| esquire within |

Waiting (with the light on).

My mom's side of the family is unusually close-knit.  I spent my first twenty-odd Christmas Mornings* waking up with my cousin to shake gifts under their tree in Texas.  And few years went by without taking that 12-hour drive (11 if we eschewed little niceties like food and bathrooms) down to Dallas during summer vacation. 

Theirs was a second home.

So when the news came about my uncle's diagnosis -- colon cancer -- we rallied around him.  He underwent surgery and a tumor was removed.  He responded extraordinarily well to chemotherapy and radiation, and his cancer cell count, which had swelled to 3,000, had dropped by 80%. 

Next they found lesions on his liver and spots on his lungs.  His treatment was adjusted, and he handled it well, enduring the side effects and maintaining not only his optimism, but even his impish sense of humor.

Recently, he was referred to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, allegedly home to some of the world's most skilled cancer specialists.  I was so relieved when he made the trip down.

When their doctors discovered that cancer cells had migrated to his intestines, rather than formulating a treatment plan, they simply cut him loose.  "We don't have a program to treat that," they said, and out the door he was sent, without so much as a referral.

It sort of makes you wonder at the Center's track record for successful treatment -- maybe it's easier to keep your numbers high when you send the harder cases packing.  Meanwhile, their funding goes up for ostensible success, while the hospitals and doctors who bust their asses on more challenging cases -- well, their numbers don't exactly compete for grants, now do they? 

Fortunately for my uncle, those close to him would push the world off its axis on his behalf, and a friend in L.A. connected him to someone who can help.  Today, we find out whether or not his heart can withstand the treatment this doctor has proscribed.  If his organs are as tough as the rest of him is, the new chemo will start tomorrow.

I think there is something about the human condition that is entirely susceptible to choice -- that the hallmark of a survivor is that choice to survive, that will to live.  And luck -- there's a bit of luck involved, too.

Fortunately, my uncle comes from a long line of survivors. 

So we keep the candle lit, a light from an open door cast across a long hallway.  We keep the candle lit, and we wait, and we hope for a little luck. 

*Actually, I can't let that slide.  We almost never did Christmas on Christmas.  Our "Christmas Mornings" varied from year to year: sometimes the 27th, or the 28th, or the 29th.  Or hell, even into January.  Armenians aren't concerned with trivial things like calendars, which goes hand-in-hand, I think, with their similar attention to, say, cardinal directions.

Yep. We're related.

Armenian eyes like friggin' LASERS.

Bookworming.

Yesterday I finished Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective.  (Thanks, Laura!)

Well, it was a shocking murder.  And although the "undoing" of Mr. Whicher was a touch anticlimactic, the whole thing still made for a fascinating read.  My inner journalist absolutely reveled in the narrator's storytelling, shifting as she was through old newspapers articles, editorials, notes, pictures and letters to piece together the singular, disturbing events that lurk behind a great deal of the 19th Century's emerging detective fiction.

This morning I grabbed Reading Lolita in Tehran, and picked up where I left off -- Chapter 22, a few pages before the closing of the University of Tehran, where my mother earned her first degree in English literature.  I needed a break from it before, I think.  Nafisi does her job only too well: to read her book is to watch wide-eyed the cultural assasination of a free and vibrant people.  What Iran has lost is immeasurable. 

I think next I'll take on some of the literature referenced by Summerscale, particularly Dickens' Bleak House, which has been on my list since London, anyway.

Whodunnit?

I installed a widget on my blog that tracks where my readers are coming from.

I can safely guess at the Iowa readers.  And probably the New York and Massachusetts readers.  And I could easily name the lone reader in Wisconsin -- and the one in New Zealand (hi Sarah!).  Plus, when people Google their way here, I know what search string lit the way -- so I get that some folks came entirely by accident.

But who are the "direct views" in Louisville, Kentucky?  Or San Rafael, California?  Or Broomfield/Lakewood, Colorado? 

How about Newark, New Jersey?  Knoxville, Tennessee?  Ashburn, Virginia?  Alpharetta, Georgia?  Gainsville, Florida?  Phoenix, Arizona?

Who is it in Valdivia, Chile?

I can't stand the mystery!

Maybe I'll take the train instead.

Did anyone else hear about the horror-flick-come-life that was the "Greyhound Incident" in Canada? 

Jesus, talk about shocking.  Apparently a very normal-seeming man, entirely at random, whipped out a giant knife and repeatedly stabbed the passenger next to him.  One witness described him as "robotic," showing no emotion as he mechanically slaughtered the victim.  As the other passengers fled the bus (no one, it seems, attempted to intervene), the attacker very calmly began to hack away at the neck until he completely decapitated the body. Reports vary as to whether or not he disemboweled and began to eat his victim as the bus driver managed to lock him inside the vehicle.

I mean, holy hell. When I saw the interview on YouTube I thought it was some kind of hoax -- like some campy horror flick publicity thing.  Au contraire, the world really is that senseless.  Can you imagine what his family is going through? 

Of course, that's not quite where the depravity ends.  PETA's involvement (that's right, the animal rights cractivists) is pretty nauseating, too. 

Apparently, the folks in PETA's public relations department found inspiration in this gruesome murder, and devised an ingenious, edgy new marketing spin:

While it isn't every day that a human is violently attacked and eaten by another human, it's worth noting that it is the norm for many people not to give any thought to the fact that restaurants are serving flesh that comes from innocents who were minding their own business before someone came after them with a knife. How amazingly and conveniently compartmentalized the human mind is…

To stress this very point, PETA will be running an ad in the Portage Daily Graphic* comparing the similarities between this gruesome bus butchering and the acts of cruelty and killing performed every day by the meat industry.

Wow, right?  This brain-child was whipped up as the corpse was still cooling.

What makes it even more disgusting -- if that's even possible -- is that this line of crap comes from the very same organization that killed more than 90% of the adoptable animals in its care last year.  Adding PETA's 2007 numbers to the mix, it's estimated they've whacked somewhere on the order of 19,200 dogs, cats, puppies and kittens since 1998.  That's about 1,900 "murders" a year for the last decade.

Somehow I doubt anyone at headquarters is clambering to turn themselves as serial killers.  But I guess it's okay to kill thousands of animals and throw them in your giant, $9,370 walk-in freezer -- you just shouldn't eat them lightly salted with a hint of lemon.

*Apparently the Portage Daily Graphic, a Manitoba newspaper, is only 12ish miles from where the murder took place.  They sensibly declined to run it.

If only I were kidding.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," a Russian judge ruled at the end of July, just before he threw an unnamed 22-year-old woman's case against her 47-year-old creepo boss out of court.

Apparently, in the last 15 years, only two women in Russia have successfully pursued sexual harassment claims.  And considering that the dude in this case "always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," it makes you wonder how far one has to go to cross the line in St. Petersburg.

Sort of makes you feel sorry for all those Russian men out there who are forced to sexually harass their coworkers for the sake of the nation's biological mandate.