I have a new pet peeve: people who let their tiny children toddle along in an airport terminal, when they (should) know damn well that people who are late for flights need clear running paths. I discovered this pet peeve tonight, as I sprinted through Hartsfield during my fifteen minute(!!) layover. To say I ran like gangbusters is an understatement. Going from gate B5 to gate D36 wasn't easy to begin with. Having to hurdle a dozen snot-nosed ear tuggers* didn't make it any easier.

Looking on the bright side, I know that my cardiovascular fitness is improving because toward the end of said sprint, I still had the wind to rudely say to one parent, "Seriously, pick her up!! People have flights to catch!!" Yep, that's right. I am THAT person. But whatever. As a possible future pediatrician, I was just being an advocate for the toddler, so she wouldn't get stepped on. But sometimes I think that having a kid must knock out the "I should be considerate of other people" gene.

Anyway, I just barely made my connection: they had to unlock all the boarding doors and what have you. And as I sat on the plane, I realized that karma was paying me back for being rude:

1) even though I got a seat assignment, that apparently goes away when you're late. So I got an aisle seat and the privilege of having people's butts in my face.
2) Soon after sitting down, still panting, I developed sharp back pain that made me pretty sure my aorta was dissecting.
3) I also developed a cough that just would not go away.
4) I also developed a pretty spectacular nosebleed.

This was all within five minutes!! And worst of all, I had Easy Lover by Phil Collins stuck in my head for the whole flight. Not the whole song. Just the "You're not the only one, seeing is believing" line. For the whole flight.

Whew. That's enough ranting and whining for now. I made it home safely. I hung out with my parents briefly, and now everybody's heading to bed. Goodnight, and have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!

*I think 'ear tuggers' is an appropriate synonym for 'young children'.

Well, really just to one... who shall remain nameless.

If you are taking subject- and/or system-specific blocks of questions, geared toward material you have just gone over, you do not get to marvel at your high percentages. Join the rest of us big kids taking random blocks and take your low 50s like a (wo)man. Or, if you refuse to do that, don't talk about it to me.

To quote Eli's away message, What's the only thing better than 8am class on a Monday? A 7:30am exam. Even better, they actually expected us to stick around for Histology lecture and lab. Clearly, I did not. Nor did the dozens of other people I saw heading homeward. Of course, I'm not at home right now, because I suck at life and picked the world's stupidest apartment. I thought about going home to chill for a bit between the exam and preceptorship, but the drive out and back would have cancelled out any relaxation I could have done. So here I sit, at somebody else's place... story of my life this year. Even though I know my living situation will be better next year, I'm still super-frustrated at the moment. I want to move, RIGHT NOW.

Today was my final day in the Head and Neck clinic. I saw a teenager come in with a fistula (meaning,a communication that should not be there) between her external carotid artery and internal jugular vein. The artery just dumps its blood into the vein, and veins really aren't meant to have arterial blood in them. The end result was this visibly pulsatile mass just behind the ear. It had what's called a 'palpable thrill', which means you could palpate it and feel the blood whirring around. I thought it was really interesting, but the attending told me that I couldn't even comprehend how unusual it really was. Of course it was new and interesting to me, I've seen nothing. The doctors who've been doing head and neck surgery for 20+ years had never seen one, either. We spent almost half an hour just looking at the scans. It was awesome. And you know what they're going to do to fix it? Tie off the external carotid, just after the common carotid bifurcates.

So. Apparently, the external carotid artery is not quite as essential as our Gross Anatomy professors would have us believe. I feel like I've been lied to. Why in the WORLD am I memorizing the eight branches of the external carotid, and the fifteen branches of one of the branches, if you could just clamp off the whole thing with no ill effects? In an attempt to further my own education (and do better on the upcoming final), I asked if we could talk about the arteries that take over when you get rid of the ECA. The attending's reply? "Oh, I couldn't give you names, it just works." It just works. Nanney and Dalley would have us believe that we wouldn't even have heads if it weren't for the ECA. Yet actual medical doctors practicing actual medicine will not hesitate to tie them off. Bilaterally, even! And it just works!!!!!!!! I am wasting my life.

