I came to medical school for real people stories. Blogging by nature is self-involved and I usually have little to write about other than myself, which in college I found to be the main thing I wanted to change about my life. The first year of school has been fulfilling in huge part to feeling that, albeit very slowly, I'm on the way to doing that.
We've been introduced to patients in different ways. One of my favorite classes this past semester was Biological Basis of Behavior, which had us study a small corner of psychiatry on a neurobiological and personal level. After each lecture a patient with an illness related to the lecture came in to talk to our class for an hour. This included PTSD, drug addiction, schizophrenia, OCD, binge eating, depression and narcolepsy. The thing that really struck me about them, overall, relates to something Allison once said about how psychiatric disorders are on the extreme end of a spectrum that we're all a part of. For these people, the things we all do were greater in degree and longer in duration.
It was hard to see how memories plagued the Vietnam veteran with PTSD so longer after the war. I always thought my memories lingered abnormally long, but here was a person defined against his will by his past. The man with drug addiction was a doctor, whose career had been put in jeopardy because of his problem. He had real insight into his disorder; he seemed to understand its character so well, even as he knew that despite that knowledge, it was still a struggle to battle it. Don mentioned that his articulation was a function of his education, and that perhaps this insight doesn't come across as clearly with other patients. I hadn't thought of that, and makes me wonder how much expression really conveys comprehension, and what I need to learn to see people beyond what they're capable of showing. I wrote a little about the woman with schizophrenia in the last entry. She was shaking slightly as she spoke to us, I remember her sitting on her hands, and she shared the big and little of her life with us. The narcoleptic person talked about not being able to keep a job, how he was often let go. He said, "I should've been more of a fighter when it came to doing things for myself. I just thought it was time to move on." The man with OCD was a lawyer, whose disorder seemed to pervade his life but he also said no one but his wife and mother knew about it, said that he was good at hiding it. Made me think that patients' relationships with themselves, and with their disorders, are pretty complex. He had an incredibly patient wife, to whom he would relate all the little things that drove him nuts, each night. He'd list the things throughout the day that he obsessed about--did he lock that key, did he mail that letter. And she'd listen, and tell him he was being ridiculous. I remember being frustrated with the interview with the man with a binge eating disorder, because the questions asked of him weren't at all conducive to getting his story. Afterwards a few students came up to him to ask him more, and in those few moments we learned a lot. The absence of something made me feel a little better what I seek.
The man with depression gave us something singular. The other patients told us about their illnesses, but this patient experienced his illness right in front of us. He shed tears continuously through the interview, often without any stimulus. His wife had passed away in the eighties, and he had symptoms of depression back then but it didn't come on full-strength until a few years later and has lasted since then. When asked by a student whether he had any long-term goals, he interpreted the question as asking him what kept him going, in the face of such debilitating depression. He said that that day, his goal was to get to our class. On some days, it was to brush his teeth. He said: "Do I think it's strange that it's been so long, that it hasn't gone away? Yes. Why haven't I given up? Is there something? I don't know." After a few moments, he said, "I hope to get better."
This question brought me back to a conversation I had with the classmate who asked it, a bit earlier, after our pre-clinical clerkship session at the nursing home. Another way we've been introduced to patients and patient care is through pre-clinical clerkship, weekly sessions that expose us to different areas of medicine. We've learned to do physical exams on newborns, interviewed child/adolescent patients, examined and described art to hone observation skills.
My favorite this semester was the geriatrics session, where we performed mini-cognitive tests on the residents. I was bit blown away by how every group discovered cognitive deficits in their residents; I've been so used to practicing the neuro exam on my classmates who have mastered saying the months backwards. The patients we saw couldn't draw clocks that depicted 4:30, or think of more than a few words that started with A. The person my group spoke to knew it was April, but when asked what season it was, she paused. Instead of looking back through the window behind her for a clue from the weather, she stared ahead and I wondered what she was looking at or for. Then she said, fall and I think all of our hearts broke a little.
On the shuttle ride back to school, the classmate and I talked about the session. He'd found it depressing, because he placed so much value on cognitive ability, our capacity to think about our lives and what they're for. I told him I agreed, but that I also liked geriatrics. In the most kind way, he asked me what the point was. I didn't have too good of an answer then, aside from my usual perspective of trying despite an end, because isn't that what everything is on a large scale. Talking about it afterwards, I realized that it's about experiencing things, more so than thinking or expressing. I can't really say what those geriatric patients feel or think, but they must experience. Even if I can't ever understand it or connect to it in a conventional way, it feels worthwhile, maybe all the more so because it's fragile and remote. It feels more moment to moment, rather than continuous with memories and goals and future. With the person with depression, he didn't seem to be thinking about purpose. He just wanted to get through each moment. He just wanted to experience the next second.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
people part one: classmates
Back in college, my roommates and I ate frozen yogurt in cake cones voraciously. I love cake cokes and defend their superiority over sugar cones (which I do like but are just not the same) every chance I get. The yogurt or ice cream softens the cone as you eat; you still get the crunch, but it's molded into the texture of the ice cream so that you get everything in one bite. The flat bottom of the cone is divided into squares, so the ice cream fills the space between and it amplifies the effect of the upper cone and gives it something new too. As we ate our cones with each other and in contentment, and got to the bottom, we'd say, this is the best part. Without ever saying it explicitly, we adopted this as a mantra for what was the best part of college--each other. In thinking about the first year of medical school, it's true again that the bottom of my cake cone is the people, on several levels, one of them again being my classmates.
