i made this!

Homemade yellow cake w/chocolate icing. The icing was a little strange - made with sour cream. (I liked it but it got mixed reviews.) I wish the cake had been perfect, but it was a little dry. Mom says I probably overbaked it. I give it like a 5.5/10. Maybe a 6.5 after you leave it in the car for a few hours and it gets moist. Haha.

Kamna did the design because I knew I would mess it up. A hispanic quarter century?

Nom nom. Despite its not being the best thing I've ever made, most of it was eaten. I made it for my roomie's birthday so we took it to the birthday dinner. 25 hungry people left little cake behind.

It was my first attempt at a two-layer cake, so hopefully I will have better luck next time. I also took the recipe off a food blog, which does not have the pre-approved nature of family recipes.

PS Points to whoever read "I made this!" and heard the little kid's voice saying that after the credits on an xfiles episode.

kanye, making my days a little brighter lately

fake it till you make it

Tami says this a lot when we're talking about work, and I think it a lot when I'm interviewing patients. The only way I get through patient encounters is to pretend like I know exactly what I'm doing and what I'm talking about. I'm pretty sure if I acted as nervous or clueless as I usually am, the patient would panic and not trust me with a thing. So I smile, shake hands, ask questions with confidence, and try to look at competent as possible.

It doesn't always work. Yesterday I was trying to take a blood pressure, but I was doing it sort of awkwardly, and my preceptor was like here....let me show you how to make this less awkward. lolz lolz lolz. At least I had my stethoscope in my ears in the correct direction!

Yes, that has been a problem before.

It's also interesting having to ask your preceptor for certain things you want to get out of your experience. We saw some patients and I took notes and did a few menial tasks to help her out, but when she listened to hearts and lungs I never got to take a listen. Afterwards when we were summing up I told her that it would be better if I actually got to practice some of the physical exam myself - I mean, how am I supposed to know what a murmur or rales sound like if I never hear them? Anyway, for some reason I was nervous to ask her to let me do more stuff, but she was like "of course, of course."

I think it's that real doctors intimidate the **** out of me. Seriously. You have no idea how much stuff they know. I have probably been taught a lot of it, but I can barely remember any of it. It's embarressing and stressful and motivating. When am I going to be the repository of knowledge that they seem to be? Answer: not for many, many years. Le sigh.

ANYWAY. You would think I'd end this post with something like "and now I'm going to go study so I can be more like them." Well, it's Friday, and I'm stressed out, and I'm going to happy hour instead. I will count it as a win if I get some good studying in sometime later this weekend.

Side note: I get to go see Buzz Aldrin tomorrow! what what. Exciting. At a book fair! Also exciting. I do love me some books, and some space, and some wanna be astronauts. Or one, anyway.

the moth

I have a new obsession: The Moth podcast. It's just a podcast where people tell uninterrupted stories with no notes. Some are hilarious, some are frightening, some are insightful, but they are unfailingly good because they are always told with a tremendous amount of voice. You feel like you know the person telling the story by the end. And you usually like them.

Anyway, this (and other podcasts, namely This American Life & Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me) do an amazing job of speeding up your drive. I drove up and back from Princeton and the time just flew by. I love it. It's the perfect compromise. I can't listen to books while I drive (because if I get distracted, even for one instant, I stop listening) and one plot for the entire drive can be tedious. And what if you don't like the book? The podcasts switch things up every fifteen minutes or so. And music usually entertains me for a while, but I can get bored eventually while driving if all I have is la musica. So! Glory be to public radio. Which I burn onto a CD, but anyway.

Princeton was fun. I like it there, even if Brandon doesn't. Of course, I have the luxury of visiting. It's a pretty little place to visit. Too quiet and too cold to live there, though. I'll take pictures in the wintertime and post them so you can see how it's like a fairy tale town in the snow. It looks magical.

Unfortunately, since coming home, I've been ill all day. Hopefully I will be 100% by tomorrow because this week is going to require me to use all the time I've got.

CREDIT TO KAMNARS

Bacillus cereus

self-explanatory.

ah, lecturetimes.

i think about important things.

I have decided that sushi is the perfect first date food for me, for the following reasons:

1) Mexican food makes you smell....like Mexican food
2) I don't like Italian food all that much YES I KNOW IT'S WEIRD
3) Delicious peppery things get into my teeth (weh)
4) Also bready things get into my teeth
5) Many other foods have the potential to make me feel ill, THEREFORE:

first dates should be sushi. I had this revelation tonight after a girl's night. I was like hey! I smell normal, nothing's in my teeth, I am comfortably full and my stomach doesn't hurt. VICTORY.