I also got to see a couple of facial nerve tests. Another thing that in actual clinic, is not nearly as meticulous and drawn-out as Dalley & Co. would have us believe. All in all, it was a great day to wrap up the preceptorship. Now I get to focus on wasting my life... I mean, studying all this super-important minutiae.

During a conversation with my dad over Thanksgiving break, he said that he was sure Anatomy was giving me a deep appreciation for the wonder of God's creation. He was WRONG. I would feel more awed if the system were more efficient. Why in the WORLD does the branch of a branch of an artery need to have fifteen branches of its own? If you could open someone up and see one big fat artery that supplied everything, then I would be impressed. We could call it the Big Fat Artery of God. The Netter atlas would have just two plates: The Outside of the Body, and The Inside of the Body, featuring the Big Fat Artery of God.

But alas, He did not see fit to create us that way. So I get to try and figure out a tangled mass of aberrant arteries and structures that have far too many names relative to their size. And my instructors aren't making it any easier for me. If we're expected to know that the ascending pharyngeal artery has branches that supply the meninges, they could have damn well told us that during the lecture on the damn meninges!!!!! How hard would that have been? None of this "the middle meningeal artery is the only one you need to worry about" bullshit, followed by "Oh and you need to know these others as well," TWO LECTURES LATER. Organization is the key to adult learning.

In other news, the script I wrote for Cadaver Ball is already being quoted in the halls. Pressure to actually turn it into something good aside, that's pretty awesome.

YES, I'm still at school. YES, I will be back in just over 8 hours. Of course I'm loving my life right now; why wouldn't I??

Today, my lab group had to give a clinical anatomy presentation on knee arthroscopy. It turns out, not only is our knee joint lecturer too busy showing us gratuitous gruesome videos to be an engaging and informative speaker, he's apparently too busy finding the videos to actually prepare accurate lectures. In hindsight, it was obviously dumb on my part to use information he presented to us, but time was not on my side. Besides, why is the accuracy of the stuff I'm being taught even an issue? That's not a rhetorical question. Why is that even an issue?????

I need to get a whole lot happier about this "med school" thing before I give tours on Thursday and Friday.

I've never been fond of the whole Jeff Foxworthy redneck phenomenon, even back in the day when he had his sitcom. (Haley Joel Osment played his son, by the way.) I may not have liked that style of humor, but I could coexist with it. After all, not everybody laughs at the same things. But I just watched the Blue Collar Comedy special, and it crosses the line into absolutely intolerable. At the end, all four guys sit on stools and take turns telling jokes. Jokes that they did not write. The "first mate, bring me my red shirt" joke is not original material. And that, my friends, is inexcusable. I used to think of the fans of Blue Collar Comedy as people who just enjoyed a different type of humor. But now, my opinion has changed: The fans of Blue Collar Comedy are dimwitted yokels, every one of them. Because they are dumb enough to think that exagerrated accents and ratty clothes alone make good comedy. Because they are too simple to understand jokes so complex as to have setups and punchlines. News flash: "Git 'er done" is a catchphrase, not a joke. Stop laughing.

Of course, I'm not going to hate on the "comedians," though I will use that term loosely. I just have to admire Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Ron White, and...the other one (Bill?), for cashing in on the stupidity of the masses. They're freaking rich, but pretending they still live in double wide trailers, and the morons in the audience are EATING IT UP. I can't blame them for using other people's jokes since their audience is humor-challenged enough to let them get away with it. Unbelievable.

If you happen to be a fan of Blue Collar Comedy, and this rant has offended you, I just want to say that YOU ARE STUPID AND YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR SUCKS. Go buy some children's joke books or something, work your way up to real comedy. Or just read in general, and work your way past the stage of development where repeated poop jokes amuse you. Trust me, your life will be so much better for it.

I hate stepwise assignments. You know the ones. The actual assignment is due in a month. But until then, you've got a half dozen dinky things to turn in, one for each step of the process. First, a title and subject. Then an annotated bibliography. Then, an outline. Then, a revised outline. Then turn in your intro paragraph and thesis. And on and on and on. NO. That was only appropriate in sixth grade, for My First Term Paper™. I was ten years old, and clueless, and seven pages (handwritten, y'all) on comets seemed like a very daunting task. Mom had to drive me to the library, Dad had to help me look up big words like perihelion...things were different then. I am now twenty, and slightly less clueless, with a lot more seven page papers under my belt. If I choose to start working on a big paper the freaking day before, that is my choice as an adult. Because, and it really can't be said enough, I am a senior. Making me do a billion outlines takes that freedom away. It's oppression. I won't stand for it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an annotated bibliography to finish.

