A Chip on my Shoulder and a Bun in the Oven

My dear friends and family (and others for whom I hold slightly less affection), I regret to tell you that Reality and I are experiencing some relationship problems and are no longer on speaking terms. He threatened to leave me after finding evidence that I had been flirting with Insanity. I promised him it was over, but, one night after dinner, he accused me of continuing the affair. As he stormed out, he shouted, “If you honestly thought pickle juice would be a good marinade for fish, you have already effectively divorced Reality!”

Several weeks later, I was, at the risk of being indelicate, several weeks late. But who was the father? With no way of knowing, I decided to cover all the bases and name the child after both candidates. What title can one give to an entity that is either a painful reminder of what was once a beautiful relationship with Reality, now irreparably broken, or the life-altering result of a wild and passionate entanglement with Insanity? There is only one thing that embodies both those sentiments. In the midst of all this sadness, in several months I will have the joy of introducing the world to my child, little baby Vet School.

P.S. Gifts may be sent to my address in Saint Paul.

The Best-laid Plans

            “But why is it green?” is never a phrase you expect to blurt out upon peeking in the oven to check on the progress of your flatbread (a flatbread which, incidentally, did not contain any ingredients of the particularly alarming emerald shade of the finished product).

            My experimental baked goods may not turn out as planned, but at least my life has. It would be hard for it not to, seeing as I only had one plan: veterinary medicine (well, two if you count eloping with Kiefer Sutherland and starting a Sheltie farm in Scotland). Be it a defense mechanism against potential disappointment or just single-mindedness, I never make plans for the future. What if I set goals and have aspirations beyond my career? Tonight showed me what awaits the best-laid plans: catastrophic failure of a completely unanticipated and inexplicable nature.

            Had I planned on having being in love, God forbid even married, by the age of twenty-five, imagine my would-have-been dismay that, at twenty-three, I have yet to be in a single romantic relationship (and no, those two dates sophomore year of high school don’t count, nor does my passionate love affair with the two kilogram bag of French cocoa powder recently purchased on Amazon). Or if I had foreseen owning my own place? How disappointed I would be to find myself still paying far too much rent and not at liberty to adorn the front lawn with plaster squirrels and gnomes!

            Besides the all-consuming goal of getting into, and now surviving, vet school, I have not set a single goal in recent memory. Maybe I’m just so focused on my vocation that I lost sight of everything else. Perhaps I don’t want to put forth the effort to strive for new, exciting, challenging, and frightening things. It could be I just don’t want to have a dream to compare to reality when all is said and done. Had I expected a crisp, nicely browned flatbread for dinner tonight, how much more dismayed would I have been at the sight of the gummy, green, scrambled-egg like sheet that emerged from the oven? Is it better to have no expectations and no results that come up short (no risk, no letdown, but also no reward) or to dream big, try hard, and risk ending up with a disappointing reality? Of course, you could succeed … but that’s about as likely as a spontaneously green loaf of bread.

 

Update: Rummaging in the kitchen for a glass of water before bed, my eyes alit on the leftovers (aftermath?) of tonight’s ill-fated dinner. Teal. It is now electric teal. Dear God, what have I brought into this world?

Fifty Shades of Beige

            Despite the fascinating nature of my life as detailed in this chronicle (the italics denote sarcasm, by the way), it may be surprising to you to learn that my life is, in fact, replete with thoroughly boring and uneventful happenings (at least to me. I have been informed that vet students have different standards for “usual” though). Years from now, all this will be published as my autobiography: Fifty Shades of Beige (alternatively, A Series of Unremarkable Events). In an effort to inject some drama, I present to you the following vignette, a snippet of my life in the style of a short horror film.

 

            “Could you grab a laundry basket from my room?” my mother asks from the living room.

            “Go up there … alone?”

            With trepidation, I climb the stairs, startling as the seventh one creaks under my foot. My hand hesitates above the doorknob to the bedroom. There’s nothing in there, of course. Right? As I reach for the knob, the door drifts open of its own accord with a drawn out squeak. Drafty windows, I guess. Padding into the room, I survey the surroundings in search of the requested basket. Despite the neat piles of miscellanea piled in corners, the room has an empty feel to it, an almost palpable hush hanging in the air. With a wary glance over my shoulder, I grab the first basket I see and start to hurry out of the eerie room, when suddenly my eyes alight on a particular object on the nightstand. Morbid curiosity piqued, I reach out to examine it. As I recognize the mystery object as a book, I withdraw my hand as if burned.

