Discuss it with the Pillow

I don't think anyone reads anymore

2012-01-16T23:17:00.002-05:00

I don't blame you! Posting has been so staggered because of school and lack of time. I've tried to keep up with people's blogs, even if I don't comment, but forgot the password for my wordpress log-in so I haven't been able to access Tea at Ten's blog until today when I took the time to search and reset it.

Last semester of grad school for me! I'm looking forward to graduation and a job. I'm excited and scared all at once.

Conferences: Puerto Rico

2011-08-04T11:45:00.003-04:00

I am very shiny in that photo because apparently that is what 500% humidity (if you think this is mathematically impossible, think again) does to people.

The conference was better than I expected. One weekend before I was so stressed with finals looming, a thesis practice presentation I had to give, and a couple of projects due that I almost cancelled. Ultimately the notion that it would be unprofessional and unfair to cancel my scholarship-sponsored attendance won over all the stress, so I hopped on the plane and hoped for the best (the best being a pleasant stay and no catastrophic airplane delays that would screw up my class/exam schedule).

One of my classmates put the seed of doubt in me about the conference possibly being a huge Come Work for Us! event, since it's all organized by this big contracting company. As it turns out, there was no marketing, no pushing of products, tests, or therapy materials (like they have in the big national conference, by the way). No one tried to sell me anything and as far as I know no one tried to recruit anyone. I was impressed. The speakers were amazing and since the bilingual therapy niche is still small, I guess, we had a chance of speaking to them personally after each lecture. I actually had breakfast with one of them thanks to my roommate, who was her student and the only familiar face the professor saw in the restaurant that morning.

The entire weekend was re-energizing intellectually and professionally. I was one of two graduate students in the entire group, so everybody else I met was already experienced in the field, which I was thankful for since they could give me real-life stories and advice. I'm really glad I went.

I also just signed up to go to this year's national conference for the first time, so I'm going to see how that compares.

Vegas!

2011-06-25T18:37:00.003-04:00

I wasn't so sure about Vegas, and by the end of the first day I was pretty sure I hated it. In case you've never been, let me tell you how the non-tourist parts of the city are nothing special and the tourist attractions are pretty much all located in one LONG street known as "the strip" that is full of hotels, casinos, restaurants, and malls. That's all there is, really. Some corners smell like urine, and at night some people smell like drunks. Don't expect any high culture in Vegas.

But before you believe that I still hate it, let me tell you how by the fourth day I didn't really want to come back (yet). Once you realize that empty fun is all that Las Vegas is and adjust your attitude accordingly, the place is a lot of fun. I walked, looked at fun and pretty things, I sat around by the pool reading magazines and ate like a sumo warrior. It was lovely! My only complaint was the heat and the sun (we reached 109F), because it makes walking a lot harder than it has to be. Even if you buy the shuttle day passes, just walking from one corner to another can be really hard when your skin feels like it's on fire. I need to go back soon so I can eat and see a show and lay around again. The shopping malls are AMAZING, even though I probably can't afford to shop at most of the stores. Yet. Uh huh.

Exhibit A: My mom and I walking on the strip and being obnoxious tourists.

Exhibit B: Tastes from around the world at the Coca Cola store. There were 16 flavors, including 2 from Mexico (apple and jamaica flavors), 1 from Israel (Krest Ginger Ale), and 1 from Italy that tasted like liquor, even though it wasn't (Beverly), and which was disgusting. My favorite was a watermelon flavor from China and the Simba Guarana from Paraguay. I believe the watermelon flavor would sell really well in Mexico, too, so get on that, Coca Cola.

Exhibit C: It wouldn't be America if we didn't bastardize other cultures.

Exhibit D: But don't worry, we bastardize our own cities, too. We're equal-opportunity offenders.

Who's the adult in charge here?

2011-06-11T23:24:00.002-04:00

Oh, right, that's me.

I was at my assigned summer camp all week, trying to remind myself to model slow and easy speech at all times and handing out bathroom permits and, hear this, coming up with a dance choreography for uncoordinated 6 year olds, and feeling like I might be doing this much better if there weren't several supervisors around watching us at all times.

I think it went okay, though, and I was told I'd done a really good job at the end of the week.

The camp I was assigned to was for children with fluency problems (like stuttering). I don't have experience with children--not even babysitting experience--so this was the first time I'd been in charge of young children, let alone more than one of them. I learned that they are mostly easily entertained (a few beads, pipe cleaners, glue, cardboard paper, and you're in business), but they have to be entertained A LOT. Going from one activity to the next to the next to the next while maintaining control of the group and the behavior is hard, but by the second day I'd observed enough to be able to use my Nice but Stern voice if they stepped out of line while trying not to smirk when they were their little smartass selves.

In about two weeks I'll be taking a little vacation with the family in Las Vegas (I will gamble a total of $1 and if I lose then I'll stop and if I'll win I'll also stop. I don't want to push my luck there, I'm not a gambler and don't find the 1/500 odds particularly thrilling. I'm just showing up for the shows, man.). I'm trying to figure out how to pack enough toiletries for four people without having to check in any bags at the airport but it's turning out more difficult than I thought, with the amount of sunblock that four people require each day. I might just have to check in one giant bottle of sunblock lotion and call it a day.

Why is it that I can have a clean desk for 2 days, but then start piling up papers on top of each other after that? Well I think it's because paperwork sucks and the mail never stops, but who am I to stop Chase, Southwest, American Express, Disney, Bed Bath & Beyond, and all the local grocery and furniture stores from sending me at least 1 dead tree each week? Every time you don't kill a tree for no good reason, you kill America.

I still have a pile of papers to sort through and shred so I'm going to stop this post right here.

Oh, and I passed my citizenship test.

2011-05-17T00:27:00.001-04:00

My oath ceremony is this week.

(Strangely it's been such a long time and process that this feels sort of anti-climactic and I wasn't as surprised as I thought I was going to be, though I am still pretty darn happy!)

I got the conference scholarship, too!

2011-05-17T00:25:00.001-04:00

Someone's going to the beach this summer, yay!

Oh yes and to all the lectures, too. Ahem.

Happy news

2011-05-04T18:16:00.002-04:00

I went digging through Goggle the other day trying to find any kind of cool seminars or courses in my field that I could attend over the summer, when I came across this yearly conference for bilingual speech language pathologists. The website had a link for graduate students who wished to apply for a scholarship that would cover the cost and travel expenses for the conference, so I did (it's in Puerto Rico this year!).

I was contacted eventually by one of the organization's representatives and asked to do an English/Spanish phone interview, which I agreed to. She was extremely nice and helpful and told me about the organization, which also contracts SLPs around the country for bilingual services. She casually dropped that they also offered academic scholarships and I might have mentioned that it sounded interesting and that I would love to find out more. She basically said "Well, I have your conference application here and we're doing the phone interview, so I could just count this as your application, since it's the same process!". Okay then, that's great for me. Two weeks ago or so I was asked to mail a form for a background check, but didn't think much of it.

I got a letter yesterday saying I got the scholarship (which covers all my tuition for next year), along with an offer of employment after graduation! I can pick my location and negotiate the terms once I graduate, but man, I have a job offer! Graduation is only a year away, so I suppose it makes some sense, but I feel so excited to finish now. This is a great motivator to keep rolling. Even if I end up taking up another better offer, it feels nice to have this secured.

To celebrate I went out and bought myself some delicious, overpriced coffee. Something's gotta help me finish all my schoolwork and clinic hours so I can graduate!

I'm still waiting to hear from the conference scholarship, though. I want to go to Puerto Rico even if I have to attend a bunch of lectures to do so.

Still alive

2011-03-25T01:52:00.003-04:00

(I don't know if anyone's reading this anymore, AHEM!)

It's been nearly a year since my blog hiatus and I'm starting to feel the itch to write here again. I'm also thinking of going back to a public blog now that some time has passed since the serious stuff was going on, but I have to think about that a bit longer and possibly think about which posts I am willing to show and which I need to hide. I think successful med school dropout stories need to be put out there for other struggling or doubting med students to see.

Things are going great right now. I got a driver's license last summer (FINALLY) and bought my first car. Shortly after, I started grad school and I'm about to finish my first year with only 7 weeks left of clinic/class. My first semester of grad school was a clean 4.0 and my most recent midterms went really well, so it's looking like another successful semester. I'm getting great reviews from my clinic supervisors, and next year I'm starting my clinical practicum at an elementary school and a hospital, and I'll be done with that by the following summer, if all goes well. In the meantime I'm trying to figure out my niche within the field, but so far I'm enjoying the neurological disorders but I'm also looking into working with alternative communication technology. We'll see, we'll see.

One more thing, I'm thisclose to being a US citizen! My test and interview are this coming May (my fingerprints must have gone through as "Painfully boring and safe", yay!), so wish me luck on that. I'm glad the process was quick, because I'm trying to have an American passport in my hands before next year, since I'm planning a graduation trip (my graduation from grad school and his from high school) with my brother to Spain and I'd prefer it if we both had passports issued by the same country, just in case. Hopefully we'll reunite the funds by then because I'm dying to go.

PS. I'm still reading y'all's blogs even if I don't always comment, because I enjoy keeping up with your lives. :)

So, it's official

2010-04-20T18:58:00.002-04:00

I got my letter of acceptance on Friday. I'll be starting graduate school this August!

Status: P3

2010-02-27T19:07:00.003-05:00

Apparently that means that my application has been sent to the department for review. Whatever that means or however long it takes, they don't mention. Someone in my class told someone else (so you know it's TRUE) that one of our professors said they hadn't started reviewing the applications yet.

The next step, P4, is the graduate school informing me of the decision. Until then, I'm enjoying telling everyone I meet in whispered, reverent tones that I'm "status P3" and let them wonder what kind of secret agent I am.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

2010-02-25T12:16:00.002-05:00

Why I quit medical school

2010-02-23T12:20:00.005-05:00

I was sitting in the kitchen of our first house here in the US, a small rental house, while my physician cousin signed the sponsor papers for my permanent residence. You must have someone financially-able to back you up, you see. He kind of looked around while he discussed my plans to go into medicine and said "You should do it. You could help your family out."

Looking back I think that was a well-intentioned but ultimately unfair statement. I do believe a lot of this desire to "help out" was a big part of my decision to go into medicine. That, and I was always the smart kid who Did Things Right and medical school was just the logical next step. I could do something else, but then I'd possibly end up in the same place as those kids who got Cs and Bs in high school and to be completely honest, that was one of my worst nightmares. I had to do better than that. Than them.

I disliked medicine from the get go. I can tell you that with complete confidence. Once I was in medical school, it all hit me and I realized I did not want to be there. I never showed up to class after the first week, and trying to work through the material might have been intellectually stimulating but it would have only gotten me a little bit closer to another test, another hoop to jump (though I'm not sure there is much stimulation in memorizing, which is what medical school was all about). My classmates didn't incite much warmth in me, either. They all seemed to care about these things that I didn't: how to secure proctorships, research positions, how to keep working more and more and more. When I told one of them that my clinicals teacher, the pediatrician I loved, had invited me to her house for Thanksgiving because she knew I wasn't going home, her only question was "Where does she live, [Redacted Nice Neighborhood]?!" She wanted to know how expensive her house was. You know, that's all most of my classmates were working towards. This prestige they deluded themselves about.

By the time I was a medical student my family had gotten over the freshly-arrived-to-another-country financial hole and was comfortably middle-class once again. The motivation to help out was gone, replaced instead by the luxury of feeling free to choose a career path without taking compensation into account. Once in medical school, I started to see myself a little different. To survive here, I was going to have to deal with kissing some ass, sleep deprivation, high stress, competition...survival of the fittest, that is. I don't do any of these things well. All my life I got by on guts and logic, devouring material I liked but also easily remembering even that material I didn't. Coming out on top was never too much work for me. It felt natural and I almost--ALMOST--felt guilty about it because everyone else made such a big deal out of it. In medicine, at least from my perspective, whoever deals best with the stress is the winner. The rest of us fade into the background where we can maybe secure a primary care position among the other less motivated students. Lower compensation is probably the worst fear of any medical student with exorbitant student debt.

On my latest graduate school application essay, I make a vague statement about medicine being incompatible with my life expectations. It's not the whole story and it may sound slightly wishy-washy, but it's true. I never looked at any of my professors in medical school and thought that I wanted to be like that. On the contrary, most of them were worn out and stressed, even those who enjoyed their job. I knew I would never enjoy their lifestyles or their schedules or their responsibilities.

Looking back, I realize I was also depressed. I can't tell you whether depression was the cause or the consequence of all that I went through in med school, though. I think it was both. The more depressed I got, the less I could deal with medical school stress, while at the same time I had professors and deans on my back asking me to try harder. I asked for time off and was denied it, and either way, I don't know how I would have been able to make my student loan payments while I was on leave.

When people ask me why I quit, I tell them it's complicated. It's not a cop-out answer, it really *is* very complicated. Part of me feels like trying to justify a preference is useless. It would be like trying to explain why I like chocolate or the color blue. I just do...I just did. But if I tried to verbalize my reasons, I'd say it was because I was overwhelmed. I was only 20 when I got accepted to medical school. I wasn't even of age to smoke when I made the decision to go into medicine. Suddenly here I was, never having done anything but studied, facing a huge responsibility and commitment. Also, it is possible that I never liked medicine enough. I confused an love for science AND people with a love for medicine. I never considered other clinical fields, as I was obviously too smart to settle for anything else. At some point I had an epiphany and considered things that had never crossed my mind before. What would I want to do? (As opposed to "What should I do?") How do I work best? In what environment, and with what kind of people? As it turns out none of my answers fit in with the medical establishment.

I am writing this now because I still read a lot of your blogs. Lately, I have not written about medicine and how much I disliked it because sometimes I feel like I'm being disrespectful to my readers, who are mostly all still in the field. A lot of the time I don't know what to say in the comment sections of your posts, because I think you will think, Well, she's biased, what does she know. I want to be supportive of any medical goals and feel like a hypocrite. I want to agree with negative thoughts about medicine, and I feel like that person who quit and is trying to bring everyone else to her side. When I write posts about how happy I am now, I feel like a broken record. WE GET IT YOU'RE HAPPY NOW, is what you must be thinking. I just continue to be surprised at how much better it gets, and it DOES get better. I feel more relaxed. I look at my current professors and for the first time I actually think I would like to be like that. I want that job, their job. When I am at my current setting, I don't feel like an outsider but right at home. I wouldn't mind spending my nights in that place. I have had conversations with the professors, the graduate students, my classmates, and it all feels so much more genuine to me.

It's funny how suddenly other life choices don't seem so wild or wrong, when at some point I could have sworn on a Bible that a medical degree was the only guarantee for stability and happiness. Pff, a lot of people I knew could have sworn that, but as it turns out, we were all full of crap.

Someone's having too much fun with chemicals

2010-02-15T18:26:00.001-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day

2010-02-15T00:55:00.002-05:00

Sprouting?

2010-02-07T12:15:00.003-05:00

I know you're all probably wondering how my avocado seed is doing, and it probably doesn't let you sleep at night. YOU MUST KNOW. PROBABLY. I also went ahead and tried planting some orange seeds to see if I can grow an orange tree (or three). Here are the results, almost 3 weeks later:

Do you see any start of a root down there? Me neither. **CRIES BITTER TEARS** But nature can surprise us, and the cold weather might be delaying things a bit. Let's wait a few more weeks and see what happens.

Now, the oranges.

No sign of sprouting yet. However, I planted these almost a whole week after the avocado, so I'm still hopeful.

On other academic news, I've submitted my application for the master's program. My ONE application, because I only applied locally. I don't want to move again. Besides, I love the population here and I think it fits with what I want to do both in terms of therapy and research. I've been getting really interested in the implications of bilingualism (or multilingualism, for that matter) in brain development. For children with language disorders, does being bilingual help their cognitive and abstract reasoning or does it hinder it further? Is there evidence of neurogenesis on second-language learning? How does the brain organize two different languages, both motor and phonological aspects?

So, the application is in and I'm hoping for good things.

I'm going down to the speech clinic on Monday to watch a session. Students are free to go and observe, and since the therapy rooms have one-way glass we are comfortable watching without disrupting the sessions. I'm visiting because I have to transcribe a session, this time with diacritics. In phonetic transcription, there is a whole set of additional symbols to describe any deviant or atypical articulation patterns. So if a sound is palatized, or labialized, or rounded, or retracted, or aspirated, or nasal, there's a symbol for it. There are different symbols for all the different types of lisps. It's a lot to remember, and the differences are sometimes very hard to hear. But as far as sound descriptions go, diacritics is as detailed as we can get and it's helpful for therapy purposes.

