Rocks optional.
Absolut Boston
Several dashes bitters
Juice of one blood orange
Juice of 1/2 lime.
I recently stayed at the Park Hyatt D.C. in Georgetown, and cannot emphasize enough what a lovely and relaxing experience it was. The service was unparalleled, and I had the most delicious whiskey sour ever, a sublime concoction of 18 year old Sazerac and blended-to-order sour mix. It was accompanied by WARM pistachios and the Washington Post. The bed was comfortable, the shower wonderful, and the front desk responsive and friendly without pretension. I highly, highly recommend it.
I confess that for a long time I only really, truly loved red wine. I was attracted to oaky California Zinfandel (although ultimately only carnally satisfied by Chateauneuf). I wandered long in the gardens of Rioja, and feasted on Super Tuscan after Super Tuscan. But then I had Meursault. And Condrieu. And lush Alsatian Pinot Gris. And slowly, the composition of my case of wine shifted to the whiter side of pale. Now I find myself drinking white all year long. This wine is made from a blend which I initially questioned as perhaps too… fusion: verdehlo, vermentino, sauvignon blanc and viognier. Luckily, I didn’t read the label first, and so I bought it anyway. It’s sturdy, reasonable, quick-witted and bright; not unlike Senator Sherrod Brown on the Senate floor this week. The vermentino gives a nice acidity, and the steely sauvignon fences in the over-the-top fruit that California viognier can bring. It’s a white wine for winter; comforting and substantial, but affordable enough for parties.
When the last leaves in Ohio fall, my fickle wine-love turns back to red. It’s not quite cold enough for zinfandel or cabernet, and so my new favorite French thing under $20 (It’s $13 in Ohio) is the Kermit Lynch Cuvee 2007 Cotes-du-Rhone, a blend of grenache, cinsault, mourvedre, and syrah. It’s expansive, soft but not flabby, finely-honed but not sharp. It has such an elegant scent that at first I worried it wouldn’t have that particular southern wet leaves-and-mushroom character, but it does, just woven with plum and black pepper and iron and leather. I suggest cancelling any plans for the evening in favor of The List and the Cotes-du-Rhone.
There is a reason you don’t hear many Generation X’ers on the NPR This I Believe segment; we haven’t been able to think of anything. That is apparently because we’re all so morose and sarcastic that some of us didn’t even vote for Barack Obama because we gave up HOPE between 1981 and 1992, before there was even a poster. No matter–as we are told every four years, our generation isn’t big enough to warrant novel marketing schemes, let alone sway an election. Sure, others of us spent hours canvassing and phone banking and proselytizing, but we never really thought anything good would happen. Now we have a centrist disguised as a progressive elected by disaffected liberals, which gives me that old Clinton feeling all over again. No matter, at least I still have HOPE, the bumper sticker.
I was driving my 120 mile round trip commute recently when I heard an eloquent and moving This I Believe essay on the power of love (or some other sentiment) by Huey Lewis and the News-I want a new drug? I forget. I am constantly amazed at the cortical real estate I have devoted to song lyrics. Is there some evolutionary advantage here? Did my ancestors chant escape routes or recipes for mammoth, resulting in improved survival and thus the vestigial capacity to remember every word of Purple Rain? Surely this is an argument against Intelligent Design. I doubt a truly omniscient creator would provide hard drive space for the entire Duran Duran discography). These “audio essays” always make me a little teary and wistful and sentimental, but for some reason on this day, the depths of the convictions expressed on this program made me wonder a couple of things, apparently not surprising based on my birth year:
1) Who cares what everyone else believes?
2) Why are they taking up air time which could be filled with Splendid Table or This American Life?
3) What do I believe?
