Skin

A friend of mine at the park was asking about my work in between taking care of the little ones and I said, “Oh, it’s going great. I just got to lecture people under the pretense of writing about a design program.” And flashed her a smile.

“Oh, really,” she smiles back. “What did you lecture them on?”

“Voluntourism and ecotourism and their perils. Like how after all these are consumer-based activities, not humanitarian ones."

“Oh, nice,” she says, “impressive that you got that all in there while talking about a design school. Did you get a lot of negative comments?”

“I thought so,” I said, feeling admittedly rather smug. “And no, I didnt get any negative comments. Well, to be honest, I didn't actually look though I did get retweeted.”

“You know, I had the most interesting conversation the other day, of all places at a birthday party.”

Now just as a little background, these birthday parties are deadly. Absolutely so. People are so dumb, now. They’ve got to invite all the parents for some reason only known to themselves. I had one where I specified that the parents were not invited and all the children were absolute angels. Because they knew their parents weren’t there to micromanage them I presume. But the wealthier the parent, the dumber they are, it appears, except of course for the few liberal ones I’ve befriended.

At one party, I was literally pigeon-holed on the way to the bathroom by two women who were discussing in depth and at length the virtues versus the drawbacks of the iphone 4 vs 5. Yes. This was a real conversation. I wish I was making it up. I must have looked more and more desperate as I tried to inch my way towards the bathroom and finally I blurted out, “I have to go to the bathroom.” When I emerged, this conversation was still ongoing. The two women looked at me expectantly and I said, equally desperately, “I have to go check on the baby.”

Thank god for babies.

This is, then, the level of intellectual engagement one can expect. So it was with great and pleasurable surprise that my friend who happens to have a PhD in BioChemistry, not Neuroscience, discovered the aunt of the birthday boy worked for Doctors without Borders. “And she was saying exactly the same thing you are. That it is very complicated to be a doctor because it is just what you said. People competing for resources, competition between villagers for, in a way, who needs more, and all sorts of ethical, potentially degrading social issues.

"You mean like how not to just treat them like zoo animals for example?"

"Right! She said that here you are trying to do good but you dig a little deeper and all these other issues come up. So she came back to the States but eventually quit that because she just couldn’t stand people coming in to be treated for a little mole on their pinky or whatever. So now she’s trying to figure out how to help and be meaningful in her work because once you stop focusing on just that person in front of you who is in grave need, there are all these larger social and ethical issues.”

I’m not really saying anything here. Just nodding.

“So this is taking place in a larger conversation. It’s actually her brother whose son is having the birthday. And he’s a horror movie producer. We’re all talking together and she’s relaying this story about a woman whose skin was literally liquefying. It was a compounded immune –related problem because this woman had AIDS and there was literally nothing they could do to stop it. There wasn’t even any blood. It was just literally disappearing. Fortunately, the same thing was happening to her brain so she wasn’t aware of what was happening to her.”

Well, you know where this story is going, right.

So the brother says, “Wow, really?! Now that would make a great movie!"

Only in Pacific Palisades. Where in the place of Nazi refugee intellectuals like Thomas Mann, we now have horror movie producers. As an aside, apparently when Susan Sontag was young, she took the bus out from somewhere, maybe even UCLA, down Sunset to the Palisades to meet him. Now that is what I call a pilgrimage.