Author: paulattinello
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Poisoning Rats
Warfarin is a drug in very common use – a variety of stroke, heart and other blood conditions tend to lead to it being prescribed. It comes in several strengths, each of which has a different color; patients get blood tests, at first weekly or biweekly, to see just how much they should take to…
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The City
It will be obvious to anyone who has read much of this blog that San Francisco still has, nearly thirteen long years after I last lived there, an intense fascination (or should I say obsession?) for me. My love of small, beautiful cities, of gently artistic, liberal people, of hillside houses, of small neighborhoods stamped…
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Snapshot
After last night's slightly dense blog entry, which seemed to involve working through my feelings about the past year through the plots and changes of a television show: today was spent waiting, rather uselessly, for the electric company to come replace some sort of switch. They had reserved me from 8 am to 8 pm,…
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Epitaph One-B
It is slightly peculiar how Joss Whedon's television series seem to give me what I need to work through times of unexpected crisis…. The Buffy book, edited by Vanessa and I at first, with Janet getting it over the hump in the last two years, is finally coming out at the end of this month.…
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Ocean’s… twelve
A calm, efficient, bustling day: cleaning, haircut, picked up the exams to mark, managed the first session of the year of the HIV patient group presentations, shopping, lunch. Not in that order; but things tended to happen neatly, quickly, and all slightly too fast to plan ahead and think about – which is actually good;…
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Dilatory
Yes, I know: don't I comment, far too often, on my own rather flaky, inefficient working life in this blog? It seems that both Michael and Patrick have been annoyed by my apparent inability to just get to work, steadily – Michael to the point of gradually removing me from his virtual list of those-worth-being-concerned-about.…
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Riches
The nameless woman, sometimes called Lady Sarashina, who wrote the eleventh-century Heian memoir As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, remembers what happened soon after she arrived as a young girl in the capitol Heian-kyo: "As I was leaving she asked, 'What would you like as a present? I am sure you don't want anything too…
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Time/lines
The snow muffles everything, but reflects some light, so that though it is long after midnight I keep moving restlessly around the apartment in a sort of glowing silence, without lights. My sister bought me some Heian literature for Christmas, among other books; it is giving everything a strange resonance – there are three time frames:…
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Year’s end
And so as the year winds down, so does my time here in Sitges. Some wandering around today, dinner with Chris tonight, perhaps wandering around to see what festivities are happening for New Year's Eve in this beach town; then tomorrow at midday a taxi comes, I go to the airport, and come home. I…
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Encounters
The gentle elderly painter from Sunday's party, the one I talked to for a while about strokes (and who called me a 'boy'), was standing in front of a shop window in the street in Sitges yesterday. He looked tired, hesitant and sad, his hair uncombed – though he was wearing a shiny new jacket,…
Paul Attinello 