We got up this morning and saw part of the royal wedding extravaganza. We both have the day off, and celebrating with a little view into another world was a fun way to start. After dying Easter Eggs late last night, we headed off to the grocery store to buy some British food (crumpets, Earl Grey tea).
This whole thing is exactly why I married Mykala. I would’ve just, well, sat around last night and slept in this morning. And yet, doing something out of the ordinary for a day that is (most certainly) out of the ordinary (we actually see one another!) is just great. She has such a joie de vivre.
I should be studying right now. I wonder what I’ll remember from this time of my life when I look back. Will I remember freaking out in my first year? Will I remember the endless parade of exams in my second year? Or will I focus on my very first patients and my learning to be a clinician in my third?
I wonder what next year will bring.
I’m almost a senior in dental school. Just writing that out in black and white makes it seem close, real. And now, 8 years later, I can vividly recall being a senior in high school and feeling a similar, though smaller, sense of accomplishment. I was beginning to pull at the reigns of high school a little bit at that point. Which, for me, didn’t mean much in terms of rebellion. I did little things like bring CDs to school so I could listen to them during class — one class, actually: “Career Investigations”.
It was getting to be spring into summer (late April… almost eight years ago exactly), my absolute favorite time of year. I wore shorts to school, ran out of the building at 2:05pm to go play tennis. Whenever I hear the first chords of “See You Again” from ATB’s album “Two Worlds” (one of the few CDs I owned back then), my mind is taken directly back to that computer lab where we had Career Investigations.
I remember seeing “Dentistry” and thinking “hmm, that seems interesting.” It felt like a good fit: I thought I could handle the long required prep period, and really liked the sound and routine of a 1-3 doctor practice. I didn’t over-think it (as I tend to do). I just… gravitated toward it. It was filed in my brain, and 12 short months later, I committed to it after my first year in college.
And here I am. God willing, in 12 months, I will be a dentist man person. Despite how far I’ve come, though, I still occasionally walk the halls of my high school in my memory. After all, my mind has filtered and dimmed nearly all the bad things.
Eight years from now, in 2019, I’ll walk the halls of Moos Tower, and just remember the good things.
Mykala, after recently graduating from her 200 hour instructor training at Core Power, is now (almost) certified to teach yoga. By summing up the whole experience in one sentence, I fail to describe the amount of energy required to get through the training. As Mykala was gone for many nights and weekends, I did my best to be supportive, but I got a chance to actually help when her class of budding instructors was required to bring in a novice and teach a class. I was the novice.
This was one of my favorite things Mykala and I have yet done together. We were both outside of our comfort zones, but it isn’t like we could rely directly on one another for support. We were apart — she one of the teachers and I one of the amateurs. I was nervous that I would fall over in the middle of the class; she was nervous because she had to teach and make sure we didn’t fall over. These Core Power classes rely strongly on verbal cues to pace and the class and guide the students. When everyone is new, the cues must stand nearly on their own to describe the postures of yoga… there is no “expert” in the class you can look to for a clue of what shape you should be putting your body in.
They turned down the heat in the room a little bit for us, so I think we were only at 78°F, or something like that. It was just enough to get you warmed up and more flexible, but not so much that it felt stifling. Mykala did a great job teaching her part of the class, and I didn’t fall over.
In the future, I’d like to try not only more yoga, but more things where we are both outside that comfort zone. I’m sure books on relationships recommend exactly this type of activity, but such advice sounds much less trite and obvious after you’ve actually tried it.
There’s something I love about really tight knit online forums. My earliest experience regularly reading and posting to a forum was at NewCelica.org. I really, REALLY wanted that car (Cf. this post from 2004). It wasn’t just the car, though. It was all these people talking about something that really brought them together. Later, my fascination with old stereo gear brought me to AudioKarma.org; to this day, that is one of the best communities I have ever followed. (After all, one of its Minnesota members invited me down to his house, and FLATOUTGAVE me an entire vintage set-up… for free. In fact, it’s sitting in our living room right now and we use it every day. I’ve still another chapter to write in that story. I’ll cover that another day.)
When I really want to learn something (like right now, trying to figure out the best tires for our car), I always dig deep into online forums. I’ve yet to be disappointed by the quality and accuracy of the information I find there. You just have to read a lot of posts.
A. Lot.
Inevitably, you’ll run across a feud of some type. Or, someone will mention some huge event “Well, let’s not get into this again. Someone lost an eye when we tried to settle that argument back in 2008.” That comment was made up. This one, from my research tonight, is real:
Are you seriously trolling people about tires?
But, my all-time favorite tonight is this one:
I think you are correct the the Michelins are fine if
you drive like a sane person. However some of us drive
like complete idiots and the Michelins can’t handle it.
In our smug insistence that race is no longer a factor in
our society, we are continually brought up short by the
old code words and disguised prejudice of a tribalism
beneath the thin surface of our “civilized” selves.
This makes me want to watch Ken Burn’s The Civil War.
The next two days are street cleaning days for Minneapolis. I finally get to put away the 534 pound mountain bike and get out the 2 pound road bike. This is EXTREMELY exciting.
