on our one year anniversary

I thought of making a list to do with this decade, but it was so overwhelming, to think of all that has happened, all the music that has kept me alive, and all the movies that have submerged me into their worlds, all the events that shaped the world as it is today, so that seemed like work best left to those who are a bit more insightful. Then I thought of making a list about this year, but honestly, I've not been fond of this year, and I've also been somewhat removed from things. Case in point: I've still not read a single piece of news about whatever is going on with Tiger Woods, have never seen an episode of Jersey Shore (my friends, I am sorry to tell you that I actually went to the Jersey Shore one weekend back when I was living in that neck of the woods and I am here to tell you that I have no desire to be exposed to any of those people in any way ever again, thank you very much), and only just figured out who Lady GaGa is in the past two months. So I couldn't really find the motivation to write anything extensive about 2009 either.

But when I did think of the past year, I was struck by one bit of pop culture, which was perhaps more evident to me all of a sudden because I was thinking of it in the sense of a decade. In the year 2000 (do you know how impossible it is to type those words down without having Conan O'Brien images stuck in my brain?), there was quite literally no appreciable South Asian presence on television. Now, consider the past year, and let's just highlight the most notables:

• Mindy Kaling: Mindy Kaling has been around for a while, to be certain. To tell the truth, I don't really even watch The Office anymore. It has grown a bit tired, and the whole Jim-Pam behemoth has drowned out the more entertaining aspects of the show. However, Kaling continues to find ways to be hilarious, frequenting the late show circuit this past year, tweeting cleverly, and most notably, creating a series of webisodes that culminated in a music video entitled Subtle Sexuality. Watch it here and thank me later.
  
• Aziz Ansari: I have to admit something. Sometimes, I don't find Aziz Ansari all that funny. He was at his prime when he was making fun of Kanye West, but now he is buddies with him. I watched the first few episodes of Season 1 of Parks & Recreations last year, and didn't really get into it. I'm told the show and Ansari took it to another level in Season 2. Regardless, Ansari has been ubiquitous this past year- he played against desi stereotype, playing a slacka$$ med student on Scrubs, created an alternate obnoxious persona for a role in Funny People, and is often said to be the funniest thing in Parks & Recreation. The only comedian who had a bigger year than him was Zach Galifianakis (sigh). His twitter has moments of brilliance when he channels P. Diddy or Soulja Boy, or when he has imagined tweet-versations with the likes of Lauren Conrad.
  
• Danny Pudi: If I was really writing a proper list, I would have put Pudi before Kaling and Ansari. Community is, to me, the funniest show of 2009, and it became inspired when the show acknowledged that it was an ensemble and let Danny Pudi and Don Glover run wild. Pudi's character is socially awkward, quotes pop cultural institutions like The Breakfast Club and Over The Top, and does a nifty Batman impersonation.
  
• Naveen Andrews: yeah, yeah, so he plays an Iraqi (I'm never going to get over that one, show), and the show has been on for years now, but Andrews can count himself with Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn as the only actors on the show who have been consistently watchable on Lost from the moment that they hit the screen. I acknowledge that the show is a morass of confusing plot twists and unanswered questions, and all of that can be both frustrating and entertaining. But Andrews' bada$$, miserable Sayid is my favorite thing about the show, and when Abrams and company blow it and kill the character off, I'm going to have to stop watching.
  
• Rekha Sharma: only the nerds know about her, but for those of us who watched Battlestar Galactica, it is worth noting that one of the Final Five Cylons was a desi, dudes! Not just that, but her character, Tory, was a little troublemaker, duping the President, seducing Baltar, killing off Callie, eagerly abandoning the humans. She was a strong, complex character, and fans of the show anticipated her comeuppance, which wound up being a major plot point on the show.

What I like, in considering the above, is that I don't even watch Kaling and Ansari's shows. And that there are plenty of other desi actors I have not included here- Maulik Pancholy in 30 Rock (his Jonathan has had some truly inspired exchanges with boss Jack Donaghy, but he has been sorely absent from most episodes this season), Sendhil Ramamurthy in Heroes (sorry, but I refuse to watch that show), Kunal Nayyar in Big Bang Theory. The list undoubtedly goes on. It's pretty impressive, when you consider that in 2000 even ER had not managed to have one Indian doctor on the show, which, let me tell you, after having spent over two years in medical school, is absolutely ludicrous (if you can find me a hospital in Chicago, Seattle, or Princeton with no Indian residents or attendings, I will gladly supply you half of my tuition). So I guess it's been a good decade for the desi's, and when I think about it, this decade's treated me alright too.

see how they resemble one another

Oh but you know I couldn't end the year on such a note, now could I?

I started this exercise this week, partly to snap myself out of writer's block and partly because everyone keeps mentioning the end of the decade. I've been working on summing up each year of this decade. It's an illuminating experience. This was my first decade of fully formed adulthood. The significance of that is more than I expected it to be when I reflected back. And my, for such a boring person, I managed to sneak a lot of twists and turns into a decade.

Thinking of who I was in the year 2000 and who I have become, it's made me feel a little better about life. I was taking small steps at the beginning of this decade, timidly nudging my way towards what I wanted. But I really came into my own during these past years, in a way I never would have expected. If I am sometimes unsure of myself, if I sometimes wallow and brood over my future now, it's because I am fully aware that I am writing my own script. There are no expectations on my shoulders, except those I place on myself. This is my story, and it goes through many rounds of revisions and editing, it often feels ripe for a rewrite, characters sometimes clutter chapters, and other times it seems the protagonist does a lot of navel gazing.

Some writers say you should know the last sentence of your book before you start. This is not that kind of story.

*

In other news, this is maybe not the best song to close the year out, but I like it. Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago undoubtedly has made many a list of best's. This song is not off that album, but has Bon Iver's trademark intimate sound, conveying the feeling of looking at a candid snapshot from a moment that meant something to someone. It seemed apt. I have trouble summing up each year into some big sweeping epic, but even I have the photo album of times that froze still and are still frozen safely stored away in my mind.

one foot in and one foot back, it don't pay to live like that

Phew, it occurred to me that it's been far too long since I've posted. I think it only matters to me, but it troubles me nonetheless. With the holidays and the end of the year approaching, I held a mirror up to what had been going on and realized that it's time to work it all through.

