Hope The Cafeteria Food's Decent.

For those of you going starting school back up this (or next) week, here's an uncannily accurate guide about your college's website that you might find useful.

I can't find SHIT [via]

So true, though. Seriously, how come campus maps are always 1) hard to find and 2) ten times harder to read than they need to be?

Gahhhh. I don't miss those damn maps.

However in some ways I do kinda envy students as they can "escape" the Real World for a couple more years while the economy tries to correct itself. I know of more than a few examples where people have done/are doing just that, and I can't say that it wasn't a smart thing to do. I mean, other possible life circumstances aside, why not? This isn't very encouraging.

But yeah, the start of the fall semester is always exciting. New classes, new daily routine, new Facebook friends ... I used to enjoy finding new spots to study and people-watch. And let's not forget the advent of Autumn! (Okay so the seasons won't really start changing for a few more weeks, but it's coming up.) Anyways, a fun time of the year all around.

Good luck on your first day!

Work To Live.

The only thing that sucks about having a great weekend is that it inevitably ends, and Monday looms overhead like some gloomy cloud.

Good thing I enjoy the work that I do.

I'm really not sure what would take more getting used to: going back to school after spending years in the workforce or going back to work after school. I can honestly say that I kinda liked not having to work the 55-hour weeks anymore (granted this was in the mortgage industry where the turnover rate is much higher than average) and downshifting into going to class a few hours a day. It was a different type of time management; you could say that "going to school" became my job. This became literal once we entered into our yearlong clinical internship and became completely immersed into the world of diagnostic radiology. Now I work full-time at my MRI preceptorship, which will transition into a real job after I go through the usual process of applying to hospital/clinical positions.

I like the structure it gives me, coupled with a nice rewarding feeling of having done some good in a grand social sense. It didn't take long to re-familiarize myself with the pace of getting up and working long days. Guess I'm just gearing up to re-enter the rat race for real.

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Lately I've been entertaining visions of moving to Europe to sample the lifestyle there. From the articles I've read and a brief first-hand look a few years ago, the general pace of life seems to be much more relaxed -- not centered so much on grinding it out at your job for 40+ hours and trying to amass wealth. Not that I wouldn't want some extra zeroes in the savings account, but I don't want to have to burn myself out over a period of years to do it. I don't think it's worth it. But here in the land of "keeping up with the Joneses" and "he who dies with the most toys, wins" it's hard not to get caught up in that mentality. As in all things with life, a balance must be achieved.

Ahhh fuck it. Who wants to move to Europe with me?

Sorry if this entry is all over the place! This was more of a stream-of-consciousness thing than anything else.

PM Update 005: Temporary Adjustments.

Haven't posted in over a week due to my laptop breaking and studying for finals, but I've finally managed to upload last week's Sunday Seven. I'm blessed with a temporary spare laptop. It runs decently most of the time, but some of the keys stick and the damn thing has a maddening tendency to focus randomly on wherever the cursor happens to be -- so I'll be typing something and suddenly I'm somewhere else in the sentence, paragraph, page or window. I swear I'm gonna wear out the backspace key on this thing before I get my replacement machine, but I'm not one to complain.

Finals are at the forefront of my mind right now, so don't be surprised if posting remains intermittent over the next few days (I'll have a bit of time to catch up this weekend though). I'm still taking photos so I anticipate this week's Sunday Seven to be posted on time.

My fellow students, good luck on this semester's final exams, and keep checking back here.

Most Textbooks Gather Dust.

I used to wonder how much of the stuff I learned in school I could apply in real life. My conclusion was that I could take just bits and pieces of the things I learned in my 100- and 200- level classes and apply it randomly to certain situations, but for the most part much of the statistics, theories and facts I scraped from various lectures and textbooks frankly could've stayed there and I'd be no worse off.

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Now that I'm almost finished with the RT program here at FHSU though, I'm glad that the vast majority of the information I've been cramming into my head will be of some use. There are still tons of material that probably could have been left out as I believe (for now, anyway) that they will have no bearing whatsoever in what will be my daily professional life. But I guess if instructors only taught the absolute bare essentials, all of our classes would only last a half-hour each. They're getting paid to teach, and might as well fill up the time with something. In the meantime, many of my $100+ textbooks sit and gather dust because most of the material we're tested over come straight from the PowerPoint presentations we go over during lecture.

Yay.

At any rate, I tend to dump most superfluous information minutes after I take tests. If you ask me what the last questions was on some exam we just took, there's a good chance I will already have wiped it from my memory.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Probably not.

