Like father, like daughter? Cheating has gone to the birds…

A zebra finch pair. Image from Biology-blog.com, taken by Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

A scrappy orange-billed bit of a bird, the zebra finch, may afford us a peek into our own promiscuity. The zebra finch mates for life. Usually. But particularly bold male finches aren’t above serenading good-looking females. Sometimes, the girls even respond, and the two flutter off into an affair. Researchers haven’t been sure what makes these girls willing to break monogamous bonds though–after all, the guys are simply following that evolutionary prerogative to spread their seed, reasoning goes, while the girls have a lot to lose and little to gain.

Turns out the girls may be able to claim ‘my genes made me do it.’ Genes for promiscuous behavior in finches have been hypothesized, and now researchers have confirmed a genetic pattern of inheritance between “cheating” finches and those cheaters’ daughters. The daughters and granddaughters may not be seeing any direct benefit from having affairs, but they’ve inherited the same genes that boosted their male relatives’ willingness to find more mating opportunities.

How does one catch a zebra finch playing the field? Lots and lots of early-morning spying on finch sex, it turns out. Researchers watched a total of  4,601 courtships among coupled-off  pairs and 3,958 “extramarital” courtships. For monogamous couples, sex happened a lot more often: 23.3% of the time, compared to couples trying out a fling, who only successfully mated 7.2% of the time.  Though the girls sometimes initiated mating attempts, finch sex is apparently fraught by roadblocks like males losing their balance, interruptions from other birds, or females leaving suddenly. Males often attempt to rape females, both in and outside of coupled relationships, but are usually thwarted.

Making assumptions about human promiscuity and genes is tenuous, but studies like this have caused researchers to admit that perhaps our genes account for more of our mating behavior than we’re currently aware. Monogamy, too, may have a genetic factor.

The Hooding of Henrietta Lacks

 

 

 

 

HeLa cells divide. The chromosomes, lining up in the center, are marked in green.

Flying tassels, tear-smeared mascara, camera pop-flashes: it’s commencement season.

At Morgan State University’s recent graduation ceremony, one student stood out. For one thing, she had been dead for nearly six decades. For another, her cells still multiply a steadily as a metronome, filling thousands of petri dishes peered into by disease researchers across the world.

By now you’ve certainly heard of Henrietta Lacks. If not, author Rebecca Skloot can catch you up.

Lack’s deathless, cancerous cervical cells have fueled reams of valuable disease research. They divide beautifully, over and over, capable of filling barrel after barrel with a thick cellular carpet. They’ve also sparked fierce ethical debates over who, exactly, owns and profits from cells these days.

Lacks didn’t have a say in who got to use her cells. Or in who got to make money from research using those cells. Neither, it turns out, do many of us visiting our doctor to leave behind a vial of blood, a suspicious mole, or perhaps a cancerous lump of flesh. After all, the point is to get those diseased pieces of ourselves stripped off–we don’t want them. Most of the time our doctors don’t, either–they toss them straight into a medical waste bag for incineration. Once in a while, though, a piece of tissue or a particular patient strikes a doctor as being special. Peculiar. Likely to unlock a few more cellular secrets in the laboratory.

And when those cellular keys work, the results can be dramatic. Thousands of us arguably now owe years of our lives to research run on Lack’s HeLa cells. Undoubtedly the cells have made the kind of world-wide public service contribution Morgan State University had in mind when it chose to award Lacks her posthumous PhD.

At the risk of splitting hairs (or chromosomes, in this case), I’d like to ask, though, if the award should be given to Lacks, or to Lack’s tumor. The distinction may seem overly fine. But it does bring up a large-scale question: Are we personally responsible for the goods or damages our tumors and other diseased cells may eventually bring about once those cells are funneled out of our hands and into research labs? Can we claim credit (or blame) for what our cells (the ones we didn’t want) achieve in this world?

I’m not sure it’s a useful question. But to me it’s certainly an interesting one. I ask it not to question Morgan State University’s decision, or to in any way tarnish Lack’s contribution, but to offer us the chance to more deeply consider the profits and losses of our own diseases, and the fact that though we disavow our diseases, they may yet form a vital chunk of who we really are.

