A Reflection on Silence

Hello all in the blagotubes (explanation here). Tonight I'm writing to you because I really can't stand the quiet in my house at the moment despite my Little Green Cars Pandora station tunefully crooning away from my laptop and I need a distraction. The house is quiet because the remaining residents of this homestead have left for a couple of weeks for their summer breaks. This inevitably means that our constant banter back and forth, shouting from upstairs in desperate tones to stop the flushing of the toilet while they take showers (guilty), and general camaraderie is severely lacking at the moment. It's just slightly eerie to walk through a house that normally holds so much life to find it suddenly dormant and silent.

There are plenty of different silences in this world actually. There is the well-known awkward silence as in the one that follows and introduction but you don't know how to continue the conversation or make an adroit exit without looking too desperate. Also there is the contemplative silence that falls between a contented pair of friends as you gaze up into the dark night sky that is peppered with bright pinpricks of light, infinitesimally small streams of photons on a journey ending on your eye (relevant and thoughtful link). Don't forget the wondrous silence that occurs when two people simply  must gaze upon one another to hold an entire conversation in their heads, never having to open their mouths except for a smile at the end that nobody sees because it is buried in the heart of the other person's warm embrace. However, there are dark silences as well. The silence that follows a realization of the terrible, like in the instance where you immediately know that it wasn't the brachiocephalic branch but the left subclavian that was the answer on the final you just finished taking. Or perhaps the somber silence of remembrance for one who has been lost, perhaps someone you knew for your entire life but it could also be someone that you've never known before but somehow they touched your life in this small way.

The silence I have ringing incessantly in my ears is altogether a different silence though. Neither happy nor sad, this silence comes from the absence of vital, vivacious, and vibrant life but is not so horrible as all that. It is quite pensive as well and I have been able to do plenty of wonderful thinking about a great many things (not least of which is my studies in cellular biology... Frizzled Wnt receptors and Disheveled activating proteins and such). But at the same time I reflect and miss the intensity of living with other human beings and the interactions that I can share with them. Being alone is a very necessary thing for me to live a sane life (or something resembling sanity at least) but so is friendship and human contact. Quick phone calls while a dear friend drives to Wal-Mart, conversations about Marvel making Thor a woman (seriously though... what the heck Marvel?) over a Facebook message, or a brief check-in with people half a continent away do not really count and being a hermit (however romantically appealing it may be) is not really something I would like to put on my resume.

This mood will pass, as do all of my darker more serious moods, when I wake up tomorrow. There is something about the birth of a new morning that refreshes my mind. I don't know what it is but I see correlations to it and the magic in the Dresden Files that washes away with the dawning of a new sun and the birth of a new day (slightly cheesy yes, but it is strikingly similar).

Well, my laundry is now done and I feel that I've said about all that must be said at the moment. If you've actually clicked on all of those links, I'm sure that you've seen quite a few from webcomic xkcd and that would be because in addition to thinking and studying and contemplating silence, I've been on the internet browsing comics that appeal to a little bit nerdier and sarcastic clientele. Needless to say, this one fits the bill. You should check it out. Goodnight all.

“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.” - Marcel Marceau

P.S. I really hope that the future doesn't remember us like this.

A Brief History: Part I

Hello folks, today I'm going to try and give you a little bit of history of things. I'll only go so far as to cover up to the end of high school for the moment and leave out the last two years of medical school as well as my passions for the medical field and what drew me to choosing it as a career. I'll cover those in other posts at a later time.

To start off with, I was born. There. We've started. Yay us!

The rest of my life after this rather violent event has really just been a series of fortunate and unfortunate mishaps that have led me to where I am today (uh... and that would actually be sitting in my spot at K-Place and writing this blog post, watching YouTube videos about perpetual motion, and listening to some awesome Young the Giant and The Postal Service songs).

We can skip past infancy, elementary education, and most of that dreaded time in most humans' lives they like to call puberty but is really just a black spot of awkwardness in any person's timeline. Suffice it to say that I was an ornery and know-it-all child that nursed a hatred of bananas and an affinity towards the outdoors and picking on (perhaps a bit too strongly) my younger siblings... however, I doubt my childhood was any worse for wear from these things and in fact, my dislike of bananas I believe has strengthened who I am today.  I was homeschooled, went to a Biosciences and Medicine Academy (BSMA) for my Junior and Senior years of high school, was extremely active in my Boy Scout troop (was honored with the Eagle rank) and the local Order of the Arrow (Vigil Honor for all of you out there who might know what I'm talking about), and generally enjoyed learning about a myriad of different interests.

All throughout high school I was doing stuff outside of the classroom that were really enjoyable. I went to national conventions for HOSA (look it up, I'm not going to explain everything!) as a part of an academic team for two years through the BSMA, I went on some high-adventure, week-long trips to New Mexico and Canada to backpack and canoe through the wildernesses we encountered there, and I also went to a community college my senior year for a semester and got my EMT-Basic training/licence which was awesome!

Summers were spent on trips with school or Boy Scouts, some family vacations, and random high school stuff like concerts with "awesome" bands, lots of Starbucks, and plenty of just hanging out and reading lots of books in my spare time. Overall, it was a fairly problem-free childhood and actually prepared me fairly well for being on my own in college/medical school.

Sometime soon I hope to continue my story towards medical school, to catch up on everything that has happened pre-blog. Until then enjoy your lives, enjoy your sleep more, and don't get into too much trouble.

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.”

An Ominous Beginning

Hello to those of you that either will follow this blog from the beginning and are reading this shortly after I post it, those devoted readers who follow me after a number of posts and read to the very last page, or those of you who are impatient or otherwise engaged and just skipped to the very first post. To all of you, no matter your origins, I bid you a good evening.

I probably should first establish some ground rules (which will inevitably change as this blog hopefully continues and lengthens). First off this will be a blog chronicling my journey through medical school and possibly beyond. I will not have any regular postings but will try to post with some frequency about my life as I see it. These posts will encompass a wide variety of topics including, but not limited to, medical school classes, administration encounters, living arrangements, life encounters, and opinions as I see fit to share them.

I am currently in my second year of medical school at the University of Missouri in Kansas City (I'll do my best to periodically fill you in on my life before now and how amazing it was until I decided to start a blog) and am planning on another five years of school here (I'm going through a 7-year curricular route). That's probably about all I'm gonna write for now. It's late and my roommates just started watching World War Z so obviously my attention is being diverted elsewhere and now I have to watch it. I'll try posting some of the history of the past two years fairly frequently at first.

About here is where I'll have a fun catchphrase or something to end all of my blog posts... for now you just get this. Enjoy!

"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with the first step" - Rafiki