Happy belated Birthday to me...yes, I forgot to post on my own birthday =)

Haha, thanks to everyone who called and sent cards etc. You are all awesome =) I wasn't overly thrilled about turning 21 but thank you all for remembering =)

Just a warning... if you have a weaker stomach, the rest of this post is gonna be about my anatomy lab experiences so don't read on...

Yay! We had our first anatomy lab today and got to make our very first cuts. Across the skin on the clavicles (collarbones), down the midline of the chest and then around the bottom of the rib cage. And then you just grab the flap of skin with your fingers and pull, exactly like how you would take the skin off of a piece of chicken. I've been told it isn't uncommon to develop a distaste for meat during the first few weeks of anatomy, I'm not surprised =)

Our cadaver is emaciated, just a fancy way of saying really, unbelievably, famine-victim thin. So much so that when we cut through the skin, we almost sliced right into the muscles of the chest because there was absolutely no fat underneath. Our cadaver also had a pacemaker implanted into his chest, right underneath the skin, and you could see the outline of it even with the skin intact. Once you peel back the skin, right underneath some connective tissue is the pectoralis major muscle, aka chicken breast. Covering the shoulder is the deltoid muscle, and the cephalic vein lies in a groove in between the deltoid and pec major.

But despite the cutting and the peeling and the unmistakeable smell of formaldehyde, the highlight of today would have to be: signing out scrubs and wearing them for the first time. As if all those years of hard work, my entire life has been building up to this moment when I could finally wear scrubs and not feel like a wannbe =) The cutting itself? Meh...I'm not planning on going into surgery. It was ok, but really I was just happy because it beats sitting in class.

I scored a goal!!! I actually scored a goal!!! Over the last 3 weeks, I've started to play intermural water polo on Thursday nights. The timing is really quite awkward for me - it cuts into my precious phone time, it requires me to skip out on the last few minutes of my night class, it requires me to walk home late at night with wet hair in the freezing Edmonton winter - but it's been a surprising amount of fun.

The game I play is butt-in-the-hole-style innertube water polo, so I imagine we must all resemble upside-down turtles waving our limbs ineffectively in the water. The first week, only 3 girls showed up (myself included) and since the rules require you to have 3 girls in the pool throughout the game, we played the entire 40 minutes and by the end, I was so exhausted I pretty much sat in the same spot and passed as much as possible so I wouldn't have to move. The second week, we had a few more girls so we could afford to chase the ball a little more. But last week, we won 13-2!!! When we started breaking the double digits, we decided to switch everyone up just for the heck of it and give our regular goalie and all our defencemen a chance to play forward.

You have to understand how big of a deal this is to me. I'm the stereotypical kid who got picked last for teams. We used to play kickball in elementary school and the rule was that if you kicked the ball and it was caught right out of the air, you were automatically out. I was the kid who ran after said ball, only to have it smuck me in the forehead. Or in the mouth. Once, only once throughout my entire elementary career did I catch the ball. It happened in Gr. 6 actually, at the kid up to bat was Charlie Johnson, the class jock. And as luck would have it, he kicked it straight at me (honestly, everybody kicked it straight at me because they knew I was going to drop it) and I sat there for a moment panicking because by this point, everybody else had resigned themselves to the fact that we (I) was gonna give up a home run. But in quiet desperation I lifted my hands up and...I caught the ball...

And in my head it was like a movie...y'know where everyone slowly turns when they've realized what you've done...and one by one... they start to clap...slowly...until the appluase builds into this thundering that echoes throughout the stadium...

I find my complete lack of coordination to be rather ironic considering that I'm dating a jock. Like this one time we were walking around in Toronto and we ran into a group of his friends who were like...25 m away. And for fun, he started throwing baby carrots at them. And for a moment, I was completely stunned by the fact that you could throw something as stupid as a baby carrot and actually hit a person 25 m away and to top it all off, he was hitting them in the head. Had it been me, that carrot would have travelled about 10 feet and landed sadly closer to myself than to my target, but here he was launching carrots, every single one landing exactly where it was supposed to. Bing! Bing! Each one was like a little arrow that pierced into my clumsy soul and I stood there in awe thinking "I am not worthy...I am not worthy..."

Blogging lately has been very hard for me.

The reasons for this are multiple. I try to be really honest about what's going on in my life - but to be honest, nothing is. In my life, like in that of so many other people, nothing really happens. You wake up, you go to class, you make chitchat with the people around you, maybe you go see a movie, you try to eat a balanced diet and not offend anyone. It's really not worth blogging about.

