If you want to be loved, be lovable.

America

2011-01-26T17:57:00.000-08:00

So I was watching Obama's state of the union last night with the family. The baby (MP) slept through it but to get My Love (ML) to watch it, that took a little doing. For whatever reason, I feel like it's something important, for Americans to sit down and have a shared experience as a nation. Kind of like with the Olympics, but more often than every 4 years, and about something other than sports.

I love this country. It's something that I have in common with my brother, Day Trader (DT). In our left-leaning, hyper-liberal circle of friends, it's not a common trait at all, having pride in the US of A. It's not like DT and I don't have share the left leaning politics of our friends. We want electric cars, universal health care, abortion on demand, homo marriage, and a ban on whale murder just like everyone else. It's just that we recognize how amazing this country has been to even the people around us who disparage it with every breath.

I know that there's a lot wrong with this country. I really do. I just think that sometimes, it's pretty amazing what kind of creativity and innovation that's possible. People going from nothing to everything. I see it around me all the time.

Baby

2011-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

So I tried to do some writing at work on Christmas Day 2010:

"So this will be my first experiment in writing blog posts from work. Today is December the 25th, Christmas 2010. My daughter MP is one week old today (MP are her initials). I type this sitting in the CAT scan trailer parked outside the ambulance bay of the hospital.

One week ago today, at 1 am, ML’s water broke. Unfortunately, my sinuses had been clogged from earlier on that day and at the time of water breaking, I was a couple hours in to a lovely benadryl induced haze. ML woke me up and somehow I convinced her to let me sleep another 30 minutes. Apparently early labor has nothing on the dysphoria that arises from messing with my benadryl haze.

But eventually my sense and ML’s anxiety got the better of me and off I went to get our zipcar to drive us off to the posh hospital just the next state over where MP would come into being.

There are things that I want to remember about the birth. For instance, the soundtrack. For whatever it means, the music we listened to on the way to the hospital was Jack Johnson. When the pitocin was really starting to kick in and up through to the epidural, it was Lemon Jelly’s Lemonjelly.ky. During active labor during the child’s first moments here in the world, the album was Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. And to calm the infant child during the first few days in the hospital, either Pinback or Jack Johnson seemed to work wonders."

People are always trying to remind me and ML about how they grow up so fast. Today MP is 5 and a half weeks old. And in just that brief time, I understand what people are saying to me. The time goes so fast because every moment is just so precious. It's really amazing. I'm not sure it's something I ever could have understood prior to having this baby. It's something I definitely can't put properly into words. I will try though...

Just to write

2010-05-06T21:03:00.001-07:00

So much has gone in my life in the time that I've been away from this blog that I'm no longer sure what I've written about here. But at the risk of repeating myself, I was just thinking about what one of my high school English teachers once told me; "If you want to be a writer, you have to write." It was in the context of a conversation we were having about how to find inspiration. So I was thinking about that, and here I am. Once again. Not sure if anyone is going to be reading this, but it doesn't really matter. I'm here. Just to write.

It was about a month ago now that My Love (ML) and I took our first real vacation together. I mean real in the sense that it was enough vacation that we really started to forget how long we'd been gone from work and our day-to-day life groove. We had the kind of time spent on vacation where it seems that possibly, just possibly, we might not go back to those "real lives" of ours.

One souvenir of the trip that I'm sure I'll have for quite a while is my first tattoo. It was done by Hippie Pops (HP), a man I'd not seen in far too long. Now I hadn't planned on getting a tattoo at all, but like so many good things in my life, it seemed to just sort of happen and I feel like a better person for it.

I got in touch with HP just a few days before ML and I were to arrive in San Francisco. He was working and invited us over to his tattoo shop to say hi and maybe figure out what to do later. Of course, at the end of his day he had a little bit of time in his schedule and that planted the seed in my mind.

Something I admire about those with tattoos is of course the ability to commit to something in life. If only it's just a small amount of extra pigment in the skin, you know that tattoo wearing people will at least be decisive about something.

There have been a few things I always thought I'd want to get, but the only thing in life I've been through worthy of a tattoo is to commemorate my getting out of medical school with my degree.

To that end, I'm now sporting a caduceus on my shoulder. You know, the winged staff with the double helix of snakes. The purists of course would have you believe that the rod of Asclepius is the true Greek symbol of medicine. And they would be right. The caduceus more formally got its start as the Wand of Hermes and is classically a symbol of protection for travelers, tricksters, and gamblers. It's a symbol associated with knowledge and eloquence. It's actually got a pretty fascinating history. Most people just think it symbolizes the medical field. But it really doesn't. So I like that. Most of us are many things to many people though initially defined by first impressions. And I think I found a good symbol to represent that part of me. Plus HP is just a fantastic artist, so that helps.

