In the Merry, Merry Month of...What?

As I walked through Madison Square Park on Monday, I was greeted by the sight of tulips.

Beautiful tulips

Tulips of every color (with matching park-goers)

But then, I saw one of those sights that requires a double-take.  Was this an illusion?  Was my brain messing with me?  As it turns out, no.  There was, in fact, a giant statue of a distorted head in the middle of the park.  This was not an illusion.

See background Empire State Building for conformation of photographic non-distortion.

Brilliant.

Since Fox was dropped by the major cable providers in the New York metro area this week, we have been forced to be creative to watch the Giants/Phillies NLCS showdown.  (Twice, we were forced to watch an illegal live stream of a Spanish network's coverage, wired to a TV from a computer with a shoddy internet connection that tended to freeze every time the game got exciting.  Fun.)  Last night, tired of our makeshift solutions in the Bronx, we headed to the Upper East Side and its bountiful selection of sports bars and pubs for what turned out to be an extremely tense, extremely exciting, extremely weird game of baseball.  (Dropped balls?  Players hit by pitches?  Runners bowling catchers over?  Both teams storming the field?  Weird.)

So what is the "brilliant" all about?  The bar.  Why?  The bar food.  Particularly what?

TATER TOTS.

The end.

Tourists

My mom visited New York this weekend, meaning I finally had the chance to be a shameless tourist for a few days.  YES!  My favorite parts of the weekend were seeing The Lion King on Broadway (my first Broadway show - incredible!) and touring the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (sooo interesting).  More highlights:

 American Museum of Natural History - SPACE and DINOSAURS!  Great on a rainy day.

Crumbs.  Delicious as always. 

Beautiful view of the south end of the city from the Empire State Building 

Happiness in ice cream form: a Monday Sundae from the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck 

I got to introduce my mom to the worth-the-wait deliciousness of Shake Shack.

Only in New York.

Mickey and Mousey

Who in the world would rather study for an endocrine test than wander New York City with the one and only Mary, a.k.a. Mousey?  Certainly not me, which is what made last weekend fantastically fun-filled rather than sadistically study-filled.  My Friday consisted of over 9 miles of walking throughout the city, which may sound like a lot, but Mary easily covered double that because of her previous run and post-me-leaving wanderings.  Impressive, to say the least.

We began mid-Central Park and proceeded to go wherever we pleased...

Snaking through the city blocks, we made it to the "oldest bar in New York" for a cold, thirst-quenching round of beer on the hot afternoon.

Motorcaded dignitaries driving past, coming from the U.N. General Assembly.  Ridiculous headlines in the New York Post.  Times Square madness, crowding, and lights.  The cheapest Indian lunch buffet I've ever seen.  Beer in the afternoon.  "Jews for Jesus."  I'd say it was a successful day.

The next day, I headed to Staten Island to stay with the Lunds, the Coast Guard family that Mary had been staying with during most of her visit.  Totally incidentally, I happened to be on the ferry during sunset.

More beautiful than usual.

The next morning, we woke up bright and early to make our way to Red Hook, Brooklyn, for the Tunnel to Towers race.  This race is run every year to commemorate firefighter Stephen Siller.  When he heard that the towers had been hit on 9/11, he abandoned his car at the blocked-off Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, running the length of the tunnel in his full gear to help at Ground Zero.  He lost his life that day, along with hundreds of other courageous civil servicemen.  This year, over 20,000 people ran in the 5K race, which takes the runners through the tunnel and around Battery Park, ending near Ground Zero.  It means a heck of a lot to a heck of a lot of people, and it was an incredible experience to be a part of it.

 20,000 people.  You can't even see the start, because it's about a quarter-mile away.

Oh, there's the start. 

Tunnel! 

Into the tunnel... 

To the finish!

Freedom Tower rising 

 A parade to honor the firefighters

And a fantastic concert by Montgomery Gentry

Bronx Bombin'

Yes, I made it back to New York.  My final week in India was interesting because I was dealing with lingering illness.  Without going into too much detail, I was still having effects of whatever began plaguing me that last night at Darling even when I came back to the U.S.  Luckily, Cipro is essentially miraculous and was able to wipe out whatever residual disease was hanging out in my intestines, and I am now (I think) cured.

