On Saturday M and I take a short road trip to Rhode Island, the one New England state we didn't visit on our early summer road trip. Our windows are down the whole time. The drive is mostly on 95, then for awhile along a smaller road with trees whose freshness we can smell. We drive over the bridge leading to Newport. We pass by the mansions, and look for a beach with waves. After some logistical hodgepodge of parking, coins, inquiries, beach-hopping, and so on--we make it to a warm beach with some waves where M can surf and I can be a bum. The water is chocolate brown, the brown coming not from chocolate but from massive amounts of algae. It feels good to be in it; it's been so hot. M catches one very long wave which makes him happy and a good amount of other ones too, and it's nice to see him happy in this way. After he gets out of the water he sits looking at the water while I fall asleep with his hat over my face, and when I wake up we walk out onto a cliff of boulders by the sea. There's a large one with three sides from which you can climb up, so we clamber over it for awhile and this is my favorite part--the confined yet endless exploration. Then we throw the Frisbee around, to warm up to get back into the water. He wants me to get comfortable going underwater in the ocean. So we jump into waves for awhile, one hand in his to keep from dying and my other hand over my swimsuit which slips too easily. After several of these, M looks at my back and tells me we have to get out. I follow, and seconds later feel the urgency of his return to shore--the algae living in the water is host to tiny crawling worm-like bugs that bite. We spend a good twenty minutes trying to wash them out in the same water where they swarm. We find a "shower"--a two-second stream of water giving about a fourth the volume of a faucet. There's only one, so we take turns, pressing the button for second and third streams before giving it up to someone else waiting and getting back in line for more. I can't do much about the algae now growing entwined in every strand of my hair, until we're at home and I shampoo it out half a dozen times. To get there, we drive home, in the dark now, still smelling the same trees through the windows.
On Sunday we do three loads of laundry and get groceries. M has completely run out of shirts, and I've eaten my last egg and piece of bread. And our things from the beach need much cleansing. I stock up on fruits and veggies, and he buys masala sauce and naan to make our own chicken tikka masala dish. I'm glad to have the basics in abundance, and eat two peaches, handfuls of grapes, an orange and an apple. Our attempt at Indian food is good but needs more cream added to the sauce, we decide. Next time we'll buy cream.
Showing posts with label summary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label summary. Show all posts
Monday, July 25, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
while being away
I guess that I've been away, or really that New Haven has been away from me. In either context, things are happening, which is the nice thing about doing things in compact spaces of time/place. Like on trips, when so much seems to happen in a week, by nature of changing routine and scenery. While in California, there have been blocks of things contributing to an intense, fragile balance of being fulfilled and seeking out.
In the morning before work, I get up to do the p90x workout of the day. Before this I've never considered exercise to simply strengthen. I like activities, and liked them a lot when young, but early in life, learning overshadowed playing games, and so now, when I feel a bit too old to be learning anew, throwing myself into activities seems more of a priority than developing strength and flexibility and balance. But not only do those contribute to being active, they also feel good on their own. My brother said to me, why does a girl need to be strong? It was said with slight real sexism; and it's true in a way. A girl doesn't usually need to be strong to attract a guy, or to beat up another girl. I've discovered that I really like feeling strong, for no real reason other than to know you're capable. It is also a little odd to see your activities make concrete changes in your body, and like all physical things I enjoy, it strengthens a lot of mental processes and approaches.
I take the bus to my rotation at the San Francisco Free Clinic. Walking to the bus stop, riding it, and walking to clinic takes about an hour. It goes by pretty fast, and doesn't bother me in terms of time since clinic hours are usually 10-5. I like navigating the city this way; I also use the bus to meet up with friends, go to the rock gym, go shopping and run errands. I often don't know from which side of the street I should be waiting for the bus. But I have more time to figure it out than I would in a car. And I'm by myself so only I have to deal with my spectacularly awful sense of direction, and only I can feel how rarely this can feel less of a confusing burden and more of a freeing confusion. A lot of old people ride the bus, and there are so many Asians in this city; I alway forget this. I'm not sure yet how the difference in population has affected me, but it's something that made me take notice. On the bus I read books, and I've gotten into Agatha Christie, as there are several of her books at my brother's. I was never into genre novels--fantasy, sci-fi, mystery. But I've gotten into Christie because the books are fun and easy to read, and because over time I've organically gotten better at paying attention to details, which makes both the book and life outside of the book more enjoyable.
The patients at the clinic, which provides primary care to the uninsured, have made for an amazing experience. Each one has subtly strange qualities, strange in that they are rare, not always that they are extreme. Because of that, I have a much stronger sense of each one after a day of several patients, than I have in other primary care settings I've experienced. Each one makes me think, or cling onto a characteristic or word or facial expression, or share our conversation with someone else. More on this as it goes on, can't fully describe the gratitude for such exposure and absorption of things outside of how I am/what I know.
In the evening, I eat dinner with my brother in his beautiful apartment lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that open up to the ocean. The water can be blue, green, gray, or mixes of those, and colors the rest of the house with its lighting. During the ab exercises from p90x, we sit up from painful crunches to see the sun setting diamonds on the water. The dinner is often something my mom has packed up for us. I'm glad to be in easy comfort with my brother in the same apartment, my parents across a bridge, not a day-long flight away. If I have an early day or extra time, I take the bus to the rock gym to boulder, since I can't climb by myself...I miss the style afforded by being attached to a rope, but bouldering is pretty mentally challenging. It requires a lot of initial strength that I don't have, and also a lot of overcoming fear (since there is no rope), which I've found very hard, especially alone. But it feels really, really good when at one moment it happens, especially after a lot of stalemate and frustration. On some evenings I spend time with friends in the Bay Area; it is a place containing people from different phases of my life. I'm lucky to have so many people with whom I want to share the mixed-up self I bring back to home, a person away.
At night I share the bed with Mikey the cat, whose personality has been branded dog-like. He follows you everywhere, showers you with affection, licks and bites you lovingly, stares at you with huge green eyes of neediness. I've pretty much fallen in love with him, and his strangely perfect combination of cat and dog.
It's also at night that I think of being away. Immediately before coming here, M and I went on a fantastic week-long road trip through parts of the East Coast. Coming straight from that to another experience, I might find it easy to forget the smell of fires, fresh early summer mornings, new sun emerging from weeks of rain, long drives of lush green, five kinds of rain in five minutes, a beautiful rest stop and unassuming cove of space and lucky discovery on the search for a bathroom, a beach wrapped in fog, revisiting a home in perfect weather--but I haven't. The sensations resurge in small moments and strong waves, and I feel incredibly lucky to have so much here, and so much away.
In the morning before work, I get up to do the p90x workout of the day. Before this I've never considered exercise to simply strengthen. I like activities, and liked them a lot when young, but early in life, learning overshadowed playing games, and so now, when I feel a bit too old to be learning anew, throwing myself into activities seems more of a priority than developing strength and flexibility and balance. But not only do those contribute to being active, they also feel good on their own. My brother said to me, why does a girl need to be strong? It was said with slight real sexism; and it's true in a way. A girl doesn't usually need to be strong to attract a guy, or to beat up another girl. I've discovered that I really like feeling strong, for no real reason other than to know you're capable. It is also a little odd to see your activities make concrete changes in your body, and like all physical things I enjoy, it strengthens a lot of mental processes and approaches.
I take the bus to my rotation at the San Francisco Free Clinic. Walking to the bus stop, riding it, and walking to clinic takes about an hour. It goes by pretty fast, and doesn't bother me in terms of time since clinic hours are usually 10-5. I like navigating the city this way; I also use the bus to meet up with friends, go to the rock gym, go shopping and run errands. I often don't know from which side of the street I should be waiting for the bus. But I have more time to figure it out than I would in a car. And I'm by myself so only I have to deal with my spectacularly awful sense of direction, and only I can feel how rarely this can feel less of a confusing burden and more of a freeing confusion. A lot of old people ride the bus, and there are so many Asians in this city; I alway forget this. I'm not sure yet how the difference in population has affected me, but it's something that made me take notice. On the bus I read books, and I've gotten into Agatha Christie, as there are several of her books at my brother's. I was never into genre novels--fantasy, sci-fi, mystery. But I've gotten into Christie because the books are fun and easy to read, and because over time I've organically gotten better at paying attention to details, which makes both the book and life outside of the book more enjoyable.
The patients at the clinic, which provides primary care to the uninsured, have made for an amazing experience. Each one has subtly strange qualities, strange in that they are rare, not always that they are extreme. Because of that, I have a much stronger sense of each one after a day of several patients, than I have in other primary care settings I've experienced. Each one makes me think, or cling onto a characteristic or word or facial expression, or share our conversation with someone else. More on this as it goes on, can't fully describe the gratitude for such exposure and absorption of things outside of how I am/what I know.
In the evening, I eat dinner with my brother in his beautiful apartment lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that open up to the ocean. The water can be blue, green, gray, or mixes of those, and colors the rest of the house with its lighting. During the ab exercises from p90x, we sit up from painful crunches to see the sun setting diamonds on the water. The dinner is often something my mom has packed up for us. I'm glad to be in easy comfort with my brother in the same apartment, my parents across a bridge, not a day-long flight away. If I have an early day or extra time, I take the bus to the rock gym to boulder, since I can't climb by myself...I miss the style afforded by being attached to a rope, but bouldering is pretty mentally challenging. It requires a lot of initial strength that I don't have, and also a lot of overcoming fear (since there is no rope), which I've found very hard, especially alone. But it feels really, really good when at one moment it happens, especially after a lot of stalemate and frustration. On some evenings I spend time with friends in the Bay Area; it is a place containing people from different phases of my life. I'm lucky to have so many people with whom I want to share the mixed-up self I bring back to home, a person away.
At night I share the bed with Mikey the cat, whose personality has been branded dog-like. He follows you everywhere, showers you with affection, licks and bites you lovingly, stares at you with huge green eyes of neediness. I've pretty much fallen in love with him, and his strangely perfect combination of cat and dog.
It's also at night that I think of being away. Immediately before coming here, M and I went on a fantastic week-long road trip through parts of the East Coast. Coming straight from that to another experience, I might find it easy to forget the smell of fires, fresh early summer mornings, new sun emerging from weeks of rain, long drives of lush green, five kinds of rain in five minutes, a beautiful rest stop and unassuming cove of space and lucky discovery on the search for a bathroom, a beach wrapped in fog, revisiting a home in perfect weather--but I haven't. The sensations resurge in small moments and strong waves, and I feel incredibly lucky to have so much here, and so much away.
Monday, July 20, 2009
in review
Pediatrics was my introduction to life in the hospital, and while it gave me time to cook and exercise and spend time with my friends over dinner and at the beach, finding balance still meant too tired at night to flesh out the day. So as inadequately as usual, some snippets of a wonderful four weeks working with school age children (spanning ages five to eighteen, though the highest I personally got was thirteen).
*Getting personal with swine flu: It was splashed anywhere our eyes and ears fell upon, and overexposure created distance. It's true that it's not much different from your annual winter flu, but it gave me a chance to see its effects during a summer rotation, out of its usual season. "Asthma exacerbation secondary to swine flu" sometimes made up a quarter of the hospital admissions while I was there, and it was my first patient. Heard real "crackles" in the lung for the first time (sounds like undoing velcro). Flu is inconvenience for most; for asthmatics it means being confined to a hospital room where people come in and out armed with a gown and gloves and strapped with a respirator mask, a mouth mask, and a face mask.
*Listening slowly: A patient with chronic pain, in the hospital for an acute episode, was my foray into this world of subjective disease and healing. I learned that one way to measure a pain is whether a person is "easily distractable," and learned that distraction is a two-way street. My sickle cell patient read aloud deliberately and slowly. So slowly that I lost track of sentences and just heard words. She decided she didn't like two books after a few pages; she did finally like Nancy Drew.
