Hoping Not to Be Bitten by a Moose

A moose bit my sister once...

Sorry, had to throw in a Monty Python reference in there. In 10 minutes, I will go to the bus stop to begin my 10-day journey to Norway. TO NORWAY! I will be staying with Becca, one of my college housemates, and we are both falling over with excitement. Bergen, here I come! I promise pictures, but later...probably after I get back. I can't wait to spend Easter in Scandinavia! It should be different! And even more...I can't wait to see Becca! I would go almost anywhere in the world to visit her. Even scary moose-infested places.

Spring

Spring came a week early. For 5 days straight, New York was blessed with clear skies, abundant sunshine, and warm breezes. Perhaps we deserved it after that ridiculously destructive (as far as the apartments are concerned) storm the previous weekend. Every afternoon, after classes were done, my classmates could be found playing frisbee, throwing footballs, reading books, playing guitar (or, in my case, ukulele), and basking in the sweet sunshine. I'm not being entirely honest. Sometimes it was during classtime, not afterwards. (Did I skip class? Well...maybe...but it was so warm! And so beautiful! And it was a 2-hour-long class on statistics, which I already knew! And it was the only class I've ever voluntarily skipped! Well, I take that back. I did once skip Astronomy to buy combat boots. But I digress...)

Saturday was the nicest of them all: 70 degrees and absolutely clear skies. I took my studying materials to Central Park and then failed to study for most of the afternoon. Instead, I enjoyed the sights. There will always be rainy days for studying.

Central Park was crowded with people happy to finally come out of their winter lairs.

Good to know the bees are hard at work already.

Nothing says spring like daffodils.

Weekend Potpourri

When it rains in the Bronx, the Einstein student housing complex turns into a giant vortex of doom. It rained yesterday. The 40-m.p.h. gusts were translated into hurricane gales in the wind tunnel that is Einstein housing. The windows here don't have great sealing (i.e. no sealing), and even in the absence of wind, I feel a healthy draft flowing through my room. Yesterday, that was translated into violently shaking windows, wildly rattling doors, and the pleasant but havoc-wreaking burbling of water seeping in through the nonexistant window seals only to be momentarily spurted by the draft onto the floor.

Bubbling windowsill water

Unhappy, warped kitchen floor -- with happy mold underneath

It didn't stop me from going into the city, as I usually do on Saturdays. Yesterday, I had a new adventure when I donated platelets for the first time. The blood center staff were unexpectedly reluctant to let me do it; they didn't believe me that my veins would be good enough to withstand the constant cycling between drawing and returning blood for 75 minutes. I was persistent, however, and they were pretty desperate for my valuable O- platelets, so they finally acquiesced. I had a very strange sensation of tingliness accompanied with occasional chills and numbness during most of the hour and 15 minutes, but everything went well otherwise, and I was fine as soon as I got out of the chair. Weird.

The wind was bad in the city, too, but it was isolated to certain sections and streets. As I approached East 86th Street from the south, I could see that I was walking into a wind tunnel. I'm not joking: compared to the (relatively) calm breeze on 3rd Ave, the straight-line winds (made exceedingly visible by the rain that was steadily increasing) looked like something out of a movie, and I needed to turn and walk straight into them. Umbrellas were useless. Abandoned, mangled umbrellas littered the sidewalks. I was in for a cold, wet afternoon. My raincoat soaked through, my jeans were shiny from the water, my hair was plastered to my face, and the only part of me that wasn't wet were my feet, happily toasty in my rain boots. Maybe that's why I was so chilled while giving platelets.

Back to the apartments. In addition to the flooding (which was very mild in my apartment compared to some others'), the buildings always suffer from the wind in another way: the doors. My building always seems to have the worst wind effect compared to the others, so the sliding door is taken out of commission, forcing us to use the regular pull-handled door. That's not a huge deal, but the wind has a nasty habit of making it shut very quickly, and sometimes unexpectedly. Today my wrist almost got crushed as a gust of wind took the door out of my hands. Luckily, I pushed my elbow out in time, so it was my upper arm that took the brunt of the blow. I don't normally bruise easily, but I have a pretty big spot developing there. My diagnosis? Inappropriate bruising due to lack of platelets. COOL!

Finally, today is Pi Day (you know, 3/14...3.14...nerdy pi), so this afternoon my friends and I had a Pi Day celebration by eating pie! My contribution:

Blueberry. The best.

