My dance history professor from undergrad said graduate school taught her how to read. At this point in the game I whole heartedly agree. It shows in my fun reading -- I'm on my fourth book in a week and a half. But I probably must also credit my Nook since I can optimize the font style, font size and line spacing to my preference. Maybe its also all the time I had whilst without internet (which is up and running again -- whee!)....
1) Janet Evanovich, Smokin' Seventeen (2011).
Book eighteen came out in November, dropping the e-book price of Seventeen to what I consider a tolerable. Excellent humor. No required thought on my part. Perfect. Zoom.
2) Kathryn Stockett, The Help (2011).
I feared it would end up being a novel version of a chick flick. Boy, was I ever wrong! I am positive that anyone with even the teeneist smidgeon of awareness reads The Help with parallel examples running through their head, be they of personal experience or historical origin. The notion profoundly applies that those who act unto others and make the biggest public stink are often directly and/or indirectly addressing their own personal issues. Maybe its the overexposure to 17 Stephanie Plum novels since August, but I found myself wanting to text OMG to a few who have also read The Help when I vehemently never, never, never use such "acronyms." (For the record, I also use punctuation and form actual sentences when texting unless limited by space constraints.)
3) Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (1989).
Sacks is an incredibly sweet and humble doctor who is profoundly interested by both the pathological conditions and, more so, the patient themself. The man has only one fault: using four times as many commas as is appropriate, second only to the comma usage of some writers from The New Yorker. But for Sacks I am willing to forgive.
Seeing Voices is a discussion of prelingual deafness, meaning a child is born without the ability to hear or loses their hearing before having acquired any understanding of language. The deficit is larger than most would expect. The ability to form thoughts is dependent upon language, so much so that without it there is no of reasoning, no cause and effect, no concept of numbers, no concept of time, no concept of the ability to express ideas may exist without the brain having a basis for communication. This is different from those who acquired at least some language before losing their hearing, or postlingual deafness.
The process of learning is very intricate and relies on principles of neuroplasticity, how your brain adapts to new events. Spoken language is shown through research to be very left brain heavy, but the left side is a processor of the fine details of what is known. Exposure to a novel event (i.e. new event -- learning words, hearing a new usage of a known word, etc.) requires processing by the right brain, where global understanding predominates rather than fine details, which then sends the information to the left side for storage and future use. There are numerous fine details of the process, including whether long term potentiation is achieved through the limbic system (i.e. the process of an event becoming an actual part of your long term memory base), but we'll keep things simple for now.
Interestingly, American Sign Language (ASL) was only considered a true language within the last few decades. ASL was for many years assumed to be crude pantomime and/or a series of shapes strung together. In fact, as Sacks points out, ASL is its own language separate from signed english that has its own grammatical framework including word manipulations for tense/emotion/etc, it is highly spacial dependent for individual words and full thoughts alike, and has fluidity of thoughts and phrases.
The use of space while signing plays a huge roll. Spacial orientation is classically a right brain activity. It is acutely developed within signers significantly more so than in speakers, and yet because spacial orientation is linked so closely to "speaking" in ASL it becomes integrated into the left brain's language centers. Apparently signed english is much harder to convey thoughts than with ASL, and studies cited by Sacks demonstrate that over time many using signed english organically manipulate its use to where it begins to resemble ASL and its unique grammatical constructs.
4) Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010).
Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 of an aggressive cervical cancer, but the cell sample (named HeLa) taken from the tumor growth is still alive today. Previously no human cells survived in culture past a few days. It was not for many, many years until scientists discovered the likely reason why her cells divided at a rate 20 times of other cells ad nauseum. The cells were then distributed across the world to anyone scientist who wanted to research using human cells for the first time, eventually leading to the polio vaccine, cancer and AIDS research, the effects of radiation and toxins, genetic mapping, drugs....
And yet a huge ethical construct exists. Many have heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, where blacks were used for research in a horribly unethical way. Henrietta Lacks was not infected with cancer by her doctors, but cells were removed and distributed into what became a multi-billion dollar industry while her family was left with nothing, including no knowledge that cells were harvested in the first place. Consent, disclosure, maleficence... you name it, the history of the HeLa cell line is wrought with it.
Next week will become a slow return to orthopedics. I'll be working my way through all three semesters' worth of manual therapy notes and through my textbooks (like my new gait book by Perry and interventions book by Magee -- ya!) to wrap my brain around treating a patient population filled with runners and triathletes instead of normal folk's usual pathologies. Hoping my memory is as robust as I *think* it is...
