moving

almost 2 am and that 16 ounce latte at night was not a good idea sleepwise. going back to the east coast for the holidays this wednesday (weather permitting). excited to see the family, especially the new baby, but have a feeling the visit might get a little lonely. was looking at my friend list on facebook, and out of almost four hundred and fifty people, if i put out a last minute bulletin asking people to hang out this weekend, i'd probably get less than a five percent response. things have changed so much, and literally almost everyone has moved away. i keep on holding to this strange idea that once i finish training, everything will work out and this awesome job in manhattan will appear and all my old friends will move back. but what the fuck? people drift apart, and while all of my old close college, med school & residency friends have moved on with their lives, i haven't. i've been through enough bittersweet anticlimactic 'reunions' to know that there's not much more to talk about after the requisite 'it's been x number of years since i've seen you. so what's new? nothing...' followed by awkward silence and retreat to the bathroom/bar. i live life backwards and romanticize my time spent in manhattan yet forget the hours of unwelcomed (and welcomed) solitude. sometimes i can't help myself, and everyone else has just forgotten.

mirrors

you look in the mirror one day and you're excited. first year of medical school, wondering how you ended up living in a dorm with co-ed communal bathrooms when such atrocities never happenened in college. but fuck it, you're twenty one and surrounded by your peers in the 'greatest city in the world,' nerds in new york, and you're happy, young and ambitious, with lots of old friends to hang and new friends to make.

you look in the mirror and you're trashed. twenty four years old, thinking maybe you've had enough of the city. fuck it, i'm leaving new york and heading to california, just like every other stereotypical medical nerd who thinks they're chasing salvation on the sunny beaches of the west coast, best coast. but it's your birthday, and you didn't drag all these people out here last minute to go out weak. so you suck it up, down that 18th stella and shot of whiskey in your quest to drink your age in beers. you pass out, wake up, introduce your jew friends (new friends) to your old friends and family, and vomit in the bar and on the feet of the girl who desperately and unrequitedly loves you.

you look in the mirror and you're cocky. yeah, you're getting older, but now you're a 'resident,' not just an intern. older and 'smarter,' but still young, or so you think. your skin still looks taut, fresh, but what are those lines around your mouth? marionette? i'm fucking scared of puppets. tis okay, my patients still think i'm a baby. thankfully they're blind.

you look in the mirror and you're amazed. you're thirty, where the hell did all that time go? you're still in college, or so your address tells you. you stare in amazement as your savings dwindle. fancy titles don't mean shit when your degrees, diplomas and awards are hung in a 500 square feet studio. you see a new line, on your forehead, on the part of your face that used to be so smooth. you look surprised, but realize that surprise just means more lines. oh shit. this is when it begins.

you look in the mirror and you're resigned. gray hairs were cute when you were in high school. sign of wisdom, sign of respect, preternatural intelligence. gray hairs aren't cute when there's more of them than you thought. and why are they so fucking hard to see? is it gray or is it reflected light? does it matter? you look in the mirror and realize that's you. deal with it. fuck it. shit...

enough

please, no more uveitis. can't take it anymore. board studying is making me bored...harhar. nah, but kinda like a pregnant woman's fetus, reading up on all the shit i've forgotten over the past three years is sucking out my life blood. was watching anthony bourdain's 'no reservations' from san francisco, and i don't know how i missed it the first 5 times on replay, but he's totally sloshed through half of it. his frankness is refreshing and what i aim to be.

growing

every trip to the bay makes me not want to leave. if i can handle the transition to small-town madison, i'm sure a downsizing from new york to san francisco is palatable. what was also palatable was the food (sorry, my segues are nauseating). even with the overwhelming caucasian hegemony surrounding me, had a great brunch at the ferry building doing all the stuff white people love: lattes from blue bottle, macarons from miette, mexican food (specifically chilaquiles veracruz) from the tamale stand on the pier, and eating outside speaking spanish while listening to jazz played by cambodian refugees on organic instruments locally sourced from the tenderloin. also stumbled again upon in-n-out, the highlight of my foray into fisherman's wharf. was honestly awesome to see a lot of newly old faces from residency and i actually made some time to go to the meeting. i'm growing up!

