apparently i am a horrible person

I want to go to medical school. We all know that. For the past several years I have been steadily prepping myself for medical school and all the horrors that accompany it--sleeplessness, humiliation, feelings of inadequacy, unfathomable debt--because I genuinely want to do it.

My concern is this--am I doing all this for the wrong reasons? When I ask myself honestly "do you want to go to school and become a doctor," the answer is always yes. I know that I would be good at it. I know that it would give me a feeling of substance and accomplishment. And I know that I will enjoy it. But I also know that the prestige, respect, and money that come along with the job are HUGE motivators. The problem is, no one wants to read honesty on a med school application essay. They want the Patch Adams version--"I want to be a doctor because one time when I was a little kid I saw a baby squirrel fall out of a tree and I picked it up and nursed it back to health in a shoebox and ever since all I ever wanted to do is help people"

Can I get a bullshit? Anyone?

I'm not saying that I don't want to help people. Of course I do. I would end up a shitty-ass doctor if I didn't. I don't view people as a paycheck, and am insulted by doctors that do. But I also refuse to delude myself into thinking that I would be willing to throw away the best years of my life in a fit of academic turmoil and pain if I didn't know for damn certain that there was going to be adequate compensation at the other end.

I mean, is there anything wrong with what I'm saying? Is everyone else just too uncomfortable with the truth to come clean, or am I genuinely lacking sensitivity and humanity? I'm tired of people making me feel like a shitty human being for saying "yes, in some ways i AM in it for the money."

crush.

This is the boy I like.



It's a little confusing right now, and for that I accept complete responsibility. But despite all that, I think you guys would really like him.

i guess treadmills can be fun

I am in awe right now. Every particle of my being wants to believe that this is all one take, but it just doesn't seem possible.

i am a brat

My Mom just delivered the shocker of the year...she and my dad are looking at real estate in Charleston. My first reaction to this news was sheer horror. I thought she meant for herself and my dad. I thought she meant they were moving from TR. I thought she meant that they were leaving the house that I grew up in and coming down to this coke-palace of a city to settle on a beach somewhere and begin retirement/old age. I was destroyed.

However, all of these emotions not only happened in around five tenths of a second, they were also slightly premature. As soon as she saw the look on my face, she backpedaled, exclaiming "NOT FOR US! For you guys!"

This should be great news, right? I should be really excited, right? In a way I sort of am. I mean, its a cool idea and all. But something about it really depresses me as well. I am 23 years old, with a stable job. I have been paying rent and all other expenses on my own for a little over a year now with no trouble. I would continue to pay the same amount of rent and take care of the same expenses if I were to move into this hypothetical house. But something about having my parents as my landlord makes me feel like I am right back in college, with them footing the bill. It would almost be like having them next door, even though in reality they are a comfortable four hours away.

That being said, their reasoning for wanting to buy property is completely sound. My mom explained that since a) I am going to be here for god knows how long, b) Emily is here for at least 2 more years, and c) Randall will be in the city for another three years, it only makes sense to be pouring my rent money into a mortgage, rather than into my slumlord's pocket. Not to mention the whole "ultimate buyer's market" thing. So it is completely logical that they would want to do this.

I can't decide which is more spoiled--living in a house that my parents bought for their kids or complaining that I might have to live in a house that my parents bought for their kids.

i accidentally just ate one

A quick question...where the HELL did they cook up the flavor cherry? Like in Jolly Ranchers and various and sundry other hard candies and kiddie medications? We think it tastes like cherry because we have been conditioned to think "cherry" when that particular flavor hits our tongue since childhood. But the next time you taste it, reallllly taste it and then compare it to the taste of an actual cherry fruit. I think they should just change the name of the flavor to "juvenile diabetes". At least it would be more accurate than "cherry".

now its time to say goodbye...to all our company

I have to sacrifice the mice that we have been working on Wednesday so that I can strip-mine their organs and send them to a lab to tell us how much cancer they have. It leaves me feeling vaguely guilty, but I can't really put my finger on why...

killer tat, brah

I'm pretty sure this is the image I am going to ask them to turn into my tattoo design. I'm thinking exactly this style, but with pink/red tinge on the ends of the petals where the color normally is.

I think after its done my biggest issue won't be stigma, inability to find gainful employment, or regret over its permanence. It will be finding ways to hide it from my parents for as long as humanly possible.

The problem with Charleston is that during the summertime, most people wear shorts or a short skirt. These people can get away with wearing a t-shirt that provides adequate coverage of the shoulders because their bare legs even out the heat distribution on their bodies. Unfortunately for me, however, I refuse to wear shorts ever, and short skirts make me feel like an alien version of myself--I know I look weird in them. So I wear jeans. This means that I have to wear a tank top or I will most certainly die of heatstroke.

