For prescription pills, doin’ the most

(Blue Strips – LeCrae)

I recently had an awful interview experience…

I’m smart enough to not give too many details because obvi I don’t want any program to find out what I wrote about them and be upset. I don’t want to hurt people, I just want to have an outlet to write about it…

So at one point early-ish in the interview, I was asked “since you’re not hanging out with friends during residency, what new hobbies or skills have you developed?

Me inside my head was screaming “who says I don’t have any friends?!?” When I was in high school my brothers would tattle on me about sitting by myself, and to be fair I really didn’t have very many friends in high school and I mean really I counted people as my friend if I was pretty sure I’d say hi to them about 50% of the time if we were alone together in the hallway…so I had a really low bar for friendship and struggled even with that to make friends and the vast majority of my friends only lasted until the end of the trimester…so up until 10-15 years ago, sure, that might have been a valid question…but…I do have lots of friends now – friends that I actually can use my words with, so like people that people on the outside would also agree are my friends.

Me outside my head after trying to figure out what I was supposed to say since I really couldn’t think of anything new except for that at work I am learning to advocate for myself but I am not really sure how or if that will be useful if it becomes a skill to transfer to outside of work…I responded I have a very active social life, but when I am not with my friends or working I like biking and rollerblading except not right now because it is very icy and snowy outside…

So yeah…I was sups awkward…but why in the world would they assume that I am incompetent at developing community?!? Like I might not be the most awesomest interviewee ever, but I don’t feel like I failed hard enough by that point in the interview that it is fair to assume that I don’t have the ability to form deep relationships.

The only other thing I am going to say is that it felt like they were super afraid of seeming inferior like everything they said about their program was like it might sound like we are not going to be any good, but we are really awesome…and TBH the more they said that the more I felt like maybe there was some back story of problems that they were trying to hide…I mean, the only weakness that was ever really presented was that the desks aren’t super comfortable if you are tall…I always feel like you have something to hide if you can’t come up with anything in particular you’d like to change about the program…so I feel a little disappointed because I was feeling pretty good about this residency prior to the interview, but the more it went on the more I was like this would be better than nothing but isn’t really what I want…but before I say too much and make it possible to identify which program I am writing about I am going to stop…

So yeah, general rules in interviewing me:

1. relationships are super important to me
2. I am sensitive about my social skills

Those things mean you are going to win me over better by assuming I have a vibrant social life and letting me figure how much you should know about how hard I work to communicate than by assuming I am a complete failure at making friends. Hashtag I’ve only been here les than a year and feel so deeply connected to my community that it will hurt to leave…hashtag for that matter I only spent 5 weeks in South Dakota for a rotation and it was super hard to leave behind all the friends I made there…I am not a social butterfly, but I have definitely learned how to create community wherever I go.

Sometimes lightning hits too near

(When the Smoke Clears – Stephanie Pauline)

So I started writing a facebook post and realized I had way too much to say for that…you’re welcome…

Story time with Wiggle Worm…

So I was playing more cards…because I didn’t know what to work on so I worked on nothing because I am good at logical thinking like that…plus I keep getting wordsed at about work life balance and taking breaks and I don’t like breaks, but we can just call all the time I get nothing done a break and then it at least looks like a win even if it is really a fail because it increases rather than decreases stress which is not the purpose of taking breaks…and I was smelling smoke and really annoyed about it but was blaming it on being a cold day and therefore the furnace must be burning off the dust…

…umm, yes, I was blaming the burning smell on the furnace. In February. And so eventually I realized that if it was going to smell burn-y it would have done that months ago and if I was going to blame it on the furnace when it hadn’t ever smelled like this earlier in the winter then I better go take a look…

So I got off my lazy bottom and started walking towards the furnace in my apartment…but…I didn’t get very far when I saw the smoke rising from the stovetop.

Problem identified.

Guess who thought she could totally just put some stuff for lunches this week on the stove while she did church on zoom? Guess who completely forgot she was cooking anything once she was engaged in church?

Yep, it was me on both counts. Apparently I cannot multi-task…although, to be fair, researchers have shown that there is literally no such thing as multi-tasking, there is just rapid-attention-switching. You can’t actually think about two things at once.

