INTERESTING TIMES

 "'If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.'"

--John Irving, "The World According to Garp."

Medicine is "like working in an auto repair shop," writes veteran internist Brendan Reilly. "You listen to what the car owner says; you ask him some questions; you listen carefully to his answers; and then you look under the hood. People today think medicine is all about technology -- DNA tests and MRI scans and robotic surgery. But it isn't. There's an age-old, tried-and-true method to clinical medicine, and there's nothing mysterious or high-tech about it. It's grunt work.... If you shortcut the grunt work you'll screw up the job."

I hold the most archaic values on earth; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.
--Gary Snyder

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

--BY ROBERT HAYDEN

You make a living
by what you earn;
you make a life
by what you give.
--Winston Churchill

At least, that's what I heard on the radio. Whenever I hear that "Everybody" says something, I am immediately suspicious. Everybody? OK then, what jobs do we want? Jobs with health insurance, and a paycheck, right? How about a desk, a telephone, and a computer? A window? A coffee maker? Boy now we're talking about the kind of job I could go for. But is that really what we need? I mean WHAT DO WE NEED?

I think we need a bunch of adventurous entrepreneurs to figure out what it is that we really need, and get busy developing the means of production. I went to naturopathic medical school because I see natural medicine as a sustainable and beneficial profession in which I can continue to serve no matter what the economic condition of my community. I am going to offer my assistance, and I trust that my knowledge and service will be of adequate value to allow me to live a good life.

I don't want a job!!! Jobs for me have been dead ends, places where I can get comfortable while my life drains away doing someone else's work. When do I get to do MY work? To be creative? To do my good for the world?? I saw this culture headed for the brink a long time ago. And it's still headed that way. I want to create a window to a better future.

What do we really need after all? A safe and comfortable place to call our own. It doesn't have to be fancy. We all need shelter, somewhere to keep our pillow and toothbrush. We all need fresh water, and good food, and we all need touch and love. That's about it! Jobs and insurance are figments of this paradigm that's headed for the drink.

( today's news: U.S. poverty rate rises to 15.1 percent, number of uninsured Americans hits record high  )

If you are a woman, especially. Women are more likely to be described as "cooperative, affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, nurturing, tactful or agreeable", and it turns out the last thing you want is for someone to sing those praises for you in a recommendation letter. Why? Well researchers at Rice University did a study in which they took the personal pronouns out of recommendation letters. The readers couldn't tell if the applicant was male or female. They controlled for all the concrete academic reasons that a person might be selected, or not, in a medical and academic field, meaning that the letters were sorted as to be equal in that regard. Then they asked "who would you hire"? The answer was that the people hired would be the ones described as "confident, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, daring, outspoken and intellectual". And those words of course were more often applied to men. If you apply those words to a woman, you're practically calling her a bitch in our culture. So women can't win. No big news there, but the lesson is clear. We can influence our reference letter writers to use a different paradigm in speaking about us, and get hired more.

SOURCE
http://www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/news2010-11-09-letters.shtml

You'll never crush your own mediocrity working only four hours a week.
--Robert Bruce, poet

Think of your biggest personal goal
Don’t tell anyone what it is
Telling goal makes it less likely to happen
Work to achieve goal is needed
If you tell and it is acknowledged, the mind is tricked into thinking it is already done
(I think this depends on the rxn of the person responding: if they congratulate you on your awesome plans, that is what tricks your brain, but if they talk with you about the hard work and long road ahead, this may not happen)
so you have less motivation to complete the work
This goes against conventional wisdom that our friends will help hold us to our goals
People who talked about goal didn’t work as long and felt closer
Delay gratification of social gratification
Say it in a way that gives no satisfaction or stay mum.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/947