Judging by the cottage industry of books and videos hawking strategies for “Getting Things Done”, most people seem to be overwhelmed by how much they have to do. My challenge is the opposite; I have a hard time coming up with what to do next. Even when I get into something (like so many of my landscaping projects in Fresno), no matter how exacting I am with each step, no matter how much of my seemingly limitless time that I expend, ultimately I reach the end, and then once again I have to wrack my brain to invent another project, often more elaborate, sometimes more fringe, to occupy my time.
Last Tuesday while on my way to work, I fell off my bike at 11th and Market. It happened so fast, I’m not entirely sure why I fell, but I believe I was braking to avoid some bikes ahead of me when my front tire came in contact with the streetcar tracks, which caused my bike to slide out from under me.
I hit the pavement hard. The entire impact of the fall was concentrated on my left elbow—there wasn’t a scratch anywhere else on me. Thankfully no other bikes or cars were involved. My arm swelled up, but since I could still move my fingers I didn’t think anything was broken. Until I saw the x-ray.
I had a friend in middle school who was driven to be the first person to wish me a happy birthday. I don’t know if it was just with me, or all her friends, but she carried this on for many years, after I’d moved away from my hometown, then gone off to college, well after our paths had diverged.
On the other hand, I could never really remember anyone’s birthday. I mean, I remember my brother and sister’s, but to be honest I have trouble with my parents’. It was just not something that my brain was interested in holding on to. Of course at the time, the geeky, budding engineer in me mused on ways to “solve” that problem, like creating a spreadsheet or calendar of all my friends’ birthdays. But that entailed tedious upkeep, and it wouldn’t solve the problem of alerting me on the day.
It was a weird confluence: first the entire internet mourning Steve Jobs, then multiple items in my feedreader about Amit Gupta of Photojojo. He was recently diagnosed with acute leukemia and thus will need a bone marrow transplant from someone of South Asian descent in the near future. It compelled me to put a link on my blog calling out to all South Asians.
At first I thought the link I posted for Amit was the most I could do—I’m simply not South Asian. No, the most I could do would be to get tested and added to the National Marrow Donor Program, regardless. So this morning I went to Be The Match to request a free “cheek swab kit”.
