Obligatory 9/11-esque post

Driving to Virginia Beach for Sunday’s half-marathon, we passed a stretch of highway near the Pentagon that’s been renamed the “9/11 Fallen Heroes Memorial Highway,” or something like that. I can’t stress how stupid I find this to be. My friend Dave, who’s much smarter than I am, spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the way in which our memory of past events changes as the cultural landscape changes. He’s spent a lot of time at the Shanksville memorial site, doing research for what I’m sure will be a brilliant book, and he’s watched how the dialogue surrounding those events has shifted. I don’t want to scoop, so I won’t say anything else, but here’s what I think:

 

Some people did heroic things on that day. Fire fighters in lower Manhattan. The people on flight 93 who fought back rather than allow themselves to be turned into a missile. But most of the 3000 or so dead people aren’t heroes –they were victims of a terrible crime. They didn’t do anything heroic that day: they woke up and went to work. If they had done something heroic or extraordinary, their deaths would be, paradoxically, a lot more ordinary. Their deaths are extraordinary and terrifying because they were doing something utterly ordinary on that Tuesday morning.

 

 

So, google+ is gonna shame me into blogging again.

Yup. Let’s try to do this right for the 9^th time or whatever…

Having half the summer off made things fly by in a hurry. I read a couple of great books – in especial Felix Gilman’s “The Half-Made World,” for which no linked reviews will be provided. It’s a fantasy/sci-fi book, and I don’t read a lot of those, so I can’t really judge it from the standpoint of whether it’s successful within its genre. But as storytelling, it’s dazzling. It’s sort of an alternate history of America, with a touch of magical realism lending a lot of weight to the use of archetypes. The mythic West, about which much ink has been spilled, is actually literally unmade: land is “made,” or formed, I suppose, by the sustained presence of humans. Humans name things, and keep the landscape from being quite so inconstant (to pilfer a phrase from Auden.) Far out West, at the furthest point you can travel, land, sea, and sky are inseparable. We become familiar with three distinct factions, more or less: you have The Line, which razes the natural world in its thirst for oil and what it defines as “progress.” You have the terrifying and bloodthirsty Gun, which recruits characters that have Waitsian names like Dandy Fanshawe, to do its bidding – which is mostly to kill and terrorize the men of The Line. And way back when, there was a honest to goodness republic buried somewhere, a society which believed in order, laws, and peace.

Anyway, the book is great fun – the writing is terrific, the characters are all compelling, the archetypal subjects are familiar – native Americans, early Christians, abolitionists - and there’s a pleasant haziness there that keeps some of the images just beyond the edges of what you can imagine. For example, we never quite get a clear sense of what the Engines that drive the Line look like, nor do we understand how the spirits that constitute Gun exist, or where they exist. Anyhoo, I understand a sequel is in the works, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.  

Stephen Malkmus came out with a new album, and you should listen to it.

I also developed a bit of a musical crush on Jessica Lea Mayfield.

Also, everyone had babies.

And that about catches you up on 2011 so far. More on thesis, school, and other things to follow.

I had gin and tonics at lunch.

So, when a coworker asked me if Ms. Abstract and I were thinking of kids, I responded that, to date, our copulatory activities are still largely recreational, and not necessarily goal-oriented.

 

On being immersed in genetics

Grad school has been a huge time-drain, which is why I rarely get a chance to post anything anymore. Every now and then, a half-hearted attempt, but nothing really comes of it.

Still! Quite a story from the other night. I've been taking a class on genetics and related ethical issues – a strange class, with two policy students, some staff from the university's genetic counseling center, and about 10 med students. It's been a terrific experience, largely because the class delivers on the ethical side, and also because I'm learning a lot about genetics.

