Tag Archives: family

My Granddad with vascular dementia

He remembered I was in med school, asked me how it was going. Usually I have to remind him. He reminded me of how he was a medic in the Navy during the Korean War, forgetting he had told me this story more times than I could count. I loved hearing about his life though and listened intently. We talked about how we were the only two people in our family with any background in healthcare. I said to him, “In a little less than three years, I’ll be Dr. Cobb, how crazy is that?”

He looked up from his lost gaze and said “I hope I’m here to be able to call you that,” and for the first time in my life I understood that he may not actually make it that long, that he was dying. Continue reading My Granddad with vascular dementia

Charitable Walmart

I’m about to make an argument on a premise that not many people agree with me on. I guess that’s a pretty silly idea but hell, I’m doing it anyways. I wrote a post not long ago encouraging people to be more selfish. You can read it here. But the general gist of it is that selfishness is not synonymous with greed and that if one is truly concerned with oneself, then they will inevitably help everyone more than someone who strives for selflessness. An analogy would be to giving an employee a higher wage so they can come to work without hunger and therefore, be more productive. Sometimes, I understand that this is not the case, that to the employer, the benefit of satiety is minute in comparison to the cost of feeding. But I argue that this is a dynamic stage, not a homeostatic one. I believe from fundamental logic of thermodynamics that an economy can reach equilibrium unless restrained by external interference. Of course there will be unemployment but there will be less than if restricted by regulation.

So here I go. Grant me that initial premise and you may realize this one. Or maybe the combination of two seemingly faulty premises will help with acknowledging that I may not be a quack after all.

Walmart is actually an awesome corporation. There I go; I said it. I know I’m not the first one and I imagine (I hope) I won’t be the last. Why is Walmart awesome despite the overwhelming hatred for it and its customer base to be, shall we say, less than classy and occasionally inbred? Walmart is great exactly because it is as selfish as it can possibly be.

Continue reading Charitable Walmart

Farting in elevators

You want to know how awesome my childhood was? When I was a kid, nearly every year my family would vacation on the Gulf of Mexico in Fort Myers Beach, Florida to a resort called The Pink Shell. While, like normal families, we did enjoy playing in the sand and the waves, much of the time spent on vacation was actually causing mischief. Nearly every year, my dad, my sister, my brother and I would take a walk down to a store chock full of rude toys and buy the worst of the worst. With stink bombs and fart machines in hand, we ran back to the hotel ready for pranking. After realizing that the stink bombs faded too quickly in the ocean breeze and the fart machine could rarely be heard over the waves and traffic, we migrated to the quiet confines of the hotel elevator where we unleashed hell on unsuspecting victims. Continue reading Farting in elevators