Bring it, Block III

Block II introduced the physiology of three organs and how they work together as a system: the heart, the center of the universe; the kidneys, the organ with mysterious forms of regulation; and the lungs, keeping our blood red, not blue or purple (inside joke). The hardest part of the block, though, was parsing the material from lecture, picking and choosing the relevant details, and reassembling it into something more coherent, digestible, which wasn’t that bad. I can’t complain. I enjoyed the material, as long as I didn’t think about it for too long, because when I tried to understand an elusive, mechanistic detail not covered in class, the set of rules given to me failed. What did I expect? Two weeks studying an organ, treating it as something autonomous is risky business: there are who-knows-how-many parameters playing around in the quicksand. So the moral of the story is to have fun learning by picking your intellectual battles: I believe a smart, compassionate student can be selectively apathetic, when appropriate.

Last post I alluded to the holy-grail, the well-intended cliché of balance. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t that successful. Sure I protected an hour here and there for pleasure reading, a weekend free of studying, etc. Something was missing, though: medical school was still dictating my schedule. After talking with my classmates, who have given this issue some thought, I’m teased with the idea that maybe medical school can work around my schedule! So I’ve come up with a New Year’s Resolution: be more promiscuous. *gasp!* This means I’m going to talk to a PI (yes, I have an attractive prospect), attend some lab meetings, read some papers, maybe start a baby experiment!?!?! I also want to read more, write significantly more, volunteer a little, explore my gastronomic talents, and enjoy the culture around me (e.g., the Hammer Poetry Series each Tuesday). I’m ambitious. We’ll see. But I’d like to end the post with a little, hacked-up blurb by the poet Allen Ginsberg that left me inspired to try a little harder. I hope you too can share something from his words, which I feel can be applied to anything you think is creative:

“The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, the most representative, most universal… The cure for that is to write things down which you will not publish and which you won’t show people. To write secretly… so you can actually be free to say anything you want… You really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself…, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.”