My Very Favorite Parents

I got to spend two days with my Mom and Dad!

It seems like everyone who's ever met me has inevitably come to realize that my parents are the stuff legends are made of. A visit with them always hovers somewhere between being an utter train wreck and hilarious history in the making.

For example, there was the time my dad randomly stepped into his room for a few minutes, then came out dressed like this:

¡Es el Chapulín Colorado!

There was the time my sister, Beth, came home and realized there was a live chicken wandering around in the kitchen. When she asked my dad about it, he just said, "We like chicken. We might eat it one of these days."

Infinitely practical food expert

Or the time when some of my college girly friends and I went camping in the White Mountains but my dad wouldn't let us leave for the campsite until he had attempted to convince each and every one of us that we should carry pistols on our belts for protection from the bears.

The Glorious Gun Geezer Glenn

And of course, there are all those times my mom has carried on an entire conversation using only her patented catch phrases: "I don't know what's in your food that made you so silly, but I'm glad it's not in mine," and "Wanna play Rummy?" (By the way, if you turn down the Rummy offer, she'll follow up by offering to play Four Kings, then finish by insisting you play Canasta. I think that Canasta is her favorite game because she doesn't actually know how to play it, which means she gets to make up the rules from minute to minute to suit her fancy. I always lose.)

Behind those Harry Carey glasses lurks a Canasta cheater!

Last of all, there are my favorite moments: The times when mom randomly makes dad drop everything in order to dance with her right there in the living room. I hope to continue that tradition someday.

They're funky, but they're mine, and I love them more every day. :-)

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My classy hotel in Hollywood

Perhaps I should have worried when the hotel's front desk clerk was behind 3-inch-thick bulletproof glass. Or perhaps when I had to pay a $5 cash deposit in exchange for the television remote control. Or maybe when I had to step over a homeless man asleep in the outdoor breezeway on the way to my hotel room. Or when the door of said hotel room had 4 locks on it, one of which had recently been broken by brute force. Or when all but one of the room's light bulbs had been stolen by its previous occupant. Or when the toilet tank in the bathroom had no lid to cover its inner workings. Or when I found a half-empty bottle of gin tucked neatly under the ironing-board cover. Perhaps I should have worried, but there comes a point when you're just tired enough to click the 4 locks and peacefully drift off to sleep.

Things forgotten. Things remembered.

December has been a busy month for interviews. Here's a sketch of my life for the last week: Wednesday: 10 hour interview day in Minnesota, then a 10 hour drive to Michigan. 2hrs sleep. Thursday: 8 hour interview day in Michigan, then an 8 hour drive to Wisconsin. 4hrs sleep. Friday: 10 hour interview day in Wisconsin, then a 7 hour drive to Indiana. 3hrs sleep. Saturday: 6 hour interview day in Indiana, then a 9 hour drive to Minnesota. 6hrs sleep. Sunday: 12 hours of flights and layovers to get to San Francisco. 4hrs sleep. Monday: 9 hour interview day in San Francisco, then 5 hours to get to Loma Linda. 6hrs sleep. Tuesday: 9 hour interview day in Loma Linda, then 3 hours battling traffic to get to Los Angeles. Wednesday: 7 hour interview day in Los Angeles, and hopefully an awesome night of sleep tonight before I head to Iowa tomorrow then Arizona the next day. What do I remember from any of that travel odyssey? Only this:

Somewhere along I-90 in Chicago, there's a midnight toll booth operator with a black bouffant, a golden voice, and a steely gaze. I didn't have my camera with me, but I swear this recreation with PhotoShop is extremely true-to-life!

Elvis lives, and apparently the economy has been rough on him.

Treasure

With Thanksgiving behind and Christmas ahead, I've been thinking a lot about gratitude and truly appreciating the things I've been blessed with. My mind keeps returning to the kids in Ghana, especially this little boy.

Looking back through my journal, here's his story:

"My favorite part of the outreach clinic day always comes after we finish the vision screenings, while we wait for the bus to come pick us up. Today there was a crowd of children, as usual, so I pulled the little bouncy ball from my backpack to play with them. Most of them have never had the chance to play with anything like it.

"There was one little boy who I had noticed earlier in the day. He was particularly grubby, with flecks of straw stuck in his hair and such dusty clothes that the underlying cloth print was almost indiscernable. But the most notable thing about him was a bulge low on his belly, which I had taken for a huge umbilical hernia. Things like that are common here, since surgery is usually too expensive or too far away.