Watching Grey's Anatomy right now. Dr. Bailey owns my soul. I aspire to be like her. "Pissing off the nurses? .... Stoopid." And it doesn't matter that I missed the first part of the ep, because TWoP recaps the show now. How great is that? They're also doing both season 1 and 2 of Project Runway. Life really doesn't get better than that.

Today was pretty busy. Since I didn't write a single word of my novel yesterday, I practically woke up with a pen in my hand. I feel like falling behind the pace would be just too discouraging and could spell the end of this whole project. So first thing this morning, I caught myself up. Then I went to Starbucks to meet up with my partner for this French presentation. We got our entire outline together. Quite a productive meeting. I then tried to work on my art history paper in the library. But after checking out the books that were on reserve, I realized that I had no idea which pages I needed to read in those books. That was okay, because I also realized that I needed to book it to some store and buy a final clue for my little. After doing that, I had just enough time to change clothes for exec/pledge meeting/revelation/after-revelation dinner.

So then, there was exec. There were three members of section staff there. (A 'section' is like, all the chapters of APhiO within a metro area.) Section staff is made up of fraternity alumni who still want to be active in the organization. That's just background information. All I really have to say about their visit is that I work too fucking hard for this organization to sit there and be scolded by people I've never even met before. Too fucking hard. The scolding was because there was a section picnic at Lullwater today, and apparently only Kim H. attended. Please refer to my previous paragraph, and tell me where 'attend a picnic' could have fit in. Now consider the fact that I have a lot more free time than most other brothers. Then consider the fact that I'm one of the brothers in the chapter who makes the most effort to do APhiO stuff when I'm short on free time. Consider the fact that the past week was clue week, and that last night was our major fall fellowship. Consider the fact that Delta Kappa probably has more 20+ credit-hour-per-semester, thesis-writing pre-law pre-business pre-med pre-vet pre-dental members than Tech, Oglethorpe and UGA put together. Does it make sense that our attendance was low? I'm not too pissed at the scolding, since I know it was more of a general expression of disappointment than specific pointing of fingers. It's stil annoying though. Whatever. Exec's got a meeting with all these alums on Thursday, and maybe we can come up with...something. Or I could quit the chapter and have a lot less hassle in my life!

Nah, I won't quit. After the pledge meeting (which I missed because people I've never met before had to laugh at our service hour requirements, which we KNOW are low, thank you very much, person I've never seen before.)...after the pledge meeting, was revelation. That's always fun. Like, a lot of fun. I'm a dork. Katie's reaction when she turned around to see that I'm her big was great.

After-revelation dinner was supposed to be at the Cheesecake factory. One day, we'll learn that it's impossible to ever go to the Cheesecake Factory if it's a weekend, and if you're in a group larger than four. So we ended up at Outback Steakhouse, which was tasty. And I decided that if I ever get an acceptance to a medical school, I'll eat at the Cheesecake Factory every day for a month. Because I'll have to go there with all my friends to celebrate, but we can only go in groups of four.

I didn't do a damn lab-related thing all weekend. All week. I'll have to go in at like 9 tomorrow. Le crap!

Usually, I leave my science classes feeling hopelessly downtrodden, but that was not the case today. I didn't have to wake up early and hurriedly prepare stuff to show JK. I got a stat mech assignment back with a lot of check marks. The Dragonbone Chair continues to be a good read, and entertained me through biochem. All in all, good times.

One thing that doesn't entertain me in biochem is the large number of know-it-alls. The people who ask tons of obscure questions, not because they don't understand, but because they want to make it clear that they know something. "Professor, is [blahblah] the same as [alternate name for blahblah]?" It's obvious that they know damn well that the answer is yes. But it's essential that the whole class know that you have this information, and that the professor know you have it. Thanks for wasting our time with your attempts to show off. Ramiro put it best: "You're not Pinocchio, your nose can't get any farther up Dr. Y's ass."

