A brief memoir on cutting up dead bodies

Will two washing tablets and two cupfulls of perfumed conditioner be enough to get the stink out? Maybe three. Even as I pushed my stained-and-minging-with-blood-and-formalin labcoat into the washing machine, I felt a smile break somewhere inside me of how matter-of-factly I manage to go about my motions during the weeks of dissection. Maybe I really have taken the leap of being totally nonplussed about the whole slasher routine that unfolds through my fingers every morning. Strange what routine does to you. Which calls for a perfect reminder of the journey that’s turned me into this relatively hard-skinned butcher that I am today.

Signing up

However much this might surprise you, dissection at my med school has always been optional (blame the lack of funding and a renewed interest in empowering doctors with psychosocial crap in the latest white papers which don’t seem to mind if the newly graduated clinicians can’t differentiate between a nerve and a string of fascia). About a quarter of a cohort signs up for the intensive two week module every year and attends it in an anatomy lab where eight corpses lie covered on separate stretchers and each cadaver is shared between 6-7 people. With a brief intro in the morning and afternoon, 2-4 hour long sessions involve novice med students poking with their scalpels, scissors and fingers, laughing and grimacing, getting disgusted and awed in perfect tandem.

The first year

This is the year of the hype. The build-up. The tension and the anxiety. Its the year when you, for the first time, legitimately slash another person (albeit a dead one) to pieces. First comes the dreaded unveiling. Wrapped in two layers of white sheet, as the covers come untucked, the first thing to chill every bone of your body is the expression on the cadaver’s face. The first impression of watching someone frozen in a half-scream: the lips fixed open, only some creases and lines fixedly pronounced and the stiff half-open eyelids revealing an eye-less black nothingness isn’t admittedly a pleasant one. Top that with the fact that as you touch the shaved head, the sprouted hair feel as alive as your weekly stubble and the surreal moment of realisation of a key emotion felt is complete. Its the defining moment when you tell yourself that you are indeed governed by your biology. Life is finite, fragile; death is one of its biggest truths; and at the end of the day, the human body is basically a machine. After this brief 10-15 seconds of silent existential awakening, from which you are rudely awaken by the stench of the formalin and tissue, you begin the routine.

The first cut begins with you holding the scalpel in one hand, and shouting to yourself inside “Its alright, you are just cutting a non-living doll open” close to 30 times before the blade touches the ashen skin and just like that, you run your blade down like slicing away a birthday cake. The fact that no blood comes gushing out is a huge contributory factor in you getting “warmed-up” to this small miniplex of slaughter within the first half an hour.

In the first year we basically have to cut open the limbs which starts with first peeling the skin away after we have made the guiding cuts. You begin the skinning by first revealing a corner of the cut skin and pulling on it to let it tear away from the underlying muscle. The greasy layer of fat just beneath the skin and the sound effects of you cruelly ripping away the skin are just two of the things that make the squeamish around the corpse-table squeal and run. Still, of the two weeks, peeling the skin off remains an absolute favourite amongst the dossers of the groups. With one person holding fat pads and fascia layers with tweezers and the other casually slicing it all with his scalpel, its one of the few jobs that’s as smooth as applying butter on the bread, gives quick results and allows a lot of free mental bulk for chattering away to your heart’s content .

The first two days go about finding and naming every muscle and its respective tendon in the upper arm, then the lower arm, then the hand (skinning the palm and the fingers is strangely goosebump inducing), then the thigh and the lower limb along with the feet. The last two days involve butchering every bit of muscle and exposing the bones. And it doesn’t end there; to have a good look at the insides of the knee, hip, elbow and shoulder joints, the last day involves some serious pulling and jerking of bones to snap them out of place and poke into the gooey synovial joints.

7 more memorable things about the 1st year dissection:

1. Not having non-vegetarian food for the first week of dissection (its like your eyes and nose are stuck in a weird synaesthetic loop. You see any meat and you smell the stink of your anatomy lab).

2. Wishing you had bleach to wipe the foul smell away from your hand everyday at the washing-up sink.

3. Getting over-zealously confident in the 2nd week and accidently making a minor cut on your finger that makes everyone’s jaw drop with worry that you have contracted every virus on the planet. Subsequently, getting freaked out yourself at the possibility of what if you really have contracted any.

