STARSTRUCK

wait, this is shaping up to be the best week ever! oliver sacks, jane goodall AND jonah lehrer, ALL WITHIN 7 DAYS?!? NERD HEAVEN!!!

ugh, he’s so dreamy. check out that braaaain.

suck it, toxicity!

on the last day of class at the end of sophomore year, our professor gave us all a piece of advice that i’ve been overcomplicating ever since: keep toxic people out of your life. 

that order seems simple enough when you consider extremes: you obviously don’t hang out with someone who’s consistently toxic, but unfortunately for us, the world is 50 shades of grey. so what do you do when these toxic people are also people whom you genuinely believe to be good? people who just happen to externalize their negativity, and then immediately feel remorseful about it? when does it become acceptable to internalize your definition of toxic, and just go with your sinking gut feeling that you’re better off keeping someone out of your life?

my recently-adopted life philosophy, the holstee manifesto, offers, “if you don’t like something, change it” – another piece of wisdom i find utterly confounding in its simplicity. i’m certain that i’m unhappy in my current living situation, but i’m completely confused about how to change that. do i need to change something external, or something internal? do i need to give up the convenient and naturally-lit awesomeness of my cheap 28th floor apartment and move in with people who are more extroverted and positive? or am i doomed to be dissatisfied with all my living situations because they’re rarely those perfect amalgamations of all my best past living experiences? do i need to change others, or should i just change myself? AGH seriously! story of my life: i can’t decide whether unhappiness stems from other toxic people, or i myself am the source of poison in this situation.

i was thinking about this in the context of generational differences yesterday. maybe because we have far fewer real problems in our lives than our parents did (we have enough food to nourish us, there are roofs over our heads, and live in a generally meritocratic world), we focus our worry and anxiety toward more trivial problems (punishing ourselves when we eat too much food, fretting over who we live with, paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong choice given all our options).

WHEN DO I FINALLY GET TO GRADUATE FROM 7TH GRADE?! honestly! aren’t i old enough to be able to make my own damn decisions about what and who i like and don’t like, about whether i want to let certain things negatively impact my mood, day and life?

ugh, yeah, this post has obviously just regressed into meandering nonsense. oh, in cool things, i went to neurology grand rounds with oliver sacks this morning! he was great. interestingly, it took oliver sacks talking about hallucinations to start to snap me out of this week-long stint of living all up in my head. yikes!

I need real hobbies

i’m not sure instagramming counts

 

everything worth doing is worth doing at 11

what a day! do you often get those drunk-on-happiness moments? when you’re just in awe of how amazing everyone and everything around you is?

we had our third exam in four weeks yesterday and we’re finally done with a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, so everything since 10am yesterday has been AWESOME. an afternoon spent in neuro icu, a talk on psycho-oncology, a surprisingly delightful dinner at the faculty club, coffeehouse (which, btw, our class ROCKED), a night out at a lounge that was obviously and hilariously divided between the bridge & tunnel crowd and p&s.

a couple hours of sleep, then up at 6:30am and off to a creative mornings session in dumbo: beautiful views, an inspirational talk on creativity, courtesy of jessi arrington, and oh yeah, a rainbow parade with sparklers. yes.

then, because i only had 8 hours between the parade and a prior commitment in soho, i decided to walk around the city. in a green jumpsuit. which, surprisingly, did not garner very many disapproving looks in chinatown, where i had the best noodles of my life at xi’an famous foods. seriously. hand-cut rice noodles with lamb and cumin in soup. totally worth the sodium. by 1pm, i had decided to take the jumpsuit off, only to realize that it was 45 degrees outside, and a t-shirt wasn’t gonna cut it. so of course, i had to go shopping. and then, after i stocked up on a semi-branching-out coat and some very boring v-and-scoop-neck long-sleeved t-shirts, i killed a few more hours wandering around mercer street, looking at clothes i couldn’t afford, then at furniture and art i definitely couldn’t afford (it’s going to be so weird making more than -$250 a day when that happens in 10 years). and finally, it was time to honor my prior commitment, which was a curated tour around a babeland, a sex toy shop, compliments of one of our deans. aaaand because our class is super enthusiastic, there were like 25 of us in there. delightful dinners, delightful warm showers, delightful pj’s. life. is. good.

hope everyone else enjoyed their 11/11/11’s too :)

in honor of today’s google doodle

it’s marie curie’s birthday!

i love this poem. read it and cry.

Adrienne Rich – Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

stereotypes exist for a reason.

yes, yes they do.

horcruxes!

this weekend was reunion homecoming at stanford! so naturally, i spent 2 days pent up in my room, toggling my computer screen between histology slides and facebook, wishing i were in the red zone / at nola’s / in california?

maybe wishing i were back in the bay is my defense mechanism against the air getting crisper and the leaves turning orange (omg, so many orange leaves!) – a consequence of my self-diagnosed seasonal affective disorder. but i suspect that my nostalgia is much more accurately described as a desire to leave parts of myself in different places, just in case something terrible happens to me in my present life.

but isn’t this something we all do to some extent? placed in new or vulnerable positions, don’t we all have a tendency to retreat into ourselves, to take refuge in the more flattering versions of ourselves that we, our family or old friends presumably saw at one point? or is this understanding of nostalgia only accessible to those of us who have been fortunate or imaginative enough to have had a past worth reminiscing about?

starting a new social life is hard.

babies!

tonight, i got to see one come out of a womb. SO COOL. the renewal of life!!!

I TOUCHED A HEART TODAY

totally worth the 7 hours i wasn’t studying.

i challenge you to find a post in which i do not mention doctors nor nerds

ok three things:

first of all, i met a doctor today who made me want to be an excellent clinician. oh god, and not by example. i think i had been spoiled by our doctoring class, because i definitely had a skewed perspective of medicine, in which everyone with a white coat is sociable and normal. this doctor scolded his assistants in front of me and his patients, mumbled a lot and just made me feel super uncomfortable. it was awful. and then he expected me to shadow him twice a month. must figure out a way to get out of this one…

secondly, a middle-aged man sitting next to me on the subway today was reading an illustrated book about prussian soldiers. YES. freddie the great! i love seeing nerds out and proud in public.

thirdly, i love having wannabe doctors around all the time. i scraped my finger really badly a couple days ago (the swinging door on the recycling bin ate my finger) and went onto the subway without a band-aid today. then i got really worried because my distal interphalangeal joint was stiff (pp joint!) and i remembered this horror story our anatomy professor told us about having to stay in the hospital for a week because her cat bit her hand and the infection spread. but then one of my neighbors gave me a band-aid and told me i probably don’t have hep c. it was great. i feel great.

and now, my 2-lb chocolate bar and i are going to start studying.