Serotonin

"If you're happy and you know it clap your hands..."

As bitty-bye kinderkids, we learn our lefts and our rights, our rights and our wrongs. We learn to share, we learn to care. We learn to stand up and to sit down, to speak up and to speak out, to zip, buckle, and bow. We learn to dot, we learn to cross, and to stay inside the lines. Simon says this and simon says that and we eat it up with our paste and crayons.

As young adults with our growing pains and acne, we learn ego and we learn id. We learn judgment, we learn rejection. We learn to question. We learn to challenge. And we start to change.

As masochistic medical students we learn our limits. Fifty two lectures on a quiz, thirty six hours on a shift, and twenty four usable hours in a day. We learn to count down, we learn to cross fingers, we learn to never give up ever ever ever. But we're never taught how to be happy. We're never taught how to live with life. We're never taught keeping in touch and how to sleep in. We're never taught how to relax. We're never taught what defines friendship. These are things we find, things we pick up, things we cope with.

Slowly I've given up my destracting, destructive vices, one by one, and I'm now left with this gaping void, this vulnerability, just skin deep. I feel a fragility in my breath and slowly am coming to realize that I'm finally catching up with myself. It's like the blood has finally rushed back into my body, as if I've been dead for these past 25 years. It's a peculiar thing to describe. I've been lost for so long, and now that I am finally exactly where I mean to be, I can finally take the world off my shoulders, put down my bags, and call this home.

Time to time when I'm driving home from school the waves crest and crash and it sucks the air right out of my mouth. I cry. I cry like a little baby. And I have no shame about it. Because I made it, despite it all, I made it. It's overwhelming, this gift. And it's becoming harder to forget how lucky I am to be here.

This is home.

This is me.

This is mine, my one and only.

You, Me, And Everything In Between

(photo: the late Francesca Woodman)

While getting my regular Radiolab fix this morning with Jad and Robert, I began a decent into my introspective meaty bits (I could lose days to this obsession of mine). The selected episode of the day was one analyzing the roots of fate and fortune. In one section, they suggested that good fortune in life may began early on in youth when a child learns about delayed gratification and how that leads to aiming higher and achieving greatness. Now I'm am not a greedy person but I have been known to indulge in the occasional immediate desire. Though I appreciate the benefit of self control and investing in the future, I don't believe in constant denial. All things in moderation, right? At the heart of Buddhist principle is spontaneity and how can one live in the moment if one is constantly focused on an undetermined, unpromised next event? On the other hand Buddhism is all about not giving into desire for desire is suffering ... so in the end I'm just as conflicted as the next kid. I believe in a bright, shiny future, but I have no illusions about entitlement. What I know for sure, as much as you can know anything for sure, is what I have right now and I'm not about to deny that in lieu of a dream, though I dream heavily and dream big. Does that make me less likely to succeed, because I flirt with the present? That seems pretty shitty. In fact, I'd be ok achieving less if it means I get to live a little.

Granted they presented all sorts of convincing data in favor of this idea, success still seems to stem more from a growing sense of self worth and confidence. In effect, good fortune comes from within, from this thing we call self esteem. Growing up and going through all that yucky life stuff like death, rejection, failure, betrayal, &c, I developed this sense that if I wanted anything I'd have to fight for it. Nothing is going to just majestically flutter onto my plate, I'd have to earn it.... and even then it's no guarantee. Hand in hand with that I never gave much thought to how I came off or what people thought of me, I was just too focused on my constant tête-à-tête with reality. Any wax or wane of my self esteem had little to do with my environment and everything to do with my mind, which leads me to my closing argument: perspective is everything.

When realizing that all my previous downward spirals came from an inner battle with myself and not a me-against-the-world phenomena, I had a profound moment of insight. I was choosing to have a shit time with life. Having a bad day was, for the most part, my doing, in the sense that I was choosing to respond with perpetual self deprecation and negativity. What does this have to do with good fortune and success? To bring the pieces together, if I am successful at all, it has little to do with whether or not I deny myself indulgences and everything to do with choice and assuming full responsibility for the ensuing pattern of consequences.

Life is too short and you only get one. So if it hurts, you're doing it wrong.

---

Somewhat related side note: The one thing I can't wrap my mind around in medical school is this notion of prestige. Yes it's a bitch to get in, and yes most people dont, but to me this is just another thing I do. I am uncomfortable with this imagined hierarchy and societal ranking. Maybe I'm missing something but I think we're all tangled up together and that the success of the doctor has just as much to do with the confidence, trust, and respect of the patient and fellow medical staff. They are not mutually exclusive but depend on each other. In relation to self esteem, I suppose this means that if you're feeling low about yourself then I have some shared responsibility to help pick you up again.

We're a team. You, me, and everything in between.

Be Cool, Honey Bunny. Be Cool.

What is it about a person that reaches up and grips you, right in the ribs, and holds you? What is it in the look, the touch, the smell of them that peculiarly gathers up the senses into profound liberation? What is it, if a thing, that marks them outwardly to inwardly, for painful lack of expression, as "cool?"

What is this transcending coolness we envy, evoke, and envision? A week or so ago my sister asked me what precisely this cool thing was that we've come to torture over the centuries and what I had to say, I sensed, unsettled her quandary more than quenched. You can look it up, there will be words to dissect words. They have been deemed by Merriam and Webster to be an adequate answer to this inquiry, but if that were all that is "cool," it would soon, in its own due time, fade into a sorted blandness, deprived of all its sensationally capable meaning, as of't becomes of abused vocabulary. It's not merely an aesthetic appreciation, a determined nonchalance, or confronting harmony. It's a breathtakingly pure honesty, rough and raw.

What it is, is something personal, something splendidly oblivious in possession, something that grows in your bones with blood cells, cartilage, and fat. It seeps from your pores and drips from your eyes. It swims under your skin and bounces in your gate. It's unavoidable when it takes you and we all know it, all but you. The most beautiful thing about it is how unaware you are that you have it, and the most excruciating thing about it is how completely aware I am. If it were possible I would pluck out your eyes and exchange them with mine and pull your brain into my bleeding split skull and share my reflections with your blinded hemispheres. Friend, lover, foe, or family, what confirms the suspicion of coolness, just so, is exactly this humbling humbleness, however unintended, however ignorant of that fact. It's a sobering honesty, and enviable oblivion. You just are, and have always been, with suffering justice in terminology, a straight up, brilliant, fucking Cool. Broken, obliterated, fixed, or true, that thing about you that silences the encompassing world is innately indestructible. Fight it and flail all you want, but you'll always be cool.

Permanence

I have been known to temper my more sinewy thoughts with the occasional free writing exercise on scraps of paper, countertops, book covers, emails, lose them, and then find them years later. And when it happens that I rediscover these portals to a past I claim to forget, I am always caught off guard by how foreign the words sound. It is as if some other force had taken a hold of me and for that moment I am a stranger to myself. The lastest find from mid July 2006 is as follows, from unknown context, unedited, and raw. Enjoy:

If I were to take back my venomous, spiteful, hateful, hurtful, malicious words and pack them in a suitcase, lug that case into the back yard and set it on fire, there would still be ashes left. If I took those ashes and shot them into the ocean from a canon for the whales to suck into their infinite bristles with micro-plankton some Japanese fisherman will harpoon that motherfucker and fry that ashy flesh up and some poor soul will devour that beast only to crap it out into some backed up sewage pipe that'd burst in some field in middle America. Even if the earth were to unite that ashy whale shit with the dirt some plant will sprout out and some cow will eat that plant and that same cow will turn into the bloody lump I eat for dinner with pickles and lettuce. It'll never go away at least not while I keep reminding myself with every night alone, and not while I'm running with no place to go, or searching obsessively for answers in endless pages of fiction. I want to do something stupid. I want to carve my heart out and hang it from my tree. I'll smash it until candy comes out. I'll make soup out of it. Soup's good for you, it's half digested already. Steps one and two are all done, cut and chew, done and done.

Two Percent

According to some supposed tried and true personality profile, what I am comprises approximately 2-8% of the world's population (thank you Wikipedia). The first time I took said profile I was probably about 14 or so and took that as a confirmation in my weirdness and, let's use unique, my unique perspective and approach to thinking, experiencing, and understanding life. In a word, I was convinced beyond a doubt that I was destined to be none but a loner, lonely in company. It stopped bothering me that I made no sense to most people and that their expression of such confusion was to categorize me as that itchy word, "quirky" because apparently I only made sense to 2-8% of the population anyway so it was only natural that I'd stand out, be separate, and alone.