            “No …” The hoarse whisper grows into a shout. “No!”

            Raking my eyes with my fingernails, I flee from the scene, horrified. That night I rocked myself to sleep, trying to forget what I had seen: proof that my mother (my mother) is reading Fifty Shades of Gray.

            Days later and miles away at my grandmother’s house, I feel a premonitory tingle as the hair on the back of my neck stands at attention. The evil presence from the house has followed me! Whipping my head side to side, I see nothing. No spooks or ghosts lurking in corners. Wait, someone is coming! Two sets of footsteps approach, and my stomach knots in fear. My mother and grandmother step into the light of the kitchen, and I let out a relieved sigh. Until …

            “I just finished the second one, now I need to get the third,” my mother says, no doubt referencing the aforementioned evil tome. Only one thing could possibly be more horrifying than such a thing in my mother’s possession.

            My grandmother replies, “I have that one on the shelf over there.”

            “Oh God, why?!” I cry as I fall to my knees, eyes cast upward and arms outstretched to the heavens. “Whyyyyyyy?” Gray may have fifty shades, but my horror at the thought of that book (I use that term loosely, as I consider it the literary equivalent of a stillborn mongoose with a particularly gruesome birth defect) in the hands of my sweet, lovely grandmother has a million hues.

Cough Syrup

Meticulously putting the final touches on the one hundredth bubble of the one millionth scantron sheet of the semester, I carefully planned my obligatory “end of semester, woo we made it!” facebook status update. A perfect snippet of a song began to ring in my ears: “one more spoon of cough syrup down.” The verse echoed in my head, now empty after having dumped all previous contents out and classifying them as A, B, C, or D. Such is the dual nature of vet school: one invests countless hours learning detailed, complex information (some of which may actually have relevance to the world outside our cave of a lecture hall), appreciating the scope and implications of this new knowledge, anticipating how it will serve a purpose in practice, and then, finally, all those intricate details and rich concepts are chucked into a trash compacter, compressed into a tiny cube, and unceremoniously tossed out like refuse, leaving only the residue of a number 2 pencil in one hundred circular bubbles (which, I note onerously, are normally oblong. Every ten exams or so, they switch to round ones just to irritate me and disrupt my focus).

After putting to paper, “That got me thinking about the dual nature of vet school,” I promptly rethought my life choices. No, not veterinary medicine! Publishing that sentence! I realized that my narrative voice had unwittingly morphed into Carrie Bradshaw and that this was rapidly devolving into the graduate school version of Sex and the City (though the vet school version is closer to “Only One Sex in this City, and it’s Female”). In fact, that embarrassingly trite, voiceover-style transition is the only life choice that does not hold up upon examination. For most of the semester, the better part of our class has been mired in a cloud of “only x number of lectures/exams/semesters until the end of today/this semester/vet school.” I wholeheartedly participated in this, which is why another chunk of my training biting the dust as I dropped my exam sheet onto the pile at the front of the room (looking back only to shoot the professor a dirty look for being cruel enough to think that my brain could differentiate ascaris and toxascaris by the final day of the year) prompted the sentiment of “one more spoon of cough syrup down.” Because vet school is like pulling teeth (which, incidentally, is actually about as much fun to do as to have done), a total chore, a necessary hurdle between you and your “real” life as a veterinarian. Right? Then, for the first time in too long, I stopped and thought. Why didn’t I feel relief? Why weren’t my shoulders lighter after having some of the load taken off? Why had my enthusiasm for my perfectly apt facebook status suddenly waned?

My mouth must have hung open as the cogs turned and the gears gradually clicked into place. My palm met my forehead with a comical slap. What an idiot I’ve been! An ungrateful, whining, unappreciative dipshit. Two years ago, what would I have given to be standing right there, in the atrium of the College of Veterinary Medicine, having just completed the first half of my second year? Anything. And now? Now I can hardly be bothered to go to lecture, can’t get through a full day without some complaint (or two or three … or seventeen). Why didn’t I just stop, reflect, and remember: I love this. I love everything about this – the learning, the challenge, the camaraderie, the stress, the boredom, the clay sculptures of strangulating pedunculated lipomas and necrotic intestines! Risking another horribly trite sentence, I could not see the forest for the trees. So enmeshed in the drudgery of the everyday routine and caught up in the surrounding current of negativity, I forgot that this was not a trial, but an incredible privilege. So there you have it, the dual nature of veterinary school. From the inside, at least after three semesters, you want out, frantically clawing at the almost tangible prison bars of the lecture hall like a pissed off cat at the door of a carrier. From the outside, when you stop long enough to step away from your pig-headed self, you can remember why you wanted in in the first place, into this grand adventure, singular opportunity, and particular honor, one marked not by trophies or medals, but by cat scratches, vomit stains, dog hair, and hundreds of tiny, penciled-in circles.