4. Coming home and explaining the tiniest gory detail to the family and then laughing at their grossed out expressions.

5. Naming the cadaver “Juicy Lucy” on account of the fact that every cut made on her body leaked out more formalin mixture which used to sting the eyes.

6. Not even daring to think about female genitalia within any sexual context (imagine!) for weeks after butchering away in its vicinity during lower limb dissection and staring at a dead woman’s pubes for days together.

7. The hair-pullingly hard exam at the end of the module. 100 true/false statements with stuff like “Does the proximal branch of this and this nerve runs medially to this and this artery below the middle arm of so and so muscle?”

In the next post: The second year.

Still alive

15 days too late, but not shamefully late to put my one and only resolution to practice. To keep this blog I so cherished writing all my last year on, alive. That’s it. No more putting my blogging off. And no more procrastinating. I am back with a vengeance and I promise to flood with crap from TV and movies which I just so devilishly enjoy. What’s with Bollywood suddenly? So much activity, the going-ons beg to be commented on.

No seriously, I mean Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother UK?!?!? Its like the most outrageously bizarre phenomenon on British TV this side of 2000. I remember how her posing on the red carpet as she stepped out of the Beemer in a sari made the whole of Britain gasp on the night and then the next day when the poses made it to the front page of every British daily. Actually I remember strangely feeling smug-to-be-Indian first morning back to the university when crushed between the peak hour crowd on the Central Line, a Bollywood beauty on Metro’s front page for a second or two gave enough motivation to gear up for the year ahead. Please don’t ask the semantics of this weird association. This is 7.30 AM I am talking about when my brain’s concept of complex emotions like rationality and motivation are really messed up. It felt good to see an Indian’s face pasted everywhere. Period.

The chick’s got me hooked to this stinker of a reality show though and watching the white chavs like Jade Goody and dumbhead-football-wives like Danielle gang up against her does make for some engrossing TV. My sympathies with apni desi leggy beauty, but what was she thinking when she signed on the dotted line? She’s an A-lister through and through back home and probably the only true “celebrity” in there and it really pained me to see her go through all that she has. She just didn’t deserve it.

For all her sashaying down the red carpet in a gorgeous sari and elegant namastes, her stint in the actual house has actually poked a deeper vein of the society than I had ever imagined. The disgusting show of the fellow British catty whiteheads and vile bullies has really brought about the age-old socio-psychological occurence of culture shock, alienation, and the much dreaded R word. Racism. Yes, its all there in its shining glory–the name calling, the swearing, the bullying, the singling out, the catfights… and its not of any subtle, implied variety. Its the crass shmuck that can be heard on every public school’s playgrounds. My utmost sympathies with the otherwise genteel (if at times annoyingly apologetic and I-like-to-please-everyone) Shilpa, whose short and curt comments are really quotes to behold (”This is your claim to fame… so good for you” & “I represent my country, is this what today’s UK is?”) and whose personality plus the way she has dealt with it all (okay she really does only know the tip of the slagging-iceberg meted out to her, but still) I have become a fan of. Go Shilpa, win this CBB… you deserve the booty, the fame and the applause more than anyone in there!
After bullshitting such obvious appearances like going to shrines all year together etc etc and scoffing plus denying galore, the fact that finally the Baby Bachchan has proposed to Aishwarya Rai even as their fourth cinematic Titanic together sinks made me frown a bit. Something as private an affair as engagement nicely timed to a movie release takes away some genuinity. But what the heck, maybe its my subconscious jealousy for the junior Bachchan to tow away one of the world’s most beautiful woman talking. Oh well!

And from one Bollywood beauty to another! Finally, Madhuri Dixit’s back! After years of religious googling (yup, no matter how much it pisses the Google head honchos, I love saying googling rather than “searching on the net”) on her name first thing in the morning, I almost fell off the chair last month when she landed in Mumbai. The ultimate diva is all set to scorch the silver screen very soon, and boy, if I said I am counting the seconds to the movie’s release, even that’d be understating it. My fanship for this ultimate stunner knows no bounds even after 16 years.

Damn I forgot, this post was supposed to be on movie reviews. And here I am, rambling away like a Page 3 freelancer! Oh well, this whole dual personality thing (for all those still clued in, I am still a hardcore medic by the day) is supremely cathartic but very soon I hope to throw in some philosophical nuggets (read whines and moans) from my own field of study. Very soon.

