Stories from the back row, left side

Southern Hospitality... NOT

2011-12-05T23:33:00.001-05:00

It's time for another blog post - that makes 2 this year, I'm on a roll!

Today in clinic a patient came in with his home health nurse. I went in the exam room to get his pillow for his wheel chair, and his nurse followed me to gather the rest of his belongings. My attending was still in the other room talking to the patient's mother, and the elderly female nurse stood in front of me staring at my ID badge. "I recognized your name, and I was wondering if you were planning on continuing your work here or going back overseas," she stated with an eerily calm demeanor. At first, I thought she meant she recognized my name from the hospital and her other visits with this patient. Then, I realized with a crushing blow of racism that she recognized me as a foreigner. Was it my yankee English that made her suspicious? Did I inadvertently slip into my mom's accent? Was she just screening every vaguely foreign person she met (even if they did look like an innocuous pediatrician in a cardigan) for suspicious behavior to report to Homeland Security? Are my eyebrows significantly bushier than usual today? I responded that I was born and raised in Colorado, and she seemed confused. I was confused too because I don't encounter this stuff much... maybe out of willful ignorance.

--By Farrah, who was asked by an attending physician once if her favorite movie was Aladdin because she looked like Jasmine. She didn't know if she should be flattered or offended, so she just nodded.

Reasons to get a roommate besides Teddy

2011-02-25T04:24:00.010-05:00

This morning at 3:14 am, my alarm started its mighty wail. I leaped out of bed, unaware of the time or the implications of the alarm going off. I went straight to the wall and turned off the alarm as if I had walked in the door from the garage and nothing was wrong. I finally took in the alarm's unfamiliar phrase as I typed in my code - back door open back door open back door open. I looked at the back door, and it was OPEN. Teddy was hiding under my bed shaking - a very useful watch dog. My phone started to ring as I stepped toward the back door. The alarm company called to verify I was still alive. Talking to the security guy on the phone, I verified my safety code without really considering if I was safe or not. Security guy asked if I need the police. I replied, "I don't think so, nobody's here. I just wonder why the door is open." He said obviously, "maybe you didn't close it all the way." Uh, thanks dude for your insight. I closed the back door, and set the alarm again. Teddy and I sat in my room revved up and wondered what the next step should be. It was very windy and a little rainy outside. It was probably the wind, plus teddy is afraid of rainy weather which explains his persistent shaking. But then I thought, what if an intruder had intimidated Teddy into this fearful behavior. I decided if I ever wanted to sleep, I would have to search the house for intruders. I went to the kitchen and grabbed the biggest knife I could find. I sleuthed through every room like a detective from Law and Order, my back against the wall sneaking to the doors, then busting though each door knife pointed forward. I was reassured after my search, and I settled back in bed with the knife on the nightstand. I let Teddy climb into bed to help calm him down. Teddy promptly pooped in the bed - parasympathetic rebound is the pathophysiology, an hour long clean up was the result. Now, needless to say, I cannot sleep - though my bed is now in perfect condition to prevent SIDS - no bedding or pillows, just a warm outfit on firm mattress. The washing machine is producing the noise of a large unbalanced centrifuge unaccustomed to the weight of a duvet and pillows. I may just have to invest in a new bedroom set.

This is not the first time Teddy has soiled a bed. Back in our Boulder days, Teddy soiled my sister Sami's bed when he wasn't feeling well. Sami was in Denver that weekend, so I started to clean everything with the hope she wouldn't find out. In another battle of washing machine vs. duvet, her bedding ripped and the washing machine flooded. I started to sew everything together, hoping I could still salvage the situation. The rip was right in the center after repair, and I went to the fabric store looking for something to help. I bought her name in iron on letters and ironed them over the sewn up tear. She got home shortly, and I told her I had a surprise for her. She went up to her room and emerged with an extremely confused look asking why I had labeled her comforter. I hurriedly replied, "Teddy pooped in your bed, your comforter ripped in the clean up, there's a small flood in the bathroom, and I have to go to work now. I'm really sorry! byyyeeee."

--By Farrah, who's sleeeeeepppyy

Stories from Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T11:51:00.008-05:00

Our blog has recently been distracted by the long hours of residency and most of our posts are about the woes of internship. I hope this blog will take us back to our blog roots, funny stories about growing up with foreign parents. Recently, I hosted my very first friendsgiving. The night was a rousing success with plenty of food, and traditional board game fun. The party went off without a hitch, especially since I removed the extra bag of entrails I accidentally left in the roasting turkey before most of the guests arrived. It was during this evening I discovered I am turning into my mother by participating in her favorite past time - embarrassing people. I made everybody go around the table and state what they were most thankful for - since we have all only known each other for a few months, it was admittedly awkward. My fellow intern Sarah, who hates awkward situations, went last and was simply thankful that the awkward moment was about to end. However, I did not pull out my mom's awkward and embarrassing piece de resistance, which brings us to the heart of this thanksgiving story. Every year at the thanksgiving dinner table, my mom makes my little sister (by little I mean 1 and 1/2 years younger than me) sing a song with the chorus line "shaniqua don't live here no more.". You may be thinking, "I've never heard of that song, it is clearly made up." The song does exist, and awesomely, my mom thinks it is a hilarious song. A hit in the year 2001, the hip hop duo of Little T and One Track Mike hit it big with their one hit wonder "Shaniqua." Enjoy it yourself below:

Yes, the experience was surreal for us all at the first thanksgiving my mother demanded the song at the dinner table. Even more surreal for my brother-in-law's run of the mill american parents who were spending their first thanksgiving with us. Now it's a regular event, despite my younger sister's insistence every year that she does not remember the words to the song until she eventually gives in and busts a rhyme.

--By Farrah, who wishes you a very happy thanksgiving tomorrow

Things in the movie Babies not recommended by the average pediatrician

2010-10-22T18:22:00.008-05:00

Once again a blog brought to you by the random and obscure shit available on Netflix instant watch. Here are some things not recommended when providing infant appropriate anticipatory guidance.

1) Riding a motorcycle while holding your babies

2) Co-sleeping

3) Letting your toddler hold your infant

4) Letting your baby suck on a piece of chicken

5) Letting your baby crawl through a field of cows

6) Giving your baby coca-cola

Overall, a very adorable movie, but there exists a point of adorable overload - this point was reached during the viewing of this film.

--By Farrah, who sees adorable kids all day everyday so her standard for cuteness is unattainable by the average child

Lonely Nights in the Baptist

2010-10-10T13:21:00.003-05:00

Being on call is not as sexy as Grey's Anatomy makes it seem - well, at least for not anyone I know. There are no call room sexual hijinks, no flirting with cute, single doctors, and no dire emergencies (or at least in psychiatry). Instead, call is really busy and very mundane. I usually wander around the ED, very cranky and irritable, wishing that I had become anything else in the world but a doctor, wearing an old UNC sweatshirt that makes the Wake Forest security guards who are inevitably stationed outside a suicidal/homicidal patient's door, telling me "I don' like yo sweatshirt....I'm a [insert any other shitty ACC team here] fan." At 4 AM, however, no one wants to give a dissertation on why you are a Tarheel fan, no matter how die-hard you are about the Dean Dome, Dean Smith, and Roy Williams.

However, probably what I hate most about call is not the work or the scary/depressed/psychotic patients who have decided that 3 AM would be the time they would come into the ED with their crazy command hallucinations or decide to cut their wrists with that trusty old razor blade, but my loneliness. When I'm on call, I swear I hear the Britney Spears' chorus running through my head as if a soundtrack for my current state of mind - "My loneliness is killing me....baby hit me one more time."

For psychiatry, we do not have team structure call - I am literally the only psych person on call - no on site upper level or attending in sight. So I wander the halls of the Baptist alone in my solitude. I wander into a resident work room and see at least 6 internal medicine residents all hanging out together, joking about patients, having human interaction at 3 AM, and I get jealous of their comraderie. The other night I went to the friendly bagel shop to get their disgusting asparagus omelette bagel contraption, and as I waited in line, I saw 4 handsome internal medicine residents drinking their chai lattes at 3 AM, joking and chatting amiably. I enviously looked in their directions in the hopes that someone would talk to me, but they didn't - cliquish as they were. I grew irritable and thought, "Hey, I have friends! They're just at home...sleeping right now, but when they come back, we talk and joke just like your program." And so, I bravely trudge on through calls, counting down the hours before it ends, because after all, the night eventually does have to end, right?

--By Mariam, who realizes the shitty nature of this blog but was getting tired of Farrah's constant reprimanding, "I am keeping this blog alive since residency started, Mariam." This one is for you, Fars.

Vampire Weeknights

2010-09-27T02:51:00.008-05:00

I've started to work the night shift in the emergency department, and I can tell you right now that I would make a horrible vampire doctor (or Dr. Acula). I do not look elegantly disheveled with perfectly tousled hair after sleeping all day like the vampires all the tweens are into these days. I certainly don't have the patience to stare intensely at anybody like that dude from the Twilight movie. I usually describe myself as a night person, but this schedule is really messing with my flow. I perpetually live in sweats transitioning from scrubs to PJs to workout clothes then back to scrubs. The workout clothes are simply prophylactic to encourage me to work out, lest my regular pants not fit after my month of elastic waistbands is over. I could conceivably get out of the house in the afternoon when I wake up, but it doesn't feel right. I feel like I'm living in a dream world where work at night doesn't really count, but I have to work all night, so my days are not terribly productive. I sit around waiting to work all night, and then I work all night. Sleeping during the day is not great either, light always manages to seep through the seams of my blackout curtains and Teddy often barks at the stupid birds chirping outside. This experience brings my complaints about residency up to two:

1) Night Shift
2) Residents who complain about residency

On to the topic of complaints, I know that everybody needs somebody to vent to about the crap you have to deal with during residency, but seriously every resident gets over worked with crap - stop complaining about it! Just get a little attitude adjustment and before you know it your month of torture will be replaced with different month with possibly less torture. I'm a little peeved at myself right now just for complaining about the complaints. But seriously, this is my conversation with any intern in almost any specialty - I have had this interaction on multiple occasions from 3rd year of med school till now.

Me: how was your night?
Other intern (OI): *extreme exacerbation* I had to see (insert any number from 1 to 100) patients last night, and I still have to finish (insert any number from 1 to 100) notes! *prolonged sigh*
Me: Oh, I'm sorry, did you at least get to see anything interesting?
OI: Not really. *lets out loud involuntary groan as something on computer doesn't work*
Me: Well, you at least you get to go home soon?
OI: I'm so tired I can't even function right now *falls asleep in chair*

This is how the interaction should go:

OI: how was your night?
Me: TOTALLY AWESOME!

Ok, so maybe that's a little hypomanic reaction, but when you're sleep deprived you have an excuse to act a little loopy every once in a while (as long as there is no alcohol involved). I will admit Surgery gets worked harder than say Pediatrics, but if you picked Surgery, it's your own fault you're so busy (sorry Abby - I still heart you). At least the night shift slows down around 3 am and affords some free moments for blogging - live from the ED!

--By Farrah, who's nickname in the ED has been declared to be "Fawcett head"

NOVA special provides terrifying glimpse of the future

2010-08-08T23:52:00.008-05:00

I did not buy cable when I moved for residency. So now instead of watching episodes of the Jersey Shore, I am forced to watch the random and obscure shows available on Netflix instant watch. I stumbled on a NOVA special called "Doctors' Diaries" that profiled 7 doctors starting in their first year of medical school at Harvard in 1987. I watched it mostly out of boredom, but also for a glimpse of what school was like for my attendings. The answer was anticlimactic - school was exactly the same for my attendings, except there was a higher incidence of women with shoulder pads and perms. They struggled through the first two years of medical school reading about the basics with little to no connection to clinical work. They arrived in the second half of medical school knowing nothing while they were pimped. One student was aggressively pimped during his neurology rotation, and he replied with "I don't know because it's only my second day of neurology" followed by a nervous chuckle - a response I used in almost every rotation in medical school.

Not only was school the same, the students were the same even inside the ivy-covered, prestigious walls of Haaahrvaard. There was a slightly creepy mustachioed non-traditional student, a few brainy book nerds, a no-nonsense tough girl, and an emotional do-gooder. Every student on the documentary was a foil of a student in my class. Their lives in medical school were pretty boring and simply told me the story of my past 4 years. The second half of the special, about life beyond the first day of internship to the year 2007, is where their stories went from boring to terrifying.

All of the men on the special were divorced at some point - the mustachioed man managed to squeeze in three divorces. Two of the doctors actually mentioned that treating their spouse like an intern led to problems in their marriage. I can't imagine the poor wives given scut work at home, and admonished when it wasn't done correctly. The book nerds went into academics and seemed to genuinely love their jobs (anesthesiology, ophthalmology), but felt bad about spending time away from their families. Dr. Moustache became overweight, started smoking, got asked to leave his job in the emergency department, and grew a new hairstyle to become Dr. Braided Pony-Tail and Beard. I couldn't really see what element of their lives as doctors was so difficult and was starting to get depressed.

Two of the women no longer worked as clinicians. The no-nonsense young woman became a cardiologist and then a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company. She stated she didn't want to worry about her lifestyle doing heart caths until the age of 70, and she was definitely not worried as she pulled her fancy Audi into the driveway of her massive California home. Another woman, the only pediatrician, delayed intern year to work for a non-profit and get her PhD, and eventually ended up running the same non-profit instead of working as a clinician. The overly emotional girl from medical school became the only female clinician, and was my favorite doctor on the documentary. She worked as an internal medicine doctor for an urban population, she focused on public health, and she seemed to be the only doctor that didn't flaunt the fact that she went to Harvard. The only downside to her story is that she didn't get married until age 40, and even though she's now happily married with children, it does seem kinda late.

After watching these stories, I was left with an image of the future with my family left behind unless I left medicine - it's not terribly encouraging. I hope that I don't become as tired and cynical as these doctors that trained before me. I'm not sure if you can win with this career I've chosen, but I'm guessing I will need a supernatural ability to balance the elements of my life. I think I better take up tightrope walking to practice.

--By Farrah, who was recently told by Mariam to be less sarcastic, pretty good, right?

The Five Stages of Accepting Your Pager

2010-07-30T13:19:00.006-05:00

I had a pager in medical school, but it rarely made any noise. The nurses, residents, and fellows were far too busy to page a lowly medical student to see a procedure, and so the pager's only assigned tasks were to devour AAA batteries and to beep when it required fresh meat. Now my new residency pager not only devours AA batters (bigger is better), it's buzzer goes off with responsibility. The nurses need to page me for tasks at 3 am like "the patient in room 807 is gassy and could you please order some gas drops." I don't mind getting paged and checking in on the patients, but it did take a few weeks to get to this state of acceptance. I present to you my model: The Five Stages of Accepting Your Pager.

Stage 1: Brief Elation

July 1st is just a blurry memory overcast by my nervousness. There were not only butterflies in my stomach, there were angry giant pterodactyls. I was hyperaware of the weight of my pager on my hip, but with it's first buzz I was kinda excited. A page! For ME! I could now pick up the phone, dial the number, and say "Hi, this is Dr. R. I was paged." (I said Farrah, but still- I could've said Doctor if I wanted to). The cherry on top was they needed me, not the resident above me, not the fellow, not the attending, ME! It's nice to feel needed.

Stage 2: Denial

What is that buzzing noise? ... ... ... hmm, somebody's pager must be going off ... ... ... Oh CRAP! It's my pager.

Stage 3: Anger

At this stage, you start visibly cringing when you feel the first vibration, and your eyes narrow as you lift up the pager to see who needs you now. You start to recognize certain series of numbers and hold grudges against those numbers. For me it was 2811, which meant I had to go to a delivery. I can tell you right now neonatal resuscitation protocol is not enough training to let you handle what goes down in a delivery.

Stage 4: Bargaining

I'll take 500 pages in the next 5 minutes if I just don't get paged between the hours of 1 and 5 am.

Stage 5: Acceptance

At this point, I knew enough to handle simple problems I was paged with - "why yes I will write for some gas drops." I also knew how to reach somebody above me if I needed them. I could better understand the paperwork and how to write most orders. I knew the patients better by this time too so I knew which ones needed to be checked on before I even went to bed. The initial terror and nerves of residency were on longer operating at 100%, they were toned down to maybe 75% of capacity. I know now that no matter who pages me, I have backup and it's going to be okay.

--By Farrah, who's finds herself inadvertently slipping into a Southern accent several dozen times per day

Career-dropping

2010-07-18T11:13:00.001-05:00

If I had a Match.com profile, my dislikes would include: the sitcom Two and a Half Men, tourist traps, and bragging. I absolutely hate when people brag about their fancy homes, cars, watches or their elite Ivy League education or the fact that they are the frequent object of admiring glances from the opposite sex.

How things have changed. Before I started residency, during my summer vacation, I wished that I could plaster "M.D." on my forehead so that the world would know all that I had accomplished. For instance, last month I was at our local department store Belk getting a gift wrapped at customer service. The elderly lady wrapping my box told me that she had an aunt that was a 100 years old and still lived at home and on occasion played ball with her grandchildren.

A thought suddenly flashed through my mind, I want these nice ladies at Belk to know that I am not an average customer, I want them to know I'm a doctor. So, as the lady talked about her amazingly healthy century-old aunt, I nodded in faux-admiration and casually inserted into the conversation: "That's so great she's healthy! These days people who are over-50 have so many diseases like hypertension and diabetes."

I thought I sounded knowledgeable without coming across as self-aggrendizing, but the lady continued to wrap the box with pink ribbon and did not ask me, "Well how do you know that?" as I had intended her to. This will not do, I thought. So, then I said, "I'm in the healthcare profession and people are so unhealthy these days! It's nice to see your aunt is doing great at a 100!"

And that did the trick. "Well, oh my gosh, what do you do?" the lady asked, finally going along with the script I had created in my mind.
"Well, I will be a doctor at Wake Forest in July."
"Well congratulations, that is just so great! What kind of doctor?"
"A psychiatrist," I replied.
At this juncture another elderly lady appeared from the woodwork. "A psychiatrist? You know you'll need a gun, right?" she exclaimed in her Gentile Southern accent. This, of course, was not the intended response and almost seemed as if it were a non sequitor and borderline offensive, mocking the career of a mental health worker who labors to ensure patients don't disappear into the abyss of suicide or psychosis.
"Excuse me?" I said trying to hide my annoyance.
"Well, those crazy people - they could hurt you! I saw it on the TV," she said, a firm believer of the scare tactics of the 5 0'clock news.
"I'll be okay. They treat us self-defense at orientation" (for the record, they do not). And so, with that I learned my lesson of casual boasting. It never does end well.

And now, that I have actually started my residency, answering pages with, "This is Dr. Qureshi" fills me with an unforeseen anxiety. I feel like a huge fraud - after all, who the hell is this Dr. Qureshi? Certainly not me; I feel like I'm playing pretend as my dad, who has been answering the phone with that line for the entirety of my life. Every time I have to answer a page on call, I never know what to say since Dr. Qureshi sounds so extremely prideful, and pride cometh before the fall.

And so, I try out different phrases, hoping one will fit comfortably; "Hi, this is Mariam, the new intern" or "Hi I received a page, I'm the new psych intern" or "Umm, hi did anyone page psychiatry?" or the now-dreaded but direct, "This is Dr. Qureshi returning a page."

--By Mariam, who is no longer an MS, and is now a PGY-1...Is that an upgrade or a downgrade? Jury's still out.

Bad Muslim Jokes

2010-06-02T00:51:00.007-05:00

I was watching the latest episode of Party Down, a show on Starz that I am pretty sure no one has heard of but is actually really funny, and for the first time, I was offended by an offhand joke. In a rather farcical episode, the Party Down catering gang is at a gig for an after-party for the actors of a community theater play. Two of the main characters - Casey and Henry, her on-again-off-again love interest, are messing around with the costumes from the play backstage. Casey jokingly puts on a flamboyant pink burqa costume and Henry says, "I still can see your crudely wanton ankles," he says sarcastically.

I don't believe in censorship, and sometimes humor pushes the boundary of good taste. But I found this joke fundamentally annoying. It seems as if a new trend in comedy is to mock Muslim women's choice of modest dress. I haven't seen the new Sex and the City 2 movie (shoot me first), but I read in a review that there are hijinks involving "flaunt[ing] the flesh in front of Muslims." I find jokes where an enlightened Western woman shows off her beautiful tanned body in front of Muslim men and their covered women and the ensuing stares they encounter not funny at all.

Modest dress is a choice for most women, especially those of us who choose to do it in America. There exists no oppressive father (with a scary beard and outrageous temper) who tells their daughter in heavily-accented English, "You will wear zee hee-jab! I command it as does Allah!!!!" Of course, I admit, there are negotiations between parents and their kids when they are teenagers on what is classy and what is just plain hooker trashiness, but I assume that happens in white folks' homes, too. Classic example in Clueless, when Cher's dad says, "Cher, what is that?" when she's going on her "date" with the rather obviously homosexual Christian. Cher responds, "It's a dress, Daddy."
"Says who?" he commands.
"Calvin Klein," she states. There were many permutations of this conversation when I was a kid and wanted to wear some outrageously trashy Arden B. or Betsy Johnson shirt to high school, and my mother would argue against it.

And while I understand that some of us who do not wear the hijab make arbitrary choices on what we do and do not wear (no short sleeves or no sleeveless or no capris etc.), they are still our choices (not some ominous patriarchal figure who looms in the background at home), and they should be respected. Because on the whole, let's be honest, those of us who attempt modesty achieve it compared to mainstream America.

And I hate to be cliched, but the Sex and the City gals are not liberated in their scantily clad clothing. They are enslaved by it. Wearing low-cut tops or short skirts doesn't make you more enlightened or more free than a burqa-clad Muslim woman. Because men objectify you - you are not a sum of your parts, but just a faceless, mindless pair of boobs, ass, or legs to them. Female objectification is everywhere in movies (probably because of patriarchal male directors and crass American audiences). Ever seen a movie where the camera languishes over an actress's lean body (see: any Jessica Alba movie)? Or how about gratuitous female nudity, where an actress is dancing around in her undergarments for no apparent reason (ex. any Katherine Heigl movie)? Now that is female objectification. These kinds of movies make me want to put on a black burqa even in the 90 degree, sweltering summer heat of North Carolina.

--By Mariam, who apologizes in advance for not making this blog as funny as previous entries but blames Uzma K. for her influence in reverting Mariam back to her radical feminist ways.

Fixing the Finale of Lost

2010-05-24T12:54:00.003-05:00

Lost left a lot to be desired in the series finale. Mariam invested 6 years watching the show and tried to convince me that the ending was touching and appropriate. I only invested 6 months in the show and hated that the last season was about the death of only one character who I didn't even like that much! Maybe I am more cavalier about dismissing the show entirely because I didn't invest 6 years in it, but still it was about 120 hours of television. I could have gone to the gym instead and burnt at least 120,000 calories! I know the writers want to leave the ending open to interpretation, but it is poor form to end a show about a lot of interesting mysteries and character interactions on an island completely removed from the island and its mysteries. I suppose the lost writers and die hard fans can keep their lame ending, but for people who just want straightforward resolution they should include a highlight reel of character events after Jack's death, much like the end of any teenager coming of age movie. Imagine the song Don't You (forget about me) by Simple Minds playing as screenshots come forward with a few sentences updating us on how things turned out. Here's how I picture things turning out.

PEOPLE WHO WERE ALREADY DEAD

Jack: Enough about Jack, no update needed.

Juliet: She goes on to marry Sawyer in afterlife part 2. She runs into Jacob one night at a Sushi restaurant. After some saki bombs, he reveals he wouldn't let woman have babies on the island because his own mother died after childbirth. Juliet slaps him.

Locke: Locke opens a walkabout company in afterlife part 2. Nightly boar feast and luau included in cost of package if you buy right now!

Sun and Jin: Live together in afterlife part 2 where they never speak Korean again. They sell oxygen tanks for submarines specifically designed for unconscious people.

Sayid: Lives a slightly fulfilling life with Shannon. They live in the suburbs of afterlife part 2 and join a really WASPy country club.

Charlie: Afterlife 2 treats him well. He has 4 kids with Claire, and teaches music classes.

Shannon: Eventually dies of an asthma attack and ends up in afterlife part 3.

Boone: Wanders around awkwardly, smiling and giving everybody hugs. Sometimes he sleeps with Shannon.

Alex: Stays in afterlife part 2 until she eventually finds Karl. They date for a while, but grow apart after she leaves for college at Brown. She eventually meets Detective Miles and totally hits that.

Rousseau: Marries Dr. Linus and cooks him french food in afterlife part 1. They have adopt a baby named Pierre. They abandon him after Rousseau and Alex remember the island and they move on to afterlife part 2.

Daniel Faraday: Wins over Charlotte with his super awesome muzak.

PEOPLE WHO MAYBE NEVER EXISTED

David (Jack and Juliet's son): Gets abandoned by his dad and mom mysteriously one day after his grandfathers funeral. He has a lot of issues about it until he crashes on a strange island with a group of strangers (including Sayid's niece and nephew!).

PEOPLE WHO DIED IN THE FUTURE

Kate: Escapes on the Ajira jet, and helps Claire raise Aaron. Dies in a tragic run away ferris wheel accident.

Sawyer: Starts a blog called Nickname. It is epically successful for its one liner wit.

Miles: Finds a bag of diamonds in his pocket after landing on the Ajira flight. He becomes CEO of Oceanic airlines, but is removed after a duct tape repair scandal.

Claire: Runs a decorating company specializing in goth themed baby furniture in Beverly Hills.

