Filed under: The Me's I Could Have Been | Tags: Charles Darwin, dinosaurs, earthquakes, Geologist, geology, natural disasters, rocks, volcanoes
Now THIS is sexy: geologists at work. I could watch them measuring core samples all day.
Yep, I Googled myself, and found out someone with my name is a geologist.
I wonder if, like me, she used to play geologist when she was little? That’s right, Barbie and I used to go out into the wilds of suburban Massachusetts on rock collecting expeditions. We would fill our pockets with them. Beautiful ones with specks of sparkly mica; smooth and rounded specimens in a variety of pastels; some that looked like opaque diamonds; others that were interesting shapes; flat ones that were good for hopskotch. I loved rocks. Heck, I still do; I compulsively pick them up on different trips around the world, and have a pile sitting on a shelf in my study.
I even took a Geology course in college; the highlights of the class, for me, included attempting to identify the rock that composed the stalls of the college library women’s bathroom (granite, not marble, as my other classmates had guessed!) and my page-turner of a term-end paper on…wait for it…”The Topsoil of Ancient Mesopotamia.” Unfortunately, that exciting document has long since disappeared–misplaced among old files or discarded. A great, great loss to history and mankind.
I heart rocks.
Why? Because many people don’t realize that geology is sexy. Many of us have forgotten that once upon a time, it was a very cool and popular thing to do. There were amateur geologists everywhere. Remember Charles Darwin? Yes, the man who wrote the On the Origin of Species was a geologist. The same Darwin whose work Sarah Palin so conveniently disses (as she does with all geologists, except the ones involved in oil drilling) when she says she doesn’t believe in evolution, and seems to think man coinhabited the Earth with the dinosaurs.
Not impressed yet? Well, geologists are dinosaur hunters. (Paleontology is a subspecialty of geology.) Just imagine if it was your job to dig dinosaur bones for a living–so cool. And geologists are natural disaster gurus: think volcanic eruptions. And earthquakes. And floods. And former asteroid collisions with the earth. And historical tsunamis. Take any given geologist, show them a cliff face or an area that’s been exposed that features different layers of soil and rock, and they can read crazy disaster patterns galore. This was a dry year, this year was a wet year, this year had a volcanic explosion, etc.
In my opinion, geologists are just a little bit magic.
Here are a few great videos from YouTube that show I’m not alone in my admiration of them. Enjoy!
Filed under: The Me's I Could Have Been | Tags: Barack Obama, doctors, ER, Grey's Anatomy, House, life, Surgeon General
This is the doctor they call McDreamy. If I were a doctor, they would call me McSqueamish.
Apparently, for people with my name, the medical profession is incredibly popular: there are pediatricians, neuroligists, and ob/gyns, to name a few.
(Right now, my parents are probably thinking: where did we go wrong?)
But it’s interesting that for someone who has so many namesakes in the medical profession, I don’t actually know much about being a doctor. I don’t have any friends or family members who are doctors (yet, but there are one or two in training.) And although I have had my fair share of doctor’s appointments, I really have no idea what their lives are like outside of the hospital–how they spend their time, what they do for fun, what they eat, their hopes, their dreams, things like that.
So all I have to go by is what I see on TV. And from what I can tell, doctors are some of the most highly sexed and unfortunate beings on planet Earth. Take the show ER, for instance. It features some beautiful people who keep switching sexual partners (it’s a good thing they don’t have any STDs…oh wait, one of them did. A long time ago.) But, for their sins, most don’t seem to enjoy sowing their wild oats for very long: they get killed in ambulance explosions and bizarre helicopter accidents, or get maimed by trucks, suffer from tumors various, get caught in an insane number of hostage crises, or find that their family members have a terrible casualty rate once they start working in the Emergency Room at County General. Or take the stars of Grey’s Anatomy: have there ever been so many gorgeous doctors in one place? I wonder if Seattle is suddenly seeing the health of its citizenry decline as besotted locals attempt to crowd the halls of local hospitals. Yep, because the staff at Seattle Grace Hospital believe in spreading the love–they sleep with each other and their critically ill patients. (They are known for their bedside manner.) Even my favorite doctor, Gregory House (from the FOX channel’s House) who has possibly the worst bedside manner ever documented, and a limp, looks like he’s going to be getting it on soon with his hot boss, Lisa Cuddy, the fantastically stunning Dean of Medicine at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. But he’s had quite the run of bad luck, too: he’s been taken hostage a few times. He’s been shot at close range. And he was in a near-fatal bus accident last season (that killed his best friend’s lover.)
I tell you what, folks. I don’t think I want to be a doctor, even if I do get to sleep with George Clooney. The mortality rates are just too darn high.
Unless I could be a doctor in the template of my nephew, Garrett, whose alter ego, “Dr. Joe,” is an excellent practitioner of medicine. He is very efficient: if you have an ailment, he’ll take out his plastic lunchbox full of plastic medical instruments. When you tell him where it hurts, he will take a careful look. Then he’ll dig into the lunchbox, and pull out an implement that looks like a hammer. Then he’ll strike the injured area with the hammer (usually not that hard), pronounce you “all better” and say “now you have to pay me.” At a buck a visit, it’s an incredibly reasonable price to pay for healthcare nowadays. And the best thing is, he sets his own hours.
I think Barack Obama missed a big opportunity by overlooking Dr. Joe for Surgeon General. Dr. Joe, along with his up-and-coming resident trainee, Dr. Neve (my niece) will soon be releasing their highly acclaimed nutritional weight loss plan (recently praised by Oprah and Dr. Oz), the Sour Patch Kids Diet. Coming to the children’s section of local bookstores soon, with a special pre-release show on the PBS Sprout network.
The key to the diet is don’t tell your parents.