*Witnessing what's worthy: I never found a way to the feverish little one, who was seen by so many different doctors and nurses and random people like me. Politely answered my questions, politely refused offers of games, always said he was feeling good, in between and during fits of cough and sputum. But he lit up for his older sister, my age. His sister who stayed nights with him and left at six in the morning to commute to her job a couple hours away, after having left a detailed note about where she left his Taco Bell leftovers and full of thanks for taking care of him. Who was so happy to see him improve, happy maybe more ingenuously than anyone I've seen. When I told him he was lucky to have such a sister, he looked at her, smiled a slow crinkle of lips, and said I know. How many kids know, how many grown-ups really know.
*Finding the elusiveness of observation: So many of the kids we saw had been through so much, for so little body grown and so little time lived. Being impressed by their toughness became quickly ingrained, such that moments of outright vulnerability surprised me, and reminded me to let things show themselves and to consider them as they did. Hearing a little girl say she was scared, pulling her hand away from the IV, hearing her dad talk about not wanting to put her through another sedation, stood in my mind beside the images of her walking steady and holding her head firm, despite physical oppositions--I was pulled back to what was there, reminded to be open and not escape into all else that had formed.
*Gathering more and more respect: I admired one resident's natural cheerfulness through sleepless nights and ease of humor, another's tough efficiency and caring demeanor with the kids over whom he towered, and the attentiveness of everyone on our team to everyone else, past the patients to everyone in the hospital regardless of role or involvement. I was more than awed by the expertise of the nurses, their quickness and ease of movement. Sometimes I want to be them, with so much concrete need in their hands, more presence to their kids.
*Memorizing contours from senses: We've absorbed so much from sight and experience, almost without effort, that I wonder why I've tried so hard all my life to pound all that's outside inside. I think I felt this most with my last patient, who sometimes slept with his glasses on, and whose facial features would register at odd moments. Long after the day was over I found myself worrying about how he'd grow up and whether he'd gain the comfort of a secure home, the self-confidence of good health taken for granted, and the weight to develop into a person that could physically stand among others. He smiled inadvertently and in surprise when I beat him in Connect Four, with a diagonal line he hadn't noticed. When I remember that, I worry also that his teeth might always be in the wrong place.
*Seeing people return: I've seen more than a handful of patients return: with the same thing, with the same thing but worse, with a different thing, for nothing at all. It is strange to feel some sense of accomplishment with sending a patient home, then to feel a sort of regression when they return, because it's the same person. There's a disconnect between the linear or even cyclical image we have of a person's life, and thereby our relation to it, and the connect-the-dots relationship we actually have with them. I was disconcerted by some of the discontinuity, some of the chronic non-health problems.
*Seeing people disappear: We talked about how we thought she would still be there when we finished our month of inpatient pediatrics. Each day hearing of her tiny progress, only to find out the next that she'd deceived. She wasn't healed when she left. Watching her leave that one day, one day earlier than had been scheduled earlier that week, many days earlier than in my mind--face and nails made-up and leaving me a sense of glittery blue even as I'm unsure that's what she was really wearing--I felt I understood so little.
A., who likes to sit next to waterfalls, talks often of being humbled by feeling his smallness among big things and his incapacity to know anything in this vastness, and recently listed a slew of good places to perceive this: in the hospital, in a warzone, in love. I hope that the next time I forget, I'll try to think on how the immensity of small things and small people made me feel small too.
*Getting personal with swine flu: It was splashed anywhere our eyes and ears fell upon, and overexposure created distance. It's true that it's not much different from your annual winter flu, but it gave me a chance to see its effects during a summer rotation, out of its usual season. "Asthma exacerbation secondary to swine flu" sometimes made up a quarter of the hospital admissions while I was there, and it was my first patient. Heard real "crackles" in the lung for the first time (sounds like undoing velcro). Flu is inconvenience for most; for asthmatics it means being confined to a hospital room where people come in and out armed with a gown and gloves and strapped with a respirator mask, a mouth mask, and a face mask.
*Listening slowly: A patient with chronic pain, in the hospital for an acute episode, was my foray into this world of subjective disease and healing. I learned that one way to measure a pain is whether a person is "easily distractable," and learned that distraction is a two-way street. My sickle cell patient read aloud deliberately and slowly. So slowly that I lost track of sentences and just heard words. She decided she didn't like two books after a few pages; she did finally like Nancy Drew.
*Witnessing what's worthy: I never found a way to the feverish little one, who was seen by so many different doctors and nurses and random people like me. Politely answered my questions, politely refused offers of games, always said he was feeling good, in between and during fits of cough and sputum. But he lit up for his older sister, my age. His sister who stayed nights with him and left at six in the morning to commute to her job a couple hours away, after having left a detailed note about where she left his Taco Bell leftovers and full of thanks for taking care of him. Who was so happy to see him improve, happy maybe more ingenuously than anyone I've seen. When I told him he was lucky to have such a sister, he looked at her, smiled a slow crinkle of lips, and said I know. How many kids know, how many grown-ups really know.
*Finding the elusiveness of observation: So many of the kids we saw had been through so much, for so little body grown and so little time lived. Being impressed by their toughness became quickly ingrained, such that moments of outright vulnerability surprised me, and reminded me to let things show themselves and to consider them as they did. Hearing a little girl say she was scared, pulling her hand away from the IV, hearing her dad talk about not wanting to put her through another sedation, stood in my mind beside the images of her walking steady and holding her head firm, despite physical oppositions--I was pulled back to what was there, reminded to be open and not escape into all else that had formed.
*Gathering more and more respect: I admired one resident's natural cheerfulness through sleepless nights and ease of humor, another's tough efficiency and caring demeanor with the kids over whom he towered, and the attentiveness of everyone on our team to everyone else, past the patients to everyone in the hospital regardless of role or involvement. I was more than awed by the expertise of the nurses, their quickness and ease of movement. Sometimes I want to be them, with so much concrete need in their hands, more presence to their kids.
*Memorizing contours from senses: We've absorbed so much from sight and experience, almost without effort, that I wonder why I've tried so hard all my life to pound all that's outside inside. I think I felt this most with my last patient, who sometimes slept with his glasses on, and whose facial features would register at odd moments. Long after the day was over I found myself worrying about how he'd grow up and whether he'd gain the comfort of a secure home, the self-confidence of good health taken for granted, and the weight to develop into a person that could physically stand among others. He smiled inadvertently and in surprise when I beat him in Connect Four, with a diagonal line he hadn't noticed. When I remember that, I worry also that his teeth might always be in the wrong place.
*Seeing people return: I've seen more than a handful of patients return: with the same thing, with the same thing but worse, with a different thing, for nothing at all. It is strange to feel some sense of accomplishment with sending a patient home, then to feel a sort of regression when they return, because it's the same person. There's a disconnect between the linear or even cyclical image we have of a person's life, and thereby our relation to it, and the connect-the-dots relationship we actually have with them. I was disconcerted by some of the discontinuity, some of the chronic non-health problems.
*Seeing people disappear: We talked about how we thought she would still be there when we finished our month of inpatient pediatrics. Each day hearing of her tiny progress, only to find out the next that she'd deceived. She wasn't healed when she left. Watching her leave that one day, one day earlier than had been scheduled earlier that week, many days earlier than in my mind--face and nails made-up and leaving me a sense of glittery blue even as I'm unsure that's what she was really wearing--I felt I understood so little.
A., who likes to sit next to waterfalls, talks often of being humbled by feeling his smallness among big things and his incapacity to know anything in this vastness, and recently listed a slew of good places to perceive this: in the hospital, in a warzone, in love. I hope that the next time I forget, I'll try to think on how the immensity of small things and small people made me feel small too.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
six weeks
Back in Connecticut, today was the first day of third year. We were advised to be present: to be aware of where we are in a moment and to stop thinking about where else we need to be or what we should do after this moment is over. During the lecture about how to manage stress, it was suggested to write things down as they happen, so they don't slip as days pile upon one another. I'd meant to catch up on some things during our trip to Prague, but that didn't work out for various reasons. One of the things that has frustrated me most in med school is not having time and energy to reflect in thought and writing all the things in which we're immersed. I recall clearly deciding to not spend my life writing because I had nothing to write about, to experience instead so that I'd have something to say; medicine has brought me closer to that, has given me much to say but in the process often takes from me the capacity to form sentences.
One piece of advice was to just get things down, even if incoherent. I used to do that often, but somewhere between that and now, have done it much less. The idea is to capture your immediate impression; that you can return to it later, give it real form and thought later. I worry very much that I never will return to it, that there's too much; that I can't fully describe how I feel in a moment without more time and energy, and so I should only write when I have all the time and energy I need, and since I won't settle for less, I end up doing nothing. While I'm somewhat proud of this stubbornness about taking care about completeness, I realize that in some circumstances you do have to work with limitations, not just ignore them.
In theory this would mean I would jot down the overwhelming amount of stuff thrown at us today, but there is a lot of past too and I'd like to share that first, even if insignificant. I know I can't spend my life catching up to myself, but for the next two weeks before we start in the hospital where I have to be present, I'd like to have that luxury.
So to go back to what feels like way way back, the six weeks I spent at home studying for the Boards was pretty wonderful. I'm not sure how the test itself went, and while I learned a lot, it didn't quite feel like enough. I'll talk about that whole process maybe later. But other things happened, and for those I'm proud and glad.
I ate all my meals with my parents, and my brothers came home on the weekends for the more elaborate meals my mom would make. The first few days I returned, Fremont was gray and green. I studied in a room with a window facing the street, and we live on a busy street. I had three second glimpses of people as they passed from the left edge of my window to the right, or the other way: teenagers walking home from school, missionaries going door to door, parents wheeling strollers, dogs on leashes, stray cats, a man collecting cans in a shopping cart, young couples, old couples, people talking to themselves and each other, various runners with different running styles, a woman singing and running into her notes as they flowed forward and she walked after them.
I ran a few miles every couple days, all on the treadmill after my first week at home, which I know surprises everyone because people think I'm really unathletic (which I am, except for in elementary school but no one believes me when I tell them I was good at sports back then) and because when I do run it's always outside. I started because it got too hot in the afternoons to go outside, and despite sleeping fine for the most part I was too tired to run in the mornings. So I grew to love the treadmill, which faces away from the screen door to our backyard, in our living room. I'd open the screen to make it feel more like outside, and I grew to love the mechanics of running on a machine, of focusing purely on movement (not even forward movement, obviously, just moving), rather than surroundings and surrounding feelings. I was disappointed to realize it'd take me much longer than I anticipated to work up to a decent pace, after many years of irregularity, but it did motivate me to continue. I also started to like milk (I do tally this on my list of accomplishments), because it was the only cold drink we had. It was really satisfying to have everything I needed to run at home. Just changed in my room, went downstairs to the living room for the treadmill, panted my way to the kitchen for milk, then back upstairs to shower.
I finished one book during Boards studying (in my small defense, it was a long one)--The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami. It's up there with my favorites of his. Much of it was dark, and I'd go to sleep unsure. Through it all there was something to hang onto, as is usual with even his strangest contexts and characters most disconnected from things. And in this book amidst all the unbelievably expressive and knowing and detail, there were in particular two pages that I may hang onto the rest of my life.
I didn't get to see friends as much as I would've liked, only seeing my high school friends the day before I left for Prague. I did fly to LA for a day to see Iron & Wine at the Troubadour with my oldest friend. Awhile ago I posted about my top songs and none of them included Iron & Wine, even though he is one of my top artists. This is because what I love in his music runs through everything he writes, and the whole experience of hearing Iron & Wine with someone close to me who values that feeling, felt like that, where places and events and things lose definition and become vessels for something ineffable and common in all of them. He ended with Trapeze Swinger, which is a long song and one I'd been listening to often before the show. It's a beautiful beautiful song and one that will always make me think of that moment in the show, and also the walk in the cool night to the venue before the show, and the car ride afterwards which I remember as a long straight road punctuated by streetlights, though I'm not entirely sure it was that way the whole time.
