Ostrich

Every once in a while I get to acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand. I get ensconced in my routine, used to the way I run my life, and fail to reach out and grab the chances offered to me. Meetings of interesting organizations go unattended, simple surveys unfilled, because I'm just used to the way I've settled into things, because Grey's Anatomy is on and I don't want to miss it. It's a ridiculous and infuriating tendency in me, this love of sitting back and relaxing. Life would be better if I were always on my toes, at the edge of my seat. When I was finishing college, I realized that though it might seem on paper that my hand was always in something or other (metaphorically, not literally), I really didn't do nearly as much as I could have or should have or might have.

Because of that realization, and because I don't want to have regrets when I graduate from medical school, I'm trying to live with the concept of doing more than you think you can. Like Imogen Heap sings in Tidal, I want to "do it for all the times we wished we had." And that means stretch myself academically, extra-curricularly, socially, and with new experiences. I've been doing all right so far, and it was especially easy to stretch myself out of some comfort zones while medical school was still new and fresh and I hadn't yet settled into a routine, but I'm finding myself edging towards that dangerous complacency now, and I want to avoid it.

Also like an ostrich with its head in the sand, I can be completely clueless sometimes. Case in point: this evening around 9:30 I realized that I had failed to attend the FIRST SESSION of an elective this afternoon. I was really excited about this elective, too: Art of the Human Body at the Museum of Fine Arts. But instead of going to it like a responsible student, I completely. Forgot. Instead, I took a two-hour nap this afternoon (glorious, but not exactly productive), studied some, cooked a tiny bit, and watched two premieres of two shows. I'm not saying it wasn't a good day overall. I'm just saying I need to get my head out of the sand (or my ass, or my routine) and take a look around every once in a while, because I miss important things when I get this way.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Best: I met Amy Tan tonight! I love her books, though I haven't touched one in ages, and I didn't even get to hear her read because I had to leave early, but meeting her was such an honor, and I got her to sign my yellowed paperback copy of The Joy Luck Club and take a picture with my sister and me. All in all a pretty great Monday night.

The Great:

1. I went to a reading last Tuesday evening by my wonderful former creative writing professor, Emily Fox Gordon (www.emilyfoxgordon.com). She is one of the most intelligent authors I've ever read--in my adult life, other than when reading, say Moby-Dick or Midnight's Children, never have I had to look up words so many times while reading a book. Emily's cadences are nearly always spot-on, and I am so proud to have been taught by her. She struggled with trying to write fiction for many many years before realizing that personal essay was the genre for her (and, I think, the genre for me--this is the class I took with her), but she had to write two memoirs and one novel (the last a triumph for her, because she never thought she could write fiction) before FINALLY getting to publish a collection of her personal essays entitled Book of Days. I bought this book at her reading and had her sign it, and she signed it "To Chaya, one of my very favorites," which made me feel really special. I'm hoping to have lunch or coffee with her some time in the near future. That reading came at the perfect time: between my first medical school exams. It reminded me that there's a whole other amazing and happy side to me and my life that isn't sciencesciencescience, and I had nearly forgotten about that aspect. So it was just. Great.

2. I've realized that I can count on my best friends to see through my facades and know exactly, exactly when I need them and to be there when I need them, and that is comforting in a way I cannot even express. I don't know what I'd do without the wonderful people I have in my life.

The Good:

1. I've made soup twice since moving into my apartment, and both times, the soup has come out great. Really, great. This is absolutely wonderful, partly because I love soup, but also because I've always, always wanted to be a wonderful recipe-less cook like my mother, and I'm finally starting to edge towards the possibility of that. I've eaten tons of sub-standard Indian food (prepared by myself) for the past few years as I've tried to find my cooking rhythm, and I'm finally starting to get that magical intuition that all Indian mothers seem to have. And my newfound cooking savvy seems to extend to pastas and soups as well! This is wonderful news.

2. I'm one block into medical school, and I've not only made it so far, but enjoyed it. I'm a little loath to begin studying again now that a new block has begun, but I'm hoping that my enthusiasm will grow slowly but surely.

