From "Promises to Keep"

    "To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the feet of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down. It's a lesson taught by example and learned in the doing. I got that lesson every day while growing up in a nondescript split-level house in the suburbs of Wilmington Delaware. My dad, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., was a man of few words. What I learned from him, I learned from watching. He'd been knocked down hard as a young man, lost something he knew he could never get back. But he never stopped trying. He was the first one up in our house every morning, clean-shaven, elegantly dressed, putting on the coffee, getting ready to go to the car dealership, to a job he never really liked. My brother Jim said most mornings he could hear our dad singing in the kitchen. My dad had grace. He never, ever gave up, and he never complained. "The world doesn't owe you a living, Joey," he used to say, but without rancor. He had no time for self-pity. He didn't judge a man by how many times he got knocked down but by how fast he got up.
    Get up! That was his phrase, and it has echoed through my life. The world dropped you on your head? My dad would say, Get up! You're lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself? Get up! You got knocked on your ass on the football field? Get up! Bad grade? Get up! The girl's parents won't let her go out with a Catholic boy? Get up!
    It wasn't just the small things but the big ones—when the only voice I could hear was my own. After the surgery, Senator, you might lose the ability to speak? Get up! The newspapers are calling you a plagiarist, Biden? Get up! Your wife and daughter—I'm sorry, Joe, there was nothing we could do to save them? Get up! Flunked a class at law school? Get up! Kids make fun of you because you stutter, Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden? Get up!"

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Biden, Joseph R. Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008, xxii-xxiii. Print.

Araby

I would get off the school bus a few stops too soon. The way the streets and time, and to me, fate, worked, I would—never speaking—get to walk past her on my home. A few minutes later the bus would pass me on it's return route, and the driver would give me a peculiar look, wondering why I always got off at the wrong stop.

On the November 2015 Paris attacks

    This past Friday a number of terrorists conducted a series of shootings and suicide-bombings in Paris, claiming the lives of 129 people from over 26 countries. I was getting dressed, readying myself to work the night shift when I heard about it. The death toll was still estimated to be around 16. On my way to the L train, I passed an old friend and coworker on standby at 16th and 1st. He was listening to the radio broadcast of the very event, and told me that the city had been issuing high situational awareness alerts.
     The reaction of the western world was predictably somber, but stoically so. The lights on the Empire State Building reflected the Blue, White, and  Red of the French flag, the UN condemned the attacks, and people took to social media to vent their distress. This blog post isn't about mourning or politics, it's a response to what I've been seeing in the aftermath of the events. A few days later, as with most tragic events of the modern day, friends galore were posting article after article about who to blame, why everyone sucks, and why you suck most. Wanting to avoid inciting unproductive arguments limited to facebook message-length comments, I figured it'd be more constructive (and better for my health) to write about it here. The two particularly aggravating types of articles (or rather, misuse of articles) I've encountered are along the lines of: Western countries are hypocritical for mourning the Paris attacks and ignoring the Beirut attacks a few days prior,^(1)(2)(3) and Why Islam is the problem.⁽⁴⁾
    So instead of doing my Chemistry homework, here we go:

1.) Why it's not hypocritical for the West to pay more attention to Paris than Beirut
     Mourning is subjective. It always has been, it always will be, and that's okay. Would you mourn a friend's death more than you would a strangers? Of course you would. I'm not saying a strangers death isn't tragic, but it's just human to be selective with who you care for. Historically, France has been a close ally of the United States (cue Mel Gibson at the end of The Patriot). And I'm willing to bet the average U.S. citizen couldn't tell me what country Beirut was in, much less point it out on a map. I know it sounds awful, talking about tragedies as if I'm comparing nothings, but the awful truth is that you can't mourn for everyone.
    During my rotations in healthcare, I had the misfortune of treating a woman who had miscarried. She was crying, and understandably so. But did any of the doctors call her a hypocrite, citing that miscarriages are even more common in 3rd world countries, and thus shame her for mourning? No. They sympathized with her, because that's the right thing to do.
     Yes, what happened in Beirut was a tragedy. But don't stand on some self-made moral platform and call out people for being a hypocrite while they're mourning. On top of that, if you want to treat tragedies like some statistical competition, you would never find an end. Why stop at Beirut? Sudan is still a vortex of fighting, suffering, and death. There are an estimated 293,000 U.S. children that are used in sex trafficking.⁽⁵⁾ Why aren't you mourning for them as well? My point is that suffering in this world is unending, mourning is subjective, and that's 100% understandable.