Happy New Year 2010

2010-01-06T15:23:00.000-08:00

If whenever I have a birthday, I get a little bit depressed and pensive, then every New Years I get a little happy and hopeful. I know that it's a little bit contrived, but it's just the way that I feel. So much possibility for the future. My resolutions for 2009 were to write more and to be more honest. To that end, I started this blog. Which I think helped me a little bit to do both. As for this year, I went pretty modest with the goal of drinking more water. What could possibly go wrong with that? Anyways, for my first post of the new year, I get to write about one of my friends with whom I go way back; I'll call him Not Crazy (NC).

Anyways, NC and I met back in my sophomore year of high school. We went to high school together, we went to college together, we shared a ton of misadventures together. December 13th of 2009, NC's parents called the cops on him, he was taken in and got a 5150. As I've previously worked in a psychiatric inpatient facility in California, I was well aware that the 5150 is a 3-day involuntary hold, which can be upgraded to a 5250, the 30-day involuntary hold. I don't know exactly what NC said or did but he got that upgrade too. So lucky him, he got to spend Christmas and New Years in a loony bin. Or so I thought. I got to see him the day after New Years and I found out that he was actually staying at a "clean living" home. He seemed all right. I was out in Los Angeles with My Love (ML) and went to see NC with ML and a couple of other mutual friends. Walking in to visit felt a little like Buckner walking back into Shea. The layout was pure frat house. However, the difference was that instead of kegerators and beer-pong tables, there were all the hallmarks of 12-step programs. Lots of coffee, ashtrays, and friend of Bill W. literature scattered all around. Having regularly attended 12-step meetings in the past, I knew the scene very well. We were told to have a seat in the lounge and that NC would be right out. It took maybe the longest 5 minutes of my life sitting there and waiting. I wasn't sure if I was going to get the NC that I knew so well, or someone waxing manic, talking a mile-a-minute, or possibly a haldol'ed out shell of a former human being. Luckily, the person who emerged was NC, just like I remembered him. He said that he was actually in the middle of a class and that we should come back in about 20 minutes. We went to the burger stand across from the house, had some snacks and in 20 minutes NC came outside and we sat outside the house catching up.

This wasn't quite what I was expecting. Being on a 30-day involuntary hold, NC wasn't behind any locked doors. He could have just strolled out to the car with us and rolled away it seemed. But for now, he was staying put. If he did AWOL, I'm sure there would have been some consequence for sure, and I really didn't want to find out about it. It was quite a scene, the 5 of us sitting on a beautiful day in Southern California, the least crazy and least addict prone person in the group had somehow become the person who ended up in treatment. Like I said, I don't know the full story and I didn't want to press, but my theory is psychiatric mismanagement. Sometimes the meds that are supposed to make you sane, all they do is just make you crazy.

Birthdays

2009-11-03T20:34:00.000-08:00

"Whenever I have a birthday, I think back over the past year, how I've spent my time, what I've accomplished, what regrets I have, how I've tried to make the world a better place, and what exactly I've been doing with my life over the past 365 days, and I think to myself: 'Man, I wish I'd gotten laid more'."
-Unknown

So for some reason or another, it seems that I've been celebrating a lot of birthdays recently. Partly because I do know a lot of people with October birthdays and also partly because one of those birthdays was my own. I was back in San Diego for the night before my birthday, starting off the night with Jelly Bean (JB), some delivery Chinese food, and the Laker game on TV. JB was a dealing with some kind of cold/flu issue and since I was without My Love (ML), I was kind of looking forward to a relaxed kind of birthday celebration.

I used to both love and dread birthdays so much more. Especially that day before, the last 24 hours of being a certain age. They used to make me so anxious and pensive. Strange as it may seem, the older I get, the more it seems like I have the time to do the things I want to do. Maybe it's because there's just so much less pressure to go out and make the most of every day like when you're young. Maybe it's because I've gained a maturity that makes me enjoy the simple things in life. Maybe it's just the calmness that comes with being in love. Whatever the reason, I spent the day before thinking more about all the things for which I was thankful rather than think about all the things for which I had regret. It was nice.

I ended that night and early morning with Vikey McStoner (VM), sitting around and just shooting the breeze like we did so many nights as medical students. And in the midst of it all was of course a great deal of phone calling to and from ML. I was without her for a whole 9 days and while it was nice to be on vacation, it was hard to be away. Of course I write this now with her a few feet away asleep in our bed and when I think of it now it all seems so silly. For a time there though, it really did take a lot of the flavor out of life being so far away. It feels good to be home, which of course is wherever I'm with her.

