Shipwrecked & Comatose

I know I came quite late to the party on this one, but I recently read Gone Girl . I also managed to avoid all of the hype before I read it, so I really didn't know much about the story other than it was a very dark and strange story about a woman's disappearance. (Spoilers ahead) Once I read it, I found it a fun, if somewhat disturbing, story.  It sucked me in pretty quickly.  If you are unfamiliar with the book, I'll give a short synopsis of how it flows.  Protagonist Nick comes home one day to find his wife Amy missing with a few signs of a struggle.  He becomes the main suspect in her disappearance.  The chapters alternate between Nick's discovery of evidence against him, and Amy's diary entries.  The diary talks at first about her deep love and devotion for Nick, but then takes a frightening turn as she begins to worry that he is a danger to her.  As the story progresses, Nick becomes a much less sympathetic character.  We learn that sinc...

Last week I watched The Theory of Everything .  At first I enjoyed it.  I felt the movie was a bittersweet love story that humanized someone I merely saw as a scientific icon.  I had known very little about Stephen Hawking's personal life before I saw the movie.  I had known he was married, but not to whom, or how many times.  Shortly before I saw the movie I read that Jane Hawking eventually divorced him due to burnout, but that was the extent of what I knew. I was discussing the movie with my family and the accuracy of the story came up. My mother mentioned that Hawking would eventually marry his nurse Elaine Mason.  This was completely glossed over in the movie.  It is never mentioned in the brief epilogue at the end of the film, which gives a rosy, happily-ever-after picture of Hawking's and Jane's post-divorce life.  In real life, Hawking left Jane for Mason.  This is not stated outright in the film.  Their parting scene does invo...

Where do I even start to discuss the way I'm feeling right now?  I look out my window and see a cold, dark winter day, and actually wish I were outside. I feel weak and soft.  I am in pain.  I feel disappointed in myself for letting myself be in this position.  What hubris brought me here?  What weakness is so innate in me that I ended up here?  Why can't I be healthy?  Why is it any time I make progress with my body something happens to break it down? I am recovering from surgery from a labral tear in my hip.  Labral tears don't happen from sitting around.  They happen from overuse.  Too much movement in the hip joint can tear or crush the ring of cartilage covering the hip joint (the labrum) which is what happened to me.  I didn't have to have the surgery.  I could have just lived with the pain as it was not terribly intense and could easily be avoided by avoiding certain types of movement.  That didn't seem like a goo...

Since the recent lack of indictments over Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the massive fallouts that have resulted, I have seen some rather unfortunate memes going around Facebook.  What makes them so unfortunate is that when it comes to issues of race, too many Americans just don't get it. The memes all go along the same lines.  They center around an unarmed white victim who was shot to death by either by a police officer of unspecified race, a black police officer, or sometimes just a black civilian.  Occasionally it is just a meme, but often there is a link through to some right-wing website that makes Fox News look like The Nation . There will be a story about some white person who was unquestionably innocent.  The article contains no information about whether or not the victim had a criminal background.   He or she died a horrible death by shooting.  The story ends there.  It is sad and tragic for anyone to be shot to death, but if you're as...