Just Gotta Press On

What's it like to have the ground freeze beneath your feet, the mud tracks becoming solid, within the span of a day? A little disconcerting I must say. I think I must utilize the final evolution in my winter-gear. Time to bust out the eskimo-like coat. I hoped it wouldn't have had to come to this this year, but alas.

I apologize for not blogging in the last several days. I've been quite busy studying for my finals this week. Two down and two more to go! On Wednesday I'll be DONE.

You know, it's kind of sad when in order to study for an exam, you need to think about all the ways people die. For one class it's cancer - breast and colorectal especially. For today's toxicology final I had to review things like alcohol poisoning, drug overdosing, heavy metal exposure (lead, mercury, etc), and such. And on Wednesday is pathophysiology - so basically what happens when something goes wrong with the body. So. Much. Death. No wonder doctors have some of the highest rates of suicide.

Here's my public service announcement. Do NOT take alcohol with Tylenol (acetaminophen). Both damage the liver in large quantities, but the combination creates something called reactive oxygen species that literally use electrons to punch holes into the surrounding liver cells, resulting in liver failure. Death soon follows liver failure. See?! Death!!

What's sadder is when you see something that makes you initially get excited before you realize what's going on and then get sad. For example, KS-F told me her cousin has colon cancer. At age 22. Right away I suspected FAP genotype (basically, you start getting colon polyps at age 10-12 and these have a 100% chance of becoming cancer by the time one's 17 if left untreated). I was excited to know what's the likely cause of colon cancer in such a young person, and I suggested genetic counseling for her family (though she seems to be fine, so she didn't inherit it). Then I realized how ridiculously sad it was to have colon cancer at 22.

Later I talked this over with AG-F and she agreed. The genetic counseling students would get all excited over an interesting/unique case in conference, but then they meet the people. And when you meet the people these diseases affect, you can't help but feel sad (and a little ashamed that you were so excited by the disease in the first place). Such is the world of health care professionals. The day I stop seeing people as people and start seeing people as just walking symptoms/diseases is the day I've lose my humanity.

Last Day of Classes!

I thought this day would never come. The semester dragged on and on until Thanksgiving, then suddenly it's all over now.

I went to work (research) today. I won't go into the details here, but my experiment epic failed on me and I lost 3 hours of my life. I want them back. I did nothing wrong! Stupid buffer. This exemplifies why I hate research sometimes.

I got my anti-pharmacy grade back from the exam I took last night. 24/28, the mean was 22.9/28. Not bad considering I studied for less than 2 days. This'll probably end up as a B+ or A-, or maybe an A if I'm really lucky. So as long as I don't get lower than an A- on the final, I should get an A of some sort in this class. Oddly, I don't find myself caring much.

It rained today, which sucked. It melted most of the snow. As much as I hate the cold, I hate cold icy rain even more. I would take the snow over icy rain any day.

A clothing store in town was going out of business. So I went with SR-F and we each bought a T-shirt for $4.22. That's a pretty damn good deal. It took me FOREVER to find a medium-size shirt; most were L, XL, or XXL. I mean, honestly, an XXL can almost fit two of me.

JW-M sent me an email today with the subject line as "oh yes, they do exist." Refer to the pic below:
This was in Xi'an. Those are the "famous" biang biang noodles. Notice how ridiculous the first two characters are (the two large characters on the left and middle)! I mean, "biang" isn't even a legal pronounciation in Mandarin! Anyway, the old Asian man icon thing is pretty badass, as well as that super-char composed of very common component-chars.

I Missed You!!

Picture from here.

Hey, I'm back! You may have noticed a few minor-ish changes to the blog format and the pic in the header. I bet you missed me as much as I missed you (or maybe you didn't notice my absence). A few things to update.

Yesterday was my friend JW-M's birthday. He's in Beijing studying abroad right now. I wished him a happy birthday online and on Facebook. I also told him that I loved him as a friend, something I've never said to a friend before (I think). And it's true, I value his friendship very dearly. He also told me that I was the one "true friend" he made in college, so that was really touching. I almost teared up a little.

I took my toxicology (anti-pharmacy) exam today. It was kind of rough but shouldn't be too bad, considering I just started studying for it yesterday.

I finished my term paper!! It is epic 12 pages with 13 references. The policy proposal I came up with is quite novel, if I do say so myself, as it doesn't involve government legislation to proceed with regulation. My topic is the need for regulation on PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis).

In a nutshell: PGD is where they take 1-2 cells from the early embryo and do a genetic test on the DNA to see if that embryo has any genetic diseases. The embryo isn't destroyed in the process and can be implanted into the womb.