Desmond: Escapes successfully from the Hugo-run island after Hugo decides to install a Star Trek-like transporter with his island magic. Lives happily with Penny and his son.

Richard: Sells eyeliner for men.

Lapidus: Works in Vegas as a Kenny Loggins impersonator, and writes a weekly conspiracy theory newsletter.

Walt: Uses his angst from his parents absence to start very promising acting career as a vampire on the CW. His strange magic powers that scared his stepdad in the first season really help him in his role.

Aaron: The dire warnings about him not being raised by his mother turn out to be wrong. He becomes a very successful marine biologist and is rumored to be dating Walt from the CW.

Ji Yeon: She channels her angst over her parents death into becoming the first female leader of the Korean mob. Think O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, Part 1.

Ben: Makes a lot of number 2 jokes with Hugo, especially after finding out from Desmond that the island is just a big clogged toilet.

Hugo: Hugo acts as the island protector until 2537. He is eventually replaced by Jar Jar Binks in an even more upsetting finale.

--By Farrah, who is 26 tomorrow

TV Doctors never write Medical Notes

2010-05-12T20:50:00.003-05:00

There are only two doctor shows I can stand to watch on TV - House and Scrubs. Both of these shows were better in their earlier seasons, but after getting involved in the character stories I just watch out of inertia. Scrubs is probably more realistic, but House tends to have more interesting cases with entertaining Sherlock Holmes-type medical mysteries. The most annoying unrealistic thing about House is that the multiple overqualified MDs are in a never ending internship disguised as a fellowship for a specialty which does not exist. These docs can run any test in the hospital - MRI scans, cardiac catheterization, exploratory laparotomy, neurosurgery, genetic assays, autopsies, bacterial culture, breaking and entering. Every mundane test is run with the personal attention of doctors in perfectly tailored white coats without the help of any nurses or techs. The only mundane task these doctors are almost never seen, even miming, is the act of writing a medical note. Since my last month of medical school is flex time, I spend my time painting, playing guitar, and watching TV online. As I watched an episode of House in a feeble effort to exercise my already atrophying medical knowledge, I started to wonder what the medical chart would even look for an episode of house. In an exercise of pure boredom, here is what the chart would look like for the House episode "Brave Heart."

History & Physical

History: 39 year old male presenting with trauma, fell 30 feet from building

Family: Father, paternal grandfather, paternal great grandfather - death in 4os from heart disease

Social: Detective, Reckless because he thinks he's gonna die at age 40 like his relatives, unmarried, no children

Physical: 2 broken bones, severe concussion, collapsed lung

Assessment: Trauma stabilized, but unknown cardiac condition warrants an inpatient work up. Differential Diagnosis includes familial hypercholesterolemia, marfan syndrome, brugada syndrome, idiopathic

Plan: Admit to diagnostic medicine service, EKG, cardiac catheterization, genetic testing, routine labs

Progress Note

Tests: Negative

Assessment: Um... still probably genetic

Plan: Will get consent to exhume bodies of relatives (would insurance EVER cover this, put it on credit card, he's gonna die at 40 anyway!)

Progress Note

Interim History: Patient's ex-girlfriend presented to hospital revealing patient has a son.

Pathology on relatives bodies: Negative

Assessment: Um... still probably genetic

Plan: Get fresh pure squeaky clean bone marrow biopsy for genetic analysis (a little painful, but what's the pain of a child compared to cinching a farfetched diagnosis!)

Progress Note

Son's Bone Marrow Biopsy: normal

Assessment: Probably faking it = idiopathic, Will give patient imaginary diagnosis of Ortoli Syndrome, a rare cardiac disease treated with pills

Plan: Give patient sugar pills, discharge home

Autopsy Note

History: Patient collapsed 4 hours after discharge. Found in laundry room of apartment building by landlord. Pronounced dead on arrival by EMTs

Procedure: Post-mortem incision at midline of sternum revealed active bleeding. Patient comes back to life coughing and screaming in distress

Assessment: Not dead yet. Extreme Bradycardia. Differential Diagnosis includes sick sinus syndrome, metabolic disease, isolated anti-ro antibody

Plan: Transfer to ICU, start steroid treatment

Progress Note

Interim History: Jaw and tooth pain, patient pulled out own tooth with forceps from cart in room. Dentist analysis of tooth revealed normal tooth

Assessment: Source of pain could be bone cancer with paraneoplastic syndrome. Li fraumeni syndrome

Plan: Gamma survey to look for tumors

Progress Note

Gamma survey: normal

Assessment: Source of pain could be related to nervous system - hereditary sensory autonomic neuropathy type 1

Plan: Carbamazepine

Progress Note

Interim history: patient with continued pain and urinary incontinence

Assessment: Wilson's disease (is there a single episode where this isn't in the differential? seriously writers, it's just like Lost's obsession with dural sac rupture)

Plan: Penicillamine (why diagnose? just start treatment!)

Progress Note

Interim History: Dr. House heard the word "button" triggering the concept of heart attack button leading to the obvious next diagnosis of intracranial berry aneurysm pressing on brainstem

Assessment: Intracranial Berry Aneurysm

Plan: Neurosurgery for both father and son, then heartfelt reunion!

Good lord this show is stupid laid out like this! But inertia is terribly powerful so I will likely keep watching.

--By Farrah, who spent the last 5 days babysitting her 2 year old nephew and who never knew she could pull off the unkempt mom look so well, several people told her to have a happy mother's day

Childhood STOLEN by American Girl Store

2010-04-06T22:34:00.008-05:00

I recently went on a trip to Colorado with Abby. We spent a week dog sledding, skiing, and gazing at the magestic beauty of the Rocky Mountains. We did not decide to spend our last day outside in the refreshing barely-oxygenated mile-high air, and instead decided to spend it in the retail air of Park Meadows Mall where an American Girl Store had just opened!

Like all little girls, I begged my mom for an American Girl doll on a regular basis. My mom was a big fan of her daughters reading, so she happily purchased the six books of every series for me and my younger sister Sami. My favorite books were about Samantha Parkington. I read Meet Samantha, Samantha Learns a Lesson, Samantha's Surprise, Happy Birthday Samantha!, Samantha Saves the Day, and Changes for Samantha hundreds of times each. At the back of each book was a small, harmless-looking postcard that you could send away for the American Girls Catalogue which sold dolls based on the series. My mom didn't appreciate the series as much after the arrival of the catalogue.

Sami and I would spend days lovingly turning the pages of the catalogue (Sami focused on Molly because they both wore glasses). They were the greatest dolls you could EVER own. Not only could you have the doll, but you could get everything the doll had in all of the books! You could get Samantha's pretty pink dress from Happy Birthday Samantha! along with a tiny ice cream maker and a tiny wicker set of table and chairs. You could even get a matching outfit for yourself! However, the dolls cost around $85 just for a starter kit - doll, book, and maybe a brush. My mom dismissed our whiney begging, stating that she would get us the dolls when they went on sale. Sami and I knew, they would never go on sale. My mom eventually got us similar looking porcelain dolls at a lower cost that partially filled the massive void in our American Girl hearts.

When we saw the American Girl store had opened just a week earlier in Colorado, we decided to go. I have to admit that even at age 25, I was excited to see a Samantha doll in person - a little sad, I know. We arrived at the magical store, where glass covered perfect displays of all the dolls just like in the catalogues. There were a few new dolls that I didn't recognize - Josefina? Ruthie? Rebecca? LANIE? Who the f*** cares? Where is Samantha?!? I rushed through all the displays, but she couldn't be found.

Abby, Sami, and I aggressively elbowed children out of the way to talk to one of the salesclerks.

"Excuse me miss, where are the Samantha dolls?" Sami asked as we all backed the clerk into a corner.

"I'm sorry, Samantha has been retired. It actually happened a few years ago," she politely replied.

"WHAT!?!" we responded in unison.

She's only 10 years old, I thought, how could she retire?

"I was going to pass one on to my daughter!" I said loudly to the sales clerk, realizing in the same moment that - 1) I don't have a daughter and 2) to pass something on to a daughter you have to own it yourself first. I could have cried (don't worry, I held it together - a future pediatrician should not openly sob in a doll store), and we left the store sad and dejected.

Samantha now costs around $300 on e-bay - a little too much for me to handle. I'm guessing she's going to come out of "retirement" at some point to give a little sales boost to the doll makers - much like the Disney vault which gives you a periodic one month window to get a limited edition Beauty and the Beast before it goes back in the vault. I may get my sister a Molly doll for her graduation so she never has to face the horrible realization that she can't pass it on to her imaginary daughter.

--By Farrah, who is house hunting and considered applying for those HGTV shows about "My first home" but didn't want to look too Liz Lemon-y looking for a house to live in by herself

Blast from the Past: Journal Entries

2010-03-23T23:21:00.003-05:00

Last week, Farrah invited me to her house. She lured me to Perrysburg with the promise of home cooked fish and a tantalizing glimpse into her diary from the 12th grade. My interest was piqued - what was Farrah like at age 18? I was almost positive that although her comedic timing wasn't as matured and developed in the twelfth grade, it was well on its way. After reading an entry from 9/12/01, I realized I couldn't be more wrong. Senior year Farrah was not the person I know now - she was so incredibly earnest, very angsty, and tragically very, very Republican. A perpetual fear of terrorism, straight from George W.'s fear-mongering speeches, was a continual theme from said entry.

This prompted me to tell my parents to bring my diary from its hiding place in my room so that I could reflect on what kind of dork I was. Here is an entry from 5/22/97:

In science, Hardy [my 7th grade science teacher who was the Heidi to my LC, the Goliath to my David] goes "any gum 2day." I said "no." She told the whole class I got a demerit. I want 3, then I can get demerit SH [study hall]. He [?] gave me tips on how to get a demerit. Then we were taking notes and my light arrow was pointing the wrong way b/c I had no room. She was checking my notes and couldn't find anything wrong. So she goes, "Why is the arrow pointing the wrong way" "B/c I didn't have room." She tore out the page and goes "Now u do." I hate her.

In English - British tea party. During break, I was asking Lauren something near my locker and Nathan walks past a & hits me on the butt (this time no long object). I was like "U perv." He blamed it on Brice. More LATER! I asked Mrs. Horlacher 4 a demerit. She said no. Then I started chewing my gum really loud & she says, "You're chewing gum, automatic demerit." I was all excited and I thanked her. After I left, she said, "What's her problem." Mrs. Gibson never gave me a demerit. I asked 3 times. In Pre-Algebra, Nathan told me to get another demerit, just in case.

In history, I found out who Betsy liked - Nathan W!!! She said in her note, "he's so foxy." So she's over NF. In art, me and Jenna drew our houses and William told all the guys about how I live near him. Then I was like, "One time I said hi to u & u ignored me." Then Ryan and Nathan W said, "If I lived in your neighborhood, I'd ignore u 2." Whatever! Guess what I found out, Mrs. Morrison didn't give Betsey a demerit 4 chewing gum. I hate her! In PE, Saira & Nathan F. broke up. Now they're going out again.

And here endeth a typical journal entry from my seventh grade year. To glimpse into my twisted seventh grade mind is truly enlightening and frightening. I barely recognize myself - a boy crazy Valley girl whose greatest obsession was a guy who barely knew she existed. Hardly the pretentious, liberal hipster who references 30 Rock and I am Charlotte Simmons regularly that I am now. Most importantly, after reading this blast from the past, I realize how important it is to keep a journal. If we can't look back at our angst-ridden teen years and laugh, at least we can feel infinitely superior about how much we have changed. Or how much we have stayed exactly the same.

--By Mariam, who is an MS4 and thereby, INVINCIBLE.

I promise we didn't couples match

2010-03-18T14:46:00.002-05:00

Looks like both Mariam and Farrah will be residents at Wake Forest University. Good news, the blog doesn't die here!

Blog Submissions: Awkward Interview Moments Series

2010-02-06T16:06:00.003-05:00

Welcome to a new series that will start after Match Day. Some of us have been through an exhausting, grueling interview season of fake smiling, wearing uncomfortable polyester-blend suits, and asking nonessential questions about programs that are all essentially the same. During these 3 months, most of us have probably encountered an awkward moment with an interviewer - whether it be on our parts or the assistant professor of [insert medical specialty] or current resident. And we want to hear about it! We will compose a blog about the most awkward moments we encountered on the interview trail 2009-2010. All submissions will be anonymous, and don't fret, overly cautious MS4s, this blog will not go up until everyone has matched. Blog readers, come out of the woodwork, and participate - send your most awkward interview moment to mariamq786@yahoo.com.

-- By Mariam, who will scream if anyone ever asks her, "Do you have anymore questions for me?"

Critical Analysis of a Tile: Part IV

2010-02-01T19:47:00.002-05:00

The interview season is winding down, and while I have a pile of 15 thank you cards to write, I am taking a break to provide more blogging entertainment. So now back by popular demand, another critical analysis of drawings on tile.

Farrah: The size of these kites couldn't really generate enough lift when compared to the placement of the string and the size of the bows. The message of "be free" doesn't exactly make sense in a hospital setting. What is this child trying to imply? Be free of medical treatment? The parents who avoid vaccination aren't setting anything free other than a new epidemic of mumps. Be free of disease? How is being free of disease related to kites? If you set a kite free, it doesn't have a brain, and it can't feel the importance of its liberation. It might even land in a local river, suffocate a swan, and leave a baby swan behind who thinks it's ugly while it is raised amongst the ducks! Finally, these supposed "kites" look strikingly similar to a spermatozoa with a crude drawing of the mitochondria in the tail. I don't know where these sperm are going to "be free," but I do know it's inappropriate for children.

Mariam: I am wondering what exactly the association between hospitals and kites is, too, Farrah. But, really, who can fathom what kind of crazy shit goes on in a kid's mind? One interpretation is that the kid is stuck in the hospital and weird people keep waking him up to poke him and check on him, and maybe he wants to "be free" of the hospital and walk out AMA*. I highly don't recommend that because then insurance doesn't pay for your visit, and who the hell wants to pay a $30,000 hospital bill out of pocket? Also, I'd like to point out the inaccuracy of the tile as well - first of all, kites are not free - they are tethered by a string and held by a snot-nosed kid (such as the one who painted this tile). In fact, they are totally operator-dependent. If a kid wanted to make an accurate (albeit irrelevant) tile about freedom, he should have painted some birds. Now, birds are totally free.

*= Against medical advice

--By Mariam and Farrah, who spent this past week making jokes about Dr. Spaceman.

How to tell a residency program "I want to go to there"

2010-01-26T13:08:00.003-05:00

When I was applying for medical school, I turned to the internet for help. For those frequent readers of this blog, we know how that turned out from Traumarama: Cake does not get you off the waitlist. However, I made it through, and now almost four years later, I am ready to take my next step of training by applying to residency. After the personal statement, the CV, and the interviews, I find my self agonizing over what to put in a simple thank you note. How personal should it be? Hand-written or e-mail? Who do I send it to? The program director? The program coordinator? The chair? My interviewers? I turned to the internet once again for help, and returned to the dreaded Student Doctor Network forums to find what the average gunner was doing these days. I then stumbled upon the following advice designed for the international medical graduate. It's actually pretty standard advice, but it does contain language that although entirely English, still distinctly reads as foreign. I've highlighted my favorite parts.

Writing effective Thank You Letter

You may wish to thank the program coordinator before you leave for the well organized trip. It is a very good idea to remind about yourself with a thank you letter sent to everyone you interviewed with. It is going to be much easier if you write your thank you letter right after the interview while everything is fresh. Touch the subjects you talked about, that will make it more personal and your interest more genuine. Use the forms you completed to refresh your memories. It is also a good idea to ask about a possibility of a "second look" interview.

A sample Thank You Letter

Dear Dr. XYZ:

Thank you for the courtesies extended to me during my interview yesterday. Your program's atmosphere was inviting and warm, despite of unusually cold weather. I appreciate the way you made me feel at ease with informal conversation about the program as well as lifestyle in ZZZZZ. A site of the state capitol has impressed me.

I especially enjoyed learning about research opportunities at the program.

I liked a lot rounds with ward team directed by Dr. YYYYY. Her non-pressing style lets residents think and express their thoughts freely.

I was particularly impressed by the satisfaction of the current residents with the program. I feel like I definitely can fit into the team.

I strongly believe that I would be an excellent trainee. I really think that the program may benefit from my experience. Even though I had an interruption in practicing medicine, my current position helped to bring my skills up to speed. Whatever I could have missed prior to that, I will catch up by hard work.

I hope to successfully match with your program. Since it was my first interview I can definitely say that I rank your program as number one. But seriously, I will give you an update on my ranking in January. I am sure that the program will be at the top of my list.

Sincerely,

AAAA BBBBBB, M.D.

My very favorite part is the joke in the last paragraph. I had to read it several times before I realized it was a joke. Anyway, I finally settled on a nice hand written note on Crane & Company stationary sent to the program director and my interviewers. After the thank you note is still a mystery for me. I think there is some sort of program director calling program director protocol, but I don't know if I'm ready for that step yet.

--By Farrah, who is in Mariam's home town, which is smaller than you can possibly imagine and contains an abandoned gas station converted into a Jesus figurine and fruit stand.

The Poltics of Naming

2010-01-05T23:21:00.002-05:00

When a group of 20-something girls congregate together, the discussion always veers towards baby names - what names we have picked out for our hypothetical kids regardless of our marital status. And my contribution to this conversation is invariably, "I will pick a name that is pronounced the same in Urdu and English so my kid won't have a weird name complex."

This is because I suffer from a so-called "name complex" because (Cosmo Confession) my name is actually pronounced Mur-ium, not the Anglicized Westernized version: Mary-am. When I was a teenager, I had no problem introducing myself to white folks as Mary-am. I didn't think twice about the identitarian politics associated with assimilating ones name to ease social interactions with mainstream society. I just wanted white folks to have an easier time with my foreign name, and so I was "Mary-am Qureshi." In fact, my Carlisle friends would tell me, "I love how your mom says your name: Murrrrium! Murrrrium!!" as they rolled their "r's" as if my mother was a sassy, sharp-tongued, South American tango dancer. Back then, I didn't have the cojones to say, "Yo, my mama says it the right way!" Instead, with a subservient smile, I would say, "I guess it's cool."

When I got to college, though, the politics of assimilating ones name became more complex. At Carlisle School, the vast majority was of Southern white people, whose only interaction with Pakistan or its people had been through a copy of National Geographic at the local library (sigh in the pre-9/11 days). At UNC, though, brown folks abounded - there were academics in every department.

When I took a women's study course my junior year of college, I discovered two horrifying facts: 1) my professor was a short, thin Indian lady named Dr. Chatterjee and 2) class participation abounded and this was just the type of subject where I'd be continually raising my hand. The first time anyone wanted to participate, Dr. Chatterjee would say, "Your name, please?" Even though I really wanted to participate in some of the riveting discussions about the gender politcs of the egg and the sperm and how scientific language made menstruation seem so wasteful, I held back for fear of how to say my name. Should I say "Mary-am" to appease my classmates or "Murrium" for the Indian professor? Now, at this point, dear blog reader, I can literally hear the groans from people like Amar or Erik Peterson as they collectively sigh, and say, "JESUS, why is this such an issue for you Mary-am? I mean, seriously, who cares? Can't you make fun of sick children or the homeless some more?" And in my defense, I can only say, yes, this may seem trivial, but it still haunts me to this day, and the egalitarian nature of self-publishing on the Internet allows me to post absolute shit if I want to on this blog.

In the end, I decided to raise my hand and participate in a discussion about women working "pink collar" jobs in the West Indies for Western companies and pronounced my name is "Murrium." I figured that a women's studies professor whose particular interests are in colonization and post-colonial gender studies would notice me selling out to Western hegemony.

However, the problem persisted, especially in medicine, where every rotation I had was filled with some brown person. I got confused literally at the start of every rotation. And so, I came up with some general rules to live by:

1) Say "Mary-am" to patients because usually they are small town white folks who have never seen a Pakistani and would get really confused if I said my name the right way.
2) If there are only white doctors around and white students, pronounce it "Mary-am."
3) If the doctor is Pakistani/Indian and everyone else is white, then pronounce it "Murrium" because the highest authority figure who is grading you matters the most, and you don't want them to think you are an Oreo (white on the inside, brown on the outside).
4) If the team is a mix of Pakistanis/Indians and white people, pronounce your name both ways depending upon whether the person is brown or white. I have to make sure that the other members of the team can't hear me during each introduction though. That leads to confusion within the team and no one ever saying your name because they don't know which way is the right way and are too lazy/embarrassed to ask. This happened to me during my pediatrics rotation in my 3rd year when the team was a mix of Bengalis, white people, Hispanic people, Indians, and Persians.

And so, this is what happens to you when you are a first generation American - I have now realized that straddling both your parents' culture and being an American is not as easy as they make it seem in heartwarming immigrant movies or that documentary they show you when you visit the Statue of Liberty. It involves a lot of complicated, minor and major compromises with your identity continually in flux as you negotiate the Old World and the New.

--By Mariam, who is so sorry she hasn't blogged in so long, but life got in the way.

Hospital on a Hill

2009-11-09T23:38:00.004-05:00

There are many reasons that I think a hospital on a hill is a bad idea. Here are my top 5:

1) Sick people don't have the strength to climb hills

2) Parking

3) Ambulances are not the best vehicles to speed up winding steep roads

4) Earthquakes + Gravity

5) When the fog settles around the hill, and a patient unfortunately has end-stage disease, they may look out their window and have a terrible existential moment. Am I already in Heaven? Is Hell this hospital room where I have to see the same residents everyday, much like Sartre's play No Exit? No joke, the following is a picture from the hospital on a hill.

--By Farrah, who is now giving bonus points to non-hill hospitals when comparing her residency choices

Well Portland Oregon and sloe gin fizz, if that ain't love then tell me what is

2009-10-31T00:52:00.012-05:00

I am currently doing my fourth month-long away elective in Portland. I now realize that while I know I don't want to stay in Ohio for residency, getting out of Ohio for 4 whole months probably wasn't the best plan. I was exposed to H1N1 in multiple hospitals. I lived in environments that involved sharing bathrooms down the hall with french scientists, hippie medical students, and occasionally a lizard. I had to buy both warmer and cooler clothing depending on my location and inappropriate packing (how could I predict what I would need for the next 4 months when I left Toledo?). I had to shop in weird unfamiliar grocery store chains. Today, I felt homesick and trekked down a steep hill to get some Chipotle like they have back in good old Colorado. I got back to the co-op where I am currently staying and settled down to watch yesterday's episode of 30 Rock. As I watched Liz Lemon substitute a scented candle for deodorant, I saw myself in her character.

(There was a video here before the NBC nazis took it down: it was Liz Lemon smelling her armpit and then rubbing a scented candle on it)

Later when she went to Georgia, I was reminded of how uncomfortable I am in the unfamiliarity of each new location I visit.

(There was also a video here: it had Liz Lemon sick with Jack handing her a bottle of medicine. She then says, "What is this? Peppy Bismilk? Why is everything a little different here? I HATE IT!")

I feel unkempt, and less organized in general in all these new locations. While I really enjoy visiting lots of new locations, I am afraid I may have tired myself out too much before interview season. Here are a few things I learned about each of the cities I visited. This information does not include any opinions about any of the residency programs because it's interview season and I'm not stupid.

San Francisco: Expensive city. Don't go into the woods in golden gate park after dark, and also before dark. I don't like Ethiopian food. I really like "hot chocolate" brownie desserts.

Tucson: Really hot. Lot's of different desert wildlife: snakes, lizards, scorpions, coyotes. The desert museum is not actually a museum - it's a zoo. A cactus can be pretty. Also, when I said there were scorpions, I want to emphasize that they were IN the house, yuck.

Denver: Best city ever. I love being home.

Portland: I've only been here for a week. I live right next door to the hospital so I don't really get a chance to explore. I am excited to see what the city is like this weekend. So far I only know that it is wet, the fall trees are really pretty, and there is a pretty high chance that there are bed bugs based on the bites on my legs and arms. :( Also, there are a LOT of hippies here, and that's saying something from a girl who went to college in Boulder.

--By Farrah, who never thought she would admit that she misses Toledo. Also, bonus points to anybody who recognizes the lyrics in the title.

Singles Vs. Marrieds: A Comparison Study

2009-10-01T22:36:00.002-05:00

In the Sex and the City episode "A Woman's Right to Shoes," Carrie attends her married friend's baby shower. The host insists she take off her Manolo Blahniks upon entering her penthouse apartment. But when Carrie leaves, the Manolos have been stolen, and the hostess refuses to pay the exorbitant $485 to replace them. At the end of the episode, Carrie registers herself for the same shoes she lost at the Manolo Blahnik store and announces her marriage to herself. After all, she reasons, "Think about it. If you are single, after graduation, there isn't one occasion where people celebrate you. ... Hallmark doesn't make a "congratulations, you didn't marry the wrong guy" card. And where's the flatware for going on vacation alone?"

I never really thought there was much of a difference between married and single people. Weren't we still a part of the human race? Recently though, after spending quality time with married people and observing them in their natural habitats - one-dish dinner parties and Ikea - I have realized that singletons and marrieds have diverged into two different species - call it homo marritus vs. homo singletus. The question remains - can we still co-habitate?

