New beginnings...

According to Mark Twain, there are two constants in life: death and taxes. I'll add a third: new beginnings. New job, new friends--newness is a perennial theme, and just when we least expect it, something new pops up, like cancer. But can there ever be newness with something old, something worn, something you once thought was abandoned, left for dead, unsalvageable? Friendships for example--old ones, broken ones--are they, too, deserving of new beginnings?

I hope so. It's just so damn hard to make them new again once the stains of the old have already settled in. There's never going to be a pristinely fresh start. Too much history, too many guarded feelings and cautious words make rekindling a chore, something to be tended to, like a young plant, too vulnerable and easily crushed. I, in my quest to reclaim what was lost, question whether that which was lost was ever that good in the first place, good enough to be remade. I have doubts, and so does my friend. We are friendly but we are not friends, at least not the way it used to be. That is my new beginning, a place much colder and grayer than I anticipated. The truth is ugly.

But friendships, like old toys you gave up on, get accidentally unpacked, are hard to get rid of, and if nothing else, they grow on you once they're gone. The smell of them, the feel of familiarity and old warmth leave you longing for the past, when you thought things were simple, and the games you played were innocent. The colors seem so alive back then, when truth mattered less than sincerity. And so you pick them up again, these old friendships, and dust them off only to find cracks and tears underneath the silvery patina of memories, valleys running deep against the grain that no effort can ever make them heal, and you realized why they were abandoned in the first place. Your only option now is not to mend the broken, or bring back the dead, but to forge something new. You hope that your old broken friendship would at least be ignored so the new one has a chance to grow unmarred. It's a hope, a dream that you can easily wake from, but it's all that you have. A hope for new beginnings, where the cracks of the old are remembered for what they are: imperfections of a life, lived.

Tiling the fluff

What does Home Depot grout, broken bathroom tiles, and an unfinished wooden violin make? If you say junk, then you've obviously not been introduced to contemporary art. No, really, if Damien Hirst can 'paint' a canvas with feces-covered flies, then my crappy 'mosaic' of things-I-found-at-the-recycling-center is a modern day, Caravaggio's David. Okay, that's a stretch, but I made my point.

Sometimes I think contemporary art is just full of bull shit, mental masturbation for the mathematically challenged. I count myself in that pool. What does all this have to do with medical school? Tenously, I'm attending an SMFA art course, and the instructor has given me a wooden, unfinished violin to decorate. The finished product will be auctioned at some event to raise money for health care issues in Boston. It's a noble cause, but I don't really have time. But she insisted, and I obliged, so now I'm staring at a beautifully carved Suzuki violin--naked without its glossy veneer--and thinking of ways to mutilate the poor creature. "I'll chop it up and make it useless (Picasso anyone?), I'll decoupage it with pictures of models' body parts (hmm, too literally Pop), I'll charr the surface and expose its innards (hmm, too serial-killer like)..." the endless possibilities seem to pour out of my head.

No, I think I'm going to tile it. I don't know why really, but I've just always had the urge to do some tiling and mosaic work, but never found anybody willing to let me redo the kitchen floor. Of course, I had to 'justify' my work (apparently, wanting to make something beautiful needs an explanation of what is beauty, too) and so I made up some metaphysical dish about entrapment and beauty and capturing the transient...blah blah blah to titillate my professors. I did this over lunch, 3 paragraphs in 15 minutes. The write-up is so vague it practically warrants its own explanatory writeup. They loved it, gobbled it up, ate it with an excitement that I could only imagine as similar to the way art critics practically wet themselves everytime Andy Warhol made another soup can print back in the day.

I sincerely hope that they were just being nice. I know artists can be on the fluffy side, but this was nothing but hot air.

!!!

Too. Much. Anatomy.

It's Friday night. Where is my life?

Edges

I just spent 3.5 hours in the anatomy lab today, afterhours, from 8 to 11:30 pm. Barbara seems to smell better in the evening, I don't quite know why. It was like a party in there, everyone basically camping out to study for our big exam next week. I knew it was time to leave when off handedly I asked Barbara a question, and she said no, as I was quizzing myself some structures on her arm. Barbara, being dead and all, can't talk, so it was my mind in a manifestation of her voice that answered my own question. I saw friends dancing with a skeleton in the corner. That was it. It was time to go home.

I am three quarter of the way through John Updike's novel, Seek My Face. I'm halfway through Cunningham's nonfiction novel Provincetown. If it weren't for Itunes and audiobooks, I think I would go crazy only dreaming of blood vessels and dancing skeletons. My favorite phrase from Updike in this book: "... the pre-dawn, before light begins to lift edges into being. I am trying, it may be, to paint holiness." Beautiful.

green papayas

A girl in class tapped me on the shoulder today and asked "Can you speak Vietnamese?" Startled, I replied with a "Yes," almost followed by "And are you stalking me?"

