In the past week, I've had to replace my phone charger, my iPod charger, and my computer adapter (though my computer just died altogether, so it may not have been the adapter that was the issue). My phone charger has been acting up in the past few months. I have to wiggle and bend and contort its attachment to the phone, to reach a precarious position where it will charge the phone. For awhile it only took a few seconds and a book for pressure, to get it working. And per usual this is an inconvenience I can willingly put up with indefinitely. But it got to the point where ten minutes of adjustment didn't do the trick, and even if it worked eventually, there was no standard way of adjusting; it'd be a different trick each time. I've been content charging my iPod via my iPod stereo or my computer, since the charger that came with the iPod broke a long time ago. This was back when Apple still gave a charger with the iPod (that's right, first generation iPod packaging). This also gives you an idea of how old everything technological I own is. Anyway, I would've been fine without a wall charger, except now my computer is dead and I can't go without charging my iPod for three weeks while abroad in Vietnam. And my computer has been having issues with its adapter, where none would charge it up anymore; I'd found a new one at home that worked for several months, then wasn't working; so I got another last week. But looks like the computer needs more than that, because it won't start up.
So as many have told me, it seems that I probably need new things, rather than continually trying to recharge old ones. But even if I replace everything, I'm left with my old sometimes worn self, and I'll always have to find ways to recharge. Thank goodness for running into people at exactly the moment I need cheer, for stubborn climbs, for him in the evenings and how he makes me value not just his presence but my own, and for new travel to old places.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
friends
In a period of low where I felt both made to feel, and self-induced to feel, a bit mediocre, I sought love, and found it. No matter what else I accomplish or am trying to accomplish, knowing that I can be something to someone, makes me feel purpose more than anything else. When our home is a place to ring the doorbell at any hour, when our couch and kitchen is open to someone who wants company, quiet company while sleeping exhausted or raucous accompaniment to the guitar, when there is a knock at the back door just cause--I'm incredibly grateful to be a person to come to. And to be able to go to them. Though generally uncomfortable with positive reinforcement, I admit there are times when it's needed, and nice. To have a friend you respect so well tell you you're one of the best, to have a boyfriend who calls you at work when you're feeling inferior and makes you feel chosen instead, to have a group of wonderful people want to be with you, to have emails end with love that's genuine and felt across distance. To be deserving of it all, is the best goal to have, and when other things aren't going so well, this alone is reason to keep trying to be better.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
schedule
As I'm apt to do when confronted with large blocks of free time, I've developed a semi-schedule for my weekdays. It's very broad in its division of time, and loose in obligations, and makes me pretty content every day.
Morning: Run or climb. Running makes for good alone time that gives energy for the rest of the day. Climbing in the morning means quality time with my classmate/friend Caitlin, who also gives energy for the rest of the day, and it means a mostly empty gym with lots of room.
Afternoon: Write and/or research. On some days I have interviews for research. Most days I spend long afternoons at coffeeshops, sometimes with other friends doing work. I have long stretches to write; I don't spend much of the time actually writing, but it feels like a process.
Evening: Spend time with M. We divide active activities between squash and climbing. He usually makes food, and now that he's taking classes, we spend some time studying. During that time I also do stray work that I don't like to do during the day, and that I find more bearable in his company. If there's not much work to do we watch movies, and regardless of what else there is to do, we talk.
Meals are often spent with friends, and evenings mixed up with friends too, and as I've been thankful for the past several years, I continue to feel lucky for the balance and perspective they give. And I feel lucky for the balance of these times of day, and how much they give me, so that in the future I can share. In the meantime, it's nice to just absorb.
Morning: Run or climb. Running makes for good alone time that gives energy for the rest of the day. Climbing in the morning means quality time with my classmate/friend Caitlin, who also gives energy for the rest of the day, and it means a mostly empty gym with lots of room.
Afternoon: Write and/or research. On some days I have interviews for research. Most days I spend long afternoons at coffeeshops, sometimes with other friends doing work. I have long stretches to write; I don't spend much of the time actually writing, but it feels like a process.
Evening: Spend time with M. We divide active activities between squash and climbing. He usually makes food, and now that he's taking classes, we spend some time studying. During that time I also do stray work that I don't like to do during the day, and that I find more bearable in his company. If there's not much work to do we watch movies, and regardless of what else there is to do, we talk.
