Oh, The Places I've Been!

“Things may happen and often do to people as brainy and footsy as you”― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

How many of us received Dr. Seuss's Oh, The Places You'll Go! as a graduation gift? I got mine after high school, I think. For graduation from residency, My Awesome Parents (MAP) gifted me a piece of personalized artwork with each state in which I got my education: Maryland (K-12), Missouri (BA), Illinois (MD PhD), and Pennsylvania (residency). Each state is made of words about the state written in a different primary color. So Maryland has crabs, Missouri has the Ozarks, Illinois has deep dish pizza, and Pennsylvania has the Liberty Bell. When I opened, I knew exactly what I wanted to do to personalize it further. I hopped on RedBubble and found transparent stickers with objects associated with each state. I actually ordered more than would fit so that I would have options; the leftovers will probably end up on travel mugs (then maybe I won't lose them as easily!). Below you can see the work in progress. For Maryland, a black-eyed Susan with the Maryland flag at the center and a crab with the state glad didn't make the cut; I chose the Old Bay spice box from McCormick's and a fancy, mosaic blue crab. I thought about fried ravioli or the Washington University in St. Louis seal but settled on the facade of Brookings Building (looks like a castle) and the silhouettes of two lindyhoppers. For Illinois, I left off the Block I for the University of Illinois in favor of the Alma Mater statue; and I put a painting of Louis Armstrong up in Lake Michigan for Chicago and the blues. And for Pennsylvania, I put a golden Cathedral of Learning for the University of Pittsburgh at the center and made the difficult decision to leave off the Mr. Rogers trolley in favor of the Duquesne incline, for reasons of space. Oh! And I ordered a "Made in Texas" QPC code, for obvious reasons. I was momentarily stymied when I discovered it was *exactly* the same size as the frame I picked up at Michael's, but a few trims with scissors cut it down to fit nicely. I'll hang the finished product either in our bedroom or, when I get one, my office.

I am young. I am hip.

Sorting through old papers while packing up my study, I came across a folded piece of paper torn out of a notebook. Judging from the notes on one side, it dates to the fall of 2000 or winter of 2001, when I was a freshman in college. On the other side are pencil scribblings, clearly drafted to High-School Sweetheart (now Dear Husband). I think the poem is lyrics to a song that, in my mind, has a country-western tune. I doubt that I ever sent the note underneath them. It's time for June bugs, so for Throwback Thursday I decided to immortalize young love here on the interwebs so I can recycle the piece of paper. Photo is from about that time, maybe the year before, taken one summer in my parents' breakfast room. You can tell the same girl in the picture wrote the following.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

We drive over the bridge^ and
     my heart jumps over the moon.
It's crazy, I know, this feeling
     that everything is all right,
But then again, I have al-
     ways been crazy to the world.

I wish this feeling would last forever.
I wish this feeling could last forever.

But what is forever to the young?
It is now. It is never. I will love you forever.
Forever is the time I spend in Calculus--
     and that seems long enough to have
     more than enough love to last a lifetime.

I am young. I am hip. And I will love you...forever.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

I want to write poetry. I want to write the words so that they are lilting and beautiful and so that they touch you.

Having said that I want to write poetry, does that ruin it? I don't know. I can't help admitting it. Maybe you will think it is--that my writing is like poetry--anyway.

You see, sometimes the words I call poetry well up inside me, bouncing around and buzzing, like June bugs in one of those plastic bags gardeners put out in their yards when the nights begin to warm. If I open the bag for a glimpse of the shiny green beetles, I risk losing the words like so many winged insects. If I don't peek in the bag, the beetles just flounder about in agitated consternation at being trapped, and maybe there will be so many eventually that they escape anyway. Then the close evening sky would be filled with the metallic sheen of the flying beetles quickly becoming mere shadows amid the dusk, soon all gone.


^ This might be the bridge over the railroad yard "we" (my fellow after-school tutors and I) had to cross to get to our Federal Work-Study site, but I am not certain.

What Medical School Looks Like XXVII

Upper left: organic chemistry. Upper right: physiology and genetics. Bottom: amino acids.

Older

Newer

"Lead on, O kinky turtle!"*

One of the things fourth-year medical students do is away rotations. This is when they ask another medical school if they can visit. Sometimes students do this to audition for a residency program. Other times they want exposure to something their own school doesn’t offer. That was the case with me: I wanted to learn about pediatric physical medicine and rehabilitation. I have already written about the insanity that is applying for these positions. The ridiculousness of that list was compounded in my case by my inability—despite fifteen years of higher education—to figure out how to properly use a special website to upload all the paperwork necessary to get a background check in New Jersey. And by the hosting institution forgetting to email me the start time and place information, such that I wasted the first of my ten days there trying to get somebody anybody to tell me where I was supposed to report. I got scolding emails from the background check website for a month until I called and asked them to deactivate my account.