A woman with schizophrenia came to talk to us in one of our classes who made me think about my friendships. When asked if she had friends or people close to her, she said that she'd never had many and currently she had one. When then asked how that was for her--to have just one friend--she said, "I feel really lucky to have the one, because it's so hard to find people who really care about you, who want the best for you." It took one friend--and maybe because it was just one--for her to so sincerely feel the value of friendship. It made me feel overwhelmingly lucky, to have met and gotten to know and become friends with the people in my life.
I don't become close to people or let them get to know me very easily. It took me a year and a half in high school before finding the people who were my friends at the end, and I was no good at the orientation thing in college. So coming here I was a little worried, because I didn't know if med school would give me the luxury of time to cultivate closeness amidst my shyness and introversion. I was doubly surprised. Early on, I found kindness and openness and humor. As the year went on, after the usual threshold when comfort sets in and you stop seeking, I found more.
My friends here are wonderful. No matter how I'm feeling, they make me laugh without fail. For this reason I've gotten a reputation for laughing at everything. As I've explained to them, I laugh at things that aren't really funny but that are characteristically them, things that make them endearing and amusing and there's so much of that. They pay attention and they really care. They come to my room when I look upset in the elevator, ask how much sleep I've gotten when I look awful, patiently listen to me ramble and overthink and overfeel, bring me notes when they notice I'm not in class and food when I don't want to go out for dinner. I go to class and linger at the worst cafeteria in the world for their company and any time spent in conversation with them feels full. And beyond and independent of what they do for me, they are just good people, the kind that don't have to do anything for you in particular to make you feel that you're glad to know them.
One night I was telling Jen that I can remember exactly how I met most people in our class. I can see clearly in my mind where I was and what was said. During SAY (pre-orientation), we sat in a circle for one of those icebreakers where we had to repeat the names of the people sitting next to us. I remember thinking it was just my luck to be phonetically challenged...and have Prathap on my left and Bibhav on my right. Looking back, how lucky I was to have met my good friends on my first day at Yale. Bibhav was always smiling, and Prathap became part of my PCC group though for a long time I was intimidated by how nice he was. I also met the rest of my PCC group, and Henry and Nupur at SAY. I met Macdale at the barbecue right before the icebreaker and remember feeling that maybe he didn't find me very interesting but he would always say hello to me after that so I got over it. I met Don that first day too, sitting across from him at a blue table next to Harkness lawn, one of the ones in the middle. I remember not knowing whether he was a first or second year because he exuded a sort of laid-back quality and didn't force his presence as a newcomer. My next interactions with him over the coming weeks centered around being Vietnamese. I remember standing outside the Harkness door in a halter top on a warm night to go out and talking to him about going to Vietnam, how we both wanted to go there next summer. Then I remember him turning from his row in front of me during White Coat to tell me that his parents asked him about the one other Vietnamese person in our class, and then how his dad saw me afterwards and asked me in Vietnamese whether I was Vietnamese.
I remember meeting Allison at another blue table, this time in the corner close to the walkway, on a later day of orientation and how she told me about her California/Northwest road trip and how she ate a lot of food in the Sunset district and how we found out we'd both be orphans for the white coat ceremony and would be going to the orphan dinner together. And she came up to me after the ceremony and said, Hi orphan, and I remember feeling glad she remembered. Narae, I knew about beforehand from Albert, and when I saw her walk by (while sitting on yet another blue table), I was excited to have something automatically in common to bring up with a stranger. Haha, I remember she said, Oh yeah, I know about you, then went on her way, and we didn't have a real conversation until the next semester. I sat next to Jen during a talk for SAY, in Marigold's, where we discovered I was from the same town as her then boyfriend. She came with me and Allison to Ikea the next weekend and later told me she found it awkward because she didn't know how to talk to girls. She told me this post-Indian-food-debacle in the winter, which is when we actually became friends. I don't know how long these images will stay with me so it's nice to write them down.
I am grateful to those small moments that have grown, for the people. For one who supports his friends in so many ways, offering help in the endeavors we undertake like going through all his pictures for the sake of my magazine, is so passionate about the well-being of other people, who perceives so much from afar and comes close only when he thinks it will help, never for his own reasons. And who never gets tired of the same joke. Another who I can call when I'm sick on Saturday morning and will go out of his way to get me medicine, but who above all is fair and gives everyone the benefit of the doubt and listens to anything and everything you have to say. I'm glad for the friend who checked out all the coffeeshops in New Haven, asks me questions, doesn't judge me for my foolish choices, never makes me feel that our conversations are cutting into her time because it's genuinely what she cares about, who always reminds me of not school but life. And for the friend who values honesty and straightforwardness and rationale but still loves me for the complications and emotions, and who sees the immensity of small things and small gestures. And the one who makes me smile just by the way she answers the phone, who is fiercely loyal and tells it as it is without qualms, who tells me when I did something right and when I did something wrong. I'm glad for the one who's made me grow and be more patient, more accepting, who wears everything on his sleeve and makes it natural to ask things of people, who surprises me with what he remembers and how he tries.
We'd say, this is the best part, often, because once you get to the bottom there's still more.
A woman with schizophrenia came to talk to us in one of our classes who made me think about my friendships. When asked if she had friends or people close to her, she said that she'd never had many and currently she had one. When then asked how that was for her--to have just one friend--she said, "I feel really lucky to have the one, because it's so hard to find people who really care about you, who want the best for you." It took one friend--and maybe because it was just one--for her to so sincerely feel the value of friendship. It made me feel overwhelmingly lucky, to have met and gotten to know and become friends with the people in my life.
