esa lengua celestial

yes, i know. it’s been a month since I last blogged. Here’s a slew of updates, and a long overdue response to JP’s tag.

Thanksgiving

Yocksiong and Kelvin descended upon my nightmarishly messy apartment for thanksgiving… I had a lot of fun just catching-up-with-slash-getting-to-know them. Kelvin I hadn’t seen in a few years and Yocksiong… despite mutual friends I don’t think we’d actually had a real conversation before :) But I had quite a blast; it had been a long time since I’d had good Singaporean company. Made me miss home quite a bit, and wonder if I made the right decision to leave. Have been talking to Tish/Yol/Annch online recently too, and I really do miss sg. Or rather, I miss RGS/ACJC days. :P I’m too damn nostalgic for my own good. Oh, and I made thanksgiving dinner for 5 people — my largest homecooked meal to date. Unfortunately we were out of salt, and I forgot the butter was unsalted. So some stuff turned out a little funny. But people ate it anyway, the gracious souls. 

Med Sch Apps

So far I’ve interviewed at Wash U (St Louis, MO). I have another interview coming up at Columbia (NY, NY). Both are for MD programs, not the MD-PhD programs I applied to. Not sure how much of this is due to the relative weakness of my application and how much to the relateive lateness of my application. I’m starting to freak a little because I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t get in MD-PhD anywhere. Those programs are funded, whereas the MD-only programs are about $200kUSD for the four years. and I don’t think that includes living expenses. My hopes right now rest on getting a merit scholarship from WashU and then applying to transfer into the MD-PhD program internally. My savings should cover living expenses for a year, so that could work. but that’s contingent upon getting IN to WashU, AND getting a scholarship. St Louis is looking better and better by the day. :P 

Work

Work has slowed down and I’m getting a little bored. Senioritis has kicked in, I suppose. Am considering finding another job if I don’t get into med school this year, and working another year. but transferring visas is a nightmare, so it probably won’t happen. I might be able to shift between labs a little, but that’s about it. Other than that, I went to a conference in november which did little for me other than to trigger a depressive episode and instill in me some fear of the dumb-ass airport officials that have to approve my re-entry into the US.

Depression

And that brings us to this. I’ve had a number of deeper-than-usual sinkings into depression this semester, mostly to do with unreleased anger and frustration stemming from oh geez, about 5-10 years ago, and a huge overdose of nostalgia. I had it pointed out to me that for someone who constantly philosophizes about living in the moment, I sure do obsess a heckuva lot about the past and the future. So true. =/ I guess it’s just that there are all these things I never said, some nice, some not, but they needed to be said. And there are some people I miss profoundly whose lives i may never really be a part of again. Sometimes hope can really gnaw away at your soul. It’s funny… I never used to cry, growing up. Anyway. I feel like I need to resolve these things, but what’s resolution for me may very well be reopening old wounds for others, and well… that’s not very nice, is it. *Sigh* which brings us to….

Christmas :P

Christmas was always a bittersweet time for me. Back in the Carmel days there was at least a whole lot of distractions about. But since I left the faith, it’s as if someone drained all the sugar out of the dark chocolate and left me choking on cocoa powder. (Sorry, I had tiramisu recently and as always was choking on the cocoa powder, so it was on my mind :) Anyway, this year I decided to take a vacation with Ansel to sunny Florida to learn to scuba dive…. but Florida wasn’t sunny, our scuba instructor was incompetent(IMO), we both got violently seasick on the boat rides, and I came down with an extremely incapacitating head cold on Wednesday which still hasn’t gone away. So. we changed our plans and flew back yesterday. I must say, despite being sick, it’s good to be home.

Books

Have read three books by Dawkins this semester (River out of Eden, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene). Enjoyed them all, although I think Dawkins would have been better off writing fewer books and repeating himself less. That said, I think it’s a little frightening how many people I’ve encountered recently who have no idea about what evolutionary theory really puts forward, and simply have some vague notion about adaptation (These also being the same people who blanketly reject evolution because of how ‘meaningless’ it is). Oh BTW one thing I liked about The Blind Watchmaker was that Dawkins made it a point of explaining what it means to say that mutations are random, and that cumulative adaptation via natural selection is about as non-random as you can get. In any case, I do recommend them all, although The Selfish Gene, albeit his seminal work, is IMO not a crucial argument in the debate over evolution, but rather a matter of perspective.

Read Memoirs of a Geisha on the way home from Florida yesterday, and it was surprisingly not too bad. Not as good as the hype, but I’m willing to bet it’ll turn out better than the movie version. Then again I’m biased that way.

Speaking of which, I want to re-read Narnia now that I’ve seen the movie. I was rather disappointed in the film version; I think they could have done a lot more with it. The book has a lot more grandeur and depth to it that the movie, IMO, didn’t bring out at all.  

Tag – 5 Weird or Random things about Myself

1) I once made milk-less, egg-less pancakes because I was craving them but was short a few ingredients. Found a great recipe, and they turned out wonderful.

2) I’m planning on getting a unicycle in the spring.

3) I haven’t done laundry since… hm. probably better not to state that here :)

4) I couldn’t eat anything spicy until AFTER I came to the US.

5) I slapped my best friend in the face when I was in P1. She got appendicitis a week later, and I felt guilty for years.

Since none of my predecessor tag-ees have tagged the appropriate number of people, I’m not tagging anyone :P