ANYWAY, after all of that nonsense, I needed a girls’ day-out with some of my college besties. After some bus and subway shenanigans, we met at Port Authority for a Greek lunch and then hiked up to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), me dragging my suitcase behind. Along the way, I snapped this shot of Stephen Colbert’s Tonight Show headquarters on Broadway for Dear Husband. At the MoMA, we joined the masses to take in the modern European gallery. Here are a few of my favorite pieces.

“The Dream” (1910) is one of Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings. Rousseau (1884-1910) never saw an actual jungle. Instead, he consumed its representations in the metropole, through the Jardin des Plantes, colonial expos, and popular literature. The first thing that leapt to my mind was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The painting also evokes Eve in the Garden of Eden and the writings of another good imperialist, Rudyard Kipling.

This 1913 Futurist sculpture--"Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" by Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916)--graces the cover of one of my favorite books from graduate school, Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. A group of Italian artists became particularly enamored of the parts of modernity that were fast and sleek, like locomotives and automobiles. Here, a running man has become a little bit of each one. Kern talks about how new technologies like telegraph and cinema compressed time and space: a message could cross hundreds of miles in seconds rather than in days, and the curious could watch dispatches from the front lines back home during WWI.

Best Title went to an art-glass sculpture by Marcel Duchamp, "To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour" (1918).

Roberto Matta’s “inscape” entitled The Vertigo of Eros (1944) was entirely new to me, but I liked the tension between the abstract and the concrete. I see Gaussian lines, bodily organs, algae, endoreticulum, crystals, and ripples. It is an “automatic” illustration whose inspiration is supposedly somewhat mystical. Matta (1911-2002) was born in Chile but lived and worked in various countries throughout his life.

Then we wandered through the large exhibit on Pablo Picasso’s sculpture. It turns out he was never formally trained in this medium, and he rarely if ever exhibited his three-dimensional work during his lifetime (1881-1973). However, he kept many pieces in his studios, and over 100 were on display at MoMA. He went through phases during which he experimented with one material or another: clay, cardboard, metal, plaster of paris, found objects. Unsurprisingly, none of his sculptures are conventional. To the left is a still life of musical instruments made out of cardboard. To the right is a metal woman in a garden from 1929-1930. She’s probably naked, like all of the other women in his art. But I still think it looks like a rooster.

Hungry, but not wanting to battle Friday evening rush-hour traffic, we treated ourselves to coffee and dessert in the nice cafe on the 5th floor. Finally, we headed home to eat dinner, listen to the final game of the World Series, and play a neat board game called Veritas from Cheapass Games. Each player represents a different version of “the truth” recorded in manuscripts in a medieval French monastery. Each turn, you can copy and/or spread your truth to other monasteries. Sometimes one burns down, and then the manuscripts scatter. The goal is to strategically take over the most territory possible. CM and I duked it out until EF secured a come-from-behind victory, unlike the New York Mets, who lost in four straight to the Kansas City Royals.

The next morning I flew out stupid early to begin Residency Interview Season.

*EF's aunt once misquoted a hymn title while out with EF and her mother. It should be, "Lead on, O King Eternal!" But now we laugh about kinky turtles whenever we have a college besties' girls-day-out.

Chickpea Saga Spinach

When I was a senior in college, I lived with two "suities" (pronounced "sweeties") in an apartment on campus. Once a month we organized a fancy dress-up dinner party at our place. Each one had a theme, and we took turns inviting different groups of friends. One month I wanted to make a new side dish--I think we were trying to cook vegetarian--that involved spinach, chickpeas, onion, garlic, and some basic Italian spices. Actually, the original recipe required some brand-name Indian pickles or something, but I just edited that out. We three piled into the one's car to go grocery shopping. Not finding chickpeas at the first store, we stopped by an expensive specialty store. None there, either. By this point, we needed to start cooking, or there wouldn't be anything to serve when our guest arrived. So the suitie with the car dropped the other two of us off and struck out for a third store. She arrived just in time with a can: "Garbanzo Beans," read one side of the label. "Chickpeas" read the other side. It is entirely possible that the desired legumes were to be had at all the stores we visited, but we just didn't know! Whoops. At any rate, the dish earned a memorable moniker and was a success on the table.

Ingredients: 1 lb spinach (frozen is fine, fresh is better) 15 oz can chickpeas, drained 1 sm onion, finely chopped 8-10 cloves garlic, minced (more or less to taste) 2 tbsp lemon juice (=1 sm or 1/2 lg lemon) 4 tbsp water 4 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning OR make your own: 2 tsp dill seed, 1 tsp dried basil, 1 tsp dried oregano, 1/2 tsp black pepper

Saute the onion, garlic, and seasonings in the lemon juice and water. Add the chickpeas to warm. Stir in the spinach and cook until lightly wilted (if fresh) or hot (if frozen). Serve.

Considering all the difficulties we had getting the title to my car transferred, I thought a little Chickpea Saga Spinach was in order.

(You'll have to imagine the chickpeas in the spinach, as I had
used up our store of chickpeas in the lentil-rice patties!)