Then I came to medical school.

And it was impressed upon me further how dissimilarly minded I am exactly. I'm not just a kinetic learner, but auditory, and visual and and and. I actively involve every possible realm of sensation I can and not quite out of want or desire but a sort of necessity, like an unquenchable thirst for a full, surround sound visceral experience of everything. Beyond that my brain is a potential I have only barely tapped. There's something stirring in there and it's big and exciting but it's horribly trapped behind all my other superpowers like my anti-routine power, my functional insomnia power, my constant rapid cycling thoughts power, my alarmingly accurate intuition but still suck at tests power, or my unnerving ability to compartmentalize and digest life's little horrors in split seconds power...

I'm still working on my living up to my potential power.

But somehow, despite all my splendidly frustrating uniqueness, I managed to find not one but a small crowd people who are as deliciously different as I am. Point in fact, one of them is the exact same kind of 2-8% as I am! And another is simply pure magic, the kind that feels like finally all the madness that got me to this exact point was worth it, like this is what I was fighting for. Suddenly through this most terrific of discoveries I'm not an island, I am not lost in the 92-98% of normalcy. The world is once more a blissful scale of greys, no longer the white of them and black of me.

I'm still weird and different and not like most people but in this great big small world of six degrees and Kevin Bacon, I found a home where I am no longer threatened by my separation but finally at a point of embrace. Still a round peg in a square world but I am completely falling in love, beyond a reasonable doubt, with my curious 2%.

Forgetting to Remember not to Forget

"Make eye contact, but not too much, aim for 80%"

Introduce yourself, shake hands, sit down, give non verbal feedback, summarize, listen.

My professors have relationship building down to a scientific formula.

Sitting there in class I looked around to see if anyone else thought this lesson on patient-physician relationship building was as absurd as I thought it was. I mean, these aren't machines you have to figure out, no IKEA assembly required. They're human beings like you and me, right? When I performed our mock interviews later with the camera recording and thirteen of my classmates plus a moderator watching me fumble my way through a chief complaint assessment with a mock patient I could feel the formula creeping into my natural progression as I tripped over my own thought process. Definitely cramped my style. But this is a different world I'm in now, this isn't Venice Family Clinic, I'm not home, these aren't my neighbors and friends. This is the land of the professionals and figureheads. When I put that white coat on in four years I'll be bearing the weight of great responsibility and it's slowly dawning on me how big a change that is going to be. As I prepare for a hellish next few weeks I am beginning to feel a shift inside me. It's not painful like it was in grade school... and high school... and college. This change is more a natural evolution of perspective, of spirit, of mind and body. But I worry that I may inadvertently lose touch with my own person in the process.

It's so easy to forget myself, forget time and place, forget family and friends, forget the past and dismiss the present while I forge ahead for a pressing future here in med school. Finding time for laundry washing, bill paying, car refueling even, has become an annoying chore. It's easy to let that formula take over, to become a robot, a drone: study, eat, sleep, study, eat, sleep. This is a brave new world I have immersed myself in, and I have to remind myself consciously not to forget that I am a human, too.

But I must remark how frighteningly easy it is to forget your own humanity as you work to save the humanity of others. It seems a vicious cycle... unless I remember not to forget.

Don't forget.... don't forget... don't forget....

Life is Not for Robots.

While discussing stem cells in today's MCB lecture I wandered back in time...

An example of intestinal stem cells came up, and the first thing I thought about was PH. His funeral was one of the few if only where I cried, correction, bawled*, something I loathe doing publically. For some reason I have a complex about showing weakness, but Crohn's disesase is one of those plagues that penetrates, deep into the heart of you and everyone around you and will of steel or not it gets emotional. Remembering PH made me remember SR, that one was a very terminal, fast acting pediatric leukemia. SR made me remember SH, probably one of the most aggressive cases of breast cancer I've come across. And so on...

Given that I didn't know medicine would be my battle field until, truthfully, a year ago, remembering these people, these diseases, and how they did and still do affect me, how I've lost friends and family to other personal battles, how I nearly lost myself to my own -- have all given me a guiding light through these long steady hours of endless studying. Though I wasn't looking for it, life just sort of has a way of teaching you a thing or two about yourself. And what I'm learning, slowly and surely, is that I'm both bigger and smaller than I thought I was. I'm bigger in that I never thought I could achieve anything like this, no, not ever. And smaller because there is so much I have yet to learn, from class, from my classmates, and from life.

The last one is probably the most important. And something you so easily forget here in the receptionless walls of medical school.

This is the eve of our first MDQ. It's technically only worth 3% of our grade but it'll reveal if we've managed to master a semester's worth of material in a week and a half for a quiz that roughly covers the scope of an undergraduate final... I've taken maybe 5 hours of "me time" in the past 10 days... but today I'm taking it easy. It's not even 6 and I'm already in my jammies. I'm slowly learning how to center myself in all the crazed intensity around me. With my notes in hand it's a work in progress, clearly, but I'll keep at it.

--

All that we are not stares back at what we are. - WH Auden

3 - 2 - 1 GO!

It's 9:30 on a Saturday morning and I actually felt great starting my kitchen chores before rushing to school to meet up with my study buddy, because it was at least some semblance of a normal life. Med School is a whole different kind of beast. One of my M2 friends said there's something wrong with the M1's, we're studying too much too early, we're supposed to be out getting sloshed, she said. But as my study buddy says, working hard and wanting to do well is not gunning it's being responsible. My impression of what it means to be a gunner is someone who's just throwing fire wildly and intensely in the hope that they'll hit a target without burning themselves up in the process. My study buddy and I are more just terrified of failing, far too pressured and focused and determined to start mowing people over... ourselves aside.

What strikes me most about medical school is how easy it is to lose touch with reality. I went to a show the other night, tickets for which I bought way before I knew what new world of crazy I was entering into, and it was the most incredible release from long nights of academia. I went with two people who are going to become great friends of mine... both of whom condemned me for even thinking about classes while we were out. (I'm going to need to keep them close by for my own sake.) Something so mundane and common back in L.A. as a music venue became this medical-free safe haven of pure stress-free bliss! On my way to the gym this week, something I've taken to not for exercise but for sanity, I had to remind myself that just the day prior I was wrist deep in superficial back muscle of someone's grandpa. I had to take a moment to remember that this hunk of dissected flesh was once a person, with stories, with scars, with memories. It's so easy to forget, and difficult to digest why. Why do I not cringe when I see images of anencephaly or skin harvesting? Burn victims? At the same time I am not altogether unfeeling, no, I appreciate the horror and the sadness, but where do those feelings go? How do they dissipate so quickly? What is this person I am becoming? And what is she capable of with so few limits and a stomach of steel?

In the midst of everything I remain resolved to win, to conquer, to succeed. I say hi to anyone and everyone, keep positive, lighten the mood with my casual self deprecating humor... then I get 5 hours of sleep and push push push! There's a monkey on my back and it's telling me to stop writing and start studying.

Every day I am reminded that this is the happiest time of my life. I am in love with the people, in love with the school, in love with the classes, and even in love with Cowtown. And that is what will keep me going.

I made it. I am here. And I am going to rock. this. hard.

The Zero Hour

The past week has blended into a blur of orientations and meet-n-greets but the reality of my new life here didn't really dawn on me until I woke up this morning after 5 hours of sleep eager to hit the books again. I have finally become more fully a nerd of the worst... and best kind.

I've given myself this one first week of classes to get my rhythm down and as I told my housemate EF, MUST WIN MED SCHOOL.

--

Today we meet our corpse. After my stint in the ER morgue and reading Mary Roach's Stiff I feel at least emotionally prepared for this cryptic rendezvous. Now, anatomy is another story...

