Back in Miami

I love how they set things up - Ross, that is. After the most difficult semester so far, we get a truncated break, because our big welcome to 5th semester is the Comprehensive Basic Sciences Shelf Examination. It's supposed to be a review of all of the first two years, similar in scope and ire to the USMLE step 1. However, it is not the step, and most med schools don't even make their students take it. Ross does - because they're a Caribbean medical school, they've got to prove that their students are every bit as good as the US schools, so they make us jump through more hoops. Honestly, though, it isn't such a bad thing - I've been spending the past week studying up for this beast, and I'm puttign together all sorts of notes and stuff that I'll use when I go to tackle the real deal. Actually, I took a practice test today, written by the NBME. It was highway robbery at 45$ a pop, but it's supposed to be a decent approximation of the actually CBSSE, which is supposed to be the same for the step. After how well I'd been doing in class, my performance was disappointing - it put me right at the mean score for US med students (and the thought of being just average makes me nautious). Nevertheless, I'd have passed the step. I'm just glad there's more time.

So what have I been doing for the past few weeks? Shortly after writing that last post, Nicole and I flew to Texas to spend a few day with my family. The goal of this particular inter-semester hiatus had always been to focus on rocking the Comp, but there had to be some down time. So we hung out for a bit - going to see Obsessions, Wolverine, and State of Play at the movies, visiting Dad's cath lab and watching a few interventional cases, and spending entirely too much time and money at the outlet mall down the road. Even though we'd both lugged along First Aid and various other study-accoutrements, nothing got done.

So in between that and now I've been lost in a [very small] flurry of facts, stretching from the beginning of my medical days until now. The new apartment has taken some setting up, as is always the case, but this time it's much nicer than anywhere else I've lived before.

It really is a very pretty building - that first shot is taken from just across the street, near the metro stop. The second one is taken from the roof, looking down into the central area. There's a pool somewhere down there, but I couldn't get it in the shot and still show off the sky. This place is pretty on the inside, too.

Some colleagues of mine were going to save a little cash and go with an unfurnished apartment, but I really didn't want to deal with the hassle. When last I spoke to them, they were trying to contact some furniture furnishers, and having a heck of a time at it - I hope everything's worked out. That go me thinking, though.....look at that picture of my room. It seems a little meager, no? The furnishings look almost spartan. Know why? Because I don't collect the little baubles that I'll call Useless Stuff that Makes it Looks like Someone Lives Here. Here's what I mean:

First of all, that plant isn't even real. So here I have a plastic plant, that really serves no purpose but to cause my apartment to look like it's inhabited. Even if the plant was real, what would be the point of it? It's certainly producing neither significant amounts of oxygen nor fruit to warrant it being here. It's presence means "someone who wants this here lives here". Next up, those tiny little cookie-looking things - if they actually were cookies, their value to me woul be self-evident. Rather, they are artfully designed, aromatically flavored lumps of wax - vanilla-smelly candles you can't burn. I'll return to the topic of smells and scents in a moment, but let's talk about candles for a moment.

Here we have a candle that can be burned - however, it's evident from it's shape that it's not supposed to be burned. What good is a candle you can't burn? For that matter, what good is a candle you can burn? (1) This is Miami - I don't need it for heat, and (2) since I'm generally pretty good about paying my bills on time, the electricity works fairly well. Thus, this artfully sculpted block of wax seems to say "The person who lives here pays so much attention to every square inch of this place that he wanted me here." But wait....what is that behind our candle? While I'm all for nuts and snacks and the like, if I needed somewhere to store them, I wouldn't keep them right behind the carefully placed candle. It's not like they're even supposed to be eaten - what good is a collection of nuts you just look at? It's....it's a tease, that's what it is. Sure, it's visually interesting and breaks the monotony of the granite countertop, but let's face it - they're show nuts.

Regarding this thing, I have no comment. It's sort of like how I don't really consider much abstract art to be art. Honestly, the only interesting thing is that someone had the audacity to call it as such, but that's why I'm not a critic. But I guess I'll call this piece "Rocks on Sand in Glass". The other stuff - in some faraway time - was at least useful; light, or warmth, maybe a lovely snack - this thing would only be useful if I decided to buy goldfish.

This one takes the cake - at least the previous picture was a jar in which I could, you know, put stuff if I didn't have anywhere else to put it. But here we have balls of styrofoam, around which have wrapped strips of variously braided and twined bits of paper or some such. And it's twenty dollars! I haven't had a good rant in a while, but this just about takes the cake. Somewhere, at some board meeting, some guy said "yes....let's make that - we can sell that!" And you know what? He's probably right.

I said we'd get back to the scents. There was a study done a while ago, which showed definitively that women have more sensitive noses than men. There was another article recently - which I had to share with my brothers - in which Axe antiperspirant is altering their camgpaign - apparently, teenaged boys walk around in clouds of the stuff. My point is this: where I might see Useless Stuff that Makes it Looks like Someone Lives Here, someone else may see an item that makes life liveable. I'm such a boy.

I leave you with various pictures of Miami - I guess we just want to be surrounded by stuff that lookes nice.