Lastly, apologies for the late update today (come to think of it, I've been kinda off since this weekend). I'm currently gearing up for the second half of the week: outline due at midnight tonight, presentation and test tomorrow, then the fourth and final test of the week on Friday. Need to finish strong.

Focus.

Sometime last night I realized that this week was actually gonna be pretty busy. I looked at my calendar and saw that instead of two tests as I'd previously thought, I had four: two tomorrow and one each on Thursday and Friday. After the initial moment of predictable panic, I settled down and became grateful that the exams were at least somewhat spread out over the week, allowing me some respite in between them.

An excerpt from this article on Zen Habits touches on my reactions to a busy day/week:

You are in the middle of your day today, and you’re caught up in the sandstorm of thoughts, feelings, to-dos, meetings, readings, and communications of this day.

Pause. Breathe. Let all of that fade.

Now focus on doing one thing, right now. Just choose one thing, and clear away all other distractions. Seriously, clear it all away.

Admittedly this is not that easy to do if your entire week is filled with to-do lists for each day, but focusing on the task at hand is essential for me if I want to stay sane -- especially now that the semester is drawing to a close and so many things have to be wrapped up and attended to.

Zen rock garden

The trick is to let everything else go and focus on the doing of the current task, which in this case is cracking open my notes/textbooks and re-absorbing the material I've learned over the last couple of weeks in four different subjects. A bit more complex than it sounds; I often find myself thinking about Rad Bio when I have my CVIT notes spread out and vice versa. The distraction of being at home is also more than I can handle on many nights, hence my frequent trips to Memorial Union for a few hours of (attempted nightly) study.

I find that to-do lists do help a lot; I manage my tasks and events for the week/month on Rainlendar, a nice little calendar app that sits on top of my laptop wallpaper. I'm not the most organized person by nature, so having a constant reminder of what needs to be accomplished has been invaluable. It helps me focus on individual tasks, and I get great satisfaction when they disappear from the list.

Even with this time-management tool, the biggest challenge for me is really being able to focus on one thing at a time without letting my mind become distracted by other obligations. But no one ever said that achieving Zen would be easy, did they?

Ommmmmmmmmm. Wish me luck.

Caffeine Therapy.

I can't seem to regulate my sleeping patterns. Wait. That's not quite right. Actually, I can't seem to bring myself to go to bed at a decent hour, even when my 8:00 class requires me to get up at 6:30 every other morning. I end up procrastinating and going to bed at ungodly hours -- which makes me a very sleepy boy indeed when early afternoon hits. Most of the time I resist the temptation to take naps during the day but sometimes, falling asleep anyway isn't unheard of for me. And then I'll wake up disoriented, groggy and occasionally not knowing whether it's AM or PM.

This probably needs to stop. I'd say I need an average of six hours of sleep nightly in order to function properly the next day, making midnight my target bedtime. Problem is, I don't remember the last time I wanted to go to sleep at that time. I consider myself a nocturnal creature like millions of other people, but this doesn't work well with my morning schedule. So I turn to coffee.

Currently I only drink an average of one cup a day, during breakfast. This boost gets me through my classes in the morning hours and a little bit after lunch. Inevitably, I crash around 2 or 3 pm and never fully recover (which is bad news for my afternoon classes). I drink the occasional second cup in the evening when I study after dinner, but for the most part I've been okay at going without. But I've been sorely tempted to up my regular caffeine intake so I can be more functional as the day goes by -- and believe me, this semester has been and will continue to be full of long busy days.

Scientific studies say too much caffeine is bad for me and I wholeheartedly agree, which is why I'm trying to cut down. But there's no doubt I study better in the evenings, so why not strive to be as sharp and productive as I can be with the help of a nice cup of coffee? It's hard to argue against that, and so I indulge in that second night-time drink.

Then again, it's even harder to argue against being more disciplined and consistently going to sleep at a reasonable time, isn't it?

Capstone Course Concentration.

Today I'm taking a major mock exam for my Seminar in Radiology class, which is prepping us to take (and pass) the boards after graduation in May. The grading scale in all of the courses in the Radiological Technology program here at FHSU is steeper than the national average -- 94% and above is an A -- so it's definitely a good thing that we're being pushed harder than what's required. True, it has made for some frustrating moments during the past few semesters, but I appreciate that we're essentially being given a cushion.

