Frustration and Brilliance and Late-night Infomercials

My last post was about hard questions without good answers.

(Somehow, it turns out it was also about cats wearing space suits.) 

Because really when you come right down to it,
maybe Catstronaut is the answer after all?

While I was thinking about all that, it occurred to me that what controversy and frustration really come from is the mismatch between how bad a problem is (ENORMOUSLY bad) and how adequate the solution is (WOEFULLY inadequate). 

By extension, I wonder how many of the world's issues can be charted out according to how well-matched the problems and solutions are.

Problems can range from being no big deal (toast with the crust still on it) all the way up to indescribably awful (life/death/dismemberment/catastrophe/war).

Solutions can range from being completely useless (battery-powered light-up pepper grinder) to beautifully life-changing (cataract surgery restoring sight to the blind).

When the magnitude of the problem and the solution matches up, you're on the green line here:

If you could boil down the stuff our sincerest most human goals and aspirations are made of;

if you could condense the very essence of what parents want their children to grow up to do,

it would be that we find the perfect solutions for the hardest problems. Cure cancer! Clean up the SuperFund sites! Make Donald Trump's hair look good! Do something worthy of a Nobel Prize! Solve political corruption in Latin America! Build a better mousetrap! Move humanity forward!

It would be where the Green zone sits on this matrix:

Green is what we all dream of accomplishing in our lives: Finding an authentic answer to an enormous and profound problem. It's establishing accessible clean water in developing countries. It's implementing the affordable effective vaccine that eradicated smallpox worldwide. It's the innovatively-engineered retrofits that brought Apollo 13 home.

At the other end of that line where problems and solutions are well-matched, you've got ineffective solutions to problems that aren't really problems. It's the Yellow zone of the graph.

Yellow is a place for all those life hacks on Facebook. They don't actually work but it doesn't matter because the problem wasn't that big of a deal anyway. Solutions...or not... for problems... or not... doesn't really matter, doesn't really stir up a heated debate, doesn't inspire brilliant efforts. Meh?...or not.

But what happens when a brilliant mind pours blood, sweat, tears, time, and mental energy into finding the perfect solution to a tiny problem? A problem that wasn't really worth spending so much brain power on?  That's the Blue zone on the graph:

Blue is late night infomercial products and virtually everything in the now-defunct SkyMall catalogues -- great solutions to problems that never actually bothered you all that much.  Blue is 6 misspent years doing ingenious work to get a hard-earned PhD on a pointless topic, making a substantial contribution to a field no one cares about, then going on to work at Starbucks. Blue is where brilliance is wasted.

What if the effort going toward the Blue zone could be reallocated? What if all that phenomenal cosmic effort were pointed toward phenomenal cosmic problems?
The place where we have staggering, seemingly-insurmountable problems and woefully inadequate solutions is the Red zone on the matrix:

Red is traumatic optic neuropathy and CPR in space and cold fusion and the Syrian refugee crisis and trying to raise good children in a rough world. Crushingly difficult issues with no good answer, no matter how much we wish we had a good answer. It's a churning, struggling, unsatisfying, painful place. The Red zone is full of things worth arguing about and problems worth grappling with.

I'd hazard a guess that everything that has ever arrived to the Green zone was in the Red zone first.
That means that frustration and controversy are only bad things if we sit around angrily-but-ineffectually stewing about them, rather than actively pushing them along the pathway toward the Green zone.

So there it is. Red, Yellow, Green, or Blue.
What are you spending your life on right now?

Is doing nothing doing something?

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a former astronaut about his experiences flying 3 shuttle missions. He mentioned that each mission has a crew member trained as the medic for the trip, which led to a conversation about the supplies they carried and the emergencies they trained for. Ultimately, he wound up talking about their protocol for doing CPR in zero gravity. The problem with trying to do CPR chest compressions inside a space shuttle in zero gravity is that anytime you push against something Newton's Laws still apply, so rather than generating a good compression you just drift away. 

How did NASA solve that problem?

No.  Actually, the solution was not Catstronaut.

NASA's solution: In the moment when a vital crew member is dying from a cardiac event and there isn't a minute to lose, the protocol calls for taking about an hour to set up a securely-braced platform to attach the crew members to, so that CPR chest compressions can be performed effectively. They all knew that by the time the system was set up it would be too late for CPR anyway.  They all knew it was a completely inadequate solution to a terrible situation, but they trained for it anyway because there was no other/better answer, and simply doing nothing seems wrong.

