A modest manifesto

We had a little bit of weather out New England way last night, ayuh. A Nor'Easter, they call it. About two to three inches of snow fell, out at the homestead. The sticky, snowball-fight type stuff. Interestingly to this flatlander, the slightly higher elevation we have on our ridge was enough to keep the town itself from seeing much more than on campus, where they only got a dusting.

We'll see about how my Midwestern sensibilities handle the wool-wetting squalls of a proper Upstate NY/ SW Vermont weather system. I can tell you that about two solid weeks of dribbling grayness has left me unimpressed and with a fine head start on my latest bout of Seasonal Affective Screw this, I'm Going to Take a Nap disorder. I did find a fine woolen topcoat at the local Goodwill for $12.99, so the "wool-wetting" thing above is not just an artful phrase.

Speaking of artful phrases, I said I'd divulge the reason I'm so happy-go-lucky lately, and as a matter of fact I did make time to squeeze in the watching of a four-hour Shakespeare documentary over the long weekend (as well as The Big Lebowski and Ninja Scroll). Meanwhile, my classmates slaved like beaten dogs to prepare a stack of work for their courses. And say, come to think of it, I haven't adequately explained why I'm not in those same courses, nor how it is I'm nonetheless their classmate if that's the case.

So, dear reader, sit back for another lengthy story. Not that it's a complex or difficult thing to explain. I'm just so much more laid-back about my pre-med stuff now... or, to be more precise... (needless pause)... my pre-PA stuff.

Yes, these days I've been tooling around the winding mountain roads, the back seat loaded with books on not Organic Chem but Human Anatomy & Physiology. Not Calculus, but Statistics. The weather guy has been predicting rain, the Kaiser Chiefs have been predicting a riot, and I've been feeling like finally instead of "potential," I have a future I am excited about, and a way to get there.

A side note... true, technically I might be able to say I'm a pre-med or I'm headed to "med school" and be correct, because I do plan to apply to a mess of schools, and many at of the top of the list will be schools where the PA program is part of a med school that also trains young MD's (and if I can have a Scrubs moment, going someplace where Young MC is on faculty would be a bonus. Bust a move!). But let's be clear: in this day and age, in the good ol' US of A, the bare fact of it is, you don't gotta be a doctor to practice medicine. And I'm not talking about some 'alternative' thing either. Good old paternalistic, ego-driven, Western know-it-all medicine can be done, and done very well indeed, by Physician Assistants. For dudes like me, that's a concept that is just brimming with intrigue and attraction.

I would have been remiss not to seriously think over my options, once I got on the road and discovered how well "the system" used for training future doctors and I get along... or don't. I might have been too proud or too stubborn to consider the advantages of finding another way... but I wasn't. What sealed it was my thinking long and hard about what I want to do, how and where I want to practice, and then combining that with what I don't want to do, and the things about the job I frankly don't want to have to deal with. It all adds up very nicely to exactly what the PA profession is (according to one way of looking at it). It's practicing medicine without a lot of the intervening stuff that makes docs crazy.

Now, sure, absolutely, you want your doctor to be someone who could conceivably pick up the nuances of Orgo (or Physics or Calculus), sufficiently well to get a decent grade in a course. But having worked in pretty much exactly the place we're all trying to get to, I know how far down the list of important characteristics that really is. You want smart, yes. You want quick-thinking. You want knowledgeable, even encyclopaedic. You want 'able to talk like a person.' You want a lot of things, and so few of them have anything to do with academic achievement, after a while it starts to become scary to think that such a large proportion of doctors started out as kids who got great grades in science courses.

This is not to say that poor achievers have any better shot at becoming good doctors, or that they should. Getting good grades usually means working your ass off, and you need people who can work their asses off, both to be decent students and to be decent actual working physicians. But the thing is, the PA way of doing things isn't all that different, in terms of the things that matter to people (meaning practitioners and patients, a group often overlooked in this whole training thing). Before I get into the guts of it (literally!) in PA school, I'll have to prepare with some of the things pre-meds don't see until med school year one: a buttload of anatomy, physiology, statistics... hey, waitaminnit, those are my courses now. Hmmmm.

I anticipate an objection here: No, it wasn't because I had an academically bumpy Summer. It wasn't even because more terms like that one would assuredly have helped me get lost in the pile, kept me from getting interviews, and made it unlikely I'd get the shot to get into med school in a year, or two, or maybe more. Nor was it any doubt about my ability to get through med school (and do it damn well, as a matter of fact). It's more that I already know what it's like to slog through something that's almost what you want to do.

