Harry Potter 7, part I

Before you read this, you should know that I've only read the first Harry Potter book. I know that this means that I don't know everything because they leave stuff out of the movies.

I went to see the first half of the final movie last night. It was good, but I realized what it is about Harry Potter (well, the movies, anyway) that I haven't liked all these years. Harry never does anything in the movies. He either reacts to what happens to him or he follows Hermione and Ron around while stuff falls into their laps. As far as I can remember, in all the movies he never does anything special, smart, brave, or heroic (with the exception of maybe Quidditch, which isn't even that important). He's not really an exceptional wizard, not very coordinated, and he never did anything to earn any sort of reputation at all. And he never has any sort of control of the precarious situations he's always finding himself in. I'm looking for something awesome to happen in the end although I'm starting to suspect that his wand is going to magically wave itself and Voldemort will die.

I had to write a paper this week for class. Knowing that this is my one chance to score higher than the kids who never forget stuff (the gunners) I was actually kind of excited (I even wondered if they'd give me extra credit if I submitted it in English and Spanish). Anyway, I had to write about an article I read on how the brain can make stuff up. The example they give of how this works and why it would be important is if you were watching a dog running behind a picket fence, your brain would fill in the parts of the dog that you can't actually see so that you perceive a complete picture of the dog. It goes on to discuss a girl who feels an itch on her head that is not actually there. It torments her so much that she scratches all the way through her scalp and her skull to her brain.
I got thinking about whether or not my brain does stuff like this and I thought of one example that gets me every time. Now, I'm going to post a picture and I want you to think about what this candy tastes like:

If you're anything like me just looking at these little guys makes you sweat under your eyes, pucker up, and salivate. Not the kind of salivating you do when you see a steak come off the barbecue, but the kind you do when something is so sour that you can't wait to bite into it to get to the sweet core. Can you taste the sourness in your mouth? I really kind of feel like the little guy on the package when I eat one--it makes me wonder why I used to spend money buying these things as a kid. I actually wrote about Warheads in my paper--hopefully my professor will know what I was talking about because, if not, I could be outscored by the gunners one more time.

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.