Me and Brandon
I set the camera settings wrong, so this picture has been heavily sharpened. I’ve heard that the new sharpener in Photoshop is unbelievably awesome and shown in this demo called “Image Deblurring”. I’ll use something like that in the future.
Dr. Baisden and Dr. Rohrer were our elected “hooders” — those who place the hood over your head, signifying your degree.
“George, you’re sitting on my application for licensure in the state of Minnesota.”
“Meow.”
“What if it gets wrinkled?”
“Meow.”
“Ok, fine.”
Someday, I hope to have a place with a bookcase like this:
However, I’d be fine if I had these cool suspended bookcases like this:
Or, much more reasonably and realistically, there’s this lovely, cozy little space:
The thing I love about books has nothing to do with nostalgia, but the fact that, when I have a book, I can’t do anything with it other than read. I have this computer here, and I can do any number of things — email, calendar, weather, Wikipedia, and on and on. And on. I should define the context switch — that’s what happens when you’re reading a book, get tripped up by a word, look it up in a dictionary, then return to your original book. The fact that you have to actually put down one book, pick up another, and look for a word focuses your attention and keeps you doing one task. For the entire duration of that physical action, the picking up and setting down, your brain is going dirigible… dirigible… d-i-r-i… have I seen that somewhere before? However, when you have a computer, you just twitch on the alt-tab keyboard shortcut, and suddenly you see your Twitter stream, rather than your thesis. While your computer is pulling up the entry for dirigible, you’re checking the weather forecast for tomorrow.
So, with this awesome, powerful machine, you can keep a bunch of balls up in the air. Your brain becomes accustomed to focusing on tiny bits for short bursts of time, rather than focusing on big chunks for long stretches of time. When I read a long article on a computer, I switch out of it more than I would like, distracting my mind with other (useless, pointless) things.
But when you pick up a book, you’ve just got the book. I find that my mind calms down, knowing there’s nothing else going on — it’s not like my friend posted the funniest picture I’ve ever seen, and I can see it by going 42 pages back from my current page. People are curious… they’ve GOT to see if someone posted that picture. What if, in the past 5 minutes, someone posted something even funnier? And you’re on the road to addiction. But, not so with your book. It’s just the book. This is incredibly calming to my brain. In fact, I remember things more when I read them in a book or magazine. By contrast, on the computer, I have to switch to another program and make notes, just so I remember what I’m supposed to remember.
It is with a sense of numb relief that I mark the completion of dental school in this space. My final check-out meeting was this morning, graduation is this Friday. I started four years ago, on a hot August day. I lived elsewhere then. Mykala and I weren’t married. I had no idea what I was in for. It’s no understatement to say I was a different person.
My emotional bank account has been enriched. My intellectual, interpersonal, experiential accounts, too. Our fiscal bank account has experienced a stunning downward trajectory below zero, a trend which will likely prove the most dramatic of our lifetimes. Neither of us question the value of the investment.
Lately, I’ve begun composing these journal entries as though they were letters to my children — this imagining shapes my topics but not my prose. I’ll make an exception to that, and address our future children now.
Kids, you never knew me before I had this degree. I didn’t know me very well, either. So, I learned it’s not true when someone says that “it wasn’t meant to be.” I could’ve taken a handful of times in school to mean that “this wasn’t meant to be.” I could’ve stopped, left, quit, given up, thrown in the towel and convinced myself that forces outside my control conspired against me to prevent me from reaching my goal. However, I learned a really REALLY important thing. That really important thing is this: sometimes, you only have control over your own effort, so you need to calibrate your self perception; at the end of the challenge, if you can honestly say to yourself “I did everything I could to make this happen,” then you’ve nothing to worry about. Don’t take that “everything” lightly — the entire statement descends into horrid platitude without that word. You’ll astound yourself at what “giving everything I can” can mean. “Wait, all I’ve got is this, and yet I can do all that?” Yes, you can. We set up blocks and boundaries and limits at what’s uncomfortable, but the true limits lie way, waaay out there.
You decide what’s meant to be in your life, and you make that happen. These things don’t happen by fighting against all that surrounds you, but recognizing the little switches you can flip, knowing when it’s exactly the right moment to throw all your weight against the door blocking you and your dream. You can’t move the ocean, but you can surf the breakers back to the shore.
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