Tales From This Side

Secret insight into my thesis chair's hopes and dreams... http://www.theonion.com/content/node/48461 ...and I swear I'll get back to the fireball story shortly.

In a cruelly ironic twist, whilst writing this bit about the time I put myself in the hospital I actually ended up in the hospital per an entirely unrelated event. Last weekend, after enduring several hours of wrenching pain in my digestive track, I finally succumbed to my roommmate's will and took a trip to the hospital. I was therein informed that my appendix would have to be removed within the next few hours. Being unable to perform such an operation myself, I resigned to the doctor's knife and got down to business. What a worthless organ the appendix is. What the hell is it? What does it do? Whence has it come? All worthy questions. Wikipedia defines it as such: "Currently, the function of the appendix, if any, remains controversial in the field of human physiology." In my body, however, the function of the appendix seems quite obvious: to fall victim to inflammatory, catastrophic failure (a failure of an aforementioned, unknown function) and render me...

You know how musicians, over the course of their careers, tire of playing the songs from their early days? How authors stop talking about the same things they did when they were younger? How actors bore of answering the same old questions that they’ve been plagued with since they first hit the scene? You can feel the analogy coming, no? Well, for the umpteenth time I was asked, yesterday, to painfully relive the moments surrounding my now (amazingly) legendary two week trip to the Grossman Burn Center in beautiful Van Nuys, California. Sighing deeply as I launched into a spirited-as-possible retelling, I decided it was high time I recorded this tale in lurid and detailed fashion in hopes of warding off future tellings. Needless to say, with this only the fourth blog entry (and really just the second, thematically), such an early excavation of the memory archives is an ominous warning about its longevity. Alas, we will live in the moment. Err, the past moment… But first, some backgro...