My sister asked me to roleplay for her trial practice class, so I’m busy memorizing my script before I have to leave shortly. My memory is fairly good, so I should be able to get away with glancing at it only a couple times. That method worked for me pretty well in college. Not so much in law school.
Over the coming days, there is sure to be a media avalanche of opinions and suggestions about “what to do” with people who have (or appear to have) a mental illness. We Americans are driven to do two things in the wake of a senseless tragedy like the Virginia Tech killings. We search for ways to assign blame and we search for ways to assure ourselves that something like this can’t happen again. And I’m afraid that, at least for the next few weeks, people with mental illness are going to be a convenient punching bag for both the professional and amateur ranks of our national punditocracy. In the meantime, I wouldn’t be surprised if our thoughtless overreactions have a chilling effect on college kids who may want to seek out counseling or psychiatric services, but don’t want to be branded by their peers as the next campus psycho.
I’ve always considered myself a mainstream progressive in most regards. I think free trade is generally a good thing. I don’t have a fundamental dispute with our market-based economy. However, it does seem as if the profit motive is creeping into our daily lives a little more each day and usually not for the better. The unfolding story of the improprieties in the private student loan market is a case in point. When I was a law student, I benefited greatly from the federal Direct Loans program. But restrictions on the amount of federal loans that an individual can take out force many students, like my sister, to turn to the private market. And because the private market is largely unregulated and because they are the source of last resort funding for many students, these banks can charge interest rates that will keep these students in debt for most of their working lives. When my sister graduates, she will have the kind of debt load that once could be only be acquired when buying a house.
A college degree is the most reliable guarantor of higher earning power and a life safely out of poverty. We should be encouraging every kid with the desire and the potential to continue their education. Instead, we expose them to the cold machinations of a banking industry that most definitely does not have their interests at heart. The federal government cannot do everything, but I trust it more than Citibank to provide students with loans that have reasonable rates and repayment schedules. We should be able to agree that corporations shouldn’t be able to make a buck off the educational aspirations of our citizens.
A Pew Research Study reveals that regular viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the most well-informed regarding world events. I’m not sure this is an example of cause-and-effect. If I use myself as an example–a dangerous thing, I know–then I suspect that much of the audience for those two shows consists of people who are already news/political junkies. In fact, a recent essay in The Economist on The Colbert Report (at least, I think it was in The Economist) pointed out that viewers of that show tend to be politically astute because it’s a requirement for understanding the show’s satire.
In other news from the Land of the Blindingly Obvious, viewers (or should I say minions) of Fox News are the least informed. Rupert Murdoch has turned millions of innocent Americans into squawking parrots mimicking the empty catchphrases of a collapsing ideology. Have pity on them.
I participated in my second Race for Justice today, an annual race/walk that raises money to provide loan repayment assistance to attorneys who represent low-income clients. I completed the 5K course in about 48 minutes, but I’m fairly certain I could lower my time if I could figure out a way to boost the top speed on my chair. That was a simple task with my previous chair, but the manufacturers of this chair aren’t so trusting.
Next year, I think I’ll put together a team of racers. We’ll call it something like The Official 19th Floor Groupies Club.
I created a MySpace page today, mostly out of idle curiosity. The page itself is rather plain vanilla, which means no background images of puppies, no overly earnest emo soundtrack, and no videos of me dropping Mentos into a bottle of Coke. You can find my uber-boring MySpace page here. Start adding me to your Friends lists now so you can claim you knew me back in the day, before the fame and the drugs and the multiple paternity suits tranformed me into a recluse.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical correspondent, on the lessons he learned while writing his latest book:
At the same time, I came to learn how much we do know about ways we can chase life every day to live longer, healthier lives. I learned that most people don’t necessarily want to live longer, unless they are of sound mind and body, without terrible illness late in life, not confined to beds or wheelchairs. They want to live their lives like an
incandescent light bulb, burning brightly, until they suddenly go out. No flickering at the end.
The only thing in the above paragraph that offends me is the amateurish metaphor–it’s like something you would find in an Expos Writing 101 paper. Gupta’s lack of imagination when it comes to quality of life isn’t surprising; it probably typifies the attitudes of much of the medical community. And he fits right in at CNN, where this sort of facile, vapid commentary is de rigeur. If Gupta wants to believe that life in a wheelchair is too terrible to contemplate, he can go right ahead. I have the same reaction when I imagine being forced to read his book.
The Bush administration is finally starting to act with the spirit of the petulant, truculent C-minus student that this president embodies. How else do you explain the administration’s revelation to Congress that it “accidentally” lost countless e-mails that could shed light on the dismissal of several federal prosecutors? The administration isn’t even trying anymore to disguise its bad behavior. It knows as well as Congress that those e-mails were deliberately deleted, but Bush’s operatives must be feeling too embattled to come up with a more plausible excuse.
Congress will almost certainly issue subpoenas for those e-mails and uncover at least some of them. I’m dying to read Rove’s clumsy and repeated invitations to Harriet Meiers to come on over for a little Merlot and some Idol-watching.
I often forget that the mundane little details of my like must seem incredibly foreign to most people. One of my nurses just asked me if suctioning is uncomfortable me. Suctioning is the process by which a catheter attached to a vacuum pump is slid down my trach tube to remove excess mucous. It’s something that I usually do one to four times a day; sometimes less and more if I have a cold. It certainly doesn’t hurt, and it can actually feel good if I’m congested or if I’ve put off doing it for a long time. I still prefer to cough things up on my own if I can, but suctioning is so routine that I rarely give it much thought.
But don’t try sliding a suction catheter down your nose. I’ve had that done to me as well and I can’t say that it’s a sensation I would recommend to others.
My trusty universal remote–the kind that can tame an entire entertainment system and creates an unholy bond with its unsuspecting owner–has died. My choices are: