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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November 25, 2019

by drplasticpicker

Don Quixote is one of Mr. Plastic Picker’s favorite novels. Mr. Plastic Picker was a short story writer during his high-school and college years, and studied Shakespeare as his major while doing premed. I have always known that this picture by Picasso was his favorite. I have not read Don Quixote (it is next on my list now), but I have read The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain who are part of that literary tradition.

Don Quixote (paraphrased from Wikipedia) introduces the nobleman Alonso Quixano, “who has read so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant to revive chivalry and service his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha.” He recruits Sancho Panza and together they go off “tilting at windmills,” which some would say “attacking imaginary enemies or an act of extreme idealism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

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