I said goodbye to my great-aunt, and the funeral is something else I'd like to write about, and separately. I wasn't close to her, but I tried to stay close to what it meant. I can't say that I was always able to completely focus on it, with the hectic background of studying and other things, which forced me to consider balance and my role in that. It also made me glad to be with my mom, who is much nicer to me than I deserve and who did teach me to make a couple of her dishes. Not quite as many as I wanted, due to her cooking hours before I got up in the morning; by the time I was getting up early enough, I was trying to make up for lost time in studying. But now I can (theoretically) make my favorite spring rolls and savory crepes? pancakes? Not really like either, but yellow and crispy and eaten with fish sauce and lots of lettuce and herbs.
I also cut off about 12 inches of my hair. I needed 10 to donate to Locks of Love, so the hairdresser asked me if I wanted to keep that extra 2 inches, but I told her to just take it all. So instead of messy wavy hair down my back, I have manageable straightness to just my shoulders. Even though I don't like the look of the haircut much, it felt pretty good to make a dramatic change, after growing it out for two years. Other tidbits at home included getting my white coat tailored to my actual size, getting a new backpack, and finishing a roll of film.
Writing about things awhile after I've thought of them is hard, and dissatisfying in the knowledge that it's inadequate. The intersection of language, or my language, and feelings makes me feel that it's always inadequate, even when I write in the moment, but this feels more so. Still, I'm really very glad to be able to do at least this.
One piece of advice was to just get things down, even if incoherent. I used to do that often, but somewhere between that and now, have done it much less. The idea is to capture your immediate impression; that you can return to it later, give it real form and thought later. I worry very much that I never will return to it, that there's too much; that I can't fully describe how I feel in a moment without more time and energy, and so I should only write when I have all the time and energy I need, and since I won't settle for less, I end up doing nothing. While I'm somewhat proud of this stubbornness about taking care about completeness, I realize that in some circumstances you do have to work with limitations, not just ignore them.
In theory this would mean I would jot down the overwhelming amount of stuff thrown at us today, but there is a lot of past too and I'd like to share that first, even if insignificant. I know I can't spend my life catching up to myself, but for the next two weeks before we start in the hospital where I have to be present, I'd like to have that luxury.
So to go back to what feels like way way back, the six weeks I spent at home studying for the Boards was pretty wonderful. I'm not sure how the test itself went, and while I learned a lot, it didn't quite feel like enough. I'll talk about that whole process maybe later. But other things happened, and for those I'm proud and glad.
I ate all my meals with my parents, and my brothers came home on the weekends for the more elaborate meals my mom would make. The first few days I returned, Fremont was gray and green. I studied in a room with a window facing the street, and we live on a busy street. I had three second glimpses of people as they passed from the left edge of my window to the right, or the other way: teenagers walking home from school, missionaries going door to door, parents wheeling strollers, dogs on leashes, stray cats, a man collecting cans in a shopping cart, young couples, old couples, people talking to themselves and each other, various runners with different running styles, a woman singing and running into her notes as they flowed forward and she walked after them.
I ran a few miles every couple days, all on the treadmill after my first week at home, which I know surprises everyone because people think I'm really unathletic (which I am, except for in elementary school but no one believes me when I tell them I was good at sports back then) and because when I do run it's always outside. I started because it got too hot in the afternoons to go outside, and despite sleeping fine for the most part I was too tired to run in the mornings. So I grew to love the treadmill, which faces away from the screen door to our backyard, in our living room. I'd open the screen to make it feel more like outside, and I grew to love the mechanics of running on a machine, of focusing purely on movement (not even forward movement, obviously, just moving), rather than surroundings and surrounding feelings. I was disappointed to realize it'd take me much longer than I anticipated to work up to a decent pace, after many years of irregularity, but it did motivate me to continue. I also started to like milk (I do tally this on my list of accomplishments), because it was the only cold drink we had. It was really satisfying to have everything I needed to run at home. Just changed in my room, went downstairs to the living room for the treadmill, panted my way to the kitchen for milk, then back upstairs to shower.
I finished one book during Boards studying (in my small defense, it was a long one)--The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami. It's up there with my favorites of his. Much of it was dark, and I'd go to sleep unsure. Through it all there was something to hang onto, as is usual with even his strangest contexts and characters most disconnected from things. And in this book amidst all the unbelievably expressive and knowing and detail, there were in particular two pages that I may hang onto the rest of my life.
I didn't get to see friends as much as I would've liked, only seeing my high school friends the day before I left for Prague. I did fly to LA for a day to see Iron & Wine at the Troubadour with my oldest friend. Awhile ago I posted about my top songs and none of them included Iron & Wine, even though he is one of my top artists. This is because what I love in his music runs through everything he writes, and the whole experience of hearing Iron & Wine with someone close to me who values that feeling, felt like that, where places and events and things lose definition and become vessels for something ineffable and common in all of them. He ended with Trapeze Swinger, which is a long song and one I'd been listening to often before the show. It's a beautiful beautiful song and one that will always make me think of that moment in the show, and also the walk in the cool night to the venue before the show, and the car ride afterwards which I remember as a long straight road punctuated by streetlights, though I'm not entirely sure it was that way the whole time.
I said goodbye to my great-aunt, and the funeral is something else I'd like to write about, and separately. I wasn't close to her, but I tried to stay close to what it meant. I can't say that I was always able to completely focus on it, with the hectic background of studying and other things, which forced me to consider balance and my role in that. It also made me glad to be with my mom, who is much nicer to me than I deserve and who did teach me to make a couple of her dishes. Not quite as many as I wanted, due to her cooking hours before I got up in the morning; by the time I was getting up early enough, I was trying to make up for lost time in studying. But now I can (theoretically) make my favorite spring rolls and savory crepes? pancakes? Not really like either, but yellow and crispy and eaten with fish sauce and lots of lettuce and herbs.
I also cut off about 12 inches of my hair. I needed 10 to donate to Locks of Love, so the hairdresser asked me if I wanted to keep that extra 2 inches, but I told her to just take it all. So instead of messy wavy hair down my back, I have manageable straightness to just my shoulders. Even though I don't like the look of the haircut much, it felt pretty good to make a dramatic change, after growing it out for two years. Other tidbits at home included getting my white coat tailored to my actual size, getting a new backpack, and finishing a roll of film.
Writing about things awhile after I've thought of them is hard, and dissatisfying in the knowledge that it's inadequate. The intersection of language, or my language, and feelings makes me feel that it's always inadequate, even when I write in the moment, but this feels more so. Still, I'm really very glad to be able to do at least this.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
the abcs of 2008
I stole this idea from Victo, who did it several years ago.
Ayden met the world August 12, and brought us together for our first full family Thanksgiving celebration in snowy Colorado.
Bon Iver holed himself up in Wisconsin in the depths of winter to recover from a rough year, and ended up recording the ineffable album that’s been my constant companion in 2008’s winter, the sounds to my first snowfall and its cold snowy run past icy creeks and flake drenched roads. Wife & I were front row in concert, bought our first vinyl records (still in need of a player), complete with autographs due to the kindness of a roadie.
Chapel Street, where lies our new residence, is home. Our roomy kitchen’s been host to big planned group dinners, roomie meals, smatterings of guests, which means Nupur’s spice-filled veggie Indian with bread from scratch, my mom’s crack chicken and noodles with fish sauce and crispy 2 AM egg rolls, and Jen’s comfort Chinese and strawberry banana smoothies and friends cooking in our kitchen, pancakes and Korean rice and pastas.
Dani California was the theme song to our summer cross country drive from California to Connecticut: “Black bandanna, sweet Louisiana/robbin’ on a bank in the state of Indiana/Never made it up to Minnesota/North Dakota man was a gunnin' for the quota/Down in the Badlands she was savin the best for last/It only hurts when I laugh/gone too fast.” We didn’t rob in true Thelma & Louise style or see Louisiana, but we did bask in the surreal Badlands that, from seemingly nowhere become surreal canyon, and we DID drive straight through the entire span of Minnesota.
Elected Obama and for once felt good to be a part of the current events of this generation, and to know that long stuggles are worth something and will continue, because “what began in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.”
Friendship pushed me to act on what it really means to be there for those close to you, to put someone else before what can hurt you. Goes without saying that friendship requires give and take, but normally what’s good and happy for one is mutual for the other. It doesn’t usually require you to give up something really, really valuable. But this year, I let go of a friendship that I want in my life and will always tangibly miss, and worked everything in me to its worn edges to keep another. Knowing it’s best for people you care about is worth the effort, even if it doesn’t take away moments of difficult and sad, and there is the reward of a best friendship. Knowing this is easy; actually being tested and doing it wasn’t, for me. But that’s what 2008 gave me for the first time, and twice. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish circumstances had been easier, but given this, I’m glad for the challenge and the hope that I’m capable.
Guson’s camera, which I had to borrow for Puerto Rico because my faithful college digital camera died (which became obsolete within months but served me for years), got me to give myself an SLR, to document summer and future travels. With such sensitivity to light, images are no longer lost in the dark.
Harvard reunions with the roomies nearby in New York, Henry coming back from South Africa, Jen coming by New York. Visiting, as I have annually in the fall-winter since I’ve left, for the Game, visited the old dorm, tunnels, library, dining hall and Bernard. The snow-in-a-can still sticks to our fireplace brick, and they’ve put a new DVD return box in the Adams library.
Iron & Wine, our Halloween costume to mirror our namesakes. Made a flowy thing out of burgundy curtain and a tissue paper wine label (Gamay Rouge, made in California for most likeness as possible), and Jen went crazy attaching metal things to herself (utensils, safety pins, jewelry).
Jojo’s, the dark reddish coffee shop with pillows on the next block from home, joins my list of favorite study spots (with Koffee Too and the architecture library). Each has things to endear (window ledges, warmth, good chai, open space, sun-pouring windows, quiet/noise) and things that bother (dimness at night, cold, quiet/noise, crowds), and where I go at a particular moment depends on a number of these things.
Kites stole a corner of my affection,seeing hundreds of them in the sky in the big grassy field at El Morro, where we dispersed to the edges of the grass to the water and stood on walls, watching families fly so many that they felt like stars. Then flying them on the island of Vieques, standing in the ocean somewhere where the Atlantic merges with the Caribbean (we never could decide where we were standing), the first time I flew a kite in the ocean and the first time, at twenty four, G. flew a kite at all. Then in Vietnam where my favorite photograph is of my favorite person there looking up at one, as she told me how kites work, how you run and release and there it goes, up.
Learned the physical exam and will continue to find new ways to mess it up.
Music reached the height of addiction (this I realize when I get a little physically anxious studying without it). There’s little that can be felt that music doesn’t feel too. It’s kind of amazing that sounds can do that. Books, movies, even food makes sense; we make, as a society and individuals, associations with words, images, tastes; but why are songs in minor key darker and more somber than those in major? Why does a certain bow across a certain string make something in you move too? For that phenomenon…concerts include Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova, Built to Spill, Thao Nguyen, The National, Rachael Yamagata and Bon Iver.
New Mexico tickets bought one week before flying, for my oldest brother’s no-frills-but-beautiful wedding where I made my first speech for the person who raised me with such love and care.
Older, like every year. I can’t remember when I stopped feeling my age but this year was no different in that either.
Published Atrium, the first volume of our literary magazine. Its coming out party consisted of Bar pizza and wine, live music and readings from my classmates and people from the nursing and public health schools, and the majority of our class supporting.
