summer to-do

since this summer is both the first and last break we'll have as medical students (and therefore the last one ever), "what are you doing this summer?" was probably the most popular conversation starter the last month or so of school. so i thought i'd let you all know a little bit about what i'm going to do with my 102 days of freedom.

officially, the big thing this summer off from classes is...more classes. as some of you may have heard, in addition to working toward a medical degree, i plan to also get a masters in public health, and classes for that degree begin this summer. explaining what exactly public health is should probably be its own post, but briefly, i'm taking these classes to hopefully be a smarter doctor, one who thinks not only about what his patient is sick with, but also what about his patient's life is making him sick--where he lives, his behaviors, etc. in some ways it's like focusing on the leaky pipe instead of cleaning up the puddle on the floor, if that makes sense.

but of course that's not all i'm doing this summer--far from it! there's going to be lots of voluntary reading of non-textbook books (with an emphasis, though, on books about medicine and...uh, saving the world), and going to concerts (starting with m83 with aaron next week, and also including a couple free days at the pitchfork festival), and buying a condo (we've almost decided--very soon there'll be an extra bedroom for you the next time you come to chicago!), and watching soccer (the champions league final was yesterday, and the european championships start june 6), and maybe traveling (we're waiting to see if any smoking deals show up for last-minute flights), grilling food and then eating it, and riding my bike all over the place, and just a whole bunch of fun things. i'm pretty excited, and i guess now you know a little of what will be populating the old blog the next several weeks--so there's something to look forward to!

what about you guys? got any good, exciting plans for the summer? the comments section isn't going to write itself!

best summer ever

ok, sorry about that absence there. i counted, and this year i filled out 28 of those bad boys up there this year. if it makes you feel any better, all you really missed by me not blogging is "i studied today" posted about 100 times. not that much to read.

but today life got a lot better: i finished my first year of med school. a classmate informed me we have 102 days until next year starts. 102 glorious days!

anyway, while this post is full of numerical data, i realize it's a little low on funny. but fret not--consider yourself warned that the blog is back, and i'm going to make all kinds of stuff happen around here. you'll see.

next week daydream

this morning i took a test for my physiology class. it was ok. wednesday i have a nutrition test and then friday is the physiology final. after that, barring disaster, i will have survived the first semester of medical school, and passed everything, too! i will count this as a victory and be pretty happy about it.

i'll also be pretty happy about break, which starts on friday after that last test. you may have heard med school can be a rather intense experience, and if you have, you have heard correctly. that makes the non-intensity of breaks even more refreshing. so that's what i'm usually thinking about while staring blankly at whatever textbook page is in front of me. it makes my brain salivate. i've never really thought about it before, but i guess if the brain salivates it salivates from its pituitary gland. (oh, great--more than a month away from the blog and i'm already making med school jokes in my first post back.)

anyway, as i've been thinking a lot about what i'll do when break is done, and also about how i wish i'd been blogging more this last semester, i thought i'd combine these two thoughts into one action: a blog about what i want to do over break, which i'm going to go ahead write as a numbered list, it being december and all (see #1).

1. first of all, i plan to take part in my favorite december tradition: the making of lists. this year i plan to make at least three lists (which you all can look forward to showing up here in the near future): a top 10 2007 albums list, a top 2007 songs (not on top 10 albums list) list, and a favorite albums of the year (not of this year) list. as a preview to all of that (i realize this is more for my benefit than yours), i have added that flash widgety thing on the right sidebar of what i've been listening to lately (now you can always know!) and also the picture there, which is i think all the 2007 albums that'll be in contention for those lists.

2. lately, i've been noticing strange changes around my apartment--things aren't where i left them, the dishes keep getting cleaned, and sometimes the toilet seat is inexplicably left down. apparently, my wife also lives where i live. high on my list this break is investigating this fact and perhaps even getting to hang out with this wife person. i expect that together fun will be had. and...

3. also i expect there to be some together enjoying of the city i've been seeing the tall buildings of while riding my bike home each night. looks like a fun place--i think i'd enjoy visiting.