I'm not adept at simply writing: it has been a bad year. The world has been whittled down by whimpers rather than bangs, and the art of losing has become exceedingly easy to master, but that does not really make anything any better. It's, in some ways, seemed like a simple thing. It seems like I've handled it well, losing some of the people that I counted among my closest friends. I didn't fight to keep them. There were no massive blow outs. And once they were gone, it sort of felt as though that was how it was meant to be.

And yet, the voids are there, gaping holes. You could pour water through me these days.

Meanwhile, medical school continues to be this odd mixture of a calling and a clusterf***, quite frankly. There are so many things about medicine to love, and so many other things about medicine to make you wonder why anyone goes into it at all or why someone doesn't just dismantle the system and start over from scratch. This is universally acknowledged to be one of the worst years of one's medical education, so it could just be a temporary issue. There are still plenty of times that I am fully aware that I got exactly what I wanted and that I am quite fortunate to have it.

But at the same time, sometimes you just have to admit the ugly truth, which is that it has just been a miserable, lousy year. It's been exhausting, and it's been lonely. The people I've shoved into the gaping holes don't fit, are bargain stand-in's. A lot of physicians say that you find your people during your clinical rotations, find your tribe, and that's how you know what your specialty will be. I bought into that initially this past year. It wasn't until recently that I truly started to accept the fact that I will never magically find some secret society of like-minded people. And maybe if i did, that wouldn't satisfy me either. After all, some of the dearest friends I have had lacked much in common with me.

So really, I've been spending the close of this year fixated on the concept of healing, which might be a topic for a separate post. I remain hopeful that next year will be a better one. Much to the surprise of most people that know me in real life (whatever that is these days), I am actually irrationally optimistic about how life will turn out. Despite all the data and evidence suggesting otherwise, I prefer to believe in the endless possibilities.

people try and hide the night

Sleeping is giving in, no matter what they tell us
Sleeping is giving in, so lift your heavy eyelids

You might think, from the way I post around here, that I've just been on surgery rotations for the whole of the past six months. Because it's the only time I seem to write about anything. For a while, this fact really bothered me in the sense of oh holy sh*tmonkeys, am I destined to become a surgeon, fml?!? But revisiting the OR this past week, I've become more aware of why I find myself writing about it.

First of all, there's the whole novelty of it. One of the things I've learned this past year is that the easier rotations are the ones you have no interest in doing for the rest of your career; strangeness makes sense. I treat all surgical endeavors like I am visiting the set of a movie or a distant planet or something similarly completely out of my sphere of reality.

Then, there's the fact that surgery is a magnet for ridiculous personalities. Perhaps that's why surgeries are so often the subject of fictionalizations of hospitals. All the characters are down there in their scrubs, equal parts bravado, brains, and eccentricities. You know what you're getting into with surgery. You don't expect kid gloves, you don't expect to be treated well, you don't expect forgiveness.

Then there's the simplicity of knowing what you can expect from surgery and surgeons. You expect to be worked to the bone, and you expect to be shamed, and you rise to that sort of humiliation because usually there is low-hanging, tangible fruit to grab to escape embarrassment. Surgeons may grumble about how you haven't memorized every artery or ligament, but if you can manage to tie a good knot, well, then you might be spared a complete flogging as a med student. Is it a good and useful way to educate? Not really. But it's predictable.

This song was randomly played in the OR this past week, but I was thinking of how apt it is. Surgeons are on this kind of crack; they convince themselves that rest is for the weak, a chance to cut is a chance to cure, and medical complexities are not worthy of their attention.

I mean, also this Arcade Fire song is independently an a$$ kicker. It's filled with mischief and energy, and as soon as it came on in the OR, I wanted to shout out, oh it's you, old friend! Like an old drinking buddy visiting from out of town reminding you of why you were always so fond of them. I heard it and was refueled for the rest of the very long day.

That's the difference, I guess. Internal Medicine, which is probably where my future lies, prompts me to want to pull out Billie Holiday and have a stiff drink- and that's a post for another time when I've a lot more capacity for introspection. With Surgery, I get a peppy Arcade Fire or Phoenix song, and convince myself all of this is so temporary, it will be gone before I have time to be completely exhausted by it.

but we didn't mind, we didn't know better

So I had wanted to write this whole thing about a Regina Spektor song. It had all started because I saw her perform very recently. Unfortunately, every time I sit down to write about it, the only thing that seems to come out is an unintelligible mess. Oh well, try, try again.

I’ve already beaten to death a (now) rather old Spektor song, Fidelity, but when I heard it live, it pretty much evoked the exact same reaction I had when I first heard it. The strangest things can happen at a good concert. Standing in a crowded theater with the lights down low, I was transported to a sunny block in Potrero Hill, big dumb grin on my face. A good, good friend, an evaporated one, one of the ghosts, introduced me to the song so many years ago. And as I listened to Spektor play it, I thought of how perfect it was and how sometimes people just get you. Sometimes, entirely unintentionally, but then again, it turns out that doesn’t really matter.

Here’s another Spektor song. Initially, I had wanted to write about Eet- it seemed a very appropriate song for a few friends who are going through rough patches at the moment. Only problem is that I just don’t feel that way at the moment. I don’t feel that time is fading or dulling things.

Once you get infected with love, it’s like a virus, that’s how I feel. It’s a virus that lays dormant, and you think you’re cured, and oh, next time it will all be so different. Then someone comes along, infection gets reactivated, and next thing you know you’re sprawled out on the ground, sick once more. And I suppose you could be sad about that, but Spektor does not appear to be, not in The Calculation, which seems to laugh at the sleepwalking that goes on in life and delights in the fire that ignites when there is an awakening.

It’s all rather absurd from a certain angle. Right after falling for someone, the arithmetic begins. Does it all add up? What is the ratio of good to bad? What can be subtracted? Can the feeling multiply exponentially? Or is the whole thing headed for long division? But you could pull out every polynomial and apply all the integrals, and none of it would give you an answer. Maybe the only thing mathematic that applies is infinity- it feels just that large and intangible, that real and unreal.