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Shelves for my sanity, and the advent of spiderabbitdolphinsealworm
[Note: I have been without internet access at home since 12/17, hence the delayed topics for posts thereafter. Tomorrow we should have renewed access, at which point I will steadily continue to catch up to all the posts I've been meaning to share.]
Every four months or so I develop a substantial itch to change something, be it a purge-cleaning of the apartment, rearranging a room, or sometimes simply getting a haircut. But the itch isn't as benign as it seems -- for every day I continue to ponder the itch but delay satiation it grows in factorial intensity. It is especially intense if it goes unrecognized for six months instead of four, as was the case this time around.
Since the latest itch struck at the start of our two weeks of finals, it emitted its own aura of anger that had Nathan quite worried about me. Needless, to say, Nathan has shown great patience with the whole thing. I mentioned my need to fix the situation to my mother over the phone. At a certain point she asked, "How are things with Nathan? Are they okay?" I replied "Yea, they're fine. Why do you ask?" After the fact I realized she misinterpreted my manic wrath of the piles as displeasure with our relationship. Oops. I am just glad that the itch helps my failing-due-to-grad-school housekeeping.
I like to limit my belongings to a small assortment of functional items. Clothes I haven't worn in a year get donated (aside from a select few nostalgic pieces), I'm not into filling my space with chotchkies, and I like having visible wall space. Nathan has much the same set of preferences, though his heterosexual male self is belied by his method of "organization." Piles exist, floor space is exposed, nothing is rotting in corners or underneath crawl spaces, but the walls are lined end to end with said piles without much heed as to how and where.
I've been there with working in retail, where after a long day or sorting through dirty items and constantly cleaning up after inconsiderate shoppers who disassemble an organization you moments ago achieved through three hours of tedious work. And the holiday season?? Forget about it. When you get home after work, particularly since work shifts never end on time, the last thing you want to do is pick up your own living space. You take solace in knowing that is all your items that are all over the place, so you don't mind living in the clutter for a few more days that turn into weeks. Since Nathan is the store manager, he tends to put in as many as three extra hours per shift on any given day. I don't expect him to come home and scrub or clean.
The other caveat: there is only one closet available to Nathan and I, a 36-inch wide closet in the bedroom that we must share. No utility closets, no storage in the basement, nothing. So piles exist because you have to acquire a structure on which to store them.
Voila, an itch boiling over for two weeks encapsulating the entire friggin' apartment.
Last post I mentioned sleeping for nine and a half hours after going to bed at 8:30 p.m. the Saturday following my last exam. I awoke Sunday on a mission that mostly maintained its momentum for the next 48 hours. By then we had two 72"-high metal wire shelving units standing in parallel with a little room between for a few extra, larger items. Boxes from all across the apartment finally have a home. The damn guitar case that flops everywhere and tripped me every three days for the last who-knows-how-long is now stored. The shipping material from the various Ebay things Nathan has intentions of selling (in what I hope is the near future... *ahem*...) is now out of sight. I even moved my four-drawer file cabinet out of the bedroom to be included in this makeshift closet. Now I just need cheap, wall colored sheets to cover the outside and it'll be done.
It is fair to say the manic two weeks of the semester became a manic two days of desperate cleaning. Even now, over a week after completion, I find myself standing in front of the configuration with hands on hips exclaiming "Hah! I win!" at inanimate objects. Yet another quality that makes me prime debutante material.
Miss Sadie, on the other hand, immediately took to the challenge. The units have a three-inch ground clearance. I barely had all the boxes stored and brushed the dust off my hands before Sadie wormed her little self beneath one of them. Took her twenty seconds of squirming to get under. I don't think she accomplished much aside from laying on her belly scratching at the floor like a walrus to turn directions. Then it took her a full minute of squirming to get out. I just stood there, glaring, saying "I told you not to go under there. I won't say 'I told you so,' but don't expect me to help you get out, either." She didn't mind. Miss Mischief needs no assistance.
That guitar case I mentioned is stored on top due to its irregular shape. Sadie loooves to lay on canvas of any sort. One sheet covers the unit's kitchen-side temporarily, perfect for scaling her way to the top. The first few attempts had her turning horizontal and crawling in an uncoordinated zig zag until she finally got to the top. Sadie's feline name has acquired a new addition of spider, upping her ante to spiderabbitdolphinsealworm. Seriously....
Every four months or so I develop a substantial itch to change something, be it a purge-cleaning of the apartment, rearranging a room, or sometimes simply getting a haircut. But the itch isn't as benign as it seems -- for every day I continue to ponder the itch but delay satiation it grows in factorial intensity. It is especially intense if it goes unrecognized for six months instead of four, as was the case this time around.