If the going is tough, that's fine. If it's circuitous and time-consuming and expensive and stressful, that's fine. But only if where you're headed to is where you really want to be. So if you're smart about it, you think a lot about where you want to be. And you don't stop thinking about it, now and then, just because you're on the way to someplace people respect and think is cool. So, I thought about it.

I don't want to own and run a small business. I don't want to head up a department. I don't care (that much) about huge piles of money, or my name being synonymous with a maneuver or a weird-shaped surgical tool. I don't want to pay malpractice premiums higher than my income was when I worked in the corporate sector. I don't want to set policies. I don't want to call all the shots, just those that constitute care for my patients. I don't want to be the only guy within 50 miles who can do something. I don't want it to ever be considered a weakness if I feel I want to consult somebody.

I want to teach a little, write a little, do a little research into things that interest me, and mostly just practice medicine. I want to work on a team, as one of its leaders. And oh yeah, I want to have a life. As a PA, I will be "limited" to practicing, and I'll have to do it as part of a team. I honestly don't see the down-side here.

So around Labor Day, I made the decision. My pre-reqs are for PA school, and the classes are much more directly applicable, which is nice for an impatient and energized student like me. Hey, I like understanding things for their own sake, I really do. But I have a tough time being graded on things when I can't see the connection, and because of limitations of the system I can't be given time and space to find my own. I have a tough time believing that academic performance is an indicator of smarts or ability.

Oddly enough, I'm currently on track for A's in everything. Hmmm.

Hi to Joanne

Gadzooks, I didn't know I had "real" readers! Okay, okay, I'll make sure to say something concrete next week. Right now, school's going on a long weekend hiatus, and TeslaGrrl is coming to visit. I may or may not have time to write.

The preview version is basically this: there's been a slight adjustment in the career trajectory. Everything I've obsessed and fretted about is still relevant, and my vision of what I'll be doing in 10 years is similar, maybe even identical (at least in all the ways that matter to me). Also, my vision of what I'll be doing in five years is about 1400% better than it would have been if nothing had changed.

Knowledgeable pre-meds (and people who followed me here from SDN) already know what I'm talking about, but casual readers will be getting the first of potentially many fireside chats from me about the future of health care, and how to be a clinician while maintaining some semblance of sanity. As of recently, it looks like someone even asked for it.

Seeya next week.

ah, yes, dear reader, the plot thickens...

I am writing (the first draft of this post) from the 'reading room,' which is to say the lounge-y area in the science building which is the semiofficial headquarters for those in my program. I haven't written about school, or anything else, very much lately, and for that I apologize. There must be at least two people who know about and read this thing. Which, come to think of it, makes "dear reader" more apt. The silence will be broken soon, but I'll just ease into it for now by saying that on this particular rainy evening, all my school-type work happens to be caught up. I went to the gym this afternoon, and even sat in the sauna for a bit. Then I got some food, and here I am.

Yes -- I'm caught up with schoolwork, I'm exercising, and I'm writing in this thing again. Clearly there have been some changes.

It's been good to have this time to reflect on the big fat decision I recently made; for a while just after it, every passing day was another chance to celebrate my being so intelligent and self-aware to make this particular judgement call... but it was also that glorious feeling of no longer being stuck. So from here, weeks, nay months, later, I trust it much more. And wow, I was really intelligent and self-aware.

But the telling of this one will take some background, plus I like to imagine there's a sense of drama to these things. Plus I like to believe that more beings read this than merely sp*m-bot$ and part-time workers doing the jobs of said bot$... and and so I'll tease it out a little more. Long story short, everything I've said below about what I'm doing and why is still true, and still the same. The difference is, what I am doing and why has simultaneously changed completely. It's kind of a quantum thing.

To Young M. Small, on the Occasion of His First Birthday

Kiddo,

You are going to have just the most 21st-Century scrapbook ever. Your whole life thus far, or at least bits of it, has/have been the subject of your dad's writing. And although I'm sure someday this will totally mortify you (and send you to some manner of psychotherapy that we losers in 2005 can only imagine), some other, later day you'll be glad because it's really good writing. But whichever way it goes, or when, hey. He's your dad. Can you blame him? At least it's not, say, a closet jammed to the rafters with M. Small crop art.

