there is still hope

Sometimes I can think about Judith Butler and Michel Foucault after I step out of a patient's room.

Today I was the harbinger of bad news to a Mexican man who was likely an undocumented immigrant with no good source of longitudinal clinic care. The rules about what hospitals vs. clinics can do for you seemed very silly to me as I explained them, even though I know these institutions have different functions for good reasons.

Things in medicine that make you feel soulless: referring someone who you're pretty sure is unlikely to follow up.

Does this feeling get less shitty with time?

Do Guatemalan clinicians in government hospitals feel bad about this? Do they become blunted from repetitive interactions like this? Will I?

Today's amazing thing

This madrugada, I walked to the hospital under a storm and got drenched on my way in. This evening, I walked home from the hospital under the same storm and got drenched on my way back. Something about this felt beautifully cyclic and metaphoric for how we enter and exit this world.

A few blocks from my apartment, I found myself appreciating a yellowing gingko sapling under the light of a lamppost, resisting shedding its leaves in the downpour. Just a few fainted onto the sidewalk. And the rest clung on gracefully.

Trees. So resilient. So magnificent.

Nothing has inspired me to write for several months, so here are some things

Nothing has inspired me to write poetry since August 21st.

I can't think of a time in the last five years that I've gone three months without writing a poem.

This is an uncomfortable sign that life feels bland. And many distressing things are going on in the world. So I want to take stock of several amazing things that happened in the last week.

1. I read Mindy Kaling's "Is Everyone Hanging out without Me?" It was easy to read and not boring, which is much more than I can say about almost everything else I'm reading right now. I was laughing nearly the whole time. It felt good to have positive emotions. And also, now someone has written about being a nervous chubby Indian girl at the top of a diving board. Damn, girl. I know how your ten-year-old self felt. Thank you for sharing that with the world.

2. I watched the first few episodes of Aziz Ansari's new comedy, "Master of None." It made me laugh and cry. The representation of Indian people I grew up with was Apu from the Simpsons. And now there is a show that is mainstreaming at least some aspect of my second-generation immigrant experience of the United States. I want to think I've moved beyond identity politics, but this is how I felt when I walked into the Beyond Bollywood exhibit at the Smithsonian last year. Appreciative. Proud. Like a real, recognized human being. I've been feeling so unIndian and so unanything recently. I guess that part of me is still alive.

3. I ate a slice of honeycrisp apple with chopped cilantro and my palate exploded. In a good way. This was an accident. It only happened because I was too lazy to bust out a second cutting board. I am capable of enjoying food. I am still capable of being inspired by taste.

4. I have been swimming instead of studying. Swimming slowly, in the most unathletic way possible. (That's right, Mindy Kaling, our ten-year-old selves would be so proud of me now!) I experienced a "swimmer's mellow," which I'm naming after the "runner's high" I haven't felt since I was a waifish teenager. There's something about your fingers slicing through the water, over and over again, that's meditative.

These are all good things. If I ever read this in the distant future, cheers to these things.