I have to admit that I am a typical Xer, as pointed out frequently by my Boomer boss. My earliest political memory is Nixon’s resignation, my parents are divorced, and now so am I. I hate group activities, feedback, constructive criticism and supervision. I never had sex before HIV, don’t have a shred of religious faith, lack loyalty to any particular organization, and mostly just want to be left alone to pursue my tangential avocations. I have three jobs and seven hundred hobbies, and really resent the fact that I can’t do them all. I have more than $200,000 in student loans and credit card debt from medical school scheduled to be paid off just as I become eligible for Social Security, which at that point will have become insolvent. (And if it does still exist, I’m hoping to get a discount by having my SS check direct-deposited toward my debt to Sallie Mae). I’m afraid of the church, disappointed by Congress, disgusted by popular culture and frustrated by laziness and ignorance. It is a life filled with paradox; I doubt the methods of education in public schools, but I think most home schooling is ridiculously arrogant. I resent the lack of genuine interaction in society, but I don’t see why anyone would make a phone call when they could just text or email. I feel guilty about my carbon footprint, but I have my espresso beans shipped from San Francisco.
I certainly do not believe in flavored coffee. Coffee already has a flavor; it’s coffee-flavored. It’s ridiculous to make it into hazelnut-amaretto-raspberry-french-vanilla. It’s even more ridiculous to have to stand behind someone simultaneously cackling into her cell phone and ordering a grande mocha caramel frappuccino without whip. Not only is that not anything remotely related to coffee, but she’s subtracted thirty calories from an 875 calorie beverage, and robbed me of four minutes of my life I will never get back. Starbucks needs an express line. The line for those of us who want to order coffee because we are away from home on business or because we woke up in a strange place with a pounding headache and need to find our way home, or because we are in an unfamiliar city and don’t know where to find better coffee. That way everyone who needs a mango tea shaken with Splenda and topped with gumdrops or who just dropped in to pick up the new goddamned Taylor Swift CD can have their own queue, and I can be on my way without getting blood on anyone’s new Abercrombie hoodie.
I also do not believe in kitchen gadgets, the quintessentially American invention. If there really are people who cannot slice a bagel without a plastic holder, or who are uncertain how to dice an onion, or who require an electric peppermill, I might as well go out and peel off that bumper sticker right now, because our culture has become so helpless that soon we will lose our position in the food chain. Surely we still have dominion over pancake batter without needing a dispenser for it. Doesn’t anyone look at the microwave bacon rack (and the microwave too, for that matter) and envision its future in the landfill? All the kitchen tools we need were invented hundreds of years ago. They are knives, grinder, scissors, ladle, corkscrew and spatula. And okay, grapefruit knife; but it’s steel, not plastic.
Another thing I do not believe in is air freshener. If one requires fresher air, one can open the window. If the air is not fresh outside one’s window, there are larger problems requiring more drastic solutions than further polluting the air with chemicals, especially if the chemicals require a plastic gizmo that uses electricity. If the house smells so bad that such a device is needed to spray perfume into the air around the clock, my first suggestion is to check the basement. I don’t know why everything is so complicated. In the bathroom at the local Senior Citizens Center I saw a sign taped to the wall that read, “DO NOT SPRAY LYSOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.” I am frightened by the thought of a situation in which the need for Lysol would be absolute.
Further reflection reveals a long list of things in which I do not believe: ghosts, aliens, wall-to-wall carpet, all whimsical variations of the martini, original sin, dried oregano, most uses of the word “addiction,” and raw food diets. After this soul searching, I know that I do believe in science. Don’t let anyone tell you that science is the opposite of religion. Science requires a certain level of faith; you have to just accept certain things, like electricity and gravity and absolute zero and neutrons and carbon dating. Of course these things exist, but I’m not smart enough to explain electricity (and neither are a lot of other people; that’s why when you ask someone what electricity is, they start talking in water metaphors). And then there are some concepts, like neutrons and absolute zero, that just have to exist in order for all the other reasonable corollaries to be true. But unlike religion, science encourages dissent, and no one is more attracted to dissent than a disgruntled Xer.