Sheltering Arms was good fun. I love the wee little babies. Next time though, I think I want to work with the 1-year olds, who were in the wee little baby room last year. After that, Kathryn, LB and I had dinner at Fellini's and ice cream at Coldstone (see how we tied together service and fellowship, there?). Then it was back here, for an amazing four(ish) hours of biochem studying. And now, I sleep, because tomorrow, I build. Hopefully. If they don't reject our massive group because we didn't contact them ahead of time (which I tried to do). Oh well, too late to worry about it now.

Tuesday's accomplishments:

I realized that I am a math idiot and was making a certain task a LOT harder than it had to be. I wonder how I've gotten as far as I have, with a complete inability to work with numbers. Abstract stuff, fine. I can see a big ol' equation, and identify its components by what they look like. "Yes, well, that part's obviously the contribution from translational entropy." Actually plugging in numbers? No can do. "Um...so if that's the log, I'm raising to the power...eh??" Yay LaKedra.

Worked out. It was lower-intensity than usual, because I planned on going swimming too. However I'd forgotten about my plans for...

Dinner with Alex and others. We went to Osteria 84..3..596? Osteria with some numbers after it. Italian. Pretty good stuff. The Cannoli was wonderful. And that will be the last time I spend money on food before like, Sunday. I canNOT turn into this crazy mad spender.

One month until this program ends. Until I'm done with this career in research crap. Until I no longer have to tolerate people looking down on me because I want to be a doctor. Somebody's gotta do it! It takes a lot of nerve to scoff at someone willing to spend like, the next decade in school for a PURPOSE, when you spent about the same amount of time for NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER. What the hell kinda reason is "I just wanted to stay in school"? No. That's why you're NOT HAPPY. Sit down.

I had to get that out, in preparation for the group session tomorrow.

Last night I dreamt about the fucking MCAT. Gaaaah.

Yesterday we drove down to GA State to figure out where the school is, where the building is, where parking is, all that good stuff. Our first attempt went horribly, horribly awry. I'm looking at maps, and we could not possibly have been farther from State, while still in Atlanta. Took the wrong streets because they all had the same names as the streets we were looking for. Damn you, Atlanta, with your multiple Mariettas and Piedmonts and Peachtrees and Decaturs.

Now, Baton Rouge knows how to be creative with street names. We have so many names stored up, we've got to use multiple ones on the same street. Having to know that Sherwood Forest Boulevard becomes Siegen Lane becomes Burbank Drive is a lot easier than having to know that there are two freaking Marietta Drives, on opposite sides of the city. I shake my fist in the general direction of Atlanta.

People claim that they want to do service projects with more concrete results. They want to feel that they're actually helping someone. Well, I'm in charge of one of the most concrete service projects we do! You might actually get to pour concrete, that's how concrete it is. You get to see a house go up. You get to meet the person who will be owning it. You get to leave your mark on a person's first home of their own. I don't understand how that could not appeal to the service-minded individual. Yes, it's an early day, and time-consuming, and tiring. Shakespeare Tavern can be just as time-consuming (Hamlet was over 6 hours!), but no shortage of people there. What the hell is the point of a service organization if nobody wants to get their hands dirty??

What has fueled this rant? I've got the biggest group of people signed up for Habitat, that I've had all year. Twelve! The problem? Nine pledges, three brothers. One driver (a pledge). First of all, it upsets me greatly that pledges obviously want to do service, but the brothers are letting them down. The brothers who do have cars seem to be far too entrenched in their cushy projects...or they've gotten their hours done and have just quit. So where does that leave the carless? Screwed over. Where does that leave the PC? Pissed off.

I'm ready to go back to Atlanta right now. First of all, having been asked when I'm leaving, every day for the past THREE WEEKS, has been wearing on my nerves. It's not even asking for a good reason. Apparently that's just the only "conversation" that anyone feels like making with me. If it were a meaningful question, the people asking would LISTEN to my answer and not just ask me again the next damn time they saw me! It's not "I really want to know when you leave because I am interested in you or your life." It's "Oh, you're still showin' up. Why??" Then the answer's promptly forgotten. To top it all off the parents' annoyingness factor is climbing by the second. I'm not very happy. Boo.

