Happy Holidays!!
I welcome change, though I also like the basic patterns of my life to stay the same. I go into more depth on my health later (consider yourself warned!), but since I wrote last year’s missive things have not gone as well as usual. After leaving Tanzania early, I decided to work some in the USA, principally so I could get some up to date references for future employment (ha!), and I had to settle for a less than optimal position in Waycross, GA from February through April. During that time I had one of the highlights of the year: we kids surprised my mom the weekend of her 75th birthday in March by all coming home. I flew in on Friday and hid out at my sister Kelly’s, then snuck upstairs while the rest went in my parents’ house. I reenacted a tradition of running down the steps at the last minute on Sunday morning for Mass (I enjoyed that aspect of it far more than anyone else). It was a really nice weekend; a lot went into it, as we got her sisters (except one) to come and reminisce and eat too much. Just before that my mother found out her mitral heart valve was bad enough to need surgery. Just before THAT, I found out about a job in Northumberland, 11 miles from Danville, which sounded good. I got that job and got home from Georgia the day after her surgery. I wasn’t required to do too much as she did great initially, but it was helpful for everyone to have me around (for once). It was the first time I’ve worked from home; I must say I didn’t always like it, but I sucked it up at times (not that often, M&D) for the greater good (I think I had to reach some sort of record for eyeball rolling dealing with my parents and their peccadilloes). Because of my knee, it was the worst summer I’ve had: almost no adventures. The only other highlight was I endowed, in honor of my parents 50th wedding anniversary, the Dr. Terence and Sandra O’Rourke Scholarship in perpetuity at Moravian College (a story immortalized in the most recent Moravian College Magazine). That requires much more than pocket change, but since I had regular work and didn’t spend as much as I’d planned while in Tanzania, I was able to swing it.
Now I am back in New Zealand and only have my own peccadilloes (and those of the Kiwi medical system – sigh!) to roll my eyes about. I returned to Waimate (Why-matty), as they really needed some help. I will be here until the end of the year and then will head up to Coromandel (it is supposed to be REALLY nice there) for the first 5 weeks of 2012. If all goes as planned, Greg Wright will arrive then and we will have a rollicking journey around Australia and New Zealand before I head back.
It was a drag being away for Thanksgiving again; at least this year I had that Thursday off and I was able to go on a much tougher hike here in honor of the traditional morning hike that starts at 209 West Market. I hope to gradually get back to my running and may lower my standards a bit from now on, as it really stinks to be injured and it costs a lot to have surgery.
Good Music: *****Powderfinger, ITunes Live – Sunsets Farewell Tour; ****Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks “Mirror Traffic”; *****Fountains of Wayne, “Sky Full of Holes”; ****Buffalo Tom, “Skins”; ***J Mascis, “Several Shades of Why”; ****The Naked and Famous, “Passive Me, Aggressive You”; ****REM, “Collapse into Now”; ****Social Distortion, “Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes”; *****Todd Snider, “Live: The Storyteller”; I also found out my friend Van Wagner’s CDs could be purchased on iTunes and bought 5 of them: “Be a Tree,” “Lost in the Mountains,” “North of 80,” “Shikellamy,” and “Woolrich Coat.” They are all excellent (I have a review posted for each one. Van told me they sound like a professor wrote them. Then he coughed and said something that sounded like “NERD!”). I just saw Kiwi prodigy Hayley Westenra in concert and her new CD “Paradiso”, made with Italian music legend Ennio Morricone, is absolutely beautiful.
Books I read and recommend (these are NOT all the books I read – just the good ones): Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church by Jason Berry (a bit too long, but important); The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson (very clever); Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges; Private Life by Jane Smiley (a very nice historical novel); Conservatives Without Conscience by John Dean (I would say this was the most important book I read all year, as it explained why so many political figures and their supporters act the way they do – the quotes I saved from it would fill pages); The Plundered Planet: Why We Must- and How We Can – Manage Nature for Global Prosperity by Paul Collier; A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace; Reread Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky; The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II by John Cornwell; The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel by Arthur Phillips (a must for Shakespeare fans – I am ambivalent); Padre Pio Under Investigation by Francesco Castelli, and I will likely have finished Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects (everyone should read some Chomsky, I have found) before I send this out.
