Andrew Statum

Lauren, Lauren, you pesky, saucy minx. I think you may have lied to me, but I can't prove it. Tisk, tisk.

I was born in Colorado in 1980, a healthy 7 lbs, 10 oz. to a mother with thick brown hair and a father with a sharp nose and a perennially clueless air about his movements.

So there I am, one of what must have been thousands of race fans posted along the curb a few strides after mile marker 24 in Central Park on Sunday afternoon, scanning the river of runners going by for the familiar faces of our loved ones. Mine, I knew, was wearing orange. This was Natasha's first marathon and, as she's from Florida, she decided to wear a Florida Gators running shirt - orange with blue trim. My camera was on the "burst" setting and I was poised to strike. How could I miss her? Surely, with an orange shirt and red hair, she'd stick out like a sore thumb.

Did you know they've made a movie out of this? Despite the typical promotional histrionics, it looks like it could be decent, though I'm not sure what snowboarding has to do with anything. (And I just looked over Tougaw's blog and found out these last two sentences were completely redundant. My apologies. I'm a total rip-off artist.)

Here's my review of a blog called Neurons Firing. I guess it's meant to be for something like the on-line version of Learning or Teacher magazine or any publication whose readers are in the educational field. As many of our fellow students are themselves educators, I thought this would be a particularly relevant blog to review and get feedback on. Thanks y'all.

All this talk of sleep problems last time got me thinking about my own sleep and dream issues which, I think, are intimately linked. In part, I think dreams are the brain's way of sorting through, and explaining to itself, the intra- and extracorporeal phenomena it is picking up while asleep (I don't know if those are real words but I like the way they look).

For my final project, I'm going to continue work on my creative writing workshop piece which I'm now thinking of calling "The Fugue of the River Bend Diner." Kitschy? Eh, maybe. I don't know, we'll see. The piece follows the thoughts of three characters (Marcus, Frances, Joseph) as they navigate their way through an afternoon at the River Bend Diner in River Bend, Utah. Their voices weave in and out of each other in much the same way the "voices" of a fugue move in relation to one another, with one voice developing the theme at any given time while the other voices play counterpoints. The overall idea I'm working with here is that everyday represents a kind of reckoning with one's past, and this reckoning takes place in the loneliness of one's consciousness, even while one is immersed in the minutiae of day-to-day interactions.

Some thoughts on Chaya B. Gopin's entry on the (mis-) labeling of patients.