Joan Is Okay

by Weike Wang

a question I liked to ask was how is this patient interacting with her machine, what’s the dance there like? If a patient fought, machine and patient became dyssynchronous. If they danced, the two were synchronous. Usually, the patient fought. Our innate drives to breathe and to dance alone are strong.

What is learned outside of the classroom is just as important as what you learn in it, if not more. Meet the right people. They can open the right doors. Wouldn’t it be cool if someday you became a senator’s wife? (The famed MRS degree, because in practice, a female brain is worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled rage.)

Chuàng (创): to create something that never was, to forge a new path, to innovate, to achieve, to strive; anything worth doing requires a person to chuàng.

A woman needs something else that is hers alone. Children leave. Children are not always yours.

Fascinating to me that viruses could infect living cells and take over, but not be living themselves. Only carriers of genetic code, only genes bound by membrane. Not being alive means that viruses are ungovernable by evolutionary laws like survival of the fittest or reproductive strength. So, without this basic constraint and purpose, how have they persisted through millennia, invading cell after cell?

To have a home is a luxury, but I now understand why people attach great value to it and are loyal to defend it. Home is where you fit in and take up space.

Home could be many things. It could be both a comfort and a pain. It could exile you for a little while but then demand that you return.