Put simply, genetic testing can raise a number of issues, none of them with easy solutions. The first thing that makes genetic information unique is that it typically gives you information about more than just yourself: it gives you information that might have clinical utility for your relatives. In some cases, you relatives may not want to know the information that is conveyed. If your maternal grandmother died of breast cancer at an early age, and if one of your uncles had prostate cancer, you might think it's reasonable to find out if your mom's side of the family carries the BRCA mutation. But say your mom refuses to get tested for it – for whatever reasons (good or lousy – she remembers her own mom's battle with cancer and would prefer not to know, or she's generally afraid of the process, or whatever) – but you want to find out. Well, if you test positive for the mutation, and if there's no cancer on your dad's side, you know that your mom has the mutation. She still doesn't want to know? Fine, you don't have to tell her. But what do you tell her if you opt for a radical bilateral mastectomy as a preventive measure? In a sense, it's impossible for you to make an autonomous decision about your own genetic health without somehow infringing her sovereignty too.

That being said, BRCA testing is fairly simple and fairly straightforward. The mutation is known; once a family is known to be at risk for the mutation, it's easy to do relatively cheap tests on the family to figure out who has the mutation and who doesn't. Once you know your BRCA status, you can decide whether you want to, say, get on with having kids so that you can have your ovaries removed before turning 35 (despite being named for BReast CAncer, BRCA confers a much higher risk of ovarian cancer.) You may opt to go the Christina Applegate route. You may do both, just one, or neither.

Other kinds of testing that are equally deterministic are similarly straightforward. Huntington's…that's the one everyone goes back to. If you have the mutation, by your mid-40s, you will begin to show symptoms of the disease, which is devastating and inexorable, and arguably one of the best arguments for the availability of physician-assisted suicide. Wanting to know if you have the mutation can be empowering or terrifying. Unlike breast cancer, where genetic mutations account for only about 10% of new cases, Huntington's pentrance (the link between the mutation and the disease) is basically 100%.

Finally, there's information that's not deterministic at all. For example, genetic mutations for Alzheimer's disease would tell you that you have a 55% chance of developing Alzheimer's – not much better than a coin toss. (Oddly, there are studies showing that people with some of these mutations are more likely to buy life insurance and long term care insurance, neither of which are protected by the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.)

Anyway, clearly the stuff is interesting, and as a spectator, I was excited to attend a patient panel (cruelly scheduled at the same time the university would be handing out tickets to the president's kinda-meh speech about energy policy yesterday morning.) Except, after hearing a couple of touching stories from cancer survivors and pre-vivors (eg, someone with a BRCA mutation who has never had cancer but has still opted for the bilateral mastectomy), we were treated to the sound of this dramatic, conceited, self-righteous doc with a family history of diffuse gastric cancer prattle on about how the only right decision to make, in the face of a genetic mutation, is to cut whatever it is out. She actually told another panelist struggling with Lynch syndrome, who had already undergone a partial colectomy, to "use it or lose it." In reference to her uterus. The panelist who wanted not to use or lose her uterus was a sweet woman, in her early 30s, who desperately wants a child before undergoing the procedure. She is single, and painfully aware of the menacing ticking clock in her life, but she has chosen to manage her heightened risk by increasing the frequency of her colonoscopies and uterine biopsies. Another panelist, who had delayed her oopherectomy and mastectomy for as long as possible, acknowledged the doc's strident position by quipping, "Well, apparently I'm screwed."

Probably unintentional, but the panel illustrated, vividly, what several studies have shown: that doctors are much more directive (ie, much more likely to approach genetic results with a perception that there is a right and a wrong course of action to be taken as a result of the test) than genetic counselors are. If this were an academic blog, I'd provide you with references, but it's not, so you just have to believe me when I tell you that, when it comes to genetics, doctors get a lot of basic information wrong (eg, whether men in a BRCA family are at increased risk for anything – they can be, if they have the mutation, as can their offspring, etc) and are more likely to try to get you to do something, with little regard for your own ability to make autonomous decisions about risks and trade-offs.

The phrase “rags to riches”

I was, to my chagrin, watching an episode of "Storage Wars" the other night – a show whose mere existence still confounds me – when the resident dickhead on the show said that he wanted to name his business "Rags to Riches," after his own life-story, you see. They then flashed a picture of his childhood home, which was…pretty nice, all things considered. Rather than rags to riches, his journey seems to have been more of a "lower middle class to perhaps upper middle class-ish."

