Knowledge, my soulmate.

Chatting with a friend today made me realize, one year post-college, working the 9 to 5, going to the gym two to three times a week, “sleeping in” until 8 on weekends, meeting up for a drink after work, going on dates with guys I don’t want to sleep with and sleeping with guys I don’t want to date, that I am finally jaded.

Don’t get me wrong, I like my job and love my friends, but like today I spent the whole day pasting formulas into Excel and formatting a survey. During lunch I balanced my checkbook. I am not devaluing the utility of Microsoft Office or balancing one’s budget, but it’s days like these when I really miss college.

Ultimately, college brought out the best in me. There were some rough patches, but college made me want to prove to myself that I was cut out to make a difference. That, as I observed the machinery of the world through protective lenses, someday I too would help make its wheels turn, and that other people would be there to help me grease the gears. Learning became something that I viewed not only as practical and useful, but nourishing, replenishing, and empowering. And I really miss learning for learning’s sake.

I realized that I have not had any remotely satisfying conversations with people in the real world. For the past year I have had so few intellectual debates, nerdy gush sessions, or vaguely scholarly discussions it’s a little discouraging. I miss the days of sitting under the gazebo with a tub of Ben and Jerry’s and pondering the moral implications of artificial intelligence, or walking into my sorority’s living room and hearing people exchange thoughts about gender roles and stereotypes, or going to a talk on a Tuesday afternoon about the clashing of traditional Islamic culture with modern civilization experienced by youth in Muslim countries. I remember attending my friends’ thesis presentations and just being amazed and inspired by how erudite they were. People seemed to be interested in so many things and open to so many ideas; college seemed like a place where, whatever crazy interest you had, there was always someone who you could bounce it off of.

I am thirsty for knowledge, and I can’t wait to learn, learn, learn. I want to experience the rush I get when studying the elegance of homeostasis in the cardiovascular system, I want to be brought close to tears by the final scene of Isben’s “A Dollhouse”, I want to revel in the absurdity of Dada poetry, read about the existential philosophies of Camus and Sartre, be haunted for weeks by Wagner’s operas, delve into the glutamine theory of schizophrenia, examine health disparities related to demographics, know why the universe is expanding, and learn to differentiate a cabernet sauvignon from a syrah by taste.

I guess this is good news since I AM practically selling my soul to debt just so I can go back to school for another 4 years followed by god knows how many more years of training. No surprise that I picked one of the careers with the highest time investment in educating oneself. Point is, knowledge is my drug; I live to learn.

Love/hate the internet.

I opened Firefox, investigated USC Keck School's website for 2 seconds, then googled "red line DC", followed by "jon and kate announcement", and finally "chris brown rihanna".

UGHHHHHH

internet 1
me 0

Can't think of a good title, but we can try "The New Place Fucking Rocks"

Thoroughly enjoyed my first weekend at the BOMB aptly located in BRIGHTon, Mass. We had our first guest over on Friday night, and made deliciously rich macadamia nut-encrusted mahi-mahi and steamed broccoli and had little dessert cookies from Trader Joe's. I made the most perfect eggs this morning; glossy, runny yolks firmly ensconced in an amoeba-shaped bed of soft, light whites. With a dash of sea salt and ground pepper. Served on wheat toast with butter.

Spent a large portion of the weekend at the office rewriting my personal statement, which actually consists of 90% contemplating, 9% wordsmithing, and 1% writing. I sent the old one to someone on Thursday, who happened to be online by chance, and lo-and-behold her advice was so absolutely right-on that I decided to scratch the whole thing and start over. There was something about the old one that just didn't seem right to me, and now that I have a new frame everything makes so much more sense. I saw reasons and consequences behind my actions in the past few years that I had not noticed before. I always thought my decision to go to medical school was just something I stumbled upon, a default career path by process of elimination. In some ways, it still is. There will always be this partly intuitive aspect to it, like I knew this is what I would do just as you know when you feel a connection to someone or something. And the problem was that I was trying to explain the why, and that was like writing an essay on why we love; we can't explain it, we just do. Now I have shifted to explain the how and what, and I'm noticing themes that thread together my experiences, academics, internships in a way that is almost freakishly tidy. Things make sense, what can I say.