I give delicious seafood a close second.

Uhh....so that's what I thought about on the way home from girls' night.

Anyways I shouldn't be needing to go on any first dates because I have Brandon! And he is finally home. And we are both in the same place, and by "the same place" I mean two and a half hours away from each other, but that beats this summer by, quite literally, miles and miles.

Brownies are in the oven and it's Wednesday and I'm out of excuses to avoid studying. Except you know that I will find a way.

I applied for a jorb today. I would make money! I would collect urine samples! lolz

labor day in PA

One of my classmates (Logan) invited the entire class to his parents' house in Pennsylvania for Labor Day. Only 5 of us came, so it's not as crazy as it sounds. Too bad for everyone else, though - it was a blast! And much more relaxing than worrying about the upcoming exam all weekend. I drove up with Craig and Birju. After a solid 3 hours of driving and listening to NPR podcasts, we made it.

The farmhouse from the pool area. You can see the barn in the background.

We immediately put on swimsuits and relaxed in the warm sun. Then Logan's mom put us to work gathering corn for dinner.

Craig and Birju working together.

My very own baby corn!! Awwww

We then had a corn shucking contest that I lost spectacularly. The first corn I shucked had a worm in it!! This was damaging to my competitive psyche. Le gross. Anyway we cut the parts with worms off and most didn't have worm damage. Apparently worms are what happens on an organic farm!

Dinner was the next adventure and I helped prepare the chicken by basting on some sort of delicious butter-vinegar special sauce.

Look at the end product! Yumz.
Post-dinner, I watched some college football, and to my absolute joy OU lost to BYU. I couldn't have been happier. I wish I were going to be in Dallas for the Red River Shootout to rub it in their faces before our game in the traditional trash-talking parade the night before. They've got absolutely nothing to brag about this year!

Then one of the Weygandts' family friends brought over a huge hollow log that he "found" somewhere. And he lit it on fire. It was amazing. I've never seen anything like it. The log was so thick that you could touch the outside and it was still cold.

Proof!


Amazing, no? It burned for hours and hours. Toward the end the boys got a little bit crazy. Logan's dad drilled into the log to make a jack-o-lantern smiley face and then everyone took turns chopping the log up, till it was no more.




And that pretty much ended our night. All the medical students were exhausted and passed out. All the other kids stayed up drinking and messing around. Haha. I slept on the couch downstairs and the next day I learned how to can food! We made our own salsa and canned it. But I'm saving that for the next post because I need to study. So! Stay tuned.

pretend all the good things are for you

I would update this blog more if I brought my computer to class, but it turns out I pay little to no attention if there is a computer available during lecture. Sacrifices must be made to the gods of academia.

Speaking of those "gods," they have deemed that we can't have any food in our lecture hall. They took away our free neoplasia breakfasts/coffee because we brought the food into the lecture hall. To punish us. Oh, I'm sorry. If we're having class from 8am to 1pm, we might get a little hungry in the meantime.

It's cool, everyone eats in there anyway. What can they do to us? There is actually no way to punish us. I want to start a blog called "Eating @ Armstrong Auditoriums" and post pictures I take during class of people chowing down, then send the blog link to the building administration. Just to spite them for taking away our free food. How low can you go?

James is in North Carolina right now with Tami. I think this makes me a bad friend. I wanted to go this weekend, but airline tickets were insane and I have an exam next Thursday, so spending 12 hours driving was not really feasible. And Tami had to work one of the days too. It feels ridiculous how close/yet far away I am.

So if you haven't read this article in the New Yorker, you should. Texas probably executed an innocent man. This has always been my problem with the death penalty. I would say sure, an eye for an eye, a life for a life, if you were 100% sure about guilt, but we're not infallible. We make mistakes. And how can you live with making a mistake of this magnitude? It's chilling to think about.

Another week of school is almost over. Labor day weekend has yet to shape up. Will I go to Philly? A Delaware beach? Ikea? ???

The weather has been absolutely beautiful lately. I don't remember this twilight summertime from last year, but that's probably because I had yet to suffer a mid-atlantic winter. So every bit of sunshine counts right now and I'm trying to store up against the cold. Like...a bear? I'm probably eating enough right now to go into hibernation. Class makes me eat.