So, one more spoon of cough syrup down? Not unless it’s Nyquil, in which case, that sounds about right for vet school: it may knock you flat on your ass, but at least you’ll be happy as you hit the ground.

In which an old acquaintence comes to call

After spending the afternoon rearranging my nine loaves of bread in the freezer to make room for the new ones I planned on acquiring on tomorrow’s grocery outing, I felt an unfamiliar urge to be productive. Two hours after sitting down to study intensely for the remainder of Friday night (and about twenty minutes into actually studying, damn you reddit!), I wandered onto Facebook and saw a post from my dad. Left to his own devices for the entire weekend, his primitive hunter-gatherer instincts kicked into overdrive, which led him to the hunting grounds of the local bakery. His prey stood no chance – cheddar jalapeno bread, Thanksgiving stuffing bread, classic honey whole wheat loaf (for health’s sake, of course), double fist-sized pumpkin chocolate chip muffin, and cranberry white chocolate chip square (which, by the size, would more appropriately be described as a small storage box filled with sugar and flour). Alert the CDC about this breaking epidemiological discovery – bread addiction is apparently genetic. Thousands are at risk for carbohydrate overindulgence and sandwich toxicity!

As I smiled and laughed, my giggles caught in my throat. Ah, the homesickness has arrived, perfectly in concert with the end of daylight savings time and the onset of another long, dark winter far from family. Another unfortunate aspect of my inheritance less enjoyable than a bread fixation – anxiety, depression, self-loathing – has crept up on my these past few weeks. As the sun sets earlier and earlier, my state of mind sinks alongside it.

Owing to a diet with more leafy greens than the Jolly Green Giant’s underwear drawer and fruitier than a Broadway leading man (not that there’s anything wrong with that …), I have hardly been sick a day in the past several years. In the past month, I’ve been plagued by nausea, headaches, and various unspecific little miseries. Frustrated and befuddled, I eventually arrived at the conclusion that I had contracted lepto from the mice infesting my kitchen cupboards. Liver and kidney failure were sure to follow, but at least that would excuse me from taking the neuropathology exam. Sitting in class one day, I took stock of the state of my body: shoulders tensed, stomach in knots, and mind in turmoil over … over what, I asked myself?

Nothing. My head was spinning and my brain was wrung out because of absolutely nothing. I was anxious for no reason at all.

Anxious.

Shit.

At that moment, it was clear that lepto was not to blame for my malaise, but it would have been preferable to this particular culprit. Anxiety, my old nemesis. After years of battling panic attacks, vague yet terribly uncomfortable uneasiness at almost every moment of the day, and various and prolonged gastrointestinal illnesses (all psychogenic, of course), I thought I had recovered and learned to cope. After spending high school on medication and in therapy, I finally found relief during college. Or so I thought. In hindsight, the anxiety never left; it disguised itself as a nasty little eating disorder that persisted at some level for, well, come to think of it, until a few months ago. Since I had evicted my anxiety from its new home, it decided to pop up in its old stomping grounds – dizziness, nausea, tenseness, racing thoughts, agitation.

So now it’s clear – if this pattern holds, I will never be free. Once I conquer one manifestation of my anxiety, it will occupy another niche, take another form, one that I don’t even recognize as my old foe. It will forever evade my efforts to banish it from my life.

However, there is always hope, because knowledge is power. I know my enemy better now, and I know where it hides in the corners of my mind. Knowing what’s behind my mysterious symptoms makes them a little more bearable, less worrying (although those damn  mice probably gave me something or other). If I know who I’m fighting, I have faith I can win.

Days ago, I got up, completed my morning routine, ate breakfast, and even suited up to take the dog for a walk. When it came time to leave the house and go to class, all I had to do was put on real pants (as opposed to my designated dog walking pants. The biggest chore of my day is imprisoning my legs in any fabric other than flannel or fleece). And I didn’t. I just … couldn’t. My bag was packed, my keys were waiting by the door, I was ready to leave. But I couldn’t. For no reason whatsoever, I was paralyzed, had run smack into an invisible brick wall of I can’t (or maybe just I won’t). I didn’t necessarily want to stay home or do anything else; my willpower, my motivation, my everything had suddenly and inexplicably been sucked from my body as if into a black hole of apathy. I knew that I would regret skipping class, that I would be plagued with anxiety over what I missed and self-loathing that I was so lazy and weak-willed that I couldn’t even put on a damn pair of pants and walk out the door. But I still chose not to. And I hated myself for it, tore myself to shreds all day. Why hadn’t I just gone to school? It was a half mile walk that would have saved me a full day of self loathing, worry, and regret.