Speaking of more symbols to learn, I want to buy those American Sign Language flashcards and start learning a few of them. I won't be fluent without practice, but at least I could somewhat communicate with any deaf clients. (Oh yes, in SLP we call them clients. It threw me off at first, because it was such a no-no in medicine.) Deaf-education and therapy are a separate subset within speech pathology practice, but we will be learning some about it during graduate school and might still have to deal with people who are hard of hearing and can benefit from sign language.

Cross your fingers for me. I can't believe I'm actually doing this, finally.

Growing an avocado pear tree

2010-01-17T15:12:00.006-05:00

I found a method to grow your own avocado tree posted on this lovely gardening blog, and I'm going to see how it works out. Right now I have this container sitting on my bedroom windowsill and warning everyone not to touch it. Supposedly it takes years before you get fruit out of the plant, assuming it survives to adulthood, but it's my last day of official vacation and I wanted to start a fun project to keep me going until the summer. I'm also going to plant a few orange seeds tonight and see if I can grow an (or some) orange trees.

Wish the young seeds luck!

I hereby ruin a movie for you

2010-01-11T12:17:00.005-05:00

I was dragged (because no one wanted to see Sherlock Holmes again, SADLY) to see Avatar on Saturday. Futuristic, dystopian, end-of-the-world movies don't appeal to me that much. The storylines are usually too stressful, and I feel like I'm the only person sitting there hoping for a diplomatic solution. Why must they choose the path that will inevitably result in losses and death? The train of thought that leads to it never makes much sense to me, and I wonder if this whole "rational being" is more myth than reality when it comes to humans.

The movie lacked good writing (Unobtanium? Pandora?) but made up for it in special effects, if you are into that sort of thing. It was entertaining and even touching if you don't think too hard about why the natives needed salvation in the first place. That said, I think I'm heading to see Sherlock Holmes again next weekend.

Time to take that Christmas tree down

2010-01-04T20:01:00.000-05:00

This isn't a post about me (CHORUS: THANK GOODNESS) but just a curious aside for cultural benefits.

Traditionally, where I'm from, Christmas is slightly different and slightly prolonged. See, we're not quite ready to quit partying or eating after January 1st.

On the 25th of December we celebrate the birth of Jesus and nativity scenes remain baby-less until that day. There's not much to explain here, since this is hereby known to most Americans as Christmas Day. It's what comes after that's different.

On January 6th there is what we call the Three Kings' Day, though in English they refer to them as the three magi. King Cake (which I later discovered through my first college roommate, is also eaten in Louisiana during Mardi Gras) and hot chocolate are served. The cake has little plastic baby Jesuses (this sounds funny as I type it) buried inside of it, and if you happen to get one you are due to host the party on February 2nd, which will be explained later. Because the gifts did not reach the baby until this day, it is the day when gifts are given. Fortunately for the kids, they are usually neither gold nor myrrh nor frankincense. I could imagine a 5 year old being disappointed by any one of these gifts, valuable as they might be. In order to receive gifts, children write a letter to the three magi and leave it inside a shoe the night of the 5th, and wake up to their gifts the following morning.*

Then, on February 2nd, 40 days after Christmas, the presentation of the baby at the temple is commemorated. On this day the baby is again removed from the nativity scenes, which are also removed until the next Christmas season. The traditional food in the celebration includes tamales, which you will be paying for if you were one of the lucky ones to almost choke on a little plastic symbolic baby Jesus almost a month before.

These traditions are slowly getting lost, I feel, not because of a collective disinterest in them but rather a collective modernization of the world and work schedules. Holidays in the middle of a workweek are inconvenient, and a lot of families don't live close enough to get together this often.

I'm still eating king cake tomorrow, though, and if anyone wants to send a block of solid gold my way I promise I won't complain.

*Recently, though, intelligent children everywhere have discovered that believing in both Santa Claus AND the Three Magi has the potential advantage of producing double the amount of gifts.

New Year's planning

2009-12-28T14:51:00.002-05:00

There are so many things that I want to do this coming year, things that I've been waiting a long time for. For one reason or the other (and there's always a reason) I have yet to get my driver's license, buy a car, or get the very needed new prescription glasses. I'm thinking of trying contacts this time, because I just long to wear pretty sunglasses but, well, my face is already occupied lest I run into walls or moving cars. Prescription sunglasses are always an option, but the prescription kind of excludes many of the shapes and frames I like because then the glass would be too thick and too big.

Now that I have a job, and since it will probably still be there after the holidays, I want to save up for a car. It's too easy for car-averse me to spend that money on plane tickets or books (I may be car-averse but I am certainly not travel-averse...on the contrary). My number one goal this year is to have a car so I can feel more independent. My requirements for a car are as follows: 1) That it is affordable, 2) that it is a gas-saver, and 3) that it has air conditioner. Oh, and 4) THAT IT WORKS is a given, of course.

Outside of gaining more, um, displacement abilities and more financial independence, my other goals are more hazy. There's obviously doing well in school, but that's a given and I don't plan to do anything but do well in my classes. There's grad school, assuming I get in, which I am looking forward to. In the case that I do not get in, I'm going to get my SLP assistant license and work in the field for a year or two before trying again. I'm only applying to the local university because I want to stay home for now. It's not only the cheaper (read: fiscally responsible) option, but I've found a nice niche here with family and friends. I'm not planning on trying out new places until I've graduated and am financially secure, at least in the sense that I'll be able to get a decent-paying job where I want to go.

Things are so different right now from how they were last year I can't even begin to describe it. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it just hit me recently that I haven't had a panic attack in the last 6 months, that I am not constantly nervous anymore, that I haven't felt palpitations in a long time, and that I couldn't care about what people think anymore. I used to hesitate about getting a job dealing with the public in case I ran into any of my old med school classmates. I still felt shame. Shame at what, I'm not sure. People switch professions and change majors every single day and no one bats an eyelash. Unless you're in medicine, I guess. But I don't feel that way anymore. I don't have that speck of doubt in the back of my head, wondering what could have been, because now I'm sure that I would have hated what could have been and I'm sure what I feel right now is contentment. Medicine me wasn't me, it was someone I think I sometimes imagined myself to be. The wandering me of right now feels much more authentic, I have a better idea of what I like and where I'd like to go. But the most important thing for me is that my likes and dislikes have time and room to change. That's really the only thing I ever wanted, some room to breathe.

I might show you all the pretty things I got for Christmas, though I swear I didn't ask for anything. Unexpected gifts are the best kind of gifts. I'd show you all the food but I think I may have eaten it all. For that I am not at all very sorry. I'll try to upload some pictures for the next post, it's looking a bit drab around here lately, with me forgetting I have a blog and with my laziness about the camera. For the next post, pinky promise.

Que que?

2009-12-23T17:54:00.003-05:00

I finally got my final grades and I got straight As (for some reason that phrase, "straight As", sounds so high school-ish). I think that'll be good enough for the application, don't you? I also got the forms needed to my LOR writers, requested all transcripts necessary, and took the GRE. Basically, it feels like I'm more than halfway done with this application.

I have been working like crazy, 40 hours each week PLUS overtime. I'm so glad the worst of the shopping season is over tomorrow, but I'm sure I'm going to miss the paychecks when I'm only getting 10 hours per week. I wish I had crazy stories about customers, but with a couple of exceptions I can think of, all of them have been reasonable and nice. Oh, and for some reason all my coworkers think I'm 18 years old. When I correct them, they say "You look so young!", which I won't complain about, ever.

Yesterday I went insane for a few minutes and decided to go out and buy new work shoes and slippers. The (old) flats I had been wearing to work had been looking quite spent and my slippers somehow got holes in them over the last few weeks. I guess they're old, too. The point is that the nearby shopping strip was crowded and the parking lot was a mess, but after going into two stores I found nothing I liked or was willing to pay my hard-earned money for. Finally, without getting my hopes up, I went into an expensive-looking shoe store where I found a pair of REALLY NICE shoes for work that were on clearance for 70% off. They were just sitting there at the top shelf, just my size, as if they had been waiting for me. Two aisles over I found some lovely clog slippers also on clearance. Clearly the gods were smiling on me.

Tomorrow will be a long day at work again, but I haven't had to close in the last two weeks (another sign I should maybe, just maybe, buy a lottery ticket) and it's the last of the busy days. I'm planning to go see Sherlock Holmes on Friday, and though part of me thinks it will be fantastically bad, I can't say no to Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr.

Did I tell you I saw "Twilight: The New Moon" a few weeks ago? Well, I did, and I laughed the entire way through.

At the lack of a good conclusion paragraph, I'm going to be lame and unimaginative and just say, THE END.

And I was even sick during the test

2009-12-14T19:09:00.003-05:00

I took the GRE today and got a really good score, THANK GOODNESS. My quantitative (math) section score was close to perfect, according to the unofficial results the computer produced. I'll get an official copy of the scores plus my writing score (that one you don't get the same day) in about 3 weeks.

So now that hurdle is over and I can go back to the regular holiday scheduled programming of working and napping and eating and napping.

Try not to squee too loudly

2009-11-29T13:34:00.001-05:00

A good kind of Christmas meme

2009-11-25T10:51:00.004-05:00

I saw this list on another blog and decided that since I'm not asking for anything for Christmas, nor am I planning on spending big on others, I'd instead try to give money to people or charities that really need them. I figure it's a good way to reciprocate all the good things that have happened to me this past year.

So I figured I'd get the ball rolling here on Blogger and hopefully this year someone will give me something. So here's my wishlist for Christmas.

Dear Santa I'd like...

#1
$15 donation to St. Jude's Research Hospital.

#2
$15 Tribute donation to the Red Cross

#3
$15 Tribute Donation to the Heart and Stroke Foundation

#4
$15 to the Autism Society of America

#5
A new set of pajamas or slippers for one of your local nursing home residents. (Some homes put up trees with gift wishes from the residents, pick one!)

#6
Drop off a box of coloring books and non-toxic crayons at your local children's hospital or orphanage.

#7
A hot cup of coffee to the person outside who can't afford a cup.

Consider yourself tagged if you read this, and put up your own Christmas list. I'll try to pick something out of each list to give.

Game on

2009-11-11T11:08:00.003-05:00

I got a 75.1 on one of my phonetic transcription assignments the other day and I'm extremely proud of it.

No, really. It was the highest grade in the class! We're transcribing speech samples after only hearing them once, and in this case we were transcribing different dialects/accents. I made a few mistakes here and there but I was surprised to get most of the transcription right, since I thought it was a pretty difficult task and was nervous about getting my grade back given how the professor isn't very forgiving when grading. It's very hard to transcribe something you only hear once and it's even harder to avoid falling into the trap of transcribing it the way you say it or the way you think it should sound.

We're getting into diacritics now, which is another layer of phonetic transcription that adds details like intonation, stress, aspiration, nasality, lip rounding/unrounding, etc. The more detailed the transcription, the better the evaluation. Speaking of evaluations, I'm doing a speech evaluation on 3-year old child. It's definitely very interesting to see how speech samples are broken down and analyzed, and it is much more detailed than I thought. I love that it combines two things I love: analyzing the grammars (is the child using nouns, verbs, plurals, negatives, past/future/gerunds, auxiliaries, etc?) and articulation, and the therapy aspect of treatment, which is very hands on.

On other related matters, I finally registered for the GRE. I'm taking it on December 14th...so that leaves me about one more month to study for it. Game on, GRE.

What I'm up to

2009-11-09T20:17:00.004-05:00

I haven't been posting here as often as I used to. Sometimes I really feel like I have nothing to say, and sometimes many of the comments that pass through my head are posted immediately on Twitter.

But besides that, I've been writing for this blog called Lady Business under the pen name of "Mafalda." I've only posted a few articles, but I've been having a lot of fun writing for a website with a bit of a wider audience, under a pseudonym, and without any baggage. You can see my profile here.

I also plan to update my forgotten Language Prodigy blog. I hope to get into more discussions now that I have a bit more knowledge about the technicalities of language, and maybe do my own analysis of research articles I find interesting.

I think my keyboard's been more productive in the last month than it ever was in this last year.

Calavera: 2009

2009-10-31T10:45:00.001-04:00

Uf, tantas cosas que contar,
tantas que han pasado este año,
la calaverita vino,
y se llevó la medicina al caño.

Ya pasada la calaca,
yo me regresé a mi casa,
un poco acongojada,
como una uva hecha pasa.

Pero que la calavera viene,
a decirme, "Ya está bueno!
O te encuentras algo nuevo,
o los dedos te trueno!"

"Está bien!", le respondí,
y me busqué otra carrera,
una que me viene mejor
y que la calavera no quiera.

Mientras tanto Dragonfly,
ya casi acaba la escuela,
y seguro que en muy poco
va ser la doctora mas buena.

Sara tiene un nuevo gato,
Namerovsky, así se llama,
lo tiene muy consentido,
que hasta le hizo una cama.

Xavier sigue estudiando mucho,
para ser una buena doctora,
toma mucha cafeína,
para aguantar las largas horas.

Arturo no se dónde está,
hace mucho que no visita,
tal vez esté muy ocupado,
o de vacaciones en playita.

Mientras tanto Tea at Ten,
también ya casi termina,
ya casi acaba sus estudios,
y seguro que hace fiesta en la piscina.

Ya espantada de tanto estudio,
la calavera se fue corriendo,
se regresó a su aposento,
y estoy feliz, no les miento.

(Translation in the comments)

What It Is

2009-10-22T15:58:00.001-04:00

1. I can get my SLP assistant license after next semester. It's my contingency plan in case grad school doesn't happen right away. The local school districts have openings and the base salary isn't bad at all for an SLPA, so I'm guessing hospitals or clinics should also be hiring and paying similarly or a little more. This knowledge assuages my financial fears for the time being. If it comes down to that, I can start earning real money in 6 months. I'm sick of not having money.

2. The local SLP Master's program admits only in the fall, but the SLP program in my undergraduate alma mater admits new students in the fall, spring, and summer. I'd rather stay home because it would be cheaper and easier (another move, again? Ugh), but if the other program is only one year long (and I think it is, I just haven't confirmed) it's tempting to attend that one instead.

3. There is such a thing as "moonlighting" for SLPs, apparently. Who knew? Still, it's a nice option for additional money, if need be.

4. The GRE costs $150 and you can get unofficial results the same day. NOT THAT I'M NERVOUS OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT.

2009-10-18T21:31:00.004-04:00

I don't regret being here now, but sometimes I wonder if the way things went down wasn't a bit unfair. I was expected to get myself together, but I wasn't thinking straight. I was expected to, I don't know, figure out how to fix things on my own, but pass my classes until I did. I asked for a year off, but I needed to justify it, as if emotional well-being wasn't justification enough. I was tired, and worn out, left behind, and feeling guilty for having somehow gotten myself in that place. I understand I had to do it myself, but I felt like I needed more time. Perhaps too much time, and that's why it was just not going to work out. Maybe it never would have, regardless of time. I like having space to breathe, and I knew that regardless of time I would be afforded little of it if I stayed. I know I'm happier now, but I still wonder if. Just...if. I'm human, I guess.

Because I never learn

2009-10-11T23:56:00.002-04:00

I'm sitting here studying for a Phonetics exam tomorrow. Could I have studied earlier? Absolutely. This gives my life a bit of excitement, however, and I think in some deep and sick level that is the reasoning behind a lot of my procrastination. It's a strange rush to get an A on an exam that you studied for only the night before, or a paper you finished printing 15 minutes before class. I'm insane, I know.

We are doing phonetic transcription and I have the consonants and most vowels down, but a few of the vowels are quite problematic. Does the vowel in "hot" sound the same as the first vowel in "father"? Almost, but not quite. Is the first vowel in "always" the same as the vowel in "the"? The answer is yes, in most cases (unless you're saying "thee" as you may in front of certain words). The vowels in "wood" and "full" are also the same.

Language development is interesting, although it tends to veer towards the social science side. Basically, there is a bunch of things we think might be happening during the early years but no one is quite sure exactly how they happen. Also, my professor tends to make comments that irk me sometimes. He's made several comments about English being more difficult and more complex a language, and though on a phonetic level I may agree (see vowels above), his tone and the insistence with which he says it makes me think he means something else. We live on a border town, so our classes tend to focus on both English and Spanish sounds, since a lot of the patients are bilingual or speak, especially in the early years like so many of us did, only Spanish. We have talked about cultural nuances in development of language in the average American English speaker and the average Japanese speaker (the Asian population here is quite small, and most of them are Chinese or Filipino), but never about the cultural influences in the development of Spanish speakers. For some reason this strikes me as a dismissal of a rather important part of the problems in our area and, if I may say so, in a lot of other areas in the US.

Oh, and the book he picked for our class has a comment in the introduction page about so few of us women being ladies anymore. I'm still pondering that one. Now, if you'll excuse me, this woman has to get back to studying for a test.