So that’s that. A comeback, full-of-vain post to convey that yes, I am still very much alive and kicking. Keep reading folks!

Anyone with one good reason why I still shouldn’t be mad about her? Man, that smile…..

The Namesake: Movie Review

The Namesake (2006): ***

Catching a movie at a film festival has an undying charm. And almost all of it comes from the fact that you see the film months before its official release. So here I am–fresh from the screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake feeling relatively smug of having watched it atleast half a year ahead of the general public world over.

Now Namesake the book (by Jhumpa Lahiri) and me go back a few years when I was binge-reading Indian fiction in English day and night. Freshly disappointed with the author’s ticket-to-fame Interpreter of Maladies, and in awe of authors like Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth who had the penchant to weave the most complex of stories into well-defined and emotionally well-pronounced old-world epics, The Namesake’s laid back, sensory-concentration didn’t evoke a sort of must-read-it vibe and I remember placing it on the bookshelf after reading some 50-60 pages. 2 years on, and just a few weeks back I picked it off my shelf on a whim and was totally amazed by how easily and beautifully, Lahiri shaped her characters. There was also this it-couldn’t-have-been-said-better feel and the sheer power of emotion between the lines that just had me hooked. And the undercurrent of a deeply felt uprootedness is something every NRI worth his salt would identify with.

The dilemma this time around was, I had already booked the tickets for the film playing at the British Film Festival, was dead curious to see what magic thespians like Tabu (who I have sorely missed after Meenaxi and Maqbool almost 3 years back) and Irrfan Khan would create together under the reins of Mira Nair and what Mira Nair, whose sheer honesty and unmanipulative warmth as a film-maker I had become quite a fan of after watching Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra would handle a book as subtle as The Namesake. So, to do justice to my film-watching experience and for once get an objective view of a book-based film, I reluctantly sacrificed reading the book once again after 70 or so pages. Do I regret it? Well, after watching the film, I have to say yes, a bit.

I wouldn’t hyper-intellectualise why the film doesn’t really work in totality for the faults are pretty basic. Given the epic scope of the novel which spans over a weighty 3 decades or so, to stuff all that in a 120 minute screenplay is a tough job. Especially when the film chronicles a family’s journey over two generations, having a high emotional quotient in drama and conflict go a long way in making it memorable. But here, with every successive hopping-years-in-a-single-silent-cut, the viewer slowly feels more and more distanced from the film’s characters until there comes a point when you feel too much has been left out, too much is cut rather too soon, and too much is happening too soon in a screenplay that gets jumpier with every passing minute. Just when you start becoming comfortable with a point in timeline of the lives within the Ganguli household, you are pushed further along. Its like being in an over-crowded museum where everything is so beautiful, you want to stare at it a few more seconds if only the person behind you would stop sighing so loudly, making you to do the decent thing and move to the next equally beautiful sight.

The compliment in the last sentence is for the whole cast each of whom turn in such endearing performances that you can’t get enough of them. Give her the slightest of lines and she’ll still shine the brightest. That’s Tabu for you. Filled with everyday nuances (watch her mix red-chilli powder, salted peanuts to rice crispies for breakfast or watch her glances as her boy’s girlfriend addresses her and her husband by first names), she fills Ashima Ganguli with so much life in her own lethargic, lived-in way, it takes a single scene to warm up to this constantly bewildered character. I actually loved the subtle transition that Tabu so brilliantly plays in Ashima on her trip back to Calcutta where an otherwise sober parent in her turns into such a bubbling uninhibited livewire that even her phoren-born-and-bred daughter is embarassed when her mother playfully poses atop a rickshaw. The actress totally looks the part too. From exuding timeless charm in her 20s as a reluctant Bengali girl with beautiful long hair and petite profile to radiating pure, maternal warmth (replete with dark circles, greying hair, tired eyes, decently draped saris)–its a transition that gives the film much of its humour, graph and soul.

Matching Tabu step for step is Irrfan Khan as Ashoke, who with his everyman face literally sleepwalks through a chokingly sympathetic sketch with life-like geniality. Kal Penn is another inspired piece of casting who not only triumphs in his now-signature straight face comedy but is pretty effective with the otherwise grossly underwritten dramatic portions which bring out the angst and infuse life-affirming lessons in Gogol Ganguli. The trio alongwith Sahira Nair paint a believable picture of a family that could have easily done with more screen time together.