Quit writing only about myself and started writing more about other people, granted because they made me feel or think. This happened because I learned a lot about people outside my friends and family, and in an entirely new setting. The chance to meet, even for a moment, such variety and depth in real people, even though I see the limitations (now and in the future), was the best thing med school’s given me so far.
Richard got married, my first very close friend from high school to do so. Despite this grown up rite, a long California drive and night of champagne and dancing with the girls whose lockers were next to mine for years made me feel how young we are, despite time passed.
Spring break in Puerto Rico was the best week of first year, obviously. Kayaking in a the bioluminescent bay, hiking in the rainforest, ferrying to the beach island of Vieques, lazying on a different beach each day and the hot tub at night. To be outdoors all the time, in weather that rendered lotion unnecessary, was insanely happy.
Turned carrots into carrot cake (“wait, does carrot cake have REAL carrots?” asked an innocent first year), after eating so much of Claire’s carrot cake, and apples into apple pie and flour into pie crust and so on. I love sugar.
Undid the epic knot in my hair, which was particularly unruly due to being wavy and very long this year, and required the long, assiduous work of several friends. 2008 was host to my first distinct hairstyle (that I liked, thus excepting my 6th grade perm). I’ll miss long wavy hair, even if tangled to the point of oblivion.
Vietnam was the place of many firsts: meeting my uncle and relatives, spending a summer abroad, completing the public health project, hot humid days on end without electricity, finding how quickly you adapt to sleeping on back-aching slabs of wood, seeing my dad’s countryside village, riding motobikes with strangers. Best first experience.
Writing has gone slowly: began half a dozen trains of thoughts, finished not close to one. Because I didn’t do it and because it was the one thing I wanted to do most, writing more is my one concrete resolution for this year.
Xiphoid process, an extension of the sternum, was what Allison came up with for an “X” word, when we played the alphabet game night driving through Colorado (after I told her it was not likely we’d spot a “xenophobe”--not being able to see anything, we just guessed at what we might see if it were daytime), showing how much we learned in anatomy.
Yale Med was my life, 2008 being my first full year of being a medical student. It’s hard work, and hard sometimes to learn and cooped up with yourself without being able to do much with it. Though as med students issues of balance, usefulness, and ability arise often, finding a swelling sense purpose in the people, science, and experience reminds me of how lucky I am.
Zero is how many times I talked to strangers, my one resolution for 2008. Oops.
Ayden met the world August 12, and brought us together for our first full family Thanksgiving celebration in snowy Colorado.
Bon Iver holed himself up in Wisconsin in the depths of winter to recover from a rough year, and ended up recording the ineffable album that’s been my constant companion in 2008’s winter, the sounds to my first snowfall and its cold snowy run past icy creeks and flake drenched roads. Wife & I were front row in concert, bought our first vinyl records (still in need of a player), complete with autographs due to the kindness of a roadie.
Chapel Street, where lies our new residence, is home. Our roomy kitchen’s been host to big planned group dinners, roomie meals, smatterings of guests, which means Nupur’s spice-filled veggie Indian with bread from scratch, my mom’s crack chicken and noodles with fish sauce and crispy 2 AM egg rolls, and Jen’s comfort Chinese and strawberry banana smoothies and friends cooking in our kitchen, pancakes and Korean rice and pastas.
Dani California was the theme song to our summer cross country drive from California to Connecticut: “Black bandanna, sweet Louisiana/robbin’ on a bank in the state of Indiana/Never made it up to Minnesota/North Dakota man was a gunnin' for the quota/Down in the Badlands she was savin the best for last/It only hurts when I laugh/gone too fast.” We didn’t rob in true Thelma & Louise style or see Louisiana, but we did bask in the surreal Badlands that, from seemingly nowhere become surreal canyon, and we DID drive straight through the entire span of Minnesota.
Elected Obama and for once felt good to be a part of the current events of this generation, and to know that long stuggles are worth something and will continue, because “what began in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.”
Friendship pushed me to act on what it really means to be there for those close to you, to put someone else before what can hurt you. Goes without saying that friendship requires give and take, but normally what’s good and happy for one is mutual for the other. It doesn’t usually require you to give up something really, really valuable. But this year, I let go of a friendship that I want in my life and will always tangibly miss, and worked everything in me to its worn edges to keep another. Knowing it’s best for people you care about is worth the effort, even if it doesn’t take away moments of difficult and sad, and there is the reward of a best friendship. Knowing this is easy; actually being tested and doing it wasn’t, for me. But that’s what 2008 gave me for the first time, and twice. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish circumstances had been easier, but given this, I’m glad for the challenge and the hope that I’m capable.
Guson’s camera, which I had to borrow for Puerto Rico because my faithful college digital camera died (which became obsolete within months but served me for years), got me to give myself an SLR, to document summer and future travels. With such sensitivity to light, images are no longer lost in the dark.
Harvard reunions with the roomies nearby in New York, Henry coming back from South Africa, Jen coming by New York. Visiting, as I have annually in the fall-winter since I’ve left, for the Game, visited the old dorm, tunnels, library, dining hall and Bernard. The snow-in-a-can still sticks to our fireplace brick, and they’ve put a new DVD return box in the Adams library.
Iron & Wine, our Halloween costume to mirror our namesakes. Made a flowy thing out of burgundy curtain and a tissue paper wine label (Gamay Rouge, made in California for most likeness as possible), and Jen went crazy attaching metal things to herself (utensils, safety pins, jewelry).
Jojo’s, the dark reddish coffee shop with pillows on the next block from home, joins my list of favorite study spots (with Koffee Too and the architecture library). Each has things to endear (window ledges, warmth, good chai, open space, sun-pouring windows, quiet/noise) and things that bother (dimness at night, cold, quiet/noise, crowds), and where I go at a particular moment depends on a number of these things.
Kites stole a corner of my affection,seeing hundreds of them in the sky in the big grassy field at El Morro, where we dispersed to the edges of the grass to the water and stood on walls, watching families fly so many that they felt like stars. Then flying them on the island of Vieques, standing in the ocean somewhere where the Atlantic merges with the Caribbean (we never could decide where we were standing), the first time I flew a kite in the ocean and the first time, at twenty four, G. flew a kite at all. Then in Vietnam where my favorite photograph is of my favorite person there looking up at one, as she told me how kites work, how you run and release and there it goes, up.
Learned the physical exam and will continue to find new ways to mess it up.
Music reached the height of addiction (this I realize when I get a little physically anxious studying without it). There’s little that can be felt that music doesn’t feel too. It’s kind of amazing that sounds can do that. Books, movies, even food makes sense; we make, as a society and individuals, associations with words, images, tastes; but why are songs in minor key darker and more somber than those in major? Why does a certain bow across a certain string make something in you move too? For that phenomenon…concerts include Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova, Built to Spill, Thao Nguyen, The National, Rachael Yamagata and Bon Iver.
New Mexico tickets bought one week before flying, for my oldest brother’s no-frills-but-beautiful wedding where I made my first speech for the person who raised me with such love and care.
Older, like every year. I can’t remember when I stopped feeling my age but this year was no different in that either.
Published Atrium, the first volume of our literary magazine. Its coming out party consisted of Bar pizza and wine, live music and readings from my classmates and people from the nursing and public health schools, and the majority of our class supporting.
Quit writing only about myself and started writing more about other people, granted because they made me feel or think. This happened because I learned a lot about people outside my friends and family, and in an entirely new setting. The chance to meet, even for a moment, such variety and depth in real people, even though I see the limitations (now and in the future), was the best thing med school’s given me so far.
Richard got married, my first very close friend from high school to do so. Despite this grown up rite, a long California drive and night of champagne and dancing with the girls whose lockers were next to mine for years made me feel how young we are, despite time passed.
Spring break in Puerto Rico was the best week of first year, obviously. Kayaking in a the bioluminescent bay, hiking in the rainforest, ferrying to the beach island of Vieques, lazying on a different beach each day and the hot tub at night. To be outdoors all the time, in weather that rendered lotion unnecessary, was insanely happy.
Turned carrots into carrot cake (“wait, does carrot cake have REAL carrots?” asked an innocent first year), after eating so much of Claire’s carrot cake, and apples into apple pie and flour into pie crust and so on. I love sugar.
Undid the epic knot in my hair, which was particularly unruly due to being wavy and very long this year, and required the long, assiduous work of several friends. 2008 was host to my first distinct hairstyle (that I liked, thus excepting my 6th grade perm). I’ll miss long wavy hair, even if tangled to the point of oblivion.
Vietnam was the place of many firsts: meeting my uncle and relatives, spending a summer abroad, completing the public health project, hot humid days on end without electricity, finding how quickly you adapt to sleeping on back-aching slabs of wood, seeing my dad’s countryside village, riding motobikes with strangers. Best first experience.
Writing has gone slowly: began half a dozen trains of thoughts, finished not close to one. Because I didn’t do it and because it was the one thing I wanted to do most, writing more is my one concrete resolution for this year.
Xiphoid process, an extension of the sternum, was what Allison came up with for an “X” word, when we played the alphabet game night driving through Colorado (after I told her it was not likely we’d spot a “xenophobe”--not being able to see anything, we just guessed at what we might see if it were daytime), showing how much we learned in anatomy.
Yale Med was my life, 2008 being my first full year of being a medical student. It’s hard work, and hard sometimes to learn and cooped up with yourself without being able to do much with it. Though as med students issues of balance, usefulness, and ability arise often, finding a swelling sense purpose in the people, science, and experience reminds me of how lucky I am.
Zero is how many times I talked to strangers, my one resolution for 2008. Oops.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
changes and happenings
A lot of things have happened. While not everything has been smooth or even pleasantly rocky, I feel the heaviest kind of lucky. It's quite sappy how consciously lucky I feel every day to have everything I do, how much it holds up even the worst days. To inadequately recap. I spent the summer in Vietnam to work on a public health project. I traveled to the center and south, and lived in the north. I stayed in a rural town for a couple weeks, visited my dad's old village, and lived with my uncle, his son and his son's family in the city the rest of the time. My cousin's wife, quite possibly the sweetest person I've ever met, cried at the airport when I was leaving.
I spent three full days at home in which my dad told me how he planted a near dying cherry tree in the middle of our yard and my mom armed me with hoisin sauce to bring to New Haven. You know how parents are cute to everyone but their own kids? My parents are so cute even I think so. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, and having a full week with them (and all the brothers, so I think it might be our first full family Thanksgiving ever). My mom keeps reminding me we'll make the turkey together (she made her first one only a couple years ago) and that she'll make my favorite meal too. She and my dad keep asking me if I need funds, something they haven't done in years. I'm guessing they're asking now because they think I've run out, which I was worried about too, but it looks like I'll be able to ride out at least this next year on residual income and aid, which is another part of the luck. But it's funny to me that my mom tells me not to worry about buying a dress for the semi-formal because she doesn't want me to "suffer" (literal translation).
I drove cross country with Allison. We stopped in Tahoe, Lovelock Nevada, Salt Lake City Utah, Denver Colorado, Wall South Dakota, Madison Wisconsin, Rockville Maryland, Lancaster Pennsylvania and arrived here after ten days, 72 hours which were spent driving. We saw lots of rocks and castles, real and figurative. We saw salt and sunsets and my new nephew. We talked a lot, and laughed an unfathomable amount. We played lame games and took pictures of nothing (on the hour). Silly things happened, like our Wisconsin adventure which included bruises and a flooded bathroom. Beautiful things were seen, like Utah and the beautiful beautiful Badlands, which are not castles but make you feel royal, but also small. I'm so so glad that we took the trip and that Allison was the Thelma to my Louise, because how often do you get to do that and more rarely, have it be quite perfect? When in your life you feel both brave and unsure and open to emptiness, drive across your country with your Thelma.