Hail is NOT paved with good intentions

2009-10-06T14:58:00.005-04:00

I am applying to grad school this year after all. I'm taking the GRE sometime next month and thinking about the interview (just one application, just one interview, yes). I've also got the two people who will write me letters of recommendation. One of them was a PhD whom I did research with back in 2007 here in my hometown. Unlike many of my classmates, I have a pretty strong science background. You wouldn't believe how many of them are career-switchers from fields like business or education, who've never taken a biology class. That's not an insult but an observation, and I'm hoping I have a slight advantage over those candidates. Anyway, the point is that I'm hoping LOR1 takes care of painting a good picture of my interest in science. The second letter-writer is one of my medical school professors, the doctor who taught our weekly clinical sessions and who was our small college leader. Believe it or not, and this is exactly what I hope this letter will prove, despite my poor performance and my dislike for most medical school classes, I liked and performed well in the clinical areas. This doctor always reiterated to me that I was very good with patients and she was supportive throughout the whole fallout process, and said she was happy to write me a letter. This particular letter means a lot to me. The letters of recommendation were the part of the process I was most concerned about, so having these two people secured is a huge weight off my back. The grades I'm not that worried about. Undergrad classes are...well, cake.

Also, I found out that I can get my SLP assistant license after I have 25 hours of undergrad SLP classes. If I don't get into graduate school next year, I have a good option to fall back on for financial support while I get ready for the second round. In terms of classes, I have been really enjoying phonetics. I'm pretty good at it, without having to make much of an effort. It sounds lazy, but it's so nice to find something that feels so effortless, something that when I study it is not fighting again every instinct I have. In the future, I may not make such a bad dialect coach.

Speaking of jobs, I did get the homeschooling job I had raved about, but I ended up rejecting the offer. They low-balled me in terms of salary, and it just wasn't worth it for the amount of work they expected from me and the distance I'd have to travel to get there. After gas and taxes, I might have ended up losing money.

Oh, and we also got golf-ball sized hail a couple of weeks ago. Cars are dented all around, insurance companies are crying, and roofers around the city are laughing all the way to the bank right at this moment. I'd never seen or HEARD anything like it. For a brief moment I wondered who the hell was throwing stones at our house (stoning is so last millennium, guys!, though I hear TPing is all the rage these days), until I looked out the window and saw the culprits falling from the sky:

The aftermath left us with dented cars, damaged roofs, beat up plants, a couple of broken lamps, and several hours of googling "HOW DOES HAIL FORM IN 90F WEATHER OMG?" and "WILL INSURANCE COVER THIS?" Thankfully this is about as crazy as the weather gets around these parts.

*As a sort of postscript, I must tell you about how I wrote this post in between classes, and after wrapping it up and saving it I rushed upstairs where my class was about to start, only to trip with my own big feet in the stairwell, thinking I could recover quickly and just keep going, and instead tripping all the way and ending up having to admit that I had indeed tripped (the floor in front of my face was a big clue) and maybe my right shin really hurt. Ouch.

It's funny 'cause it's true

2009-09-18T00:11:00.001-04:00

Image credit: http://xkcd.com

Reading checklist

2009-09-15T15:27:00.002-04:00

Things I've finished reading but haven't blogged about:

1. Lolita (quite a while ago, and I keep meaning to share my favorite quotes and then forgetting)
2. Like the Red Panda
3. The Sun Also Rises

I also intended to read As I Lay Dying but it never managed to hold my attention or my appreciation. I'm not sure I follow Faulkner's "stream of consciousness" style spoken in Southern dialect.

Currently reading:
1. Moby Dick (Found about 15 copies at the library, I KNOW, and I took one of them. So far I really like it and am glad I traded Faulkner for Melville.)
2. Re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in anticipation of the movie.
3. Trashy novels during my brain-decompression breaks. (NOT Twilight, though. I just won't.) So sue me.

I want these, all of these

2009-08-27T23:36:00.002-04:00

Okay, I have refrained from posting all of them here, but I really can't decide which one's the best. (Via: Mental Floss T-shirt store)

Time may be money, but only imaginary money

2009-08-23T19:49:00.004-04:00

Birds have been eating away the leaves and seeds of my beautiful 5ft yellow AND brown sunflowers. I should care, but I don't, because I'm a softie. If I were a farmer or a horticulturist making a living out of my crops I might not be so nonchalant, but I don't see the harm in birds eating off my garden if they can. So far they only seem to like the sunflowers anyway.

I start classes tomorrow and I still haven't bought my books. I will probably drop by the bookstore tomorrow and pick them up, hoping they aren't too expensive. Also, if things go well, I might be starting a teaching job soon. A real job, with a contract and tax obligations and everything. I interviewed with a family to tutor their homeschooled daughter last week, to keep her on track with the program, since both parents work. They gave me an address and said they lived "on the West side of town" (I live on the East), which really meant on a farm on the West outskirts of town, all the way over in the next state. It's a long drive from home, at least for this city's standards, about 30 or 40 minutes away. On the way in I encountered several horses, a Dalmatian, two Shi-Tzus, a parrot, a hamster, and god knows what else was hiding in the other rooms. The family was lovely and I felt comfortable, which is important to me if I'm going to spend many hours there each week. They seemed to like me, my field of study, and the fact that I have experience. Either way, it's a good deal for me and for my plans of buying a car and paying next semester's tuition. I really hope I hear back from them.

A lot of my other students have started school now, so I don't see them as often. I was so proud of the two youngest kids the other day, when they managed to speak a few complete English sentences. I'd only been teaching them for about a month. I decided to throw caution to the wind and skip the simple vocabulary-only plans I found everywhere, and instead I gave them vocabulary AND verbs AND pronouns. You know, things they could actually use to convey significant meaning, since saying "apple" only takes one so far. Not just that, but I've been working with them on pronunciation (in my mind, this is practice for my future work) and they pick it up almost effortlessly.

The one thing I have not done this summer is register for the GRE. I have been procrastinating about it. Sometimes I think that it wouldn't bother me that much if I waited another year to go into grad school. It feels slightly hurried to apply this year for entry the following year, as I feel like it was barely yesterday that my career plans changed so abruptly. I have been wondering about taking a bit more time, doing some more traveling, perhaps even through the university as an undergraduate abroad. I really need to make up my mind about this. To be honest, the main motivator to accelerate the process is the prospect of real money a year earlier than otherwise.

To wait or not to wait? That is the question.

What, another post? (Yes.)

2009-08-10T23:02:00.005-04:00

This is my second post of the day. I'm on a roll here!

I've been having doubts as to where this whole blog thing is headed. Now, I'm not about to cryptically tell you I've decided to stop writing for personal reasons, because I find those types of posts annoying. They all sound like "HELLO, MY MINIONS, THIS IS YOUR BLOG OVERLORD ANNOUNCING THE END OF THE WORLD AS YOU KNOW IT" as if anyone cared that much. One blog less in the world, no one's really going to bat an eyelash. You'll have 20 new Woe is My Life blogs within the next five minutes, I'm sure.

No, it's not about that. I've just been thinking about how I've been using my internet life as a crutch, or rather, an excuse for a social life. One of the many reasons I left medicine was because I didn't want the lifestyle. I wanted to have time to see my friends, to make new ones, to date, and to do my job around my life rather than the other way around. This was a personal choice that just fit better with my expectations of life. The point is, I want to start working on building new relationships and developing that part of my personality that's been holed up in favor of academic achievement for the last few years.

You all, you whom I've never personally met before, saved my life over the last year. I don't know what I would have done without this virtual community and all your advice and encouragement. I'm not about to leave you guys, not when you're so freaking smart and funny and nice.

My goal from now on is to make an effort to add more people to the group. Being the intense, stubborn introvert that I am, I'm afraid this will not be that easy. It's not the first time I have tried and it sure won't be the last time I fail. The social compartment of my brain got stagnated at some point and it's a little rusty by now. Sometimes I doubt whether it can be reactivated at all. I'm not good at getting personal, you see. It's frustrating because I know what I should do, but the execution is always difficult, almost painful. But mulling over it won't help me feel any better, so I suppose I should try harder. (See, the fatalist in me is already saying things like "I suppose I should" as if it were my last resort.) (It kind of is.)

So...that is all about that subject. Here's a picture of a puppy rug--that also doubles as a puppy Swiffer--to make everyone feel better. His name is Mike, he belongs to my cousin (or the other way around, it's hard to tell), and he likes to terrorize all visitors, which is why he was tied to a doorknob for a little while:

"Let me go or Elmo gets it!"

Me, Double Agent.

2009-08-10T22:15:00.006-04:00

I just finished reading "Infidel" (thanks for the tip, Sara) and another book called "American Chica." Let it be known I've been reading something worthy over the summer. The latter is an autobiographical story of a woman who was born in Peru to an American mother and a Peruvian father. There was a certain quality in her story that rang true and familiar to me, and I found myself nodding along some of her passages, as if she had just managed to say what I'd been thinking all along. Some quotes I enjoyed:

“Mine would be an American indoctrination, in a language I hardly used outside. In the process, I’d learn to see the world through a foreign scrim, feel apart. I’d begin to become the creature of a place I’d never smelled or seen—the product of a cloud-built school, where rootlessness was at the heart of the curriculum, isolation at the edge of the page.”

Rootlessness. I've thought about this feeling for a while, though I'm not so worried about having no roots as much as I'm worried about not having enough of them. Or rather, not enough of them for two. When you live your life in between two places you begin to feel like you are never quite entirely in either one. There are advantages to this. You become versatile, flexible, and in a way, fearless. You can adapt, and that makes you stronger. On the other hand, it's like trying to root for both teams in a soccer match. Your loyalties waver every now and then.

“Many years later, when I was studying at the British University of Hong Kong—linguistics, to be precise, after I’d studied Chinese, after I’d studied Russian and French, trying on languages like so many dresses—I came across a theory claiming that bilingualism can hurt you. This was not one of those theories about the educational process or the capacities of the brain. It was a slender little monograph, not particularly well-written, which claimed that in operating as two distinct personalities in two distinct tongues, a bicultural person will be highly suspicious to those who have only one culture. The bicultural person seems so thoroughly one way in one language, so thoroughly different in another. Only an impostor would hide that other half so well. A liar.

But the monograph doesn’t begin to tell the story. The truth about biculturalism is more complicated. That others doubt you is not the point. The doubt creeps into you, too. What Carol was saying was that not only did she fear people would think her a two-face, she was confessing that she was afraid she was. I understood it, because I, too, had doubted my own trustworthiness. I had been fooling people for years. Slip into my American skin, and the playground would never know I was really Peruvian. Slip into the Latina, and Peruvians wouldn’t suspect I was a Yank. But even by the age of ten, I had gone one giant step past Carol. I was flitting from one identity to another so deftly that it was just as easy to affect a third. I could lie, I could fake, I could act. It was a way for a newcomer to cope in America. You can’t quite sound like your schoolmates? Never mind! Make it up, fashion a whole new person. Act the part, says the quote under my school photo, and become whatever you wish to become. Invention. It was a new kind of independence.”

I think there are good reasons why people act differently when speaking different languages. Languages come with their own culture and their own set of rules. For example, I feel a much more polite person in English. It's not that I'm rude in Spanish, it's just that niceties and they way they're expressed are different, less showy. In Spanish I feel more earnest and sincere, and I hear it the same way. I'd rather comfort a child in Spanish, just like I'm more soothed by Spanish intonations than I am by English ones (though I'm sure this last one is a matter of conditioning rather than some special quality in the language).

I'm not sure I have different personalities in each language, but rather different personas. Kind of like behaving one way at work, and another one at home. The tools you use to communicate change slightly, as do the mannerisms, but ultimately the core remains the same. Now, whether or not other people understand the duplicity is another story.

“The Truth, whether or not my father could factor it. His children had not gone from any first thing to a second. We were the “neither-here-nor-there people”: one thing when here, the other when there. Or forever from some other place. We were neither; we were both.”

On being an introvert

2009-07-26T23:51:00.001-04:00

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid."

-Bertrand Russell

Writer's Block, explained

2009-07-24T19:31:00.002-04:00

So for a while now I've felt like I have nothing that exciting to write about. Nothing funny, nothing angry, nothing depressing. I think I finally figured out why, though. You know how when you're sleep deprived and stressed you go into Zombie Mode and then either of two things happen: everything is funny, or everything sucks. So, let's say you haven't slept in 30 hours and you have an important test and 2948759 pages of reading to get through, and a fly goes flying by right in front of your nose. You either laugh about it and start thinking very insightful and nonsensical things about flies, or you start crying and cursing all flies because they ruin your study mood (which was bad to begin with).

So yes. That happens.

Nowadays I'm not really stressed, my heart rate and blood pressure are back to normal, and I sleep 8 hours a night. 10 on weekends. I can't even say OMG YOU GUYZ I HAVEN'T SLEPT IN 3 DAYS AND IM TPYNG LKD THIS AND RED BULL, WOHOOO!

So...I'm either really boring, or really relaxed nowadays.

The cop-out list post

2009-07-21T10:49:00.003-04:00

I can't for the life of me think of anything remotely interesting to write about, so instead, here's a compilation of things that have happened lately in my exciting life:

Things my students have said to me that made me laugh
1. "How do we say 'shoes' in Spanish, Matt?" "Zaputos!" (LOUD. IN THE LIBRARY.)
2. "My favorite actor is Bread Pitt."
3. "Last night I went to a steakhouse and I ate cowgirl. Cowgirl was huge!"
4. "Tenemos un gato verde." ("We have a green cat." Unrelated to class, but funny nonetheless.)

Things I've acquired lately
1. 4 James Patterson novels for 25 cents each. Don't ask. I know. I'm very ashamed of myself for even admitting this.
2. New dental floss, after I dropped the one I had in the bathroom trash.
3. New colored pens, for the eternal nerd inside me.

Things I'm happy about
1. The new seeds I planted.
2. Frozen cream puffs, otherwise known as Death in a Lard-Covered Cream Cheese Ball. Mmm, death is delicious!

Things I'm sad about
1. A fungus that has infected my flowers?
2. Fungus! (Okay, I just like saying "fungus!" a lot.)

I can't believe my vacation is almost over. I need a couple more weeks to reunite tuition money! Thank goodness for people who are bad at school, without whom I'd be folding jeans, hating life, and selling the remaining two square inches of my soul to yet another student loan.

I also would like everyone to know that we need better and more diverse restaurants in Texas. I spent half my weekend driving around with a friend looking for anything resembling foreign food, and Mexican doesn't count. We ended up at a fusion-type restaurant which most likely didn't serve us authentic Japanese food. I don't believe the Japanese eat out of 1-gallon bowls, for instance.

I've also decided that I need to broaden my musical tastes. It's been YEARS since I listened to anything that wasn't on the radio during car trips, so let's just say that last time I checked the Backstreet Boys were still famous. I need recommendations. Feel free to link to your favorite bands or songs and do me the great favor of maybe not being such a musical outcast. Thank you. That is about all for today.

....

Fungus!

....

Alright, I'll stop.

An Engrish Tale

2009-07-10T11:24:00.007-04:00

I recently found my old English books, the ones I used when I was learning English. They are a reservoir of Engrish and unintentional hilarity. My brother and I haven't laughed so hard in a while, because, you see, back then it all made perfect sense. To me. Only to me.

Unintentional Hilarity Display, Numero One:
And in California is a park of the Disneys where is a river that ends in the sewage's pipes.

Unintentional Hilarity Display, Numero Two:
I really hope you wasn't drank while you were driving that car, kid. I also hope you saw who was, because the car hasn't insurance. We can has go to jail for this. Oh, no, wait, thankfully I hasn't a car so I hasn't to worry about this kind of stuff.

Unintentional Hilarity Display, Numero Three:
I just wanted to say to all my readers that you need eat lunch in the after noot, okay?

Unintentional Hilarity Display, Numero Four: I love this one because it's so...well, fitting.
WHERES IS MY INTERNET, BITCHES?

Gardening in America: 4th of July edition

2009-07-04T10:57:00.003-04:00

I hope my fellow Americans are having a good holiday this weekend, eating some good old fashioned American food and enjoying the fireworks. I know I will.

I wanted to post the new garden pictures. We've been getting a lot of rain lately--for a desert, that is--but lots of rain nonetheless. Rain makes plants happy, as they've already let me know by bragging about their bright green leaves and pretty flowers in front of me every morning. Show offs!