I suppose all of this applies to writing something down about this song. I could try to describe why it is a great song. I could try to explain what about hearing Spektor open with this song sold me on it. But it likely wouldn’t make any sense, not from outside my head. Still, people keep on singing love songs and trying to write about things they can’t fully articulate, don’t they?

round here, something radiates

I'm going to do something uncharacteristic and write about something that has nothing to do with med school. I know, I know, hold your applause, please. It's sort of appropriate, given that this blog turned 5 without me noticing it. That's how time passes for me these days. But what has been on my mind since yesterday goes back to all of the things I used to think about when I first started writing here. Love, longing, place, person, time.

Maybe that's why I've liked blogging all of these years, because here is a place that nothing needs to make sense or to fit. I can be the square peg that I have always been here and some of you actually, shockingly, don't mind. The world, the blogosphere especially, is riddled with misfits perhaps.

All of this, of course, started to turn over in my head because of a song. This song might not be your speed. It's super-subdued, as almost every song Sam Beam writes is. And I should warn you that there's a twang. It's a little bit country. Don't be scared. Or maybe do. I don't like this Iron & Wine song because I am a hipster. I am the least hipster-ish person on earth these days, trust me. This song reminds me of home.

And it's an odd thing to write because I don't really feel like I have a home. It reminds me of the home that I rarely write about, because it's so much in the past, so long gone. It doesn't even exist. Really, it's gone- the broseph and I used to race into the forest behind our house after school or every day of the summer. All the other kids from the neighborhood did the same, and we would spend our days and afternoons there, building forts, digging up salamanders, venturing deeper into the woods until our childhood internal alarms warned us we had gone too far. It was our own little world and we lived in it every day until dusk, when our neighbor Michael's mother would ring a loud cow bell, and all of us scattered back home to our very, very different lives. And that place is not just gone because I'm no longer a child, or because I no longer live in EBF, or because times have changed such that a bunch of 5 to 7-year olds wandering around the woods is no longer kosher. The forest was cut down years ago so that a new housing development could be built instead. Trees no longer hold any mystery; you can see the house behind them clearly now.

Still, this song evokes all those memories for me. Memories so idyllic that I wonder if they came from someone else's childhood. There were all the bad things you can imagine about living in the middle of nowhere and being brown, but it didn't wholly define my experience of living in EBF. There was also strawberry picking in June, shelling peas on a porch, jumping into piles of autumn leaves, building snowmen. And later there was what this song really reminds me of. Being a teenager in EBF was the oddest thing of all- on the one hand, to have MTV at your disposal on the one hand, and, on the other, to have lazy afternoons on a lake or quiet mornings sitting on a dark shore watching the waves crash against the rocks. To discover Morrissey and Public Enemy on the one hand, and to listen to an acoustic guitar at a picnic or around a campfire on the other. And to add to all that inherent strangeness, I was aware that I was one more layer of different. You grow up in a place like EBF and everything there seeks to root you down in the place; in its very nature, in every tree, leaf, and sky, it seeks to bind you. And yet, I was always also aware that I wasn't quite so captive- and I wasn't sure whether to be happy or sad about it.

I've met a lot of people now, and I know that I am not the only Indian kid who grew up in the middle of nowhere. It's not a singular experience. Still, it twists my brain, especially since I did flee so far. I gravitated towards cities desperately. I wanted to be near a pulse and a beat, and I wanted to be in a place where there was nothing I needed to explain. And I have rather loved that. Some of the times I have felt most at peace in the world, I was simply walking down the street in Manhattan or San Francisco.

Then again, it's fall. And in the fall, I always think of EBF, its country roads, and the fiery leaves lighting up all the trees.

It's not that I want to go back. That's the thing about the past, I suppose. I don't want to relive it, and I don't even really miss it. But it is there, that history, in my very bones. I'll always be that girl who has Resurrection Fern and M.I.A on her iPod, and is equally enamored of both. It feels good to get older, because you get so much more accustomed to all the eccentricities. You stop trying to avoid contradiction, or rather you become forgiving of contradictions, because you realize they only seem so from a certain angle. It no longer strikes me as strange, to dream of both the Mission and the Flume. And better yet, as you age- you stop caring if others find it strange.

Would you prefer the easy way? No, well okay then, don't cry.

October arrived abruptly. The past month was a blur anyway, but October came and it went from the scorching heat of summer to the cool wind of fall overnight. Do I make it sound like a bad thing? That's not my intention. When the chill came, when I had to shut the ceiling fan off to fend off the shivers, I knew everything was going to be alright. Not just because I can turn on my oven. Not just because it means I've survived by far my worst month of medical school. No, not just all of those things.

But all the same, whatever the reason, there's a pizza in the oven. There are people, even in the horrible morass of medical school (and I can now call it a morass with complete certainty, having seen the ugliness that is prevalent among medical students up close and personal now), who have lent a hand. I thought, for a time, that I was taking advantage of them. Maybe I am a bit, but I am grateful for them, and that has to count for something, I like to think.

I suppose I was set free recently when an attending told me that I should be more of a show-off, play the game. It was strangely liberating, because, while it was a criticism, it was one of those moments that defines you in life. A line is placed in front of you. You can cross it and it may get you some short-term gain. But you have to live with what is on the other side. And I realized, I am willing to pay the consequences of staying on my side, of staying fundamentally me.

I've realized that a lot of people in school think I am young because I appear to be quite malleable. Which I am. But the thing is, that's because I know I have plenty of flaws. And I really and truly love many aspects of medicine. I want to be good at it. So I tend to take criticism seriously and adapt accordingly.

But not this kind of criticism. And it feels, oddly enough, good to know that there are some parts of me that are not amorphous. Some parts of me are set in stone. I could change them, but I could not live with the change.

I was reminded of all of this, tangentially, because I had recently purchased Amelie on DVD for sanity prophylaxis, and was watching it today. For some reason, I was thinking of seeing it in the theater. I had been living in New Jersey at the time, and we had to drive 40 minutes to get to a theater that was playing the movie. Not only was it well worth the trek, but as I sat there, soaking in this perfect, perfect film, I remember thinking that I didn't ever want to lose the part of myself that, even while living in multiplex suburbia, was compelled to seek out such little treasures.

