DOCTOR COMIC - PART 6

Her name was the eponym for pain, in another language of course, and hereby HIPAA compliantly introduced to you, dear reader. She didn’t feel like eating before the increasing lethargy sent her off to our ER where she coded for an unspecified amount of time and came back to life miraculously with not even a single rib broken from chest compression. As a result, multiple organs within her cachectic body went on a coordinated strike and demanded further negotiation with life and death in the ICU.

The effort to wean her off the ventilator was eventful with multiple attempts of breathing tube self-removal requiring a multitude of sedation and complicated adjustment. Not a sigh of relief was there when the drama of the ventilator machine completed and she could breathe on her own from a nasal cannula, since the oxygen in her blood quickly dropped to an alarmingly low level whenever she yanked the oxygen off and hoarsely declared that she wanted to jump off a bridge.

So essentially, she was dependent on the nasal cannula and she became extra saucy whenever her oxygen turned low with her frequent dislodging of the device. Provided that she had the oxygen flowing at above 6 liter a minute, she would be more reasonable; however, she remained as feisty as possible. We had to put padded mittens on her hands to prevent her from digging into her thighs out of frustration since the wrist restraint stopped her from removing the cannula. Whenever I tried to put the mittens back after her uncanny successes to pull them off, I noticed her fingernails with chipped polish in the shade of red wine imprinting angry indentation over the thin translucence of her bony palms.

THE LOVER AND THE HOLIDAY

Holiday Balls

The 21st of December is the shortest day of the year. The lack of sunlight makes me feel like a tragic babushka lamenting over burnt potatoes. Thanks to the glorious spirit of the holiday's commercialization that I can live my excitement vicariously through the experience of others. This girl just bought her mom a 7'' tablet; I'd prefer it somewhere in a neighborhood of 9'' and above, but I guess that will do for the time being. Another girl got a big bag of Christmas beignets, deep-fried to a golden delicious crisp. Hark! Nobody cares about the correlation between a low caloric diet and longevity anymore. For me, I want no tablet nor grease, I just want to bring my lover home and have a very merry gathering with the rest of my family. Below are several possible reasons why I can't. Pick one for your entertainment.

DOCTOR COMIC - PART 4

Source: Chainsawsuit

When you're done with undergraduate education, what do you usually do? I know this girl who went straight to medical school after an exotic vacation along the coast of Vietnam (the flight took 27 hours, one way.) Other people got married and flooded Facebook with artsy wedding photos (I wasn't invited.) Another guy fought with his dad then stabbed him multiple times (he looked startled in his online mugshot.) Oh so many juicy details that I could babble about all day, so I don't have to talk about myself.

You probably remember my rants on the medical school application a while back. Now when I think about it, that time was actually quite fuzzy and fluffy like a fat country baby eating peaches off the hard wood floor. Maybe I should have complained a little bit less? But ranting makes me feel so good, so that's what I'm gonna do.

An Ode to a Pin-up Girl

Alright, It's Betty Page, y'all

Betty Page was such a bad ass. She dropped the devil's horns and put on the angel's halo, yet her leaving the dark side didn't offer much peace to her. I wonder what should one do to be happy? To do what her heart desires or to restrain herself from natural instincts for a higher purpose? I may sound like a hedonist, but I don't advocate the exclusive choice of either self-deprivation or indulgence of any earthly pleasure. What we need is a fine balance between indulging and abstaining. This leads to the concern of what guideline there is to help us achieve this equilibrium.

For Betty, she chose Christianity, which obviously doesn't endorse indulgence in its teaching. After all, it is entirely up to the person's own judgement, whether there has been responsibility and mindfulness when an action is done. If Betty had loved what she did and her action harmed nobody, she wouldn't have had to rely on a higher entity to justify herself. However, people sometimes lose trust and hope in themselves. When the mind and heart are weak, their vulnerability is easily taken advantage of, all in the name of love and salvation.