 

 

New cells for old

They’re young, they’re fresh, and they’re literally changing the face of modern medicine.

Embryonic stem cells have been knocking on the operating room door for a long time now, but no one’s let them in. Too controversial. Too likely to cause a flap. Untested. Instead, doctors have been soldiering ahead with adult stem cells: tougher, less malleable cells that have still shown promise. Adult stem cells are scarce in an adult’s body, however.

Proponents of the embryonic cells argue that the cells, along with all their promise, are only headed for medical waste bags anyway. Might as well salvage the cells from the unused embryos and bring some good out of the situation. Opponents say the cells’ usefulness is beside the point, however–any good stemming from harvesting even an unwanted embryo is too ethically compromised to be worth it. A devil’s bargain, in other words.

Embryonic stem cells are knocking again, this time on the watch of Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology. He hopes to soon see 50,000 embryonic retina cells poured into the eye of a patient suffering from macular degeneration. When surgeon Steven Schwartz tips his cannula toward his patient’s eye, he’ll be crossing a medical and ethical threshold.

Read more about it: http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/15/saving-sight-testing-faith.html

It’s surprising Lanza even got this far. Funding for even cutting-edge medical advances has been difficult to secure lately, and Lanza is certainly broaching a loaded topic. He’s a successor in a long line of researchers whose work has staggered along to the beat of market ups and downs, and a reminder that progress, even the progress of controversy, is not assured.

Outside the clinical space

My friend Nitin has written something remarkable: http://buckmouse.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=9

So go read it. Come back. Evesdrop as Nitin and I thumb-wrestle it out: a raw, green public health Ph.D candidate and a second-year medical student whispering in a corner.

Today Death breathes down our napes. Nitin hears death in the inching wheeze of someone’s last breaths, and sees death sprawled stiff in a hospital bed. And I hear it in the rattling key-strokes of record-keeping, in all the ways we’ve failed to keep ourselves well.

In 2002, only 50% of American deaths took place in the hospital. Nitin lauds palliative care advocates with the achievement of a victory. One more notch in the bed-post of “the good death,” which Nitin (and Nitin, if I’m getting the tone wrong or am exaggerating too much for effect, call me on it!) disparages, as though someone who dies at home is hiding his head under his quilt, frantically self-medicating with morphine.

Nitin does have a point. For a long time, we did not much go to the hospital to be born or to die. And now we do. It’s the expected thing. Pregnant mothers plan routes and contingency routes to all the nearest “good” hospitals for when their contractions hit. Those of us stricken by accident or grave health news also plead for the starchy comfort of that narrow hospital bed.

But now, it seems, that comfort has grown cold. What Nitin may see as a desertion of the medical community, I might argue is simply a search for a warmer community, albeit a less knowledgeable one. Perhaps we are naive, to clamor for the hospital when there is hope, to hightail it home when we are terminal.

But is this response really all that foolish? The Germans call their hospitals Krankenhauses — sick houses — and to me, that remains their primary role. If not always treating sickness, at least promoting wellness with prevention, early intervention, and perhaps even more of an emphasis on exploring the meaning sickness adds to our lives.

I’d like to return to the conception of community. I don’t think many would argue with me, when I say that most of us think birth and death are ultimate passages of a sort. The sterile sanctuary of the hospital is not an inappropriate gateway for these passages, but neither is it the ultimate sanctuary. To preference hospital competence at the cost of personal agency disturbs me, because it places medical judgment above one’s personal sense of fitness.

I’m thinking about the year when I was a nursing assistant, and I’m thinking about Felicia Emanuelson,  a small Mexican woman with elegant hair, shriveled down to a very small Mexican woman with slightly less elegant hair. For the most part she lies very still in the hospital-style bed that has been wheeled into her bedroom. A pillow is wadded up between her legs: protection against bed-sores. She takes each inhalation with consideration and deliberate care. She has lung cancer, and, though she does not know it, about six days left to live.

