Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Physician Wellness & Life Design”
The past few days have been disturbing. A brutal death caught on tape. Peaceful mass protests and organized civil unrest on an order of magnitude not seen in a generation, evolving in a few places into looting and rioting. An image in the Times of the LA Farmer’s Market was the gut punch – that’s where I used to take …
I’ve never been more fit. I’ve never spent more time sitting on my bum. By serendipity, my shifts this month and last were batched together, providing long stretches of time off. The upshot was that I have done some form of exercise (weights, cycling, walking the neighborhood) every single day for several weeks. I feel good about this turn of …
Lessons From Birdwatching This morning I was up just after dawn and tackling a local hill on my bicycle half an hour later. The sun had not yet crested the hill when I noticed a loud bird call followed by a thud coming from overhead. It was a scrappy mockingbird taking on a tough looking crow (a couple of conspicuously …
A Romeo Among Swordsmen I was a weird kid in my middle school years. I didn’t fit neatly into any cookie cutter categories. I played Dungeons and Dragons with smart, socially awkward boys in the 6th grade. Boys with pallor that stood out among southern California tan. Boys who read incredibly thick fantasy books and practiced speaking Elvish to one …
At this moment in history, where many assumptions I’d made about reality are being rapidly discarded, it’s valuable to identify those few constants to keep me tethered (however tenuously) to the world. The regional pillars of my world come down to two individuals and one species. Shirtless Keith I didn’t know it at the time we bought our home, but …
Dear reader, I realize these topics are light fare in comparison with what we deal with on a daily basis during the COVID pandemic. Some posts were written before it unfolded, others are my attempt to engage my brain in a manner other than the apprehension that characterizes many of my waking hours. If you seek distraction as a form …
I was at a conference in Vegas last week when local manifestations of the global crisis occurred in rapid succession. The day after I departed, our district announced that local schools would close for at least the next two weeks. A day later, an older immunocompromised loved one was hospitalized with a viral pneumonia (thankfully not COVID). My loved one …
Confessions Of A (Former?) Drama Geek I was a teenage Madrigal. The Madrigals were our high school’s premiere mixed vocal music group, and our Broadway-influenced musical director made sure we had choreography and a mix of classic and contemporary vocal arrangements to make even the most sedate nursing home audience stand up and pop wheelies with their walkers like the …
45 years ago, British economist Charles Goodheart inserted what he considered a snarky aside into an otherwise serious academic publication: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. Was his humor hard to recognize due to his being a British academic or due to his being an economist? Hard to say. …
There was a time in life when the poetry and prose of Richard Brautigan brought me great solace. He was widely popularized as a Beat poet, but I always viewed him as a lonely soul who found companionship through his readers. I was one such reader as a high school student. I was alone surrounded by people. I connected with …