Archive for tag Random
October 20, 2008 at 12:44 AM
I’ve been thinking a lot about the trajectory of my life lately. I haven’t really come with any good answers, and I feel like I’m working against the ever-ticking clock for some reason. It seems like the only time I can really make definitive decisions is when I’m put on the spot. Otherwise I just end up ruminating endlessly over increasingly worn-down ideas without ever coming to a conclusion.
And, neither here nor there, it occurs to me that I’ve been lonely for a long time. Maybe numbness is not the worst thing to be feeling these days.
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October 13, 2008 at 04:41 PM
I don’t know if it’s just the time of year. Maybe it’s the waning sunlight, heralding my impending succumbing to seasonal affective disorder. Maybe September has never been a good month for me, and October is always about trying to figure out where I went wrong.
You would think that, after a few decades, I would have some sort of idea.
Today, I find myself questioning my purpose in life. Oh, don’t get me wrong. This is probably something I do every day. But it’s usually a brief thought, a transient crack in my already fragile, crumbling ego. For all this time, there has been one thing that has propelled me through time, that has allowed me to endure the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as it were. It was, admittedly, never a very good reason. But it was a reason.
Despite all my high-minded rhetoric, my desire to do the right thing, and my wish to live a fulfilling life, the only concrete goal I’ve ever crafted for myself was that I wanted to be a doctor.
As of June 30, 2008, that journey had officially come to an end. I am now a full-fledged board-eligible internal medicine physician and pediatrician, and, as much as I’ve entertained the thought, I don’t really have the wherewithal to go on with any further training. From here on out, anything I do is entirely of my own volition, and not due to the requirements of some educational accreditation organization. (OK, that’s probably overstating things, but I’m drawing to illustrate a point.)
So it isn’t very surprising that I am feeling incredibly, profoundly lost right now.
I don’t know if it’s a cultural trait, or simply the unspoken mythology of my mother’s side of the family. Underlying everything, perhaps, is this sense of duty. Of responsibility. Oh, the responsibility of power is one thing. When I’m working under the aegis of my profession, it is almost terrifyingly easy to wield this responsibility. This is the Thing™ I have set out to Do, after all.
But then there is personal responsibility. The thing that I’ve learned is that I have a hard time with this form of responsibility. I struggle with it daily. I barely survive that struggle at times. If not for a lot of help from my friends, and my family, I would certainly have died or have killed myself by now. It’s amazing, considering that I can literally be responsible for life and death at any given moment, but I guess that’s the trick of things. It’s easier to be responsible for other people that it is to be responsible for yourself.
The day-to-day things I need to do to keep myself alive and a functioning member of society are, at best, annoying trifles, at worst, nearly unmovable burdens. At times, it seems a lot easier to keep someone alive, to make someone well, than it is to keep myself going. I can’t explain it. There is clearly something wrong with me.
But as long as I had a Purpose™, I could endure it. I have been steadfast, though perhaps somewhat dim-wittedly, unquestioningly so. I have ascribed certain failures in my life as sacrifices to the Purpose™, have foregone any hope of happiness in certain regards and used the Purpose™ as an excuse.
And now that the Purpose™ is for all intents fulfilled, the cowardice of my inaction is laid bare.
There are things that I have failed at, things I have refused to pursue, for the simple reason that I was afraid, and, until now, I’ve always had a plan to fall back on.
Now all my plans seem to lead nowhere, actually. Part of it is that I just want to be still for a while. Perhaps a long while. I just want to stop struggling, stop striving, and just let the current carry me, even if the current throws me off a 100 ft precipice, dashing me against the cruel sharp rocks below. I’ve literally travelled thousands of miles and spent dozens of years to achieve my Purpose™, and right now, I just want to lie here and not do anything. Perhaps I just reached too far, and now that I’ve been cursed with exactly the thing that I wanted, I’m realizing everything else that I’ve given up in order to achieve it, and I’m not entirely sure it was all worth it. Oh, “what if?” In all reality, there was no “what-if.” This is, was, will always be the path that I have taken, and as much as I long for alternate pathways and timelines, there was probably nothing I could’ve done.