Elsewhere, I can handle. Not fitting in, no problem. But I don't want to be a stranger to myself. And now that I know that, I somehow know everything will be fine.

I took the money, I spiked your drink

It occurs to me that I never really write much about graduate school. It somehow seems fitting to write about it now, all these years later, though still, I don't find it possible to say much about the experience in detail. It wasn't a good time in my life.

Like other dark times in my life, I find myself occasionally looking back on the chapters and thinking it quite something that I made it out of there in nearly one piece. But not entirely in tact. That would be giving myself too much credit. I've realized now that I have a very specific reaction to this kind of unhappiness- it's evolved in some ways, but in other ways it hasn't evolved at all.

The weird pattern I've noticed recently is that every time I fall into one of these downward spirals, some poor soul emerges as collateral damage. And every time, in some ways, it has gotten worse. In high school, it did not matter, everything was a jumble, who knew what motivated us back then, and we were too young to take anything very seriously. In college, it was easy to think of it as a shared blunder, but there remain pangs of guilt that come over me when I think of two people who put up with a whole lot of me being morose and glum in the hopes that it was the start of something much more meaningful than it was ever intended it to be.

In grad school, it felt indisputable. There were rationalizations that could be made in college- it wasn't entirely my fault, I could tell myself without feeling like I was fooling myself. I was out of excuses in grad school. I was just in a horrible place in my life, and as a result, I sought after anything that made me feel less miserable. A part of me knew I was giving the wrong impression, knew I did not reciprocate, and yet, I went along with it all because I was so numb. That's what happens when you feel that awful, I suppose- you cease to care about inflicting that sort of misery on anyone else.

But it's short-lived, and there's a reason that I don't write anything much about grad school. I'm not impressed with myself, I'm quite the opposite. No one, no one at all, not even those who were there at the time, knows just how unimpressive my behavior was, and maybe no one ever will.

This is an interesting test, the business of the present tense. I'm not nearly as low as I was in graduate school, not even close. But I'm raw and unsteady the way that I was back then. And a victim has emerged to offer himself up. I've been trying my best to avoid the temptation, because I know where this is leading, I know what this is all based upon, and it's not real, not to me. I'm older now, I understand more. I'm less interested in the idea of a temporary fix, because I know about the decades of regret that follow. It's not like they're persistent, not constant. But every once in a while, I'll be reminded, and I'll be sorry all over again. I can do without adding another something to wash up among those waves.

I'm just trying to get myself some gravity

There's a whole story behind these, but it's unlikely to be interesting to anyone else, so let's just call it my pathetic form of rebellion against the system:



And allow me to say a few words about caramel: it requires your undivided attention. You cannot turn your back on it for a minute, or it will punish you by turning into a burnt bitter mess. You have to concentrate on it. And also, much like some of my favorite work when I was working in the lab, you have to orchestrate a few steps together in parallel. And just as in the lab, I get a great deal of satisfaction from the abracadabra transformation, from the I made this tangibility of it all.

I wish these would keep well enough to be mailed. I would just send them off to all you all. Instead they'll likely wind up in the hands of the very people who are currently making me miserable and causing me to have nightmares. On a tangent, I wake up infuriated when I've had dreams related to that sort of stuff. It's as though you never got a break from it all, because your subconscious decided to stew over it all through the night.

It probably did not help matters that I went out to dinner last night. The double-edged sword in med school at the moment is that the outside world is completely out of your grasp, but you desperately want to cling to something outside of the hospital. The double-edged part of that is that the only people available to you, then, are your fellow inmates. I have mixed feelings about it all. On the one hand, I suppose it's nice to commiserate. On the other, it never really gets you anywhere, and then you've really just remained in your little bubble anyway. So all you've really done is conjured up an illusion of "getting out" when really you've gone nowhere.

And then of course, there is the distinct possibility that I have no idea what I'm talking about. I've noticed lately that I'm so tired that I have stopped making sense. What a great and safe way to learn about medicine.

so lead us there

It's not all rainbows and sunshine in California, it must be said. Moreso now, maybe moreso now than ever. On the surface, it's bright and people are smiling, but it's a thin veneer. Everything's on layaway, the ground beneath your feet is moving, the hills are on fire, and that smile doesn't fade despite all the other things that fade- friends, family, jobs, whatever. You want to shake those people with the painted-on smiles and yell "Feel something, already!"

All those things could be said about this place, I suppose, but there are plenty of times that I let all of that slide. I tend to scrutinize it the way you do with anything you love- you find faults in love when you are feeling rotten. And thus, this song came to mind. I suppose I don't love California as a whole but all the same- I'm wasting time being homesick for the East Coast because it's more convenient than dwelling on the fact that I am rather profoundly unhappy right now.

And then comes the trickier part, which is why I have avoided fixating on the topic or writing about it either. This cannot be fixed. It's something I simply have to withstand. I just have to tough out a bad spell that will last for a long while. It's a difficult thing to swallow, that reality. The delayed gratification thing didn't feel like delayed gratification to me before now.

But you know. California has the San Francisco fog. California has the chateaus in Sonoma. California has Yosemite Falls. California has the beautiful 1. California has the beautiful Coronado sunset. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems, and this too shall pass, and all of that jazz. It might sound trite, but it also often happens to be true.

there isn't much that I feel I need

Oh, if you would please, have a look at this video of Grizzly Bear's Two Weeks. Not only is it a rather beautifully made video, but then you can hear the song that's rattled about in my head for the past, well, two weeks.

I've nothing to write about school at the moment. It's been lovely of late, and tiring, and it keeps me away from a lot I yearn to do and from people I yearn to speak with or write to, but I brought it on myself, and I don't think I'd change much if I could, so what is there to write really?

Since so much discourse has become polarized, I feel increasingly like the misfit that I undoubtedly am. Which is fine, as I've become accustomed to being an oddball, especially in the conformist world that is medicine. But that is why I rely so heavily on music at times, because somewhere in some song is a friend who gets it.

A roundabout way to say that I like this song. The original version bemoans, I only want a proper house, but then qualifies it with I don't mean to seem like I care about material things like social status. I just love that. It's not contradictory is the thing. With everything being so all or nothing, so extreme, the subtleties are lost. It's got to be true, I have to believe. You can want stability without being wholly complacent, without blindly following the current. And is it really necessary to be ambitious for ambition's sake? This, I find, is an important question to ask yourself in the academic setting again, again, oh, and then, once more with feeling.