Most years I include a (somewhat?) boastful account of my physical status. I was looking forward to building on some changes in 2011; instead I had my worst year health-wise since I lost nearly 10 pounds (10% of my weight) with diarrhea and vomiting in 8th grade (I was never taken to the doctor). After struggling with some minor injuries at the beginning of the year, I developed stiffness and pain in my left knee while in Georgia. I ran despite it for a while, but then got an MRI, which showed a complicated degenerative medial meniscus tear, saw an orthopedist, and eventually had an arthroscopy on August 11 after failing again to train through it. For two weeks before the surgery I had benign positional vertigo – I learned to treat myself with a well-positioned pillow and have not had that since. I had my worst allergies ever as well (Georgia!!). Unfortunately I think the surgery accomplished almost nothing: I have more pain now than I had before it. To my credit, I’ve dealt with it all well. I have cranked up my incredibly hard non-running workouts more and more to stay fit and keep my weight down until I can resume running every day again. Nothing compares favorably to running for me; I will never understand why so few people seem to enjoy it (because they do it wrong? Because they might have spent the time since freshman year of high school injured, recovering from an injury, or about to be injured?).
From a local Danville want ad: FREE FIREWOOD. Must cut down tree and haul away yourself.
Living people I would most like to have a conversation with: Wendell Steavenson (if you don’t know who this is, you will be surprised if you google the name), Fiona Apple, Daniel Johns, Garry Wills, Chris Hedges, John Dean, Jill LePore, Dexter Filkins, Jon Krakauer.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of propaganda in the USA, especially while watching my nephew play with his GI Joes. I know since I have been self-aware I have been hammered constantly about the great honor of dying for my country, the excitement and accomplishments of soldiers, and how we have to fight for this and that. For several years of my life I was prepared to give up my life (though not to take the life of others) for this country. Now I know it is all a monumental load of crap. Who has died for anything bigger than the safety of the humans around him/her at the time, all of them there for no good reason as well? No one wants to die for a meaningless cause, so we are all constantly lied to about national interests, our freedoms, and the actual costs. There is nothing worse than war, and nothing worth it. We will be paying for all our current conflicts for the next 50+ years, both in cash and the human misery of our veterans and their families. Unfortunately, this issue is not limited to the USA, has been prevalent throughout human existence, and it is likely to never go away, especially as oil gets harder to extract and potable water scarcer (THE issue in the next 50 years, especially if FRACKING is widespread). I just bought Winning the War Against War, so maybe there is some hope.
The Crankiest 47 Year Old:
I am boycotting all movies that include the following plot devices: Time travel; Body switching: Marijuana smoking; Getting so drunk and/or high you can’t remember what you did the night before; Adam Sandler. Karaoke scenes are discouraged, but I will tolerate another rappin’ granny (only without the Sandler).
From now on, when the President or the Congress want to declare war or send soldiers into harm’s way, there should be a referendum of all voting age adults: everyone in favor of fighting will have the entire bill for the fighting split up amongst them, so the blood is not longer on all of our hands.
The problem with a representative democracy is finding qualified and ethical representatives. Wanting to run for national office should automatically disqualify whoever is interested. Much as I hate the concept overall, we need publicly funded national elections, all “first to the post” without primaries, and campaigns restricted to a shorter period, say 6-8 weeks (even if it takes a constitutional amendment to make it possible). This would cause a few problems, true, but it would solve so many terrible ones it would be worth it. (psst – It will never happen)
There was a lawsuit filed this year in Georgia to end reimbursement discrimination against primary care physicians (we generally get far less for our time than specialists). While I agree with this suit in principle, I think the result should be specialists get paid what we do (I make plenty of money) rather than paying us more; their hourly reimbursements need to drop immensely to make the future costs of medicine affordable.
Why do managers (usually) make so much more money than the people they manage? They don’t produce anything, and anyone who’s worked for a manager knows they don’t make as much difference as having an extra person doing something would. Modern management boils down to getting people to do more work for less money without doing an obviously terrible job = the American way.
There is a reason public sector workers have gotten generally nice benefit packages: their jobs can be terrible, and the only way to get someone competent to do them is to promise them a good retirement and health benefits (same with the military – don’t get me started on how much our men and women in the services have been lied to). Most of our government employees are startlingly competent. We all have seen highway workers standing around and can recall slacker teachers from our youth, but teaching, for example, is extremely important, and it is a hard job, even if you get summers off. I sure don’t want to trade, and being a doctor can annoy the crap out of me. The best way to get better teachers, or any type of worker, is to pay them more, whether by merit pay, good benefits, or some other scheme, not by making them out to be villains.
