A friend of mine sent this to me and I loved it. Maybe because, amid all this politicized, polarized health care debate, it's good to be reminded that health care is people. People dedicated to helping other people beat disease.
Not to mention...dancing with pink gloves.
The guy with the mop is my favorite.
One of the many things I'm thankful for is that I live in the same town as these dedicated, professional, pink-gloved goofballs. Love ya, P-town!
There’s the kind of dream vacation you think about for years, cutting out pictures of pink beaches and pinning them on your bulletin board, sighing, One of these days…
And then there’s the other kind of dream vacation. As in, Never in a million years would I have dreamed anyone could talk me into this.
Well, gentlemen (and ladies): Start your engines. This last weekend my sweetie and I flew more than halfway across the country to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a place I’ve never in my life thought about for more than four consecutive seconds. Why?
MotoGP is motorcycle racing. The GP stands for Grand Prix. The riders compete against each other at races all over the world for the annual MotoGP championship. (Three days at Indianapolis, and those are pretty much all the hard facts I know.)
My sweetie was concerned that before the weekend was half over, I’d liquefy into a festering puddle of boredom. (Like the two women we saw sleeping in chairs underneath the stands, behind the Indy Dog vendor.) But this is the thing about that other kind of dream vacation: discovering stuff you never knew existed. The T-shirts alone are another whole subculture. Lots of black, lots of old English font, lots and lots of skulls. The T-shirts supplied information…
Hell yes it’s fast (Dumbass)
…philosophy…
Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music
…advice…
Ride it like you stole it
…and often, a powerful simplicity: Your bike sucks
And then there are the brolly girls. Brolly girls hold umbrellas over the riders so that they don’t get hot/rained on/otherwise inconvenienced. Here’s a brolly girl practicing:
If you’re imagining four men to every woman at MotoGP (including the brolly girls), you’re about spot-on.
But if you’re also picturing bad mullets, chrome studs, and leather fringe, a la a Harley Davidson rally...nope. If Harley Davidson is the pit bull, MotoGP is the greyhound. Sleek. Stripped down. MotoGP isn’t about chrome. It’s about speed, baby.
Sunday—Race Day—dawns. After nodding off during the qualifying runs and practice laps the day before, I’m taking no chances. My satchel is crammed with a netbook computer, two novels, a magazine, and a newspaper crossword.
The thing is, I’ve never understood motor races. Horse races, yes. Horse racing is spirit and muscle and power and skill and immeasurable, limitless heart. In comparison, motor races always seemed so…well, mechanical. And loud. And endlessly repetitive, with all that going around and around and around. Yawn.
But it turns out that a motorcycle flashing past at nearly two hundred mph is…well, it’s like this:
Wow. Okay.
I got the crossword partly done. And then I couldn't help it. The motorcycles hooked me in.
Three laps into the race. The cyclist in the lead, a Spaniard named Dani Pedrosa, crashes his bike. Long skid over the grass, but he gets up. Whew. Then he gets back on the bike and rejoins the race. From the lead he's now dead last, by an enormous margin.
A few laps later, the next guy in the lead, Valentino Rossi, also crashes. Also rejoins the race, but his bike is too damaged, and he drops out for good.
That leaves one rider, Jorge Lorenzo, waaaay in front. Unless he crashes, too, it’s now a race for second place.
Bikes flash past. Zoom. Zoom. Last of all, Dani Pedrosa on his orange Honda Repsol. He’s by himself on the track, the rest of the field literally a mile ahead, but he’s flying. He has no hope of finishing anything but last, he’s already crashed once, and yet he’s not letting up one iota. Even a rank amateur like me can tell.
The field comes around again. A mile back, Dani Pedrosa. I squint. Look at the field. Then back at Dani. “You know," I say, "I think Pedrosa is catching up.”
“No way,” says my sweetheart. Another lap. “Damn, you’re right," he says. "He is catching up.”
Now we’re not watching the battle for second. Everyone's watching the battle for last. Every time Pedrosa flies past—gaining, always gaining—the crowd cheers. When he catches the rider in front of him and passes, the stands erupt in roars. I’m whooping right along with them.
Twenty-eight laps. The checkered flag comes down. Jorge Lorenzo wins. Good on ya, Jorge.
And Dani Pedrosa? Tenth, in a field of fifteen. Crashed his bike, ended up more than a mile back from the field, and still passed five other riders.
Yeah. That’s heart. From this out-of-left-field vacation, I found a new hero. And something to remember the next time things get tough.
No matter what, keep on flying.
I ought to put that on a T-shirt.
For some of the action, click here...I tried to embed it, but MotoGP won't let me. But it's a great video. And if you're dying to find out about engines and highsides and lowsides and what all the flags mean...then this is for you.
