, consider to be angels on earth. Yesterday, my mother had to endure yet another rotator cuff surgery to repair a reopened tear (damn dogs!)....There is nothing quite so humbling and jarring as the bedside observance of a parent in pain. I think that my emotional picture of my mother is fixed with her in her thirties, with a long brunette ponytail, encouraging my brother and I to hike/Xcountry ski/do homework/try something just a little bit more. Given that I am not even in my thirties any longer, this is obviously irrational, but just the same, I cling to this false idea of stasis. On the surface, I may appear to be fully self-actualized, but inside I still carry the little girl who believes in Joo Joo and the Green Slime (family horror story) and kisses make boo boos all better.

Pinky on the Electoral College

A number of years ago, based on some late night conversation and I am sure copious amounts of wine, some friends and I set out to prove state-by-state, how the electoral college is a misrepresentation of the people. I am not sure how many people know that some states do not require their electoral vote to represent the popular vote. Or that the casting of the same is not tied to the percentage of the voting population who actually visits the polls during any given presidential election. If I remember clearly, we demonstrated (at least to our own wee hour satisfaction) that Montana could be a deciding factor in a presidential election EVEN IF NONE OF THE POPULATION VOTED. Don't ask me to reverse engineer that proof, but you may want to visit this article for some critical thinking of your own.....

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27283314/

Pinky on Professions

I have always been an advocate of a liberal arts education as the foundation for the ability to creatively and critically approach life as well as provide a sustainable income that doesn't involve the phrase "Do you want fries with that". As a double-major in English/Political Science, certainly my career can provide evidence to support that one can be successful outside of teaching and law with that type of background. I have held leadership positions in mostly the information technology field and have (written oh so modestly) at some points made some significant income. HOWEVER, whether it is midlife crisis or just early morning career frustration, I find myself pondering the options again. Outside of a think tank, what options are there for somebody who wants to read and think all day? Is there a publishing house in the PNW that would allow me to comb the slush pile for the next Great American Novel? Can I do that remotely? What if, as the hubs suggests, I start posting book reviews on the blog?

Pinky thinks Mommy either needs hormone treatment of to go for a run.....

Pinky on Perfection

We have added the "Living Oprah" blog to our watch list ( see B (l) ogging down section), because we are a fan of the Big "O" (ha) and we were curious about how this blogther ended up on the Today show just because she is practicing mimcry. the Big "O" seems to practice a spiritual and warm-hearted approach to life that definitely appeals to us and we have always been rewarded by following her book list suggestions. (Stones in the River should be in the Pinky Pages section). However, (you knew it was coming, didn't you), the article on the MSNBC news feed suggests that the Mini-Oprah is practicing what Oprah preaches solely on the basis of acquisitions rather than implied philosophy or good works.

Hey, I have a material girl streak that wouldn't mind the ability to retail therapy my way into contentment on occasion, but in the spirit rather than the price tag of some of O's suggestions, I think I could provide an alternative accounting that represented in this blog.....

http://www.livingoprah.com/

Pinky on the Plumber

Now that Joe the Plumbler is Joe the Jobless Plumber, my theory that people are increasingly comfortable opining in neutral, facesless media such as THIS is once again supported. I don't think many of us will survive unscathed any level of social spotlight shining on our underbellies, so despite the level of credibility that seems to be being granted to the "social networking" environment, are we really just practicing avoidance rather than neutral anonymity? If we have faith in our convictions; personal, moral, political or professional, has the scrutiny of the media on everybody from celebrities and politicians to the "Joe's" rendered it impossible for us to display our truth images and names in our posts and discourse? A colleague of mine has asked in Twitter whether he needs a more professional photo of himself to accompany his various spots of sunlight on the net......I am tiptoeing around the distinctions between public professional and private persona myself...

Any comments, thoughts, flaming arrows?

Pinky on the Perimeter

About a week ago, on one of our daily block walks, we noticed a very nice mountain bike that had been recovered from the blackberry bushes by construction workers preparing for the equivalent of our small town's Big Dig (Bostonians, we are definitely not vying for your record). After consulting with the hard hats, we decided to call the LAW and report it. We ourselves had come home from a honeymoon trip to discover that our Kona had been lifted, so thinking that in a karmic world, helping to return another fracture-creating toy would help us.

