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.

lub-dub

Last Thursday, on the last day of this year's first month, thirty and some of us sat in a lecture hall with stethophones on our laps and in our ears, listening to heart sounds that a stout doctor committed to principles of the physical exam played for us on a mysterious machine that used infrared waves to contact some rectangular box attached to our devices. His words are clear and serious. You've all been listening to normal hearts. It's important to know what abnormalities sound like. Know murmurs. Here's what mitral regurgitation sounds like. Once you hear it, you'll never forget it. First I'll start out with the normal heartbeat, and then I'll add the murmur.

We listen and wait. Here it comes. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. So soothing and constant and rhythmic and after such a long day, more than a bit sleep-inducing. I see him turn a knob and then whooosh. There's the murmur. Lub-d--whooosh--ub. Lub-d-whooosh-ub. I thought, suddenly--wow. That's it. My life is this lub-dub and I'm that whooosh that's just passing it by.

*

Thursday began with a 9 AM lecture on renal physiology. In college I hated studying the kidney because there are so many parts and each one functions intricately differently. But it's true that repetition helps, because after a very cursory look in college, the first overview lecture here, and the histology lab, I wasn't as intimidated by having to hear someone talk about how the kidney reabsorbs salt and water for an hour. It turned out to be an hour lecture on the proximal tubule (1/6 of the kidney's tubules). Just the proximal tubule. It was surprisingly good. The proximal tubule is a hard worker and very smart.

From 10 AM-1 PM we had our last anatomy lab. It was the most brutal we've had, and yet anticlimatic. I haven't been too bothered by the physicality of anatomy; it's been more beautiful than disturbing. Removing the chest wall, dislocating the shoulder, uncovering the hand muscle by muscle--it's all been for something, even at times we spend more time with dissection than actual visualization. It never seemed disrespectful, and we are reminded so often of what our donor should mean to us, to respect their gift.

This time, the sounds and movements and my own inability to distinguish anything in the nasal and oral pharynxes made the procedure seem unnecessary and made me feel sorry for doing it. It involved sawing the head--skull and all--in half. Through the nasal septum, if you managed to be exact. The sound was in one word, awful. We used a manual saw, and it was worse than the loud grinding of the mechanical one we've had in the past. Because the exertion was so obvious and physical, the back-and-forth and the amount of time was palpable.

Perhaps I should have prepared more, but the fact that I didn't know anything about the nose and mouth and gained very little from the lab made me feel infinitely more guilty for doing this to our donor. I don't attach too much significance to the body after death; I'd like to be cremated and I have some sense of some sort of soul. So it's not like I prioritize bodily preservation, but the sacred the body holds when alive can't help but remain.

I will remember where I saw my donor's ligamentum arteriosum because it made sense based on what I knew about it--I remember Rizzolo forcing us to reason out why it would be there and how satisfying it was to confirm it both anatomically and intellectually. I will remember the long tendons of his arm and hand and moving them to move his fingers, my favorite lab. I will remember the subdural hematoma that engulfed his brain and how that both fascinated and hurt me. But how much anatomy will I remember? Likely little. Are those memories enough to justify everything else? I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it would be enough for me to give myself up, even as a person who thinks little of what will happen to my body after this is all over.

And so, it ended. Not quite with a whimper, but definitely no bang. Allison and I were talking afterwards about whether we'd have strong visual memories of our donors. I said I didn't think so, because we never looked at the body in its entirety. We always covered parts we weren't working on, including the face, which would be easiest to remember. It's hard to really retain vivid images of things in isolation.

Yet--though I don't feel I've solidified an image of his body or even his face, I do know I've acquired, in slow and fast gulps, an entirely new perspective of body. They say anatomy is a rite of passage, and it is. It is, not for all the arteries and nerves and muscles, but for the new and complex and strange and wordless.

