pretty :)
love.
discovering new songs
“It’s an odd feeling… farewell.
There is some envy in it.
Men go off to be tested
for courage.
If we’re tested at all,
it’s for patience…
for doing without…
for how well
we can endure loneliness.”
sb so far
A lot of walking: long trek to find Mark at Terminal C/walking around ALL of Boston commons only to take a taxi to get right back where we started/a lovely walk from Harvard to MIT along the Charles.
Balanced out by a lot of food! Random (very yummy) Indian restaurant in Harvard sq. bubble teaaaa, pasta with Matt and Marie, followed by Canolis and ice cream, all-you-can-eat Wellesley dining halls.
And surprises: unexpectedly making a trip to Atlanta, conversations in the MIT frat house, missing my stop going to Wellesley and then getting a ride from a nice stranger.
Sitting on the floor of Weixia’s dorm while shes in biochem…things feel impossibly calm here. I’m a little sad to have to leave.
springbreak.
Leaving for Boston tomorrow. I plan to do lots of wandering around old bookstores and knickknack shops. Let me know if you’re going to be in town! I want as many excuses to eat food and frequent cafes as possible.
Unfortunately there is also quite a lot of work to be done…
- PPE take home midterm due Saturday night. ugh.
- Health Policy paper proposal/compile notes/study for midterm immediately post break
- Physics problem set
- Majorly catch up on Spinoza and Hobbes reading.
I suppose I will have plenty of time to do all this while Mark hides in the McKinsey office glued to his phone and computer.
surprisingly
finance interviews are actually significantly less stressful than consulting ones.
“Is the bridge gappable (as Mr. Cantor might say)? Yes, if the Republicans are interested, but only because neither side has really grappled with the cost issue. When Aunt Minnie back in the district has a hip replacement (her second) and gets a bill for $90,000, the challenge is not to find someone other than Aunt Minnie to pay. The challenge is to deliver hip replacements for less than $90,000, or tell Aunt Minnie she can’t have one.”
“But iTunes isn’t selling access. It’s selling content, song by song. It changed the game by letting us buy individual recordings instead of albums, which dovetailed beautifully with the rise of playlists, the modern cousin of the mix tape.”
“Maybe the hardest part of leadership—be it leading a company, a family, a relationship or simply your own life—is that often times you don’t know and you have to still have to act. Leadership in some ways is built on learning to be comfortable with not knowing, with imperfect knowledge, with the inherent uncertainty of it all.”
perspective
Just had dinner with the Yes men, and watched their new movie, “The Yes Men Fix the World.” Totally blown away. Recommend it to everyone.
ahhhhh
I’m going to be in New York for the summer! Working for a financial consulting firm? So unexpected yet beyond awesome. I’m going to find an apartment, and hang out at the Met and the MOMA and China town and go running in central park. excited excitedness :)
“But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”
waaaant.
(via tweexcore)
Here’s a helpful tip. Next time you have surgery, ask the surgeon one simple question:
Will you use checklists as part of the procedure?
There are 40,000 commercial flights in America every day. And planes rarely, rarely crash. 100,000 people die in America every year due to medical errors. That’s the equivalent of a jumbojet with 273 people inside crashing every day. Minimize your risk when you enter our nation’s healthcare system. Print this checklist out and bring it to your doctor. Then ask the question. If they don’t use checklists, demand that they do in your case or find an institution that does.
For more information, see this article by Atul Gawande:
Pronovost recruited some more colleagues, and they made some more checklists. One aimed to insure that nurses observe patients for pain at least once every four hours and provide timely pain medication. This reduced the likelihood of a patient’s experiencing untreated pain from forty-one per cent to three per cent. They tested a checklist for patients on mechanical ventilation, making sure that, for instance, the head of each patient’s bed was propped up at least thirty degrees so that oral secretions couldn’t go into the windpipe, and antacid medication was given to prevent stomach ulcers. The proportion of patients who didn’t receive the recommended care dropped from seventy per cent to four per cent; the occurrence of pneumonias fell by a quarter; and twenty-one fewer patients died than in the previous year. The researchers found that simply having the doctors and nurses in the I.C.U. make their own checklists for what they thought should be done each day improved the consistency of care to the point that, within a few weeks, the average length of patient stay in intensive care dropped by half.
The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.
Today in smart.
street crossing, chicago
break.
It is as if the snow could give the whole world a fresh start; brilliant in its simplicity, blinding in pure white. In the past few days the snow has stopped falling in pockets of time just long enough for the roads to mix brine with slush, before once again being covered in yet another layer of white. I don’t recall the last time snowdrifts reached heights greater than my own. The hardened piles seem at once daunting and permanent. Facing them now, it’s hard to imagine how they could ever melt into flat pieces of mulch or pavement. It’s hard to imagine what could possibly lie beneath what is so impossibly white.
The days pass predictably. Wake around 10, read, eat, attempt productivity, talk to Mark over phone or gmail, contemplate/anticipate/dread another semester of enlightenment/sleep deprivation/stress/experience/fun and of inevitable hellos/goodbyes/smiles/tears/failures/triumphs. It feels a little bit like riding a bike in front of a car that I’m afraid will speed up and run me over. What choice do we have but to pedal faster?
2010
A few simple resolutions.
Take everyday as it comes and make the most of what I am given. Cry less, smile more, appreciate more, doubt less, love more, fear less. Balance faith and confidence with work ethic and determination. Be someone whom I would be proud to know.
“One study of America’s Fortune 500 companies found that the one quarter with the most female executives had a return on equity 35% higher than the quarter with the fewest female executives. On the Japanese stock exchange, the companies with the highest proportion of female employees performed nearly 50% better than those with the lowest. In either case, the most likely reason isn’t that female executives are geniuses. Rather, it is that companies that are innovative enough to promote women are also ahead of the curve in reacting to business opportunities. That is the essence of a sustainable economic model.”