Recently, I was sitting at a table with married people who were slightly older than me, but not so old that they wouldn't get the Jesse Spano, "I'm so excited!" reference. As I sat there, attempting to make conversation, I realized that for the first time I was at a loss for words. One girl discussed the difficulties of building a home - picking out the tiles, the sinks, the appliances etc. I had been renting since I was 18 and would probably continue to do so until the age of 31 when I finished residency (i.e. when I could finally afford anything that didn't have linoleum floors and a shared wall), so I merely said, "Yeah...Home Depot is a confusing place" awkwardly.

Another girl discussed how her son had just gone for his first soccer practice and how confused he had been by the concept of kicking the ball into a large net and had merely wandered off to pick daisies instead. I didn't have a 4 year-old son or ever play soccer, so I merely "awwww'ed" accordingly as is customary to do so when someone tells you an incident about their under the age of 10 child.

Another day at a post-Ramadaan brunch, I once again found myself at a table full of married folks. The restaurant was taking a long time to fulfill everyone's orders, and one girl's husband rushed to her side and gave her a Danish pastry he had ordered so that she wouldn't get hungry. "Awwww!" the other marrieds cooed, "My husband doesn't do that ever!" they said with mock-jealously. There was congenial laughter about how sweet this said husband was and how their own spouses were too busy watching football to care that much. I was the only single girl at the table and by this point, I had learned the value of silence.

During my one-month stay amongst the Marrieds, I felt less like the independent Miss Mary Tyler Moore with her "you're gonna make it after all" attitude and more like an old unmarried lady with other unmarried lady doctor friends who only had a wealth of arcane medical knowledge and a litter of cats for company. Even Carrie who felt inferior to the smug married people got her Manolos at the end of the episode and could drown her sorrows in her fabulous wardrobe. But where are real single people supposed to find solace? In their crappy H&M and Banana Republic-on-sale button downs and poly-blend work pants (which is all one can really afford on a resident salary)? Or perhaps we can find silver lining in that our conversations haven't solely degenerated into the chemical composition of baby vomit and home moldings. Yet.

--By Mariam, who feels bad because she hasn't blogged in so long.

Critical Analysis of Drawings on Tile: Part IV of a Series

2009-08-19T11:32:00.006-05:00

While we are studying for the USMLE and learning about child psychiatry, we don't want to leave our dear blog readers without art to critically analyze. Here is part IV of the series:
Farrah: The degree of jaundice here implies pancreatic cancer. Very hard to cure. This child is very ambitious, very ambitious indeed. Also that shot looks like a pen.

Mariam: You totally couldn't cure cancer with a simple "shot" to the hand. You'd need central line access shit to "cure" cancer AT THE VERY LEAST.

--by Farrah and Mariam, one of us saw Julie and Julia, and it reminded her of us, in our infinite narcissism

Meet Farrah

2009-08-10T20:44:00.008-05:00

Several people commented that it may not be politically correct to critically analyze the drawings of children, so in an effort to make things fair, I present a series of my own drawings. I am doing an independent study in pathology, studying for the USMLE in the library of my childhood home, surrounded by many hardcover books. In a cabinet underneath one of the many shelves, you will find some soft cover books written by and pictures drawn by me and my little sister. Since any distraction from Crush Step 2 is welcome, I browsed through this cabinet and found out a few things about myself. This project was a self portrait with a short biography at the bottom. It hung on the wall of my elementary school in September 1992.

"September 15, 1992

My Best friend is Victoria. My favorite book is Little me mo's Pizzra. When I grow up I want to be a doctor. I'll never forget when I went to Iran for the first time. The hardest thing to do for me is math. I feel happy when I am at home. If I could go anywhere in the world I'd go to Orlando, Florida. I like to read."

This biography is somewhat accurate. The thing that surprised me the most is that I said I wanted to be a doctor when I grow up. I was almost positive that I made that choice my sophomore year of college. I guess I have always wanted to be a doctor. I really wish I could use this stuff for my personal statement. In terms of the artwork, my critical analysis found that the nose holes look extra weird, and there is some sort of hemifacial hypertrophy. Anyway, if I wrote the same type of biography today, it would look like this:

"August 10, 2009

I have a super awesome friend named Tor. The Harry Potter books are some of my favorites. When I grow up, I want to be a pediatrician. I forgot most of what happened when I went to Iran for the first time. The hardest thing for me to do is statistics, but I used to be really good at calculus. I feel happy when I am at home. If I could go anywhere in the world, I'd go to Venezuela and see Victoria falls. I like to read."

Hmm... not much has changed.

--By Farrah, who's got more childhood drawing and hospital tiles to critically analyze!

A Complex Person

2009-07-21T23:41:00.003-05:00

This week, I discovered new medical school blogs from strangers by typing in "Medical school" into the magic Google machine. I found entertaining blogs about medical school and the standard woe-is-me entries about how tiring, entertaining, pointless it is to be a medical student, even though we will go on and become the top earners in American society. The backrow blog has had its fare share of bitch sessions about medical school, and I realize now that these stories aren't universally entertaining. They are only amusing to our small, select audience of secret medical student readers, Jack's dad and sister Eileen, and Lindsay, our friend from the Detroit suburbs. What this blog needed was wider appeal like my hero David Sedaris.

And what I want to say is: yes, I'm in medical school, and it consumes a lot of time, but I am still an interesting person, regardless. In essence, I want to reclaim my identity from medical school, and I want to say to UTCOM, you have not destroyed me - I am still desperately clinging to the last shards of my personality. For instance, I do a funny white person voice with Farrah**, I really like zombie movies, and I love Sephora. In other words, I am a person without you, medical school. I am a person of varied interests, and I will now have to end my affair with you. We are officially on a break until I reclaim myself from your tyrannical clutches (really, medical school, you are as possessive as a jealous mistress). No more, I say! Down with medical school entries about butt abscesses and patient care! Viva non-medical school-related blogs!

**Really, it's very humorous. I wish blogs had audio capabilities.

--By Mariam, who can talk about things other than rotations and medical school. Just ask her about the Nazi plundering of art treasures during WWII.

Crtical Analysis of Drawings on a Tile: Part III of a Series

2009-07-06T22:31:00.006-05:00

To help you dear blog readers pass the monotony of summer nights, here is another critical analysis of a child's drawing. Warning: it's one of the most challenging drawings to date.

Farrah: This drawing captures the very terrible nature of illness. Especially illness next to triangle shaped gravity-defying houses.

Mariam: ?!!???

--By Farrah and Mariam, who are now MS4s at UTCOM.

Critical Analysis of Drawings on Tile: Bonus Link and Video!

2009-07-01T12:45:00.008-05:00

Sadly, there is no tile in this post, though we do have more tiles to offer at a later date. I was talking to one of my friends who reminded me of a website from my undergrad days that abrasively made fun of kids rather than critically analyzed their work in order to improve their art skills. Anyway, it reminded me of us, and it's from the humble guy who runs thebestpageintheuniverse.net.

When I was searching for the site, I was brought to another favorite undergrad website - Homestar runner. This clip is way more awesome than the link above, and it's highly recommended from this backrow baller. Enjoy!

--By Farrah, who just moved back to her sister's house where her 2 year old nephew now knows enough words to say "Teddy pooped" when the dog farts, aww!

Garage Sales

2009-06-27T14:46:00.007-05:00

My husband and I recently had a baby girl, and let me say, clothing these little monkeys is a ridiculous venture. You pay $10 for what can’t be more than a yard of fabric which they will outgrow in a month or so anyway. Honestly, though, a month is about the longest these clothes would make it because the instant you put a clean outfit on your child, he/she will vomit/poop/pee on it. You can tell a baby's age by how much stuff their parents will allow to be on their clothes before changing them. Generally it goes from a small amount of spit up to a onsie so crusty it maintains the babies shape after you take it off.
So the best solution I have found to the huge cash sink that is infant clothing is attending garage sales. In the interest of public service and contributing to the blog, I want to share the many awesome things I have learned about garage sales.

1. The best prices can be found in lower middle class and upper class neighborhoods. Lower middle class members realize the value of dollar, and let's be honest, they probably bought the clothes at a garage sale too. The upper middle class was probably going to throw the stuff out anyway, so why charge more than a dollar for anything? The middle middle class is under the delusion that because they value their stuff, so do other people. But truthfully, no one cares that your little girl ate her first carrots in that chair, I am still not going to pay $50 for it.

2. Bring quarters. There will be adorable little children at most garage sales selling lemonade. And you may not care about supporting their first venture into a capitalist society, or hell, lemonade may give you a severe case of GERD, but I promise you, a cute little girl in pigtails + minute maid = you giving up those quarters.

3. Sometimes Googlemaps likes to mess with you. Bring a backup map just in case someone out there in internet land thought it would be funny to send you into the shady east side of Toledo near dusk.

4. Estate sales sound like the weirdest thing on earth, but actually it is an opportunity to spy on people in their (once) natural habitat. The only other way you will get to know people this well is by risking a breaking and entering charge.

--By Sarah, who is contemplating not letting her daughter watch Disney movies.

Critical Analysis of Drawings on Tile: Part II of a Series

2009-06-25T13:18:00.015-05:00

We are well aware of the popularity of this series, and so, we present to you Part II of the series. Please comment below on what your analysis of the art is. After all, we bring a huge part of ourselves as observers when we examine art or in this case the confusing nature of child drawings. For more see: Part I of the Series.

Farrah: This picture was clearly drawn by an adult! CHEATING! Nice representation of sterile technique though, except for the LACK OF EYE PROTECTION. Shit in the eyes is a very likely complication of said "miracle of birth."

Mariam: Your cynicism about this tile is so ugly and disheartening. This kid could be the next Michelangelo for all you know. However, I'm not sure what is going on with these proportions - the torso of this butch-looking lady is way too short to give birth to anything remotely human. The "miracle of Rosemary's baby" perhaps?

--By Mariam and Farrah, who should be studying for their surgery shelf so they will never have to endure this horrific rotation again.

Critical Analysis of Drawings on Tile: Part I of a Series

2009-06-24T14:08:00.021-05:00

The walls of the pediatric ward at our local hospital are decorated with touching tiles made by children about illness, recovery, or any of the other fascinating things that can occupy the mind of a child about weighty topics such as death, dying, and cancer. Though they could only work in blue, yellow, green, and maroon, since these were the only colors given to them by the Color Nazi hospital admins, the tiles add an artistic flair to the dull walls of the hospital. They were drawn by children who are now grown adults. Maybe they can look back at these tiles of yore make some objective observations about their art. And since we can't possibly track down those folks, we will offer our own critical analysis of the tiles in Part I of the series.

Farrah: This picture doesn't really differentiate between hurt and better. The sun is shining in both sections which doesn't really leave kids with a motivation to move towards better. A+ for spelling. B- for leaves on trees.

Mariam: I completely concur with your analysis. I really don't see much difference except that the tree is closer to the so-called "patients" in the "better" picture. I am truly not getting a sense as to what the hospital did for this child except plant some trees. Def a C- effort and that is only because I'm feeling generous.

--By Farrah and Mariam, who are not this critical of people who are still children, and who actually want to heal kids when they grow up (which probably won't happen anytime soon)

"It's all fun and games until someone gets shit in their eyes."

2009-06-21T12:48:00.002-05:00

Although I blogged on this topic not too long ago, I firmly believe in knocking down the facade of the seemingly glamorous lives of doctors. Everyone sees the fancy cars, the long white coat, and the self-assured and cocky attitude of doctors, but rarely does anyone realize what this job actually entails.

My mom was always enamored by doctors. She didn't get to go to medical school and always regretted that decision. She said things that were classic of a non-doctor like, "Wow, you get to be economically self-sufficient" or "Doctors get so much respect," or "You help people!" In short, the classic immigrant lines about the American Dream. She, of course, had me at "economically self-sufficient."

I find that it is my duty as the resident blogger/muckraker to dismantle the myths about this seemingly dignified, respectable profession of the bourgeois class. I realized this year that being a doctor involves doing a lot of shit, literally.

For instance, last week, I scrubbed into a procedure that I thought would be simple - a mere colostomy and central line placement. But then, suddenly things took a dark and sinister turn as the patient was placed in the lithotomy position. The surgeon started to explore this lady's anal cancer as if he were the Vasco da Gama of the anorectal canal, and I was his humble skipper there to help with whatever was needed.

The scrub nurse (who had the attitude of a cab driver in rush hour in NYC) aggressively forced a small yellow bowl and suction into my hand and told me place it under the butt hole (for a lack of a better word) as the surgeon irrigated the fistula that had developed there. As he cleaned out the fecal matter from the vagina, I got to suction the lovely contents up like a dutiful Vanna White that I was. It was at this point that I thought, I went through 8 years of extra schooling to do this? To have the dubious honor of suctioning up shit?

My internal diatribe was interrupted suddenly with a huge splash. The saline and fecal solution that the surgeon had been irrigating splashed on my face and eyes. The moment was very surreal - did this really just happen? I didn't say anything at first until I heard the scrub nurse making a huge commotion about how it got into her eye.

"Uh, can I, uh, please get a towel?" I asked timidly still thinking that my job of holding the feces bowl was still relevant despite actual contact with someone else's bodily fluids.

"WHY?? DID IT GET IN YOUR FACE?" the nurse said in a panicked voice.

"Yeah, um just in my eye and face," I said. I was then forced to de-scrub and promptly head to the eye wash to irrigate my eye.

The doctor looked at me with bemusement and said, "It's all fun and games until someone gets shit in their eyes." Ah, a surgeon's sensitivity.

When I told my friends about this incident, they couldn't stop laughing. "This happend to YOU? YOU?" they said with incredulity as they pictured their prissy blogger friend in such a horrendous, disgusting situation. And then I had an epiphany as I filled out an incident report at the nurse's station that day: that being a doctor doesn't require the intellectual mind of a great thinker. Because when all of that prestige and respectability and glamor is stripped away, all you're left with is someone who is willing to get down and dirty and deal with all the literal and metaphorical shit of people's lives.

--By Mariam, who loves the "Wedding & Celebrations" sections of the New York Times, just like Katherine Heigl in that crap movie 27 Dresses.

The Death of Blogging

2009-06-06T13:44:00.006-05:00

We rarely update this blog anymore with an average of 2 blog posts per month, a far cry from the BackRowBallers' heydey when we posted at least 3 times a week. Of course, this is a sad turn of events, but the daily grind of life prevents us from having the time to be witty and engrossing. Or it could be that I have simply run out of material - there are only so many funny, foreign stories from childhood one can share. Or perhaps, on a larger scale, blogging is no longer the "rage" anymore with short twitter posts by Ashton Kutcher (which are a disgrace to the craft of writing but whatever) becoming the new style of self-expression. And so, my suspicions about the End of Blogging as We Know It were confirmed with this recent New York Times article with a quote from a former blogger that I can especially relate to:
“I just wanted to post something interesting and get people talking, but mostly it was just my sister commenting.”

I sometimes feel like Paula Cole, singing "Where have all the blog commentators gone?"

--By Mariam, who hates surgery with a fiery, burning passion. June 26th will be a magical date.

Surgery Grand Rounds

2009-05-24T10:07:00.002-05:00

General surgery M&M and grand rounds conference has been more formulaic than the average medical service grand rounds. It always starts in the same way. A resident goes forward to present on a patient who was very sick or died that month (morbidity and mortality for those of you not in the medical field, an M&M unfortunately completely unrelated to chocolate), and the attendings decide to talk about everything that is wrong in medicine in the seemingly impossible aspiration that it will lead to "quality improvement." But since medicine tends to be practiced in the same way week after week, the conference tends to become repetitive. Here are ten gems to bring up if you ever happen to be an attending at a surgery "quality improvement conference."

Excuse me resident, did you happen to do a (insert atypical diagnostic test) before you did (insert standard diagnostic test)?
Did you do a rectal exam?
Wait go back (insists on going back to first slide that states only age, gender, and chief complaint), what is the prognosis?
Did you do a rectal exam? I don't think our residents are giving everybody rectal exams.
Resident, have you read any studies during your research that explored (insert any question, related or unrelated to case)?
Did you do a pelvic exam?
Wait, could you go back and explain (insert exceedingly basic medical knowledge) for the medical students?
Did you do a rectal exam? I would like to emphasize the importance of rectal exams.
(Question resident in audience) Let's make sure we're paying attention and learning, what are the approaches for the procedure? (word this question as bizarre as you can so that you can correct the resident when they are done speaking)
I would just like to comment that the rectal exam is very important.

--By Farrah, who would like the reiterate the importance of rectal exams. Oh yeah, and shout out to Amar who was sitting next to me in grand rounds while I was drawing the picture.

Musings while on Surgery Call

2009-05-02T18:53:00.010-05:00

I imagine that when you used to tell people you were in medical school in the olden days (i.e. the 90s), they would think "NERD" or "GEEK" or something decidedly low on the social ladder. In the'00s because of popular primetime dramas like Grey's Anatomy, medical school is one's path to a life of nonstop glamor and sexual hijinks with fellow residents. For instance, the "on-call

My On-call room. Notice the Coke. A call must!

room" has a whole new connotation since the crazy cast of Grey's has popularized it with extra-curricular activities other than sleeping.

But here I am, nearing the end of my third year of medical school, and I can definitively say that while there may be some eye flirting between MS3s (the equivalent of "fresh-meat" in college) and the tired residents, life as a student is just one large charade of pretending to be a doctor. Here are some examples:

Seemingly Glamorous Activity: I'm on 24-hour call tonight, and when I tell non-doctors this fact, they are probably thinking, "Wow impressive! Saturday call - you must be really committed to be a doctor to sacrifice weekends." People might wonder what kinds of fun things I do when there is a trauma emergency - as I run in scrubs that fit me perfectly to the ER.
Reality: I've been sitting in a windowless call room with no cell phone reception for over 12 hours. No one has paged me to do anything, and my afternoon has been spent studying and watching a documentary on Roman Polanski (he was unfairly convicted!) and Little Mosque on the Prairie episodes. If there is a trauma, I'll most likely walk at a brisk pace to the ER and then act as an extra as real doctors run the show.

Seemingly Glamorous Activity: Pre-rounding on patients at 6 AM and writing notes about their progress overnight. Improving patient care, saving lives, and taking names.
Reality: I write progress notes that I can't put in the medical chart or the attending physician will get sued. No one ever reads them so my elaborate works of progress note art are relegated to my pocket. The question remains: if a SOAP note is written in the forest, and no one reads it or acknowledges it, does it even exist?

Seemingly Glamorous Activity: Scrubbing into a radical neck dissection surgery in the OR. This is preceded by going through the entire procedure of scrubbing and possibly flirting with cute resident/student by the metal sinks while soaping up one's arms into a heavy lather.
Reality: Scrubbing in for a student means holding a retractor at an awkward position for hours on end. The uncomfortable angle makes me wish that I could cut my arm off just to end the misery. And unless I want to stare longingly into the eyes of the middle-aged scrub nurse, mother of 5, then it's best to look straight ahead into the sterile field.

And so, while rotations are a necessary part of preparing us for the responsibilities and hardship of residency, the tediousness sometimes makes me wish I were an intern already, despite the low pay and lengthy hours. After one year of this, I'm ready to stop playing doctor, and actually, you know, be one.

--By Mariam, who hopes that no one gets drunk and hits their head or gets run over by a car tonight (i.e. the bulk of traumas at the UT ER).

UNC: 2009 NCAA Champions

2009-04-14T15:23:00.005-05:00

Naadia and I ventured off to Motown City to attend the Final Four last week. Sure, it cost us an arm and a leg for tickets. Sure, we were in virtual nosebleed territory despite sacrificing aforementioned arm and leg because of the shitty seating system at Ford Field. Sure, half of the crowd cleared out 1/4 of the way through the Villanova-NC Final Four game. And sure, we were surrounded by a literal sea of Spartan forest green. And no problem, that we were late to both games due to technical difficulties beyond our control. And, sure we got lost both days because I-75 S to Toledo was closed and we had to take a scary detour for almost 30 miles before we got on the right track. And finally, no problem that when NC won rather anti-climactically in the final game Monday night, the Michigan State fans cleared out like someone had yelled "fire" in a crowded theater, and no matter that there were about 200 people left to celebrate the glorious Tarheel victory. And also no big deal that the next day during surgery lecture I was so tired that I hallucinated that the professor was talking about going to Costco to buy normal saline when in fact, he was talking about cholecystectomies.

In the end, despite all of these factors and the subzero Detroit tempeartures in APRIL (April is the cruelest month when you live in the Siberain terrain of the mid-West), it was still worth it to see Tyler Hansborough and friends single-handedly crush the dreams of an entire city on its last legs as it is mired in an economic depression and soaring unemployment rates. It was still nice to see Goliath take home the glory for my home state of North Carolina. Because even though we always love an underdog to come home with the prize - a la Ralph Macchio at the end of The Karate Kid - it so rarely happens in real life. Because hell, Goliath is an unstoppable machine with at least 6 future NBA players. Eat it, Detroit.

--By Mariam, who thinks that she should have gotten AP credit for the surgery rotation since it literally has taken the life force out of her.

Cosmo confession: I was a TV Extra

2009-03-12T11:05:00.006-05:00

We all do embarrassing shit when we're younger. We wear hideous clothes like tie-dyed T-shirts or Hard Rock Orlando sweatshirts. We may get high on caffeine pills and accost our Upper School director. Or we may have had a profound love of Boys II Men. But there comes an age when your misguided thoughts on what seemed like a good idea are actually just unforgivable.

For instance, when I was a junior in college, my friend Bushra and I decided to be extras on the teen drama One Tree Hill. We got the call from a casting company asking us if we'd like to be extras, and I thought, "OMG OMG OMG CHAD MICHAEL MURRAY IS A HOTTIE!!!EEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKK. THE SHOW IS SOOOOOO AWESOME.!?!" in the manner of a teen girl with the latest copy of Tiger Beat. And so, we took the day off from our classes and drove down to Wilmington, NC (known as Wilmywood by locals) to participate as glorious extras and get paid a tremendous sum of $60 for 14 hours.

I am not sure how I imagined my stint in show business - maybe some glamour and fraternization with the talent. I rehearsed what I'd say to Chad, "Hey, I think you were so great on Gilmore Girls! Want to chillax later?" Maybe one of the actresses would like my top and ask me where I got it, and I'd tell her with an air of sophisticated casualness.

What I imagined in my mind's eye was far from reality. When we got to the designated meeting spot, the extras from all walks of life (mainly unemployed townies and trashy bottled blonds from the local high school) were ushered into yellow school buses like cattle. Inside makeshift tents, the production assistants told us to keep quiet and not to ever talk to the talent. We were lowly human beings or "background artists," not worthy to be spoken to by superior Hollywood folk. If we did dare talk to the actors, then we'd be banished from the set, never to work in the "biz" as background artists again.

Our assignment was simple. Walk back and forth in a club scene. Bushra, sensing her inner hotness, whispered urgently to me, "Mariam, they are picking cute girls to dance in this 'club' scene, and that's haram, let's move to the back so we can lay low."
Never one to rock the Islamic boat, I hid behind some tall African American guys. And so, we merely walked back and forth, mouthing to each other, even though we were not in the shot. I stared at Chad Michael and all of the other D-list actors with great awe, and I thought, someday I'll be back, but I'll be a part of the crew! And as you blog readers can see, that wish certainly didn't come true, because here I am, in medical school and not in Hollywood (or even Wilmywood).

Anyway, Bushra started to sense the low-class nature of extra work and started to get agitated.
"Let's go! This is so lame!" she whispered.
"We can't! We'll ruin the continuity of the episode!" I said, ever the ye old faithful to Hollywood magic.
"This whole scene is so trashy" Bushra countered. She was my means of transportation so I finally acquiesced begrudgingly. I had realized early on the trailer-trash nature of the whole activity, but I didn't care - so caught up was I in learning the anatomy of making a TV show. We grabbed our stuff and I sadly made a run for the parking lot, fearing that the One Tree Hill crew would hunt us down and make us return to the "club."

And that was the day I gave up hope of working in Hollywood. I should probably thank Bushra for crushing my dreams like a cockroach on the wall, but I realize what could have been: I may have ended up a washed-up, 40 year-old extra in Wilmington, hanging out at the local casting office, begging to be cast in a high school classroom scene or the big prom episode. Instead, I sit back hundreds of miles away from Wilmywood and watch Chad Michael Murray's shitty acting chops on my 42" TV. Ah, the life.

--By Mariam, who is loving OB/GYN!

Specialty Scoreboard

2009-03-09T20:37:00.004-05:00

I'm done with almost 75% of my medical school education now. It's hard to believe, and I hope that somewhere in this chaos I learned something. I don't know if I'm wiser, but I really do feel older, like George W. after 4 years in the white house, extreme stress brings out your mature look. I went into medical school with an optimistic vision of me as an OB/GYN, maybe coming to the aid of the lady who went into labor at grocery store, or TJ Maxx. I'm not so sure OB/GYN is my first choice after three years of school, but here's the current scoreboard of specialties I've already done with arbitrary numbers assigned to each specialty.

Internal Medicine: 57.43 points

Hospital: Can you say diabetes medicine management? Most interesting things were consulted out to infectious disease, cardiology, nephrology, pulmonolgy, etc. and all that was left for the primary, trampled on internal medicine team was making sure Mr. Jones didn't go hypoglycemic in the middle of the night. To be fair, this was probably where I learned the most about the kind of medicine you see on the average medical board exam.

BONUS! Internal Medicine Outpatient: negative 1,000,000 points

Seriously one of the most boring times of my entire life. And the patients were mean, and angry, and yelled at me, and stupid, and ugly. Learned an awful lot about how NOT to do a physical exam properly.

