Melanie and I got the opportunity to do something pretty cool last week...the man in the middle of this rediculous picture is Patch Adams, the real one...maybe not as good looking as Robin Williams, but he's probably impacted more lives. I found out that he was speaking to a charity group that provides healthcare for the poor in Dallas so I bought tickets for us to go; it turns out that we were the only non-doctors there (tickets weren't cheap) and some how I found the opportunity to talk with him before his speech and after (we were the last ones to leave); To try to be real brief about this: Patch Adams is a huge hippie; he looks like a hippie and lives his life that way too (remember that he lived in a commune for anyone who was sick and needed a place), except that he is a pretty brilliant hippie, which may be more rare. It seemed that the act of being a doctor was incredibly simple for him so he spent his time on other things, like using it for political and social activism; he isn't a Christian, but understands perfectly what one should look like, he chastized America for being a pretend-Christian country as in his eyes many of our decisions aren't ''loving our neighbor as ourself', I think he understands the message of Jesus better than most of us, and actually summarized it in his speech as 'Get off your butt' (though he admitted that he didn't know the chapter or verse that it came from) He is all about love, in any form that it can be conveyed, and we can all do that, no matter what the profession. He is an idealist, and isn't real in touch with reality some would say, but as my friend Lisa observed we need his kind to see what is possible if we will just let ourselves be a little extreme. He asked me what about who he is and what he says means the most to me and that's pretty much what I said, that he represents what most people only dare to let themselves dream about being, and that is really inspiring and uninhibiting. You should all try writing a letter to him, he doesn't do email but promises to return all personal mail and says he writes 600 letters a week (did I mention that he only sleeps 4 hours a night). Anyways, I will confess while on the subject that in a classic though poinant moment of cheeziness I watched the movie with my friend Aaron Roberts the night before we took the MCAT so that it could remind us of why we were trying to go down this road...i guess I should explain the picture, he made us act like we really had to go to the bathroom..we took it once and then looked at it on my camera and decided that he was way more into it (miserable looking) than we were and we would need to do it again...after we took this picture he looked at it and then said to Melanie "you look like you already went."
Melanie and I got the opportunity to do something pretty cool last week...the man in the middle of this rediculous picture is Patch Adams, the real one...maybe not as good looking as Robin Williams, but he's probably impacted more lives. I found out that he was speaking to a charity group that provides healthcare for the poor in Dallas so I bought tickets for us to go; it turns out that we were the only non-doctors there (tickets weren't cheap) and some how I found the opportunity to talk with him before his speech and after (we were the last ones to leave); To try to be real brief about this: Patch Adams is a huge hippie; he looks like a hippie and lives his life that way too (remember that he lived in a commune for anyone who was sick and needed a place), except that he is a pretty brilliant hippie, which may be more rare. It seemed that the act of being a doctor was incredibly simple for him so he spent his time on other things, like using it for political and social activism; he isn't a Christian, but understands perfectly what one should look like, he chastized America for being a pretend-Christian country as in his eyes many of our decisions aren't ''loving our neighbor as ourself', I think he understands the message of Jesus better than most of us, and actually summarized it in his speech as 'Get off your butt' (though he admitted that he didn't know the chapter or verse that it came from) He is all about love, in any form that it can be conveyed, and we can all do that, no matter what the profession. He is an idealist, and isn't real in touch with reality some would say, but as my friend Lisa observed we need his kind to see what is possible if we will just let ourselves be a little extreme. He asked me what about who he is and what he says means the most to me and that's pretty much what I said, that he represents what most people only dare to let themselves dream about being, and that is really inspiring and uninhibiting. You should all try writing a letter to him, he doesn't do email but promises to return all personal mail and says he writes 600 letters a week (did I mention that he only sleeps 4 hours a night). Anyways, I will confess while on the subject that in a classic though poinant moment of cheeziness I watched the movie with my friend Aaron Roberts the night before we took the MCAT so that it could remind us of why we were trying to go down this road...i guess I should explain the picture, he made us act like we really had to go to the bathroom..we took it once and then looked at it on my camera and decided that he was way more into it (miserable looking) than we were and we would need to do it again...after we took this picture he looked at it and then said to Melanie "you look like you already went."