If only the screenplay had stuck to one timeline from the start and used the rest as flashbacks, we would have so many more scenes of these characters seeking out to each other which really would have turned the movie into a real-life dramedy on par with any of Mike Leigh’s works. As of now it resembles a watered down Baghban (the emotional peaks are missing) meets a watered down East is East (the humour is more subtle) with shades of watered down Pardes (the loneliness and the resulting melancholia amidst the elder members of the Indian diaspora begged for more sequences).

And even though my references might raise an eyebrow or two, the fact remains that the genre this movie is in (that of a family drama) its surprisingly quite wishy washy in everything it attempts to address–the loneliness of a newlywed couple in foreign waters, their struggle to carve out a home and raise a family amidst the culture shock, the differences in perceptions and in opinions that ensue amidst the parents and their kids leading to the alienation of the former and finally the growing up and owning up phase where there’s acceptance and respect for one’s identity, roots and family (symbolically embodied in Nikhil Ganguli’s namesake–Gogol). All with splendid scope for drama which somehow remains unrealised thanks partly to the aforementioned snap-cut approach taken in the screenplay which robs the film of a natural flow and the jokey tone that the film-maker prefers and relies on so heavily that when things get serious, the film’s ill-at-ease with loud display of emotions and subtlety soon becomes a justifiable blandness. Yes, the humour almost always works but a story as epic as this needed an equal conviction to the serious parts. As it stands, it is poignant, but only in places. The background score is also quite ordinary and because the movie is so brutally edited, one’s interest starts to waver towards the last half an hour or so making it seem longer than it is.

So that’s about it. The Namesake is a movie I definitely did not absolutely regret spending £15 on (that’s the most I have spent on a movie without owning it). The fact that it feels incomplete despite hearfelt performances from the ensemble has only made me more determined to read the book and get a bigger slice of the Gangulis’ life. And reading it again with such good actors in mind will definitely be entertaining. If hypothetically, the book turns out to be as truncated as the movie, then I’d concur that maybe the story just wasn’t meant for the big screen. But I’d have to reserve that judgement until I read the book (which I hope to complete and review sometime very soon). Till then I hope Mira Nair has shot more of this movie for every extra scene we didn’t get to see today will only add more flesh and blood to the well-enacted characters and a heart-rending story that pays a sweet tribute to parenthood and family.

The trailer for those keen on the movie:

Don-The Chase Begins: Movie Review

Don (2006): * and 1/2

How do you go about critiquing a movie which is so mediocre it doesn’t evoke any emotion from the viewer? Having just come out of the screening, I am so numb with disappointment, that there’s neither any incentive to praise this piece of crap, nor the energy left to bash it with junky adjectives. Since when did Bollywood mainstream movies become so utterly predictable and so totally boring? Have film-makers absolutely lost the sense of having a proper graph, having good dialogue and good characterisations? Where is the integrity in the screenplay, and where’s the feel or a sense of thrill, tension, pace and seeing something that isn’t simply staged and rehearsed? And all this when its actually a remake of a decidedly over-the-top (it was the 70s) yet taut-to-the-last-scene thriller of the yesteryears. Despite all the special effects and marketing gimmickery, the new Don is proof of Hindi cinema’s storytelling quality spiralling downward with such godspeed that if a few good films don’t release fast, even the most hardcore Bollywood devotees wouldn’t touch the stuff belched out of this industry with a bargepole.

2 hours later, after calming down a little, I was able to put together a few thoughts about why this movie simply didn’t work for me and have randomly stuffed them in a few points below:

1. I must have repeated this line so many times reviewing the biggies from Bollywood this year (Fanaa, Phir Hera Pheri, Krrish, KANK), its probably lost all its meaning. But still I’ll say it again–Don is unpardonably boring; a staged, fake bore-a-thon that’s neither got the pace nor the tension that a good thriller so badly needs. And for a mainstream movie, that is a sin. A cardinal sin. Its a general rule that whatever it takes, your prime focus should be to involve the audience in such a way that a common thread or theme keeps them intrigued with charismatic stars; elaborate, showy dance numbers; over-the-top melodrama; plot-holes so big you can ride road-rollers in and co-incidences to drive home the point under 3 hours only adding to the fun factor.