Nephrology: 77.777777 points

Nephrology gets more points because it was slightly more interesting than internal. When you can focus more on a single subject, you can really start to understand it. Still there is a lot of poorly managed diabetes around, and the strain dialysis takes on the patient's life is hard to watch. The thought of having to endure an internal medicine residency to get to the nephrology fellowship is too much to bear.

Family Medicine: negative 3,234,782 points

I am NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER going to do Family Medicine. There are a lot of people who feel comfortable tackling a little bit of every specialty. I am not one of them. I encountered a few family doctors who were really good at combining everything, but I also saw quite a few bad docs. I encountered a doctor tell a patient that she should absolutely not get Gardasil - that's not informing the patient, it's forcing your opinion on the patient.

Pediatrics: 53,234,598,371 points

I loved pediatrics. It's lighthearted and fun because it has to be for all the kids right before you shoot them with a vaccine! Most people who don't like peds cite dealing with the parents as the biggest deterrent, but I love that parents bring their kids to the pediatrician - when else will you get patients who so actively seek health care and follow up. Even the parents that don't take good care of their kids, I would love to be the doctor that is the advocate for those children. Plus I dearly love to laugh, and 3 year olds are hilarious. Just note the following conversations:

Me: What do you want for Christmas?

Kid: um... A SHARK!

Me: What do you want for Christmas?

Kid: well... um... PINK!

Me: Are you sure? Just pink?

Kid: I guess... purple?

*Kid who has recently eaten blue popsicle*

Me: Oh my, your tongue looks like a smurf!

Kid: uh...

Me: Do you know what a smurf is?

Kid: nope

Psychiatry: 15.005 points

Psychiatry gets a lot of lifestyle points - the hours are truly awesome. Short days, home calls, and no blood. However, I really dislike working with the angriest people in society. After a patient told my fellow med student Steve that he could stab Steve in the neck with a ball point pen if he felt like it, and that he could slap the hell out of me, I wanted OUT of psych. 6 weeks was plenty for my lifetime, maybe I'll do a child psych rotation, but that's it.

OB/GYN: 799.99 points

I got really lucky with my OB/GYN rotation to get the private practice office with basically the best hours an OB/GYN could hope for with only 4 calls per month, and normal office hours otherwise with no weekends. I really like my attending, and I don't think childbirth is as gross as others had described. I also really like the patients, and interacting with them. However, the estrogen impact is overwhelming at times. There are only women in the office, and women in the patient rooms, and no doubt more women floating in-utero waiting to be born. It's a lot like that movie The Women starring all women, that I do not recommend unless you are really in touch with your feminist side. All that estrogen left me with chocolate cravings and spontaneous crying for the first 2 weeks of the rotation. I also had the inclination that I should start moving more aggressively towards having a baby of my own. Woman were coming in at my age, well off and happily married for several years, having their second child - people with family first, career second - it's practically unheard of among the female medical student! Things have eased up a bit now that I'm on week 4, but I'm still a little wary of the specialty when I see signs in the office that say things like "If you have melted chocolate on your hands, you are eating it too slowly!" or "OB doctors help to bring a little more sunshine into this world." It's okay to cringe, I did.

Surgery: ??? points

Surgery is my next rotation, so we'll see. My tallest friend asked me, "Will surgery be like baseball? Fun to play, but really boring to watch?" I think he's probably right, and I'm in for a boring few months. Hopefully I'll get to do a few things and find out if I actually like it. I like watching baseball at the stadium, so maybe surgery will be more exciting live.

--By Farrah, who wonders if she should be studying right now at this very moment

Those Cute Slumdog Kids

2009-03-03T21:31:00.006-05:00

I will wholeheartedly admit that I loved a mainstream movie - a film for the whole family, one even my 12 year-old cousin in Pakistan loved - Slumdog Millionaire. The kids in the movie were adorable - with their wide, sad eyes and grubby faces and their precocious acting. The movie had a real-life dimension, too, as the child actors, who lived in Garib Nagir in Mumbai (which literally means Poor Corner), got to attend the Oscars a few weeks ago. The two youngest kids looked so excited even though they probably had no idea who Kate Winslet or Mickey Rourke were. In one interview with the E! Channel, Ryan Seacrest asked one of the little kids how he liked working on the film. He looked at him in a puzzled manner the way my grandma used to look when a white person spoke to her. Then the other kids piped up excitedly, "He doesn't speak English." Watch the video of crazy Oscar hijinks below:

This moment reminded me of my own childhood because for the first few years of my life I only knew how to speak Urdu. Here I was, a little foreign FOB preschooler despite having been born in the whitest area of America - the Midwest.

When I got to preschool, my parents did not seem to be concerned that they were sending their FOB-ish 4-year old, who did not have a basic grasp of the English language, into the proverbial lion's den of little white kids, who could attack the foreigner in their midst at any time (this was the South after all, with its dark history of the KKK and lynching mobs). However, once I got to preschool, there were only minor kerfuffles with the whole language barrier thing. I remember getting Urdu and English words confused a lot, and I would tell my teacher about "anecks" (eyeglasses in Urdu). She would look at me in confusion and probably thought I was a kid with neologia.

Now, since I lived in the country with no siblings, I also developed a selective FOB accent. Once in kindergarten, I told Mrs. Caldwell about how my dad went to the "e-mur-gen-cy room" for his job, and I ate "veg-e-tables" at home. She looked at me with a casual disdain and said haughtily, "It's ee-mur-gency and -veg-table!" That day I promptly went home and told my parents that they pronounced these words incorrectly. And so, we sat in the car together and worked on our pronunciation chanting, "ee-mur-gency" and "veg-table" over and over as if we had just invested in Rosetta Stone: English edition.

--By Mariam, who has returned from blogging hiatus.

The Curious Case of Benjamin snore

2009-03-01T12:43:00.004-05:00

I'm so sorry to have taken so long to return to blogging, but there was no way to wake up and motivate myself after seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button back in January with Mariam. Mariam convinced me to see this movie, citing it's numerous oscar nominations. I wanted to see the seemingly endearing old people romance Last Chance Harvey, but Mariam told me that movie was just for old people. The problems with the Benjamin Button movie were obvious to me upon hearing the concept of the film - there is only one point in the movie where pedophilia isn't an issue. Yeah, I know the mind of old Benji isn't the same age as his appearance, but while it might be appealing in the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it's extra creepy on film. The beginning involves a deformed old man baby hanging out at an old folks home chilling with other people's grandkids, and the end involves Cate Blanchett holding her old man baby lover at the same old folks home. You may go into the film thinking that at least I get to look at Brad Pitt for 3 hours, but you have to endure the first two hours waiting for the guy you swooned over in Fight Club and Meet Joe Black to emerge. You are staring at a scientifically impossible ugly old man baby for far too long, and I don't know how this film could have been inspired by a SHORT story. I simply have to agree with Jon Stewart's assessment of the insomnia curing film, "It's Forrest Gump meets (snore)." Now that I've finally emerged from the coma this movie induced, I hope to return to telling humorous tales of the adventures of a 3rd year medical student.

--by Farrah, who recently got to watch the extremely messy, sloppy, and bloody miracle of childbirth

"Mary" @ Tech Support

2009-01-31T11:56:00.003-05:00

My dad calls me daily with a different question, but the conversational theme is always the same: electronics.
"Mariam, my iPod isn't turning on. What do I do?"
or
"Mariam, how do I raise the volume of my phone?"
"How do I listen to my voice mail?"
And my personal favorite: "Mariam, how do I email?"

Everyday, it's either some vaguely described technical issue with an electronic or it's a huge, broad question about the modern technology as a whole (for example, how to email). Now, since I have no brothers, I always had to play the role of a dutiful son within our family unit; for instance, I had to help my dad carry the heavy TVs up a flight of stairs or movefurniture (I can almost picture the naysayers, reading this in disbelief, and thinking Yeah right, like she ever did that! But full disclosure: this is true). I also became really interested in electronics so my dad could have someone to bond with when we went to Best Buy or the now-defunct Circuit City. We would read Consumer Reports (one of my favorite magazines until age 12) and read online reviews on CNET of various electronics from TVs to cell phones to blenders together. These were truly moments worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting.

When I moved away for medical school, though, these moments came to an abrupt end, and I think my dad is still dealing with the after effects. And hence, the daily phone calls to technical support: me. As a busy medical student, I really can't help him trouble shoot over the phone, nor am I exactly trained in dealing with issues such as, "My computer has been running slowly. How do I make it faster, Mariam?" Usually, if it's an easy question, I'll break it down in layman's terms: "You see that circle white thingy on the iPod? Make circles with your finger and that will increase the volume!"

At other times, I admit, my patience wears thin, and I say, "Dad, why am I in to school?"
My dad will say, "So you can be a doctor!"
And then I'll respond with: "I'm not going to school for computer engineering! I'm not Mary, technical support from India, am I?"
My dad, unfazed by my catty sarcasm, will merely say, "I know, Mariam! But I expect you and your generation to know everything about technology!" And with logic like that about Gen Y, how can you argue?

And then I realize that there is a beautiful analogy hidden amongst this daily back and forth. Doctors go to school for years to fix people; people come in with a vague constellation of symptoms, and the physician basically figures out what went wrong with the intricate machinery of the human body. And in theory, how is this cognitive process any different than technical support at those call centers in India?

--By Mariam, who is so excited for the Jon Hamm-Tina Fey event on 30 Rock!!

I, Robot

2009-01-06T21:17:00.003-05:00

In many Hollywood films of the action/sci-fi genre, the plot starts with strange, unexplained happenings such as street lights changing unexpectedly, computer screens blinking randomly, and then, people start dying in strange and unseemly ways. Who is this terrorist that lurks within, the audience wonders. And then, all is revealed - the enemy is really a huge supercomputer housed somewhere in the D.C./Virginia area. The supercomputer has taken on a life of its own and has started to destroy the life that it helped make easier. The metaphor is this: society is too technology dependent, and if we do not rectify this immediately, BAD THINGS will happen, like the deterioration of human relationships or even, DEATH.

When I was in grade school, computers were just starting to gain popularity in the average home. My dad brought home a computer when I was 7 - we were the first people to have one on our block, probably in the entire county, because I live in the literal backwoods of North Carolina, where running water and grocery stores are novelties. Anyway, our computer had a tiny screen with literally 10 color graphics and was very, very thick (about a foot in diameter). I played Wheel of Fortune on it and different addition/subtraction games ("educational" CD-ROMs were the only computer programs my dad approved). To play these games (that seemed wondrous at the time, but now in retrospect I realize were really ghetto), I had to navigate complicated command lines in MS-DOS like "C://execute: game.exe."

One day, I remember my 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Billera made a general, sweeping statement that many grade school teachers are prone to: "Computers are going to change the way we live. We may not even need certain jobs anymore because computers will be doing stuff for us instead of real people!" Now, I'm not sure if Mrs. Billera had read the completely wrong predictions of Orwell in 1984 one too many times, but I do think this was a tremendous overstatement.

Anyway, I took her very literally. Suddenly I imagined a world where my dad's job was replaced by a cold, steely robot. I imagined this robot examining and diagnosing sick patients quickly and efficiently, and my dad pathetically begging the robot for his job back. The robot would ignore my dad, since human physicians were now as irrelevant as VCRs or record players and continue coldly and methodically about his day.

I immediately went home and asked my dad in a panic: "Can a robot do your job, Dad? Can you be replaced by a robot?" My dad was foreign, so he didn't understand the concerns of children who lived within the cushiony comforts of America. He was used to children wondering whether they'd get dinner that night because there were 10 other siblings to feed that night and only so much chicken, and so my dad merely stared at me in confusion, as if to say, "WTF?"

Needless to say, I never got a satisfactory answer to my pressing paranoia as Michelle or Stephanie would have gotten at the end of a 30-minute episode of Full House, like "No, daughter, we're going to be okay. Computers will make our life easier, but your dad won't be jobless, on the street, asking for money because of technology. Rest easy, little one." Instead, I was left with my stream of paranoid, OCD-like thoughts, thinking that one day welfare and a soup kitchen were in our imminent future as technology advanced (i.e. humans pushed towards their own self-destruction, just like in the movies).

It is 2009, and we now have the iPhone, robotic surgeries, and a robot vacuum cleaner, and my dad luckly still practices medicine. No sirree, no robots doing his job as of yet. But I guess the ultimate point was this: children have the darndest imaginations.

--By Mariam, who realizes the substandard nature of this blog, but feels the need to keep the BackRowBallers blog alive.

The Pathophysiology of a Butt Abscess

2008-12-14T01:49:00.003-05:00

During my family medicine rotation, my very important role amongst the "team" of healthcare providers is to merely shadow a resident around as he sees patients with the usual holy trinity of diseases - diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension. It gets really boring after a while, and I keep myself from gouging my eyes out by looking up sports statistics on my iPhone surreptitiously as the adults talk about boring stuff. Sometimes, though, God hands you a little gift by making life interesting.

A few weeks ago, I was following around this Indian resident. A young girl came in to follow up on her gluteal abscess - i.e. butt ulcer. She exposed the affected area, and the ordeal, I mean, exam began. Firstly, there was this strange yellow discharge coming from her buttocks. Then the doctor proceeded to clean the wound and "pack" it with new gauze. The patient screamed her head off and tried to grab the resident's hand mid-procedure, which really annoyed him. She would yell, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO WAIT!!!!!" while the nurse told her to just hang in there and let the doctor do his work so the ordeal could be over and done with, but the girl continued to protest and yell. The whole thing was grueling because the girls' screams reverberated through the office walls as if she had just come back from the trenches of Flanders Field in World War I and had a horrible case of trench foot. I, too, was getting annoyed with the patient's dramatics and thought unsympathetically, "Geez some people have such low pain thresholds" I smiled at myself smugly and proceeded to condescend down to the patient, "It's okay! It'll be over so soon!"

After the wound cleaning, screaming, and general torturing was over, the girl asked how she had gotten this gluteal abscess. And this, dear readers, was the resident's explanation (insert New Delhi accent here):

"Vell, you see, this is how you get this butt abscess. It is wery common. If you are overweight, the hips, you see, they are rubbing together more. And then there is also hair there in that butt area. And then the hips of the overweight person are rubbing together, and then you are also sweating a lot there. And then there is the hair, and it gets infected. And then you are in a car for 6 hours, and your butt cheeks are rubbing against each other, and then with the hair and the sweat, you get that infection and then the abscess." So, the basic medical pathophysiology of a butt ulcer was this:
Overweight sedentary person with large hips + hair + sweat = Gluteal abscess

I tried not to laugh as he explained this in layman's terms to the patient, but I couldn't help it. I literally started to laugh in front of the patient. In order to remain the ever-neutral professional, who never judges a patient's problems, I tried to compose myself by ordering myself to think of the tragic day my grandmother died. But the above equation was too much, and I laughed despite forcefully recalling the hard, unfunny times I had experienced. The resident left the room and merely said to me, "That was funny how I explained it." I wasn't sure if it was a rhetorical question or a statement, so I just nodded and wished I could have appropriately memorexed the moment with a tape recorder or video camera.

--By Mariam, who is glad that the hellish experience of family medicine will finally be over.

It's so hard to say goodbye

2008-11-22T11:54:00.004-05:00

There are a few things that I've started to adjust to during my 3rd year as a medical student. A history and physical work-up for a consult may be as simple as listening to a patient's heart and lungs through their gown, and making sure they are conscious. A full history and physical is almost never done, and there's no time even in an office appointment. The part that bothers me the most in the hospital is how some of the doctors close their encounter with the patient. They will get a focused history, do a basic physical, and then without a word they will leave the room in a walk as brisk as that of an incontinent rushing to the bathroom. Occasionally, the doctors will finish their physical and linger to say "ok" before leaving the room. Then, in the grand order of things the attending leaves the room, then the resident, then the intern, and me and the patient are left behind a little baffled about what the next plan of action is going to be. Sometimes I feel obligated to linger and tell the patient, "You will be admitted to the floor upstairs soon. The doctor will come by to see you tomorrow morning, goodbye." Then I scurry off to catch up with the team.

Am I missing something? When does the patient get informed about what happens next? Do the nurses tell them? Has the emergency room doctor already explained to them that they will be admitted to the hospital? Do the attendings come back around after team rounds to inform the patients about the care? They don't even say goodbye, or we'll see you tomorrow, not even a ttyl. Fortunately, it's not as bad in pediatrics because even the most socially inept doctor will understand a parent's need to be informed of their child's care. I'm figuring out the doctors I respect the most always ask the patient if they have any questions at the end of the interview, and actually explain what drugs they will be getting while they are in the hospital (i.e. you're getting Vancomycin, a very potent antibiotic, instead of we will give you some medicine, and see how things go). In the end, not many patients complain and everybody will get their questions answered eventually. Though I still think many of these docs could use a review of the 2nd years FCP closing the interview lecture.

Now for your enjoyment, the blast from the past that brought you the title of this post. Four part harmony gets me every time.

--By Farrah, who actually likes pediatrics after HATING internal and family medicine. I may just want to be a doctor after all.

Careful, the beverage you're about to enjoy is extremely hot

2008-11-04T18:42:00.010-05:00

Over the weekend, Mariam and I decided to go to the library. Yes, you read that right, the library. Only one person stopped me to tell me, "You're not a library person, what are you doing here?"

I wouldn't go without a small dose of caffeine so we stopped at the local Biggby Coffee (formerly known as Beaners until they figured out that slang was not very nice, even this far from the border). I go to that location of Biggby coffee pretty often as they're coffee doesn't taste burnt and the barista once told me (when I wasn't wearing any makeup and hadn't brushed my hair), "Oh my God, you're so pretty. I'm jealous."

I instantly liked her, and she subsequently put fancy latte art in my small vanilla bean to go. The same barista was there this weekend when Mariam and I went in for some coffee. I ordered my regular latte, and Mariam ordered some tea to sooth the pharyngitis given to her by the evil sick children in pediatrics. The barista put a heart in my latte, and I bragged to Mariam about how I'm special while I went to get a lid.

The barista said, "I only give hearts to my special customers" as she handed Mariam her tea too aggressively because it splashed onto Mariam's wrist. The barista then exclaimed, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, let's get it under cold water!"

Mariam still in shock said, "It's okay" as the barista dragged her behind the counter to the sink. Then Mariam's wrist started to hurt as the shock wore off. Mariam ran off to the bathroom to get a paper towel. The barista apologetically said, "Oh no, I give you a heart, and I burn your friend," but she then went to the back. She never reemerged, and Mariam and I were left on out own to tend to her burn as it started to blister. We got a cup of ice and paper towels, and wrapped Mariam's arm like a carpal tunnel victim.

Mariam frantically said, "Should we go to the ER?"

I replied, "No, we'll just go to the pharmacy and get some silvedene," impressing myself with my knowledge of burn care.

We went to Walmart (ugh), Mariam's dad talked to the pharmacist, and we finally made it to school where Mariam told everybody what the incompetent staff of Biggby did to her wrist.

This whole ordeal reminds me of burns I would get when I was a kid. The worst episode happened when I was around 10 years old. I was watching my brother light smoke balls in the driveway around the 4th of July. He wouldn't let me play with the matches or the smoke balls. He would just throw them himself and expect me to be pleased by watching the colorful plumes of smoke without the joy of playing with fire. He went inside when all the fireworks in the package were gone. I searched the whole driveway for any firework left unlit. I finally found a black smoke ball that looked intact. I grasped my tiny hand around it as I realized it had been lit before and hadn't gone off. I dropped it, but not before it left a burning red circle in my palm. I ran screaming inside to my mom to take me to the doctor, anything to make it feel better. This is when my mom went to her trusty home remedy that never made sense to any of us - toothpaste. She slathered sticky, minty Colgate all over my hand. I didn't really feel better, but I just sat on the front steps wishing the burning would stop, feeling sorry for myself. Eventually, the burn calmed down and I didn't have a lasting scar (maybe there's something to this toothpaste thing). Hopefully the same will happen for Mariam.

--By Farrah, who wonders if she can ever go back to that Biggby Coffee now that Mariam has contacted the corporate office with her complaints

The Amazon Wish List

2008-11-02T19:03:00.006-05:00

The days of getting crappy birthday presents that you have to trudge down to the mall and try to return are long gone. The Amazon.com wish list function has changed all of that. However, since becoming a popular trend amongst the Dream Team, I realized that a public wish list comes with its own baggage and potential for embarrassments.

I pride myself on my cultural pretensions - deeming myself a literary conossiuer. For example, I'd like to read about Sophia Hawthorne (Nathaniel's wife) and her sisters. This shows the world (i.e. people who stalk my wish list) that I am interested in American cultural history - I am no Joe Sixpack! But look a little closer, and one realizes that this book has been on my wish list since 2006, and the paperback version has been available for one year now.

Sometimes I look at my wish list and think of it as a work of art - a mix of eclectic and intellectual - not too geeky and not too mainstream. A great way for my future husband to look at the list and say, "Wow, Mariam seems very interesting. I'd really like to get to know a girl who wants to read a book entitled Heavy Metal Islam!"

That all changed yesterday. Sarah told me she had been stalking my wish list to find me birthday present.
"I found this wish list, and I was really confused - all the books were chick lit. I wasn't sure it was yours because it had books like In Your Shoes and Loose Lips."
As I stared at her in shock, Farrah helpfully added, "Maybe that was another Mariam Qureshi!"
"Yeah! There's a Maryam Qureshi right here in Toledo" I exclaimed. I'm a horrible liar so I mumbled, "Um I had different reading tastes back then."

When I got home, I typed in my name into the "Wish List search" box and sure enough, the embarrassing list that had 8 chick lit books from circa 2003 appeared. Teenager Mariam liked to read books with shoes and bows on them, books with little character development, a formulaic plot, and a saccharine romantic ending. And so, I did what any self-respecting, pretentious hipster who had a reputation to protect would do - I made that list private.

But then I realized we spend so much of our time ignoring the fact that we were geeks way back when. We weren't always the picture of the cool, self-assured future professional who likes NPR, Ethiopian food, and the complete works of Ian McEwan. At some point in our lives, all of us (with the exception of Gwenyth Paltrow) were nerdy 17 year-olds who read those dumb romance novels with the sad hope that we, too, could find love in the most unrealistic, unreasonable place imaginable. And then I had an epiphany - the fact that we were not always the epitome of cool was okay, and we should own our high school geekiness and blog about our embarrassments for the world.

Full disclosure: my current wish list
My wish list as a teenager

--By Mariam, who has to get up at 5:30 tomorrow so that she can vote. Who knew being a good citizen would require such grave sacrifice?

Mariam Q = 3 siblings in one!

2008-10-19T17:47:00.004-05:00

As Mariam and I got to spend so much time together during our internal medicine rotation, I am starting to realize that she is a bizarre combination of all three of my siblings. Since I am desperately missing my family these days, stuck in Bellevue taking medical histories from deaf octogenarians, these similarities are highlighted even more. My siblings all have different personalities and traits, but Mariam, this pampered only child with NO siblings, manages to act a bit like all of them. Here are some examples:

1) SUESIE = the oldest of my siblings, she has a husband and one adorable son

They share a love for chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory and Red Lobster. They are both completely willing to drive an hour and a half to fancy malls, and yell at people on the phone to demand refunds. They also both can't get enough of adorable babies, and both tend to mother me.

2) CYRUS = the hardworking lawyer that trained me in sarcasm

A shared love for certain restaurants is one thing, but this is where it starts to get weird. They both like to EAT gum. That's right, not just chew, SWALLOW. It's a bezoar just waiting to happen. They enjoy the exact same kinds of gum too - Big league Chew (grape flavor), Bubble Jug, and these little Japanese fruit flavored gums only available in home country and Asian grocery stores. They also both enjoy pot pies and party pizzas.

3) SAMIRA = the recent graduate who is about to attend graduate school in international business

They both both tend to like mainstream things, but are reluctant to admit it (One Republic, Gilmore Girls). They both act exactly the same when they have a migraine. They also both think I should act more like a girl when I listen to their stories (i.e. OMG, SHUT UP, he did not say that? and then what happened? lol, grl u r too much.)

BONUS SIBLING! JEFF = my brother-in-law the orthopedic surgery resident

They both liked the movie Superbad. There aren't as many similarities here, unless of course Mariam takes up bodybuilding.

It's amazing how being homesick can bring out all these qualities in one spunky Pakistani girl. Sadly there is hardly any time left to chill with this sibling substitute with yet another AHEC dragging me to rural Ohio. What I really need is some time home, I'm about to send another cake to the University of Colorado Med school admissions office (not really, unless you have some info that I don't about cake bribery leading to easy transfers).

--By Farrah, who voted this weekend. As Diddy would say, rock the vote!

The Sarah Palin in All of Us...

2008-10-08T10:26:00.003-05:00

Most people think Sarah Palin isn't very smart. Palin has sounded like an idiot on more than a few occasions in recent weeks - the train wreck Katie Couric interview comes to mind.

Now of course, it wouldn't be such a big deal if Sarah Palin was Just One of Us (i.e ordinary folk). But her nonanswers crumble under the intense scrutiny of the 24-hour news media and the persistent vivisection by the blogging elite. Palin's opponent in the election for governor in Alaska says: "During the campaign, Palin's knowledge on public policy issues never matured—because it didn't have to. Her ability to fill the debate halls with her presence and her gift of the glittering generality made it possible for her to rely on populism instead of policy."

