- In line for a flu shot this morning. The hard surfaces in the office’s wide lobby bounce every patient’s check-in conversation at near full volume from wall to ceiling and back again. Lazy architects?#
- Years ago we opened a new campus building. The first floor was dedicated to classrooms. I taught during the first hour of the first day the building was open. Within about five minutes all of us in the room could tell from the sound of voices bouncing off the walls that the architects had not bothered about the acoustics. The bums.#
- I mentioned this to a vice president of the state-wide university once. He instantly proposed that someone on our campus had scrimped on the budget--that it was not the fault of the university architects. He said it so quickly, with no other intervening conversation, that I assumed he was being defensive rather than seriously thinking about the problem. The bum. #
- This anecdote is a completely trivial incident, and I have no complaint about the person who gave me the flu shot this morning. This is what happened for the first time in forty years of my adult memory.#
- The nurse gave me the shot in my upper arm. I remarked on how small the needle felt. Then she said, "Oh, you're a bleeder." She wiped away a trickle of blood and applied a bandaid.#
- I can't remember ever having a trickle of blood after a shot. It's a first. As far as I know, I'm not "a bleeder."#
- It was a trivial matter, but her sweeping generalization was completely inaccurate. Interesting how easy that kind of mistake is to make.#
- And maybe this was a way of removing any possible blame, I don't know. Might she have thought that I would assume she made a mistake? I don't know. Did she make a mistake, hitting a vein? I have no idea. And it's a trivial thing.#
- But interesting to think about how easily it happened. How easily this kind of misjudgment--today trivial, tomorrow maybe not--comes to our species. And perhaps how defensively.#
“It may be impossible to stop wars, just as it’s impossible to stop glaciers, but it’s still worth finding the form and the language that reminds us what they are and calls them by their true names. That is what realism is.” --Salman Rushdie on Vonnegut's realism
#“Any history in which working-class people cannot recognize themselves is not good history.” --Historian George Rawick (1929-1990)
#