On a somehow-related note, I'm giving a presentation at work soon about treatments for Traumatic Optic Neuropathy, which is vision loss caused by injury to the optic nerve.  It's a controversial subject because all of the treatment options have major risks, and none of them are proven to work.  Picture a person who has just been blinded by nerve trauma and all we want is to make it better, but we have no reliably-proven way to do so, and the harder we try for a benefit the more risk it is to the patient.  ...But yet again, simply doing nothing seems wrong.

And yet again, shockingly,
somehow the solution is not Catstronaut.

Is it more frustrating to have a lousy answer or to have no answer at all? Imagine if instead of describing a detailed protocol (albeit one that won't work), what if that page in the manual just said "We're very sorry. There's no way to fix this one." 

Would that be better or worse?

Armies might win battles, but Puppets win wars?

While we were all too busy being distracted by Sesame Street scandals:

"They are not gay. They are not straight.
They are puppets.
They don't exist below the waist."
~ Gary Knell, Sesame Workshop President and CEO

and Sesame Street holidays:

Your family isn't the only one with awkward Thanksgiving dinners.

and whatever-exactly-it-is-that-Elmo-brings-to-the-equation:


So. Much. Senseless. Tickling.

While we were all distracted by that stuff, Sesame Street was apparently out there quietly taking over planet Earth.

Did you know that there are multiple versions of Sesame Street outside of the US?  Everywhere from Bangladesh to Russia?
Did you know that Sesame Workshop's international outreach efforts are partly funded by the US government?
Did you know Sesame Street has an Executive Vice President of Global Impact and Philanthropy? As a show helmed by a gigantic talking bird, I had assumed its management consisted of a small group of hippies and theatre dorks who hang around using weird fake voices and cutting out felt fabric and making up new ways to talk about the alphabet letters.  In reality, Sesame Street has an entire office full of policy-oriented humans from backgrounds like the Council on Foreign Relations and UNICEF, and they are all busily trying to find ways for the show to make the world a better place.

There is a Sesame Street Afghanistan (mind blown), and it recently announced a new character named Zari.
She's fun and smart and curious, but most importantly she's a SHE, and she's getting an education. In a nation where 85% of women never have a chance to go to school, and where less than a quarter of women are literate, but more than 80% of children have watched Sesame Street, adding a schoolgirl character like Zari is a HUGE thing.

Hi. My name is Zari. I like healthy foods and bright colors!
I also like to totally challenge paradigms and put a
great big smackdown on stereotypes!
...brought to you by the letter Z and the number 6. 

It's hard to change the mind of an adult.  Taliban members and ISIS soldiers and Ku Klux Klansmen and members of other groups of a similar ilk -- their minds are already made up, and their direction is pretty firmly solidified.  But once upon a time, there was a point in their younger lives when their minds were flexibly open and the hateful prejudices hadn't been learned yet. What if, right in that moment of childhood, they could have learned something else instead?
What if they had learned that girls can be fun and smart and curious and go to school?
What if they had learned that simply wearing a hijab headscarf doesn't make someone a scary terrorist?
What if they had learned that red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple muppets and puppets and birds and a Count and a garbageman can all hang out together conflict-free?
What if the entire future direction of a nation is determined by what its children are learning right now?

Well played, Sesame Street. Go take over the world.

Tulip Festival

 

What is this unbelievably gorgeous place?

 

 

Am I currently hitchhiking my way across Holland?

It's Skagit (rhymes with "gadget") Washington, about an hour outside of Seattle, where every April they plant fields of tulips as far as the eye can see.

Seriously, the wonders of the Pacific Northwest never cease to amaze me.

 

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

On a side note, while wandering through the gardens and reading the names of the different varieties, I developed a theory that it's quite possible that all tulip names can be classified into 3 distinct categories:
  -  Pretty Glitter Super Pink Wonderful Girly Disney Princesses
  -  Paperback Romance Novel Characters on the slippery slope toward Pornstar
  -  Professional Wrestlers

I'll just leave these with you and let you figure out which is which...

 

The Warm side of Death

Being in the medical field has some quirks.

Let me rephrase that.
Being in the medical field involves several profoundly unsettling, surreal, perspective-altering experiences. Over time, those experiences become so frequent and so familiar that they stop seeming profound and, instead, begin to just seem like quirks.

For example, in the normal lives of regular people, our interface with death is usually in the context of a loved one passing away. One day, your relative, friend, or pet is alive and warm and here. The next day, he is cold and gone. The encounter is personal, and we experience it from the Warm side. I'd hazard a guess that most people (maybe all people) who've been to a funeral have found themselves thinking that the Cold waxy figure in the coffin is not the person they knew. The person they knew was Warm. People who believe in a religious afterlife tend to picture reuniting with their loves ones Warm. It's the only way they've ever known each other, and it's how they envision knowing each other again.