I arrived in New York early on Wednesday morning.  By the time I went to bed that night, I had been up for 44 straight hours (except, I suppose, 1-2 hours of napping on the plane).  My body was so confused that I never had very bad jet lag, just a few nights of needing to go to sleep slightly earlier than normal while waking up at a normal time in the morning.  That was fortunate, because we started classes the next day, on Thursday.  My attitude toward medical school has taken a drastic turn since last June, when I was dreading coming back in the fall.  I'm actually very excited and happy to be back.  It's been so fun to see my friends here again, and classes, though harder, will be much more interesting than last year.  Even more than these reasons (which are great reasons to be excited on their own), I now have a goal, a view of the future, a reason to be excited about medicine and my future career.  That goal is flight medicine.  I am determined not to lose sight of it, for it has given me more focus and determination than I have ever felt toward medicine in the past.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying being back in America.  Most of this centers around foods that I missed.  Cold milk, cereal, barbecue, pasta, fresh vegetables, macaroni and cheese, strong coffee...I could go on forever.  It's great to be home!

Appreciation

Apparently, it's Fleet Week.  I don't actually know what that means, and since I'm too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia, all that I've noticed was that there were lots of little groups of men and women in uniform in Manhattan.  Obviously, a sight like this makes me proud and happy knowing that I am a part of the big family of the U.S. military, but I also wondered what the New Yorkers thought of it.  It's easy to brush off New Yorkers as being too busy and self-absorbed to care, because really, when do they ever stop and give you the time of day while speedily dodging past on the sidewalk?  I was surprised, then, when I was walking slightly behind a group of three young women in Navy uniforms, and a man walking past cheerily said, "Thank you, ladies!"  The women looked at each other and giggled, and I couldn't help smiling as well.

Colbert

When I made my decision to go to school in New York last spring, I had one goal, one dream, one great aspiration that would mark my four years here as successful. I am ecstatic to announce, only nine months into my stay here, that I have achieved that lofty ambition: I have attended a live taping of The Colbert Report.

Right here.

Tickets are free and available on the show's website, but that doesn't mean they're easy to get. On the contrary: they're released in small amounts at seemingly random times in the day for seemingly random upcoming dates. This past Monday, I checked the website out of curiosity after finishing the pharmacology exam, and what do you know, I scored three tickets for Tuesday. Let me just say that it wasn't at all difficult to find two more people to come with me. We had to get there early (which translated to 4:45 -- we couldn't get there earlier because of class) to get a better spot in line, which translated to better seats in the studio. When we were finally able to walk into the studio, it was like magic. It looked exactly like the TV show (obviously), but it felt so surreal to actually be there. Before the show began, a comedian came out and entertained us in the audience. Then, Stephen himself came out and did a short question-and-answer session.

SOOOO excited to be here!

My favorite Colbert moments are the ever-so-rare clips in which he cracks up, not able to stay in character because of the ridiculousness of whatever he's reporting. Miraculously enough, we got to witness one of those moments. Check out the clip, OR just go ahead and catch the full episode. I'd recommend the latter.

My stomach ached from all the laughing. Jon, Eman, and I were euphoric after the show, calling and texting our friends to brag about it. What a perfect night. Oh, Colbert. What a hero.

Loratadine

Spring is great. Flowers are pretty. Leaves look nice. Warm weather feels good. I love the changing seasons...and in the past, I've never had any reason to dread them. I'm happy and comfortable in my beautiful home state of Minnesota. I'm also willing to concede that New York can be beautiful, too.

Beautiful...but with a hidden foe.

I've never had allergies before. All that playing in the mud had apparently paid off in my lack of inappropriate immunosensitivity...until I moved to a new state. New York, you're great, but I'm allergic to you. I'm sorry, but I can't love you anymore. You've made me dependent on daily medication, and for that, I resent you. Just look at the evidence:

I don't appreciate expending extra effort to open my eyes against your evil edema...

So thank goodness for self-diagnosis and loratadine...a blessing and a curse.

Norway: Coming Soon

Once I have a chance to breathe, I plan on sharing my Norway adventures. Becca and I had a fantastic time together, and the entire time there, I had a bizarre but pleasant sense of familiarity. My brain knew I was in a different country, but so many times I caught myself thinking of it as home. I will now include three pictures for illustrative purpose. More to follow.

Aaker House, where I lived with Becca and 5 others during our senior year at St. Olaf. Typical homey, cozy Minnesota.

New York, being typical New York: exciting and unendingly busy

Where Becca and I stayed in Leikanger, on Sognefjord. Now does it make sense that Norway felt more like home than New York?

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.