One of the things one learns in biology which carries over to medicine (and not everything does) is the concept of homeostasis. This is the idea that the inside of the body (and with a little extrapolation, the Universe), is constantly adjusting every little molecule to achieve a perfect milieu. This happens on both the micro- and macro-level, tirelessly, around the clock, a flux of water and metal and electricity and proteins too complicated in each moment for the larger organism to even consider. In every instant, there is another equation, a complicated transaction whizzing along some gradient in every cell, magnified in the state of the human as a whole. If you eat too much sodium, your kidneys pee it out. If you forget to have breakfast, your liver releases glycogen. If your intravascular volume goes down, your heart rate goes up. If you drink sixteen margaritas, you barf.
Therefore, because I believe in homeostasis, I believe in balance. Fortunately for me, my service to the disabled children of the Midwest is balanced by my black, irrepressible hatred for humanity when I am behind the wheel of a car. When I am driving, I concentrate on the road. I do not smoke, read the newspaper, yell at my kids, apply mascara, talk on the phone, give blowjobs, or sing karaoke. I drive, paying attention to the traffic patterns, alert for incompetence at every turn. I am never disappointed. The fact that a snarled, tooth-grinding, two-hour traffic jam in a major American city frequently turns out to be caused by drivers slowing down to look at a fellow driver changing a tire is enough to send me into a paroxysm rivaled only by the experience of following someone who doesn’t know how to merge. There should be a separate license required to drive on the interstate. The test you take in the parking lot where you snake the Ford Taurus through those orange cones is inadequate to ascertain whether or not you will freeze at the top of the on ramp, crippling traffic behind you for three miles. I realize that a lot of people did not take physics; however, it seems fairly self explanatory why there is an on ramp in the first place. If you were supposed to screech to a halt, it would be an intersection.
My commute gives me a great deal of time to listen to the radio, plan my day, see the countryside, and think of solutions to the many problems I see on the road. I frequently see my drive home from work as an obstacle course. If I make it home in less than 2 hours without crying, I feel like a winner. The obstacles include, but are not limited to:
1) Minivans—particularly Chrysler Town and Country and Dodge Caravan. As a matter of fact, any vehicle made by Chrysler is seventeen times more likely to have an owner who drives under the speed limit for safety and has no idea where he is going. The PT Cruiser in particular seems to attract a subset of the populace that owns an automobile for the sole purpose of driving aimlessly at 35 MPH.
2) Cell phone talkers who can only talk while taking their foot off the accelerator–if they could drive and talk at the same time, I wouldn’t care. But they are not good problem-solvers. Something tells me that these are the people buying egg slicers.
3) The rich white guy in the Tahoe who knows full well that the lane he is in is about to end, and so speeds up to get to the very head of the line of people who politely moved over when they read the fourteen signs, in hopes that this would foster an orderly flow through the bottleneck. I hate that guy.
4) The lady who is driving 55 MPH in the left lane of an eight lane interstate on purpose, to teach everyone a lesson about how we should also be driving at this rate. This lady is the source of my deepest seething resentment. I call her names inside my car. I imagine that she has all sorts of horrible qualities. I feel sorry for her husband. I know she is bossy and self-righteous and politically backward and probably lives a passionless life filled with iceberg lettuce and margarine and that she only listens to the adult contemporary station. I am certain that her kids are smoking pot and having sex out of sheer rebellion against her unyielding domination.
I’d like for someone to develop a communications system where your cell phone account could be linked to your license plate number, giving me the ability to hit you up when you are driving in front of me, and ask the questions burning in my mind: Why does everyone who drives a Volkswagen Beetle feel compelled to get a vanity plate to point out that the car is a Beetle? Why did you pay eighty thousand dollars for a 750Li if you’re going to drive it like it’s an RV? What does that bumper sticker mean? You got what you voted for, are you happy now? How do you find your way home at night if you can’t decide where to turn? My girlfriend is embarrassed when I pass people and glare at them through the window. She says I don’t have to glare. But how else will they know how much I despise their driving?