4. i want to play my guitar. i haven't done nearly enough of that lately. i would like to play the guitar, and perhaps even make up things to play on my guitar. and then play them.

5. unfortunately, i am going to be reading about neuroanatomy during the break. i won't say i want to do this, but i will say i'd rather do this than be utterly lost when the second half of the year i can't wait to pair in sentences with past tense verbs starts.

6. i bought myself a christmas surprise last week, and provided it arrives next week, i plan to open it and see what's in it. at this point all i know is it's someone's entire record collection which a friend rescued from certain trash. there will almost certainly be pictures of this excitement when the time comes. obviously this will be a several day project of cataloging, careful listening and evaluating the quality of the records and the music, deciding which to keep, and possibly reorganizing of the collection, should the number of keepers necessitate more space.

i have 1 week in which to do this, and then kim and i are going to california to celebrate christmas with BOTH our families. we're pretty lucky it worked out this way, so it'll be great to be able to see both everyones and also to sit on the sand and relax. that'll be pretty fun.

so, in summary: i'm almost done with the first semester, expect more posts over the next couple weeks, and also sorry about all the not posting.

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.

the end of our endless numbered days

this weekend we took our last trip of this summer, this time to maine, to see my friends chris and tarah get married on the ocean shore. it was pretty much as cool as that sounds--maybe i'll show you some pictures in a minute. and it was a great weekend.

since tomorrow is the start of orientation for med school, kim and i had been planning on getting home and falling gratefully into bed, resting up for the first of many long days. but instead, we opened the door of our apartment and were greeted by the rich aroma of natural gas, so i figured i'd write a blog while we wait for the gas people to come and fix the leak. hey, it's a science experiment--let's see if i write more or less coherently under the influence.

the night of the rehearsal dinner, chris and tarah had me sing a song, which i did at the beach. check out this cool blue atmosphere!






here's the wedding itself. here we see tarah ('s veil), chris, brian the pastor, and tarah's sister ashley and friend megan, who we thought was a pretty great person to know and hang out with. i'm representing for the groom on the other side of the beach, but you just saw a picture of me playing guitar, so i figured you'd be ok not seeing that.

the day after the wedding, chris and tarah and megan and kim and i went whale watching. the boat went fast, which blew our hair back and apparently made me squint my face awkwardly. they say the camera adds ten pounds. and the wind, it adds a good fifteen just to your neck. in pure neck fat.

speaking of fat and all, here's a whale. this is the blue fin whale, which is the second largest of the whales. "whale watching" means riding in a boat for a couple hours and never seeing any more than this much of any whale at any one time. so i'm telling you that this whale is really big, but as i never saw more than this 10 feet of it, i've got to tell you i'm relying a little on extrapolation and a lot on the tour guide, who sounded pretty knowledgeable.

in three-part summary, congratulations chris and tarah; maine is cool; and if i think much about it, i'm a little nervous about tomorrow and the beginning of all that. i'll update you with all that fun soon. in the meantime, i'm gonna go get started on the rest of my life!

the big envelope

yesterday while kim and i were driving around california my roommate nate called me to let me know that i had recieved another official looking piece of mail from the university of illinois, and...it was big. he opened it up while i was on the phone with him and began reading:

"dear incoming student..."

...and then, you know, "it is our pleasure," etc. and they even have a seat for me! even though my own state school doesn't. so i guess i didn't have to have the letter in my hands to believe i'd been accepted, as long as someone i knew had it in their hands. so i'm in, i'm in, and all that waiting wasn't just a really long tease. JOY!

i'm so happy to have been accepted, and to be honest a little relieved. the next question is if i've been accepted to the urban medicine program, which will determine if i'm on the chicago campus or the urbana-champagne campus. i'll keep you all updated, but for now i'm just going to have a nice deep sigh...