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The test today will cover cranial and spinal anatomy and procedures, some aspects of radiation safety, exposures and patient care. I feel okay about taking it; I've been taking practice exams for the past week or so and my resulting grades have been decent. Not to say that I wouldn't love to ace the thing, but the instructors say that everyone's generally on track. Besides, the program boasts a very high passing rate on the boards so I'm not too worried at this point. The important thing is to keep taking the practice exams consistently 'cause they're modeled after actual board questions.

Wish me luck! I'll be glad when the day is over regardless.

[Update: Just got done ... and I passed by a comfortable margin! Actually performed markedly better than my current average. Now, to build on that success and improve on the next test.]

Box Project 001: Inspiration & Conception.

Okay. So I've been meaning to post about this for a while now.  Somehow, I stumbled upon across Jake Lodwick's (one of the co-creators of Vimeo) tumblr blog a few months ago and read a series of posts he dedicated to what he calls Standards. It was a so-called "self-management experiment" over the course of a few weeks in which he tracked his daily activities and, using time-management tools and some self-discipline, changed his habits and made his routine more efficient, productive and ultimately rewarding.

I found the blog entries fairly interesting reading, enough to want to explore this myself. However, I wanted to wait until the new year to begin formulating some kind of plan to adhere to -- basically New Year's Resolutions tracked on an Excel spreadsheet and some online time-management websites. True to form, however, I hadn't gotten around to actually doing anything about it. Hence I had to get off my ass and get started by at least posting about it.

Lame, I know, but you know what they say: A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step -- or something like that. But yes, I've begun to swirl the concept around a bit more, and will come back in the upcoming days with something a little more concrete than "just thinking about doing it."

This coincides well with the fact that my final school semester is starting in about a week and a half, so that's a pretty good deadline to have if I'm going to set some time-management goals up. Box Project will be the tentative name for my experiment, as I'm going to attempt to "box" my activities into neat bundles, organized into coherent schedules that will hopefully improve my life.

Whew. Let's do it.

Done With Exams.

Took my second and last final today, so I'M DONE for the semester!! The following video represents how I feel -- the player in blue = me, player in red = test:


I have one more week of clinicals left, but for now my brain can relax!

Ahhhhhhh.

Some Specifics.

For a writing exercise in my Composition course this week, we were asked to make Top 10 lists of specific likes and dislikes. I'd never really made a list like this before, but it was interesting to think about and "discover" what some of my (un)favorites are. A few are pretty superficial, but a couple are more profound than I thought (at least personally).

Likes

1. Reading bedtime stories to Veronica, my 3-year-old daughter, and watching her slooowwwly fall asleep
2. Foggy, rainy, windless weather, complete with low-lying clouds
3. Upbeat British electropop music like Little Boots, La Roux and Ellie Goulding
4. Salmon sashimi very lightly dipped in soy sauce, mixed with a little wasabi (spicy Japanese horseradish) to give it a bit of heat
5. Going to movies by myself. It's really not very different from renting a DVD and watching it at home -- but on a much bigger screen
6. Washing dishes. I find it extremely therapeutic
7. Hanging out with my brother or sister, both cool and cosmopolitan in their own unique ways
8. The noise, excitement and energy of modern city life
9. Long road trips to either coast, accompanied by good music and even better company
10. Attending the weddings and baby showers of childhood friends

Dislikes

1. The inevitable daily piece of junk mail waiting for me when I get home
2. Mowing the lawn, although other yardwork is fine with me
3. Passengers on a bus or train who don't offer their seat to someone who obviously needs to sit down
4. Bank and post office hours. Some of us don't get off work until after 5, you know
5. The evening shift of my clinical rotations. Noon to 8:30pm really throws my schedule off for the entire week
6. Dead bugs, road tar and other highway debris accumulating on the front of my car after a long road trip
7. Office politics and gossip. Just do your work!
8. People who hide behind a facade of friendliness when they are really not that pleasant
9. Babysitting friends who've had too much to drink, ruining the fun for others
10. The short battery life of my cell phone. It barely lasts a whole day on one charge

Midterms & Travel Plans.

It's hard to believe the middle of the semester is already here ... Kinda scary/exciting, actually. Got a Pathology midterm this week, plus quite a bit of writing and critiquing for my Composition course. Then I'll be flying up to Seattle near the end of the week for a few days to celebrate my baby girl's third birthday ... so I'll be MIA for a minute.

Stay warm.

Downshift.

Owing to a busy academic week, I'll be concentrating on the essays and books for a couple of days, so I'm taking a short hiatus.

In the meantime, relax and listen to the type of music that fills many an evening in my apartment. Yeah it runs 47 minutes long, but trust: it's superior background ambience for all your nocturnal needs.


