exercise- actually doing it is important

Smoke falls. Things are created in the violence of fire.
-Martin Amis

My reading break is this friday and monday, so Courtney and I are heading out of the city. My parents generously booked us a place to stay through their timesharing service, so we should be living the good life for a few days. We will go snowboarding tomorrow, cross country one day and probably just vegetate for the remainder of the time. There is no telephone, tv or even cellular service where we are staying, which will probably be nice. I will miss you internet, but I'll be back soon.

I decided to make my reading break 5 days long today by not going to school. I was full of energy this morning and decided not to waste it sitting in lecture. Also, it was sunny in my room, and my window faces south, so a solar powered afternoon nap was in order. Lectures can be good when I'm feeling less than enthusiastic and just absorbing a little is better than nothing, but when I'm ready to get my learn on, it's much better for me to be in charge of what goes down. Besides finally acquainting myself with the 31 brainstem slices in my neuroanatomy manual, I was able to get ready for my trip and do a few fun chores like repot my peace lily. I also spent a considerable amount of time first admiring some nice cumulonimbus clouds and then trying to figure out why they exist. I mean, if I had never been to earth before and someone asked me what would happen when water evaporated into the air, I would just assume that it would disperse uniformly, until it reached a certain concentration and then come down as rain. I really don't get why it makes such pretty white stacks with clearly defined borders. I guess I should ask the internet, but this is one those rare times for me when I prefer to wonder about it than just get the answer. I think more than anything, things like this make me realize that before you try to figure out a complex system, you better hope you understand all the variables at play, and you probably don't.

This one might take the cake for most boring post of all time. Sometimes I sit down and have no idea what I'll write and am pleasantly surprised to find out that things have happened in my life. This is not one of those times.

hey sophiiiiaaaaa!

It's like your whole life you think you're a tiger and then you look in the mirror and you're like "I'm a kitten"
-Sarah Armstrong, on discovering she is short

I read this blog on someone else's computer the other day, just to check up on myself I guess, and the font was uncomfortably small and difficult to read. Hopefully it hasn't been like that for any of you. I feel like I've recently discovered some lunch-time spinach in my teeth after a long afternoon of business encounters with important and beautiful women, whatever that feels like. Maybe this is better.

I used to take naps all the time. When I was in undergrad, I would often stay up ridiculously late, go to early class and then sleep for a few hours in the afternoon. Although I eventually abandoned this inefficient, albeit enjoyable, technique, it did teach me the important skill of the cat nap. Although the 3 hour long SLEEP (let's be honest with ourselves), was great, I realized I was unable to waste that much time in the afternoon and that sleeping that long resulted in a sweaty and confused awakening. I learned that I could just sort of doze for 15-30 minutes on my bed and feel great afterwards. The keys for me are:

1. Do not get into bed. It makes your body think it's night time. On top of the covers or the floor is best for me.
2. Read or play guitar first. Guitar is best. Get some bigger waves going on in your head and then lay back.
3. Don't set an alarm. Obviously dangerous, but for me it prevents the slippage into a deep sleep.
4. Get up after 30 minutes.

Since being in med school, I've lived with two working lame-o's who go to bed at 10pm on the dot every night, so it hasn't been too hard getting enough shut-eye. These days, however, I've had some problems staying asleep (during the night), so I'm trying to bring the cat nap back into rotation. It's dangerous, but in the right hands can be a powerful weapon for the forces of good. Also, someone has done some research on the health benefits of napping, which has been in the news recently.

is chilli whack?

At a certain season of our life, we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Another week/end comes to a close. Some events are as follows.

1. After many glitches and delays we are now able to rank our choices for our rural practice rotation. I haven't gone through it all yet, but it looks like Prince Rupert and Port McNeill will be at the top.