There was no reason. That’s the point, the point of anxiety. Its greatest weapon is nothing at all.

With only two hours of classes today, I was sorely tempted to repeat my mistake. Only now I know who I’m up against, what it’s fighting with, and how to beat it. How does one conquer nothing? With something, of course. Anything. Anything at all. When that familiar mental paralysis hit, I wanted to succumb to it, but I told myself: just move, do something, anything, no matter how small. So I put on a pair of jeans. It was the hardest thing I did today, but as soon as the denim took the place of flannel, I felt empowered, unencumbered, liberated (odd, seeing as the rare occasions when I put on real clothes instead of pajamas usually have the opposite effect). It was a small victory, but served as proof of concept: I can win. If I keep moving, keep doing, and learn from my past stumbles, I can heal.
There may not be hope for a full recovery, but the prognosis seems less dim after pouring our my heart and mind to my family and to you readers. Oh, and after buying two new loaves of half priced bread this morning. What can I say? Like father, like daughter.

Walk Wok

The Universe is once again messing with me, but this time I think she’s apologizing for years of mischief with serendipitous series of events. At the gym for the first time in months and deliriously excited to awaken my muscles from their mid-semester slumber (although my sitting muscles have become quite conditioned), I began to pedal on my favorite elliptical machine, the one located in front of a sunny window that overlooks a picturesque meadow outside. Perfection. I switched on my ipod, anticipating gorgeous, rich sound to emit from my new headphones (so what if I can’t afford to eat for a week, I can hear God through those things!). Nothing. After a brief moment of confusion and denial, my brain eventually rumbled to the conclusion that the battery was dead. The prospect of a silent workout made me want to drop to my knees, look up to the heavens, and let out a guttural scream. This can’t be happening! My much-anticipated, perfect workout spoiled by a dead battery!

It was at this moment that the Universe decided to intervene. A sudden sound to my right caught my attention (and activated the reflex to turn my head via the caudal colliculus – just in case Mom is reading and wants to make sure I’m getting my money’s worth in tuition). It was a lunchtime zumba class. A slow smile crept across my face. No silent workout, then. Oh, Universe, you sneaky girl!

How often do we curse unfortunate events, whether as insignificant as an unreliable ipod or as devastating as loss of a job, without knowing how it changed our lives down the line? Had I attempted to listen to my own music, I would have been rather annoyed as the zumba music (“Too loud!” cried the little old man on the stationary bike) drowned it out. What a fortunate misfortune!

Running late enough not to be able to go on a full walk with Sport before submitting myself to nine hours of confinement in a windowless cell (aka vet school), but not so late as to justify not walking him at all (and subjecting myself to that face. I’d rather introduce my elbow to the corner of a table before I had to deal with the guilt of saying no to that face), I decided to take a different, shorter route. This deviation in our routine perturbed me to no end, and confused my poor, habituated dog; our morning walk takes the route along the park, past the house that sells flowers, up the deceptively steep hill, and down Squirrel Lane (as I’ve dubbed the delightfully rodent-infested block). In the evening, we go up the long, slow hill, across the magical crosswalk (clearly something out of Harry Potter, as it seems to be invisible to anyone behind the wheel of a motor vehicle), and down the street with a disproportionate number of tomato gardens. This is just how it goes. Every day. No exceptions.

Except this morning. I felt hassled as I took a new turn past the park. I felt a tug on the leash as Sport turned the usual way and gave me a quizzical look. His eyes lit up as he realized that we were going somewhere NEW! New smells! New leaves! New places to pee! I grinned as he trotted merrily beside me, purposely eschewing the sidewalk just so we could tromp through the ankle-deep piles of leaves that mirrored the glowing reds and yellows of the sunrise we were now facing. I no longer cared about disrupting my ingrained routine, being late for 8 am epidemiology, or even – hey, is that a box of free stuff on the sidewalk? My inner cheapskate snapped to attention (just as “new” makes Sport’s eyes light up, “free” does the same for mine) as I made a beeline for the pile of miscellanea. I surveyed the treasures: a suitcase with a note indicating a broken zipper, a Trader Joe’s shopping bag filled to the brim with knock-off Tupperware, and (be still my stingy heart) a wok! Oh, Universe, how did you know? It’s just what I wanted! Caring even less about the quizzical stares from passersby than my abysmal performance on last week’s repro exam (appropriate that it was that subject, because I got screwed), I strutted through the neighborhood with a leash in one hand and my large, cast-iron prize clutched proudly in the other. I think even Sport may have been judging me just a bit at that point.