The one thing that I am certain of, the one thing that leaves a hollow pit in the bottom of my stomach, that keeps me lying awake at night listening to the silent darkness, is that whatever it is that you want in life that is worth having always, always, always requires a lot of hard work and sacrifice. Oh, sure, there are a lot of other things I would like out of life, but I no longer think I have what it takes to get them. I no longer have that sheer, singlemindedness that got me to where I am today.
I’m just really tired. My soul is damaged and broken in a lot of important ways. And I’m exceedingly lonely.
There is a part of me that wants to know what else there is in life. A childish, whiny, emo part of me, to be sure. A part that just wants things to be*, but isn’t really brave enough to go out there and make those things *become.
There is a part of me that is resigned to the idea that that’s all there is, there ain’t no mo’, and the rest of my life is going to be relatively unchanging, and I’m going to die this way, without passing any more milestones, without experiencing any other sort of personal joy. Oh, I’ll play witness to lots of other people’s joys and sorrows, but that’s it. I’m only going to be a passenger. A spectator.
My question is a typical one. A hackneyed, trite cliché. Is there any further purpose in my life? Was I wrought to do aught else on this mortal plane? Or is this it? The One Thing™? The task of a hundred thousand million little things and small trifles, from which no great glory can be won. Of which no songs or stories are ever written. I guess it’s really a lot better than nothing.
The only thing that really kills me is the suffocating loneliness.
But I suppose you can’t have everything.
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September 07, 2008 at 02:07 AM
Now his failure is complete
—Darth Vader
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August 24, 2008 at 04:55 AM
Bewilderment spins mercilessly around my heart
weaves/binds/patterns/stitches, embedded like magical runes
threads of fate, minutest of imperfections becomes a message
that I cannot decipher, much less interpret
the last few thousand days far exceed the extent of my ken
elude the limits of my perception
more like meaningless, patternless ribbons of light,
photons swarming hither and thither
sparking random garbled currents coming out to gibberish
in the quivering gray jelly encased, entrapped in my skull
what does it all mean? does it even mean anything?
how did this come to pass? am I really seeing what I’m seeing?
Foolishly I stumble down the broken, shattered road
and not even the stars light my way this night, nor any night
these fragments perhaps meant for me to find
not to fix, realign, re-grade
but merely to record what has come to pass
misrepresented/misinterpreted as an straight and unerring line to destiny
the story always comes long after the event transpires
and the ending is happy or tragic only depending on where you cut it short
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August 23, 2008 at 11:44 PM
I’m not sure where I pulled the number ‘8’ from, but it may be from pathology class from the second year of med school. 8 minutes is the amount of time you’ve got before the lack of oxygen starts causing permanent damage (such that if you *do* manage to restart the heart and/or reopen the blocked vessel, you may actually cause even more damage than what has already been done—so-called reperfusion injury.)
Surprisingly, when someone is actively dying, eight minutes can actually feel like a terrible eternity.
But weirdly, this factoid has become enmeshed with another piece of (more accurate) trivia: 8 minutes is about how long it takes for light from the sun to reach the earth. Astrophysicists always like to talk about these hypothetical scenarios where you imagine that somehow the sun was extinguished, or went supernova, and it would take eight minutes before Earth actually went dark, or eight minutes for the blasting radiation to hit us.
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August 22, 2008 at 12:43 AM
So I finally met my neighbors the other day, after living next to them for several months, and hearing all sorts of snippets of conversations as they smoked their cigarettes outside my open window. It’s kind of funny that I plan on moving out at the end of the month, but, oh well. After four years of living in this pit, I’m about ready for a change.
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August 21, 2008 at 03:58 PM
Questions that had answer choices that all had something wrong with them, leaving me to pick the answer that seemed the least wrong.
I couldn’t stop coughing the whole time. It was terrible. I’m sorry if you had to take the test with me.
“Can you read my mind?” type questions.
I complained about the pixelated font in the survey. Hah!
I knew it would be freaking cold in there. They weren’t kidding when they said to dress in layers. It’s like they set the thermostat to suit the person who has the highest free T4.
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August 20, 2008 at 02:44 PM
It occurs to me that each of the previous board exams I took have been taken under somewhat adverse conditions.
Just before USMLE Step 1, the girl I was really into hooked up with someone else.
Because of extraordinarily poor planning, I had to drive 150 miles to take USMLE Step 2 on New Year’s Eve.
