A sad truth

I heard once that in order to keep people reading a blog, you have to post something at least once a week. While I hope that google reader will save my blog from oblivion, I still feel like I should make an effort to write more. The tragedy is that not much happens to me these days. Week to week there are lectures and tests, with the occasional weekend here and there. As exciting as that is, I feel like a few general observations I've made over the last several weeks might be more interesting to read:

- Anytime before Thanksgiving is way to early to have a Christmas tree.
- Halloween decorations in the front yard are fun but dummies hanging from trees may not be very kid-friendly.
- The Utes are overrated and the Jazz are underrated. (I've been saying this for a while).
- Negativity is contagious. Several of my classmates tend to be negative about school--it kind of wrecks the whole experience.
- 27 is a great age. If you haven't tried it yet, you should.
- I read that retail therapy doesn't really work. This may be true about long term happiness, but if they're talking about short-term life improvement then I beg to differ*.
- Every narcissist has a soft spot. (A story for another time).

People without kids...

...need nieces and nephews.

Living at home

Living at home with parents (and sister) has some serious benefits. This fall I've had a bottomless supply of peaches, pears, cupcakes, rice crispy treats, and honeycrisp apples. If you don't know about the honeycrisp variety it's probably because they're too expensive for most people your age to buy. Living at home I also get to share stuff and borrow stuff like ties (dad has an amazing collection), cars (although only occasionally), and toothbrushes. Wait, toothbrushes?

A couple of times a week I brush my teeth upstairs, usually only if my sister, Gracie, is in the bathroom we share downstairs. Yesterday I finished brushing my teeth up there and I heard her run upstairs and ask me, "did you just use my toothbrush?" (I should mention at this point that there is only one toothbrush in the upstairs bathroom and it's mine). "Your toothbrush?" I asked as the clean feeling of recently brushed teeth was beginning to be replaced by grossness. "That's my toothbrush, I put it there when I came back from St. George four months ago!" she said. The grossness instantly spread from my mouth to my entire body. I wanted wash my mouth out with bleach. I quickly renounced ownership of the toothbrush and is was immediately placed in the dishwasher. On the list of things that should never be shared, toothbrushes are somewhere near the top. We had a good laugh and then Gracie started singing "the old family toothbrush."

"First it was mother's, then it was father's, then it was brother's, and now it is mine."

Charts and graphs

I've always found that my brain tries to associate what I'm learning at school with real life. For example, the other day as I was walking to my car I saw a spot on the sidewalk and thought, "that looks like a simple squamous epithelium." For this reason I become less and less sociable the longer I'm in school.

One of the things they've got me studying right now is statistics. We try to figure out different types of studies and how the are expressed as graphs. This means that my brain is starting to put ideas into graph form spontaneously. Here's a graph of my social abilities (y-axis) compared to years of medical school (x-axis):














(p=0.0001)

During the last couple of years I've made some friends who went to BYU. One of the best parts about these friends is that I get to hear all of the bad date stories from when they were at school down there. It seems like they have more stories than anyone else (it's almost like the Y invented bad dates, which may not be far from the truth). So here is a graph of number of bad dates (y-axis) compared to years at the Y (x-axis):













(p=1.0)

Here's how much I want a fall break compared to weeks of school:











(p=0.00001)

It's not OK...

...to leave the 'g' off the end of a gerund. Runnin is not a sport, doin fine is not fine, and chillin isn't cool. Even if you include an apostrophe. I don't really care how you say it--but in writing keep it classy, don't abandon your 'g's.

In another life...

...I would be a writer. Once I wanted to write a Quixotesque screenplay about a guy who spends all his time watching reality TV until he becomes crazy and thinks he's in a reality TV show. It would be to raise awareness of how dumb that stuff really is.*

Today I want to write a George Orwell type novel. I don't think I really like Orwell's writing, but the idea I have would definitely be something he would have done. Here's what would happen: twenty years or so in the future a company will invent something called an iBrain. You can carry it in your hand and it remembers everything for you. Faces, names, conversations, pictures, everything. Within a matter of years everyone has one, from small kids to adults. Over the next hundred years or so people forget how to remember things. They only know how to find them on their devices. There would have to be a main character who either becomes aware and chooses or is forced into the strenuous process of reversing his/her mental atrophy. I'm not sure yet if I would let this person actually achieve mental independence or if he/she would die trying. The purpose of this one would be to get everyone to stop letting their tech gear to get in the way of living their lives. At the football game yesterday there were tons of people texting during the entire game. It wasn't the most interesting game ever, but still. I think it's healthy to turn off the phone every now and again. Does this make me a hippie? Or was I just born ten years too late? I think I would have loved Van Halen in their heyday.

* Turns out that the original "Don Quixote" was written to make fun of the "novelas cabellerescas" (knight novels) that were as ridiculous as they were popular in Spain during the 17th century. Cervantes wanted everyone to see how dumb the current trend was, so he wrote a novel to make fun of novels. Thanks to some modern playwrights, we've taken the story and made it about idealism and free thinking.

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A recurring theme at church today seemed to be: “why do bad things happen to good people?” A valid question, especially when one considers oneself to be a “good person” (which most people seem to do), however, I wish people wouldn’t get hung up on it so much. I propose that in this age-old conundrum there are two superfluous adjectives: bad and good. Remove them and you’re left with “why do things happen to people?” I feel like this is a more appropriate question to ask, and it’s way easier to answer too. It’s tough to say if something that happens to me is good or bad. Some of the biggest crises in my life at the time seemed like very bad things but in hindsight they taught me some of the best lessons I’ve ever learned (and actually increased my happiness in the long run).

Why do things happen to people? The answer is pretty simple: because that’s why we’re here. God wants things to happen to us and so do we. We wanted things to happen to us before we were born, which is why we chose to come to earth in the first place. Chose to come and were stoked about it. Sometimes things are brutal and sometimes they’re awesome, but do we really have to classify them as good or bad? After all, they’re just things. There are a billion different analogies that are all related to life being like a ‘refiner’s fire’ that burns out impurities and helps us become stronger. It’s a good analogy but maybe at some point we could stop trying to compare it to something and look at the situation as it actually is. Things happen to people. All sorts of things. Some things we want to last forever and others we wish had never happened, but if we can see that they all happen to teach our immortal souls to be more like our Heavenly Father then they don’t seem quite as earth-shattering.