After lunch (and no, it's not really strange at all to eat after anatomy lab), I made a quick run to the post-office to drop off my ballot for Super Tuesday; the fresh air was nice. Then I had a meeting from 2-2:30 PM with a professor at the Public Health school. It was one of two required meetings for my application to go to Vietnam this summer. I'm hoping to do a social health project to evaluate the effects of the healthcare system on low-income patients, in terms of their living conditions, employment and education. The professor was helpful in telling me what I needed to do to make the study design tighter--which is the most difficult part of the whole thing. If it pans out, I'd be based in Hanoi, but also live with a family in a rural commune while doing fieldwork. Talking about the finer details made some anxiety about getting it all done re-surge, but I'm hoping very hard it works out.

From 3-5 PM we had Pre-Clinical Clerkship. Since the new semester started, it's been all physical exam. I honestly hadn't given much thought to doing the physical exam prior to this; despite it being a core experience, it wasn't something I associated with medical school like I did with anatomy. I guess I couldn't really see myself doing it. It's been fairly incredible. I feel as inept as ever, but small improvements like actually knowing the names of my instruments and how to hold them makes me feel disproportionately good. The fulfillment of DOING stuff gets so lost in academics, and it's been refreshing to feel things very concretely.

The hardest thing thus far has been using the opthalmoscope to look into people's eyes. You have to get uncomfortably close to a person's face to do so, and keep one eye closed. I discovered what a struggle it is to keep my left eye open when my right's closed. Then seeing the person's blood vessels is surprisingly difficult--finding the optic disc near-impossible. After many, many tries on different weeks I finally saw one, and again the excitement was too large for such a tiny thing.

Dean Angoff introduced our introduction to the physical exam by saying how important it is to feel the discomfort, anxiety, vulnerability of the patient. That by being patients for our partners to practice on, we have some sense of what it's like to have to bare yourself for inspection. I love Dean Angoff, and I love that after so many years in medicine she is still so in tune with people. I have definitely felt anxiety being the patient, and she makes me remember to be thankful to have that feeling to draw upon in the future. I'm not going to lie. Taking my shirt off for the lung and heart exams was uncomfortable. Actually, even having a light shone in my nostrils was discomfiting. And that's with an awesome partner who couldn't be more considerate. I imagine it's worse for a patient, who doesn't even know why we're doing things, whereas we understand why someone's poking us in this place and that.

The physical exam has also added yet another thing to draw our class into a cult, of people who torture each other with bright lights in our eyes and amateur percussing and hesitantly sticking otoscopes in our ears without damaging something in there. I try to step back and look at that from the outside, and it amuses me and find that as awkward as it can be to do this on people you know, it's another aspect of the med student bond. However, I welcome any of you to be my patients for practice.

This week's physical exam practice was supplemented with the heart sounds session I mentioned before. It is amazing to hear something buried in you beating in your ears. It is extremely hard for me to distinguish sounds, which beat is louder at certain places, the timing of a beat and an underlying/overlying murmur. It's such an art.

The day finally officially ended, and I spent my hour before dinner ordering books--Let's Go for PUERTO RICO, and yet more Murakami to read while in PUERTO RICO. After a five-hour planning party wherein ten or so people were in and out of my room on three computers searching for travel deals and spilling tea and yogurt on my sheets, we booked TWO rooms for FOURTEEN people in San Juan. Six nights, six-and-a-half days with packed, co-ed rooms. I am so excited, and so glad that all my good friends here will be together in another country with no med school frenzy.

After a nice dinner (our dorm food is always bad, but company is always good), I thought about doing work, but ended up g-chatting with Allison for a couple hours about boys, school, motivation, friends. Even though we're so busy, I think we all give a lot of thought to our experience here--why and how. It's necessary to stop to consider what we're doing, because it's so easy to get swept up in the rhythm of things.

I did manage to review the kidney lecture from the morning, but that was about it before we headed to PubMed. PubMed is a free party with open-bar on the first floor of our dorm. Its convenience cannot be beat. We got pretty tipsy. Some of our classmates who have formed a band performed several songs. Events like this make me want to grow super arms to hug my entire class at once. They are so goofy and amusing and supportive of one another. I like how, since the first day we went out, we can all dance with each other in complete innocence and fun. He and I had a tiff and a moment, which consumed most of the night but ended with me glad for how people surprise you.

