HNY

Happy New Year, everybody!

I just got back into town. I was quite surprised to see how clean I'd left my apartment.

Anyways, for the New Year, I leave you this quote from Basho:

Another year is gone
a traveller's shade on my head
straw sandals at my feet

Xmas

Well, merry fifth day of Christmas. I still have two more nights here at home out east. I got my parents hooked up with a cable modem yesterday, so I'm back on the net... phew!

Christmas has been pretty good to me. Two notable things: first of all, my friend M. Tabernac gave me a call, and we got together for the first time in about four years. Recently, he posted his first ever Youtube video:



The other good thing was that my nephews got a book of 'string games' for Christmas. Now, I can do 'cup and saucer', 'Eiffel Tower', 'Cat's Cradle', 'Soldier's Bed', 'Jacob's Ladder'; you name it, I can do it, and I'm awesome.

Night of Union

It's the Night of Union again, the 733rd anniversary of Rumi's death. I'll offer up a quote from Mevlana:

If you want everlasting glory,
don't go back to sleep.
If you want to burn with love,
don't go back to sleep.
You have wasted so many nights!
Tonight, for the love of God,
meet the dawn,
don't go back to sleep!

That translation is by Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin in 'Rumi: Hidden Music'.

Break

The gastroenterology exams yesterday went well. It was interesting stuff; I wish I had studied harder. With that, our Christmas break has begun; we have two weeks off. Our next vacation won't be until Christmas of 2007, so I will have to try and destress as much as possible over the next two weeks. Frankly, there's almost no point, since January will easily be the busiest month of medical school.

Anyways, I head back east on Tuesday, so I have three days here to clean up the detritus of my life. I started with some movies. First was 'Magic in the Water', a movie starring a friend of mine from my Boston life. She was very impressive. Next was 'The Million Dollar Hotel', which I rented because it was directed by Wim Wenders. I didn't realize that it starred Mel Gibson, nor Milla Jovovich, neither of which I would have expected to see in a Wenders movie. It was also a surprise to find out that the story was cowritten by Bono.

Anyways, I now have Wender's 'Wings of Desire' in my drive, which I don't think I've seen since 1993 or so.

Oh, the big success of the day was finding a restaurant that serves jajang myeon; it's less than ten minutes drive away from home. Wow, what a relief.

Livin' on a Prayer

I had two brushes with technological disaster in the past 48 hours.

First story: I sitting in small group yesterday, and was just opening up my notes on my laptop. "Where's that crazy buzzing sound coming from," I asked myself; "How are we supposed to work with kind of noise in the building?" I then noted that my computer was vibrating quite strongly, and that it had actually hung. At that point, I realized that the source of the incredibly disturbing noise and vibration was not construction, but my computer, notably my hard drive. Not good! Rebooting resulted in a few loud clunking noises, like a hammer being dropped onto a metal table. Later attempts resulted in a weird opening-and-closing metallic zipper sounds. I thought I was screwed; naturally, I don't have backups. Well, the happy ending to the story is that when I got home, and I tried again, it just sat there for 15 seconds, then booted up as if nothing had happened. I ran off to buy a spare hard drive, and backed up all my files. Phew. Everything's going to be o-kay.

My other mini-story occured the night before. I got home, after a long day at school, and went to try and wash the formalin smell off of my hands. I turned on the bathroom light, and was greeted with the flash of a bulb burning out. No probs. I had a low-wattage flourescent bulb that I had wanted to install anyways. I screwed out the old bulb, and put in the new bulb. I hit the light switch. Boom! There were some big sparks out of the light fixture, and part of the fixture fell out of the ceiling, smashing the bulb into a million tiny shards on my bathroom floor. Examining it later, there must have been a short circuit inside the thing that you screw the bulb into; it had blown its ceramic shell into two parts, and parts of the metal around it had melted away. Excitement! The happy ending to this story? It forced me to clean my apartment, so that I wouldn't be embarrassed when the landlord came by to fix the fixture. Spotless!

El derecho de vivir en paz

I thought I'd comment on the death of Augusto Pinochet.

Back when I was in middle school, my sister brought home a record from the local public library; it was 'Pongo En Tus Manos Abiertas' by Victor Jara. I loved it. This was soon followed by the rest of his albums that were available from the library. To this day, I can sing along to 'Preguntas por Puerto Montt'.

