A Random Header Image
13th August 2007

Still fangirling

Atul Gawande is still the man. If there was anyone that I would be tempted to worship and make a golden calf in his honor, it would be him.

He was a guest commentary for the New York TImes in May. Unfortunately, these all required a paid subscription, but I finally scrunged them up on the web, so if you’d like to read them, they can be found at my medical blog, here (I know, I have way too many blogs).

Read his commentary about Sicko and the debate about universal health care here. I think it’s one of the best articles, as always, for addressing that the issue of medical reform is complex, but there are several different methods that we could try and then reject if necessary, that are better than the current system.

posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

13th August 2007

end of the story

I am doing so much better. 🙂

I regaled some of my friends with the date story… seriously, had a crowd who were interested in every detail, which launched me into full storyteller in my finest element. Apparently, a date is a rare and special occasion and needs to be details so everybody can live vicariously through the event. All agreed that the outfit was horrible (in the original story, it should have read that he was wearing khaki shorts, not pants. Khaki pants are perfectly acceptable. Shorts on the other hand, are not), but that the guys in our church are lame and don’t know how to date, so not to take it personally. In fact, they all seemed pretty impressed that he had accepted the invitation in the first place, as he has a reputation of never dating anyone. Huh. Well, I guess that explains the shorts.

So thus ends the saga. I promise I won’t be spamming your flist with any more of my gloom and doom. 🙂 Thanks for the support, in any case.

I’m really making progress in the transferring of this blog to WordPress. It’s a lot of fun going over my old entries. I pruned most months down to just a entry or two; when you get rid of all of my Lord of the Rings squeals, my fanfiction and random memes, I really didn’t say much the first years.

The fact that I can edit comments is almost enough to convince me to head over there entirely. I love that I can go through and fix all of my annoying misspellings. But it doesn’t have userpics, and it doesn’t have threaded replies and it doesn’t have *you*. 🙂

posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

13th August 2007

motto: no pity parties for the sleep deprived

“However, I feel much better now than when I began this entry. I’ve got quite a bit of resentment and rebellion and discouragement out of my system. That’s the chief use of a diary, I believe.”

Like everybody, in daylight Emily found things much less tragic and more endurable than in the darkness.

“Night is beautiful when you are happy–comforting when you are in grief–terrible when you are lonely and unhappy. And to-night I have been horribly lonely. Misery overwhelmed me. I seem never to be able to stop half-way in any emotion and when loneliness does seize hold on me it takes possession of me body and soul and wrings me in its blank pain until all strength and courage go out of me. To-night I am lonely–lonely. Love will not come to me–friendship is lost to me…”

~ *Emily’s Quest, *LM Montgomery

From the beginning, I promised myself that I’d treat my blog like a real paper journal… what I write, I keep, even though I cringe afterwards. So that means no filtering or privatizing those entries which, in the morning, are particularly whiny and self pitying.

That last one was really emo, wasn’t it? Good thing I’m at the VA where I can’t access LJ or I *would* be tempted to delete.

I’m better now. Really. If I wrote early in the morning, this blog would be drastically different. Bunnies and sunshine different. Things are always so much more positive in the sunshine than they are at midnight.

You know what. I had a great time, even though it didn’t fit with my expectations. I did. I’ve certainly experienced worse. At least it wasn’t ten innings at a baseball game with nothing to talk about. *shudders at memory* So, Jared’s a subpar date. Fine. I can accept that and I’ll move on. Maybe I will consider approaching the cute (but oh so young! 7 years younger!) guy at church. For one, he knows how to dress. 🙂

posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

13th August 2007

i need not to need

Theoretical question. If you were a guy (or if you are a guy, I have a few of those on my flist *hugs my manly friends*) and a woman called you up and invited you to a dinner and a movie, emphasizing as she did so, that it was a date (I believe my exact words were “I’m getting a group together to go out to dinner and to see the new movie Stardust, and I’d like you to be my date”), would you wear a teeshirt and khaki shorts and not shave for 2 days?

Now, I may have been spoiled by my friendship with Chris, who keeps Banana Republic singlehandedly in business, but uh, really, I thought it was more than just Miss Manners preaching to put a little bit of effort into an evening out. Granted, he was post call, I do make allowances, but still.