While I was taking USMLE Step 3, my dad was sitting in the CCU, waiting to get cath’ed.
I almost wonder if some kind of severe stress is necessary for me to pass these things.
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June 25, 2008 at 12:12 AM
It is weird to observe new beginnings without actually being part of it. Like when A+E first got together, for example.
But today the new interns started, and the heady mix of excitement and apprehension was intoxicating. I wish them all well. The next three (or so) years are going to be an adventure.
For a while, I felt like I was soaring, blown upwards by paroxysmal blasts of wind, wanting to do impossible things, forever chasing sunlight. But weariness creeps in bit by bit. In a lot of ways, I know that Bn is right, that my life is still ahead of me, that it’s too early to settle down and take root.
Even though the past four, eight, twelve years are finally catching up to me, and I look at the cold hard road behind me, and I realize that there’s no going back at all.
A part of me yearns achingly to claim this place for my own, to make that decision that this is enough.
That I am home.
A part of me recognizes that no place will ever be home, so long as my heart is sundered into sharp, jagged fragments. Just as I belong to no land, to no country, so too can no place lay claim over me. My soul lies fallow. What’s left of my heart is cold and still.
Maybe our hearts always know our destinies. As much as I’ve clawed, kicked, and railed against Fate, it has moved on inexorably, leaving me floundering in its wake, gasping for air and only swallowing sea water.
It’s been a long, long time since I remember knowing what I wanted. It may still be a long, long time to go.
It’s never gonna be that simple.
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June 22, 2008 at 09:04 PM
My dad relates this anecdote to me:
Doctor: What is this stuff in your ear? It looks like a melted glycerin suppository!
Patient: Damn. No wonder I still haven’t been able to poop. At least now I know where my hearing aid probably is.
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June 21, 2008 at 10:47 AM
Skipping merrily along the random fractured paths of the Internet, I somehow found my way from the sad fact that Cody’s Books on Telegraph and Dwight has closed (hat tip to Jamie Grove to the revelation that such a thing as a Twitter political debate exists, and that it sucked immensely (with commentary penned by the lovely Jennifer Van Grove) From there I discovered that there is now a patron saint to Twitter: tweetjeebus.
Somehow, this led me to some meme watching: check out I am aware of all Internet traditions (spawned by John Cole) and Nuking the Fridge (which I was led to by Jason Kottke)
Eventually, I found myself reading Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem ”The Raven.”
Nevermore.
If there really is a balm from Gilead, I wonder if the active ingredient will be gileadensol, gileadensone, gileadensamine, or gileadensic acid?
And apparently, while nepenthe refers to (probably) opium (not surprising, coming from Edgar Allan Poe), a compound called nepenthol would probably have to be a barbiturate. Still, it would be nice to not be depressed, but have my memories intact.
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June 10, 2008 at 03:18 AM
Just when you think all is lost, sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised. After struggling futilely to find some kind of jerry-rigged solution, sometimes all you have to do is turn the power off, and then turn it on again, and miraculously, everything else takes care of itself.
If only the rest of life worked out this way.
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June 07, 2008 at 02:11 AM
Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.
—Douglas Adams
The problem is that if you think too far ahead, everything always ends in disaster. This is the ugly reality.
The trick is to recognize the appropriate time frame and to not exceed the limitations of human perception.
The is far more difficult than you might imagine.
I think of poor Sidney Carton, and wonder if that’s the only possible path at this juncture. Self-sacrifice. Unrecognized martyrdom. Is this the far, far better thing that I must do? Death, so that others might be happy?
At least they’d fucking remember me. I guess.
Is sustainable happiness simply too much to ask for? Oh, I know that life is filled with pain and struggle. I know that I will suffer. Even if she loves me in return, it doesn’t mean that we won’t argue, fuss, or fight. That kind of harmony is impossible, and anyone who says otherwise is suspect.
But, to have fucked up days upon end, and yet know that you’ve got someone on your side, even if they disagree with you and think that you’re totally wrong, to know that she’s got your back. Is this just too much?
I’m not going to get anywhere in the state I’m in. Maybe I just have to call it a night, and pass out into the oblivion of sleep.
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June 06, 2008 at 12:23 AM
I am thinking that 26 years of formal education can really burn a guy out. I’m like beyond slap-happy. I’m this close to raving lunacy.
