I am so proud of this kid. A blurred image of him from our time in DC. I was a research fellow back them at the National Institutes of Health Intramural Research Program. I was working in an endocrine lab, but really just looking at surveys and spreadsheets all day. It was a magical year where I was getting a very small stipend that hardly paid for his preschool. We were hemorrhaging money that year, as Mr. Plastic Picker was finishing Musculoskeletal Radiology fellowship up in Boston, and was commuting to DC weekends to see us. We had a small apartment behind NIH, that was the shabbiness place that we had ever lived in. You could hear the neighbors running the bath. We think they were running a laundry service out of their apartment. It was furnished with IKEA furniture that didn’t withstand our young family. The apartment was semi-subsidized by NIH – but not really. It wasn’t that affordable either especially on my research stipend, but I could walk right into work as the back entrance of NIH abutted the grounds.
Reusing this picture again. The last blog I left up, but the blog was painful to write.
May 11, 2022
by Dr. Plastic Picker
It’s 608AM and our oldest will be getting up soon to take his AP Spanish Exam. He is such a good boy, a good son and a wonderful older brother. One thing I want to do different from my children is not to foster a sense of competition among them. For some reason and I was the worse at it, there was always a sense of competition among my siblings. Friendly and in good nature, but still there. I don’t want that for them. There are two of them, and when I am gone from this earth that is hopefully habitable – they will only really have each other. I want them to love each other and to support each other.
That is what I’m trying to do for our climate and health community in San Diego. My mentor Dr. Bruce Bekkar led his last meeting as Chair of the Public Health Advisory Council of Climate Actions Campaign, and I’m next up. Those are big shoes to fill, but I think I’ve figured out the role I’m meant to play. I’m meant to be everyone’s cheerleader, supporter and just to keep us connected and going. That’s the most important role I can play right now. It’s a very non-Crimson University skill. In fact it’s probably the one trait that Crimson University is horrible at. But I’m glad that trait remained nascent in my psyche and has been able to grow.
It’s Tuesday morning and it looks like the middle management meeting was cancelled today. I don’t worry too much about office politics anymore, am I purposefully being left off emails? How are things running? It’s probably my overactive imagination anyway. Many people can be thoughtless, and I don’t think I’m that important to be the target of any political machinations. You have to care about someone to let them hurt you, and honestly thinking of everyone as just part of nature has helped me. You don’t get mad at compost nor at the carnivorous insects that devour a carcass? It’s part of the cycle of life, right? And I honestly think that is true for many human relationships as well. I met a young new doctor yesterday in the program that I used to run, and things were not going smoothly. I had written my workflow out many times when I was asked. It’s funny that I had written out step by step my workflow, and even those that had asked for it – I don’t think ever read it? I found it in my files when I was trying to get the new young doctor settled in. I was there and provided her supports and checked in on her, but it’s not my job anymore. I decided to let that part of life go and I’m forever grateful I did. It’s not anyone’s fault just the system is not running smoothly. The system will sort itself out. It’s not my job anymore.
With that, I’m so lucky to have meaningful work – both my work work and my volunteer climate work. I was a doctor yesterday and saw many patients. Lots of kids with fever and lots of my own patients. With each interaction, I felt I left each family a bit better. I addressed parents concerns, and sometimes I just listened. I shared their burdens. It’s funny how that simple thing can be very hard in the cacophany of our modern world, but it’s sometimes the most important. If I as a doctor don’t acknowledge their illness and their symptoms, than did it happen? I need to acknowledge. I need to witness. I need to be present.
It’s 645AM and I’m blogging this morning to process everything that happened yesterday. My mother-in-law is puttering around the kitchen and has another upcycled matt someone gave her. Our house kind of ebbs and flows with the upcycled things that enter into it, and then exit out mostly donated to Goodwill or gifted to someone I know. Choosing to step off the consumerist wheel was one of the ways I have been able to be such an active climate and health advocate. When one stops shopping for fun, you gain so much of your time back.
We still buy things here and there, but choosing to value things and people as precious and non-disposable has been the core of my activism. That has been true for most of us in this work. I’m looking out into our backyard garden, and it’s so gorgeous and worthy of any eco-magazine. You can’t replicate it, because it’s upcycled planters and tomatoes overflowing with hidden sweet cherry tomatoes. It’s our rosemary bush that was propogated from my friend Dr. Jill Gustafson’s cutting several years ago. We don’t have to buy rosemary anymore. It’s the plethora of flowers from rescued plants my mother-in-law picks up from friends and the local Sprouts, whose manager knows her well and is happy to have her take the plants that would otherwise be thrown out. Yellows, reds, and little white flowers that look with baby’s breath from where I sit. Even the vegetables when they are seeding give off flowers, as we save the seeds for next season. It’s tended with a loving hand and appreciated by our sustainable family, knowing that we are a part of nature and the result is this confusing yet sensible mess.
It was a frustrating three hours on the virtual queue again yesterday to give public comment at the San Diego City Council budget meeting. Riley Gilbertson, one of our premedical advocacy interns, and I have been working on this leaded aviation fuel project for the last seven months. This is when we first heard about it from the Montgomery Gibbs Environmental Coalition. https://www.mgecsd.org/index.html
I’ve never understood regret. The Korean word for regret is 후회. Honestly, I don’t think I even know the word in Vietnamese despite being fluent. Just googled it. I do know the word. It’s tiếc. I guess I don’t hear my parents regretting that much growing up, unless it was a some food that was actually spilled. I remember once going to Costco (Price Club back in the day) and an entire large tray of eggs flipped and was summarily all broken and unedible. My father, young back then, had been joyriding on the shopping cart which caused the tray of eggs to be broken. My mother probably did regret it, and likely said ” tiếc” in Vietnamese. But I don’t think my father would have regretted that moment, because I remember him laughing and joyful and handsome in a young father way.