So there you have my first impression of the evening: not impressed at all.

Okay, I’m being a bit unfair and setting the evening up as a total failure. Which it wasn’t. We had a good time at the restaurant and the food was good (Indian. The Chicken Tandoori was very dry but improved with some of the sauces. The Chicken Tikka Masala was much better, although I have had better. Bombay House for you Utah people. ). I tried very hard not to talk just about medicine (which since it is my life was very hard) and we found a lot of stuff in common and time quickly passed; we actually had to race to the movie. The movie, Stardust, was fabulous and we were both rolling in laughter. And I looked beautiful (for a human). I did. I don’t think very positively about myself very often, but I don’t think I can look better than that.

Jared apparently raved about the evening to his roommates. Both of them came up to me (one practically leapt across the foyer to talk to me, which I found a wee bit amusing as we’ve had very little to talk about before this) and asked me how our date was, which I thought was promising. And better yet, they actually used the word “date,” so I was somewhat reassured that the message had gotten across.

But he barely talked to me today. Well. I guess that says it all.

I told myself that I wasn’t going to have any expectations. And I did manage to squelch most of them. But there’s still that romantic bit that refuses to give up that had hoped, so hoped that maybe, just maybe he would the guy who would find me interesting enough, attractive enough to push for one more date to get to know me better. And that part of me is undeniably hurt tonight.

Geez, I’m crying now.

This isn’t about Jared. I really barely know him, and now I know just a few more small talk things about him. He likes much of the same types of movies as me, has 5 younger brothers and sisters, grew up in Idaho and is, at least when it comes to health care, a Republican (which made me shudder. While I am a moderate, I’m a flaming liberal with my ideas about health care reform). That’s it. But I had hoped for a chance to learn more.

I know, I know the old saying that love comes when you are least expecting it. To stop looking and it will find you. And all I see is years that I’ve been alone, where I haven’t been looking and it hasn’t come, and a future that doesn’t appear to be changing.

I’ve always stocked my unattractiveness to the fact that I’m overweight. Medically, at this point, I’m at least 30 pounds overweight. That’s not getting me to a skinny weight, that’s just to the high end of a healthy weight. I’ve told myself since high school, since junior high that one of the many reasons that I didn’t have the dates or even a dance was because I was fat. I found my high school yearbook and I was astonished. I broke down in tears looking at those pictures. I wasn’t fat back then. I was average and I was beautiful. So if I am successful about losing the weight, which I am working so hard to do, it’s really not going to change anything. Because I’ll still be me.

I don’t know what to do better. I don’t know how to make myself more “dateable”. I’m trying so hard to have faith, to believe in God’s plan for me, that He is watching out for me, but being surrounded by blissfully happy couples, and not even getting a chance, I’m struggling.

I know that when compared to the challenges that others have to go through, of poverty, illness, abuse, abandonment, true obesity, hunger, death, etc, this is pretty minute. I know. I meet people every day who face more suffering and trials that I’ve ever had to see in my protected life, and they do so, with the grace and strength that I hope someday to possess. I feel little and selfish and ridiculous that I’m in tears because some boy didn’t live up to the fantasies that I had imposed, which makes me feel even worse about everything.

In a few days, I’ll laugh at myself again, and go on living the life, and will try to ignore those stabs of loneliness and longing and be back to my normal self. For now, I’m allowing myself a little bit of moping and tears.

***

In other news, the sore throat and earaches are completely gone today. And I’ve started the process of moving my blog over to wordpress to make a family acceptable version that will at least keep them updated in what I’m doing in my life. It seemed like the best compromise, because I really need to keep one place where I can vent and not have to filter. The nicest thing about wordpress? You can edit your comments! It’s a beautiful thing.

posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

  • Julia’s Journal

  • Just an ordinary girl.
  • Archives

  • RSS Red Head Snippet

    • Books read October-December 01/01/2024
      My goal was to read 120 books this year. I just finished number 129. (Some of these I reviewed as part of my WWW posts). October: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I had high expectations for this book, as it had been so praised, and I felt let down by it. Still enjoyable, […]