Last week I visited my grandparents' hometown, Tainan, together with my mom, my caretaker, Ruth, and my grandpa. My aunt joined us there and took us for a ride the next day. It was a nice tour, and we got to meet some relatives, some of whom we've never met before. Here's the slideshow. Enjoy!
A maverick, genius, and a medical expert with a disability and a drug problem, Dr. House would make a fascinating case study at any research institution. Not your regular doctor in the neighborhood clinic, he pushes everything and everyone to their limits with his cunning sense of humor and dead-on precision in diagnosis. Their ethics, decisions, and rationale--his colleagues and his patients are constantly challenged to rethink all of these--because of his persistence.
Pain
But Dr. House is the epitome of pain in the world of television names. Being miserable is not the only thing that defines this fictional protagonist on the Fox television series. Yet, not too strangely, the idea of pain--the physical one in his leg and the lack of sympathy for that of others--became the one single trait that distinguishes him from all the other "TV doctors". Some people say his characteristic grumpiness stems from the inconvenience of his crippled leg; others say his demeanor is really just a cover-up for the real inner pain he experienced with those he loved.
What makes House MD so watchable, though, is how much humanity we see despite the lack of its expression. It is about how far House would go to find the truth regardless of social expectations. He once asked defiantly if the patient would care that he was more interested in solving the case than saving her life. There was no answer. But he said what others dared not say, and did what others could not do--and sometimes, it seems, that is all they should ever ask for.
Grumpiness
I assume people don't associate me with the word 'grumpy' because I am so calm and rational in my everyday encounters. But sometimes the voice at the back of my head tells me, "Yes, you are one grumpy, miserable soul, just like Dr. House." And I believe it--just as I believed most of what that voice had told me about myself: smart, sarcastic, and permanently crippled.
I don't find it shameful at all to admit that I can be very grumpy at times, because we all suffer those bouts from time to time; life itself is meant to make us grumpy. Nevertheless, being grumpy doesn't exempt me from fulfilling my duties and meeting the expections of the society. And so that's where I give in: that's why I learn to be grumpy inside and never show it.
House is unafraid of showing his grumpiness, but deep down I know it is only his pain in an articulated form. He does the unthinkable from time to time, breaking so many hearts and hurting so many's feelings in the process, that, by the end of the drama, we don't want to forgive him anymore.
But eventually we do. Because we know he's right, and because we know he is so much like us.
He is a doctor, a friend, and a human being waiting to be loved. He would make a fascinating case study--in anybody's life.
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Yesterday I saw a clip from the show (Season 4, Episode 3), and I fell in love with it immediately. The artist, Alanis Morissette, is a Canadian singer and songwriter I admire greatly. To watch the two-minute clip, click here.
For every year of life we light
a candle on your cake
to mark the simple sort of progress
anyone can make,
and then, to test your nerve or give
a proper view of death,
you're asked to blow each light, each year,
out with your own breath.
- James Simmons (Irish poet, 1933-2001)
Almost five hundred years ago today, Michelangelo finished the ceiling frescos of this chapel, in 1512.
The 19th century German writer, Goethe, said, "Without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving."