Many, many thanks to my brother, who invited us out for the MotoGP, and to all their family for putting us up... especially my nephew Michael, who bunked with his brother Ryan so we could have his room. You guys are the best!
Channel surfing today. Saw an ad for vitamins. For teens. More specifically, one version of the vitamin for teen boys: “For healthy muscles!” and another version for teen girls: “For healthy skin!”
Maybe the heat is clogging my brain. But…
…do not girls also need muscles?
…do not boys also need skin?
…does anyone in the year 2009 really think this crap will fly?
Where, oh where, is Don Draper* when you need him?
*Mad Men. MadMenMadMenMadMen. Loooooove Mad Men. This vitamin ad campaign, it needs some Mad Men. There would still be outdated, blatant sex stereotypes—but they would be subtle. They would whisper. Because Don Draper, he understands how to wake the fears and wants of our subconscious in a way that higher brain functions can’t decipher. That is advertising genius. Vitamin people, pay attention. Or, better yet, join us in the 21st century. It’s true—girls have muscles here. But we’re not scary. Much.
P.S. Speaking of stereotypes…the best stereotype-busting, genre-crossing, hilarious irreverence of a book I’ve come across in lo these many months is…
Spring. Still cold, gloomy and raining (this is the Pacific Northwest) but at our house, spring means that sometime between the fading of daffodils and the blooming of tulips, the raised beds are gonna get planted.
The beds were here when we moved in. Four big rectangles set in a corner of the yard. We replaced sagging boards, shored up the sides, and amended the daylights out of the clay topsoil they were filled with. (We still occasionally have to take a pickax to particularly stubborn deposits.) The beds have grown everything from corn to catnip, eggplant to peppers, basil to zucchini. Every spring I look forward to planting them, and I say this not as a chlorophyll-addled health nut but as a lifelong vegetable hater. Yes, you heard me: I hate vegetables. On the other hand, I love anything deep fried, high in nitrites, or full of saturated fat. Preferably all three. As far as I’m concerned, the perfect food is bacon. Fried crisp, hot, and lots of it. Mmmm.
And yet I also love the raised beds. It’s primeval magic: plant a seed or shoot, water, watch grow and bear fruit. All in one season’s time, which also satisfies my need for instant gratification, and why I don’t plant asparagus, because it takes two years until harvest which is one year and nine months longer than my gardening attention span.
There have been lots of media stories in the past year about how more and more people are raising their own backyard vegetables. Which warms my vintage heart no end, because it’s like the victory gardens of WWII all over again. Only back then, it was the government urging Americans to get busy with shovels and seeds. Canned fruits and veggies were needed for the military, so the idea was to get citizens to raise and preserve their own food. It worked: during the course of the war, 20 million backyard gardens produced 8 million tons of food…almost half the fruits and vegetables consumed nationwide. Even city dwellers with no land of their own got in the act. Neighbors banded together, cleaned up vacant lots and planted their own community gardens. Grow More in `44!
I love the idea of the modern, grassroots-driven victory garden. Some people are getting into it to save money on groceries; some, because they’re inspired by the local/fresh/seasonal food movement. Here we have organizations like the Portland Fruit Tree Project, which helps people harvest fruit from their trees and also teaches them the arts of canning and preserving—skills that most of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers knew, and hardly any of us today do. (We once helped friends harvest apples from their half-dozen trees and make hard cider from them. Pressing, fermenting, and months of aging later, we held the ceremonial tasting. As hard cider, it was awful. But if you closed your eyes and pretended it was a strange, dry sort of Chardonnay—possibly from another planet—it almost worked. Hey, at least we tried).
So in the midst of all this newfangled victory gardening, what about the vegetable-haters, like me? Is it possible to turn us to the light side of the Force?
I’ll admit it: I have learned to adore a homegrown tomato. My favorites are the little yellow pear tomatoes, just picked, cute as buttons and still warm from the sun. And have you ever noticed how good a tomato plant smells? Like summer itself: green and fresh and delicious. And artichokes! Have I mentioned artichokes? Yummy in their own right but really—simply to do them justice, you understand—much better eaten with loads of melted butter. Mmmmm.
Baby steps. That's all I'm sayin'.
And what about you? Anything you're planning to plant this spring?
Who hasn't watched birds, and wondered what it would be like to fly? Me, I always figured skydiving would be as close as a human could get.
I was so wrong.
I love how the first guy comments that jumping out away from the cliff got boring. Which I can totally see, because yeah, having all that space around you as you streak through the air at 100 mph would be so dull. As opposed to streaking through the air at 100 mph an arm's length from solidrock.