*

I don't write much about daily happenings, because for me they don't give a good impression of how things are. But giving a sense of what medical school is like is difficult. Thoughts and responses clamor for space and it's hard to fully revisit any one of them. Thursday, January 31 was a long day with a smattering of almost every thing that comprises my life here, and one I'd like to remember in detail. I'd like to calm that murmur and listen to the beat of things.

my brother's wedding

My oldest brother got married. The event drove several very obvious things home: marriage is a big deal, life's hard, I've gained a sister and I am still a kid.

Back when they thought they'd have more time to plan the wedding, they took me to look at dresses and rings, and I couldn't really get into that. Flying to New Mexico, I felt little anticipation; I had a sense of going through the motions because of the practicality of the ceremony and its haste. This lasted until the moment I saw my brother and his bride, dressed--he in something other than his normal sweats and she with a winter coat covering the white but still instantly beautiful. He was so happy to see us, kept thanking us for coming; it's been a long time since someone has been that happy for my presence and I felt so lucky to be able to give it to him.

The mass was in Vietnamese, and I couldn't quite get into those formalities either but somehow I found myself near tears anyway. I almost felt like the older sibling--the one who's proud and weepy. Things that are of value are continual; they don't happen in a moment, but there are moments where these things concentrate and come to a point and make you hyperaware of them. You always wish for the happiness of those you care about, but during certain parts of the mass I could feel the strain of me physically asking for it. I'm not going to pretend that I feel that as often as I should, and the tug was like the loving ache a muscle makes after a long time in disuse.

The circumstances of the event weren't ideal, and I so wish that it had been better for the both of them. His wife is balancing school, of which she's missed much lately, their new life together coming into being and something in her old life passing away. I honestly don't know how she finds the strength to do it, and I wonder at how I get overwhelmed with my own life when it is so much easier. The happiness that day should be will always be overshadowed by the sorrow that it was. For me, so invested in memory and story, that would be so hard to accept. Without having any tangible evidence, I sense that she will and gracefully so. She and I get along, but we don't have too much in common and haven't really talked at length about many things. But it's easy to see there is much to look up to and learn from in her, and it hit me for the first time that it will be very different to finally have a sister in the family, and one who isn't actively trying to take care of me but is just showing me by being.

So it happened that marriage, birth, and death--the events of a lifetime--were crowded into the space of one day. I thought about how none of my days in twenty-three years has been quite like that day for her, and I can clearly recall being fazed by the sudden realization that I am a child. And that all the experience I hope for, the majority of it lies ahead and that I shouldn't want to hurry it. It comes hard and fast, and you need all the time before it to brace yourself (uselessly, probably) against the parts that don't fit.

Though he didn't show it, I know it was hard for him too, to have things done this way, having to cut so many corners for something he's wanted for a long time. Yet he adjusted so well, and found happiness in it all. And it made me very glad to have had the opportunity to speak about his selflessness in the speech he asked me to write. Sometimes I forget how much my oldest brother cares about me (much more than I actively deserve), because we only see each other once or twice a year, and neither of us have time to have the frequent conversations we used to have. When he first asked me to make a speech for the wedding, I was a little overwhelmed, because things have been so incredibly busy. In my semi-exploded state, to write something meaningful in a few days about an event we only knew was coming a week in advance seemed like too much to ask, when of course it wasn't and I was just being self-absorbed. As short as it is, it took a long time to write but like with most words that take time, I learned a lot about how I felt in the process of writing. After, I was really thankful and honored that he'd asked me to do it. He so rarely asks me to do anything and it was nice to contribute something concrete to his moment.

So here's what I said.
*
This is the first wedding speech I've ever made, and at first I thought it would be really difficult to write. And well, it was. When I asked Hoang what I was supposed to say, he said to me, "What else is there to talk about? Me and Vy!"...And while that seems obvious, it was helpful to hear.

Because as much as a marriage is about the union between two people, it's about the two individuals themselves. So in thinking about this, I thought about these individuals. One who has always been family, and one who has become family.