Meals are often spent with friends, and evenings mixed up with friends too, and as I've been thankful for the past several years, I continue to feel lucky for the balance and perspective they give. And I feel lucky for the balance of these times of day, and how much they give me, so that in the future I can share. In the meantime, it's nice to just absorb.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
patience
Hemingway, who was my favorite writer in college and will always remain significant to me, said he would stop writing when he knew where to go next. This could be mid-sentence or mid-idea. This way, when he started again, it would be easy to start, and starting is always the hardest part. It’s advice that many aspiring writers quote, because it’s good advice. It works, by leaving something in anticipation and coming back to it in anticipation. It works not just in writing but also in living, I think.
But it’s hard to leave something with the feeling that there’s more. It takes discipline, willpower, and foresight to consider the benefits of delay. I’m not too good at it. Probably because in one sense I have a lot of patience for both good and bad. I don’t get tired of continuous good too easily, and I don’t mind trudging through some or a lot of bad to get back to the good. I’m not too particular about the ease of things, and I don’t give much thought to efficiency when it comes to abstractions in my life (or concrete things either, but that’s a different topic). While I think this is useful in some areas, I wonder if it’s the best way to go about things. Instead of having patience for inconvenience and difficulties, maybe I should have more patience for trying to cut down the inconvenience and difficulties, in my writing, in my life.
But it’s hard to leave something with the feeling that there’s more. It takes discipline, willpower, and foresight to consider the benefits of delay. I’m not too good at it. Probably because in one sense I have a lot of patience for both good and bad. I don’t get tired of continuous good too easily, and I don’t mind trudging through some or a lot of bad to get back to the good. I’m not too particular about the ease of things, and I don’t give much thought to efficiency when it comes to abstractions in my life (or concrete things either, but that’s a different topic). While I think this is useful in some areas, I wonder if it’s the best way to go about things. Instead of having patience for inconvenience and difficulties, maybe I should have more patience for trying to cut down the inconvenience and difficulties, in my writing, in my life.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
recording
This morning, I met with my research advisor to go over a transcript of my first interview, which I conducted back in September. My project is qualitative research, speaking with hospice or near-hospice patients about their main concerns during this transitional period that we term end-of-life. My first interview was with a lovely woman from the South, with a subtly sharp sense of humor and generous spirit, who died a couple months after I met her. She's the one who I wrote about previously, who had written a story she'd wanted to publish in her nursing home newspaper. We'd worked on it together, and she died before it could get published; it will be printed in April.
With those strings in mind, I read the transcript with my advisor, who said, isn't it funny to hear her voice coming back? I agreed, and I thought how nice it was that I had the interview on tape, and also how nice it was to see it transcribed on paper. I've been so trained to close-read that when conversation becomes written, I pay attention differently. Words take on much more contextual meaning. And as fresh eyes to the interview, my advisor noticed motifs and word choices and turns of phrases that I hadn't, while speaking to the patient. She also loves telling any story that comes to her mind when something reminds her of it; they're always funny, or touching, or interesting.
Reading the transcript made me excited anew about the project, realizing that there was more than I realized in those conversations. I'd worried that without structure, and with such different people in different situations, it'd be hard to glean anything from the interviews. But even if each transcript turns out to be very different, there are plenty of individual insights into a person's thought process and expression of them, and that's worthwhile.
Much of the reading I've been doing on qualitative research and narrative analysis emphasizes what's lost when conversations are transcribed into script. You lose tone, pauses, faces, and so on; it's true that much nuance is sacrificed. And so I was surprised to see that simultaneously true is that something's gained in this translation. There's something about the act of recording, which inherently must be in a different medium than actual experience, that gives a perspective outside of the experience itself.
*
This afternoon the wife and I continued to labor over our class slideshow, to be shown at our school's annual second-year-show this weekend. Each year the graduating class puts together a slideshow of pictures. Ever since I saw the fourth year class slideshow during my first year here, I've wanted to work on ours.
We downloaded all the pictures sent from our classmates, and because I wanted to give the show a theme and not just be a conglomeration of pictures, we went through them and organized them. Then we laid them out into slides, keeping in mind order and cohesiveness and variety. Then wife and another friend/classmate of ours chose music to correspond to different parts of the slideshow, and had to learn how to splice music to put together a mix. Then we had to sync, sync, sync, and sync again the music to the pictures; there were a lot of transitions in the pictures that we wanted to line up with transitions in the music. Then we embedded a short video to conclude the show.
