Utter incompetence! My dreaming is never able to conjure up the desired creature. A tiger appears, sure enough, but an enfeebled tiger, a stuffed tiger, imperfect of form, or the wrong size or only fleetingly present, or looking something like a dog or a bird.
~ ‘Dreamtigers’ by JL Borges, translated by Alasdair Reid
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“Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American
I want to believe in vocation, but there is also the question: where is the money?
Do you remember being a kid and putting a bunch of posters on your bedroom wall? I had 3 Ben Wallace’s, 1 Jason Kidd, and a Curt Schilling - all from the centerfolds of my Sports Illustrated for Kids magazines.
This Website is a bit like that - just a place where I throw up the things I am interested in. Although, by now, my interests have changed. I am ‘career focused’ in that I chose to do something for work that I find value in, despite the ever diminishing value it seems to find in broader society. My work? I am a veterinary epidemiologist and clinician focused on the sustainable management of veterinary health resources to advance wildlife conservation, environmental protection, and public health. You can read more about the UN’s schema describing this theory of impact better than I could in an About page here: UN Sustainable Development Goals. I also provide summaries of projects here with links to relevant publications and pages.
In addition to the ‘academic’ side of my job, I find a lot of creative inspiration through my interactions with people and write fiction and non-fiction essays to scratch the itch left by living in an absurd world. I publish these in full on substack and provide snippets on this page.
Feel free to contact me if you are find that interacting with like-minded folks helps with your inspiration!