And then came along this cover by Taken By Trees, which, to me, distills it down even more. Playful, simple, a tiny bit nonsensical, and of course, the island feeling of the music doesn't hurt either. Who needs lemonade and porch swings if you have this song, I wonder.

I'll find us a way to make light

You guys, I still can't find my camera charger. This means I really still need to clean up my trash heap apartment. Instead, I keep getting distracted by trying to catch up with the world. For example, until yesterday, I didn't know what the frak birthers were- I'm still not sure I understand, for that matter, but really until yesterday, I didn't even know the context of the term.

I've also been distracted by music, because I knew better than to start listening to too much new music while I was on my surgical rotation. That's a dangerous bit of business. Sometimes, if I find a new song I like, I have to listen to it about 200 times, nearly crashing my computer. I've always been this way- my brother thought I was completely mental in high school as I destroyed tapes, because Mr. Khosla, I would rewind it all the time. Worse yet, it wasn't enough to just have the music playing. No, I had to sit there, nearly catatonic, absorbing the song for the 70th, 80th, eleventy-billionth time. That would not have gone over well on my surgical rotation- though there were still a few I'm-dead-tired-and-about-to-hit-a-wall moments when I set iTunes on random and said hello to a bunch of old friends.

Anyhow, now I'm kind of overdosing as a result. After swallowing whole the entirety of the new Goldspot album (which really is excellent and deserves a post all of its own) and the new Cornershop album, I have become fixated on two songs. One is not a very good song, the other is absolutely breathtaking.

The first is Pearl Jam's The Fixer which I've posted for your listening pleasure. Which is funny, because this is the song that I don't think is that good of a song. It's not a bad song, but it's not on par with Pearl Jam's gloried past. But the lyrics to this song really got me thinking this week. I've already had a few email exchanges about it. Most music, most films, most everything these days, truly, are about letting go. Even I, who used to be so in need of anchors and chemical bonds, have become comfortable with entropy and floating around without any restraints. At first, I thought this was just the nature of getting older, but lately, I've been thinking that it's more of a cultural shift, some sort of sign of the times.

And while I think that it's important to be present, to not dwell too much on the past or the future, there's something to be said for the lyrics to this song. I've thought about it specifically because I think that's what I found rather seductive about surgery. I don't think I'm ultimately cut out to do it for a living (punny!), but there's something so tempting about the simplicity of it (a surgeon somewhere is sharpening their scalpel and aiming it for my jugular right now for daring to call surgery in any way simple). There is something undeniably satisfying about it- cut out a tumor, cancer gone, thank you, come again. I know it's rarely quite that simple, but surgery lures you in with that possibility.

I suppose the lyrics to The Fixer are similarly seductive-

when something's dark, let me shed a little light on it
when something's cold, let me put a little fire on it
if something's old, I wanna put a bit of shine on it
when something's gone, I wanna fight to get it back again

I know, I know. I know the song is a mirage. I know it doesn't quite work this way. And I guess that's why I'll never be a surgeon, because I can't, at the end of it all, buy into the simplicity. I know it's not as straightforward as all that. Usually, if you're talking of letting go, if you've lost something, it was meant to leave or it's gone such that there's not much you can do to get it back again. You're just clawing at empty space, and wasting a lot of energy in the process, more often than not. It's odd. I think I've only got that fire for myself these days- I don't like the feeling that pieces of me are falling away. I will fight to get it back again, to get back those pieces of me that I did not want to lose. Like the part of me that can turn into a zombie because she happened upon some silly song.

The other song is Grizzly Bear's Two Weeks, which, I don't know what to say about it exactly. If you've listened to it a bunch of times, perhaps it's grabbed you like it did me. I mean, it has this to recommend it:

Would you always...
maybe sometimes...
make it easy,
take your time.

I love the unfinished thoughts, how much is left unsaid and unresolved. I know dysfunctional relationships are horrid and unpleasant to experience, but holy Toledo, do they ever make for beautiful songs.

there goes the fear again

There's this heartbreaking line in 500 Days of Summer:

You weren't wrong, Tom. You were just wrong about me.

I have alternated between wanting and not wanting to see this movie. It's a strange little and large experience. I found myself laughing even though it should have hurt. After watching the film, AP wanted to catch up on all kinds of things that had nothing to do with the movie, and I found myself a little bitter about that. I just wanted to cling to the movie, hold onto the whole experience.

But then I concluded I didn't really need to cling to heartbreaking and heightened scenes from a movie. We all have those scenes from our own lives, and it seems that this movie just reminds us all of that. And it is funny and sad, just like the film is.

Honestly, I don't even want to write anything else about it. Let's see how it stands up with time, but right now, it feels to me nearly close to Before Sunset in terms of breathtaking familiarity.

(But do allow me to say that I knew this movie was going to sucker punch me when the protagonist karaoke'd The Pixies' Here Comes Your Man. That's as good as sending the Borg after me.)

*

Sort of related, sort of not. I have an extremely brief break but am trying to make the most of it. To that end, of course, I had to make some ice cream. When I've straightened out my apartment well enough to find the charger to my camera, I will document it, but there's a rather funny story associated with it. Well, it's funny to me. It might be disgusting to others.

I had decided to make peanut butter ice cream. I don't know exactly why, but I don't question these impulses anymore. I had put some half-and-half in a pot and started to heat it up. Scalding milk and heavy cream is the basic beginning to making the base for ice cream, at least the way I make it. The half-and-half had been in my refrigerator for 2 weeks but it was unopened and pasteurized, so I figured it was fine. Well, not so much. I started to boil it, and spontaneously, it just started to curdle. At first, I tried vigorously stirring the mixture, thinking I could get it homogeneous again (ha! What kind of Indian am I anyway?). Then I stopped and took stock. This was shaping up for FAIL of the major variety.

And then I laughed and stopped trying to make it work. I love you, Tim Gunn, but sometimes making it work involves embracing failure. So I let the mixture full-on curdle and then set it aside. I took out some fresh heavy cream and milk from the refrigerator and made the actual ice cream custard base while the curds cooled down off the stove. The peanut butter ice cream came out just as I would have liked- not too sweet, a little salty, a fair amount of peanut butter flavor.