"Natural is better" (TM)

** interestingly this photo comes from a Stanford University site featuring an article about how Univ of NE is considering restricting stem cell research... that's a beef for another time... **


Being a devoted NPR listener, the first thing I did when I arrived in cowtown was find the NPR station. Every city has to have NPR to stay informed right? said the arrogant city girl to the ignorant country bumpkin. Right. Well. About that. I did manage to find an NPR station, between the hours of 4pm and 7pm. In the early afternoon it's bible verses and homilies and in the evening it's a jarring union of smooth jazz and rock, country rock. But throughout the day on several radio stations there are these wellbeing announcements to help you stay good and healthy, and informed between the hours of 4pm and 7pm. First there was the series "Worst Place to Put Things," where I was advised not to put my purse in the shopping cart because I would contaminate all my produce. Then there was the water distribution bureau advising me to stay hydrated, but preferably with clear water because, and this was sung in a jingle, "Nat-ural isssss better!" Hmm, I thought, as I remembered the cute pink haired girl stopped next to me at the traffic light in Hollywood, the requirement to have at least six visible tattoos to work at Intelligencia off Abbot Kinney, and my fellow western european Snow-White-pale friend who hits the tanning beds before trips to Hawaii. All that seems very standard to me but out here I'm beginning to get a sense of how very not-standard most of L.A. actually is compared to the rest of the USA. For example, traffic doesn't much exist outside of L.A. though when they do mention a slower commute on the wires out here they also add, "So don't forget to bring your patience." Patience? When driving? Bitch please. I mean, oh heck!

Clearly I have much to learn.

Home Sweet Mansion

The best part about getting out of L.A. is how incredibly beautiful it is everywhere else...



As you drive down the open highway the lights disappear, then the billboards, then all the noise, then all the people, and the world becomes so much bigger than you could possibly imagine. After growing up in one of the biggest cities in the world it's easy to lose sight of nature, of roots, of organic existence. But driving out here you see the raw, bare, open of the Earth and it altogether becomes a living thing, as it always has, but perceptively for the first time.



I loved my city life. I grew to appreciate the conceit, the noise, the crowds, the angst, the incessant dictation of the media. But out here, in this nothing, is peace, is civility, is calm and slow.




Over the drive out here my muscles released one by one into a pleasant looseness, weights of metropolitan tenseness built over 24 years, trickling off with the sweat of 110 degree heat. It was a purge of anxiety, of pollution environmental and subconscious. This is where I will find myself, where I will grow, where I will heal, and where I will become a better version of myself... far far away from the seething city lights.




Out here is everything I imagined bliss to be... that is, except for one thing...

When charting our route out here I decided to visit a place I've never been. Being great lovers of road trips my family's trekked over much of this half of the states but in the middle of that hot mess is a place that spelt disaster but I just had to see if for myself... just once...

..........

Take the worst crazy of LA, remove all the class, crank the temperature up 20 degrees and you have Las Vegas. You know you're there when through the car vent wafts a curdling stench of cheap hotel rooms, cheaper perfume, and cigarettes. It's the smell of sweat and desperation. Underneath the tacky lights and escort ads is a strict outward denial of and unconscious internal conformity to the illusion that is this city. Built on false hope, Las Vegas turns weakness and vulnerability into obscene profits. But the people, they come like little moths, tantalized by the flames, answering the call of a siren to the feeble minded.

And if the heat doesn't get you, the casino-hotel will. Lost in the labyrinth of our hotel as we twisted around dead ends in search of our alleged suite on the fifteenth floor, two similarly vexed and perplexed Scotsmen in matching kilts cried out, "How do you get out of here?! We've been here for three days!!!"

S: is that a hooker?
L: no, that's what over compensation looks like.

..........

After one short but much too long night in LV we hit the road again and just three days ago I finally arrived to cowtown USA, the great heartland, where I'm living in an old co-op style mansion. It's creaky and falling apart but the place has soul and you can't really beat $400/month for rent utilities and food.

So many elitist city folk (myself admittedly included not three years ago) have such narrow, harsh eyes for this land and its people. I hope in the next few years I can paint the real picture of life out here for all of you, from the converted eyes of a cosmopolitan girl attempting to wrangle the mid west country.

I can say for starters everyone here is every bit as nice, polite, and courteous as the word on the street, and it is doing wonders for my disposition. I almost feel it's illegal to get upset here, and I rather like that pressure to be good.

School starts in a week... we'll just have to see how long this peacefulness lasts...

Sequoia

Driving around with my grandmother today running errands she turned to me, after several wrong turns and swapped names, and in heavy breaths remarked how heartbreaking it would be to lose your memory, as hers makes its inevitable slow decline...

As my time here in my hometown comes to a close I have been preoccupied with the move that I have hardly given a moment's thought to what I'm leaving behind, as I make my dreams visionary. I am thrilled to be disappearing off into the great, exciting, and above all terrifically new world of medical school... but I find it curious. All I've ever wanted since I can remember is to go far far away from this place, to get away from constant reminders of lives past -- and now I'm leaving with the fantasy of blazing trails in neuroscience, with a specific aim at making a dent in the treatment and prevention of Alzheimer's.

Nothing terrifies me more than losing my memory. I do not believe in an afterlife, I believe in here and now, in legacies and footprints. What I cherish most is my mind and the entire capacity therein -- which means all my memories, good, bad, pleasant and painful. All I have is my catalogued experience of this world and I am a bit ashamed to have desired so strongly to erase, to run and deny.

I hope I may have the courage one day to grow roots, really plant myself, and embrace all the emotional costs that I am of the luxury to bare.

--

I will miss this tired place, but I look brightly to what lay beyond the great wide open before me...

Blue/Boo-boo

Some clean their slates in ocean tides, some wipe them clear come the new year chime, but for me I blow it up in gun powder clouds, illuminated by fire lit skies. This Independence Day we caught a stray, chasing shadows in circles, but always homeward bound, bound by collar, bound by name. Scared perhaps, or better, freed, we trapped him and carried him back to his private prison paradise.

Home can't hold me anymore. I've out grown this place. My memories track me everywhere I go, a face, a heartbreak, a promising innocence crushed by elusive truth. I'm throwing mine up to the dragons in the sky to burn my slate, dry it up, crumble and toss. I'm not running this time, I'm spreading my wings. It'll be in the wind, silent, reminding, a trace of dissolving bread crumbs. I'll find my own way. I have no home, I have no name, no face to be remembered by, just a life, a dream, and a will to succeed. The stuff legends are made of.

Full of emptiness, yearning to be filled, I've lit the fuse to a long goodbye. This is a new door, a new faith, a new life. And this one is mine. This time I'll learn to fly.

THE DOCTOR IS IN

It was one of those moments where time stops for a minute and you're convinced this can't be for real because things don't just fall into place like that, you don't get what you want just because you want it badly enough. That stuff doesn't happen. That stuff is for dreams and fantasy.


Well,


Welcome to my fantasy.


There was a message on my answering machine and I thought to my rejection-weathered self how great it would be if it were for me.... and... well... it was! I'm now officially a member of the Cowtown med school class of 2014!

and cue the tears. ok now stop. I had worked my ass off. Ya damn right I got in! Just two days prior I was talking to MC on the phone about how you just gotta laugh at the madness of the world, and also how beautiful it is that nothing is assured and there are no rules. Things just happen the way they happen. She had told me how she was so upset with life, that of all people I wasn't getting what I'd be working so hard for -- so you can imagine the joy I felt to talk to her again two days later with such life changing news. Finally! A breakaway! Like the fates had fallen asleep and someone had slipped me an ace by accident. Was I really going to get away with this? With having my dreams come true? Is this supposed to happen?

Ya damn right.

Next stop: MED SCHOOL, BABY!

This Sentence Is False

Apparently people have been slowly pulled off that dreadful waitlist in cowtown, none of whom have been me, yet. So the agonizing wait continues... and while my academic future hangs in limbo for going on a year now, the things I thought I knew certainly and surely, about myself, about human nature, about life, have had time to crumble a bit under the pressure. The boredom with this in-between chapter of my life, this intermission of will and want so to speak, has plagued me with my old mischief. My concentration has been subject to a drive by shooting of misery but being a veteran of this blurred vision of reality I know better than to succumb to its wrath. Instead of clawing the dates off the calender in vain hope, I thumb through pages of research papers and contemplate things like the liar paradox entitled here. Acceptance is key. My mind has never been quiet and I've stopped fighting the flood of thoughts, instead tending to them, ordering them to fetch far reaching theorems of concept and query, and poke it back with that same painstaking vigor with which it keeps me up at night.