So instead of refried beans I get to eat half-cooked but also moderately burned beans that I tried to rescue by dumping in a bunch of chili seasoning and hoping that would cover the burned flavor. Spoiler alert: it didn’t seem to matter how much I dumped in, it really still was overpowered by the flavor of burnt, so I went on to plan B and diluted it with frozen tomatoes.

That at least sorta worked. It isn’t like delicious or anything, but it is not disgusting…so I guess I’m glad I still have something to eat.

And since this is now a blog post instead of a facebook post I can tell you what else I learned today: bread makers get super duper hot on the inside if you use them for cooking. I don’t know how I thought it would be going from flour and yeast to actual bread without getting hot, or if somehow I thought it wouldn’t beep until the temperature decreased or if I thought the temperature would instantly decrease upon completion of the cooking…but regardless of that, it was very hot…and I kept trying to touch it and it kept being hot and I didn’t know what to do and yeah…how was I supposed to know that? Until now I’ve only ever used a bread maker to make dough that was going to go in the actual oven, so I’ve never experienced what happens when you are making it into bread inside of the bread maker. I’m not sure if I like it that way, but I guess considering my skill level in cooking and remembering that I am cooking it is probably good to do my cooking in an appliance that turns itself off when it is done…

Oh, and I was reminded today that if you don’t know your right from your left and didn’t go over the directions very well prior to trying to use them AND didn’t label your hands left and right…the best directions ever from google maps plus the gps on your phone are going to really struggle to get you where you were trying to be…and that is probably another reason I prefer to go to the same place every day than to have any variety…but I eventually figured it out, and was only a tiny bit late, so it was all good…plus I had pizza today, and that automatically makes it a good day no matter what.

Oh, and hot chocolate is good. Hot apple cider is good. But today I learned that they are not good in the same cup…oops…there may have still been some apple cider in my cup when I dumped the similac in to make the hot chocolate…the ascorbic acid makes for an interesting flavor for hot chocolate…

I’m almost done…just one more piece of advice…not only can the cold not get in, but neither can really any air at all when you wear both a mask and your winter coat tight over your face…lol, I thought I was dying…and then I realized that maybe I needed to unzip my coat…and suddenly I wasn’t suffocating…but I was still a combination of out of shape and anemic that made biking not a pleasant activity so I waited for the mail man to finish delivering mail so I could determine that I don’t have any mail and then go inside…plus, flare pants are still my favorite kind of pants, but are not really the safest biking option…

I used to hold your hand so tight there was no question but now…I’ve never felt so alone

(Boys Don’t Cry – Plumb)

So that isn’t super true…I’m the kid who said “I’ll hold my own hand” and proceeded to walk across the street with my hands clasped in front of me…

…but the whole boys don’t cry thing…I wish I was a boy, because girls do cry…

Sometimes you just have to be like okay you’ve been playing cards for four hours and it is time to get dressed, so no, you can’t sit on the floor in pajamas crying…you don’t have to wear the shirt given by daddy’s work and you don’t have to wear the grief camp shirt, but you do have to wear *something* besides pajamas…The amount of good and not falling apart time I have is definitely significantly higher the further our I get, but it doesn’t go away…it never goes away.

But on the positive side I got almost 5 hours of sleep last night and 4 the night before, so there is hope of someday being a more functional person…and I know my body is healing even if things are still hard, because I was just thinking this week that for the past few months cleaning the hair off of the bedroom floor and the shower wall has become a lot less frequent task…and you can’t really blame it on improved nutrition, because I still am surviving primarily on fruit snacks and apple cider mix, so it’s gotta be the decreased emotional stress.

…but the whole playing cards all day thing is not going to be a good way to get my work done…and I think it is getting on the nerves of the person who sits next to me at work so I’m gonna need a new way to get through the day…preferably one that involves actually getting my work done…but we’ll see…

Hashtag but I got away with a beautiful bright red visual abstract and I might think the idea of a visual abstract is dumb, but if it can be pretty unlike my poster that was supposed to be yellow and black which is not my favorite then it isn’t so bad…

And now for some random quotes that twitter showed me this morning because obvi I needed to figure out my twitter password which meant after I got dressed I needed to get on twitter…because that makes a lot of sense…

“I’m always right, except when I’m wrong…which is often.”

“When life closes a door, open it again. That’s how doors work.”

“I don’t need a paper to tell me I succeeded. I just need food.”

“Love food, love others. Nothing else matters.”