For a long time it has been obvious, she is as sunk in her struggle as Mr. Thompson. She cannot speak very much any more. I bring her a lemon ice from the store; I was out shopping for her and the family, and thought perhaps she might like it. Very carefully, with her help, I swing her upright so she can sit on the bed’s edge to peel her treat. She does it very slowly. She licks it slowly.

“I want another one,” she says. It is one of the only things she has enjoyed in days, and a few hours later she is able to have another one, and this treat feels very small and very paltry, of course, and yet it is personal. It is personal when her family begans to camp at her home — they have gathered there for every holiday season in more than thirty years — and it is personal when each of them talks to her, and when they watch her struggle, and when, finally, she dies with all those casserole dishes still warm on the stove, and half the box of lemon ices still in the freezer.

Is Mrs. Emanuelson’s death “more right” than Mr. Thompson’s? Of course we cannot say. But I assert that we leave it up to Mrs. Emanuelson or Mr. Thompson, and I also assert that nobody can really make the “right” decision, because we can only do our uninformed best when it comes to making decisions about the terra incognita we’ll traverse with our last few steps and breaths.

Yes, death is creepy, but less so for some of us — the fear of death and the refusal to accept it is not equally distributed across all of us. What is shameful about withdrawing from the clinical space, once it is clear the clinic has very little left to offer but bleeping monitors and impersonal latex-gloved nurses ushering one into the last rigor of the mortal coil? It is not shame. It could be simple choice to spend one’s last night as one has chosen to spend the majority of one’s nights so far: in one’s own bed.(Or, as I think I would like it, alone with some good window-light and a cup of ginger tea warm in my hands, if my death is to be a relatively quiet one.)

Why is it wrong to suppose that we be allowed to choose our own dying grounds, and not be forced to rely on a prescription to die, so to speak?

Perhaps these proclamations of mine seem overly judgmental, or perhaps I am biased by my own hospital experiences, or am too sentimental when it comes to dying. It would be melodramatic to claim I have nearly died. But I have had appendicitis, and was prematurely sent away from the hospital with the wrong diagnosis, only to come battering on its doors once more, this time falling into shock and peritonitis from that vestigial little strip of an organ which by now had exploded, and whose aftermath continued to leak pus through my abdomen for three weeks afterward.

It could have been the shock. But I remember contemplating death on the operating table with tranquility; I remember asking that my status as an organ donor be duly confirmed, and my organs stripped from me immediately should something go wrong.

And I remember the hospital days of convalescence, when I was again walking away from Death, glad the hospital had saved me, yet nearly forgetting its mercies in spasms of restlessness, anger at monitors and IV drips and the people, people, people who constantly paraded through the room, offering care I did not need, or, more frequently, no care at all, foregoing a simple question that recognized I was as human, though not as mobile, in favor of gesturing at my case, speaking in third person, moving quickly onward to more interesting struggles.

A scrap of conversation would have eased this cold, flat, stiff distress of a hospital bed and a hospital experience, which was costing upwards of $2000 a day. Of course I remain grateful for the surgery. And I also remain wary of the environment, which made healing so much more uncomfortable. Had I been closer to dying, I know I would have wanted out. I would have wanted community, sincerity, and the chance to wave goodbye to the people who actually knew my thoughts, and had not just merely prodded my organs.

The hospital sets right our internal glitches. But seems to do very little for our internal rightnesses. It does not affirm our minds. It does not address our deepest cares. It does not ask what makes us different than any other patient about to die. It is professional, and so it deprives us of the chance to experience our deaths as amateurs. For we are all amateurs when it comes to dying, doctors and doctorees alike.

I do not think hospitals do wrong by overseeing death. Where else did Mr. Thompson have to go? Surely his death, as deaths go, was not a “bad” one. Perhaps he was too far gone to even have much of a sense of agency left; perhaps that was beside the point; perhaps the location and the details don’t always matter as much as the substantive part of the experience.

