Figures that it's Christmas Eve before I get half a second to myself on the computer. As it is I don't have a lot of time...we're going to a Christmas Eve service tonight, for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long. Usually we go over to my mother's best friend's house for dinner on this night, but she's in Texas visiting her son and daughter-in-law this holiday, so...church. The eternal backup plan. (No, I'm actually looking forward to it.)
Since exams ended on Thursday (and THOSE are now but a distant memory) I've been busy with lots of fun things. Julie and I were at a Sarah Slean concert on the 21st. Sarah is so lovely live -- she makes all kinds of weird, dreamy, funny comments and has a great rapport with the audience. And she played some new songs from her forthcoming album, which were gorgeous. I also saw Sweeney Todd, and was actually fairly impressed with Johnny Depp's singing voice. :D I thought it was a great time. A bloody, macabre, over-the-top, unsettling great time. I've also been catching up with friends from undergrad and high school, in addition to a trip to the theatre with my parents. All in all I don't think I've been home for more than a few hours (except to sleep).
In all of this I haven't had much time to get sad or depressed, even though I normally catch the holiday blues at this season. I'm cooking tomorrow, which should keep me busy...other than that, Christmas has snuck up on me, somehow, and I should be able to get through it without even realizing that it's really here. I'm not sure how appropriate that is as an approach to Christmas. But there you go.
In closing, I leave you with a taste of my mother's own particular brand of whimsical thought. I have Kyasuriin's and my betta fish, Spike, at home for the holidays. However, I forgot to bring home his food (even though feeding him is the entire reason I brought him home in the first place). Wen I told my mom this, the conversation went something like this: Mom: "Oh no! And all the stores are closed now! We'll have to go out FIRST THING tomorrow and buy more food." Me: "I'll be at the mall later anyway...I'll just pick it up then." Mom: "I know, but the poor thing will be hungry." Me: "All I'm saying is, he's been left over weekends plenty of times, and been fine." Mom: "Yes, Susan, but...it's Christmas, and he's a guest in our home!"
My mother, the very heart and soul of hospitality. Even to fish.
A merry Christmas and happy holidays to one and all!
-I must have been nuts, going to medical school. What was I thinking? I forgot one of my key cardinal flaws when I signed up: I'm the type of person who likes to be the smartest person around. Now I'm not even the smartest person in an empty classroom -- the extreme mental genius of other people in my class seems to remain after they've left, as a kind of psychic shadow.
-I'm a little too chill about how little I know about everything. I'm hoping that I'll be more motivated to learn things next year, when what I know or don't know actually has an impact on people. People other than me. I don't know why screwing MYSELF over isn't enough of an impetus to study.
-The computer room, where I've been spending most of my days lately, is a fun little mecca of studying and procrastination. People come and go, to and from food, the study room, the lounge, home, or other classrooms. The same faces tend to show up again and again. Right now, the popular procrastination tool is Facebook Scrabbulous games. I don't have this application as I don't trust these dodgy little Facebook accessories, but I know all about how it works. One of my classmates in particular tends to play it quite loudly, with the entire room, whether they want to participate or not: "Is GLIM a word? GLIM? Anyone? What do you think? Hm, I'll look it up in the dictionary. OH, it's NOT. That's too bad. Hm, how many points would it have gotten me? Oh, 15, that's not so great anyway. What else can I do...?"
Other things I've learned about and discussed while studying here in just the past day: the existence, organization, history, and ethical question of NAMBLA; Anne Geddes and the fact that her stuff is really kinda creepy; the 1993 Canadian federal election, particularly the infamous Conservative smear campaign focusing (allegedly) on Liberal leader Jean Chretien's facial nerve palsy; Wikipedia as the repository of all human knowledge; the fact that Rembrandt had stereo blindness. Ok, maybe not so much about genitourinary anatomy. But that's ok.
-I really want to make these cookies: Minty Chocolate Christmas Cookies. But I suspect that that's too much procrastination, even for me.
-I'm going to see Golden Compass tonight, so I'd better get back to studying.