On my numbing and nerdy quest for distraction I came across two things that thoroughly tickle me pink. The first is the WMC followed by Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

As a kid, born in the bloom of computer technology, I was heavily influenced by this growing dependency on electronics. And when I say influenced I mean gently horrified. The way my father appeared to keep his memory in the sim card of his PalmPilot unnerved me. It wasn't long before I was convinced that the more we used our technology, the less we used our brains and that they'd just sort of shrivel up from neglect, a little pruney marble rolling around in that hollow chamber resting on our necks, with little googley eyes bobbing around aimlessly. I became obsessed with my memory. Alzheimer's to this day is the worst disease I can think of, for without your memory what are you but a lump of uncertain bloody flesh with a bland and colorless personality? It is the worst nightmare. At some point in grade school I had this idea that if I wrote anything down my brain would get lazy and fat and I'd be totally useless, until dementia rendered me finished. So I stopped writing things down. I thought, if I forgot my homework assignments well then I'd just fail out of class, and I didn't want that did I? Then freshman year of college I remembered a story about this girl who didn't take any notes, just would sit there and listen, absorb, and after getting over the initial competitive jealously, I thought to myself, I can do that! Of all my classes to test this out in I chose Anatomy and Physiology. I sat in the second row, put my feet up on the first, and for an hour, funneling sour gummy worms into my eager, gnashing teeth, I would be the best sponge I could be. I cannot take full credit for the success of this venture and must admit I owe much of my A in the class to Dr. S who was a comic genius. Certainly he offended half my classmates, but to me he was a hero of science. I remember our cumulative final was just 50 true and false questions citing that he could hardly tolerate reading half-assed short answer essays from 60+ amateurs. While everyone was pissed by this announcement I on the other hand, with no notes from which to study, was totally enthralled. I think if I had failed that class my perception of brains and memory would be entirely swayed but I rocked that class and found the allure in testing my limits... It is doubtful I'll ever be up to the World Memory Competition level but the idea is inspiring to say the least.

Next discovery is Gödel's incompleteness theorems. I will not pretend to know a lick about mathematics, a subject that comes second only to history in my worst area of academics, but I have a great appreciation and respect for this field (as I do history, and pretty much everything else I can't master). Gödel is just one reason why. Given that math is a tool for measuring and understanding our world, it follows in logic that philosophically, mathematics explores deeper questions about space, time, and in a sense, spirituality. Take his theorem. In over generalized, layman's nutshell of terms, Gödel proposes that in math there may be some axioms or propositions that are true and yet, unprovable. The implications of this in just the realm of faith alone are outstanding. Sure you can argue that there is not likely a cross over of disciplines with this particular theorem, but it does make one wonder. Just this past weekend I was tutoring my student in quantum mechanics in chemistry and had to explain to her why we can't know both the position and momentum of a particle, and that it has something to do with the dual nature of matter (both wave and particle). This too leaves me flooded with questions, questions about human duality of nature, conscious versus subconscious, instinct versus reason, and so forth.

Though art is at my core, science is my muse. And when I can keep out of trouble long enough I find such incredible treasures in both.

**inspired by RadioLab's Limitations episode**

Rush Like Water

While waiting for our trial subject to finish her psych/cog evals, my research partner showed me this video piece by Bill Viola. Though I didn't want to mention it at the time, I found something eerily familiar about this image.

"Acceptance" it's called.

It reminds me of all those dark, twisted parts of me I've tried for years, to no avail, to cut out. It evokes that sickly gut feeling I get when I'm approaching my limit but keep a straight face and just keep on going, pushing myself, almost senselessly, and always out of fear of admitting weakness. This stubbornness has been a blessing at times, leading me places I never dreamed I'd go, but then again, I've got the scars to prove it. Much of how far I've come has been an uphill battle, and mostly with myself.

What about weakness is so terrifying? What is so wrong with being flawed, being human? What's funny is I just wrote my personal statement about exactly that, what it means to be human, redefining it, and yet, what terrifies me most is accepting that I am just human, nothing more, nothing less. I said I believed we're a strong animal, and I do believe that. I believe a little determination goes a long way, but oh what I would give if I could just fall down sometime, turn over, expose my tender underbelly, and not fear that some fanged monster's going to swoop down and rip my guts out. I'm exhausted, and have been for years. But I fear it, as I suspect many do. We fear vulnerability. We carry our bitterly scorned pasts into every new venture, an overly generalized explanation or warning, when it's already gone, tucked away in its own absent context. But fool me once, right?

What of this other thing I wrote about in my statement, this interdependence part? Taking that idea out of my academic essay setting, what of the beautiful thing where two people are vulnerable together? What of that beautiful thing where two people turn over and expose their tender underbellies, and aren't eaten alive, but accept each other, scars and all? It's never a promise, always a risk, and a huge one at that. And a resurrection from a broken heart doesn't happen over night. I mean, we're human after all...

But one can only hope that one day that quiet, internal, obtrusive wall, whatever it may be, in whatever realm of our lives, will just rush over us like water and we'll finally be done with it, free at last, free at last, free at last.

For the Sake of Your Infinite Abyss

Knitted Brain by Psychiatrist Karen Norberg of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts

When does knowing something with purely emotional conviction transcend the crazy that it is to become sheer brilliance?

When is stealing a brain on a hunch that it'll reveal neurological secrets worth losing your job, your credibility, in the very same field you're stealing it for? I guess that's a question for Thomas Harvey. This rogue pathologist high tailed it out of Princeton with Einstein's brain believing it to tell the fortunes of the brilliantly minded... perhaps he was mad with genius, or perhaps he just got lucky, but his partners in crime eventually found something.

They found something big, that made big waves in the neuroscience community, the very same I've managed to get myself tangled up in, and blissfully so I might add. But it is things like this, big discoveries like this that can happen in a moment's time that... just... change... everything.

In anatomy, the thing we know least about is our brain, our powerhouse, the home of our identity. It makes me wonder, how can we possibly know as much as we do about all the rest when the thing that controls all these other squishy, bloody parts is such a great mystery to us. Our brains are this infinite abyss of secrets and magic right now. There's so much there to learn and explore, leaving so much behind to be redefined, corrected, transformed.

I have this love hate relationship with this science. It's this immensely passionate and rewarding relationship but I can see it completely consuming me. But maybe that's ok. Actually, maybe that's the best part. It feeds my brain, it intrigues my soul, and it gives my life a purpose. It also teases me, it builds me up to break me down again. I trip over my eagerness, I wonder if my love is in vain, if it'll throw me a bone. It owes me nothing. There are plenty of scientists in the sea, but the chance of a breakthrough, of progress, of change, of something so much bigger and better than what it or myself has now keeps me going, keeps me chasing that impossible dream.

For me too, I suppose, some things are worth losing yourself over...

Dear Magdalene,

Last night I discovered my mortality, locked in on its deathly gaze, and 3 - 2 - 1 plucked its eyes out.

There are moments, much too many in my silly little life, where I come to a cliff, plunging below, and despite crippling circumstance manage to tap into some hidden, deep abyss of salvation inside me and in the middle of a nose dive I find my rip cord.

These moments come where I see who I am, in the unflattering light of truth and honesty, and discover something both invigorating and terrifying... a seemingly limitless boundary.

The night falls and I helplessly along with it into a faceless consuming flame but with slow, heavy, calculated breaths, I reach out to a stranger and she plucks me from my widening grave. While she stands guard over my hollowing body I find my light in the devil of a darkness. I greet a wall and obliterate it with nothing at my aid but my mind. And using naught but wits, and deep meditative concentration I find my burning wings and I fly into the quenching rain.

And in the quiet of the dawn I slip back onto the ground and I wonder both how did I survive the night, but more still, could it ever get dark enough before I cannot see? I have faced the fires, and I have put out every one.

Is this all you've got, oh crowded nature?

Hit me with your best shot. I'll take you down, blindfolded.

For the Bulldogs

Oh Graduation... that happy time when you celebrate your survival of brutal academic warfare, when you're not quite sure what you've accomplished but feel pretty damn certain something significant just ended. You're a little softer in the middle now, little rough around the edges, and finally have time to notice. You'd do something about it but the last few years of sleep deprivation have only just begun to settle under your eyes, on your shoulders, and in your chest and you're starting to have the tinglings of remembrance of what energy used to feel like...

But oh happy day! Right?

You're free! You're free to be that homeless, unemployed, underpaid, over-educated top 1%. It's terrifying and liberating and you wouldn't take it back for the world. You've tested your limits, you've found yourself in the face of defeat. You're a professional now and this horror of reality that you are about to embrace is a privilege, damn it! Rock that poverty!

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

A little while back I had a close encounter between a bathtub and my iPod and now I can only shuffle the tracks or I get locked out of the main menu... so when I'm out jogging with my headphones in, this song will suddenly come on and every time it does it makes me feel like a champion. If you don't know Edith Piaf, get yourself acquainted. If she can believe what she's singing I think you can too.

