Autumn is Here!!

Yesterday heralded the coming of autumn, my favorite season. Granted, today felt like it was eighty million degrees out, but it was an Autumn Day! I can't wait for Halloween, costume parties, pumpkin pies, beautiful maple trees...yay. Busy as it is, there's no time like fall.

LA Weekend Craziness...

This weekend, I spent many hours with Will and Andi in Will's white Honda Civic, cruising the I-5. As we drove past wind turbines in the Altamount Pass, tumbleweeds and fruit farms in the Central Valley, and other, slower cars on the Grapevine, this was our road trip song.

Will thought they were singing 'Fuzzy wuzzy wuzzy marijuana,' which is what we sing in polite company...Oh, and we also stopped at In-N-Out for lunch, where we had a conversation about what we would do if we ever got pregnant or got someone else pregnant.

Anyway, I'm so glad I got out of town and was able to see Billy! This weekend we exchanged schedules to hopefully make speaking to one another easier while he does law school and I do med school. He also gave me a quick lesson on how to throw a disc because I have somehow been suckered into playing on our med school IM Ultimate Frisbee team. I have never held a frisbee in my life, but Billy was the captain of our undergrad team and they were very good.

One super embarrassing thing that happened was -- I fainted! This was the third time in my life that I've fainted. One was in sixth grade in the cafeteria line with my two best friends on either side of me; one was in a dance class during college, again with one of my best friends with me who then took me to the hospital; and then on Saturday evening. I was at the bathroom sink, looking in the medicine cabinet for a comb, when I hit my elbow at the funny bone incredibly hard on the metal towel rack that was at, well, elbow level. The pain shot up my arm and my head felt all tingly, and then the world started to go fuzzy. I thought that couldn't be good, so I called out to Billy for help. I had an odd dream about fainting in a bathroom, but when I woke up, instead of being in bed, which is where you'd expect to be after having a dream, I was on the bathroom floor with Billy holding my head and asking if we should go to the hospital. Scary and very embarrassing, considering that every doctor I've ever seen has said that it's probably normal and I just have a vagal reflex that gets easily stimulated. I have never fainted at the usual things -- heat, blood, etc. Just randomly when I'm hungry or, apparently, in immense pain.

To recover, we went out to dinner at Baja Fresh and I had some delicious fajitas (courtesy of Billy). Sadly, I couldn't finish them all, but a homeless man on the walk home was happy to help me out with that. Westwood, where we went for dinner, is very pretty on a late summery evening before the undergrads arrive. Everything felt well-lit and peaceful, with trees and wide roads everywhere.

The next morning, we feasted on baguette and cheese and apples and bananas before Will and Andi came to pick me up. They had to drive around for a while before we found each other, which I was unhappy about. However, I did get a chance to see Billy's law school classrooms and library and building, all of which were just beautiful. Our building at school isn't half as nice!

On the drive home, we played the Alphabet game, where you name a word for each letter. First we did it with Diagnoses, then we did it with Anatomy. Then we decided we were being too nerdy, so we did it with Slang Terms (That You Wouldn't Use In Front of Your Grandma). Finally we did it with the Bible, but that one we did quite poorly, since only one of us had ever had a Bible-based Christian upbringing (and it wasn't me). An hour after we got home, our IM Ultimate Team had (and lost) its very first game. We had four women in an open league, and half of us had never played before. Needless to say, the score was 2-11. But at least we have a good team chant, which I must take full responsibility for: Bind, bind, bind, bind...Zinc Fingers!

I'm glad to be home, though, because work is going to hit very hard very soon. For example, I should be working now instead of procrastinating by writing this blog.

Why blog?

I have started several blogs before, and I always end up changing or deleting them, feeling that what I'm putting out there is just too personal. I think it's hard for me to strike a balance, when writing anonymously, between being evocative and just disclosing way too much.

But I'm going to attempt it one more time, simply because there have been people who actually read what I wrote during past attempts. There are two 'triggers' for my giving it another shot -- one positive, and one disturbing. Anyhow, there's a lot going on in life that I think might be good to get out there where family and friends can find it. So here goes nothing!

I want to start with some good news. I just got a new bike! It's a 2008 Trek 7.3X, and it's bright blue! With that and my silver and purple helmet, I feel pretty badass, and much better about some of the other stuff going on at the moment (which I'll get to later). This one looks very similar in color and style, but it's a 7.1 FX. For some reason, I couldn't find an exact match for my bike. I didn't want one that was too girly (B helped me with bike shopping, and it was so cool that they let him test ride one with me! They didn't even give him a crappy one, they let him ride a $900 cyclocross bike):


I haven't taken it out that much yet, only twice for real, but what I want to do is get an odometer and keep track. My poor parents keep freaking out that I will be vehicle fodder. I will try hard not to be. Yay! New bike for the first time since junior high!!

So part of the other reason for restarting this blog is some not-so-fantastic stuff that is going on. First of all, the stock market is in a downward spiral. First Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11, then B of A bought Merrill Lynch, and now AIG is apparently being bailed out by the government. What this means for my poor Dad, who works in corporate risk management abroad, is that he has slept only 6 hours in the last 48 trying to do damage control. Secondly, it means that we are not doing too well financially as a family, which in turn means that I can't ride horses regularly, as I was hoping to do this semester.

Perhaps that is meant to be, since I can't find a class at the barn that matches my schedule anyway. But it sucks to get back into something after not having done it all through college, only to realize that you're going to have to pretty much give it up again anyway. You can't really ride horses sporadically -- you don't get better, so it can actually hurt your self-esteem, and also it's not that safe to just ride once in a while, because being used to it really does make you far safer. Sigh. I'm so glad I have a bike because it means built-in exercise. And I am NOT in biking shape -- half an hour wears me out right now!

The other thing that's saddening is that one of my friends at school is having a really bad time right now. She moved a long, long way to come to med school, and she also has some underlying health problems that she is dealing with. She recently told us that she might take part of the semester off, and I really hope she doesn't. If she has to work less so she can give herself time to heal, that's okay with me. I would much rather see her everyday than lose her because she felt a sense of guilt or obligation to us as her colleagues (we do a lot of case-based, peer-group work). I hope she knows us better than to feel defeated or guilty or like she's to blame. I just want her to know that we all support her and she doesn't have to be uber-productive for that to be true :( I don't really know what to do, and I think maybe the answer is there's not much I can do.

Anyway, it's another classmate's birthday today, so I'm off to go bake him a cake with a few of the girls from my program. I haven't gotten much work done in the past four hours, but it's been good to get this off my chest.

It's so beautiful outside today -- cool but sunny. Maybe someone will go with me for a walk down by the water.