I've known your dad for approximately 20 years, and your mom for not much less than that. I say 'approximately' partly because I honestly can't recall the exact dates or really years, and partly because it's too freakin' weird to contemplate being this old. Someday you and I will almost certainly talk about the stupid stuff your dad and I (and to a much lesser extent, your mom) said, thought, and did when we were "your age." These stories will not be exclusively for your amusement -- because we did learn a thing or two, here and there -- but I promise right now that I won't be mad if you totally miss my point and just laugh yourself stupid instead. That's some quality uncle-style fun for me, right there.

Anyway, soon enough you'll be able to wield a computer yourself, and whether your money is on genetics or environment, your kung-fu will very probably become very mighty. Please use this power for good, as we have tried to, and not for evil. That said, feel free to even the odds. Post whatever stories you can about your pop's misadventures and weird habits, or any photos you have of him mowing the lawn in black socks, loafers, and bermuda shorts. I can help, if you want.

Also, and don't tell the Internet I said this, but you're way cuter than the kid over at Dooce.com. Happy Birthday, electro-boy!

I heart technology

If you have a blog, you know about this fancy new form of annoyance where a bot will post a 'comment' that's actually spam. If you don't have a blog, there's this thing... that I just described. Give me a break; I'm drinking my morning coffee.

So, it's nice to be obscure and a-visitor-ic enough that I have seen maybe three of these on this blog in the time it's been up. But it's unbelievably sad that I got an email to alert me of the new comment, and even I, who ostensibly see a reason to put stuff here, was surprised.

So, dear reader, I'll try to change that. There's no shortage of stuff to comment on, and as I've mentioned this thing will be a scattershot but hopefully complete record of a process that's interesting to me, anyhow. Not to mention important (to me, anyhow). We'll attempt some more writing soon. I have a raggedy-ass text file on my laptop that serves as a sketch pad, and somehow not having the Web at home (I know! It's just like in pioneer days!) makes it easier to think of and organize stuff for the blog.

Five-Star

For the first time I can remember, I have completely used up a three-subject notebook.

The first day of classes was two months ago, on June 9. I started out by making a note about the fact that water molecules are "polar," whatever that meant. And there was some stuff about hydrocarbon chains. Soap was described as a "functional (and big-ass) molecule," with a hydrophillic head and a hydrophobic tail. And there was some parenthetical stuff thrown in about how I thought it would be cool to look at what magnesium sulfate is, and why it helps with migraines. Then I settled down to some problems (I guess there were not too many notes that first day) and the next day we started with the lab. Real notes started the following Monday, with Dalton and Rutherford and atomic theory.

This notebook ends with a back page where I'm finding a bunch of resonance structures for C5H12 (there are three, by the way). The organized part ends with yesterday's notes about the molecular orbitals in CO2, using SALCs to show which combinations of SP2 hybrid orbitals work, and where the sigma, sigma*, pi, and pi* bonds are in relation to the original energy levels of the MOs in the molecule. The chart looks like crap, but the info is correct.

We are not in Kansas anymore, people. I complain about the truncated, compressed, five-week Summer courses. It's just enough like Keanu getting an eight-inch RCA plug through the back of the neck to be unpleasant, and regrettably not as fast (not to mention, the kung fu I know now is arguably not as cool). But it's getting clearer that what appeared impenetrable is now, four to nine weeks later, nearly easy. This occurred to me after I sat down and whipped out some stuff today that I need for a project, and remarked on the foreign language I've been learning.

See, a water molecule is polar because the electronegativity of oxygen is 3.5, versus the 2.1 on hydrogen, plus the structure is bent, which puts the net dipole of the O up on its own end. I can create a nifty graphic in Gaussian, or run a sample through the UV-vis or the NMR to show you more about it, but really all you need to do is see how the boiling point of water is way higher than that of, say, methane. The mag sulfate thing will be more thoroughly explained in Biochem, I'm sure. I think that's in Spring term.

Another nice thing about today was that Dr. Fargo, a friend from back home who finished his EM residency at the Center of Excellence and now works in the 'burbs, sent me some notes he says he plans to use when he writes the letter of rec he will be sending to my program here. It'll be part of the committee letter, or maybe accompany it, when the time comes for me to work on the big med school application. He doesn't have to do this, and in some ways I'd rather he didn't, but hey, if a guy asks how many "l's" are in "excellent," what are you going to say? (No, that didn't actually happen, but I'm saying he's writing it, not me.)

Sure, my grades so far do nothing to boost my soggy GPA and the faculty is probably worried I'll go completely sideways on the day of my MCAT, but the letters are looking good so far. Fargo says some things about me that make me go "gawsh" and look at my shoes. But at the same time, it's a nice reminder of "hey, yeah, I know what this is all about; these ain't just pajamas I'm wearing" and "ohhh yeah, that's why I've volunteered for this absurd adventure." And I will cheerfully own anything that helps me do that.

