spring break

Cal's on Spring Break next week, so we're going to drive up to the beach for a few days.  Having just moved into our house two weeks ago, clearly there's some element of not really wanting to pack up our clothes and toothbrushes again and go on a trip when we're only barely settled in, but we planned this trip early last October.  The house is rented, Joe's parents are driving down from Ohio--we're going.  So...Spring Break!  Woo!

I'm not a beach person in particular (don't like swimming in the ocean, too much sand, the sea air makes my hair into a Chinese Lady 'fro), but look, here's a view of the view off the deck of the house we rented, and where I'm going to sit for the next four days doing absolutely nothing:




And here is a thing I'm going to look at.  We'll call it Nature's Screen Saver:




It's been a very busy few months and a particularly stressful past few weeks, and even though there's so, so much work that needs to be done, it'll be nice to get away for a few days, look at the ocean, and spend a few days with my boys.  Hope you have a good weekend, and have at least a little time to relax and be with people that make you happy.

next I suppose you'll want me to explain calzones

So as today was Doctor's Day, NOT ONLY did we have free bacon for breakfast in the doctor's dining room (they love us to the extent that they want to keep us in business, I guess?) we also had a special lunch, which consisted, somewhat eclectically, of some kind of heat-lamp-incubated meat log, tilapia with mango (I know), and a falafel bar. So obviously--the falafel, right?

(Full-disclosure, I also did chip off a piece of the meat log. Come on, I'm not made of stone. MEAT. LOG.)

So I'm assembling my falafel when one of the radiologists I'm friendly with came up and pointed at the chick pea patties sitting in one of the steamer trays. "What's that?"





"Oh, I think that's for the falafal." And then, as some further explanation seemed to be required, I added, "For Doctor's Day."

"What's a falafel?" He replied innocently. And then he said something else, but I couldn't hear him because my head exploded.

"WHAT'S A FALAFEL?!" I repeated, after I had collected all my head pieces and reassembled in roughly the correct configuration with bioglue and an Kling wrap. "It's THAT. THAT is falafel. Fried chick pea patties. Cucumber tomato salad. Tahini. Pita bread. Please tell me you know what a falafel is." And then, like a very bad Pictionary player whose teammate clearly has no idea what is being represented, I just emphatically pointed to the food again. And maybe I screamed the word "FALAFEL!" a couple more times, just in case he hadn't heard me properly.

"I think...I'll get some of this fish," the radiologist finally said, which, I'm sorry to say, was not the correct response.

After this, I informally polled a handful of people in the anesthesia department, all natives of the South. None of them had ever even heard the word falafel before. So tell me, am I crazy? I know I grew up in New York and what's commonplace in New York is not commonplace in most other places, but I had always figured that falafel was just a ubiquitous American-adopted ethnic food, like pizza, or tacos. You know, when you walk down a street in New York, it goes like this: coffee cart, hot dog/pretzel cart, falafel cart, and that vendor that sells three dollar cell phone cases from Hong Kong. I didn't know people didn't eat falafels in the South! Which makes it all the more mystifying that they chose to serve it to us for Doctor's Day. Maybe it was the vegetarian option, and they figured no one would touch it anyway?

Now I also know not to go out clubbing really late and end up with a case of the 3:00am munchies, because where there is no falafel, there is certainly no schawarma, and if there's no schawarma at 3:00am when you're drunk, there is no tomorrow.

Uh...Happy Doctor's Day!

(For the record: I don't think we as doctors need a "Day," but I appreciate the sentiment--I will continue trying to earn it.)

the price of admission

The cooking lesson today was a success.  The avocados ripened in time (if you missed my blow-by-blow on Twitter: basically, I had a clutch of rock-hard raw avocados 24 hours before The Great Guacamole Mash, and hey, putting them in a paper bag with a few bananas and apples really worked!) and the kids had fun mooshing and tasting and everyone made glorious mess.  I would have taken pictures, but I think getting lime juice on my iPhone would have voided the warranty.




Of course, the trade-off was that, in order to ensure I could make it to Cal's cooking day, I was on call the night before.  Probably there are jobs where you could arrange to go to your kid's school the next morning without having to stay up in the OR the night before, helping take some other kids' gangrenous appendix out...but that's not my life.  Not that I mind.  At least it's rarely boring.




So anyway, I'm pretty tired today.  Still.  Worth it.

flavor of the week

Well, it's that time of year again. Haven't I done this before? Like, a couple of times?  I know that this kind of thing is part and parcel of the school experience for kids these days, I'm sure as hell glad I didn't have any "Person of the Week" type stuff when I was a growing up. I was super shy and I had all this anxiety about speaking in front of the class and performing and just generally breathing in public. If I had to present some posterboard about myself in front of everyone, I probably would have just cried the whole time. (I think I cried every day at school for the entirety of first grade, as a matter of fact.)

Cal's a little older now, so we just kind of gave him free reign with the poster, handing him pile of markers, the posterboard, and a pile of loose pictures that we had lying around from Christmas card season. Have at it, Cal. Of course I think that 80% of the things that my kids do are magical and delightful (75%?  Fine, 68%) I do find it particularly adorable that for his own Person of the Week poster, of the nine pictures he chose for the poster, fully seven of them are of Mack. Which proves that though the dialogue in this house seems solely to consist of:

"Stop it!"

"No YOU stop it!"

"No, YOU stop it!"

(continue ad infinitum or until I intervene with some suitable distraction--TV, snack, Ketamine dart, louder yelling, what have you)









...the kid really does love his brother.  How gratifying.

I'm on call tonight, which means that tomorrow I'll be post-call and therefore able to go in to give that "cooking class" that I'd mentioned before.  You guys had given me so many good ideas--I was originally going to go with vegetable dumplings, because I figured it was different and culturally relevant and fun, what with the dumpling skins and whatnot.  But then I was looking at the ingredients on the dumpling skins and I remembered that there's at least one kid in the class who is gluten-intolerant (not that it'll kill him or anything, but he does get a pretty bad rash).  So in the interest of making the activity fun for everyone, and minimizing the unknowns (I also realized I had no idea what kind of heating elements, if any, I would have access to--very Top Chef Quickfire Challenge) I decided to go with something simple and easy and healthy.  Healthy-ish.




Cal and I made a test batch yesterday (what, you don't think I would go in cold, without practicing, do you?  If so, you don't know me very well--before the Oral Boards, I took a test drive to the exam location at least three or four times, and it was only ten minutes away) and it turned out pretty well.  We even put jalepeƱos in--turns out they're not really that spicy if you scrape the seeds out.  And if some kids don't like guacamole (Cal doesn't like avocado himself, but he does enjoy guacamole) I got, like two giant bags of chips.  KIDS LOVE CHIPS.  Except for that no-gluten kid.  I will just give him a spoon and a bowl of guacamole.

