Pissing in your own pool

Everyone, at one time or another is involved with someone from work or school. This in itself is fine, as long as that person is not your direct superior or subordinate. Also, it helps if the person doesn't work in your group or doesn't have to see you 8 hrs a day 5 days a week. Easy enough right? Somehow all of us seem to know this general rule, and yet we mess it up. It seems like we just can't help ourselves. For many people it comes down to a lack of options. I see Sally every day and we are "friends" (but in reality you have no idea what she is about nor her feelings on issues. You are merely acquaintances. You work together by sheer random chance.) so why not date her? Fine. Until something happens in the relationship and suddenly everyone else in the office knows everything about you and suddenly the office supply person can't seem to find the pens you want.

Transition into a hospital setting. You, the medical student, resident, attending, are dating a nurse. Fine, she works in the ICU and you are an internal medicine resident. You see her sometimes if you have a pt. in the ICU. You date and then suddenly you break up. You are now getting paged at 3AM by the shift nurse to ask if she can give you pt. tylenol because she has a headache. "Yes, give the LOL in 2123 tylenol for god's sake." (not laugh out loud you IMers, little old lady. Its from a book, remember those? Paper with ink on them instead of an LCD screen with pixels. The book is House of God. Its an unabashed view of medicine as it really happens. Read it, if you actually have free time to read books other than ones with some kind of -"ology" in the title.) Basically you pissed in your own pool. You screwed yourself, because now you are seen as an asshole to the other nurses, some of which you had your eye on previously, but now they won't even smile at you when you walk by and always seem to lose your orders.

Sound not that bad huh? Okay, lets go a step further. Transition to medical school. Not only medical school, but a regional campus of a larger university. You are in a class of 14, with 15 students younger than you. Half of those are members of the same sex. I'm not into that, but far be it from me to limit other people. So we are talking about lets say 15 people of the opposite sex. Five or six of them are married or engaged. You are left with 9 people you can tolerate. You would consider maybe half of that, because medical students as a general rule are not super models. Not that there aren't good looking med students. There are, trust me. The numbers dwindle so much... You like a person, why not date them? No, even medical students aren't dumb enought to make that mistake. So what do you do? Well, like every other medical student, you like to drink to relieve stress from studying 80+ hours a week for tests over information you will never need to know if you actually ever see a patient. (Side step the cynicism on your way to my point.) The answer to this riddle is that you end up hooking up with the person you like only after a twelve pack of beer or four LPRs (Liquid Panty Removers), because you aren't really sure they will go for it. Why not seek other people you ask? Good question. The non-medical school population of college aged students in town look like extras from the cast of Michael Jackson's Thriller video, without the classy dance moves. This population consists of people who appear normal, scratch that, a small percentage of them appear normal, but in reality they will turn out to be as smart as the mouse you are using to scroll though my rant to see the moral of this post.

Pissing in your own pool is what it comes down to. Limiting your options by hooking up with a person from a small group. If you plan to hook up with someone in a small group setting you damn well better date the person and plan to not be in the group after a short period of time (appox. 2 years, but I'm just throwing that out there). Or, come to grips with the fact that you are all going to hook up eventually. The result is a weird love tetrakaidecahedron (fourteen sided shape). Moral: Don't piss in your own pool unless you are willing to drink from the mess you made.

Endless lecture

My life is one endless lecture. In college, my life was firmly divided (in order of precidence) into napping, classes, running, doing house related things. Now, my life has turned into lectures, lectures, lectures, drinking to relieve stress from lectures, sleeping, thinking about lectures while sleeping. (I spend more time at school in lecture and studying than I do simply being in my apartment. I'm paying for space that I'm not using.) It seems like almost every lecturer loves to bloviate, simply to hear their own voice. Stories that go on for 20 minutes at a time with a seemingly absent punch line. I feel like I should at least give a courtesy smile at the supposed punch line. Although, I can't bring myself to even care about what is being said anymore. Most of this occurs in Patholgy with Dr. Flynn Medicine Woman. The woman has a never-ending string of mu-mus or house dresses. Apparently she doesn't have a problem with looking like an amorphous mass of tissue. She is one of those lecturers that loves gory pictures. She has spent too much time away from seeing patients at the bed side. She has a total lack of what anyone might venture to call a personality.

