Just Keep Swimming

Corny Finding Nemo quotes aside, things have seemed to devolve of late.

(1) Got my financial aid "award" from med school. I think they use "award" in the same sense that one says a puppy may leave a "present" for you on your carpet. Our expected family contribution doubled somehow from last year. Might be a mistake, that's what I'm hoping for. Otherwise, I don't know how I'm going to pay $25,000 out of pocket every year, in addition to accumulating ~$25,000 of loans every year. And if I can't pay...... then..... what? This line of thought goes downhill relatively quickly.

(2) Whenever someone tells me, "You're almost done, eh?" I shudder.

School sucks. I've spent the last few days almost entirely working on lab projects or my symposium presentation. I worked from 6:30am Thursday morning to 1:30am Friday morning on my presentation, which I gave Friday to a huge crowd of 5. (One was my advisor. Another one was the prof who had to stay to give the introductions of the speakers.) We have one out that would keep our lab project afloat, otherwise the past few weeks of work have been in vain. Frustrating.

On top of that, I have two papers due Monday that I have had no time to work on all week. One's a 10 page term paper, the other's a rough draft of a lab report that's going to be around 15-20 pages all told. The parents & grandparents are down this weekend, and though it's good to see them it sucks having to be distracted from a good weekend with them by the papers. Thursday my final research proposal (full length, NIH-style) is due, with a complete outline of experiments that I "plan" to "perform." I will not actually ever get the chance to do the experiments, of course. We just have to pretend that we know what the hell is going on with advanced methods in biochemistry.

So yeah, whenever someone tells me, "So, you're almost done, eh?" I shudder.


Well, I've returned to blathering on about my problems. It's hard to abstain from it. On the other hand, the glass remains half full. I am in to med school, which a lot of people would die for. I am in to Wash U, which makes me pretty darn proud. I am getting paid $3500 this summer to do two things I love: research and being in the clinic. Dad's doing really well. He gets his last antibiotic IV next week, gets the IV line out, and then goes for joint replacement around the end of May. Then, on June 3 we all go to Movin' Out, Billy Joel's musical, in Madison.

I guess that's life, eh? Taking the good with the bad, bad with the good. I'm really uncomfortable with the problems I don't have control over (i.e. money). The papers have always worked themselves out before. I guess there's no reason to assume they won't this time.

"If you take life too seriously for too long, it'll get you." -Erik Estrada