"When I got out my ball, his face suddenly beamed. Like a connoisseur extracting his most treasured specimen, he reached into the front pocket of his overalls and produced a tennis ball. Completely stripped of its fuzzy green skin, cracked and scaly and brown; the most valuable prize of a 4-year-old boy in the middle of nowhere Ghana."

There is so much to be thankful for.

Glurp. Blort. Burble.

Twas the night 'fore Thanksgiving and all through the sinks,

the drain was clogged up with gloopy pipe stuff that stinks. The kitchen was blurping and threatening to flood, so to quell the emergency, I called my great bud:

Disaster averted!

Taking a closer look at the plumbing greatness: 1) Glasses. Because I'm a disgrace to real scientists worldwide, I don't own safety goggles anymore. Instead, this is a grungy pair of fake Gucci sunglasses found on a beach in Miami. Safety first.

2) Scrubs and a white coat. Full skin coverage, and free laundry service at the hospital. Perfect for dealing with caustic chemicals and mystery sink-stink.

3) Plungers. I didn't own a plunger, so I went to the store (where everyone else was buying late night last-minute cranberry sauce). The store had plenty of cranberry sauce. It had zero plungers. There must have been some sort of clogged drain epidemic, because they were completely sold out. For good measure, I bought two plungers at the next store.

4) Ski gloves. It's all fun and games until the drain cleaner dissolves your fingers off.

5) Ye olde sink. It turned out to be clogged with a huge bogey of latex paint, which the apartment maintenance dudes must have washed down it when they prepped the apartment before I moved in this summer. If you've ever washed paint down a drain, fie on you.

6) Draino, which didn't work. Instead, we ended up using industrial strength, self-heating, foaming green crystals that psuedo explode when they touch water. Hence all of the above safety gear. It was like the 4th of July fireworks, right in my kitchen.

Stop the world, I want off

So tired... befuddled... delirious... 3 cities in the last 3 days...

Wednesday: I went to St. Louis for another interview, and another day of that same bizarre misty rain. I guess the upside of the gross weather was that I was absolutely the only person at the St. Louis Arch park, so I was free to dorkily balance the camera on a wet trash can lid and try to impersonate the arch to my heart's content. Thursday: Chicago, where I took an 8-hour medical boards exam. My ultra-fun classmate, Dar, was there testing on the same day. We practiced in the parking lot before the test. Friday: Salt Lake City for yet another interview. Long day, hard questions, and no time to explore. Barely summoned the energy to take a random lame picture from the sidewalk before stumbling to hotel room.

P.S. In St. Louis, I rode in the same metro train cabin as Bill Clinton. I never knew I could have such a classy experience for the price of a mere $2.25 rail pass.

Mighty Boss-tones: I get knocked down

Boston, home of Harvard's Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary, was slick with rain when I got here on Saturday night. It was that weird type of misty rain that feels like it's just condensing onto you in teensy pinpoints out of the air instead of actually falling from the sky. The mist/fog/rain was still going on Sunday morning. I didn't want to waste the chance to explore the city, though, so I went out for a drizzly stroll through the Boston Commons, which is sort of like their version of Central Park. The plot thickens: I wanted to snap a picture at a gorgeous oak with its branches draped over the walkway, but I didn't want my camera to get soaked in the process. Success with my camera's self-timer has made me brave. I started the timer's countdown, planning to hover over the camera to shelter it with my umbrella until the last second then step into the shot. Instead, the slick sidewalk won.

Picture taken 0.1 seconds before I slipped, fell end-over-teakettle, thwacked my head on the concrete, landed in a puddle, shattered my dignity, then retrieved my camera and slinked away looking like a bedraggled drowned puppy.

On a completely unrelated note, doesn't calling it an "Infirmary" make you think of huge hospital wards with rows of steel beds where all the patients are infected with (at least) tuberculosis and polio and scabies or something? I know it's ridiculous, but I kind of expected to see an Iron Lung ward somewhere inside this building.

Infirmary: Yes.

Iron Lung ward: No.

P.S. The Liberty Hotel in downtown Boston used to be the Charles Street Jail. Bonus points for irony.

Cleveland Rocks!

Howdy from Cleveland! I'm here for a residency interview at the Cleveland Clinic Cole Eye Institute. It's a beautiful place, and the program is astounding. I think the lobby was designed to hypnotize the people standing on the third floor, though.

You are getting sleeeeeeeeeee-py...

Anyway, I flew into Cleveland yesterday afternoon, then rode the train from the airport into the downtown area. The train's total count of homeless dudes asleep in the aisles was only 2. I took that as a good sign.

The train unloaded in the subway level of a shopping mall where I whiled away some time, then visited a nearby statuary before catching my bus to the hotel.

