Monday, June 1, 2009
Free house
It's been a long while since I've blogged. It's not that I've fallen into credit card debt and spend my days and night checking my balances and reconsolidating loans, quite the opposite in fact. I've been studying and living in other people's houses and shopping at Aldi and Unique Thrift Store and generally buying little. But an exciting new opportunity presents: Owen and I are moving downtown and plan on furnishing our apartment only with things we already have, things we make ourselves, things we get for free. Follow us as we embark upon creating a house where you are free to be you and I am free to me, just as free as free can be. What will this place turn into? If its any indication, we have already started saving spent pens and discarded peanut butter jar lids in order to make an 80s era sculpture or mural of refuse. I'm terribly excited and ready to dumpster dive and curb surf like a maniac during our last weeks in Evanston to get ready for FREEHOUSE!
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The End of an Era
As the year of greatly reduced buy sputtered out of existence with the advent of 2008, I have mused a bit about what I learned by undertaking this experiment. First and foremost, it is hard not to buy anything, whatsoever. It requires more foresight, planning, impulse-control, and awkwardness with friends than I expected or possessed. We live in a country built on the notion that you can buy your way to happiness, peace, power, and security. Our government is poised to give people money specifically so that they can spend it on random trinkets. What kind of message does that send to children? Consumption is a civic a duty? There are so many ways to participate in our government, and our society more broadly, but it seems that buying things is the easiest route. Consumption appears to take the least amount of time and emotional involvement and thus defines our collective societal terrain. (Although as someone who shopped the post-Christmas Old Navy sale/insanity for colored jeans, I would point out that I emerged from that store hours later and mentally and emotionally drained). So lesson one of the year is that it takes considerable effort to stay involved with mainstream American society if you don't buy.
The second thing that struck me about this year is the difference between being anti-consumer and pro-environment. At the outset, these ideologies might seem perfectly aligned, but I found that I could live quite frugally in environmentally harmful ways. When Owen and I were still in Baltimore, we often grocery shopped at Save-a-lot, a store remarkable for its rock bottom prices on everything. But, many of the products were trucked or shipped long distances, the tuna was not dolphin-safe, the produce was drenched in pesticides, and the coffee was probably traded in the most unfair way possible. If I was paying bottom dollar, then somewhere else in the world, another person or animal was being shafted. Two ideas spoke to me on this issue. The first is Michael Pollan's argument (from his book, the Omnivore's Dilemma) that we should eat locally and recognize where our food came from and the impact of growing or raising it. Second, reading NY Times articles about the environmental and human abuses at factories in China following the lead paint on toys scandal impressed upon me again that cheap things carry high costs elsewhere. I want to start buying more toys and clothes made domestically and with an eye towards quality. Both Pollan and the Times coverage made me think that environmental protection, human rights, and support of local business are things worth paying premiums for.
The third thought I have looking back is that it can be FUN to participate in the economy. Owen and I joined a crazy beater of a gym down the street from us called the Sweat Shop. We love going to exercise classes and working out there. The monthly fee is worth those experiences and benefits to our bodies.
Perhaps I will have more thoughts about this experience soon. I'm reading Alan Wiseman's "The World Without Us" and have been salivating over a world with no human influence where nature can reclaim its space and dominion. How could we create that world now, with us still here?
The second thing that struck me about this year is the difference between being anti-consumer and pro-environment. At the outset, these ideologies might seem perfectly aligned, but I found that I could live quite frugally in environmentally harmful ways. When Owen and I were still in Baltimore, we often grocery shopped at Save-a-lot, a store remarkable for its rock bottom prices on everything. But, many of the products were trucked or shipped long distances, the tuna was not dolphin-safe, the produce was drenched in pesticides, and the coffee was probably traded in the most unfair way possible. If I was paying bottom dollar, then somewhere else in the world, another person or animal was being shafted. Two ideas spoke to me on this issue. The first is Michael Pollan's argument (from his book, the Omnivore's Dilemma) that we should eat locally and recognize where our food came from and the impact of growing or raising it. Second, reading NY Times articles about the environmental and human abuses at factories in China following the lead paint on toys scandal impressed upon me again that cheap things carry high costs elsewhere. I want to start buying more toys and clothes made domestically and with an eye towards quality. Both Pollan and the Times coverage made me think that environmental protection, human rights, and support of local business are things worth paying premiums for.