I don't become close to people or let them get to know me very easily. It took me a year and a half in high school before finding the people who were my friends at the end, and I was no good at the orientation thing in college. So coming here I was a little worried, because I didn't know if med school would give me the luxury of time to cultivate closeness amidst my shyness and introversion. I was doubly surprised. Early on, I found kindness and openness and humor. As the year went on, after the usual threshold when comfort sets in and you stop seeking, I found more.
My friends here are wonderful. No matter how I'm feeling, they make me laugh without fail. For this reason I've gotten a reputation for laughing at everything. As I've explained to them, I laugh at things that aren't really funny but that are characteristically them, things that make them endearing and amusing and there's so much of that. They pay attention and they really care. They come to my room when I look upset in the elevator, ask how much sleep I've gotten when I look awful, patiently listen to me ramble and overthink and overfeel, bring me notes when they notice I'm not in class and food when I don't want to go out for dinner. I go to class and linger at the worst cafeteria in the world for their company and any time spent in conversation with them feels full. And beyond and independent of what they do for me, they are just good people, the kind that don't have to do anything for you in particular to make you feel that you're glad to know them.
One night I was telling Jen that I can remember exactly how I met most people in our class. I can see clearly in my mind where I was and what was said. During SAY (pre-orientation), we sat in a circle for one of those icebreakers where we had to repeat the names of the people sitting next to us. I remember thinking it was just my luck to be phonetically challenged...and have Prathap on my left and Bibhav on my right. Looking back, how lucky I was to have met my good friends on my first day at Yale. Bibhav was always smiling, and Prathap became part of my PCC group though for a long time I was intimidated by how nice he was. I also met the rest of my PCC group, and Henry and Nupur at SAY. I met Macdale at the barbecue right before the icebreaker and remember feeling that maybe he didn't find me very interesting but he would always say hello to me after that so I got over it. I met Don that first day too, sitting across from him at a blue table next to Harkness lawn, one of the ones in the middle. I remember not knowing whether he was a first or second year because he exuded a sort of laid-back quality and didn't force his presence as a newcomer. My next interactions with him over the coming weeks centered around being Vietnamese. I remember standing outside the Harkness door in a halter top on a warm night to go out and talking to him about going to Vietnam, how we both wanted to go there next summer. Then I remember him turning from his row in front of me during White Coat to tell me that his parents asked him about the one other Vietnamese person in our class, and then how his dad saw me afterwards and asked me in Vietnamese whether I was Vietnamese.
I remember meeting Allison at another blue table, this time in the corner close to the walkway, on a later day of orientation and how she told me about her California/Northwest road trip and how she ate a lot of food in the Sunset district and how we found out we'd both be orphans for the white coat ceremony and would be going to the orphan dinner together. And she came up to me after the ceremony and said, Hi orphan, and I remember feeling glad she remembered. Narae, I knew about beforehand from Albert, and when I saw her walk by (while sitting on yet another blue table), I was excited to have something automatically in common to bring up with a stranger. Haha, I remember she said, Oh yeah, I know about you, then went on her way, and we didn't have a real conversation until the next semester. I sat next to Jen during a talk for SAY, in Marigold's, where we discovered I was from the same town as her then boyfriend. She came with me and Allison to Ikea the next weekend and later told me she found it awkward because she didn't know how to talk to girls. She told me this post-Indian-food-debacle in the winter, which is when we actually became friends. I don't know how long these images will stay with me so it's nice to write them down.
I am grateful to those small moments that have grown, for the people. For one who supports his friends in so many ways, offering help in the endeavors we undertake like going through all his pictures for the sake of my magazine, is so passionate about the well-being of other people, who perceives so much from afar and comes close only when he thinks it will help, never for his own reasons. And who never gets tired of the same joke. Another who I can call when I'm sick on Saturday morning and will go out of his way to get me medicine, but who above all is fair and gives everyone the benefit of the doubt and listens to anything and everything you have to say. I'm glad for the friend who checked out all the coffeeshops in New Haven, asks me questions, doesn't judge me for my foolish choices, never makes me feel that our conversations are cutting into her time because it's genuinely what she cares about, who always reminds me of not school but life. And for the friend who values honesty and straightforwardness and rationale but still loves me for the complications and emotions, and who sees the immensity of small things and small gestures. And the one who makes me smile just by the way she answers the phone, who is fiercely loyal and tells it as it is without qualms, who tells me when I did something right and when I did something wrong. I'm glad for the one who's made me grow and be more patient, more accepting, who wears everything on his sleeve and makes it natural to ask things of people, who surprises me with what he remembers and how he tries.
We'd say, this is the best part, often, because once you get to the bottom there's still more.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
soundtrack
I am in love and I already know I can't do it justice but I have to proclaim it anyway. Thao Nguyen comprised the soundtrack on repeat to my hours and nights of packing and if I miss anything about packing it's that. Her songs paint an image of a person I would like to know and would like to be. Charming but disingenuous, sensitive but strong, knowing but open, messy but together, brassy and effortlessly thoughtful. Her voice is deep and full and husky, but lilts into a lightness. It meshes with her folksy guitar and catchy beats, and then it stands on its own even as the background continues. She bares her insecurities and heartbreaks and not once seems weak for doing so. She does it so naturally and above all, honestly. In Chivalry, my favorite, she sings: "An offer of me you politely refused/Is it that my heart beat too loud/Is it I did not bid it calm down...I am tired/I am through/When I love I will love so hard." She draws out each "I," her voice up and down, and then comes the fast, beautiful plucking of guitar that forces you to keep up with her feeling, which you might've missed if you hadn't been listening because the song is light.