(Hey wait, I'm looking at the poster again, and I think Joe helped him cut out the Statue of Liberty figure.  Cheater!)

acknowledgements

Although I do hope that many of you will eventually read my book, I labor under no misconception that everyone will. Therefore, there is one small excerpt from the acknowledgements page at the end of the book that I wanted to share here, because, quite simply, as many people as possible need to know about how important these people were and have been to me, and to the thousands of young doctors that preceded and followed.

...In medicine, role models are everything, and while I have had countless mentors that have made lasting impressions on me, I would like to single out three in particular: Dr. Steve Z. Miller, Dr. Glenda Garvey, and Dr. Ingrid Fitz-James. Every single day, I remember what you taught me, and whatever good I have accomplished as a doctor has simply been from doing exactly what you told me to.

Dr. Miller I've spoken about several times on this website, and thinking about him always makes me tear up just a little bit, because he was such a good man, with so much left to do in this life.  People say that things happen for a reason, but those of us in medicine see all too clearly that sometimes there just is no reason, sometimes senseless things happen to good people, young people, and the sense of waste is truly tragic. But in addition to his family and his gorgeous children, Dr. Miller achieved the truest type of immortality.  He is still practicing medicine today, through all of us that, whether we know it or not, will continue to channel his voice, his approach to patients, and his attention to the unspoken details.

(To learn more about the Steve Miller Medical Education Day at Columbia University, click here.)

Dr. Garvey is also no stranger to this blog.  I first talked about her very early on, because she's just that kind of doctor that inspires absolute idolism and devotion in medical students--especially young, idealistic lady med students like me.  The thing with Dr. Garvey was, my worship of her never waned, and in fact, only strengthened throughout the years.  She was quite simply one of the smartest people I'd ever met, and her ability to balance that keen intellect with such a sense of true warmth and caring and effortless grace is something that I wish I could emulate if only I knew how.

Some months after Dr. Garvey passed away, I got an e-mail from her family, telling me how much what I had written about her on my blog had meant to them, and had meant to her.  Which, at the time, felt almost embarrassing to me, that the public sum of my gratitude could be quantified only as a handful of skimpy blog entries and and, now, an acknowledgement in the back of a book.  But Dr. Garvey, as an Infectious Disease Specialist, would surely have appreciated that there's more; that what's visible pales in comparison to the what's unseen and intangible but nonetheless fills the spaces between.

(To learn more about the Glenda Garvey Teaching Academy, click here.)

Dr. Fitz-James is quite simply the woman who taught me how to be an anesthesiologist.  Period.  She was my "one-to-one" mentor when I first started training in anesthesia (all first-year anesthesia residents are thus closely supervised during the first few weeks of their training), and I have to admit, I was a little bit afraid of her.  She was so firey and intense, and she would look at you with these EYES that could on one hand indicate that you were brilliant and destined for success, or else that you were the biggest fuck-up that ever lived, and you might as well start packing your bags now because your career in anesthesia was going to be a short one.  She had this way of calling us all doctor ("Doctor Au...") in this dry, arch way that always left some doubt whether or not she was putting invisible air quotes around the honorific.  And damn it if you didn't try all the harder to show her you could live up to that expectation.

Dr. Fitz-James is so smart, and she cares so deeply, and her commitment to not just doing things, but doing things right, every single time, had a deep and lasting impact on me.  As an attending anesthesiologist, there is not a single day that passes that I am not doing things just the way Dr. Fitz-James taught me.  And thank goodness for that.

Did you or do you know Dr. Miller, Dr. Garvey, or Dr. Fitz-James?  What was their impact on you?  Or, for those who trained in other institutions, who inspired you, and how did they do it?  The comments section is open.

apparently turning into a running tattletale series about other drivers

So I was driving back from my local Asian Grocery Mart (Super H Mart!  I love you and your multiple Pocky species!) when I was stopped at a red light behind this SUV.  Suddenly the door opened, a hand stuck out, and dumped a half full plastic cup of some beverage out of the car onto the pavement.  Not just the liquid part, mind you, the whole cup.  Then they closed the door, and when the light turned green, they just drove away.




Part of me was incensed, because if Ranger Rick and his Forest Rangers taught me anything, it's that LITTERING IS BAD.  But it's the complete disregard for the social contract that really drove me crazy.  It's like in that episode of "The Simpsons," when someone asked Homer why he threw trash on the ground instead of looking for a garbage can.  ("Because it's easier.  Duh.")  Which is funny because it's true, but this was broad daylight in the middle of a giant street, wasn't this person even a little embarrassed to just jettison trash out their vehicle?  What was this, outer space, and they're just blowing detritus out of their airlock hatch?

Like George McFly, I'm essentially a coward when it comes to confrontation, but I was two impulse units away from beeping my horn in disapproval.  The only thing that stopped me is that I've watched enough local news to have a healthy suspicion that, particularly in the South, outrageously rude drivers actually carry firearms in their vehicles with alarming frequency.  So in the interest of not getting shot, I didn't do anything more disapproving that taking a picture with my cell phone and posting a scoldy commentary on my marginally trafficked blog.

Uh, that'll teach them a lesson!  Or something!

all new surfaces on which to urinate

You'll have to forgive me, but this has been a really exhausting week. Aside from the move last weekend and a busy few weeks at work, I've been literally limp with exhaustion every night. They're the kind of evenings where, in med school, I would have once easily fallen asleep in front of the TV with a sandwich sitting on my chest, only now I have these damn kids demanding time and attention and some kind of moral compass (default answer: be nice to your brother) so instead of watching "Top Chef" and passing out early as God intended, I have been preparing snacks and pushing trains around a wooden track, making pathetic chugging noises symbolizing breakdown. So sorry if I'm a little haphazard with the grammar.

Anyway, here is my grand plan for the living room.

The house itself is in good shape. We just don't have anything to put in it, and the stuff we have looks terrible. The fate of the former med student(s) is Ikea Purgatory, and Joe and I are certainly no exception. In fact, the only room that looks halfway decent is the playroom, and that's because it's a playroom and aesthetic sensibility plays second fiddle to comfy carpet and easy access to Legos.  Here's a little before and after of the playroom--the former owners had used it as more of a solarium, which was very nice and very suited to their purposes as an older retired couple.  We, however, need a place for the kids to amass their impressive array of colored plastic whatnots, and this seemed like as good of a place as any:



The dining room we are repurposing as a dining room-cum-living room, because we rarely eat in a formal dining room, and anyway, we need somewhere to put the TV.  Here is what it looked like when the former owners lived here.




