Stuff from February, 2012
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on February, 2012.
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on February, 2012.
Made Better in Japan at the Wall Street Journal:
“That’s omotenashi,” Thompson explains, “a kind of hospitality that involves anticipating what your guest needs.”
Early in the evening yesterday, I was tired. I hadn’t really had a good weekend of sleeping in, my sleep deficit was high. So, a little before 5pm, I went upstairs and went to sleep. 4 hours later, I woke up. Mykala got home, we chatted and ate, and I went back to bed to sleep for 7 more hours. When I sleep that long, I end up with a lot of REM sleep in the morning. Conversely, when I was quite sleep deprived during my first few years of school, I recalled my dreams exceedingly rarely.
I am worried and frustrated that all I do is write in platitudes, and that the quality of my prose has stagnated at “barely mediocre” for the past 5 years. When ideas are flowing from my brain to the keyboard most naturally, I still seem to lose their essence and elegance during editing. (Or, I lose them completely when the browser crashes. I’ve got to stop composing in the browser.) Although I have done nothing to fight against these concerns, I continue to write here, hoping that I can break through to the next level of writing quality. Focused practice seems to be the only way to advance, and the stagnation in my writing quality has correlated directly with what can only be described as years of literary dilettantism. I will keep practicing, starting here:
We are five days away from my final final final (final) board exam: “Central Regional Dental Testing Service, Part IV & V”. In this one, I spend 9 hours at the school working on patients, proving that I can do selected procedures at an acceptable clinical level. Doing the procedures isn’t hard, it’s the proving that you can do them that can be tricky. There’s a lot of paperwork, and a lot to coordinate.
“A patient of yours just checked in, has no appointment for today, and axiUm says the chart is checked out to you.”
This was not the voicemail I wanted to hear this morning during breakfast. I sighed, closed my laptop, and hurriedly biked down the hill to school to see the patient.