On Thursday morning, as I was driving to the hospital at about 7:50 am, the sky was so striking that I could barely keep my eyes on the road and almost crashed several times. The clouds partially obscured the sun, so that half of it was glowy white and the other half was smoky gray. It looked kind of like a pearl that was half white and half black, and each half had unfurled rays of its own color. Some distance away from the sun, there was a smear of a rainbow, as if someone had dabbed a part of the sky with a giant paintbrush which had been dipped in every color of one of those cheap kindergarten watercolor palettes. It's so difficult to describe; I wish I had been able to take a picture, or that I could paint a picture, to properly illustrate how beautiful and bizarre it was. It was one of those early mornings where I was barely awake after pulling an all-nighter and wasn't sure how much I was hallucinating what I was seeing, or how much the bleariness of my eyes contributed to the melty glowy blurry lights and darks of my vision.

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in scatalogical matters. Not sexually, certainly. *shudder* Not that I judge those who are turned on by such behaviors. Truly. It's, um, just not for me. (Okay, I'll stop.) But it is an element which seems to reappear in my stories...part of it is the desire to probe subjects which are considered taboo, to shock myself and others. Which is a bit adolescent (residual teenage rebellion bullshit). But then, a lot about a character can be illustrated by how he or she pisses or shits: what she thinks about as she sits on the toilet, how he shakes himself of stray drops in order to minimize staining his underwear. I'm fascinated by people who are fearful of pissing or shitting in public bathrooms. I knew a guy in college who would wait until the shared bathroom was empty of others before he allowed himself to shit. Poor guy. These strange little games we play with ourselves.

At one point I decided that since I knew of no female writers who used toilet or gross-out humor, I was going to change that by writing a full novel of it, dammit! But that idea lasted about as long as my decision to become Durham's resident mime.

As I was doing my dishes today I listened to this weekend's installment of "This American Life" and was surprised to hear a story read by Truman Capote. Ira Glass commented that he sounded eerily like David Sedaris, and I agree. It was a Christmas story about friendship and loss and the rural South, and like most of Capote's writing, it was evocative, incisive, and taut with emotion. Tears pricked my eyes at his final image of broken kites drifting up towards the heavens. I first became interested in Capote when I saw a film by Almodovar called All About My Mother, which I absolutely adored. The first Esteban in the story (who was insanely beautiful...*sigh*) received Capote's Music for Chameleons as a gift from his mother, and read the forward out loud, where Capote describes how self-flagellation is a necessary part of a writer's existence. And then I knew I had to have that book. I'm not sure, but I think Joe might have given it to me. Capote has a reputation as a "gossipy" writer, because of his famed exposes of Marlon Brando and other celebrities, but his talent went far beyond that. (Although I did enjoy his gossipy anecdote about Errol Flynn playing "You are My Sunshine" on the piano with his penis). His story about Marilyn Monroe, "A Beautiful Child," was one of the most lovingly poignant portraits I've ever read. The final story in that collection is a conversation with himself which unfolds an astonishing spiritual revelation; I still shiver when I remember how I felt as I read it...a "profound expansion of being," as an author (her name escapes me) of a fiction story in The New Yorker once said. He gives me hope that one day I'll be warmly enveloped with the blanket of a spirituality of my own, which will soothe me to sleep. Somehow I need to construct it, discover it, find it.

Capote did what Nan Goldin did through her photographs: reveal the vulnerability and the beauty and the humanity of a multitude of people he knew and loved, but through his exquisitely written stories. When I went to Montreal earlier this year, trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life since medicine no longer seemed like the answer, there was an exhibition of Nan Goldin's work in the Musee de L'Art Contemporain. One of the highlights was a slide show of her work set to a hymn sung by Bjork, and I bawled quite embarrassingly over the insane beauty of it all. But it then struck me that this was what I wanted to do with my life. Those people were all so brave, to expose themselves and their vulnerabilities, to share themselves so completely with others. And Nan Goldin not only showcased her friends and lovers; she also turned the camera on herself. I want to be that brave, I want to be that vulnerable, I want to share the beauty and vulnerability of others. But I just haven't decided which medium would work best for me to do this. My writing and my art are not accomplished enough, and I'm not sure that I have enough raw talent that I could ever create much that is worthwhile. Is it possible in medicine? I don't know. I'm working in an oncology clinic and it's been surprisingly satisfying. Most med students want to shy away from dealing with death or with terminally ill patients, but I appreciate how introspective these patients are, and the newfound perspective that they have. They're forced to truly evaluate their lives, given the lack of time they likely have left, and most are comfortable enough to share their thoughts with me. Given the threat to my own mortality earlier this year, I can relate just a tiny bit (although of course what I went through is nothing compared to the certainty of their approaching deaths). And the oncologist with whom I work is just fabulous. I adore her, and she is certainly the kind of physician I'd like to be, if I do end up becoming one. She truly knows her patients and cares deeply for them. But is medicine really what I should be doing? And so I obsess and obsess and obsess some more...