Obviously they took all their furniture and art, as well as their chandelier.  We did a little more paring down by taking down the much-discussed mirrors, and now we're sort of halfway there with what we need to do with the room, given that we've set a moratorium on buying anything large-scale new for the house.




Instead of one oversized dining room (which we will never use), we split the space into two separate areas.  We kept the dining space but moved it a little bit over towards the former mirror walls, and made the rest of the space into more of a living area using our old dog-pee couches.  How do you make old couches look somewhat less terrible?  Well, the grown-up answer is to reupholster them, but you overestimate the investment value of our furniture--these are really, really cheap couches.  So for now, we just got some neutral, bright slipcovers, and I splurged on (well, splurged is the wrong word--they were pretty cheap--let's say sprung for ) some new couch cushions at Home Goods.




I got a neutral jute rug (on the recommendation of the lovely Miss AB Chao--we solicited her advice for the family room but then we ran out of money for anything new, and anyway, the family room became the box room and now it is extra terrible-looking, though STAY TUNED WORLD, we may get our acts together yet) and put it underneath our dining room table.  The main reason I got it is to prevent the chairs from scratching up the hardwood floors, but it tries my compulsions every day--particularly my compulsions to make sure everything is at right angles at all times.





I put up this old poster that we had framed a while ago on the mantle, first because we have nothing else to put up, and secondly, because the colors are going to tie into my next project, which is to recover the dining room chairs with new fabric.




Our dining room tables look...sad.  If you think I was just kidding about us having pee on all our furniture, well, obviously you don't have two little kids and a dog, because, for realsies, there is old pee everywhere.  Kids just want to eat dinner and pee on a chair at the same time, apparently.  IT IS THEIR WAY.




Yes, in retrospect, the decision to cover a dining room chair cushion in plain off-white was unfortunate, but look, this was way before I had so many messy beings in my life.  But it's OK, because this weekend, I'm going to try to recover the chairs, a project that I've been putting off for (literally) the past two years.  And I have a whole bottle of Scotch Guard now.  And it's going to be awesome.  Just try to pee now, you little detrusors.  (No, wait...don't.)  Here's the fabric I picked.




Anyway, we're trying to do one of those "big changes, small budget" things, and look, I'm not saying that it's going to look like the palace at Versailles, but at least it will look a little bit more updated and modern and kid-friendly.  As long as there's two decent rooms that I can spend time in, I can deal with the fact that the rest of the house looks like some kind of cardboard shantytown.

writ large, small talk

Many of you have noted that I talk about medicine much less than I used to on this blog, and you're all absolutely right. I still talk about medicine generally, of course--ideas and themes and problems in medicine, but except for the book, I would wager that it's probably been a couple of years since I wrote anything appreciable and specific about any particular case or patient experience.

Part of it is because, with the kids and everything else, medicine constitutes a much smaller percentage of my waking thoughts than it did during medical school and early residency. But the other part of it--maybe the main part of it--is now that I'm The Attending Of Record, I am much, much, much more conscious about patient privacy and HIPAA. The last thing I ever want, now that the buck stops with me, is for a patient to Google my name (I always joke that if I'm doing my job right, my patients unfortunately never remember meeting me--but of course some of them do remember, I get nice thank-you cards from some, and there's that unusual and memorable last name that I have) and turn up a story of my blog that, disguised though it may be, is clearly recognizable as them. So I just sort of avoid it altogether. Not that there aren't times I wish I could tell those stories, of course--stories about individual patient interactions are the most moving of all. But in my field and in my scope of interaction it's just not the kind of relationship where I feel like I can ask patients about sharing stories, nor do I feel that those stories are always appropriate to share. I know that it's hard to understand, but there's something extremely intimate about the practice of anesthesia, and bearing witness to a patient's medical care and diagnoses while they're unaware. I just tend to keep more work stuff to myself nowadays is all, and I think that's probably the right way to go.

However, it's not that I don't have things to say about medicine. I think a lot of thinks, you know. Most of them are largely frivolous (see my Twitter feed for the truest evidence--I guess that's true of society in general, where everyone's internal monologue becomes externalized) but some thoughts, if not intelligent, at least bear some insight that comes with time and perspective. And maybe some people are interested in hearing about them.

Anyway, I've been asked to give an additional talk at the Iowa Writer's Conference--thank you to the medical students that suggested this to the conference administrators, I am flattered and I am pleased as punch to fly in a day early to hang out with you all. The title of the talk is, "Humanism: The Radical Notion that Doctors are People, Too" and it touches on some of the more general topics in medicine that I've talked about recently. Anyway, it's going to be a fun talk and I'm going to show some of my comics and we're all going to chat and commiserate and hopefully feel a little better about this crazy life that we somehow signed up for. And if you happen to be in Iowa City Friday April 22nd, I'd sure love it if you'd join us. Conference information is here. And if anyone is still interested in an informal meet-up, I'm thinking that Friday night--check back here for more information and I'll figure out a nice spot that I can walk to and that serves food and perhaps some kind of non-obnoxious booze.

like it was made to do just that



Some of you might have thought I was kidding about repurposing the bidet at our new house as a toddler-sized sink.

 I WAS NOT KIDDING.

translocation

Moving is the worst, I think we can all agree on that.  But since this is our fourth move in less than three years (YES), I like to think that at this point, we have things down to a science.  Our schedule for the current weekend is this.  Friday night, we moved the kids and selected essentials (read: clothes, diapers, toiletries, plates and silverware, particularly beloved toys, and just general crap necessary for daily function) over to the new house.  We spent the night in our completely empty new house, billing it to the kids as a "sleepover party" and amassing a giant mega-bed out of one mattress Joe was able to cram into a U-Haul laid next to the two futon mattresses for the as-yet-undelivered  bunk beds.  Today the movers packed up the rest of the stuff.  And tomorrow they will move all that stuff over here.  It is a series of staged maneuvers, like a military strike.




We learned that this staging is the best way to go about things only by trial and error.  Our first error was during the second move, where we spent the night in our first Atlanta townhouse after the movers had packed everything into boxes but before they actually moved everything out.  There were many boxes.  Cal was distressed.  Kids have a sense of order when it comes to their homes and seeing everything upended and entombed and mummified in plastic wrap horrified him.  So since then, we've learned to minimize the kids' actual exposure to the moving process.  Keep them out of the way for the packing, and remove them from the house when the movers are actually moving everything in.  (Planning for this, we have a babysitter lined up for tomorrow morning.)  This keeps their little heads screwed on straight, because forcing plasticity onto the construct of what they perceive to be a concrete entity tends to blow their tiny head gaskets.