The Job

2009-09-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

Alice tried another question. "What sort of people live about here?"
"In THAT direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: And in THAT direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland

Each day that goes by, I find such new and interesting ways in which my new residency program is dysfunctional and broken. Of course it all starts with the people who've somehow ended up working there and as I'm well aware, I am one of them. But in this installment, I'll tell you about another coworker who is just one of the most amusing people with whom I've ever shared a job. I'll call her NF for No Filter. I used to think I said random nonsensical things without a hint of self-awareness. NF just takes it to a whole new level. She has a little boy, just over a year old, and just the very mention of his name brings such joy to her eyes. For some reason, almost every day, without fail, she will tell you about his poo. Just today she was telling me about him making poo, how it smells like roses, and how every #2 the kid makes is a precious, precious gift to be held like gold dust with the aroma of morning coffee. Then she went into a ramble about how much she loved cleaning the kid's bits and pieces. Apparently she finds her son's wedding tackle just so adorable and before long she was telling me about how yucky she finds the naughty bits on girls. It's a tirade I've heard before but only from flaming gay men, not so much from thirty-something-year-old mothers. And while I think NF is sort of a nice looking lady, it's hard to imagine how she ever figured out how to get pregnant. She's just the kind of person who wears old-lady sweaters and sensible shoes no matter the context, I imagine her more as the kind of person who would end up with a dozen cats before she ever ended up married and parenting. That being said, I enjoy her company tremendously and in the very near future, I hope to craft more and better stories about the crazy things she says and does.

Too Long

2009-09-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

It's been a strange 10 weeks or so since I've updated this blog. As I've known people to disappear before in the way that I've done so recently, I've learned that the reason is usually one of three things: drugs, religion, or love. I must say for me the overriding things that has so completely turned my life upside-down and inside-out has been the experience of falling in love. While there are many reason I don't want to write too much about the experience, one of the biggest things is how syrupy sweet I feel about the whole affair. I'll call the person I'm with, ML for My Love. We seemed to have formed such a disgustingly saccharine couple that while I often get looks of empathic joy and happiness from complete strangers at our public lovey-dovey displays, I feel just as often looks of jealousy mixed with nausea and I completely understand. So for now, I'll just say that I've found the person with whom I'd like to spend the rest of my life, and everyday I find my life start anew.

A Strange Night

2009-07-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

So I've recently started at my new residency program. Done with the horrors of a medical internship and relaxing with the easy life of a medical subspecialty. And I must say, I really like most of my new coworkers. Last week, I ended up meeting one of my senior residents for a drink, staying out most of the night and sharing all kinds of secrets that should not be shared by people in the medical profession. Though I assure you, there are a lot of us with all kinds of secrets. So this particular girl, I'll call Doctor Ballerina (DB). Before going through the whole medical school / doctor route of life, she worked as a professional ballet dancer. So you can kind of already see why we would get along. It's amazing what kind of lives doctors lead before they ever put on the big white duty coat isn't it?

In any case, the strange night of the title here refers to 3 other people that have yet to be introduced in this blog. For now, I'll try and write the condensed version out right here.

So it's Friday night, DB and I had some tentative plans to hit the town. Unfortunately she seems to have taken ill that day so she had to stay home and recover. Meanwhile, I could have just gone out by myself and lived my life, but I ending up staying home, getting stoned and drunk while and eating cheap, shitty NYC mexican food and watching baseball. It was some amazing baseball on that night though, Jonathan Sanchez's no-hitter against the Padres. Anyways, game's ending and I notice a text from this girl that I wanted to get to know a little better. It's midnight and she's asking what I'm up to and if I want to come out tonight. So immediately I'm pretty happy, thinking booty call all the way. I do a little booty call dance and get dressed to head out.

Riding my scooter down to meet this girl, it dawns on me though, the girl that I wanted to plow has the same name as one of my new co-residents. Also, the girl that I wanted to plow, though I never put her phone number in my phone, I realize it's a different area code than the area code tagged to the text message that got me out that night. So I'm starting to wonder if what I thought was going to happen would actually be happening at all that night. It didn't go at all as planned.

I got to the bar and it's not the girl I wanted to plow, it's one of my new co-residents. She meets me outside the bar and informs me that another of the senior residents, the exact guy that earlier in the week within 30 seconds of meeting him, I told this girl I did not like this guy; this guy was there. The night was being quickly demoted from booty call to rescue operation. And I was a little annoyed.

So I got the 3 of us to leave the place they were at. We went to a much quiter, more chilled out pub and I had a drink and made some small talk. And as quickly as I could, I let it be known that I had to cap it and offered the girl a ride home.

So that's how we got out of there. This girl and I then ended up at some koreatown spot which probably would have been pretty cool except that I was a little annoyed and even more, that shitty mexican food was starting to destroy my gastrointestinal tract.

So then I took her home, told her that I was glad to help bail her out and reminded her to please never ask me to do that again.

Then I barely made it home. Dropped an explosive deuce, barely made it to the bed and passed out.

That was the strange night. More about the fallout from that night later on...