The third thought I have looking back is that it can be FUN to participate in the economy. Owen and I joined a crazy beater of a gym down the street from us called the Sweat Shop. We love going to exercise classes and working out there. The monthly fee is worth those experiences and benefits to our bodies.
Perhaps I will have more thoughts about this experience soon. I'm reading Alan Wiseman's "The World Without Us" and have been salivating over a world with no human influence where nature can reclaim its space and dominion. How could we create that world now, with us still here?
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Thinking about Thinking about Medical School
In one of my education school classes, I had to read an article called "thinking about thinking", which encouraged teachers to expressly model and instruct metacognition to their students. We were supposed to make our thinking processes transparent, so that students could start to understand and recognize how they store and access information. It's a good idea and lets students and teachers reflect on how they learn and use the information that they pick up.
In the swirl of medical school, I feel fortunate when I have time to think about the thinking that I am doing for my classes. Dogged effort and limitless patience for fine textbook print are considered prime qualities of the medical student, not necessarily reflection or measured responses. So when I read an article from the Brown alumni magazine about Christine Montross, a writer and medical resident who recently published a book about her first year experiences in the anatomy lab, my first question was how did she have time to write anything down during her first year? Shouldn't she have been studying? How did she pass all of her classes when she was spending so much time reflecting on mortality and her cadaver? Owen joked that if I were to write a reflection about this year, it would be a study schedule, punctuated only occasionally by a run or conversation with him. His jab is not far from the truth, and therein lies the problem. Maybe Montross' time writing about her first year made her a better student, more focused, and motivated. It's not that I want to become a writer in the next two years, but taking the time to sift through the piles of information that are tossed upon me, and the myriad experiences in health care settings that I am experiencing at lightening speed would make for a more thoughtful medical school life. Whoever wrote the unexamined life is not worth living could extend their moniker to the unexamined education is not worth undertaking.
In the swirl of medical school, I feel fortunate when I have time to think about the thinking that I am doing for my classes. Dogged effort and limitless patience for fine textbook print are considered prime qualities of the medical student, not necessarily reflection or measured responses. So when I read an article from the Brown alumni magazine about Christine Montross, a writer and medical resident who recently published a book about her first year experiences in the anatomy lab, my first question was how did she have time to write anything down during her first year? Shouldn't she have been studying? How did she pass all of her classes when she was spending so much time reflecting on mortality and her cadaver? Owen joked that if I were to write a reflection about this year, it would be a study schedule, punctuated only occasionally by a run or conversation with him. His jab is not far from the truth, and therein lies the problem. Maybe Montross' time writing about her first year made her a better student, more focused, and motivated. It's not that I want to become a writer in the next two years, but taking the time to sift through the piles of information that are tossed upon me, and the myriad experiences in health care settings that I am experiencing at lightening speed would make for a more thoughtful medical school life. Whoever wrote the unexamined life is not worth living could extend their moniker to the unexamined education is not worth undertaking.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Mining the Portfolio Project
For our most recent reflection about med school, we were asked to write a letter to our best friend describing the experience of being in gross anatomy lab. Here is what I wrote:
Dear best friend,
We are now six labs into Gross Anatomy during our M1 year at UIC, and I can’t say that I love it, though [hopefully] I am learning a lot in the process. Lab occurs every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from around 4-6:30. The lab facilities are located on the seventh floor of the College of Medicine building and sport the gruesome tagline “where the living learn from the dead.” All 185 of us change our clothes in an overheated, formaldehyde-drenched locker room across from the bodies and the changing process is an interesting corollary to the dissection room: hundreds of hot, live bodies as opposed to tens of cold, smelly ones. It vividly contrasts the living and the dead.
Once you enter the dissection laboratories, a rush of chilly corporal preservative smells greets you. The bodies lie on metal tables, enclosed in thick white plastic bags. Each time we go up to dissect, we must unzip our bag, lay out our instruments, and unfold the skin and superficial layers of muscle and bone that we have already looked at. It’s the body as a book, and we must turn past the pages that we have already read.
