Glory on high.

Things are going well.

School is amazing. Even the banal pharmacokinetics homework seems fun and I know why it seems fun - it is because it is practical. I really missed practicality. Even in my chemistry undergrad I hardly ever felt like the work I was doing was practical. It felt contrived. The long labs were useless. But now the homework, the classes, the readings all seem important. It is a nice feeling.

My favorite parts so far have to be PBL and Anatomy. PBL, if I haven't explained before, is 6 hours of class each week where we are given limited information on a made up patient and essentially made to diagnose the problem. It is surprisingly exciting - I get really into it.

And anatomy, though tedious at times, is fascinating once we start to be able to see how various systems interact. We are in the abdomen at the moment, working through the gastrointestinal system and we spend a few hours each week teasing out the arterial, venal, nervous and lymphatic systems related to the GI tract. It really is cool how complex we are. I had no idea. I guess I thought that because the medical profession had become so adept at surgery that the body was simple - that you could cut through someone, fix up a lung, and stitch the person up. Not at all. Nerves and veins and arteries run everywhere. I can't imagine, at this point, how surgery can possibly work. It will be terrifying but amazing to get into a surgery clerkship in a few years.

My life is plenty busy and getting busier. I just started working for Kaplan as an LSAT teacher (for some reason) and also just found out that I will be heading to Honduras for the summer to set up health infrastructure with the concurrent benefits of learning spanish and travelling around South America. The actual project is only about a month, but I am going to see about staying for much of the summer. Maybe I will head back to Montreal for a month ... it is just so great there.

I bought skis for the first time in maybe 13 years which is awesome. I am heading up to Big White in January for a big ski trip which will be the first time I have skied in about 10 years. I am considering getting a Whistler seasons pass, but they are pretty pricey. That said, who knows when I will have the same amount of time as I have now.

I went to a research night on thursday. I somewhat regret the research that I ended up in. I don't know why I thought I liked computers as much as I did. I totally would have prefered to have done either social research or immunity research. I am glad that I am in medical school. I shudder to think how terrible my life would have been if I had ended up in a chemistry graduate program.

But I am not. And, as if things weren't great enough, I have a handlebar mustache (to the extreme) which I am cultivating as part of Movember. I like it. I like it a lot. I may have to change my wardrobe/style/lifestyle to fit the mustache.