During medical school, there's a major paradigm-shifting experience of learning human anatomy through cadaver dissection. Somewhere, a family knew and loved a Warm person. There are photos of them in an album. There are people walking around with memories about them cracking jokes at work or celebrating wedding anniversaries or teaching the grandkids to make sugar cookies. But by the time they generously donate their body, and by the time that body reaches the anatomy lab for a new academic year, it is already on the Cold side of death.
As med students, the Cold side of death was made easier to navigate by the fact that we had never known this body as anything but a cadaver. No name, no past, no story. There were troubling days -- the day when we saw our cadaver's face for the first time, or when the group at the next table realized their cadaver had nail polish in a soft shade of pink -- days when eerie echoes from the Warm side of death snuck through into the anatomy lab.  But most of the time it felt surprisingly un-conflicted; routine; normal. In fact, I got so used to the Cold anatomy that my first time in an operating room for surgery I was caught off guard by the patient's internal organs being so warm and soft.

For the 3rd year of med school and beyond, we're back among the living. The patients may be sick or struggling, but they are alive. They are still on the Warm side of death. The side where a family brings flowers to set on the nightstand, and church groups are sending thoughts and prayers. The side where you have long end-of-life discussions with the patient and her loved ones in order to make hard choices proactively. The side where a lady who happily chatted with me while I examined her during morning hospital rounds suddenly codes after breakfast and can't be revived, and the hardest phone call in the world has to be made to her family. The Warm side of death is fraught with difficult emotions and impossible decisions and an inevitable time-stamped endpoint.

I've been working exclusively on the Warm side since 2008.
A few weeks ago, I ventured back into the Cold in order to collect tissue from an organ donor. After 8 years of knowing patients, caring about them, watching them weeping or bravely smiling, winning or losing their fights with disease, it was nearly impossible to turn the switch in my mind back to functioning in the impersonal world where a body is a body instead of someone's father/brother/friend. All around me, the morgue employees were bustling around in the routines of their day, well-adapted to the Cold; moving this body to the cremation furnace; rolling that one to the embalming room; deciding whether to use a purple-tinted industrial preservation chemical to offset the jaundiced hue of the skin; wrapping the other body in plastic for transfer to the funeral home.

No name, no past, no story.
I was lost.

Being in the medical field has some quirks.



Learning to Walk Again

The title of this post makes it sound like I've been through a tragic accident in which I had a stroke and broke both femurs and lost the ability to ambulate. Thankfully, that is not the case. This is about a few of the much subtler aspects of walking that I recently realized I've been taking for granted.

Last weekend, Seattle had its first glorious sunshiny day after a winter of cripplingly depressing gray skies and record-setting rainfall. I crawled from my cocoon of blankets on the couch and ventured outside, blinking my dark-adapted eyes against the long forgotten sunlight.

It was a perfect day for a hike, so I ventured out to a very popular nearby trail up Little Si (a mountain at the base of the even-bigger Mount Si).

 

This was my first time taking a legitimate hike in the Pacific Northwest.  It turns out that all the things I learned from hiking anywhere else are pretty much wrong for this place

 

Hiking in the Southwest had taught me that navigating is simple:

Look up toward top of mountain. Walk up to top of mountain. When in doubt, use position of sun to orient self.

Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas, NV. 
It's like someone hit the wayfinding Easy button.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, the bottom few miles of a hike are more like wandering around on the forest moon of Endor. As far as I can tell, navigating involves looking for an Ewok and asking it for directions. 



Hiking in the Midwest had taught me that anything taller than a speedbump in the WalMart parking lot should be reverently referred to as a "mountain."  With that as my most recent contextual reference, I was kind of braced for disappointment as I contemplated hiking "Little" Si.

Cast your eyes upon Missouri's most formidable mountain range.
Don't even think of attempting to explore this wilderness
without ice axes, crampons, supplemental oxygen,
and a highly-experienced wilderness guide.

The hike up Little Si taught me that "Little" is relative. At one point while stopped to rest on an overlook, I accidentally dropped my ear-warmers on the ground, and then helplessly watched as they bounced down a sheer 300 foot dropoff into the wooded abyss below. Little is Bigger here.

I was actually sitting on this exact ledge at the time.
Thank you, stock photo from Google,
for helping capture the moment
even though I didn't take a picture there!

Last but not least, the very mechanics of safely walking are different here.
Hiking in the pine forested mountains where I grew up, if you're losing your balance you reach out and grab a tree trunk. Stable, safe, trusty tree trunks. Virtually anything growing vertically from the ground there is guaranteed to help you as you make your way along.