After our last move (again, on a weekend), we discovered on Sunday night that not only could we not find Cal's lunchbox, but we also couldn't find his backpack, his jacket, his shoes, or any of the library books that he was supposed to return the next day.  So now we have a policy.  Anything that we anticipate needing within the first, oh, say, week of the move, we take with us ourselves.  Either we take it to the new house in a series of car trips or, as this time, we rent a U-Haul and take a whole truckload over in advance of the actual moving truck, so we know where everything is.  There is nothing more frustrating that needing something tiny and essential like a nail clipper, and not knowing which of the thousand identical, vaguely labelled boxes it resides in.  We have learned our lessons.  We will let the movers help us carry the couch down the stairs, but anything that we need and want to use, we bring over ourselves, in our own car, so they don't get tossed into a giant box maddeningly labelled, "HOUSE STUFF."




Anyway, we're here, at the new house, though most of the big stuff is not.  The movers are coming tomorrow.  I think we're in pretty good shape.  We don't have very much furniture, old or new, and I think that there's one room off to the side of the house that's going to have to be The Box Room for quite a few weeks (who am I kidding?  MONTHS.) until we get all our ducks in a row, but we're going to be in good shape by Monday morning, I think.  We're going to be at 80% efficiency, which, as long as you don't need me to attend a cocktail party or locate that one soup tureen that we got as a wedding present but which we never use--we're in pretty good shape.




Moving still sucks, though.  Did I mention we have no internet access yet?  I am stealing this connection from a nice man named Linksys now, as a matter of fact.  I know, I know, first world problems.  At least the weather's nice.




Have a good weekend.  Barring the possibility I will be pinned by a falling chiffarobe, I'll try and have a good one too.

then and now

So!  Match Day!




Match Day, for those lucky enough to not know, is the day that fourth-year medical students across the country find out where they will be doing their residency training.  Our Match Day was--oh lord, could it have been?--EIGHT years ago.  I was much more awake that morning than most of my classmates, who had been up late partying the night before at "Super Night," our name for the big annual pre-Match bash at the med school.  I'm sure a similar tradition exists at medical schools around the country, and though regional differences surely exist, there is one commonality of which I'm almost certain: the involvement of booze.

I myself was still recovering from a bout of peritonitis when my acute appendicitis in February was misdiagnosed and I subsequently developed a small bowel obstruction and a perforated viscus (TRUE), and so during Super Night I was on Flagyl and couldn't drink anyway.  It was still fun though, and basically ensured that I was not hung over the following morning for Match Day, enabling me to recall each nerve-wracking minute in crystal-clear detail.

I'd heard that in the olden days, Columbia had a tradition of holding Match Day in a giant auditorium, where one by one, students from the fourth-year class were called up to a podium and handed an envelope with their match results, which they were then to open in front of everyone and read aloud, into a microphone.  Of course, not everyone always matches exactly where they want to match, so this ritual (thankfully) came to be regarded as somewhat inhumane, especially in the already high-pressure environment that is med school.

So by the time Joe and I were cycling through in 2003, they had reduced Match Day down to a reception at the faculty club, with a table full of labelled envelopes off to one side of the room.  People could take their envelopes and leave, or open their envelopes there with everyone else.  Within this group, there were people who would open their envelopes and cheer, others who would open their envelopes and start crying, and possibly some that would open their envelopes and promptly punch one of the poor waiters who was trying to pass out shrimp cocktails on toothpicks.  One hopes against that last option, for the waiter's sake.

I am telling you this because the fact of Match Day, and the ritual of Match Day, is one that makes you think that Match Day is probably one of the biggest days in your life.  And it really seems that way at the time.  Hell, Joe and I were getting married about a month afterward, and I think I had put in more time, energy, anxiety and thought into Match Day than I had about the wedding.  It was a big fucking deal, this feeling that the rest of your life was hiding inside this one thin envelope.  It was a big deal, but also...it wasn't.

It was eight years ago.  This is what I can tell you now.  I matched at my first choice program, which was in a Pediatrics residency at the Children's Hospital of New York at Columbia.  Eight years later, I'm not even in that field anymore.  Joe matched in his first choice program too for residency, but for his transitional year, he got his absolute last pick, a fact which deeply dismayed him.  Didn't matter.  He had a great year, got excellent training, and he still has many fond memories of that institution to this day.  We had friends that failed to match at all, and who instead scrambled into spots in other fields, or in cities they never dreamed of living.  They are all successful, happy, healthy, and practicing the kind of medicine they want to practice today.  They have significant others, spouses, children, and they are enjoying their lives in medicine just as much as their lives outside the hospital.  They are happy.  It all works out.

Most of you are probably pretty excited today.  Some of you maybe aren't.  Some of you are dealing with hard choices, and I know that talking about this now doesn't make those choices any easier.  But if you went to med school, I know you have a long memory, so I'll tell you this: some day in the future--five, eight, ten years from now, you're going to look back on this day, this Match Day.  Then you're going to look to the present, at the life you're leading now.  And you might not be where you thought you would be when you were a medical student.  Hell, look at me, I thought I was going to be a pediatrician in academia, and now I'm an anesthesiologist in private practice.  You can't find two more different fields.  I couldn't have predicted it.  But it all works out in the end.  It really does.  You'll find where you need to be, what you need to do, who to go there with, and you'll get there.

So congratulations to all the fourth year med students in the Class of 2011!  Can't wait for you guys to graduate and join the team!

Now on to what's next.

like one of those urban legends, but dumber

So look, I'm not a good driver--you know this.  I am a little bit better at it now, because I am forced to drive every day in order to get...well, anywhere (it's Atlanta) but still, when things happen that are out of the ordinary when I'm driving, I don't like it.  I get nervous.

So when I was driving down a major street yesterday and that big van pulled up close alongside me, I didn't like it very much.  I liked it even less when some guy stuck his head and half his body out of the window of the front passenger seat and started frantically gesturing to me, then to the back of my car, and then back to me again.

At this point, I figured one of several things.

1.) My brakelight was out. 
2.) The back of my car was on fire. 
3.) I had just run over something (or, god forbid, someone). 
4.) I had a flat tire. 
5.) I was going to get carjacked.
6.) There was a killer in the backseat with a hook for a hand, and the call is coming FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! (Also, my trunk was filled with Pop Rocks and Coke.)

I looked over at the guy and gestured quickly (again, difficult to do, I have this thing about keeping both hands on the wheel--and by "thing," I mean that I am a constitutionally nervous driver) "What?"  He didn't say anything, just make this desperate, panicked face, again gesturing to me, then to the back of my car, then to me again.  Well, shit.