Things I keep forgetting when I decide to return to New Zealand:
- No matter how many times you ask them about the things they have come to see you for, half the patients keep one thing secret until you stand up to usher them out. It is usually the most important thing to them.
- Somewhere between 10-20% of the patients every day come just to get papers filled out to get them money for not working. Sometimes this is the secret thing.
- The GPs in New Zealand are expected to print everything out to be signed in their office/exam room. There are two different sizes of paper for forms and prescriptions. I have to change the paper in my printer around 40 times a day.
- The people who work at the New Zealand Medical Council aren’t worthy to have a horse tail hanging over them.
- The slang! I hate the term “Brekkie.” That refers to greasy breakfast sandwiches and is used way too much with too much enthusiasm for something so foul. Same with “heaps” (you’ll save heaps at the big sale!); “wee” (Just a wee favor to ask); “Sweet as” (Me: “This antibiotic will have you starting to feel better in 48 hours.” Teenage patient: “Sweet as.”; “lollies” (any kind of sweet), and now, “prezzies” (what you give someone for Christmas).
- The people are decades behind US trends: kids (and adults) still have rat-tails/mullets; short shorts on men (with dark socks, often as part of their work uniform); scooters abound.
- I tell the staff at the office there is no need for speed limits or enforcement of them: there are so many campervans going 20km below the posted limit to be overtaken you can never average above the limits (especially during the Rugby World Cup).
- While the sheep are famously ubiquitous, another species runs rampant: cats!!! They are roaming all over. One of them comes in my garage every time I leave the garage door open and walks on my windshield. Grrrrr.
- The extra letters in their words, especially diagnoses I have to code: anaemia, hypoxaemia, oedema; and their spellings of medications: amoxycillin, aciclovir, oestradiol (even my spell-checker keeps changing them as I write this – these lists could otherwise be oendless).
Things I love about New Zealand (I am not always complaining here):
- The yogurt/yoghurt is awesome: so many choices and gigantic containers
- Tim Tams: the best mass-produced cookie-based snack in the world.
- EFTPOS – like an ATM card only much better. And the banks pay you a thing called “interest” (4%!!) for saving your money with them.
- The best muesli in the world (Hubbards Berry Berry Nice – I <3 u!)
- The wallabies at Victoria Park (near my office).
- They recycle everything possible – my recycling bucket weighs much more than my trash each week.
- Drug-seekers and prescription drug abuse almost unheard of.
- No snakes, ever, and no predators.
Streaks: Rosary: just passed the 5 year mark for praying it daily. I have not vomited since approx. March of 1993 – 18.5 years.
Quotes:
One of the great features of a Kindle is you can highlight passages in books and magazines and save them to a folder that organizes them for you. While I don’t absolutely agree with everything compiled here, and I realize this makes a very long document obscenely long, they are all intriguing, including the ones from me I have mixed in. I have put this at the end, as I know most of you will not make it this far.
“That’s the way most New Zealanders drive.” Me, in reply to an elderly Kiwi patient, who, during a vision test for his driver’s license renewal, said he thought I asked him to cover both eyes.
“We have an ethical responsibility to bequeath to unborn generations either the natural assets bequeathed to us, or other assets of equivalent value.” Paul Collier
“I read the owner’s manual and followed the instructions.” Me, to my anesthesiologist, when he commented on how healthy I was.
“Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a] few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones.” Albert Einstein, explaining why he was a socialist, in 1949
“’Women can be extremely cruel to each other.’ The idea that the world would be ‘sweetened’ if women ran it is preposterous, she says.” Christine LaGarde, the current IMF Chief, in an interview before accepting that position.
“More than the divides of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate. This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture.” Chris Hedges
“I’m used to functioning at a level just below a superhero.” Me, griping about my health problems to Kerry Smith.
“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” Chris Hedges.
“It’s coming out like hot lava.” Megan, while emptying her food-poisoned colon in the bathroom sink of the posh wedding shop in “Bridesmaids”, the funniest movie since Monty Python.
“Blind faith in illusions is our culture’s secular version of being born again. These illusions assure us that happiness and success are our birthright.” Chris Hedges.