I was leaving the rec center yesterday, and I heard the radio edit of Rihanna’s song “S&M” echoing from a few blocks down frat row. (Or, as the City of Minneapolis calls it “Greek Letter Chapter House Historic District”.)
I find it difficult to understand how such a great public-broadcasting-of-music opportunity can be squandered. I mean, you’ve got these huge speakers pumping out gigantic amounts of sound to your peer group. You’ve got this opportunity to really get these people excited about what you are promoting: tonight’s party, spring, or a combination of the two (tonight’s spring party). You’re playing to a captive audience.
And you choose a song everyone has already heard.
What happened to DJs (amateur and otherwise) being excited about spreading new music? In this situation, how about something like “Miami 2 Ibiza (feat. Tinie Tempah)” by Swedish House Mafia?
Mykala’s trying to decide what job she wants to do. While I have lived comfortably inside the four walls of dentistry, shutting out the frighteningly wide world of possibility, Mykala has been looking for the right fit for her. She’s whip smart and interested in many things… which makes it hard. I can relate: I love coding, but would never want to do it for a job. Mykala loves dance, but doesn’t always want to do that for a job. What’s more, we both have complicated ideals around work:
Work should not be the wellspring of satisfaction with life.
Nevertheless, work should enable one to do something that one feels has purpose and meaning.
One must fight for autonomy.
Later this year, Mykala will graduate with her Master’s in Human Development, and this opens so many doors that we’re trying to narrow down the door count. The Paradox of Choice rears its ugly head: it’s hard to be happy with one career when you know you could do 5 others. By contrast, it’s easy for me to be happy with dentistry… I have to be. As much as I enjoy it, I know that I must be a dentist in order to pay back my loans. I have no choice but to derive satisfaction. Mykala has no such limitations.
A distinct possibility for Mykala is Health Coach. I was particularly encouraged by HealthEast’s site about health coaching. It seems to indicate that there is a place for folks in this profession to act as “trainer, nutritionist, relationship guru, career counselor (MH)” in a referral-based setting. As an emerging field, Mykala could get that much-needed autonomy as she shapes both her immediate surroundings and the direction of the profession.
The scariest thing, I think, is that to pick a career makes one feel that they are discarding many others. I mustn’t, however, think of career decisions as once-in-a-lifetime.
The seniors at dental school are elated: boards results came in and most of them are past their last large hurdle of school. In the meantime, us third years are emerging from the trenches to start out charge toward graduation. In 60 days, we’ll be the oldest at the school.
Earlier this semester, there was a day at school when I finally stopped being afraid. I can’t point out the box on the calendar when it happened, but at the end of that day I realized something had clicked. Reminds me of this quote:
You’ll know what you’re doing when you
stop asking for permission.
—rands
Finally, the fear of patients, the fear or being reprimanded by professors, the fear of a mis-step or mis-cut or perforation faded. These distracting feelings finally got out of the way, and I could learn. FINALLY, I could learn things!
And now, this past week, another stage: that of flow. One achieves flow state when the difficulty of the tasks at hand slightly exceed one’s abilities. It is as though you are being tugged along by a rubber band, there’s a constant tension that you are managing, and you are always making forward progress.
This causes 10 hour days to feel like they’re about 3 hours. It’s kind of exciting.
Well, it’s been a few years since I visited this topic, so here we go. I posted this at HN, and since people liked it there, here it is in a slightly edited form:
The loudness wars are the primary enemy of quality sound reproduction in most (not all) music recordings today.
This is about radio.
As you sit in your car, tune your radio to your local Top 40 station. You’ll notice that, even when you turn down the dial to the lowest audible setting, you perceive a constant drone of music/noise (depending on how you feel about pop music). Now, tune to the local classical station. Little spurts of noise can be heard, punctuated by… quiet spots. The average consumer thinks: “What’s wrong with this music?! I have to turn up and turn down my volume all the time!” Connoisseurs of classical music, however, encourage dealing with this high dynamic range, because dynamics are a critical part of classical music.
Here’s the sad part: POPMUSICDOESN’T NEEDTOHAVEITSDYNAMICRANGESMASHED! Doing so makes the music less interesting… it’s just at one level of loudness for the whole song, for the whole album, for every single artist that’s been popular over the past decade. Thing is, radio stations can easily take high dynamic range (big differences between the loud and soft parts) source material and run it through a compressor to limit the dynamic range, thus making their music more car compatible (solving the classical music ‘problem’). However, consumers expect to hear the same when they download an AAC/MP3 and play it outside their car. “What’s wrong with this old recording, it’s so quiet”, is a common complaint. Of course, when iTunes (and competing software) have features like automatic output leveling (Sound Check), compressing dynamic range at OUTPUT and not at MASTERING should be the choice producers make.
Yet, the industry persists, making the music louder at the expense of eliminating its dynamic range. They’re painting soundscape with a more limited palette (though, doing a surprisingly effective job, given the limitations).
No one knows, no one cares, yet our musical experiences suffer.