Bears 3!

And now, just to round things out and hopefully help us all understand the mind of a bear a little better:

Bears 2!

Amy was right, the last sketch I did of a bear was just too nice looking.  So I've drawn up a new picture for all those of you who think it might be fun to give a bear a hug. 

I was trying to decide if I should give him red eyes, just for that extra terror factor...

Bears!

The other day at a dinner party the topic of bears came up.  There aren't really many things I'm afraid of in life, but bears scare me to death.  Remember when Alfred asks Bruce Wayne, "Why bats, master Bruce?"  And he answers, "Bats terrify me.  It's time my enemies share my dread."  If fear of an animal is what turns people into superheroes then it's a good thing I don't have billions of dollars or any enemies, because I would be Bearman, and things would get really ugly really fast.  I mean, bats can give you rabies (which is pretty terrifying), but we have vaccines for that.  No vaccine for a bear attack that I know of.  And you can kill a bat with a tennis racquet (my brother-in-law had to do it several times in their house in Virginia).  A tennis racquet, seriously?  Why would you be scared of bats?

I think my problem is that I have a pretty vivid imagination and so I've thought it through probably a thousand times and I still can't figure out how you could survive a bear attack.  First of all, they're huge--grizzly bears weigh up to 800 pounds and stand somewhere around 8 to 10 feet tall.  But the crazy thing is they're really fast, like 25-30 miles per hour fast.  That's about a 2.4 minute mile.  By the way, it would take a bear less than 8 minutes to run 5k at that pace.  And I've heard that the rumor about them not being able to run as fast downhill is false.  Fast, huge, strong, and lots of sharp things with which to hurt you--what is more scary than that?  Oh, and they can climb trees pretty well too.

I looked up "how to escape from a bear" on wikihow.com and they had some good ideas for survival.

1.  Avoid close encounters.  It says things like don't follow bear tracks.  It amazes me that there are people dumb enough to need this tip.

2.  Keep your distance.  Gladly.

3.  Stand tall, even if the bear charges you.  Yeah, that's not going to happen.  I try to run away from dogs that attack me.  Speak loudly in a deep voice.  How about a deep chipmunk voice?  Because I'm pretty sure that's the best I'd be able to do with an 800 pound death machine coming at me.

4.  Know your bear.  Because a black bear is going to kill you differently from a brown or polar bear.  I think everyone should be well-versed in bear taxonomy.

5.  Understand the bear's motivations.  Motivations?  Bear psychology?  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's pretty simple:

Still, somehow not very reassuring to me.  A bear encounter just seems like a lose-lose situation where all you can do is hope that the bear is stuffed, happy, and not surprised.

Medical school is hard.

I always knew that it was going to be difficult to succeed in medical school. But the last four months have been even more busy than I'd ever pictured. The thing that they don't tell you about before medical school is the exams. Partly the bi-weekly quizzes they give us to make sure we're staying up on the material, but mostly the standardized national exams. Since December I've switched over to a system where I study all day, every day for my national board exam (I take it in June) for 10 days, then cram for three days to pass the quizzes. At first I was hesitant because I was afraid that I would start failing the quizzes--oddly enough I started doing better. I have two theories for why this is:

1. There is some overlap between the board material and the class material.
2. The quizzes touch on small details from the powerpoints that are better held in the short-term memory for a couple of days (knowledge binge-and-purge method).

In reality it's probably a mixture of both. Either way, I've discovered a few things about my learning style in the process that have been helpful.

I think that there are three different principles of learning: memorizing, understanding, and integrating. Unfortunately for me, memorizing has never been my strong suit. I've always known this, but haven't had a good solution to the problem. But I'm coming to realize that if I can memorize stuff I can usually do pretty well understanding bigger picture concepts. So I've started focusing on flashcards (yesterday I made my 2000th flashcard since December). I spend at least a couple of hours going through cards every day on my computer in an effort to memorize everything. The remainder of my time I do practice questions (which is a whole different beast--I'll try to describe what they're like on here some other time).

These days I spend about 15 hours a day studying or in class, leaving about three for playing and eating. As much as that would have sounded miserable to me a couple of years ago, it's actually surprisingly rewarding. In some ways it feels like being a missionary again--you kind of just put your head down and go. It's not impressive or exceptional--it's just what you do when you're in medical school. And you find happiness in small successes, like getting the right answer on a question you would have missed a week before. It's progress, and that feels good.

As you can imagine, all this studying doesn't leave too much time for blogging. Even if I did have more time for it, not too much happens to you when you live at school. Still, I'm not ready to completely abandon my blog. But if you're reading this I'll warn you that, while there may be a couple more posts in the next few months, they're not likely to have anything too interesting.

To my siblings who don't live in Salt Lake...

