Match-made

It used to be a tradition
involving trays of coffee and desserts,
a shy, obsequious girl on display
and the chinking weight of gold.

I hid somewhere among
exploding stars and raging seas
waiting to be found.
Now the planets are aligning
but my heart isn't.

Its a winged creature
with a mind of its own
spoilt by too many dreams,
and Prince Charming looks nothing
like this. Except for the stars.
They, apparently, approve.

I’m overwhelmed, asphyxiated by
words ricocheting in my head. Their clamor
is like the primate section of a zoo on a
midsummer weekend, except it intensifies
after the sun goes down. No banana for you,
I think to myself.

Their risqué mating rituals form thoughts,
paint illusions on a caffeine-starved mind
too tired to bother looking for reality. Too tired
to be a bulwark against the words, really.

Tonight, I let the ink spill onto paper,
words that resemble rorscharch paintings
in syntax and form. Yet the words are there,
whispering,
out of control,
catcalling,
inviting a cataclysm.

So glad I'm on vacation.

Ah. This month is solely to remind me how much I dislike outpatient medicine. I'm in the pediatric urgent care clinic - its driving me crazy. Half the time it feels like punishment for having had a wonderful time last month with Cardiology. The heart is beginning to make more and more sense, and all I really need to do is sit down and read some more to fall completely in love with the heart.
I've always liked the heart, but now its pulchritudinous. I'm in danger of wanting to do a fellowship. Uh-oh.
I love pediatrics more than I like medicine, the balance is tilted, but I prefer well-child care to doing urgent care. The one good thing I can think about is that I'm learning to document concisely. Sigh. You think I would have learnt that by now!
Not ready to be a senior yet, not ready to supervise an intern or student on my own, but I don't have intern-itis yet. I find the inpatient floors more intriguing, more interesting even if I have to pry myself out of bed at the unholy hour of 5AM. Even if there are a multitude of things I don't have time for, its still a rewarding experience. I'm still in that phase of liking heroic medicine, so to speak. I don't like the mundane bunch of rashes and snotty noses I'm seeing, even though they come attached to the cutest beings toddling around on the planet.
Oh well. I'll figure it out. Eventually.

A Letter to Someone's Children

It is my regretful endeavour
to inform you
Mrs. Rose K
must die.
That, somehow,
you must find the strength
to listen to her, let her go.
The funeral must be planned,
the casket satin inlaid.
Her Grandchildren must be sung to sleep
every night as usual.
You will point to a star
older than life itself
and tell the children
it is Grandma,
and the baby will learn
that she was the tooth fairy.
Flowers must be bought
and you will return to your goth days
to wear black this weekend,
and share wet smiles with yourself
at JC Penney's
in the dressing room mirror -
Oh how she grounded you when she found
black lipstick in your purse
covered in a condom.
You may now leave the house
and not worry
that she will be dead when you return
because she won't be there.

But I will give you tonight
to rant and rave
and call me a tryant
because I killed your mother.

Signed,
the Inept Intern.

Six months later... I still love life

Ah. The gorgeousness of winter is passing here in the Sunny City. That sentence would have been irony, except that the past week has actually been Sunny and pretty. Last week it was snowy, this week it is spring.

I've made friends, lost friends and learnt more in the last six months than the whole five years of med school. I fell in love with babies and watched them grow and beat the odds. I see them in clinic now, and smile every time they show up on my schedule. I see people in my continuity clinic, adults, some of whom picked me because they like my "spunk". We hug at the end of each 20-minute visit. I'm happy, I'm smiling, I love going to work.

I've stopped submitting poems to be published, mainly because I haven’t had time to type up the poems I write. They’re not even sad, they’ve turned more introspective, a questioning of things I have always believed. No, I’m not questioning my faith in the inherent goodness of the world despite having been hurt. I’m finding out that life is a series of checks and balances, and the scales are finely balanced. Always. There is no grief unmatched by joy, no sleepless night unmatched by lazy day. There is no smile that is unreturned, unless you count the infants, but they don’t have to smile all the time to be adorable.

