Remember Demi Moore in the movie G.I. Jane? Wuss. Remember Jennifer Garner in Alias? Total pan-sy. Remember Hillary Swank in Million Dollar Baby? Lazy. I now have a new idol for bad-assness who is not a fictional character. She’s a teacher, a boxer, and about a dozen other things…and she does them all in a single day. You know who I’m talking about? Frequent Sepia Mutiny commenter Coach Diesel. She’s also a blogger. This morning before work I read her entry about her stint as a foster kid with an Indian family. Here is an excerpt (but if you don’t read the whole thing then you’re gonna’ miss the point):

The first thing I thought about the Patels was how weird their house smelled. It was a strange smell but I liked it too. I thought it might be the incense they burned, like at church. My own house smelled like dogshit because the dog was old, had issues and, of course, we had to walk the dog. I had known Indian people and gone to school with them. I’d had Punjabi friends, but these people were different than anyone I had met in my life before. Their house was super clean. You had to take your shoes off before going inside from the hallway. The people liked to explain things to me, which noone ever had done before.”We put our shoes here because…”The parents spent a lot of time writing.They were vegetarians. They had a lot of rules and Mr. Patel would take forever to explain, in great detail, what each rule was for and why it was in existence. I felt he talked an awful lot.

“Number one, You must wash your own dishes to respect the work that the chef has put into the meal. Water is expensive, so please wash like this…” Oh gawd, not this shit again…I look around and Mrs. Patel is standing behind me with her arms crossed over her chest, watching me, not smiling. She is a tiny woman, thin and about my height. She has a gold earring through her nostril, wears a ballcap with a Mets insignia on it and has a pencil behind her ear. I think to myself, my grandmothers would hate you, you Mets loving bitch. [Link]

Despite being a blogger I don’t actually read a lot of blogs (gasp…my secret revealed). I only read like five, and Coach’s is the newest one. Anybody that can make me feel lazy has got to be spouting some wisdom up in their space that is worth reading. Her back-story has also has me thinking about adoption and foster homes in the South Asian American community. You always hear about white couples going to India to find a child but you seldom hear of South Asian families adopting or taking in children of other races. Anybody have any stories they want to share? I for one am grateful to the “Patels” because if it wasn’t for them perhaps Coach wouldn’t have been interested enough in South Asian culture to visit this blog.

I’m going to stop here because she’s probably already embarrassed that I wrote even this much about her. Sorry Coach. Ohhh, except one more thing. I bow.

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In today’s New York Times, this recollection of a classic desi coming-of-age dilemma:

Both his parents are physicians, he added — his father a urologist and his mother a pediatrician — and growing up in Athens, Ohio, he tried hard not to follow in their footsteps. “This idea that a bright Indian kid is supposed to be a doctor — I resisted that,” he said. “I wanted to be a rock star. I played guitar and wrote songs and even had a couple of club shows. I was just terrible.”

So Atul Gawande became… a surgeon. A celebrity surgeon, in fact, thanks to his side practice as a writer; he’s a regular presence in the New Yorker, his book Complications came out last year to critical acclaim — Amardeep wrote about it here — and a new book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, is out this week.

So now that he’s, like, this author, we get to accompany him into the operating room where we learn that the brother never gave up his love for music; indeed, he gets to inflict his musical taste on the O.R. personnel, though, he allows, “You can’t play anything hard-hitting if there’s anyone over 45.” Thus:

On a recent day, when he took out a gallbladder, two thyroids and what was supposed to be a parathyroid gland but maybe wasn’t, the playlist included David Bowie, Arcade Fire, Regina Spektor, Aimee Mann, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, the Decemberists and the Killers.

My favorite bit in the article, however, isn’t about the music but rather about how Gawande found himself becoming a writer, shaking off a dismal experience in college when a writing instructor, in a moment of brilliant teaching technique, “told him that he could write a sentence but had nothing to say.” At some point Gawande started contributing to Slate, and his characterization of writing for that particular outlet is a masterpiece of damnation with faint praise:

“Slate was perfect for me,” he explained, “because it enabled me to fly under the radar. It was just like going through surgical residency. I did 30 columns for them, and it was like doing 30 gallbladders. Then I had to learn how to get comfortable with 4,000-word and then 8,000-word essays for The New Yorker.”

Okay, so he’s had a charmed life; I know plenty of writers who would die for a Slate commission, and the “advance directly to New Yorker” scenario is not exactly commonplace. Oh, did I mention he also has a MacArthur grant? Still, in my book at least, anyone who likens writing for Slate to extracting a gallbladder — and can back it up with actual experience — earns a toast of love, not Haterade. Continue reading →