Best song lyric of my life (this week)

P-p-p-"pneumothorax" is a word that is long
They’re just tryin’ to put the punk back into "punctured lung"

The Kaiser Chiefs rule.

Worst. Summer vacation. Ever.

The truth is, I love being here, in the abstract but also in the quotidian details and the busywork. I love learning this stuff, it's very cool, and even the most odious of tasks, which loom unpleasantly on the "to do" list, become something interesting, and even fun, once I'm actually into the work. What's new today is that the anaesthatizing thrill that came from the newness of it all has begun to wear off. Now this is my job, just like I knew it would be. And I'm at work at quarter to nine in the evening.

I have a junior migraine with big ambitions, more than I myself feel just now. I have some oddball lower GI deal going on. I have a sleep debt running from the weekend. But I have a huge paper due tomorrow. All things being equal I'd rather be in bed, at home. If I listen to my inner voice, I hear the Miami-tinted voice of one of my EM resident cohorts, good-naturedly saying "enjoy it now, bee-yotch, because it gets WORSE." And then laughing. I guess you'd have to know the guy; he somehow makes that seem encouraging and sympathetic, because he's right there with you.

This is just a momentary break. The paper is actually not such a huge project; actually, whittling it down to ONLY five to seven pages might turn out to be the tough part. And the PowerPoint for Thursday will be very much in the vein of those med student lectures I sat in on, so many times. Booya.

Everything I am assigned to do for class turns out to be cool. (Ask me about my slime mold!) But there's just so damn much of it, sometimes. Plus, the super-compact five-week version of the courses that comes with summer term is a hell of a way to get started. It's like, muscle fatigue sets in after the cells run out of energy from ATP stores, and after respiration has shown that can't make enough available quickly enough, and on top of that the anaerobic route is running out of glycogen from fat stores. It actually takes quite a bit of exertion to do it, but once you're there, you can stimulate that cell all you want, it's not doing anything.

Come to think of it, I'm nowhere near that point yet. And my paper is obviously calling me. I should go.

Oh, and the reading room is in the wireless cloud for the computer lab. Which very kindly has half a bazillion songs on their iTunes. So I'm fine. I'll sleep when I'm dead. Thank you Cell Biology, may I have another.

Harry Potter and the crappy AMCAS application

So, there's the "Ultimate Workout," there's my not-excellent first official letter grade here in postbac, and then there's Harry Potter. I'll try to keep it intelligible, but I need to be speedy too.

Many many thanks to my dad and family for the gift card from Wal-Mart; this is a way for me to obtain goods without so much giving the big nasty mega-retailer my own money directly. And thanks to the mega-gigundo-chain for having a big stack of HP6's when I walked in, looking for a nice pair of $25 running shoes.

See, there's a lake in town, about 2 or 3 miles or something from the house on campus where we live this summer, I really don't know, and some of my housemates have been doing this thing where they run to the lake, jump in and splash around for a while, and then run back. This has been dubbed the Ultimate Workout 2005 (I suspect there may be exclamation points involved), and eventually I have to go along, because there's a fat guy inside me just dying to get out and, y'know, basically eat a lot of stuff. Hence my need for shoes, hence my being in the store I have decided I will now call Volde-Mart.

Hence my buying "the book" today, even though not 48 hours ago, I had been lamenting the idea that I would have a tough time staying spoiler-free, what with the very real and immediate need for me to study. To study a lot, actually. And more than that, to study in some way (yet to be figured out) that is more effective than what I had been doing that first five weeks, which seem so long ago but actually ended last Friday.

Mostly because if you get one grade on one course like the one I just got, it's no big deal, really, especially if it's for the first course and besides, you haven't touched chemistry or algebra for, no shit, about 15 to 20 years (shudder). But if you get a whole raft of grades like the one I got in this one course, you don't so much get invited to interview with the Mayo Med School, now matter how nice a guy you are or how flat your abs are supposedly going to be.

Anyway, staying spoiler-free will still be rough, because now my studying is going to work something a little more like this: get as far through Chapter 7's Chem problems as I possibly can, having read Chapter 7 but not yet having been to the class where we will be talking about it. Then, read some Potter. Re-read the Bio stuff we covered last week, since it's going to be on Tuesday's test. Then, read some Potter. Go through all the little figures in the Bio book and re-draw them myself, as a way to get more familiar with what stuff is and why I care. Then, read some Potter. Oh yeah, plus eat and sleep. Sometimes.