Then I examined the curds, and decided, what the whey, and strained out the liquid. Then I dug up a recipe for chocolate ricotta cheese muffins, and made them. I ate one (okay, two) this morning to make sure this whole crackpot scheme did not involve any unwanted microorganisms causing problems. No issues. And the chocolate muffins came out moist and tender because of the curds. It wasn't what I had in mind when I had started the whole production, but that, ultimately, is part of the fun, isn't it?

Yes, indeed, I am looking forward to autumn.

it's not a miracle we needed

Luxuries at the moment include blogging this post, and the promise of properly washing my hair tomorrow morning- I could have indulged and washed my hair tonight, but frankly, I lack the energy such a task requires. Yes, I'm fully aware of how idiotic that statement is; doesn't make it any less the case.

I will write this because I used to, once upon a time, mention music more frequently than not, and eventually, the following will lead to the mention of music, I swear. This past week has been, well, the suck, let's call it. Probably the worst part of a med school rotation in surgery is that, as a student, you end up spending a lot of time standing, nervously trying not to break the sterile field, but unable to see or do much of anything. At such times, you are acutely aware that you could be doing other things with this time, like, I don't know- sleep, eat, study, go to the bathroom, shower. But, such is surgery.

Today, I was unfortunately scrubbed into an excruciatingly long surgery. The first week, when I was stuck scrubbed into these types of marathon boredom sessions, I used to get progressively impatient, noticing how tiring it is and starting to fixate on that Danny Glover quote "I'm getting too old for this sh*t." Probably moreso than any other specialty, it's seductively simple for me to latch onto that quote and use it as an excuse for all.

But then I have to remember that, were that the case, I wouldn't be here at all. Yes, it is a bit more physically demanding some time, but then I've never been a person who enjoyed standing around for hours on end and I've never been a person who could function on a minimal amount of sleep. I made do when I was younger, and I can make do now. It's just easier for me to fall into the trap of whining right now because it's fairly clear to me that I don't want to be a surgeon.

I don't know if this is a distinctly female thing, but I can only think to describe myself yesterday as being so tired that I was afraid I was going to burst into tears. Just from sheer exhaustion. Does that only happen to women? Better yet, does that only happen to weirdos? Regardless, I came home and decided that I couldn't have another day like that. There's no crying in baseball and all of that (no worries though, I did not cry at the hospital- on principle alone, I will not be driven to tears by surgeons). So today, I was actively thinking of ways to deal with the boredom.

The room was silent, which, as it turns out, was a blessing. Most people complain because this particular attending does not allow iPod's to be blasting music while he wields his scalpel. Usually, I would complain too, as one of the few joys for me the past few weeks has been analyzing various surgeons' playlists (I still have a soft spot in my heart for the dude who played most of the Pretty in Pink soundtrack and General Public's Tenderness). However, it means you are at the whim of someone else's tastes. Today's silence was a kind of a freedom.

I've already posted it here in the past, but I think Phoenix's 1901 has fueled me through 2009. Or, when I've worn it out a bit much, Lisztomania is just as useful. It reminds me of the year that The Killers first broke and I kept finding myself driving at unsafe speeds whenever their songs played on the radio. Phoenix is pretty much my Red Bull. There's something so hopeful and hopeless about the songs, but the music has this pulse and drive. These are songs of now, somehow. So, when I really can't take it, when I think I can't take another minute, I let the music get into my head and it just pushes me forward. No choice but to keep going, that's what the band seems to say. And at 3:30 in the morning, or when holding a suction tube for two hours, that's a message that needs to be heard.

you're gonna send me, right back to the start

Allow me to apologize for the manic nature of these posts. And let me write up front that this post is mostly silly. I think some silliness is warranted right now, because the serious things can't be written about at the moment.

First, I've thought about writing about this post since the first time I saw this video some weeks back- I think I first got the link from A N N A. I'm sorry it's not embeddable, but I suspect that most people have seen this wedding entrance dance by now anyway. A couple of my classmates have since sent the link to me as well, with the requisite ZOMG! and squee!'s required of their generation.

Do I sound grouchy? I suppose I am a bit. I do think the video and the idea is super-cute. I think all weddings would probably be improved by such ceremonial flourishes. Only, I wonder- have all the viewers of this video never been to any Indian weddings? Have they never seen any Bollywood movies? Yeah, these guys danced down an aisle, sure. Indians dance all the way down the street on their way to the wedding.

I don't know, but I was just thinking that it's sort of funny that the West seems to have just discovered that dancing is not a crime, and may actually demonstrate an appropriate amount of joy at an event that is supposed to be celebratory.

I just realized I totally sound like Indian Uncle on Goodness Gracious Me who yelps out "INDIAN!" at everything.

*

Though I know it's rather unfortunate to celebrate a person's body of work after they've passed away, rather than while they were still alive, I think John Hughes is so imprinted on most children of the 80s that we very nearly take him for granted. What I think makes Hughes' movies so Hughes is not that they were so quoteable- though they often were- but that they have such personal significance. I know that probably seems stupid, given how light in substance some of the movies appear. But they meant something to me as a kid, and even now. I was having these thoughts when I heard about his passing away:

• Even though the premise of Pretty in Pink is ridiculous on so many levels (and I'm not sure I'll ever understand how we're supposed to believe that Molly Ringwald ruining two perfectly decent dresses to create one of the ugliest dresses in film history is an indication of her character's talent), I've always been fond of it for a few reasons. First, the music, my goodness, the music. Second, I had a Duckie in college (he bore an uncanny resemblance as well). And even though Pretty in Pink never fully delved into it, I know how sweet and also how painful that can be.
  
• Sometimes I think I was permanently scarred by Hughes' movies. For example, I think Some Kind of Wonderful might have destroyed me on par with Say Anything. The latter movie is destructive in that it leads people to believe that there might be a Lloyd Dobler out there (although some of my friends have met and married him, so keep hope alive!). The former is destructive because it leads people to believe that Watts' martyr-style devotion can lead to a happy ending. I don't care though. I love Watts. How many characters can get away with saying "you break his heart, I break your face"? Even if Watts hadn't strolled out into the fade to black wearing her best friend's future, she'd still be the person I'd rather be.
  
