Yoked to the apartment waiting for a UPS delivery.

Would really love to be able to walk down to ArcLight and see Tree of Life.

I have this lurking feeling of dread that occasionally confronts me head-on... "I HAVE TO BUY A CAR!!"

I do not want to do this. I don't know how to even start going about it.

Yesterday we went to Drew's sister's house for a Memorial Day bbq and our niece gave me a doctor puppet:

 

A friend's sister took this photo seconds after I officially became a doctor.

My life has turned into this long struggle to change careers; that struggle has been going on for seven years now, so sometimes it's hard to stop and appreciate that this change has actually happened. I've gotten where I was hoping to go. Obviously I have a lot (everything) to learn, but today instead of worrying about residency I'm just going to stare at this picture and be thankful that I've made it this far.

 

Medical school is over. We moved back to Los Angeles eight days ago. I'm currently sitting in our office/guest room surrounded by half-emptied boxes. There -- now you're all caught up.

I found it difficult to write while I was doing clinical rotations. So many of the good stories involved patients, and I'm loath to put anything about any patient on the internet. Also, I was way too tired. And lazy.

I have four weeks until my residency program's orientation begins. My baseline anxiety has been well-documented on this blog, so I won't bore you with how freaked out I am to be responsible for sick children. Except to alert you to the fact that sometimes I think I might faint at the mere thought of it.

I have major performance anxiety.

Speaking of which, I recently re-watched Katharine Hepburn on the Dick Cavett Show (which is AMAZING); she attributes much of her success to her ability to concentrate.

Focus and concentration can definitely carry you a long way when you're trying to do good work. My ability to concentrate fully, to completely immerse myself in whatever it is I'm working on at any given moment, has definitely suffered recently. And by recently I mean pretty much always.

Drew, meanwhile, is a master at this. It's inspiring to watch him work; he sits at his computer for hours and hours without even using the restroom or taking a sip of water. I used to accuse him of lying when he admitted that he "forgot to eat" because he was working on some project. Forgot to eat? This never has and never will happen to me. His ability to focus on a task has been good for the move from Philadelphia back to Los Angeles. Although I will admit that I've snuck off to the bathroom to check Facebook once or twice or three dozen times while he was doing something like individually bubble-wrapping everything we own. I just can't keep my mind on anything for more than a few minutes.

A recent episode of Science Friday on NPR about science books for summer reading highlighted a book which blamed the internet for destroying our ability to do "deep reading". While I'd love to blame the internet for my inability to concentrate more than five minutes at a stretch, I'm sure there are other factors at work here. Still, it is true that I love to click through from article to article while "reading the news" online. To the point that I often don't make it past the dateline.

This exchange has happened more than I'd like to admit:

Someone: "Did you hear about _______?"
Me: "I saw the headline but I didn't actually read the article."

So these are my tasks for this week:
1. Use the internet only when there's a clear purpose behind it (e.g. twice-daily email checks, a morning perusal of the front page of the New York Times, settling arguments with Drew re: things like "Why is gold a precious metal?"
2. Read fifty pages of a pleasure read without interruption.
3. Read twenty-five pages of something that requires more of Hepburn's "concentration" without picking up my iPhone to see if anyone has responded to that hilarious thing I just posted on Facebook. Which shouldn't be difficult if I successfully complete task #1.