People getting punched

2009-07-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

Skinny White

2009-07-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

So I don't particularly have much in common with most doctors. I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine about how as a medical student and how even now as a resident, people would come to give lectures or talks and occasionally remark about how as a group, we as physicians must be such great future-thinkers and gratification-delayers. My entire youth it was widely regarded that I'd never live past the age of 21 due to my complete and utter lack of regard for my own safety and well-being combined with my penchant for extremely dangerous, self-destructive behaviour. I mean, if you think about it; isn't everything dangerous by necessity fun? (okay, there are exceptions, but seriously, think about it for a moment)

So that brings me to Skinny White (SW). He's Irish, he's probably the palest person I know this side of albinism, and he's about 6'3", 135 pounds. I once convinced this guy to do some push ups with me and I couldn't stop laughing for 15 minutes. So yeah, skinny and white, Skinny White. I remember first meeting this guy during intern orientation. I had on an oxford shirt and a necktie, trying to keep up appearances. He was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of an underground techno music club. Not long after, a bunch of us about-to-be interns, headed out for drinks. One by one, the flat-leavers left us and SW and I were the last 2 men left standing. We ended up walking around Brooklyn that night, having a drink at every bar we could find. I don't especially recall the cab ride home too well, but I did recall thinking that I was probably going to have to make friends with this guy. A common occurence between the last 2 people left standing after a hard night's drinking.

I would also soon discover, that both SW and I had previously trained in the arts of turntablism and also we had both at points in our lives made money busking through our respective juggling acts. I mean, how often does that happen that 2 physicians meet who also have extensive experience in the world of house, techno, turntablism and juggling.

Later on, ask we worked in the hospital further, we also both got reputations for being very smart and very arrogant. Because if you know something that the other people on your team don't, I guess you're not supposed to bring in the relevant research and give power point presentations and try to educate the rest of the team about the things that you know. Because that's just the arrogance running out of control right there.

In any case, you can imagine the hi-jinks SW and I got ourselves into. We were both, young, single, and brand new to NYC. The specific hi-jinks I will leave for another time. In terms of women, my plan was to just go around and knock out some hood-rats, you know; boom-boom-boom. SW was looking for something a little deeper and more meaningful, I think.

The person he ended up with was Worried Girl (WG). This name may not be totally fair because she really is so much more and I really do love her to pieces. However, to me at least, her defining characteristic is that she gets wound up over certain things, certain things about which SW and I would never give a second thought. For instance SW once lost his phone and because WG couldn't reach him, she obviously asummed that he was dead or kidnapped or something so she called the police and put out an APB to get the guys that took out SW. That was a tough day for SW, especially because it was my ass that had to go bail him out of jail. But whatever, we can laugh about it now.

(most of that above paragraph was fictional, if you were keeping score)

Anyways, that's the brief intro to SW and the even briefer intro to WG.

One Good Night

2009-06-24T23:07:00.000-07:00

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
-Neil Gaiman

So Jelly Bean (JB) just left. Through a series of fortunate events, she was able to spend about 27 hours with me here in New York. She arrived in the afternoon, we played some playstation Karaoke and drank tequila, had a very fancy dinner, saw a beautiful muppet musical, came back to the apartment and stayed up until dawn writing poetry and enjoying the company. The next day, we had lunch across from the museum of natural history and afterwards took my Vespa out for a tour of Manhattan. Just randomly meandering the city always reminds me how beautiful it is out here. Stopped for a coffee and a walk around Union Square. It rained off and on a little bit, but it was more than tolerable with JB on the scooter, keeping me warm, safe and impervious to rain. Then we came back, had some drinks, had a good talk, played some cards. And like that... as abruptly as she appeared, she was gone.

Since I was a kid, I've wondered about what it is that made people miss each other. I remember as a freshman in college, I once went home for the weekend. Upon coming back to campus a girl I knew asked me if I missed her while I was gone. I thought about it for a moment and then lied to her, saying, "Yes, of course." She was a little bit upset about the pause I think.

I never used to miss people. Maybe it was something to do with ego. I felt like I was the star of my own life with an interchangeable supporting cast. Definitely, there are people that I like. I enjoy spending time with my friends. I really do. But for the most part, even now; out of sight, out of mind. (if you're my friend, and you're reading this, i assure you; i don't mean you) Occasionally though, there are those in my life who when they are gone, I feel the ache of lacking their presence. I really couldn't tell you what it is about certain people that does this.

I miss JB.

Driving

2009-06-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

Another thing that I realized in going back to Southern California was just how much I missed driving a car. And it's not for the convenience of having a car and being able to move people and stuff around. It's not even for the visceral thrill of throttle response and body roll from a high apex turn. It's more to say I miss the meditative experience of driving.

I got to do a little bit of road tripping while out and California and it made me realize how peaceful, introspective and thoughtful I become when in road trip mode. Something about the right proportion of conscious and subconscious activity that it takes to drive on wide open freeways that frees the rest of my mind to achieve true clarity of thought. The kind of mindset that allows me to truly process and prioritize the feelings and memories in my life.

I hear that there are those who practice meditation and can reach this state just with sitting and perhaps chanting or listening to some new-age type records. Too bad for me, it's only come with driving.