med school mailroom drama

i very nearly had the momentous moment i've been waiting for the last couple weeks (or months, or couple years, depending on how you look at it) yesterday. the UIC website informed me earlier this week that they'd made their decision about me, and a letter informing me of this news had been sent. so when my friend sarah (my good friend and fellow high school alum who now lives one floor below me) called me to tell me she'd seen some mail from med school in the mailbox i grabbed the nearest train home and listened to my heart beating louder than my headphones in my ears. i was finally going to know! i found my letter and ripped it open, only to find...information on financial aid? nothing saying i've been accepted or not accepted, just information on how i ought to go about applying for fafsa. but...but...am i accepted or what?!?

i suppose it's possible to speculate that these facts would INDICATE that i've been accepted, but i'm not believing anything until i have the letter in my hands. this waiting game, i tell you what. i suspect i've ridden on so many miserable, long bus rides (and waited at bus stops for long, late, cancelled bus rides) just to condition me for these experiences. so i guess i'm thankful, because i feel like i should be going crazier than i am. we'll see what happens when i get back from california...

oh yeah, california! so in a couple hours i'm flying out to california to visit kim and her family. in the short time i've been here kim has progressed from being an especially interesting and fun person to a completely unique person, to a person unlike anyone i've ever met in my entire life. somewhere along the way she's also become my girlfriend and since last week she went home for a bit i've decided to run out there as well. so the next post should have more definite news about med school and maybe some sunny beach pictures.

unless my plane crashes and i die.

med school madness

i told you all i'd update with information about my med school plans when i had them. and here i am to do just that! here comes the infos:

when i moved to chicago, my mail did not follow me. despite filling out the appropriate forms i still haven't gotten mail forwarded to chicago since i moved here. i was reflecting on this a month or so ago and decided that i should call my friends in omaha to see if they'd made a decision and had sent it...to the chicago post office, where it was wasting away and wanting to tell me all its important news. the addmissions person told me they hadn't made a decision yet, and we chatted a little bit and then all of the sudden she started talking in a very quiet voice and whispered that she wasn't supposed to tell me this, but the fact was that my file had been reviewed and that i had been accepted to med school!!! but since she wasn't supposed to tell me, i couldn't tell anyone, either, so i had to keep it on the dl.

fast forward to just before i left for china, and let's open the letter i got from unmc, congratulating me on being accepted to school but saying that unfortunately they didn't have a seat to offer me at this time. and that's how i came to know the fabulous world of the alternate list. since everyone that gets accepted to unmc doesn't ultimately decide to go there, spots open up with time, and i'm on the list to get one of those seats when that time comes. i am in the top 25% of that list, which pretty much guarantees that i will be offered an actual seat (ah, the fine difference between being accepted and having a seat! very important distinction!) by the time august comes. so that's the situation for going to nebraska.

meanwhile, let's talk about the chicago situation. right after i got back from china i interviewed at the university of illinois-chicago college of medicine (uic to you) and had a great experience. the interview process there is three one on one interviews, and during the second one after discussing a little of my background and the parts of medicine that interest and concern me the interviewer interrupted me to ask why i hadn't had an interview sooner. i told her i wasn't sure and she said "the reason i ask is because usually we see people of your talent level much earlier in the process". she went on to tell me about a relatively new curriculum at uic called the urban medical education program (umed, thank you very much), a small program focused on serving patients in urban areas and meeting the needs specific to that environment. there are several aspects of the program that pretty much perfectly match what i want to do with medicine, so i'm obviously very excited about the chance to be a part of the program. so was my interviewer, who went so far as to call a person on the committee for selecting students for the umed program to say that i am a "phenomenal candidate" for that situation, and helped me introduce myself to the dean of admissions while i was there. it's hard for me to imagine having had a better interview there.

so we'll see what happens. i've never been a "phenomenal" candidate before, but i have been a very strong candidate who didn't get accepted, and i've been an even stronger candidate than before who got accepted but who didn't have a seat. so i guess i'm cautiously optimistic. but the program would really be an incredible opportunity and i'd love to be a part of it. i should know in the next month or so about all of that, so we'll see how things turn out. more updates on the way!