Those few lines make me think of one of those rare very true things that feels like a revelation when you learn it, something Hussain told me once. I was telling him how I worried that I was behind everyone else, because I kept believing in certain things that experience would then contradict and I would be surprised, how I still think about things that people get over, how I will never fully accept the idea of loss. I was worried that the ideals I thought were strong were actually naive. That maybe I hadn't matured and was left behind in the growth curve. He said that maybe maturity isn't about experience breaking down ideals, but about "having gone through that pain and hurt and all that without giving up your sense of self, without being jaded and cynical and giving up on people." And so I love Thao Nguyen for being tired now, but loving hard later.
I like the title of her second album, We Brave Bee Stings and All, her appreciation of a small, intense sensation of a bee sting. In her songs she says geography will make a mess of her, that she's a superhero, that she doesn't know, how she stings and how she's been stung. She talks about rainy seasons and big kid tables. And yes it is doubly awesome that she's a Vietnamese-American with voice. People describe her music with words suggestive of movement: bounce, jangly, poppy, vibrant. It's true that the beat draws you in first. But even amidst all the motion of her words and notes and voice and instruments and thoughts and sounds, there is a constant expression of something real and felt, and that takes you all over but really, holds you still in one place.
Those few lines make me think of one of those rare very true things that feels like a revelation when you learn it, something Hussain told me once. I was telling him how I worried that I was behind everyone else, because I kept believing in certain things that experience would then contradict and I would be surprised, how I still think about things that people get over, how I will never fully accept the idea of loss. I was worried that the ideals I thought were strong were actually naive. That maybe I hadn't matured and was left behind in the growth curve. He said that maybe maturity isn't about experience breaking down ideals, but about "having gone through that pain and hurt and all that without giving up your sense of self, without being jaded and cynical and giving up on people." And so I love Thao Nguyen for being tired now, but loving hard later.
I like the title of her second album, We Brave Bee Stings and All, her appreciation of a small, intense sensation of a bee sting. In her songs she says geography will make a mess of her, that she's a superhero, that she doesn't know, how she stings and how she's been stung. She talks about rainy seasons and big kid tables. And yes it is doubly awesome that she's a Vietnamese-American with voice. People describe her music with words suggestive of movement: bounce, jangly, poppy, vibrant. It's true that the beat draws you in first. But even amidst all the motion of her words and notes and voice and instruments and thoughts and sounds, there is a constant expression of something real and felt, and that takes you all over but really, holds you still in one place.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
the second time around
Back in the fall, in biochemistry, we learned about Lesch-Nyhan disease. People with Lesch-Nyhan are deficient in an enzyme called HGPRT involved in purine salvage, which leads to uric acid buildup. I remember these details because the other thing about people with Lesch-Nyhan is that they for some reason also mutilate themselves. They bite their own lips and fingers. Completely helpless to stop themselves, people with this disease often bandage their hands to prevent inflicting hurt upon themselves. Our professor referred us to a New Yorker article about a man with Lesch-Nyhan, and how the lack of control in self-mutilation pervades his entire approach to life. Instead of telling someone he loves them, he swears at them. Seeing a sharp pencil induces an uncontrollable urge to take it and do harm. He uses his right hand to grab and restrain his left hand from grabbing a knife and hurting himself or someone else. His intentions and his actions are completely at odds, and they divide his body.
The author of the article framed the disease as the extreme end of a phenomenon of which we are all victim, what Edgar Allen Poe termed "the imp of the perverse." The idea that we all do things that we know are bad for ourselves, like eating too much junk food to the point it's not pleasurable anymore or contemplating swerving your car into oncoming traffic for no particular reason. I remember first learning about this strange, rare disease and thinking that I must have some emotional form of Lesch-Nyhan, where I perpetuate things that I know, in mind and in heart, are not good for me and will hurt me.
Doing it once made me none the wiser the second time around. In a recent lecture about the biological basis of pain, we learned that when you feel a certain kind of pain for the second time, you feel it more acutely because you know its character. I'm not sure about the implications about your recovery and resilience, because I would guess there is also a desensitization process, the idea that pain makes you stronger and more able the next time. But what was clear is that once you get to know pain through first encounter, you are more aware when it hits you again. You don't have to feel around in the dark to learn its edges and figure out how to hold it. You know its contours without exploration.
The professor who lectured on pain did make a mistake, though, when he alluded to Lesch-Nyhan and said that people with the disease don't feel pain when they self-mutilate. I distinctly remember that they do feel pain, but the awareness of it can't stop them from hurting themselves. For them there is no desensitization or increased strength, only a constant fight against recurring pain. But I admired the man in the article, because there was a deliberate fight, a will against what he did to himself even if he knew it would continue.
For all the mistakes that I make twice and three times, growth does lurk in the corners. Despite similar themes, and a similar trajectory of trying not to hurt anyone and in the process hurting everyone including myself--there are different circumstances, reasons, people, feelings, and most importantly, more things learned. It does make me wonder again if I'll ever feel the same as I did the first time around. That used to worry me, but now I know that each thing offers something else, and it's valuable. And if I experience that feeling again, it will still have newness and surprises and a sense of other. It makes me think that for the man with Lesch-Nyhan, each finger bitten is not quite the same, and that even though you know the shape of its pain, you still reach out to find something different.