But really, let's think for a second. In reality, we all know someone like Palin - someone who thinks CNN.com is a haven for intellectual discussion but doesn't read anything beyond that because said person is too busy reading pink books with shoes or clothes on them. (For example, Sarah Palin reads all newspapers). Of course, people are way too self-absorbed to notice that the person they are conversing with is not actually saying much of anything - they are just repeating generalizations and stereotypes a la Willy Loman. Here are some common scenarios that we have all encountered:

Scenario 1: You are having man problems. The guy you like or are vaguely interested in may possibly be an asshole. So you turn to your Palinesque friend for advice: "Wow, I mean I think he's cute, but he's been really critical of me - like he told me that I just 'borrow' my opinions about important subjects from The New York Times. I mean, it's rude, but am I being too hard on him?"
Your friend says, "Oh wow, he doesn't deserve you! You deserve way better."

And so, all you are left with is that you deserve better, but she really doesn't specify as to what kind of guy you deserve exactly. Maybe you deserve a guy who reads The New York Times, too, and also lacks original opinions. Or maybe you need a guy who actually has opinions so you can borrow his. Whatever the case may be, she just provides a stock answer that you could have gotten from talking to yourself or from reading an article in Cosmo.

Scenario 2: Your favorite new show is Mad Men, which is complex and symbolically rich, so you would like to discuss it with someone. Say you are confused about what happened on this week's show, where the metaphors and themes are not as obvious as Meredith's voice-overs at the end of Grey's Anatomy. You come up with an articulate-sounding analysis about the show, a skill you got bullshitting as an English major at some pretentious liberal arts school. You present it to your friend, and he/she says, "OMG Don Draper is so hot!" Nevermind the fact that Don Draper is an amoral philanderer who is going through an existential crisis, but the way he slicks back his hair and handles a martini is...hot. Of course, your friend did save you from sounding like a pretentious, pompous drone, so there's that silver lining.

While Sarah Palin may show what is great about America - a place where dreams can come true - where a simple, folksy hockey mom with a funny accent can become a GOP vice-presidential candidate - it also reveals its fundamental weakness. The American political system rewards mediocrity; if Sarah Palin is Just Like Us with her plain speaking and vernacular expressions of "goshdarnit," then she deserves to be VP. At the same time, Palin reveals the human weaknesses of ordinary folk - how in a time when it is suddenly cool to be a geek, many of us fumble unarticulately about things we know absolutely nothing about.

--By Mariam, who thinks it must be bad for McCain-Palin campaign if North Carolina is a battleground state.

Pretend Patients

2008-09-30T11:17:00.010-05:00

Last week, we had the joy of experiencing another OSCE exam. The OSCE exam consists of several rooms of standardized patients pretending to have some common complaint seen in an outpatient setting. The actors come in and tell us they have back pain, or chest pain, or burning with urination, and we ask them the standard questions. Have you had a recent fall? Does it radiate to your jaw? Are you sexually active with men, women, or both? What we never do is evaluate these fakers for what their symptoms really resemble - Munchausen Syndrome - a factitious disorder named for the German Baron Munchhausen (see photo) who liked to travel from town to town telling fantastical stories. These patients not only see several (potential) doctors throughout the day for attention, they've figured out how to get paid for it! They try to convince us they actually have back pain, but the limp is clearly feigned. They claim chest pain, but their S1 and S2 sound healthier than mine! I wonder what kind of reaction I would get if I told the fake patient that I simply can't ethically provide them an invasive test with the lack of symptoms on physical examination, but I can refer them to psychology if they are willing. I don't think the joke would be funny enough, totally not worth it.

In other news, I'm sad to see the end of internal medicine means the end of ethics class. I don't know why, but ethics sessions were the only part of medical school where I actively participated. I often interjected my opinion loudly with well though out, extremely liberal, socialist jargon. With all the conservatives in the class, I sometimes felt I had to stay true to my hippie roots from Boulder. I was so loud that it got to the point that with Mariam and I sitting off to the corner I wondered if I shouldn't notify the class that I am not in fact gay, but just really against denying anybody health care based on sexual orientation. For the rest of internal medicine, one student would turn to me for my opinion whenever anything vaguely liberal was brought up. "You believe in socialized health care don't you," he would say to me accusingly. I would promptly reply with, "You know it, I'm the only fraking liberal here." I sometimes would confuse this student by saying things like, "I can't believe that liberal biatch Tina Fey gets to play Sarah Palin." He would then ask me, "You're a Republican?" - yet another sign my face is too serious when I'm being sarcastic. I'm actually pretty moderate, but I think I just really enjoyed disagreeing with everybody - though, I usually also disagreed with them. Now enjoy this clip of that liberal biatch playing the glorious Sarah Palin - what a hottie!!

--By Farrah, who got her first professionalism report yesterday for sleeping all the way through her family medicine orientation (I had two alarm clocks set, wtf!) - only two more reports and I get a verbal warning, oooooooh I'm sooo scared

My Sparkling Personality....

2008-09-15T18:29:00.002-05:00

I am a huge fan of self-aggrandizement. For example, I think about my sparkling personality quite often. Other adjectives I use to describe my personality are "infectious," "witty," "sweet," "quirky," and even "eccentric."

In my 19th century British lit class, my professor once said of Oscar Wilde: "He was such an incredible conversationalist that his friends were amazed at his on-the-spot witticisms." At the time, I thought how weird it was that Wilde was remembered for his conversational skills rather than say, the convoluted genius of The Importance of Being Earnest. But then, eventually I wondered if I was the reincarnation of Wilde, an incredibly witty conversationalist, a type of person whose witticisms people remembered and posted on their Facebook profiles under "Quotes" (the 21st-century version of Bartlett's).

Of course, I thought that my comical and enthusiastic conversational style would be very helpful to me on my medical school rotations. I thought that 3rd and 4th year would a time when I would shine - I would literally charm these overworked, tired individuals with my exaggerated Southern drawl and cute expressions. My friend Blase even told me, "I'm sure patients love you!"

Ah, Blase, if that were reality.In fact, I have had a fair share of strange, awkward moments rather than charming moments of cuteness. Instead, I have found that some of my more awkward, decidedly less personable classmates have had a better time integrating themselves into the hospital hierarchy. Here is a round-up of some awkward moments for your reading enjoyment:

1) Last week, when rounds ended, I asked senior resident whether I should shadow him for the rest of the day. He told me, "Sure, I'm going to get a drink." I started to converse with him about some inane topic, and we kept walking down this really narrow hallway. Suddenly he stopped outside a door and said, "Uh, I have to use the bathroom." I had literally followed him to the door of the men's room without realizing it.
"Uhh..sure! Sorry!" I said and quickly booked it down the hallway. Yesterday, he actually told me in advance he was going to the bathroom so I wouldn't make the same faux pas again.

2)I was obsessed with trying to bond with our senior resident even though he was a strictly business. One day, he told us to read a boring biography about some doctor dude. I randomly said, "I started a humanities club at the medical school!" Silence all around. Yauss merely stared at me with an uncomprehending face that seemed to say, "Why did you just say that?"

3) One day, I went to use the phone on the hospital floor at the same time a rather heavyset nurse with over-processed blond hair reached for it. Ever polite, I said, "Oops sorry." She gave me the once-over, and rudely said, "What are you? Like 12?" Instead of saying, "Actually 11. And I'm going to be your boss one day. Unfair and scary, isn't it?", I said, "Uh, no...uh 24?"
"I must be getting old!" she said (most likely).
"Are you...uh...going to trust me when I'm a uh doctor?" I said nonsensically.
"If you learn to talk," she said. And scene, conversation over - no witty comeback, no biting remark. Just me mumbling and making no sense whatsoever. I resolved that I would give her one of my trademark withering stares the next time I saw her, but unfortunately, I have already forgotten what the nurse looks like, since all old, large ladies look the same to me.

4) #4 if too sensitive for blog, so if you are my friend and a girl, please ask me about the Aveda make-up bag incident.

Hopefully, my next rotation in pediatrics will go better - I love cute, fat babies, so if I'm unable to charm people my own age, maybe a kid will be easier to please.

--By Mariam, who thinks the Palin lady is very pretty but at the same time scary with all of her gun and anti-abortion talk.

Excuses

2008-09-04T20:42:00.004-05:00

I can't study because my dog is sleeping on my books.

Once again the bloggers will most likely be on a month hiatus with the upcoming shelf exam, but blogs to look forward to (if we ever manage to finish them) when we're back on track:

1. Farrah and Mariam go to Zingerman's a la Harold and Kumar go to White Castle

2. My opinion of internal medicine

3. A woman vice president!?!? Hitting that glass ceiling sure gave me a headache!

4. More pictures of my dog!

--By Farrah, who misses you, yes you, I miss you.

Cosmo Confession: I Hate Sex and the City

2008-08-23T20:22:00.006-05:00

With a definitive lack of material to blog about, I thought I would reveal a secret that has burdened my frail shoulders for so long - I hate Sex and the City - from the characters to the horrific culture that it spawned. Now of course there is the obvious reason I hate the show - my prudish sensibilities deem it "sophisticated, Emmy-winning porn" for girls who like their adult entertainment to have more character and plot development than the average Girls Gone Wild by Joe Francis or Coed Confidential. But my hatred runs deeper.

Since every girl I know loved the show, I watched many episodes but found the characters really annoying. Samantha's cougar activities and affected staccato voice were grating on my nerves, and Charlotte's domesticated wholesomeness was really tiresome. Carrie's voice-overs that were supposed to reveal the secrets of relationships to the viewer were shallow, insipid, and nonsensical if you really sat there and listened to the content of her "column." If I were Samantha, Miranda, or Charlotte, I would have stopped sharing intimate secrets with my blabber mouth columnist friend a long ass time ago.

But beyond just the show, I hated the audience that were such fervent believers in the show - middle class girls who lived in the heartland and longed for a sexy, cool life in NYC, as they longed for Manolos with the religious fervor of a Catholic at the Vatican, and they bought the Steve Madden knock-offs in their desperate way to achieve the aspirational lifestyle of the characters. What was particularly sad was when girls compared themselves to the glamorous characters on the show - "I'm a Carrie!" their Facebook profiles would cheesily declare after they had taken a 4-quiz questionnaire.

Probably the saddest thing of all was when I read that a tourist could take a Sex and the City tour in NYC. Out-of-towners could get a glimpse at all the hot spots seen on the show, from Carrie's apartment to the sex shop where Charlotte got her rabbit vibrator. The tour then ended with pink Cosmos that were made infamous by the show. When I read this article in Radar, I realized how capitalist America suckered tourists into paying $50 during a recession to experience the life of the show in a third-hand way.

The bottom line was this: people didn't just gleam shitty relationship advice about becoming "romance intolerant," but they saw the fabulous wardrobe Patricia Field created for her characters as something that was attainable at the local H&M or Express. And the tragic truth of the world is this: Carrie's wardrobe in the movie or show were not attainable at a local Midwestern mall near you - as far as I can tell, the craft of Dries van Noten or Christian Dior couture are pretty hard to replicate decently even by the evil geniuses at Steve Madden and Forever 21 (both stores which have been slapped with lawsuits for their knock-offs).

And so, it's just so sad for young girls to aspire to supposedly "liberated" NYC life, filled with a stream of eligible men and a closet full of Jimmy Choo's and Giuseppe Zanotti's when the lives of the four characters are just shallow, superficial, and decidedly un-liberated. Because take this into account: these supposedly feminist women just sit around at lunch at a fancy chi-chi restaurant and define their identities around the men they date and their expensive "power" wardrobes rather than anything of real substance.

--By Mariam, who totally sounds like a pretentious, women's studies professor at some liberal arts college who hates fashion and looking cute. Sadly, that is really not the case as she has a shopping problem in reality.

The One Time I was Mean (Hard to Believe)!

2008-08-12T22:24:00.005-05:00

Anyone who knows me thinks I am niceness personified. I am considered to be the epitome of nice. For instance, this is how I imagine conversations to be like when I'm not around:
Person X: I'm hanging out with Mariam today.
Person Y: OMG SHE IS SO NICE!
Now for those stranger blog readers out there, I'm sure the above hypothetical exchange just made you want to be my BFFF.*

Nevertheless, I recall a time when I was mean to someone, and when I think about it, I cringe inwardly from the memory. It was 10th grade, and I was still the hardcore conservative Jesus freak (or should I say Prophet Muhammad) that I am now. A boy, who we will call Chad Lowe, used to harass me in school all the time. He would make my life miserable - steal things from me, call me "DL, the dyslexic monkey," and generally harass me so that I could legitimately report him to HR had I been in an office-type setting.

I didn't think his sexual harassment was cute - I thought it was super annoying. I didn't find his attentions flattering, nor did I think of myself as super hot because I was the object of his continual attention. I just thought it was annoying as shit, and I wanted to get violent on his ass (the fact that I am a physically frail individual with fragility issues actually prevented me from unleashing my id throughout my time at Carlisle).

Anyway, one day, Chad Lowe stopped me in the hallway, and he said nervously, "Can I ask you something?"
He took me into a private classroom and asked me to the upcoming homecoming dance. I was merely annoyed that he had had the audacity to ask someone who was as religious as me. Didn't he know I was Muslim? I thought outraged. I didn't go to dances with boys (much less with a group of my single girls who were all going together...not because of religion but because it was fundamentally lame).
"NO!" I yelled meanly.
"Uhh..please?" he asked tentatively, his confidence faltering to subzero levels.
"Uh...NO!" And I stalked off, fuming.

In retrospect, I really feel bad for being mean to Chad Lowe. Ideally explaining the religious reasoning behind be defiant "no" would have been better, rather than just getting viscerally agitated. Who knows? Had I said yes, maybe today, I would be married to an infidel with 2.2 kids and a white picket fence living in in zina. So, I guess, things did work out because I just ended up having a reputation of being "stand-offish" at Carlisle (or at least according to Mr. Keefer). Did I learn a lesson about being mean? No, not really, because in the end, I didn't have reputation of ill repute, nor receive disapproving glances from Allah or my parents. Score: Mariam - 1, Chad Lowe - 0.

*Best f!*&ing friends forever - courtesy of Pineapple Express.

--By Mariam, who is so happy it is Pakistan Independence day! Happy PID!!!!! Pakistan zindabad!!!

The Most Romantic Day of My Life

2008-08-12T14:21:00.003-05:00

I have to say one of my biggest regrets in life is how my husband proposed to me. Or rather, how I proposed to my husband.

All of it is a bit hazy, because at the time Adam was working for Anheuser Busch and through some miracle his free beer card had stayed active for the six months between his two internships leaving our dining room literally wallpapered with cases of beer. So I was enjoying one of America’s finest domestic beers and surfing the internet, looking for something to waste my waitressing money on. Somehow I got it into my head that I wanted to look at wedding dresses, but I wasn’t engaged to Adam yet and we all know looking at wedding dresses before you have any prospects is a little crazy. Or at least it’s crazy if the person you may have a prospect with is in the room. So rather than saying “Screw society, if I want to look at pretty white dresses, it’s my god damn right as an American with a fast internet connection,” I decided it was time to get engaged.

“So Adam,” I slurred, “we are gonna get married, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So we are engaged?”

“Well…”

“Can I call my mom?!?”

“No!”

“But we are gonna get married right? So we are engaged. I want to call my mom.”

“Don’t call your mom.”

“Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaaase can I call my mom? I want to call her!!!”

I imagine by this point my voice had gotten very loud and shrill. Anyone who has had the unfortunate task of sitting next to me in group discussions knows that when I get excited about something I lose all control of the volume of my voice. So by now, I must have been yelling about calling my mother to tell her we were engaged. And as with anything I really want, Adam caved.

“Fine, call your mom!”

And that is how I became engaged. Later on after we were married, Adam told me he had wanted to ask my dad’s permission for my hand and had begun planning exactly how he was going to propose and all this other romantic stuff. Instead I am left with a cautionary tale about the dangers of beer, internet shopping, and long term relationships.

--By Sarah, who thinks awesome, creative engagement stories are way overrated, right?

Difficult Communication

2008-08-07T20:54:00.004-05:00

My first rotation had some minor problems with communication. Many of the doctors in the internal medicine department were from India or Pakistan. I had absolutely no problem with the people, they were friendly and open to teaching. Occasionally, they would forget I was there and slip into Urdu. I still actually understood a few words, like the numbers, which were similar to the numbers in Farsi. Though, it was a little hard to understand a sentence where the only word you recognize is "five." I would clear my throat, and they would realize I didn't understand and translate even if it was useless information, like "I had the eggs for breakfast" or "Mrs. Doe told me I was a gosh darn mother flubber when I didn't give her more percocet." I had gotten completely used to my interns and residents a few weeks into my rotation, and the problems started when I was around them so much that I started to just barely develop an Indian accent of my own. I wasn't trying to mock them, or even doing it consciously, but I noticed I was putting the emphasis on the wrong syllables while I was at the hospital. I would tell my resident I was going down to the emerGENcy room to get an H&P, instead of my usual eMERgency room. This just shows that I'm turning into Mariam circa kindergarten. The subtle inflection left when this rotation was over, and hopefully I didn't offend anybody.

Today, I had my first hostile patient. I arrived at the outpatient clinic and this particular patient was too short of breath to explain their story to the medical student after she already explained it to the nurse. She was not too short of breath to yell at me to get out of the room. After this troublesome encounter, I overcompensated by being extra-friendly and asking permission to do anything. Apparently, my compensation also involved developing a country accent for the small town patients at my AHEC rotation. "What's that? Y'all try to get out on yer bicycle when ya can. Well, that's downright healthy for yer heart, it sure will bring down yer cholesterol." I can't help but annoy myself when I hear the country drawl coming out of my mouth. I don't mind country accents - I just know I'm being a total poseur and perpetuating the stereotype that country people are friendly. One day I hope to find my own voice, my own self - just like Christina Aguilera sang in Mulan - when will my reflection show, who I am insi-aye-aye-ide.

--By Farrah, who's very happy to be back in Toledo from her AHEC, doesn't really know why she picked that picture of Dr. Nick, and realizes the video was probably overkill

M&M's "Just Ok"

2008-07-20T21:23:00.005-05:00

Abby and I have few opportunities to hang out together ever since we started our 3rd year, so we've started eating our feelings in the form of chocolate. We went to the store and found rows of fancy boxes claiming to be "m&m Premiums." You'll open up this box to find a lavish gem-like coating on these scaled up icons of the candy world. You'll bite into them with a shocking jolt because your teeth won't expect the lack of crisp candy shell. But I pose this to you blog readers, is it still a m&m if it doesn't have a crispy candy coating? I didn't think so either, so Abby aptly renamed the chocolates. I now pose this questions to myself, did I really just write a blog about m&m candies? I even took a picture of the box, which means I thought this was a good idea for a blog for longer than five minutes. Though I don't think that now, I clearly need to get out more. Let this be a lesson to us all: Don't use bad blog ideas, just say no.

--By Farrah, who will make a better effort one day to not be so very boring

The Subtle Art of Bragging

2008-07-19T19:36:00.009-05:00

My mom is very computer illiterate. In my mind, I imagine all moms having no operating knowledge of how the mysteries of computers and the Internet work. However, my friends sometimes casually say things like, "My mom emailed me this article," and I am always in shock. How can Baby Boomers, who thought that the advent of televisions in their home was a novelty, know how to use this newfangled contraption?

My mom is infamously bad with computers. The really endearing thing is that she really wants to learn but she never seems to really get the hang of it. It's almost as if she's Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, as he poetically looks up at Countess Olenska's Paris apartment and says with such poignance, "Say I'm old-fashioned: that's enough." You see, like the ironically named Newland, my mother may as well belong to another time - a time where one used a slate and chalk to do long division math instead of calculators. Of course, this may all over the top metaphorizing, but you're probably used to my blog hyperbole.

Imagine my surprise when, I got this email from my "mom":

Dear Mariam,
I was able to able make it to NC.We both miss our medical student daugter. My fingers and my mind are somewhat exhausted after such a lengthy email.
yours Mom
ps your physician dad is saying hello

The joke here about the medical student daughter is that we often laugh at parents who subtly include their children's achievements into conversation. For example, "Johnny would come out to dinner, but he's got to go to the law school library and study." Now of course, said parent could just say, "Johnny has got to study," but by including "law school library" everyone knows that this kid is no ordinary Gen-Y slacker. It's sort of like that David Sedaris story "Ship Shape" in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, where David and his mother overhear a lady at the Korean dry cleaners say, "My sister and I are visiting from out of town. I'd love to stay awhile longer and explore but my home - well one of my homes - is on the garden tour, so I've got to get back." Apparently, the Korean man had no idea what she saying, and merely nodded "the way you do when you're a foreigner and understand that someone has just finished a sentence."

Once, we met this guy who was a neurosurgeon, who went to Harvard undergrad and had a host of other impressive achievements. His parents were fawning over the Harvard experience and how Ulysses S. Grant had lived in his dorm room. My dad, not one to be outdone, said in a tiny voice,"Uh, Mariam likes English and writing?" as if this question/statement would impress the parents of a Ha-vuhd grad. For once, my parents were at a loss for bragging rights. Finally, my dad resorted to another technique, hyping himself up - "I exercise a lot, and I have successfully reduced my LDL merely through diet and physical activity." This statement just got lost in the conversation, and no one even heard it - since the parents were now going on about how the governor of their state had invited them to his daughter's society wedding and how they were thisclose to the VIP glitterati of society. Finally, the Qureshi family conceded defeat in this bragging war, and we just sat there and listened, silently fuming at why I wasn't smart enough to go to an Ivy League and consoling ourselves by saying, "Well, UNC is a public Ivy."

Now, that's not to say that I, myself, am immune to bragging in an underhanded fashion. For instance, I still cringe at how when I first got to medical school, I would subtly include my MedStart status into all conversations with strangers. For example, after an introduction with the Block 1 professors, I'd sidle up to an unfriendly stranger and say, "Yeah, CBC is so incredibly nice. Do you know she went to school with Jennifer Garner?" as if to imply, I've got the inside track to MCO, bitch, and CBC and I do each other's hair after school, so take that! Hopefully, I've learned how lame that is and no one wins friends by saying they are a MedStart student - they merely incur the wrath of other fellow medical students who get angry because you didn't take the MCAT.

--By Mariam, a medical student who is so incredibly busy these days with night calls. Oh crap, was that bragging again?

Things I didn't expect

2008-07-12T22:26:00.004-05:00

1) My first blog-related rejection letter:

"We are sorry to inform you that your personal statement submission, "Traumarama: Cake Will Not Get You Off the Waitlist," was unable to be accepted for publication in this year's The Legible Script. This year we had many more submissions than there was space in the magazine. We hope that this will not deter you from submitting your work again in the future. We are enclosing a copy of this year's magazine for you to enjoy."

When they say "enjoy," I assume they mean bitterly page through while telling myself that my story was better than the others. Now, Mariam's rise to fame in The Independent Collegian leaving me behind hurts so much more.

2) A post-board exam equivalent of post-partum depression. After delivering my knowledge baby for 8 hours, I was feeling glum. But I guess it wasn't the real post-partum depression, but rather the normal response to pregnancy that didn't last longer than a couple days - all better now. :)

3) Forcing myself to pretend to laugh at my patient's incomprehensible jokes. Here's an example you can follow if you encounter a similar situation:

Patient: *with heavy accent* A man walks into with a jamican and a purple man valks through the woods, and found a wife, into the and to the blurg bloobidie, and they ran into a dentist!

MS3: Oh, hahaha... hoohoohoo. You sure do know a lot of jokes. Now, I know where to send the nurses for a comedy show.

4) Bringing my dog, Teddy, to Toledo means waking up a half-hour earlier everyday. During this half-hour, I'm outside in my professional clothing begging Teddy to take a poop so I can get to the hospital on time.

5) There is so little time to blog. Sorry.

--By Farrah, a new MS3 who is convinced that she has lyme disease

My Tortuous History with the MSA

2008-07-06T23:55:00.006-05:00

When I was at UNC, I was "morally opposed to the MSA (Muslim Student's Association)." For those readers of the non-saracen persuasion, MSA is the club to join if you are a Muslim college student. It's a great place for Muslim kids to network with each other on campus and find their lifelong best friends who can understand their definitively unmainstream lifestyle choices. Anyway, despite the fact that my roommate was a hardcore MSA geek - she was "social chair" - I would refuse to go with her to any events or meetings because of a belief system that I had arbitrarily made up before even setting foot on campus.

Do you ever look back on what you thought was super important and wonder if it like, really mattered? Do you look back and think...okay, my convictions were slightly extreme and well, irrational? Well, this is what happened to me with regards to the MSA (and my previous bitter hatred of cauliflower and cabbage - both are really good!).

My whole rebel without a cause, anti-establishment attitude stemmed from what I thought was a really good reason to hate MSA - that girls got all dressed up in their cutest, modest clothes to find a husband. The year before I got to UNC, the social chair of the MSA had married the vice-president, a trend I noticed at many campuses around the country (i.e. George Washington University - where all East Coast Pakistanis congregated). I thought this was morally reprehensible. Finding a husband in the MSA? Lame, I thought! How anti-feminist! Backwards social thinking, I sputtered, this is what kept saracen girls behind - the neverending quest to find a husband! We were at a top institution like UNC to learn about William Blake, capitalist markets, and population genetics, not search for an appropriate boyfriend from the MSA. And so, thus began my four year boycott of MSA.

Ironically, what I failed to realize was that MSA was where I met my closest friends. I went to the first "social" at Mediterranean Deli and met Sukaina, who seemed quiet but told me she liked my aggressive handbag so I obviously thought to pursue the relationship. At Jummah (Friday prayer), I met Sinthia, and then the three of us nerd-bonded over how hard Chem 11 was.