More recently, perhaps, I've been chagrined by Speaker Boehner's characterization of his own childhood (the one that so often causes him to weep.) He was one of a gajillion kids, and he worked in his dad's bar. Now, from my vantage point, being the son of a small business-owner in a tiny Ohio town seems like a pretty good family to be born into. Just because you had to share a bathroom with the gajillion kids your parents kept having (because they were either (a) too ignorant to use contraception, or because (b) they want the kids for either free labor or a preferential tax treatment) doesn't mean you were raised in abject poverty.

I would posit that being in a single-parent family, and then managing to attend a prestigious university followed by an Ivy league law school on your way to becoming president of the country is a tad bit more impressive (Clinton, Obama.) But my point here isn't to compare Boehner's biography to that of two former presidents – it's to point out that more and more, the type of self-mythologizing that allows an individual to believe that everything they have acquired in life has been acquired solely through their own hard work and dedication, and that none of it is the result of existing power structures, institutional biases, etc, is one of the most dangerous ideas in political discourse today.

Bill Gates is a popular example of true "rags to riches," but I'm not sure the rags were so raggy in his case (although the riches certainly are richy.) I think that, in all probability, the closest true occurrence of a rags to riches story comes from the world of sports. Terrell Owens, Michael Vick? Terrible humans, in all probability, but they come out of a type of poverty – a setting – that most of us cannot imagine. The rags are there, and so are the riches. (This is doubly true for, say, a Brazilian athlete who makes the national team, or who gets to play in Europe. The amount of work and adversity they face to make it as professionals makes the hardships of being a collegiate athlete seem…well, like first world problems, frankly.)

It might be the case that people are using this phrase as lazy shorthand for "my life-story is improbable." Which is dumb, because every life-story is improbable. But for Boehner not to realize that not going hungry, having dinner on the table every night, being raised in a loving family, and being assured work that would contribute to the family's wealth as a young teenager gave him and his siblings a tremendous institutional advantage over others is either disingenuous or delusional. And the fact that he hasn't been asked to clarify what about his journey is so remarkable seems negligent on the part of the media.

 

Fuck this year.

> All kinds of terrible things have happened this year.
>
> I am at MIA, with my mom and sister, about to board a plane to Rio. A few hours later, we'll be joined by my brother.
>
> I'll spend my birthday at a funeral for my grandmother, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack yesterday. She was supposed to be arriving in the U.S. this Sunday morning to spend the holidays with us. Instead, we have a few days there to do all the tedious and cruel legal shit that follows an unexpected death before scampering back to the U.S. to have a grandmother-less Christmas. After my last final, of course.
>
> I'm not a big birthday person. I don't ask for much. I would prefer, however, not to spend it in a cemetery in Niterói, giving my grandmother a place to rest next to her late husband.
>
> Repeat: fuck this year.

Of Election Results and Shame

The day after the midterms this year, I was in a weeklong meeting with people from a variety of different African nations. During these weeklong meetings, you tend to fall into a pleasant rhythm of amicable "ain't you tired of this thing too?" banter over a catered breakfast before spending the next 6 hours bashing your head repeatedly against a brick wall of language and document editing. The folks from Africa tell us what strange facet of America they've encountered via the airwaves the night before – "what exactly is it that the phrase 'G.O.P.' stands for? Who are they?" – or, "evidently, the issue of querying blood donors about polygamy isn't strictly an African problem! What is this 'Sister Wives' show I've seen?" – while those of us from the office try to provide answers and/or context.

The day after the election last month, our room was in a fairly distraught mood – not just because of the electoral teagasm, but partly because most of us in the room who live in the District aren't fans of Vincent Gray. The day before, he had given a smarmy speech with Marion Barry standing directly beside him. Gray ran a kind of unnecessarily divisive campaign against the incumbent, Fenty, who most people think did a pretty decent job (even if he came across as kind of an arrogant prick.) Gray made several insinuations that under Fenty, life in the city hadn't improved for all voters, and that it was time for a boom that would help the wards that were being left behind. Like I said, unnecessarily divisive from a racial standpoint, and demonstrably untrue from a spending standpoint.