Cautiously (again, remember, we're still driving high speed down a road at this point, a big, busy road, with no place to pull off), I rolled down my window and tentatively shouted out my window, "Is something wrong?"

The guy in the van, not missing a beat, shouted back, "I can't help but notice that you have a big dent in the back of your car, ma'am.  Would you like me to help you fix it?"  He was looking for freelance auto body work.  What did he I think I was going to do?  Say yes so he could throw a handful of business cards into my window?  I very politely said no thank you (trying all the while to keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road), and rolled up my window again.

What I didn't tell him is that I had made that big dent in the car myself, while backing up our other car into it in our driveway last year.  Because I'm a terrible driver.  And he's lucky I didn't put a dent in his van while he was trying to arrange some sort of high speed interaction with me as we were both barreling down a major street during rush hour.

In sum: I hate driving.  The end.

keeping it real

Hey, my book got a nice review from Kirkus!*  Thanks Kirkus! Though it seems the full review won't be available to non-subscribers until the book is actually released, here's a brief excerpt:

An account of medicine, marriage and motherhood, executed with style and enough humor to offset the not-always-happy endings for patients...An upbeat memoir by a woman still imbued with the idealism to serve, but also to be there for her husband and two sons.

I'm especially happy because it seems that the reviewer keyed into the one of the main things I want to get across, which is that I really tried hard to write a first-person medical memoir that was ultimately upbeat, and occasionally irreverent hopefully without tilting towards cynical. Lots of medical non-fiction I've read can either be academic and detached, bitterly humorous, or difficult to read because they're kind of ceaslessly grim. I tried, and hoped I succeeded (though you all can tell me in May, I guess) in writing an account of med school and residency that keeps in mind that I was a human being training in medicine, not that I was a medical trainee that just so happened to be a human being.

Anyway, thanks again to Kirkus for the lovely review!

(P.S. Yes, I know the cover image on the Kirkus site is still the original cover image. We are working on getting it updated to the new hotness.  Thanks!)

never too much of a good thing

It seems strange to write some breezy blog entry when catastrophic world events have occurred and continue to unfold, but I’ll just remind everyone that there are many ways to help, and personally continue to be grateful for the things I sometimes take for granted.




So Cal’s newest obsession is Monopoly. He loves Monopoly. Begs us to play it whenever we get a chance, which is…well, you’ve played Monopoly before, right? The game never ends, it’s like torture. But what can I say, Cal would rather play Monopoly than do basically anything else in life. Joe originally got the game as sort of a math skills activity (you know, adding, multiplying, making change and all that) so not only is Cal now relatively good at doing math in his head, but he’s also turned into some sort of mini-Donald Trump-type figure. He'll quote you properties and prices and strategies and talk about "mortgage value" until your eyes start crossing.  He’ll even just play Monopoly by himself if no one will play with him, which is cute, if a little odd.




Mack is like the opposite of Cal. Where Cal is quiet and analytical, Mack is loud and demonstrative. He chases the dog so he can kiss her on the lips. He makes his dinosaurs fight and then make up. He climbs up and then jumps off of everything, which is why we’re recarpeting the bedrooms in the new house with a thicker carpet pad, and why we ended up deciding to buy a house with very few stairs. He’s affectionate and he’s sunny and if he doesn’t think you’re hugging him hard enough, he’ll say, “Squeeze! Squeeze more!”

But this is why it’s really impossible not to love Mack. I was putting him to bed a few nights ago (he was overtired and not in the best mood), and after turning off the light and walling him in with his cryptozoological gallery of stuffed animals, I hugged him and kissed him and said good night.

“Good night, Mama!” he squeaked. “I too happy!”

He’s too happy. And I wanted to tell him that there was no such thing as too happy, though, if there was, I was "too happy" right along with him. But instead of saying all that, instead of all the words, I just kissed him again, and hugged him tight tight tight, so tight he didn't even need to tell me to squeeze more.

perspective

Were you on call this weekend? Me too!  Spring forward indeed.  (I would say something wittier here, but I'm tired.)

Very interesting feedback and discussion in response to the last entry, thanks everyone for weighing in.  I think that to generalize is to oversimplify, but I said this in the comments and I'll say it again here: I think the reason that the process of medical training is so stressful for people is because those who go into medicine in the first place usually try their hardest to do their best, no matter how difficult the circumstances. And it can be difficult for us when we feel like our best, for whatever reason, is not enough.  More than the fatigue or the workload or the ridiculous life-and-death stress of working in the hospital, far and away the hardest part for me was feeling like my best was not enough.  Of course, my efforts for the most part were "enough" (at least by most quantifiable metrics and some intangible ones), and though it never felt like enough, I tried my best, then as I do now. As we all do.

Watching the news reports and photos and video footage coming out of Japan these past few days has been incredibly sobering, and puts into perspective how uncertain life can be, and how much we have to be grateful for.  So let's keep up what we do, trying our hardest to do our best.  Here are some ways to help.



(Kyoto, Japan, 2002)

it gets better

The lowest point in my residency was in January of my intern year.  I was a Pediatrics resident back then, doing a month-long rotation on "Team 2," which is what we called the general inpatient pediatric team, with a focus on the patients on our liver transplant service.

It was a very long month.

I'd get to work at around 5:45 every morning to pre-round, and invariably leave after dark every night--not difficult, considering that, in January, it seemed like it started to get dark around 3:30pm every day.  I was there much later than that, of course--most nights I'd leave around 7:00pm, unless I was on call, in which case I'd leave at around 10:00am the following morning.  We'd have pre-rounds and then rounds, then attending rounds and work rounds, followed by teaching rounds and radiology rounds, with time at the end of the day for sign-out rounds.  Twice a week we'd have Grand Rounds and Chief of Service Rounds.  How we ever got anything done with all this rounding, I'll never know.  How I ever got to spend time with any patients in between all these rounds is even more of a mystery.  It just felt like a day of endless, endless scut.  Losing the forest for the trees.  It would be a day full of writing down numbers and pagers beeping and phone calls and faxes and entering computer orders, and not nearly enough time practicing medicine or spending time with patients.  And then I'd go home and collapse and wake up at 4:15 the next morning to go in and do it all again.

It was shortly after this that I decided to switch fields, to Anesthesia.

But this entry is not about me and my switching residencies (though this is easily the topic that I get the most e-mails about--I think I've addressed it a couple of times on this blog, but for the most fully fleshed out explanation of when and how and why I switched residencies, I'd recommend you check out the book, it's probably one of the sections I spent the most time editing in order to get the details right), it's about something else that I want to talk about, which is this: residency can be deeply depressing.

