Just a little thought on love

This might sound silly, or even ignorant, coming from someone who is going to be a pediatrician, but I think that one of the things I least understood before I saw a lot of newborn babies and their families was how parents handle having a baby with a congenital disability, like Down's syndrome for example. 

When you're childless and thinking about your theoretical future parent self, the idea of having a baby with a disability from day one seems very scary. I can remember having many discussions, before and after starting medical school, about whether or not I or the person I was talking to would choose to keep a baby, knowing that he or she would be born with a bad disease.

But one of the things I've really only internalized in the last couple of years is that, in the end, your baby is just your baby, and there's exactly the same amount of love between a parent and a baby, regardless of what disabilities, physical or mental, that baby is born with.  A child is just a child, and that child will grow at his own pace, into his own body, and will just be the person he is, with the parents and problems he has, forever.

I don't know why it's taken me so long to understand this, but it has.  And now I do, which is nice. 

Blocked

Well, the goal is to post every day till March, but I really just can't think of anything worthwhile to say today. Brain is too tired from alternately thinking about sick babies and being freaked out about how much medicine I've forgotten in the last year.

I can feel it rattling around in there somewhere, though. (The medicine, that is.) Hopefully if I shake it around enough it will fall out and land on my patients.

Sheep wrangling

Today I attended my first rodeo, which was awesome. And mutton busting is officially my new favorite sport.

Do I dare to eat a peach?

Yes. This one. The best kind of pulse purchase.

Seattle foods

Foods I ate on the first day of my rotation in Seattle: Starbuck's coffee from the cafeteria, blackberry pie brought in by the other med student, wild rice salad and Greek pasta salad (all vegetarian) for noon conference lunch.

So far seems like my kind of place.

I always think this is weird

Overheard at my sister's house: four-year-old Trevor playing pretend with legos or something, saying, "This big one is my iphone and this little one is my ipod!" 

I guess it's a nano.

How things look

When it comes down to it, one of my most fundamental traits is that I'm a sucker for for a lovely sight.  In nature, in high-fashion spreads in the New York Times, in museums, on brightly-clad African ladies - I love an interesting aesthetic.  I do.

Which, on the theme of Reasons I Love New York, is, well, another reason I love New York.  There are just more bright colors, more artistic expression in the way people dress, more interesting signage.  There are creative office spaces and vintage flea markets, which, however cheesy or overpriced, certainly provide fodder for one's artistic imagination.

I also love how much people who live here absorb this facet of New York as part of their culture.  When I come here, I become instantly more aware of the aesthetic my surroundings, and much more apt to talk about it - what it means to me, how it makes me feel, why I think it's interesting.  And my friends here are just as apt to discuss these things at length, conversations I really don't have anywhere else.  It's a part of my brain that lies dormant much of the time, as I'm carefully cultivating my more sciency bits.

I guess what I'm saying is that coming to New York reminds me of pieces of myself that I forget about, don't always have time for.  And it's nice to be reminded sometimes that those pieces exist.
 

Once in a blue moon

Tonight is the second full moon of August, 2012 - sneaking in just under the wire. For reasons the internets don't seem to be able to shed much light on, this is called a blue moon.

Blue moons come around, on average, about once every 2 or 3 years. When I read facts like that, I like to think about where I might be the next time whatever phenomenon it is happens.

So, in 2 or 3 years, where will I be? Let's make some predictions.

Not New Hampshire, but geographically not really certain.

Almost a full-fledged pediatrician.

Probably still a vegetarian.

And...that's as far as I can get.

I guess life seems pretty undefined at the moment - seems this moon brings some mysteries.

Get back to you at the next blue moon.

Tea bloggin'

Whenever I come to New York, I do try to find new places to drink coffee and eat bagels, two of my favorite Brooklyn activities, but I always seem to end up back at the Tea Lounge.  There are several reasons for this:

1. Plenty of outlets.  One of the worst trends of recent years is coffee shops that purposely don't provide electrical outlets.  I understand that this is to keep turnover high, but it's still annoying.  I will gladly pay a dollar more for coffee if I sit in your shop for four hours, plugged in.  I will probably also buy lunch.  I was in a different coffee shop this morning where they also had "no-laptop" zones.  I'm sorry, but why do you think people come to coffee shops??

2. Comfy couches.  Never underestimate the power of a comfy couch to lure me into a coffee shop.  On a particularly sleepy day, I might buy a tea just so that I can pretend to read and discreetly nap on your comfy couch.

3. Excellent location.  Very close proximity to a park (also for reading/napping in, if I feel too conspicuous on the comfy couch), to a taqueria, and to a subway station, three basic needs of the New York lifestyle.

4. Morroccan mint iced green tea.  Just a little spicy.


So, there's a little insight into what makes me tick.  I like electricity, napping and spicy tea.  That's about right. 

The Universe

In high school we read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and I have always loved it.  I hadn't thought about it really in years though, until yesterday when I was eating a taco in my friend Alison's apartment as she packed up to embark on a three-month foreign travel adventure. 