-- (for the less french savvy) --

No! Absolutely nothing...
No! I regret nothing
Neither the good that I've done nor the bad
All this is much the same to me!

No! Absolutely nothing...
No! I regret nothing...
It is paid, swept away, forgotten
I don't care about the past!

With my souvenirs
I lit a fire
My sorrows, my pleasures
I need them no more!

Swept away the love affairs
With their tremors
Swept away forever
I leave with nothing ...

No! Absolutely nothing...
No! I regret nothing
Neither the good that I've done nor the bad
All this is much the same to me!

No! Absolutely nothing...
No! I regret nothing...
Because my life, because my joys,
Today, that begins with you!

Inside/Outside

There's a part in her novel, Invisible Sign of My Own, where Aimee Bender describes the character of Mona Gray's neighbor who wears on a string around his neck numbers that correspond to his daily mood. Sometimes he's 3, usually a 5 or 7, and on really extraordinarily good days sometimes he's close to 10. It's out there, for everyone to see, to know. Open, clear.

I found out today that yet another one of my very good friends is going through something, something I wish wasn't so familiar. It reminds me of this book. It reminds me of how much easier it might be if we had our own silly numbers to wear, when all the words to explain what was going on inside have been pressed out of us under the weight of our world. Where the rest would know how you were doing outside of who, what, when, where, why.

Asking for help has such an ugly stigma, such an ugly, weak, helpless, shameful stigma. The saddest part with this is that no one can help until you're ready to ask for it, and sometimes that just never happens. Sometimes it's to stop something perceptively worse, sometimes it's to stop something that can't perceptively be worse. I cannot say what is going through my friends' minds, or what was going through the mind of the one they lost, though I have a feeling. I've tasted some of the fruits, and whatever side you stand on they remain bitter and biting.

Though what remains is a memory, it's not likely to be forgotten. As much as I wish it wasn't then and isn't now, it is a inextricable part of who I have become. The beauty of remembering though, is it's always transient and changing. Every time you recall something, you're pulling out this imaginary file, rifling through it, but before you store it again you integrate the current climate of your brain's chemistry thereby distorting the original context. So what I have left to offer them of my experiences is really just the haunting, skeletal remnants of phantom recollection. Even still, something like that stains and leaves a mark.

Inside...

... is somewhere deep, dark. Where feelings fade into a vacancy. Things become disproportionate and exaggerated to a point where there was no before. There are no things like full and warm. Friends and family grow distant. Words are forgotten because none of them fit anyway. Close your eyes for a minute and that light goes out, that little guiding, end-of-the-tunnel one, that serves as an often overlooked reminder of impermanence. It's not necessarily that everything must be over, but it's unclear where one thing ends and the rest begin. It's all tangled up together, with reason, with the promise of chance, of change, of tomorrow. It's all grey and flavorless. Then comes the speculation... of the end... but when inside, you forget about those who are not, the ones who inevitably will bear the weight of that world you wish so much to shed.

Outside...

... time stops, abruptly and charged. It knocks you off your feet. Your insides hold still, hold tight. It's like if you're still and quiet long enough, maybe it wont be real, maybe you wont fall, maybe you'll wake up. Were you sleeping, you wonder... but it's come. It's been. It's there. And it's an end of one pain and a beginning of another, and the latter is in pieces, unscripted and innumerable. And you're left to reconcile what was never in your hands to change.

And I have these very good friends, who are going through something. And I wish it will be different.

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

Meet Norrie May-Welby. Born a man, reassigned as a woman, and officially gender neutral as of January of this year, thanks to the progressive Australian ruling classifying May-Welby as a "neuter."

Pronouns be warned.

After a recent intellectual discourse on the subject with a similarly curious mind, I learned that the most common form of gender reassignment is apparently for men who feel they are lesbians. I know one such case personally and though, admittedly, it was not expected, it made perfect sense. I met this person as a man. I went to a tea party with this person as a woman. And I have to say, she was far and away much better for the transformation. The altering of demeanor and morale was so strikingly positive, I could not be anything but supportive and excited for her. What a relief it must be to finally know thyself. Is that not the ultimate goal: nosce te ipsum.

Oh, but the conversation doesn't end there, how can it? Something so human, so important, so spiritually personal, begs for deliberation. What exactly happened here? I do not believe she has had or will have a gender change, anytime soon anyway. So what exactly changed? What are those things that make a man a man and a woman a woman?

Mentioning this to my baby siblings, with their young, eager minds, forged a new question. If we are beginning to redefine gender identity, how now do we categorize sexual preference? If your orientation is grounded in your biological gender, what are you then, for the sake of labeling, if you are of this new breed "neuter?"

Before I can explore what homosexuality really means, I suppose I must first understand how we distinguish ourselves as any particular gender in the first place.

Before I go on, I want to point out that I use any and all formal technical jargon and phrasing somewhat uncomfortably. There are areas of science that I fear stray a bit from humanity, but that is a private qualm. I mention it only in the event that my words and descriptions might offend unintentionally.

Consider the Cognitive Correlates of Biologic Sex and Gender Identity in Transsexualism, a study undertaken by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Studies at University of Washington, one of the leading medical schools in the US. To be elected for a sex change operation, a patient must undergo a battery of psychological evaluations in order to be determined psychologically fit for the physical change. (For those less inclined to read peer reviewed journals, may I suggest TransAmerica or Boys Don't Cry as a glorified, hollywood alternative. Lights, camera, and action aside, it's an interesting peek into this topic for those who are unfamiliar with this culture.) In this study, twenty-two clinically determined transsexuals underwent two different psychological profiles. In addition to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and what they refer to as a "measure of conceptual styles," the investigators used the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale, your typical IQ test, in which the subjects aligned with their biological gender. The other measures associated the subjects with their gender identity but with no psychopathological explanation for the varying results.

All that the IQ test tells me is that there are in fact both male and female brains, but this identification is somewhat meaningless and has less to do with gender identity than merely perception of and engagement with the world. Several years ago a neighbor was on an education board and needed young kids to test drive a new IQ test. Dutifully, my mother lent her my brain, much to my dismay, for four hours one painful Saturday morning. I never got the results but I can assure you, asking an ADHD kid, last minute, to sit for four hours and answer questions about shapes and numbers and words in a classroom full of windows, toys, and pictures, is not going to give you accurate results. Granted she was not testing my gender association, who knows where my profile would have fallen.

Then there's the observation that you can classify one individual as both 'male' and 'female' depending on what test you give them, what statistics you present, etc. And here is where science fails us. We are attempting to take this deeply personal quest and slicing and dicing it under a microscope to try and define it biologically. It is interesting that wherever science falls short, philosophy and spiritual theory jump in. To know thyself is in its own phrasing personal, so what then does it matter how you package it up in societal words and labeling?

In this light if it feels right to May-Welby to be a neuter, and for my friend of a friend to be an XY lesbian, who am I to question it? I'm putting science aside on this one.

As for where I stand, well, you'll have to take me to dinner first.

putting words in my mouth

Hank: I'll make it up to you.
Rebecca : I know.
Hank: Do you?
Rebecca : Sure, you never mean to let me down, but you do.
Hank: Yeah, I guess I do.
Rebecca : You know, its all well and good to talk about happy endings. But if the person can't deliver, if he keeps screwing up, well eventually I guess you kinda just have to say "fuck you"... or words to that effect.
--
Californication 1.7

What I am, is perturbed.

A thirty something friend of a then boyfriend leaned into my early twenty something-ness over a yuppy dinner one upper middle class Monday night, and over an herbal Pinot breath she whispered to me her shallow wanna be modern, urban proverb. This is what she told me.

She said, in so many well intentioned, superficial words, that I need to take good care of myself. No, not my health, but my looks, she meant. Qualified it then, like a punch to my ovaries, with the misguided clarification that "this" is all "we" have. This being our seductive prowess, and we being womenkind.

I politely hid my growing disgust and nodded in forced sisterhood camaraderie then immediately began questioning her primordial retrograding insanity. I am no feminist. That I would like on the record in bold italics. But what is this?

What happened to esteem, what happened to intellect, to the lure of ambition, tenacity, and confidence? What happened to the 21st century, to progress? How can I still, now, find these women who believe and preach so convincingly that we have so little in our lot as the influence of our looks instead if the sensuality of our capable minds? How can these women still believe that men lend us our own strength and caliber?

In that moment, the warm spirits from the shared dinner-side bottle had shriveled up into a profoundly sobering pity. How have we failed this poor woman? How have we led her astray so far as to believe her one path to success was through pubic waxing, brow plucking, product and plaster? What happened to her to believe only her looks made her worthy?

