December 2, 2019

by drplasticpicker

I’m old enough to have been there when Cyber Monday became a term. I’m old enough to have known “Facebook” was the actual Freshmen picture registry at Harvard that was given out to the incoming class so that they would know some basic information about their classmates, before it was co-opted by Mark Zuckerberg. And I’m old enough now to remember when we never had Cyber Mondays and the world was fine without it. Drplasticpicker is technically the tail-end of Generation X, the generation of latch-key kids when our parents were thought to be somewhat neglectful and we came home afterschool by ourselves. We let ourselves into the houses with our latch-keys and made ourselves TV dinners, and sat in front of the TV watching sitcoms and doing our homework alone. At some points our working parents came home to parent us. And we then threw out those plastic microwave meal trays away.

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December 2, 2019

by drplasticpicker

This is the third post in this series. Since ocean plastic picking, I now spend a few minutes every day figuring out what other easy actions our family can take to help the environment. I like to track of these actions on the notes section as free text on my iPhone. So this is my summary for November 2019 in what I call our Secondary Environmental Net Positives.

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November 29, 2019

by drplasticpicker

Happy Thanksgiving and Indigenous People’s Day to everyone from the Plastic Picker family. Today was one of those milestone days. Like riding your first bike, aceing an organic chemistry midterm or draining your first abscess – today drplasticpicker cooked my first Turkey! It was a 7 1/2 lb bird and it was glorious!

One of my middle management friends is male, older and wiser and always says, “For those that have great strengths, they have great weaknesses.” My great weaknesses are some of the practical matters in life. I became a good driver late in life, and now in my mid-40s I cooked my first Turkey and I am beyond bursting with pride.

For the actual turkey recipe, it was the first one I googled “Easy, No-Fuss Thanksgiving Turkey” https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/easy-no-fuss-thanksgiving-turkey/. Thank you internet!

Being a second-generation American and married to a first generation American, Thanksgiving was always a complicated holiday for me. I grew up watching Thanksgiving on TV with those 1980 sitcom families, and that was what I thought “Thanksgiving” was supposed to be. Then going off to college, living away from my nuclear family for 15 years, marrying a first-generation immigrant from New Jersey whose family also did Thanksgiving a bit “off” compared to TV shows, and then having children while still doing medical training and feeling that I should be providing them a sort of tradition that I never had myself.

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November 28, 2019

An original poem by drplastipicker

I flew home.

I flew home to be with my family

to be surrounded by the warmth of their bodies, the beautiful calls of my kind

I flew home to be with my friends

to move together in the sand and the air, sometimes as a line

I flew home through the storm, confident in my strength and wings

but i did not reach home

the winds were fierce, the storms were strong, and i did not have the endurance

there were little bits of plastic in my gullet that stole my strength

you are home dear human, it is Thanksgiving, and this is your beach

love your children dear human, hug your puppy dear human, and celebrate your feast

but clean the beach dear human, so that the next of my kind

can fly home

November 25, 2019

by drplasticpicker

I wanted to continue the second in a series of weekly interviews with Pediatricians who are environmentally minded. Pediatricians are natural allies to the children fighting for the environment, as the American Academy of Pediatrics has stated children will bear the brunt of the effects of climate change.

Dr. Craig Canapari https://drcraigcanapari.com/did his undergraduate at Yale University, earned his MD at the University of Connecticut. He completed his General Pediatrics and Pediatric Pulmonology training at the Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston. He was also one of the senior residents I worked with often when I was in medical training. Dr. Canapari was well loved and well regarded by all his fellow residents. He balanced a good sense of humor with excellent clinical care. When I was a resident, everyone wanted to be on his inpatient ward team because his rounds were fun! He taught me to always take care of the patient in front of me first. “No one ever died by note-openia” I remember him telling me.

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