Being in Pathology for two hours at a time is like looking at the entire museum of Ripley's Believe It or Not for a solid two hours with a tour guide that has every fact about every exhibit and is reading it from the same brochure that you have in your hands, pictures included. I swear this woman loves her pictures. She gets a weird smile on her face every time she talks about some abnormal disease or condition. Strange. The medical field runs the entire gamut of personalities. Probably much like every other professional and non-professional field.

She's talking about her fucking cats again. She is obviously not married.

More from the hell of medical school later...

In the mean time, the good parts of medical school:
It allows me time to catch up on blogging while not paying attention in lecture.
It gives you a new appreciation for the human body and what it can do.
It provides you with a knowledge that what goes on on ER is sometimes wrong.
I know these things are mundane and superfluous but they make me smile in the face of paying $44,000 a year for school.

It does afford me time to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting on my ass. Thank god for a fast metabolism. Otherwise, I might be 400lbs. Oh, I have also acquired a wicked caffiene addiction. I actually gave it up last year for a period of time. Not anymore. Its all coffee and tea now. A person I dated last year was the one to prod me to give up caffiene. Big mistake. I should have known she would turn out to be a wacko. Who tries to make someone give up something that they love? I love caffiene. I have been in school for almost two decades straight. I deserve at least one addiction, and its not yayo or any other illicit substance. Also caffiene has never been shown to have adverse effects on growth, personality, or have any whatsoever cancer initiative properties. Caffiene is the root of American culture. Coffee shops are everywhere, I'm not going to start on the capitalistic nature of Starbucks and their revenue generating potential, but... They have the highest per square footage revenue generating capabiltity of any fast food restaurant (I really hate fast food restaurants) and most businesses. Something like a ridiculous $20,000 per square foot. Anyways, to deny caffiene is to deny the American way of life: I want it now and fast!! Moral of the story: caffiene is good, medical school is bad.

Supplement to Motivation

I found an article that might help anyone else finding themselves unmotivated post-race.
After the Marathon

Running in the Rain

So, since this is supposed to be half about life and half about running, I will actually post some running info. Let me first back up and say that I have been running for the last almost decade of my life. Only in the past about year and a half have I run "long distance." I used to consider long distance to mean anything over an 800 at one time. Sure I did some endurance runs of 2 miles or so, but nothing above a 5 K. I hurdled in high school and college. Now, I am an aspiring marathoner and triathlete. Yes, it is a bit of a change. I had to retool my thinking about running and my cardiovascular capacity.

So, last May I ran my first half marathon. I was less than impressed with my starting corral and finish time. I got to about mile 10 and then felt like my feet were bleeding for the last three miles. No, they weren't bleeding, but they sure felt like it. Anyways, I started in corral W. Eventhough I just recently had switched to running distance, I still ran a sub 8 mile for extended mileage. So, starting in W was like putting Meb in with people who run an 8 hour marathon. Okay, yes I just compared myself to Meb. Probably shouldn't have, but... If you don't know who Meb is then check out this website. Meb

Anyways, I finished in 1:50:39. Not bad for a kid who just started running distance and had to weave through traffic for 8 miles solid. I had planned on running another half in Sept, but I sprained my ankle almost to the point of breaking it (I had almost no ligament left in my ankle). So, I had to cancel those plans.

Which brings us somewhat up to speed with today. I ran 2 miles this morning at a pace of about 7 min/mile in the rain around the neighborhood. I felt like I was running my first 2 miles again. I was going to do 5K, but I couldn't get motivated to do it. So I turned around at the mile mark and headed back in. I sped up a bit on the way back.

Since my half marathon it has seemed so hard to motivate myself. Maybe its because I don't have a set schedule anymore. I was following a Hal Higdeon schedule for last May. It worked pretty well. I fit my workouts into my study schedule for school. It was okay training by myself because of the flexibility, but I think that I need to find a training partner who will push me to train harder. Difficult with the rigors of medical school studying, but plausible.

I think that the other problem is that I don't crosstrain enough to allow my body and my mind time to recover. I just recently bought a Trek 1200, almost brand new. I had a chance to ride in Colorado and loved it. It was almost better than running. I love going fast, so the bike was a big hit. Maybe the problem is that I need to set more goals. I see people around me setting goals all the time and it seems to work for them. I tried it a bit in college with running times. It seemed to work fairly well.