Anthropologists argue about what separates us from the animals. Language? Music? (It isn't tool-making or self-awareness; those got shot down a while back.)
You know what I think it is? Whatever thought process it is that leads somone to say, I want to fly. I can't fly. How do I fly? I know: I'll invent a wingsuit and then I'll put it on and jump off a cliff. Maybe I'll fly, maybe I'll crash. Let's find out.
It's just so like a human being. Reckless and creative and visionary and stupid, and from the safety of my couch, it warms my geeky heart. Crazy people, fly on!
What about you? Do you see this and say, Man, I wish I could do that! Do you think it's cool but you'll just sit back and watch, thank you very much? Do you think people who do stuff like this are certifiable?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to grow up in a famous family? What privileges and riches you might have, and—more ominously—what expectations you’d have to live up to?
What if you were born to one of the most famous families in history? What if your grandfather was Mark Antony…your step-grandfather, Augustus Caesar…your uncle, Tiberius Caesar. Yeah, no pressure there. Not to mention your father, brother, cousins, and even nephews, all of `em busy morning til night trouncing Germans on the battlefield, being appointed to high office, and generally running the whole damn Roman Empire. While you…oh, my. How to put this gently?
You’re the family idiot. Your own mother treats you as an embarrassment. In a family of massive overachievers, you stammer, your head twitches uncontrollably, you have a congenital limp, and you can’t enter a room without breaking or tripping over something. Your uncle Tiberius quips you could wreck the empire simply by strolling through it.
Unloved by all but a few, the butt of every family joke, and the least likely person anyone can imagine ever ascending the imperial throne, you are Claudius…the fourth emperor of Rome.
Never heard of him? Neither had I, until the first time I saw the BBC miniseries I, Claudius on DVD. I loved it so much, I immediately 1) bought the DVD set for myself, and 2) read the novels on which the series is based: I, Claudiusand Claudius the God, by Robert Graves.
Imagined as an autobiography, Claudius tells the story of his family and his own role in it. And what a story! He begins before his birth with Augustus Caesar and his wife, Livia. You think Scarlett O’Hara was sassy? You think Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington was a bitch? Claudius’s grandmother Livia could eat both of them for lunch and not break a sweat. Sweet grandma she was not. Oh, she’d bake you cookies, all right…and then cry convincingly at your funeral. Her one goal: to have her son, Tiberius, succeed his stepfather Augustus as emperor. Here is Tiberius belittling her grand plans: Tiberius: Anyway, where does all this get us? There's not only Marcellus, there's Agrippa too. And Augustus prefers both of them to me.
Julia, Marcellus’s wife: [Screams off stage] No, noooo!!
Tiberius: Ye gods, what's that?
Livia [calmly serene]: It sounds as though there is now only Agrippa.
And that’s just the first episode. I, Claudius is packed with intrigue, betrayal, passion, and a galaxy of unforgettable characters—the most compelling, Claudius himself*. His only goal is to survive his murderous family and live quietly as a scholar. (Hard to do when one of your nephews grows up to be the infamous Caligula). Not only does Claudius not want the throne, he’s opposed to the very idea of the monarchy. He longs for the vanished days of the Roman republic, when the people ruled themselves, free of king or emperor. How he ends up exactly where he doesn’t want to be—and what happens when he gets there—makes for 10 hours of some of the best television ever made.
Senator: You're not fit to be Emperor.
Claudius: I agree. But nor was my nephew [Caligula].
Senator: Then what difference is there between you?
Claudius: He would not have agreed. And by now, your head would be on that floor for saying so.
Having seen it now approximately eleventy-three times (I’m watching it again as we speak) I can tell you with authority: I, Claudius is a gem you cannot miss.
*Claudius is played by the amazing Derek Jacobi (before he was a Sir). And yes, that is Patrick Stewart—Captain Picard himself—in one of his early roles, the ambitious and dastardly Sejanus. If I ran the universe, though, the biggest award ever made would go to Sian Phillips. Her Livia is a masterpiece: pure ruthlessness seething under a façade of grace, modesty, and impeccable moral rectitude. Livia insists everything she does is for the good of Rome. She truly believes she is right…and that, somehow, makes for the most heart-chilling evil of all.
I'm a veterinarian who started writing and never stopped. I've published two young adult novels: Ten Cents a Dance, which was named a Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and Tallulah Falls, which was named a 2007 Book for the Teen Age by the New York Public Library. I practice veterinary medicine part-time; the rest of the time, I'm up in my office, clacking away at the keyboard.
Life is discovery. Sometimes, I think the stuff I’ve discovered is so cool, I have to share it. Feel free to roll your eyes, it won’t bother me. I’m a geek…I know it.
