Long time, no posts!

I have been writing blog entries in my head for the past week, and, so far, nothing actually typed!!  I've been a bit overwhelmed with the interactivity of Facebook, discovering old friends, and learning more about current friends - very odd!!  Also, work has been busy...

But, I do want to upload a lot more stuff - use this space as a place to work out ideas...

We'll see...

For now, I pray that the Inauguration goes smoothly on Tuesday, and that we enter a new age of hope, change, and optimism.

Trip to Chicago

We landed in Chicago this morning, and we've been walking all day - what lovely weather, especially after just leaving the already sweltering DC clime.
One thing I've learned so far - nothing beats visiting your spouse's childhood home to clarify some of the "issues" that have mystified you for years!! No, I won't share what revelations I've had on this blog, but let me just encourage anyone who is in a long-term relationship to let your partner take you to the place they consider home, and show you around - you never know what will emerge!
I've been to Miami plenty of times with Ron. But there was never any real emotional content to those visits for him. Funny. I always teased him for hanging on to his passionate identification with Chicago as his hometown. From my perspective, his hometown is Miami - that's where he went to high school, he went on to college and med school in Florida, his family lives in Florida - Florida is home!! But, that's from my point of reference, not his! For me, Palo Alto is home, because , prior to living in Palo Alto, from age 11 on, I had never lived in one place longer than 2 years, and most of the places that I had lived in had been for stretchs of only a few months. So, for me, prior to settling, such as we settled, in PA, I had no other real place to identify as home...
But Ron definitely did...
I think I'll be much more forgiving of his attachment to this city.

thinking about culture differences

i attended a talk yesterday about the "Ethics of Bedside Rationing" - mostly focused on the question of who gets scarce medical resources like kidney and liver transplants... a colleague (someone not born in the U.S.) asked a question about whether it would matter in the choice betwee two identically-situated transplant candidates (same prognosis before and after transplant, same age, same clinical status) if one of those candidates had 3 dependent children who relied on him, and the other had no dependents. the speaker said, categorically, "No". which , I think, is a reflection of a great divide between thinking in America (where there tends to be an emphasis on the "individual") and other parts of the world, where community ties carry more weight.