Caprice

If I'm going to get this experimental with adzuki beans, I think I need a food processor that does more than a cup at a time. A decent batch of brownies takes at least three cups.

Someone in Russia, evidently, has kindly posted Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore. http://bookre.org/reader?file=289730&pg=1 I am not sure if I approve or not, but seeing as the book is out of print and no one seems to show any interest in reprinting it, I consider it null for the time being.

It is one of my favorite books. Tepper has done better than anyone at getting down on paper the odd sense of half-freedom half-constraint of being in between life stages.

I may have just made my life more complicated, but probably no more hectic than it already was.

I somehow was under the impression I was going to spend eight hour days this week at my student-experience-field-site, but I am finding I am doing everything but. I have to go there, some day, I really do, but the sense that I accomplish nothing there overwhelms the sense that I accomplish nothing everywhere else.

In the meantime, I am still as stuck as ever on the guy I spend large portions of emotional will not calling every single day. The secret to anything long distance, of course, is to pretend it's not bugging you as much as it is, because if you started to truthfully describe it you would be a quivering heap of despair. Fortunately the last time it was an issue I was on so much mind-altering corticosteroid that I could only maintain one emotional state for about 5 minutes. These days I just feel heartsick and spend a lot of time in my apartment. Partly because whenever I leave the apartment I will by default have to pass either a thrift store, a library, or a grocery store, all of which are pretty high on my irresistible wastes of time list.

Libraries are not so bad, but thrift stores want me to spend all my non-existent funds on newish clothes and teacups. Grocery stores are tricky. They are necessary evils, but there's nothing so frustrating as either going into the grocery store and coming out two hours later with more food than you can use or coming out two hours later with nothing at all because you managed to rein in your shopping impulse so well you put every item in your basket  back on the shelf, because "you don't really need it."

Meanwhile the lentils languish unused in my kitchen.

I live off of bread, cookies, yogurt, and variations on french toast or pancakes. Some apples make their way into my diet occasionally, accompanied by almond butter if I have enough patience to retrieve it before eating the entire apple. I may break the mold today and try to have spaghetti with sauce and seafood.

Most of my dietary variation right now comes from eating dinner with my family. I suppose that might be part of the reason for the homogeneity of my apartment cuisine. In the past I made something interesting instead of making the 40-minute drive out to the farm. Put that way, I wonder if the time spent seeking new and interesting food is equivalent? Just distributed in a novel way.

Anyway, grad school is turning into an awful sort of limbo. 

 

 

My grocery coup this week, spotting some high-end tomatoes that had inexplicably been marked down to $1.50 from 4.99. I held my ground against the scanner at check-out, which had not been informed of the sale, and thus have been enjoying a half dozen tomatoes that would be almost average in summer, and in winter (and at a grocery store) are simply stunning. Since they aren't summer tomatoes, a little extra flavor is called for.

Today I cut one up and put it over some broken up mushrooms. I never have the patience to slice the mushrooms, I just crumble them apart.

Because my plants like my apartment's southern exposure, and also their new self-watering pots, I actually have fresh rosemary and tarragon. I added a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and hazelnut oil over the herbs. I do not love hazelnut in quite the same way I love almond, but it is a beautiful flavor. Besides, it's probably best not to have too many flavors out there that recreate the catnip effect. 

Basically:
Mushrooms
Tomato
1 sprig each rosemary and tarragon
jot of balsamic vinegar
drizzle of hazelnut oil.

Eat!

I'm trying pumpkin pie tartlets right now, but I suspect they got way too much nutmeg and may actually be inedible as a result. Maybe refrigeration will help.

The melody starts...and it is mesmerizing. The vocals join in, and I am transported by the beauty of the music. The bridge is hauntingly evocative, and I am left speechless by the ending. The song will stay in my memory forever, and I know right off that I like it.

Yeah, no. This has happened with ONE song that I can think of, which has remained obstinately impossible to track down except for the once every ten years that I accidentally tune into the radio right when they play it.*

However, I think I have hit on the proper way to determine if I actually like a song. It requires multiple repetitions, since I tend to get distracted and miss large swathes of the lyrics, when I don't just misinterpret them. Consider it a 3-step process.

1. Listen brief soundbites, to determine if I'm interested. If at least a few songs on the album have potential to intrigue me, I will sit through mediocre music for their benefit, but if I downright dislike it, I am not going to force it.

2. Listen to the album while cleaning, working, or blogging. Given the blanking-out-on-that-part-right-after-words-started, this is a good technique. I have some idea of what songs I enjoyed, and can consider going back to find out what they were singing about.

3. The litmus test: Listen to the album while baking. Since I can dance when I'm baking and less prone to losing large swatches of time, this gives me a much better idea of what the songs are, plus I've heard them once and can decide if they stand up to repeated listening.

