Yuppie Moms

"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.