mud pies to medicine: February 2011

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Ice

The tree outside my window is coated with ice but the streets don't look so bad. Regardless, I've declared a snow day. And while snow days don't really exist in medical school because they simply mean another day to study and make up lectures from home, I am doing my best to make it feel like a snow day.

Study fort!

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Mess

Tonight's forecast is for 3/4" of ice. While my last post might have raved about my love of snow, ice is completely different. Actually, as a figure skating enthusiast, I particularly love ice, but not when it falls from the sky. My car had an ice armor coating when I reached the parking lot after a long day of school. This is about to be one of those weeks. My closet is looking something like this:

Not pretty. It doesn't help that the largest wall of the closet faces the outside so after being shut all day I can practically see my breath when I venture through the mess in the morning. Not exactly the sort of conditions that would encourage one to clean up. And because all that dirty laundry is just laying around, my clean socks stash has left me looking like this:

Which brings us of course to my desk, where I live. Really, I eat here, I study here, I do my nails here, and you can tell just from the reflection in my netbook:

And while I could take the next 24 hours of ice storms and clean... our exam is less than two weeks away which means, major crunch time!

The inspiration you ask?

I miss making mud pies. There is this huge rock in my front yard. To call it a rock really does it a dishonor. It is a boulder, brought home by my father on a huge dump truck after he blasted it out of a work site. My mom one day told me that even though it is nearly 2.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.5 feet wide, that it was, in fact, only half-showing. The scientist inside of me was disbelieving and set out to get some proof. Clad in a dress, bow in my hair, and my best accessory, a shovel, I trudged outside ready to prove my mother wrong. That is when the digging began. I dug, and dug, and dug, and nearly all 3.5 feet of Danielle fit in that hole when I had reached the bottom of the rock. That became my digging spot, my mud pie kitchen. Each day it was dug, and each evening it was filled back in. Sometimes the holes were small, sometimes they were enormous, and most days the hole was turned into my mud mixing bowl with that rock as my counter. The novelty never wore off. The ebb and flow of my childhood was, in many ways, measured by the ever-changing depth of that hole in the front yard, the hole that never really disappeared even each day after it was filled in. Even though the grass has grown back in that spot, there still remains, an indentation, the scars of a childhood well lived and the disbelieving scientists I have always been.

So, you ask me why I want to be a doctor? I do not want to be a doctor. I want to open a mud pie bakery with the cash register on that rock in my front yard. But, somehow, I doubt I would stay in business long, for the world seems to have lost its taste for mud pies. I guess being a doctor will have to do.