When I told Guson I was going home before summer because I missed my parents, he said I was maturing. My immediate reaction was to reject that idea, because isn't growing up about not missing home, not needing your parents? But it turns out he was right. There's only been one other time when I made sudden plans to go home. That time was a result of wanting to be away from where I was, a push from there to home. This time, I don't feel a push away from anything--I absolutely love where I am, in all senses--instead, it's a pull from home. That time I felt a little weak and this time I feel stronger. This time around, it's different.
The author of the article framed the disease as the extreme end of a phenomenon of which we are all victim, what Edgar Allen Poe termed "the imp of the perverse." The idea that we all do things that we know are bad for ourselves, like eating too much junk food to the point it's not pleasurable anymore or contemplating swerving your car into oncoming traffic for no particular reason. I remember first learning about this strange, rare disease and thinking that I must have some emotional form of Lesch-Nyhan, where I perpetuate things that I know, in mind and in heart, are not good for me and will hurt me.
Doing it once made me none the wiser the second time around. In a recent lecture about the biological basis of pain, we learned that when you feel a certain kind of pain for the second time, you feel it more acutely because you know its character. I'm not sure about the implications about your recovery and resilience, because I would guess there is also a desensitization process, the idea that pain makes you stronger and more able the next time. But what was clear is that once you get to know pain through first encounter, you are more aware when it hits you again. You don't have to feel around in the dark to learn its edges and figure out how to hold it. You know its contours without exploration.
The professor who lectured on pain did make a mistake, though, when he alluded to Lesch-Nyhan and said that people with the disease don't feel pain when they self-mutilate. I distinctly remember that they do feel pain, but the awareness of it can't stop them from hurting themselves. For them there is no desensitization or increased strength, only a constant fight against recurring pain. But I admired the man in the article, because there was a deliberate fight, a will against what he did to himself even if he knew it would continue.
For all the mistakes that I make twice and three times, growth does lurk in the corners. Despite similar themes, and a similar trajectory of trying not to hurt anyone and in the process hurting everyone including myself--there are different circumstances, reasons, people, feelings, and most importantly, more things learned. It does make me wonder again if I'll ever feel the same as I did the first time around. That used to worry me, but now I know that each thing offers something else, and it's valuable. And if I experience that feeling again, it will still have newness and surprises and a sense of other. It makes me think that for the man with Lesch-Nyhan, each finger bitten is not quite the same, and that even though you know the shape of its pain, you still reach out to find something different.
When I told Guson I was going home before summer because I missed my parents, he said I was maturing. My immediate reaction was to reject that idea, because isn't growing up about not missing home, not needing your parents? But it turns out he was right. There's only been one other time when I made sudden plans to go home. That time was a result of wanting to be away from where I was, a push from there to home. This time, I don't feel a push away from anything--I absolutely love where I am, in all senses--instead, it's a pull from home. That time I felt a little weak and this time I feel stronger. This time around, it's different.
Friday, May 2, 2008
loss
To borrow a sentiment from Steph's blog...God, it fucking hurts again.
*
A couple of weeks ago a graduating medical student was killed by a car outside of our dorm building, at an intersection we've all crossed hundreds of times. She walked along a red light, following a truck that was doing the same, and the car going green didn't see her. I was struck ajar at how much it affected me, the people around me, and the Yale community as a whole. There are many factors, I think--her youth, an emanating sweetness that seemed to touch those to whom she was unknown, proximity and inclusiveness. I don't really have anything new or insightful to say about the tragedy, neither its obvious immensity nor its subtleties. I'm sorry for that, but I'm glad there are many people who will do her memory full justice.
A few days after it happened, I read a short story called Found Objects about a woman who compulsively stole personal items. She didn't steal from stores, just people. She didn't steal for monetary or other gain; she didn't use any of the items she took. She piled them onto a table in her home, separate from all else in her life. She took a screwdriver from the back pocket of a plumber, a wallet left by a woman in the bathroom, bath salts from her best friend. The climax of the story was when she rummaged through the wallet of a one-night-stand and found a scrap of paper, saved through time and place, on it scrawled: I believe in you. She took it and never returned it. You could tell she hated herself for it. And you could tell she didn't know how else to be. It wasn't about the addictive thrill of getting away with the crime. It was about collecting pieces of people, and hurting them and hurting because of it.
It caught my eye in the New Yorker while I was in the waiting room at the pharmacy, because the title made me think of a short column I read once in the magazine about a person who collected people's lost gloves, storing them away in the hopes that someday one would find its other half. Found Objects turned out to have a very different theme, and it wasn't so much about things being found as being lost.
On the same day that we mourned the world losing Mila, I lost something separate and large in my life. It felt selfish, yet fitting at the same time, to be consumed by this multifaceted pain. What I lost, I lost because I was a little stupid, a little careless and not brave enough. Natural things that afflict most, and things sewn into all of us, and things grown out of circumstances and other people's mistakes too. So I'm learning to not place too much blame on myself but that doesn't decrease responsibility or the quite awful realization of your own capacity to cause pain.
I felt a bit like the woman who steals, and it makes me think of the driver of the car in Mila's accident. Granted that no one will ever suffer like those close to her--but the driver must suffer too, knowing what his mistake (and it was no one's clear or full fault) did to a life and having to live with that always. I feel a sort of immense sorrow for him, and I worry this is a little unfair and not right, but it seems to me that pain can't be too relative. It hurts very much to be hurt, and it hurts very much to inflict the hurt upon someone else. The driver on Frontage Street, the woman in Found Objects, and me, different beads on the same string.