I took both of these pictures 20 minutes apart, the first up at Jeremy Ranch and the second down in the valley. I thought this might make you feel better about not being here for Christmas--the smog this year is extraordinary.

I'm always trying to figure out how I can be less tired in class. Not that I'm falling asleep or anything, but sometimes I'm just sleepy in the mornings. So the other day I had the brilliant idea of switching beds from the twin I've slept in for the last 20 years or so to the empty queen that used to be my sister's to see if I could sleep more soundly. It's big, soft, has sheets that probably have a thread count of 12000, and a down comforter--this was a fail-proof plan. It worked pretty well, until I had a dream I was attacked by a bear. Once I finally got my heart rate back down I drifted off again, this time to a dream that I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. At this point I was pretty sure I was not going to have an easier time in class in the morning. Nonetheless, I fell asleep again and had a dream that I had been left somewhere without a car or any way of contacting anyone. Fail. At least it wasn't the night before a test.

If you ever want to be late to something, try to get stuck behind a Buick.

Back

All right, so I've been absent. It took every last bit of energy I had to make it through "brain and behavior". I made it through and now it's on to "circulation, respiration, and regulation," which is a fancy way of saying "heart, lungs, kidneys". Somehow cardiology appeals to me in a way that neurology didn't--I'm really sure why, but I think it might be because it's more directly related to running.

A big part of this block is going to be preventative medicine, especially in preventing obesity and diabetes. Every time they teach us about nutrition stuff the little hippy inside my head gets all riled up and starts noticing things like how unnatural Snickers and Coke are: "man, the government wants you to eat that stuff to lull you into believing that it's actually real food." It's a good thing that I don't own my own house and won't be in charge of purchasing Halloween candy this year--for reasons both philosophical and financial I might end up handing out half-of-a-half-of-a graham cracker to each trick-or-treater.

But, in reality, the timing for Healthy Dave isn't too bad--there are hundreds of tomatoes, peaches, and honey-crisp apples here at the parents' house (I'll never leave) to keep me happy.

Sorry for the long absence. Here's hoping that this block of school treats me better than the last!

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to jump onto a moving train? I've never done it either but I think I have a pretty good idea of what it would be like.

On an unrelated note I started my second year of medical school yesterday.

Mt. Aire

In my new lab we are all required to use the same notebooks. Here I've snapped a photo and highlighted my favorite part:
In case you can't read it, it says: "USE YOUR IMAGINATION". Which apparently is a trademarked phrase. I'm all for it, I think it's a great slogan, but then I open the thing up and it looks like this:
...and my imagination takes me right back to undergraduate chemistry lab. In case you didn't take chemistry in college and you don't know what it's like, picture a really old building (but not the cool kind of old) with large yellow stains all over the linoleum floors that look like they've been there since the dawn of time. It smells a like a mixture of acetone (fingernail polish remover, I think) and mold, and everything you touch is sticky. You get paired up with someone who doesn't speak English and spends most of the two-hour purgatory texting. You trudge through the protocol--it feels like trying to stay awake at 6:00 am after an all-nighter. In the end you're evaporating or weighing something when your partner awakens from his/her cell phone trance just long enough to spill your project all over the crusty floor, which miraculously manages to absorb the spilled liquid. You call over the slightly bilingual TA (who always manages to find some way of taking points off your assignments) who says, "you must repeat." Isn't using your imagination fun?

Here are some pictures from running dry creek (see previous post). Taken on my phone.


Isn't that an inviting trail? Then, on my way down I ran into this friend:I was going fast enough that I couldn't stop by the time I saw him so I went right over the top. He almost scared me to death, just cooking in the middle of the trail.

Interpreting

This week I've started doing some interpreting at the hospital. It had been a little over a year since I last interpreted and I realized how much Spanish I had forgotten. I had also forgotten how fun some of the people I meet up there are. I was sitting with one patient in the waiting room when she told me this story:

"I have a 7-year-old daughter who won't take pills. Last year she had a terrible fever. We took her to the doctor and he gave her a prescription that she absolutely refused to take. So we went back to the pharmacy and got it in a suppository. It kind of freaked her out when we gave it to her. Then, later that week when she didn't want to eat her dinner I told her that if she didn't eat we'd have to give it to her the same way as the meds. She's never been a picky eater since."

Dry Creek

Dry Creek might be the best place to run in the entire world even though it's not currently very dry. Starting at the JCC you climb and climb until you come out on the shoreline trail with a view of the entire valley from the Great Salt Lake to Mount Olympus. I run it at least once a week.

A couple of days ago I took my older sister up there (she lives in Wisconsin but she didn't let the altitude slow her down at all--tough as nails). As were on our way back down she asked me if I was training for anything. "This," I said.