Upon returning to New Haven, I embarked on a scrambled unique honeymoon with the wife, traveling in a 14-foot U-Haul to retrieve and move furniture. First time I've bought real furniture, first time I drove a U-Haul. It took me a full week to get everything and unpack, a week in which I ignored all things school while realizing in class that we were already supposed to have learned in that week what would've amounted last year to a month of material. But it doesn't matter, because I love our new home almost as much as I love the wife. We live on a street lined with restaurants and little shops like the camera store and the random stuff store and the art store and the Art School, and two coffeeshops, including one that's half a block away and owned by Asians who already know how much I love chai. We're on the first floor of an old brick house with hardwood floors and white walls encased in darker wood, with a big kitchen and the homey feel I knew I wanted when we were looking for an apartment. It's just that much farther from school, and that much closer to downtown. Jen and I cook, and Nupur has a bread machine.
School is intense. I can't learn this much this fast. We're learning in modules this year, and we've started with the heart. One of the most interesting, and complicated. Apparently in a month we're supposed to understand the diseases, know the treatments (what do you give first? what's a last resort? what do you give to diabetics?), comprehend how an EKG works and what it's supposed to look like in every kind of dysfunction of your heartbeat (do you know how many different ways your heart can beat?). All this makes me again grateful for being here, without real exams or grades, so I'm still able to appreciate how intellectually satisfying the science is and remember how lucky and awesome it is to pursue something that works your mind and heart. The year's going to be a bit insular, all of us cooped up studying, which sounds kind of sucky but there will probably never be an excuse again to just be cramming in knowledge (hopefully) without other obligations.
At the very least I like the people I'm cooped up with, and through everything else I feel most lucky for the sheer quantity and quality of the people in my life. My college blockmates are all really happy and kicking ass in their respective areas of work/study, and that makes me really happy, to think of everyone growing through the ups and downs of the post-grad years with such grace. It's even crazier to think on the growth with my high school friends who are still some of the best people I know. And in New Haven I have the family I adopted (or who adopted me), people who really love me and at the lowest points (which have indeed already been experienced in the past few weeks) remind me I have absolutely everything I need. Anything that's been hard reminds me also of how there are things I still don't know about myself, and how the more painful experiences force you to know yourself. How you're built, what you value. I know better that honesty matters to me more than acts, that there are things I know I deserve even as much as we hate to use that word on our own behalf, that for as much as I communicate there's a whole lot I miss about even people I know really well and so I need to work on that, that even if you're supposed to pick your battles I will never be able to give up on a person that gave me reason to start trying in the first place. In the end, even if what you find makes things harder--not so much the realization but you yourself--there's good reason for being how you are, and good reason for how each person is.
Reading this over confirms the sap that gratitude makes you produce. But another point is just--so things are quite different. I don't think I'll be blogging much from now on, because I started writing a tiny bit over the summer and I think I want to try as much as I can to continue that, and this year forces me to choose. I'm not sure what happened, but I think it's been this accumulation of gratitude that's pushed me to finally put some things into stories, or rather, clumps. I'll return somewhere in between clumps.
I spent three full days at home in which my dad told me how he planted a near dying cherry tree in the middle of our yard and my mom armed me with hoisin sauce to bring to New Haven. You know how parents are cute to everyone but their own kids? My parents are so cute even I think so. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, and having a full week with them (and all the brothers, so I think it might be our first full family Thanksgiving ever). My mom keeps reminding me we'll make the turkey together (she made her first one only a couple years ago) and that she'll make my favorite meal too. She and my dad keep asking me if I need funds, something they haven't done in years. I'm guessing they're asking now because they think I've run out, which I was worried about too, but it looks like I'll be able to ride out at least this next year on residual income and aid, which is another part of the luck. But it's funny to me that my mom tells me not to worry about buying a dress for the semi-formal because she doesn't want me to "suffer" (literal translation).
I drove cross country with Allison. We stopped in Tahoe, Lovelock Nevada, Salt Lake City Utah, Denver Colorado, Wall South Dakota, Madison Wisconsin, Rockville Maryland, Lancaster Pennsylvania and arrived here after ten days, 72 hours which were spent driving. We saw lots of rocks and castles, real and figurative. We saw salt and sunsets and my new nephew. We talked a lot, and laughed an unfathomable amount. We played lame games and took pictures of nothing (on the hour). Silly things happened, like our Wisconsin adventure which included bruises and a flooded bathroom. Beautiful things were seen, like Utah and the beautiful beautiful Badlands, which are not castles but make you feel royal, but also small. I'm so so glad that we took the trip and that Allison was the Thelma to my Louise, because how often do you get to do that and more rarely, have it be quite perfect? When in your life you feel both brave and unsure and open to emptiness, drive across your country with your Thelma.
Upon returning to New Haven, I embarked on a scrambled unique honeymoon with the wife, traveling in a 14-foot U-Haul to retrieve and move furniture. First time I've bought real furniture, first time I drove a U-Haul. It took me a full week to get everything and unpack, a week in which I ignored all things school while realizing in class that we were already supposed to have learned in that week what would've amounted last year to a month of material. But it doesn't matter, because I love our new home almost as much as I love the wife. We live on a street lined with restaurants and little shops like the camera store and the random stuff store and the art store and the Art School, and two coffeeshops, including one that's half a block away and owned by Asians who already know how much I love chai. We're on the first floor of an old brick house with hardwood floors and white walls encased in darker wood, with a big kitchen and the homey feel I knew I wanted when we were looking for an apartment. It's just that much farther from school, and that much closer to downtown. Jen and I cook, and Nupur has a bread machine.
School is intense. I can't learn this much this fast. We're learning in modules this year, and we've started with the heart. One of the most interesting, and complicated. Apparently in a month we're supposed to understand the diseases, know the treatments (what do you give first? what's a last resort? what do you give to diabetics?), comprehend how an EKG works and what it's supposed to look like in every kind of dysfunction of your heartbeat (do you know how many different ways your heart can beat?). All this makes me again grateful for being here, without real exams or grades, so I'm still able to appreciate how intellectually satisfying the science is and remember how lucky and awesome it is to pursue something that works your mind and heart. The year's going to be a bit insular, all of us cooped up studying, which sounds kind of sucky but there will probably never be an excuse again to just be cramming in knowledge (hopefully) without other obligations.
At the very least I like the people I'm cooped up with, and through everything else I feel most lucky for the sheer quantity and quality of the people in my life. My college blockmates are all really happy and kicking ass in their respective areas of work/study, and that makes me really happy, to think of everyone growing through the ups and downs of the post-grad years with such grace. It's even crazier to think on the growth with my high school friends who are still some of the best people I know. And in New Haven I have the family I adopted (or who adopted me), people who really love me and at the lowest points (which have indeed already been experienced in the past few weeks) remind me I have absolutely everything I need. Anything that's been hard reminds me also of how there are things I still don't know about myself, and how the more painful experiences force you to know yourself. How you're built, what you value. I know better that honesty matters to me more than acts, that there are things I know I deserve even as much as we hate to use that word on our own behalf, that for as much as I communicate there's a whole lot I miss about even people I know really well and so I need to work on that, that even if you're supposed to pick your battles I will never be able to give up on a person that gave me reason to start trying in the first place. In the end, even if what you find makes things harder--not so much the realization but you yourself--there's good reason for being how you are, and good reason for how each person is.
Reading this over confirms the sap that gratitude makes you produce. But another point is just--so things are quite different. I don't think I'll be blogging much from now on, because I started writing a tiny bit over the summer and I think I want to try as much as I can to continue that, and this year forces me to choose. I'm not sure what happened, but I think it's been this accumulation of gratitude that's pushed me to finally put some things into stories, or rather, clumps. I'll return somewhere in between clumps.
Monday, January 15, 2007
new year
new year
I don’t usually reflect on past years or think much about new ones come January. Mostly because the calendar year seldom signals any change for me. I think more in terms of the school year, or my age. This year is the first that I’m not in school, and the first in four years that I haven’t been busy with exams and papers. 2006 was also an “important” year: we graduated, I left a city and group of people that were my home and love and escape and reality for four years, I committed and applied to medical school, A. and I loved and traveled and broke up, I moved into an apartment in San Francisco, I started my first full-time job and derived a new sense of failure and also a new kind of fulfillment, I found myself more distant from my family than when I was 3000 miles away. I was able to organize my photographs and mementos from the past couple of years, I had more time to keep in touch, I had to choose what I wanted to leave at home and what to take for my new place. It was difficult, because I wanted my place to feel different from college but I hadn’t accumulated or done anything new yet, and I felt a step behind my new life. For these and other reasons I can’t quite discern, this year is the first that feels like a new beginning, or at least a time to think about what I’ve been and what I want to be.
Perhaps this comes from learning more about myself and people this past year than I have in a long while, maybe ever, and growing in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s scary, and comforting, to think there’s so much we don’t know. So what is it that I learned? Nothing novel or anything I haven’t thought before, but the thing that was special about 2006 was it wasn’t mere thought, it was actual experience (even if much of that experience happened internally).
The last stretch of Harvard in 2006 was so much more difficult than I foresaw, and so was post-graduation, not because it was bad but because it was so full of everything and many times I felt too small to hold it. No other year have I seen my flaws more deeply and clearly, things that worked against me and what I wanted for others. Getting fixated on little things, being stubbornly self-contained, not being able to get past things and improve, taking advantage of some love and not even recognizing other forms. It's amazing how you can be so aware of your faults but still struggle so much to change. I do think that this happened because of the challenges I accepted and created, and so, it was a byproduct of something necessary. And the faults aren't so bad when the ones you care about seem to like you anyway, and when you know that you, like everyone, are fine and can always keep trying. It was the best surprise to know someone who pushed me to make these efforts, not with pressure but with the steady force of just being there.
And I tried really hard this year. Seems like an odd phrase because I can't quite follow it up with concrete phrases of what I tried really hard to do. Sometimes to stay the same despite everything, and sometimes to be better because of everything. Vague. Through it, I found that I am capable of reaching out after all, and the people who you really love and trust will be there waiting for you. These are few and rare, and thus all the more deserving of the inner effort it takes for me to ask for them. It’s okay to need things from people. I didn’t feel weak, like I feared. It sounds so obvious, but I really did feel more human, at my most broken and torn and confused. I hope that I’ve given a lot of myself. It will always be my nature to keep certain things close, not because I don’t want to share but mostly because I’m not naturally good and open with explicit expression. I also find more and more that this is the way a lot of people are, or at least the people close to me, and that everyone wants/needs signs that you care and want to know before they reveal themselves. And I care and want to know, and there are other people who do too, and they’re worth it. There’s still a long way to go, and all this was the main theme of the story I wrote for creative nonfiction this past semester. It ended: “Still scared, but feeling more capable, I continue.”
At the same time, it’s okay to feel and be alone. During certain moments, it was hard to be away from the bustle of school and the cove of company that keeps me busy and warm. It was odd because before this I’ve always been fine with being alone, but I guess this was a different kind of alone. Feeling loneliness then was new, and though sometimes that did make me feel weak, I ultimately grew to see it again as a human vulnerability. As lonely as that was, I’m glad to have gone through it. Knowing that some things exist independent of environment and other people was something I couldn’t have really felt otherwise.
I’m also glad to have been immersed in college and then be removed from it in the same year, as hard as that also was. Because even though I can’t avoid defining some things as inextricably tied to the college phase and that time in our lives, I can see better now how we are beyond that, not just now after graduation but even within those confines. Yes, the people I know and love do define my college experience, but they themselves aren’t wholly defined by the experience, and neither am I. One of the things I’m most thankful for is the perception of life as a thing that stretches and expands. It helps me find the balance between appreciating what’s past and what’s now, and what can come.