Nowadays when I see people crossing that intersection against traffic when the light's red, I get a little sad because they don't know any better. And nowadays, when I do the same, I get a little sad because I do.
*
A couple of weeks ago a graduating medical student was killed by a car outside of our dorm building, at an intersection we've all crossed hundreds of times. She walked along a red light, following a truck that was doing the same, and the car going green didn't see her. I was struck ajar at how much it affected me, the people around me, and the Yale community as a whole. There are many factors, I think--her youth, an emanating sweetness that seemed to touch those to whom she was unknown, proximity and inclusiveness. I don't really have anything new or insightful to say about the tragedy, neither its obvious immensity nor its subtleties. I'm sorry for that, but I'm glad there are many people who will do her memory full justice.
A few days after it happened, I read a short story called Found Objects about a woman who compulsively stole personal items. She didn't steal from stores, just people. She didn't steal for monetary or other gain; she didn't use any of the items she took. She piled them onto a table in her home, separate from all else in her life. She took a screwdriver from the back pocket of a plumber, a wallet left by a woman in the bathroom, bath salts from her best friend. The climax of the story was when she rummaged through the wallet of a one-night-stand and found a scrap of paper, saved through time and place, on it scrawled: I believe in you. She took it and never returned it. You could tell she hated herself for it. And you could tell she didn't know how else to be. It wasn't about the addictive thrill of getting away with the crime. It was about collecting pieces of people, and hurting them and hurting because of it.
It caught my eye in the New Yorker while I was in the waiting room at the pharmacy, because the title made me think of a short column I read once in the magazine about a person who collected people's lost gloves, storing them away in the hopes that someday one would find its other half. Found Objects turned out to have a very different theme, and it wasn't so much about things being found as being lost.
On the same day that we mourned the world losing Mila, I lost something separate and large in my life. It felt selfish, yet fitting at the same time, to be consumed by this multifaceted pain. What I lost, I lost because I was a little stupid, a little careless and not brave enough. Natural things that afflict most, and things sewn into all of us, and things grown out of circumstances and other people's mistakes too. So I'm learning to not place too much blame on myself but that doesn't decrease responsibility or the quite awful realization of your own capacity to cause pain.
I felt a bit like the woman who steals, and it makes me think of the driver of the car in Mila's accident. Granted that no one will ever suffer like those close to her--but the driver must suffer too, knowing what his mistake (and it was no one's clear or full fault) did to a life and having to live with that always. I feel a sort of immense sorrow for him, and I worry this is a little unfair and not right, but it seems to me that pain can't be too relative. It hurts very much to be hurt, and it hurts very much to inflict the hurt upon someone else. The driver on Frontage Street, the woman in Found Objects, and me, different beads on the same string.
Nowadays when I see people crossing that intersection against traffic when the light's red, I get a little sad because they don't know any better. And nowadays, when I do the same, I get a little sad because I do.
Friday, April 4, 2008
backwards
Yesterday I met a baby two days old, and realized that's the closest I've ever come to the concrete very beginning of life. Then we saw another newborn born without a small intestine who, the nurse told us, wasn't going to make it. And that was the closest I've ever come to the concrete very end of life.
Last weekend, I left the rain in New Haven for rain in Fremont. The hills had turned green since I last saw them. There is nothing I love more in my hometown than the green hills on gray days. The greenery is so fresh against the rain. We drove through Niles, a part of Fremont I rarely see; the last time might've been the summer before high school, with the same friends. We drove for two and a half hours to get to Sutter Creek, and drove through numerous new-to-me and lush highways and narrow roads along the way. We passed hills sprinkled with churning windmills, hills strewn with cows, flattened hills that stretched to remote ranch houses. I saw a whole new part of California, with two of my oldest friends as passengers, going to the wedding of a friend whose closeness I still miss. The tears at the ceremony were for him growing together with his one, but selfishly, the feeling that lingered afterwards was our growing apart.
I missed home and family something awful while I was at home, most when they were right there for me. I sometimes get the impression people here don't think I'm attached to them or value these values as much as they do because I don't miss California and my family when I'm away. It's hard to explain that these things are so sewn in me that I rarely feel disconnected from them. Yet for whatever reason this past weekend, the physicality of my parents made me feel there are some things I can't carry as well as they can give me in their presence. When I was leaving, my mom exclaimed, I miss you so much! She often forgets to insert the right tense in her English phrases but her mistake made my nonsensical ache for home while I was there right. I miss missing home.
Last month, Henry visited me at Yale and I talked to him in person for the first time since June 2006 when we graduated, and we had similar conversations as we did then. Or at least similar topics of conversation. He mentioned the people we respectively let go. He called them the birds we let fly...willingly, purposefully. He talked about how hard it was, how he hasn't loved anyone that intensely since then, but focused on how much he's grown since then, and how he didn't think he could've grown in the same way if he hadn't. I agreed but will never make up my mind about a concrete rationale for any of that, no longer want to make sense of my senses. I miss the bird I let go, the one who nodded yes you are a difficult person but I don't find it difficult and want to be there as you figure it out because I love all of you. All of you. I grew with him and I've grown a lot without. I've been incredibly happy in both. Like Henry, I know that I've lived distinctly differently because of that willful, purposeful choice.
But that's a given for anything you choose or anything that happens to you, that it has shaped your life in a certain way that's never quite the same as if you had chosen something else or if something else had happened to you, but you can't judge which is more worthy, and in the end you can only be grateful for having had something and later, something else.
