Do You See L.A. Brewing in My Tea Leaves?

Yes, I am capable of worse puns...like: have you ever seen a bear bruin tea?

From Newspaper to Med School buddies!

My usual morning. Snoozed my PTX song alarm a few too many times. Forgot the important letter I needed to send today on the kitchen counter, dashed back to get it, but then missed the 9:20am Metro train. Of course, Metro trains start taking their leisurely time after 9:30am, so I tried to sneak into lab from the backdoor. Got caught by the post-doc sitting next to me anyways.

Who, by the way, asked me something that I am itching to tell him to never say to his daughter during her teenage years in the future. Though he honestly meant well. He was just trying to point out how tired I looked.

True, the past few weeks, months, and probably entire year, have been a strenuous ride. That will go without saying for anyone applying to medical school. The whole process is like the college Common App on steroids. You need a lot more grit and some lofty numbers to hold your ground. In the primary application, you hack away at a personal statement and then pick the schools you want to apply to, no problemo. When each school sends its secondary application, which includes an outstretched palm often asking for >$100 and a flood of mini-essays (especially for MD/PhD programs), you might feel like you're drowning. Once I am brave enough to reread them, I actually do want to drown myself in the Potomac river that I renamed the "Pontomac," and for issuing a new government program called "Medicard."

Then there's dreaded silence. I often couldn't focus on my work because of the fear that I would hear silence forever. One by one, precious interview emails start trickling in like rain in a desert.

First interview. I have to dress like I'm going to a funeral but smile until my cheeks hurt. Walk from office to office until my flats or heels drag like sodden clogs, and fervently nod my head because of how fascinating a professor's research sounds, when really it's putting me to sleep. My body is sore and stiff from constantly feeling evaluated by eyes I can or cannot see. Repeat several times over the span of 4-5 months.

The silence returns. I have nightmares about the MCAT. I wonder if silence is better than rejection. I wonder if silence is rejection. And for several schools, it is. They just don't get back to you... or maybe I just forgot to submit my secondary properly?

With so many outstanding applicants, medical schools are bound to reject students who were plenty qualified. But it still hurts. And is really confounding sometimes. I'm frustrated by the number of crosses on my list of applied/interviewed schools. No circles yet, and I'm already down to 3 schools out of a dozen...

Rejections from dream schools, safety schools, random schools... they make me question my worth, my intelligence, my conversation skills. I begin to doubt the amount of sweat, tears, and mouse blood I have shed for the sake of my passion to slave away at medicine and research for 15+ years.

While reflecting, I realized that the uncertainty I felt was something new to me as a premed, who has followed a clear curriculum and specific goals for 5 years, but was familiar to my peers looking for a post-grad job. I had been looking at medical school as an end-goal, as if once I got in everything in my life would be set. When really, this process was preparing me for the sort of challenges I would experience after graduating from graduate school in another 8 years from now.

The moment I stopped looking at my life as a check-list, something wonderful fell into my lap. Two acceptances to two schools where I felt most at home, and wait-listed at my dream medical school. I felt a burden being lifted from my shoulders, it was amazing.

And that's when a new dilemma arose. By April 30th, I could only have one of those beautiful, glittering schools on my plate, but I sincerely wished I could go to all three. Two schools invited me to return. They wined and dined me from daybreak to twilight. I have never felt so important in my life. I have never met so many inspiring professors and fun and intelligent peers as I have in the past two weeks.

I passed up Stanford, my dream medical school, for the security of the MD/PhD program, but now I was left with the very same two schools I had battled between for undergraduate school: The University of Chicago (the school I fell in love with at first sight and continue to love dearly) and UCLA (which is over an hour away from where my family lives). I knew I would be happy and sharpen a successful career at either. Agonized, I tore up my hair (literally) while trying to choose one.

The letter I forgot, dashed back for, and finally mailed out this morning, was sent to UChicago. It was the more difficult letter to send. In the afternoon, I quickly wrote a much more joyful letter to UCLA. Of course, I managed to spill chamomile tea all over it as I rushed to the mailbox right before the mailman arrived... All I can say is, I have decided where I will be the happiest and that decision better not change for another 8 years!

"Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be." — Abraham Lincoln

The Ebb and Flow of Memories: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

My childhood memories mainly consist of me being somewhere, eating something.

The ebb and flow of memories at The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel by Neil Gaiman

Mild spoilers ahead...

Where does your childhood memory start? For Neil Gaiman's unnamed protagonist, he recalls the empty seats at his seventh birthday party. As I would have done, he crawls upstairs to escape into some C.S. Lewis adventures, "Books were safer than other people anyway." Reminds me of my own seventh birthday party. My friends clamored to sit next to my best friend instead of the birthday girl. I felt pretty bummed, I wanted to sit next to my best friend too. I suspect that Gaiman did not name his protagonist and drew on some of his grim childhood experiences when writing this book, because he initially wrote this work as a short story dedicated to his wife, the quirky artist/singer Amanda Palmer.

It took me a while to understand that birthday candles are not always yours to blow...

If you are any familiar with Gaiman's work like Coraline and American Gods, you would know how effortlessly he threads dreamlike fantasy into the seemingly everyday. The result can be rather unsettling, especially since the enemies in The Ocean at the End of the Lane hit close to home, literally. A sinister power manifests itself as the unwelcome strangers in the protagonist's house who make his life miserable, like the suicidal gambler who steals his father's car, and a pretty nanny who seduces his father and wins his younger sister's affection.

With his family turned against him, the protagonist runs away and receives shelter in the warm abode of the magical Hempstock family. Grandma, Mother, and (a girl his age) Lettie Hempstock are all strong-willed and kind. They protect him from evil entities and help him find his way while he tries to adjust to big changes in his life. Lettie Hempstock is particularly sweet, though the protagonist finds her quite eccentric for insisting that the small pond by the Hempstock farm is an "ocean." An ocean, the protagonist later finds out, that is much like the tremendous yet fleeting feeling you get when you wake up from a dream where everything suddenly makes sense...but then quickly forget.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane reminds me a lot of Pan's Labyrinth, because in both, I feel like the stories can be interpreted as protagonists trying to deal with horrific incidences through fairytale-like magic. War or threatening strangers have destabilized their sense of belonging, so they use magic to forge a new story, a new reality, and a new identity. Hence, the power of myth and Gaiman's craft as a storyteller.

The way the story unfolds through the hazy lens of the adult protagonist slowly remembering his hurtful past, really made me feel as though I was reliving a long-lost memory. I especially love Gaiman's portrayal of adults in his book. He shows that all adults, even the monsters that haunt the protagonist, actually share similar uncertainties and fears. Their actions have consequences that they did not intend and cannot control. As Lettie explains, “Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

The adult protagonist reflects on his rather drab life until now, about his divorce, his children who he never really sees, his job, a recent funeral... he wonders why the ocean brought him back to remember everything.

"Why did she bring me here?"
"I think she wanted to know if you were worth it," the old woman said.
[Long pause...] "Did I pass?"
The face of the old woman was unreadable in the gathering dusk.
"You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear."

So when work is hard, an experiment doesn't work, someone I love has hurt me or vice versa... I'll look back on my rich childhood memories, remember the sacrifices other people have made for me to have a better life, and realize that nobody else has had the same experiences I have had. Nobody on earth can judge my life, not even me. And so I get up and keep going, leaving behind those memories buried in the recesses of my mind until I need them again.