Month: October 2011

Tough Mudder.

/ Nate / 7 Comments

This past Sunday, myself and twelve other idiots, otherwise known as postbacs, threw ourselves into a 10-mile, 28-obstacle “endurance event” called the Tough Mudder, at Wintergreen Resort in Virginia.

So what is a Tough Mudder? The website describes it as “the toughest event on the planet,” but it isn’t – that distinction belongs to the Spartan Death Race, which is a 48-hour race involving just about every kind of torture you can think of, including eating a pound of onions.

While no one had to eat a pound of onions, this wasn’t exactly your standard-fare race. I’d been working on my endurance for about three months, with varying degrees of success, but I at least thought I was ready.

What follows is a “retro-diary” of the Tough Mudder, told through my running narrative with myself during four hours on Sunday morning.  This account is quite clear through one particular obstacle… and then everything gets blurry.

Continue reading →

Bromo Sapiens

/ Nate / Leave a comment

That… did not go well.

We just got done with a pair of midterm exams – first physics, then biology. I thought I did okay on physics yesterday and terrible on bio today, only to come home and find my second consecutive unacceptably bad physics grade waiting for me online. Awesome. I can’t wait for biology’s grade to come out. A text message conversation with a postbac friend, “L,” went as follows: Continue reading →

M-Cat

/ Nate / 3 Comments

I have a physics test tomorrow. We’ve all been studying for it for far too long, as evidenced by the following story:

During a morning conversation with a few other postbacs about how screwed we all were, which somehow involved talking about someone’s dog, we got to talking about pets. A brilliant idea surfaced: We should get a postbac pet that can roam the halls of the continuing studies building (okay, perhaps not the best idea).  We were talking about what we should name this hypothetical pet, and the thought suddenly popped into my head:

“We should get a cat and name it… <dramatic pause> M-Cat.” (aka medical college admissions test, for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about)

My friends smiled, laughed a little, and moved on. I, however, could not. The idea of M-cat began to root itself in my brain and expand, firm in its own belief that it was the Funniest Thing Ever. I came up with a hundred jokes in the next twenty minutes:

  • I’m gonna get a cat and name it M-Cat. Then I can be honest when I say I’m allergic to the MCAT. (The last time I visited a friend with a cat, named Cosmo, I had to take so many Benadryl that I couldn’t make a sentence with more than one clause).
  • The cat needs to be very friendly at first, then when you say the wrong thing to it start scratching the hell out of you.
  • We should take M-Cat and throw it around. Then we can say we passed the MCAT. In fact, we can paint it, then say we passed it with flying colors.
  • We can… okay, I’ll stop now.
You get the point. The rest of my day has been completely ruined. Case in point: during our seminar discussion on the American healthcare system (syllabus: everyone is fucked), I thought of an M-Cat joke – I won’t spell it out, but it involved getting a couple of kittens and calling them Practice M-Cats – and nearly had to get up and leave the room for fear of being overcome by giggles.
I know, I know, I’m procrastinating and should be studying instead of writing on my blog about things that no one actually cares about. Fine. I’ll go read my study materials: The instructions on the cat food I just bought in preparation for M-Cat.