I don't even remember why I mentioned T.S. Eliot, but she said, "I have 'The Waste Land,'" and promptly handed me her copy, which was actually her dad's copy, handily annotated with translations of Eliot's favorite obscure non-English passages, with which he enjoyed frustrating the reader by inserting them as preludes or sometimes just into the text of his poems. 

Anyway, so I am finally, over a decade after passing AP English with flying colors, in possession of my very own copy of "The Waste Land."  To celebrate, here is what has always been my favorite passage from Prufrock:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say"'But how his arms and legs are thin!')
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. 

Do I dare disturb the universe?
Sure, why not?

The Empire State Building

Every time. Just gets me. Beautiful. From an era when that's what architecture was striving for. Along with that whole tallest building in the world thing.

Home?

I was counting the other day and realized that I have lived in six cities in twelve years.  I would venture a guess that that's more cities than most people have lived in, in their entire lives.

So I was also realizing that New York is really, even after four years essentially away, the city where I still feel the most at home.  Partly this is because I know it better than any place other than the Upper Valley, and partly because there are still so many people here whom I love.  I think that, since a lot of my friends left New Hampshire when they graduated last year, New York still has a higher concentration of people Alexandra loves than anywhere else.

I guess what makes New York feel like home, then, even though the restaurants have changed and the prices have gone up and people have moved, is that I still feel like I come back to a family here.  And for a meandering soul such as myself, turns out that's really important.

Meta packing

For someone who travels a lot, I suppose it's pretty odd that the chore I hate most in the world is packing a suitcase.  I have been sitting on the couch in my room for the last hour trying to get up the motivation to finish packing the suitcase for my upcoming trip to New York/Seattle/Salt Lake City. 

I always hate packing, but I think the other element of tonight's particularly difficult struggle is that I've only gotten to spend two nights at home since leaving for camp last Saturday.  I'm ok with this, as I'm excited about going the places I'm going, but there really is just something about sleeping in one's own bed, and invariably, when packing a suitcase, it's a signal that you're not going to see your bed for awhile.

So, good-bye home.  I look forward to putting my suitcase back in your closet in a month or so.

Generation

The last time I was a camp counselor was more than a decade ago. Last time I worked at camp I felt like the campers' fun big sister. Now, I definitely feel more like their mom. I know I'm not that old, but...today I feel at least a little old.

Oops

Already missed two days, but I have a good excuse, which is that camp doesn't really have very good internet and I'm not allowed to carry my phone. (And so the next post actually didn't publish when it was supposed to - it was from Monday.)

It's been awesome though. Who knew rheumatology summer camp would be so fun. I loved my camp as a kid, but this one means something to these kids that I will never be able to share or relate to, and it's incredible to watch; I didn't appreciate before I got here how important this week is to some of them. Kids who are used to having to explain their limitations and special needs, just being understood by everyone around them. Even the ones who play sports or do cheerleading or other very active and joint-stressing things clearly get so much out of being around other kids with arthritis or similar conditions.

Plus, any adult who chooses to take a week out of his life to come here without the enticement of pay or academic credit is a pretty special person, so I've met some really amazing, kind fellow counselors as well.

And also there are camp fires and songs and ropes courses! Yay!

Singing taps

There's something about already knowing the words to a song everyone is singing.

Summer camp is pretty fun

I get to spend the next week playing with kids here. And getting academic credit for it. Med school's not so bad I guess.

Snack-selling

One of the the things that I, rather unexpectedly, miss about Dar es Salaam is grocery shopping. Not for necessities really, but for the impulse buys. Packet of cashews, Haribo gummy cola bottles, delicious spicy cassava chips.

Tonight after wandering the aisles confused by the sheer selection of body lotions, as I was choosing between pumpkin seeds and sub-par gummy candy, I definitely had a pang of nostalgia for Shrijee's, my local crappy supermarket in Dar.

I'm thinking this might get better when I once again live in a place with a Trader Joe's, which always has superior snacks. Maybe. Maybe they'll start stocking spicy cassava chips.

Small towns

Today I walked into my local sushi place to see a friend on a date in the corner, and a much more unexpected friend in line behind me for takeout.  And this after running into two of my professors on the street and meeting another friend's husband in the coffeeshop around the corner.

Then I went to see a movie in a small theater where, though they caught me trying to bring takeout in, they also had a refrigerator to put it in, until the movie was over.

Also, Batman was just as awesome as I thought it would be.  That has nothing to do with small towns, but I'm still really glad about it.

The Crossover Post

New leaf, new blog, that's what I say.  For the last year I've been blogging here, spouting infrequent wordy diatribes on life, medicine, politics and occasionally wildebeests.

Here, though, I'm trying something new for me.  The goal is to post something (ideally something interesting) once a day until at least March 15, the day my next new leaf gets turned.  The Match.  The day that decides where I will do my residency in pediatrics, and where in all likelihood I will be living for a big chunk of the next decade.

So, here it goes.