Or is she right, are our looks our only gamble on success,

on love?

---

I first watched The Pleasure Seekers about a year ago at the insistence of my one-up sister and I have to admit -- I enjoyed the crap out of it. I enjoyed the dresses, I enjoyed the songs, but what I enjoyed most was the fucking talent. Okay, maybe not the Susie character, she was a space cadette of the worst order of woman, the gullible, idealistic, submissive "this is all we have" kind. What I didn't enjoy though was how dominated these otherwise beautiful and vivacious woman allowed themselves to be by their subsequent men.

Now, I am all for throwing caution into the wind for love, but this isn't love, this is a sickly dependence on the validation of a male counterpart. Where does love become sacrifice? When is it okay, if ever, to completely surrender yourself, your strength, your independence in the name of love?

--

That was the last time I saw this friend, once removed. Roughly two weeks after this sauced and sorry advice, I left said former boyfriend for his utter lack of respect for who and what I am. I cannot point my hindsight finger at her mistaken words of wisdom, but they did plant some much needed skepticism in that love-blind mind of mine.

--

On the drive home from my last pitiful day of work, I listened in on my favorite NPR wires in time to catch Divorced Kid, a Minnesota radio story about divorce, from the perspective of the turmoil tossed children. I thought about how my parents are still together. I thought about how lucky I suppose I am, and about how much their fighting affected me, as a youngster, and as a... much older youngster... and I wondered, as I still often do, is this what marriage is? Should you just stick together through thick and thin? Or should you just get real and never make an affair contractual? What is love anyway? How much does it have to do with marriage, really? Is it something transient or can it be so real that it lasts a lifetime? What do they have? What did I have?

--

What is marriage? It works for my parents but I still don't want what they have, and will go out on a limb here and take it you don't want what your parents have either, be they divorced, separated, or "together." Thinking back on all my failed romances it makes me wonder what it is I am even looking for.

I know what I want, but how then do I reliably lose my way every time I go in search of it?

I thought, wouldn't it be nice if the next guy I met wanted to make babies and go with me on adventures and be there for each other. And then I met a guy who wanted to make babies and.....

and the only way it could have been more wrong is if it were written by Quentin Tarantino himself.

If what I want is simply a companion, if what I want is a hiking buddy, a book club of two, a philosophy junky, a sound board, a meditation guide, a teammate... why then do I keep getting shafted by this silly love business... whatever the hell it is...

What am I doing wrong? What do I not understand?

What is this thing that makes good, smart, sensible people go completely nuts over other people... people who wouldn't know what to do with you if you came with an iPhone app?

--

Can love die?

If it dies, was it not love, then?

How can love feel so much like poison, like torture? Is it not love? Is it lust then? Is it infatuation? When does it become one and not the other? How can you know who you are, what you are, and have that be such a mystery to another? How are we misrepresenting ourselves... or how do we keep finding the uninspiring idiots? And worse, how do we keep falling for them, and succumb to worse versions of ourselves in the process?

--

And back to this troubling phrase, "this is all we have." If this is the kind of woman he is around, it is no wonder I felt so very little like a human being with my former partner, and so much more like a doll. To have worked so hard to shape my intellect but feel only appreciated for my ass is demoralizing at best.

--

Tell me, my friends, what is love, be it in romance, at work, between friend (and foe)? And what the hell happened to it? Where did we go wrong?

No Religion, Too.

My two dear darling beautiful friends G and G went with me to the planetarium today to watch Center of the Universe. Before the show I was remarking how I couldn't contemplate outer space because it was so magnificent and incredible and I hadn't yet figured out how to factor it into my complex, piecemeal belief system. The presentation was so beautiful and gently probing however, that I became all at once awestruck by the beauty of knowing so little and being a part of such an enormous ... thing (even if relatively insignificant). I left there corrected, humbled, and yet, unshaken. I am still without a theism, deeply in love with nature and science, still believe art is what makes life bearable, etc. The universe was still a universe before I existed, my mom told me so, and will likely still be a universe long after my useful body parts have been donated and my remaining bits have been burnt and the ashes have been mixed in with a newly planted tree (my death wishes). And that relative insignificance doesn't scare me anymore. Whether or not my existence matters in the grand scheme of things, as far as I can tell, doing good work and promoting peace, love, health, and justice still seem like something worthy of my short little insignificant time here on this one little planet. This is the world I have to live in right now and I want it to be a happy, healthy, peaceful, decent, courteous, respectful, thoughtful, loving, funny, delicious etc place. Amen.

That said... my experience today got me to thinking... as pretty much everything does.

This is what I was thinking about:

There are two things people fear most, two things that send them either running to or running from religion, and they are: death and the cosmos. Death leads to questions about the end, cosmos, the beginning, and both to questions about meaning and purpose.

After experiencing more premature deaths than I care to describe here, I have constructed a very personal relationship with death. For one I was born during the spirit of the Dia de los Muertos celebration and though that is neither here nor there and simply serves as a fun insignificant fact, I've always felt strangely connected to the earth with a peculiar acceptance of mortality. I suppose part of that was a small misdiagnosis by my now former personal physician followed by yet another one of those too close for comfort premature deaths that convinced me for a long time that I was going to die young. Suddenly now was so precious, then wasn't important, and next wasn't so assured. I began living in the moment more and more fully. This obsession with present investment in turn manifested as an anxiety disorder in which I couldn't fall asleep at night if I didn't feel I had been productive that day. I thoroughly detest wasted time and find being around unambitious, weak people as a major source of irrational panic. But over the course of a series of adventures (and misadventures) my mind and whatever internal parts of me constitute my spiritual nature have found a growing peace. Sleep still evades me from time to time and my restlessness is persistent but most of my worry has subsided with the soothing discovery of Buddhism.

Before I took my Buddhism and Zen courses in college I was a mischievous Catholic. I say Catholic because that was the groundwork of my first religious stirrings in a horrifically hypocritical Catholic school where my Catholic faith was just as quickly being constructed as deconstructed. Being brought up in a family of fiercely independently minded intellectuals and academics I naturally had a strong inclination to question everything. By the time I discovered Wiccan paganism in 6th grade I had already put the notion of a god on the shelf and had flat out refused to go to mass by the time I was 13. It wasn't that I was anti-theism or anti-worship, it just no longer felt comfortable to wear that Catholic title, to partake in the Catholic customs, though the principles of thought remained (the golden rule, love thy neighbor, forgiveness, that good stuff). The one thing Catholicism, Wicca, and Buddhim, and ultimately the career I have chosen for myself have in common, is the notion to do no harm, to oneself or another. This for me transcended into a long journey of self reflection and at times self persecution, always on some existential, transcendental quest to improve myself. Admittedly I went a little overboard in my young, timid late teens and hit a slight self-loathing, destructive patch but the thing that cured me wasn't a personal lord and savior but community service and art, the former to remind me that it wasn't all about me, and the latter to help me healthfully digest my past, comprehend my present, and dream sweetly about my future.

In my meditations on what I have done right and what I have done wrong, on the bad things that have happened that I allowed, and on the good things that haven't yet that I have no control over, I have come up with a pretty good, albeit personal and nameless eclectic religion that goes something like this:

