you don't miss me but I really don't mind

I just remembered that, oh yes, I have this thing called a blog, and I used to post here. You let a few days pass, and then they become a week, and then all of a sudden, it seems like maybe keeping a blog isn't much of a priority. And then there's some weird itch I can't scratch, and I am writing weird random garbage on post-it notes and other places, wondering why I have this need to get these things out.

I saw A N N A this weekend, which was good for the soul. I've baked so many cupcakes, cakes and cookies for the past few weeks that I may be single-handedly responsible for the country's diabetic epidemic. I have found big cracks in my foundations, a big gaping chasm where a friend used to be, and have been too tired and distracted to do anything about it. It's as though addressing that crack might crumble what is still keeping together. I've been feeling generally run down, and so I enlisted the help of Indian Uncle-ji to be my drill sergeant. Because no one does harassment better than Indian Uncles.

There's nothing much in all of that, now, is there? Also, I am trying to acquire a plane ticket for the holidays. Which is a borderline insane thing to do a week into December, with limited vacation time and an even more limited budget.

My defense mechanism in all of this has been humor. Oh yes. I have been watching Justin Timberlake dress in a leotard in order to be a backup dancer for Beyonce. I have been watching Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich threaten little children with Christmas tales involving them losing their toes. I've been watching every episode of 30Rock I can get my hands on.

Oh, and I've been mercilessly ridiculing Twilight to combat the idiotic affection some of my classmates have for it. But it's kind of like making fun of George W. Bush- way, way too easy.

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I've also discovered something about how I feel about medicine. I'm interested in it, sure. Unlike some of the haters who think nothing in books prepares you for anything, I do think the classes are all important and helping me. Similarly, I know that next year, I will learn a lot from the doing aspect of things. But, I've also figured something out. It turns out, I kind of like drama. I like listening to one field of medicine attack another- and let me tell you, you don't have to go too far to find that. The surgeons rail on the internists, the primary care folks rip on the surgeons, almost everyone finds something to tease the emergency doc's about, and absolutely everyone has a hate/envy thing going on with the dermatologists. And while my classmates were all either dying of boredom or frantically trying to translate the indecipherable language of rounds this past week (what we're doing right now is just like dipping a foot in the pool, just so that we get an idea of how bad the water is going to feel when we get dunked in it in our skivvies), I was blissfully following along for one reason and one reason alone. Initially, sure, I was trying to figure out what all the terminology meant, and noting which drugs I had never heard of, all the responsible med student stuff. But after 2 hours of rounds, when you're a 2nd year student who is not supposed to understand really, most of my classmates were zoning out. Instead, I was watching the dynamic. Just like I treat my fellow medical students, being on rounds was like watching the Discovery Channel. I got to watch an entire episode of When Attendings Attack, and it beat the sh*t out of any crap you could write for House or such nonsense.

This is, of course, not much of a skill, and certainly not a skill of any use as a medical student. But it was an interesting realization. If that's what interests me, I guess I need to find the specialty with the highest concentration of headcases, well, excluding psychiatry.