Last weekend, I left the rain in New Haven for rain in Fremont. The hills had turned green since I last saw them. There is nothing I love more in my hometown than the green hills on gray days. The greenery is so fresh against the rain. We drove through Niles, a part of Fremont I rarely see; the last time might've been the summer before high school, with the same friends. We drove for two and a half hours to get to Sutter Creek, and drove through numerous new-to-me and lush highways and narrow roads along the way. We passed hills sprinkled with churning windmills, hills strewn with cows, flattened hills that stretched to remote ranch houses. I saw a whole new part of California, with two of my oldest friends as passengers, going to the wedding of a friend whose closeness I still miss. The tears at the ceremony were for him growing together with his one, but selfishly, the feeling that lingered afterwards was our growing apart.
I missed home and family something awful while I was at home, most when they were right there for me. I sometimes get the impression people here don't think I'm attached to them or value these values as much as they do because I don't miss California and my family when I'm away. It's hard to explain that these things are so sewn in me that I rarely feel disconnected from them. Yet for whatever reason this past weekend, the physicality of my parents made me feel there are some things I can't carry as well as they can give me in their presence. When I was leaving, my mom exclaimed, I miss you so much! She often forgets to insert the right tense in her English phrases but her mistake made my nonsensical ache for home while I was there right. I miss missing home.
Last month, Henry visited me at Yale and I talked to him in person for the first time since June 2006 when we graduated, and we had similar conversations as we did then. Or at least similar topics of conversation. He mentioned the people we respectively let go. He called them the birds we let fly...willingly, purposefully. He talked about how hard it was, how he hasn't loved anyone that intensely since then, but focused on how much he's grown since then, and how he didn't think he could've grown in the same way if he hadn't. I agreed but will never make up my mind about a concrete rationale for any of that, no longer want to make sense of my senses. I miss the bird I let go, the one who nodded yes you are a difficult person but I don't find it difficult and want to be there as you figure it out because I love all of you. All of you. I grew with him and I've grown a lot without. I've been incredibly happy in both. Like Henry, I know that I've lived distinctly differently because of that willful, purposeful choice.
But that's a given for anything you choose or anything that happens to you, that it has shaped your life in a certain way that's never quite the same as if you had chosen something else or if something else had happened to you, but you can't judge which is more worthy, and in the end you can only be grateful for having had something and later, something else.
Friday, March 21, 2008
time
To get to the photo lab on Willow Street to develop my film, I take the Green Shuttle from Phelps Gate to Orange and Willow streets. Having gone three times before, I have the timing down. The Green Shuttle comes every thirty minutes, on 5 and 35 of the hour. It takes exactly ten minutes to walk from York Street to Phelps Gate to pick up the shuttle. This route begins at 12:46 PM. In the morning prior to this time, the shuttle comes on 8 and 38 of the hour.
After I found the morning schedule at 11:26 AM today, I scrambled to get ready in 2 minutes so that I could start walking by 11:28 and make the 11:38 shuttle. I made it there at 11:37, and had to wait a couple minutes because the shuttles are always slightly off. I saw the Green coming my way at 11:39...then the driver waved his hand and passed me right by. Thinking that perhaps the morning schedule didn't quite work the way I thought, I waited for awhile longer. Fifteen minutes longer. So when a Blue Shuttle came by, I decided to just take it instead of waiting another 15 for the next Green. Because I can take the Blue Shuttle to Whitney and Canner, which is right near Willow Street. The walk is about twice as long as from the Green Shuttle stop, but I estimated it'd be less time than waiting for another Green.
I got on the Blue, which took me right back to the Med School because the Shuttles don't go back and forth; they travel in loops. When I get there, the driver tells me that he's taking a break and that I have to wait for the next shuttle to get there in 10 minutes. It's near noon by this time, and I figure that if I have to wait another 10 minutes, I might as well walk the 10 minutes from the med school to Phelps Gate, to catch that next Green Shuttle that I didn't want to wait for in the first place. And try to catch the 12:08 Green. Since the 11:38 was on time but just didn't stop for whatever reason; maybe it was a transitional shuttle, I thought.
So I walked back to exactly where I was 20 minutes earlier, having expounded twice as much effort to get there than the first time around. I waited a little bit and saw the Green coming; it always stalls at the red light. I thought I'd made a good choice, even for having wasted a half hour..and then it passes by me again. I swore audibly.
It was another 15 minutes before a Blue Shuttle came by. I took it, again. It brought me back to the med school, again. I waited there for 10 minutes before it took off on its route, again. This time I rode it all the way to the stop and walked the 10 minutes to the photo lab. I finally got there at 1 PM.
When I got there the woman told me that she wouldn't be done developing my photographs until 3 PM, so I sat there and read while I waited. It turned out that I could only develop 2 prints out of 2 rolls (about 24 prints) because something went awry in my camera winder and the prints overlapped, making it impossible to print them. The fact that the Puerto Rico photographs I'd been so looking forward to are now forever encased in negative was bad enough, because I get upset like that. But atop it all my entire morning and early afternoon was taken up with this fruitless commute.
As I walked back, I saw the Green Shuttle pass right by me again and walked on forward to the Blue Shuttle stop, which I did catch. Because there's only one of each colored shuttle for each shift (morning and afternoon), the same driver who dropped me off picked me up. He was a gruff man in his late fifties with scraggly hair who looked through me when he talked to me, but not unkind. In the seat behind him was a boy maybe ten years old, who rode with him. I'm guessing his grandson. His grandson was there on the shuttle I took to the lab, and the shuttle back. He didn't have a book, or a gameboy. He didn't really talk to his alleged grandpa or to anyone else. He just sat in the same seat, looked out the same window, sometimes got up and stood by the driver and sat back down. He didn't look bored or restless. He rode that same route all afternoon.