The actual appearance and tone of the flesh is much different than in real-life—most color has faded to a muted yellow-tan-white and most things that we touch, the lungs notwithstanding, have been firm. The homogeneity helps you to forget that it is a person and also frightens in its distance from personhood. That dichotomy is the hardest split to navigate in the lab. On the one hand, this experience is supposed to teach us to be avid students of human anatomy, dispassionately scrutinizing every nerve and muscle as a potential site of therapy and intervention. You simply cannot think too much about the humanity of a person when your scissors are cutting through their heart muscle. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one must keep the ultimate end goal of helping live people in mind as corpses surround you. It is challenging to hold both of these perspectives in mind (and in body) during a two or three hour dissection.
Finally the dynamics of cutting through a body with a group of people is interesting because the eyes and action of five other people mediate your experience and emotion. There are the overeager, though misdirected scalpel-wielders who jump at the chance to look for a structure embedded in tissue or fat if it means hacking their way in the body. There are the readers, who want to keep the dissection on track by referring constantly to the dissection guidebook. And there are those who carefully and tenderly poke into the body cavities when their turn to hold the knife comes around. I am some combination of the two final lab personalities, and my tablemates display different proportions of each of the dispositions. Thus dissection has its own body politic and share of human drama. This is, I surmise, a nice corollary to the teamwork that we will do as physicians, as each health care professional will bring their skills and attitude “to the table” and somehow or another we will have to learn enough about the patient to treat them.
Dear best friend,
We are now six labs into Gross Anatomy during our M1 year at UIC, and I can’t say that I love it, though [hopefully] I am learning a lot in the process. Lab occurs every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from around 4-6:30. The lab facilities are located on the seventh floor of the College of Medicine building and sport the gruesome tagline “where the living learn from the dead.” All 185 of us change our clothes in an overheated, formaldehyde-drenched locker room across from the bodies and the changing process is an interesting corollary to the dissection room: hundreds of hot, live bodies as opposed to tens of cold, smelly ones. It vividly contrasts the living and the dead.
Once you enter the dissection laboratories, a rush of chilly corporal preservative smells greets you. The bodies lie on metal tables, enclosed in thick white plastic bags. Each time we go up to dissect, we must unzip our bag, lay out our instruments, and unfold the skin and superficial layers of muscle and bone that we have already looked at. It’s the body as a book, and we must turn past the pages that we have already read.
The actual appearance and tone of the flesh is much different than in real-life—most color has faded to a muted yellow-tan-white and most things that we touch, the lungs notwithstanding, have been firm. The homogeneity helps you to forget that it is a person and also frightens in its distance from personhood. That dichotomy is the hardest split to navigate in the lab. On the one hand, this experience is supposed to teach us to be avid students of human anatomy, dispassionately scrutinizing every nerve and muscle as a potential site of therapy and intervention. You simply cannot think too much about the humanity of a person when your scissors are cutting through their heart muscle. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one must keep the ultimate end goal of helping live people in mind as corpses surround you. It is challenging to hold both of these perspectives in mind (and in body) during a two or three hour dissection.
Finally the dynamics of cutting through a body with a group of people is interesting because the eyes and action of five other people mediate your experience and emotion. There are the overeager, though misdirected scalpel-wielders who jump at the chance to look for a structure embedded in tissue or fat if it means hacking their way in the body. There are the readers, who want to keep the dissection on track by referring constantly to the dissection guidebook. And there are those who carefully and tenderly poke into the body cavities when their turn to hold the knife comes around. I am some combination of the two final lab personalities, and my tablemates display different proportions of each of the dispositions. Thus dissection has its own body politic and share of human drama. This is, I surmise, a nice corollary to the teamwork that we will do as physicians, as each health care professional will bring their skills and attitude “to the table” and somehow or another we will have to learn enough about the patient to treat them.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Stealing from School
As many of you know, I have started medical school in Chicago. This has put both the year of-no-buy and my blog on hiatus over the past weeks (although there is an arguement to be made that the blog is on permanent semi-hiatus) as I get settled into the new world of medical science, cadavers, and classmates. As I am back to no-buying and blogging, I will defer writing about moving for no money, and making new friends for little money, and instead post a school assignment. We have to keep reflection portfolios about our development as physicians at school. Here is my first installment, with more to follow as the portfolio grows:
I have answered the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” with the response, “a doctor” since people have asked me that question. At age five, this may have been because the possible answers were limited to doctor, lawyer, professional athlete, astronaut, and confusingly, President of the United States. (I always wondered why there were enough slots in most professions for people to enter those fields, whereas there can only be one president every four year. Your individual odds are terrible). As I grew older, and my convictions that medicine is the best field for me deepened, I, paradoxically, felt freer to explore other interests and passions. While I contemplated majoring in biology in college, my advisor told me to do something that I would never be able to study again, so I opted for French History and Literature. Not the most career applicable major, but I loved the very personalized course of study that I followed and support that I received from faculty and advisors. I learned how to think critically and write (and write and write and write) in my major, which are two skills that served me well on the MCAT, at least on the verbal section.