Here is the little stretch where I planted zinnia seeds. All grown up now!
The butterflies and hummingbirds really seem to like them, too.
These are the honeysuckle vines and in between them you can see sunflowers, which are HUGE, by the way. They're not done growing yet, either, I've still yet to see their flower.
Do you remember my tomato and jalapeno plants? Well, they were outgrowing their little patch of land. We had to open the space up and move the jalapeno plant a bit more to the side so that they would both have time to sprawl. I'll show pictures of the new arrangements once I take some, but this was them prior to the move:
This is the new crepe myrtle tree. I bought it because I noticed that they had them in the full sun and yet their leaves were still intact. That, my friends, is a good sign if you're planning to plant anything around here. It must be able to resist the amount and the intensity of sun in the Southwest. It's been in its place for almost a week now and it's already starting to show its pink flowers.
Also new is this mimosa tree. I've always liked these trees, but I hadn't seen them in any nurseries until a couple of weeks ago. I'd drive by houses where they had them and just look at them longingly. They grow really tall and wide, and have a feather-like pink flower on top of their leaves. The employee at the locally-owned nursery said they don't need that much water and that they can stand the sun of the desert. I was sold.
Well, that's it for the garden for now. I hope you all have a good Independence Day. Stay healthy!

Geeking out

2009-06-30T23:09:00.005-04:00

Obviously, given my track record of academic choices, it's no secret that I am what people would call a nerd. I read books, I enjoy watching PBS, I wake up early on Sundays so that I can watch all the political talk shows, and I have been known to have been a bit too fascinated by a 2-P microscope. When I observe a pianist doing his job, I pay more attention to his fingers than I do to the music itself. However, the one thing that fascinates me even more than the how is the why. What can I do with that microscope? How can I turn this knowledge into something practical? How does it help? I appreciate processes, but I want them to be useful processes. I'm practical.

Sometimes science draws me in very strongly. I want to be in a place where I can think, create, and be paid for it. I want to be around other thinkers. Lately I've been feeling that pull. I suspect it's because I've been out of school for over a month and there's a void where my classes and the constant new knowledge used to be. Then there is that other side of me, the one who closely observes people, who studies their interactions, their inflections, and who is good at it. I've mentioned here before that I enjoy working with children. I like children not because they're cute, or because I like playing with them, or because they are less annoying than most adults. If it were that, I'd become a kindergarten teacher or a nanny and call it a day. But I do enjoy studying them. I like watching how they learn, how the interact with each other, how they think, and most importantly, I enjoy detecting the errors, the deficiencies, and figuring out how to correct them.

And the point of saying all of this is that knowing it makes me feel like I'm heading in the right direction this time.

Workin' it

2009-06-28T17:15:00.005-04:00

I've been swamped with work lately. Who knew so many people browsed Craigslist? Here's a list of my latest and most interesting students:

1. 30-something year-old man, married, two children. He needs to pass an Organic Chemistry summer class in order to enter his graduate program (he's a nurse), and guess who's been helping him rock those exams? ME. Chemistry-hater, thought-I-was-done-with-it-forever, wanted-to-burn-my chem-books me. Like they say in my country, lo que hay que hacer para tragar! (Just kidding, I think I may even be starting to like chemistry now that I feel like I understand it well enough to teach someone else.)

2. South Korean 32-year old doctor. She's here visiting relatives and I'm teaching her English. In the process we've both managed to learn a lot of sign language. In broken sentences she's managed to convey to me how to order alcohol in Korea, asked me why Americans drive drunk all the time, and told me that she really likes the beer this side of the country. Notice a theme here?

3. 40-something year old college student, about to get his bachelor's degree in Studio Art after 8 years of work and a long absence from school prior to that. I like him. He shows up every session well-prepared, having read all of the notes, done practice problems, and ready to work with more math. I barely have to do anything except answer any questions he may ask.

Next week I'm starting English lessons with two children who're fresh arrived from Mexico. One is 10, the other one's 7 years old. I still have no idea what I will do to keep them interested, as I barely remember what most 10 and under children act like. Still, I suspect I'll be glad to be older than my students for once. I've pretty much given up on the job search, since I applied to what seemed like 100 places and never got a call back. I'm not good enough for K-Mart, y'all. So screw them. I figured I only have to work about 12 hours a week tutoring (and if I get more, even better) to earn the same money I'd be earning working full-time almost anywhere else, and tutoring lets me set my own schedule and I don't have to follow stupid rules or wear uniforms or any other such thing. Instead I've been promoting the tutoring business, and I've been getting a good enough response to keep me very busy.

I know I still owe photos from that vacation that already feels was forever ago, but I'm a lazy slob who manages to upload one, gets tired of browsing through 1000 photos, gives up, and then decides to go do something else entirely. I am sorry.

What I will do today is tell you how my little garden has grown. Since we last spoke about it, (which was a long time ago because I was afraid I was alienating all the sane people with all the garden talk), my zinnia flowers have bloomed beautifully, the honeysuckle vines are growing, the sunflowers have sprouted, little green tomatoes have appeared, and I've bought a mimosa tree and a crepe myrtle tree. There was also a successful experiment with some ground cover cuttings. Next in the plans are a few more trees (WHAT?) and maybe one of those little artificial ponds for the patio.

The garden pictures you will probably see soon, since there aren't hundreds of them. Yet.

What in the world?

2009-06-17T19:07:00.002-04:00

I know I promised vacation photos, but I've been getting so many tutoring calls I don't know what to do with them! Where were all these people during final exams?

I'm back!

2009-06-11T13:51:00.004-04:00

But I really wanted to stay and find a job and get a dog and an apartment near the sea*.

(More pictures later, after I've caught up on all the missed chatter with my mattress.)
(*That water was freezing cold.**)
(**It felt good anyway.)

Gone Fishin'

2009-06-04T13:03:00.004-04:00

I'm leaving for San Francisco on Saturday, along with a very excited 15 year old. I expect to have many adventures there and maybe have some good anecdotes to tell when I come back.

Rejoice! I wrote a cheerful post.

2009-05-24T11:36:00.006-04:00

I'm finally officially off from school. I got an A in both my classes, which makes my GPA for this semester a 4.0. I've never had a 4.0 semester before. There was always that one B+ that would ruin everything, usually some Chemistry class. To celebrate, I bought a GRE study guide. (Sounds a riot, huh?)

Also, I'm filling out my citizenship forms (finally) and just need one pesky date that I can't figure out and I'm not sure if I can find out. They're asking for the date that the passport that I used to enter the US was issued. I used that passport for the last time in 2001 and I was about 6 years old in the photograph, meaning that it was issued almost 20 years ago. The INS office kept it when I applied for permanent residence, so they should be able to see it when they retrieve my file. I'm just not sure if I should write "date unknown" on the application. Also, it turns out I probably HOPEFULLY maybe qualify for automatic citizenship (no test, no interview) through my US-born dad, so that's a relief.

This year will be 8 years since I moved to the United States, and here are some of the things I like the most about my adoptive country:

1. Americans love their closet space. Every house and apartment that I have lived in had walk-in closets, linen closets, kitchen closets (okay, PANTRIES), storage closets, tool sheds in the backyard, shelves in the garage, etc.

2. Along with a love for closets comes a love for organizers. I love that I can walk into almost any store and find plastic totes, stackable drawers, filing cabinets, drawer organizers, dividers, 100 different kinds of clothes hangers, shoe racks, under-the-bed boxes...you get the idea.

3. Wide streets. Seriously. If you've ever lived and driven in Mexico you'd realize just how wide and comfortable our streets are here. Most Mexican houses don't have much space for a driveway, so you see a lot of cars parked in front of the sidewalk on BOTH sides of the streets, which leaves only a narrow space in the middle for you to drive through. When they run out of sidewalks, people will not hesitate to double park.

4. Weird ice cream flavors. I'm not sure why it is a law in this country that a new ice cream flavor be created every week, but it is. Some of them are disgusting (don't ever eat peppermint ice cream!), but others are delicious. Where else could I find "Cookie Dough" and "Wedding cake" and "Cherry Amaretto"?

5. Home Depot. I love Home Depot. I love walking around it and imagining possibilities, because there's always something somewhere that needs to be painted or upgraded or beautified. I love that they have 1000 kinds of carpet and hardwood floors and window shades and paving stones and lamps. I probably don't NEED any of it but it's nice to have choices.

6. Bookstores. There aren't as many gigantic bookstores with coffee shops inside of them in Mexico.

I'm sure there are more but these are the ones that come to mind right now. Oh, and did I mention I'm teaching myself to knit? I can already make a scarf but nothing else. Baby steps. (Also, unless I learn to make something else by Christmas, everyone is getting a scarf as a gift!)

Look who's here!

2009-05-18T12:28:00.001-04:00

What makes us happy?

2009-05-12T20:44:00.003-04:00

I wanted to share this article with you guys, because so many times I have read in fellow medical blogs about the author feeling lonely, isolated, disconnected. I sure blogged about it back in the day (I say that like it was a long time ago). Something to think about:

Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Quote of the Week

2009-05-09T12:23:00.003-04:00

I haven't done one of these in a long time, but I found this today and I liked it:

"If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter—for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself….Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."

-Max Ehrmann.

I really just like saying 'Pigeons'

2009-05-05T14:42:00.005-04:00

I found out today that the professor for my A&P of Speech has exempted me from half my final (there were two parts to it). I'm so thankful. This news means less stress during finals week and more time to do other things. This semester I have been reading and doing research about writing and publishing and I've already started writing a little something.

In other not necessarily surprising news around West Texas, this weekend shone on us with >90F temperatures, which means that it was about time to install the air conditioner. Ceiling fans don't do much when all they do is spread hot air around the rooms. Several interesting things happened during the installation of said appliance:

1. Two baby pigeons were found hidden underneath the AC unit. The pigeons were removed and placed elsewhere, causing the mother pigeon to fly frantically around the ceiling for a while before she found them.

2. Pigeon repellent was sprayed on the ceiling.

3. Air conditioner started working again for the new summer. A celebration followed.

4. Pigeon repellent smell was brought inside the house by our now-functional air conditioner.

5. Windows were opened and house was properly evacuated by all its inhabitants.

6. Ceiling areas around the AC were properly washed, which probably means that a new pigeon family will move into the area soon.

7. Discovered that pigeon repellent doesn't repell any pigeons. It works perfectly well with humans, though.

In other topics and because I'm officially the Obsessive Gardener around here, I'll have you know that I have planted seeds this week (some people have cute cats, I have tomatoes, though they're not as cuddly). I did it all by myself, too, because any excuse is a good excuse to get dirty, use a shovel, and play with my new multiple-capabilities hose. By the way, I found out that the jet functions can reach almost 30 feet in length. Basically, I can stand on a corner and water the whole garden. Or I could shoot pigeons on the ceiling with it. (Don't worry, I won't.) (But I could.) If all goes well I expect to have flowers in a couple of months. Definitely a delayed-gratification way of gardening, but also a lot cheaper.

All in all, I'm very excited to be almost done with this semester and about the upcoming trip. I still haven't reserved a hotel. I keep looking and comparing and asking, since I want to be within walking distance to places AND to not have it cost me an arm and a leg. A few options have already been noted. I'm also studying for the GRE, which doesn't look so scary compared to the MCAT, but I still want to get a great score so I can increase my chances of not only getting into more places but of securing some financing or scholarship money. I've noticed that I have regained my pleasure for studying, and I want more and more of it. For some reason this kind of work doesn't feel like work at all, which I think is a good sign. I hope it stays that way forever.

New readers

2009-05-03T11:53:00.003-04:00

To those of you who recently got an invitation to read this blog, I've added a few links on the right side of the page. Under "Topics on this blog" you can find a few tags about some relevant posts that might interest you, and I'm working on re-tagging all my posts to make this blog a bit more friendly for everyone else as well. I should be starting a series soon on the topic of quitting specifically, since that's part of what brought a lot of you here.

Thanks for reading.

Garden updates

2009-04-28T11:59:00.006-04:00

This is going to be a picture heavy post, so I'm including the photos in small size and you can click if you want to see them bigger.

My plants are getting so pretty, and I've acquired some new ones that I hope will take. These are my begonias:

These are the tomatoes and jalapeno plants. Remember how small they were?:
The tomato plant is starting to show some flowers, so hopefully we'll see baby tomatoes soon:
Also, I'm not sure, but those little green bulbs in the middle might be the beginning of jalapeno peppers:
Now, the new plants. My mom and I have been getting up early and walking around a nearby park. The park is full of these climbing flowers that smell really nice...you can smell them from really far away, there are so many of them. Of course, I wanted some. So we took a couple of cuttings (is that illegal, by the way? I don't know) to plant in our garden. We're hoping they'll take well and we can have a whole patio wall covered in them. Google tells me they're Japanese Honeysuckle, also known as "Hall's Prolific":
Aren't they pretty? Imagine a whole wall covered with them!

Heading West

2009-04-27T23:31:00.004-04:00

I've booked a vacation for the summer! I'm excited, a little guilty for splurging a little, though I got a good deal, and the whole thing was very cheap, and I haven't taken a vacation anywhere I've never been before in years, and I've never seen the sea (I know!), and now I'll get to see it for the first time. So I'm happy.

Oh, who am I kidding, I'm so giddy about this trip!

Deer Sighting

2009-04-27T10:58:00.002-04:00

*Photo courtesy of my dad, who was out of town for work (no deer around where we live).

Coming up this week

2009-04-26T15:42:00.002-04:00

I haven't updated much lately (well, not about anything substantial) because things are a bit busy around here. My finals are approaching and I have a Linguistics exam next Thursday and a project for my A&P class. I have to speak for at least 10 minutes on one topic, which I've already chosen and I like (air pressures and breathing patterns during speech, if you must know), but TEN MINUTES, guys! It's a lot of time to talk all by myself. I've also been getting some more tutoring work, since other people's finals are also approaching, and the high school kids are taking their state-mandated exams. I spent 4 hours reviewing Algebra on Saturday with the 13 year old, who clearly has a better attention span than I do. And on top of all of that, I have a 3rd interview with that tutoring place. I really want to do well in the interview because I really want that job, and by now I think I wouldn't be so bad at it. Wish me luck, please.

To do this week:

1) Study for Thursday's test.
2) Work on project, see if I can do some sort of class participation thing to get things interesting.
3) Fill out citizenship forms. (I keep putting paperwork off but I need to just get it over with.)
4) Tutoring with two students on Monday.
5) Job interview on Wednesday.
6) Figure out if I want to take independent study next semester to do some research in SLP. There are two professors whose projects sound really interesting. They're both studies in the neurological bases of speech. I keep doubting whether I should because it would raise my tuition and because I'd have a bit less time to work. I was really more hoping someone needed a lab assistant so that I could get paid to be there, instead of the other way around.

I wanted to take some pictures of my plants and show them, but maybe for the next post. They've grown! My tomato plant has a few yellow flowers already and I think I can see little jalapeño bulbs on the other one. The begonias are still alive and colorful as well. Yay! I can't wait to see veggies.

What I do when I'm bored in class

2009-04-22T12:34:00.003-04:00

Since we're on the topic...

2009-04-19T19:14:00.004-04:00

I thought I'd plagiarize Tea at Ten and continue with the topic of houses, kitchens, and all related topics. I've been helping one of my uncles house hunt this past week and all the houses I've seen has put me in full-blown nesting mode.

This is sort of what I want. Something small that isn't ostentatious, something which isn't too big to clean by myself and that doesn't require me to sell my soul to some bank. The porch is a must.
I also came across this one I liked, if I decided to live in a colder weather. I love the big windows.
Of course, whatever my house ends up looking like, I know I want a room inside it that looks kind of like this:
In the midst of ~~procrastinating~~ perusing through the internet in search for house porn, I came across this one. Isn't this a gorgeous kitchen?
Then I had to stop looking because I was getting too excited/jealous. Of course, some may view all this daydreaming as unnecessary and unrealistic (for now), but I think it's important to visualize what it is exactly that you want. How else would you know which way to turn if you don't know exactly where you're going? Everyone needs a map. This is my map.

On second look...

2009-04-14T21:04:00.000-04:00

I am very concerned about those hanging puppies. What kind of sadistic person put them there? What if the line isn't strong enough and those puppies FALL TO AN UGLY DEATH? What if their buttons pop open and they FALL TO AN UGLY DEATH? How far from the ground are they anyway? Is it easy to make a puppy let you clothe him and then hang him from a rope? Are they being choked to death by their onesies?

Post-Easter Mardi Gras

2009-04-14T17:59:00.003-04:00

I hope you all had a very nice Easter (and to Sara, a Passover, though I know that's not over until Thursday). My dad, my brother and I managed to stay alive just fine in my mom's absence, and the house is still clean and standing. My mom came back from Mexico carrying many homemade tortillas, pipitorias (peanut candy), mazapanes, and repostería (very small and very fine cookies made with pecans or almods, usually). Don't worry, we're pacing ourselves with all of it.

