Plate o' Shrimp

And they all look just the same..........

4 week left of instruction until we start the finals cycle—two weeks of constant study interspersed with 3 hour exams and lots of free floating tension. I spent my weekend goofing of like nobody’s business. I only studied for 5 or 6 hours on Saturday (three of those spent going over cranial nerves with a visiting prof from Cambridge.. Dr. Welsh, very nice man who is leaving this week—he reminded us all to actually look at our patients and not just at our lab work) and a paltry 3 or 4 on Sunday. The rest of the time that I spent doing wacky things like watching movies on my laptop having dinner with friends at he waterside restaurant at True Blue Bay Resort and watching Weeds. Weeds, for the uninitiated is a Showtime series about a widowed mom who ends up as a suburban pot dealer when her husband drops dead of a heart attack (available for download from my dealers—the fine folks at itunes). The main characters are all about my age, and as I watched the last five episodes last night it has me thinking a little. The song that plays over the credits is “little boxes----” the same song my mom used to sing to my brother and me as we drove past the houses the doting the hills next to 280 in South San Francisco. It goes something like this:

Little boxes
On the hillside
And they are all made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes
On the hillside
And they all look just the same

(full text of song to be found here http://ingeb.org/songs/littlebo.html)
I remember thinking at the time when my mom explained the social import of that song that I never wanted to end up like those people in the boxes who all went to universities and came out all just the same. Sometimes I wonder now if it was I never wanted or having never felt entitled to the more conventional life, the home, the kids, a husband who I love and who loves me, a stable job—I started to dream of other things.

I get feedback from you all, that this (selling everything and leaving the country to go to medical school) is all so incredibly brave of me to do, but I am not so sure. I haven’t been brave enough to make a commitment to anyone in my life who perhaps would have made life in one of those boxes not just tolerable but profound. And there were a few candidates in the past.. not many but a few. And I managed to scare myself enogh that I never let them close or pushed them away.
The question that comes to mind is would I have been happier had I imagined a more conventional life. Would that life have been safer, less prone to the events that shake and challenge my sense of self? I know none of us are safe from diseases like cancer, random accidents or the fickleness of our collective hearts. Is my choice, the one to always pursue what is most interesting to me myself and I-- a safer choice? It is more lonely and there is safety in that, but it was the thought of staying in my nice stable job at my nice stable home that really scared me. My loneliness here has a cause (I go to school with folks who are largely much younger than I am—old friends are far away) and a projected duration (until I get back to the states for clincals or until friendship here deepen and grow). My loneliness in Albuquerque threatened to be of long duration and due not in a small way to my own inability to form a lasting relationship. That was hard. That scared the shit out of me. That gave me sleepless nights worrying about dying alone.
Here at least I am on a path that will allow me to make my life about something more than the occasionally constricted and twisting pathways of my heart. I have no idea what or who this choice will bring me. But I do know that making the choice to come here was the choice that filled me with the most hope.

posted by Sa @ 7:11 AM