A few disjointed thoughts

Some disjointed thoughts that won’t quite grow into blog posts. In no particular order or relationship to each other.

1.       I spent my lunch time in our office kitchen, eating some kind of meat soup, potatoes, and carrots. I listened to my colleagues chat in Russian about minor domestic topics. I finished my meal with black tea and sour Russian bread. I’ve spent the last decade of lunches like this. I will spend 2011 the same way.

2.       People need narrative to make sense of their lives. If you don’t have a story, your life is just a series of disconnected events. If you help someone find the right story, their life will change. Religious people know this, even if that is not how they see things.

3.       I worry about inequality, all the time. I worry that income inequality, in particular, is going to destroy everything good that human beings have managed to build. But I am a health professional, so I focus on inequalities in health and access to health care. It’s what I can do. It is not enough, but it is something.

4.       My brother and his wife are visiting from the US for the holidays. I have lost the knack of relating to non-expatriate Americans and I keep forgetting to give them information. They want to know stuff all the time. What’s for dinner? Who will be at the party we’re going to tonight? Expats just assume that either no one knows or it doesn’t matter that much. You don’t really have to tell them anything except the time of the next scheduled event. I am pretty sure my brother and his wife are the normal ones in this situation.

5.       I worry about water all the time. We are clearly using up and destroying all of our clean water. What happens next?

6.       Some Excel tricks: If you’re dealing with a big spreadsheet full of text, like a workplan or a logframe, it’s always easier to review column by column than line by line. I wish I had learned this years ago. Also, you can spellcheck an excel spreadsheet. And if it has any text in it, you should.

7.       Is everything getting worse now that it has been before, or is it just that we have more information about all the bad stuff? Aside from climate change, which is clearly getting worse.

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photo credit: stagewhisper