That Time I Couchsurfed All the Way to North Carolina

Went to see one of my favorite singers, Jeffrey Foucault, along with Kris Delmhorst, at The Bellhouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which is a phenomenal concert venue.



Saw the new Harry Potter movie in IMAX with Shira and Nate. Now we only have to wait 6 months for the second half.

Found out that the global issues in women’s health class I helped a professor of mine put together has been approved and will be offered in the College of Nursing in the spring.

Was reminded what pure genius Sesame Street is while trying to figure out how to entertain a sick 2-year-old.

Packed up my apartment and moved out. Glad I had some help from a certain little white dog…NOT.

I am currently the best couchsurfer in New York. If you’ve got a couch that’s been feeling under-surfed recently, just let me know, I’m sure I can help you out. A shout out to Shira and Jess in particular, whose couch now has a semi-permanent Emma-shaped indentation. Thanks team!

Side note: several people have pointed out that Eskimo is on my bed in every picture I post of him. This is true, mostly. It is because the grim reality is, my bed is basically the only piece of furniture I own and certainly the only it is appropriate for a dog to lie on (he doesn’t like the bookshelf…can’t figure him out….). I live(d) in a very, very small apartment and move frequently. There just isn’t much of a point to furniture, more or less.

Finished writing a 35-page paper on why midwives are awesome and how they are integral to health care reform.

Had my last doula baby in New York. Welcome to the world, Audrey. Audrey is especially awesome because she shares her birthday with my grandmother.

Took the train to North Carolina for Thanksgiving. Now, I love trains. I’ve ridden trains all over the world (Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, India, Botswana, South Africa, Kenya, Scotland, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungry, Slovenia, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France). Because of this, I want so badly to like Amtrak. But I don’t. My thought process on Amtrak goes something like this:

Yay! Trains! I love trains! Wait, why are we slowing down. Wow, we’re moving really slowly. Ummm, we’ve totally stopped and we’re in the middle of nowhere. [Garbled announcement…delay…freight train on single track…broken down…wait for it to be fixed….third in line to go around…].

Eventually and inevitably, my thinking deteriorates to some version of, oh no, I’m going to die old and alone on a piece of semi-derelict siding in some remote part of Virginia. Without anything else to do, I begin irritating everybody on my contact list with increasingly desperate and melodramatic text messages before throwing my hands up in despair and falling asleep, only to be awakened by my seatmate’s perpetually crinkling potato chip bag.

What I do like about Amtrak, and all train travel, is seeing an entirely different side of things. Especially in the northeast, Amtrak runs through the heart of a largely forgotten post-industrial landscape and some pretty spectacular sprawling urban blight, but also some really beautiful countryside.

That all said, it was totally worth the trip to spend Thanksgiving with my family in Beaufort (North Carolina’s third oldest city!) on the Carolina coast, where my sister is in grad school.

We wandered around the old cemetery at dusk.

Took a sunset walk around town.

 Took a sunrise walk around town.

 Figured out the best way to make the turkey taste amazing.


Ate Thanksgiving dinner.

Ate the best sandwich ever at Beaufort Grocery Company. They make their pimento cheese with gouda.  Gouda.  And then they put two kinds of meat on it. I also enjoyed the coronary bypass surgery I had to have immediately afterwards. 

Went to the beach.

Learned how I WON’T be advertising my women’s health practice someday.

The World Comes to New York

It's been a pretty international few weeks around here:

Had Afghan food with my friend Gabe from Hopkins.  He was in Afghanistan at the same time I was in Iraq, so we caught up on our experiences.  Now he works on an HIV vaccine study.  Like other studies, it's not been found to be protective against HIV; in fact it has been found to slightly increase the chances of contracting HIV.  He's in the unenviable position of contacting study participants and sharing this information, a challenging job to say the least.

Met up with my friend Howard, also from Hopkins, who was in town to see his Canadian friends.  We started with Belgian food, but ended up at the amazing pizza place Artichoke in the East Village.

Saw the Verdi's Il Trovatore, based on a Spanish story, sung in Italian (with those cool English subtitles in the rail in front of every seat!) at the Metropolitan Opera with my friend (and backup doula) Hana.

 

The seats were high.  Really high.  Like parallel with the chandelier high.  But it was still cool.

Eskimo got a present from Hong Kong, via my roommate Jaime who was there for work.