While I was growing up, Hoang always felt like a parent to me. Not just because he set my bedtime and wouldn't let me eat too much candy, but because he gave without expecting anything in return. As a child I found this to be natural. But when I got older I realized how rare it is for a person to give more than they take.

So when I met Vy and saw the same generous spirit in her, I knew it was something special. She extended her full self towards our crazy family, and with Hoang, she was unquestionably selfless. And so Vy reminded me as an adult of what Hoang taught me as a child: that a true connection between people is not about, like they say, give and take, but about give and give.

With their marriage, Hoang and Vy give not only to each other. They also give all of us faith that two such caring people do exist, and can find each other. For that and much more, we wish you many blessings, happiness, and much more.
*

The actual speech went about 82% the way I had practiced it--had to give some pause for laughs (I was struck slightly ajar by actual laughter), for having to talk louder because there was no microphone, for a couple slight misphrasings, and for how people started clapping and making noise at "many blessings," leaving the "happiness and much more" drowned in chopsticks against glass. I'm glad that part went 82%. For all the quiet steadiness of life thus far, it's the noise you often remember and you often look forward to.

home

Since we started college, no visit to home has been unaccompanied by conversations about how it feels to be back home and what it means. As more time goes by, the visits become fewer and more far between, and the conversations about them longer. I don't see Fremont being a place that I will be again, outside of the holidays. It won't likely ever again be my home again in the sense of living here for any extended period of time, not even summers. I may end up in the Bay Area again, but that could be anywhere--not this street, not this place.

They say home is where your heart is, but I'm not sure my heart is here either. Not because I don't love Fremont. It always surprises me when I come home, how beautiful Fremont is. This small town with few claims to fame, with little to do, with little to see. One of the first things I did here was run around my neighborhood in the morning. The love I felt for this home was so immediately palpable; it breathed as I breathed. So much of it came from familiarity, because if you know me you know it takes forever for my surroundings to become familiar to me. Even now, I'm little aware of the street names and how they relate to each other. But I recognize things and it doesn't take much to re-feel them. The route to my piano teacher's house and the church where we played our recitals, the steps where my first boyfriend and I used to kiss, my old junior high. It has been gorgeously bright and warm enough to run comfortably in a T-shirt. December is a nice month here, where the hills are just transitioning from brown to green, so you see them in all their shades. Seeing Christmas lights on houses and decorations in the yard, during the day instead of night as intended, gives this small cove of the town an endearing charm. Instead of magic, it's real, and sweet. Fremont's not hip or urban or quirky or worldly or especially quaint, and it doesn't keep anything hidden that makes you want to seek out its corners. It just is what it is, a place where people live.

Maybe for that reason, home has become a place where I fix things. I've written earlier about how I hang onto broken things as long as possible, but when I come home I'm more amenable to changing them. I finally switched from rain-worn phone to my old phone so that it won't die on me after a few hours anymore. My family gave me a new laptop for Christmas to replace my only somewhat functional computer of the past few years. Home is where my mom sews buttons back onto my coat, where I finally get clothes dry-cleaned, where I cut my hair and go to the dentist, where I finally get a pair of dress pants so I can stop wearing the ones from high school. Home is where I began running, and where I returned to it during difficult times. It's clear that much of this is about convenience and familiarity, but convenience is not easy to come by and familiarity inherently doesn't happen instantly. Some things aren't so easily mended, but what comes first is the desire to mend, to maintain or move forward. I might carry my heart wherever I go, but this will always be a place to move around the pieces, to put them back in place or make them anew.

body

Maybe it's anatomy, or running in the mornings, or Body Worlds tomorrow, or talk of organ donations, or M & A's resolutions to gym & hot yoga it up in the new year, or Mike S's musings on naked parties, or something completely unrelated...but I've been thinking a lot about my body. I've mentioned before that my body is pretty aware of me--it inevitably responds to my stress and anxiety in the form of rashes, canker sores, sleep deprivation, exhaustion. On my end, I haven't been too good at reciprocating, haven't paid much attention to my body. I make observations and pick up on the details, but I don't consider it like I do other aspects of myself. Like Aud says, I'm too self-aware...which is true, and also paradoxically the reason I become blind to certain things. So this is going to turn out to be a pretty superficial and self-centered entry, but I suppose most my and blog entries are.

