It takes me longer than it should to compose my “out of office” email messages at work. The text of the message itself is quite short; what’s hard is actually pressing the Send button. Intellectually, I know perfectly well that I am allowed and even encouraged to use vacation days. Emotionally, it feels like I’m playing hooky. A holiday, where everyone is out of the office, is so much different than a day where I am home and everyone else is laboring away under a fluorescent glare.

Right. Up. To. HERE. A phrase that goes with a brisk horizontal salute where the speaker’s four fingers indicate the precise level up to which it has been had by them. Bulging eyes and a slight quivering of the hand are optional.

(Note: I worked on this poem a long time, trying to decide between free verse and a much stronger structure. I like the balance of what I ended up with, and what it forced me to omit.)

Rebuilt, by Michael Chorost, is the story of the author’s own experience with his bionic ear. The cover image is an x-ray of his head, the cochlear implant showing up bright and geometric against the misty, swirling bone of his skull. For someone who watched The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman with great attention and envy as a kid, this story was irresistible. What made the book even more entertaining is that Chorost is only three years older than me and was watching the same shows at about the same age, with the same fascination. It’s like finding out that an old elementary school friend had become bionic, both of us knowing its significance. He knows what it is truly like to be Steve Austin, at least at this point in history.

One thing the Kindle has helped me remember is how much I love to simply sit and read. When I first bought the Kindle, part of my justification was that it would be more portable than the couple of dozen tomes that would otherwise litter the house and the car. The irony is that now I have the Kindle and another couple of dozen physical books lying around.

The eighth and final list.

“That’s what parents are for!” This has become the one-size-fits-all answer to any complaint about further erosion of public standards of decency. The general tone behind it is, “We didn’t have kids (or don’t care about them), so let us party like we want and you stay home and protect them. If you didn’t want to do that then you shouldn’t have had kids.” I’m getting tired of it and the premise that somehow they are only my kids. They’re yours too. They are members of the next generation and they will be in power when your power is waning. Do you care yet?

A headline on the front page of today’s Arizona Daily Star caught my attention: a man died while waiting over 8 hours in the emergency room. It was shocking but inevitable. Emergency room care is so bad here in Tucson that I can’t believe it took this long for it to happen. At least now everyone is talking about it, and that’s important.

The seventh list.

“Another book on happiness?” grumbled my wife. “It’s kind of hard not to take it personally.” Well, yes, I suppose technically it is, and it’s true that I read it right on the heels of Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. But neither of them are self-help books for glee addicts looking for a fix. The first one, as you remember, is about how the brain works, and this one is comparative cultural anthropology, and entertaining coursework at that.

Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, has popularized the idea (the meme?) that “a human being is a gene’s way of making copies of itself.” Cute, maybe, but inherently illogical and, if taken seriously, harmful.

The sixth list.

In an essay on my main web page some time ago, I ranted about trying to find a text editor whose native format was something I’d still be able to read in twenty years. Turns out it’s been right under my nose: it’s the humble Mac OS X TextEdit application.

The fifth list.

Here’s a great link to go with my review of Stumbling on Happiness, by Wired contributor Lore Sjöberg.