People say that Nixon used to pour cheap wine for his guests, but replace the wine in the decanter he drank from with Margaux. What a guy. I don’t believe in saving things for special occasions or just for myself. We can hoard all our money and keep the china locked away, and put plastic on the sofa, but it won’t make any difference. Everyone with perfect carpets and shiny shoes and overflowing wine cellars will end up just as dead as me. I drink the Raveneau from the Spigelau and eat with the silver and cook the fresh morels for whoever sits down at the table. I do not understand the concept of saving it all for a special occasion. Every day that I do not have a psychotic break is a special occasion. Conversely, I feel that one should always be prepared for the “special.” What if I ended up with that cute girl in my living room and didn’t have any real Champagne already chilled? What if I needed to make a salad at the last minute and hadn’t smuggled that Reggiano from Tuscany? I figure using the good stuff invites the unexpected.
Besides, when you witness the events in a Pediatric hospital, you learn to consider each day of neurological integrity as a special occasion. I can still chew my own food and pee by myself? Waiter, another dozen oysters, please! The stories are almost unbelievable–the kid who had been working in a junkyard with his grandfather when one of those big steel hooks on a crane came loose and swung right into the side of his head, removing about a fourth of it. The cheerleader who had a cardiac arrest right in the middle of cheer practice (it was caught on tape by someone’s mom who was watching). The shaken baby, the toddler who drowned while both her parents were serving in Iraq. The brain tumors and the diving accidents. The teenager who skateboarded into the side of a bus and hurt his brain–some years later, he had a nosebleed and aspirated blood, causing further brain damage. There was the seventeen year old who was canoeing with a group of fellow counselors from her church group, when the canoe tipped and she was trapped underneath a rock for quite some time, and not adequately resuscitated due to the remote location. I heard that some years later her mother quietly turned off her tube feeding and let her die.
We all have everything to lose, and the losses are random, not based on merit. You can’t hide, so why bother? It makes more sense to appreciate what hasn’t happened to you (yet) and move on to accomplish something. Being paralyzed by fear or indecision or laziness is just as good as being dead. Living a meaningful life is not for cowards; it is not available to those who refuse to look at the truth straight-on, or for those who cannot change.
I do try not to tell stories of tragedy and meaningless violence and stupid accidents, but it’s what I do all day and so it’s difficult not to interject, especially when I hear people complaining about what my friend Lisa Whipple calls “first-world problems.” (Not unlike air fresheners, traffic jams, and flavored coffee, perhaps). Recently, my twelve year-old was resisting going to swimming lessons. (Apparently, swimming lessons are still held, as they were in my youth, early in the morning in a pool still cold from the night; he wasn’t feeling so much like shivering and turning blue at nine a.m.). His dream summer morning combines Playstation, lemonade and the sofa. Cry me a river, I said; you should come to work with me and see some kids whose dream it is to be able to swim across the pool on a beautiful summer day! He rolled his eyes–the 800th time he’s heard this speech, I know. It’s my version of the Starving Children in Africa lecture, though it sometimes takes the form of How Would You Like to be Sewing Nikes in China? Or Maybe You’d Rather Go Live with Dick Cheney? The point being obvious; his life is better than ninety-eight percent of the kids on the planet, most of whom live in poverty, many of whom live with fear and abuse and hunger and other insecurities he can’t even imagine, things so bad I wouldn’t even tell him for fear it would sink into his tender heart. There’s no room for complaining that someone’s helping you with your breaststroke when you have loving, if odd parents, a warm bed to sleep in, good food, and an intact spinal cord. And so this is the HOPE I have left, the only real way remaining for my generation to change the world. I can’t make sense of the Universe, and I can’t protect him from everything, but I can encourage him to eighty-six the whining and do something useful instead.
This, I believe.