What exactly happens when a person is saved from being lost, what does she realize when her blind eyes suddenly start to see? The awareness of her own self and the discovery of a meaning for her existence in the world are the answer. Religion can be a mean to this end. Sadly, the person has to avoid such realization in worship of a higher being that her lowly self wouldn't dare to match. Again, I want to stress that if you don't regret your choice of dedicating your life to god, then you are doing the right thing. That is how you define your identity and your place in this world, I respect your intention. However, always keep your mind open. Even if there is guidance, you can close your eyes yourself, fail to see, and ultimately become a lost wanderer in this monstrous confusion called life.

Anyway, enough indoctrination, it is time for some music. This mix offers a refreshing interpretation to the classic repertoire, some vintage inspired pieces, and a bit of old school goodies near the end. Enjoy.

Tracklist:

1. It Don't Mean a Thing - The Puppini Sisters
2. Mambo Italiano - Club de Belugas ft. Dean Martin
3. Soul Bossa Nova - Quincy Jones and His Orchestra
4. Rum 'n' Coca Cola - Tim Tim
5. We No Speak Americano - Yolanda B Cool
6. Whipped Cream - Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
7. The Mambo Craze - de Phazz ft. Pat Appleton
8. Maria Elena - Xavier Cugat

Doctor Comic - Part 3

Source: Buttersafe

I finally took the MCAT last Friday. The amount of coffee I drank pumped me up so high till I crashed down and slept like a dead log hours later into the night. I've come to the conclusion that the amount of stress you got after the test is inversely proportional to the amount of time you spent studying. Last summer when I took the test, which I failed of course, I didn't have the smallest piece of anxiety or fear or any negative feeling. Now that I spent months preparing, I've been haunted with so much fear regarding my scores, which I will share with you below.

The highest maximum score anyone can get from this test is 45T, with the letter is for the writing samples' score. To be hopefully accepted, you need to have a 27; to be competitive, you need at least a 10 for each of the three sections other than the writings. So here comes the possibilities.

1. I fail it again. My family disowns me so I have to go sell peanuts at the stadium where people watch American football. Don't get me wrong, selling peanuts competitively is an art and if you don't meet your quota, you are fired. As I run toward a waving customer on the horizon, a smiling shady old man smacks my butt, which makes me trip on his cane, spill all of my nuts, break my spine, and get paralyzed from the neck down. "You drop your nuts, little boy," he says. The end of my life.

Doctor Comic - Pas Deux

Source: Buttersafe

This is the second comic that puts doctor, patient, and butt together, just like the one I posted in this entry a while ago. I am being the dullest person on the face of the Earth, doing nothing but pretending to study for the MCAT, which is coming on the second of September. Whenever I think about it, I feel as if I just carelessly step on a baby's face while calling the mom fat or something equally devastating.

Apparently, I don't know how to read actively and critically enough. I guess I daydream too much. For example, below is a sample of how my brain processes a passage as I am reading it with the italic representing my thoughts.

Philosophers Immanuel Kant and David Hume both spent their professional careers searching for a universal principle of morality... ugh, what the fuck, not philosophy again... Considering that they began their searches with seemingly irreconcilable...damned hate big words...ideas of where to look...blah blah...the similarity in the moral systems they constructed is surprising...yeah...yeah my ass is surprising...

And then a brain transplant?

So that's how I fail the so called verbal reasoning on the MCAT, beside my inability to comprehend, I often bear this intense animosity toward the passages themselves. There should be no reason to have such sentiments toward those passages, they are only designed to wear my brain down, lower my overall scores and ultimately prevent me from going to medical schools altogether. As a result, I'd be so green with envy and turn into a giant cucumber when all of my friends touch their first cadavers and contemplate the meaning of life and death. To prevent this from happening, I have come up with several ways to learn how to love those passages:

