Broken

So I get one of those new Macbook Airs recently, and it's awesome. It's funny, just 2 years ago I was the biggest Apple hater in the world but slowly I've managed to get just about every gadget they've put out. Competition? None for some of this stuff, I'm so tired of my horrible, heinous Blackberry Storm - to think some people called it the "iPhone killer" when it first came out. BBM is cool, but that's about it. Even Brickbreaker is like impossible with its crappy screen. I'm pretty psyched to (finally) get the new Verizon iPhone coming out in a few weeks, right in time for me to hit the wards with it - badass.

Anyways, so my new computer is great - light, quiet (my old computer is so loud with its fan), and turns on/off like in 2 seconds. Well, then it started to give me some error messages and having some trouble waking up. Wait, I thought Macs don't DO error messages - aren't they perfect? Well, figures that when Steve Jobs gets sick so does my new computer. So I take it in to this somewhat dubious shop in town and am told basically that my "logic board" is causing my computer to crash because something about it not being about to learn how I use my computer most. Huh? Logic boards? Learning? Sounds very 1984/Big Brother kinda stuff, but whatever I'll just roll with it. That's waaaaaaay above my paygrade, anyway it's under warranty so hopefully I'll get it back in the next few days.

Oh yeah, our new medical education building opened back in the Fall and we now have classes there everyday instead of in the old Jordan Hall dungeon used for so many years. We're on the top floor, get tons of natural light, and our room is nice and spaced out... not that all that many people go to class. I said it last year, but now it's almost comical - sometimes we are down to about 20 people (especially at 8 AM) out of 140. Being the audio/visual learner, I'm there holding down the fort with the "skeleton crew." Plus, going over new material in the morning makes me feel less guilty about going over old stuff in the afternoon. It'll be interesting to see how to balance studying new material presented (and it's hard - hematology/oncology [basically blood problems/cancer] and virology are out major subjects now) and going over the old stuff. Guess I'll just have to wait and see how it works out!

Dynamite

Whew, it's been a long time. Don't know why I really fell off the train - inexcusable! I'm back now, isn't that all that matters?

To put it mildly, I've been busy. Where to even begin? I haven't yet been kicked out of medical school and I'm trucking along through 2nd year. How is it compared to the 1st? Different - LOTS more material. I miss the good old days of having only two hard classes and one joke class. Now we have 5 (yeah, five) classes that are by no stretch easy and take up tons of time in their own way. The result? Cliff has like no free time. At least all of what we are learning now (pathology, virology and pharmacology) is all directly applicable to medicine. Last year, it's a little hard to keep perspective when you're learning about random biochem pathway A rate-limited by Joe Synthetase 78 - it was almost like a bunch of hand-waving magic. This year - talking about heart attacks and lung disease we can actually imagine and think about what caused it, how to treat it, and maybe how to prevent it. Plus, I've seen some of this stuff with my rescue background which makes it that much more interesting - really helped during the cardiac pathology section!

Got a little something coming up in April - USMLE Step 1 ("the boards") which I don't really feel like talking about because it eats up my already non-existent free time and social life. I'll get into specifics later - basically it's a titanic test on the first 2 years of med school. Scary! But we start Year 3 in May - we're all counting down!

But my whole life isn't just study study study, I made time to travel out to Arizona last week for the BCS National Championship Game between Auburn and Oregon (my brother in law went to Auburn) - had a fantastic time, Auburn won at the last minute (see celebration picture!). It's the second time I've been to Glendale where the stadium literally looks like an alien mothership in the middle of the desert (went 2 years ago to see Texas play Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl, another great game!). Definitely had a few highlights - Coach Jeff Fisher's awkwardly firm handshake and Nick Saban's "yessssssss" to an Auburn turnover coming out of the bathroom behind me were two of them.

I really liked the Auburn fans - didn't fall to the level of "yeah bro SEC 4 lyfe!" like some of the other teams in their conference do. They were doing it all for themselves and for the personal glory - it's not like the rest of the SEC was cheering for them anyways (see: Nick Saban's reaction above). Seeing people shaking Oregon fan's hands saying "hey man, great game it was fun" was something else. BCS games are such a blast, it makes me wish that much more that UVA's football program was worth something more than the small vial of hypnotiq sitting on top of my desk (first cheap thing I see around me). We're getting better with our new coach (top 25 recruiting class!), but it's gonna be a while. Plenty of time to get into the swamp of UVA athletics another time.

Anyways, I'll try to update more often. At the very least it'll be a nice study break!