I’ve never made resolutions either. I always thought that kind of thing should be an ongoing process, but I can see the benefit of having a defined time and reason to say, I’m going to do something. I’ve also seen how unrealistically ambitious I tend to get when making lists of to-do. So this year I made some concrete resolutions that will be hard but not impossible: learn to (somewhat) play the guitar, cook a new recipe each week, and get to know San Francisco even more. And those harder conceptual resolutions? I resolve to try to remember all this, to be open, to be more patient and take things one at a time when I’m overwhelmed, to be good to other people and less self-involved, to be the “sort of person upon whom nothing is lost.” I suppose it may be a cop-out to say that my resolution is to try, but 2006 taught me that it’s quite a hard thing to just try, and I don’t want to overlook my own weaknesses in making too bold of a resolution.
So this year, in summary? It has been my happiest, my hardest, my loveliest, my saddest, my best, my favorite, my most. It’s not the last.
I don’t usually reflect on past years or think much about new ones come January. Mostly because the calendar year seldom signals any change for me. I think more in terms of the school year, or my age. This year is the first that I’m not in school, and the first in four years that I haven’t been busy with exams and papers. 2006 was also an “important” year: we graduated, I left a city and group of people that were my home and love and escape and reality for four years, I committed and applied to medical school, A. and I loved and traveled and broke up, I moved into an apartment in San Francisco, I started my first full-time job and derived a new sense of failure and also a new kind of fulfillment, I found myself more distant from my family than when I was 3000 miles away. I was able to organize my photographs and mementos from the past couple of years, I had more time to keep in touch, I had to choose what I wanted to leave at home and what to take for my new place. It was difficult, because I wanted my place to feel different from college but I hadn’t accumulated or done anything new yet, and I felt a step behind my new life. For these and other reasons I can’t quite discern, this year is the first that feels like a new beginning, or at least a time to think about what I’ve been and what I want to be.
Perhaps this comes from learning more about myself and people this past year than I have in a long while, maybe ever, and growing in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s scary, and comforting, to think there’s so much we don’t know. So what is it that I learned? Nothing novel or anything I haven’t thought before, but the thing that was special about 2006 was it wasn’t mere thought, it was actual experience (even if much of that experience happened internally).
The last stretch of Harvard in 2006 was so much more difficult than I foresaw, and so was post-graduation, not because it was bad but because it was so full of everything and many times I felt too small to hold it. No other year have I seen my flaws more deeply and clearly, things that worked against me and what I wanted for others. Getting fixated on little things, being stubbornly self-contained, not being able to get past things and improve, taking advantage of some love and not even recognizing other forms. It's amazing how you can be so aware of your faults but still struggle so much to change. I do think that this happened because of the challenges I accepted and created, and so, it was a byproduct of something necessary. And the faults aren't so bad when the ones you care about seem to like you anyway, and when you know that you, like everyone, are fine and can always keep trying. It was the best surprise to know someone who pushed me to make these efforts, not with pressure but with the steady force of just being there.
And I tried really hard this year. Seems like an odd phrase because I can't quite follow it up with concrete phrases of what I tried really hard to do. Sometimes to stay the same despite everything, and sometimes to be better because of everything. Vague. Through it, I found that I am capable of reaching out after all, and the people who you really love and trust will be there waiting for you. These are few and rare, and thus all the more deserving of the inner effort it takes for me to ask for them. It’s okay to need things from people. I didn’t feel weak, like I feared. It sounds so obvious, but I really did feel more human, at my most broken and torn and confused. I hope that I’ve given a lot of myself. It will always be my nature to keep certain things close, not because I don’t want to share but mostly because I’m not naturally good and open with explicit expression. I also find more and more that this is the way a lot of people are, or at least the people close to me, and that everyone wants/needs signs that you care and want to know before they reveal themselves. And I care and want to know, and there are other people who do too, and they’re worth it. There’s still a long way to go, and all this was the main theme of the story I wrote for creative nonfiction this past semester. It ended: “Still scared, but feeling more capable, I continue.”
At the same time, it’s okay to feel and be alone. During certain moments, it was hard to be away from the bustle of school and the cove of company that keeps me busy and warm. It was odd because before this I’ve always been fine with being alone, but I guess this was a different kind of alone. Feeling loneliness then was new, and though sometimes that did make me feel weak, I ultimately grew to see it again as a human vulnerability. As lonely as that was, I’m glad to have gone through it. Knowing that some things exist independent of environment and other people was something I couldn’t have really felt otherwise.
I’m also glad to have been immersed in college and then be removed from it in the same year, as hard as that also was. Because even though I can’t avoid defining some things as inextricably tied to the college phase and that time in our lives, I can see better now how we are beyond that, not just now after graduation but even within those confines. Yes, the people I know and love do define my college experience, but they themselves aren’t wholly defined by the experience, and neither am I. One of the things I’m most thankful for is the perception of life as a thing that stretches and expands. It helps me find the balance between appreciating what’s past and what’s now, and what can come.
I’ve never made resolutions either. I always thought that kind of thing should be an ongoing process, but I can see the benefit of having a defined time and reason to say, I’m going to do something. I’ve also seen how unrealistically ambitious I tend to get when making lists of to-do. So this year I made some concrete resolutions that will be hard but not impossible: learn to (somewhat) play the guitar, cook a new recipe each week, and get to know San Francisco even more. And those harder conceptual resolutions? I resolve to try to remember all this, to be open, to be more patient and take things one at a time when I’m overwhelmed, to be good to other people and less self-involved, to be the “sort of person upon whom nothing is lost.” I suppose it may be a cop-out to say that my resolution is to try, but 2006 taught me that it’s quite a hard thing to just try, and I don’t want to overlook my own weaknesses in making too bold of a resolution.
So this year, in summary? It has been my happiest, my hardest, my loveliest, my saddest, my best, my favorite, my most. It’s not the last.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
summer in cambridge
For various reasons I decided to stay in Cambridge for the month before summer school starts, instead of going home. It’s been busy, in a good way. The days have been completely full. I’ve had so many first-time experiences in the past month.
Week 1: Dorm Crew
Thrown into a pile of dust and grime, I was told to make it clean. Each day we took off another layer of dirt, moving from the top floor down. The complete procedure consisted of five steps: trashing, sweeping, damp dusting, dry mopping, wet mopping. There’s a lot of cleaning terminology, and whenever our team talked to one another about what we’d been doing or what we needed to do, the vocabulary made me feel like we were playing a game.
I liked the physical process of watching the dust bunnies disappear and making the wooden floors visibly shinier. There’s such gratification in being able to see quantifiable results. There’s almost a false sense of control. Scraping corners with hand brushes and attempting to scoop every last bit of dust made me think of what Steph says about the neverending fight against entropy. We collect dust so that dust could collect again, but somehow there’s slight pleasure in that.
Week 2: Day Counselor
Watching over a group of 9-10 year olds for a few full days was exhausting, but so much fun. I ended up with a group of all girls. Very different personalities, but they got along well together and, thankfully, with me. It surprises me how naturally and easily kids give their affection, and how nice it feels to be on the receiving end, when they hold your hand not because they have to cross the street but because they want to belong to you.
I liked the simple act of taking care of their basic needs. It reminded me of the talks Drew and I had during those five-hour chemistry labs, about that persistent question, why medicine? People never ask me that because there are so many common explanations, but I don’t think it’s at all a straightforward answer. One thing we talked about was how you’re taking care of people on such a basic level. I’m not sure why but it was so fulfilling to have a snack ready when the kids were hungry, and making sure they had enough water throughout the day, and putting on their jackets when they were cold. Not to downplay the frustration induced by constant pleas to repeatedly ride the teacups, inquiries about the time every two minutes, refusals to compromise, and the inability to get along with boys. Tired but not defeated, is how I would describe the counselors.
One of the best parts of the job was that I got to participate in all the kiddie activities. We went to Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire, saw the Lions of the Kalahari at the Museum of Science’s Omni Theater, Fenway, the Aquarium, the Museum of Natural History, and we had field day and a dance on campus.
Most of all I liked getting to know them. It made me think a lot about what I was like as a kid, and what really happens as you grow up.
Row 1: Lizzy, Grace, Annie
Row 2: Lindsay, Hope
Row 3: Anna, Weezie, Sarah
The girls in one word, and in some sentences:
Lizzy: Independent. She was the most difficult one to watch, because she’d always stray from the group, and wouldn’t understand why she couldn’t walk faster or slower than everyone else. She wouldn’t let me do anything for her. Whereas the other kids were always asking me to do things for them, she insisted on getting her own food and drinks, and she even wanted to walk home by herself. When she did need help—like when she got locked out of her room—she rarely admitted it. She would always say, it’s fine, when it clearly wasn’t, something that I do all the time without realizing how unproductive that is. I feel like she’s going to grow up to be Cora Munro, as played by Madeleine Stowe in The Last of the Mohicans, because she’s so strong-willed and smart. She also had a younger, blonde-haired sister named Daisy who was less mature and more innocent, just like Alice Munro. Anyway…she made me rethink the things people, myself included, do in the name of independence.
Grace: Delicate/fierce. The things I love the most seem to embody this dichotomy, so I have a soft spot for Grace. She had this amazingly sweet voice, as though she was giving you a gift every time she spoke. She told me she liked tunnels; she liked how it became dark and “how you went through them.” She was the smallest one and seemed the most fragile, but she was the only one brave enough to go on the big rollercoasters at the amusement park. She was quiet and reserved, but she was intense about things she cared about. She had a younger brother, and at one point he was wandering off. The other girls tried to get Grace’s attention, yelling her name over and over, but she was so intent on watching over her brother that she didn’t even hear them. The girls gave each other nicknames and Grace was “Shinny,” a combination of shy plus skinny. Needless to say, I empathized with her, not that she ever saw herself as being at a disadvantage, which made me love her even more.
Annie: Tough. She’d broken her arm a week before she got here, and her parents didn’t even know until they arrived in Boston. She was still up for all the games and was really athletic. She never complained when she was thirsty or hungry; she didn’t seem to like acknowledging vulnerability. But being an animal-lover and vegetarian, she was frightened by the images of lions hunting prey at the Museum of Science and clung to me during the entire hour. To feel safe enough to admit your fear—it’s a rare feeling, one that I was grateful she could have, and one that I’m only beginning to let myself experience.
Lindsay: Adorable. This girl must be the cutest thing that ever existed. She wasn’t even one of my kids, but every morning when she arrived at our meetingplace I would wish that she was in my group. I was lucky enough to get a chance to spend time with her at the dance because as I was trying to get some of my more relunctant kids to dance, she happily joined in. Don’t let the cute pixie face fool you—this girl can really move and was my favorite dance partner. Later, when she told the other girls that she lived in London, she consented to saying “cheerio” in a British accent, and I so wanted to take her home to keep.
Hope: Introspective. She lagged behind the others, because she kept stopping to look at a pile of rocks or a random stick or a bird underneath an obscure tree. When I asked her about it, she said she liked “being a tourist.” When we played MASH, she wanted to be a scientist, geographer or world explorer. She only stayed for a day, but the next few days I found myself accidentally stopping the group to look back for her, only to see little things she might have been looking at if she had actually been there.
Anna: Beautiful. She’s a halfie and the prettiest eight year old ever. I told her I could see Kristen Kreuk in her. Amy says the most beautiful thing about people is when they don’t know their own beauty, and I see that in most kids, because they haven’t come to the point of self-awareness yet. Even more so in Anna, because she was the messiest, most accident-prone one in our group. She kept spilling things on her clothes, and the first day at the amusement park she scraped her arm and legs and injured her foot (her nickname was Boo-Boo). She was entirely oblivious to these external blemishes, and she gave no thought whatsoever to preserving an outer appearance, which made her all the more beautiful. She also had really small hands that were wrinkled and looked like they had been burnt. When one of the other kids asked her what happened to them, she said, “Nothing happened. I was born that way,” and smiled. When I think of her beauty, I think of her hands before anything else.