I believe...
~everything is connected, you, me, this desk plant, the water I'm drinking, everything
~you should treat everyone with respect regardless of who, what, how, when, and why, especially if you expect it in return
~everyone should have food, shelter, healthcare, choice, education, love
~whether or not there is a god isn't going to change how I live my life or why I live it the way I do. I will respect the possibility but I will not base my decisions, actions, intentions, or motivations on that theory.
~what you have and know right now is all that is certain, it's precious and fleeting and should never be taken for granted
~if __ doesn't make you happy, make you a better person, inspire or support you, get rid of __, life's too short otherwise.
~the planet is a living thing that is not ours to own but ours to love, nurture, respect, and restore
~nature is far more powerful and complex than we could possibly imagine or begin to explore
~everyone has a right to what happens to their own body - this means regardless of how I feel about abortion it should always, always be legal, safe, and accessible
~sexual liberation is life affirming and abstinence only education is irresponsible. Kids are going to have sex, face it and teach them how to do it safely, responsibly, and respectfully.
~you have to be comfortable with yourself before you can have a really fulfilling, satisfying intimate experience (with or without sex)
~you only get one body so if you're going to put it in harms way, at least know what you're signing up for and be ready for the consequences should they arise. Everyone has their vice, just know what you're gambling and ask yourself if it's worth it. For me, if it's not something I'd want to tell my little siblings who look up to me about, then maybe I shouldn't do it.
~"an eye for an eye" makes no sense and only perpetuates pain (has something to do with my notion of everything being connected)
~the Wiccan Rede, "an ye harm none, do as ye will" includes harm to yourself, and that you can only have as much self respect as you allow others to show you and as much as you show other people
~marriage is personal and has nothing to do with gender, race, or creed. I'm hardcore equal rights. I've been fortunate to have really strong women in my life but I still don't follow feminism for this reason. I'm a woman, ok, so hear me roar... with equal volume and vivacity as male counterparts... as well as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders.
~this is the only life I have or will ever know, so I'm not putting all my eggs in the heaven basket...
~if you don't plan for the future you wont have much of one
~an education is the greatest gift, tool, and weapon
~the most important and significant thing I have ever learned is how to read
~there is tremendous power in the strength of the human spirit and will
~happiness is not a goal but a perspective and a way of life, you cannot achieve it passively
~if you dont like it, change it
~children are the future, invest in them
~you're stronger than you think
~you have to love yourself before you can give love or let love happen (with any success or health, anyway)
~asking for help is a sign of strength not weakness and if you can help, you should
~confidence is key to pretty much everything
~if you're not going to do it right, well, or with integrity, don't do it at all
~people are inherently good and learn evil
~if you don't deal with it now it will distort and haunt the later
~nature has a way of balancing things out but it's not something you can count on for personal gain, validation, etc. karma is an idea, not a guarantee. good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. that's just life. it is what it is, how you deal with it is what matters.
~focus on the good and the positive and you'll live a happy, full, rich life
~perfection is an illusion and an unattractive one

... what have I missed...?

Get Your Thinking Caps Here

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/06/euroupdate_2_is_science_art.php

HMMMmmmmmmm!

science is art as art is science?

Versus

old dogs versus new tricks

... does it really matter?

"Mental Gymnastics" regardless of their efficacy is better than having old fatties melting into the couch with a Heine in your fist and Van de Kamps smeared across your face watching last week's Lost on TiVo via projector on a white washed wall in your Fruit of the Looms.

Brains need food too, let's keep it local, organic, kosher -- or the intellectual equivalent.

Maybe it's the hippie in me but I'd rather invest in the high/false hope of warding off dementia with a gentle push-pull on my neurons than to cross my fingers passively and succumb to the mind-numbing wrath of the almighty popular culture of burning brain cells under the black light of social networking.

Red Pill Blue Pill

Driving back from my Tuesday lunchtime 5th grade screenwriting mentoring I tuned into NPR just in time to catch the tail end of this. And that led me to this slightly disturbing discovery.

If we are preset for our, hmm, let's call it "conscious awareness," what kind of reality is it if, should we be depressive by nature, we require chemical "enhancement," say, via psilocybin, to achieve charity? I find it unsettling from a philosophical perspective and yet intriguing from a neuroscience one.

Is that real or is this real? What is real?
vs.
Could this be a medical breakthrough or is the use of hallucinogens as a medical treatment completely delusional and backwards?

After fighting the good fight against drugs -- how cocaine is stored in your cells setting you up for overdose, acid is stored in your spinal cord, heroine can kill if you quit it and can drive you to an unintended suicide, ecstasy literally boils your insides and dissolves your brain -- studies like these come out and I feel like someone's just told me that north is east and west is south.

It's shaking the foundations of my moral debate with drugs, especially hallucinogens. Am I so naive and prudish to think any altering of the brain's chemistry should be scrutinized? Being a depressive individual myself who has turned down both psychotherapy as well as drug compensation, I wonder what lies out there in the world of behavioral assistance. No I'm not about to go chomp down on some 'shrooms, I still think what ails me has less to do with chemistry and more to do with irritating people and circumstance, but I wonder... am I being too strict in my adherence to bodily preservation? Or are these studies leading us down a psychedelic yellow brick road into fantasyland?

Dr. Clark Martin, the featured retired clinical psychologist, describes his experience as thus, "“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating. Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.” I've experienced similar sensations during guided meditation in my zen class. Why do I need psilocybin to point me in the right metaphysical direction?

I know highly intelligent people who dabble in drugs, and arguably dependent upon them to "cope" as they say, and some of them are still fantastic, highly functional human beings.... whereas others are incredibly lazy, dull, and intolerable. Does their drug use have any merit? Granted, it'll be harder for the lazy, dull, intolerable lot to convince me, but what of my pot head PhDs out curing cancer? What about them?

I wonder, what about those mathematicians I saw on that KCET/BBC special Dangerous Knowledge about mathematicians who were driven insane and ultimately to suicide on their quest to discover infinity? Would psilocybin have helped them find similar alleged "clarity" or is that clarity too an illusion?

It's the matrix all over again only instead of Keanu Reeves it's a little toxic fungus leading us down the rabbit hole.

I am hesitant to extend credit to the drugs themselves and more to the perspective adjustment itself, likely on the come-down. How is it different than community service, or the birth of a child, or a near death experience, or the endorphin rush from exercise, the soothing nature of controlled breathing like in yoga? Why the drugs?

Take my issue with medical marijuana for example... what's the point in smoking it? How are the deleterious effects of smoke inhalation worth the benefits of its medical use? Cannot migraines and nausea be satisfied with the body high of ingested tetrahydrocannabinol? Cannot muscles be relaxed with the same digestive base? Why smoke it? What's the head high for? Some argue that smoking, which constricts blood flow, helps relieve migraines, caused by dilation and expansion of blood vessels, but smoking compromises the integrity of those very same blood vessels leading to all sorts of problems more detrimental than the insufferable migraine itself. Pros and cons people! You're flirting with permanent damage for temporary relief. How does that make any sense?

--
Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again - NYT - John Tierney - Apr 11, 2010
Turns out all of that "mind expansion" you did in college might pay off in emotional stability - NPR - Patt Morrison - Apr 13, 2010

8 4 90 52 103

just spent 8 straight hours doing nothing but medicine today. shadowed a family practice doctor. took 4 hrs in the car to make it happen but i made it happen, even got to see the sunrise.

saw a vibrant and full of life 90 year old grandmother of 52, yes, FIFTY TWO grandchildren and i'm happy to say she wasn't the oldest cognizant person I've met. when i was working the ER over in SM I met a 103 yr old who was a feisty as the day she was born.

i feel so honored and lucky to be a part of this world, to be a witness to such life affirmation day after day. i cant wait to jump in.... hear that Creighton....? any day now right?... riiiigghhhttt?

i'm still here, and i'm still dreaming.

dont forget about me, universe.

Brain Food

At last! I spoke with Dr. N, one of the admissions directors, about my application and he had very favorable things to say. Said there was hardly a place left for improvement and that they thought my candidacy was a really good one, which made all my words fall out of smiling teeth from hence forth... just one... small... detail... "a weakness if you can even call it that," he said, was approximately 1/3rd of my MCAT score. Judging from his tone he did not think too much of it himself and said that likely my waitlist status was hung on that one stupid number, in the physics section no less, and likely just because it's so late in the process (interviewed late Feb). And half of that section is chemistry which I now tutor! Humph! But!! He said do what everyone should be doing and prep for the next cycle but to sit tight and wait till mid-June to see if I make it into the first round of accepted waitlisters. I have really good feelings about this, as do many of my closest friends, so I'm just going to keep the faith and hope and pray... and eat and love (I really gotta read that book...).

That said, I do not do waiting well. Not in the least. SO. Here's the tentative schedule for my brain food until med school:

full time to part time
VFC has a UCLA peds MD on standby for shadowing
UCLA brain doc's working out an epilepsy research/shadowing plan
driving down to SD on Mon to shadow a surgeon/primary care doc
CoachArt orientation on the 13th, art mentoring for terminally ill children
and finish up with YSF <3

now I just have to wait for the stars to align...

Oh no, you did *not* just tell me to wait(listed)

Dear Creighton,

I love you, you are my other half. Complete me and make my dreams come true.

Your one and only,

Laura

Homo-interneticus

are you a Homo-interneticus?

is the internet distorting our perception of reality? our social standards? our moral compass?

if you haven't already, listen to some of these BBC World Service broadcasts, they bring up a plethora of hard hitting questions about the way we do things here in the 21st century...

perhaps we should get off the internet and find out what we're missing.

no more talking, make it count

i have six weeks to perform two miracles

neither of them i have complete control over

and both are the world to me.