My Liberal Arts

There are many reasons I am thankful I went to St. Olaf. Going into all of those reasons would take far too much time out of my so-far-perfect day, so I will now just explain the one which has contributed the most to this day's beauty. It's the liberal arts. When I applied to colleges, I knew that I wanted to eventually go to medical school, but I also knew that I enjoyed most school subjects, even beyond the ones I was most interested in. St. Olaf helped me appreciate a well rounded education even more. I could talk about all the phenomenal professors and fantastic classes I had for hours, but here I'd like to focus on the one class that has had, in an unlikely way, the biggest impact on my appreciation for the world that I live in. The class: Vertebrate Biology.

I can recognize bird calls. My friends look at me as if I'm insane. I was elected to the medical student council in large part because my personal statement was the most unique: I somehow tied my enthusiasm for the job to my experience skinning and stuffing a squirrel. When I likened removing the skin from our cadaver to my semester project that involved skinning both a red fox and a newborn (stillborn) fawn, even my lab professors had to stop what they were doing, look at me, take a moment to comprehend, and then go back to work.

Clearly this was a unique class, and it's one that I didn't have to take. Once I realized that I wasn't going to major in biology, there was no reason for me to take any more biology classes except for my own pleasure. I decided to take Vertebrate because I had heard that the professor, Gene Bakko, was one of the most interesting, most enthusiastic, most caring professors out there -- and it was true. Even though my idea of fun was not necessarily memorizing the classification system of all Minnesota vertebrates (e.g. moose: Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Artiodactyla, Family Cervidae, Genus Alces, Species alces -- and yes, I had to look it up on Wikipedia), the experiences I had in that class, including the 6:30 a.m., 3-hour, required field trips in the surrounding wilderness to look for waterfowl, were unforgettable. When else in my life would my response to seeing a dead wild turkey on the side of the highway be to pull over, investigate the partially disemboweled bird, take my gloves and trash bags out of my car, carefully pick up and package the still-warm turkey in plastic, secure it in my trunk, and excitedly bring it in to Professor Bakko the next day? (Yes, the turkey stayed in my trunk overnight. Don't worry, the temperature was essentially that of a refrigerator.)

I have a new respect (not to mention knowledge) of nature because of Vertebrate Biology and Professor Bakko, which is something that I appreciated today during my run in the gorgeous, 55-degree, sunshiney weather. I saw a juvenile red-tailed hawk. No, it wasn't flying or high up in a tree; it was on the ground, 10 feet away from me, hungrily tearing out the organs of a freshly killed squirrel. I watched it for a while, thinking to myself how amazing the circumstances were, thankful that I could appreciate the beauty of the scene. I also had the chance to observe other people's reactions to it. One middle-aged man out for a walk on his own was clearly excited; he pulled out his cell phone and began taking pictures. A set of young boys yelled to each other to hurry up and come see it, smiling and laughing and trying to inch closer until their parents yelled at them. One 5- or 6-year-old boy mischievously threw pinecones toward it; I think he was just curious to see what it would do, but it was still sad to watch him try. Luckily, his parents yelled at him, and the hawk just kept eating its delicious meal. A group of three teenage girls, probably high school age, thought the scene was interesting but disgusting, crying out things like, "Ewww, I'm gonna barf!" "That's so cool!" "Poor squirrel!" and, "That's so disgusting!"

Personally, I didn't feel bad for the squirrel. I was actually wishing that I could get closer and see its little organs, now that I've seen what the human equivalents look like. The hawk, though, was beautiful and fierce and an incredible sight to see. I wonder if it killed the squirrel, or if the squirrel was already dead. It looked really fresh, so I'm guessing the hawk killed it. Cool.

Out of Shape

After hearing the broadcast of a live recital played on Chopin's 152-year-old piano, I was inspired. I had to play some Chopin of my own. I'm a huge fan of the nocturnes because they're relatively short and achingly beautiful, many of them. However, I decided it was time to bring back the Polonaise in A Major. Mmmm...so full and vibrant, not to mention RAUCOUSLY FUN. I break it out every once-in-a-while. I like to have the music out, but I've discovered it's one of the few songs that has remained in my memory from my recital days.

So anyway, I opened my book, put on my headphones, smiled to myself, and began, leaving no note spared, no forte unpounded. Halfway in, I could feel myself getting warm. 3/4 through, I could feel the squeezing ache of fatigue tighten my forearms. It was all I could do to keep the momentum through the last note...and then, BAM, I was done. I grinned like a fool. My forearms ached, my fingers were shaking, I was sweating, and my dorsal metacarpal and cephalic veins were nearly popping out of my hands and wrists (sorry, had to get some anatomy in there). Even my upper arms felt worked. Incredible. I've got to keep in better shape.

My veins are never this big, which leads to the (possibly valid?) question: Who needs to lift weights when there's Chopin around?