I know, me and my megalomania issues.

"Can you read and write it too? Like, literature?" chirped this petite girl behind her dark, all encompassing glasses that circumscribed her face most unflatteringly. I'm not quite sure what about her made me recoiled, maybe it was the florescent lighting that bleached her face, or the inquisitively darting eyes floating on a sea of teeth she kept flashing repeatedly. Her effervesence was spilling over onto my seat, dangerously close to my rumbling discontent, left over from this morning's run-in with the exam from hell. I distrust happy people.

"Um well, yes. I can read and write Vietnamese..." I hesitated before she rudely interrupted me. "Oh, so like are you a first generation immigrant?" I paused, contemplating her use of this very politically correct, sociologically accurate description. I was expecting something more coarse, like "so when did you get off the boat?", my mind in gear to protest the banal and stereotypical assertion it had concocted. No, she's too smart for that, and I, too ready to be offended. "Like, were you born there?" She thought I didn't understand her the first time around.

"Yes. I came here when I was 10." I declared.
"Oh, see, I was 4." She remarked quickly, pausing, then resumed darting her tongue. "Oh wow, you couldn't tell I was Vietnamese, not from my last name?"
I pounced quickly, feeling gleeful for having caught her off guard. "No, I don't notice these things. What is your last name?" I felt like telling her that not everyone looks for others of their 'kind' on the roster.
That was cruel. She was only trying to make rapport. Could I blame her for seeking sameness, maybe friends? I admonished myself.
"Um, so, are you from around here?" I asked in a gentler tone.
"No, I'm from Northern California." She stated.
I shoot. I miss. The ball's back in her court.
"Uh huh..." I continued the conversation, asking her about the New England weather, where she went to school. She's incredibly sharp: tongue, eyes, mind, a Smith graduate with a fiance. Now I felt safe.

She mentioned some movie she saw in Thailand. "It's called something 'Green Papayas'. It's by a Vietnamese American director, supposed to be really seminal. I didn't like it..." She was fishing for dialogue too.
'Well why are you telling me to watcht it then?' My internal monologue droned on.
"I don't know, you could check it out." She laughed awkwardly.
"Oh, um, sure. Maybe I'll look it up sometime. Thanks!" I hurriedly sped in front of the line. Class was over. I wanted to leave. She waved back, also awkwardly.

I'm so bad with strangers.

Nip Tuck

The message is everywhere: loose weight, bulk up, look tight, shave this, nip that, and your boyfriend will love you.

"So you're on a diet?" I asked my friend as we casually waited in line for 'Capote' last night.
"Yeah, I haven't had dinner," he replied.
"Starvation is not a diet you know." I quipped.
"I know...been busy. I do try to eat healthier though. Today at lunch I had a chicken breast, some sunflower seeds, carrots, and a small salad. Those damn sunflower seeds got husks or something, 'cause they stick to my teeth..." said my friend in his trademark Southern drawl.
"That's practically bird food for you." I snickered, looking at this 6 feet tall, stockily built, lumberjack of a man.
"Yeah well...I'm really hungry now. Was at the gym for like an hour." He conceded.
I waffled and waxed on some nutritional knowledge I learned in medical school, namely, that skipping meals was not a good idea. He seemed genuinely interested.

The movie ended. All we could talk about was food. We settled on Rock Bottom for its easy decor, proximity to the T station, and most importantly, a kitchen that wasn't closed.
"I'm so hungry right now my brain ain't workin' straight. I'm gonna get a nice, juicy steak,” proclaimed my friend. From a distance, he looked like a blond version of the Brawny Man on TV, husky, hirsute, a man’s man, practically oozing confidence. I felt safe around him.

A very late dinner ensued. I asked him about his recent motivation to diet. Twenty minutes later:
"He called me fat."
"What?" I shouted, raising my eyebrows, flabbergasted. "That's low. "
"Yeah. Totally. He was drunk, and he said that the reason we didn't have chemistry or whatever, was because I was fat. He was trying to let me down gently." Said my friend, disgusted, slightly hurt.
"You're not fat." I tell him. He doesn't believe me; I see it in his eyes, but I continued. "You're stocky. It's your build. Nothing wrong with that."
"No, no I know. It's also been something I've been meaning to change about myself. You know, be more healthy, eat right, exercise, lose a couple of pounds here and there." He retreated to the rational.
"Those are all good reasons. I just hope that you're doing it for yourself. What that boy said was an impetus, I'm sure, but..."I was interrupted.
"No. Yes, it's an impetus.” He quickly recaptured what I meant to say. “But it's not like all that important..."