I had a very insightful post planned last night, given how I haven't written anything too substantial in a while, but I waited and then by morning all inspiration was gone. So this is what you get, just a short update because I have to run to class in about 5 minutes. So instead of a long post I give you puppies! On a clothesline! Cute!

And now you forgive me. Right?

Happy Easter

2009-04-11T22:06:00.002-04:00

Some updates

2009-04-07T17:05:00.004-04:00

I still haven't found a job. Not that I've been turning in applications in every place, but the "just give me a job, any job!" is starting to set in. I want to start saving up money for all the fabulous plans I've been brewing in my head during my free time.

On the good side, my parents sorta kinda offered me their old car yesterday. It's not old in the true sense of the word, just old as in, the one they've been driving for 4 years. Basically, if and when they get another car this year, I'd buy this one off of them for a discounted price. It would be very nice because I've already driven that car, I know that it's been well cared for, it's got all the services and repairs done, and it's an economic, 4-door, 4-cylinder compact. There's also this car being sold by one of our neighbors, it's the exact same brand and make as my parents', but a couple of years older and in a parrot green color. Very pretty, yes, the kind of color which can be spotted halfway across town. It's been on sale for months now, so I've been jokingly referring to it as "my car", the one I will buy when they're so desperate to sell it that they'll knock off a few dollars off the price. I've already been practicing a lot of haggling conversations in my head.

As for the fabulous plans, I got one e-mail from my university which made me think a little. It was about some program to spend a paid year teaching in aboriginal communities in Australia (land of Dragonfly, yay!). Now, there was some mention about these communities being a bit desolate and hints about not having much access to technology once you're there. On the one hand, it seems like a worthy cause and a way to travel and get good experience. On the other hand, I've never been outside this continent and spending my first time abroad teaching for a whole year in some faraway place sounds a little scary. So I wanted to ask Dragonfly if she knows anything about aboriginal communities and what it would be like to live and work there. Shoot me a comment or an e-mail if you do and if you have some time! (Thanks!)

Other than that, not much news. Here's a summary in bullet points:

- Classes are still going well, will be off in May.
- I started reading Lolita because everyone keeps raving about it, and so far I like it (even if the subject matter is a bit disturbing, the language is beautiful).
- I thought it was April 14th today, for some reason, and thought I was late in paying my credit card. I wasn't.
- I bought some summer tops and bermuda shorts fit for the approaching summer here (read: light fabrics only).
- My mom's going to Mexico tomorrow, so we'll be eating scrambled eggs and pizza for the next few days (my dad is good at a lot of things but cooking is not one of them...I may have to take the kitchen away from him if it gets really bad).
- I think my plants are growing, but something may be eating my jalapenos. Whatever it is, it's obviously Mexican.
- A dog escaped from one of our neighbors and terrorized my mom from half a mile away. (My mom has a somewhat irrational fear of dogs. She has good reasons, though, and a couple of scars to prove it.)
-- I may be heading to Ruidoso, NM, sometime soon with a couple of friends, and though we have missed the snow and skiing season, there's always walking and lounging around in a cabin for a whole day.
- My brother has bought this and can be found hanging from various doorways at random hours of the evening.

More updates later.

For Arturo

2009-04-05T14:25:00.001-04:00

I made this yesterday and it was delicious! Thanks for the recipe.

Pozole

2009-04-03T16:47:00.002-04:00

My breakfast this morning:

Perhaps the main reason why I should never try to earn a living playing poker

2009-04-02T16:17:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was April Fools here in the US. All day long I heard stories about really elaborate and hilarious pranks, and I even tried a little prank on my little brother (put a post-it over the eye/sensor of computer's optical mouse with "April Fools!" written on it, and then watch the other person struggle for a few minutes trying to figure out why the mouse doesn't work). The thing is, I'm really bad at pranks. I can't keep a straight face, so I have to set it up and then leave the room, which kind of takes the fun out of it since it keeps me from seeing it all play out. My friends know this about me, so I'm not ever allowed to be in on jokes or pranks.

Has anyone ever gone to great lengths to fool you on April Fools Day (or whatever version of the day your country has)? Have you ever played elaborate pranks on anyone else?

Fall Schedule (probably)

2009-03-31T11:47:00.002-04:00

Here's my schedule for next semester:

Phonetics, Monday 4:30-7:20pm
Phonetics Lab, Monday 3:30-4:20pm
Language Development, Tuesday 3:30-6:20pm
Hearing Science, Thursday 3:30-6:20pm

Sure, the three hour classes ~~might~~ will get boring eventually, but it leaves me a lot of time to work and make money to save and be able to pay for the following semester in full. I talked to my advisor and she said SLP PhD programs are mostly for people who want to do research and work in university settings. If you want to be licensed and practice as a speech therapist you need a Master's degree. However, I've found out there are some combined MA/PhD programs which give you both options and I think I want to apply to those as well as some Master's programs. The doctorates offer tuition waivers and stipends, and in case I decide to leave after I get the MA there is no penalty. If at some point I got into one of these programs and were offered such incentives, I wouldn't turn it down. As for now I'm trying to study for the GRE (which shouldn't be that bad, right? RIGHT?) so as to get such an awesome score that no one would reject me. That's the plan, at least.

After the advising I walked downstairs to turn in my slip to the secretary, who's in charge of clearing students for registration, and I walked right through the speech clinic. They were working on a tiny 2 year old, playing a tape that would make "Aaaah, aaaah, aaaah" sounds over and over again. Eventually the toddler started repeating the noises. A few others could be heard behind doors practicing words. I can actually say that I want to do that and that I want to work with people like these.

Right now I'm waiting to hear back from a job with a tutoring center. I had interviewed there a couple of months ago and they called me in for a second interview last week. I'd be teaching homeschooled children and that scares me a little (what am I supposed to do with them for 3+ hours?), but it might turn out to be a nice challenge and good practice for working with younger kids.

I confess that I also want the job now because I want to start saving for next semester and for the summer. I've been planning a trip to San Francisco for a while. I know approximately how much money I need and I can't wait, I'm excited! It's been a while since I took a real vacation somewhere I've never been. Oh yes, and there's that little issue about the citizenship application which I also want to fill out and submit very soon. I qualify since last summer and I should just turn it in and get it over with, since I know I'm going to do it eventually. Gah, wish me well on that! Teach me the pledge of allegiance! The state capitals! How many states are there again? Wait, "democracy"? Yeah I think I heard something about that once...it's like, the national flower, right?

(Just kidding, INS people, JUST KIDDING.)

A few notes

2009-03-30T18:22:00.004-04:00

A few notes from lectures on literary criticism by JV Cunningham, which a fellow blogger over at A Commonplace Blog was kind enough to share. I found them interesting, though I disagree with him on some of them, at least on first instinct. Here are some of my favorites:

Meter. Poets must learn, young, to speak and hear it.

Form precedes its realization, even in the first instance.

A literary work is a convergence of forms.

The assumption of translation is that things can be said in several ways and that the ways can be compared.

Dialogue. People aiming at a sort of change through oral interchange. An elementary form of it is the catechism, a question-and-answer dialogue. Modern forms, unknown to antiquity, include psychotherapy, labor negotiations, a roundtable discussion. These are Socratic dialogues in well-furnished rooms.

Background information is often imparted (or learned through study) merely for the sake of believing in the foreground. Thus, when Laertes warns Ophelia against marrying Hamlet, he is speaking plain truth, for he is speaking in the foreground and must be believed. The background was this. All mixed marriages between a royal personage and a commoner ended with the commoner in prison, in exile, or dead.

Tolerance is almost identical to indifference.

A text has a value in its society that may reflect an inaccurate interpretation of it.

Modern critics tend to “vague-ify” and psychologize—that is, they turn the externals inward. The obvious is repellent for some reason to the literary sensibility.

Thought. In Aristotelian terms, it is what a speaker would ideally say in arguing for or against something. Defects of speech, then, are defects of thought.

The abstract simile: “As familiar as a bad mistake.”

There is no such thing as no style. The no-style is impossible.

(Cunningham asks the students for their definitions of style.) One says, “It’s the way a writer uses words.” “You might think of style as the way words use a writer,” Cunningham replies.

The writer seeks the unique in the common language.

Writing must be accurate (that is, objectively right), but it also must have something that takes the reader in.

When style is overpowering it takes us over. We think we have said what we have heard.

Dante’s definition of a poet: a rhetorical fiction, written metrically.

Fiction is a gimmick, a device. Not an idea; that blurs it.

A work of literature should not only stick to the point; it should stray. It should have, so to speak, something extra here and there.

Behind the work of literature is unsolicited and almost overpowering experience. It could be made up, but more likely seen.

Variety is good. It is also distracting.

Verse has lines in addition to grammar. This is its distinguishing mark. And a line is formed by systematic phonetic repetition, the most of which is rhyme. For the lines must be heard.

We look for continuities. We want plausibilities. There are no blinding flashes in modern literature. We have excluded from fiction and from life—that is to say, from our views of life—the essentially interesting, the extraordinary, the sudden.

Whining, and new plants

2009-03-29T18:05:00.004-04:00

I hope the last post didn't come off as too self-victimizing. Things have been hard at times and I've no doubt have had to work hard and go without some luxuries, but I did all those things because I was where I wanted to be doing what I wanted to do. I've been lucky in that sense. I've always done whatever the heck I wanted to do; I went to the university I wanted to go to, got into med school when I wanted to get in, and walked out when I figured it wasn't really the best thing for me. It was precisely because I am so self-sufficient (and proud of it) that I felt hurt when I was told that somehow I wasn't trying.

I have to go to academic advising tomorrow so that I'll be able to register this week. I have a long parchment roll full of questions. Mostly I'd like to find out about MS/PhD programs and the requirements. There are a few good MS programs with a PhD track, which offer tuition wavers and stipends. I won't lie and say that the latter is not a motivation, since I really don't want to go into even more debt. Not if I can help it. The lower my debt, the sooner I'll have financial freedom and the sooner I can finish paying my current loans off. Apparently there are also different "specialties" within the field. For example, one to focus on working with special needs students and another one to focus on swallowing and respiratory problems. Some are more focused towards hospital work, whereas others are more geared towards working for school districts. I'm also going to ask about applying to programs out of state and how that works with licensure issues. I've been itching to move away from Texas for a while.

I've been living in Texas ever since I moved to the US. I don't mind it, really, but I feel that we don't always connect. I'd like a more template weather, somewhere where plants grow, somewhere with mountains and possibly nice beaches, and some place where it's diverse enough that it'll be easy for me to blend in. In regards to the last requirement, almost anywhere else in the South is out of consideration. I've seen enough confederate flags in my travels around it to put me off most places, including the big cities. I contemplated the Northeast for a while, but it's not my ideal kind of weather. I never have and hope I never will have to deal with snow plowers or frozen roads. Currently I'm thinking about the ~~East~~ (oops!) West Coast, namely California. Diverse enough, nice weather, beaches, nice mountains in the Northern areas. It's expensive, I'm sure, but perhaps this recession's effect on real estate prices isn't such a bad thing for those of us who will be buying in the next few years. Even so, there's more to quality of life than square footage.

Speaking of weather and plants, I planted some begonias, tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers in our backyard. It's supposed to take approximately 60 days for the tomatoes and peppers to grow enough to produce fruit. If they make it that far, I'll let you know. Here they are:

I wanted an orange tree really badly, but they were more expensive, so I'm saving up for it and all the soil it will require (you can't just plant anything in the soil around here because it's so dry, so you have to put in new fertile soil). If I manage to keep these alive and make them bear fruit, I'll buy myself a tree. Just my way of trying to turn this desert into something a bit greener (yes, futile, I know, but I can't afford to move yet).

Now you know what to call me if you really want to kill me

2009-03-25T17:02:00.005-04:00

I've been feeling extremely restless this week. I don't know if it's all those Spring Break do-nothing days that have piled up and given me the urge to do SOMETHING, or what. All I know is that one moment I'm sitting here happy about my life and the next one I want to go, do, or be anything and anywhere else. Then sometimes I don't really want to do anything because the possibilities are so overwhelming.

Yesterday, my linguistics professor asked me if I was sure I didn't want to be a linguist. Apparently I am good at it (not to brag, but I am). I do find the subject very interesting, but I also know that I like the idea of working with people, hence the career choice I've made. Speaking of the new career, I am looking into the differences between Master's and PhD programs. Of course, by "looking into" I mean "debating endlessly." My desire for financial independence in the near future and my desire for academic recognition, the latter no doubt more of a habit from my pre-med and medical school days than a rational decision, are sometimes conflicting.

I quit medical school so that I could live the life I envisioned for myself, one that still included patients and treatment plans, but one with a little less stress and a lot more freedom to squeeze in the other things and people I love. I try to keep this in mind as I take every step from now on, though a big part of me is afraid that I will choose wrong again. And again. And again. I realized that this is why I've been so restless lately. I'm afraid that I won't find that life that I want, so I keep thinking and planning and I should probably stop, but some old habits die hard.

Back when I was going through the medical school issues, one of the deans told me that the academic committee didn't think I was being proactive enough. This sole statement hurt me and enraged me more than any failed classes or appeal meetings or summer courses or forced learning disability evaluations ever did. He didn't know how much I had worked to just make it through my high school years, when I was still not legal in this country; how much I had called and called financial aid offices prior to starting college; how much I'd lobbied for scholarships so that maybe I'd be able to pay my way through school; how I had moved into my freshman dormitory all by myself; how my first year of college I didn't, not once, have enough pocket change for a coke; how I didn't come home for Thanksgiving when I couldn't pay for it and how I was usually 1 of 3 students left in our entire building for those days; how many essays I'd written before I dared turn in my applications to the medical school I was now standing in; how I'd walk to the supermarket in our dangerous area of town because I didn't have a car, watching my back and clutching my keys between my fingers the whole way; how fucking hard I had worked for a long time just to get here. Telling me I was "not proactive enough" was the utmost insult he could have called me, as far as I was concerned.

So here I am, my "not proactive" self using every minute of every day to plan and schedule all the things I feel that I have to do in order to get to the finish line. Well, this finish line, though I hope there are others in the future. (Life would be a little boring otherwise. ) I'm doing little things to try to slow down and just enjoy myself in the present; I've been working on my writing, I planted a few things in the garden which I try to remember to water every day, and I've been reading a lot for the first time in a while, once again finding pleasure in it instead of just guilt at knowing I should really be studying something else. I'm trying to stop stressing out about the outcome and just work on being good at what I do right here and right now.

Still, everyday I picture more plants, more books, more classes. Like I said, some habits are just hard to break.

Twitter is back up

2009-03-24T17:33:00.003-04:00

All my random thoughts have to go SOMEWHERE, after all, lest I start speaking them out loud.

The new address is http://twitter.com/diwtp

Carlsbad, New Mexico

2009-03-20T12:32:00.004-04:00

Let me preface this by saying that I had to get up at 4 in the morning for this cave trip. 4! In the morning! During vacation! And of course, like it always happens, the night before I couldn't fall asleep until about midnight. It was worth it, though. So here is the photographic evidence:

I was finally out of the house at 5am, along with my comfortable clothes and shoes and lunch for the day. I would show you pictures of that time, but it was dark and you wouldn't be able to see anything. There was a pretty spectacular desert sunrise about an hour into the drive:
The sun made the landscape visible:
For a brief moment we also had some beautiful mountain scenery, as it's necessary to drive right through the Guadalupe mountains (seen above in the background) to get to the final destination, but I couldn't get a good picture of those. It's hard to photograph objects when you're driving 70 mi/hr past them, with a relatively cheap digital camera.

Finally we get to the cavern site to find that another car has beaten us there. It's nice to be there early, though, because there are only a few people before 8am, which means you get the caves almost all to yourself (not counting the park rangers). Here's the entrance to the cave. Yes, it's kind of dark in there, but your eyes adjust to the low light after a few minutes:
While you're walking inside (and that thing there is very, very steep, as my thighs are witnesses) you can see some bats flying from one side to the other of the cave. I saw the park rangers walking along very casually, though, so I stepped in as casually as possible as if those bats up there didn't bother me at all. The rangers all look like very kick-ass people so you don't want to go running out at the first sight of nature. Just keep walking. OH, A BAT! HOW NICE! I'M JUST HERE MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS! IN A CAVE! But the bats didn't eat me so I guess they're not that bad after all.