Weezie: Spunky. A million personalities piled into one active body. Weezie was the first of my kids who I met, and she was wearing one blue sock and one green sock when I met her. She spoke a mile a minute, and you had to pay attention because amidst the usual nonsensical kid talk she would say the most insightful things. When I spoke to her, I never doubted that she understood what I was saying. She encouraged me to be a photographer because photographers capture what other people think are pretty but don’t think to capture, and she told me that college is about experiences, and that being a doctor is about being nice. When nine years of life can give me so much, it makes me wonder at how much she’s going to give the world in the future.
Sarah: Precocious. She would pick up on things that adults think children don’t notice, and that’s the thing with kids. They notice everything. Seeing and understanding are different. We think that just because they might not understand something, they’ll ignore it, when really, they’re just taking it in, storing it and unraveling it later.
Week 3: HMS Premedical Institute
So for five days we worked with a simulator named Stan (short for “Standard Patient”) whose heart beat and lungs breathed. Without much instruction they told us to take care of him. We had to figure out what was wrong, and then we had to fix it. It was both an intellectual process and an emotional endeavor. It sounds simplistic, and that’s the fault of my expression, but I’m not sure the mechanics of it would really convey what it was like.
We performed practice surgery (virtual reality), and the idea of having to navigate the human body was simultaneously familiar and foreign (we all thought: Magic School Bus!). It’s funny how little you know about your own physical self. Then I got an ultrasound. How weird and awesome is that, to be able to see your insides on a screen? The doctor confirmed that I didn’t have gallbladder or kidney stones. Then I saw my heart for the first time. I had to hold my breath in order for it to show up, and I almost forgot to start breathing again. It was beautiful, in the way that art is beautiful. You begin to see everything as organic creations and programmatic systems at the same time, and it’s mind-blowing.
The group of people also made it really fun. I got to know my blockmates in a different way, and other Harvard people better, and people outside of our school. Being pre-med means that you’re often categorized by certain mentalities, certain courses of study, certain manners of doing things. It was nice to get at more meaningful ways of connecting people interested in medicine—a particular passion for people, for solving things, for being challenged.
On the last day they gave us a book called “On Doctoring.” It’s a compilation of stories, poems and essays on medicine, patient care, illness, death. The first thing I read was the last paragraph of the introduction: “Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘To affect the quality of the day—that is the highest of arts.’ Both medicine and literature have the capacity to affect the quality of the human day. Resonances between these two disciplines offer us a unique view of the human condition that neither one alone can provide.” Ever since freshman year, after that brief but significant interaction with Artichoke, I’ve been reading a lot by and about William Carlos Williams. The figurehead for the doctor poet. The book includes a lot by him and by so many other writers I love and admire, and I was touched by how fitting an ending to the week the book was.
WCW writes, “The physician enjoys a wonderful opportunity actually to witness the words being born. Their actual colors and shapes are laid before him carrying their tiny burdens which he is privileged to take into his care with their unspoiled newness. He may see the difficulty with which they have been born and what they are destined to do. No one else is present but the speaker and ourselves, we have been the words’ very parents. Nothing is more moving.”
It’s amazing how long it’s taken me to come to a very simple conclusion, or to jolt myself into consciously knowing what my fingertips have always sensed. I want to take care of people, and I want to write. The how part will come later.
Week 4: Project HEALTH
I moved into Eliot House on Saturday. What a difference a five minute walk makes. Living here feels different from Adams in so many ways. We have neighbors, other houses. My room looks into the courtyard, our common room looks out on the river. It gets so quiet as you walk down Dunster St. away from the bustle of the square toward the cove of river houses. It makes me feel like I’m sharing a secret—with who, I don’t know.
Organizing the Summer Policy Institute for Project HEALTH has been a lot of work, and I hope it goes well. Though a bit intimidated by the responsibility, I like having the control to shape an entire program. Just in preparing for the weekly speakers, I’ve learned so much. There are so many people out there working on ways to improve other people’s lives, and even though the sheer number and immensity of problems that exist is daunting, it makes people’s desire to help so admirable. A bit more on this later, coupled with a movie update (which actually do relate).
It’s nicely surprising how different your life can become even when you remain in the same physical space. Harvard in the summer is nothing like Harvard during the school year, and not just because my classes haven’t started yet. The long days induce warm laziness. With less students you notice a different flow of people through the square. There are so many trees here. I can’t stop looking at them. Of course we have a lot of trees in California, but they’re not clustered quite in the same way. The palm trees in front of my house are always there. Boston trees seem to revive, all at once; they make you aware of their presence, as light and airy as they are. It’s a sudden discovery, but quiet at the same time. I try to think of ways to describe them, but I can only fall back on the simple, familiar, stock adjectives. Green and leafy. The funny thing is, these generic words suffice. Every time a season starts I’m convinced it’s my favorite season, so right now I’m in love with summer. The beginnings are so sweet.
Week 1: Dorm Crew
Thrown into a pile of dust and grime, I was told to make it clean. Each day we took off another layer of dirt, moving from the top floor down. The complete procedure consisted of five steps: trashing, sweeping, damp dusting, dry mopping, wet mopping. There’s a lot of cleaning terminology, and whenever our team talked to one another about what we’d been doing or what we needed to do, the vocabulary made me feel like we were playing a game.
I liked the physical process of watching the dust bunnies disappear and making the wooden floors visibly shinier. There’s such gratification in being able to see quantifiable results. There’s almost a false sense of control. Scraping corners with hand brushes and attempting to scoop every last bit of dust made me think of what Steph says about the neverending fight against entropy. We collect dust so that dust could collect again, but somehow there’s slight pleasure in that.
Week 2: Day Counselor
Watching over a group of 9-10 year olds for a few full days was exhausting, but so much fun. I ended up with a group of all girls. Very different personalities, but they got along well together and, thankfully, with me. It surprises me how naturally and easily kids give their affection, and how nice it feels to be on the receiving end, when they hold your hand not because they have to cross the street but because they want to belong to you.
I liked the simple act of taking care of their basic needs. It reminded me of the talks Drew and I had during those five-hour chemistry labs, about that persistent question, why medicine? People never ask me that because there are so many common explanations, but I don’t think it’s at all a straightforward answer. One thing we talked about was how you’re taking care of people on such a basic level. I’m not sure why but it was so fulfilling to have a snack ready when the kids were hungry, and making sure they had enough water throughout the day, and putting on their jackets when they were cold. Not to downplay the frustration induced by constant pleas to repeatedly ride the teacups, inquiries about the time every two minutes, refusals to compromise, and the inability to get along with boys. Tired but not defeated, is how I would describe the counselors.
One of the best parts of the job was that I got to participate in all the kiddie activities. We went to Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire, saw the Lions of the Kalahari at the Museum of Science’s Omni Theater, Fenway, the Aquarium, the Museum of Natural History, and we had field day and a dance on campus.
Most of all I liked getting to know them. It made me think a lot about what I was like as a kid, and what really happens as you grow up.
Row 1: Lizzy, Grace, Annie
Row 2: Lindsay, Hope
Row 3: Anna, Weezie, Sarah
The girls in one word, and in some sentences:
Lizzy: Independent. She was the most difficult one to watch, because she’d always stray from the group, and wouldn’t understand why she couldn’t walk faster or slower than everyone else. She wouldn’t let me do anything for her. Whereas the other kids were always asking me to do things for them, she insisted on getting her own food and drinks, and she even wanted to walk home by herself. When she did need help—like when she got locked out of her room—she rarely admitted it. She would always say, it’s fine, when it clearly wasn’t, something that I do all the time without realizing how unproductive that is. I feel like she’s going to grow up to be Cora Munro, as played by Madeleine Stowe in The Last of the Mohicans, because she’s so strong-willed and smart. She also had a younger, blonde-haired sister named Daisy who was less mature and more innocent, just like Alice Munro. Anyway…she made me rethink the things people, myself included, do in the name of independence.
Grace: Delicate/fierce. The things I love the most seem to embody this dichotomy, so I have a soft spot for Grace. She had this amazingly sweet voice, as though she was giving you a gift every time she spoke. She told me she liked tunnels; she liked how it became dark and “how you went through them.” She was the smallest one and seemed the most fragile, but she was the only one brave enough to go on the big rollercoasters at the amusement park. She was quiet and reserved, but she was intense about things she cared about. She had a younger brother, and at one point he was wandering off. The other girls tried to get Grace’s attention, yelling her name over and over, but she was so intent on watching over her brother that she didn’t even hear them. The girls gave each other nicknames and Grace was “Shinny,” a combination of shy plus skinny. Needless to say, I empathized with her, not that she ever saw herself as being at a disadvantage, which made me love her even more.
Annie: Tough. She’d broken her arm a week before she got here, and her parents didn’t even know until they arrived in Boston. She was still up for all the games and was really athletic. She never complained when she was thirsty or hungry; she didn’t seem to like acknowledging vulnerability. But being an animal-lover and vegetarian, she was frightened by the images of lions hunting prey at the Museum of Science and clung to me during the entire hour. To feel safe enough to admit your fear—it’s a rare feeling, one that I was grateful she could have, and one that I’m only beginning to let myself experience.
Lindsay: Adorable. This girl must be the cutest thing that ever existed. She wasn’t even one of my kids, but every morning when she arrived at our meetingplace I would wish that she was in my group. I was lucky enough to get a chance to spend time with her at the dance because as I was trying to get some of my more relunctant kids to dance, she happily joined in. Don’t let the cute pixie face fool you—this girl can really move and was my favorite dance partner. Later, when she told the other girls that she lived in London, she consented to saying “cheerio” in a British accent, and I so wanted to take her home to keep.
Hope: Introspective. She lagged behind the others, because she kept stopping to look at a pile of rocks or a random stick or a bird underneath an obscure tree. When I asked her about it, she said she liked “being a tourist.” When we played MASH, she wanted to be a scientist, geographer or world explorer. She only stayed for a day, but the next few days I found myself accidentally stopping the group to look back for her, only to see little things she might have been looking at if she had actually been there.
Anna: Beautiful. She’s a halfie and the prettiest eight year old ever. I told her I could see Kristen Kreuk in her. Amy says the most beautiful thing about people is when they don’t know their own beauty, and I see that in most kids, because they haven’t come to the point of self-awareness yet. Even more so in Anna, because she was the messiest, most accident-prone one in our group. She kept spilling things on her clothes, and the first day at the amusement park she scraped her arm and legs and injured her foot (her nickname was Boo-Boo). She was entirely oblivious to these external blemishes, and she gave no thought whatsoever to preserving an outer appearance, which made her all the more beautiful. She also had really small hands that were wrinkled and looked like they had been burnt. When one of the other kids asked her what happened to them, she said, “Nothing happened. I was born that way,” and smiled. When I think of her beauty, I think of her hands before anything else.
Weezie: Spunky. A million personalities piled into one active body. Weezie was the first of my kids who I met, and she was wearing one blue sock and one green sock when I met her. She spoke a mile a minute, and you had to pay attention because amidst the usual nonsensical kid talk she would say the most insightful things. When I spoke to her, I never doubted that she understood what I was saying. She encouraged me to be a photographer because photographers capture what other people think are pretty but don’t think to capture, and she told me that college is about experiences, and that being a doctor is about being nice. When nine years of life can give me so much, it makes me wonder at how much she’s going to give the world in the future.
Sarah: Precocious. She would pick up on things that adults think children don’t notice, and that’s the thing with kids. They notice everything. Seeing and understanding are different. We think that just because they might not understand something, they’ll ignore it, when really, they’re just taking it in, storing it and unraveling it later.
