I’ve realized, though, that it just returns because I’m sort of paralyzed at the moment. There’s a growing list of things I must do in the next month, but I seem to have trouble making anything happen, because EBF keeps sinking me into this weird rut of blah. And it’s exactly that feeling of blah that has kept me from writing a post today, when I promised I would write about The Goal.
So it turns out that I might be just letting it out there about The Goal today, sans navel-gazing, sans suitable explanation, sans the many steps or reasons that brought me to where I am now headed. Most of your guesses were far, far cooler than reality.
I love getting comments, but I am a bit of a private person. I am constantly paranoid that someone is going to inadvertently find my blog, someone that is not supposed to, and somehow my secrets will be out. And I sort of feel that there is an unspoken rule with blogging- that you blog as much or as little as you want to, in terms of detail, and that we all have to resist the urge not to poke at the specifics.
But on the other hand, it’s also silly to be coy. What’s more is that I think I’ve been hesitant about letting The Goal out because it really is not cool, not at all. It means something, it means very much to me, but the chances of it holding meaning for anyone else are pretty low. And I worry that you will all know what an awkward nerd I am. Oh, also, an awkward, unoriginal nerd, no less. But the thing is, once I realized that was what was silencing me, I realized it was time to cowboy up. Because let’s face it- y’all already know that I am an awkward, unoriginal nerd.
So, with all that wind-up, all that stalling for time, here’s the plain truth. I have left the life I had spent ten years building, the life of a corporate stiff, a life I had never intentionally built, a life that sort of just happened to me. And I have left it so that I can begin, in a very short time, hemorrhaging all the money I have saved at the expense of tuition for none other than that most stereotypical of Indian undertakings, medical school.
I like to kid myself that I am somehow different, because I really did love chemistry in college. I really did want to be an organic chemistry professor, and I probably could have lived out my days that way. But fate had other plans. And it’s hard to explain, on a day like this, marooned in EBF, how and why I came to the decision to go to medical school (especially as someone who could potentially qualify for a senior citizen discount). It’s hard to feel that there’s anything special about it, even. And that’s fine, at the moment.
As anyone who has been through the grand fun of applying to schools knows, you have to become quite comfortable with uncertainty. Will you or won’t you becomes the deliberation whenever your mind is allowed to roam free. People’s anxious questions have to be swallowed as well-intentioned even as you seethe at the salt poured on open wounds. But, you know, I’m being stupidly dramatic at the moment.
It meant a lot to me when I found out I got in somewhere. But right away, my restless brain was starting to calculate the probabilities of where I might find myself. The amusing thing, to me, if you happen to go back to that post, is that all my predictions were hilariously off. I guess I should watch out for pesky statistics or heavy mathematics.
The unthinkable happened. I posted back then that there was a 1% chance I would be remaining in California. And until very recently, I had made my peace with leaving California indefinitely. But as it turns out, California, here we come, right back where we started from. I won’t be coming back to San Francisco, of course. And, believe it or not, the decision to move back to California was actually a difficult one. But I am going, going, back, back to Cali (that one’s on tamasha).
Phew. That was a lot more direct and specific than anything I have written for a while. Tomorrow, I’ll return to foolish vagueness, frustrating ambiguity. But for now, I have bared this to you, and now I will brace for the judgment, silent or otherwise.
In other news, I love the song of the week this week. I mean, I love all of them, but I’ve held off posting this one for a few weeks to let it fully seap into every fiber of me first. It should be noted that I have been playing the album Robbers & Cowards non-stop ever since I got my hands on it in a fit of EBF ennui. I love almost every song on the album, but this one caught me and pulled me in immediately from the very first, banging piano chords. It’s sad and angry while pulsing with vitality and just generally rocking. In some ways, I think it captures so much of what war means, what suffering really feels like. All of that makes it sound like such a sad, morose song, and yet that’s not at all what it is. Do me a favor and check this one out. I swear I don’t just love it because it has the word ‘Hospital’ in it.
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