I quickly realized that the library didn't have any albums from after 1974. I did some reading, and found the reason (we couldn't just wiki back in those days): he'd been killed in a military coup in 1973. He was taken prisoner, tortured, and murdered. The man responsible for his death: Augusto Pinochet.

Last year, I was happy to find that Victor Jara's work has been rereleased as an eight-disk CD collection.

Almost there...

I've made it to the last week of school. Exams are Friday. Of course, Darth Vader is right on my tail as I head to the end of the trench, so I must be in top form for the rest of the week.

Last week, we finally finished off the 'Culture, Health, and Wellness' project that had been sucking up so much effort. What a relief that was. Unfortunately, the recent drop in stress levels induced immediate slacking on my part, and I watched a stack of movies. Chief among these were 'Paris, Texas' and 'The Great Yokai War'. Having potential was 'Sympathy for Lady Vengeance', but it got a bit sappy in parts. I also watched 'Slackers', by accident, since I had actually meant to rent 'Slacker'.

Anyways, time to hunker down...

December

It's been a while since I last posted. December and Advent have arrived (well, Advent arrives tomorrow).

Last weekend, I spent both afternoons in a Starbucks at the local Chapters, just doing some 'Culture, Health, and Wellness' work; they were playing Christmas carols the whole time. Three songs jumped out at me; one was an uninspired cover of 'Happy Xmas (War is Over)'. I kept thinking, is that Sarah McLaughlin? She's killed this song. Well, it was her, and she did kill it. The second song that jumped out at me (a personal favourite): 'Hallelujah' by LC. Of course, besides use of the word 'Hallelujah', it is in no way whatsoever a Christmas song. Anyways, the third song was 'Reggae Christmas' by Bryan Adams. I actually have the 72-rpm 'Christmas Time' single from 1985 back home, printed in glorious translucent green vinyl. Ah, that took me back to happy days.

Unfortunately, this weekend, I've been too busy to make it to Chapters. Instead, I've had a couple of Christmas parties to go to. I can't get into the mood, though. We're so busy at school; it sucks, really. Oh well, two more weeks, and it'll be vacation time. January will be ugly too, but February should be nice and relaxing. I can't say that I've ever looked forward to February so much in my life.

From the news, it's interesting to see that Stéphane Dion has been elected as the head of the Liberal party. Looks like Ignatieff was viewed as being too soft on the Iraq war back in his Harvard days. This should heat things up this winter...

Apathy

Lately, I've been pretty apathetic, about everything. For example, eating has been tedious. I don't want to eat anything in my cupboard, so I hop in my car and start to drive. KFC? No. The Bell? No. Wendy's? No. Arby's? No. Chicken on the Way? No. Not even Timmy's! Two weekends ago, I ended up deep in the southwest part of town, before finally eating some popcorn.

Fortunately, GI class has turned things around for me. Weird that the vagaries of the intestinal tract would get a person excited about life again. Plus, classes reminded me of the pleasures of a fibre-containing diet, and so I have hit a local sub shop for the last two nights, for a tasty vegetarian sub. Mmm!

Funny enough, when I went in to the sub shop for dinner last night, I recognized Helena Paparizou playing on their radio; it was a song I'd never heard before. As I ordered, I thought to myself, "This is destiny. How many people in this city could instantly recognize Helena Paparizou's voice?"

Educational Reading

I didn't get very far in my GI text this weekend; just a few pages.

Instead, I finished reading the story of Buddha... in comic book form. Made me want to go to India.

I wish that we had textbooks in comic book form.

Down and Out

The repro/obs/gyne exam yesterday was not an easy one. GI starts on Tuesday, and will hopefully catch my attention better. Textbook reading has begun, although once again, I find that the text is an inappropriate length for the amount of time we have. 815 pages in one month? Hmmm... at least so far it looks better organized than either of my obs/gyne textbooks.

It turns out that this is the Remembrance Day long weekend over here in AB, so we have Monday off. Rococo, Magic Pants, Bejeweled! and I are starting things off right, by heading to Nellie's to work on a skool project over breakfast, dealing with the influence of socioeconomic status on choice of medical specialty.

In other news, Stephen Lewis came to talk at our medschool last night; Car Hermit organized the whole thing. Lewis is a former Canadian ambassador to the UN, and is currently the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Pretty interesting guy, obviously. Apparently, he's a big fan of Bill Clinton; he had just met with him on Wednesday, after the US Democrats' big gains in their midterm elections. Apparently, the Clinton Foundation has been crucial in the negotiation of lower prices for antiretrovirals. Lewis sees this week's power shift in the US as potentially resulting in a big changes in their policies in regards to sub-Saharan Africa. We'll see.