also evidence of my maturation...a new car (a la rod roddy from the price is right). i went uber-practical and bought a honda fit sport "for the cargo" that i don't really need. it's not like i deliver cakes or anything. but yeah, i'm happy with my purchase but a little soured on the fact that parking in downtown madison is almost as much as manhattan (wtf?). all they have here is space.

grounded

haven't left my apartment all day and honestly don't feel like i'm missing much. the badgers lost to iowa, and game would've been cool, but would've been stuck with drunk girl/woman again. i guess i should recap. went out last night to a couple bars downtown and with my buddy, his gf and her awful, sad, desparate, very drunk friend. the bars were fine, typical for madison, but since the happy couple still make out like horny teenagers, i unfortunately spent the majority of the night stuck with the hag (not cute), listening to her talk about how she's hypersexual/loves her saggy breats/loves being naked, how watching our friends make out makes her want to make out (fuckin' nauseating), and actually watching her make out with my buddy's gf for attention (sad), motorboat my buddy (sad) and make out with an old man (really sad). plus i had to listen her talk about her fucking career and how she's all business and work and all play when she leaves, kinda like a mullet. she was absolutely awful and i'd rather stay home than deal with something like that again tonight. plus i'm leaving for san francisco next week and should save up some money for that.

fail

like those shoes above, i've failed. don't know when it was exactly that i became such a bad friend. you'd think that staying in new york for grad school would've kept me in touch with all those college people. to an extent, it did, for at least a couple years. then complacency set in and we all kinda drifted away. i'm reminded of just how poor a friend i've been each time a wedding passes without an invitation. i'm not gonna whine about it (but i guess i am already) and i'm not gonna call the waaahmbulance. all i can do now is try to be better.

homecoming

had the privlege of joining orbis (the flying eye hospital) on their recent trip to jaipur, rajasthan, india during the end of september. if you're indian or familiar with indians, that infuriating head-nod should look familiar. is it yes? is it no? is it maybe? i'm still not sure. it's like that episode on growing pains when mike seaver was trying to create the perfect hybrid T-F for his true false tests. anyway, had a time. kinda good, some bad things, many interesting things, but made me think. surprisingly kinda still jet-lagged, and going to sleep at 7 or 8 pm isn't helping me to adjust. i do like to travel but hate the actual travelling part. kinda sucks. on this latest trip, because of an eagerness to buy a ticket without looking at the itinerary, i ended up with ~15 hrs of layovers on the way over and maybe 7 hrs on the way back. each leg took 30+ hrs, which left me totally disoriented.

now back in madison. snow flurries earlier this morning made me seriously re-think my decision to come to the midwest and served as an omen of the hellish winter to come. missed emy's costume-themed birthday party today back in the jerz. hope it went well. hope other people worse costumes too, or else it would'be been a redux of that lumban association dinner dance when cheryl was the only person wearing a costume. embarssing but hilarious when it's not you.

thinking about heading back to ny soon. also thinking of my future. would love to be back there, but not sure if any of my friends will be left. the latest casualties are kevin, who might end up in arizona, and sabena, who will do a lil bit of locums oddly in arizona too. i generally don't ask for much, but i do want to be happy. need a sign.

regression

i'm seriously living like a college student. right now i'm in the "resident lounge" because i don't get wireless in my apartment. it's nice and all, but it looks like one of those student lounges from third north (nyu dorm) that no one really used in college, because seriously, why would you be hanging out in a student lounge in manhattan? i thought my studio apartment was adequate until i saw that one of the first year residents is living in a fucking house. these are the moments that make me step bake and take a meta-analysis of my life. wtf?