Ponderosa pine forests of the Arizona highlands.
As a bonus, if you stick your nose between the cracks in the bark,
ponderosa pines all smell like some delicious blend of
maple, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Not kidding.

In contrast, if you're losing your balance while hiking in the deserts outside of Tucson the last thing you'd want to do is reach out for the nearest sturdy vertical plant. Because it will be a cactus. And you will have many, many, many regrets.  Instead, the best move is to crouch down so your center of gravity is lower and more stable, and look for an open patch of gravel to rest your hand on for balance.

Dear hiker, I am a saguaro.
I'm here for you to lean on whenever you decide you need me.

And in the woods of Minnesota, the best bet was to make sure you were placing your steps on solid footing in the first place, like large stones or fallen logs. That way, you knew what you were stepping on would be high, dry, and able to bear your weight well.

Even chickens, notorious for their stupidity and cowardice,
realize that walking on logs is a good way to keep your feet dry.

Except in the Pacific Northwest. I learned the hard way that stepping on a nice big fallen log here is a good way to end up knee-deep in a nice big rotted log. Everything is wet, so nothing on the ground stays solid for long. I'll probably be cleaning rotten logfunk out of the scrapes on my leg for the next several weeks. Mmmmm. Logfunk.

But despite my astoundingly maladaptive hiking techniques, I still managed to reach the top alive. Worth every step!

Here's to having a blue sky overhead
after a long, long, long gray winter!

 

The oldest you've ever been

When I was 5 years old, I fell asleep on the school bus one morning.

It must have been January. I remember that for two reasons: 1) it was cold and snowy, and 2) a girl in my class named LeAnne had recently gotten a pair of enviable puffy purple snow boots for Christmas which she relentlessly talked about and wore nonstop, even indoors. In contrast, I had a pair of hand-me-down canvas fake-Keds shoes which had probably started out white but by the time they became mine they had taken on that very special shade of drabbyshabbysadness. When I walked through snow, it would collect into the peeled glue seam between the sole and the fabric, then soak through as it melted getting my socks all wet.

I remember waking up alone, peeling my droolyface off of the brown plastic seat cover, and realizing that the bus was silent, frigid, and utterly empty. The kids had all been dropped off. The driver had parked the bus and gone. I remember instantly feeling like this unpleasant situation was most definitely my fault. Then, I recall realizing that the sooner I could fix the situation by getting off the bus and finding my way back to kindergarten, the less fallout there would be for my personal sin of falling asleep on the bus.

I had seen the bus driver make the door open countless times -- it involved some combination of magic knobs and switches and a gigantic lever. With trial, error, and herculean kid-strength, I managed to swing the lever and get the door open. The bus was parked in a large open-ended barn in a great big grassy field with all the other school buses, behind the Springerville Public Library where my Mom sometimes took us to check out books. I knew that up over the hill and down the other side I'd find the elementary school, so I just started walking. Uphill in the snow. Seemed like the logical choice.

It's almost a mile. Sheesh.
I'd honestly never mapped it until just now.

When I got to the school, I went to the spot on the sidewalk where the bus usually dropped off; where the playground gates were usually open; where the nice recess lady Mrs. Kasoose was usually standing with a welcoming smile. Instead, the gates were locked and the playground was deserted.

I climbed over the chain-link fence.  I stumbled my way down the hill and into the front doors to the school office. My shoes were icy, my sweater was drenched, my hands were numb, my ears were on fire, my nose was runny. I was crying with embarrassment, apologizing over and over for falling asleep and missing class and causing so much trouble.

Did I mention I was 5?
My 5-year-old self interpreted this whole thing wildly differently than my adult self.
My adult self sees a littlebitty kid without good winter clothes abandoned in a locked bus then walking a mile in the snow uphill in January alone. My adult self thinks that no kindergartner could possibly stack up to that.
My 5-year-old self just saw a problem and did her best job at fixing it.

Here's my hypothesis:
At any given moment, you are the oldest you've ever been. Thus, maybe in the moment you're more likely to perceive yourself as capable, whereas in hindsight (with the benefit of being even older) you aren't going to think you were even remotely suited to the task. Maybe you're doing things right now simply because you don't know you can't.

At the time, 5 years old was the oldest I'd ever been.
  The most wise.
     The most qualified.
        The most experienced.
I didn't know that I was a littlebitty kid who couldn't handle that. I probably would've sagely agreed that a 3 or 4 year old couldn't do it, but I must have been pretty certain that by the ripe old age of 5 years I was just supposed to take care of business.

Right now, I'm 34. It's the oldest I've ever been.
   The most "wise."
      The most "qualified."
         The most "experienced."
What should I tackle now, before I realize I can't?