Brown Motion

By Siddhartha Mukherjee.   An oncologist by training, Doctor Mukherjee studied at some of America's oldest educational institutions and continues to lecture at some others.  His book titled the same as this blog, won the 2011 Pulitzer for nonfiction.   While a longish and largely technical read, it was a chance encounter with a parent during a college visit that prompted me to check it out.  I am glad I read it. It is in the author's words a 'biography of cancer'.   Second leading cause of death in America after heart disease, this is a fate worse than death itself.  Most of us know someone or a degree removed who either is battling this horrible disease or has succumbed to it.  Cancer has the uncanny ability to be humiliating, demeaning, strip one of their humanity and a fate worse than a life sentence. As a trained medical doctor, Mukherjee has attempted to be the detective looking for clues about cancer and a historian all in in ...

I seek it.  I thrive with it.  It recharges me. Amidst others of my species, even the near ones there is a limit.  While my most loved ones provide the emotional structure and scaffolding from which I nourish, they too can in return draw from me and in that it is tiring. Solitude is blissful.  It allows the mind to wander or not at all.  One leg in front of another and nature doing its work is the best case scenario. So I set out early this Sunday to a hill not far.  It was amazing to watch the early fog rise and then get chewed up as the thermals began to form and the breeze further broke up the clumps of moisture. My hike began with meeting a horse.  A 15 year old and its 60 year old lady owner.  Grazing in the parking lot.  The horse I later would realize was having a morning snack before his partner rode him up the hill I was about to climb. Not many folks out early although some ardent ones were returning by the time I got ...

This title refers to the business of University students hosting potential applicants to their campus.  We did the rite of passage in visiting some Southern California campuses as our kid prepares to apply for ongoing learning at one of the (esteemed) houses of education. Some observations of this endeavor we endured.  Endure perhaps is too strong a word but it does get exhausting.  Show up at appointment time and get your car parked.  Spend around $12 for that privilege.  Then get yourselves checked in to an auditorium or lecture facility on campus. Cue the arrival of docent / paid interns who have a prepared speech to provide highlights of the school.  This is the Rah-Rah moment.   All great things with amazing people - faculty, students and the like.  Bunch of metrics that start looking the same with a few schools crammed into the trip as we did. I get to ask 'what is one thing you would change', knowing it will be treated like a rh...