Care

While America ties itself in knots in a farcical debate whether it will make health care available to all its citizens, here in Canada I am enrolled in the Medical Service Plan, which covers all my basic health needs: emergent, urgent, preventative, and elective care. It costs $48 per month. Paperwork? My doctor’s office simply swipes my Care Card when I arrive, hands it back to me, and we’re done. Ask a Canadian what a deductible or co-pay is; they’ll just look at you with a blank stare.

And lucky thing I’m covered. Just look at that gash on my forehead!

Advances in Clinical Chemistry

My second-most-favorite magazine of all time is Clinical Chemistry. Like my first-most-favorite magazine, I pretend to read it for the excellent articles, but mostly only look at the pictures.

If that’s not entirely true, it’s only because the images in Playboy (do they still publish Playboy?) are considerably more interesting than those in Clinical Chemistry, which tend to run toward crazy-shit-complicated graphs and conceptual layouts of brain-melting science. So, alas, I do struggle through the articles — which take me several hours for six to eight hard-won pages — with a Googleload of reference help.

No one will ever adjudge the literary merits of Clinical Chemistry to be on a par with, say, Granta, or the quality and usefulness of the science it contains to rival that of, say, Cooks Illustrated. Still, the rag has its own nerdy charm.

Imagine my delight, then, when Clinical Chemistry finally published something that not only covers my favorite subject in all of science, but that I could read without feeling like a third-grader: a profile of Carl Wittwer.

Remembering Julius Schulman

Julius Schulman, the preeminent photographer of American modernist architecture, died on Wednesday at his home in the Los Angeles hills at the age of 98. I was lucky enough to spend two days with him at that home – one he commissioned Rafael Soriano to design for him in 1947.

I met Julius quite by accident, and it was love at first sight.

Filial Piety Awareness Day

Mother’s Day — that annual festival of last-minute teleflorism — is once again upon our sorry selves. It is not the worst Hallmark Holiday of the year, of course. That honor would go to Father’s Day, for which there is not even an accepted, go-to, eleventh-hour gift alternative. Still, it is a celebration we’d do well to drop from the calendar.

I’m sure there are a few mothers deserving of praise for their efforts, including (I grudgingly admit) the one pictured above. Probably some fathers too, at least hypothetically. Still, I’ve been to too many confessional dinner parties with people claiming to be children of parents to believe that there are so many truly outstanding (or even passably competent) child-rearers as to justify a whole day (and a prime spring weekend slot, to boot!) in their collective honor.

Ass as Canvas

My visit to Austin had an inauspicious beginning. Thwarted by a widespread lack of hotel availability – due to the annual South by Southwest Festival of independent film, music, and other media – and a constitutional aversion to pay big-bucks for multi-stellar lodgings, my booking for the night was at a hell-hole near the University of Texas, aptly named the Roadway Inn. I will not catalog the diverse and plentiful dysfunctions of the accommodations. I’ll mention only that my single-pane windows fronted onto Interstate 35.

But things would get better — and a lot more interesting!

Be Careful

I arrived in Austin as dusk was beginning to descend and was at loose-ends until a meeting at noon the next day. I had a relatively sedate, if not exactly sedentary, evening planned. I had mapped-out a three hour trek that would take me to a seemingly well-regarded BBQ joint, into the heart of the downtown South by Southwest Festival scene, and back through the University of Texas campus to the crappy hotel where I was staying.

Forty minutes after setting-out, I found myself on Austin’s East 12th Street, as grim and raw as any nighttime streetscape you might care to imagine. The streets were just empty enough to feel abandoned, just populated enough to exude a palpable desperation. There was almost no car traffic, despite the relative breadth of the thoroughfare. I had no intention, of course, of wandering into an area of human tragedy. Google Maps can chart one’s path to bypass such things as toll roads or highways, but it does not counsel the avoidance of poverty and hopelessness. And I was not of a mind to alter course, in any event.

Let Me Run This by My Accountant

I was among those invited last week to the Raj Nivas by the Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry, His Excellency Govind Singh Gurjar, to discuss new initiatives for creating environmentally sustainable growth in the Pondicherry region. After the meeting, the LG greeted me warmly and teased, “So, are you an Indian citizen yet?”

“Excellency,” I smiled, “I cannot begin to imagine the bureaucracy involved with attempting to become a citizen. I cannot even manage to get a PAN card issued so that I can pay my income taxes.”

“You don’t need a PAN card!” he lightly chided me. “I will give you my PAN card and you can pay my taxes.”

New Arrival

Yoo-Mi and I are back in Washington, D.C. to meet our new niece, Maia Eun-Hi Lee. As you can see for yourself, she is utterly adorable.

One of the fun things about the visit is spending time with Puff and Anika, Maia’s parents, who are amazingly well-adjusted at week four. Two of the most annoying things about new parents — chosen from among the thousands of annoying things about new parents — are the gaudy display of what passes for parenting expertise and their seeming belief that the experience they are going through is somehow novel, discovered-if-not-invented by them alone. Puff and Anika love-the-hell out of Maia; but they don’t act as though they are the first people on earth to have a kid or like there is anything particularly magical about the acts of feeding, coddling, bathing, or changing diapers. I guess they didn’t read the parenting books.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Most people get cake on their birthday. I was fed poison. Just unlucky, I guess.

Salmonberry Jam and Other Acts of Domesticity

Summer has been slow to reach the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, and the natives have been getting restless. While we are sweating our asses off in India all winter, they are slogging through cold, grey, short days. The folks here seem relived and excited, in equal measure, that the cloudless skies of summer finally seem to have arrived.

My major disappointment about the unseasonably cold June is that the blackberries, which grow in such profusion here, will be slow to ripen. Fortunately, the fabulous salmonberry is now ripe for the plucking.