I spent a grand total of $19 this weekend. $8 at Goodwill on some trinkets and a $4 stainless steel pot, and $11 on art supplies for custom art for the apartment. Irene is working with finger paint, sponge rollers, and gessoed canvas, and I am working with foam board + markers. So far I have a pencil sketch of a grotesquely proportionally distorted aerial view of downtown Boston. Drawing reminds me of the good old days in high school when I would be up late at night with only my thoughts, my art, and the New Pornographers. After I finish this project I will start on making a drawing for the game "pin the tail on the exotic animal" for our upcoming jungle-themed housewarming party.

Two weeks.

2009 will soon be classified into two time frames, pre-June 1st and post-June 1st. Here's what's happening leading up to that monumental date:

May 20th - final exam in Biology of Cancer
May 23rd-30th - Redlands, San Fran
JUNE 1ST - I will finally become a real person who acknowledges her need for such things as natural light, and all the perks that come with it, including photosynthesis, vitamin D, warmth, a sense of the time indoors, and anti-vampire powers, as I will be moving out of the Dumpsta into a lovely SUNSHINE FILLED apartment in Cleveland Circle! Hallelujah!

In short, these are epic times ahead.

Cello Suite No.1

I took the T from Harvard station this morning. This rastafarian dude sat in the corner adjusting his cello bow while hordes of working people in their casual Friday clothes waited for the train. As I stared at the tracks, he began to play the first Bach Cello Suite. I can't describe how sweet the sound was. He might have looked disheveled and homeless, but my God did he know music. It was like, this hollow, negative space being replaced with something so organic and human, it was like he took this beautiful, rich melody, deconstructed it into its metaphysical parts of tone, articulation, rhythm, and created an abstract tapestry of space and time and sound that was larger than the sum of its parts, that was more than whole; it was nothing short of magical.

Geez Louise.

I came home to an ear-splitting fire alarm in our hallway. My quite undomestic roomate tried to "deep-fry" breaded pork loins in our crappy Ikea pots, and ended up setting the oil on fire. Like, there was actual FIRE, like flames flying out. The firetruck was just leaving as I got home. Fortunately, my roomate and the apartment are okay. Not okay: our pots, the freaking AIR in our apartment, the bathroom tile which got burned through? (I don't even want to know what happened.)

Yep. Dumpsta's Paradise just got demoted to Dumpsta's Inferno.

This is not March.

At least not weather-wise. I've been dressing kind of how I think the weather should be like in my head and since I have no windows in my room it's not really that hard to do. My feet were not happy today.

There is a guy at my gym who I swear looks like the yuppie version of Stephen Malkamus. The gym thing has worked out quite well so far, surprisingly. I need to invest in some new sportsbras that will actually support me but otherwise the maternity pants have been living up to their full potential and I'm getting a lot stronger. I think I should have lost more weight than I have but being a wino and a foodie and all, I'm not particularly compromising.

On Saturday I had a wine and cheese party at my place. I made sure there was enough wine and cheese to feed a family of 10 (twins). We had aged Gouda with walnuts, Gruyere, two things of Brie, Raclette, blueberries, strawberries, pita chips with garlic hummus. Two bottles of Malbec, two different kinds of Cab, Chardonnay, sparkling Pino Grigio, and normal Pino Grigio. And everything within budget thanks to Trader Joe's! Enough people came so that it was easy to mingle, and people started leaving before I made a fool out of myself. Interestingly, the boy I have a crush on came, as well as the boy who is interested in me (not one and the same, unfortch).

I am going to Virginia next week for work, Monday through Wednesday, hopefully getting back in time for my 7:35 class. We're spending a few days at the University of Virginia, attending a staff meeting, training some staff, and recruiting patients straight out of the waiting room for a recorded interview. We've been conducting the same interviews over the phone at Mass General with a mostly Caucasian upper-middle class population on how people understand the various medical terms pertaining to colorectal cancer screening. It should be interesting to see how a underserved, low-literacy population such as the one in Charlottesville will understand what a barium enema or sigmoidoscopy is. I'm excited to see what happens because it's too often that we take basic anatomical knowledge and the various things we just hear on the news or read online about health and cancer screening for granted.

The new Dmouth prez is ridiculous. He is not only going to save the world of medicine and public health, but also the sector of higher education. Go him!