Saw my friends Gann and Dale, who are just back from 7 years in Uganda (sound even better than 7 years in Tibet), where they were kind enough to host me not once but twice.  They were in town to speak to country missions on or about to be on the Security Council about the situation in northern Uganda.  The organization they were working with, Mennonite Central Committee, does peace-building work in this region, so they've got a lot of expertise!  I was able to grab them away to have breakfast at the American classic, Tick-Tock Diner, by Penn Station.

And then some good old just plain American.
Enjoyed fall in my neighborhood park.

Went to a pie party.  Made an apple-raspberry pie with fall leaves top crust.

Babysat for a little boy whose mother I was a doula for way back in March.  He's grown!

Have been running a lot, trying to see everything New York has to see and enjoy the great fall weather.  This run is my favorite, especially down in Battery Park when you can see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.


Accompanied a (morbidly obese) patient to a transesophageal echocardiogram of his heart, where I saw one of the coolest views of the beating heart yet.

Triumphant Return to Blogging

Sorry guys.  I fell off the blogging horse for a few weeks.  I'm back on and here's what I've been up to for the past three weeks:

Saw the South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela at Carnegie Hall.  It made me homesick for South Africa.  It's a country that gets under your skin.

My favorite baby in New York turned one year old.  Happy Birthday, Eryn!

Took a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan, courtesy of the NYU College of Nursing.  It's the only nice thing they've ever done for us, and I half expected them to corral us down in the hold for a lecture on advancements in pressure ulcer treatments, but it was lovely all around.  Whatever you think about New York, you have to admit:  it's magnificent to look at.

There's also amazing views from Eryn's parent's apartment near Washington Square (hi Mike and Gina!)

Got angry at this article about the (female) aid worker who died in Afghanistan last week.  Like every death in Afghanistan, it's a tragedy.  But the author of this article asks the question what drives WOMEN to risk their lives in war zones.  It asks how a parent would feel if their daughter announced she wanted to work in a war zone and implied that this (and other) "brilliant" young women didn't belong in war zones.  I say, why do I belong in a war zone any less than a man?  My parents certainly weren't thrilled, but they weren't any less thrilled than the men in Iraq's parents.  I had just as much to offer development goals in Iraq as any man did, and just as many qualifications to be there.  Though it may have been an unusual choice, it was a valid one and totally unrelated to my gender.

The article also references a book called Emma's War, by Deborah Scroggins.  This is one of my least favorite books ever.  The Emma of the book was in Sudan for all of the reasons, and her behavior was appalling and individual, not representative of every female humanitarian worker as the author of this article presents her.  I would go so far as to say that the Emma of the book was an anomaly and an embarrassment to the many qualified and responsible female aid workers working around the world.

Cleaned out the freezer.  For reference:  we moved into this apartment in September of 2009.

Came across this interesting tidbit: every dollar invested in helping women avoid unintended pregnancies saves $4.02 in federal and state Medicaid expenditures.  Straight from those genius people at Kaiser Family Foundation (kff.org).  Why WHY do people continue to think that family planning isn't there business, or that the government shouldn't be involved?  Because the government is definitely involved when it is paying those Medicaid bills.  There are states (Louisiana) where Medicaid pays for more than 50% of births.

Had a doula client who had a baby.  I left my house about 4:15 am Saturday morning and the baby was born at 1:38 am SUNDAY morning.  But there's something about birth that puts you into a sort of time warp where time moves in a different way, more quickly and more slowly, and puts you almost in a parallel universe, where you recognize that the world is going on around you and yet that the world you are in at the moment is somehow entirely outside of that.  I left the hospital at just before 4 am and rode the subway home with a pirate, two butterflies, Waldo, a monkey, and the Grim Reaper.  It was Halloween after all.  A side note: I took NJ transit to my aunt's later that day with a bunch of New Jersey Jets fans on their way to Meadowlands Stadium for a game, and I have to say that I will always choose the Grim Reaper over Jets fans to ride a train with.

Enjoyed the last few weeks of our CSA, including more tomatoes than we knew what to do with:

Spent Halloween at Beth's in New Jersey.  Someone TP'd the house.  Wasn't me!  Also went to a haunted house in her neighborhood.

Saw my friend Hana's choir, Ghostlight, perform at Trinity Lutheran Church.  Their concert consisted entirely of music related in some ways to nightingales (the birds, not the nurse), which there is a surprising amount of.

Saw the most impressive chalk art I've ever seen.