Now, some issues I had to address in my paper:

1. Cost and access. PGD isn't cheap at about $5000 and most health insurances won't cover it. That's clearly a health disparity along economic lines, and the poor who may need this technology can't access it.

2. PGD for controversial medical use. There is the case of Molly Nash. She was born with Fanconi's anemia, a fatal childhood genetic disease. Her parents used PGD to conceive a second child who was born free of the disease and was an HLA match with her sister. Because he was selected as an embryo to be an HLA match, doctors could then transfer his bone marrow into Molly to save her life. Were the parents ethically/morally right in "commissioning" a second child to save a first?

3. PGD for sex selection. Should PGD be used to select the gender of one's child? The only accepted indication in the medical field is when there's an X-linked disease in the family that would be bad for a male offspring. But the private sector can do whatever it wants in this respect.

4. PGD for non-disease genetic traits. Let's put it this way. Should deaf parents use PGD to make sure that their children are also deaf? Should straight parents use PGD to ensure their children are straight, or gay parents use PGD to ensure their children are gay (assuming the children is conceived via surrogacy and there is a single gay gene - which there is NOT)?

5. PGD and public health. If we could use PGD to eliminate genetic diseases from the population, should we? Can we? There are dire ramifications when we mess with the diversity of the human genome. For example, when a person only has one copy of the sickle-cell anemia gene mutation that person is resistant to malaria, but two copies of that gene mutation causes full-blown sickle-cell anemia. We don't know enough about the human genome to mess with it. And even if we do, I don't think we should.

So those are the interesting issues I had to consider and ponder and come up with some kind of regulatory policy on. If your head's spinning, don't worry. Mine was too on Saturday as I was on page 4 of 12.

Anyway, I realize (for the 100th time or something) that I post really long posts. I apologize, but that's unlikely to change, and that's probably why I don't have 20,000+ page-views. I mean, I'm not THAT boring am I?

Picture from here.

I really liked that picture. A lot of bloggers have been down lately. If you're one of them, and you see this, or you know a blogger who is in need of some cheer, send them this or an e-hug or something.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

A belated Thanksgiving thought. I went to bed a couple nights ago with a random smile, as I thought of how my grandpa will be 80 in about 3 months and how he's still so ridiculously healthy (no medication of any kind). I'm thankful that he's in amazing health, that he wakes up with a smile almost every day, that he's still enjoying what life has to offer.

In a different vein, I'm thankful for all the e-friends I've made through this blog. I'm thankful for the (seemingly) handful of readers that come my way. While it hasn't felt like I've changed much or grown since I started this blog, I know that to be false. The bigger question is, what's the next step?

I want to make a massive overture to a particular subject that I'm thankful for. Those with access to it probably don't think much on it, but rather, just expect it. My next post, the one on this, may be a while from now. I'm considering taking a mini-hiatus for a week or so (somehow I don't think I'll be misssed) to finish my term paper and study for my 4-5 exams. In the mean time, I hope these random thoughts below amuse you.

1. So, for the last few days, I kept thinking I had an appointment with my adviser at 2pm tomorrow (Monday, Dec. 1). But I knew that I'd have to miss my pathophysiology lecture about 30 minutes early, and that's my favorite class. I agreed, and she was meeting with all her advisees at once I think, somewhere on the 6th floor. I realize now that it was all a dream. There is no appointment meeting. Now I wonder how much of my other scheduling events are the result of a dream. Hmmm.

2. I had a dream last night where I was traveling to Beijing, China. My dad was with me for some reason. We drove to the airport, where we got on a plane but we had to transfer to another plane for some reason in Chicago or something. My dad got in a fight with the pilot and was then handcuffed to his seat. So we're on this plane to San Francisco (my dad handcuffed to his seat), where we stop before arriving in Beijing. For some reason I was really anxious and/or apprehensive about flying, which I rarely am. There were storms expected ahead and I wasn't sure if the pilot was going to attempt to fly through them or go around. Anyway, I woke up mid-dream and I tried forcing myself back to sleep to finish the dream. I hate waking up mid-dream. Anyone else do that?

3. Some Lolcats pics. From this site, of course.

I love this site, haha. It's the most addicting distraction I've come across in a while. My friend and I just kept sending each other links for about an hour.

4. Last, but not least, I'd like to introduce (who haven't come across it yet) the blog Equal Eight. It's rather hilarious, so go over and say hi! :D

A Breath of Our Inspiration

I didn't have a Thanksgiving post (obviously). I don't know if anyone missed me in my week's absence, somehow I doubt it. First, I'd like to direct people to AJ's and Matt's blogs, to give them words of encouragement and love and all that in this time.