And there is another consideration: the “duty” we might bear toward each other, or at least the window we give one another. Someone dying in hospital instructs the medical community, shows another instance of the body’s inevitable ultimate failure, fascinates those like Nitin. Someone at home under the familiar quilt, leaving fingerprints on the morphine bottle, shows a different community, one tied by closer blood-bonds, what death looks, smells, feels like close-up, and I think this may go a long way toward making us more comfortable with the idea of an end, and less prone to panic and be foolish and try to behave as though immortality is something possible.

Yes; for some people the exit of one-time-use plastic is the way to go. Others of us might like our death and our life a little more mixed, a little less sterile.Both are Martian fever dreams beyond our reckoning.

The Height of Emotion

This morning she carefully outlined her eyes in black pencil. She straightened her hair for more than twenty minutes. She yanked on a baggy blue sweatshirt and those snug black tights everyone is wearing now.

Now eyeliner slowly skids over her cheekbones.  The skin drawn tight in that pit between the collarbones vibrates like a little drumhead. She’s crying. Slowly. She’s crying some more.

“So often we use words to say how thankful we are. But that’s not the only way to say thank you. Look into each other’s eyes.” The Rap Director paces inside our circle of linked hands. We face outward, looking at a larger circle of younger students.

“Staff, take one step to the left.”

We do. I now look into one of my student’s eyes. David cries simply and helplessly; tears catch at the bottom of his glasses; his wire-frame shoulders shake; his burr-tight hair makes his skull seem vulnerable. He is full of angles. I drop linked hands to hug his ribcage, and he is light as a crow. I feel his breath sobbing inside him.

“Don’t break the circle,” the counselor admonishes.

I step back. I step left. I continue the goodbye ritual ingrained here at College Summit, and I cry with the best of them.

And I wonder where crying gets us all. We came here to this little campus at West Virginia State University meaning to change each other. And that might just have happened. But in a few more weekends, I’m not sure we’ll even remember each other’s names.

And is that disturbing, or is it simply the way things go in the dynamics of youth groups, motivational speakers, and all other events of the change-your-life-in-a-weekend sort? Perhaps it’s enough to admit that we have, in some way or other, mattered to each other during this grueling boot-camp of a weekend; perhaps the psychological tactics used to ramp up the emotion have their place in course-correcting the high-schoolers, and in cementing staff dedication to the college-bound cause. Or perhaps the moves are calculated, and the emotional heartstrings finely calibrated– the fibers of these students tremble in time with staff pleas; they cry compliantly, out of real emotion that has nonetheless been dredged from them them predictably as mud from a riverbed.

On this particular weekend, 25 staff members and volunteers have gathered to shepherd 52 West Virginia high school juniors through the college-application process. The effort shows on everyone’s face.

The days here starts in the grey mist of 6:30am. We file into a bare-bones cafeteria–rows of students sprawl face-down on the table, trying to grab a few precious moments’ more of relaxation before turning in their breakfast trays and starting the day’s hysteria.

I ask the attendant for a dollap of scrambled eggs, a biscuit–gravy on the side, please, and no, no I don’t want extra gravy, I want a piece of honeydew. It’s laughable–and I laugh–that someone has optimistically posted a flimsy piece of paper showing the Food Pyramid next to the fried-foods line. (In this land of easy-calorie bounty, the processed snacks, fat-heavy meals, and generous sauces virtually guarantee that even the most health-conscious students will stay condemned to expansive waistlines. West Virginia has solidly sunk to the bottom of the pile, wallowing in its distinction as the U.S.’s third-most obese state. (Mississippi leads.))

Breakfast over, we bolt into a long series of meetings. For staff: pre-class meetings. Class. Evaluation meetings. Decompression meetings. Scheduling meetings. For students: cramming with counselors, class-time (in three-hour blocks) to craft stellar admissions essays and statements, and finally the dreaded Rap sessions that probe student psyches and don’t count themselves successful until nearly every participant is red-eyed and wet-shirted with crying.

Friday night’s rap session needled one student into a seizure. Another collapsed in hysterics. And more than one student is psychologically touched–either angry, frustrated, or freed. The toll shows on Sunday morning: mussed hair, undereye bags, fervent wishes that Saturday night’s rap session will “go easy on us!” as one of my students pleads on Saturday afternoon.