Despite meeting some lifelong friends at MSA, I still refused to attend any of the events because I thought I was so "above" Muslim people culture - i.e. going to hookah bars and thinking they were all badass (which I still think is lame, but I digress), having ice cream socials in Carmichael, and putting on an annual MSA Sportsfest (this seems dumb to me even now since I hate playing sports). Ironically, I became president of the MSA in medical school - how that came to be was a mixture of fate and bad timing. Anyway, when I told people from my former life that I was MSA president, they would incredulously ask, "You?"

The MSA at UTCOM was not at all about social networking and Muslim bonding but about guy/girl segregation and awkward lunch meetings, but (silver lining) it taught me how to deal with conservative guys who didn't like interacting with people of the female persuasion. And I often wish I was back at the cushion-y safe haven of UNC MSA where there was decidedly less drama and male/female tension.

Anyway, as I reflect upon my college years, I really wish that I had not been so hard on the MSA. In retrospect, it was a meat market (with guys checking out the hijabi girls surreptitiously from across the room), but so what? There was no need for my theatrics and my easy dismissal of it as unprincipled, uncool, and lame. What other forum would allow Muslim guys and girls to hang out in a halal way? At an even lamer ISNA matrimonial event? Because at the end of the day, let's face it, Muslims, even the hardcore haafiz ones, still need a little lurve.

--By Mariam, now an MS3 at UTCOM (mashaAllah).

What I Want to be When I Grow Up: A Blogger

2008-06-15T02:15:00.011-05:00

During USMLE study time, I did 3 things:

1) Study.
2) Watch decade old-reruns of 90210.
3) Read ever single online publication/blog out there - the lowbrow, the middlebrow, the highbrow, the middlebrow for the high brow. From the obscure to the mainstream, I read practically everything on the World Wide Webs to avoid learning.

As a result of number 3, I came to a major conclusion: blogs are the wave of the future. A recent New York Times article was about a socialite who blogged about her married life and issues with dishwashers. If the esteemed Times could spend time waxing poetic about a blog composed mainly of uninteresting pictures, then how important had blogging become to the upper-middle class white people culture? The guy from Stuff White People Like had gotten a book deal. Julia Allison, Star Magazine's editor-at-large and the real-life version of Carrie Bradshaw, was a constant object of mockery on Gawker. Perez Hilton, formerly an unknown, chubby but snarky loser, was now a still-chubby, famous Hollywood power player.

Before the internets, artsy types hoping for a glamorous career amongst the New York literati had to be a well-connected rich kid who could hire a ghostwriter (I'm looking at you Jonathan Safran Foer...JK).

However, with the handy advent of the Internets, blogging has now democratized the entry into these formerly exclusive halls. If enough people found your thoughts were interesting, you, too, could get a book deal or sell ads at an upwards of $50,000. Maybe most of you devoted fans of this blog (all 8 of you) already realize this, but I just realized that blogging could be a legit profession literally two days ago.

Weirdly, last year, when the winter of my discontent became all-consuming, I'd ironically say I wanted to be a "blogger" when I grew up, and I laughed at the utter absurdity of such a career. After all, as a first-generation, in my world-view people got jobs as professionals. People didn't blog for a living. They wrote blogs as side projects because they were fundamentally, at heart, narcissists, who thought their unfiltered, unedited, grammatically-incorrect posts mattered to an invisible legion of kind-hearted readers.

However, blogging is merely a component of "micro-fame." It satisfies our voyeuristic sensibilities that define the current zeitgeist. After all, consider the popularity of reality crap shows like The Hills. The seemingly vapid LC's willingness to live her life out on the stage of Hollywood has granted her a certain tabloid fame, well beyond the allocated 15 minutes.

And so, we blog on, thinking that our spur of the moments thoughts matter in some small, shitty way. But now, there is this fear of "oversharing" on the internets that Emily Gould let us know about in her cover story in New York Times Magazine. She was a former gawker.com editor who would overshare about her relationships on her blog and on her posts on the website, and it came back to bit her in the ass when her ex divulged all her dirty little secrets in Page Six. So while all bloggers believe sharing is caring, I think we all know what the lesson here is: while Al Gore is an all-round do-gooder these days with his fancy Noble Peace Prize, his crazy invention of the Internet is really difficult to control. So, be careful, little lady, it ain't safe out there on them blogs.

--By Mariam, who can't figure out how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. I mean she played Steve Sanders' GIRLFRIEND on 90210.

A Blogging Gift

2008-06-12T15:55:00.006-05:00

Hello Upper East Sider...er Toledoers, Blog Girl here,

Just kidding. The latter was a mere parody of bloggers who think of themselves as reincarnations of Kristen Bell since the advent of the show. Well, the Back Row Ballers are still on blog-iatus, tragically. I am withering away in North Carolina studying and having random aggressive, emotional outbursts aimed at foreign medical school graduates, NBME, and inexplicably Katie Holmes. So in short, I will not be back sharing sarcastic adventures for a while.

However, to tide blog readers over, I have found this so-bad-it's awesome blog via Gakwer: "socialite" Emily Brill's blog (her dad invented Court TV), a therapeutic exercise in narcissism (as I guess all blogs are) and self-aggrandizement and an obvious attempt to portray oneself as an up and coming "It" girl but with an "edge." Let the mocking of the disaffected, over-privileged Ivy League grads begin!

You know you love me, xoxo

--By Mariam, who seriously hates lysosomal storage diseases. HATES. THEM.

Ah yes, I am an ass

2008-04-30T06:59:00.004-05:00

So I guess Mariam and Farrah stepping down from the blog means its time for other people to step up (I looking at you Abby). Luckily for the blog world, I embarrass myself in front of large groups of people on a very regular basis. Unluckily, I am a terrible writer and storyteller, so bear with me.

For some time now, my husband Adam and I have been talking about having a baby, weighing the financial burden (that’s right, babies are burdens, anyone who disagrees should watch the show Jon and Kate Plus 8) and the actual logistics of having something you can’t leave in a cage when you want to leave the house. Finally, we decided now would be a good time to try: Adam is making enough money and I am able to delay the horrors of the third year of medical school for a year while I participate in a pathology fellowship. I decided that if I became pregnant, I wouldn’t tell anyone other than Adam for the first trimester since the risk of miscarriage is very high. I did however decide to share with my friends that I was trying to have a baby, mostly because if I tried to keep it secret my head would explode. However I tried not to tell too many people, as I am pretty sure most people really don’t care about my reproductive status. And yet, somehow, at a school function I managed to tell 20 strangers (and Sapna) that I might be pregnant.

I signed up to be a peer mentor group facilitator at school and had to attend an orientation dinner where, in the grand tradition of leadership training, we played an icebreaker game. I had been popping in and out of the dinner all night because my lunch and I were not agreeing with each other about my having left home so when I walked back into the dinner for the third time everyone had formed into groups. I hastily returned to my seat and joined whatever group was located there. Upon sitting down, I was handed an index card and told to write something unique about myself, but to not put my name on the card. I figured at this point we would turn the cards in and they would be read aloud amazing everyone that someone so unique was in the crowd. So I turned to Liberty who was sitting next to me and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I wrote that I might be pregnant? I mean, how ridiculous would that be?” She uncomfortably agreed it would be pretty funny (I should have taken the hint).

This is where the night took a turn for me. The rest of the game was then explained: we were to pass in our cards and they would be redistributed to be read aloud. Then the reader would guess who had written the card, and afterwards the person who actually did write the card would identify themselves as the writer. At this point my stomach dropped and I turned to Liberty in a panic, “Oh my god, what should I do!? I don’t want all these people knowing I might be pregnant!” Liberty shrugged sympathetically but as they already had passed the cards back out, there was really nothing I could do.

So my card was read around and every looked around in befuddlement. I could see in their expression they were thinking who would share pregnancy news at a peer mentor facilitator group meeting? I debated just staying silent and not admitting to my possible oven bun. Luckily I didn’t have to decide because Simas, the current pathology fellow whom I had informed a month earlier my husband and I were trying to have a baby so I could get an idea of my schedule for next year, was in our group. Immediately after my card was read he turned and pointed right at me. I turned red and tried to explain I had no idea that we would be reading the cards aloud or I would have said something like banal like “I have three dogs!” Instead I spent the rest of the dinner flushed with the realization that by tomorrow everyone in the school would have heard the story about this weird girl telling everyone she might be pregnant during an icebreaker at a school dinner! I guess one good thing will come out of this embarrassing experience. If later the hormone surges of pregnancy make me bite someone’s head off (I am looking at you Simas), they will have received advanced warning that I am both unhinged and possibly pregnant.

Ok, so I know I have more ridiculous stories like this (hopefully they aren’t so long). So if you enjoyed this one, and can remember me telling you any embarrassing story about myself let me know and I will write it up. If you didn’t enjoy it, you should probably be studying for boards anyways.

--By Sarah, who wishes her hair was as big as all the secrets she was filled with

A Blog Hiatus

2008-04-29T16:06:00.003-05:00

The Boards are rapidly approaching, as my friends can attest. I inundate them daily with emails asking advice on what books they are using, reading, thinking about, and cherishing (I'm so sorry). As a result, Farrah and I will be taking a blog-iatus for the next 2 months. I am deeply sorry for such a crushing below, but I'm sure that the majority of you dear blog readers are medical school students yourselves and will also be busy with Goljan lectures rather than read well-crafted essays about foreign people.

So, I thought I'd say goodbye that that we will meet again in cyberspace soon. Ironically, when we resume blogging again in late June, Farrah and I will no longer sit in the back row, left side (and actually, Farrah doesn't really sit there anymore anyway, because she doesn't come to class). We will be (inshaAllah) full-fledged third years, and we will sit where the attendings and residents tell us to rather than an emo, foreign-filled row of our choosing. I thank all our readers - both the vocal and the silent - for their support and love, and we will see each other soon. Our blogs will take on a different quality. In my case, they will be less about medical school as an institution but about embarrassing things that have happened to me while on my rotations - I am horrifically clumsy so I'll probably just make a patient bleed by merely staring at them.

And so, in the immortal words of Heidi Klum, "auf weidersehen."

--By Mariam, who is wondering what book you are using for embryo? Can you tell me? E-mail me back! Thanks!

Agree to Disagree

2008-04-20T11:19:00.003-05:00

One man's trash may very well be another man's treasure, but can these men be friends? To form a great friendship, you have to have some things in common. They should hate some of the things that you hate (strangers, talking on the phone with strangers), and they should love some of the things that you love (This American Life, my dog Teddy). We happily agree with each other that our taste in movies, music, clothing, and even toilet paper is generally more awesome than the taste of all the losers around us. Most of my friendships proceed like this indefinitely until we inevitably discover we cannot agree on something. Will this something tear our friendship apart? When these disagreements pop up, most friends will take any of the following actions:

1 - Drop/change the subject: I guess I might vote for Obama... your shirt is super cute!
2 - Make fun of me for my position until one of us moves away/becomes deaf/dies: It's okay, vote for Obama. I always knew you were an elitist who hated the working class. :p
3 - Start a civil debate: This is why I'm voting for Obama, why are voting for Clinton?
4 - Aggressively argue for their own position. These are the kinds of friends you can't bring up politics or religion around because they will take over the conversation. If I say I'll vote for Obama, will you shut up?

Those individuals who find themselves in the fourth category too often don't make friends easily, or I should say they don't keep friends easily. If you truly disagree, somebody has to eventually drop the subject or risk going from category three to four, where feelings are hurt. If you get too aggressive about your own opinion, I'm liable to stick my fingers in my ears and yell, "LALALALALALAALA!" until you stop talking, and I wont want to hang out with you anymore. (That's why I haven't hung out with Tom Cruise since he called Matt Lauer "glib") An occasional discussion in the third category may be a welcome intellectual discussion, but it carries a danger of escalating and ruining friendships. This is why Trivial Pursuit can be a very dangerous game. In this battle of wits, people will argue anything to get their pie piece. (I still think "the tube"="the underground" you competitive bastards out there!! I want my pie piece! *sob*)

I've started to realize that every good friendship also has a healthy element of disagreement. It keeps things interesting. I've also realized that if Abby or Mariam gives me a food suggestion in a restaurant, it is the exact thing I should NOT order. At least I got to try a lot of interesting foods I didn't like on the road to this discovery. Abby and I recently discovered we might disagree on more than we thought. We went to see Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day in an empty theater, where we could talk as loud as we pleased, and had the following conversation:

Farrah: That guy's pretty cute.
Abby: He's okay... *silence*
F: Oh no, that guy's cuter!
A: *silence*... um, he's not my type
F: Look at him play the piano, he has to be growing on you.
A: I'm starting to realize we have nothing in common

Fortunately, our friendship falls into the second category, and I've progressed to telling Abby a friendly, "You're stupid," on a regular basis. I think friendships are happiest in the second category. I know I'll never convince my friend Brittany to like South Park as much as I do, but I can just make fun of her obvious hatred of all fat comedians (Cartman, Chris Farley, Jack Black) because she's a "fatist." Next time you find your friend on the verge of offending you, just tell them how their shirt is super cute (or make fun of their ugly shirt), and go on your merry way.

--By Farrah, who found she simply can't focus when it's so nice outside, so she hopes it rains today

Am I a White Person?

2008-04-15T12:38:00.004-05:00

If you are my friend, here is what a typical interaction consists of:

Mariam: Hello infidel white person!
Jack: You are as close to a non-white person I've ever gotten! Saracens aren't too bad, I guess.

Or something like this:
Mariam: When I was growing up, amongst white folk, and I was the only brown person, and my mom made me kabab sandwiches instead of turkey, it was really hard on me. Yay Pakistanis!
Abby: I'm a WASP, and I went to Lehigh, where diversity goes to die.
Sarah: I am figuratively and literally very white.

I also enjoy saying things like, "I had one white friend in college. She was a cheerleader in high school!" as if the latter fact is some affirmation that she was a normal, mainstream white person American. And so, the bottom line is this: my day consists of reaffirming white people's whiteness, and my own difference as a brown person infiltrating this hegemonic whiteness. I.e. I am so foreign, so different, so exotic, look at me, I had weird experiences with immigrant parents and strange, smelly foods.

Many people who are foreign but very assimilated spend time telling me that I am not foreign because I was born in America (Granite City, IL, which could possibly about as middle-America as you can get). People like Shlee, who is Persian, but considers himself an American, say things like: "I am not foreign. For example, my girlfriend is white." I think that's excellent that Shlee is doing well for himself in America, but if I were a white person, I would look at his dark hair and beard and think, not American! Maybe that's just me, though.

Anyway, one day, my entire identity was called into question. Last week, I stumbled onto a really cool blog called Stuff White People Like after reading about it in the New York Times. Mocking whitness was a clever idea, but then, things took a very dark and sinister turn. I realized I liked 41 out of the 95 top things white people liked.

This seemed excessive so I asked Jemily, my favorite medical school power couple. Emily cheerfully told me not to worry - the blog was mocking her, too! Easy for you to say, you are white, I thought meanly. Jack argued that these were merely "people interests." I personally thought that of course, he would think this - white males always tend to think that the their interests are the world's interests.

An identity crisis ensued. I prided myself on not being mainstream - I even stated as much on my Facebook profile. I was proud of my varied, decidedly unique interests (David Sedaris, English lit, Michael Gondry, Whole Foods, incidentally all things on said list). And I was proud of my ethnic heritage - always showing off about being Pakistani to make white people aware of their own inherent homogeneity. And ironically, this, too, was on the list. The blog made me realize not only that I wasn't very unique, but that I was almost a parody of the typical, upper-middle class, educated white person.

A mere blog made me realize a fundamental truth about myself - that I was more assimilated than I thought I was. I had white friends because I was just like them - I wasn't exactly the threatening picture of difference people often associated with foreigners (for example, Elvis, who came to the US in 1998, asked me what a "dreamboat" meant). All the white people thought they were being diverse and liberal by befriending someone from a different cultural background (extra brownie points because I was from a recently maligned religion and country), but in fact, they were just becoming bff with someone just like themselves.

In high school English, we learn about a hero's tragic flaw (or hamartia) in classic Greek tragedy - and I guess I found mine - hubris. I had such pride in my difference, my browness, standing proudly in a sea of white, and then I realized I wasn't so different after all. Because ultimately, you are a product of your environment, and hanging with all of these white folks had rubbed off on me.

--By Mariam, who went to Pakistan and had to experience the pitfalls of a "developing nation" for her summer vacations. Take that, white people!

When Drug Naming Goes Bad

2008-04-10T13:43:00.008-05:00

It's a pity that we are supposed to memorize the generic names of drugs rather than the brand names. The drug companies have fancy teams of marketers to make sure the newest drug brand name is unforgettable and rolls of the tongue in a phrase like: "Doctor, why haven't you tried prescribing me Requip? I saw an ad for it the other day on my television." They might follow up and provide you with their own diagnosis: "I didn't know my shaking leg was a disease! I always thought it was because of my 18 daily cups of coffee. I have Restless Leg Syndrome, and you can treat it, what a relief!" It's much easier to say Requip than its generic name ropinirole - that's 4 extra letters! It's completely unreasonable to expect the American public to say a word that long. Sometimes brand names have a handy way of remembering their drug's function, for example the drug Procede is supposed to keep your bald husband's hair from receding, catchy! The generic names of drugs don't provide this luxury. It doesn't matter that I remember the name Minoxidil because there are no hints revealing its function - it takes brute memorization to remember that it is the highly advertised hair loss drug Rogaine.

Abby and I have both started to pay attention the drug ads on TV because it's a little bit of studying hidden in our marathon of watching The Hills. Watching TV the other night, we noticed the newest drug for acid reflux. Before I give you the name of the drug, I want you to think of the board game Mad Gab where you get a card that says "Eye Mull Uvma Chine" which you repeat over and over again, until you finally yell out "I'm a love machine!" The name of the new drug is AcipHex. You know like acid effects on your stomach, only they used pH in the middle of the word (you know, like a measure of acidity!), and you pronounce it "ass effects." With this revolutionary drug, you can eat the entire plate of food shown to the right without the bothersome effects of acid reflux... or if you pronounce it my way, without the bothersome effects of flatulence.

--By Farrah, who is sorry. She phoned this blog in because she's starting to feel the pressure of board exams looming like the bleak gray skies of Toledo.

Summer Camp for Dorks

2008-03-26T15:52:00.005-05:00

Sometimes, I look around the darkened classroom of HEB 110, where my medical school classes are held, and think, How the hell did I end up here with these people? I have cooler conversational talking points than these people who have dedicated their lives to getting papers published on the loss of function of the p53 gene leading to cancerous growth. I like cooler things - i.e. One Republic, This American Life, and the troubling prevalence of art theft in Europe. I don't belong here, I think, Get me out of here! After all, Medical school is a place where right-brained creativity goes to die.

Then yesterday, I had an epiphany. What if I wasn't that cool? I perished the thought. But then I reflected upon my life, filled with a lottery of dorky episodes, and I realized, of course, I would end up in medical school.

While Clique A all jettisoned off to Europe to have romantic adventures during the summer, I attended dorky summer camps for the academically gifted. Examples: Summer Ventures in Science and Math, Bridgewater Leadership Camp, and my personal favorite, YADAPP, an anti-drug camp that Students Against Drug Driving (SADD) nominated me for. I told people that I wanted to go to "drugs are bad" camp because it would look excellent on my college applications, but who was I kidding? I wanted to go to YADAPP because deep down inside, I was a hard core dork.

YADAPP stands for Youth Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention Project. SADD sent me and three other members to this summer conference in northern Virginia. Anyway, I realized right when I got there that this camp was going to be extra-loserish, even for me. I had secretly been looking forward to going to the conference, since I had pledged not to drink or use tobacco products for SADD leadership (easy since I was a devout Muslim), and I wanted to inflict my view upon the less-devout masses (hmm...sounds sort of like American hegemony?).

There was a long line of teenagers from various Virginia schools, and from the looks of it, mostly urban, public schools, which was frightening for a rural hick like me. On the opening day ceremony, they played the song "Lean on Me" and made us go through these pre-determined hand motions. Anyone who knows me will say, "UM OMG I cannot picture you doing that, Mare" (Bushra). Well, I had to, and it easily the most idiotic experience of my life, because the song was not only horrifically dorky, but the hand motions added a level of embarrassment that I cannot even describe. We had to sing this song every morning and whenever we encountered another YADAPP group out on the quad. Here is a video of the YADAPP crew singing the song with hand motions. Seriously, a must see:

lean on me

Things only got worse. Our group was one of the only one in the entire camp that was filled with only white people (+ one brown saracen). When we were told we would have to do a skit to exemplify our feelings about YADAPP, I grew even more agitated. For some reason, the white people decided it would be a good idea for us to make up a rap while clapping to a beat that Heather, my cheerleader friend, created. Nevertheless we made up a corny rap, and my line went something like "Makin' new friends and being together till the end."

We were one of the last groups to go up on stage in front of a crowd of 500 people. Well, our rap was, shall we say, culturally different than the rest of the acts. The other groups did elaborate step performances, which were amazing. Since I was from preppy Carlisle, where I was the poster child for diversity, I had no idea what steps was but found it as exotic as the Bedouin tribe that picks up Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient. Well, we suffered through our dorky white people + 1 brown person rap, and I remember hearing laughter from the crowd (yes, laughter at a rap that was meant to be decidedly earnest and not funny). Afterwards, Heather blamed me for "messing up the beat during the rap." At this point, I realized that I could never look at this girl the same way again - she was reaching a level of gunner that even I could not fathom.

I put YADAPP on my college applications, and I highly doubt it helped me get into UNC. And while there were traces of nerd within me, as my friend Naadia continually likes to point out**, I ultimately realized that even dorks have a threshold.

--By Mariam, who urges you to YouTube YADAPP and experience the Hallowed Halls of Dorkdom for yourself.

** This coming from a girl who tabbed her law school books to every inch of their life.

My Anti-social Generation

2008-03-24T12:49:00.009-05:00

I never liked to talk to strangers on the phone. When my mom would ask me to do something simple like order pizza, I would push the task on somebody else. I was intensely shy as a child, often hiding under a blanket when my parent's friends would come over, so that's my excuse. I decided the task of talking on the phone was a task for adults, so I refused to do it as a small, corruptible child. I never managed to grow out of it. I will now call strangers when absolutely necessary, but I will make excuses to put it off - like my preceptor probably isn't working on a Friday afternoon, so I better wait and call on Monday. As I started living with my peers in college, and now in medical school, I found out that I'm not the only one.

Even my social friends will avoid talking to some whiney, acne-afflicted teen working the phones at the local Domino's. My college roommate, Anna-liisa, admitted that she didn't like phone interactions anymore than I did. Abby, my med school roommate, and I will exclusively order from Papa John's pizza because their online ordering allows the least stranger interaction as possible. Anna-liisa pointed out when I was home for spring break that it's our whole generation. We hate talking on the phone. You know that's got to be the main reason Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan have assistants. It's not all of us - when I was younger I could assign phone tasks to my less intimidated friend Brittany, and Mariam will always volunteer to call a retail store to explain their transgressions against her and to demand discounts. But even Brittany has recently pushed awkward phone conversations to me.

I wonder if the main culprit here is the internet. When we were finally old enough to talk to strangers, the web started to explode with information, eliminating the need to investigate by phone. That can't be the only problem here though because I am never hesitant to ask for what I want in a restaurant or from a sales person at the store. Maybe it's that my generation needs to be in control of what they are provided, and wants to eliminate the need to depend directly on another person to get their order right. I was forced to overcome most of my phone phobia when I started working at the testing company Kaplan. I had to call students when they were halfway through their test preparation classes to ask them if they were satisfied with their experience. I hated the task, and I had a feeling that many of the students I called, also part of my generation, hated the phone calls as much as I did. I could here some of their exasperation over the phone, with a tone of voice that implied you're taking me away from my very busy schedule of smoking pot and watching South Park. I think it will be telling if this trend continues into the next generation. As this series of tubes that is the internet gets bigger and bigger, hopefully the silly need to talk to strangers will be eliminated.

--By Farrah, who switched over to Apple during spring break... that's right, she's a "new soul in this very strange world"

The Dark Side of Flirting

2008-03-19T12:10:00.004-05:00

Everyone has the Moment in their lives - a Moment of pure clarity, where one realizes exactly where their lives are headed. Their previous existence of directionless meaninglessness finally comes to a halt, and a Path is provided. The latter sounds like an inspirational poster, I realize. But it isn't lame and cheesy when it actually happens to you.

My big Moment was in high school. It was senior year, second semester. Senioritis had set in, and I sat in AP Macro Economics, the last period of the day. I aimlessly stared at the chalkboard while I waited for Mr. Keefer to stroll in from flirting with cute blond girls. At the front of the classroom, I watched with boredom as Jenna, my bff and neighbor, flirt with Hunter, a popular soccer player who didn't speak much beyond a few monosyllabic grunts.

Hunter, in a hormonal haze, pretended to strangle Jenna in a general display of boyish tomfoolery. All of a sudden, Jenna turned blue, but Hunter didn't notice. She lost consciousness and collapsed onto the floor. I guess Hunter underestimated his own strength and realized that flirting can have a dangerous side.

What I remember most about the Moment is how all 19 students in AP Econ became quiet. Everyone stopped their after-lunch chatter and merely stared at Jenna in gaping, uncomprehending silence. Then, I heard Elizabeth say, "Wow, I don't think she's kidding." I got up and yelled, "OMG!" I sprung to action and ran into the hall.