Mike mentioned that at naked parties (okay, I'd never even heard of those until this conversation), you see that every body has its imperfections. I thought that was an interesting insight to have during a naked party and made me think on what I try to hide and what I value. I feel lucky to have been in environments and around people that make me loving of even those things I hide, of those fragilities. It makes the imperfections things that I seek to describe, understand, articulate.

Since running at home, I've confirmed that my feet are abnormally sensitive. Some people think all feet are unattractive, but I don't think that's true. I think it's definitely true of mine. They blister really easily, especially on the sole below my big toe, and my heels have a coarse quality more typical of someone who actually is physically active. They remind me of my dad's, except my dad stood 14 hour days and I bum like no other. And the nails on my toes just grow awkwardly.

My skin in general doesn't stay healthy for long; it dries easily because I love really hot water in the shower and probably because I was born that way. The skin that comprises the boundary between fingernail and fingertip is really sensitive to cold and sometimes cracks so that I bleed. I'm not very good at moisturizing either. While I like my hands in general, they're not attractive either. I can't keep my nails long or even nicely trimmed or maintained, because I have this habit of peeling them, which everyone thinks is disgusting and I find soothing.

Besides shying away from letting a significant other's feet touch mine and discover their lack of appeal, I hesitate to shed the shorts over a bathing suit on the beach. I've gotten used to the fact that my thighs (and calves) are bigger (the few people I've mentioned this to scoff, so to clarify, I mean--proportionally to the rest of me, okay, not absolutely). I actually kind of appreciate that now (the thighs, not so much the calves--which I'm also not really fond of because of how my skin gains a spotty quality there). I appreciate them because it's the little thought I think to myself and fold in my hands whenever someone comments on me being too small or thin. I keep it for me and then feel no urge to defend myself. But anyway so the hesitation isn't due to that; it's because I developed the inevitable stretch marks early on, before I even knew it was normal and was kind of freaked out by them. So those are there. Probably forever.

I've grown out my hair the longest it's ever been, and the tangles that arise because I don't brush my hair become particularly apparent when I'm at home and there's no conditioner to smooth them out. When I was little I never brushed my hair. When it got so tangled that my mom forced me to brush, the brush got stuck in my hair and that was a mess. I swear that ever since then, that spot in my hair grows in tangled--even after cutting it and growing back as new hair, it gets impossibly tangled in that one spot, becomes a ball of uncombable string.

Some of these things never bothered me, a few I grew to accept on my own, others were loved and cared for in a way that comforted and reassured.

My favorite bone is the clavicle, because it's what I like most on myself, the way you can feel it and how it's the most easily fractured bone in the body. I especially like where the clavicles meet, the hollow beneath your neck...which I learned in anatomy is unromantically called the sternal notch. It's an actual space, and you can press into it and feel its texture and contours different from the bones leading into it.

As much as people tell you appearances don't matter, I think senses do. Feeling the cold sole of worn feet against thick calves when you cross your legs, running ragged fingertips along an arm to relieve an itch, tugging on that mass of messy hair when you have to stop being a homebody and go out in public, holding or being held by that hollow when you are vulnerable and loving. It can be as much you as those things inside.

anastomoses

I used to think that fiction would bring about my downfall, but am finding that scientific fact is contributing too. Each offers a glimpse of beauty whose existence I appreciate and consequently strive to possess, but can't quite create for myself.

Everyone here turns to me when they want to know in what context the word "satiate" can be used or which Shakespeare play "Get thee to a nunnery" is from or what some eight-letter word means. I've almost never been able to give an accurate or complete answer. I would like to explain to everyone that for me, studying literature means only appreciation, not expertise. We speak the same language; I don't know any secrets. I can't verbalize myself any better than you--I'm probably worse at it because I value all the feelings and know none of the constructs.

