the first week

i have now completed one week of medical school. that is to say, i am now a medical student, for real. i guess this means i have a career track--i am ON a career track. i will one day, barring lots of persistent failing of exams, be a doctor. i'm not sure if that's scarier for me or for my future patients, but it's not all gloom and despair--it turns out med students know how to party, too.

so on saturday night kim and i went to a party thrown by a fellow m1 here in our neighborhood. there was tasty food and drinks, lots of mixing and getting to know new friends, and discussion of how fast the lectures move, and the homework, and so on. but then, as we all stood on our second floor apartment deck chatting in the evening air, a group of neighborhood kids walked up the back alley armed with water balloons and unloaded on us. one of my classmates tried to catch them to throw them back, but a much more resourceful student began throwing chicken wings and sandwich squares until they ran out of balloons and fled the scene. these events repeated themselves about a half hour later, this time with more words exchanged. a particularly mouthy 11 year old boy responded to some taunting from the students by shouting "don't make me go stone cold steve austin on you!", which left pretty much all of us on the deck speechless--how do you respond to that kind of threat?

a bit later, a kid from the group came alone with a plastic bag and walked away. the bag was full of several filled balloons, a bag of empty ones, and those faucet adaptors that seem great in theory but never really work out--they were inviting us to join in the arms race toward some wonderful kind of mutually assured saturation, and we were more than willing.

it was a pretty good first week, and a pretty great party.