2. Why Islam is not to blame 
    An interesting statistic is being thrown around. According to journalist Brigitte Gabriel, 1.2 billion people are Muslim, and of those people, 15-25% are extremists.⁽⁴⁾ That comes out to a staggering 180-300 million extremists, roughly the entire population of the United States. Yes, that's an eye-opener of a statistic. Therefore, something must be wrong with Islam right?^*
    My answer to this is a resounding, "um...Wtf..no?"
    An interesting tidbit, coming from journalists interviewing ISIS prisoners is that a staggering amount of them know very little about Islam. As Lydia Wilson writes about her interviews with such prisoners, "They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate."⁽⁶⁾ So how is it that Islam is to blame if many of the extremists, at the core, have nothing to do with Islam other than the name? I can call myself African, but that doesn't make me any more African than all my pasty Asian relatives.
    It's reasonable to speculate that these "Muslim" extremists then, might, maybe, just a little bit, kind of, somewhat, be using Islam as a face for something else (that something else, according to Erin Saltman, senior counter-extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, is a combination of "adventure, activism, romance, power, belonging, [and] spiritual fulfillment").^(6)** My point is these people very well could have used something else to justify their destruction. Just like the Nazis masked their destruction with genetic right, and the Army of God justified their terrorism with Christianity, and the People's Liberation Army rationalized their genocide in Tibet with geographical sovereignty.

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*Now, just for the record, Brigitte Gabriel never claimed that something was wrong Islam. Her argument regards the pointlessness in trying to be politically correct. My response is against the people I see using and subsequently misinterpreting her speech to bash Muslims.
**Saltman refers to spiritual fulfillment not as it is according to the Salafi form, supposedly demanded by the Islamic state, but as a fulfillment of each individual's romanticized idea of it.

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(1)http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/culturebox/2015/11/the_media_covered_the_paris_attacks_more_than_the_eirut_bombing_the_problem.html
(2)http://www.huffingtonpost.com/halim-shebaya/from-beirut-to-paris-selective-grief_b_8279676.html
(3)http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/middleeast/beirut-lebanon-attacks-paris.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&referer=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FPbaOMXytkz
(4)http://qpolitical.com/someone-said-muslims-bad-woman-delivers-amazing-response/
(5)Richard J. Estes and Neil Alan Weiner report in Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, University of Pennsylvania (2001) 
(6)http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/

Baseball Caps and Pacifiers

    A few years after the fact, I'm starting to realize just how much was asked of me that night. I was just an undergrad, just working my part time job when a man's life was placed in my inexperienced hands for the first time. The often overlooked aspect of this job is the unpredictability of the environment. In the hospital you have students, nurses, and doctors skillfully intertwining knowledge, experience, and resources. As for me and my partner, we were packed inside the elevator of a project building alongside the patient's daughter and granddaughter when he died on us. We were both just a few years past being teenagers, and while we had both trained for such situations, this was the first time either of us had to deal with death in the first person.
    The first of many are always memorable. By the time of this writing, I must have seen death dozens of times, but they're all a blur compared to the first. I remember his name, his address, his age, his granddaughter's name; I remember the red "Asystole" blinking on the cardiac monitor.

     I wrote down the details of the event elsewhere, to reflect on what I did and what I could've done better, but the most stand-out moment that night didn't seem to warrant a lesson. After you passed, and after the doctor pronounced you, I went outside to clean the back of my bus. Lost between the failed IVs and stylets on the floor, I found your navy blue baseball cap and your granddaughter's pacifier lying side by side, having been dropped and forgotten in the midst of everything. What a juxtaposition, I thought. There's something to be said about life and death, and beginnings and endings here. But sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's more than enough, to not say anything and let the raw experiences and memories exist for themselves. I wrapped her pacifier inside that old cap of yours, handed it to your daughter, wished her the best, and left to consider those thoughts.

Jumping to Conclusions (Pun totally not intended)

Here's a story an old high school Math teacher told me:

Before the age of PETA, a scientist wanted to conduct an experiment regarding frogs and the distances they can leap. So he got himself a frog, told it to jump, and recorded how far it could leap. He cut off one leg, yelled, "Jump!" and noted that the frog now leaped a shorter distance. He cut off a second leg, yelled, and the frog leaped an even shorter distance. He cut off the third leg, yelled, and noted that the frog leaped yet a shorter distance. He cut off the fourth leg, yelled, "Jump!" and concluded the frog became deaf.

First World Problems

The worst things about winter are the cold toilet seats