To start with, Don doesn’t have a common thread or theme to speak of. It starts off as a bland cat-and-mouse chase between the police and the ever-growing-self-professed-kingpin SRK, then quickly changes gears to this kingpin getting seduced and attacked by vengeance-driven women (aka Kareena and Priyanka) thanks to his itch of bumping off his right-hand men who always turn out to be seductresses’ bhais, then somewhere in between him getting bumped off and replaced by a UPite-bandwala twin by a cop (Boman Irani) who plants him as a mole in this stylised cocaine-land, and then a whole load of fuss about a CD containing all the account details and passwords of drug lords of the world the semantics of which are so braindead, my head hurts. There’s another angle of an IT security fella (Arjun Rampal) who’s had his wife and son held at ransom and when asked to rob hundreds of crores worth of diamonds, the guy obliges and gets caught by the same cop who’s leaving no stone unturned to expose the drug mafia. Unable to complete his part of the deal, Rampal’s wife is killed and his son, who’s left to fend on the streets, is adopted by the UPite bandwala twin of DON. The two big twists of the movie are *SPOILERS*–Is the cop really doing what we think he’s doing? And Is the UPIte twin of the DON really the one we think he is? I guess the tone of these two questions have given them off but since I am not recommending the movie anyways, I am not bothered. And the question really isn’t whether the two twists shock or not, its actually–do we care? The answer is a resounding no.

2. Shahrukh Khan is hopelessly miscast as the DON. As the shaking, spindly, anorexic, and irritatingly animated ganglord he’s basically the twitching loverboy who’s seen the old Don probably too many times. Not only is the actor crippled by his own physicality (its just the wrong baritone–lines like “I’m the king” are unintentionally funny, wrong physique–even Boman Irani and Arjun Rampal look more upto the job of bashing people up and indeed kick some serious SRK-ass) which makes him look eerily like a kid playing “let’s pretend” amidst hefty men; his perpetual pouting, and hyper-expressing gives away the lines much before he’s mouthed them. And there’s simply no presence or no meany threatful menace to this Don, which is quite saddening as SRK was really in his element when he played grey in Darr and Baazigar not forgetting his hilarious yet convincing turn as Baadshah. Now, everytime the fidgety SRK attempts a swagger, its more of a catwalk, and everytime he utters the supposedly tough-yet-cool lines from the old Don, it looks like a college teenager cheesily trying to make a pass. And this when the movie isn’t even a spoof. His now-routine attempts at sauve sarcasm and rustic tomfoolery fall totally flat not because they are badly written, but because he does them in a way that shouts “Can I have some claps for what I just did?”. Of late, he’s also mistaken acting for a collage of similar windblown close-up shots of his goggled face which is becoming very tiresome to watch. Its all disheartening as this character had some brilliant scope had it been done with silent, sauve unpredictability-words this Khan has flushed down his toilet sometime in the late 90s. Compared to him, both Boman Irani and Arjun Rampal pitch in far more believable performances.

3. The action sequences are a mess and not even remotely as swanky as the smartly edited preview would have you believe. The flash-cut-left-right-cut–centre-cut-top-flash technique sucks even the minutest bit of rawness or excitement, not to mention the fact that you see them coming much before they do. What’s even worse, when the camera remains still, the actors look like in the middle of a dance sequence than an action one (there’s a SRK-Arjun Rampal martial-art one-on-one which is possibly the fakest Bollywood fight I’ve had the oppurtunity to see. Not only are the actors unconvincing, the sound design and the camera angles are shockingly mundane). Also, the superhuman genes have been sprinkled generously to the whole male cast, and not just the hero. So there are scenes when Boman Irani, the cop, would get shot at visibly heart-level, blood would spurt out from both the holes in chest and the back and he would not only run but shout, strategise and point a pistol with both hands for the whole of the remaining sequence a hundred times before all of its conveniently forgotten.

