caseyoc

And this:

About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.

In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. You can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops.

“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

Can you imagine something so basic as a trip to the grocery store (a chore I utterly loathe) completely upending your world-view? But how heartening that he really did care so much for his people and yearned for the same bounty for them. I hope he was really able to make a difference.

Will you do any type of reconstruction?

I hope no one thinks I'm joking--I'm curious how a man feels about how a mastectomy has affected his body, and if you'll feel comfortable going shirtless. And good job to you for spreading awareness about this!

Do you have anything to declare?

I was recently reading about an effort in Minneapolis to work on meaningful alternatives to an actual police department--essentially, a community policing effort that removes the negative effects of police work and works to change the social culture to one that eliminates many of the root causes of crime.

One of the things I heard suggested was that in domestic violence situations (the most physically dangerous call law enforcement officers make), an officer specifically trained for domestic violence response would be paired with a clinician who would do early intervention on the situation. That way you'd have a partnered team responding who are fluent in the dynamics of domestic violence, and could provide more meaningful response, hopefully helping to reduce the number of return visits.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you heard of it before? How many clinicians do you think would be interested in this type of work? Do you think there would be enough mental health professionals out there who would get into this kind of work?

I went to an Antiques Roadshow. It was a ticketed event, and each person who had a ticket got to bring one item in, and you had to wait in a long line to get into the facility. When you got to the door to the main room where the appraisers were, you were directed to the right group based on what you'd brought. In my case, I brought a doll from my grandmother's grandmother. My guest brought an old survey transit my dad had used. So in our case, we went to the Dolls and Toys section (something like that), and the Tools section. We waited in lines at those locations until an appraiser came around--there were 2-3 appraisers in each section we were at. I'm sure the appraisers and production assistants were eyeballing everything people were carrying around, looking for good stuff that might make a feature story.

It turned out I didn't have anything that was particularly unusual or interesting--each item was appraised at around $200. We then wandered around the event center for a while to see what other people had brought in, watched a couple of appraisals getting taped, and then recorded our little video of what we'd brought and what it was worth.

Bottom line is that everyone got an appraisal when I was there. Nobody got turned away.