2. We will soon be able to rank our choices of schedules for 3rd year. I am hoping to get the one where my 2 week elective is during the time my dad usually goes down to Guatemala. Also, I am (kind of) considering doing the chilliwack program, where you spend all of 3rd year doing rotations in....you guessed it...chilliwack. There a few reasons it seems like it might be a sweet deal going out there. Number one for me is that apparently you are treated as valuable and useful rather than just a nuisance. Despite my desire to evenutally live somewhere small, I'm feeling reluctant to leave the city just yet, which is probably good for me to realize.

3. Met up with Kristi and got the pants that Kurt gave me for Christmas that I had left in her truck. Although perhaps a little tight on my prodigious thighs, they fit and will work great.

4. Helped Jordan move out of here and into his new place. Trev showed up on Thursday at lunch and has been nesting (that's what he calls it) ever since....which as been sweet for us, as nesting apparently involves lots of cleaning and baking. Threw out my back a little helping Jordan move in his new monstrous 60 inch television.

5. Met with a hypnotherapist today as part of a DPAS project. It was intrigued by the process and enjoyed the interview. I find the issue of alternative/complementary/integrative medicine pretty difficult. I agree that medicating many people for depression, anxiety, addictions etc is not ideal. It seems that using a technique where people focus on their behaviour patterns and triggers would be useful. Despite this, I find it hard to recommend something that isn't based on evidence. Although I like the idea that we use evidence in medicine to make decisions, I find it problematic that a good portion of that evidence is supplied by large pharmaceutical companies. It seems unrealistic to think that we can generate good evidence on all possible interventions. So how do you decide to recommend something that seems to make sense but has nothing to back it up?

At the end of the interview, she tried to hypnotize me for a few minutes. Although there were periods where I felt myself start to fall into a trance, I would recoil and not really let myself relax. Hypnosis apparently works best on people who are "suggestable". I knew I would be difficult.

schwarz sleep

Time is money, every moment is costly
So I ration emotion, cause existence exhausts me
-Atmosphere, They're All Gonna Laugh At You

I'm having an extremely difficult time studying tonight. It's not even that I've been doing alot of work lately. I just. Can't. Get. Into. It. It's especially worrisome because we just started off in a new PBL group. PBL stands for Problem Based Learning. You get put in groups of 8 and work through a case during 3 sessions/week. The key to impressing your group and tutor is to know everything on the 1st wednesday and then just look up interesting facts for the remaining sessions. That way, in subsequent meetings, your group thinks you know everything but are just letting everyone else have a go at trying to explain things. Unfortunately, I don't think that will be happening this block for me. In all honesty I don't think it has happened for a while. I guess this block I will have to go with the "Lower expectations, Deliver above them" strategy, where I act really dumb on the 1st wednesday but then do lots of work later on in the block. Although more work, this is probably a more successful technique.

I'm mostly joking about all this stuff, but it's starting to get to the point where you have to do something to try and spice up PBL.

Short day at school today, the cooling system in the anatomy lab got knocked out by some flood, so it was almost 30C down there today. I'm still not sure how they can't just turn off the heat or something. I was actually looking forward to exploring the infratemporal region but the concentration of formalin in the atmosphere at that temperature has to be above the max ppm.

one more photo

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery - not over nature but of ourselves

-Rachel Carson

If you've never seen it, I recommend tuning in to Planet Earth on Sunday nights. It's a BBC series broadcast on the CBC. I'm not usually that enthralled by nature shows, but the stuff you see on this show, you'd think they were filming on an alien planet...with really sophisticated cinematography. I almost don't want to watch it because I think I will buy it one day on DVD. Tonight's episode was about the oceans. Along with some weird and wonderful creatures living in coral reefs, they had footage of a great white eating a seal in slo-mo. It was unreal.

Simon was here for his CaRMS interview this weekend and came over saturday night. We had gone to Memphis Blues for dinner with Robin, played some Catan (Sarah won), and watched a movie before he made it over, so we were up pretty late chatting. Simon is interviewing for a plastic surgery residency spot and they did some crazy psychological testing on him. Like ink blots and stuff. I'm not sure if he will post about it on his blog, as the whole interview process is pretty crazy and I think he's just keeping it under wraps until it's over and done with. Hopefully I'm not blowing his cover.