Before I was a senior dental student, I used to pull up their schedule online just so I could jealously admire it. “What must it be like,” I wondered, “to no longer have to go to class and just to show up in clinic each day?”
Now, I know — it. is. awesome. Through all those days and nights of studying and stressing, I’d tell Mykala “but hey, fourth year is really great!” At the time, she was understandably skeptical. But hey, this year has definitely lived up to expectations; the decrease in day-to-day stress is unbelievable. As students, we’ve started to get more leeway from our supervisors, in part because we’re rapidly talking and opining more and more like doctors and less and less like students. When people are working under your license (as we do with the dentists at the school), I’m sure it’s easy to give an almost-doctor more wiggle room than an overwhelmed second year student. So that’s nice.
My last hurdle this spring is tall: I have to find patients for a Sunday exam where, under stringent regulations, I perform dentistry and have it evaluated by a team of dentists. There’s a front tooth (Class III) filling and a back tooth (Class II) filling. Then, there’s a deep cleaning (the periodontal portion of the exam: scaling and root planing).
All this excitement happens one month from tomorrow on Sunday, February 26, 2012.
$1360 to take the exam. $15 spare patient-pool fee (if your patient doesn’t show up and you can’t produce one, you fail). $75 site fee. $175 V-ring system fee. $150 paid to patients, for their time. $300-400 paid to assistant.
You know what comes next. You can say it with me: getting done with that exam? Priceless.
I have never, in my entire life, as I tried to complete the spectacular variety of electronic tasks that modern life throws at us, thought this: “Damn, I wish I understood Unixless.”
While bench pressing yesterday, I dropped 205 pounds on my sternum. It wasn’t an “uh oh, I can’t push the weight up anymore”, instead my left wrist unexpectedly rolled forward, and the grip has completely worn off my right glove, so I had nothing to stop the bar from rolling forward. After leaving my left palm, the bar’s downward trajectory was slowed by scraping along the inside of my left forearm (I don’t actually remember any of this, but I was able to trace the abrasions later… I originally thought my right wrist was the one that rolled), and then the bar ran into my chest, totally pinning me between the left side of the bench and the bar.
Luckily, I always take certain precautions on the bench to avoid extreme injuries:
Never clip the weights onto the bar. If they can never slide off the end, you may never get out from under the bar.
Never put your feet on the ground. Feet should be either at the level of your back (resting on the flat part of the bench) or held above the level of your back.
These precautions saved me from permanent injury. The weights had already begin to slide off the bar when someone came to help me (I never even saw their face, I was so full of embarrassment and adrenaline). Foot position helped, too: because my feet were elevated, the uncontrolled weight bar could drag my entire body along its path, instead of my feet unconsciously trying to counteract the dragging force. If my feet had been planted on the ground, they would’ve tried to brace against the framework of the bench, placing an incredible force on my spine. Instead, my spine was completely fine, as it was just dragged rather than torqued.
The thrill of escaping relatively unharmed from a potentially deadly event is what adrenaline junkies thrive on. It isn’t the utter loss of self during the inability to think of anything but the moment (though I’m sure that’s nice), but it’s the feeling afterwards of it could’ve been so much worse. I’m not the sort to pursue that feeling, but experiencing it inadvertently, I recognize it.
The Galata Tower in Istanbul was built in Medieval times as a part of fortifications. Its stone walls are 9 feet thick. I guess it has a more historically accurate cone top to it now, but I think the wooden cupola pictured here looked cooler.
Unsustainability and moral bankruptcy of US business
The story we tell ourselves about ourselves shapes our lives (narrative therapy)
Media overload
Materialism
Here’s one quote I liked:
We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We
need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore
and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too
often to plop down in front of the television set and let
its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the
thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a
car battery—it recharges by running.
I also liked this:
You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see
your politics and religion become matters of habit rather
than thought and inquiry.
Don’t go on autopilot, don’t coast, don’t put a box around ideas you have and petrify your beliefs. Finally:
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies
your soul is a rare achievement.