Yet, I would't say that my life is without meaning. The things that stand out in my day are the small moments between friends, the quiet times alone in the morning and before I fall asleep, the conversations about absolutely nothing. How do you take those moments and turn them into a post worth reading? How do you convey the significance of the most intimate moments of your day and make them into something that can be read by your closest friends, by mere acquaintences, by perfect strangers who chance upon your innermost thoughts.

Whenever I have a moment of spare time, I like to hit the "next blog" button at the top of my page and see where chance takes me. The majority of blogs I come across are angry teenage rants or written in another language or ads for home insurance, but occasionally you come across one that epitomizes all that you want your own writing to be. It is both amusing and personal, it is intelligent, logical and well-supported but neither preachy nor arrogant. And I admire these anonymous writers so much because they've taken their material from the "nothing" of their lives, from the intimate moments and they've made it accessible to me, a random 1AM, insomniac surfer. And in trying to be all of these things, I end up instead, voiceless.

Aiy...1 AM and I've literally done nothing since 5 this afternoon. If you're all looking for a really good place to waste some time, I would suggest talkingcock.com Get your minds out of the gutter =) "Talking cock" is a S'porean expression for chitchat and the website's generally devoted to strange S'porean humor.

My own family actually comes from S'pore and for the longest time I thought it was perfectly normal to say things like "Alamak! Why you so kay-poh? I talk cock with Aunty Sandy you no need stay wat! Wah Bo Eh! Go do maths already or not?" Alright, I exxagerate a little. But I'm happy to say that as she adjusted to life in Canada she lost a lot of her strange Singlish mannerisms. Now she's left only with the tendency to use the word 'gallavant'.

If anything, it should give you all an insight into PKwek (for those who know him =) For the full effect, try and imagine him actually saying those phrases - without the accent, the full beauty of the language is lost =)

Today being the first day that U of A undergrads are back in school, and tomorrow being the deadline that the Canadian government set for matching donations to tsunami victims, our class has been hard-pressed to organize a fundraiser in time. What this translates to in practical terms is that I stood in HUB today - no ID tags, no scrubs, nothing to indicate that I'm a medical student, holding a Ziploc bag full of blue ribbons and an Aldo shoebox and started asking random people to donate money. And despite my complete lack of credibility...

They gave! They actually gave! I had people handing me $20 bills and then asking me "so where did you say this money was going?" We raised $150 in 35 minutes.

Today was a lesson in the usefulness of Psych 101. If people gave us the excuse that they had no change, we'd give them a ribbon anyways and many times, guilt would bring them back to our table. And not with toonies...no my friend, they came back with bills. Big bills. I believe in Psych this is referred to as the "reciprocity norm". Go check it out people, useful tool for fundraisers everywhere.

The other thing that I learned today is that just about anyone can make up a cause, dress themselves up pretty, grab a shoebox and make one heck of a lot of money in a really short time. I'm not saying it was wrong for those people to donate to us - the money we collected really is going to charity - but I was completely shocked that we got as many donations as we did.

One of my favorite moments from the holidays. I couldn't really breathe =) But you can't really tell from the look on my face can you? Candice looks like she's in pain =) 

Aaah...the start of a new year...

Yes, I know I've been bad and haven't updated in weeks, but what can I say? I had better things to do =) But now that all the feasting and sleeping and drinking and shopping has been dispensed with, it's time to head back to normal life for another 4 months.

My break was probably much the same as all of yours - just spending lots of time (though never enough) with the people that I love. Although I've noticed that every year, my circle of friends remaining in Calgary grows smaller and smaller. I usually start the holidays with a whole list of people I would really like to see and spend time with, and this year I met up with half of those. The majority of my broken friendships inevitably seem to follow the same path. It always starts with good intentions. But as time grows increasingly scarce, I resort to cut-and-pasted emails, fewer phone calls and eventually the "we should get together soon" which evolves into a half-hearted attempt to arrange something at the last possible time.

Enough of my ramblings, school has started up again and as much as I dislike Edmonton I have to say that I was surprised to discover that I missed many of my classmates over the break. A few of us went to see 'The Phantom of the Opera' today, the movie version. As a person who lived and breathed the soundtrack during my formative years, I have to say that their interpretation was nothing short of scandalous. THEY SPOKE!!! IT'S A FREAKING MUSICAL PEOPLE!!! YOU HAVE TO SING EVERY SINGLE FREAKING LINE!!! WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT, THAT'S HOW IT WAS INTENDED TO BE PERFORMED!!! And I just didn't think the vocal performances were quite up to snuff.

Whoa...what is this stick doing up my butt? =)