"So deep down there isn't a part of you that said 'had I been thinner things would have worked out’?" I inquired honestly.
"No. Of course not." His voice had a resolute tone that declared the topic was over. I sensed the confidence in his blood rising, in time with his vodka tonic. We toyed with news of his other prospects, 'in the pipeline' as he called it. My friend had been busy, not letting the previous rejection curve his enthusiasm.

It was late. The last train was leaving.

"All right. Well, I hope you feel better." I spoke reassuringly as he wrapped me in his bone cracking, but friendly, embrace.
"What do you mean--feel better? You mean about my impending cold?" He questioned, fully knowing my answer.
"No, not just that. About everything." I smiled, walking away, the dim glitter of the city to my back.

ideas?

Nevermind anniversary. Valentines' Day. I've never had to plan/engage/act on anything on this particular day, except to wish ill on anyone who wishes me a happy... Yes, death to well-wishers.

Because I'm new to this, I'm pathetically out of ideas, or at least good ones.

Any suggestions from the peanut gallery on some good Valentine Day things for Mikey?

productivity

I came back from a night out at 12:50 am on Friday to the sounds of stifled giggling eminating from the common kitchen. "Have you ever put marshmallow in a microwave?" Seth, a first year medical student, asked me gleefully. "Um, no." I blurted, half wishing I'd said yes so I could be on my way. Seth pulled me into the kitchen. I watched, for almost a full minute, five other grown men glue their eyes to the bubbling, expanding sugary balloon as it turns brown and goopy inside the radiation chamber. The fluffy gop finally imploded in comical silence to a cheering crowd. "You don't know how many burnt marshmallows I've eaten tonight..." proclaimed Adam, as I, slowly, and with a drooping smile, walked away.

It's Friday night in a medical school dorm. You wouldn't know it except for the sign.

the human stain

A certain smell startled me when I did laundry today. No, I usually don't jerk reflexively at the scent of Tide, but it was the too familiar smell of anatomy lab in my freshly washed clothes that made me gag. Barbara's smell was new death, I called it, because it was more pungent and intense than in other bodies, those that have spent longer in formalin. New death. And I just caught a whiff of it. Strange. I found the offensive garment after some mild rummaging. An undershirt, pristinely white on top, with big, sprawling ovals of grease seemingly intact, stared back at me in defiance. Stubborn stains. I had washed that shirt with my other offending undergarments from the lab in a separate machine, and thought to dry all my clothing together to save a dollar. My plan was foiled. I threw the garment again into the washing machine as quickly as I could. The shirt probably could have used a pre-treat the first time around, but I was unaware of its state until now. I doused and soaked the thing in a concoction of 3 detergents, hoping to undo what was done.

I thought about why I had reacted so violently to the smell of formalin and human fat, one I've grown accustomed to, made jokes about, and taken pride in as a medical student. It was ten times milder than in the lab, and I don't gag there. I suppose it was the unexpectedness of it, a reaction to something so out of place and wholly vulgar to my sphere of domesticity, of weekend laundries and household chores. To find the garment still soiled, after having gone through a process that rid clothes of their ordinary stains, rendered these stains somehow otherworldly in their existence. The reality of how the marks got there escaped me. I just wasn't prepared for an encounter with a remnant of the dead, here, in my domain of the living. A momentary panic ensued as I frantically sniffed my laundry, hoping the offending smell didn't infect the load. An infection. As if the un-cleanliness were a viral contagion.

I inhaled deeply. Nothing but the springy scent of Tide reassured my nerves.

pic by De-Bivort; 2005

awkward...

Physical diagnosis class is turning out to be one hilarious hour. We get to feel each other up. And by that, I mean practice the physical exams we've learned. We were on the lower extremities, and of course, that meant touching in all the uncomfortable areas around the groin. Yeah. My all male, mostly heterosexual group decided to avoid awkwardness by having each person palpate himself. This was only possible up to a certain extent. Half way through the session, no wonder the instructor thought it odd that in our group everyone had his hand down his pants, touching in silence.

Nothing like male bonding.

Shanghai Restoration Project

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Desert Bloom

I never thought I'd say this, but who knew orthopedics can be so...BORING?!? My mind began to wander after only 20 minutes of listening to the professor drone about the gait cycle today. Usually, I'd at least pretend I'm taking notes until half way through the hour. Recent word of the end of a friend's dating dry spell occupied my thoughts. The news sounded serendipitous. They met unexpectedly. A dinner. A dance. A third date. I'm having whiplash just hearing about events as they unfold. My head, meanwhile, is spinning with questions. How does one go about breaking a (?) year dry spell in 3 days? Is this engineering, or plain luck, or a senior spring fling that could probably use some speedbumps? More importantly, am I channeling Carrie Bradshaw?