What I did on my summer vacation (part 1)

2009-06-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

So New Yorkers typically don't really respect you if you're not from New York, the exception I've noticed is if you're from California. Which is where I'm from and it's where I went on my little one week off, last week. My usual trips home, I see my parents, I see my core group of friends, I usually try and get a game of spades going. However, on this particular trip back home I got to see Jelly Bean (JB), someone who until this past week I'd only seen twice in the past 7 years. And I was really looking forward to seeing her. I really loved JB. Well, still do actually. We met back in undergrad. I was an actor, she was an artist, we were tight. We had so many good times as brash young kids with fake IDs and access to way too many drugs. What I've learned about drugs is this. Everybody has their limit. I think she hit hers a little before I hit mine. And that's where I lost her. I would eventually hit mine in medical school (evidently my limit was quite high), but that's another story for another time. So I guess that's the ultra-abridged version of the first part of the story of JB and me, though volumes more could be written just on the 2 years we had back in undergrad.

Anyways, due to a rough couple of months for JB, including some scary emergency abdominal surgery, I got to go and visit her relatively recuperated but still school-less and job-less. Which made for an especially great time since most of my friends are understandably working stiffs and can't really hang out all-day, every-day. The first day I went to visit, we met up and had sushi for lunch. Ordered 2 rolls but couldn't even finish those as we instead proceeded to drink a couple of pitchers of japanese beer and a couple of bottles of sake on top of that. Then we went to the market and got a fifth of 1800 tequila and a handle of cuervo. I was just going to get the fifth at first but at that point during the day, a fifth just felt so insubstantial in my hand. We then play Wii bowling for shots and beers, took a nap, then went out for wine and pizza. It was a great day.

I want to write more about all the things I thought about during that trip but I think this is a good enough intro. Basically the first thing that happened is that I pretty much spent 3 days straight, drinking all day, everyday. And on the 4th day I felt a clarity of mind that I had not felt in some time. I'm not saying that doing what I did would be a good idea for everybody. But it worked pretty well for me.

Another reason I hate my job

2009-05-30T15:50:00.000-07:00

So I had this patient. Nice guy, Spanish speaking only, didn't laugh at my Spanish like the Puerto Rican patients I have. I learned my Spanish from Mexicans so the accent I have may be a little bit not what the Puerto Ricans are used to. Anyways, that's not really the point of this story. The point of my story is that, when I'm trying to be a good person and a caring doctor, that seems to be the time that I often get shit for going out of my way to help another human being as a fellow human being.

So this patient had a stroke, left side paralyzed. He had a bedside commode but a nurse across the hall stole it for one of her patients. And my patient really had to drop #2. So the nurse in the stroke unit is trying to tell me to let it slide, that she'll clean it up. And I don't get this, but for some reason, only myself and the patient seem to grasp that it's not a good thing to poo yourself if you can at all avoid it. I ask the nurse to try and help me get the patient to the bathroom but she won't have it saying that I never put in an order for that level of activity.

So what else could I do, I picked up the patient myself and carried him to the shitter. The nurse of course gets pissed off at me about liability issues or some such crap. The patient is really thankful, except that I have to hang out with him while he drops off the kids at the pool. I mean, I really do want to the guy to be safe, but still I have to take all this flak from the nurse about how I could hurt myself and the patient doing what I did and how inappropriate it is to carry a guy to the john.

I don't know. Maybe it was wrong. But it's what I would want if I was a patient. Just a little bit of compassion. Anyways, in the end I got the patient back to bed and later on I brought the nurse some pie to cool everything out. Nurses love pie.

And I didn't tell anyone but the nurse was right, my back hurt like hell for the next couple of days because I did that. The guy was not a small guy. Whatever. Like I'm going to hold someone liable for my own idiocy.

I'm just trying to do a good job. And in the end I get so little respect.

Idol of the Day: Birdman

2009-05-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

So Chris Andersen. They call him Birdman. Mother gave up custody of him when he was a kid. Father was an artist who left him to tour with his art. Spent part of his childhood in an orphanage. Played some junior college ball after high school, then left to go pro... in China. Then bounced around every development league known to man before he made the NBA. Then his girl left him, a hurricaine took out his house and the NBA suspended him for 2 years for being high (it's been said it was tweak but who knows). Served his time and just came back stronger. Birdman.

:There used to be an ESPN Birdman video here that's since been taken down. Oh well.:

Three Rings

2009-05-23T17:31:00.000-07:00

The Train Story

2009-05-23T16:50:00.000-07:00

So another one of my very good friends and for a while my housemate during medical school was someone I'll call VM for Vikey McStoner. VM and I first really got to know each other going snowboarding. We quickly founded a friendship that started on a common ground of big mountain snowboarding, painkillers and a lot of weed.