Once inside there is a very impressive sight. I'd do an injustice to the rock formations if I tried to describe them, so let me just show you pictures instead. Forgive the blurriness in some of them, but it's hard to take good pictures in dark places. This one here is called "The whale's mouth":
Some stalactites hanging from the top:
You know what they say when you ask a stupid question:
-"What is it called when a stalactite and a stalagmite get together?"
-"A column."
These were called "Lions' tails". There were an awful lot of animals in that cave:
Here's where you start praying "Please God, don't let me die in a cave by stalactite stabbing":
I loved these rocks that look like they are melting, almost like a hot caramel fountain:
I wish I could give you a good idea of the actual immensity of the place, but did you know that the flash will only illuminate whatever big thing is closest to the camera and leave everything else in the dark? Well, it will. So I couldn't take any good panoramic pictures inside. Maybe it's mother nature's way of keeping her deepest secrets underwraps. To give you an idea, there is a room called "The Big Room" and like its name says, it's the biggest hole of them all. Several football fields could fit in there. Seven, I think that's what the guide said. Here's the most decent attempt, a bit dark, but you can kind of see:
And finally, at the end of the tour, a bathroom, where I peed, 700 feet underneath the ground. Hey, the bats do it, too.
There's also an elevator at the end which takes you back up to civilization, with glass windows so that you can see that it's taking you up through rocks. The elevator man talks during the whole ride, telling you about the history of the elevator, the length of the ride, etc. (That must be a boring job, repeating the same things to people over and over all day, up and down, up and down.) Once outside we went to the little town nearby (by nearby I mean 20 miles away), where the post office, the grocery store, the theater, and the only restaurant sit all in the same street. They have the most beautiful views out their windows, though. I guess that's the trade-0ff for numerous stars, clear mountains, and beautiful sunsets.

The spring break mini-trip

2009-03-19T23:54:00.005-04:00

Today I descended more than 700 feet under ground, walked a couple of miles inside a dark cave inhabited by bats and desert crickets, finally learned the difference between stalactites and stalagmites, learned the correct term for bat poop, took 150 pictures of rock formations, and lost almost all voluntary control of my upper thighs before taking an elevator 700 feet up through rocks and dirt.

Pictures tomorrow.

More proof that my brother is related to me

2009-03-17T18:04:00.002-04:00

I was sitting in the kitchen this morning when I suddenly see my brother walk over to a drawer, pull out a marker, walk over the counter where a package of bread is sitting, and very surreptitiously write something on the package.

Upon further investigation, I discovered that the bread's brand was "Rainbo" and that my brother had gone ahead and added the "w" that was missing at the end of the word to make it grammatically correct.

A book review of sorts

2009-03-17T00:33:00.008-04:00

Finally, I have finished reading 100 Years of Solitude. I also now owe $2 in late fees to the public library, which I don't mind paying since I wanted to give a donation to them anyway in some shape or form (what? I'm poor!). I'm thinking I might also try donating some books I have which I no longer read (mostly children's books, and most of them in Spanish which they don't have a good selection of, from what I've seen).

The book was good, though I'm being impartial since I have a special affection for García Márquez. He captures that dusty and mysterious air that I seem to remember about my own hometowns, and I'm guessing a lot of people in Latin America can identify with as well. There's almost a feeling of abandonment in so many of these places, of people and buildings who once were new but for some reason or another have been forgotten in time. That's what I see in his stories and in a way it all seems so familiar, the places, the people, the superstitions that sound so supernatural and yet so much a part of life for everyone. There are things which I know are impossible and unreal, and yet I have almost no trouble accepting them as part of life. It doesn't matter whether or not they happen, you see, it only matters if you believe it. And I do, sometimes. I also love that so many of his stories are interrelated. In this book I noticed Eréndira makes an apparition, along with the thief from "Tuesday Siesta", and the old man with enourmous wings.

The characters in the book are sometimes hard to keep straight, as names repeat endlessly and so do their personalities. That's kind of the point, however. Time passes but history repeats itself, and in either case, I don't think the people of Macondo are the central characters of the story. They are simply unwitting participants in time, acting over impulses that were formed either by inheritance or force of habit.

I was reading a few commentaries after I finished the book, and in one of them the writer claimed that the women in the book had only a passive role in the story. I am not sure which book he read, but in the one I read the women of the story were crucial to the survival of the family. Ursula, the head matriarch, acted not only as a glue that held the Buendías together but also as the force of life. As long as she was willing, there were flowers in the corridor, music in the house, and guests at the table for breakfast. After she died, it was her great-great-granddaughter, the only woman in the family to inherit her strength of spirit, that upheld the family house by sheer force of will. The men were at the mercy of their female counterparts, suffering when their love was rejected and tied down to their woman's wishes when it wasn't.
If by "passive" however, he meant that they rarely left the house, then I suppose he was right. They didn't need to.

And now, to wrap this up, one of my favorite quotes from the book, right after the 4-year-long rains finally stopped raining on Macondo:

"On the other side of the rain, the merchandise was falling apart in pieces, the counters and walls gnawed away by humidity, but the arabs from the third generation were seated in the same place and had the same attitude of their fathers and grandfathers, taciturn, impavid, invulnerable to time and disaster, as alive or as dead as they were after the insomnia pest and after the thirty-two wars of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Their strength of spirit facing the ruins of the game tables, the tents, the street where dreams were interpreted and the future was told, that Aureliano Segundo asked them in his usual informal way of what mysterious resources they had disposed to keep from naufragating during the storm, how in the devil they had done to avoid drowning, and each one, door by door, flashed him a lazy smile and a dreamy stare, and all of them gave him without having agreed to do so the same answer:

-We swam."

That is all. (Remember to swim!)

Thank my big mouth

2009-03-12T13:04:00.000-04:00

Remember my last post? Well, I dink I sboke doo soon!

Aaachooooooo!

2009-03-10T15:42:00.005-04:00

I have the worst cold EVER. Well, the worst in a long while. My head hurts, my eyes are sore, and I have this annoying itchy cough. Some sore spots which are presumably swollen lymph nodes in my neck and upper back. (And now prepare for some gratuitous sharing of information.) No mucus, though, which is good, and which is strange. (You're welcome.)

Also, you'd think that I would have learned not to google "sore lymph nodes EVERYWHERE" by now, but clearly, I haven't, and now I am convinced that I have lymphoma and possibly some other horrible and deadly diseases.

This is how you know that spring is almost here.

2009-03-05T16:00:00.003-05:00

I don't know what this new haircut has done to me, but I feel like I'm getting waaaaay more boy attention than I'm used to. And yes, I'm wearing my usual clothes, nothing different there: jeans, top and tennis shoes (because there's no way I'm walking in heels to class. IT'S JUST CLASS, PEOPLE).

Maybe they're just in heat.

This week so far

2009-03-04T17:11:00.004-05:00

Ah, today I got a new haircut. I feel like I've been born again with a brand new and better head, which is how I feel every time I get a new 'do. Plus, my hair is so full and so thick that if it grows too much it becomes a big burden and ends up in a ponytail everyday. And ponytails are boring. Anyway, SO MUCH BETTER NOW.

On other more serious matters, I got a 94 on my Linguistics exam! (Highest grade in the class, by the way.) I'm very, very happy. Right now we're doing a lot of phonetics, and I'm learning a whole new alphabet of symbols I didn't even know existed for variations in sounds I never noticed (but now I do). Tomorrow I have my A&P exam. I know this semester is very relaxed with only two classes so I'm enjoying the freedom before it ends. I'm studying like crazy and reading like crazy for the first time in a while, and enjoying it. Next semester should be a lot more interesting, though. I'm taking Audiology, Disorders of Speech, Phonetics, Neural Basis of Speech and some others I can't remember. I look forward to it, really.

I have to go to work now, then study with a classmate until late. Hopefully tomorrow's exam will go well.

Damn it, I can't think of a title for this

2009-02-25T10:57:00.003-05:00

I closed my Twitter account. It just seemed like a waste of time nowadays, especially since I have a new blog which I want to work on and Twitter was kind of adding to the time I spend online. I've been busy with school and work as well. I'm still tutoring some kids and I'm also working on a project with my A&P of Speech professor. It's a campaign funded by the NIH to spread awareness in schools about hearing damage (with what the kids today being constantly plugged into their iPods). Also, I've checked out 100 years of Solitude, again, from the library. I intend to finish it this time, because the last time I tried I was about one hundred pages short of finishing when finals got in my way.

In other news, my city's rating just went up by a few points since the new organic store opened. I went there last week and got me some Greek yogurt (which I'd never tried, but is DELICIOUS) and some cocoa tea. The cocoa tea is amazing. I never want to put it down. It smells and tastes like chocolate, and it has a bit of spiciness and sweetness which is pretty damn good. I wish I'd bought more than one box. Oh, and I also picked up this thing called "soyrizo" which is really funny to me. The thing is, I looked at the ingredients for the regular packaged chorizo and ever since I wish I hadn't. Among the ingredients are salivary glands and lymph glands. Yeah. I haven't eaten it since. So anyway, I thought this fake soyrizo might be the answer to my cravings. It doesn't taste exactly like real chorizo, but it's close enough and it doesn't have any sort of glands inside it. I think this is one substitution I can live with.

Today, by the way, is my brother's birthday (15, and he's a foot taller than me) so we're taking him out to dinner. He's such a great kid and I'm so proud of him, his good grades, his amazing piano abilities, his great analytical skills, and most of all, his sharp grasp of sarcasm. That is one smart kid. But before y'all think I'm like, RELATED TO HIM, or something, I'll stop with the gushing and the bragging.

There is some homework and studying undone this morning, so I must stop here and go do that instead. So, hasta la próxima.

Quote of the Day

2009-02-22T19:04:00.003-05:00

For those of us who were born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, and between voices:

"It's my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of natural laws, suitable for general application. I even hope that he will find himself in agreement with George Bernard Shaw when he declared, "Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it." But that may be an audacious hope too far. We'll see if Obama's lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice "I love my country" while saying with another voice "It is a country, like other countries." I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony."

-Zadie Smith.

New blog

2009-02-20T21:59:00.002-05:00

I've started a new blog here. It's geared towards Speech Pathology and related topics, so this blog you're reading here will remain the place where I share stupid stories of what I'm currently doing and/or reminisce about medical school (I hope to eventually work on a series of posts about what I think went wrong with my career choice and my reasons for leaving, at which point this blog will probably stop being private once and for all).

Well, so the new site is public and will consist of a collection of facts, links to research articles, and I hope to alternate some posts that talk about literature and other language arts. So if you're interested in that stuff (I am!) you may want to check it out.

Happy Friday!

Times when I don't want to see my reflection

2009-02-17T15:45:00.004-05:00

I can't believe I never wrote about this back when I was in medical school, but I just remembered about them now and thought it would make for a funny post.

The medical school library had bathrooms on every floor. However, the ones on the third floor had one interesting addition behind their toilets. On the posterior wall behind every stall, there were mirrors. MIRRORS. BEHIND THE TOILET. I was always puzzled by this detail and to be honest, a little creeped out. Who was it that thought that it would be a good idea to put the mirrors there? Were they double mirrors, completely transparent to the men on the bathroom stalls on the other side of the wall? Is it so I can check if I forgot to zip up? So that I can check I cleaned up everything? No, really, WHY?

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't really want to see my posterior every time I have to go pee. Especially back then, I was downing about 5 liters of coffee every day, which meant that I had to pee quite often. I am not planning on putting on my make up or doing my hair in front of the toilet, either. I don't need a mirror there reminding me that it's laundry day and I'm wearing my granny panties, or that I should start running again.

I can't believe I didn't start a motion back then to remove those evil things off the wall.

This is why you're fat. com

2009-02-14T15:44:00.001-05:00

I just had to share this.

And we keep going

2009-02-04T13:28:00.003-05:00

I've been very absent from this blog lately, mostly because I am not sure whether I feel like I want to continue writing here. I'd like to make it public at some point and get a wider audience, but I don't know if it's too soon for all this information to come out. There are plenty of identifying details here and I think my classmates would be able to figure out who this is. (Hello!) That is, assuming my classmates have time to read blogs. I've been deviously plotting to wait to make it public until they are in third year because by then they will be swamped with work and I'm sure the last thing they will care about is wasting time online. Either way, I feel like these random texts would be of use to someone out there. Oh, I would have given my right arm to be able to find SOMEONE, anyone, who had gone through what I was going through, someone who decided to quit, someone who did it and was successful and happy. See, these kinds of things are not talked about in medical school. It's the kind of stuff they don't tell you at orientation. When they do, it's talked about in hushed tones, as if the students who were now gone had been abducted by aliens and God knows what horrible things happened to them. Classmates avoid them as if their malaise were contagious and they were afraid of catching some form of Medikal Schoolus Hateitis Totalus.

So, I don't know what will happen. I'll write on here whenever I feel like it and I'll make it public whenever I feel ready for that kind of thing.

I'm doing very well in my classes so far. Linguistics is coming on easy. I love the subject and am glad to find out that I haven't forgotten most of my Spanish syntax and grammar. It all came back once I started writing in that language again. I'm kicking ass in A&P of Speech, because, well, because I know most of the information already. Ha.

I've also been extremely lucky in finding work. I am tutoring two high school students, one in Chemistry and one in Algebra. It's easy work for the most part, and I get handsomely paid for my time. Not only that, but I am enjoying working with them and think I've found my nice little niche in working with kids (as much as you can call 13 year olds "kids"). I can set my own hours and I can work as much or as little as I want. I will also probably start working in the research lab sometime this month. That's another place where I had a great work experience, I love the people and the investigators there, and it's my chance to satisfy the scientific side of my personality.

Oh, and I have an exercise routine once again. No, not the walking to school thing...in fact I found out that there IS a shuttle that goes from the Health Sciences building to the main campus, so that saved me twenty minutes of walking uphill (and it's STEEP, I tell you!) and getting all sweaty and gross before I even made it to my next class. No, I've just been going out to walk/jog every morning. There's a nice park nearby with a track which I've been using. My dad is a really good runner, so he runs most of the time and puts me to shame. Take into consideration that he's almost 30 years older than me. Oh, I'm embarrassed but hopefully I'll get better.

Now that I have a job and what do you call it? MONEY, I can start making plans for buying a car. I'm much better on the road already, having already stopped worrying about every single car driving along the same road with me (why can't I just have the streets for myself?) and also having lost the fear of going faster than 40 miles an hour. I'm like an old lady on the road, but I don't care, as long as I get where I need to go in one piece.

My legs hate me

2009-01-22T15:36:00.002-05:00

The semester has officially started and today is my second day of class, because I'm a lucky bastard who only has classes Tuesday and Thursdays. The classes look very interesting, although I am looking forward to Linguistics more than I am to A&P of Speech because, well, A&P of speech is too easy at this level for me. I was thinking of going to the professor and perhaps asking for more advanced readings and assignments (pff, who am I kidding, I'll teach the class if he wants me to) just because I think I will be bored if we keep discussing medial vs. lateral this whole week, but I'm not sure if it's appropriate or if I'm just asking for trouble.

On the job theme, I got myself a tutoring student. He's in 11th grade and we've already had one tutoring session which went well, I think. I was afraid that I would not remember chemistry (which is not exactly my favorite subject, but work is work) but I really shouldn't have worried. High school chemistry isn't exactly challenging. Hopefully my former research mentor will also have a project for me starting February. Between us (as research info on ongoing projects is CONFIDENTIAL), he said it involves lead poisoning and its effects on learning and speaking, which is right up my alley for my new career and sounds very interesting.

One of the advantages of my current schedule is that my classes take place on two different parts of campus. The health sciences part is about 10 blocks away from the "main" campus, although both are considered part of what is called the Main Campus (I don't know why this building is so apart from the others). I have about three hours in between my classes and I decided to just walk the distance instead of taking a bus from one place to the other. Walking takes me only 20 minutes (I timed it) and I love to integrate an exercise program into my normal routine since, like I have stated before, I'm not a fan of scheduled exercise (i.e., 1 hour at the gym every day). The only catch is that it's about 7 blocks uphill. You can imagine how my legs hurt at this moment, but I walked the distance nonetheless. The legs just better get used to it.

So far, so good.

Says the lady who has blogged about her plants

2009-01-17T20:12:00.002-05:00

With only three more days to go until school starts, I'm scratching my head while I try to think of something at least mildly interesting to write. Tuesday I'll be heading to class and hopefully will have a day full of anecdotes to fill in the blanks on my screen.