• Probably my weirdest reaction to a Hughes movie was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. While so many of my friends were cuckoo for Ferris Bueller, when I saw the movie, my first instinct was to sympathize with his sister. I think this is because my brother was something of a Ferris Bueller. He wasn't really that popular in high school, but he was always the one getting away with all sorts of misbehavior. He could and can quite effortlessly charm people, and things just always come easier to him. So me, I could understand Jeanie's rage. And of course, I could relate to Cameron. My entire adolescence centered around worrying about getting in trouble, but then ultimately being dragged into doing something irresponsible.
  
• Even though a part of me begrudgingly has to admit that I like Sixteen Candles, it was also the first movie that I saw and thought this is some effed up sh*t regarding racial stereotypes. I've had entire hourlong conversations with RR about Gedde Watanabe, and whether he feels a sense of self-loathing about that role or whether he just found it funny.
  
• I came to realize that I was officially an adult/old due to a Hughes movie. While I still find the movie entertaining, The Breakfast Club now just seems like a bunch of overdramatic teenagers feeling sorry for themselves (with the exception of Bender- I now wonder why protective services never intervened on his behalf). But I'm not too old to remember that I did once think that it captured a lot of what it felt like to be in high school. I suppose it's a bit of a relief to find that high school really doesn't hold the same weight it once did. (on a side note, Don't You Forget About Me was my high school graduation song, which is sort of funny to me now because, um, I have forgotten. A lot.)

Anyway, as a tribute, I am also posting a song from Sixteen Candles that I've always liked, just to finish off the nostalgia overload.

if you want me to break down and give you the keys

I want to write of the things that I knew before I was born, the things that were predetermined, the things that everyone in my family knew but never dared to speak aloud. But of course, I am just another member of my family, the same tongue-tied inability to articulate cramping my fingers, constricting my throat.

Instead, all I can write is that the closest semblance to a sister I've ever had- not an older sister to look up to or a younger sister to dote upon, but a true sister- is not well. And from 2000 some odd miles away, there is very little I can do. Even were I there, it's likely there is not much I could do. Which is immensely frustrating given what I've been doing with my life for the past three years.

What I really want to do is write about her, but I feel as I have always felt about her. Fiercely protective. I often have little shame when it comes to writing, but I would not cheapen her by telling her story, especially through my eyes.

All I can write is that I am one of three. One never made it, one fought for every breath, and one was me. I doubt anyone knows that, I doubt anyone sees the connection. I am not my parents' child. I am one of three, and I have never lived up to it. And if she goes now, I don't know how I'll ever make amends.

tired of talking, talked out, ticked off or toughed up

I've been following the laws of physics lately, and thus, this blog has been getting the shaft in favor of sleeping, eating, and passing this forsaken rotation.

I haven't bothered writing about these rotations because I don't feel like boring everyone to tears with that babble, and besides which, being immersed in it as much as I am, it feels as though it is hard to write sensibly about it. I need some distance which is not really possible at the moment. I can say that it sometimes feels frustrating, sometimes feels triumphant, sometimes feels important, sometimes feels trivial, sometimes feels like medicine helps people, sometimes feels like medicine is in vain. I have worked with physicians that are admirable and some that are not so admirable. I have watched behaviors that I would like to emulate, and others I would rather avoid. I've been told that I should be a surgeon, and I've also been asked, "you're not interested in surgery, are you?"

For the record, no, I am not interested in surgery, not even vaguely. This rotation has been great, though, in that it has made me properly respect surgeons and confirm that it's work best left to others. And it's just an interesting unfolding of life or lives before your eyes. People minding their own business when they were hit by a car and are now stuck in a hospital bed for months with fractures and complications. Gunshots and stab wounds, alcohol and methamphetamine, the suicidal and the demented. There aren't that many opportunities in life to see that sort of cross-section of the world.

The only thing that's truly felt like torture is having to interact with some of my more difficult classmates, who have started to exhibit that classic medical school attribute that I like to call "I will stab you with a shiv first chance I get if I can do so while improving everyone's opinion of me." It is the innate characteristic that makes my stomach turn about students. It's not across-the-board, but all it takes is one student like that to really annoy.

But even that has been an opportunity. Such clowns will never go away in life. There is no one field populated by well-intentioned sweethearts. The key is not to let the a-holes get to you. I've been able to manage by refusing to rise to the bait, and also by recognizing that it's not worth it to me to engage in that fight.

That's the thing about being a middle-distance runner. You have to decide which race you wish to run, which mark you want to meet. I used to think, when I was younger, that you had to push yourself until you were the best, better than everyone else. But that was a long time ago, and I've seen how that kind of drive comes at a cost. I am starting to think I will be okay without losing who I am. That seems the thing most worth fighting for.

they say time may give you more than your poor bones could ever take

Last Friday, I had one of those days that made me quite grateful to have dropped out of Corporate America. I've never been particularly ungrateful about it, but last Friday was different. Some truck had tipped over on the freeway, and I was stuck in traffic for nearly three hours (this drive usually takes me about 30 minutes). When this happens, and you are sitting in gridlocked, stand-still traffic, even the calmest person starts to develop hypertension and smoke coming out of their ears.

But when I finally got to clinic, it took about five minutes to get into the swing of things, and I promptly forgot all about the miserable morning commute. When I was working for The Man, I would have spent the better part of that three hour drive contemplating whether I ought to take the next exit and simply return home. And I would have spent the better part of my work day annoyed by my late start.

It's obvious, of course, that this is because I did not really enjoy what I was doing for a living, and therefore all of those external forces and factors could easily encroach on the tolerability of my work day. Now it's so much simpler. No matter what is going on, when I get to clinic, I feel very much there and not much distracts me.

That last Friday, when I left clinic, I was feeling chipper even, until I was sitting in a ridiculous rush hour traffic jam on the way home. Since I've always had a soft spot for Falling Down, I decided I had better decompress before things got out of hand. I took a very early exit and spent an hour strolling around the local co-op, at which I bought overpriced cardamom pods. Yes, they were overpriced, and as an Indian and as a Guju in particular, I felt a measure of shame buying them. But I had decided it was my indulgence for the weekend.