The train story starts with a girl. This girl we'll call FG because well, she's a girl from France. I like FG, nice lady, nice looking, used to wear these boots with flowers painted on them that I really enjoyed. Now she's working as a doctor in an Emergency Room somewhere, but whatever. So DT went out with FG on a couple of, sort of, dates. I still give him shit because his experience with her sort of belies his complete lack of game. I remember he came back once after going out with FG and told this story about going back to her place, not making his move in the proper manner and somehow ending up hiding in her bushes from some combination of shame and regret.

Maybe I should start telling nicer stories about DT though. Because regardless of what I've written on this blog about him, I swear he's a good guy. It's just that I happen to know a lot of his secrets.

Anyways, that's a brief synopsis of DT's story with FG. Some time later, it was VM's turn to try and plow FG. They just finished a nice dinner and were taking a moonlit stroll when VM attempted to turn on his charm, full blast. At what should have been an otherwise lovely moment, the train rolled by blaring it's horn. VM couldn't quite hear what FG was trying to say, and so she had to repeat herself. In trying to raise her voice about the din of the train, the horn stopped blaring and FG could be heard by the entire city to yell, "I DON'T DATE!"

We still don't know what that story means. But between VM and myself, we've told it a lot. And at occasional embarassing moments in our lives, that's why we are prone to yell those words. To honor that horribly, horribly soul-crushing moment in VM's life.

The Laziest People on the Planet

2009-05-21T17:41:00.001-07:00

So like I've said, I don't really have a good grasp on how the general public views physicians. Since my parents are doctors, I've always known that doctors are just as full of shit as everyone else.

Recently though, I've been thinking a lot about why it is that my colleagues represent some of the laziest fucking bastards I've ever met in my entire life. I mean, even for me, when I think about doctors and people who go to medical school, I think about hard-working, driven, motivated type people. But for some reason, I'm surrounded by people who, in the style of George Costanza, would do end-over-end contortions of unreasonable proportions just to get out of doing work.

Anyways, unlike a lot of questions I've had in my life, this question has very real answers.

I suppose the first answer is that this laziness is something I see in my fellow resident physicians. Resident physicians are held to a pretty ridiculously high standard in terms of what needs to be accomplished in the course of a day, and what may be seen as lazy by medical residency standards, may be a pretty standard work day for the average guy on the street. So maybe I can't judge my coworkers too harshly.

Also, there's that whole thing by which communism fails at work in the residency culture. "From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need." as Karl Marx would say. Which is basically another way of saying that you get punished for doing a good job and rewarded for doing shitty work. So I try to do a good job, day in and day out. And as people have realized that I'm capable of carrying more than my fair share, I keep getting harder and harder assignments with teams consisting of weaker and weaker people. Which is the whole thing where laziness seems to get rewarded. The work needs to get done and dumb-shits like me are caught running around picking up the slack.

Alrighty, I think I'm starting to get a little too much into rant mode. So maybe I'll cut this one short. Or maybe I'll come back to write some more on the subject.

Yuppie Moms

2009-05-17T18:03:00.000-07:00

"The reverse side also has a reverse side"
-Japanese Proverb

Yuppie Moms (YM) was one of the very first people I met in medical school. I was 21 years old when I started in medical school, straight out of graduating with an undergraduate degree in theatre, very much completely out of my element. My first memory of her was meeting her at the medical school retreat. I was off smoking cigarettes by myself somewhere, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into when she came up and asked to share a smoke.

Allow me to digress for a moment here. As this is the second character in my life I will adorn with the moniker of "Moms", I think I need to explain something about my formative years. It's no longer the case, but for a time in my youth I use to have a lot of female friends. Just friends, as they say. I had a conversation regarding this subject with YM a while back and it was then that I realized it might have been because I was searching for a mother figure to fill a certain void during that time in my life. So in medical school I had HM as I wrote about earlier. Just as important if not more so was YM. Probably more important was YM because she kept me from putting a hollow point into my chest; but that's a story for another time.

In any case, YM and I spent that whole night smoking cigarettes and bonding about... a lot of stuff actually. She had gone to a top film school as an undergrad and has plans to make her mark directing television commercials. I had gone to a top theatre school with dreams of being an actor or a playwright and yet somehow we both ending up careening towards careers in medicine. We are also both only children which gave us somewhat of a dynamic friendship at times because as YM's mother once informed her, "Only children don't know how to fight." An aphorism that I've thought about a lot over the years.

Just a quick story about my love for YM. We were out once for a nice dinner, something that we did from time to time. Decent Japanese Fusion place. To start we had ordered the spiciest sushi roll on the menu. The sauce was habanero based and rated at at least 500,000 scoville units. That's the level of Law Enforcement Grade Pepper Spray. 100 times more potent than Jalapeno Peppers. Because YM is not insane, she let me use all the sauce on my half. I was basically sweating like John DeLorean under federal indictment for the rest of the meal. By the time we left I had stomach pain worst than anything I've ever felt, easily 10 out of 10 in severity, YM pretty much had to carry me home. Then at her place she got me a couple glasses of milk and the pain was magically gone. We spent the rest of the night pretty much, sitting on her porch, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine. It was a beautiful night. From my perspective anyways. She said a lot of nice things to me that night. I am a sucker for flattery. So that's how I recall it. I think if you ask YM though, she probably has a little different interpretation of the night. But whatever. It's one of my favorite memories of her.