Week 3: HMS Premedical Institute
So for five days we worked with a simulator named Stan (short for “Standard Patient”) whose heart beat and lungs breathed. Without much instruction they told us to take care of him. We had to figure out what was wrong, and then we had to fix it. It was both an intellectual process and an emotional endeavor. It sounds simplistic, and that’s the fault of my expression, but I’m not sure the mechanics of it would really convey what it was like.
We performed practice surgery (virtual reality), and the idea of having to navigate the human body was simultaneously familiar and foreign (we all thought: Magic School Bus!). It’s funny how little you know about your own physical self. Then I got an ultrasound. How weird and awesome is that, to be able to see your insides on a screen? The doctor confirmed that I didn’t have gallbladder or kidney stones. Then I saw my heart for the first time. I had to hold my breath in order for it to show up, and I almost forgot to start breathing again. It was beautiful, in the way that art is beautiful. You begin to see everything as organic creations and programmatic systems at the same time, and it’s mind-blowing.
The group of people also made it really fun. I got to know my blockmates in a different way, and other Harvard people better, and people outside of our school. Being pre-med means that you’re often categorized by certain mentalities, certain courses of study, certain manners of doing things. It was nice to get at more meaningful ways of connecting people interested in medicine—a particular passion for people, for solving things, for being challenged.
On the last day they gave us a book called “On Doctoring.” It’s a compilation of stories, poems and essays on medicine, patient care, illness, death. The first thing I read was the last paragraph of the introduction: “Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘To affect the quality of the day—that is the highest of arts.’ Both medicine and literature have the capacity to affect the quality of the human day. Resonances between these two disciplines offer us a unique view of the human condition that neither one alone can provide.” Ever since freshman year, after that brief but significant interaction with Artichoke, I’ve been reading a lot by and about William Carlos Williams. The figurehead for the doctor poet. The book includes a lot by him and by so many other writers I love and admire, and I was touched by how fitting an ending to the week the book was.
WCW writes, “The physician enjoys a wonderful opportunity actually to witness the words being born. Their actual colors and shapes are laid before him carrying their tiny burdens which he is privileged to take into his care with their unspoiled newness. He may see the difficulty with which they have been born and what they are destined to do. No one else is present but the speaker and ourselves, we have been the words’ very parents. Nothing is more moving.”
It’s amazing how long it’s taken me to come to a very simple conclusion, or to jolt myself into consciously knowing what my fingertips have always sensed. I want to take care of people, and I want to write. The how part will come later.
Week 4: Project HEALTH
I moved into Eliot House on Saturday. What a difference a five minute walk makes. Living here feels different from Adams in so many ways. We have neighbors, other houses. My room looks into the courtyard, our common room looks out on the river. It gets so quiet as you walk down Dunster St. away from the bustle of the square toward the cove of river houses. It makes me feel like I’m sharing a secret—with who, I don’t know.
Organizing the Summer Policy Institute for Project HEALTH has been a lot of work, and I hope it goes well. Though a bit intimidated by the responsibility, I like having the control to shape an entire program. Just in preparing for the weekly speakers, I’ve learned so much. There are so many people out there working on ways to improve other people’s lives, and even though the sheer number and immensity of problems that exist is daunting, it makes people’s desire to help so admirable. A bit more on this later, coupled with a movie update (which actually do relate).
It’s nicely surprising how different your life can become even when you remain in the same physical space. Harvard in the summer is nothing like Harvard during the school year, and not just because my classes haven’t started yet. The long days induce warm laziness. With less students you notice a different flow of people through the square. There are so many trees here. I can’t stop looking at them. Of course we have a lot of trees in California, but they’re not clustered quite in the same way. The palm trees in front of my house are always there. Boston trees seem to revive, all at once; they make you aware of their presence, as light and airy as they are. It’s a sudden discovery, but quiet at the same time. I try to think of ways to describe them, but I can only fall back on the simple, familiar, stock adjectives. Green and leafy. The funny thing is, these generic words suffice. Every time a season starts I’m convinced it’s my favorite season, so right now I’m in love with summer. The beginnings are so sweet.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
socal adventure
Friday:
Arrive at Richard's house. Attempt to parallel park next to the curved curb. Encounter his relatives. His sister shows me embarrassing photographs of him that we've all seen. Little boy offers me a lychee jelly drink. Nearly permanently damage another child. Jeopardy. Precautions, goodbyes, and reminders from Richard's parents. Big fat map. Aud is a robot. Nonstop talk one second, sound asleep the next. Music requests. "Do you have Christina Aguilera's Dirrty?" "I DO!" "...I was kidding." The mystery of idle construction workers with cones. Aud goes to the bathroom often but scarily fast. Britney Spears's Toxic. Snack bag. Peanut butter crackers turn out to be cheese crackers. 10 PM traffic. (F)alicia Rice. Why calicos are female. Malcolm's fur pattern. Peachy colored apartment.
Saturday:
Slightly complicated shower. Bagels and cereal. Self-realization becomes self-parody. The Passat. Parking for Mr. Lee only. Sunglasses. Sushi and tempura green tea ice cream. Kristen's work. Aud reads Japanese. Black Eyed Peas. The Getty. So California. Irises. Pictures. Three dollar kid-size T-shirts. Drop Richard off at frat house with messy front lawn (styrofoam cups and beat up couch). "The Row." Winding hills and roads to Topanga Canyon. Topanga Canyon. "I'm going to pee." "Okay. Does anyone have napkins?" Persistent bee. Serendipitous hummingbird. Close toed shoes (flip flops in trunk) and photographs of closed toe shoes. "Did we all take pictures of our feet?" Invisible Man. Third Street Promenade. La Salsa. Crazy crowds. Anthropologie. Santa Monica beach at night. Wet jeans and sandy toes. Kristen on starting a water fight: "I don't know...would you guys get mad?" Chimes on the pier. Wayside stories. Hollywood drive. Dead end. Tattoo shops. Coldplay. Green eyes. Cynthia Street (Victoria: "Let's see where she goes.") Life after college. Drunken phone call. "So what'd you guys do today?...Where'd you go today?...What did you guys do?" No more apologies. Topanga and Cory. Outkast's Roses. Kristen and Aud sleep horizontally.
Sunday:
Sleeping in. Subway sandwiches and Popeye's. Victo's workplace. Venice Beach. Venice Beach Recreation Center. Finally find college roommates and friends. Three-person Frisbee team. Melkis's fingernails. Steph and Jey's sand crabs. Neil/Lance Armstrong. Head back north. Richard sleeps. Aud takes over and promptly gets on the wrong highway. Quality friends. Japanese song. Kaze means wind. Details of Aud's life: gymnastics, remarriage, religion, calling to live on a boat, her mom's life. Parental stories. We know you're not irresponsible or spoiled. Fight Club (Now what should I do? Go to college. Now what? Get married). Life after college, again. I Love the 90's. Bad movies. Super personal question (Answer: No). Shrimp chips ("Geez Kim, this bag was at least half full!"). Aud on night driving: "It wasn't like we were in a different place; it was like we always did this." Spotting five different car accidents. Lending Aud's sister the ND cap, gown and perhaps diploma ("Congratulations...Muto"). Phone calls from Richard's dad ("Hello?" "Rich?" "...No, this is Kim." * "Hello?" "Kim?" "...No, this is Audrey.") Melted chocolate raisins. Richard looks lost. Richard finds the squigee. Simultaenously sudden laughter. Richard demands that we stop laughing. Milk or dark chocolate? House sitting for Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez. First CD's. Making memories mode. Missing the bandwagon. Good, good conversations that flowed into one another in such a way that I can only remember the feelings and none of the words. Home, and sleep.
***
One road trip. Two and a half days. Five friends. Four girls and a guy. Two cars. Two iPods and many songs. Two full size beds and one sleeping bag. Two In-N-Out stops and numerous bathroom stops. Two breakfasts, and three eat-out meals. Two beaches. One high school and five colleges. Two long drives and several short ones.
How to end the counting? Not at all.
Arrive at Richard's house. Attempt to parallel park next to the curved curb. Encounter his relatives. His sister shows me embarrassing photographs of him that we've all seen. Little boy offers me a lychee jelly drink. Nearly permanently damage another child. Jeopardy. Precautions, goodbyes, and reminders from Richard's parents. Big fat map. Aud is a robot. Nonstop talk one second, sound asleep the next. Music requests. "Do you have Christina Aguilera's Dirrty?" "I DO!" "...I was kidding." The mystery of idle construction workers with cones. Aud goes to the bathroom often but scarily fast. Britney Spears's Toxic. Snack bag. Peanut butter crackers turn out to be cheese crackers. 10 PM traffic. (F)alicia Rice. Why calicos are female. Malcolm's fur pattern. Peachy colored apartment.
Saturday:
Slightly complicated shower. Bagels and cereal. Self-realization becomes self-parody. The Passat. Parking for Mr. Lee only. Sunglasses. Sushi and tempura green tea ice cream. Kristen's work. Aud reads Japanese. Black Eyed Peas. The Getty. So California. Irises. Pictures. Three dollar kid-size T-shirts. Drop Richard off at frat house with messy front lawn (styrofoam cups and beat up couch). "The Row." Winding hills and roads to Topanga Canyon. Topanga Canyon. "I'm going to pee." "Okay. Does anyone have napkins?" Persistent bee. Serendipitous hummingbird. Close toed shoes (flip flops in trunk) and photographs of closed toe shoes. "Did we all take pictures of our feet?" Invisible Man. Third Street Promenade. La Salsa. Crazy crowds. Anthropologie. Santa Monica beach at night. Wet jeans and sandy toes. Kristen on starting a water fight: "I don't know...would you guys get mad?" Chimes on the pier. Wayside stories. Hollywood drive. Dead end. Tattoo shops. Coldplay. Green eyes. Cynthia Street (Victoria: "Let's see where she goes.") Life after college. Drunken phone call. "So what'd you guys do today?...Where'd you go today?...What did you guys do?" No more apologies. Topanga and Cory. Outkast's Roses. Kristen and Aud sleep horizontally.
Sunday:
Sleeping in. Subway sandwiches and Popeye's. Victo's workplace. Venice Beach. Venice Beach Recreation Center. Finally find college roommates and friends. Three-person Frisbee team. Melkis's fingernails. Steph and Jey's sand crabs. Neil/Lance Armstrong. Head back north. Richard sleeps. Aud takes over and promptly gets on the wrong highway. Quality friends. Japanese song. Kaze means wind. Details of Aud's life: gymnastics, remarriage, religion, calling to live on a boat, her mom's life. Parental stories. We know you're not irresponsible or spoiled. Fight Club (Now what should I do? Go to college. Now what? Get married). Life after college, again. I Love the 90's. Bad movies. Super personal question (Answer: No). Shrimp chips ("Geez Kim, this bag was at least half full!"). Aud on night driving: "It wasn't like we were in a different place; it was like we always did this." Spotting five different car accidents. Lending Aud's sister the ND cap, gown and perhaps diploma ("Congratulations...Muto"). Phone calls from Richard's dad ("Hello?" "Rich?" "...No, this is Kim." * "Hello?" "Kim?" "...No, this is Audrey.") Melted chocolate raisins. Richard looks lost. Richard finds the squigee. Simultaenously sudden laughter. Richard demands that we stop laughing. Milk or dark chocolate? House sitting for Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez. First CD's. Making memories mode. Missing the bandwagon. Good, good conversations that flowed into one another in such a way that I can only remember the feelings and none of the words. Home, and sleep.
***
One road trip. Two and a half days. Five friends. Four girls and a guy. Two cars. Two iPods and many songs. Two full size beds and one sleeping bag. Two In-N-Out stops and numerous bathroom stops. Two breakfasts, and three eat-out meals. Two beaches. One high school and five colleges. Two long drives and several short ones.
How to end the counting? Not at all.
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