It occurred to me that I’m totally fried. Like beyond toasted. Charred. Carbon.
Realizing this was somewhat liberating. I shared my epiphany with my preceptor today. I promised that my mental faculties would probably return once I finally actually finished residency.
The remainder of the month is otherwise going to be an awful struggle.
Today was also the earliest I’ve gotten out of work this week. At 6:50 pm, I was cruising over the Coronado Bridge, and I decided that I ought to catch the sunset. Monday I think I may have just passed out. Tuesday, the sun was barely out, quickly extinguished by the marine layer as I gazed at the sea from Torrey Pines. Yesterday, the sun didn’t even come out once.
So, as per my routine, I camped out off of Sunset Cliffs. There was a layer of haze sitting on top of the ocean. I am thinking there is a slight possibility that I may have caught a green flash on film the CCD sensors of my digital camera, but I have yet to download the images to iPhoto. We shall see.
For some unaccountable reason, I felt joyful on the drive home. Maybe I just need something as simple as sunlight to make me happy. Then again, I’ve grown to associate sunsets and the sea with redacted, and every time I think of her, I find myself smiling a little.
The trick, however, is to stay firmly anchored in the here-and-now. It’s the hopes and aspirations that always manage to do me in. It isn’t fair for me to have any expectations whatsoever.
Friendship has been offered. This is already a lot. In of itself, it is already a very generous gift.
To use an idiom of our times, it is what it is.
The first order of business is to get my fragmented life into some semblance of order. I’ve lived in this hellpit for four years now and have never managed to arrange it into a livable configuration. I figure this weekend will probably be a good time to at least give it a shot.
Then there are the things I need to fulfill before the end of the year. These may be a little more difficult.
As always, it all about small, non-threatening things. No problem is so big that you can’t run away from it.
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June 04, 2008 at 09:04 PM
The color of the sky as far as I can see is coal grey
—”Like the Weather” by 10,000 Maniacs
The weather really does make me want to crawl back into bed and call it a day. I’ll try again tomorrow.
Instead, with a mania partly fueled by caffeine, but significantly driven by some kind of raging insanity, I feel compelled to wander back out into the tangled mass of chrome and light precipitation that creeps outside my door.
It’s no joke. No one in Southern California knows how to drive in the rain. It’s really pathetic. I don’t understand it.
But on my excruciatingly long, slow commute from work, I got to thinking about this whole timing thing.
I’ve never been very good with timing, as most people who’ve known me for the past decade or so know. And it’s not like I have a knack for very bad timing, either. I just can’t get things right. I’m in dyssynchrony with the universe or something.
But somewhat surprisingly, this situation (or perhaps, more accurately, this non-situation) that I find myself skirting around the edges of and refusing to write about is the fortuitous result of coincidence. Things couldn’t’ve transpired any earlier (what with redacted being in a relationship and all) but any later and I probably wouldn’t have all this time to ruminate, ponder, and over-analyze everything.
I discovered an amusing blog post by Kahlee about why ‘nice guys’ finish last, and yeah, it’s true, most guys who think they’re nice guys aren’t really nice guys. They’re just unattractive shlubs who expect a woman to just dig their emo-ness and whining, and who have serious co-dependency issues. Because, come on. The pendulum swings both ways (so to speak), and just like it’s feminist dogma that a woman doesn’t need a man to be complete (the whole “fish and bicycle” thing), it’s also true that a man doesn’t really need a woman so long as he’s got at least one hand, some type of lubricant, and free access to porn.
Or, to summarize the one enlightening epiphany I’ve had in the last 15 years or so: I am going to live the rest of my life alone and unloved, and when I die, no one is going to miss me until they notice that the work is starting to pile up and I haven’t been pulling my weight at the office. If I’m extremely lucky, death will be swift and painless.
Oh well. It’s only life, after all.
I did try the whole hedonism thing for a while. No one cares what you look like if you wave around a bunch of benjamins (I’m’a tell you what Wu told me: cash rules everything around me) and while it’s kind of depressing to only be able to have sex with skanky hos with chipped teeth who charge by the hour, in smoke-filled motel rooms with busted-ass beds, sometimes the porn just doesn’t cut it, and it’s nice to have a warm body underneath you or on top of you for all of those 30 seconds. And, in reality, once you realize that sex is relatively easy to obtain no matter what you look like, it really sort of loses its charm and novelty.