We were thanked and informed that the patrol would come up and pick it up......

wait for it.....

bike still there.....

Do any of you who are out there tirelessly searching the internet for pointless rambling discourse care to respond to the following questions:

1. What should we do next?
2. Is the bike being returned to us in a different form? Oh ,Buddhist and other Spiritual Fellowship friends, come on, give me your thoughts...
3. We know our small town is not a hotbed of celebrity high-speed chases and AIG money-laundering (I mean SPA trips), so since we live about two minutes away from the police station we are curious about what activity could have prevented a quick stop.....Do we complain? Do we post a rant? Do we worry that this inattention to friendly citizen involvement and concern portends worse inefficiency?

4. Do we get a new bike?

Pinky on Nuclear Medicine

Deep in the bowels of the UW Medical Center lurk the hearts and souls of badge-wearing, white-coated, lab rats, eager to inject you and strap you down to machines only saved from medieval metaphor by the obvious GE logos emblazoned across their humming sides.

Since I had never been subjected to bone scanning of the radioactive variety before, I came prepared with my usual curiousity (flavored by a little bit of fear and tons of frustration that nobody can seem to decide what to do with the tear/fracture/cyst in my left wrist-let's just blame mountain-biking in Colorado). For me, curiosity manifests as questions and the insatiable need to SEE what they are looking at behind the curtain.

So, at 10 am I get an IV and get what looks like a horse syringe filled with unpronounceable isotopes plugged into my right arm....then, of course, I get strapped to the mobile device-thingey for 10 minutes to check the positioning. I get to come back after a brief interlude (you can go in secret places in the hospital if you have an IV shunt hanging out of your arm...bwa ha ha, rubber gloves, anybody?) and then they look again.

The lag between the injection and positioning and actual "reading" of the results is SIX HOURS.....With my trusty Blackberry and the newest Gregory McGuire book tucked at my side, I began to roam. (Yes, bossman....I was checking emails, making calls, etc.....while I was exploring.)

Since UW is in the heart of Starbuck's country, I had several choices of venue from where I could acquire the non-fat latte addiction of choice and then venture forth. After my first experience with the hand surgeon (unnamed but he worked on the Husky QB thumb fracture), I was eager to see if evasive, horrid bedside manner was actually TAUGHT at the school itself . One research obstacle that I had to overcome was that it is impossible to tell in a 2 billion acre medical center which of the scrub/white-coat/badge wearing personnel are doctors, students, or janitors. The camaflage was stupendous. I am dressing like a doctor/student/janitor for Halloween. I think it will take twenty years of my age. Most folks who didn't appear to be patients DID appear to be between the ages of 12 and 23. I thought it took YEARS to even become a resident.

Even more All-Hallow's Eveish is that you can pretty much go anywhere in the hospital without being challenged.....if you have a shunt in your arm and stride with purpose. From mystery book reading, I am sure there are medical centers more labyrinthine, but I would enter the basement of UW in any B-horror movie location hunt. Any double door you go through leads you to a corridor that involves a hook to the left or right. I have always wondered what is in the space between the corridors and I still don't know, but I am sure it has a GE logo. Things hum really loudly or they thunk. It is very cold and the flourescent lights flicker and die. Sometimes, you accidentally hit the right double-door hallway hook combination and arrive in an atrium area. Then you get Starbucks.

This was like an on-line fantasy game from my wildest nightmares. And, I was radioactive. And they told me that a RADAR gun would pick me up. I asked one security officer if he would try and zap me as I ran back and forth across the crosswalk; he was spectacularly not amused.

Pinky on Politics

We've been watching Obama's McCain roast at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner. What a blessed relief from repetitive messages of the past month. And, what an opportunity to get in some of the digs that we have all been thinking without making Obama appear as bitter as McCain. Pinky particularly enjoyed the not-so-subtle but appropriate jabs at McCain's age......

So, if you havent' seen it, I've embedded it for your amusement...

The Beginning

It has been an inauspicious beginning to our foray into the social networking sub-category blogging. I'm struggling a little bit with necessary demographics both in terms of my profile and the audience with whom I want to interact.....not that I want to be exclusionary, just that I am exploring this medium somwhat curiously rather than ambitiously. We'll see how this works....Right, Pinky?