I ask them what’s been so difficult. They say they’re being herded through grueling hours of testimony. They reveal their goals. Their fears. Their barriers. And arguably the most traumatic: their backgrounds. Lives come as hardscrabble as coal in West Virginia. Almost every student in the workshop has divorced parents. Many of them have been abused by boyfriends, by fathers, by friends’ fathers and by uncles, friends, grandparents and anyone else lonely enough to put a preying hand on a teenager. (Arguably, the system of poverty has laid its heavy hand upon them as well.) Others have been primary caretakers for long, long years, watching parents and grandparents succumb to diseases that closely follow obesity and toxic exposure.

Such a public opening of their psychological scabs affects all the students, and affects even those of us who weren’t there. We traipse perilous mine-fields, not knowing what we should or shouldn’t say. We call our coordinator for boxes of tissue. We stop class to simply talk, or awkwardly hold students as they sob.

This wasn’t what I was expecting.

And I should have known better.  Veteran of all manner of church camps, youth group intensities, and volunteer meetings, I’ve seen some tears, some shaking shoulders, some emotion-damp notes passed from hand to sweaty hand. I’ve seen what the use of concentrated emotional targeting does.

Watch. Back at College Summit on that final day of crying, we stand in our circles and shut our eyes (except for me, because I wasn’t paying attention to instructions, and have just been staring.) Five College Summit graduates, now successfully enrolled in college and returned to assist, line up in the circle’s center. Music with a soft, steady beat begins. The Rap Leader stalks behind the line of youth leaders, softly tapping each one of the shoulder. “I am from!” each one begins to yell, or whisper, or cry. “I am from rape.” “I am from oppression.” “I am from joy.” “I am from sickness.” The voices overlap, overweave, keen and grieve and sob, and like a vague echo, we take up their lamentation and begin to wipe our closed eyes.

I feel most excellently manipulated. I think it’s unfair to do this to me, to us. It’s too easy to make me cry. Is it doing any good? Is it helping, or is it just release, or worse perhaps, Pavlovian response to stimuli, the psychological equivalent of drooling? Yet these students must face what might be holding them back. If raw emotion is the muddy road leading away from the sins of their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, I’m all for it.

I think of one of the girls I’ve been teaching these past four days. Kelsey normally looks like she is about to cry. Petite. Thin eyeliner. Tense expression, eyes that don’t want to meet yours, a half smile and a willingness to giggle but a tendency to do the opposite. She really was crying though, only the second day in.

“What happened?” I had left the classroom in the care of my writing director; I was retrieving students who had chosen to write outside. Kelsey sniffs. I get the whole story out of her the following day. The writing director, a woman with considerable experience, assurance, and absolute confidence in her own analysis, has pressed Kelsey hard. She insisted Kelsey should be writing about the pain of her parents’ divorce. Not the death of a close friend whose swimming style Kelsey seeks to keep alive as a testament to him. Kelsey said she wanted to write about her friend. The writing director insisted it was a cover-up.

Kelsey feels betrayed. I feel a little betrayed. What’s the line between helpful psychological probing, and psychological bullying? Someone made one of my students cry, and I feel myself bristle. Angry. We each have the write to tell our stories, don’t we? We are not entitled to lie, but I thought we are all entitled to choose our words. Coming from a hard background does not throw you at the mercy of someone else’s charitable, possibly misguided misinterpretations. Does it?

So I want to be hands-off. I want to let stories emerge naturally, shy as fawns if need be. Not at all, if necessary. But is that too reserved a reproach? Do we “owe” each other, or ourselves, the telling of deeply personal stories?

Jesse, another one of my students, has also been deeply abused, messing with drugs, nearly resigned to being thrown upon the civility of the streets, before his father stepped in. I don’t know all of Jesse’s story. I know he told it a Rap Director on Friday night. On Saturday he is bubbling, bright-eyed through the bangs he keeps tossing nervously aside. He wants to draw out all conversations, wants to talk Kurt Cobain, and how he would never imitate his hero’s suicide. Twice he takes advantages of opportunities to publicly praise the Rap Director. “You’re like a father to me, man,” he testifies.