I posted an ad on Craigslist on Thursday to advertise tutoring services, and within a couple of hours I got a call from a tutoring business asking if I would be interested in working for them. Since I had no better plans for my weekend, I went in for an interview the next day. They asked me about my greatest strength, my greatest weakness, and about a conflict I had solved in a previous job. I have little patience for these boxed questions and I feel that they can only call for boxed answers. I'm deliberate and careful, but a little shy, and I couldn't for the life of me think of a conflict. I'm an expert at avoiding conflict, especially with people who sign my paychecks. I really wish recruiters would have a little more imagination when they try to figure out whether I'm a sociopath or not (granted, if they're working in human resources I'm imagining they're not exactly the most creative individuals of the bunch). I also had to take a math test, since it's the primary subject tutoring that they advertise. I was fairly confident that I would be able to answer all or most of the algebra, though I was not so sure about the calculus part of it. Needless to say, I remembered most of my calculus but couldn't for the life of me remember how to simplify some of the complicated equations or, get this, how to find the slope of a line given two points. This is the same reason why I can somehow always manage to perfectly parallel park the car but will forget to stop behind the crosswalk lines at a red light, costing me the passing grade in my driving exam.

In the case that I am offered the job, I'd be working with kids ranging from elementary school to high school. Some of the kids would just need help improving their grades, others consists of homeschooled children for whom I'd be their teacher (or just a helper, it depends) for that specific subject. It's a flexible job and I'd be able to make my own schedule, which is something I liked about it. But anyway, let's see if I get a call at all before we start making lesson plans.

After my 3-hour interview, I headed to campus to see if I could find someone, ANYONE, in the linguistics department who would give me authorization to register for the class I need for the bilingual certification. I took a Spanish placement exam on Tuesday, and I was told both by someone and by the school's website that this specific class didn't need departmental approval. I just had to take the exam, the results would be posted on my record within a few hours, and I could go online to register. It didn't exactly happen that way. I tried to register online and I would get an pre-requisite error message. On Wednesday afternoon I tried calling the testing center people, who transferred me to the linguistics' department secretary, who transferred me to Dr. X, who transferred me to Dr. Y, who told me the secretary was an idiot then transferred me to an advisor, an advisor who never answered the phone or the e-mail I sent her. Anyway, by Friday the system still wouldn't let me register, and I was tired of these people playing hot potato with me, so I decided to go and be tortured in person instead. (There are no classes on Monday because of a holiday, so Friday was my last chance to register before Tuesday, WHICH IS WHEN THE CLASS BEGINS. So it was a little urgent by now, lest I be stuck taking--and paying for--a different and completely unnecessary class just to meet the half-time student requirement). When I got there it was about the same story. The secretary at the front desk sent me to Dr. A, the official advisor for linguistics, who acted pissed off because I dared solicit his services as, well, an advisor. He grouchily sent me to the antropophobic lady again, who (surprise surprise!) wasn't available that day because of something or the other, but yes, she had been there the day before and the day before that, too. When did our university employees become French bureaucrats? Just when I was ready to puncture a few tires, someone else agreed to take two minutes of their precious time to override the requirements on the system and just let me register once and for all. In the meantime I made a mental note that if I ever decide to get a graduate degree in linguistics, this would be the last department to which I would apply. I don't even want to find out what happens when a class DOES need departmental approval.

Today my dad, my brother and I went out to see Slumdog Millionaire, which was surprisingly good (I guess I tend to become suspicious of movies who win all the awards, knowing that all the hype can only lead to disappointment in the end). Tonight I'll be tucking into bed and watching Roman Holiday, my most recent Netflix rental acquisition. It's the kind of movie that the guys don't like so I get to watch it all on my own while drinking hot tea and cookies. Yes, for some reason I cannot watch an Audrey Hepburn movie while eating junk food. Perhaps it's because she always played the preternatural image of a lady, but it just feels wrong to watch her movies while eating a plate of nachos--with corresponding finger-licking techniques--and sitting on the couch wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt. Instead, I'll sit on my bed wearing my pearls and drinking tea from the finest china. (Okay, I'm really kidding about the pearls and the china. Please shoot me if you ever see me do anything as ludicrous as that.)

Well, hopefully I'll be back on Tuesday to write about the first day of school. Let's hope it turns out to be interesting and full of good writing material.

2009-01-11T20:10:00.004-05:00

I'm supposed to take this Spanish placement exam on Tuesday and I'm a little worried about it. I need to take it so that they will let me register for a linguistics class that I need for the bilingual certification. I'm not worried in the real nail-biting, hair-pulling sense of the word, but in the back of my head I have this idea that maybe it will be too hard and I won't remember any of my Spanish grammar (completely unfounded fears since I speak it EVERY DAY) and that I will fail and be put in Spanish 101: Principiantes and then my student career will be over.

(Fine, so I'm obviously crazy. )

Can you believe that I still have another whole week of vacation? It's amazing. I already know where my classes are, which bus I'll be taking and which blocks I need to walk. I only have classes on Tuesday and Thursday so I'll have 5 days off a week, which gives me plenty of time to work and do other things. One of my resolutions this year is to work a lot so that I can save money for two things: a car (still!) and a nice trip. I really want to travel abroad. I probably won't be heading to Paris this coming summer, but I want to start reuniting funds and hopefully make it to Europe next year. Frankly, I am much more likely to spend that money on a trip than I am on a car, because, I? Do not like driving. Plus, I mostly think of cars as huge money pits. There's the payment, the insurance, the gasoline, and the maintenance, and not to mention the environmental damage. Why spend on a car when I can still rely on buses or walking for a much, much lower price? Speaking quite sincerely, my plans are to avoid a car purchase for as long as humanly possible in order to give myself the chance to save a little more money for other things I'd like to do (see: sightseeing). We'll see how long "as long as humanly possible" is once I start school full time.

Plus, in case you're all still curious, I think my career plans are becoming a little clearer with time. I realized that what I really want is to work with children. I've always gravitated towards them. In a non-creepy way. I know that I do not want to teach, but I'd like to work with them in some manner. Mostly I'm interested in the psychology and development of children. I'm going into the speech language pathology post-bacc for the moment, and I'm excited about it, but I also want to do some research into psychology doctorate programs. If not speech pathology, perhaps I'd also be interested in learning disabilities of childhood. Besides that , I'll keep writing and maybe someday someone will realize my undeniable charm and sharp wit and pay me to write some words...somewhere. Maybe I'll write a book titled "Yes, I Quit Med School and You Can, Too!" or "Med School Renegades" or some such thing. Hey, I don't think this topic is out there yet, so it would be a ground-breaker.

Did I tell you guys that I also paid my tuition for this semester in full, out of my own pocket? I did. It's the first time I do that and it makes me very happy. I really want to avoid borrowing more money if I can help it. Thankfully in the state university it seems very viable to pay for tuition out of pocket (I went private for undergrad, and OUCH) as long as one has some time to hold a part time job and save some money throughout the year. Also, from what I've gathered, most doctorate programs waive their students' tuition and give them an allowance in exchange for assistanships and teaching positions, which is what I'm aiming for if I decide to go the PhD route in any given field.

On other less life-defining topics, I went to a basketball game today at my new university. You know, so I could start to get acquainted with the school spirit. I had good seats, right behind the sports announcers, and the game was good. If the cameras happened to swing my way, I probably was on ESPN2. I don't know if I was because I purposely and very dignified looked at anything but the cameras. I left with 6 posters and 4 flags (don't ask why they gave me so many of them, and it totally wasn't because I took them willingly or anything, why do you ask?). I'm all showered in school spirit now.

Okay, that's all for now. I can't think of a good last paragraph. Conclusions always gave me trouble. There's also some 14 year old poking my neck because I've been occupying "his" computer for too long, so I need to go hide his lunch or something. Until next time!

Three Kings Cake

2009-01-07T19:17:00.001-05:00

Want some?

A very Merry Christmas at Home

2008-12-26T15:21:00.004-05:00

Hey guys!

Thank you very much for all the messages wishing me a Merry Christmas and reminding me that I have a blog. A very neglected blog. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas as well, and very Happy Holidays if the baby Jesus isn't your thing. Getting presents and eating a lot is fun no matter what religion you're from.

I really haven't been thinking much of this blog. I don't know, I just hadn't felt like writing anything. As some of you might have guessed, I quit medical school almost two months ago. Yes, OMG I QUIT MEDICAL SCHOOL. That's how I say it in my head when I think about it. It felt like a very good decision, a decision that took me a very long time to finally make. I wrote and then re-read a lot of entries here and on paper about my hatred for the place, the situation, and the career I was in. I realized that medical school had turned me into a person I didn't like and it had turned my life into something I didn't like, either. Weighing my choices, I considered the road ahead, the lifestyle it would allow me to live or to *not* live, the nature of the work I was signing up for...at least for the following 8 years. I came to the conclusion that medical school wasn't for me anymore. That medicine wasn't the kind of career, the kind of person, that I wanted to be. That the lifestyle that awaited me in the future wasn't the life that I wanted to lead.

So I turned in my letter of withdrawal, turned in my keys, packed my bags, rented my apartment, and left.

I was very lucky to sell a lot of things very quickly and to find someone who took my apartment almost immediately. My parents were very okay with my decision, saying that I should be doing something that makes me happy, that I was plenty young, that it would be good for me to be with my family again. My dad came over to help me move and I was back home on November 5th.

While I was moving something that seemed very poetic at the time happened to me. I wanted to write about it, but I hadn't had the time to think of a good, inspiring way of telling the story. I made note of it at the moment, but I feel like writing about it now so I'm telling you all now, however it comes out.

On the night of November 4th, I sat in my empty living room, among boxes and a couple of sleeping bags. My dad and I were watching the presidential election results. As we finished packing the remaining of my belongings, of my life in medical school, we watched as our country elected its first African-American president. Regardless of how you feel about politics or which candidate you supported, it was a very exciting moment in history. A defining moment. For a while that night, I think we all believed again in the concept of the "American dream," that everything and anything can be accomplished here, that we have pushed against the barriers of race, that we are all indeed part of a country of many colors and of many chances.

I couldn't help to see it as a sign of different and hopefully of better things to come. I was about to make a tremendous change in my life just as my adoptive land was preparing to make this tremendous change in its own life. I'm as scared about this transition in my life as there are people scared about the transition our country is going through. It seems like it's such a bittersweet time, that as we elect our first black president, the economy is going down the drain. That as I hope to find a career that makes me truly happy, I have to let go of another that occupied my mind for a long time. It's difficult, but hopefully it's all for the best.

The most difficult thing about my decision to leave is to stop thinking of myself as a medical student, and to stop planning my life around my now-nonexistent future medical training. It's as if I got rid of this enormous weight I had been carrying for a while, and in its place is this VOID that, while it makes me feel better, it also makes me feel very strange. I was used to the weight by now, and now that I am free to move I don't know which way to go. Most of the time I feel very good about my decision. I am with my family. I'm free to make new choices. I feel like I have all the time and energy in the world to do the things that I wanted to do with my life. Of course, sometimes I feel a little sad, though it's not sadness for medical school itself. I feel sad because of the classmates whom I shared my pain with. I feel sad because of the professors who were nice to me, who tried to help as best as they could. Sometimes I think that I somehow failed them and their expectations of me. It's normal, I guess. I did spend over a year with those people. It's only been a couple of months, though, so I'm hoping that with time I will be able to think about medical school less negatively. In the meantime, however, I know that this was the right decision for me. I already feel so much better about myself, my future, so much more able to go out and shape my life the way I've always wanted to.

But on to the new stuff! I move at the speed of light and somehow in a couple of weeks I managed to convince the admissions office of the University of Texas at my hometown that they should accept me. Because I am awesome and, like, smart. I start my classes on January 20th next semester. I signed on for the speech pathology post-bacc program. I thought about several career choices and came to the conclusion that perhaps I would be a good speech therapist. It would allow me to work with both adults and children, which I wanted to do; the job sounds like something I would enjoy doing, and it is a relatively flexible job with decent prospects and a not-so-shabby paycheck. Assuming that I like it and want to go on further, I will apply for the master's program to become a fully prepared and licensed speech pathologist.

By recommendation of a professor friend of mine, I took a few weeks to do absolutely nothing and established a little routine to pass the time. I discovered that my parents' neighborhood is a very nice place to bike in the mornings, the streets are very nice and quiet. That's how I get my dose of exercise nowadays. I've been reading whatever and whenever I feel like it. I've been cleaning. I've been cooking. My room is all set up now and I actually love the way it ended up looking. I took a huge old solid-wood bookcase my parents have had since they got married and filled it with my books, hung up my brown curtains, brought in my bed and my own bookcases. So now my room basically looks like a library and I couldn't be happier. I've also been eating a lot of holiday food...since after Thanksgiving it seems like the tamales, the cookies and the chocolates just never stop coming. I did some grieving about all the crap I finally put behind me and a lot of thinking about what I should do next. I knew that I wanted to continue studying. I thought about entering a science PhD program, or perhaps going the clinical psychology route (another PhD option), or going into a creative writing program just to see what happened. While I thought about doctorate options, I didn't want to enter a new long-term commitment right away. In fact, I wasn't actually sure that I wanted to get a PhD. Sure, the title sounds nice but in reality and from my own research, the market for PhDs isn't necessarily that good. If you choose to teach you have a long and difficult road to tenure and if you don't, you would need a heavy science doctorate to work in the industry...and if there's something I'm sure of, is that I'm not that good at chemistry and that I don't want to work in the industry. I still want to work with people, but that's really as far as I knew.

I went back to the methods of personality and career tests. I took some new ones and compared them to the old ones which I had taken my first year of college, which I'd actually taken the care to store in one of my folders. I also looked at some strengths profile I had produced back in college. I was pretty surprised at how much my personality type on paper matched my personality type in reality. I guess I never really expected to set much weight on those things, I was always so one-track minded. I am using them now as research tools, to try to know myself a little better and maybe get some insight into possible career types I'd be good at. Not surprisingly, it told me I have a scientific mind but I would prefer a job with flexibility and which would give me options to work individually and in a more creative setting. But I knew that already, and it is partly why I decided to try the route I'll be trying next semester. I'm taking a speech disorders class and a linguistics class, and since I'm bilingual I'll be able to easily get a certification saying so. That is important to me since that would let me help little Spanish-speaking kiddies as well, which makes me very happy. I think for the first time in a long time I'm LOOKING FORWARD to my classes and my possible job. I hope that I end up liking it as much in reality as I already like it in my head. For the moment I'm cautiously hopeful about it.

We had a very nice Thanksgiving and a very nice Christmas around here. The weather has been uncharacteristically nice for this time of the year, so that we went out in short-sleeves on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the sun was pleasant, the wind was gone, and there was no sight of rain or snow. I felt like I was in California or Florida or some other place where it's warm and people go out to the beach on Christmas. My brother and I are getting a piano as a shared Christmas gift, since he plays and I would like to (I have a semester of beginner class under my belt, yohoo!). So there will be music (or noise, in my case) in this house very soon. I'm also trying to convince the family that skiing. is. fun! so that they will agree to drive a couple of hours up to Ruidoso, NM, where I've never been but want to. But instead my brother insists that I just have to go to Carlsbad to see the caverns where he will no doubt try to push me into the abysm and finally become the only child he's always wanted to be. Not really, I'm only kidding, but I really would prefer snowy mountains to dark caverns full of bats.

Well, that's all for today. This post is already verging on the illegal side, lengthwise. I hope you are all enjoying your breaks and if you're working, I hope the work is enjoyable and fun.

Also, Happy New Year's everybody!

Waives hand

2008-11-19T11:34:00.004-05:00

Hi, I'm still here. I know, I know, I haven't answered some of your e-mails and I apologize for that. I just needed a little break from my online endeavors. A lot's been going on. I'm working on the story. It might take a while, though, seeing how I'm writing a couple of sentences every day and then going back, rewriting them, and ultimately erasing them because, dammit, I can't seem to make it sound the way I want it to sound. Other than that, I'm feeling great, better than I have in a long while. I'm pre-Thanksgiving and pre-Christmas dieting (ha!) so that I can consume delishus things to my heart's content when the time comes.

Because today I have the desire to procrastinate on the interwebs again, I'm self-tagging for Dragonfly's most recent meme:

Would you like to fall in love in the next year?
-Uuuuh....I was unsure of this, but seeing as being in love is not a bad thing, why not?

Where do you want to go for college?
-I always dreamed of going to Harvard when I was a kid, for various unimportant reasons, but even now if I had any choice I think I'd still pick it as my dream school.

What woke you up today?
-My blanket falling off my bed (it's cold!).

What are your plans for this weekend?
-Planning the Thanksgiving menu.

Have you done anything embarrassing lately?
-Oh dear, doing embarrassing things is the story of my life. I'm the queen of awkward moments. So yes. The most recent thing happened yesterday when I misdialed a number thinking I was calling the local guy who sells tamales (they're really good!) and I ended up calling someone else whom I've spoken to only once before. That was an embarrassing phone call.

Light hair or dark hair on the opposite sex?
-No preference, as long as there is hair. (My apologies to any bald men out there.)

What was your dream about last night?
-I don't remember dreaming last night.

Are you currently frustrated with a girl/boy?
-Nope, thank goodness.