Within the first six weeks of medical school, my suspicions about there being science medical students and non-science medical students has borne out. I have come to think of myself as a humanities leaning science person, and thus despite the deluge of information pouring over our heads, I make time for the New York Review of Books and a John Updike novel. I would not be me if I was not reading something currently and I am determined to make literary reading a part of my life during both medical education and practice. The other divide that I sense in medical school is the difference between people who are fresh from college and those who, like myself, are several years removed from their undergraduate days. The younger ones are young, tend to be quicker on the knowledge uptake, and also faster on the party circuit. My group of friends are all over the age of 25, and we are all adjusting to being students again, especially students of medical learning.
Now, on to perhaps the most important question of this first reflection: Am I glad that I am here, finally beginning my medical career? The answer, despite the fact that the clinic seems impossibly far away from my current life, is an unequivocal yes. Once the application/interview/decision cycle was completed, I harbored a tiny sliver of fear that I had possibly been wrong after all of these years. What if I did not like medical school, or after interacting with my classmates, professors, and medical staff understood that I made a bad choice? I don’t know what I would have done then because mercifully I still feel shivers of anticipation at the thought of being a practicing physician. I admire several of our course heads for the clear, level-headed introductory courses that they are providing for us, and have been impressed by the doctors on staff of UIH that I have come across. A friend of mine from college who is an M3 wrote in an email several weeks ago that “at some point during the first two years everyone [meaning every student in a med school class] falls in love with medicine itself.” I am lucky to count myself among those who fell hard and quickly.
I have answered the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” with the response, “a doctor” since people have asked me that question. At age five, this may have been because the possible answers were limited to doctor, lawyer, professional athlete, astronaut, and confusingly, President of the United States. (I always wondered why there were enough slots in most professions for people to enter those fields, whereas there can only be one president every four year. Your individual odds are terrible). As I grew older, and my convictions that medicine is the best field for me deepened, I, paradoxically, felt freer to explore other interests and passions. While I contemplated majoring in biology in college, my advisor told me to do something that I would never be able to study again, so I opted for French History and Literature. Not the most career applicable major, but I loved the very personalized course of study that I followed and support that I received from faculty and advisors. I learned how to think critically and write (and write and write and write) in my major, which are two skills that served me well on the MCAT, at least on the verbal section.
Within the first six weeks of medical school, my suspicions about there being science medical students and non-science medical students has borne out. I have come to think of myself as a humanities leaning science person, and thus despite the deluge of information pouring over our heads, I make time for the New York Review of Books and a John Updike novel. I would not be me if I was not reading something currently and I am determined to make literary reading a part of my life during both medical education and practice. The other divide that I sense in medical school is the difference between people who are fresh from college and those who, like myself, are several years removed from their undergraduate days. The younger ones are young, tend to be quicker on the knowledge uptake, and also faster on the party circuit. My group of friends are all over the age of 25, and we are all adjusting to being students again, especially students of medical learning.
Now, on to perhaps the most important question of this first reflection: Am I glad that I am here, finally beginning my medical career? The answer, despite the fact that the clinic seems impossibly far away from my current life, is an unequivocal yes. Once the application/interview/decision cycle was completed, I harbored a tiny sliver of fear that I had possibly been wrong after all of these years. What if I did not like medical school, or after interacting with my classmates, professors, and medical staff understood that I made a bad choice? I don’t know what I would have done then because mercifully I still feel shivers of anticipation at the thought of being a practicing physician. I admire several of our course heads for the clear, level-headed introductory courses that they are providing for us, and have been impressed by the doctors on staff of UIH that I have come across. A friend of mine from college who is an M3 wrote in an email several weeks ago that “at some point during the first two years everyone [meaning every student in a med school class] falls in love with medicine itself.” I am lucky to count myself among those who fell hard and quickly.
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