And let's get this straight.  I liked residency.  Really, I did.  Yes, it was hard, and yes, I was tired basically all the time, but I expected that, and now that it's over, most of my memories are affectionate.  Residency, like medical school, was full of stories, and many of them, in retrospect, are funny--not at the expense of patients, but at my own expense, because lord, how serious and inexperienced and bumblingly well-intentioned I was!  But that first January of my intern year, I was very close to being clinically depressed.  It just all felt so grim and featureless and endless, and I felt more and more like I was just some kind of task-programmed automaton, not like the doctor that I thought I was supposed to be at this point.

 I wanted to quit.  Not just quit being a Pediatrics resident, but quit medicine altogether.  I was unhappy.  I didn't like my life.  I wanted to be done.  I know that this comic was intended to be a joke, but there were time, real times, when I passed by a Gap or a Starbucks or whatever, saw that they were hiring, and seriously considered stopping by to fill out an application.  At least they don't make you take call at The Gap, folding chambray button-down shirts at 2:00am.

Now I'm going to tell you a secret.  Everyone who has been through a residency has felt this way at some point.  Everyone.

Maybe you're feeling this way right now.  So here's another secret.  There's more to life than this.  Even though it feels like residency is your life, it's not.  There's more to life.  There's more to you.  And it gets better.

It gets better.

There's this great line from "A League of Their Own," which I adapt and quote often. "[Medicine] is supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard...is what makes it great."  However, don't get me wrong, I don't equate suffering with nobility.  Suffering is just suffering.  All I'm saying is that it's hard, but there's more, and you deserve to experience all of it.  Don't let your residency consume you, and don't let it make you believe that there's nothing else, or that there are no other options.  There's always more.  There's always what's next.  And you know what?  If you're really unhappy, and you want to leave medicine, there's always that too.  It's OK.  There's no shame in changing your mind.  The shame is hating your life, really hating your life, and doing nothing about it.  Who wins in that situation?  Not you, not your patients.

It gets better.  I know it's winter, and winter for a resident is long (oh lord, it's so long, it feels like you'll never see the sun again) but it gets better.  Just remember that.  Remember that you're a person--an intelligent, good person with free will, not just a cog in a machine--and I swear to you, the rest will follow.

the remains of the day



My teeming garbage can after doing eight straight back-to-back cases at one of our outpatient surgical centers today.  I know basically everything in the hospital is one use only and sterilely packaged these days, but this was my giant, industrial-sized garbage can after just one day in the OR.  What happens to all this garbage anyway?

(This is the part where someone smart in the comments section answers that question, and then I get super depressed.  An inconvenient truth indeed.)

mirror, mirror, off the wall

"So, is this house a money pit?" the handyman asked us this morning.

Joe and I looked at each other. "Money pit?"

"You know," said the handyman. "Keep throwing money into it, it disappears, requiring you to throw in more money."

"Well...no." said Joe, starting in on his explanation of how the house was actually in pretty good shape, but that we just wanted a couple of big, mostly cosmetic things done before we moved all the furniture in, etcetera etcetera.

I cut in. "It's not a money pit," I told him ominously.  "Yet."

We're getting some stuff done on the new house in advance of our move day. We're moving in about a week and a half, and let's be clear, nothing needs to be done. The house is move-in ready. But there are a few things that we'd like to get done, and these things are much easier to do when the house is still empty. Mainly, we wanted to re-carpet the upstairs bedrooms and paint a few walls. But before we could paint, we'd have to take off approximately a mile's worth of full wall mirrors.




The famed homework room, of course.  Now, I hesitated to post this up, because inevitably, some subset of you guys are going to start protesting, why did you take off the mirrors, the mirrors looked good, they reflected the light, made the room look bigger, you could turn your living room into a Jazzercise studio, and so on.  So let me just say a few things to start.

1.) The mirrors were everywhere.  In every room.  Full wall mirrors.  We're not even taking them all off, just the ones in the more heavily trafficked rooms.  Because...

2.) We have two kids.  Two young kids.  The kids are boys.  They like to touch things.  I don't want to spend the rest of my life following them around the house with a bottle of Windex.  I think it's because I wear glasses that I am particular about this.  I'm not an especially finicky housekeeper in general (as anyone who has ever been to our house can clearly attest) but there's something about smudgy glass that I just cannot abide.

3.) It did reflect the light, and probably made the rooms look bigger, because, you know, OPTICS, but the way the mirrors looked (there were beveled frames and whatnot) made the rooms appear incredibly dated.  They were put up in the 1980s and they look every year of it.

4.) THEY'RE ALREADY OFF.  Nothing I can do about that now!  And if I start second guessing this decision now I will probably start getting depressed and no one wants that, right?  RIGHT?  (Right.)

The thing is, there comes a point in every project where you get a sinking feeling in your gut that, oh shit, I just made things worse.  The handyman himself said that there are certain projects that people should not see the middle of, and oh man, this was one of these projects.  Because we took a fairly pristine house and turned it into this:




A paradise of gouged drywall, tar-like glue globs, and exposed wiring.  Just to get rid of some mirrors.  Did I mention that we were trying to make this a more kid-friendly house?  How many times did I think to myself today, well, hell, maybe we should have just kept the mirrors?  One billion times.  Well, one billion and one, now.

But no matter.  As of today, the mirrors in the dining room, the stairs, and the homework room are all gone.  Onward and upward.  Drywall may need to be replaced in the homework room and on the stairs (some damage underneath, and the installers got a little overzealous with the black glue globs--particularly a problem when you need a smooth surface on which to apply chalkboard paint), but we took the plunge, and now for steps 2 through 10.  And unlike in the other two areas, the mirror wall in the dining room actually looked pretty decent underneath, and should probably be ready to be painted sooner rather than later, once the drywall is patched and sanded.




Money pit indeed.


<--- Designanted pimp space --->

Hi! Again!  Still here?  OK, good. So, there's a new event I put on the calendar. I've been invited to take part in a lecture series this May sponsored by the Literary Center at Margaret Mitchell House. (Margaret Mitchell is, of course, the author of "Gone With The Wind," and if you lived in Atlanta YOU'D DEFINITELY KNOW THAT.) The event is going to be held at the Atlanta History Center, which looks like pretty swank digs, so you should come and we'll talk and eat some finger sandwiches and it will be super-fun. Nothing is more fun than finger sandwiches. Made with HUMAN FINGERS.

I will be adding to my events calendar both on this blog and on my book webpage, so check there again if you can't be with us in the ATL May 19th, hopefully I'll have some other events in other cities to add later.

the 12 medical specialty stereotypes (2011)

OK everyone, here you go, revised for 2011 for our friends in internal medicine. Thanks for all that you do. And if you like the revised edition with the new panel, please feel free to link or e-mail or share via your social networking platform of choice. Computers!