We ain't gay!

2009-05-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

So Hippie Moms didn't particularly care for men. Sort of hated men actually. Aside from being hippie, she's also staunchly feminist and formerly gay. DT and I are not in any strict sense of the word, at all gay. But we get that all the time. I sort of understand the logic. DT is a thin, blonde guy with certain peculiar mannerisms that seems to light up on gaydar all the time. Myself, I graduated with a bachelors in theatre and have an unnatural love for dancing and fashion. But we do not find any appeal in having sex with men. This seems to bother DT that people keep finding him gay. This probably has a lot to do with that fact that gay guys try to pick him up on the subway all the time. Fortunately this doesn't happen to me as I think it takes some time to find out a little bit about me and jump to the conclusion that I might be a friend of dorothy. As opposed to DT where it's more of a snap judgement.

Personally, I find it sort of amusing when my flirting crosses over a certain point and I see a girl's reaction trying to piece together why this gay guy might actually be trying to have sex with her. It also amuses me just that people are so sure that I must be homo that I sort of just have to play along so that I don't disappoint them. I've been trying to be more honest in my life, but sometimes it's just hard when people have these stereotypes about you that are so encompassing and so wrong.

I was in the hospital a while ago and we were discussing about plans for the evening and what we all might be doing. I mentioned a club where I often go to dance and one of the other doctors asked me if the club was gay or gay-friendly. I didn't have the heart to deconstruct her whole idea of me, so I just had to tell her that it was all the way gay, and breeders like herself and her boyfriend just weren't welcome.

1000 days...

2009-05-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

If you go to certain job sites, they have a sign posted that claims a certain number of days without an on the job accident. Somehow we got the bright idea to chronicle DT's length of days without getting his socks blown. So while he lived with me, outside his bedroom door, there was a white board, and every so often, the days were added up and a new tally was made. Amazing everybody, he made it to 1000 days. He actually made it way past that, but I think the 1000 is impressive enough.

There's a phrase that I like; involuntary celibacy. Well I don't like that the concept exists and is real. But I do like that there's such a good term to describe it. I'm not going to lie and say it's never happened to me. Happens if I can't get my ashes hauled for more than a few days. And it feels bad. I'm not exactly sure why it feels bad, but I do plan to expand on the idea in the coming life of this blog.

Hospital Jack

2009-05-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

So I read the book Black Hawk Down a very long time ago. My favorite part of the book is where they chronicle the Army Ranger experience of accumulating different "jacks." For example, masturbating in the bathroom would be a bathroom-jack. In the hangar would be a hangar-jack. So on and so forth. This concept is revisited in the middle of a fire-fight in Mogadishu where a couple of Army Rangers are taking cover, being shot at my an untold force of very pissed of Somalis. They then take the time to wonder if anyone has yet to achieve a combat-jack.

This is the thought process of some of the very best of the best fighting forces in the United States military. I really hope you didn't think the best and brightest minds in medicine would think any differently.

Hippie Moms part 2

2009-05-04T19:03:00.000-07:00

"The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
-Victor Hugo

"For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all out tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."
-Rainer Maria Rilke

There are times where I start thinking about love. Interesting concept right? Bordering on irrational concept if you think about it too hard. But whatever it is, I know this; love is very, very good. And to me, Hippie Moms (we'll call her HM now) is love. Or maybe that's just what she represents to me. It doesn't matter. HM showed me what all good mothers should exude, and that is unconditional love. No matter how badly I fucked up, now matter what shape I was in, I felt I could go to HM and it would be okay. And since it was okay, it made me free to battle my lot in life rather than just climb into bed, pull the covers over my eyes and be bulldozed aside by the wrecking ball of fate. There are so very many times I would have just given up and quit if not for HM and the many ways she would remind me that she loved me and believed in me.

At this point, I just have to point out the differences between HM and myself. We were both well known medical students approaching legendary status. She was well known for being smart, working hard, and having a Mohandas Ghandi level of compassion for those around her. I was well known for being smart, being almost always completely drunk or stoned, and throwing temper tantrums like a child when upset.

You might sort of see where this mother-child relationship evolved and at the same time be kind of amazed that we would get along.

Hippie Moms

2009-04-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

So I met DT very early on in medical school by way of ultimate frisbee. There was a regular pick-up game with the medical students where we met and hit it off immediately. One of my first memories of DT was a time in the student lounge when he came in and noticed a partially eaten sandwich in the trash. As he was hungry, he picked it out of the garbage, brushed off the ants and proceeded to eat the sandwich. At that moment, I knew we were going to be tight.

