My son the rock star

The List (Week One)

So the idea behind this post, which I hope to make a weekly event, is to write about a few things I'm currently enjoying, with the main goal being to get a response from friends/readers. I want to know what you think. Here are two examples of the sorts of things you can write: "I can't believe you willingly listen to that cacophonous excuse for music," or (with respect to my friend who unabashedly touts the supposed fine flavors found in Pabst Blue Ribbon): "Damned beer snob." Of course you can also agree with me, and you can always write more than one sentence.

Book: Girl Meets God (Lauren Winner). An ingenuous spiritual memoir about the author's journey from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity. While books of this sort (in my own experience, anyhow) seem to have a tendency towards preachiness and moving towards a steadfast conclusion of the rational/intellectual/moral (etc.) superiority of the particular author's new faith, Winner admirably manages to show deep love for and recognition of her insoluble connection to Judaism without undermining all that she has found compelling in Christianity. In other words, it is written in such a way as to be gratifying for a reader regardless of his/her own religious convictions, rather than just those of her own current religious sentiments. However, I'm only about halfway through the book . . . so I suppose this could all change in the next 150 pages.

Music: Destroyer's Rubies (Destroyer). This is one of those albums that I picked up a few months back, listened to for about a week, thought "this is pretty good, but I'm really into The Arcade Fire right now," and more or less forgot about it. I have quite a few albums like that. Most of them don't end up rising to the top of my playlist again. Destroyer's Rubies is a dense, lyrically poetic and musically complicated album, and when I first listened to it I somehow didn't find the tunes all that catchy (perhaps explaining why it got buried in the pile). As is apt to occur in the subjective world of aesthetic appreciation, however, when I started playing this album again a couple weeks ago I couldn't figure out what I'd been missing when I last gave it a listen. Whether due simply to increased familiarity with Dan Bejar's sound or to my having a more refined musical sensibility (um, yes), this record suddenly grabbed me and it's been playing relentlessly from my speakers ever since. Click here for a link to a couple songs from the album.

Food: Winter squash. Being the sort who enjoys a sense of aesthetic connection to the natural environment and hence to seasonal changes, I am currently into eating squashes. Jess and I have enjoyed many a baked acorn squash over the past six weeks, not to mention homemade butternut squash soup and (on the menu for this week) a butternut squash fettucini.



Drink: New Belgium 1554. New Belgium beers are among the very few microbrews that are not unreasonably difficult to obtain (or out of my price range) in this Anheuser-Busch dominated city. Hence, while I have never been all that excited about the ubiquitous Fat Tire Ale, I have come to enjoy some of New Belgium's other selections. Currently, as it is late Autumn, I've latched onto 1554, described by the brewery as a "black ale." While not my favorite New Belgium beer, it fits the weather.

The fam

Excuses

So I've finally joined the world of blogging,* and I thought it best to begin by explaining myself. Afterall, such an endeavor is inherently pretentious. It assumes my ramblings are worth proffering to the world at large, which admittedly is highly questionable. It is a dubious assumption for most people at most times (which hasn't deterred said "most people," given the plentitude of blogs clogging the world wide web). In my own case I think the choice to blog is particularly alarming given the negligible amount of time I have been able to spend thinking about anything not relating to the medical field these past couple years (fortunately I have no aspirations of writing about what I have--or have not--learned about medicine). All this to say, I will begin with the disclaimer that I make no promises as to the quality of my musings. They are really mainly for my own amusement and discipline, to give me an excuse--or motivation--to exercise the other side of my cerebrum (which I'm afraid has atrophied considerably in the last two years).

This leads me to further explanation of why I now have time to write (and presumably think). Due to the significantly extenuating circumstances of my wife being in Physician Assistant School, myself being in Medical School, and Haaken, our six-month-old, demanding more attention than the approximately 35 non-contiguous minutes a day that Jess and I weren't studying, eating, sleeping, or stuck in a hospital, I've decided to take a few months off school in order to provide a small bit of sanity to all three of our lives. So, as of October 27th I'm a free man (at least for several months). My life has gone from 80 hours a week at the hospital to 168 hours a week in which I am free to do as I please (as long as Haaken does it with me). So here I am at 8:00 on a Wednesday morning** enjoying my coffee, listening to Destroyer's Rubies, and writing while the kid is sound asleep. This is not so bad . . .

*Some readers may be aware that I have had a MySpace page for sometime. However, as this is decidedly lowbrow, I have decided to move on to the real and serious blogging world of Blogger. This means that I am now trying to say things that are important, and that I take myself much more seriously. Please keep this in mind as you read further posts. Also, I couldn't take those shameless True advertisements and their 11 million sexy singles any longer.

**I am now savoring the fact that if I were on the Surgery rotation that I was scheduled to be on had I not taken a leave-of-absence, I would have been at the hospital for 4 hours already. That's half of most people's work day . . .