So here I am, older than my father when he was joy riding in the Costco (formerly Price Club) parking lot on the shopping cart. The tray of eggs, since they were mostly biodegradable, have been cycled back into the earth somehow (hopefully). And I’m thinking of regrets.
I’m thinking of regrets because I talk to more people now. No, that’s not true. I’m listening to more people now. I’m trying to share the burden of more of my friends, especially climate friends. And what I’m hearing is regrets. I’m hearing reflections. I’m hearing them processing professional and personal experiences and wondering, was it worth that time? Was it worth all those sessions preparing, when the session did not go as planned? After the comments, after the rejections, was it worth it?
I listenend and shared and tried to reflect some of their emotions back. Friends are dealing with it. Job rejections. Grant rejections. Feedback that may be intended to be constructive but feels like professional rejection or dismissal of your efforts.
I don’t have regrets. That’s all I can tell the readership. It’s your journey and it’s often circuitous, and that wandering in life is what makes it yours. Maybe that’s the commonality among those I love personally and professionally and their difficulty in processing things. They’ve never been rejected that much, and they live with too much regret when it rarely happens.
OMG it’s April 30th today! It’s actually the anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the mass migration of Vietnamese people overseas after the communist takeover of the south. I call it Saigon, and if you call it something else – than obviously we have an issue with eachother. I didn’t notice the date until I started blogging this morning.
No one in my household really gets how important April 30th is. I love and live in a household of Koreans. This is not by design but by chance. Usually your enemy’s enemy is your friend, and I often wonder if this is why Mr. Plastic Picker and I were destined for eachother? It’s more likely he was cute and I was cute, and we were lab partners in premed biology. I can’t explain why, but I knew Mr. Plastic Picker was the one, because he smelled a certain way. It was definitely pheremones. But I often think of the colonial ramifications of our union that transecend the premedical sciences.
It’s the last day of April, and the anniversary of the fall of Saigon. It’s been a whirld-wind month of climate projects and work. Since Saigon fell, I ended up being born in the United States of America – having been conceived enroute during my parents flight from totalitarianism and communism. And then I ended up marrying a Korean boy. And this is why my children are half Korean/half Vietnamese but don’t speak much Vietnamese but love Vietnamese food. The same drama is happening all over the world, and now again in Ukraine. Greed. Limited resources. Corruption. It leads to people being displaced and creation of new alliances.
Like many I’ve flown many times. At some points, we were very bicostal. My sister and I were studying college and graduate school in New England and our family home was in Southern California. Then trying to maintain familial relationships with all our New York relatives when Mr. Plastic Picker and I relocated our family back to San Diego required flying. But with the COVID pandemic, most of us stopped flying. I flew for just the second time in the last three years to Denver this last weekend, double masked at the end and only furtively taking sips of water when I felt dehydrated. I don’t fly lightly or without reason especially since there is still COVID and especially since I know it’s spewing carbon into the air.
Wow. My body is tired. I now realize my binge-watching Kdramas (and I’ve been a bad middle-aged mommy and binge-watching a lot) has been kind of excessive. I now realize that some of this is not unlike people who drink alcohol (which I do not but I am not judging) to numb themselves. I now realize that ending my traditional middle management career at five years of Assistant Chief was an emotionally hard and wrenching decision. I was numbing myself from the emotional fallout. The fallout, ended up being the emails and calls from some upper management that never materialized. I know that they too are just cogs in the HMO machinery, but to say that I am slightly disappointed would be true. I think all of us deep down all want to be recognized. Since I’m a metric oriented person, I know objectively I did so much in the five years that I was Assistant Boss. But now that I’m at that age of being a middle aged palindrome, where my age is the same read forwards and backwards, I realize that it was meant to be. I’m meant to decide where my path goes. Read forward or backwards, I’m still me and actually more fundamentally me that I could ever be.
So with those convulated thoughts, something amazing happened yesterday at our HMO. I was one instructor at one of the breakout sessions, but my climate HMO Friend Dr. RA organized one of hte first of it’s kind San Diego wide climate symposiums with cross institutional participation on the instructor and resident side from all the major Family Practice and Emergency Medicine departments. It was very epic and she has her own narrative that she will share soon in an academic piece.
Tshirts from @madebyvan my amazing crafy sister (also Yale /Berkeley educated attorney sister) who donated her efforts to our cause.
April 19, 2022
by Dr. Plastic Picker
It’s 7am at the Plastic Picker household and we’re continuing to put our extracurricular efforts into trying to save the planet! Reminder! Dr. Plastic Picker despite giving notice that I’m stepping down from my official middle-management role (although I’m now the ping pong tournament organizer for our big HMO office!) am still a practicing pediatrician working essentially full time. Five years is a long time to do anything, and the middle-management work although I was back to being good at doing it – honestly was like attending histology class in medical school or going to the dentist. I could convince myself it was good for me, but it stopped being fun.