Since the latest itch struck at the start of our two weeks of finals, it emitted its own aura of anger that had Nathan quite worried about me. Needless, to say, Nathan has shown great patience with the whole thing. I mentioned my need to fix the situation to my mother over the phone. At a certain point she asked, "How are things with Nathan? Are they okay?" I replied "Yea, they're fine. Why do you ask?" After the fact I realized she misinterpreted my manic wrath of the piles as displeasure with our relationship. Oops. I am just glad that the itch helps my failing-due-to-grad-school housekeeping.
I like to limit my belongings to a small assortment of functional items. Clothes I haven't worn in a year get donated (aside from a select few nostalgic pieces), I'm not into filling my space with chotchkies, and I like having visible wall space. Nathan has much the same set of preferences, though his heterosexual male self is belied by his method of "organization." Piles exist, floor space is exposed, nothing is rotting in corners or underneath crawl spaces, but the walls are lined end to end with said piles without much heed as to how and where.
I've been there with working in retail, where after a long day or sorting through dirty items and constantly cleaning up after inconsiderate shoppers who disassemble an organization you moments ago achieved through three hours of tedious work. And the holiday season?? Forget about it. When you get home after work, particularly since work shifts never end on time, the last thing you want to do is pick up your own living space. You take solace in knowing that is all your items that are all over the place, so you don't mind living in the clutter for a few more days that turn into weeks. Since Nathan is the store manager, he tends to put in as many as three extra hours per shift on any given day. I don't expect him to come home and scrub or clean.
The other caveat: there is only one closet available to Nathan and I, a 36-inch wide closet in the bedroom that we must share. No utility closets, no storage in the basement, nothing. So piles exist because you have to acquire a structure on which to store them.
Voila, an itch boiling over for two weeks encapsulating the entire friggin' apartment.
Last post I mentioned sleeping for nine and a half hours after going to bed at 8:30 p.m. the Saturday following my last exam. I awoke Sunday on a mission that mostly maintained its momentum for the next 48 hours. By then we had two 72"-high metal wire shelving units standing in parallel with a little room between for a few extra, larger items. Boxes from all across the apartment finally have a home. The damn guitar case that flops everywhere and tripped me every three days for the last who-knows-how-long is now stored. The shipping material from the various Ebay things Nathan has intentions of selling (in what I hope is the near future... *ahem*...) is now out of sight. I even moved my four-drawer file cabinet out of the bedroom to be included in this makeshift closet. Now I just need cheap, wall colored sheets to cover the outside and it'll be done.
It is fair to say the manic two weeks of the semester became a manic two days of desperate cleaning. Even now, over a week after completion, I find myself standing in front of the configuration with hands on hips exclaiming "Hah! I win!" at inanimate objects. Yet another quality that makes me prime debutante material.
Miss Sadie, on the other hand, immediately took to the challenge. The units have a three-inch ground clearance. I barely had all the boxes stored and brushed the dust off my hands before Sadie wormed her little self beneath one of them. Took her twenty seconds of squirming to get under. I don't think she accomplished much aside from laying on her belly scratching at the floor like a walrus to turn directions. Then it took her a full minute of squirming to get out. I just stood there, glaring, saying "I told you not to go under there. I won't say 'I told you so,' but don't expect me to help you get out, either." She didn't mind. Miss Mischief needs no assistance.
That guitar case I mentioned is stored on top due to its irregular shape. Sadie loooves to lay on canvas of any sort. One sheet covers the unit's kitchen-side temporarily, perfect for scaling her way to the top. The first few attempts had her turning horizontal and crawling in an uncoordinated zig zag until she finally got to the top. Sadie's feline name has acquired a new addition of spider, upping her ante to spiderabbitdolphinsealworm. Seriously....
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Final exams: check.
I laughed out loud multiple times during that last
exam. The absurdity of one
professor’s contextual questions for McKenzie technique; the little jokes that
playfully teased a professor from different courses while regarding
differential diagnosis; naming one case study’s patient Page Turner, a 46
year-old librarian who power lifts and has “obvious hypertrophy.” My hands shook while completing the
last five questions, realizing I was almost
done, but they somehow steadied in the two seconds it took to walk to the
front of the room.
I withheld from jumping and dancing right there in front of
the class, though admittedly I now wish I had done so. We so needed release from the
delusional tunnel vision of the last two weeks – hell, from the last two and a
half years. But I did not want to
gloat, did not want to make anxious those whom I know are not the best
test-takers despite being incredibly smart. I left the room, walked to the end of the hall, and saw a
first-year student at the water fountain.