Then there’s this sequence where an otherwise limping Arjun Rampal who uses a walking stick trots away on top of a 300 feet high walkway’s glass roof with his son on the back. There are shots of him slipping over the parapet often, but the guy’s agility with his otherwise lifeless leg can give circus tightrope walkers some competition. Fight-or-flight reaction is the probable explanation. And the grand daddy of them all is the one where during a fight in the plane (that’s transporting Don and his company to some godforsaken land I can’t be bothered to remember), Don himself pushes the lever of the emergency exit door mid-air and gets sucked out along with the poor Irish thug who had picked a fight with him. The funnier bit is, despite free-falling without a parachute much before the Irish guy who has suspiciously managed to get sucked into open air with one, Don’s perfectly able to pick a fight mid-air, exchange a few slaps and punches, snatch the parachute away and land safely without a scratch. And I thought I was dumb at physics.

The thing is, stunts and sequences so larger-than-life are a staple of this genre and can be easily digested if they flow with the plot or are a daredevilry showcase of a likeable character. With not even a remotest semblance of plot-graph or characters, over-ambitious scenes like these only add up the bigger joke that this movie is.

4. The only thing that tops SRK’s hamming and the outrageously embarrasing action sequences is the background score. The monotonous techno-trance music continues to thump away carelessly and endlessly with little credence for scene or situation, timing or mood compounding the headache. The music, when re-living past melodies from the old Don, is admittedly very well-orchestrated (Yeh Mera Dil’s tempo, rhythm and mood is light years ahead in sensuality than the original while Khaike Paan Banaraswala manages to retain the rustic cheekiness with electronic beats to boot), but the original melodies are plain mediocre. And despite having such names as Saroj Khan and Farah Khan in the credits, the choreography is not only downright ordinary but sometimes even shoddily put together. And we are talking of a film-maker who gave us Woh Ladki Hai Kahaan (DCH) and Main Aisa Kyun Hoon (Lakshya).

5. Now to my favourite part of the review–the girls. Like a good ole’ Bond movie, they look gorgeous and sumptuous, but within a defined range. Kareena would look utterly ravishing in some poses but is downright scary when she tries to overdo the come-hither-me routine (and boy does she overdo it or what!). There’s a veil of artificiality that never leaves Priyanka’s eyes for a good part of her screentime (with a character as shoddily written as hers, I wasn’t surprised) and her lollipop figure profile (large face and head atop a petite body) still freaks me out a bit , yet this talented girl thankfully puts an effort in creasing her facial muscles and selecting a better designer which helps in bailing out her performance as creditworthy overall. The one thing that Isha Koppikar always did with aplomb was move right but here not only she manages to look consistently bland, she hams like no tomorrow and her dance moves brought back some very painful memories of Manisha Koirala.

6. Finally I am once again, for the 5th time in a single year, shocked and infuriated as to how weak this movie is, how B-grade its treatment is, how it doesn’t even have the basic ingredients of an entertainer, how it completely fails even when compared to a tackily made original let alone contemporary police-n-spy thrillers, and how it all comes from the same guy who re-wrote the format of mainstream urban Bollywood movie hardly five years back.

I sincerely hope this movie flops miserably and leads to talented-but-now-over-confident guys like SRK and Farhan Akhtar do some soul-searching and return to their roots.

This Don really is one big yawn.

Nodding the right way

This might sound a little bizarre, a little trivial and a little too boring,
But I have some strange intrinsic issue with basic nodding,

And by nodding I really do mean the basic up-n-down head bobbing,
Something that’s synonymous with saying yes, and agreeing what the other person is mouthing,

To convey silently that I understand and I agree,
Instead of nodding, I shake my head confusing my peers, lecturers, tutors and people sundry.

The big question is why I do it, why do I shake when I am supposed to do the opposite
Saying yes by nodding is one of the first things you learn as a child, isn’t it?

Searching for a sensible answer meant thinking back to when I first started doing it,
But all the racking and recollecting has confirmed its always been a habit.

Its begun to worry me now as to how many people I’ve given the wrong signal, how many people I have unknowingly spite,
The other day, my new tutor said he’s seldom been so discomfited in his plain sight,

Though I am consciously now trying to nod the right way, correcting myself again and again,
The bloody thing is so badly hard-wired into me, getting rid of it is a bit of a pain.

Is this because as a child, subconsciously I was always a rebel, I always liked saying no,
Or maybe this shaking is just an exaggeration of a slight sideways tilt of obedient yessing, how do I know?

Hell, I am giving this too much importance,
Still, it was fun alright writing what could be a single line of real nagging concern into a quick verse.