-But not before I post this YouTube video, which is awesome:
Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, cardiology and new age healing are on about the same plane. A cardiologist saying to me "Listen! Just there, at the left sternal border! It's very subtle, but you can hear it. Just tune in...let it unfold to your ear...you'll hear it, it's there!" is about the same as a psychic saying "Ah, yes, I can see it clearly. Your aura is pulsing blue and gold. It's lovely. Just spend some more time getting in touch with your inner eye and you'll see it! It's there!" It's not that I necessarily doubt either practitioner. I just can't sense what they're sensing, and I'm pretty sure that I never will.
The thing is, as a med student, I'm supposed to think cardiology is the acme of cool, even if I don't plan to go into it. I'm supposed to swoon at the thought of hearing a mid-systolic click and go into raptures at the barest hint of an S3 sound. I have a hard time mustering the required enthusiasm, and I'm pretty sure my preceptors can tell. But I'd be lying if I said I could hear anything special with that expensive stethoscope toy of mine.
And either all my classmates have far more acumen than I do, or they're stretching the truth a little too....
Being paid money for something I've written* is the accomplishment of which I'm proudest, out of the past year and a half. Nothing I've done in medical school comes close.
I'm so lame. I sit around and I feel disillusioned with school. I make a big deal out of refusing to study and refusing to work because "none of it matters". But in favour of what? Nothing useful. If I'm proudest of becoming a paid writer this year, you'd think I'd spend more time BEING A WRITER.
But there's no point in dwelling. One can't really force these things. I, for one, find writing works best for me when I'm supposed to be doing something else. So, thank you impending exams: you've successfully ended the 4-and-a-half-month-long cold war between me and my blog.
~isolde
(*written thing can be found in the November 20th edition of The Medical Post, in the Spirit of Medicine section. The Medical Post is available online, but you have to sign up. To my knowledge, it doesn't cost anything to do this.)
As is traditional, I reread my journal upon finishing the blank pages today.
For the first time ever, there were parts that I didn't actually manage to read again. I went through a couple of awful summers with that book, and there were some things that hurt too much to go through again. There were also some parts where I can now see how immature and melodramatic I was, and those hurt to reread as well, in a different way.
This book was last completely blank on February 2, 2005, and was no longer blank at all on July 26, 2007. (There's a 6-month hiatus in there between February 3, 2007, and now. *shrugs*) It therefore covers half of my third year of undergrad, the preparation for my trip to Brazil, the summer before fourth year in which I started teaching for Princeton Review and Answerboy went off to India, all of my last year of undergrad, med school applications and interviews, and my first year of med school.
As always, here is a selection of things that I wrote -- that I like, or that I'd forgotten about, or that took me by surprise in a good way on rereading. I apologize that it's not behind a cut, or whatever, but the instructions for doing that are too complicated.
~isolde
God, I feel like a clichée. Writing in the dark felt too forced-angsty and writing with the lights on felt too earnest and businesslike, so I turned the lights back off and lit four candles and now I feel like a clichée. Good.
I'm just circling myself, like water going down a drain. Pulling myself round and round in ever smaller circles and ignoring what should be obvious ways out. I apparently take some kind of pleasure in being in this much pain, like I can win some kind of grotesque award for "Deepest Funk Incurred During The Normal Course Of Life".
The fucking Brazilian consulate and the fucking Brazil trip. Fuck everything, fuck the whole country. Fuck notaries, visas, police checks, and fuck my own general incompetence. What am I, fucking illiterate? (Sudden vision: white-sleeved arm handing me a prescription for "therapeutic F-words, to be taken as often as necessary".)
I daydream about finding a way to short-circuit my life. I imagine finding a way to move sideways quickly enough that the world can't adjust to the change, quickly enough to get suspended in some changeless alternate dimension where all I have to do is read and sleep and not actually try to be anything.
I feel that at any moment my life will spontaneously degrade into
freeform nonlinear poetry that only looks good because it's written like this and actually sucks a lot.