“The reason “anonymous Republican” does well in the polls is the actual Republicans (running for President, in this case, but may hold true without that clarification) are all jackasses.” Me, in a comment to the NY Times. This comment was deemed inappropriate and not published despite its readily proven accuracy. I have since gotten away with referring to them as “a bunch of fools.”
“People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence, and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders. They are the ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is “attractively packaged.” Wendell Berry
“One will search in vain for evidence of the superior understanding and abilities of those who have a major influence on policy.” Noam Chomsky
“After the Republican whip, Jon Kyl, of Arizona, said on the floor of the Senate that abortion constitutes ‘well over ninety percent of what Planned Parenthood does,’ Planned Parenthood reported that abortions make up less than three percent of its services, whereupon a Kyl staffer offered that what Kyl said “was not intended to be a factual statement.”!!!!!!!!!!
“There is a hint of cedar, more obvious wood smoke, with the essence of peeled grapes. But mostly I smell like a hobo.” Me, on getting a whiff of myself, as I drove back from my Thanksgiving Day hike.
“Over the years the campaigns have had two primary enemies: unions (naturally) and government. The antigovernment campaigns have to be nuanced and sophisticated (not a characteristic of any aspect of current Republican presidential poseurs, Ed.), because the “architects of policy” understand very well the need for a powerful state that intervenes massively in the economy and abroad to ensure that their own interests are ‘most peculiarly attended to.’ The goal of sophisticated business propaganda is to engender fear and hatred of government among the population, so that they are not seduced by subversive notions of democracy and social welfare, while maintaining support for the powerful nanny state for the rich…”Noam Chomsky
“The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. As Immanuel Kant wrote, moral autonomy is possible only through reflection, self-determination, and the courage not to cooperate. Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its coded attacks on the liberal institutions and ‘leftist’ professors, have really set out to destroy.” Chris Hedges.
The more things change, the more they stay the same:
“Look at the exhausted Treasury; the paralyzed government; the unworthy representatives of a free people; the desperate contests between the North and South; the iron curb and brazen muzzle fastened upon every man who speaks his mind, even in that Republican Hall, to which Republican men are sent by Republican people to speak Republican truths – the stabbings, and shootings, and coarse and brutal threatenings exchanged between Senators under the very Senate’s roof – the intrusion of the most pitiful, mean, malicious, creeping, crawling, sneaking party spirit into all transactions of life.” Charles Dickens, to a friend, after he viewed a session of the US Congress debating the budget in 1842. It must have been quite session, even for the Congress.
“It is impossible to any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and practice. Look at them at home; you will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves.” Anthony Trollope’s mother, after traveling through America in the 1820s.
“Senator James Reed, of Missouri, told the lobbyists that ‘Birth Control is chipping away the very foundation of our civilization,’ that ‘women should have many children and that poverty is no handicap but rather an asset’ at a 1926 meeting about birth control in Washington.
“In the House, Representative George H. W. Bush, of Texas, said, ‘We need to make family planning a household word. We need to take the sensationalism out of the topic so it can no longer be used by militants who have no knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program, but rather are using it as a political stepping stone.’ From 1968
Thanks again to everyone who makes my life possible and so enriching. I owe so much to my mother and father I cannot come close to breaking even (even running their Netflix and mom’s Facebook from here), and my physical condition would have been much worse without Chris’s basement gym and Kelly’s bike and trainer. I got to visit the Wrights, always a favorite stop, in January, Ollie and Heather Wagner in March, The Spells in April (and those who came to their party), Dr. Bob and Mrs. Albertini on Hilton Head in April as well, and Matthew and Niru Abraham (with the much beloved Aby and Shoba) in August, but otherwise didn’t get around much( um, for me, I guess). One of my few rounds of golf was a great day with Joe Hoffmeier at Saucon Valley. I have enjoyed spending time with Selwyn and Sue Long in Waimate (no one could adequately explain rugby to me, but they’ve tried while sharing a love of chocolate and cashews), and Tim and Janet Fletcher, who just stopped by on their travels (one must give “props” to anyone who visits Waimate). I apologize to anyone I might have missed.
I hope to hear from you, and I have to ask that anyone who might have stopped praying for me after I mentioned you could spend your prayer time on someone who needs it more in last year’s letter, please resume doing what you can for me. I can trace all my problems in the last 12 months to that single sentence….
All the best!!!!
Terry O’Rourke