Addendum (plus whining)

NB: this is actually being written much later. But I like an organized blog, and this is too long for a comment on June 21, yet it makes no sense as a contemporary post. Anyone who gives a crap about this will want to see it here. Logical progression and such, you know.

For the record, when we got back our phthalate papers, The Prof pretty much hated the comparison to cyanide. I thought at the time I read her comments that hey, they're both ingestible/ ingested, and allegedly both poisonous, so if I were writing for TIME magazine's health section, they would totally let me argue from that perspective. And it's a powerful statement of what's being asserted, plus a nice punchy way to illustrate that there's a way to come at the issue and derive some facts. I liked it; I believe I did mention that she freakin' HATED it.

I have since learned something important. The key idea is, as much as that whole cyanide thing might be totally true and valid, strictly in terms of its being a helpful way for the non-scientist to come toward the ideas, here in Chemtown we don't cotton to that sort o' talk, mister. There are sufficient differences in the two chemical processes that I look like a dweeb if I try to talk even a little outside the scope of the problem under consideration. And it's my own fault for even going there, because I had a perfectly good science paper without it*. Cue head shaking and uncapping of the red pen.

Which is cool, and helpful to someone like me who's a parallel thinker, and a right-brain interactive learner, working to establish a contextual framework and hang a shitload of information from it. I appreciate the chance to bump up against things, make mistakes, and learn from them. It's good to work these things out and arrive at an individualized, personally meaningful understanding, one which will stay with me as I continue my studies. It's great to have a supportive, nurturing environment for these little bumps in the road to come up, without a need to freak out because every tiny little thing is under scrutiny and a potential source for bad grades, or the cocking-up of otherwise good grades...

Oh, crap.

Yeah, as will shock no one who knows me well: this style of learning, interacting with my own historically-favored style of thinking, is maybe not the best combination for this particular... um... life. I am sitting here for ten weeks at an all-you-can-learn buffet, and at times I've been trying to eat soup with a fork.

It's happened several times. I mis-typed "cytosol" as "cortisol" and got busted for it. Unlike out there in the world before, my knowing how to correctly spell both words gets me no points. In fact, with that instructor and in that instance it actually made it look like I meant to use the obviously wrong word; presumably the thinking would be that they're totally different things, but both exist and are within the realm of the topic. Again presumably, it never occurs to the evaluator that it was just a mental misfire, a neuron over in the verbal section grabbing the wrong term. Science people are, like, so literal, dude.

Plus people with PhDs can sometimes seem as though it's been a long time since they skied the bunny hill. Mixing the metaphor, newbies like us would prefer a quick sketch of the big picture, and a little arrow saying "YOU ARE HERE." This is not something that is often thought of as an advanced skill, but trust me, my experience on both sides of adult education confirms it is. One instructor said, on more than one occasion (and this is paraphrasing) "yeah, I realize this all makes no sense to you guys, and for the moment it's a litany of vocabulary words without meaning. But it'll make sense soon, trust me, so hang in there." The implication being, work on the information now, and find the knowledge later, on your own time.

The good news is things have already improved dramatically on that front. The material is different, the instructors have changed more than once, and most importantly, we are learning. We're not non-science students anymore. I'm surviving the Summer term well, and really have absorbed a lot. Plus I've been continually improving my own storage and retrieval system.

My war is not with The Man, and it's not with The System, and actually it's not even a war. It's an aggravating disconnect between how well I'm internalizing what is in many ways an excellent understanding of the most important points of the material, and how poorly I'm performing on certain measures, which are widely considered to show learning.

Okay, the gripe session is amusing but it's done now. Moving on, just after I say this. There are days I'd like to go back to some of the instructors I had in my arts education, who stressed the "flail until you fly" method of learning, and I swear to god just punch 'em right in the nose.





* No fun to read, if you ask me, but I'm a pre-med student now, and fun is calculating the formal charges on atoms in a molecule. Fun is naming alkenes. Fun is blowing stuff up in the lab (actually, that one really is fun). Anytime flair, style, or expression comes into it, that's great but it's probably not helping me.

Procrastination Theatre Presents

(first in what I am sure will be a series)

WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING: Writing about the questions of safety surrounding phthalates as additives to PVC plastic, especially in toys babies and kids chew on. It's due tomorrow, sleep or no sleep.