This led of course to some of us explaining why Marion Barry was such an embarrassment to the city, and it may have even been implied that, for someone who had done very little to take care of his health, his longevity was fairly admirable if a tad irritating. This general subject of embarrassment then led to a comment about, sheesh, and now the teapeople will be representing the U.S. abroad, and their understanding of America is so dim that we have to wonder how they see the rest of the world.

"Embarrassing? You think you know embarrassment at your elected leaders?" asked one of the South Africans. Oh, right. Jacob Zuma now, Thabo Mbeki a few years ago. We nod and feel a little vexed to be making such a big deal out of a few teafolk. "And then there's L___!"

Indeed. Someone from Zimbabwe. She definitely has it worse, considering that Robert Mugabe is one of the worst people on the planet. Someone said, to alleviate the awkwardness, "I remember being in Zim in 1999, or so, and everyone was just so ecstatic because they thought…well, they thought he couldn't live much longer."

She answers, "Indeed, he is like your Marion Barry." After some more talk, she added a fairly somber thought – something to the extent of, "In Zimbabwe, you keep your head down and mind your own business. It's easy to die. It's very easy to die in Zimbabwe."

And that was all it took for us to realize that our problems are very much first-world problems. And this is in fact a helpful prism through which to view just about anything.

Example: My internet router at home needs to be powercycled more often than I'd like?

First world perspective: So, a box that gives me a fairly reliable and fast connection to the Internet from my expensive condo in a fairly posh neighborhood occasionally makes it so that I need to wait 30 seconds in order to get online with either my smartphone, one of my two laptops, or my ipad? It occasionally makes it difficult for me to stream some of the 600 gigs of media to a pair of expensive cherrywood speakers? Poor me. Life is SO difficult. I guess I'll simply retreat to the safety of my warm apartment, brew a pot of Peets coffee, and eat some of the abundant leftovers stored in my fridge, while I contemplate how difficult it is to be me.

Example: Drivers are so mean to pedestrians when it's snowing or raining!

First world perspective: Oh heavens! The well-paved streets on which I walk (safely at most times of day or night, I might add), to get to a form of public transit that, while flawed, is still better than the public transit in all but a handful of American cities, in order to get to my well-paid job in a building that is secure, where I have virtually all of the resources I need to perform the tasks assigned to me, are occasionally populated by inconsiderate drivers who occasionally fail to pause a complete beat at a stop sign for me to cross. LIFE IS SO UNFAIR.

It's kind of a big day for Fluminense.

Here's hoping that in a few hours, I'm crying tears of joy. Not like that other time.

Another chapter of...The Trumpeter Chronicles

I’m in the office kitchen, rinsing off a Tupperware container – still burping up Banana Leaves’ awesome baba tofu curry – when in walks the Trumpeter.

“So, did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” Trying to shift the conversation away from me while saying as little as possible, I say, “Yes, it was lovely. How was yours?”

“Well, [husband] and I went to a restaurant, and we had a great time.” I let this sit. “So, no cooking at home for you? Like everyone else does?”  She quickly tries to explain that for her, Thanksgiving is “all about turkey.” She qualifies this in a way that suggests that she believes it is odd to insist on turkey on Thanksgiving. “So,” I ask, “they did a special Thanksgiving menu?” “Well, yes, but what’s most important, is that they also had all their regular items. Which was great, because we decided we should go back there some other time.”

I let this sink in. She didn’t go out with her husband to celebrate Thanksgiving at a restaurant she knows, or even a fancy one, given the way she dresses (bag lady chic.) She apparently didn’t even specifically go out seeking a Thanksgiving meal from a restaurant. She just went to some random restaurant, where they happened to be serving turkey. None of this is all that weird, I guess, but it’s hard to capture context. For example, as she’s telling me this, do you know what she’s doing? She’s microwaving leftover McDonald’s French fries. About a half a serving, I’d say. Did she really set aside the second half of her fries the night before and decide she’d get a lunch out of them?

Sigh.  

don't you love it when...

...you drive to a different part of town that you only visit every couple of years - ahem, the DC DMV inspection station on Half Street - and when you come back to your own part of town, everything looks slightly unfamiliar and different? I can't explain why this happens, but I always find it exhilarating.