Med school 5,890,726 : Me 2

Once again I find myself in a battle of wills. Somewhat like that which I experienced with Giant guy. My nemesis in the library. Who had the uncanny ability to always sit in my study area and then to proceed to be loud.

Sit loud. Walk loud. Shuffle papers loud. Throw his highlighters loud. Pick them up throw them down again loud. Rearrange them.

Rinse. Repeat.

I never did pluck up the courage to say, ‘Giant guy for the love of God have mercy and stop breaking my sanity.’ No. Instead I found a secret room to study in.

Only to one day find that giant guy also ‘discovered’ the secret room. And that was the end of on campus studying.

This battle is a little different. Its one I knowingly threw myself into. Knowing that it would be a long uphill struggle. One that I chose to face. One requiring a good deal of self sacrifice. One taking everything out of me and then coming back to demand some more. A face constantly full of dirt and hands stuck with thorns.

Enter the real Giant Guy: med school.

Although some twist of fate involving my 5 year old self’s meeting one fantastic pediatrician, a consequent purchase of a fisher price stethoscope and an inspiration has brought me here, some days I do wonder if I’ll make it in one piece to the other side.

Granted I’ve got all my highlighters in a row. And the papers have thus far been shuffling in all the right ways. I do wonder when a 4.30 alarm will make me throw my shoe sized ‘phone’ across the room. When one more picture of a goiter will send me screaming out of the lecture hall. When I just won’t care what the gram stain of staph. aureaus is...err...wait too late on that one.

Frustration and some serious exam induced PTSD aside, I’m going to plug on. The dream is there. The will is there. The middle bit full of torturous grueling labor is all that’s left to fill in. That’s all.

And the days that it gets really rough. There’s always Grey’s to bring the inspiration back.

'Hello. What's this?'

This has been in my hallway for about 3 months now. I don’t know why it's there or who’s left it. It has however lent some purpose to my life…I now use to figure out when I’ve reached my floor…unfortunately there are no numbers in this building we’re labeled by letter…this backwardness is in itself left to the pondering of another day.

At the moment this stack of wood is occupying my curiosity. I am inclined to just build whatever it is for the poor bloke who left it there. Quite obviously someone got frustrated by the project, separated all the pieces and left them in inappropriate places to deter it ever reaching completion. Maybe if it’s done they’ll take it away.

I think its bits of desk.

It could be worse…I could have that evicted toilet that’s sitting out on the 4th floor.

The smell of summer

It smells like eggplant in my apartment. I’ve never bought an eggplant in my life let alone cooked one. In fact until the age of 8 I lived under the misconception that eggplant plants like the one my 3rd grade teacher had us pot and take home would grow eggs…as an egg plant should.

I have no neighbors and the giant upstairs isn’t home. Maybe the smell is in my imagination. Whatever it is, it’s making me feel like I’m back in my grandmother’s (bejee’s) kitchen.

Every summer, all of us cousins on mom’s side would stay over at my grandparent’s. My bejee has a ridiculously huge garden full of all the ‘punjabi’ vegetables, the majority of which none of us were fans of. But, none worse than the eggplant.

Every few days the eggplants would be picked. Giant, ugly things that smelled horrible and tasted even worse. My cousins and I would sit down for lunch and pull faces and attempt to find new ways of covering up the taste while ignoring the fact that when it was cooked with the skin on it looked like squishy slugs.

We were grateful; I imagine that my bejee cooked that eggplant with the best of intentions - hoping we’d grow tall and ‘hearty’. Needless to say I didn’t eat enough of it to reap those benefits.

I did however laugh more at that kitchen table then anywhere else in the world. So, even though the eggplant had to be swallowed down with enough water to give us major stomach aches afterwards, I don’t think I’d go back and change a thing.

Damn it. I know why I smell eggplant.

It’s homesick Sunday.

'J'

My greatest fear you ask?

Forget heights. Forget dogs.

It’s the fear of my computer crashing. Well…ok it’s in a close tie with swimming in lakes and oceans.

A recent accident involving the uprooting of my ‘J’ key, led me to 5 minutes of anxiety and panic. My heart may have stopped for a fraction of a second and I most definitely forgot to breathe. In short, sympathetics shot through the roof.

There was a time when the life of my computer was not tied up to my own, when I could deal with my entire C drive’s deletion. A time, when I did not think of its presence as the 2nd occupant of this apartment. However, a series of unfortunate circumstances involving a glass of water and a fried motherboard left me seriously traumatized.

Once upon a time I too laughed at sci-fi flicks of machines running their creators. Now, I’m the little cartoon that the mechanical arm hoists up by the scruff of the neck. And yes, time and again I let it pick me up and drop me down, leaving me totally vulnerable to its mechanical mood swings and passive aggressive error screens.

Cotton Swab Earplugs

On a small island in the Atlantic palms swayed, waves lapped, the sun shone down.

Following a road past a beach, shining lights, sugar cane, up a bumpy road skipping a school or two.

Along a dirt path…in a place well past its glory days….an apartment boomed thunder.

No lie.

That can only be thunder. No human being could possibly make that kind of noise. It must be an act of nature herself. She has left the flower blooming and hurricane brewing and descended upon me…as I’ve no idea what I’ve done to deserve this…let’s work it out.

I seem to have a solid streak of bad upstairs neighbors. All of which seem bent upon striking my sanity down. I do not know who these people are. I do not know what horrible twist of karmic obligation has landed them above me. But there they are.

It all began with the piano player. This man refused to learn new music and was intent on perfecting pounding out the same 2 songs dawn to dusk....but more specifically when I seemed to be in a particularly good spot of focus. I would recognize the sound of his piano anywhere and to this day should I hear it I will cringe and cower.

Then came a couple with a Chihuahua; the husband was a fan of jumping rope in steel-toed army boots from the sound of it. And every day at 10pm the Chihuahua would do laps in what could only be micro-rollerblades.

And now I’ve been graced with a giant who stomps around crushing small animals under his feet, dragging his club behind him. I’ve actually taken to moving my laptop and myself out of the room he’s rumbling over in the fear that he will one day soon fall through the ceiling and there will be a big hole, a big mess and giant in my living room.

I would go upstairs and try to resolve the issue…but what am I suppose to say…please stop making odd noises and walk quiet. Someone somewhere seems to think I need to learn some patience. I’ll take the hint. But I won’t give up hoping that the last furniture rearrangement marathon upstairs was the last.