So, today’s lesson is that life’s little disturbances and disappointments can turn into something beautiful:  a walk by the light of sunrise down an unexpectedly beautiful tree-lined street luminous with fall grandeur, a memory to cherish of an old dog with a young heart stomping through leaves with eyes aglow and mouth joyfully agape, or the most precious gift of all: free cookware.

Off the Wagon and into the Oven

            This world is a cruel, dangerous place, replete with people who make a living helping others destroy themselves? They prey on addicts, lying in wait in shady alleys and dark corners, ever vigilant for those passersby vulnerable to temptation or the regulars pulled back by the siren call of the object of their obsession. These nefarious crooks peddle their deadly goods to these poor souls, many of whom would otherwise lead clean, sober lives without having the proverbial carrot dangled before their faces and a shiny golden promise of visceral pleasure shimmering before their eyes.

            Today, I fell victim to one of these dangerous men. Passing through an alley near Fifth Street, he caught my eye. His wares were brazenly displayed on a table out in the open, a clear invitation. The object of my destructive desire, the enemy of my health, the most fervent, yet shameful, wishes of my heart within hand’s reach …

Heartless, pitiless, he never stopped to consider that I’d been sober since mid-May, and happily so. Doing so well without it, I had finally accepted that I no longer needed it. I was healing, becoming me again.

            Until him. Until he put his gain above my wellbeing and disregarded my plight as an addict, happily selling me not one, not two, or even three, but four squash. At first, I resisted, urging myself to maintain the strength that had carried me through the past few months of withdrawal. Then, as my body refused to yield to my mind’s command to walk past the squash stand and on to the next booth at the farmer’s market, I began to waver. Why shouldn’t he sell his wares? Why shouldn’t I buy them? There is an agricultural crisis brewing in this country, after all; many farmers can’t even afford the bare necessities for their families. The damage to my health would be negligible in view of the good my purchase would do for him. After several rides on this train of thought (more like a choochoo train of thought, as it was truly the logic of a child), I got off at temptation station and began to stuff my beloved and well-missed gourds into my canvas sack with wild, lustful, and hungry abandon. Sanctimoniously, I justified my actions; the only way to make sure this man could put food on his table was to put squash on mine.

            Now here I sit, ashamed and with willpower decimated, a pile of starchy, knobby-skinned vegetables peering at me accusingly from across the kitchen. A tear slides down my face as I reach out a shaky hand to turn the oven knob to that oh-so-familiar 425 degree mark, and I am gripped by a cold, sinking certainty that I am once again lost, descending into forbidden euphoria, being dragged back to hell by the sweet and sinister pull of my addiction, my downfall, my squash.

The Year in Review

July 10, 2012: Exactly one year ago, I arrived in Saint Paul. Today, I depart from that same city to return whence I came: my homeland of suburbs, used car lots, and strip malls. Back to the house where there are only two ways to answer the question “What’s for dinner”: chicken or burgers (or sometimes all of the above) instead of tofu and mushrooms or squash and cocoa powder. Much as I grew to resent the over-worked propane grill when it burned away on the back porch each summer night (and often through the winter, a path shoveled around it from the back door), I grow nostalgic every time I smell a backyard cookout. Strange as it may seem, the smell of sizzling hamburger over an open flame will forever evoke images of my mother, so many sentimental memories of countless family dinners gone by. Detestable though beef may be to eat, I cherish the aroma because nothing else makes my family so present when fifteen hundred miles separate us.

 

That paragraph entirely ruins the continuity of this entry, but after several attempts to remove it, I decided it would stay, incongruity and all. Why? Because I said so. Now I have to think of a clever segue to get back on track to my originally intended theme and structure. Oh, screw it, let’s just plunk it down on the page! Go for broke, live a little! Throw caution and good style to the wind (which, ironically, happens to carry a lovely aroma of barbecuing today). Here follows the Chomp equivalent of the sitcom flashback montage episode for the past year:

 

Night one on my own: a roaring thunderstorm welcomes me to Minnesota. A leaky window in my bedroom welcomes me to my new home by letting in streams of water down the inside of the glass, flooding the sill. I’m glad I’m alone, otherwise I would have to endure sarcastic snickers about my (ineffectual) attempts to stop the deluge with duct tape and beach towels.

