A Christmas Story: The Search for the Perfect Tree

/ Nate / Leave a comment

In honor of Christmas, or “Festivus,” as we Jews tend to call it, here’s a post from last year’s expedition to find a Christmas tree in St. Louis. Few of you have seen this before, so consider it new.
—–

For the first time in my short, Jewish life, I was invited to take place in the time-honored Christian tradition of cutting down the Christmas tree. According to rigorous scientific research, such as authentic-looking blogs and websites with festive backgrounds written in Comic Sans font, the custom of erecting a Christmas tree began in the time of the Romans with the festival of Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a celebration of the god Saturn, and was marked by pretty much everyone having sex with everyone else in massive orgies. Whether you were a male or a female was evidently unimportant. Friends and family exchanged gifts, and traditional social norms were relaxed, but really Saturnalia was all about sex. Sex with lots of unknown people, actually.  In a seemingly incongruous ritual, revelers also decorated their homes with bits of evergreen shrubbery. Continue reading →

Musings on Faulkner

/ Nate / 1 Comment

Can you think of a more boring title for a post?

When I was a junior in high school, I took AP English Literature with a teacher I’ll eponymize as Mrs. Carroll. English Lit was a tremendously challenging class – probably the hardest I had in my career – that most students hated, since Carroll made it a habit to seat students in a circle and call people out, Socrates-style, for discussion points.

I have two enduring memories from that year. First, Mrs. Carroll handed me back my first paper, a five-page analysis of Benvolio from Romeo and Juliet, with all but the last page crossed out with giant red “X’s” and a huge “NO” written the first page. The second memory was of a thirty-minute discussion about the meaning behind the literal tearing in half of the queen from Beowulf.

Not actually my paper. Her handwriting was worse.

Continue reading →

Five Fingers = Five Times the Pain

/ Nate / 1 Comment

Yesterday I received my pair of Vibrams “Five Finger” shoes, which you’ve probably seen. They look like gloves for your feet, and the idea is that it forces you to run how people were supposed to run.

I won’t go into depth about Born to Run or any of that crap except to say that I believe the author, Christopher McDougall, when he says that people were never meant to run heel-to-toe, which is what sneakers and running shoes promote. To be very brief, the biomechanics of the human foot appear to suggest that people are designed to generally walk heel-to-toe but run on the pads of our feet, and for extended periods. Since the publication of Born to Run, research into barefoot running has exploded, and the science seems to bear out McDougall’s anecdotal evidence that people who don’t wear shoes tend to walk and run in the manner described.

This made sense to me, because like many runners with an elephant-like stride (not a good thing), I tend to get shin splints, knee pain, and all sorts of random aches cropping up after some weeks of continuous training. But the real impetus for switching to Vibrams, which essentially allows soft-footed children of suburbia like myself to run on pavement without having to develop blisters and callouses, was simply boredom.

Continue reading →

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.

Being Suboptimal: Stupid Is As Stupid Does

/ Nate / Leave a comment

Disclaimer: not funny.

My first thought walking out of my organic chemistry test last night – yes, last night – was, “Pitz would have killed me.” Dr. Pitz, one of my favorite professors in undergrad, taught a psychology class called “Decision Theory.” The whole principle of the class was that people are irrationally rational – that is, they behave in predictably stupid ways. Continue reading →

Medicine Dress Code

/ Nate / 4 Comments

“Wear a short white coat, your ID, and decent clothes.”

The above is a standard email we receive for pre-shadowing instructions in the university hospital. In our first seminar here, our medical director told us we’d need to acquire a white coat, specifically one that reached about to the waist. Why? Wouldn’t you think that a white coat is a white coat? Continue reading →

Feeling the Pressure

/ Nate / Leave a comment

Now we’re into our first real week of class (with labs and everything!) I can tell you that this is going to be a very challenging semester. We postbacs are finally settling into our schedules, trying to figure out when we can eat lunch and go to the gym, feeling out our easier days and our hell days, and looking ahead to those multiple-test weeks looming over the horizon.

No huge homework assignments are yet due and no tests are coming until the end of next week, but I think we’re all beginning to feel a little bit of the pinch. There’s that sense of, “we’re about to get murdered with work, but we aren’t sure where it’s going to come from yet” hanging over everyone. At least, it’s a nagging thought in the back of my mind – “what should I be working on right now?” Continue reading →