THE VERY BRIEF BLOG THING I'LL SAY NOW: Life is good. I've never worked so hard, and yet this sure beats working. Also, I'd like my financial aid money now, please...and so, a gaggle of students from the school where I worked would be sooooo amused. Then again, I have savings and know how to budget, so [impolite gesture #14a]. (That's the two-handed V-chop, sharply inward toward the groin. I saw someone do that last weekend and it was way funny.)

CRYPTIC BONUS: I think that was #74, who sort of accidentally stole a bike for a minute.

SNIDE REMARK IN CLOSING, AS I GET TO REAL WORK: Sodium Cyanide starts getting dangerous at 0.05 mg/ kg/ day. That would be 50 micrograms. Mean exposure for the 12-to-23-month olds in one 2004 study was 0.08 micrograms/ kg/ day. 99th percentile was 2.4 mcg/ kg/ day. Is this stuff 30 times more deadly than cyanide?

So, in short, my argument might be [impolite gesture #14a].

Got to go write now.

tinkering

Messing with the fonts, layout, and colors. Fun for a humid Saturday here in the farmhouse. I'm looking for something that fills the space better, in terms of width. Lots of these templates seem made to mimic newspaper columns, and I use this more like letters or essays.

More changes will come, but for now I changed some colors and fonts I didn't like, from an otherwise excellent template. Yay for Blogger that I can do that in the first place.

Now I need to figure out the link issue, and maybe get some traffic back n' forth from friends with better sites.

So, Here We Are

I live in Vermont now.

My backyard is a ten-acre meadow.

The place next door is a big stone mansion. It's the music building when regular school is in session, and it was also the inspiration for Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

I have eight housemates, and they all seem interesting and cool and impressive in their own respective ways.

We nine have the entire campus nearly to ourselves, until Fall.

Today I held a little chunk of pure magnesium in a flame, and as advertised, it glowed and sparked and totally burned right the hell up under the fume hood. This is my job now; playing with (and thereby learning) science.

There's much, much more, but I need to go put 24 beers into a cooler because there's a barbecue starting in about half an hour.

yarrrrgh

Yes, I still intend to update this, when there are things to talk about.

Yes, there are plenty of things to talk about. But there's no time, yo! I have, like, six entries half-written in the Drafts section. Someday they'll blend in and make it look like I wasn't actually blog-free for 8 weeks or whatever it's been. Sigh.

Hey, is it completely normal to have five days left before the lease is up, a burning need to reduce all of your worldly possessions to one carload and some limited storage space, and then to not really have started preparing at all?

Yeah, I thought not.

The plus side for right now is that housing is set until August, books are paid for and should be waiting for me out East, we're visiting the Leinenkugel brewery on the way, and everyone I know is happy and encouraging about my whole deal.

One quick observation from tonight. In my last shift at the ED for a while, a bunch of patients called me 'doctor.' Must be the appearance of smarts and skills. Which is nice, but I always correct people.

The calm and poise come from not worrying about it -- because my duties and responsibilities are well within my comfort zone. I guess people assume optimistically that said zone includes all the stuff they wish someone would hurry up and do, and I get swept along in the expansion of expectations. If I really were this cool while being tasked with (and trained to) reading C-spine radiographs, diagnosing heart problems, or evaluating a tendon repair post-op, then I guess I would be The Man after all. But I'm not, so sorry folks, you'll need to wait. Can I get you a warm blanket?

Also, tonight I heard Metoprolol called "Metropolis." Awesome.

Finally, extra bonus points to me, because I spelled the drug name right the first time. Okay, I'm going to bed now.

What Occupies Me

At the bottom of the tax form, after your signature, you're asked to list your "occupation." I have always wondered, where does this information go? And where is it supposed to come from?

Recently, getting ready for the big move, I had a look at my tax forms from the past few years. Sure, job titles are good, but I don't always stick to them. The year I earned a $100 honorarium for being part of the "guest ensemble" (that's "chorus" to most of us) in a 3-month-long production at my favorite theater, I was also starting my job at the cool company (the one I just left after 7 years to go out East, back to school). That year, I listed my occupation as "Actor."

2004 was the year I started working at the hospital, in November. I was an "EMT" that year, and the next, if I'm remembering correctly. All of which is true, but maybe not entirely descriptive of where I spent most of my working hours. I was happy to be associated with the cool company, but as the years went on the day-to-day enthusiasm ebbed and flowed over time. Toward the middle there, I might have put "hapless cube-monkey" if I thought I could.

So I guess I will be a "student" soon, and that's both clear and accurate. It feels good to have no conflict to resolve. Just one more indicator, I guess, that it's time to do this.