Fun in the Most Surprising Places

After several days of being sick, what I really needed today was some fun. Unfortunately, with another anatomy exam coming up on Monday, fun wasn't necessarily feasible (or even desirable, considering that I'm still not feeling 100% better). So, my next task was to find someplace to study other than my room, because it's begun to wear out its usefulness as a productive studying space. Sad, I know. I have yet to study in the Einstein library, but from what I've seen of it, I have a feeling it would wear out very quickly. It's nothing compared to the quirky Rolvaag, where every semester I could find a new nook that felt completely different and refreshing, or the bright and cheery Hustad, where the "new" smell and the large windows all contributed toward re-energizing my desire to study. I had studied at the Fordham library last night (and plan on going there again tomorrow), and I was thinking that a trip out of the Bronx might do me some good, so I came up with a winning solution: going straight to the middle of Manhattan to study at the main branch of the New York Public Library.

Part of the main reading room, which I learned is the length of 2 city blocks!

It was a good choice. The main reading room, where I decided to camp out, was HUGE. I arrived just as the library was opening, at 10 a.m. Throughout the morning, a slow trickle of people gradually joined me in the reading room; by the time I left a few hours later, it was full -- but still, all that could be heard was the delightful ambient noise of fans, pages turning, and the muffled scraping of wooden chairs on the stone floor. Sometime in the middle of it all, I realized I was happy. I was actually enjoying myself. Studying had become less of a task to get done, more of an experience to enjoy along with the hundreds of other people in the room. I'm going to have to do this more often.

NYC, Christmas-Style, Take 2

After getting through exams, my classmates and I experienced a collective puzzlement: "What do we do now?" The answer, as always, was to go into the city. Here are a few more pictures of holiday-style NYC, including the blanket of snow that made the city look like a postcard.

Busy travelers at Grand Central Station

On Saturday afternoon, the snow began to fall as we shopped in SoHo.

The Macy's window displays were like museum exhibits.

The city somehow seemed calmer after the snowfall, as if everyone just wanted to take some time to look around and enjoy themselves instead of the usual rush.

Who knew that New York could be so peaceful?

Opinions

Flashback to September 24, 2008. After being so sick that I passed out on the airplane the night before, I made it to my Einstein interview in the morning, shaky and lightheaded from illness and lack of food but less nervous than I thought I would have been, probably because I was too busy thinking about not passing out again. I sat down in the second floor conference room with Dr. Dannis, who paged through my application, squinted, looked up at me and said, "You're from Minnesota. What the hell are you doing here?" I can't think of a less expected opening question for an interview, much less a medical school interview, much less my first medical school interview. Despite my surprise, I apparently answered this and all of the remaining questions satisfactorily, because here I sit in my apartment in the student housing at Einstein, procrastinating from my anatomy studying.

Fast forward to this afternoon. I had an appointment with Dr. Wollowitz, an orthopedist. He recognized my address as the Einstein student housing and asked what year I am. I told him that I'm a first year, and that we're gearing up for our anatomy final in a week. He made a disapproving grunt and said that anatomy is "useless; they make you remember all those useless pancreaticoduodenal arteries and the like." I laughed and said that all those arteries were exactly what I was having trouble with. I suppose you don't need to know which arteries supply the stomach when your primary concern is bones. Then he asked where I'm from. I told him Rochester, Minnesota, after which he asked, "What the hell are you doing here?" This time, I can't say I was expecting it, and I can't say I wasn't surprised, but I wasn't quite as shocked as last time.

What is it with these New Yorkers? I thought they were proud to death of their city, and that any location not touching an ocean was too worthless to even be able to recognize on a map. Maybe it's the Bronx. Maybe it's self-preservation. Maybe they just think all of us Midwesterners are sheltered, that we shudder at the thought of lights and crowds and traffic and endless motion. To them, the Midwest is a blob of homogeneity; how can we even break out of our shell? Maybe, though, I'm not giving them enough credit. Maybe they recognize the virtues of honest Midwest living and, despite their love of their city, simply cannot understand how we could adapt to a place like this. Either way, they sure have a funny way of showing it!

Fall in the Big City

The pictures will do the talking.

Peaceful street near the Church of Notre Dame

Is this really the city? North woods of Central Park

Conservatory Garden in Central Park

The ravine

I cannot get over how peaceful the city can feel. A block away, people rush about their business, hailing cabs, boarding buses, and running to catch subways. Here, none of that is present.

Beautiful trees of Central Park from the top of Rockefeller Center

From the Top of the Rock, the Empire State Building and a minuscule Statue of Liberty

Skating at the Rockefeller Center? Yes, it started a month ago. Seems a bit anachronistic in the 70-degree weather.

Fishermen at Orchard Beach (in the Bronx!)

Orchard Beach provided a slightly more "wild" side of nature than Central Park

The view from the top of my apartment building: The beautiful trees and homes of Morris Park and the skyline of the big city