We probably spent the equivalent of 24 hours over different days in order to piece together this 6-minute slideshow. We had to choose which parts of songs we wanted, decide which pictures to cluster together, find pictures of everyone in our class, learn how to have certain pictures come into view, figure out how to time slides. All of this required learning details, looking up programs, pulling hair, and intermittent/continuous swearing.
It also meant watching the show over 20 times to see whether our piecemeal efforts congealed into solid form. As frustrating as the process could be, watching the product always made me nostalgic. Four years of people and experiences, compressed in two-second segments placed side by side like pages pressed in a book. Each time we would notice new nuances, the way a lyric coincided with an item on the slide or how, small moments of self-pride and love for the images--that won't be noticed by anyone else, but are known to us and after all that work, gives a lot.
It's a representation, but not only a representation--not in the sense that it's something else other than a representation, but that "representation" encompasses more than we give it credit for. It's not a replica of the experiences that give rise to the memories or even the memories themselves, but it's an experience on its own. The process of making this out of things already made, surprises in the way that in how new it is, how much there is still to learn and feel.
There's the personal satisfaction from creating something with your own hands, and also the sense that something's happening to you. This dynamic way of connecting yourself with things outside of you that are also kind of part of you, and of connecting the outside with parts of yourself that are also kind of already part of your environment, is obviously too poignant for me to describe with any sort of clarity. But for all the curses and furrowed brows, it feels damn good (so long as it goes well for the show, too).
*
I'm really grateful for small experiences like these, things no one would pinpoint as reasons to be a medical student. And of course it's more than medicine that led me to having these moments, and of course if I'd done something else I would've been led to others, but I don't think I've been exposed to quite as much compact variety at any other phase in my life. M and I talk a lot about reasons for and against a career in medicine, with the long stressful process being a drawback. But there are also a lot of opportunities to meet things you may never have felt. I'm lucky that Yale is particularly suited to exploring these things, often without much idea of concrete goal. I also feel lucky for being a part of a small community of students for four/five years; for me it's combined aspects of high school and college I liked most (with some of the bad of each thrown in there, too). I don't think I'll ever experience anything like it again, and in remembering and living it, I miss it too. So for that too I want to record.
With those strings in mind, I read the transcript with my advisor, who said, isn't it funny to hear her voice coming back? I agreed, and I thought how nice it was that I had the interview on tape, and also how nice it was to see it transcribed on paper. I've been so trained to close-read that when conversation becomes written, I pay attention differently. Words take on much more contextual meaning. And as fresh eyes to the interview, my advisor noticed motifs and word choices and turns of phrases that I hadn't, while speaking to the patient. She also loves telling any story that comes to her mind when something reminds her of it; they're always funny, or touching, or interesting.
Reading the transcript made me excited anew about the project, realizing that there was more than I realized in those conversations. I'd worried that without structure, and with such different people in different situations, it'd be hard to glean anything from the interviews. But even if each transcript turns out to be very different, there are plenty of individual insights into a person's thought process and expression of them, and that's worthwhile.
Much of the reading I've been doing on qualitative research and narrative analysis emphasizes what's lost when conversations are transcribed into script. You lose tone, pauses, faces, and so on; it's true that much nuance is sacrificed. And so I was surprised to see that simultaneously true is that something's gained in this translation. There's something about the act of recording, which inherently must be in a different medium than actual experience, that gives a perspective outside of the experience itself.
*
This afternoon the wife and I continued to labor over our class slideshow, to be shown at our school's annual second-year-show this weekend. Each year the graduating class puts together a slideshow of pictures. Ever since I saw the fourth year class slideshow during my first year here, I've wanted to work on ours.
We downloaded all the pictures sent from our classmates, and because I wanted to give the show a theme and not just be a conglomeration of pictures, we went through them and organized them. Then we laid them out into slides, keeping in mind order and cohesiveness and variety. Then wife and another friend/classmate of ours chose music to correspond to different parts of the slideshow, and had to learn how to splice music to put together a mix. Then we had to sync, sync, sync, and sync again the music to the pictures; there were a lot of transitions in the pictures that we wanted to line up with transitions in the music. Then we embedded a short video to conclude the show.
We probably spent the equivalent of 24 hours over different days in order to piece together this 6-minute slideshow. We had to choose which parts of songs we wanted, decide which pictures to cluster together, find pictures of everyone in our class, learn how to have certain pictures come into view, figure out how to time slides. All of this required learning details, looking up programs, pulling hair, and intermittent/continuous swearing.