"I shall return" © General Douglas MacArthur. Don't miss me too much :)

Composition II.

This fall I've enrolled in a 200-level English composition class, one of two final general education courses I need to round out my degree summary so I can graduate next summer.  ENGL122 is an online course that, according to the syllabus, "emphasizes organizing and polishing steps important in composing expository, evaluative, and persuasive prose", among several other things listed in a detailed outline.

Good thing I like to read and write. I am a little worried that my skills are rusty; the last class that actually graded me specifically on writing was way back in 1994. (Time flies when you're wandering around the country chasing a career.)

Anyway, as part of the introductory online session, we were asked to introduce ourselves on the class discussion board. I was amazed by the diversity of people in my class, ranging from the typical early-20s undergrad to a couple of grandparents, a scattering of single/married young parents, a few people who were taking the class "just for fun", and even a couple of foreign exchange students from China and the Ukraine. It's kind of too bad that the class is held online; I would've liked to see the variation in person.

For our first assignment, where we were instructed to describe a room using our five senses, it wasn't hard to see the more gifted writers (and the non-native English speakers).  We were also asked to start critiquing each other's work, and so far the comments have been positive.  I'm sure that'll change once we settle in.  Here's what I wrote.

Like many other places in hospitals, the temperature of the Nuclear Medicine exam room is kept intentionally cool in an effort to keep everyone alert and help prevent the spread of germs. The occasional sigh of the air-conditioning ducts almost seems to match the labored, raspy breathing patterns of the patient on the table. The spot lights remain dimmed, casting small warm pools onto the polished floor and creating a sense of calm, clashing with the colder, more piercing lights of the monitors and instrument panels scattered around the room.

The entire place is odorless save for the sour medical whiff of the antibacterial hand foam everyone is encouraged to use. Objects in the room are bright, smooth and clean by design, in sharp contrast to the random rumpled sheets and looped oxygen lines attached to our patients. There is a quiet sense of serenity in this room, sure encouragement to those who must undergo examinations here. These are my observations as a student, shadowing the Nuclear Medicine Department.

I cooked that up in just a couple of minutes, but not too terrible I think? We'll see as the semester goes by. I'm excited to write, receive critiques, and polish my craft.

Jelly Beans, Dream Pop & Trumpets.

Gah, studying cross-sectional anatomy of the pelvis is crazy. I've been trying to make sense out of images that look like this:


The thing looks like a terrain map from some reject 8-bit Nintendo game.

While I can identify the larger, more obvious parts, I have a bit of trouble with the blood vessels that course throughout our bodies. How am I supposed to differentiate between the femoral veins and arteries if they look like someone smashed together a couple of jelly beans and smeared them across a tabletop?

Anyway I soothe my frustration and confusion with music. There's been debate and research on whether listening to tunes helps or hinders the learning process, but I'm convinced that pleasant background sound has had positive effects on my study sessions. (It definitely hasn't hurt.) I usually throw on some Miles Davis in the background -- Relaxin' and Kind Of Blue, along with some other select albums, have been in serious rotation over the last year -- and it helps me focus on the subject matter at hand. I don't know, something about the natural improvisational quality of jazz transforms my brain into a sponge and I find myself very receptive to new information.

Once in a while I pipe some new sounds through the speakers for some variety. Although I've been a fan of the "downtempo" subgenre of electronic music for years, lately I've been listening to M83 for a refreshing auditory change. They're commonly classified as "dream pop" or "shoegaze", which Wikipedia defines as having

"two distorted rhythm guitars [that] are played together to give an amorphous quality to the sound. Although lead guitar riffs were often present, they were not the central focus of most shoegazing songs.

Vocals are typically subdued in volume and tone, but underneath the layers of guitars is generally a strong sense of melody. However, lyrics are not emphasized; vocals are often treated as an additional instrument. While the genres which influenced shoegazing often used drum machines, shoegazing more often features live drumming."

Saturdays=Youth, M83's latest offering, is an awesome listen all the way through, and more than suits my needs for interesting background study music. Granted I keep the volume relatively low to keep from actively paying attention, but the songs on the album serve as a nice complement to the material in my textbooks. One particular track, "We Own The Sky," is a favorite. The band is actually accepting YouTube submissions from fans who want to interpret the song, and the winning video will be played on PitchforkTV later this year. I like this submission:


Go hipsters go!

A far cry from Miles' smooth trumpet, to be sure, but just as stimulating to my mind. And just maybe it'll help me distinguish jelly beans from arteries.