And as you can probably tell, DT and I were never quite properly civilized. This probably has at least something to do with parenting. DT's father, we refer to as Evil Empire. Evil Empire is so called because he divorced DT's mother, remarried, had new kids, and later got a dog that got the love that DT so rightfully deserved. This is the extent of the Evil Empire. The dog has prosthetic testicles and gets more love from Evil Empire than DT. I feel there might be something wrong with that. Evil Empire also may have organized a fake break-in when DT was growing up that led to the disappearance of the child DT's prized baseball cards. Like Rick James would say, cold-blooded.

So aside from complete disregard for conventions of what should be considered safe for consumption; what I'm trying to say is that DT and I shared a search for parent figures in our lives.

Hippie Moms was also a medical student and another regular at frisbee. I never really inquired too deeply into her past, but she was a little bit older than we were. She had her own father issues and my impression was that she came to America from France with her Mom as a kid to escape her father. She always struck me as someone who had to grow up faster than maybe she should have. In any case she she was to become the grown-up figure in my and DT's life.

Like a Boss

2009-04-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

The Training of a Physician

2009-04-26T20:50:00.000-07:00

Another issue I'd like to explore in this blog is the extraordinarily fucked-up journey that I took to become a physician. Seems like popular culture is so inundated with depictions of doctors. House, ER, Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs, Mehmet Oz... on and on and on. I don't really see it documented the path that I had to take. Well, maybe The House of God documented some of the horror correctly.

So I think this might be a good place to tell some of my stories. For whatever reason.

And I'll start with an introduction to my roommate for most of med school. We'll call him DT for day trader. The man failed his pediatrics rotation as a med student because he was too busy day trading, so I think it's a good name for him.

DT has problems. I mean, but we all have problems. It seems that people view physicians with such an aura of other-worldly greatness sometimes. We're just as full of shit as everyone else. I started out knowing this because my family is all doctors, so I never had an overabundance of reverence for profession. Anyways, here's a little introduction to DT. He lived on my couch for a year, then when I got a house, he wanted to live in my tool-shed. DT, prior to meeting me, lived in the student lounge of our medical school. Yes, he was a homeless day trader. And on top of that, he actually did own a house during this time that he partitioned in the most ghetto way imaginable in order to rent out as cubicle sized portions as cut-rate housing. So he was a homeless, slumlord, day trader.

I am not making any of this up. This man is now a physician in New York.

Anyways, more stories to come. I just wanted to make a quick introduction to the kind of stories I want to tell here.

Idol-a-Day

2009-04-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

So this is what blogging is like.... Interesting. So one idea I had for this actually started back in about 1995 when I was a freshman in high school. I was talking with my best friend at the time about people upon whom we wanted to base our lives. We were going to make a 365 day calendar based on this idea that we would market as the Idol-a-Day Calendar. Sadly that idea has yet to come to fruition. But oh well, now I have a blog.

The first few people that come to mind are as follows:

Hunter S. Thompson – Admirable for his total disregard and contempt for authority. Ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado on a platform that included the decriminalizing drugs and putting disreputable drug dealers in the stocks. However, showing some restraint, Thompson did say that he himself would refrain from tripping on hallucinogens while on duty. Thompson also promised to tear down the buildings obstructing views of the mountains, tear up the sidewalks for grassy paths and rename Aspen as Fat City to discourage outside investors. It seems he would have won if not for the Republicans and Democrats joining forces to defeat him. He of course did a ridiculous amount of drugs, Wild Turkey and grapefruit while inventing his own brand of journalism. Loved guns. Wrote regularly for both Rolling Stone and ESPN. Inspired a character on Doonesbury.

Charles Barkley – Recruited as a college prospect with the scouting report, "a fat guy who can play like the wind." Short for a power forward at 6'4" and way too rotund. Owned the glass, ran the floor and threw down monster 2-hand jams. Once lost 2.5 million dollars in 6 hours playing blackjack. Got arrested for driving drunk after rolling through a stop sign on his way to getting blown. Claimed famously in a commercial to not being a role model. After all, parents should be role models. Barkley's current plans include running for Govenor of Alabama.

William Halsted – Father of modern surgery. Figured out that charting vital signs, wearing sterile gloves during surgery and attaining hemostasis are good things. Prior to the discovery of ABO groups he once transfused his own blood into his sister before performing life-saving emergency surgery on her. Discovered that cocaine is both a decent anesthetic as well as a hell of a drug. Eventually kicked the cocaine habit and replaced it with a life-long morphine addiction but continued being a legendary surgeon for 35 more years while main-lining morphine. Eventually passed away from complications of gallstone surgery. Smoked Pall Malls.

Demetri Martin – Pretty decent comic. Had a full scholarship to NYU Law, yet had the balls to drop out a year shy of graduation to pursue comedy. Ambidextrous. Not gay, but supportive.