--

i have six weeks

and i have hope.

--

no more talking, make it count.

The Geography of Passion

I am devouring The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and my brain is brimming with philosophy!! Oh the masterpieces of literature, how thee feedeth my soul!

And here, a personal discovery:The geography of passion is a fiery one. It quakes and trembles from love to hate to love in a whirlwind of desire that makes for a livable, invigorating torture. Both malignant and benign, feeding fury while breathing life in heated, heavy exhales. It is inescapable, undeniable and all at once demise and creation. It's a concussion for the deep of you, that tender, vulnerable, emotional, horribly personal part of you that makes you you and not any other wayward sailor. It puts wind in your sails, pushing you into infinity, charged and moving, alive but stormy. It consumes you in the most vicious of ways: delicate but always threatening to crush you. And still, in all the turmoil, we embrace the flames and take the poison because to be without is just not to be at all.

In volunteering, in art, and now in medicine, all the pieces of me fall apart, away, dissolve and are immediately replaced with similar but different parts and this is my personal evolution.

Perhaps that is all life is: a balancing and great digestion of ambiguity and paradox. All that which makes us frustratingly uncertain is entirely the glue of the universe and nature. Is it not complete chaos at the center, at the most microscopic? There is peace in that madness, I cannot know for certain but that I do trust. This may be what all those zen masters are searching for, that peace in the chaos...

In my own life, I suspect many think I am a massive hypocrite or completely delusional the way I tend to do the exact opposite of what I say. Perhaps you think it immature or reckless, and in the context of your world you'd be entirely accurate. You are strict with your philosophy and mind set, which is itself admirable and fascinating, enviable even. My world, my constructed theories and perception, is fluid, always in flux. Here, everything is complex, but not necessarily complicated. In fact, much of it is simple, just, simply chaotic. There is so much to consider, and so much uniquely co-dependent, conjoined. Here you can commit only to the fact that what you're committing to is itself transient and impermanent, at least in how you know it at that precise moment in time, whatever that is. You adjust and accommodate constantly here. It is the code of life, it is the design of nature itself. When a natural disaster strikes and wipes away man's creations, does the earth beneath it die in sympathy? No, no it does not. It persists! It survives! Always. Earth explodes and the pieces become something new in the great open space. Everything is always changing, always fighting for life and more of it. Now is always slowly slinking into the past and the future is becoming the now and so forth.

Always everything is at once rising and in ruin.

We merely juggle the pieces as best as we can, being the messy, fumbling humans that we are.

And oh how we do it so beautifully.

Pratitya Samutpada

MY (Almost) FULBRIGHT PROPOSAL ... from 3 yrs ago:

One point Father F could not have emphasized more in his Buddhism class was the idea of Pratitya Samutpada: everything rises, persists, then ceases. In Mongolia however, despite rigorous prohibition and prosecution, Buddhism continues to persist in the culture and in the lives of the people. It is in Mongolia, a place Buddhism not only survives but thrives, where I want to cultivate my understanding of compassion and understand more fully how beautifully it fits into my path to being an Art Therapist. Throughout my time in Mongolia I will be studying Buddhism in the context of Mongol culture and compiling a photographic journal to creatively represent the basic principles of Buddhism. The images will complete a book which I will use as a tool for future art therapy patients as a guide to reflecting and understanding life and their place within it. As Dr. KH, my Zen instructor, would say, my photography will ultimately be a modern day Ox Herding Picture, creatively and abstractly capturing the Four Nobel Truths, the steps to enlightenment.

After having traveled to not only Europe, twice, but committed to service in Tijuana and El Salvador I understand how much is lost in translation and the need for breaking language barriers. I have studied French and some Italian and Spanish and am confident in the success of my Mongolian studies. I am continuing to make valuable connections with the Mongol community from the Venerable Karuna Dharma here in Los Angeles to the Venerable Chantal Carrerot of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) in Ulaanbaatar and plan to have a year of Mongolian language completed by my arrival in Mongolia. When I arrive, thanks to Uyanga, the Cultural Assistant at the US Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, I will enroll in a six-week survival Mongolian course at the Bridge School in the capital city. In addition to that course and throughout my stay I will be checking in with a tutor at the National University of Mongolia (NUM). There I will take various courses in any combination of Mongolian culture, religion, and history. For further language practice as well as a better understanding of Mongol culture I will spend some time in the countryside touring with friends I will make in the community where I live in Ulaanbaatar.

Beyond the classroom I plan to complete the Discovering Buddhism from Home program offered by the FPMT. The Venerable Chantal Carrerot or one of her collegues will be my advisor and mentor through this transformation. I will also check in with Munkhbaatar from the Gandan Tegchenling Monastery and the Center of Mongolian Buddhists. Under his eye I will observe and hopefully engage in Tibetan Buddhist rituals and meditation practices. Alongside this program I will be constructing my photography project, reflecting on my meditations on Buddhism. My images will represent my understanding of Buddhist concepts such as the three marks of existence: all is suffering, all is impermanent, and the self as an illusion. Ideas such as Nirvana cannot be understood through verbal or written dialogue due to its complexity. Only through the abstraction of art, in my case photography, can one begin to realize the truth behind Buddhism.

My background in community service and my involvement the I------ Service Organization at (university) has taught me, through countless hours of volunteering and community service, that practical application of skills is an intricate part of the learning experience. Similar to my (youth) mentor program through the College of Fine Arts at (university), I will be involved with the ArtsCouncil of Mongolia’s Artsplus after school arts education program for young Mongolians. Through my involvement with this program I hope to gain insight for my future Art Therapy studies.

I found these programs through the aid of SM and SS, two current Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia as well as LF, a current Fulbrighter there. They have connected me to many valued people but if the Fulbright Program or Institute for International Education has contacts in mind they believe fit my project I welcome the suggestion.

In Buddhism there are Four Noble Truths that one must understand before enlightenment can occur: life is suffering, the origin of this suffering is desire, when desire stops so will suffering, and there is a path to ending desire. This path is pure compassion or Karuna. It is fitting that the name of my first guide here in Los Angeles, the Venerable Karuna Dharma, means the truth of pure compassion. The compassion, simplicity, and peace I find in Buddhism, I find in photography as well. Combining my learned Buddhist meditation practices and my strengthened sense of art and culture, I will be a better resource for my future therapy patients. I will be able to communicate better how to achieve peace through not only artistic expression but through helping my patients understand the crucial element of compassion in everyday life. Upon my return to the United States, I will earn a Masters in Art Therapy and hope to go back to Mongolia again to further my research and understanding. Only through rich, intellectual and cultural exchanges like the Fulbright can humans truly take on the world and cultivate peace, internally and subsequently externally.

Problem or thesis:

When a human being does not know herself, she is in danger of destroying the very world she lives in. Art therapy can be a guide to understanding oneself, the world, and ones place within it. Through this process one learns wu-wei, a Buddhist concept that can be understood as working with the world instead of fighting against it constantly.

Your particular study/creative project:

I propose to create a photographic essay that reflects the process of going from unrest to understanding. This collection of photographs will be a resource, similar to a set of narrative meditations, which art therapy patients can use to guide themselves through this transformation.

Methodology:

My first step is to complete a six-week survival course in Mongolian at the Bridge School in Ulaanbaatar. Next I will enroll in courses in history, religion, and culture at the National University of Mongolia. In parallel I will study Buddhism under the guidance of monks at the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition and the Gandan Tegchenling Monastery. Throughout my stay I plan to assist with the Arts Council of Mongolia’s Artsplus after school art program will reinforce my studies through practical application.

Rationale for country/region:

Despite a history of prohibition and persecution, Buddhism survives in Mongolia. Of all the places in the world this remote, nomadic region maintains a strong faith in Buddhism which both impresses and attracts me. Here I am confident that my Buddhism studies will be thorough and passionately taught.

Institutional, in-country affiliation (university, agency, center where you will work):

In addition to taking courses in culture, history, and religion at the National University of Mongolia, I will be working closely in a Buddhism studies program at the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition and an after school youth art program offered by the Arts Council of Mongolia.

Anticipated outcomes (personal/professional/academic):

The immediate outcome is the photographic resource I will provide for my future patients. After my time in Mongolia I will pursue a Masters in Art Therapy. Through my Fulbright experience I hope to gain insight as to the importance of art and culture in regard to mental health and form a stronger connection to and understanding of my photographic craft.