 

Every Saturday morning, just before sunrise: I’m the first customer at the farmer’s market. I snatch up all the organic produce my puny noodle arms can carry before the other regulars (a voracious pack of little old biddies hot on my tail) can get their gnarled old talons on it. Upon arriving home with my load of goodies, I suddenly miss my father terribly; only he could possibly arrange all this food to fit in the refrigerator. I know that if he were here he would, just because he loves me, even devise a way to keep my cauliflower from coming in contact with my roommate’s open containers of raw meat. Alas, wishing him present will not make it so, and I have to wrack my spatially challenged brain for a way to keep my beets away from her beef.

 

Vet school, day one: they throw us to the cows. Bessie is feeling a little friendly and wants to cuddle with me … by leaning against me and pinning me between her half ton body and the metal bar behind me. My kidneys will never be the same.

 

Night one: My foster kittens throw me to the dogs. I get no sleep as all attempts to imprison them in the bathroom fail. I construct (and reconstruct every time they escape) a kitty prison from jerry-rigged cardboard boxes, a dog kennel, and sheets of drywall held tenuously together with duct tape. Alcatraz security would have been no match for those feline fiends.

 

My first night shift at work: a horse crossmatch! The most dreaded of all tests! A phone number mixup while on call, even worse. A panic attack and full day of misery later, I’m doubting I’ll survive a full month in this job before succumbing to the agonizing anxiety it induces and dying from a perforated stomach ulcer.

November 12: After plenty of drama, confusion, and phone calls, and months of stalking dog rescue websites daily (or multiple times daily, if biochemistry lectures were particularly painful) come to fruition. I drive halfway across Wisconsin to Humboldt Cheese Factory (a landmark readily identifiable by the giant cartoon mouse adorning the sign, visible from the highway) and meet my new dog. Damn, he is one ugly duckling! But as I scratch his head for the first time, he huffs out his cheeks and wiggles his scrawny, filfthy butt. I’m in love. Despite the shaved body covered in a film of grime, the bloodshot eyes, and the pink camouflage collar he wears, I’m smitten. I nearly perish from the stench of his nervous flatulence on the four hour ride home, but if I had, I would have died happy.

That night, the night my parents will ever remember as The Phone Call: I’m in the icy grip of a panic attack. What have I done? I’m not ready for this. I’m going to be a terrible mother. What if he doesn’t love me? Or worse, what if I don’t love him? I sob out my anxieties over the phone to a mercifully level-headed father. Sport looks at me from the spot that will become his designated 2/3 of the bed (yes, I only get 1/3) ambivalently, intensifying my fears of our failure to bond.

Thanksgiving: In the spirit of the holiday, I selflessly share a few pumpkins from my squash stash with others. This is truly a first. The resulting pumpkin pie is not nearly as impressive as the mess left behind in the wake of its creation. Even I am impressed with the level of kitchen carnage in the aftermath of making stuffing and pumpkin pie from absolute scratch. My dinner companions see only the final result, which is not nearly as impressive, but delicious nonetheless. We are lucky to be able to taste it at all; the sole man in the group had taken up a task beyond his culinary abilities and had incorporated three entire heads of garlic into his stuffing. After one bite and some very interesting facial expressions, we explain to him that clove is not another term for head.

December 21: Can it really be? Did I just finish an entire semester of vet school? As I click “submit” on my computerized radiology final (still wondering whether #12 was a spleen or a figment of my imagination, though I’m not convinced that those two things aren’t one in the same on abdominal radiographs), I leave the building feeling like I’ll be back the next morning. But I won’t. I’ll be home. Home, I think wistfully. Finally. But first, I must complete the novel that is my instruction letter to the dogsitter. I’m not a nervous parent leaving their baby for the first time  at all. She tries not to laugh at me when I hand it to her, if only because she can see how anxious I am. I say goodbye to Sport at least four separate times before loading him into her car, and once more as they drive off. Sport says goodbye only once, as he realizes that the new lady probably has better treats than I do (incidentally, my dog does not share my love of cauliflower and tofu and turns up his nose when scraps of my dinner fall to the floor).