4. Repeat as necessary.

It usually takes me the fourth or fifth rendition to start recognizing the separate songs on an album, much less pick out a favorite. I am occasionally astonished at how this develops. The song I could vaguely recognize after step 3 can become "I can listen to this five times in a row in utter stillness" category once I've listened to it while baking, especially if I listen to the whole album twice. This happened with "Almost" by Sarah Harmer, which has a rhythmic, sweeping refrain and nice lyrics, and "Miniature Disasters" by KT Tunstall, which has started edging up into comfort-song territory.



*"Orion, Mighty Hunter" is at least nominally seasonal and can be expected in the autumnal line-up on Simply Folk. It is also obscure as all get out.

 I acquired mirrored decals for the wall.

They keep falling off.

There's a definite magic ratio for placing these things. If you distance them too far apart, you get the disconcerting sense of holes in reality and floating body parts. If they are too close, well, then you just have a very small mirror, and your arms disappear as soon as you lift them up. At the right spacing, you get caught-glimpses-effect that still allows you to have a good idea what you look like (pretty darn silly, as you keep lifting your arms and lowering them to figure out where it changes to disconcerting).  

And then three of the circles fall off the wall and you are back where you started.

I begin to think that simply hanging a normal mirror would be easier and more aesthetically acceptable. Plus then I won't have all these holes in reality that keep wandering off onto the carpet, like a hamster that you know was there just a second ago.

It would seem that having a CD of whale song on makes me really, really mellow.

Which is good, because it stops me from playing with my hair. Honestly, the bottom ten inches had gotten so thin that taking them off does not leave me feeling my head is significantly lighter, but now: My hair flips! My hair hasn't flipped since I was 12! I am enjoying this way more than I expected. In fact, I am now eyeing my reflection and going, "hmm, I wonder what it would look like with another three inches off..."

However, as much fun as it is to have hair down, I think it's probably best to still be able to sequester it in a ponytail. Oh, and now that can be shapely, too, another unexpectedly nice result. It was pretty ragged before. 

And I do not intend to spend twenty minutes every morning combing and blow-drying to recreate the floof the stylist achieved. I have discovered, however, that now my hair is "short" (still past my shoulders) it is not so insurmountable a mental block to consider it being shorter, if that would allow me to wear it loose more often. The ultimate goal, of course, is to be able to wear hats without having to renegotiate with hair sticks or other hair keeping devices. 

The salon I went to was an experience, with a darkened room for the hair wash/head massage, big open studio, and glitzy handles on the doors. I have to give them points--the stylist I saw was willing to take about ten minutes the other day to do a consult on my hair and let me be slightly gunshy about getting it cut. 

And whalesong! 

And this is all sufficiently novel to distract me from the sadness over a someone I know, not to mention myself, being rejected from even consideration for a high-level fellowship. I was holding out hope for a while, but whoever the wait-waitlisted candidates are, I am not one of them. Depending on some uncontrollable variables, I may apply again in a year or two, but I don't actually see myself doing it this next year. I just don't have the academic chops to get in on merit. I'll be focusing on communications for public health and then back to veterinary medicine. I can either try to find a job as a general practitioner, to get a year or two of experience in actual practice, or go after an internship. The internship route is nice because the options for that are clearly laid out, but I have such a lousy GPA and class ranking that it would take more devotion than I currently have mustered to wow a clinic into taking me on. I don't really wow very well.

It is probably silly to say this, but in an ideal world I would have been top of my class at vet school (which may have helped with the fellowship?), and taken the year between second and third to do my MPH. That would have given me time to recover from prednisone and I would have gotten some hard core public health experience in the human world, and both would have helped a lot with the anxiety I dealt with 3rd and 4th year. I would be partway through 4th year now, probably still would have gone for the epi elective and potentially could have gotten a lot more out of it (as it was, I was in many ways just a sightseer). I may even still have applied to the fellowship this year and had a better shot, if I were already in possession of an MPH (like other dual-degree students who got in while finishing vet school, although some of them already had a PhD under their belts too).

I really did undercut myself by pushing through when still recovering from who knows how many years of uncontrolled Crohn's. My ability to concentrate flickers inconsistently as it is, which may have been originally linked to becoming exhausted too fast, and wasn't helped by the rise and fall of prednisone. 

So what lessons have I learned, when I take the time to think? I could benefit from ratcheting down my expectation of how fast I can do things, since I've taken myself past my limits a couple of times in the last few years. I need to focus more on my academic performance--it's odd, I haven't cared much about grades since I started to lose my edge all the way back in high school (probably when the Crohn's really kicked in), but now I'm approaching the end and the MPH is sort of the last word on my GPA and academic performance. I like certain status markers a LOT, like flying to new cities and dressing well but a touch eccentrically, and, it would seem, good hair. I, a bit, envy my sister's job, where she is a medical professional with a lot of training in a high prestige, high pressure job, teaching people, traveling, and still spending half her time at home. The fact she and I are completely different in how we approach the world has not deterred me from thinking my success would look the same.