anyway, there's really nothing more annoying than an insecure girl's nervous laugh. i was doing work in a coffee shop earlier, lugging around this 10 pound 'desktop replacement' laptop that i use. there was a 'hipster-ish' (are there really hipsters in madison?) couple on what looked to be a first or second date. i wasn't exactly eavesdropping, but it's a small space, and you could tell they were doing that superficial 'get-to-know-you' bullshit when your early conversations are totally vapid. she kept doing this whisper, annoying, cut-off kind of laugh over and over and over. i had to leave because i was getting so distracted, like nails on a chalkboard. fuck you annoying girl. grow some balls.

red sky

so i had one of those moments where i took a late afternoon nap after work and woke up around dusk to this. i totally freaked out 1) cause i couldn't tell if it was morning or night, and 2) i thought i was in the middle of a tornado after watching storm chases or some shit on discovery recently at the gym. i remember we had a sunset like this in new york towards the end of june on the same night that we happened to go to that open bar housestaff welcoming party at, oddly enough, red sky. also oddly that night, minhee cried. anyway, all was well as no tornado hit downtown madison (although one did somewhere in the surrounding counties) and i'm perfectly fine. well, not exactly perfectly fine, but that's other shit i have to deal with.

dairyland

for the most part, all is well in america's dairyland. been hit on by two old gay men. still have the occasional teary-spell when i look at old pictures and think of where i should be. but overall, madison's not a bad alternative. heart's still a little broken, so that clip-art is staying on the background of my shitty lg flip phone for a while. i'm kinda like that girl from dance party usa who was so obsessed with prince that she wore a fake tear on her cheek until the day she actually met him in person (or some other stupid shit like that. i actually think her name was 'princess' but, yeah, not gonna go there.)on the other hand, had an awesome squash curry with chicken from what's touted as the best laotian food in the city, lao laan-xang, at the atwood summerfest street fair. did not disappoint. was a little weirded out by the near-east madison hippies, but didn't take any videos of them dancing cause i thought that might have been a little exploitative.

had my first shift of paid work at the madison va hospital last friday. surprised no one asked what i was. well, i guess someone did ask where i was from, but i kinda eschewed the racial undertones of the situation and just said 'new york.' otherwise, not much different than my experiences in the manhattan va, now with the bonus of an awesome view (lake mendota. the awesomeness of the view is kinda compromised by the overcast day, but i'll replace it once i get a better pic).

there are, however, definitely ways in which madison is different from new york:
- went drinking for some dude's birthday at the mall
- no filipino nurses in the hospital
- less body dysmorphic disorder
- polite homeless people
- college football

i'm sure i'll add more to this list throughout the year. wish me luck.

memento

since i want to recap some of my move, the first couple entries might be a bit memento-like with flashbacks interspersed with present day shit. will definitely not be as cool or interesting as the movie though. so as my flight on midwest airlines (i know, i hadn't heard of it before either) was approaching milwaukee, this is what greeted us.

ominous, no? still managed to take this picture. what's eerie is that the previous night i had a dream that my flight had crash landed and exploded because of a novice pilot. wtf? anyway, the plane landed fine with no hullabaloo. after the 3 hour layover and the short 20 minute shuttle, i ended up safely in madison, just blocks away from this:

pretty, right? that's a shot of the memorial union, the only student union in the country that serves alcohol. not exactly a good sign for my detox plans, but whatever. when in rome.

hello wisconsin!

four years since my last post and my how things have changed. for one, i not only completed my intern year (at beth israel, new york), but also an entire ophthalmology residency (at nyu/meeth). i'm sadly no longer living in new york and have instead relocated to beautiful madison, wisconsin, where i'm now in fellowship. four years. a whole new world.

life here is not so bad. the lakes are beautiful. watersports are abundant (haha). people are nice. i have a lot more free time on my hands (evidenced by my facebook status updates and regression to this blog). and the food is good. recent discovery...

squeaky fresh cheese curds. suffice it to say people are a little larger here than they were in new york. more to love, i guess. anyway, i could wallow in my sadness and ramble on and on about how i miss new york. but that wouldn't be very mature now, would it? instead, i'll just try and move on. i'm not good at hiding emotions, so my degree of apathy should directly correlate to the amount of messages i post. let's see where this goes.