In all seriousness, though, it was really just booze and drugs, the latter only rarely, and never with the use of needles.
OK, OK, perhaps I over-exaggerate things for effect, but you get the picture. Even the messy, vomit-smelling oblivion of drunkenness never really did much except drain my wallet. It was a decent way to kill time in the Midwest during Winter (otherwise known as all the months between October and May) but you couldn’t do it every day of the week (although we damn well tried our best!)
I was fucking doomed from the start. I’ve always dug this quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline (translated from French):
Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you’re really in despair.
—from Journey to the End of the Night
Even I am shocked by the idea that I’ve somehow survived 15 years of this sort of despair.
The other thing that Kahlee’s post makes me finally, finally understand is what N was trying to tell me all those years ago when she cheated on my sad, emo, co-dependent ass by fucking some dude she knew for all of fifteen minutes: lust wins. Unconditional love is all well and good, but if she doesn’t think you’re hot, it’s just not going to happen. And it’s true. Even the nicest girls who aren’t superficial still want the hot guy, provided that he is a decent human being.
That last part, of course, is the kicker, and the only way I have an in with women of significant attractiveness. Given enough exposure and enough alcohol, I think I can manage to worm my way into any woman’s heart, and as long as I can keep her away from hot guys who are nicer than I am, I just might have a chance. It is therefore in my best interests to go around promulgating the notion that all hot guys are assholes. This is, of course, not true. (Any statement that claims ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘always’, or ‘never’ is false. Gödel would be proud of that one.) But the same story happens over and over again, much to my amusement. If you fall for that hot guy, be prepared to get shafted! (OK, that was probably low-hanging fruit. I’ll aim higher next time.)
My downfall is probably the fact that I can’t stand anyone feeling sorry for me. I mean, if it means having sex with me, I can probably stand it for at least 30 seconds, maybe even a full minute. But eventually it does get on the nerves. There’s something abysmal about being treated like some retarded and crippled pet rabbit. Eventually, even the most empathetic woman gets sick of that kind of patheticness anyway, no matter how cute it seemed at the time.
I suppose one could look at things from an extremely optimistic standpoint: at least most of the women whom I fell for, and who had no interest in me in That Way™ were decent human beings who didn’t lead me on, and who let me know the score fairly early. What’s a little suicidal depression among friends, right?
I am afraid that this conversation will eventually come up with redacted, like it usually does whenever I fall for someone who is way out of my league (which is essentially every time) and then what? Back to my personal existential hell, I guess.
What prompted all this soul-searching? I suppose it’s the fact that redacted has hooked up with someone, and for some reason, I feel like this is it. She found her One™. Whatever chance I had (and I realize the idea of me having a chance with redacted is an incredible assumption) is long gone and completely evaporated. To quote the Comic Book Guy: Oh, I’ve wasted my life.
The other thing is that another of my friends whom I’ve known for the longest time told me a little while ago that she was going to get married next year, and I realize that I probably squandered my opportunities with her as well (that is, if there was even any opportunities, which is always the big “if”)
I have essentially run out of single female friends with whom I might’ve had remote, perhaps infinitesimal— yet nonetheless finite—chances of hooking up with.
Aim low, kids… So low no one will notice it when you fail.
—Marge Simpson
But, instead of aiming lower, I manage to fall for someone who is totally way out of my league. Extraordinarily beautiful. Wonderfully brilliant. Authentically caring. And magically creative. She could literally have any guy she wanted. There’s just no way in hell. I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking.
I am reminded by Br. that this is typical of my behavior. (Man, I really miss Br. and Bn. They always knew exactly when to kick me in the head so that I’d stop acting like a dumbass.) Go for something that you know you’re going to fail at spectacularly. Because it’s safe. If you know how it’s going to turn out, then you don’t have to deal with the messiness of uncertainty. If it doesn’t kill you, how bad could it be, right?
And I can tell you, I’m pretty damn good at failing miserably. It’s a wonder that I managed to survive life as long as I have.
Whoo. It was good to get that out of my system. I don’t know why I never learned to play this game the way it was supposed to be played. Maybe because I was never meant to be a player. Darwin decided early on that I shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to the gene pool, perhaps.
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