Fall and Rise

The most expensive thing I ever bought was a trip to the Emergency Room three years ago.  I had fainted suddenly and repeatedly, while I was trying to leave a restaurant because I didn’t feel well.  I tried to walk to the door, but my feet gave out from under me and I collapsed onto the pavement.  Next thing I know, there is a crowd of people surrounding me, including my future in-laws and an ambulance technician asking me if I might be pregnant.  (I was not.)  They loaded me onto a stretcher and into the ambulance for a 5 minute ride up the road to the local hospital.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a pleasant experience, given the circumstances.  I got a lot of great oxygen pumped into my system, and the EMTs were super friendly.  But considering I am still paying off the bill for the ride, I’d say nothing I’ve bought since then can compare.

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• Calling 911 from inside the hospital (blogs.law.harvard.edu)

I recently heard that there is a new car being unveiled by Honda.  It’s called the Honda Leaf.  This is my dream car for one simple reason.  It is electric.  Rather than running on environmentally unfriendly gas, which emits all sorts of toxins in to the air we breath and drives up the global temperature, it runs on a battery that can be recharged through a simple plug.  It doesn’t hurt, of course, that the car itself looks sleek, small and sporty.  From what I can tell, this is going to be a hot commodity pretty soon.  Considering the price is less than $20,000, I can’t see why anyone would choose a Hummer or some other gas-guzzling wallet drain over the affordable, sustainable, attractive Honda Leaf.

My favorite class in college was a course called “Qualitative Sociology.”  It probably sounds boring, but that’s the opposite of what the class was like.  Basically, this was a class that taught us sociology majors how to get away from statistics and trends and more traditional forms of scientific research.  Instead, we learned about case studies, participant-observation research and in-depth interviewing.  While statistics have their place in academia, there’s something to be gained from taking a closer look at a phenomenon to better understand it.  I loved this class because each week we came together and shared what we learned from just going out into the field and experiencing learning through doing.