Relationships have been on my mind recently, and not just the one my wonderful friend is enjoying. My one year anniversary with Mike is approaching. According to the 'romantic package' planner on Orbitz.com, 'Bed & Breakfast' getaways are' so' for my grandparents. It's about rock climbing and sweatiness for today's couples. In finding ways to properly celebrate my bliss, however, I am reminded of those who are less fortunate, namely, my single friends who undoubtedly will send me hate mail after reading this blog. Just kidding, they don't really read this blog.

If you are reading, these friends of mine in faraway (and not so far away) places, I hope that you will find the wonderful people that you deserve. It does rain in the dessert, and when it does, may it be a torrential storm.

Oh, but showers are nice, too.

musings

My art installation has gotten me thinking. I see images of an empty hallway awaiting something, anything, to fill it. Might as well stack soup cans along the walls and call it a day. Mainly though, I want art that is slightly uncomfortable, but not so much so as to be distracting. It is afterall a place where the sick seeks help. Being uncomfortable is probably not something they'd prefer. But like all clinics, I loath this one for its sterility and muted pastels. I see only white walls and uncomfortable chairs. Amidst silence and dread, a long corridor leads to anonymous doors.

My blank canvas is pretty blank indeed.

For this class, the point is to engage art in everyday life, whatever that means. Bringing the sick back into everyday life also happens to be a goal of medicine. And so, in my corridor, I want life with all of its lushness and vitality, somehow melded to the artifice of medicine. I see a ceiling path of thick green grass, tricking down onto those anonymous doors. I want test tubes as vessels for seeds, and herbs.... I want them to grow from my ceiling path of grass as any plant would, each test tube like a flower bearing seeds, and life. Thematically simple, hopefully uncomfortable.

If only it were feasible.

Some truths...

In case I ever forget:

1) Medical school is not cheap.

2) Skiing= more money for orthopedic surgons.

3) It's not nice to stare...especially at the boyfriend of someone with whom you once flirted as he's trying to deposit money at a bank.

4) Vapo-rub under your nose can make you cry in Anatomy Lab.

5) Sleep is good.

Gross anatomy

My long awaited moment of truly becoming a medical student came yesterday at 2:00 pm, EST, in the gross anatomy lab. It was loud, and the smell: unmistakable.

I've always imagined what the first day cutting into the deceased would be like. I pictured a dried corpse. Something blanched, exposed, and like a Barbie doll stripped of her clothes, it would be barely human.

And then I met Barbara. She was around her early 80's when she died, possibly of hypertension and coronary heart disease. We had a moment of silence for her and all the people who gave us their bodies--it was the only silence we'd ever hear again in the lab.

I found a strange peace with the blade in hand. Her skin was so surprisingly supple to the touch that it still responded to the pressure of the knife. I thought I was sculpting, cutting away soft bits of clay to reveal the wonder beneath. I peeled back, layer by layer, the skin and folds of fat, scraping away at superficial fascia to reveal nerves and tiny blood vessels. I was lost in the motions: gliding the blade, carving at flesh. For a while, it was beautiful.

Barbara, as it turned out, wasn't going to reveal herself that easily. Her flesh still had tonicity; her fat bounced with our touch. In the words of a fellow labmate:" She's juicy." We soon realized that clearing away structures was going to be much tougher than we thought. Whatever apprehension any of us had about touching/dissecting cadavers flew out the window. Pretty soon, we were all elbow deep in subcutaneous fat, ripping, gripping with our hands at the layer of superficial fascia, digging the inner thigh for the ironically named saphenous (obvious) vein. I've been told that human fat had a distinctive odor. Mixed with formaldehyde, the smell and experience became unforgettable.

Two hours and one bucket of human remains later, Barbara finally gave in. We found the femoral triangle (correctly!).

Barbara wasn't dried, or blanched, or perpetually stiff. Her flesh was moist, and pink, and supple. She made us work, hard, and still there was much work left to be done for the next lab. But I was too tired to care at this point. I rushed home, took a long, hot bath, and still smelled the odors of the lab lingering in the air. Everyone in the dorm had dumped their lab clothes in the hall.

And I'm glad I have plenty of air freshener.

scrubs:

Got them. Plus gloves, scapel, and plenty of soap.

Anatomy class begins tomorrow.

Can't wait.