Cleveland Rocks!

During the 20-minute bus ride, one of the passengers kept up a pause-free diatribe about... well... everything. His key talking points ran like this:

- The Mayan calendar predicts the world will end in 2012.

- The world would not end in 2012 if the United States hadn't stolen nuclear technology from the ancient Egyptian pyramids.

- There are barrels of toxic waste under Cleveland, and the ocean-bottom is littered with refrigerators and stoves. There are fish swimming down there with plastic six-pack rings around their necks.

- The world would not end in 2012 if the United States hadn't stolen plastic six-pack rings from the ancient Egyptian pyramids.

- The Gay Olympics are coming to Cleveland.

- People need jobs instead of being in the Olympics. Everyone's going to lose their jobs.

- If you use your credit card at the Dollar Store instead of Macy's, Barack Obama will know you're about to lose your job. He will know.

- We should hire a couple hundred ships to go clean up the bottom of the ocean. That would be a lot of jobs.

- The world would not end in 2012 if the United States hadn't stolen ships from the ancient Egyptian pyramids.

It's a pretty coherent thesis, yes?

P.S. The Lewis Building (for business students at Case Western), is awesome.

The Lewis Building was stolen from the ancient Egyptians.

An Ode to Frankie Furter

I just got back from interviewing at the Milwaukee Eye Institute. It's a really fun, vibrant place! Somehow, I had always pictured Milwaukee as a gritty, smoggy, industrial city, a la Detroit. It turns out to be full of really gorgeous architecture and remarkably bland Bus People.

Here's a shot of the Gesu Cathedral near the Marquette University campus. It's truly stunning in person.

In a modern groovy contrast, here's the Milwaukee Art Museum which is down by the Lake Michigan waterfront. It's designed with these incredible mobile wings (apparently it's called the "brise soleil" if you're feeling fancy-pants). The wing/sail opens to a span of over 200 feet in the daytime, then folds to close over the building at night or in nasty weather.

Lastly, taking its place in Wisconsin's triple crown of Bratwurst, Cheese, and Baseball...

In what might be the most awesome sports tradition ever, they have Sausage Races at the Miller Park home games. Five people in 7-foot-tall sausage costumes race around the stadium in a battle for sausage-y fame and glory. Frankie Furter the Hot Dog is currently in the lead for the 2009 season.

A link for your reading enjoyment and athletic education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausage_Race

H1N1

I have H1N1.

Yesterday was the first time in a week that I felt feisty enough to make it from my bedroom out to the couch to lay around all day. It was a huge accomplishment. Today, my incredible feat will be taking a shower and changing into a different pair of pajamas. Just thinking about it wears me out.

...Stinking swine flu.

Thus Beginneth the National Tour

Ever noticed that all airports seem to be decorated with an airplane theme? It's as though they're worried you'll take a mighty blow to the head and wake up with amnesia, wondering where you are then realize there are airplanes ad nauseum on the carpet, walls, ceiling, artwork, and thus be cured of your memory loss. That's why it's always refreshing to see anything other than planes when traipsing along toward baggage claim . Like this classy thing here:

I'll be doing a lot of flying over the next three months for ophthalmology interviews. I'm trying to think of it as a fantastic national tour. Boston! Denver! San Francisco! Salt Lake! Tucson! Atlanta! Soon I'll be intimately familiar with all of their 2-star bargain hotels!

I just got back from Baltimore, MD, where I did my first ophthalmology interview at Johns Hopkins. It's one of the best programs in the country, nestled in one of the freakiest cities in the country. According to one source, you are statistically more likely to be shot in Baltimore than in the green zone of Baghdad. Yowch. Anyway, in the course of making my way from airport to city light-rail to subway to hospital, I got lost in that glorious wasteland. I eventually found myself on a street corner with this study in contrast:

On one side, there was this inscribed bench with gilded letters and golden dreams.

On the other side, there was this stretch of tenement row-houses.

Ultimately, I decided to ignore the shiny bench propaganda and hustle away from there, wondering if I'd be mugged as a reward for having used my camera in public.

Overnight, I stayed in a dorm room provided on campus, listening to the sirens continuously wailing outside, watching the little spiders skitter across the walls and bedspread, and counting the minutes until my flight home. The kicker is that the ophtho program there is very very very good, which makes up for a multitude of sirens and spiders.

As one last memorial to the trip, here's pictoral evidence of 1 second in Baltimore during which I was neither mugged, robbed, mobbed, or terrorized. The sun was shining, the squirrels were chomping, and the railway connection mercifully came to take me away.

