Thursday, November 20, 2003

ok, i'm at the hospital, and i've been too lazy to figure out how to get wikieditish to work on my main blog, and i'm tired of trying to screw around with Mindterm and trying to run SSH from a web browser, so here i am.



in case you care, i'm doing my medicine sub-internship right now. this is typically the most grueling of all 4th year rotations, and, for the most part, it has been living up to the hype. luckily, however, i've managed to get rid of most of my patients (no potassium chloride involved. i'm no killer. at least not intentionally) so that i'm am experiencing the veritable calm before the storm.



i am on overnight call today.



i have this feeling that we are going to get crushed today, but i'm keeping my fingers crossed.



here's to the power of white clouds. c'mon, people, it's too nice of a day to get admitted.



heh.



maybe i should go and sacrifice some chickens.



"i don't practice santeria, i ain't got no crystal ball, if i had a million dollars, but i, i'd spend it all...."



gratuitous sublime reference.



blogstipation, baby. i haven't had the urge to move my bowels write in any of my multifarious blogs in quite a while now. on one hand, i've been quite busy. on the other hand, i have come under the grips of the paranoid superstitions that most internists have. the fine line between obsessive-compulsive disorder, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. (DSM-IV, smee-es-em-four)



seriously. i wonder about the intersection of physics and metaphysics (or is this paraphysics?) the scientific vis-a-vis the occult. (i have been reading way too much philip k. dick)



(EXCURSUS: I just remembered something. I just finished re-reading, on E's suggestion, The 13th Warrior (nee Eaters of the Dead, which is basically a fictional historical account of Beowulf as told by the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan&who actually did exist, except that he never really went to Scandinavia. I read the epilogue thoroughly, and Michael Crichton commented on the effect of taking reality and, well, adding a few features to it. It is very post-modern in a very Philip K Dick-ish way. Mass delusion. People want to believe in something greater than themselves. Hilariously, I am finding this theme in Weis and Hickman's latest Dragonlance trilogy.)



but back to my point.



now, i've remarked that i have been doing tarot cards as of late. i had stopped momentarily in august, but recently did a reading earlier this week, the results of which i have yet to post. in any case, the reason i've had trepidation about doing another read is, what if fortune telling is just like scientific observation, and as the physicist Werner Heisenberg realized, the act of observation causes a change in that which is observed. so, what if the act of trying to observe your destiny changes destiny itself?



admittedly, in physics, these changes tend to be miniscule, although, statisticians know that miniscule changes can result in catastrophic changes when multiplied over time. (hence, chaos theory—the archetypal buttefly fluttering its wings in Molucca causing a hurricane off the coast of Florida—the current state of any system is not enough to predict the future state of the system. you must also know the past state of the system, and the uncertainty principle makes this impossible, although certainly you can make pretty good approximations.)



anyway. mucho major arcana showed up, for the most part meaning that my destiny at this point is out of my hands (how disturbingly true). so, really, i have nothing to worry about. (thank you, alcoholics anonymous, paraphrasing: give me the courage to change what i can change, the serenity to accept what i cannot change, and the wisdom to know which is which.) as douglas adams would say, it's somebody else's problem. (SEP fields are very useful in internal medicine, by the way. I swear, they really do exist.)



but i have rambled on and on already, easily forgetting why i wanted to write in the first place.



between "The Matrix," Philip K Dick's Black Iron Prison, and the current regime installed in the U.S., it's no wonder that we are questioning reality, and at the same time, it's no wonder that so many people are indulging themselves in unreality.



end transcription.

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