Oh, I almost forgot: you may recognize the name Kenyon College from another famous address: the singular David Foster Wallace spoke at their 2005 commencement.
Their selection committee must be well-connected.
While skimming it to find the passage I always remember, I again realized that Wallace’s narrative is ostensibly rambling but in actuality, tightly woven. I have trouble writing about him, because I’m sure my prose is exactly the type that would cause him to tear his hair out. So, I’ll try to get to the crux of the speech with a quote, but I feel a little guilty snipping a piece out to reproduce here. All I can hear in my head is DFW: “You’ll find me a truculent editee.” Anyways. Here:
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a
choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat,
dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid
in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this.
Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand
of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this
very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle
department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve
a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some
small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of
this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just
depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically
sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating
on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t
consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you
will know there are other options. It will actually be
within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow,
consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but
sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars:
love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep
down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only
thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how
you’re gonna try to see it.
I’ve been thinking about how lucky I am. Please understand that I am not using the word “lucky” as shorthand to describe the idea of ‘fortunate’ or ‘secure’ or ‘genetic lottery winner’. I am lucky. I’ll explain why.
“Ya see, this one lady is persistent, but the other’s the only one I want to date.” At Lifetime, I found myself inadvertently eavesdropping on a conversation between two men, one in his late 40s, the other in his 30s. The one talking was the older of the two, and from the way he was speaking, I couldn’t decide if he’d been through a difficult divorce or simply never married. It didn’t matter, though, he was describing how interested he was in this woman in his life.
“I called her and I asked if she wanted to get something to eat tomorrow night.”
“That’s New Year’s Eve.”
“I know; I thought, ‘what the heck’.”
“So, you asked her out?”
“Well, not really. I mean, I didn’t ask her out specifically, but I asked her about dinner… I said I knew it was last minute, and all.”
“So, you asked her out.”
Here was someone halfway through his life, tentatively testing the path forward in relationships. It got me thinking: none of us are far from his position. No matter how (consciously or unconsciously) smug someone in a successful relationship may feel, it is humbling to consider that we can never insure ourselves against loneliness.
Nearly two week ago, I was working during my last day as the student dentist at a local nursing home. Here, the average age of patients is 78 years. Most need a lot of help getting from their chair to the dental chair. Some can not move much at all, and must be transferred using a special sheet. Having been there for a month, I fancied myself desensitized to the maladies of the population. There was still plenty to surprise me, though.
Mrs. C. came in for a routine cleaning with her husband and daughter. Suffering from chronic Parkinson’s and dosed with Ativan to make her experience easier, there was no question I’d be treating her in her wheelchair. Her daughter showed me the controls for tipping her mother back. “It’ll lean back quite far, actually” she said, surprising me with the rapidity with which the adjustments were made.
C. gave no indication that she understood anything I was saying, and had quite a lot of trouble cooperating with the cleaning. We got through it. When I wheeled her back to the waiting area, her husband lit up. “There she is!” he exclaimed, taking the handlebars of the wheelchair from me, the inexperienced driver. He kissed her tenderly on her head, knowing full well she didn’t know who he was, and would never be capable of reciprocating, even if she did.
It isn’t even possible to imagine all the ways we can lose the people we love. The moment you start seeing your relationships as routine, static, rigid things is the same moment you abandon them to decay. Our connections to others live and breathe just as much as we do, and they need the same amount of care. I’m just starting to learn this.
I don’t have really many screenshots, mock-ups, etc. at all of what this website has looked like through the years. I do have a 9-year-old desktop computer that probably still contains those things; perhaps I will compile them sometime. Anyhow, this lack of documentation is somewhat ironic, because I run tumbledry to write about my life. Apparently, writing about myself is enough navel gazing for one place; adding another layer by contemplating the tool I’ve written for contemplation would be quite narcissistic, wouldn’t it? All that said, here’s a screenshot of how tumbledry looked not too long ago:
I hate it less than I thought I would. In all honesty, I’m simply posting this to test the JavaScript I wrote that lets me add images to posts without leaving the posting page. Seems to be working!
