what's in a name?

so, when you start a blog, you have to name it... here's the story about mine.

imagine, if you will, a lecture hall with approximately 250 people in it. if you can, imagine that it's a friday morning, and everyone is waiting to get back their chest and abdomen anatomy practicals. continue with me, while the professor talks about the overall class performance on said anatomy practical. he rambles on and on. and then he mentions how... this has never happened before. someone got a 100% on this practical. you can see where this is going, can't you?

well, you guessed it. i made history that day. i got a 100% on an anatomy practical. apparently quite a feat. but the name?

well, i told my friends, but not my lab group. (you just don't go around shouting from the rooftops news such as this in medical school.) but in the very next lab, one of the profs was at our table and i asked him a question. he looks at me and smirks. and then says to me with a wink...

"i know who YOU are. you're the ACE."

so sometimes i like to call myself the ace. (please note, nobody else calls me this, really.)

sick.

yeah, so i'm spending the last week of my last summer ever with a cold. it sucks. to be sick.

******

gram and i had a good time. we played some scrabble and lots of skip-bo. i plucked her eyebrows. we visited her friend in the hospital. she begged me to stay another day. sorry grams!

yeah, so i didn't take my straightener with me to gram's house. and not that my hair looks like this if i don't straighten it. no, worse. if i don't straighten it, it's really fuzzy. so i figured i could use gram's curling iron to smooth it out, but it was too small and ended up putting in too much wave, so i decided to embrace it. here's a better shot in which you can see both sides. unfortunately, i liked it. so i'm hoping i can find an old curling iron around here from 1993 that may be small enough to pull this look off.

when i look at it now, it just looks a stringy mess. but i liked it at the time. perhaps another day of experimenting is in order. i'll get back to you.

******

eek. this time next week i'll have finished my first day of pediatric psychiatry. is anyone else nervous?!?

******

saturday was karma's birthday... the big 3-0. and i sent him a really funny card and wrote some pretty sentimental stuff in it. and i called on the big day (but i don't think he'd gotten the card yet, because i'm a bit of a procrastinator...) and he's surely gotten the card by now, and i've heard nothing from him. i guess i was just expecting an email or something saying "i always knew you were a big goob." or something else equally as heart warming as the text message he sent me last week that said "i just took a huge dump. how are you?"

i REALLY need some new friends.

i'm moving into karma's house (for 4 weeks) on sunday (and then again in november, for another 4 weeks). i'm glad he'll be around when i'm having a nervous breakdown from the reality of the craziness of some kid's lives.

******

i know a famous person. well, not really. but check it. a girl from the class below mine that bigred and i used to tutor with at a local high school is going to be on the new season of "the biggest loser." you should check her out. and root for her. i'm so proud of her! we're not super great friends or anything, but i totally know her. good for you, jen! and good luck!

project.

i've been thinking about making an updated bag. tonight was the night. props to my mom. she helped a lot, with both the design phase and the actual construction phase. she's a really good pinner. thanks mom!

i love pencil bags. especially the ones that are of this particular design.

******

tomorrow, i'm going to go visit grams. she's so excited. which makes me happy. she's pretty lonely, so it'll be good for her to have some company. i'm looking forward to it as well. we'll be going on some nice little walks and playing lots of scrabble. i really adore scrabble. i know, that practically means i AM an 80 yr old woman. i'm ok with that.

dying.

i have a slight case of medical student hypochondriasis. meaning, i've diagnosed myself with mumps. mumps? that's crazy - my titers are POSITIVE... meaning, i'm IMMUNE. which can only mean one thing. it's a crazy strain of parayxovirus that i'm not immune to and that there is no vaccine for, and certainly no cure, and thus i will surely die.

if i don't come out of this, tell my mom i love her. and i'm sorry i didn't eat dinner with her.

this week's memory verses.

Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved; for you are the one I praise. Jeremiah 17:14

Behold! I am the Lord; the God of all flesh. Is anything too difficult for me? Jeremiah 32:27

where's waldo?

a week from tomorrow i'll move back to des moines, where i'll live for 4 weeks with a friend while i'm doing my psychiatry rotation. i'll be working with a pediatric psychiatrist, which i am both excited and nervous about. but mostly excited.

here's my schedule, as it now stands, for my 3rd year of medical school:
sept: psych, des moines
oct: peds, kansas city
nov: peds, des moines
dec: obgyn, chicago
jan: endocrine, detroit
feb: anesthesia, detroit
march: family practice, quad cities, iowa
april: family practice, quad cities, iowa
may-august: hospital block (which includes four weeks each of surgery, ER, internal medicine, and either cardiology or ICU), quad cities, iowa

it will be a lot of moving, but it's broken up nicely, and should work out ok.

my only other concern, is that i've heard advice that you shouldn't rotate in what you want to do end up doing right away... but this is how my schedule worked out. and so, this future pediatrician will see only kids for the 1st three months of my rotations. i'm sure that things will work out fine in the end. but i will admit to being slightly nervous about something coming back to haunt me... like hospitals that i might want to do residency at remembering me as a babbling idiot of a 3rd yr when i rotated there way back in the first block of rotations... i'll just know in my head that i have to work hard right off the bat to make good impressions on important people.

medicine, like so many other things, is more about who you know than what you know. even more than that though, it's about who you know and how much they like you. so i'll do my best to play the game: be likeable, don't ruffle too many feathers, and bring treats.

new method of coping.

i've recently decided that the best way to make yourself feel better when you are having a bad day is to compliment yourself. tell everyone around you that you are both pretty and popular.

example 1:
friend: wanna go out for lunch next wednesday?
me: i don't know if i'm free, i mean, i am so pretty and popular.

example 2:
friend: that shirt is a really nice color on you.
me: thanks; it's because i'm so pretty and popular.

i know you're skeptical, but trust me. it's good times. and the more times you say it in one day, the more likely you are to believe it. you should try it.

see how pretty and popular i'm looking here? my friends can't even stand to not have their heads touching mine. i'm that PRETTY. and POPULAR.

go suck an orange.

boys make everything so complicated. COMPLICATED. (not this boy, mind you... but i heart this picture in a big way.)

my head hurts

but i got a lot done this morning, and still had time to spend a good number of hours watching tv, hanging out with my mom, and playing on the internet. all in all, not a bad day. but my blasted head hurts.

******

on a much more exciting note... my cousin found out that it's a BOY!! i'm SO EXCITED for her!

ugh.

thinking about money gives me a headache. and makes me long for a latte. i took this the other day when i went to hang out by myself in public, pretending to like hanging out by myself in public. i'm beginning to realize that i'm lonely. i'm on a very individual trek, and i can't be too sure of when it will cease to be individual.

not that this makes any sense. but since classes are finished, for the next two years i'll be moving frequently. and though for the 1st six months at least, i'll be living or working with good friends, the prospect of not being able to settle in to a real routine for more than four weeks at a time has got me a little down today.

i think there's a delicate balance to life. and life in medical school is no different. i was always envious of karma and hot-T, because they had lives outside of school. karma had his wife, who he wanted to be with whenever there was no real need to study (which, who can blame him, really?) and hot-T had not only his girlfriend, but a whole host of other friends from college, etc. even down to big red and the man from china. they had eachother. and with the exception of hot-T and the couple of months karma has to travel, they will continue to have access to intimate relationships, while i simply will not.

current obsession

i cannot get enough.

priorities.

so, i did all my laundry, and had it sitting in my laundry basket due to my lack of space for putting anything away in the bedroom i call my apartment. so what do i do? i remove the clothes from the basket, hang everything possible, and stack the rest on top of various box piles in order that i can have an empty laundry basket for the dirty clothes (of which there currently are none). so, piles of clothes on boxes in order to avoid a single pile of dirty clothes that doesn't even exist. people, you can trust me with your life! i know what's really important!

******

one more thing. i can't WAIT to have an income. i'll settle for a student loan check.

re-do

i read in a magazine last night that it's no longer "in" to wear dark colored polish on your toes, so since i had nothing better to do this morning, i repainted a nice light pink. it looks darker in this picture than it really is. trust me, i'm totally "in"!!