My only hope is that my parents never ever come to visit me during the summer. Ever. It's not so much that I am scared of what they will say--I mean at this point what can they do to me? I am just worried that they will think its some sort of late-blooming form of rebellion--which is just embarrassing. What am I, fifteen? If I were going to get a tattoo to rebel I would have done it long ago. This is strictly because I want to do it, to sort of commemorate this time in my life. I can't imagine ever regretting something that I want so much. I would rather get the tattoo, keep it under wraps, and then show it to them a couple of months (maybe years) later, when I am in medical school, so that at least I am on the road to becoming a respected professional.

All this being said, I am beyond stoked about getting this thing. I hope my artist is hot.

lida rose, oh won't you be mine

I was really missing my Grandpa Warren this morning. I don't suppose that this is really that unusual, save for one tiny detail--he died two years before I was born.

In itself, the situation is strange enough, but for me I think it is especially exceptional. I don't easily form emotional bonds with people. As a matter of fact, the first time I heard about "attachment disorder," I checked WebMD and various other online sources repeatedly for 3 days before I was finally able to convince myself that I didn't have it (one of the major symptoms was "markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts"--that's just me all over). I am a person who was ready to let an entire branch of my extended family fade into memory as a result of a petty disagreement--not out of malice, simply because I didn't care enough to play the game. I'm sure that if someone read into this enough they could fabricate some type of deep rooted psychiatric malady with which to diagnose me. But I wasn't neglected. I wasn't abused. I wasn't unloved. It's just the way that I am.

However, against all odds (thank you, Phil Collins), I have developed a profound emotional relationship with a grandfather that I have never even met. For this minor miracle, I assign my mother full credit. I can't remember exactly when she first began telling the stories about Warren, but all of them were relevant to the goings-on in my own life. It seemed like every interest I had, every trial I suffered through, and every bawdy joke I laughed at was something that he would have had a deep and personal interest in himself. He was hilarious and emotional and real, and I felt closer to him than I did most of my living relatives.

I was surprised the first time I really missed him. My second year of college I was home visiting, and my mom and I went to see a barber shop/sweet adelines quartet competition over at Furman. My grandpa had been involved in a barber shop quartet for years when my mom was a kid, and she always had played recordings of the Buffalo Bills to acquaint me with what she perceived as a dying art form. I really loved the close acapella harmonies, and even though it probably would have been classified as supremely nerdy by around 99.9999% of the young adult population, I went. We sat through a long list of introductions and thank yous, and finally the competition started.

I have never heard anything like it before--I had to remind myself to close my gaping mouth 3 or 4 times throughout the course of the competition. Every group was amazing, and the applause was sustained and deafening. Finally, as a grand finale of sorts, all of the groups separated out into their respective parts and assembled to sing the song "sincere" as a large four part chorus. I knew the song by heart and was singing along, and halfway through I looked over at my mom. And she was crying. It was the first time in my entire life I had seen my mom really cry, and at that moment I realized that I missed him as much as she did. I missed him so much I could hardly breathe.

We left quietly after the conclusion of the song, both awkward in the afterglow of our shared moment. Neither one of us said anything all the way home. We walked wordlessly from the car to the kitchen, and when we got inside I sat down and she started dinner. After a few minutes I put on a CD of The Music Man. We sat there listening for several minutes, and then started singing along together to Lida Rose. I sang baritone and she sang lead. It was a lot less cheesy than it sounds, especially after the dog tripped her up and she yelled "goddammit midnight, don't make me grind you up and serve you as taco meat!"

When she curses, she always refers to it as "the Warren in me."

coleman family vacations

this was on disney today, and when this part came on i thought i was going to have a stroke from laughing so hard. its such an accurate representation of some of the early coleman family trips, it's uncanny.

sonata in z-flat minor

This is the most expensive violin in the world. It is a Stradivarius (nicknamed the Lady Tennant), made in 1699. It cost 2.3 million dollars.

It is very pretty, yes. And it is very old. It's namebrand. But there is something I've always wondered about high priced instruments such as this: how good can something really sound? And more to the point--if an instrument is so great that it's worth over 2 million dollars to someone, how much credit can the musician take for the sounds that come from that instrument?

This question actually comes from a more personal dilemmma that I've been faced with recently. I was given a violin for graduation per my request. It is a really great instrument--as a matter of fact, when I was trying it on I was told by the woman who sold it to me that the previous owner had only been able to upgrade to a better sounding instrument when he moved up to the $10,000+ range (for comparison's sake, this one cost around $1,900).

Well, that little tidbit hooked me completely, so I took it home and started playing, joined a band, and am doing all sorts of cool stuff with it. However, every now and then when I am playing it, I have this weird sense of guilt--like, if I were really spectacular, I wouldn't need such a great instrument to make me sound good. I would be able to draw the same quality of sound out of a piece of shit rental violin that weighs 5 pounds and has an inch of varnish on its green-pine body.