"Mr. Keefer - Jenna! Jenna!" Mr. Keefer looked at me with distaste as he always did when I spoke, probably because I was disrupting his mood of frat boy complacency. He took his time walking into the classroom to tend to Jenna, who was slowly regaining consciousness. "Go get the nurse!"

Eliz. B and I ran to the middle school to find Mrs. Wagner. I rarely ran as I hated physical exertion, but yhe adrenaline had kicked in. Jenna was ultimately okay, and I saw Hunter leaning against some lockers, crying - the entire incident had an emo, after school special-ish vibe.

I was just proud of my quick reflexes in an emergency. As all my classmates watched the scene unfold in stunned silence, I heroically jumped from my seat to find help for my friend Jenna. And that is when I realized I'd make a great doctor.*

You may be wondering about Jenna and Hunter. Well, after that weekend, they started dating for the rest of senior year. I guess almost killing someone with your bare hands can lead to an inexplicable attraction.

--By Mariam, who seriously hates Duke fans who don't go to Duke. Lame!

*= Facetious statement of self-aggrandizement

Hipsters and Retards

2008-03-07T21:46:00.010-05:00

In this New York Magazine article, Chuck Klosterman says in response to how nerdy guys get girls, "You used to be able to tell the difference between hipsters and homeless people. Now, it's between hipsters and retards. I mean, either that guy in the corner in orange safety pants holding a protest sign and wearing a top hat is mentally disabled or he is the coolest fucking guy you will ever know."

Today, Farrah, Sarah, and I were talking about movies. I admitted that I liked Save the Last Dance on a very fundamental, visceral level (my favorite line, when a tertiary character emphatically declares, "I don't got no 10.0 GPA"). Sarah had enjoyed all three Bring it On Sequals (Bring it on Again, One More Time, and Let's Milk this Cash Cow for All its Worth). Farrah was a teen movie veteran as well, having watched parts of the Prince and Me 2: The Royal Wedding, while secretly wishing a Dutch prince would sweep her from her life of Midwestern drudgery. Empirically, this may seem tragic and quite pathetic that we relished watching the so-bad-it's-good genre.

Because on one hand, this could be the saddest thing you had ever heard (that I actually liked the shows on ABC Family). But it could also mean something else entirely - that we were slacker cool, which is fundamentally ironic because medical school beats the slacker out of even the most unwilling lazy ass.

After this movie conversation, I realize that I had the potential to fit into Chuck's proposed dichtomy of "hipsters" and "retards." So, I posed this question: were we the type of people who don't do much with their lives but have a wealth of knowledge on arcane topics such as famous art heists and the career of B-list actors like Johnnie Lee Miller? Were we armchair philosophers? The "coolest fucking guy you will ever know," and cultivating this inherent hipster coolness, and all the while, sitting on our asses in our La-z Boy armchairs and rotting away beneath a pile of old Entertainment Weeklies and New Yorkers and bags of artificially flavored Doritos.

Anyone who fit the mainstream criteria of coolness would deem having an intimate knowledge of famous art heists, for instance, "retarded" and decidedly uncool. Because cool within the mainstream stems from going to the hottest bars/clubs, drinking chic shots, and mastering the art of random hook-ups. (Notice how I lack even the adequate language to express the terms of mainstream coolness, so far removed am I from that world). These individuals looked down on grimy hipsters with an air of disdain as they wear strange black and white stripe flats that don't match with anything (Farrah) or read the latest revisionist treatise on the Feminine Mystique.

At the same time, though, maybe Chuck has a point, or at least I hope I'm the "coolest fucking guy you will ever know," and not some tragic slacker anachronistically left over from the early 90s, fulfilling the prototype of the greasy, disillusioned, Gen-Xer, scowling at corporate greed and filthy consumerism as my yuppie friends put down a down payment on a NYC brownstone.

--By Mariam, whose journey to North Carolina was as torturous as Inman's in Cold Mountain.

Pakistani People and Jane Austen

2008-02-21T20:21:00.006-05:00

"EMMA WOODHOUSE, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable
home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings
of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with
very little to distress or vex her."

And so, begins Jane Austen's beloved novel that countless generations have enjoyed, especially recently given her recent revival amongst women prone to liking romance under the restrained setting of empire dresses and candlelight. What is the appeal of Jane Austen, I am sure many males have wondered. The specific struggles of the women in the novel are not at all universal, especially within American society, where mating rituals are much more relaxed, having the advantage of alcohol as a social lubricant to free the tongue and loosen the inhibitions. Her appeal, I think, lies in the fact that Americans can examine romance in the Regency era with a museum-like fascination, where reticence and social convention overruled the wild passions of the heart.

Little do these readers know that such a society exists where Jane Austen's archaic, nineteenth century values still thrive. Welcome to Pakistani society, where marriage is run in a very similar fashion to Austen's society. Of course, this is a rudimentary social theory that I have developed, so one can dismiss it with elaborate counterpoints, but if Malcolm Gladwell can get on the New York Times best seller list with a similar endeavor, then I should be welcome to pop sociology on a mere blog.

I have never been an ardent fan of Jane Austen, mainly because I am a literary snob, and I heard that many critics dismissed her as the 19th century-version of chick lit (you know those books that are pink and have aggressive shopping bags on the cover). I made this casual dismissal of Jane Austen fairly early on, despite Virginia Woolf devoting an entire essay on her. However, in 1996, I saw Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and slowly realized the eerie similarities with the ways my fellow Pakistanis went about the marriage endeavor.

For instance, if one has five daughters like the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice, the matriarch of the Pakistani family spends an aggressive amount of time befriending other ladies who have eligible doctor sons. Doctors are the modern-day equivalent of a first born son of an earl or a bachelor with "12,000 pounds a year," like Mr. Darcy. Doctors are one's preference because all Pakistanis are fundamentally bourgeois at heart- they have a stable income (upward of $100,000/year), keeping the daughters in nice handbags and modest split level home in the 'burbs of Chicago, as well as elevated social status. It seems paradoxical to me that doctors are the son-in-law of choice for Pakistanis because these days, most girls do have careers (or at least they do initially before the obligatory babies come into the picture). It's not like in Austen's time, where Lizzy or Marianne Dashwood were penniless and marriage was means out of a life of destitution. I guess being colonized by the British has lasting psychological effects.

Also, amongst conservative Pakistani families, the courtship of a high-spirited girl and her eligible bachelor is done very delicately and with great propriety. It is not considered proper etiquette to be left alone with said male due to religious considerations. However, unlike Austen's time, no one goes for strolls outside (in the Regency era, it was only proper for men and women to socialize privately out of doors). Hip Pakistanis favor hookah bars (halal and very chic) as a great place to get to know the opposite sex.

Just like in Austen's novels where Mrs. Dashwood and Mrs. Bennet, both were actively engaged in finding their children a suitable match, Pakistani mothers also actively get involved in their offspring's search for "love." "Love" is narrowly defined as "person who very strictly confines to family's idea of good match - i.e. steady job and good family." A very popular phrase amongst Pakistani parents is, "There is no such thing is true love. You grow to love, just like us!"

Now, no theory has credence until it is backed up with empirical evidence, so I began a rudimentary experiment on my mother. After watching Mansfield Park, I called and my mom and asked, "Mom, say you have a daughter who married this really boring old dude, who is kind of an idiot. She's not happy so she has an affair with a really hunky Lothario and runs off with him. Would you be shamed forever?" My mom is often confused by hypothetical "What if" games I like to play. Most foreign parents, arguably, are as they look on at their child as they are strangers and think,"Wow, my child is so weirdly American" Nevertheless, my mom says, "Yes, marriage is forever. She ruins her family's good name." See, we are just like Jane Austen's novels! And so, my theory of Pakistani society being behind 200 years has some credence.

And so, dear blog reader, if you like Jane Austen films and novels, look no further, just take a glimpse into Pakistani society.

--By Mariam, who is very excited about the political activities in Toledo this weekend!

Traumarama: Cake does NOT get you off the wait list

2008-02-20T02:40:00.006-05:00

I had a full year before medical school started to play guitar, take my dog on daily five hour walks, work in a trendy coffee shop, and teach MCAT classes. It was during my year of relaxation that I realized the terrible nature of medical school applications. I always knew it would be competitive, but I never considered the strategy and research involved. I quickly discovered Studentdoctor online forums where students compulsively called admission departments for the status of their applications. Not a very forceful person, I relied on the aggressive nature of my fellow applicants to supply my information. I knew which schools I had applied to in vain (U. of Washington - out of state, never would've happened), and which schools had late interviews. I reluctantly added MCO/MUO/UTCOM because my sister moved to Toledo with her husband who started his residency. I didn't have any desire to live in Ohio. From the outside looking in, Ohio looks like all the other flat, humid, Midwestern states I couldn't identify on a map. I don't really believe in fate, but my sister is somewhat convinced she's the reason I'm in medical school. This last minute Midwestern addition was the first school to request an interview, and I was fortunate enough to be accepted by December. I was going to medical school, but I was still holding out for a different location.

Everybody I encounter soon discovers my extreme preference for Colorado over all the other states and territories of the United States. I wanted to stay in my home state for medical school. There aren't very many medical schools in the west, so it gets competitive. Fortunately, I had a confident interview in early January. In March, I was put on the wait list in the 2nd third. I managed to restrain myself to monthly e-mails to the admissions department. As the summer wore on, I started to get more frantic. By June, afflicted with some sort of Stockholm syndrome from studentdoctor network, I was sending daily e-mails. I was backpacking through Europe that summer with my position on the wait list adding to the weight on my shoulders. When I finally came back from my trip, I had progressed to daily calls to the admissions office. My conversion was complete - I had become one of those crazy obsessed applicants from the online forums.

It was during the peak of my obsession that I was unfortunate enough to get some advice from my brother (a once obsessive law school applicant, now a successful lawyer!). I found out from one of my dad's sources that I was 5th on the waitlist to get in, a week before classes started. My brother decided that I would have to make the admissions department remember me. He convincingly argued, "If they have to chose between the applicant that they know nothing about, or the applicant that called every single day and did something memorable like take a cake to the admission's department with their name on it, they will chose the applicant that cares more." With my rushing adrenalin and anxiety over my impending move to Ohio, I believed him. The next day I went to King Soopers and bought a sheet cake, and on it we wrote "Farrah R. hearts CU medical school." I know, I know - I still cringe when I think about it, and it gets worse. My younger sister intervened to tell me that taking the cake to the medical school would be crazy. My brother aggressively argued for the cake, and I was so stressed out that about it that I cried. My brother is the more effective arbitrator, and won the argument. With the support of some of my very best friends, I drove to medical campus.

In the car ride over, my friends argued over the merits of using cake to get off the wait list. It was a Saturday, and Brittany noted, "They're probably closed," and then sat rather quietly.
"Oh no, you think it's crazy don't you," I asked her.
She hesitated, and replied, "I just don't think it will make a difference."
Anna-liisa tried to comfort me and said, "It's worth a shot, and at the very least, it will be a really funny story they can tell future applicants. There's no doubt that it'll be memorable."
I was content to be give the admissions department something that will be memorable and hopefully a little funny, and I figured I could laugh about it one day too. When we finally arrived at the school, it was locked. I was slightly relieved as I was building up adrenalin for my impending embarrassment. Just then, a student walked out of the building - shit.

We walked down the hall to the admissions department. The man I had been talking to on the phone everyday was working extra hours that weekend because school would start the next Monday. I am sure that this man is a very kind person when he's not rejecting people from medical school, but here we will refer to him as big-fat-stupid-heifer or BFSH. I introduced myself and explained my spot on the wait list and the cake, with Anna-liisa and Brittany faithfully by my side.
"I just thought it would be pretty funny. I don't think I have much of a chance at this point, so I though I would go all out," I told him with the awkward nature of the situation looming.
"I wish I could help you, but there's really nothing I can do. Um... how did you get in the building?" BFSH suspiciously asked.
"A student let us in."
"They're not supposed to do that."
"Oh... uh, sorry. Anyway, I'll just leave this cake here. So there haven't been any openings on the wait list since I called you yesterday?"
"No, again I'm sorry. You can take the cake with you and eat it with your friends. I don't think anybody here will eat it. I can let them know you brought it. You can call during orientation, and I will let you know about the list. But again, I wouldn't count on anything."
At this point, I never wanted to see the cake ever again. At the same point I lost all hope on top of my embarrassment from the over-the-top gesture, Anna-liisa started to cry.
"Don't move away. I really don't want you to move away," she told me through her tears.
"She seems more upset than you are," BFSH interjected.
I ignored him and gave Anna-liisa a hug. It didn't matter how awkward the cake was, or that we had broken into the building, or that I had clearly gone off the deep end, I was really going to miss my friends and family. In this moment of reality, my new found obsessive nature dampened and then disappeared. We thanked BFSH for his time, and left the medical campus.

I spent my last few days in Colorado mellowly hanging out with my family and friends. I had been a homebody in undergrad, driving home often on weekends, so it was unnerving to travel so far from home. I easily adjusted to life in Ohio with frequent phone calls home - it helps that my older sister is here. From the inside looking out, the scenery is dull as I imagined, but I managed to befriend some great people here. I still take any break to fly straight home - what can I say, I need my Rocky Mountains. Anyway, to the kids - just say no to studentdoctor network, or at least use it in moderation.

--By Farrah, who would like to emphasize how much this story makes her cringe

A Cosmo Confession: Internets and Anonymity

2008-02-15T15:16:00.004-05:00

Al Gore "invented" the internet in the years that I was in grade school (in actuality, though, according to Thomas Friedman, a primitive form of the internet had been around since the 1950s with a very, very archaic form of IM). Nevertheless, when I was in 9th grade, the internet was still a novelty - with its chat rooms where one could connect to strangers in places as far and mysterious as Texas, and then e-mail, virtual messages that could be received with the speed of lightning (or so it seemed).

It was the summer of ninth grade, and my friends (members of "Clique A") and I were taking physics for some unknown reason. The summers would drag on as we learned about vectors and other things that seemed difficult at the time but now prove to be child's play. One day, we started to receive weird, anonymous emails from "youwillneverknow@hotmail.com." The messages were like horoscopes - weirdly specific and general at the same time. They revealed school gossip without naming anyone. The emails would offer pornographic advice, telling girls they shouldn't be "afraid to explore their bodies because they were beautiful." Youwillneverknow was a precursor to Gossip Girl, except in a decidedly unglamorous locale of southern Virginia.

It was THE summer mystery as everyone tried to figure out who this mystery emailer was, and it offered us an exciting thrill that made me feel like I was in a Sweet Valley Twins novel. My friend Jenna, the keeper of all secrets and gossip at Carlisle, figured out who it was a year later, and the discovery of this mystery rabble rouser's identity proved to be very lame.

Jenna and I, together, were tricksters and started to send emails out to our class with an email address - "YouWillNevaKnow@hotmail.com." Our advice was actually pretty pointed and directed to certain members of the class who we thought needed help getting their act together wardrobe-wise. Granted, I wholeheartedly admit that I was a shallow bitch, but who isn't when they're 15? No one figured it out, but we got people talking.

We took it even further. We heard through the grapevine that my friend Lauren W was being harassed by an anonymous emailer called "gorillaman" (it turned out to be a cute soccer player Nathan W, we would discover later). He would send her cryptic, threatening e-mails, and Lauren received it with a cheerful annoyance that teenage boys construe as flirting.

Jenna and I decided to "flirt" with Lauren, too. We started sending her cryptic email messages from "gorillawoman" in the same vain as gorillaman. Lauren was confused and never did figure out that her close, seemingly-innocuous friend Mariam was the source of said internet harassment. Eventually, we got bored with the entire endeavor, and I never did get the chance to tell Lauren. And here I am, atoning for my decade-old sins via blog.

--By Mariam Q., a student at UTCOM.

Meeting Ira Glass

2008-02-09T23:07:00.000-05:00

Ira Glass came to the Ann Arbor Borders today to promote the This American Life DVD (in stores now!). I, of course, was beyond excited; meeting Ira Glass is the equivalent of that "Leave Britney ALONE!" kid from YouTube meeting the lovely (but deeply troubled) Miss Spears. After all, I had recently listened to a years' worth of This American Life on long journey to Pakistan and felt that in that short span of time I knew Ira.

He always seemed so genuinely interested in people's stories; there wasn't this objective distance that many journalists convey when dealing with their subjects. On the show, he also seemed so perceptive - finding a universal meaning in the most mundane, yet entertaining, of events. Now, of course, there is always that element of distrust wherein public figures rarely match their on-screen persona. For instance, the perky Rachel Ray from 30 Minute Meals seems as if she's a chirpy girl-next-door, but she was recently caught in an alleged diva moment when she demanded Starbucks coffee on the set of her Dunkin' Donuts commercial.

He did an hour-long Q&A session, in which I learned that Ira Glass was even wittier and nicer than on the radio. When he talked about work with a creative element, I was thisclose to dropping out of medical school and pitching idiosyncratic stories to This American Life for the rest of my working career. And so, Abby, Farrah, Sophie and I excitedly stood in line to get our DVDs signed. Weirdly, we were given a post-it note and told that we could have an inscription of our choice. Farrah and Abby had cute, witty ideas, and I literally suffered from a case of performance anxiety. Finally, I settled on, "Mariam, love the blog! Ira Glass."

The blog comment proved to be a very worthy segueway when Ira Glass asked me the address to our worthy website and told me to write it down for him. This was probably the highlight of everyone's evening. I then told him: "Wow you're even better in real life than on the radio," which I'm sure had this creepy element to it since it's not everyday that short, brown girls in medical school give Ira Glass comments that linger on borderline harassment.

Nevertheless, Ira Glass, if you are reading this, we love your show, and you are not a diva in the manner of Rachel Ray at all. And I literally talk about the show everyday with Farrah and Abby (in fact, in the past month, I think it's been the only topic of conversation). And below are links of our favorite blogs (if you feel that there is a story idea for This American Life within the depths of our humble blog):

Mariam:
Foreign Parents
It's Never Over: Ira Glass and Me
The Dark Side of the Gym
Studying is Serious Business

Farrah:
My Torrid Affair with Haute Couture
Hallway Etiquette
The 3-Hole Punch is the Water Cooler of Medical School
Oh, that Kayak, It's just something I built last weekend with my bare hands

Mariam and Farrah joint venture:
How to be Girly: Lesson 3: Anatomy of a Facebook Profile

--By Mariam, who is overly excited by this whole Ira Glass encounter and will probably relay this to individuals who a) don't care and b) don't even know what station NPR is on with a zealous animation that will make it seem as if she was Plaxico Buress or Eli Manning last Sunday.

The Lawn Mower Stripper Technique

2008-02-08T21:47:00.000-05:00

In my Fundamentals of Clinical Practice class, I discovered there is a lot more technique involved in the physical exam than I ever anticipated. I recently had a lecture on the most awkward of subjects entitled: Male and Female Genital Exams, and Breast Exams. I'm not even going to touch on the first part of that lecture, and needless to say, I've pretty much eliminated proctology and OBGYN as career choices. When it came to breast exams, it turns out there are several different techniques to ensure that no potential hazardous lumps go unnoticed. Several techniques were described to us: Clock Pattern, Wedge Pattern, Swirl Pattern, and Lawn Mower Stripping. Lawn Mower Stripping was emphasized as the ideal choice. I could have been mistaken, but it really sounded like "Lawn Mower Stripping" and the lawn mower part is definitely descriptive. You just go up and down as if mowing a lawn in straight lines, only you're not mowing a lawn - you're examining a breast.

I have physical exam lab the day after lecture. After sweating in my white coat for an hour, I was the last student to perform the exam. There were four students, one standardized patient, and one instructor in every lab room. Everybody watches you do your exam which is a little nerve racking. The instructor kept on correcting my hand position to make lumps and irregularities more obvious. She kindly told me, "Now, it's called the lawn mower technique, and you know when you're mowing a lawn you want to keep your lines straight. The same idea applies here, so you don't miss anything." I nervously replied with, "I don't mow lawns. Well actually, nobody let's me mow the lawn anymore because last time I did, my sister said the lines were too crooked." (This is a true story - my sister sent pictures of the lawn to my dad to show off how dysfunctional I am) We all had a nice little chuckle, even the lady with her top off had a laugh... awkward!

--By Farrah, who's going to meet Ira Glass tomorrow, and wants to ask him if he is willing to switch jobs

A Blog in Honor of Super Tuesday

2008-02-05T17:21:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, Slate had an interesting video about how Hillary Clinton was like Tracey Flick, the overzealous, uptight gunner from Tom Perotta's novel Election and Alexander Payne's 1999 film, which I absolutely love. Election is a satire about the American election process represented within the microcosm of student council elections within a Nebraskan high school. Tracey Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon in the film, is a type-A neurotic - you knew her in high school - she was on the field hockey team, student council, Spanish club, NHS, and the choir. She was bound for Harvard, but no one really liked her all that much. Teachers were annoyed at her know-it-all attitude as she aggressively waved her hand when a teacher asked question, and she also grade grubbed. Below is said video:

Anyway, Hillary is compared to Tracey Flick, and I completely agree with this analysis. She shows very little emotion and speaks about policy with a robot-like efficiency. She's that girl in high school who was valedictorian, and the teachers continually spoke about her brilliance. However, when you talked to her, you realized she was dry as toast. She didn't have a compelling personality or an ounce of creativity but could churn out lab reports and English papers with a machine-like diligence.

In contrast, Barack Obama is the popular football star in high school. He was that kid who came from an unstable background, but he had that Midas touch. It seemed like everything came to him with such ease. He got decent grades without trying, and he had this great, sparkling personality. Everyone slapped his back after the big football game in the hallway. All the teachers swooned whenever he talked in class because he was so cute! And to top it off, while others were seething with jealousy over Barack's charmed life, he was protected from the evil eye because he was such a nice guy and not an ass tool in the slightest. Now of course, this may not be at all how public high schools in small town America are like, because I went to Carlisle, where there were no clear-cut dichotomies between popular and the uncool, but it is my artistic attempt to approximate what public education offers.

Anyway, choosing between Barack and Hillary is ultimately a reflection of one's personality. Are you going to choose Barack and be sucked in by his charisma and continual affirmations of "transformative politics," and blatantly ignore the fact that he has had a mere four years of experience in the U.S. Senate? Or are you the high school minority who realizes that Hillary, despite all her prickliness, is a capable politician, but can't win the hearts of people due to her lack of charm? And sadly (or maybe happily?), I am a typical high schooler at heart, and I can only see Barack's star power with his exotic Indonesian primary school education, and I see Hillary as that sad loser in those ugly, ill-fitting power suits and her cutthroat willingness of doing anything to get to the White House.

--By Mariam, who thinks that Huckabee looks eerily like Kevin Spacey.

One of these things is not like the other.

2008-01-25T19:14:00.001-05:00

Do you remember on Sesame Street when Big Bird would say, "One of these things is not like the other, can you guess which one?" Then they would present you with three toasters and an orangutan, and you would happily yell out, "The monkey! The monkey!"

Well, I was sending an e-mail to a friend (shout out to Tor, woot woot!) about planning another friend's (woot woot AL!) bachlorette party, and these were the sponsored links along the e-mail.

Sponsored Links
Bachelorette Party Supply
Discount Prices - Huge Inventory Same Day Shipping
www.NawtyThings.com
Ladies Night Limos -
Bachelorette Party Limo's Nightclubs, Stripper, Drinks/Pizza
victoryorganization.com/ladiesnight
Fun Bachelorette Party
Pole Dancing & Jacuzzi Party At our studio in San Francisco
www.heelsontheceiling.com
Bachelorette Party Ideas
Custom Bachelorette Party T-Shirts Unique Ideas and Free Shipping
CustomInk.com
Butt Acne
Find about the latest
Butt Acne Here!
InfoZephyr.Com/acne

What I'm wondering is why Proactive doesn't start marketing to the probably 100s of people that suffer from butt acne. I want Jessica Simpson to come on TV and tell me, "For years I suffered from the embarrassing effects of butt acne. And it was just awful because I was always on the road showing off my butt, eating M&Ms, and being stressed out. They had to touch up all of my ass shots until I found Proactive. Just three steps a day, and I'm on my way to clear and smooth butt." I bet people will be super excited when it's easier than ever to tell others to "kiss my ass!"

--By Farrah, who is too scared to go to any of these sponsored links provided by gmail because she is way vanilla for heelsontheceiling.com

The Writers' Strike and Me

2008-01-15T22:22:00.001-05:00

The Writers' Strike has been going on since November, and at first, I barely felt the effects. After all, my DVR was filled to the max with new episodes of really neat shows. It was an all-you-can-eat TV buffet back then.

Now in the winter of our discontent, when it is too cold to leave the house and engage with human beings due to an asthmatic bronchospasms induced by the frigid, Ohio air, the Writers' Strike starts to hit me hard. My TV watching habits are a shell of their former selves. I have started to waver between watching the debased lowbrow entertainment that caters to the "lowest common denominator" and the relatively highbrow (for Middle America at least) - CNN.

For instance, I realized things were getting dire when I started to watch the new season of One Tree Hill, an absolutely shitty teen show that is filmed in my native North Carolina. It stars a skeezy star, Chad Michael Murray, whose marriage to his costar ended after a mere six months because of an ill-fated dalliance with Paris Hilton. Now dear blog reader, one may be wondering why One Tree Hill is so horrific; does the fact that Keven Federline (i.e. the former Mr. Britney Spears) guest-starred as a rapper-singer in the vain of CrazyTown last night make it any clearer? What is happening to me, I thought, but I continued watching because I was that desperate.

