So many days have gone by since starting school and it’s all a blur to me. I think this is what happens when something–in this case, studying–is so consuming as to nullify any awareness of the world around you. On one level, this perception of the passage of time is a good thing, as I want nothing more than to be out of the classroom and in my clinical rotations, learning how to do the stuff I actually want to do; but on another, every day that goes by without so much as registering in my consciousness feels like a waste of a day. And days aren’t exactly an infinite commodity.
There were ways to slow things down that I used to do a lot of. Write. Take pictures. Only nowadays it seems like I don’t have time for that because of school. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I could make the time, but I need to improve my studying discipline: it presently sucks.
I think I’m going to try to write more in addition to this (and I’m definitely going to have to make sure I’m on the ball with my studies), but because my earlier Project 365 seemed to work brilliantly, here goes one for 2012. And because 2012 is a leap year, it’s actually a Project 366. The aim is the same, though.
I’ve made the 100-mile trek to Chicago so often to visit my parents and old friends that this doesn’t feel like a move…only a really, really long weekend trip.
I never made much of an express effort to get to know Wisconsin. I didn’t want to waste time dating it if I didn’t think I was in it for the long haul, didn’t want to get attached. I’m only passing through, I thought to myself. Then, at some point in these last almost-eight years, these surroundings became so familiar, these people I have met have become such fixtures in my life, as to tinge this long-anticipated departure with a hint of sadness.
I’m moving back home, but in a way, I’m also leaving home.
On my last day of being a twentysomething, I thought perhaps I should try to make the 365th photograph somehow meaningful. I drove through the neighborhoods in which I spent my childhood, thinking the familiar might spur my imagination, trying to picture in my mind that last image…eventually coming to the conclusion that I was trying too hard. This wasn’t what I had set out to do one year ago. A photograph I took on that day of an El station seemed to connect nicely with the first photograph I took for the project; but after some thought I figured that I already had enough images of public transportation. In the end, this is what I chose to represent this day, ordinary on one level but with some serendipitous significance, hints of a tangential nature to an as-yet unwritten future. That this project concluded in the same city where it began is no accident; it is the city of my birth, the city I think will always be home.
In between, it was not altogether uninteresting; though there were times where the decidedly uninspired photographs reflected the ordinary, mundane days underlying them, quite a bit happened on both ends of the emotional spectrum. 29 was not without its moments of sorrow and grief, losing an old friend to cancer and having another friend go through a tragedy of his own, but in the realm of things I can control, I can say that 29 was the year I finally, successfully, made my ultimate career move. I think that this year, straddling two chapters of my life as it were, catalyzed a fair amount of introspection that no doubt informed many of the photographs that made it into the project.
On a personal level, I like to think I’ve managed to improve my skills a little along the way and also inject some narrative into the imagery. Having a decent camera on the iPhone helped immensely in keeping up with the demand of generating a photograph each day; using something with considerably fewer controls than what I’m used to certainly forced a different dimension of creativity.
When I began, I said that if I could say I lived and experienced each moment of every day, then I will have been successful. I dare say this to be true. To those who followed this project to its end and offered your comments and support, you have my thanks.
Even as I charged ahead towards a new future in my trips to Boston and DC, in my visits with old high school and college friends I was reminded of an altogether different past—a past in which I envisioned something completely different than the path I now find myself following, a future characterized by Fourier transforms and Smith charts. Delighted as regions of my brain probably last exercised in college sprang back into action talking shop with Amanda and John the electrical engineers and Angela the computer engineer, I nonetheless felt wistful at leaving all of that behind. At the same time, in Donna the teacher, and in other classmates and friends who went onto separate careers, I found some reassurance.
Technology never stopped exciting me. Math and physics still excite me. But are they enough to make me want to wake up in the morning?
Only if I can directly help someone by doing it.
I’ll just have to find some way to be an EE-doc, I guess.
It’s probably a good sign that I haven’t felt much need to post anything lately. Were it not for the end of the third quarter of year 29, I might have let November go without a post and kept October company.
Probably all that needs to be noted (and it’s old news for anyone keeping up with my Facebook status updates) is that my long national nightmare of disposable income now definitely has an end date (see the Countdown to Freedom in the blog sidebar). The anxiety of “will I get in somewhere” has since been replaced by “will I have a choice of where to go,” which is at least less stress-inducing but still admittedly tied to feelings of self-worth, however irrational it may be—yes, the applicant pool is beyond saturated with qualified candidates, but I wouldn’t be human if I said my ego doesn’t bruise at least somewhat from rejection.
I suppose all that’s left for this last quarter before I turn 30 is to have fun and enjoy it, but I’m hard pressed to remember a winter that wasn’t colored with some sort of melancholia…
The midpoint of year 29 kind of snuck up on me. I suppose that’s because these last three months have been a whirlwind of activity: with med school secondary apps (19) and Red Cross shifts (100+ hours) on top of the usual work responsibilities, it’s been busy, but in a good way. (Well. I can say that now, but in the thick of essay-writing, I think I had different emotions.) It has given this latest quarter a different quality than the one before it, feeling more purposeful and less like merely treading water. There are glimmers of hope for the future, maybe from proofreading my secondaries numerous times; they are tempered by doses of realism, but in the end, optimism wins out, buoyed by the sense that I’ve found what I want to do.
Maybe it’s fitting that this past weekend I hit the ground running to start this third quarter, logging some not-uneventful hours at Irish Fest, but the tone for this quarter will be set by the folks on the various admissions committees and whether they like what they read…
I had already gotten the unofficial word from Jerry last Friday, but last night’s shift at Festa Italiana was my first as an official full member of the team. “Take that red dot off your badge!”
Work-wise, it wasn’t a quiet shift, which felt like a good way to kick things off; there was a good mix of trauma and medical cases, some ordinary and some less ordinary. And hanging back with my teammates, the EMTs, and the paramedics is always fun times.
In the days following clicking “Submit” on my primary med school application, that initial sense of accomplishment has been increasingly replaced by a sense of dread, realizing that, by having done so, I am subjecting myself to critique and judgment orders of magnitude beyond the yearly employee performance review. I suspect this may not be so bad for the more typical med school applicant, who hasn’t had time enough to develop not only a significant body of experience but a sense of…well, I guess it’s entitlement. Not so much the “I’ve had everything spoon-fed to me and I expect it to continue” unjustified sense so much as the “I’ve paid my dues and then some–to reject me is an injustice” unjustified sense of entitlement. But, in line with not self-identifying with the “entitlement generation,” any feelings of indignation I might feel are subsumed by worry–worry that I didn’t market myself well enough on my application, that I might be judged unqualified or unprepared; and then where would that leave me? (“Oh, yeah? Well, I’m gonna build my own med school. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact…forget the school.”)
Humility. I should keep that in mind.
And there’s so much waiting. Waiting for my transcripts to be verified, waiting for secondaries, waiting for interviews… one foot is moving towards the future, but the other foot has to stay in the present and take care of present responsibilities, despite all desire to continue moving forward, making the wait more intolerable. Oh, and the uncertainty. None of what I’ve done so far is guaranteed to result in the outcome I want. (Amusing thought: does the uncertainty principle imply that if I knew that I made it into med school, I would have no idea what I did to get there?)
Maybe I need an actual vacation…especially before the secondary applications start to kick my ass.