He unknowingly asked, “How’s it going?”
I threw my bag on a chair with bravado. “I’m done.”
“Wow, you finished?”
I slam-dunked my pencil and eraser into the bag. “DONE!”
And I proceed to jump and dance like I was on fire. Moments like this beg for
uncoordinated, haphazard, flailing exuberance. Anyone who knew me in undergrad would have been ashamed to
admit I was once a dancer, and that’s just fine by me. A minute after I finally calmed down,
Danielle came down the hall with a big smile on her face. Cue yelling, bear hugs and reinstated
exuberant spaz-dancing. Add
cheering, and this was how each subsequent classmate was received, one by one,
decibels increasing linearly. Those
who finished later said they could faint hear each time someone reached the
group down the hall. You’d have
thought we’d each won the Superbowl as the underdog.
The younglings went off for their itinerary of lunch (with
beer), massages (with beer), and specific bars for their specific drink
specials as the night progressed (obviously each with beer). I lack such social and alcohol
tolerance, so instead I opted for long put-off errands, a visit to Heather and
baby Sid since they will be moving to the west coast come January, and starting
my first post-semester fun read.
The next morning (Saturday) I ran in the Ted Corbitt 15k in
Central Park at 8 a.m., wondering as the race began if I was a complete idiot
for volitionally giving a hard effort the day after the semester’s end. Turns out my usual tendency to perform
better when slightly tired held true.
Not to mention running much longer distances than 9.375 miles on a
regular basis means that by the time I start swearing to myself since I don’t
have much patience for shorter races the race is, conveniently, nearly over.
That night I was in bed by 8:30 p.m., did not wake until 6
a.m. the next morning. That how we
“old” folk celebrate – early to bed and early to rise, enjoy the next morning
with no schoolwork compromise.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
One more to go...
Twelve hours from now I'll begin the last exam of my graduate didactic career. You have no idea how ready I am for this.
Lots of changes are already happening, including no longer going to Tejas and instead staying in NYC to work with traumatic brain injury (TBI) at a major neuro hospital's outpatient clinic. Super uber ultra stoked for that one. I'll have tons of stories, since there are an incredibly amount of behavioral issues involved with TBIs. More on that to come.
In the meantime, I am have about two weeks' worth of oversaturation taking its toll. Four o'clock in the afternoon feels like midnight (and I usually go to bed at ten). My vision is blurry even when wearing glasses, which is unique to finals week rather than a suddenly outdated prescription. The kittehs either run in manic crazes or lay in apathetic lumps depending on which affect I exude for their absorption on a given day. The apartment is an absolute mess by my standards, though probably back to its former self if you were to ask Nathan or our roommate. Words and phrases from my notes are morphed into the lyrics of whatever song is in my head.
Imagine the musical tune of Wham!'s "Last Christmas" (since that's what was blasting at the grocery store when I picked up dinner and thus what remains in my head) but with the lyrics: "madibulomeniscal inferior compartment is hinge joint contributing the roll/spin of early mandibular depression." Can't you hear it? Rather than the line "but the very next day you gave it away (gave it away)" you sing "inferior compartment is a hiiiinge joint (hiiiinge joint)."
Oh my....
Lots of changes are already happening, including no longer going to Tejas and instead staying in NYC to work with traumatic brain injury (TBI) at a major neuro hospital's outpatient clinic. Super uber ultra stoked for that one. I'll have tons of stories, since there are an incredibly amount of behavioral issues involved with TBIs. More on that to come.
In the meantime, I am have about two weeks' worth of oversaturation taking its toll. Four o'clock in the afternoon feels like midnight (and I usually go to bed at ten). My vision is blurry even when wearing glasses, which is unique to finals week rather than a suddenly outdated prescription. The kittehs either run in manic crazes or lay in apathetic lumps depending on which affect I exude for their absorption on a given day. The apartment is an absolute mess by my standards, though probably back to its former self if you were to ask Nathan or our roommate. Words and phrases from my notes are morphed into the lyrics of whatever song is in my head.
Imagine the musical tune of Wham!'s "Last Christmas" (since that's what was blasting at the grocery store when I picked up dinner and thus what remains in my head) but with the lyrics: "madibulomeniscal inferior compartment is hinge joint contributing the roll/spin of early mandibular depression." Can't you hear it? Rather than the line "but the very next day you gave it away (gave it away)" you sing "inferior compartment is a hiiiinge joint (hiiiinge joint)."
Oh my....
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