Square one can be a scary place to be. Sometimes it's exciting because you don't know where you're going to end up. But square one in dating is usually not a great place. I can think of two reasons, one is that being at square one often means that you just ended some type of relationship. I've learned that even in the worst relationships there are good things--and after they end the good things tend to be more present (is the grass really greener on this side?). The other reason is that with every return to singleness you are older than before. Sometimes it feels like a never ending game of chutes and ladders that you've been playing for 6 hours and it's two in the morning and all you want to do is go to sleep.

I feel like I should clarify that this little bit of randomness does not come from recent events in my life--I didn't recently end a relationship, but it's something that I think of sometimes because if square one were a state I could probably establish residency and get in-state tuition.
It also comes from the fact that I feel bad to be the owner of a blog that is so neglected. I had to write about something. And I'm coming to the conclusion that writing about all the books I've read recently could get really old really fast. Thanks to those of you who still read.

Writing (blogging) is like eating carrots: sometimes you want to and sometimes you don't.

My generation

Yesterday I was out for a run when I passed a guy who looked like this:

He was nice (said 'hi') but I didn't trust him.

A fashion tip: my generation collectively imagines that Hitler's closet was full of clothes exactly like this.

You know you're in over your head...

When your desktop looks like this:
Sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day.

The saddest book of all time

I just finished “Where the Red Fern Grows;” if you’ve read it before* then you may already know how this story is going to end.

A few days ago I was listening in as my mom and my sister were sorting through the “children’s” section of our books to send some off to the D.I. Afraid that they would throw away “Sideways Stories from Wayside School,” I decided to watch closely. As I did, the old rust-colored hardbound copy of “Where the Red Fern Grows” caught my eye. I had a flashback of driving to California 15 or 20 years ago, my whole family in the Suburban as my parents tried to read the last few pages in between sobs and nose-blows. I picked it off the shelf. “If you don’t cry when you read that then you don’t have a heart,” my mom said.

This put me in a tough position because I didn’t want to end up crying, but the thought of being heartless didn’t sound very good either. Lose-lose situation, right? So I was careful as I started to read. The book was written for teenagers, so how sad could it really be? My strategy was to not start caring for any of the characters—especially not the dogs. And as a backup plan, I read the whole thing with a very critical eye just to make sure I didn’t get too wrapped up in it. Then maybe I would be a little choked up or kind of sad, but not in tears—proving that I am too manly to cry but that I’m not totally machine.

I did really well until the very end. I won’t explain all the details (just in case someone is reading this who hasn’t read the book), but somewhere around the line: “You were worth it, old friend, and a thousand times over,” I lost it. I tried to focus on the fact that he was using words like “old friend” or “a thousand times over,” but it didn’t matter. I was bawling my eyes out. Turns out I do have a heart (which is kind of a relief, I guess), and I’ll agree with my mom—if you can finish this book dry-eyed then you are a heartless beast.

*Turns out everyone I’ve talked to since I’ve read it has seen the movie, but nobody has actually picked up the book. Is it worth reading? A few hours after I finished the book my mom and I both started crying just talking about it—it’s absolutely worth reading.

What it's like being a music snob

One of my rules for keeping a blog is no writing about dating. The tricky thing about this is that most of the interesting stuff that happens to me is in that area of life. But it’s tough to write an interesting blog post about a funny date without making somebody look bad. Here I’m breaking my rule, but only because the only person who looks bad in the story is me.

A couple of months ago I went on an unsuccessful set-up. A couple of days after the date one of my friends was asking me why I had decided it was not going to work. I was having a hard time finding the best way to explain to him that I thought we were just too different in too many ways. He still looked confused so I picked an example:

Me: Like, she didn’t know who Mendelssohn was.

Jake: Who?

Me: Felix Mendelssohn…

Jake: Yeah, I have no idea who that is.

Me: Really? He’s like one of the top twenty classical composers of all time.

I should clarify that I don’t normally talk about classical composers on dates (not even top 20 classical composers), but we were at a choir concert and one of the pieces was by Mendelssohn.

I wasn’t too surprised that Jake wasn’t familiar with him; I just assumed that he didn’t know his classical composers very well. No big deal. Then I decided to take a poll from the rest of the table (like 6 or 7 dudes and one girl).

Me: Hey guys, do you know who Mendelssohn is?

Everyone: No idea.

Me: Really? Randy, you know who he is, right? (Randy is a really talented pianist)

Randy: Dude, I don’t know anything about football players.

Me: Felix Mendelssohn…

Randy:

Me: He’s a classical composer…

Randy: Oh, yeah I thought you were talking about football.

So while I had been wondering what planet the girl who didn’t know about some random music history was from, I was the one from a different planet—the planet of musical snobbery.