3. The new Sara Bareilles album is filling me with great joy. How wonderful when an artist one loves proves her worth with a second album that is quite possibly better than the last.

The Bad:

1. It's 9:10 PM and I've only reviewed one of the four lectures I had today. And I wanted to go to bed early tonight as getting up early (after four days of vacation) was particularly difficult this morning.

2. Crazy as it sounds, medical school is the simplest, most manageable thing in my life right now. On the one hand, this makes medical school not so bad. On the other hand, it shows how much of a struggle many other things are being right now.

The Ugly:

1. I'm trying to write a piece for my medical school's literary magazine, and I'm running into problems from the outset. I haven't written anything worth anyone else's revisions in an incredibly long time, and I really want to make this piece great, because I know there's substance there. I just feel like the lolcat in that lolcatz picture, the one that's sprawled across a keyboard with the caption "Writer's block. I haz it."

2. I just want so badly to be substantive, real. I feel that I'm not really either.

Like a Duck to Water

Crazy as it may sound, that's the way I feel that I've taken to medical school. To be perfectly honest, I wondered for a long time whether medical school was the right path for me, even as I was interviewing and deciding where to go to school. Once I got here, though. I quickly [very quickly] learned that it was exactly where I wanted to be, where I was supposed to be. Perhaps it's just the excited flush of new experiences and new friends, or the joy of learning, or the even greater joy of finally starting on the path toward my chosen career, but medical school, though challenging no doubt, is proving to be much, much better than I had anticipated.

I've been taking classes for five weeks now (our orientation was six weeks ago), and it feels like forever. I barely have a memory of the summer that was before school began. We've covered in five weeks what a college course would have covered in at least 2/3 of a semester, encompassing two tests or more. And we still have one more week of classes before we finally have an exam over our first "block" of material.

When I was still in college [now that's a weird clause; I graduated from college almost a year ago. Imagine that!], I heard from a lot of friends in med school that trying to study all the information thrown at you is "like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose." It's hard to actualize that kind of workload until you're experiencing it for yourself, but I'll have to say that the simile is quite apropos. I would like to add one of my own, though: each week, I feel as if I'm stuffing more and more compressible cotton balls (information) into a container with a snap-shut lid (my brain). As the weeks go by, the volume of the container gets more and more filled, and each week I'm having to push the cotton balls down, compress them as much as possible, then pull my pressing hand away as rapidly as possible as I rush to snap the lid shut on those overflowing cotton balls. It's a set of expectations the sort to which I've never had to rise before, and it's not easy.

But.

I'm finding that I actually like learning about feedback regulation in glycolysis, the muscle that makes my knee jerk in that famous reflex, the tendons visible beneath the skin of my hands. I like my classmates. Their intelligence, while a bit intimidating, is inspirational. Medical genetics and embryology, basically classes about every way a human being's development can go wrong, make me grateful that my genes contain no deleterious mutations, that the oddly-named Sonic Hedgehog signaling protein was present in all the right places and in all the right amounts so that my neural tube developed properly less than three weeks after my conception. There is so. much. to learn about our bodies, but how amazing to know how our muscles contract, that there are tiny little fibers that "walk" across each other every time our motor neurons fire and excite a skeletal muscle? Every time I get to thinking that this is just too much, that no one person can do this, I try to remind myself that so many others have gone before me, so it's possible. More importantly, one day I could be taking care of someone's motherfathersisterbrotherfriendhusbandwifechild, and I want to know everything I can so that I can take the best possible care of that person.

And it doesn't hurt that I still have time and energy to go out with friends on the weekends, talk to my roommate about our respective days daily, see friends from college, visit my family back home, and, yes, waste time every once in a while. More often than I probably should, in fact.

I've been watching Saved by the Bell in the mornings while I'm eating breakfast before school, and I can't help thinking that the theme for "The College Years" episodes is rather relevant to my current situation: "I'm standing at the edge of tomorrow...the future looks bright to me." I am so excited to be starting this next stage of my life, and I can't wait to be a real MD, with all the knowledge--and responsibility--that entails. Not to mention, it'll be nice to finally be getting paid.

"We're young enough to say, 'Oh, this is gonna be the good life.'" Good Life-OneRepublic