Make the best of it

Arif’s right. I chose the wrong thing to give up for my New Year’s resolution. It’s painful not to blog, to bottle up every thought that’s stored up in me. I don’t watch TV. I don’t watch movies. I don’t play any sports. I don’t even work out that much anymore.. blogging is my release. There’s just so many memories I want to keep and share with you all and I worry that I’ll forget if I don’t write them all down somewhere. So here you go:

The Come Back
After getting an 80 on my first quiz in Med Ethics, I felt really stupid after learning the class average was a 97. I probably had the lowest grade of the 160 or so people in my class. But after getting together with some of my friends in the cafeteria, reading aloud every single word on all the lecture slides together and discussing their meanings, I went on to make a 100 on my second quiz (class average 93) and then a 98 on my Med Ethics final exam (class average 92). It’s now my highest grade ever on an exam at AUC! That initial 80 doesn’t even bother me anymore.

By the way, Dr. Edwards is an amazing Med Ethics professor. She encourages everyone to participate in the discussion, explains concepts very clearly and objectively, and keeps my attention going. She’s tactful in the touchy subjects and makes us understand why ethics is something we have to learn for our future careers.

It’s About Time
For many years, school-wide student events such as the White Coat Ceremony, Community Action Day, or Phi Chi Wine and Cheese have been photographed and documented by a line of dedicated student photographers. These students put in their efforts to attend many events, after which they spent countless hours editing the photos and sharing them with the entire student body. In the past, photos from SGA and school-wide events had been stored on a variety of media sites, scattered across the many different Flickr and Facebook pages of the student photographers. And this disconnect had dragged on for years after years. Fed up with this lack of unity of our student body, I created a Photos page on The Scope that can act as a centralized place where all photos throughout past, present, and future semesters can be stored, shared by all, and spanning all time.

The Rumbling
Last Thursday, we had earthquake #4 since I’ve been at AUC…. so that’s about almost one every semester! Unlike last semester’s “bump” this time it was a 10-second vibration. At the time I had just came back home from school. While I was inside, I suddenly heard my closet door rumbling in my bedroom. Oh my god, I thought, someone’s in my apartment! The rumbling continued and now I could hear him rumbling through my things! I didn’t know what to do, and felt so helpless. Soon I realized what it really was. Fortunately, the earthquake wasn’t bad, and I felt so thankful for this. Why? Well, there’s one thing I did learn from this experience… Where’s the worst place to be stuck when an earthquake hits? On the toilet.

The Best Shower Ever
A few hours after the earthquake, while I was cooking in the kitchen, I heard a big splashing coming from my bathroom. When I rushed to go look, there I saw a steamy waterfall pouring out of my water heater above the toilet onto the floor everywhere. Without thinking about how hot the water was, I immediately reached out my hadn to close the pipe valve and grabbed a bucket to catch the rest of the water flowing out. What a mess. Every time I turned on water that was remotely warm, water continued to spew out of the heater. The next day, I reported the problem with Solutions (my landlord). They came to check that same day and determined I needed to replace my entire water heater. But as it was the weekend, the earliest they could buy a new water heater was Monday. With no warm water over the weekend, I decided to leave home and go shower at the school gym. To my surprise, despite it being “public,” it was the cleanest shower I’ve ever been in, so much cleaner than my own in my apartment! I’ll thank the nice housekeeping ladies for this. Despite the misfortune of events I left back home, I truly enjoyed and felt worry-free in that shower.

The Hang Over
On Friday, I worked out for the first time in two weeks, before which the last time I worked out was second block the semester before. It’s unusual for me not to work out for this long of a period. When I was at UGA, I worked out about five times a week, for 45 minutes to an hour each time. Over a period of four years, I went from a scrawny 140 lbs to a big 190 lbs. I gained quite a lot of muscle. However, over these past few months of not exercising, I’ve gained a gut, lost an appetite, and lost a lot of strength along with it. That night at the gym, I found that I could barely pick up half the weights as I used to be able to. Nevertheless, I pushed myself to do whatever I can do, applying what I learned from Anna Freud’s Defense Mechanisms to sublimate my negative emotions over all that lost time into a productive workout. That night, I slept better than I’ve ever had — 10 hours of intense, non-stop paralysis, so deep that even the fear of next week’s exams couldn’t wake me up. The next morning, I woke up with a muscle “hang-over,” feeling so sore and bedridden that I couldn’t move anything but my fingers. Feeling lazy recovering, I stayed in bed the rest of the day, flipping productively through lecture slides on my iPad with the fingers that I had.

So what’s the point of all of these little stories? The most important lesson is that day to day, things may not turn out the way we want them to turn out, but we all just have to see the bright side, live the moment, and make the best of it.

Take care everyone.