(As usual, click for bigness.)




Usually when I draw comics I have a very specific set of tools that I like to use (heavy drawing paper--but not watercolor paper, that's too rough--a Pilot razor point ink pen with a fibrous tip, Sharpies of various calibers) but we've moved so many times I have no idea where my drawing pad is. So this new panel was drawn on the back of a piece of heavyweight ivory cardstock, scanned, and then pasted into the original comic via Photoshop. Hopefully it doesn't look too out of place.

Also, while you're sort of paying attention, I feel obliged to point out that the price of my book on Amazon is now almost half the list price. How does book pricing work? Who knows? Also, who cares? All I know is that you save money. Also, if the price drops lower prior to the actual release date (that would be May 11, 2011 folks) Amazon will charge you the lower price. A 336-page hardcover book for a dozen bucks and change? What's not to like? (P.S. I don't work for Amazon or anything, but I do know that as much as I am largely ignorant about the world of book publishing, the sales rank on Amazon is an important and visible metric, even in the pre-order stage. And like our friends in Internal Medicine, I would like to have good numbers, if for no other reason than to avoid embarrassment. Like Geoge McFly, I don't think I could handle that kind of rejection!)

Oh, I've also been getting asked this a lot, so let me just say it again: the book will also be available in all e-reader formats as well, so never fear, my fine robot friends. But can you wrap up an e-book and give it as a graduation gift to the pre-med in your life? Well, maybe I guess, if you were giving them the e-reader device as part of their gift too, but that's kind of expensive. More than twelve bucks, anyway. Regardless, you are a very generous person. Not to mention attractive!

As always guys...thanks.

this one's for the internists

First off, let me just say that from the first moment I put it online, I knew the 11th panel in my "The 12 Medical Specialty Stereotypes" was kind of a cop-out.  To be honest, I just couldn't think of a 12th stereotype at the time.  (I know, Anesthesiology was the actual 12th panel that I drew, but for obvious reasons I'd drawn that panel in my head long before I'd come up with any other the other ones.)  So in the moment of trying to just  trying to finish the thing, I stuck in "Radiation Oncology" because it seems to be one of those medical specialties that no one seems to understand and whose practitioners it seems we never see.  But I always regretted not thinking a little harder or a little bit longer before bringing that comic into the light, because that panel always felt like a squandered opportunity.

Well, three and a half years after the original, let's take that opportunity back.  Here's the new 11th panel of that comic strip: INTERNAL MEDICINE.





I will post a full new version of the comic with the updated panel tomorrow, and also update on the comic page of this website.  As for the radiation oncologists being bumped out of the Big 12...I'm sorry.  Please start doing amusing stuff and maybe I'll make an all new comic just for you.

padded

Oh man, so many good ideas from that last entry!  So many that I'm actually going to quit my job now and just work the kindergarden circuit, teaching cooking.  SUCKS TO YOUR ASSMAR, MEDICAL SCHOOL EDUCATION.  No, not really.  (But maybe.)

Anyway, I haven't decided on the final project (will take a little more research and following some of the links you guys posted), but needless to say I will share the plans when the time comes, and there will be pictures.  Because pictures are helpful, and also (pro tip!) make the entry seem longer.

Coincidentally...here are some pictures!

At dinner tonight.  We went to a place called Sweet Tomatoes, which is apparently some kind of all-you-can-eat soup and salad chain.  I'd never eaten there until about two weeks ago, but our realtor took us there for lunch right before we went to the lawyers office on our closing day, and it fills the specific niche in our lives of being a casual but relatively healthy restaurant with a lot of choices for the kids.  Also, did I mention that Cal ate for $3.00 and Mack got to eat for free?  And each of them ate more than I did?  Socking it to the man!




This picture, by the way, is to emphasize how much Mack and Joe look alike. Oy, those foreheads!

Secondly, this from the front of an envelope of a letter that Cal wrote one of his friends from school, and which he instructed us to drop into the postal box ASAP.




"For you male man."

I don't know why I think this is so funny but IT JUST IS.

Hope you're having a good weekend. And again, thank you so much for all your great suggestions in the last entry.  At some point I'm going to go back and write them all down, because there's gold in them thar hills.

the joy of cooking

So don't laugh, but in a few weeks I have to go into Cal's classroom to give a cooking lesson.  Me.  Giving a cooking lesson.

I KNOW.

I didn't volunteer for it, exactly, but Cal's going to be "Person of the Week" at the end of March, and each Tuesday, a parent of the Person of the Week has to come in and give a cooking lesson in which the kids can participate, and which teaches something about the basics of measurement and timing and...I don't know, hygiene?  Anyway, I'm one of the last parents in the class to come in for this cooking lesson (I was originally scheduled to do this in October but I couldn't accommodate it into my work schedule on such short notice so I traded with someone else) and I have no idea what to cook.  The other thing is that I think everything that seems easy and reasonable (little pizzas, smoothies, muffins, what have you) have already been done, like a thousand times over.  Could I still just do another smoothie?  Sure.  But I want it to be special!  I want to impress the five year-olds!  They are the arbiters of cool!

So here's what I know about the cooking thing.

1.) It has to be a preparation process in which the kids can meaningfully participate.  And for clarification, this is a kindergarden class of 23 kids.  No high flame wok grilling of vegetables fine-diced on the spot, in other words.

2.) It has to be something involving measurement.

3.) Actual cooking with heat can be involved, although it doesn't have to be.  For instance, if I were going to make pizzas (done, done and done by, like, three other parents) there's an oven in another building where I could take them after assembly.

4.) No nuts.  There are all these nut allergy kids in the class and I want them to live.

5.) Nothing too hard to do.  By necessity, I will be post-call that morning (it's the only way I can get the morning off without actually being on vacation), and I fear my fatigue-addled mind might not be able to handle more than, say, five ingredients.

Does anyone have any cool ideas?  I mean, I guess I could just make cookies or something, but I'm sure that's been done before too, and then all the other wholesome moms will think I'm poisoning their kids with refined sugars and whatnot.  Why can't I be a wholesome mom?  You know, like randomly incorporate bulger wheat into things.  Or someone who knows what agave nectar is.

Actually, I don't want to be a wholesome mom anymore.  Someone just tell me what I should make that the kids are going to love.  Make me into a classroom hero, guys.  The comments section is open for ideas.

no! sleep! 'til bunkbeds!

Given the sobering realities of home ownership (the grown-up realization that Things need to be done for the house and Things unfortunately cost money--like, so much money) we have a bit of a limit on what we're allowing ourselves to buy in terms of furniture for the new house.  A rug is furniture, right?  No?  It is the way we use it!  (That sounded kind of dirty, but really what I meant is that we sit on the floor a lot.)  But one thing I did promise Cal for when we moved in, and one thing that we're going to follow through on, is that we're going to get him a bunk bed for his new room.