I also started subscribing to multiple movie channels (I have nearly 12 channels devoted entirely to B-list movies). Before the Writers' Strike, I used to be a relative movie snob. I liked obscure, indie foreign films and despised mainstream comedies for their crass commercialism and their subtle endorsement of bourgeois values. I am no longer that person; for instance, last night, I watched Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller. Although Ricky Gervais was hilarious, I recall that that movie was nominated for a Razzie award for Worst Movie. I also watched John Tucker Must Die, a crap movie starring Hollywood douche Jesse Metcalf. Sample dialogue:
Heather: John and I belong together. He's the varsity captain, and after all, I AM the head cheerleader.

At the same time, though, the strike has reawakened my civic interests as I watch CNN's coverage of primary/caucus season obsessively. Who will win South Carolina? Nevada? Primary season is like a sporting event, as one roots for a favorite team team. The tickers at the bottom of the screen showing the percent of precincts reporting is mesmerizing. The political mudslinging is really cool, too - did Hillary Clinton, the Tracey Flick of the election, just call Obama, America's own popular, football player with a charismatic smile, a drug user? I have also started to find Anderson Cooper really dreamy and imagine what it would be like if we were married (most likely an intellectual free-for-all as we trekked through the Amazon to inform ignorant Americans about obscure, environmental travesties).

I have also started to watch ESPN. I am about two days away from watching Sports Center (I'm not there yet though!). For example, right now, in lieu of Gossip Girl and its fantabulous wardrobe, I am watching a sweaty Tyler Hansborough in an unfashionably shiny jersey in the Georgia Tech - North Carolina game. Tomorrow I might even watch Nadal or the Man Who Made Tennis Boring, Federer, at the Australian Open. I have really changed, and perhaps even, grown, as a person. It is a strange feeling.

--By Mariam, who really did not enjoy today's presentation on fiscal responsibility at school today.

From Patient to Proctor

2008-01-12T15:33:00.000-05:00

Anytime you make a fool of yourself, you are bound to relive its horror until the end of time. For most of us, our first encounter with a patient, even a standardized patient, is awkward to say the least. Whether you laughed out loud when you heard the word "impotence," or you tried to keep a serious face when the answer to your question "What brings you in today?" was "My neighbor Sheila's car," you gained a memory that cannot be erased. I can still vividly remember my first patient interview from last year. I pompously thought asking a few questions will be easy. When I actually sat down for my interview in front of my peers, my voice went several octaves higher than my normal speaking voice, and I used the clever phrase "um" several times in a row.

I've gotten much better at interviewing patients and consciously lowering my voice to a mature alto. Despite my improvement, I'm still new enough at the task that I easily get nervous and speak in my high pitched little girl voice. Although we're looking at these interviews as real-life practice, our standardized patients are just playing a role. They are terribly good at their jobs, and when one tells you, "I'm having problems pleasing my wife in bed," you believe him. We're not living in a big city, and since our standardized patients are picked from the staff and community around us, we inevitably encounter them in our real life.

Student often comment on the Nazi-like rule over our testing. Those who arrive 15 minutes early get lectured about the importance of being on time, while those who arrive one minute before the test must wait in the back to be checked in before starting. In the stress of awaiting our exams, I'm not sure if anybody notices that most of our test proctors are also our standardized patients. They are all there: the alcoholic church lady, the impotent chemist, and the raving old woman who would grease her legs with something called elephant ears (?!?). I know that these proctors were just playing a role, but I can't really get my first memory of them out of my mind. Although I'm always going to look at them as the raving impotent alcoholics, I wonder if they remember their interviewers and look at me as the med student with the sing-song little girl voice. They never show judgment when I'm in the room, nervous about my own skills, for which I am grateful, so I try my best not to judge them for the roles they are assigned to play. Though now that we actually have to touch these standardized patients to practice physical exams, I hope they use somebody other than our proctors. Otherwise, before tests instead of focusing on the facts I have to remember, when I receive my scantron I will be thinking, "It's the heroine addict with a hairy mole on his back... gross."

--By Farrah, who now wants to name her band My Square Heart so it can go on bumper stickers as "MY[ ]<3"

What I Did on My Winter Vacation Part I

2008-01-08T17:41:00.000-05:00

Remember in grade school when everyone did a report on what they did over summer/winter break? Since I went to Carlisle, those reports were very exotic -i.e. "I went to St. Thomas!" "I went on a tour of Europe with all my friends and a man named Nobel Marshall, and my Gucci watch fell into the Thames river!" (a la Lyz B.). Since I was a foreign kid, our vacations consisted of going back to a "developing country," Pakistan and dealing with the harsh, uncomfortable living conditions there.

Looking at property with Ayyaz and Shahla!

And so, this past break, I went to Pakistan after four, long years. I was anxious about my trip. I had just recently finished my Immunity and Infection blog so I was super paranoid about the exotic diseases that were endemic there. What if I got tapeworm?

Things didn't start out well for me. On the day of my departure, a huge blizzard hit Toledo. It was nearly impossible to get to the airport. My taxi driver was an old man of seventy. This was going to be the guy to navigate the dangerous, snow-covered streets and carry my 50 lb suitcases? Alas, I made it to JFK.

My dad and I flew on Emirates Airlines, which was fairly pimp - much like the U.A.E. - needlessly flashy and conspicuous. My throat started to hurt, though, mid-flight, and I started to sneeze continuously. My dad had taken an entire Ambien and alas was little help in providing me with a diagnosis.
"Dad, I'm getting influenza!"
"Mariam, you have acid-reflux," my dad said in a drug-induced sleep haze. I had suffered from Ashlee Simpson disease for nearly 10 years, and I knew that this feeling of general malaise was not GERD.

We finally reached Lahore, Pakistan after 18 hours. It had been a long flight, and I was anxious to get out of my smelly, plane clothes. However, there was no sign of our 3 suitcases at the baggage claim. Then, we waited in a small office filled with scary, aggressive, desi men, who kept saying, "Welcome to Pakistan!" in response to my anguish over the lost luggage.

One boy of about 20 started chatting my dad and I up, and I thought in my head, I will impress him with my super premium Urdu-speaking skills. He won't even realize I'm from America! Tragically, this boy started to use big words I didn't comprehend. I stared at him blankly, and my dad translated. So much for blending in with the natives.

We finally headed to my nana's house after spending three hours in a claustrophobic office reporting our lost luggage. I didn't get my luggage until four days later, and I had to wear my only outfit - a Carolina sweatshirt that my mom had bought me from the little boys' section. All the while, I was filled up to my ears with snot and had developed a hacking cough that made me sound like a pack-a-day septuagenarian with emphysema. Attractive. My mother, in a desperate attempt to make me look presentable to relatives I had not seen in four years, told me put on some lipstick. Unfortunately, there was no hope for that ill-fitting Carolina sweatshirt and my non-matching Uggs.

Pictures of Jinnah everywhere!

--Part II coming soon: Jumping through bureaucratic hoops to get my luggage, and a surprise at the Karachi Sheraton.

--By Mariam, who is really upset by the New Hampshire primary results and has been awake since 5 AM due to jet lag.

A Magnificent, Most Glorious Return to Blogging

2007-12-06T17:11:00.000-05:00

After a much-needed hiatus of soul-searching, I have returned to the triumphant and deceptive world of blogging. The drama of blogging has settled , and the irresistible urge to entertain and touch the hearts of the masses (okay fine, the five regular readers excluding Farrah and me)* supersedes any desire to stand on principle.

There is a writer's strike going on, people! What does that mean for you, dear blog reader? That means no new programming on TV on any major network! No new episodes of that caveman show you've grown to love, no more The Office, just shitty reality shows about skating with C-list celebrities (at least there is college basketball to keep us entertained as we pray that UCLA drops even further in the power rankings)**. In dire times like these, bloggers should rise to the occasion and fill the hole in people's hearts left by their empty TV screens.

And so, today's blog topic: a brief memoir of my time at UNC. After coming to Toledo, I realized how truly magnificent UNC really was. There was something for everyone! Let's say you are a card-carrying member of the Republican party, your daddy was CEO of one of the textile companies, and you loved pearls, Lacoste shirts with popped collars, Rainbows, designer jeans, and sororities. Well, you could join the Tri-Delts (with the right connections to Southern aristocracy, of course) and go tailgating on the weekends.

Are you a beefy guy who loves sports? Well, UNC has one of the best basketball programs in NCAA history. You could follow the travails of Matt Doherty as he struggled as head coach in the early 00s. You could take a near-psychotic interest in men's basketball, as you camped out for Duke-UNC tickets or stormed Franklin Street in a testosterone frenzy when we beat the team eight miles down on Tobacco Road.

Or let's say you were way indie and liked the French New Wave, thought that the Bush administration was the epitome of the "banality of evil" to quote Hannah Arendt, and loved obscure, indie music. You could head on over to Cat's Cradle to listen to cool, new bands and even mainstream ones (i.e. Rooney). Liked world-class writers? Wait! There's Joan Didion as the annual Thomas Wolfe speaker! Liked Southern history? Head on over the scary hallways of Wilson Library to check out their huge collection of archival material of the Civil War.

And so, in short, this is my swan song to UNC. I love you, miss you, and we will find each other again very soon.

* = Jack, Emily, Abby, Sarah, Anna-Liisa!
** = Trash talking for edification of Roman

--By Mariam, who wonders why Farrah likes the White Stripes and is also really upset that the stupid meth-head Amy Winehouse won multiple Grammy nominations.

My Torrid Affair with Haute Couture

2007-12-06T12:02:00.000-05:00

It all started with a beautiful wool coat. In a pretty shade of winter white, it caught my eye on the Anthropologie website. It had a hood cascading from the back, and delicate barely-pink ribbons descending in the front. It was too expensive - everything at Anthropologie is too expensive. As my roommate astutely observed, "You're so shocked by the prices in the front of the store, by the time you get to the sale section in the basement, you think '$80 for a shirt, that's nothing!'" I checked the website every day, willing the coat to go on sale with my mind powers. Eventually my obsession progressed to the point that I had to see the coat in person. I didn't want to pay for shipping, so I looked up the closest Anthropologie, which was in Troy, MI. I called to see if they had the coat - they didn't. Not willing to give up, I called the next Anthropologie on the list in Birmingham, MI. They didn't have the coat either, but then the girl on the phone told me that they could ship the coat to my house for free since they didn't carry it in their store. Free shipping was a girl's dream come true! It was like getting 5% off the coat, so I was sold, and I gave her my information. She told me they would call me when the order was complete, and I was just twitching with excitement.

I waited for a week with no calls and no charge to my credit card. I called the store at this one week mark, which just happened to be black Friday. I knew the store would be swamped, but I didn't care because somebody had to track down my coat. The girl on the phone told me she didn't know which coat I was talking about and couldn't find my order, but promised to call me back after she talked to the catalog people. When I got home later that day, I rushed to my computer to check for my coat on the website. It was gone, M.I.A, auf'd! I finally found it on my wish list where it had been marked down 50%!!! I aggressively clicked the mouse to get it put in my cart, but ALL SIZES WERE SOLD OUT! I was pissed. I had ordered it a week ago, and now I would never get it... never. I made a few more calls, but my spirit was broken and nobody could help me since they had no record of my original order.

I started to look at a lot of different online shops that night to fill the void left in the wake of my missing coat. I soon stalked many items online that were outside of my budget - a red Hayden-Harnett tote bag, gold crocodile Dolce Vita heels, Provocateur Joe's Jeans, comfy suede Ugg boots. By the next day, I had signed up for e-mail notifications for discounts on 4 or 5 websites. Friends were giving me secret discount codes for various websites. It was all very hush hush and drug dealer-ish. "Go to the website Lunaboston, and put in the code 'Gretchen' before you leave for a deal" sounds an awful lot like "Go to Larry on the corner of Dorr and Byrne and say 'Veronica' and he'll give you a great deal on some crack."

I sat through the daily incomprehensible drone at school about EKGs and cardiac drugs, daydreaming about fashion. After an afternoon EKG workshop, I needed a release and I went to see a late showing of Enchanted. I thought the movie was really cute and enjoyed the way Disney was making fun of itself. When I read Slate Magazine's review of Enchanted, with its critique of the shopping montage towards the end of the film, I felt like I had been personally attacked! I dismissed the author as a feminist disconnected with the average 6-year-old girl's fantasies of princesses and designer couture. I was defending my obsession like an alcoholic justifies that extra drink.

My sister asked me if I still wanted to go see my coat in Michigan, and I told her it was gone. Then I thought maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to go to a bigger mall with more things, so I organized a trip with my sister, my 6 months old nephew, and Mariam to go to the fancy Sumerset Mall in Troy, MI. We got to the mall on a Friday afternoon around 2:30 pm, and later around 8 pm, things really started to go downhill. I found one really cute sweater, but it took an hour and a half to get there, so I was determined to get some sort of life-altering addition to my wardrobe. We eventually progressed to the section of the mall that was outside of everybody's budget, short of British Royalty and celebrities. After looking at several exorbitantly expensive purses, my sister picked up a $995 Dolce and Gabbana white patent leather purse exclaiming, "$995 what a deal!" We all jovially repeated "only $995" over and over again, giddy and weak from walking all day and skipping dinner. My nephew started spitting up in Saks Fifth Avenue all over my coat and then my sister's coat - it was time to leave. In the end, I got one sweater, Mariam got one sweater, and my sister got the 5 for $25 underwear from Victoria's Secret that she could have gotten in Toledo. We left the mall starving and unwilling to wait an hour and a half to eat at PF Changs, walking into the cold and cruel air of Detroit. My sister ran towards the car so my nephew wouldn't get cold. Mariam and I walked slowly with aching feet yelling, "Go on, you can leave me here. Save yourself, I can't go on anymore!!" This was rock bottom of my shopping addiction. We drove home and ended up stopping to eat at Red Lobster by the Detroit Airport at 10 pm with aching bellies.

When all was said and done, I got one coat on clearance and the sweater from Michigan. I ended up ordering a few things online with discount codes and sent them all back for refunds unable to justify even the discounted price after seeing the items in person. With every arriving disappointing online purchase, the drive to get more haute couture lessened - like Nicorette gum taking of the edge. I don't think I'll make anymore clothing purchases online. Things are basically back to the way they were before the white coat came through my life turning things upside down. Everything is more bohemian, without a desire for too many material things and a want to give money to like, charities and stuff. It's totally like Cher's epiphany in the movie Clueless when she starts helping the people that went through some sort of natural disaster and lost their skis. Anyway, the moral of the story: Don't do Drugs!

--By Farrah, who these days would rather spend her money on music equipment for the experimental sounds of her new band "Exaggerate" (or "Opsonize", we haven't decided yet) which is basically her and Abby goofing off
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Now playing: Simian Mobile Disco - Hustler (U.S. Version)
via FoxyTunes

My first medical procedure plus reasons not to tell your 5 year old about melanoma

2007-11-23T22:07:00.001-05:00

I can remember driving around with my mom and older sister when I was younger. My older sister was probably around 13 years old, so I was 5 or 6 years old. I remember my sister was trying to convince my mom that moles give you cancer. She emphatically exclaimed, "No mom, I'm serious, cause like this girl at school, her mom had this mole, and the doctor told her it was cancer, and they had to take out this like humongous chuck of her skin." My mom was dismissing her nonchalantly. I'm sure my mom knows that skin cancer can develop from irregular looking moles, but she was just trying to make sure her kids wouldn't go into a cancer fearing panic every time they saw a freckle on their skin. At this point, I was already panicked in the backseat. I could remember seeing kids with cancer on TV and some B list movie star telling me to donate money or these kids would die - they would die! I sat there starring at the moles on my forearm, simply terrified. I listened to my sister make her next argument from the front seat, "Really mom, if you have a mole that looks funny, it's probably cancer, you have to go to like the doctor right away."

Then I saw it, a funny looking mole. It was small and the same brown color as all of the other moles on my skin, but it wasn't perfectly round. I didn't want to die, so I knew what I had to do - I would have to excise the mole. I started to pick at the offensive mole and soon drew blood. After I removed a good section around the mole, I was satisfied and held my sleeve to the wound to stop the bleeding. The section of skin never really healed properly - it's a small bump that's barely darker than its surrounding skin. It's amazing how unfiltered information can influence a young mind. Actually, it's amazing how unfiltered information can influence an adult mind. Have you ever tried to explain antibiotic-resistant bacteria to the average mom? I'm not even sure I've convinced my own mom. Oh well, it's been almost 20 years, and (knock on wood) I've been cancer free! The procedure was a success!

--By Farrah, who is already tired of Thanksgiving leftovers, and it's only been one day!

You Think You Know Someone

2007-11-13T19:44:00.000-05:00

In Conversations with Other Women, a man and a woman, who were once married, reconnect at a wedding. The director uses a pretentious, film-schoolish split screen for the entirety of the movie. While sort of annoying to watch, the point he is trying to make by separating the screen is that men and women never inhabit the same physical and even mental and emotional plane. I think this idea is applicable to all people - that we are fundamentally disconnected from each other mentally that we can never know anyone in his or her entirety.

Of course, the very definition of behavior is predictability, but knowing someone is like having a very sophisticated computer algorithm of if...then statements of all of one's"close" friends. For example:
If Farrah gets salad with meal,
Then, Farrah gives away salad.

If Bushra sees the pisiform bone,
Then she yells at offending person.

Of course, algorithms aren't infinite, and we can't always guess what people will do. And when they surprise us, it's like we have a week's worth of gossip to disentangle and analyze.

When I was in the Upper School, there was a super cute guy in my class, who we will call Duke Orsino (Twelfth Night has some relevance to this story, I promise). Duke was slightly on the weird side, but he was such a sweet guy who had a random sense of humor (i.e. he liked to give people the finger in class and giggled anytime the teacher said to turn to page 69). Duke was popular (all the girls swooned over him), and you'd never figure him for a sap or a sucker in love. Duke Orsino was, in short, a heartthrob - Carlisle's very own modern-day, chivalric Freddie Prinze in She's All That.

Unfortunately, after he broke up with his girlfriend, Olivia (name has been changed to fit my Twelfth Night metaphor), she was really sad, but also became really revealing about the relationship. After a football game, we went over to Olivia's house, and she got out her box of memories. Now, I'd like to think that Duke and I were fairly good friends; we weren't braiding each other's hair or anything, but I felt like I knew him.

But - I guess I didn't. Inside the box were crappy poems he'd written her. I felt like I was in a really shitty teen romance novel written by Francine Pascell or something. The poems were horrifically bad as one would expect from an unworldly 17-year-old Lothario. Unfortunately, I wasn't exactly the romantic type, and all I could think about my friend Duke was how fundamentally lame he was. We all had a good laugh on his expense as he wrote things about how having Olivia in his life "was the best thing that happened to me."

Then, came the horrific yearbook entry. He should have stuck with "Have a good summer"; instead, Duke wrote a three-page diatribe on how Olivia had "saved" him from depression and that "my heart beats for you," things you'd never expect the coolest guy in school to write about. I felt strange as if my conception of good and evil had been destroyed. If popular guys were insecure, lame, and horrifically bad writers when in love, then what could be said about the universe and it's strict paradigms of who was popular and who wasn't?

After that, I never looked at Duke the same way, as he lived up to his pseudonym by being in love with the very idea of love. In Twelfth Night, Orsino says, "If thou ever shalt love, In the sweet pangs of it remember me; For such as I am all true lovers are." And so, Martinsville's own Duke was such a "true lover," who we privately made fun of by yelling out random lines of his poetry in class as he sat there confused.

--By Mariam, who is super-excited about her My So-Called Life Date with Bushra and Nameless Friend.

Art and Voyeurism

2007-11-11T02:24:00.000-05:00

The other night I was watching Grey's Anatomy, even though the show is an absolute crapfest that makes people want to go through four torturous years of medical school, just so they can become bed-hopping interns, who have implausible, inappropriate relationships with their attendings.

Anyways, as I watched Izzie and George awkwardly banter in bed about their sexual incompatibility, I had a feeling I had never felt before while watching TV - utter discomfort. Why was I watching these interns deal with such a private matter? Relationship issues and matters dealing with chemistry were so utterly private in real life, and here I was, actively engaging in whether Izzie and George would make it. And then, I realized, serialized dramas transformed the average TV viewer into a typical voyeur, our 40-inch flat screens becoming a surrogate window into peoples' secret lives, truths they didn't even share with themselves.

For example, I knew more about the interns of Seattle Grace than I did my own friends because with friends, there are certain things you just didn't discuss. For instance, I knew the elaborate sexual circle of the characters, and the intimate and embarrassing moments that had transpired between the sheets. These were things I didn't even want to know about many of my friends as there are certain, sensitive matters that are better kept away from prying eyes.

Nevertheless, all art is essentially a voyeuristic journey into both the artist's psyche as well as the fictional world he or she has created. For example, Look Homeward Angel is a novelized autobiography of Thomas Wolfe's life - Asheville, North Carolina became the mountain town Altamont, and UNC-Chapel Hill became Pulpit Hill. In one incident, Eugene Gant (Wolfe's thinly disguised alter-ego) visits the local brothel to lose his virginity and contracts syphilis from his habitual visits. While I was reading Wolfe's autobiography, I read that this actually happened to the author, and I found it shocking that he included it in his first novel. And I realized that while I know that North Carolina's most famous writer had an STD, I will probably never be sure which one of my friends ever had one - I don't think anyone would like to admit to that (unless forced to do so by the Department of Public Health).

E.O. Wilson, a professor at Harvard, examines what the scientific evolutionary purpose of art is in his work in a field of Biopoetics. Perhaps art's true purpose is that it appeals to our voyeuristic sensibilities. Maybe we realize that we can never know anyone fully (pride often gets in the way of embarrassing confessions), and art satisfies that curiosity by providing surrogate characters/artists we can engage ourselves with rather than real people, who are secretive and disconnected from each other.

And even famous art force many of us to engage in conspiracy theories about the nature of the subject to the artist. We have an obsessive desire for these paintings to reveal some hidden truth about the artist's secret inner life. For instance, many conjecture that the model in "The Nude Maja" was Goya's secret mistress. At the Prado, I was told that Goya did two paintings of the same model - one clothed for the subject's husband and a secret, nude portrait. While this conspiracy theory is rejected by art historians now, it reveals an inherently human need to find secret meanings in art - so that we can become Peeping Toms of even history.

However, to be fair, though, artists (and even bloggers) are to some extent narcissists and exhibitionists, inviting the viewer to take time out and marvel at and speculate about their rich, inner lives through their cryptic, symbolic art. After all, ask yourself, why are we so angry at J.D. Salinger for disappearing into anonymity and not becoming a flamboyant equivalent of Truman Capote?

--By Mariam, who still thinks art is, like, way cool!

Stories from the back row, left side

Southern Hospitality... NOT

Reasons to get a roommate besides Teddy

Stories from Thanksgiving

Things in the movie Babies not recommended by the average pediatrician

Lonely Nights in the Baptist

Vampire Weeknights

NOVA special provides terrifying glimpse of the future

The Five Stages of Accepting Your Pager

Career-dropping

Bad Muslim Jokes

Fixing the Finale of Lost

TV Doctors never write Medical Notes

Childhood STOLEN by American Girl Store

Blast from the Past: Journal Entries

I promise we didn't couples match

Blog Submissions: Awkward Interview Moments Series

Critical Analysis of a Tile: Part IV

How to tell a residency program "I want to go to there"

Writing effective Thank You Letter

The Poltics of Naming

Hospital on a Hill

Well Portland Oregon and sloe gin fizz, if that ain't love then tell me what is

Singles Vs. Marrieds: A Comparison Study

Critical Analysis of Drawings on Tile: Part IV of a Series

Meet Farrah

A Complex Person

Crtical Analysis of Drawings on a Tile: Part III of a Series

Critical Analysis of Drawings on Tile: Bonus Link and Video!

Garage Sales

Critical Analysis of Drawings on Tile: Part II of a Series

Critical Analysis of Drawings on Tile: Part I of a Series

"It's all fun and games until someone gets shit in their eyes."

The Death of Blogging

Surgery Grand Rounds

Musings while on Surgery Call

UNC: 2009 NCAA Champions

Cosmo confession: I was a TV Extra

Specialty Scoreboard

Those Cute Slumdog Kids

The Curious Case of Benjamin *snore*

"Mary" @ Tech Support

I, Robot

The Pathophysiology of a Butt Abscess

It's so hard to say goodbye

Careful, the beverage you're about to enjoy is extremely hot

The Amazon Wish List

Mariam Q = 3 siblings in one!

The Sarah Palin in All of Us...

Pretend Patients

My Sparkling Personality....

Excuses

Cosmo Confession: I Hate Sex and the City

The One Time I was Mean (Hard to Believe)!

The Most Romantic Day of My Life

Difficult Communication

M&M's "Just Ok"

The Subtle Art of Bragging

Things I didn't expect

My Tortuous History with the MSA

What I Want to be When I Grow Up: A Blogger

A Blogging Gift

Ah yes, I am an ass

A Blog Hiatus

Agree to Disagree

Am I a White Person?

When Drug Naming Goes Bad

Summer Camp for Dorks

My Anti-social Generation

The Dark Side of Flirting

Hipsters and Retards

Pakistani People and Jane Austen

Traumarama: Cake does NOT get you off the wait list

A Cosmo Confession: Internets and Anonymity

Meeting Ira Glass

The Lawn Mower Stripper Technique

A Blog in Honor of Super Tuesday

One of these things is not like the other.

The Writers' Strike and Me

From Patient to Proctor

The Curious Case of Benjamin snore