Spare the jersey, spoil the tourney (apparently mine was good luck)

I hate that I'm so passionate about soccer that one game can put me in a bad mood for the whole day. Stupid goalkeeper swap, stupid coaching, stupid stupid referee-ing, stupid communication breakdown, stupid subbing. Poor Hope, poor Leslie (also stupid, but I don't want to be too hard on her), poor Boxy, poor Lil ('cause this was her year, her team, her Cup), poor fans that woke up at 4am to watch every game, poor women's league that isn't getting the good press they need. Did I mention that I hate that I was in a bad mood all day? I mean, I think it's important to be passionate about things, even important to be extremely passionate about some things. It keeps people from being boring. But I wish that I could be passionate about history or art or music or something that wouldn't depress me so much when a debacle such as this morning occurs.
As if soccer wasn't enough to ruin my day, I got a lot of questions wrong today. The attendings are going to stop asking. One wasn't my fault because I was misinformed by a preceptor. One was only sort of my fault because technically the attending didn't ask the full question before telling me I was wrong. Still, big blow to the self-esteem.
The glaring bright spot of the day was that someone had a birthday in the billing department and I got free cake and icecream. Good cake too, not some crappy store-bought day-old yuckiness. Homemade chocolate with whipped cream frosting and butterfinger crumbles. I don't like butterfinger, but I sure liked this cake.
That's all for now because I have to study for a little while. But just know that I am still worked up enough to hit a punching bag for several minutes. It comes and goes. Gone during the cake and icecream, back because I'm writing about it and reliving the anguish. Hopefully gone tonight so I can sleep. Hasta!

Pickle juice in the eye

My list of things in response to "You know what the worst thing in the world is?"

• Gawker's Block. Seriously people, as someone who has been in an accident, I can attest to the fact that it's not nice to stare. It's even less nice to block a lane of traffic while you slow your car to a crawl in order to accomplish said staring. Go home and watch it on the news. Or just go home, so the rest of us can as well.
• Not being able to jump in and reveal your intelligence while another person has to sit there in the hot seat and look stupid. There's legitimacy to making somebody work through something they don' t know, but it's a whole different story when all those good bites of knowledge have to sit there on the edge of my tongue while my fellow student remains mute and humiliated. I want to impress my preceptor and come to my colleague's rescue at the same time and I'm silenced with a "when I want your opinion, I'll ask for it" speech.
• The season premiere of Bones not being aired for another week. Okay, on the list, this should fall at most at the very bottom, if it makes the list at all. But I'm not being rational. I'm being addicted, and this is what addicted people do--put waaaayyy too much stock in the object of their addiction. I just wanna watch a new episode. One that doesn't take 25 minutes to load.
• Stubbed toes. Seriously. Every time I stub my toe, it reinforces my belief that it really is the worst thing in the world. Maybe second to a severely violated funny bone. There's nothing funny about banging your funny bone.
• Wanting the rest of your life to start right now and having to wade through several months of "not yet." You know, wanting the rest of your life to start right now isn't reserved for people who are engaged or in a serious relationship and know that they have found the right person to whom they can pledge their eternal love. It's also for people who are sick and tired of school and need to have a real life. One that involves having pets and a house with a real bookcase and time to read all the books on that bookcase and a yard and money to travel and the opportunity to go to Catholic Biblical School and dozens of recipes to perfect and Sunday mornings to drink coffee while doing the crossword and Sunday afternoons to play pick-up football or soccer and the reason this sentence doesn't have any commas is because it's all a jumbled mess in my head of this life I want.
• My headaches that don't appear to be affected by modern medications and don't appear to be triggered by typical stressors and don't appear to be categorically fit for any headache type. They suck.
• Rain pouring down while I'm trying to drive. I love the rain. Really, it's like one of my favorite things in the world. The sound, the smell, the feel, the sight; everything is great about it unless I happen to be in my car. Then, and only then (and maybe during a picnic), it's the worst thing in the world.

Just to kill time until the internet works

I'm trying not to get upset about the fact that the Bones episode that I'm watching keeps freezing and I keep having to reload it. So far it hasn't angered me too much, but that's probably because I'm in the best mood I've been in for a long time. Think about all the stuff I have to be happy about, just so far today: USWNT won this morning and Abby Wambach scored two goals (I think that most of her stellar play was due to me wearing my Wambach jersey). Granted, one was a PK which says less about her as the most dangerous forward in the world and more about Lori Chalupny's hustle, but still fun to watch. More on Abby in a minute. Then, I drank a yummy grande half-caf, non-fat, sugar-free hazelnut latte courtesy of my wonderful dad and picked up some equally yummy Panera bagels on my way to work. Then I only had to work a little less than half a day before I got a glowing evaluation from the usually stern and gruff preceptor. He thinks I'd make a great professor. We'll see, but I'm not ruling it out because as I like to say, I could switch careers every 5 years and still be in the realm of pharmacy. Oh, and did I mention that I got an 'A'? Congratulations to me. (I have an audio imprint of that phrase, but I can't place it right now.) Then I had a couple of lovely, if brief, phone conversations on my drive home and here I sit with the whole afternoon ahead of me and nothing but Bones and a nap on the agenda. Not to mention my plans for a full-on Brian Larkin weekend since I'm in between rotations. That would all be enough to put anybody in a good mood. Add in some other mitigating factors from the week (Mary played a whole half on Tuesday, got to come home for lunch yesterday, got to have dinner with Jerry who happens to be visiting from Poland, Fr. Gillick gave a great talk at SVdP Young Adult Group, my roommates bought fruit pizza, the weather has been gorgeous) and I bet I could ride this high for quite some time. At least until Monday at 10am when rotation #4 starts.
Real quick justification for Abby Wambach being the most dangerous forward. Not only has she scored something like 80 goals in less than 100 games, but a large percentage of those goals have been with her head. When you are 5'11" and as accurate and powerful with your head as Abby is, not many teams can stop you. If they do choose to double-team you, or triple-team you as teams frequently do with Abby, she has an all-star backup core of forwards to take over the goal scoring. And that's why I think she is the most dangerous. She is virtually unstoppable (not even a numb toe and 11 stitches to close a 2-inch head gash could stop her), but if you manage to contain her, you are still going to lose. Lil and Hea-O (just learned Heather O'Reilly's nickname, pronounced Hey-Oh) and Tarpley and Carli Lloyd and Natasha Kai and company are going to take over in style. I love soccer. (Said in my "I love cake" voice) I love it because it is above all a team sport, and while one player can make or break a game, it takes 11 players to win championships. Abby Wambach may be the most important player on the field, especially statistically, but without Lori Chalupny's hustle or Lil's perfect serve, she doesn't have either goal today. With them, she dominates and puts me in a great mood.