It also meant watching the show over 20 times to see whether our piecemeal efforts congealed into solid form. As frustrating as the process could be, watching the product always made me nostalgic. Four years of people and experiences, compressed in two-second segments placed side by side like pages pressed in a book. Each time we would notice new nuances, the way a lyric coincided with an item on the slide or how, small moments of self-pride and love for the images--that won't be noticed by anyone else, but are known to us and after all that work, gives a lot.
It's a representation, but not only a representation--not in the sense that it's something else other than a representation, but that "representation" encompasses more than we give it credit for. It's not a replica of the experiences that give rise to the memories or even the memories themselves, but it's an experience on its own. The process of making this out of things already made, surprises in the way that in how new it is, how much there is still to learn and feel.
There's the personal satisfaction from creating something with your own hands, and also the sense that something's happening to you. This dynamic way of connecting yourself with things outside of you that are also kind of part of you, and of connecting the outside with parts of yourself that are also kind of already part of your environment, is obviously too poignant for me to describe with any sort of clarity. But for all the curses and furrowed brows, it feels damn good (so long as it goes well for the show, too).
*
I'm really grateful for small experiences like these, things no one would pinpoint as reasons to be a medical student. And of course it's more than medicine that led me to having these moments, and of course if I'd done something else I would've been led to others, but I don't think I've been exposed to quite as much compact variety at any other phase in my life. M and I talk a lot about reasons for and against a career in medicine, with the long stressful process being a drawback. But there are also a lot of opportunities to meet things you may never have felt. I'm lucky that Yale is particularly suited to exploring these things, often without much idea of concrete goal. I also feel lucky for being a part of a small community of students for four/five years; for me it's combined aspects of high school and college I liked most (with some of the bad of each thrown in there, too). I don't think I'll ever experience anything like it again, and in remembering and living it, I miss it too. So for that too I want to record.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
free time
We've been so ingrained to work for things, work so hard that we long for free time and freedom, that when there's no immediate goal to work for we feel a little lost. Writing is difficult because the hours don't add up to results; what is put in doesn't correlate to what is put on paper. I don't think I've had anything else in my life that's so painful and so fulfilling at the same time, except for maybe relationships, and it's funny to think of something so solitary to be most like something so connected to people.
I find it difficult to focus, turning to multiple writings to override the block in one (hence the blogging, the emailing). When trying to write things with clearer details and points to the details, it can be relieving to ramble with whatever comes to mind. I go back and forth between the endeavor of writing and the typing of thought, in almost a frenzy.
And I place things in the background; there is always always music and often there's a book. Currently I'm reading about qualitative research--how to analyze narratives, interpret stories. Which is interesting and informative, but also occupies a lot of the same space allotted for writing, and crowds things a bit.
I doubt that there will another time in my life quite like this one, where I can give so much attention to the space and crowding in my mind. It's ungrateful and honest to complain about the difficulty of free time and uncertain pursuits, and it's also necessary to fully portray how lucky I feel to be both so wound-up and unwinding.
I find it difficult to focus, turning to multiple writings to override the block in one (hence the blogging, the emailing). When trying to write things with clearer details and points to the details, it can be relieving to ramble with whatever comes to mind. I go back and forth between the endeavor of writing and the typing of thought, in almost a frenzy.
And I place things in the background; there is always always music and often there's a book. Currently I'm reading about qualitative research--how to analyze narratives, interpret stories. Which is interesting and informative, but also occupies a lot of the same space allotted for writing, and crowds things a bit.
I doubt that there will another time in my life quite like this one, where I can give so much attention to the space and crowding in my mind. It's ungrateful and honest to complain about the difficulty of free time and uncertain pursuits, and it's also necessary to fully portray how lucky I feel to be both so wound-up and unwinding.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
anniversary
I like anniversaries for the thought of remembering and reflecting, all that's happened between two points in time. Which is a lot, and considering how many days go by without significance--to feel that one year with someone has given you this much to feel and consider and grow, is nice. We went through a long phase of uncertainty, intermittent phases of awkwardness, a phase of closeness through distance, a phase of travel, and are in something good at the moment. I've always thought it was valuable and important to experience different stages, as we're different in different contexts. Through these with him, we've tried to be honest and open, and more than ease or sap, this is what I've loved best.
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