On the Canadian side of things, our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has also been floundering on international health issues, but I'm guessing that he'll be dumped by Parliament sometime in spring. Hopefully, Michael Ignatieff will do a better job. He did, after all, work at Harvard for a few years, so he should be a smart guy!

In contrast to last night, tonight's agenda is Borat.

Wasting Time

So, once again, I find myself with upcoming exams; this time, it's repro on Friday. Once again, I can't get into studying. Thus, I'm writing this post, despite having no subject to write about.

Hmm, we had a bizarre heat wave this week (by default, we Canadians like to talk about the weather). All the snow that we had sitting around all of last week quickly melted away, even on the north side of my building. Today, the temperatures dipped a bit again, and when we left the anatomy lab this evening, we were greeted by a gorgeous snowfall, with huge, soft flakes, gently coming down in mass quantities. Tonight, after killing time by browsing myspace, I headed over to 7/11, to spend a bit of time in the cold and snow.

Oh, I've acquired a new nickname: *** Needledriverhands.

Forwards to the Past

Yesterday, I spent six hours in labour and delivery. Now I know that I can cross obstetrics off of the list of potential specialties.

The (only!) problem was that I was the only male in the entire ward, for those six hours. Everybody was super-nice (to use the parlance of the region), but I just got the feeling that I wasn't supposed to be there. I realized that that was how women must have felt in medicine thirty years ago. Perhaps it was just my overactive self-consciousness, but I have to wonder if other males in my class had similar experiences.

Anyways, Rococo pointed out to me, that that is how the women in my class felt over in Africa. The docs were super-nice to them, but the paucity of female docs made them feel like intruders into a male world. Hmm, I recall that a big percentage of the residents there were female, though, close to 50-50; just the older docs were all male.

The Goose is Getting Fat

On Saturday, the high was supposed to be around 15 ºC, but instead, it rose above broke freezing. Wow, what a misprediction. So, as I was coming home from a party at about 1:30 this morning, there was a fine ice 'mist' in the air; I took it to be a positive omen. Lo and behold, when I woke up this morning, it was snowing heavily, and there was a good three inches of snow on the ground. It snowed all day. I love the twilight in wintertime; everything seems grey and dark, and for some reason, that gives me this intense feeling of contentment, like I'm 'at home'. I guess my love of extremes is why I enjoy the dark of a Canadian winter so much, as well as its antithesis, the wonderful heat of an İstanbul summer.

Speaking of İstanbul summers, for some unexplained reason, I went nuts over yogurt this weekend. I walked past the dairy isle on Friday, as I was shopping for baking ingredients, and saw that yogurt was on sale. I immediately bought 3.1 litres. Today, I went back and bought another 3.3 litres. Mmm, life should go smoothly for the next few days.

Tied Up

You know you're having fun when you spend Friday evening practicing tying one-handed knots. One hundred forwards, one hundred backwards. Repeat for the other hand, to attain ambidexterity. Do this every night, before going to bed. It reminds me of knitting.

Why did I begin this regime this week? I began my 40-hour pediatric surgery clinical 'encounter' this week. I also spent a couple of hours in obs/gyn surgery. I think I'm mostly over my fear of screwing up, and I'm ready to actually become helpful... anyways, I'm really excited about all this upcoming OR time.

Meanwhile, my apartment has turned into a pigsty lately. I rectified the problem today, and did some baking too, to top off the day.

All is Well in the World

This week, we began our repro course. In concert with that, on Friday afternoon, it was well woman time for my well-person-partner Running Man and me. Well man had made me nervous, when we went through it last school year, but this time around, I didn't have the lead-up time to get nervous.

In the end, it was uneventful and went well. It was a lot more difficult that a good old DRE, but who doesn't like a challenge? Running Man maintains his cool in all situations, so that helped out.

Afterwards, I could really have used a beer. Instead, I had Harvey's twice, and was reminded of why I used to love them so much.

I really have gotten down to studying, btw. I've already put in more hours than I did in the first five weeks of neuro. Hurrah!

Next!

Another course has come and gone; we had our neuropathology peripatetic yesterday, and the final exam today. Neuro completely failed to grab my attention; I guess the problem was that I already had a rough idea about a lot of the diseases involved, before the course started, so the full seven weeks really wasn't necessary.