December 22: After six long months, I’m home. After being enthusiastically greeted by some of my dogs (and spitefully ignored after my prolonged absence by certain others, ahem, Miss Hannah) all I can think is: the kitchen looks weird. Did it always seem so … I don’t know, bare? The whole house seems like a dream version of my home – the same, but subtly different, not quite real or right. Only one thing assures me that this is no alternate universe or a dream: the toilet has not been cleaned since last I saw it.

January 7: I cry as a hug my dad and brother at the airport entrance. I can’t bear to think of going back to my basement cave, the dark, wood paneled prison where I spend my days alone and lonely save for a sympathetic elderly collie. I never want to leave my family again. Let me stay a child forever! On the plane, I calm myself and realize that I will get back into the groove of being independent and will happily settle back in once I arrive home.

January 8: I was wrong. This place shrivels my soul. I cry for hours. Sport gives me a look that says, “Get over yourself.”

The remainder of January through May: Autopilot, with maybe a few adventures and foibles thrown in here and there. Househunting, jobhunting, coming up empty-handed on both accounts.

May 22: Well I’ll be damned, we made it out alive! My class arrived as excited, intimidated strangers, lowly first years. Today we depart the classroom where we spent thousands of hours in captivity as a family, hardened by months of exams and stress, enlightened by far too much information, and bonded by some indescribable substance that cements together people who make it through trauma (or perhaps it was the formaldehyde-laced goo that coated every surface of the anatomy lab and our nasal passages).

May 31: My parents arrive to help me move into a new apartment. I feel at home before I even unpack. I don’t need intuition or a sixth sense to know that this is not just my house, but my home (and a perfect match); Nature herself tells me as an albino squirrel skitters around the tree outside my kitchen window. My mother creatively dubs him Whitey.

This Sunday, my 1,872^nd shift at work (or so it seemed at the time): I find the most stunning monocytes I’ve ever seen while reading a CBC. I almost go to the ER to meet this dog and his owners just so I could tell them that their dog has absolutely gorgeous white blood cells. After a brief thought to how creepy that would sound to anyone not certifiable as a laboratory nerd, I reconsidered (but I still took pictures through the microscope and set them as my desktop background. I’m planning on having them printed and framed to hang in the living room. I think this deserves a tag of #vetschoolnerd).

 

July 31: I finally get around to editing this post. The first paragraph still irks me, but I like it so much that I feel it has to be included. I feel somewhat egotistical as I smile at my own words, but decide to enjoy my own writing and indulge in my self-perceived genius. As if hearing my thoughts, Sport lets out an amused and rather sarcastic-sounding snort in his sleep, pointedly directed at me and my ridiculousness. That’s my boy.

Forecast

As of today, my parents have been married twenty-eight years. In an attempt to manufacture some sort of theme for a long overdue blog entry (even if it is as forced as Tom Cruise’s heterosexuality), I began to wonder what my life will look like in a quarter century and three years (fell old yet, Mom and Dad?). Foolishly, I currently operate under the assumption that my long-term future is far clearer than any revelation from a crystal ball and far less mysterious: I’ll graduate, become a small animal general practitioner, have a miserable and dignity-destroying first year in practice, then slowly rebuild my self worth and skill set over the years. I’ll work 50-70 hour weeks with two weeks of vacation, spent lounging at home with my one or two dogs and watching marathons of British crime tv series on netflix. I’ll have friends at work, but no one terribly close, and no significant other. I’ll still find some way to eat spinach and yogurt each and every day and will eventually be able to transform squash into any food imaginable, like culinary alchemy.

As I munch on dried kelp while writing this, I realize that this prediction cannot possibly be any more accurate than the Minnesota weather forecast, which calls for thunder showers almost every day from April to October (you know, just in case). The Megan of even as little as five years ago could never have envisioned so many aspects of my current state, such as my predilection for seaweed snacks and leafy greens when once upon a not-so-long-ago time my diet consisted of nothing that had not at one point emerged from a cellophane cocoon. What else did I not see coming?

Five years ago, I planned on spending my life translating classic French literature. Nope.

Five years ago, I was phobic of blood and needles and would grow faint as a Victorian lady in a corset two sizes too small at the very mention of either. Just yesterday, I drew blood from I don’t even know how many dogs. Mere months ago, I performed major abdominal surgery (yeah, that was a not so subtle brag right there. I’ll own up to it. I just won’t admit that there was a doctor scrubbed in and giving me step-by-step instructions and keeping my patient from bleeding out).

