Does this make me a kiss-ass?

During my travels with my CEO last November, I discovered that she has awesome taste in music. She likes more adventurous stuff than most people I know – for example, she loves loves loves Animal Collective, who I really like too but who I basically wouldn’t recommend to anyone, even people I know who have fairly complex musical tastes. She also really likes Bon Iver, who are definitely a more accessible group but still sort on the periphery of being mainstream. Anyway, I was all excited and asking her if she knew this that or the other, and she didn’t, so I was like, “That’s it – I’m making you a mix cd.” And I finally did. Does that make me a kiss-ass? Making a mix for your CEO? My position is that it would be a kiss-assy thing to do if Karen were like, “Oh, I’m really into polka,” and I ran off and did all this research to pretend I was into polka, and then made her a mix cd of stuff I didn’t really like. (Though in fact, I should hasten to point out that I don’t dislike polka, but my polka collection isn’t really deep. It basically consists of this album, and a couple of isolated tunes like the Bluegrass Sessions band doing “Polka on the banjo,” or Faith No More’s cover of “Das Shutzenfest.”

 

So, for now, I’m going with “I am not a kiss-ass.” Feel free to disagree.

 

Did you know that today, the greatest Internet thing ever took place? It’s true. Behold, the health policy valentine’s hashtag.

 

Speaking of health policy, I am at a loss to explain why patients in states enacting tort reform are sicker, across the board, in the post-tort year. Granted, I’m looking at hospitalizations, so I can conjecture that possibly there is some work on the front-end, on the intake side, that is being postponed till patients get sicker (which would support what proponents of torts say) but that this in fact creates an unexpected high demand on hospital services on the backend (since total charges are up across the board for post-tort years.) But my advisor is hardly sold, and he’s right, since I can’t really show that there’s any causality there.

 

This weekend, I have one very exciting thing to do: making 1554 ice cream. Other than that, I will be reading about the Abigail Alliance’s doomed quest to either increase last-resort access to experimental drugs by terminal patients or to undermine the whole structure randomized controlled clinical trials, depending on whose opinion you take a shine to, and struggling with nearest-neighbor-matching techniques. You know you are wishing you were me. But I mean the opposite of what I just said, so like Elaine’s version of bizarro Superman, I should live underwater, be black, and say “badbye” instead of “goodbye.”