Do you miss anyone?
-Only one person? I miss a lot of my friends and extended family.

How is your hair right now?
-Pulled back in ponytail.

What is tomorrow?
-Thursday. Was I supposed to get philosophical with this question? Sorry, you ask a stupid question you get a stupid answer.

What are you doing later?
-Maybe cleaning out my closet, and watching a movie.

Describe the shirt you're wearing.
-It's a black turtle neck made of this really soft nylon fabric that I love.

So what's going on this week?
-I suppose there'll be some cleaning, cooking, and a couple of overdue phone calls to friends.

Do you enjoy summer?
-Yes, because my birthday is during the summer (heh, who doesn't like cake and gifts?), but I have to confess I like winter much better.

Do your parents allow you to date?
-I'm old enough to not require permission anymore...so yes? Is this a meme for 12 year olds?

Can you imagine yourself getting married?
-Not really, no. It would have to be a REALLY special person for me to marry them (as I think it should be, because marriage...it's a serious business).

Do you have a phone?
-Yes, it's a brown (sorry, espresso) flip phone. It's not that fancy and it's not that new but it does what it's supposed to do.

Do you text your fingerss off?
-No, I rarely use texts to communicate. I mostly use them with people I don't want to talk to.

Do you watch the news?
-Yes, I like to watch the news every day, though these last few weeks I haven't and instead get my news from the internet.

What do you do when you need to relax?
-It depends. Sometimes I'll watch a stupid TV show, other times I feel the need to clean.

Do you have a reason to smile?
-Yes, the morning sky and cute puppies and yadda yadda yadda. Are you happy?

If you won a lot of money on the lottery, what would you buy first?
-A plane ticket for a nice trip.

Who was the last person of the opposite sex you had a conversation with?
-My brother.

Who was the last person that texted you?
-One of my aunts.

What are you craving right now?
-Some eggnogg. It's the season.

What bed did you sleep in last night?
-Mine.

Feliz Dia de Muertos!

2008-11-02T09:59:00.006-05:00

This is my friend Corina (left) and myself (right), plus a bunch of of my classmates on the lower corner, proudly showing our display for the Dia de Muertos celebration we had at our middle school in Mexico (let's see, Alonso is the blond one in glasses, and then Sergio, Eder, and Hugo in the bottom) (you know, in case they ever read this, let it be known I remember their names). This was in the year 2000, I believe. Only 8 years ago, I was in middle school. Suddenly I feel like I'm barely out of puberty. I think this display was on Jose Alfredo Jimenez, a pretty famous singer/songwriter back in the day. He is now, OBVIOUSLY, dead.

If you must know, we spent a lot of time on this particular display. We made the papel picado ourselves, we made a fake tombstone, and we covered the ground with aserrin, which is this kind of very soft kind of material made of shaved wood used to make really nice displays on the floor because it comes in different colors. Of course, we also had the altar with pictures of the deceased and his favorite foods. Unfortunately it was a little windy that day and our papel picado is flying in different directions. I remember this was also the day some boys got a peek at Corina's bra when she was standing on a chair hanging up the papel picado, a moment that OF COURSE lived in infamy and a lot of laughter for the next few weeks. It was middle school, after all.

If I wanted to freak my neighbors out today I would have made an altar to some obscure scientist outside my apartment, but I don't have the materials. However, following the tradition I will write a Calaverita for all of you. It's a funny limerick people write about other people (dead or alive) on this day. I'm including all of my most constant readers, though if I forget someone...you probably never comment! It has to be in Spanish because I suck at rhyming in English, though:

CALAVERITA

Del panteón llegó Xavier
corriendo como espantada
dijo "Viene la Muerte tras de mí,
dice que esta enojada!"

Sara dijo, "Escóndete!
Yo la mando hacia otro lado."
Y cuando la Muerte tocó la puerta
la mandó para otro estado.

Así fue como la calaca
se perdió por Arizona
y se encontró con Dr. 85621
quien la llamó "cabezona!"

Dragonfly mientras trabajaba
con otro de sus pacientes
y en eso que entra la Muerte
y Dragonfly le tumba los dientes.

Y Tracy mientras tanto se reía,
al ver a la calaca sufrir,
y al fin la Muerte decidió
darse la vuelta y desistir.

PS. Translation in the comments. :)

When you assume, you make an ass out of...mostly you.

2008-10-26T14:57:00.002-04:00

Scene at the supermarket yesterday. I'd bought a huge bag of black grapes, by the way:

Cashier: [To bagging girl] Que tipo de uvas son estas? (What kind of grapes are these?)
Bagging Girl: No se, rojas? (I don't know, red?)
Cashier: Eh...estan prietas! Jaja! (Um, they're spoiled! Haha!)
Bagging Girl: Jajajaja, si parece que estan echadas a perder. (Hahahaha, yeah, it looks like they've gone bad.)
Me: [Thinking] *I don't think these people realize I can understand what they're saying.* Son uvas negras, y generalmente entre mas oscuras esten, mas dulces son. (They're black grapes, and the darker they are the sweeter they taste, usually.)

He, I love it when that happens, people usually just give me an "Oh crap" look. Piece of advice: Never, ever assume you can't be understood. Even if the black-grape-loving Mexican person standing in front of you is very, very pale.

Food Porn

2008-10-18T11:40:00.008-04:00

I've been really busy with exams, yesterday I had my Anatomy lab practical and I hope it went well. I think it went slightly better than last year, so that's a bonus, and I actually felt somewhat confident in my answers. I guess the tutor has helped, even it it has hurt my pockets oh so much. I'm thinking of dropping out of med school and becoming an Anatomy tutor instead.

Anyway, this week I've been making sugar cookies almost everyday (they're so easy and so good, and I finally discovered how to do it so they don't break) and I finally made some mole and rice. Some gratuitous food pictures below:

I also went back to they gym this morning, after a two-week absence. This much good food has made me feel guilty about my lack of scheduled exercise. Well, that's all for this weekend. I have to go study now because I have my Anatomy theoretical on Monday and there are 100 practice exams in my hard drive with my name on them.

Currently listening to: Mentira, by Gilberto Santa Rosa

Quote of the Week

2008-10-16T11:48:00.002-04:00

This week's depressing piece of wisdom:

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
-ELLEN GOODMAN

We live in a silly, silly world.

Strange Happenings

2008-10-13T22:30:00.002-04:00

-Somehow my washer/dryer ended up covered in a thick layer of dust. It's that kind of soft grayish dust that accumulates on carpet. I have no idea how it happened, since a couple of days ago they looked normal. (Yes, I do clean.) (Sometimes.) The units are in my kitchen behind some kind of double folding doors, so they're pretty protected from most environmental hazards. It's like someone opened a hole in the ceiling and decided to shake a dirty rug on top of them. And then they took the time to patch the hole and leave no evidence of it.

-On Saturday I wanted to go food shopping because I was out of fruit and veggies, and I get cranky when I start eating crap all the time. These last two weeks I've been extremely tired. I've been getting less than the ideal number of hours of sleep per night and even when I do lay in bed for 8 hours my sleep feels restless. Either way, I'm tired. So I got up early to catch the bus at 7:37am. I missed it by a minute or so and went back to my apartment because the next one wouldn't come until 8:17am and I was not going to sit out there for 40 minutes. At around 8:10, I went outside again. I wait until about 8:30am and figure it already came (just my luck to miss it again) or it wasn't coming. I was so pissed because, OF COURSE, these things happen to me when I'm most sleep deprived and all I wanted to do was buy some damn apples and grapes. Apples and grapes, and maybe a couple of tomatoes. I don't think that's too much to ask. I ended up sitting there until almost 9am plotting ways to kill the city's transit authorities. I only waited because I really wanted fresh food, and it was either do it then, or wait until next week. I swear the universe does these things on purpose sometimes just to mess with me.

-Being tired also makes me (even more) socially inept. One thing I am always guilty of is a lack of complete concern for my surroundings when I'm walking around. I don't really pay attention to people when I'm walking in the buildings and chances are if I run into you I won't even notice and then you'll get offended because you'll think I ignored you on purpose, but I swear I just didn't see you because I never pay attention. It's not you, it's me. No, REALLY. Well, when I'm sleep deprived I not only not pay attention to the people around me, but I have trouble operating simple devices. Today it took me a good 5 minutes to figure out how to open a door to one of the library rooms, when it turns out I just needed to push a little harder.

More cookie goodness

2008-10-10T14:59:00.004-04:00

Because during times of hardship, they make me happy.*

*Yes, some of them are broken and you can't see the ones on the back because I strategically framed the shot this way to trick you into believing that all my cookies were perfectly round and whole, but the ones in the back are a bit (FINE A LOT) broken and some of them have animal cracker-like shapes (they look like animals but you can't tell what kind of animal, just that there's the head and maybe an ear or a tail or some kind of tumor). It doesn't matter, however, because these cookies are very very good. Did we learn nothing from Shakespeare when he said "A cookie by any other shape would taste as sweet?" I shouldn't have to remind you of the wisdom of 9th grade lit and how it can be twisted to accommodate any point you want to make.

The stupid titleless post

2008-10-09T09:31:00.004-04:00

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." -WALKER PERCY

I've been having a really hard time lately keeping up with schoolwork. Again. I have three upcoming exams within the next week and this is the kind of time where my stress levels rise dangerously and I consider quitting, oh, I don't know, a few times every day. The hardest part about it is that I don't feel there's anyone I can talk to, because I am not sure other people get it. People who are not in medical school are sympathetic, but I don't think they get it. My parents don't get it. My classmates don't get it. Everyone tells me it's TOTALLY NORMAL to feel this way. I want to believe them, but how do I know when it's *not* normal anymore? How do you know if what you're feeling is a true desire to call it quits?

I was reading a journal entry I wrote last year around this time, and I was surprised to see how much my feelings haven't changed. I still feel overwhelmed, I still find studying extremely hard, I am still unable to sit through more than 2 hours of lecture, I still wonder if I am going to be able to do this. That's the toughest part. I don't have confidence in my ability to do this. How am I supposed to handle 4 years of this? The thought of struggling all the way to 4th year and then being thrown into a room with patients terrifies me. I don't want to screw this up. I don't want to do the bare minimum to get by...but that's what I feel like I'm doing.

I'm caught in a bad cycle where I tell myself that I will go out there and talk to my classmates and try to make friends, but then I realize I'm so behind in schoolwork so I stay home and study. Then I keep getting frustrated over the fact that I don't know anyone and boohoo when, I mean, why am I surprised at that fact? It's not like I go out of my way to befriend people. Then when I finally try I am just tired and I don't do a good job of it and I end up just going home, alone, again.

In an attempt at normalcy I decided I'd look for some outside classes to cultivate some of my other interests. Cooking, writing, whatever. I ended up finding a few good free writing workshops that would take 1-2 hours per week, but I can't get there too easily. It's not that they're that far away, driving would take 15-20 minutes at the most. But I don't have a car, so instead I'd have to take 4 buses to get there, which would take almost 2 hours of my time, assuming the buses are on time. That, my friends, IS RIDICULOUS. Stupid messed up transportation system. I CURSE YOU. I need to get my license and I need to get a car, neither of which I have been able to do because I'm in med school all the time and because the stupid driving school has a miles-long waiting list or maybe the just erased me off of it. Dear driving school, I CURSE YOU, TOO.

I don't even know if I want to post this. I am not looking for pity, I just need to vent a little. In fact, do not pity me and instead, I'd very much appreciated if you all kicked my ass and told me to get over myself and STUDY FOR ALL THAT IS HOLY.

Meh. There you go. I'm hitting the "publish" button and imposing my rants on all of you.

We interrup the regular programming...

2008-10-06T13:02:00.002-04:00

To share this link I came across a few minutes ago:

Female doctors feel less confident about their abilities

Gah.

That'll teach me

2008-10-06T09:01:00.002-04:00

This weekend has to be jotted down in my history pages, as this weekend I got sick for the first time in...well, I can't even remember how long it had been since I had last gotten sick prior to this time, but it had been at least three years. I hadn't gotten so much as a single cold or stomach virus or even allergies. I don't have allergies. Wait, I take that last sentence back. I'm never bragging about how I never get sick or don't have allergies ever again.

I had just finished telling someone about my incredible good streak of health, when on Thursday night, after eating dinner, I started feeling queasy and completely regretful about eating anything at all for dinner. I spent the whole night up carefully examinating the bottom of several trashbags. I'll spare you the details. I hadn't been sick like that in a while, and I suddenly missed my mom very much. By the morning, after about twelve hours of suffering I managed to go downstairs and get myself a 7UP, because the stupid vending machines did not have any Gatorade or Powerade. I figured it was better than nothing. By Friday evening I had been completely emptied out, so the pain and the suffering passed and I was able to stop cursing the boomerang gods. You know, the gods that take something you say and then throw it back so that it hits you squarely in the face. SMACK. In the meantime, I'm still surviving on a very careful diet of apples, soup, and crackers.

I'm heading off to campus, because (I can't believe I'm saying this) after four days of confinement I actually miss it. I usually can't wait to get away from it. I'm currently listening to biochemistry lectures, because I've completely given up on trying to read my syllabus. I can't get past two paragraphs without wanting to murder someone, and because I really don't want to go to jail, I figured it was time to try a new technique. You know, after a year of trying the reading method. So far listening hasn't made me stabby, so that's an improvement. What did medical students to do before the internet? Go to every class and take notes BY HAND? Good God. That sounds horrible. I don't even want to know the part about having to lug around a fat copy of Harrison's instead of having it all installed in a tiny pocket-sized PDA.

Have a happy Monday, everyone! (And don't say things you'll regret.)

Food meme

2008-10-05T11:52:00.002-04:00

The rules are:
1) Copy this list into your blog, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

And the list:
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros (Of course!)
4. Steak Tartare
5. ~~Crocodile~~ (I don't know why but I don't think I could eat this.)
6. ~~Black pudding~~
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp (My grandpa was an avid fisherman, so I've had them a lot, and fresh!)
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari (Delicious in soup.)
12. Pho (Yes! I tried this in a tiny Vietnamese restaurant of 8 tables near my college campus. It was pretty good.)
13. PB&J sandwich (Duh, who in North America hasn't?)
14. Aloo gobi (One of my Indian friends in college made this once, and it is goooood.)
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made with fruit other than grapes (Yes, apple wine! Mmmm...)
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream (It's my dad's favorite.)
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries (sadly, no, but I want some!)
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans (Um, what kind of Mexican hasn't?)
25. Brawn, or head cheese (I think I tasted it once, it's not that bad.)
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche (Of course!)
28. Oysters (A favorite treat of mine!)
29. Baklava (Mmmm, so good!)
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. ~~Cognac with a fat cigar~~ (I don't smoke.)
37. Clotted cream tea (no, but want some!)
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. ~~Oxtail~~
41. Curried goat
42. ~~Whole insects~~ (I usually draw the line at insects...)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more (I'm not that rich.)
46. ~~Fugu~~ (Potentially poisonous isn't my style.)
47. Chicken tikka masala (Yes, also made by my Indian friend, and it was good!)
48. Eel (Yes, they're one of my grandma's favorite "weird" things.)
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut (More than once, and I don't regret it.)
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear (Yes. They're cactus fruit. In Spanish they're called "tunas" and they are so much better if eaten COLD. Refreshing.)
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle (fun name!)
57. Dirty gin martini
58. ~~Beer above 8% ABV~~ (I hate the taste/smell of beer.)
59. Poutine (This sounds like the French version of chili cheese fries, hehe.)
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores (I'm craving chocolate now, thanks!)
62. ~~Sweetbreads~~ (Glands just sound yucky.)
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian (Mmm, this fruit sounds good.)
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (I've actually had all of them, yay!)
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain (No, but it sound like it's good, and I want some.)
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. ~~Roadkill~~ (Ew, that's all.)
76. ~~Baijiu~~ (Wow, this is 40-60% alcohol, which means I probably wouldn't like it anyway.)
77. Hostess Fruit Pie (Once, in desperation because I was hungry and I got it from the vending machines.)
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini (Wine and peach puree? Sounds kind of good...)
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers (I once had rose petal ice cream, which tasted like perfume, does that count?)
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam (I know Americans find this gross, but in other cultures Spam is good! I've had it mostly as a snack, with crackers and cheese. I like it.)
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano (When I try to explain this I describe it as kind of like Indian curry, but darker and without the vegetables. It's poured over chicken and rice.)
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. ~~Snake~~

As you see there isn't much I wouldn't try, except when it comes to congealed blood, insects, snakes, crocodiles, or 60% alcoholic beverages. I like to taste most things at least once, just to see whether I'd like it or not. If you're reading this and are looking for an excuse to procrastinate, consider yourself tagged.