******

an aside, if you have a second, weigh in with your opinion - this question has been plaguing me for a while now.

pampering.

i gave myself a pedicure last night, complete with soaking, scrubbing and sanding. my feet are oh-so-soft today, and i'm thoroughly enjoying the color of polish i chose for myself.

denied.

hot-T and i got our rejection letters today. we applied for a scholarship (the same one we were rejected from last year). we went for interviews the week before boards. it took away practically an entire day of studying. but tell me how much fun it was to be in the car for six hours pretending to study. we also ate at a really fantastic (and way too fancy) cafe on the plaza. i had an omelet - and they put feta cheese in it. i adore feta cheese.

perhaps had we not wasted that time, boards would've been slightly less painful. here are the two of us at the post-boards party. apparently whoever took this picture had been doing a LOT of partying. get a load of the way hot-T appears to be scheming to bite my ear off. not that i would've minded.

nutritional value.

popcorn... is it a vegetable or a carbohydrate?

lazy summer "daisy"

i'm not good enough to have my own flower pictures, but good golly, i love me some daisies... and google. thank goodness for google.



today, i did next to nothing. well, not exactly next to nothing. i spent the morning at a doctor's appointment with my mom. then i spent the afternoon sleeping. i think meridith may be on to something with her recent mono kick. she's convinced she has it because she's constantly tired. i think it's just all the residual stress in her life, but whatever. anyway, ever since i left her house yesterday, i've been ridiculously tired and sleeping endlessly. or at least wanting to. she must have been contagious.

chic-a-go

i got home earlier today from my latest galavanting. i went to mer's house in the windy city. flew in thursday evening, and left this morning - after i *ALMOST* missed my flight. talk about STRESS!! the airport was PACKED with people. on a random tuesday morning. was there a holiday this weekend that nobody told me about? i was there an hour early... and i was THE LAST person on the plane. LAST. i boarded at least ten minutes after the final boarding call. after SPRINTING from the security checkpoint to the gate.

anyway, the trip was good. we had a good time. we always do. we had a condo-warming party for our favorite new home-owner. she got a lot of cool gifts. we spent the rest of saturday napping and lounging and talking about how there must be a carbon monoxide leak that was causing us to be so lethargic. really, i think we're just lazy. so, pretty much we did not a lot of activity. meridith is one of my favorite people to do hang out with. we always have something to talk about and that makes us fun. because we say so.

on monday, mer took the day off work, and we went to a water park and acted like we were fourteen. we had a splendid time and i am now a delicious pink that will soon be a bodacious bronze. i know you're jealous.

so, it was a pretty sweet weekend. and it makes me excited to live there in december. i hope i have at least a few days off. i'll be doing OB that month, so who knows. time will tell, i suppose. and until then, we'll chat on the phone approximately 7 times a day.

various and asundry things.

i haven't been able to post for a few days because my computer got into a fight with the internet. they're back on speaking terms now, after a little coaxing from tech support, and a lot of begging from me.

so, i think the template switch solved the disappearing text issue. and i'm lately obsessed with pink, so it works well.

i just got back from a trip to des moines to see the boys once more before everyone scoots on our own merry ways... it was fun. lots of hanging out. and we ate lunch yesterday at noodle zoo. one of our favorite places. yum.

i didn't take any pictures on the trip, so here's an old one (one of my favorites actually) just for fun, so you can see how cute we are.

see? we're way cute. hot-T is on the left, karma is on the right. gotta love 'em. did you know karma's a GENIUS?!?! 90th percentile on the boards. huh? yeah, 90th percentile. psycho!

anyway, we had a good visit. and i'll move in with karma and his wife for the month of september. hot-T will be far far away, but i think we'll get to see him at least once, and that will be good.

i'm getting WAY excited about my trip to see meridith this week! i fly out on thursday. it will be a slammin' good time.

i'm SO sick of this apartment crammed into a bedroom life i'm living right now... i NEED some organization in this place. it's not going to happen at least until after the big trip. perhaps next weekend i'll be able to find nothing else to do. we'll see about that.