January

This month's update on my resolutions:

1. Blogging: Despite having intermittently blogged since college, I haven’t really figured out what makes it sustainable, or what exactly the focus of my blogging should be. But I’m not trying to have high aspirations at this point in my life (eg, finishing residency), and right now I just want to get back into writing when I feel like something is worth recording. Whether those somethings are connected, is irrelevant to me right now. So in that respect, four entries in the past month is on mark with my goal to write one post weekly.

2. Recipes: This past month, I discovered polenta. I wasn’t really sure what to do with it at first. Reading about it, it seems that people use it often as a base for toppings. So I used it as a base for eggs (yolk in tact) and roasted sweet potatoes spiced with oregano and cayenne for breakfast, which was delicious. Especially if you cook the polenta in a little bit of butter. Another time, because I’d read that it goes well with pasta sauce, I used it as a base for the tofu tomato soy sauce scramble I make often when I need something easy and savory. My second recipe was an effort to vary how I eat tofu, and found a baked peanut tofu recipe that was perfect and that M liked a lot too: http://minimalistbaker.com/crispy-peanut-tofu-cauliflower-rice-stir-fry. I scaled back on all the times in the recipe so that it only took half an hour to make and it was still delicious.

3. Albums: This was my favorite resolution this month. I’ve been away from music for so long. During residency when I’ve tried to venture back, my finds have been lackluster. I’d forgotten how much continual listening it takes to discover the narratives that really move you. This month I had the luxury of listening enough to find three albums that I absolutely loved; in the future I suspect that I might settle for just listening to three new albums in general, but at present I feel lucky. After listening to Alt J, both An Awesome Wave and This is All Yours, I felt again the desire to listen to music not as a backdrop but as a sole experience. I also loved Angel Olsen’s Burn Your Fire For No Witness. Her vocals are both extremely bare and complex, a dichotomy that I think we’re drawn to by nature, maybe because there is constant conflict between our simple, fierce feelings and all the layers on top that we’ve cultivated and absorbed.

4. News: M predicted this would be hard for me, and it was at first. I haven’t been u p to date with current events since the beginning of medical school, so I really do fairly or unfairly attribute my ignorance to medicine. Which, like many things in the process of medical training, is ironic. Anyway, this resolution was a little difficult at first, but after getting into the flow of it, I’m finding it hard to not spend all my free time reading. I’ve gotten a subscription to the Economist, which I like for its big picture focus and ability to give equal weight to a lot of different topics, including ones that other sources wouldn’t find headline-worthy.

5. Exercise: I did pretty well with this one except for the swimming, which is hard logistically because I have to get to my brother’s gym to do this. Overall I am happy with January’s fitness, especially being able to go to yoga most weekdays. This does mean that my body will feel at a deficit when I start in the ICU next month, but I’ve started doing more yoga at home so this will still be feasible when my hours get awful. Climbing-wise, I would really like to pick up momentum at some point because I feel a strong plateau that likely won’t move without a lot more practice. I also feel a strong fatigue and burnout with running, which I think has to do with too little variation in my routine so I’d like to run more outside and on different routes. But these are all general thoughts, and my concrete goal to keep me grounded is that I just want to do each activity (yoga, run, climb, bike, and swim) once a week, so that I’m doing something active almost every day and that there’s enough variety to keep myself feeling buoyant.