Luckily, the ophthalmology section was interesting, primarily because I now know how to spell 'ophthalmology'. What a great word.

Unfortunately, not so great, was that after the exam, we headed to the local pub for a couple of drinks. They have free peanuts, so I ate a lot of them. One tasted exactly like blue cheese, which is not how peanuts are supposed to taste. Now, I have this terrible feeling in my tummy.

It actually snowed most of the day yesterday, and into this morning. Still no accumulation, though, since the ground remains too warm.

Sweatin' with the Oldies

On Friday, I went camping with a few people from the medschool, about 45 minutes out of town; it was a native health pathways club thing. We set up, and slept in, a Blackfoot-style tipi, which was a fun, obviously. The only downside was that it was pretty darn cold overnight, quite a bit below zero. Happily, the sky was incredible; the best I'd seen since central Asia, all those years ago. As a few of us sat around the embers of a campfire with an elder, having her tell us the story of the wolf trail, I watched two shooting stars fly overhead.

In the morning, we got up at 6:30 to enter the sweat lodge. Sweat was a bit of an understatement; I can't remember being that hot in years. Perhaps the minibuses of İstanbul were a similar temperature? It was a great experience, and reminded me in many ways of a Mevlevi sema. Afterwards, we rinsed off in an ice-cold creek; my skin was all pruney for at least half the day.

As the evening set in, we were back at the hospital, and found that the clerkship schedules were out. I have to start setting the elective wheels in motion after this week's exams...

Bliss

Well, if I can't go to Thanksgiving, then Thanksgiving will come to me. As I mentioned in my last post, I backed out of Big Poppa's dinner to freak out over neuro. Well, Big Poppa brought a complete meal of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatos, mashed yam, beans, a bun, and cranberry sauce to school today, which I enjoyed for dinner. I broke open a bottle of 2003 Mouton Cadet Bordeaux to enjoy along with it. Wow, a great meal, which reminded me of warm memories of Thanksgivings past. Thus, today's title.

To top it off, I've had a couple of good days musically as well. Yesterday brought me a shipment that included a couple of Faye Wong disks that I had been missing, along with the special edition of 'Smile Again'. This evening I picked up a package from the post office, that completed my original-release Pizzicato Five collection. I had been missing 'Ça et là de Tokyo' up until now (okay, it's a rerelease, but what can a guy do?). Also, I've recently been thinking of submersing into Québécois rock, and lo and behold, today Fluorescent Boy introduced me to a couple of tracks from Anik Jean and Les Cowboys Fringants. It reminded me that I've been meaning to invest in a Beau Dommage album, to rekindle my youth. If that wasn't enough, this aft, Ché slipped me some rips of Cuban and latin tunes he picked up over the summer.

Anyways, to finish off this post, I've been tagged by Med Neophyte, and am supposed to list twenty random things about me. Twenty is a lot of random facts, so I will cut it down to ten useless factoids; otherwise, I'll run out of mysteries.

1) Okay, where do I start? I believe that life is way, way too short. I was just thinking, I often think of my Glory Days (à la Bruce), and yet here I am currently living another complete set of them, as we type. Lucky!

2) One of my favourite pastimes is shovelling snow.

3) I liked yellow as a kid, then moved on to green. That change of heart may or may not have been related to snow.

4) I enjoy glycobiology more than any other form of biochemistry.

5) I am an Apple maniac, as if you couldn't tell. I spend my days waiting for the perfect Mac to be released.

6) I like cars and planes that have plenty of leg room, and houses with high ceilings.

7) I'm a foreign film addict; if only my textbooks were subtitled. :(

8) I lack drive. I am where I am today, only through the efforts and inspiration of others. Without certain people in my past, I'd be a computer-game-playing comic-book-reading bum (oh wait, that describes me quite well).

9) Sadly (or happily, depending on your feelings about evolution), nobody wants to see me in short shorts.

10) Next week will be rough.

I could pass on the tag to Marysienka, but Anna's already tagged her!

Synapse

It's been another quiet week. Just studying or wasting time, these days. It's actually Thanksgiving today, and I was invited for dinner by Big Poppa, but backed out for an evening of study instead. Happily, I really have gotten down to it.

The only event of note is that I have suddenly become engrossed in the Trashcan Sinatras. A fellow former Endersian supplied me with an mp3 from them about five years ago, and the song finally got through to my limbic system this weekend.