I believe that serotonin and norepinephrine stimulate euphoria

You know in Ocean's Eleven when Linus gets stuck with the unsavory task of following Benedict around to document every detail of his schedule? And when he sits and watches the staircase for when Tess comes down from the museum and he says, "This is just the best part of my day." You wanna know when that line pops into my head every single day? The minute my head hits the pillow. Every night, I think "this is just the best part of my day." Then I lay there for another hour with random thoughts running through my head and then I spend all night dreaming up the most bizarre alternate realities for myself so sleep is never as restful as I'd like. But every night, that single instant when the light is out and I get to lie down and take a deep relaxing breath, every night that feels just as good as it possibly can. I keep thinking that means my day is incredibly boring if sleep is the best part, but most of the time that's okay with me. I can pretend it means that I find that moment so relaxing because I can rest easy knowing it was a good, productive, fulfilling day. Some days that's more of a stretch than others.
On a side note, I wasted an entire weekend watching highlight clips and whole episodes of Bones. I also read several episode recaps, so all told I think I spent about 8 hours on a show I'd never seen before Friday. Notice I didn't say "wasted 8 hours" because at least 5 of those hours were well spent. I enjoy the show and the sarcasm and the witty dialogue and the obvious romantic tension between Bones and Booth (obvious probably for everyone but Bones whose favorite line seems to be "I don't know what that means," referring to the culture reference of the moment which has floated way over her head). Some of the forensic science intrigues me (mostly it disturbs me, but I hope that means I'm a sympathetic human), but mostly I enjoy it for the characters. Well, and David Boreanaz is a lot more believable as a Catholic (yay), intuitive knight in shining FBI standard-issue body armor than a cradle-robbing creature of the night boyfriend. (shameless Buffy reference)
On another side note, the weather today was totally nap-worthy. And I'm excited about the WNT World Cup game tomorrow morning although the closer I get to it, the less and less appetizing 4am sounds. Maybe I'll TiVo the first half and watch the second half live. I don't even know how to work the TiVo but I bet I can find out. It has to be better soccer than the men's game I watched yesterday. I can blame some of the atrocity on the ref, but mostly Brazil just dominated a weaker team. Let's hope that North Korea doesn't prove to be as unsolvable. That's all for today. I was just killing time between work and Mass and this seemed like a more enjoyable means to an end than re-working my patient's Vanco kinetics based on today's random level.

Would you rather...

Today was a good food day. Just cereal and a banana for breakfast, but then watch out Emeril! I made a turkey, tomato, and mozzerella omelet for lunch. (I made a real mess on the stove though) Then I made cheeseburgers on the grill and garlic and pine nut couscous for dinner. Yummmm! It gave me hope for the future and all those meals I'm gonna be cooking for my family. It's not that I can't cook, it's just that I typically don't like taking the time, and I also don't usually have ingredients to plan a real menu. But it reminded me of a conversation I had last weekend. I asked my dinner companions to choose three things that they would love to be really good at besides their job. I enjoy coming up with questions like this that I think reveal more about a person than "What's your favorite jelly belly flavor?" I think secretly I'm storing up good first and second date questions, but that's beside the point. My three things were cooking, conversing in a way that really allowed me to get to know another person (not just know about them), and self-discipline when it came to things like procrastination and over-indulgence.
See what I mean? You already know so much more about me from those three little things. I really want to be a good cook primarily for two reasons. First, I love food. It's really that simple. I take great pleasure in the nuances of taste (and smell, see my last blog), and there are so many wonderful flavors out there to be experienced. Second, I think that food is a great medium for spending quality time with someone. Jesus thought so too and if it's good enough for Him, it's good enough for me. Wanting to be a good conversationalist reveals that I'm not, but also that I think it is important to really know the people that you spend time with. I like being surrounded by friends, and if I'm good at using conversation to get to know people, then I will always be surrounded by friends. And anyone who knows me knows that I have the weakest will power in the world. I did win the Study Avoidance Tactics Award for a reason, and I also have serious issues resisting the lure of chocolate, ice cream, coffee, that last piece of pizza, etc.
Okay, I concede that not everyone will elaborate as much on their three desired expertises as I just did, but I still think that it's a good question. It shows a person's (perceived) deficiencies as well as their passions, and that's as good a place to start as any when you really want to know someone.