MacArthur Fellowship Dreams

I've never been one to be terribly impressed by celebrity. Perhaps it is because growing up in Alaska, my brushes with fame were few. I met Jim Varney at a mall once. Hey Vern! Yea, I had a picture of us, even, but for some reason my entire body with the exception of my arm was cropped out of the picture. I think my brother was jealous. I also swear that once, at a Journey concert, when the lights went up, I raised my fist into the air to celebrate the power of rock and the aural/spiritual experience that is Journey, and Steve Perry saw my fist rise commandingly above the crowd. He then simultaneously raised his fist and joined me in solidarity. The solidarity of rock and roll. (As one of many divergences in this post, I watch a lot of Happy Monster Band these days with Jackson and two of the characters are Rock and Raoul. They make me laugh.)

So if not celebrity, then what? Big brains, that's what. I used to love Scully from X Files, then it was the Pathology Fellow who taught our small groups (oh, those big words, so dreamy). Now my cerebral lust has taken the form of doctor crushes (hard to describe to non medical folks, but think of love and admiration without gender and physical intimacy, but with intimidation and awe for what you don't know or understand) and a new fascination with the MacArthur Fellowship . My first brush came with the reading of Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeons Notes on an Imperfect Science and secondly with the work of Sven Haakanson here in Kodiak (yes, I have ditched the family and am "working for the weekend", just like Loverboy immortalized in 1981). The Foundation provides a completely unrestricted $500,000 grant to trust smart people to do what smart people will do.

I swear I wrote this down before, but when I came down here back in January, I was checking in my luggage and the airline crew member behind the desk noted I was travelling to Kodiak and innocently asked if I knew Sven Haakanson. I hesitantly replied that I did, having recently worked on a treatise of world affairs and important cultural award winners. She then asked me to take him the frequent flier card that he had left behind. Again, this afternoon, I find myself flying with Dr. Haakanson. Stephen King calls the people we are mysteriously tied to "Ka". Often times there is no apparent reason for the more than randomly placed interactions we have with specific people. We all know this feeling. There were a number of people I "knew" in Tucson that I never actually met, but we went to the same places and ran in parallel circles. I am starting to think that Sven (can I be that familliar?) is in my Ka. Perhaps some of his brain money will rub off on me.

So, how did I start this conversation again? Oh, yeah. Celebrity. I am awed by smart people, not celebrity. I do have a soft spot, however for the ilk that are portrayed in the media, but for that I have The Superficial, and that is another post to itself.