I get the sense the Rap Directors get this a lot. And I want to ask what lasting impact they see.

College Summit places 70% of its participants into colleges. 80% of those placed stick it out, wresting a college education from undoubtedly rocky holler soil. Something must be working.

I suppose I’m suspicious because I get the SWAT-team side of things; I get to mop up the emotional carnage and urge everyone college-ward, double-quick. And because I’m not seeing anything that happened before or after, I’m quizzical. The impact doesn’t much reach me, way out here on an entirely different coast. Whatever worked, or didn’t work, has been sequestered in West Virginia for another year. And it’s not that I want some kind of thanks, or even some sort of prolonged contact. I just want to know if they made it. If they clawed their way into college. If they’ll graduate. If the crying will end.

Please: tell me those four days did something. Please tell me we didn’t wring them dry for nothing. College is no panacea. In fact, without adequate preparation, it will be incredibly hard for them. Some of them will probably drop out, back into their desperations. Some of them though will go on, will find ways to reconcile upbringing and future. Will find some kind of healing. Maybe.

All I know: I’m glad I was given a chance to look into those crying eyes. To know there are more out there. To know that even four narrow, wrenching days might open a door, a window, or even a circulation vent. I want to tell them they’ll cover back up, stop crying, find some jokes and find some ways to pass the time. But in some corner of self, they might remember think about the electricity and power tears can generate. They may somehow know that over here in this corner of the Northwest, I’m still crying inside.

The People You Do Not Speak To

Right now I’ve got so much work to do, I barely have time to miss my favorite coffeeshops. Even more than ol’ Sweetwaters though, I realize I miss those anonymous people who populate it; the ones I never talk to, but know in a strange, intimate, coffee-and-space sharing way, like the couple who comes in late with their books and perhaps some knitting, or the grizzly-haired man who loves the window chairs as much as I do.

These are the people who surround you and confirm the routine, comforting part of your life. They’re home, in a way, though you may never break the politeness barrier enough to actually talk to them. That, in fact, might ruin a little of the mystique. On a certain level, it doesn’t matter who these people are or what they do. Only that they’re there, and that you know each other, or are at least familiar with each other’s faces.

Now I miss them. But I’m looking forward to meeting the new Seattle coffeehouses, filled with their comforting, anonymous regulars. I’ll be drinking my chai tea beside them soon.

Home Again, Home Again

I love moving. Not the brown-box, packing-tape-wrought kind of moving. The fresh-breath-of-air, unencumbering kind of release to leave an old place and root about in a new one.

This latest move is big. Ann Arbor (six years’ duration) to Seattle (slated for at least the next five forseeable years). It’s nice to have a plan. Nice, even to face down the butterflies of change rumbling about on leaden wings and Caterpillar-grade tread within my stomach.

Leaving. Is hard. I’m arm-wrestling a fair bit of trepidation. And wondering what really constitutes home. Can it be packaged, to be reconstituded with a bit of fresh air and water in a new place?

I wouldn’t have thought so. I find myself deeply attached to certain places. Increasingly, I won’t take a rental without an immediate jolt of “Yes. Home.” And each time it’s brown-box season these days (I’ve juggled three moves to various sublets in the past three months), I find myself cow-eyed and sloppy, bemoaning how leaving the room I’ve been so happy in is going to completely unsettle me, and I’m never going to find another place like it again, yadda yadda and so forth.

Surprise, I’m wrong – I’m finding home wherever I turn, and it’s not just because I strew my belongings over each new shelf in an attempt to normalize the new space.

Turns out, home comes down to four walls and a few windows admitting the right kind of light. That’s it. Quality of light. For all the Kinkade fans out there, that’s no news. And it shouldn’t be for me.

