March 17, 2007
Saturday
Earlier: I called El Milagro and talked to Matt, who said I can come in at 12:15 today.
El Milagro: I get a chair that has a TV with a perfect picture today! Herman cannulates me with his usual masterly skill. You can tell by watching him do this that he’s done it thousands of times and it is like second nature for him. These El Milagro staff wear your regular medical uniforms with a dialysis flair. The females wear smocks with teddy bears or flowers and brightly colored string-tie pants and some of the younger women and most of the guys wear t-shirts that say “got binders?” on them, or some other catchy kidney saying. Herman wears one sometimes that says, “Life alysis” and today if finally comes to me that it’s a play on “Die alysis”. Funny! I wonder how many things exist in the worlds that are in our blind spots? We see the world we perceive and yet at any given time there are many things right in front of us that either have no meaning to us, or we haven't groked* them, or we don't even notice them. Some folks used to say that these things didn't exist until we noticed them, but I think it's more complicated (or simple) than that. I think they are waiting for us to notice them in order to expand our awareness. I think a magician or a genie or a leprechaun (AHA I got a St. Pat's reference in here today!) must set up the world in some mysterious way, hiding things for us to discover and have "Aha" experiences. Or, maybe finding these things we didn't know until we saw them a certain way is like peeking behind the curtain of the real universe and recognizing that the pin-prick lights we see as stars is really 'the Light' poking through the darkness of our naïveté. "Whoa Jack! Calm down puppy.... Earth calling Jack..." Okay... it could be just me catching on to things the world has understood all along.
On March Madness today I get to watch Xavier vs. Ohio State. What a great game! I find myself rooting for Xavier even though I’ve picked OSU in my brackets. I’m philosophically cogitating about why I have one strategy for picking my picks for the brackets and an opposite perspective when watching the games. For making up my brackets, I look through the games and do some research and then pick the teams I think will win, usually based on their win/loss record, history in the finals, coaches, or other non-rational tidbits conjured up in my brain. So, I end up with brackets of picked winners. Then, when I’m actually watching the games, I find myself cheering on the underdogs, dark horses, and upstarts; the teams that have to struggle, play their best, and be hyper-motivated to win. Such it was with Xavier. I wanted to see them beat Ohio State, just because it seemed like such an upset and would have been a great example of the David vs. Goliath metaphor. Of course, I am sure that my sister-in-law, an OSU grad, wouldn’t agree with this tangent. So, now I’m thinking, “I wonder how it would be to use a strategy that would have me picking underdogs for the brackology… say, pick winners for the first round and then go to the underdogs from then on?” So, Ohio State pulls it out in overtime, after Justin Cage missed his second foul shot, which woulda put Xavier in the winner’s bracket. Imagine how Cage is feeling.
Well, so then we go on to Butler vs. Maryland and A.J. Graves knocks down Goliath. What a game! And then Vandy beats Washington State in a second overtime… WOW! By this time I’m back at home again and the Saturday Life-alysis session is history. I guess that March Madness has me so hypnotized I don’t really recall the decannulation (Matt did it), weigh out (wrote it down), or drive home (very quickly, I’m sure).
Notes: In at 74.3 and out at 71.8 Kgs.
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* "Grok" see Wikepedia online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok
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