letter oct 3

Dear Everyone,

For some reason I don’t feel I have a lot to write about. Yes, I did go to New York last week, but I find I have to take everything the money guys out there say with big grains of salt. I don’t think any of them can really truly say why they are successful. Most of the time it is a gamble. We did go to so interesting restaurants, first Alto, an interesting Italian restaurant. We were joined by one of my freshman year college roommates, Mike Bellacosa, formerly of Bear Sterns, and now with Morgan (temporarily). I don’t know if Mike is sure of what he will be doing at the end of October - - though in some sense he is surer than the rest of Wall Street - - for sure he will be unemployed. He has a variety of plans and irons in the fire. The night after, we went to another restaurant (whose name I forget), where we were joined by Jonathan Weiss, of the former Wachovia. He was joking that he would be owned by Goldman Stanley. See where prognostication will get you – its Wells Fargo instead. The trip was well planned by Gary, although both of us were a bit freaked out by Manhattan traffic - - we were pretty sure we would miss our flight back to Chicago. We managed to go only to managers located between Lexington and Seventh Avenue, from about 40th to 56th street. Other than the roads being blocked off by the General Assembly of the U.N. ( a great use of our tax dollars – I doubt the U.N. pays much for all the extra security, time wasted on blocked roads, etc), it was pretty easy to get around, and the weather was great. We also stopped at the Tourneau “Time Machine” watch store several times, but other than a lot of looking, no one bought anything. Owen got a tie at some other store.

Work has been going all right, I guess. I am slowly working on some administrative policies, such as when cases need to be amended (a serious issue, like changing your mind on benign versus malignant) versus appended cases (we did extra tests without additional results). It is a thorny issue, since we tend to not amend cases if possible, as it is an admission of error. This is an issue I have to over with Eva Wojcik (the chair) and Alia Salhadar (the head of cytopathology). We have already noticed the loss of our own personal IT person, with a couple of computers down in the department. One we figured out how to fix after two days of no help from the UN-help desk; the other, which is not critical, is still down. I have Neurology residents rotating with me for the next fur months. This is always a bit annoying, because I don’t have enough work for them to do and they get in the way of my other responsibilities; yet I feel obligated to try to teach them something, but at the same time it is pretty tiresome to teach them basic histology over and over again, and know it will never really be put to use.

I just finished reading a book about Roald Dahl, the author who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, along with some other very satiric adult and children’s works. After injuring himself in an air crash in his duties with the RAF, he was sent to Washington to spy on the Americans. Apparently he was quite the rake, and had affairs with many women, including Clare Booth Luce. I also got a collection of essays by the recently deceased David Foster Wallace, which I haven’t tried yet. I did look at his first novel, The Broom of the System, which I thought was only so-so.

Last Friday Cindy and I went to see Nicola in a performance done through the High School Drama club. They did dramatic readings of the poems that the students wrote over the summer in a poetry seminar. The blocking was very simple, and I thought the poems were pretty superior. My favorite was an ode to saltine crackers. The Cubs have lost, but the Bears have won. The White Sox are (still) alive, and the Steelers won!

Love, H.