I came across the following poem again, and it was, as a line in there, "A breath of our inspiration." There are powerful words in that poem, words of inspiration and change. That we can all be an agent of change. That we are the shapers of our collective future. I know not everyone's fond of poetry, but it's a good read. Enjoy.

-----

Ode
by Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844 - 1881)


We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; --
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying,
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveth with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming --
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshadowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man's soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man's heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day's late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! It must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry --
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God's future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! We cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

Found at this link.
-----

---TANGENT---
Okay, so I seem to have this ever-growing list of blogs I intend on reading and then linking to my blog. I will work on that . . . once I'm done with my term paper and exams and have nothing to do over Winter Break (in about 3 weeks). I also need to go through all the blogs and sort them out over Winter Break (I have WAY too many links, and they just keep increasing). In the mean time, I'd like to link to these 3 blogs that I managed to catch up on:

Call The Shots
The Covert Homo
This is my life...

So go over and say "Hi," among other nice things. :D
---END TANGENT---

The Value of Friendship

---TANGENT---
As James pointed out to me, we bloggers in this circle seem to go through cycles of depression and the like. He may post about it, we'll see. Several bloggers have been feeling down of late, like AJ and Landyn. Others might have "coming out anxiety" like Charlie and E. We should all be good friends and give them lots of love and encouragement, as well as the gall to drag them out of the mire of down-ness.
---END TANGENT---

On the outside I usually try to stay as calm and as stoic as possible, as it helps to quite down my emotions enough to allow me to think (and we all know how I tend to over-think). But unbeknownst to many, I have a tendency to soak up the emotions of others. So I often get happy when others around me are happy, and down when others around me are sad or stressed. Even if my own personal situation doesn't concord with those of others, the emotions of others sometimes take priority over my own. I don't know if this is a good or bad then when the lines between my emotions and the emotions of others become blurred.

A couple days ago I was in the bank depositing a check. As I stood in line my eyes began to tear up for no reason at all. I wasn't personally sad, I didn't keep my eyes open for a really long time, and I don't think it was an allergen in the air. But for some reason my eyes just welled up and although I didn't cry, I sure felt it.

I think it was the "weight of the world" kind of thing. How for a while now I've internalized the emotions infused into the posts of other bloggers, and how I've had to deal with my own things. I won't go into them here as it'd only make me sound emo or something, and I'm totally not an emo kind of guy.

I spent much of the evening bumming around in my apartment - without motivation, without inspiration, without want to do anything. I was just lonely and crawling by. Then I IMed my friend, JW-M. (For those who're new, he's probably my best friend from university here and is currently in China for a year.) He just replied, "Hey, I'm playing Neverwinter Nights (NWN) a bit, it's fun." Then he said something like, "We should make a module together!"

For whatever reason, that seemed to pull me out of my personal little mire of despair. Not sure why and I'm not sure why he has the power to do this. But I love him for it. It's totally trivial, really, designing a game mod together. We've attempted in the past with another game or two, but have never been able to finish. He assured me this would be easier if we made it as simple as possible just to get success. He said I could brainstorm storyplot ideas (he knows how much I like to think and come up with random creative things).

So in the span of 5 minutes, he had given me some kind of strange purpose in my life. I don't know, but it made me pretty happy. And it's utterly silly in retrospect - all this over him saying that we should do something with a game together. But hey, we all need random things to perk us up like that every now and then, no?

Other tidbits of my life in the last couple days:

- Apparently I did much better on my pathophysiology exam than I thought. I got an A+ with the curve.

- My cold is progressing on time. I now have a minor cough and a slightly stuffed nose. Great. Too bad my pharmacist friend told me that every study on cold and cough syrup indicate that they do nothing. Note that for the future.

- I went to go see the CSO concert. I don't think I've ever heard all of Beethoven's monumental Symphony #5 in C minor. It was something else. I may do a post on just how the conductor seemed to weave the individual parts of the music from each of the sections into what we call "music." There was much nostalgia in attending a concert.

- I watched Top Chef tonight (well, last night now) with two friends of mine. Oh how we love food, and thus that show. Her roommate also watched with us and would not stop talking! A part of me wanted to say, "Hey, I love talking to you, really, but I can't hear the TV and the volume's up at a decent decibel." After her roommate went to her room, my friend (in a very quiet hushed voiced) apologized for the loquaciousness of her roommate.

- My brother's birthday is today. I'm going to skip going to the gym and he's going to skip class so we can have lunch together.