More than wasting hours on the shuttle and being disappointed with my memories and subsequently my whole day because I get so easily consumed by moments, the image of that boy riding on the shuttle made me hurt. I miss that. I can't even remember when exactly I lost that. The ability to while away, nothingness, without thought to time. Spring break was a slight hint of that, and just this morning I talked for an hour with Dr. Fenn about what I love, and that included writing and stories and traveling, all things that make me distort my sense of time, give me more than what I have concretely, make me think outside those bounds while still feeling their weight.
But from day to day and for the past who-knows but too many years of my life I have been too often obsessed with time. What I could've done instead, whether I was "productive," whether even fun time was spent well. One of my top ten things in the world is commuting. Being a passenger or driving alone, with no real purpose but to arrive. And even that is not quite comparable to this boy on the shuttle. People say it's not the end, it's the journey, but that's assuming there is an end. For the boy, there was no end even. Just the same route.
I'd like to have days I can ride on the same shuttle, even more than twice or three times like I did today, and not be frustrated or think that something has gone to waste or forget to be glad for time itself and not just for what I do with it. I'd like to do absolutely nothing and feel more something because of it, to remove the brackets from time and just go around for a bit.
After I found the morning schedule at 11:26 AM today, I scrambled to get ready in 2 minutes so that I could start walking by 11:28 and make the 11:38 shuttle. I made it there at 11:37, and had to wait a couple minutes because the shuttles are always slightly off. I saw the Green coming my way at 11:39...then the driver waved his hand and passed me right by. Thinking that perhaps the morning schedule didn't quite work the way I thought, I waited for awhile longer. Fifteen minutes longer. So when a Blue Shuttle came by, I decided to just take it instead of waiting another 15 for the next Green. Because I can take the Blue Shuttle to Whitney and Canner, which is right near Willow Street. The walk is about twice as long as from the Green Shuttle stop, but I estimated it'd be less time than waiting for another Green.
I got on the Blue, which took me right back to the Med School because the Shuttles don't go back and forth; they travel in loops. When I get there, the driver tells me that he's taking a break and that I have to wait for the next shuttle to get there in 10 minutes. It's near noon by this time, and I figure that if I have to wait another 10 minutes, I might as well walk the 10 minutes from the med school to Phelps Gate, to catch that next Green Shuttle that I didn't want to wait for in the first place. And try to catch the 12:08 Green. Since the 11:38 was on time but just didn't stop for whatever reason; maybe it was a transitional shuttle, I thought.
So I walked back to exactly where I was 20 minutes earlier, having expounded twice as much effort to get there than the first time around. I waited a little bit and saw the Green coming; it always stalls at the red light. I thought I'd made a good choice, even for having wasted a half hour..and then it passes by me again. I swore audibly.
It was another 15 minutes before a Blue Shuttle came by. I took it, again. It brought me back to the med school, again. I waited there for 10 minutes before it took off on its route, again. This time I rode it all the way to the stop and walked the 10 minutes to the photo lab. I finally got there at 1 PM.
When I got there the woman told me that she wouldn't be done developing my photographs until 3 PM, so I sat there and read while I waited. It turned out that I could only develop 2 prints out of 2 rolls (about 24 prints) because something went awry in my camera winder and the prints overlapped, making it impossible to print them. The fact that the Puerto Rico photographs I'd been so looking forward to are now forever encased in negative was bad enough, because I get upset like that. But atop it all my entire morning and early afternoon was taken up with this fruitless commute.
As I walked back, I saw the Green Shuttle pass right by me again and walked on forward to the Blue Shuttle stop, which I did catch. Because there's only one of each colored shuttle for each shift (morning and afternoon), the same driver who dropped me off picked me up. He was a gruff man in his late fifties with scraggly hair who looked through me when he talked to me, but not unkind. In the seat behind him was a boy maybe ten years old, who rode with him. I'm guessing his grandson. His grandson was there on the shuttle I took to the lab, and the shuttle back. He didn't have a book, or a gameboy. He didn't really talk to his alleged grandpa or to anyone else. He just sat in the same seat, looked out the same window, sometimes got up and stood by the driver and sat back down. He didn't look bored or restless. He rode that same route all afternoon.
More than wasting hours on the shuttle and being disappointed with my memories and subsequently my whole day because I get so easily consumed by moments, the image of that boy riding on the shuttle made me hurt. I miss that. I can't even remember when exactly I lost that. The ability to while away, nothingness, without thought to time. Spring break was a slight hint of that, and just this morning I talked for an hour with Dr. Fenn about what I love, and that included writing and stories and traveling, all things that make me distort my sense of time, give me more than what I have concretely, make me think outside those bounds while still feeling their weight.
But from day to day and for the past who-knows but too many years of my life I have been too often obsessed with time. What I could've done instead, whether I was "productive," whether even fun time was spent well. One of my top ten things in the world is commuting. Being a passenger or driving alone, with no real purpose but to arrive. And even that is not quite comparable to this boy on the shuttle. People say it's not the end, it's the journey, but that's assuming there is an end. For the boy, there was no end even. Just the same route.
I'd like to have days I can ride on the same shuttle, even more than twice or three times like I did today, and not be frustrated or think that something has gone to waste or forget to be glad for time itself and not just for what I do with it. I'd like to do absolutely nothing and feel more something because of it, to remove the brackets from time and just go around for a bit.
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