18 Rules of The Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama

I was by myself at the local Barnes & Nobel when I decided to make the Dalai Lama my date. He said inspirational things to me, lifted my spirit up during a very dramatically turbulent time of my life. I dated a jerk and got dumped, my mom turned psychotic, and my grades took a turn to the dumpster. These events affected my snobbery negatively. With much gratitude to my crazy friend Cora, the relatively cultured things I got to do were seeing a highlighted performance of Die Zauberflöte and dining out fancily at my favorite restaurant Demi. Anyway, I was still so distraught over the whole thing that I didn't really enjoy the experience. To be more accurate, my mind wasn't there, it was imprisoned somewhere in this dingy cell of melancholy. The Dalai's words put me in a meditative mood and brought me peace.

There are people who have real reasons to suffer, who are really ill, for example, on the breadline, disaster victims, or abused. And yet, here again, they often have the power to remedy this. Practically speaking, they can and should take care of themselves, speak out against their abusers and take them to court demanding damages or again they can work extremely hard if they do not have enough food or clothes. And mentally, they can adopt a positive attitude."

Acording to Buddhism, reflecting on the reality of suffering never induces either pessimism or despair. It leads to the discovery of the root causes of our plight: desire, hatred, and ignorance, and to a way of freeing ourselves from them. By ignorance, we mean not understand the true nature of people and things. It gives rise to the other two poisons. When ignorance dissolves, desire and hatred have no foundation and the source of our suffering has dried up. As a result, we experience a happiness that is spontaneously altruistic and that is no longer at the mercy of negative emotions."

So yeah, while Bill Gates in this post proposes rules that bring awareness to a person's reality, the Dalai Lama's rules reach spiritually inward to the core of our beings and simultaneously connect us to others. I also find the concept of mindfulness much advocated by Thich Nhat Hand shares the same principles with what the Dalai Lama has to say.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
• Respect for self
• Respect for others
• Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

So, light up a candle, close your eyes, take a deep breath, be aware of the surrounding and contemplate the words. I did, felt much better, and get my feet back on the track.

11 Rules of Bill Gates

Can the Rules of Living be found
in these books?

I was doing some MCAT passages when I ran into Bill Gates' thought-provoking rules. Apparently, he "talked about how feel-good politically correct teachings have created a generation of kids who have no concept of reality and how this lack of a concept sets them up for failure in the real world." I see truth in his ways of thinking, so consider this a reality-check. Sugar-coating reality is quite lethal, don't you think?

• Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it.

• Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

• Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone, until you earn both.

• Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

• Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

• Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parent's fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

• Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasite of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

• Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

• Rule 9: Life is not divided into semester. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. You have to do that on your own time.

• Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

• Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. 

I realize myself doing or not doing certain aspects proposed by these rules, which are quite practical and applicable to me as a young adult freshly out of college. I don't think these rules only work for a certain population at a certain age but should be considered universally to everyone. At the moment, I still can't believe that I graduated. Indeed, I still call these months my summer breaks, which makes me startled every times someone asks me about my plan post-grad. "Uhm... after the summer break, I'm taking the MCAT this September... uhm... probably find a job somewhere before applying to the med school." I'm still scared though. I want to get on my own feet taking care of my future before I can take care of anyone/anything else that needs me. Sitting at home studying might sound stagnant but dear World I am getting out there. *sigh*

Doctor Comic

I ran into this comic today, from the Three Word Phrase by Ryan Pequin. It's hilarious and yes it is so wrong on so many levels but I love it.

Ideally I would be going to medical school this coming fall, but since my spirit has been *insert puppy-eyed excuses here* so yeah... it won't be happening right away. But I will do it, y'all. 

I have got all the material I need to study for the MCAT. I want to make it my little bitch and tap its ass. I got a bootleg version of the famed Berkeley review, the much-acclaimed ExamKrackers, and access codes for practice tests. Starting next week y'all, I will start studying again, or shall I say, make it my little bitch and tame it till the day I ride it majestically straight to med school. Focus Focus and Focus, of course. With no "bad poop in my butt," I can do it.