Sherpa's Revenge

State Street is a groovy pedestrian-friendly boulevard down by the Wisconsin state capitol building. I'd been hearing great things about a Himalayan restaurant there, so this weekend I decided to venture to it. It seemed like a simple enough plan. I decided to save myself a two-mile walk by taking the bus. It's a well known fact that I have an enduring love of city buses and the people who ride them. Especially the people who ride them. Some passengers are merely passengers, riding the bus to get where they're going. Some passengers are bona fide Bus People, riding the bus as a mobile vector for their craziness -- they're my favorites. I once rode through downtown Tucson seated next to a middle-aged woman with three wigs securly tied onto her head with a Mickey Mouse necktie, her eyebrows accented with pink lipstick, and a sock on one hand that she used like a puppet to announce all of the upcoming bus stops. It was divine.

For my State Street trip, I waited at the designated bus stop for an hour. A homeless dude sat by me and sang the s...l...o...w...e...s...t version of Swing Low Sweet Chariot I've ever heard, pausing between verses to take drags on a suspiciously-scented cigarette. He wandered away. A college kid (who I came to internally refer to as Bobby the Flatulent) sat by me for a while, freely releasing his gastrointestinal pyrotechnics until the bus bench was uninhabitable, then he mercifully caught another bus. Alone at the bench, I got a little punchy, desperate for ways to entertain myself as I waited for my own bus.

My bus never came.

Busless, I walked to the capitol, passing this garishly blood-red brick castle of Medieval torture on the way. (I later read the sign and learned that it's a University of Wisconsin building. Cancel the torture. Bring on the boring administrative offices instead.)

The capitol is enormous. Madison city law actually stipulates that nothing can be built to stand taller than it does.

From the capitol, I went searching for the fabled Himalayan restaurant, toodling along looking at all the quaint store windows full of antiques and cashmere scarves and artisan cheeses and hand-carved sculptures and... creepy mutilated Halloween Barbies...? I don't know if you can see it in this little picture, but the Ken on the left has been skeletonized and the Barbie further to the right is redone as a Zombie holding a meat cleaver.

I also wandered through this nifty Zen seating area in a quiet little cove between two buildings. It was a tranquil place, except for me sprinting frantically from the camera to the stone in a desperate attempt to hit tree pose before the self-timer ran out while a random dude stared at me and cracked up. He probably thought I was a Bus Person.

Ultimately, I reached Himal Chuli and had the best Himalayan food of my life -- Roti, dal, samosa with fresh yogurt, and two peanut dumplings in a hot sweet sauce, all eaten slowly while eavesdropping on the hippies at the next table who were reading aloud to each other from a book about the five great mysteries. Life is good.

Vocabulary at its Finest

Medical term of the day: Pseudocyesis Definition: The appearance of clinical signs and symptoms of pregnancy, although the person is not truly pregnant. I came across this word a few weeks ago during my Psych rotation. I think both that it is phenomenal, and that it should be worked casually into everyday conversations. Allow a brief illustration, for educational purposes: Pregnancy should not be mistaken for a beach ball.

(ball) . . . (baby)

Bulky winter clothes that make a person look a little ...uh..."healthy"... likewise are not a baby. Any coat capable of withstanding a Minnesota winter is bound to be hugemongous, miraculously managing to be size Small on the inside but size Sumo on the outside. Shameful bonus points if it's also roughly the same color as an Easter Peep, as shown here.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this man is not pregnant. On the contrary, he offers objective proof that Santa Claus exists and works as a crossing guard in the off-season.

Eggheads and Cheeseheads

Any clue what this is?

Half-chewed gum? Floppery hunk of bread dough?

Mystery nubbin of unknown origin?

...drumroll... It's the Mighty Cheese Curd of Southern Wisconsin! Unless you count the whole Little Miss Muffet sat on her Tuffet nursery rhyme thing, I had never heard of a cheese curd until I moved to the Midwest. Now that I'm in Madison, though, I'm learning all about this mystical incarnation of cheese.

It comes in multiple colors!

It can be made into cheese fudge! I repeat: Cheese fudge!

It squeaks when you chomp on it! Rest assured that I tested this fact in multiple randomized controlled trials, documented by photographic evidence.

In case it's not patently obvious from this compelling picture, they seriously do squeak as you chew them! It's like the sound made when you run your fingertip across the surface of a phonograph record really fast. (Yes, I just said phonograph. Because I'm like 85 years old.)

In short, now that I know about them, I'm a convert to curds. Thank you Wisconsin. However, to my epic disappointment, I have not learned a thing here about tuffets. Those remain a great unknown.