But even though I am surprised by this, I’m comforted. Home no longer seems that elusive. I’ve only to look for something second or third story, something with old, thick walls (preferably), and with two, (preferably) three wide windows. Trees outside are optimal, for that treehouse feel. I thought I needed high ceilings, but don’t think so. I thought I needed hardwood floors, but maybe not.

I know I need only pure, high-grade eastern light, like tapping the maple tree of each new morning afresh.

And that makes me feel as though (short of catastrophic pollution), I’m about to find home over and over again (and yes, I know how overcast Seattle can be. I’ll cope.) To me these days, that’s good news. Move on.

Through the Lens of Noor

http://www.noorimages.com/index.php?id=home

Yesterday I flicked through a magazine published by Noor photo agency. Noor, like Black Star, VII, and Magnum, gets me in the gut. Each photograph seems to smack me, like being slapped by a grit-crusted, urgently rotting fish, the kind that leaves a stenchy bruise.

This is what I used to do every week or so: gather a large pile of combat photography magazines and photojournalism books onto my knees, and let the images dig postholes into my subconscious. Here I am, sipping my latte. There you are, dying. Well, I guess we’re all dying. You, in this picture, are just doing it in a more accelerating and more alarming way. And I’m not doing anything to halt your fall. I’m not even going to buy this photography book. I’m just going to let it hurt me. Hurt me so good, even. Addictive.

Noor published an interview with a famous photojournalist. It was that familiar conundrum all over again: The photographer goes out, burning-lensed, outraged-eyed into the sunrise, and the sunset. He sees all the things that happen in a day. He sees them, but no one listens to him. And all his smoldering intent banks up inside him, slowly roasting him. No one listening. Photographs leaching through his very hands, and what’s it all for? My latte and the sweetness of being gut-socked?

I wanted to be a combat photographer. I was afraid of that: internal bitterness, the knowledge I am an exploiter who cannot make my own people reach into their pockets.

I love these photographers. I love what they do. Thank you, Noor. Thank you. I still don’t know what to do with these photographs. I need to not forget them.

I want to be a photojournalist. More, I want to help some of these pictured people find their own stories, and voices, and lenses. Maybe if they tell, they’ll find listeners. Maybe.

Konkatsu, Courtship, ?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124623617832566695.html#mod=todays_us_page_one

The specific differences aren’t always clear, but for some, ‘courtship’ has a better ring to it than ‘dating.’ And now there are even more options, one being a Japan-driven update on the mail-order bride idea: Konkatsu.

You say ‘IKEA,’ I say ‘ICKY’

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/12/cheap/index.htm

I see lurking in the corners of friends’ houses. I hear it casually dropped into conversation, echoing the same way water ripples outward from a plunging pebble: IKEA, IKea, ikea…

Everyone wants (Scandinavian blonde) furniture. The cheaper, the better. In fact, I’d go one further than this Salon article ventures, and state that in today’s posh loft or to-die-for dorm room, IKEA carries a strange, retro, didn’t-quite-nab-it-from-the-garbage, but-I’m-still-pretty-hip-in-a-nice-way cachet.

And I look at my own modest dresser, something made of cherry with metal stud-pull handles, very nice, and I think, they don’t know what they’re missing. My dresser is no great shakes. But it makes me smile. Someone, obviously, made it in a professional, yet hand-hewn manner. It does not come apart. It is not held together by little plastic bits whats-its. It’s simply a nice modest piece that makes me smile just being around it.

It’s real. So is IKEA, of course, but can’t we confess to ourselves that once in a while it’s OK to anchor our lives around something elemental and still smelling of human sweat? I grew up around plywood furniture and loose odds-and-ends, along with a few genuine chunks of wood.

It’s the chunks of wood I still remember. Probably because they look like someone cared about them.

No need, though, to lump me in with antique-obsessed crochety flea-marketers. I’m not advocating barricading onself indoors with fine furnishings. I’m just saying a little touch of the craftsman here and there–artisanal cheese, that bread you made once over Thanksgiving weekend, the hand-tooled saddle–don’t deserve to become swamped in the wake of an IKEA wave-runner.

Let me know what little bits of craftsmanship make your day better.