Thursday, August 5, 2010

Feeling Good

Ada has her surgery this morning, takes about an hour, spends an hour in recovery, then is brought right up to the same-day surgery intake/discharge area and starts to badger them into letting her go home NOW. Two middle-aged women, nurses, and an older male phlebotomist in the room; one nurse asks Ada how she feels. "I feel good," Ada says, then starts to sing, "Da da dada dada dum! I knew that I would now." The nurses and phlebotomist start singing along with her, Ada's seat-dancing in the hospital recliner, still hooked up to an I.V., the three hospital staffers dancing around her and continuing to sing along, "Da da dada dada DUM! I fee-eel NICE, da da dada dum! Like sugar and spice now!" I say, what the hell is this, an episode of 'Scrubs'? But they all keep going for a couple more choruses and then they're all laughing and high-fiving with the patient. Ada's home now, needless to say, still singing every now and then. She feels good.

So do I.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

St. Vincent's Colleagues Please Note

St. Vincent's colleagues please note: I've been approached by a group of former SVCMC non-union co-workers interested in protecting our interests through the bankruptcy process. Other interest groups, including our union-represented colleagues, will be represented in bankruptcy court . Go to http://groups.google.com/group/stvincents-non-union-employees/web/interests-of-non-union-employees to learn more. Note that joining does not obligate us to any cost, and your participation will not be made public. PLEASE SHARE THIS WITH ALL OUR NON-UNION CO-WORKERS.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

"Actually," it says here, "for the purpose of simplicity I am leaving out a few subtle differences."

So a recent conversation in other precincts reminded me that I have long held the idea that it would be a good and right thing to learn a little Gaelic, me being of mostly Irish descent, and that it would be nice, for a start perhaps, to learn at least to pronounce the words I occasionally see in that language.

Oy.

By Googling "irish gaelic pronunciation guide" I came upon "A Beginner's Guide to Irish Gaelic Pronunciation" at http://www.standingstones.com/gaelpron.html, which is nicely written and unpretentious and encouraging ("Never again need you feel uneasy when confronting words like bhfuil or Maedhbh!"), and seems genuinely to want to make a complex subject amenable to even the meanest understanding, but which reveals that comprehending Irish pronunciation is not going to be a simple matter of learning a few rules -- as, say, in Spanish, that lovely language so welcoming of the newcomer -- but rather will require actual brain-engaged study. I hate it when that happens.

Vowels come in "slender," "broad" and "glide" varieties, which govern the "slender" or "broad" pronunciation of consonants, which by the way apparently can be of the plain old, or of the "aspirated," or of the "eclipsed" varieties. Then again, "There are a few exceptions to these rules. Broad dh or gh in the middle of a word is usually pronounced "y", such as fadhb "fibe" ("problem"). Sometimes broad bh or mh ("w") can result in a combination which is hard to say, like mo bhróga ("my shoes"). In that case, a "v" sound is used instead. Also, sometimes a "v" sound occurs when bh or mh is at the end of a word, such as creidimh "krej-iv" ("belief")." And don't even get me started on "double consonants."

Only at the very end does a bit of a wry acknowledgment of the complexity of the task sneak in... "So by looking back at our first examples, we see an bhfuil (the verb "to be" in the present tense question form), the bh eclipses the f, and the u is just a glide vowel making the bh broad, so we say "an will". For Maedhbh (a legendary queen), ae diphthong is pronounced "ay", a slender dh is a "y", a slender bh is a "v", so we say "Mayv". Simple, isn't it?"

Simple? Ah, sure, not atall atall.