I still have trouble with procrastination (yeah, I'm supposed to be doing homework right now, and that fact alone makes me wonder if there's something else going on I'm not seeing, that I put it off this easily). I get very excited about communication, but I'm not very good about making social connections formally OR informally. Follow-through is a huge problem for me. I get excited and imagine what I could do, but as soon as it falls through I give up everything except the minimum required to pull through. I have pulled through just often enough that I think this is not insurmountable. For once I would like to give it my all a bit less intensely, for a longer time, and actually feel good about myself. The fact I feel more precariously balanced now and less certain of my ability to pull through worries me (ironically, if I'd gotten an interview I would have been thinking, "it's fine, I pull through", so now I am doubly skeptical of myself, not to mention lingering break-up doubts if not regrets). As with procrastination, I wonder what I'm missing that I could fix.

Oh, the whale song stopped. Well, maybe not a bad thing. I was mellow and then I started self-reflection, always a hazardous undertaking.

This is a big communication week.

Talked to one professor about health outreach to journalists and got the usual, "We try but those darn journalists are just sensation-writing nitwits!"

Talked to another professor about how the spiral of silence seems to break down a little on the internet -- people's unwillingness to take a stance opposite the group resulting in a skewed perception of what the group's opinion is, since those with the seemingly predominant opinion are more outspoken. On the internet, of course, all the nonverbal social cues are removed or toned down. But what is the effect of skype and conference calls? A question to ponder.

Yet another professor wanted to discuss a mix-up in assignments that I had caused by poor decision making, getting rushed and handing in the wrong thing which then made me look less scrupulous than I would like to be. Though, homework frazzles me in general, something I'm working on. But like tardiness, it is slow going; I have not yet determined the reason behind it.

Then I had to write an introduction e-mail. I dislike business e-mails on the grounds that I do not understand the rules, and no one teaches them. And that will be my next post.

One more week of waiting to hear back about EIS (we think...there are no solid facts on this). I'm finding distractions this weekend. Shopping is not a good distraction, but going running, clearing a garden, and painting a treehouse have all worked admirably. Actually, the treehouse painting was rewarding but I'm gonna have to say, provided an awful lot of time for thoughtful contemplation. You would think I had plenty to work on mentally for school, but it's all so bound up in this application, it's not as helpful as you'd think. So I started looking at internships I could do next year, provided that I can find one somewhere I want to go. It seems that surgery and emergency medicine is not a bad combination, at any rate. Which is yay, I think. I remember wondering if I could survive a surgery residency, and an internship isn't going to be any easier. Sometimes it really is obnoxious to have a chronic disease which forces you to question your physical limitations. As I get further out from the End of Prednisone, I think I have a better idea of how hard I can push myself, and I really think I could pull it off.

I have to keep myself in pretty good shape, since my guts seem to respond nicely to that. The weird thing with Crohn's is how the side effects are worse than the disease. So if I'm exercising and eating well, I am a normal person. If the balance is off, however, I am suddenly unable to sit on a bike, I have to run to the bathroom every hour, and am in general an unhappy woman. At which point my busy life generally effects a rescue by providing me an excuse to not eat for a day. The balance seems to be most affected by too much cake and staying up past midnight. And yet! When I attended surgeries in the middle of the night for the emergency rotation, I was easily able to stay bright and alert. No gut pain that went over the threshold of noticing. So I think there's and element of adjusted sleep schedule and a huge element of whether I had drained my one-day emergency reserve.

So really, the biggest concern I have right now is my time management. I am occasionally on time. I am occasionally early. Mostly I am late. I am trying to make it more serious for myself when I am late for lectures by not attending the lecture (since the thing I hate most about being late is disrupting other people's learning and being rude to the professor). But when I am meeting groups for projects or watching movies, I am consistently 20-30 minutes late. It's like punctuality, as a concept, surpasses my understanding. I would like to be that person who is never late, who always arrives with a few minutes spare, but I am continuously baffled by this lag-time wherein I do not seem to snap into "getting there" mode until the actual time I was supposed to have arrived. And it has started to bleed into my homework as well. I swore I'd never let myself get into an essay marathon again, and then I had to spend all Friday night doing my biostats homework. Sorry to write this long rant about it, but I really am determined to figure out how to change this. It's a habit, hopefully not a character trait. I love hanging out with people who have good time management skills, since it's such a revelation to arrive on time, consistently.

I suspect part of it is always feeling I can slip one more action into the pre-leaving time. Whether it's reading two pages of a book, brushing my teeth, or the sudden urgency to clear the floor, it puts me over some indefinite time-of-departure. At this point I would be only a little late, or maybe even still on time. But there there is ANOTHER last action to perform, and then I'm late. However, oftentimes the very last action really is necessary. Grabbing my lunch. Brushing teeth. Going back in to retrieve my bike helmet, or the homework for class. So going back earlier, to the unnecessary action that in itself has not made me late. Breakfast. Book. Changing an outfit twice. Staring indecisively at the computer, trying to remember what I wanted to look up last night as I was falling asleep. The sudden compulsion to clean the sink (I have a lot of these sudden compulsions...I think that setting aside Sunday evening for complete apartment clean-down helps, since at least they are not a necessary action in the mornings then).

Or, very occasionally, writing a blog post when I intended to do my readings...