Dr. Sour Puss

I was just finishing up my charting on a Friday evening and when I realized I was writing in volume IV of a patient's chart. It's a poor prognostic sign when your medical chart is measured by volume number. This got me thinking about other poor prognostic signs I'd seen recently. It's a poor prognostic sign when your white blood cell count is greater than your hematocrit. It's an especially poor sign if your respiratory rate is greater than your heart rate. We have health questionnaires that we send home to people to fill out before they come in for their preventative visit. Sometimes the forms come back after sitting at the patient's house, reeking of cigarette smoke. These forms then get filed in the patient's chart. It's a poor prognostic sign when your medical chart smells like cigarette smoke. It's a poor prognostic sign when your doctor sends you to a zoo for anything. "Doctor, I've lost 45 pounds and I've hardly had to change my d...

Ok, so I'm running at Green Lake yesterday and I come up to an intersection with a traffic light. The light changes red so I wait patiently, bouncing up and down on the corner. A car starts moving into the intersection, and in the middle of her own green light, she stops and waves at me to cross the street in front of her . Cars behind her are honking and I am using my most colorful language to remind her that she's come to a stop in the middle of an intersection . The light turns yellow and she can tell I am not going to cross in front of her, so she rolls down her window to give me this wounded look as if to say, "How could you refuse this beautiful act of kindness I have offered you" before driving off. Yeah, fuck you, lady. Only Seattle.

So despite spending most of my free time this winter training for a marathon, I did manage to get up to Stevens Pass last week. Stevens is 2 hours away in the Cascade mountains. We're having record snow this year. I went up with three of my best friends: Kim, Darius, and Kevin. Darius got a helmet cam for Christmas and we had some fun with it. Kim, Me, and Kevin Sometimes I just can't believe they serve alcohol at ski slopes. Especially to a guy like me who clearly looks like he's going to hurt himself out there. Marathon training update: I just finished my first half-marathon! And it felt really good! Check me out here.

So I had no idea what to expect. The 43rd district of the Washington State Democratic Party is known for being very active. I remembered going to the caucus in 2004 and to various meetings all held to strategize ways of unseating He Who Cannot Be Named. I was impressed and energized that so many in my own community were as outraged as me and it made me glad to call a place like Wallingford home. But this was 2008. I had my own fairly strong preference for presidential candidates and I knew Obama had a shot here; still, I hadn't seen any local polls, there were only a few posters around town for Obama, and I knew that the possibility of America's first woman president would galvanize a large segment of potential Democratic caucus-goers. My first clue came on Friday night. "Did you hear about the rally? Fil tried to go and couldn't even get near Queen Anne." "The same thing happened with my coworker, he said people were so packed outside that you could not move...

I just saw the film The Namesake , after having read the book last year. It is an incredibly moving story of an Indian man who comes to America as a graduate student and raises his family here where they struggle to balance their own cultural identity with the pressures of assimilating into the United States. The thing that is so remarkable about the story is actually that it is so unremarkable, having been repeated tens of thousands of times by many different Indian families, including my own adopted one. I think Mira Nair, the director (who also directed Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala, among other films) did it justice. She has such a way of capturing on film whatever it is that makes India such a beautiful, complex place. And she does this by portraying scenes on the street with a realism that is at once ordinary but also astonishing. So I finished reading the book Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts on the plane back from India. It's this mostly true story, ...

"Vasu-ana, what are you still doing here?" I was sitt ing in Shireesha's uncle's house in the village and was surprised to see that Vasu hadn't left for Chennai yet. The birthday party had been the day before and most people were planning on leaving early to get back to the city in the mor ning. Shireesha and I were going to stay and relax in the village for 2 more days. "You hadn't heard? Your uncle Munreddy died last night. He is your wife's, mother's, mother's cousin. V ery inauspicious for travel. Everyone is staying for the funeral today." "You can come," my uncle Mohan Reddy said with his loud and authoritative, yet broken, English. "Come, see our tradition for preparation of the dead person." "I don't know..." I said reluctantly. As a tall, loping, very Caucasian person in a remote farming village, my appearance at public events usually tended to become the focus of such events. During my first tri...

All over southern India you can find barefoot pilgrims from all walks of life travelling along the roads. Usually they are recognizable by their matching colored lunghis or the markings on their foreheads, sometimes they carry banners or sing songs. The decision to put yo ur job and family life on hold and walk barefooted to a sacred temple is actually fairly commonplace and pilgrims come from all socioeconomic groups. The major destinations in southern India include the Venkateshwara Temple in Tirupati , Andhra Pradesh , the Ayeppa Temple in Kerala , Kanyakumari at the southern tip of India, and this place, the Sri Meenakshi Temple in Madurai . The temple city has existed since antiquity but the current temple was built in the 1600s. There are references to the town and the rituals celebrated there in the writings of ancient Greek historians and many of the rites have been performed essentially unchanged continuously for over a thousand years. The temple has 12 of these tower...