Sort of. When I got home, I fixed myself a generous tumbler of Grey Goose and Hibiscus Tonic (it seemed like a good idea when I was at the co-op). Then I set to making the cardamom ice cream. It reminded me of childhood and home to some extent- the smell of the milk and cream scalding, gently crushing the cardamom pods and letting them steep, the fragrance of it as I cooked it into a custard. But it also reminded me of being an adult and having my own sense of home. When those smells were present in my childhood home, there was usually a frenzy and panic because my mother was frantically trying to do a hundred things in preparation for some large celebration. Instead, the scents wafted into the kitchen while I sipped a cocktail and erased all the annoyance of having spent over four hours in a car in one day. I felt very calm, and the process seemed very much mine, instead of me trying to reenact some fondly recalled memory.

And I got this out of it:



The picture, due to my horrible camera and photography skills, does not do it justice, but I was particularly pleased with the result because a) the flavor is very much like kulfi while the texture is that of ice cream rather than the icy consistency that kulfi can have, b) I had a nice buzz going on while the preparations were underway and c) I pretty much made up the recipe myself. These tiny ideas of mine don't always turn out so well, but when they do, it encourages me to keep tinkering. We'll see if that winds up being a good thing in the long run.

just a mirror of a mirror of myself

A conversation I had with a 6-year old who was tagging along with her mom at work today:

kid: Are you... American?
me: Yes... are you?
kid: No.
me: You're not?
kid: No... (holds up her hand) see my skin, I'm Indian.
me: What does it mean to be American?
kid: I don't know. Wait, what color are you?
me: (holding up my hand next to hers) I'm like you.
kid: So you're Indian too?
me: Yes.
kid: But you said you were American. (I nod) You know, I was born in America.
me: Me too. So you're American.
kid: But my parents were born in India.
me: Mine too. So we're both Indian and American, right?
kid: Oh... yeah. Wait, you were born in America, and your parents were born in India?
me: Just like you.
kid: Cool!

And that concludes this episode of Pediatric Identity Politics.

I could drink a case of you

Saheli recently tagged me on that always time-sucking addiction Facebook. While I try to avoid such things on Facebook, as a blog post, it's a happy excuse to have something to write. The idea here is to list 15 books that will always stick with you. I wrote them all down all stream-of-conscious-like, and made certain it was all off the top of my head by drinking a hefty dose of a Grey Goose concoction before starting. And the winners are:

• The Sun Also Rises- as a woman, I know that I should not technically even approve of this book, but there's something very raw and truthful to it. And since I was once the reigning heavyweight champion of dysfunctional relationships, there's a lot about this book that draws me in.
  
• The Little Prince- I can honestly say this book changed my life and me. It was given to me at a time when I was perfectly poised to be shaped by it, and so shaped by it I was.
  
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man- there's a whole chapter of torrid ridiculous business behind my initial attraction to this book. I have a copy of it from the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, though I have never been anywhere in France. There are still parts of this book that elude me, but, still, it sticks with me.
  
• Tell Me a Riddle, specifically the short story I stand here ironing- I think I stand here ironing might be my favorite piece of writing ever. It's not pretty or flowery. But it resonates like nothing else I've ever read.
  
• The Year of Magical Thinking- this one is haunting, so much moreso than The Road. Both are about a kind of inevitability, but Joan Didion's book is somehow more piercing because she's telling her own story. Sometimes you think she is out of her mind, sometimes you think she is a genius. It perfectly recreates what happens when you suffer a major loss and are left behind to live.
  
• Henderson the Rain King- I don't even know how to describe how much I will always love this book. There are characters in books that I've been fond of, and then, as I've gotten older, I've outgrown. Never with Henderson. If anything, I was amused by him when I was younger, and now I am convinced we are kin- messy, awkward, ambitious jacka$$es.
  
• Beneath the Wheel- while a lot of people are found of Hesse's Siddhartha, for me, this book was a revelation. It was another case of reading it at just the right time in my life, but it stuck with me. Almost any Indian kid can appreciate this story, which is all about the crushing pressure academics sometimes places on young people.
  
• My Antonia- I don't know. This book might stick with me for a single line in the novel. The writing is pretty, but also, I guess I am drawn to all of these stories that are about things not working out quite perfectly, quite ideally, but okay.
  
• Bartleby the Scrivener- I aspire to dispatch people with a simple "I would prefer not to."
  
• The Stranger- this book sticks with me because of the whole absurdist angle of it. There are times when we believe the universe is conspiring against us, but if you read Camus, you start to realize that the most important part is to be in on the joke.
  
• Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing- this is another book that changed my life. A auntie gave it to me when my mother complained that I kept getting in trouble for humming or whistling during class. A auntie took one severe look at me and decided I was bored and gave me this book when I was in second grade. I became an avid reader after that. Also, it was particularly perfect that the broseph bore disturbing similarities to Fudge.
  
• Metamorphosis- another absurdist tale. I was tied between this and Gogol's The Nose, but it's Metamorphosis that has more of a permanent mark on me. Strangely enough, it reminds me of Office Space.
  
• Persuasion- because I have enough alcohol in my system to admit that there is a romantic buried underneath all that cold black coal.
  
• The Corrections- because every single character in the book is a mess. And Franzen makes a point of dangling each one out as possibly the one that deserves your sympathy, and then proceeds to tear them down.
  
• The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao- technically, I may have read this too recently to claim that it sticks with me, but I doubt it. The thing is, I've searched writing by Indian or Indian-American authors looking for exactly what Diaz ended up providing. Wao has this fresh and new quality, and it encapsulates life in the new world, the real world. I don't think I'll ever lose my appreciation for that, even if I can't properly articulate it with a little too much Grey Goose in my blood stream.

Hopefully that's fifteen. May I make a small request? I know I probably have hardly any readers at this point. But, if you do happen to be reading, and are so inclined, please leave in the comments at least one book that will always stick with you. Or if you care to post an entire list, even better. I'm genuinely interested.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to find my battery charger, so that I can actually post pictures of the cardamom ice cream that will be churning tomorrow.