In staying with this theme, I also can't really put my finger on what makes me sound good in the first place. I don't feel like I am doing anything particularly skilled. Yet there is something different about the way that I handle my instrument now versus the way that I handled it ten years ago when I picked it up for the first time. But when I look back and try to pinpoint the exact moment that I went from sounding like a cat dying horribly to a reasonably skilled musician, I have no idea when it happened.

Ahhh, mysteriousness of mystery.

shaken, but not stirred

Man, I'm kinda bummed out that Hillary came in third in the Iowa caucus yesterday. On the upside however, at least Obama won it--I don't know much about the specifics of his platform, but from what I have read he seems like a pretty solid guy (albeit young), and I think that part of me is just yearning for our next president to NOT be a white male. White guys are so damn boring it kills me sometimes.

That being said, I am actually pleasantly surprised with the adequacy of the Republican front runners as well. Although I would prefer a Democrat because I'm a little more liberal and I think we just generally need a change in strategery (yeah, I said it) in the White House, we could do worse than to elect Huckabee or McCain. They both have strong views on education, tax amendment, and health care, which is great.

However, I think the reason that I couldn't ultimately support either one of them is that there is too much religion brought into the picture--too much basing the political future of a multi-faith nation on Christian values. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to come off as some sort of hedonist, but church and state are separated for a reason. When religion plays too strong a role in politics, you know what happens? The Middle East. Our mistake is thinking that because we are championing Christian instead of Muslim values, we are somehow exempt from holy wars and zealot fueled violence. This is really dangerous thinking, because when you really get down to it, every person in the world is exactly the same. The group of people most vulnerable to manipulation is the group that thinks "that could never happen to us."

And by the way, I keep hearing all this yammering on about how "America was founded on Christian principles." It wasn't. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, etc--all the key founding fathers were Christian, it's true...however, the principles that they instilled in our Constitution were overwhelmingly humanistic. As my dad once said, "The US constitution is just good common sense down on paper." After all, the concepts of fairness and equality are not copyrighted by Christianity--they just happen to be some logical, universally good ideas that Jesus taught.

Whew, I guess I'll step down off by soapbox now--I'm starting to get a little dizzy up here. Go Hillary!

miami!!

this is how ebullient i feel about my trip to miami.

god bless the greeks

Like my new template? The old one was so dark that it was really bumming me out, and I heard somewhere that taupe is soothing (and by somewhere I mean Brad Pitt said it in Ocean's 11).

So I was watching Strangers with Candy last night (why yes, it is one of those shows that I have seen every episode of a million times and just put on in the background for the hell of it), and I have come to a conclusion--Amy Sedaris is my hero. I mean, it is one thing for a beautiful actress to make herself ugly to win an Oscar (hell, it seems like that's the ONLY thing you have to do to win an Oscar nowadays). But it is another thing for a beautiful actress to make herself hideous for a living just because she enjoys doing it. And for the record, I don't think that there is any character more disgustingly, obscenely hideous than Jerri Blank.

feliz ano nuevo

Last night we went to the Cumberlands for New Years Eve/Their Last Concert Ever seeing as they are closing and we thought that it might be personally historic. I thought the ten dollar cover was a bit expensive for a place like that, but sacrifices must be made in order to cement your place in history (just ask Abe Lincoln or Jesus, I doubt they will disagree).

Anyhoo, I ordered a drink compliments of The Marj. It was pretty standard--rum and diet coke--so I was taken aback when, after the first sip, I felt like I was going to cough spasmodically and spew fire from my mouth like the hillbilly mouse taking pulls from his jug of moonshine in The Rescuers. The Rescuers? Anyone? Oh well, moving on...

So that was startling, but I realized that it might be a good thing since it would encourage me to nurse that one drink for the entire night, thus saving money, trips to the bathroom, and the slight discomfort of yelling "diet coke on the rocks!" over a sea of people with absolutely no sense of humor.

I realized quickly that since I had a negligible amount of alcohol in my system and was surrounded my drunk people I needed to find a way to entertain myself, so I started toasting people:

• "Here's to drinkin' beers, smearin' queers, and fishin' off piers!" (not mine, and not really that funny in a town with a gay population as high as that of Charleston, but I like to use it as much as possible)
• "Here's to the end of the Bush Administration!" (NOT very popular. I was surprised)
• "Here's to fake boobs!" (She had obviously fake boobs. Excuse me for living.)
• "Here's to yo momma!"

Etcetera, etcetera. This went on for a few minutes, but after a while I was even annoying myself, so I made one last toast. I decided to quote Rent. "TO NO SHAME NEVER PLAYIN' THE SAME GAME! TO SODOMY, ITS BETWEEN GOD AND ME!!! TO S & M!!"
Then, to my sheer amazement, the girl at the bar turns to me with a stunned look on her face, laughed, and yelled "LA VIE BOHEEEEEEMME!!!" It was a fabulous moment.

Then the ball dropped and it was new year and we all went home. The end.