[this is most of an entry I wrote while Answerboy was in India. Seeing as he's now in Taiwan, I find it especially relevant.] Missing you. What is the nature of that, its shape and colour? It seems to be a simple pulse -- a naked circle of DNA, a plasmid of pain. If it were a sound I imagine a single frequency, the purest and singlest of notes. As a painting it would be one of those works of contemporary art no one knows whether or not to take seriously -- a massive canvas painted in a single raw colour -- maybe an orange, or a violet, or Yves Klein's International Klein Blue. If it were a flavour it would have to be a chemical red, or a chemical grape, or a chemical green apple. Some taste made up of one molecule only, repeating itself over and over again. As a fabric -- pure rayon -- the closest I can imagine to a sheet of glass I can slip into. As feelings go this one seems shiny and uncompromising and modern to me. Invariable, constant, and repetitive. Polymerized.
So it's irrational me driving the car tonight. Oh, irrational me. What can I do to placate you? *sigh* rant useless, weak, stomach-turningly whiny rants, of course, just what I always do.
[capture of a random image, scrawled diagonally across the lines of the page] I put up the blind, and in the sky there was a brilliant white streak -- the vapor trail of a jet illuminated by the setting sun -- that I mistook for a comet. For one second the beauty of it seized me utterly. I thought I was suddenly on a faraway planet somewhere, like I had transcended Earth without noticing.
I seem to have completely and utterly abdicated myself. And you know, there's only so long that an abdicated corpse can keep attending classes and turning in papers. I'd hate myself it it didn't take so much energy to hate things.
I want to be more like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy, and less like -- oh I don't know -- Gimpy from Undergrads. I want graciousness. I want to connect with people. All kinds of people, because that's real grace. I want to act out every day the belief that everyone -- movie stars and vagabonds and princes and addicts and Jesus freaks and strippers -- is a real person.
I want to arrive in [boyfriend's city] relatively sane and settled -- not prone to dump all of this on Boyfriend, who obviously wasn't there and anyway doesn't have a responsibility to be my ultimate sounding board. He's my partner, not a surface for dry-erase marker brainstorming sessions.
I'm feeling very existentialist right now. Is Samuel Beckett a mood?
The only time it's quiet here is when Mom and Dad go out, and I can walk around and turn off all the radios. Silencing the chattering voices, one by one. I hate them. It makes me want to scream, because I prefer my own garbage utterances to theirs.
I hate these teary conversations with my mother. They make me feel like I'm in a snow globe that has just been shaken. Life will eventually return to normal, but for the moment it's like pieces of the ground are whilrling around my head.
I'm 23. For a 23-year-old, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how everyone I know will eventually die. I also spend an inordinate amount of time in a sate too drained to be kind. I wonder if the two are connected.
There are bits of me that are rotten, hidden in the foundations of bits that work good. They've just quietly rotted away. And you'd never know it -- never know it till you call on them for use and they're not there. Like a corrupt computer file, maybe, instead -- you use the program fine until you try to perform this function, and then the whole fucking system crashes.
My desk is covered in receipts, notes, calendar pages, scrap paper (the discussion of phase II and III clinical trials less relevant than the grocery list on the back), cans of Coke, masking tape. I feel like there's some thing I need to know before cleaning it up seems anything more than futility.
[on cleaning house with my mother and turning up all kinds of old things] One day I will trawl through all these and see the adults in my life not as adults, or elders, or gods, or stateswomen or archetypes, but as people. And I'll learn things that will help me to be better to others, and better to myself, and that will be a good thing. I'm glad to have rescued certain things from the trash heap today -- things that make my life, and my family's life, seem a little more like a story. Worth writing.
I've been spending a lot of my summer in my supervisor's various clinics, and today I got to go watch him do some scopes (endoscopes and colonoscopes). He's been great at letting me jump in and get my feet wet, so to speak -- in his other clinics I've been (gasp) taking real patient histories and (faint) actually writing on real patient charts. Today, I got to direct the endoscope camera for a bit -- I think I'd be way, way better at that if I'd ever played video games as a kid, but as it is, I suck. So if you have kids and they like video games, never fear! It's actually good training for something! I also got to start a couple of IVs, the first with a lot of coaching from a very nice nurse, and the second with no coaching at all. I feel good about this.