Three years ago, I wore size 10 clothes and ate nothing but processed food. Exercise was the enemy. Currently, I get angry when I run out of spinach; plain yogurt is more necessary to life than oxygen; I crave physical activity like a junkie.

One year ago, I wore size 00 jeans, and they fell off my bony little ass. I counted every calorie I consumed and never went over my set limit. Food was a stressor and eating a struggle. Earlier today, I had to clean out my fridge to make room for my new roommate. Everything that would not fit on my side, I happily deposited in my stomach (avocado and goat cheese sandwiches, rhubarb compote, homemade peanut butter, tomato and basil feta, chia seed popsicles, and the last dregs of two pints of ice cream) – guilt free. In fact, I happily envisioned all that food helping to pop the buttons off my jeans so that I would finally get myself new (bigger!) ones.

Well, did I predict anything right? Let’s see, I’m not in New England (another strike). I’m not a member of the Spice Girls (the Megan of fourteen years ago was quite sure this was in the cards). I’m not on my way to becoming an interior decorator, pastry chef, neurosurgeon, Olympic gymnast, or princess (well, outside of my own mind, of course, and maybe my dad’s), or any other aspiration I held in childhood. So maybe the future isn’t set in stone, maybe more like petrified cat poop that just looks like a rock (hey, I’ve been running fecal samples every day all summer – my pool of figurative comparisons has dried up like a constipated kitty’s stool). Perhaps none of the things I envision for myself will come to pass.

Except the spinach and yogurt. I’ll be damned if there’s none of that in twenty-eight years!

 

Two To Go

Two days left. Two final exams to go.

Two semesters down.

Too many left?

Pushing through the final stretch of the first year of veterinary school, I imagine I resemble Quasimodo, limping along, hunched over from long months of sitting behind a laptop, with a face so contorted from sleep deprivation and lack of exposure to sunlight even my dog shrinks away in revulsion. At 7:00, there is ample time between me and the impending pathology exam to learn every last detail of supppurative inflammation and whether captive cheetahs are afflicted with glomerular or medullary amyloidosis (I keep telling myself that one day, sixty years from now, that fact will save someone’s life, and I will look back and see some sort of cosmic significance to all the bits of trivia I’ve been forced to accumulate). So what am I doing with all this time? Well, I dragged out dinner as long as possible, chopping and carefully packing into tupperware (repurposed cottage cheese and yogurt containers: the student’s version of tupperware) so many vegetables that the next time I’ll need more will be the night before taking the board exam instead of first year pathology. After a feeble attempt to skim over my notes once more, it was apparent that nothing was sticking; every factoid I glossed over slid off the surface off my brain like overcooked spaghetti tossed against the wall, slowly sliding down, leaving a slimy trail in its wake, and pooling in a soggy, tangled heap on the floor. I guess that means I’m ready for the test, right? …  Your sarcastic laughter is not encouraging! I could be proactive and begin studying for the next test. Yup. Totally an option. Funny thing about options: they’re optional.

With my motivation lower than Facebook’s stock price at the end of the day today, I decided to do some blogging so that I would at least have some sense of accomplishment and productivity (even though re-runs of Sherlock are calling my name and old episodes of Monk are looking mighty attractive). Even though this should be a landmark, wrapping-up-everything entry about how far I’ve come and my journey to personal growth and enlightenment and blah blah self-actualization blah, I knew it would not be. Upon attempting to reflect on all the amazing, frustrating, emotional, and melodramatic experiences of the past year, my mind gradually rolled to a halt like a car running on fumes that did not quite make it to the gas station; I sat in front of my laptop screen with an empty “new entry” page and equally blank brain, a rivulet of drool creeping out the corner of my open mouth. Shaking off the stupor, the cause of my twenty hour headache that had been plaguing me was apparent: it’s just too much. I went as far as I could humanly push myself and found that the finish line was still on the horizon. My poor overloaded brain has put itself on lockdown to forestall disaster, shutting down my cognitive capacity as if to prevent a nuclear reactor from melting down. My body is worn out (but my chiropractor’s bank account is looking quite healthy), my brain is fried as a squirrel on an exposed powerline, and my spirit is weary. After nearly a year of having at least one life-changing event or self-revelation per week (often more) and shoving mass quantities of information into my head like junk into a closet when the in-laws are coming to visit, I am full to capacity. Nothing else can fit in. As for reflecting on everything, if I open that closet door, I fear everything will come tumbling out and bury me under an avalanche of emotions, life skills, and academia. So for now, I’m going to leave that door shut, walk away, and just be, because that’s about all I can manage with two. days. left.