On the other end of the spectrum, Aud says that I'm already using a different language now that I'm in medical school (something everyone warns you about). Three months of massive amounts of material and learning later, I find myself with a new vocabulary but little fluency. I know a lot of multisyllabic words but don't expect me to tell you a story.

"Kafka on the Shore" alternates chapters between two narrators whose stories appear disparate and converge as the novel goes on. A familiar device, but Murakami is aware of its contrived nature. He makes us conscious that he's conscious of it. We grow to understand that the point is not that this kind of connection actually exists. In fact, the out-of-reality happenings remind us that this doesn't happen and won't happen. The point is we can substantiate our underlying desire for connection in fiction. Murakami never confirms the connection, never actually says that this could happen, but nudges us and says, but doesn't it make sense to happen this way? Isn't it beautiful this way, doesn't it hurt in that lovely aching way and make you breathe slightly irregularly?

In anatomy we hear "anastomosis" over and over. Two arteries start from the same source (the aorta), branch off and become different things (the posterior and anterior intercostal arteries), then these different things come back and converge. So it does happen in a concrete thing, and it makes sense, and it's beautiful in how it works. Every part of the body is related to another, and it is a system of connections that keeps you breathing so you can tell when someone like Murakami comes along and makes you breathe offbeat.

But that's a body and that's a book, and this is me.

the family you choose

Last week, late Saturday night, I brought some cookies to Bibhav's room and we were chatting when Don came by and told us that there was free food downstairs at Marigold's. We were enticed by his plate of rice and chicken, so we got Guson and went to get some. There were three long foil trays filled with rice, pork and chicken. I started eating and thought I'd bring back a plate of leftovers for the next day. Guson then says, why don't we take all the trays back. I ask him where we're going to put all this food. He thinks we can fit it in my fridge. My microfridge which can't hold a carton of milk unless it's lying sideways. He's convinced. We each take a tray up to my room. For the next hour we take apart the shelves in my fridge, fold the trays every which way, take out some rice, put the tray back in to see it not fit, take out some more rice. Guson works at this patiently and oblivious to the ridiculous nature of his effort, while Bibhav grows tired and curls up on the linoleum floor to nap, and I stare in wonder at the whole episode.

Somehow it fits, and the boys promptly arrive for lunch the next day with Jen to help us out. We eat the leftovers for four meals: take out the foil trays, scoop heaps of food onto plastic plates, stuff the trays back in, clean the rice that's spilled onto the floor, transfer food from plate to plate since only one of them is microwaveable, heat them until our plastic plate cracks, wash the disposable ones that still work, divide the heaps, pick at the bones, finish each other's food. Sometimes we supplement the meal with tea whose leaves occupy most of the cup volume because we don't use a strainer, or maple candy, or burnt cookies. Somewhere along the continuum of this ritual, we form a family in which I am the mom, Bibhav is the silly kid, Guson is the grumpy grandpa, and Jen is the auntie.



***
A representative conversation:

B: When's dinner?
G: I'm eating Marigold's.
K: Haha, I TOLD you you wouldn't finish the leftovers. If other people want leftovers let me know but otherwise maybe it'd be good to save for when we have everyone since it takes work to heat and wash. Is that okay Grandpa? Whoever Grandpa is.
B: Doesn't look like there is much choice Mommy. Fine. Eating with Grandpa it is. Stupid Grandpa.
G: Don't disrespect your elders, whippersnapper.
B: Sorry. Nice to see you have accepted your position though.
G: I was telling Kim the other day that, technically, this means I'm her daddy (ooo)
J: You could be the paternal grandfather, you know.
K: I told Jen you all are adopted. I don't know where the grandpa came from. He just arrived one day and stayed.
G: There is no father in this family. Bibhav is a bastard.
B: Adopted bastards are cool. Uninvited grandpas who won't leave and moreover, are Korean, are not cool.
G: Grandpas who steal booze and trays of Indian food are cool.
B: Shut up Guson.
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I love my family.