The Wisdom of Fill-dirt

The wisdom of fill-dirt is simple, true, hard, and stupid. Be relentless.

Clever is good, smart is better, strategic is great, prescient is priceless. But nothing outplays relentless in the long run.

I have moved a dumptruckload of dirt in the last week. Not because I’m smart or strong- the exact opposite, in fact. I am 63 inches of idiot who won’t sit down. My back will exact its revenge in ways dramatic and mundane, surprising and expected, over the next six to eight weeks. Buy your Motrin stock now.

But here is what I learned. Smart people stop. And they should, it’s the smart move. They also hire other less-smart people to do the stupid repetitive work. Again, rightly-played, smarty.

But for the things you really want done… choose obtuse relentlessness. Maybe it’s a giant hole in your yard. (Probably not, that’s just me.) Maybe it’s a justice system that works for African-Americans as well as white people, maybe it’s a law about processing rape kits, maybe it’s immigration, or reproductive rights, or health care.

The smart people will walk away. There are a million good reasons why it won’t work, and they are all borne-out by history. The people who win in the end, the people who see the change they want, aren’t the hero on the mountain or the person on the plaque. They’re the 10,000th caller. The rube who filled out the questionnaire from their congressperson. The person who does not stop to assess their odds, or if they’re the right person for the job.

Show up. Bring your gloves.

Crash the helicopter

This week a study linking antidepressant use by pregnant women, specifically SSRIs (Prozac and Zoloft are examples of SSRIs), to a greater risk of autism was published, reviewed, and found wanting in many ways. I am so very happy about this.

Because I am tired of the demographic slur of Helicopter Mom.

Stay with me on this…

Many years ago, before the internet, when people listened to music on a stereo and all housewives were real housewives, a couple of women put out a book about pregnancy, and ruined everything.

The book was What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and it was chock full of information. The book was cleverly arranged, and some of the information was useful. A lot of it was not. (You can arrange the words ‘fruit,’ ‘sweetened,’ and ‘cookie’ in a way that makes grammatical sense, Jabberwocky-like, but that doesn’t make ‘fruit sweetened cookie’ a sensical thing.)

The worst thing the book did was to create for new mothers a quasi-statistical fantasyland of “Best Odds”; the “Best Odds” diet, for example. But they didn’t have any odds. Odds is a statistical synonym for probability, but there weren’t numbers to go with the pronouncements. Don’t color your hair or drink herbal tea because there’s no research proving that it’s safe isn’t science, it’s fearmongering.

And these women with their book mongered a lot of fear. Many obstetricians gave the book to women at the first appointment. The parents read the book, and pregnancy was transformed from a biological process to minefield.

They put out more books about childhood, and a mindset was created that posited that every move a parent makes effects their child profoundly for good or ill, and with every juice box and unheld hand, you are creating the potential for a disaster that will be on your head.

And then, after many years of soul-racking worry, high-school teachers and college admissions boards screwed up their faces and asked why the parents couldn’t step back and let the chips fall. You people are crazy! You’re ruining America with your parenting!

To which I say, this helicopter got built with flimsy click-bait science. We can’t land it until we learn that women aren’t incubators, the planet’s not a laboratory, babies aren’t soufflés, and a cup of coffee and 3 drive-thru burritos are nothing compared to the genetic goulash we pumped in at the moment of conception.

It’s a science!

For the past few years a dear friend has battled cancer.

(I know, I know. A lot of people don’t like “battled”. It suggests that if you die of cancer you were a loser, which is an ugly value judgment that is not intended. But “struggled with” cancer seems weak. I “struggle with” keeping my crisper drawers clean. I am happy to use a better word if someone has one, but I can’t think of anything that encompasses the horror, pain, exhaustion, and demeaning and dehumanizing slog that attempted to rid oneself of cancer entails.)

It was a terminal and rare blood cancer, which required many months to just diagnose, and many more to find a bone marrow donor. (Another aside: register to donate your bone marrow, please.) To skip to the end: the transplant was successful, and she is cancer free. Hooray!

When she was able to announce to everyone that she was in remission and could talk about her future again, many people said this,

“Thank God! That is truly a miracle!”

I was fairly close to the process and got to see the hospital rooms and machines and doctors, and I can tell you, it was no miracle.

It was a science! To paraphrase “The Martian”, they scienced the shit out of my friend. They scienced her blood and her DNA. And before they did that, they did experiments to see if you could take the middle of one living thing’s bone and, after irradiating (also science) another living thing’s bones, put the new bone marrow in it and see if it would grow, even though the DNA of the new bone marrow is completely different than the DNA of the recipient. And damn it all, they can!

It was also a human! Humans did lots of research, and given the nature of research, persevered through lots of failure, to figure out how we make our blood, what our blood is made of, how to kill a part of you but leave the rest of you, how infection and immunity work, and a hundred thousand other points of knowledge that came together to make this possible.

A human on another continent also agreed to participate in a medical procedure to donate a part of himself so a lady he’s never met, who does not speak the same language he does, could have a life to get on with.

Thank God. Yes. There is no more appropriate response to this than overwhelming, tears-in-your-eyes gratitude. I cried like a baby in my office, because I love my friend and a future of wedding planning and other adult tasks I “struggle with” seemed terrifying without her. But also thank science. And people, who thought up science, and then did a boatload of it to make this outcome. Because I feel pretty certain that without the science piece, she’d be dead.