Overcoat

The moment I prepared packing my gears for the Sapporo winter trip tomorrow, I started to worry about the performance of my digital camera in the wake of plummeting mercury and snowy freezing weather.

I must admit I just don't know if I need to go back to my manual Nikon FM2 camera, an old-styled but robust camera that works without batteries. Ever since the user-friendly digital camera gaining popularity, most of the manual cameras (including mine) have been locked up in oblivion. But wait a minute, I start to think about their values.

I bring all this up because of my recent encounter with the use of conventional unfractionated heparin in hospital. This anti-clogging drug, so-called unfractionated heparin that had been the standard for many years, is no longer the recommended first choice ever since the newer low-molecular weight heparin (with its ease of administration and better safety profile) has come to the market. When a lady with prosthetic heart valve required the administration of long-forgotten unfractionated heparin in my hospital last week, alas, the situation ended up in a hopeless mess. Most of us cannot, even if we want to, remember the proper way to use unfractionated heparin anymore.

All these old-fashioned gagdets are simply like ill-fitting overcoats – too awkward to parade but too warm to discard. It is only the frigid temperature that brings us to rethink their values.

Memory

Both the movies "Atonement" and "The Kite Runners" are pretty exclusively about redemption and remorse, dragging me through the stories of bitter memory. As we grow older, like the English Briony Tallis or the Afghan Amir, we leave behind each one of us a tail – a tail that we feel ashamed and would like to redeem badly.

The memory a dog killed by our cars reminds us our reckless driving. The dirty words we used when we were angry with our classmate haunt us for months, if not years.

Pretty hurtful and callous, eh? Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Whilst it's not hard to see why the tail of this sort is bothering us, we should be fine as long as we can shut down the bitter memory ourselves. After all, what counts? The memory that we conjure up ourselves. As long as we learn the trick not to bring up the bitter memory, life is not that difficult.

If you think about it, it is the others' memory that really bothers us. We will never know for sure whether our classmates will forget (or forgive) the dirty words we said. We may control what we remember and then sleep unscathed. And that was good. But we have no rights whatsoever how other people remember us. Amir could have deceived himself into thinking he had remembered nothing, but he was unable to stand the goddamn fact that Hassan was woefully stricken by the bitter memory.

I guarantee you a Nobel Prize if anyone of you can come up with a brainwashing "eraser". And, don’t forget to save one eraser for me. Please.