- My friend, JW-F, will be flying into town late tonight. I haven't seen her since we graduated. It'll be nice to catch up and such. (If you ever wonder who these people are, they're generally listed in the panel on the right of this blog if they're "recurrent characters" in my life.)

No Respite

Argh, another week. I would post the whole "10 things about me" deal that other bloggers such as AJ, Matt, Razz, E, and James have done, but I've already have a post dedicated to this kind of thing. So, I'm not going to add to that list tonight. I would, however, like to give a shout-out to Matt at Brass Matt, AJ's boyfriend's blog. Seems like a really cool guy, go over and say hi.

Now, a couple positive highlights first . . .

- My youngest brother, KC-M, got into the College of Engineering here! I expected nothing less. Now let's see if he can get into "better" engineering schools like MIT or CalTech. I wonder if he even applied to those places . . .

- My friend, SA-F, got into nursing school! I haven't seen her practically since we both graduated from high school together. I only talk to her online a few times a year because she rarely signs on. She's going to be paying me a visit some time in early December before she moves miles and miles away for nursing school. I'm SO proud of her. :D

- I made my first chicken potpie/chicken broccoli bake. Chicken broccoli bake was one of the few things in the dorms that I actually looked forward to eating, it was sooo yummy (and probably quite bad for me, hence why I magically lost 20 lbs in a year after I stopped eating dorm food). It actually turned out pretty well. It was cooked just right, it was edible, it looked yummy . . . the only problem was that it was a bit bland. Hmm, maybe I really should've used cream of chicken soup rather than low-sodium chicken broth. Oh well, got to go with what I've got (which also happens to be healthier).
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Now for the negatives.

- It's cold. It was about 50-55 degrees F during the middle of last week. It's in the low 30s/upper 20s this week. It's freezing (literally)!! It snowed all day yesterday and I made the unfortunate decision to leave my apartment to go to the library to study. And so the annual ice age begins around here . . . brrr. I swear I live in a global warming-proof state (there is actually some scientific data to support this, to a point).

- My window doesn't have a very good seal where the latch is. It's gotten cold enough to the point where condensation has formed on the inside of the windows. I live in the freezing Midwest for crying out loud! It wastes A LOT of heat and energy if cold air is going to leak in and hot air is going to leak out all winter. So I sealed it up with this plastic insulation thing. Now there's an air bubble where the cold air wants to get in but can't. I wish apartment complexes would invest in energy-saving technologies so they didn't have to jack up the rent every year. Sigh.

- I saw 2 ants in my bathroom. They have no business being there or anywhere else in my apartment. Ants must die, when I find them again.

- My bathtub periodically clogs. It sucks. I keep forgetting to pour Drain-O or a similar substance down the drain to clear it. Consequently, I shower while standing ankle deep in water that's not draining away. Note to self: remember to un-clog bathtub drain.

- I seemed to have developed a cold, again, only about 6 days after I had just gotten over a cold. I should not be getting sick so soon after just being sick. This is suspicious. And being the recovering Type A pre-med I used to be, I've come up with several possible scenarios ranging from the most plausible (like, 99%) to the least plausible (of which they all total about 1% in my mind).

The most plausible biological explanation is thus. I've been stressed, tired, and sleep-deprived all of last week. Consequently, my adrenal glands pump out cortisol to help me maintain homeostasis and cope with the stress. Cortisol also causes a person to go into a fat-storing phenotype, and thus causes people to crave fatty comfort foods. That explains why I've been craving to eat out all last week (I didn't eat out, because it was rainy and cold). Cortisol also, over long periods of time, causes a weakening of the immune system. With this weakened immune system and the many other sick people around me, it's totally plausible that this is the precise mechanism by which I've become sick so soon after just recovering.

I would go over the less plausible explanations that haunt and plague my thoughts, but they're pretty ridiculous in retrospect because of the low-risk I've put myself in (low-risk doesn't, however, mean no risk). The possibility of a worse scenario is very very slim, so I'm trying not to dwell on it.

Edit: Some may misinterpret this last part of my post, if one's been particularly keen and sharp. Let me point out examples that could fall under the "least plausible" category. There is the possibility of me getting the flu, as this is flu season and I didn't get a flu shot. A flu could kill me by initiating a cytokine storm - aka, my immune system goes into overdrive and kills me in the process. Another somewhat more likely, though still not too plausible, would be mold or some toxicant in my apartment. I have noticed that I feel significantly better when I'm not sitting in my apartment for extended periods of time. I cough less, my throat hurts less, etc.