The first part of my day went pretty well. I got my French midterm back; the professor's comments on it included "I hope you're planning to major in French!" Needless to say, I'm happy with the grade I got. Then in anthro, we took a quiz that I definitely passed. I'm pretty sure I missed the question about the three types of interviews, though. Freaking ethnography. After the quiz, I spent the rest of the lecture pondering my brackets. And after getting lunch, I went to the pchem lab and did more bracket pondering. Honestly, you'd think I didn't have a huge exam to be studying for or anything.

Physics lab was okay. I'm getting tired of stupid labs where nobody knows nor cares what is going on. It's pointless, and we shouldn't have to do it.

After lab I worked on the physics homework with some people. I'm getting tired of stupid people who don't even look at the homework before we meet. They annoy me and waste my time. The group work is supposed to be for checking answers, not giving answers to morons who don't even crack open the book. I mean, I feel guilty if I go into group work without having tried on my own first. It defeats the purpose of collaborating if everybody goes in clueless! This person also annoyed me by not paying attention (so we had to repeat everything we said fifty times), and by not knowing math. Cosine is adjacent over freaking hypotenuse. If you are a third-year science major, that should be second freaking nature for you. I should not have to draw you a freaking picture to drill 11th-grade math into your freaking head.

Then I got the mother of all headaches, probably partly caused by that annoyance. At least, it was the mother of all headaches for me. I have the good fortune to get headaches very rarely, so ANY headache is bad. I'm sure chronic migraine sufferers would laugh in the face of the headache I had, but it was definitely what I imagined a migraine to be like. I wanted to throw up, cry, gouge my eyes out (to block the light), and die...not necessarily in that order. It was baaaaad. Then it went away.

So those were the highlights/lowlights of my day. I gotta go get my green pants out of the dryer now, then study more qchem!

Dear Guy,

I do not know your name, guy, but you know who you are. Black sweatshirt over a green turtleneck, doofy-looking glasses, with headphones. And a Cubs cap. Sitting in the stands on the thid base line at Wrigley right now, as I type. Leave the game now, and go into the witness protection program. There are many many Cubs fans right now who would like nothing more than to rip your arms out so that you may never reach for any fly balls, ever again.

You probably don't understand this. After all, you were stupid enough to reach OVER MOISES ALOU'S GLOVE to try and catch that ball. If you were truly a Cubs fan, and you saw a Cub trying to make an out, and you had one single working brain cell in your head, you would get the hell out of the way! And you weren't even smart enough to bring a glove to the game, nor were you good enough to actually catch it. This is why Alou is paid to catch balls, and you pay to sit and watch. To sit, BE STILL, and watch.

And now the commentators are making excuses for you, talking about how you have to go to work tomorrow, and to your wife and kids, and blah blah it's not your fault cry me a river. Normally I'd be a bit understanding, but right now I'm hoping they're wrong. You should have no job, and you should not spawn, so that your stupidity may not be passed on to plague future generations.

I hate you, guy. I hate you.

I hate p-chem.
I hate p-chem labs.
I hate Mathcad.
I hate Webdrive.
I hate Van der Waals (couldn't he just leave the damn ideal gas law alone???!!!)
I hate melodramatic, weeping Russian people.
I hate this stupid iMac I'm using now.
I hate this stupid circular mouse.
I hate the United States Postal Service.
I hate Emory.
I hate Emory's Post Office branch.
I hate the office of the Bursar.
I hate the B. Jones Center.
I hate the National Merit Scholarship program.
I hate the Registrar's Office.
I hate learnlink.
I hate my dorm for being too damn far away.
I hate the DUC.
I hate the fact that I can't go sleep right now.
I hate APhiO Exec Meetings. (DQ better keep it short or he'll be on this list.)
I hate being Parliamentarian.
I hate the bylaws because they're sitting on my desk and aren't in my booksack.
I hate the people who laugh at me for calling it a booksack.
I hate all the noise in here!
I hate my cell phone and its crappy service.
I hate my shoes.
I hate 8:30 classes.
I hate that I have lab tomorrow from noon to 6.
I hate myself for taking these stupid classes, at this stupid school with its stupid clubs and stupid offices in stupid buildings that use stupid iMacs with stupid mouses.

Bah.