The med school adage relating to procedures is "see one, do one, teach one". It's not an ideal -- more a description of how things tend to be. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but I'm becoming gradually more confident in my ability to learn on that steep of a curve. I've gathered that, really, there's no way to prepare for the real world in these matters -- interviewing standardized patients and starting IV lines on prosthetic arms only goes so far. At some point you need to jump in. This summer has been great for teaching me not to be scared of that. Although I still am, it's getting better.
I didn't think I'd be back on here for awhile yet. But William Hutthas died, and I can't just let that slide without saying a couple of things.
I don't remember when I first saw William Hutt onstage. I've known his name for a very long time -- this is what happens when your parents are Stratford festival devotees. I do remember the last time I saw him onstage, in his final role as Prospero in The Tempest, in 2005, at 85 years of age. That show was a remounting of the Festival's production of The Tempest a few years previously, which at the time was thought to be Hutt's final farewell. I also clearly recall seeing him play King Lear. He was, however, internationally respected for his flexibility -- one of the few actors to play both King Lear and Lear's Fool, one of the few to take on both serious and comic roles. In fact, he may be best remembered for playing a 6-foot-two Lady Bracknell in drag, for The Importance of Being Earnest -- a production that was remounted three times in four years, due to popular demand.
I'm finding out things about William Hutt from reading the news reports around his death. I didn't know that he served as an army medic in World War II, winning awards for bravery. I didn't know that this experience was so powerful and important to him that he wished his epitaph to read "Soldier and Actor". I did know that he was a longtime friend of Timothy Findley, a compatriot and a peer during the inaugural Stratford Festival season, but not that he was a friend of Edward Albee, nor that Albee wrote a role in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? with him in mind. I did know that he was openly gay (The Globe and Mail says that he was bisexual), but not that he had been so for so long, during times when that was quite dangerous to accept that identity. I didn't know that, while playing King Lear to a restless high school audience during the Canada-Russia hockey game of 1972, he called out on one of his exits that Canada had won, 6-5 -- to the biggest cheers he ever received.
But I do remember, from my own experience, that he owned the stage and owned the audience's attention while he was on it. Never speak unless it improves on silence, he said. Never move unless it improves on stillness. He was as intrigued by things not spoken as by things spoken. He felt that thought and thinking acted itself, without the help of words or movements. When he was silent on stage, the theatre became super-quiet, the kind of quiet that reflects a room full of expectant minds and hearts.
He wasn't afraid of his characters, wasn't afraid of their emotions, or of inhabiting their frailties and failures entirely. And once, I fully recognized how much of a life-changing, life-sustaining craft acting was for him -- as he spoke this soliloquy, on the eve of his retirement from theatre:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
Certainly he was Prospero, watching the end of Miranda's mystical wedding masque, thinking of her growing up, of his growing old, and of the transience of life. But he was also himself, I think, for a minute or two -- in kinship, an old man preparing to rest his life's work and exit the stage, as Prospero must have been planning even at that point to lay down his mantle and his magic, and accept his mortality.
The Tempest is quite the play to end with, really, for an actor. So, in tribute, I will leave you with its epilogue -- the last words William Hutt spoke on the Stratford stage.
Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own, Which is most faint: now, 'tis true, I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardon'd be, Let your indulgence set me free.
~isolde
P.S. And in other news, the Spice Girls are having a reunion tour. Seriously -- it's that nostalgia time of life, already.
Here you have the random thoughts of Isolde. Isolde is: -somewhat surprised at being a medical student -not going to let her right brain atrophy without a fight -living in an actual apartment for the first time -happily dating Answerboy -prone to ramble -a reader and a would-be writer -completely nonsensical sometimes -very glad you're here