First off, credit where credit is due, I got this idea from Amalah (hi Amy!), who recently talked about finding a bunk bed for her two boys off of Craig's List.  I could not find an equivalent deal because Craig's List in Atlanta sucks.  No, not really--we even found our nanny off Craig's List when we first moved here and nothing is better than that--but I'm just a sad, bitter old woman who does not like to pay full price for things.  

Anyway, after reading about how Amy got her kids bunk beds, I realized that Cal would totally go for the excitement of the upper berth, because, you know, he is a human boy.  Also, our new house only (not to say "only," there's plenty of room, an embarrassment of riches compared to a Manhattan apartment) has three bedrooms, which means that we don't have a dedicated guest bedroom.  And that is actually fine, no one ever visits us anyway because we are so hateful--but we did need an option for decamping one kid or another to a different room if we ever (glory!) did have people want to stay over.  Adult people who don't want to sleep on a cheap couch.  So.  BUNK BEDS.




(This is a picture from the website--we're not that patriotic, especially when it comes to bedding.)  

We needed to get the twin-over-full option because Mack is quite an energetic sleeper (I had to search around for that euphemism) and I am certain that him sleeping on a twin would be the equivalent of him sleeping on the floor 50% of the time.  I know, there are railings for such things, but you underestimate his nocturnal gymnastics.  If we put on hard bed railings, he would be Captain Subdural Hematoma.  With his sidekick, Neuro Check Girl!  (That's me.)  Also, I wanted to find the kind of bunk bed that had stairs instead of a ladder, because I had some kind of vision that this would be safer.  Not really safer?  I don't know, I'm new at this.  Anyway, the plan will be that the kids will have their own rooms, but when guests come over, Mack will sleep in Cal's room on the bottom bunk, while Cal sleeps on the top as usual.

We were going to hold off on the bunk bedding for a few months yet, because of, you know, the monies.  But then my parents very kindly offered to get us the bed as a housewarming gift, and I was like oh you don't have to do that that's too much OK OK BUNK BEDS HUZZAH!  

I slept in a bunk bed myself as a kid--my sister and I shared a room--and I remember it being a lot of fun.  So here's to new adventures, and to hoping that my kids and the concept of critical velocity remain mutually exclusive.

midnight snack

Look, first let's make it clear that Atlanta has really grown on me, OK?  First off, the weather is pretty nice here.  Second off, people are charming and say cute things.  Third off--well, today I was taking care of a patient who just so happened to be an "ambassador" (his word) for Chick-Fil-A, and he had such a nice time talking to me that he gave me a personal business card which could be redeemed for one free chicken sandwich.  Free Chick-Fil-A!  How was your day?

But one thing that drives me crazy about Atlanta is the restaurant hours.

OK, so forget the fact that no non-fast-food restaurants open before 10:00am, like, ever.*  I like to get an early start on my day but whatever, I can deal with having to stand outside a self-proclaimed brunch establishment at 9:00am on a Sunday morning waiting for them to wake up.  But what really kills me, especially in my line of work, is the fact that no restaurants stay open past 10:00pm.  It's ungodly.  Don't people get hungry at night down here?  More importantly, don't people want to make money selling food to people like me?

Back in New York (oh, not this again) I would often get off work late.  Obviously.  Being a resident means working weird hours, and by "weird hours" I mean all the hours.  Many days I'd get in before the sun rose and leave work at 10:00pm, midnight, sometimes 2:00am, knowing I'd have to be back in to work the next day.

After a certain point of the night (I'd put that cutoff at around 9:00pm I guess) there was really no point in me hurrying home anymore, since I knew everyone there was already asleep and therefore there was no one to see.  So sometimes, on my way back downtown, I'd stop for a very late dinner by myself.  And if this sounds pathetic, it absolutely is not--eating alone in restaurants is awesome.  You get to order whatever you want and you don't have to share it with (or feed it to) anyone, and you can eat your whole meal while reading a book or listening to "This American Life" on your iPod.  And for someone who always felt like she was at the beck an call for other people (kid, patients, attendings, spouse), these occasional late night dinners were the ultimate indulgence.

I don't know how your tastes run, but when I'm up late at night, especially after a long night at work with limited sustenance, my appetite runs towards the hot, the brothy, the spicy, the comforting.  Korean food was always a good default--relatively inexpensive, lots of food, and restaurants in Koreatown (the only redeeming feature of the Herald Square area, in my opinion--please don't counter with "Macy's," you'll just depress me) are open all night long.  And everyone goes there.  There were many nights that I'd be grabbing a quick late-night meal on my way home, past midnight at some Korean restaurant that I didn't even know the name of because nothing in the restaurant was written in English, and the restaurant would just be packed with people.  Old couples grimly gumming down their hot pots, not speaking to each other.  Masses of young teenagers oozing booze and karaoke.  Single people like myself at many of the smaller tables, sitting alone but looking utterly contented.  It was so busy and alive, even at that hour.  And that made the food taste really good.

You'll forgive me this lament because obviously we're happy in Atlanta and we love the people here, but that last part is the key to why I miss New York so much.  And it's not just because I'm a creature of habit, or because everyone I've ever known in my life up until this point is in New York.  No, it's because in New York, you don't ever feel like you're just you.  You always feel like you're part of something bigger.  And that's fun.

There's a Vietnamese pho place up the street from where we live now in Atlanta that has some decent food.  But when I drove past it tonight, at 10:00pm, it had long since closed.  The lights were off, the parking lot was empty.  So instead I came home and made some instant noodles and sat in my dark house eating them by myself.




It wasn't the best late-night dinner I've ever had.  But it was all right.

* I already know what you're going to say.  "Something something The Flying Biscuit."  Right?

the homework room

I would be remiss to not post a picture of this, which is the future homework room.




You have to imagine it without all the furniture (this picture is from the realtor website, so it all belonged to the previous owners) and with the one full wall opposite the three windows repainted with chalkboard paint.  SO WE CAN WRITE OUT ALL OUR MATHEMATICAL THEOREMS.  Also, we can re-enact that scene from "Apollo 13" where Ed Harris talks about using the moon's gravity to slingshot the astronauts back to earth.  I have the NASA-era glasses already!  Now I just need to start chain smoking!

No, but seriously, I'll just be glad not to have workbooks and crayons all over the dining room table anymore.  Everyone's a winner!

(While on the subject, does anyone have any actual experience with using chalkboard paint? We bought the kind from Benjamin Moore.  Any good tips or things we should know before we make a big mess of things?)