Almost forgot to mention: National Dental Board Examination, Part 1 = PASS! Honestly didn’t expect that one, since illness and burn-out severely curtailed my winter break studying efforts. Nevertheless, PASS it is. EXCELLENT! And since I’m not looking to specialize, I needn’t stress out about the score itself.
Mykala and I found out on Monday evening. She had just given me another ride from school (snow tires for the bike are sold out everywhere… while I can get through 4-6 inches of accumulation, it gets a bit unsafe…) and we stopped at the grocery store to pick up some things, because we never get to spend time together anymore. We just sort of see one another in passing. So, if errands together mean some time together, then errands it is (or, they are?).
We get back from the store, and Mykala grabs the mail from the box outside the door. The thought of results showing up passed fleetingly through my head, but I figure that not enough time has yet passed. Mykala leafs through the stacks of paper and absent-mindedly hands me envelope. She begins to walk away as I read the outside.
“Mykala.”
“Yes?”
I flip the envelope toward her, asking “Did you read the envelope?”
Her eyes slowly widen, and we exchange a significant look.
“Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations?!”
I spent the next ten minutes trying to convince Mykala that it was a good idea for me to keep the envelope sealed until I finished my exams this week (the last one is Thursday… tomorrow… crap I should be studying pathology right now).
I failed to convince her of the validity of not opening it. So, I took the envelope with me upstairs, since Mykala offered to take a look at it first.
Instead of 3 days, my resolve lasts for 30 minutes: during a bathroom break from pharmacology, I realize that I’ll go crazy if I don’t open the thing.
Mykala and I celebrated the good news by ordering in some True Thai (she braved the snow to go get it).
Keith Jarrett and neuroscience. Sympathetically innervated sweat glands are the exception when it comes to neurotransmitters — their transmitter is acetylcholine, but you would expect norepinephrine! Whoah!
I checked out a blog I haven’t looked at in a while, and… dooce still has it. Here’s a paragraph from her letter to her daughter on the occasion of her daughter’s 6th birthday:
I remember the last exam I took in the last class I had
in college and the feeling afterward being unlike
anything I could describe, like I’d just been let out of
a prison I had been in since I was five years old.
Welcome to that prison. Only it’s worse! You have to take
tests and earn good grades! At least in prison you can
write on the walls and hit people!
Felix of avoision writes about the Puppet Bike in downtown Chicago. Essentially, a guy pedals to an intersection, where he then sets up a puppet booth with many different characters and music.
These “Choreographed cats” were captured by Felix at the Puppet Bike a few days ago. Mobile puppet booths are awesome!
“He unfortunately was boring, so to wake you up: this is
an animated chart, this is a silhouette representing the
average family, and this is a lighthouse keeper being
beheaded by a laser beam.”
Everyday, I want to become better, but I don’t mean that in a small way. I want to be wholly… Faster. Smarter. Nicer. Stronger. More imaginative. Pursuing these ideals drives me, like the fire drives the steam engine, from the inside. This all worked for me, back when I showed up to a job and then went home at peace… I pursued my own goals and reached for the gold rings that I put in front of me.
But now, in school, there’s something external that everyday tells me I must be smarter, faster, better — and if I’m not, someone will get hurt. This produces a toxic tension: I want to improve upon a bunch of pieces of me while they want me to improve on but a few.
I can’t satisfy myself and them. And it drives me crazy.
Mykala knows that, every single time I open a bottle of tap water that has been sealed for a while, I’ll comment how “isn’t it interesting that it smells like chlorine, it must have reached equilibrium between the chlorine in the water and the chlorine in the air.” Every single time.
I don’t fully understand what’s going on in China. I do have some dispiriting facts, though.
I know that the dirty manner in which China burns coal (on
a truly vast scale) is a very very irresponsible,
short-sighted way to keep up with their rising energy
demands.
The equation of the Chinese growth story that is changing
the world (and keeping U.S. Wal-Mart customers happy) is
unforgiving: Ten percent annual expansion is the guarantor
of the Communist Party’s hold on power and so everything
will be done to sustain it. Agonized debate (think U.S.
health care reform or Afghan deployment) is not for China.
Bulldozers are more its thing.
Furthermore, there’s this pervasive idea about entitlement, which was very much front and center when China single-handedly derailed the Copenhagen conference on climate. Here’s the line of reasoning: all the great developed countries in the world had a period where they polluted an unimaginable amount and pursued growth at all costs. Britain, America, and all others employed children, killed workers, and polluted uncontrollably before eventually stabilizing into (more) sustainable, clean, industrial countries.
The problem is one of scale. Let’s say you’re Britain in the 1790s… making 20% of the stuff that the world uses. That’s 20% of the stuff for 1.2 billion people. Ok. Now, let’s say you’re China in the 2000s… making 70% of the stuff that the world uses. That’s 70% of the stuff for 6.8 billion people. And all these people are demanding far far more trinkets, baubles, and shinies than their counterparts 210 years ago.
China feels entitled to this fast, irresponsible growth period that all the great nations went through. BUT, since the world economy is now so huge, the potential for damage to people and natural resources has grown untenably large. China shouldn’t get the carte blanche that other nations got, because China can do so much more lasting damage than those countries could ever imagine doing.
But like I said, I still don’t fully understand what’s going on there. It doesn’t seem good.
At this point in time, in the middle of dental school, I’ve spent many many hours in lecture halls. Here’s what I’ve found: a lot of professors are disorganized, and as a result tend to descend into tangential (yet important for the exam!) monologues that stray far from the ugly PowerPoint slide at hand. During these all-too-frequent digressions, one must be ready to transcribe a lot of information very quickly. To accomplish this, I have slowly adopted the use of a laptop during lectures.
You may wonder why have I held on to my pen and paper for so long. In fact, there are a few reasons for delaying a full-time switch to a laptop. First, the lecture halls are steeply raked, causing one’s sight-lines to the professor to be cut off by a computer screen — this interference makes lectures much less effective. Second, laptop keys are noisy (any keyboard noise is terribly distracting in quiet lecture halls). Finally, the professor wonders what I’m doing behind that screen. So, the laptop is efficient, but it cuts me off by taking me out of the lecture and into laptop-land. Despite the isolation it fosters, my only option when I need to record scads of information in a very short period of time is a laptop.
Until now.
Imagine a device allowing me to remain engaged in the lecture through eye contact, record notes quickly yet silently, and store all my books in feather-light digital form.
My oh my, suddenly the iPad looks compelling for any student in my position.