Maybe the lack of motivation thing is not just limited to running. I have lost a lot of my motivation for running, but I love to lift and bike. I know that I have also lost my motivation for medical school. Sure, on the outside I seem like a driven person. I write like a person who is driven towards something, always stiving for to be the best. I love competition. I crave competition. Believe me medical school affords competition. I used to think that I would love medical school and devote it towards my dad's memory (my dad died when I was 17). Lately it seems like my interests are changing towards something else. I used to want to be a cardiologist or cardiovascular surgeon. A noble specialty, but one that requires total dedication. Dedication to patients, the hospital, and to competition. Medicine is a lot of competition (for a residency, for a fellowship, for an attending position, for patients). Now, I feel myself drawn towards sports med or ortho. I still would like to make my father proud, but it seems now like I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I know this is a bit circuitous. I'm getting to the point.

I feel that I would be letting him down if I changed my goals. I know that he would be/is proud of me, but it seems like that was the reason for me to go to medical school. To pay homage to my father's memory and to the physician that saved his life. Hell, that's what I wrote on my personal statement. This is might be from where my lack of motivation stems. Its just that I'm drawn to other aspects of medicine and have different priorities than I used to. I know that might sound unenlightened and dare I say juvenile to many people, but at this point it is a decision that I ponder most days.

So, if my goals about my career are changing, are my running goals changing? Is this lack of motivation a symptom of the realization that I have changed my running priorities? Or the fact that I don't have a set schedule to work from? Possibly that I don't yet have a date from which to set down a plan? Or that I'm simply unmotivated because I don't yet have a competition to drive me?

I apologize for the lack of continutity and randomness of the flow of thoughts. Sometimes the thoughts flow in no specific order.

King of the Mountain?

 

Snow in Rocky Mountain National Park

Snow in RMNP

Colorado

After four days in Colorado, coming back to school is more than difficult. Its like trying to pick up where you left off after changing careers. Being in Denver was like living a dream. Any outdoor activity that you can think of and the weather to do every sport. Beautiful summers and not too cold winters, sign me up. The odd thing is that I didn't run once while I was there. Sweet, an avid outdoorsman and aspiring endurance athlete, and myself ran the gamut of outdoor activities (cycling, hiking, climbing). We took a side hike in Rocky Mountain National Park up to an alpine lake. The hike was hard, but so worth it. We left the McNultys at a lower lake and went on to hike up in snow and ice uphill, fairly steep, to the next lake and the end of the trail.

Seeing Dan with Meghan made me so happy for him. After past relationships that he and I have had... He deserves to be with someone like her. She is able to make him happy, which he wasn't for a while in college. And for a while, I mean ever. The kid was only happy when C was there. When she wasn't there they were fighting and... it just wasn't the best situation. Anyways, we commisserated in our past relationship stories on the way down the mountain and came to a similar conclusion. Cut ties to exes. The only thing that exes bring to the table is past knowledge of you. They typically have only negative things to say, or skirt any important issue. Any conversation that occurs is loaded with pleasantries that seem to lead to an endless circle of small talk. Its like being stuck in a roundabout with no escape from the enless circles. Frustrating to say the least. Moral of the story: exes are better left as pictures in a box or people that you see at the mall and swerve to avoid.

There is that feeling when you see an ex, like you somehow are embarrassed. They have seen you at your most vunerable and now are with someone else. They have that knowledge of you with your guard down and have the power to invoke those memories of helplessness. Its like being caught with your pants down and someone taking a picture. That memory will always be there to haunt you or make you laugh. The other thing about exes is that they change and sooner or later, hopefully, you realize that you are better off now than you were with them. Or you try to picture yourself in a relationship with them now and its either scares or repulses you. For example, one of my exes who has wanted to stay in contact with me, tried to either date or just hook up with one of my friends. Interesting you say? Well, apparently this is not the first offense. She is a repeat offender with my friends or guys that I know fairly well. Its like I'm her conduit to meeting new people. Needless to say, I have started cutting ties. Moral number two= once you break up with someone, don't try to start anything up again. There was a reason that you broke up in the first place, leave it that way.