Speaking of infants, I think I’m a happier pediatrician than an internist. Not even kidding. Its amazing how happy I am when I’m around the kids and babies. I still don’t know what I’m doing with a lot of the older children, but the babies make me want to sing. Yes, sing. Despite my dislike of the NICU, a neonatology career is showing up on my horizon of career choices. I’m not impressed by my vacillation on career choices. Not that it was one of the never-choices, but it wasn’t even remotely considered. I thought all the ICU fellowships were at the bottom of the list, but two of them are slowly coming up on my personal ranking hierarchy of choices. And they’re not even that far apart if I think about it. Eeek. I’m turning into a fellowship person, and it scares me. Kidneys and guts remain firmly at the bottom of the list, yessir indeed they do.

My home is still incomplete, unfurnished, but I’ve progressed to calling it “home”. I think I have picked out a couch on craigslist, that beautiful website for the cheapie like me. I’ve picked out two desks, I’m waiting to hear on one before I make up my mind. Either one will make me joyful and better organized. I’m waiting to get my living room organized a little bit before I pick out a dresser for my bedroom. A dresser and a mirror. I’m getting end tables from the dollar store tomorrow.

I went to the lake on Friday, and took a beautiful set of pictures of the sunset. It was a lovely day in the sixties. Dad loved the pictures, I emailed them to him. The new cam is amazing, and I want one of my own. I’m going to save up for an SLR or the same camera I bought for my brother, a Fujifilm Finepix S1500. I also want to buy adobe photoshop and play around with pictures. It is more fulfilling than buying a car at this point. I want the small happinesses of life – is happinesses even a word? Or a neologism?

I’ve been meditating the past few days at night, before I go to bed. There are a lot of realizations I’ve had, and one of the biggest is that I’m actually learning to stop and smell the roses. Live in the moment. Be spontaneous. Offer to help. I’m living for the small joys and it has made me a happier person. I’m happy for every 30 minute workout I squeeze into the week, every time I’m taking the bus instead of cabs. Every night I get six hours of uninterrupted sleep, I’m happy.

I love my parents, and every day I spend here in this country, watching families tear themselves apart, children growing up in incomplete homes, my respect for the gifts I’ve taken for granted rises up out of somewhere deep and chokes me. I laugh with my mother over the phone, hear my father’s oft-spoken pride in the short conversations we have every week. Get my brother’s opinion on everything from furniture to electronics. Buy him stuff. Laugh over in-jokes that no one else will understand. Tell him something and know that he'll understand why its funny or frustrating. I'm blessed, very blessed.

Its beautiful. My life is beautiful. Touché. I love life.

Poetry and the End of vacation

My 30:30 is going well, over at Splash. There are several of my favorite people on the site have been participating, and the gorgeousness of it all almost had me weeping into my oatmeal this morning. In comparision, my Open Letters pales in prettiness.

Sometimes, I think poems need to be gritty and rough, like driftwood. The poems in Open Letters are meant to reflect that. I like to believe that they fit this hope well enough. At least, I'm not embarassed to share them alongside prettier and more thought provoking poetry from poets who've honed their skills. Seriously, there is even a sonnet. Someone posted a SONNET in a 30:30 - thats the kind of people that make me want to weep for joy.

I posted Open Letters #1 on Poetbay, the response so far has been lukewarm. Part of it may have been the simple fact that I haven't posted there in longer than six months. I think I've outgrown Poetbay, I'm ready to move onto forums and places that challenge me and make me want to write poetry. I'm tired of telling people I love their poetry when really, I don't mean it. I'm tired of offering critique where it isn't welcome and the critique forum is almost a joke. Sure, encouragement IS important, but the same comments over and over again make me gag. Maybe I will go ahead and delete myself from there, and see how I feel about it. The only thing stopping me is the memory of a good friend who passed away and the thought of the few good friends I have made there. But there is always facebook, right?

I think I should go back to the AAP forum or Penshells. What scares me is how easily I can disconnect myself from any place of poetry, how these poetry forums besides Splash don't feel right to me. I can't bring myself to go back and post. It might have to do with the fact that I know that at Splash, I have friends who held my hand through a lot of things. But that isn't an excuse I'm offering myself and whoever else cares enough to read this blog. If anyone besides me reads this, I sure don't know.

Ah the difficult choices I make... haha.

In really exciting news, I received my print copy of the debut issue of Touch: The Journal of Healing. I was published, and they have the first line of my poem as a sort of introduction to the book with a page to itself and my name under it. How awesomely cool is that! This is also the first time I'm holding physical proof that unbiased people like my poetry, and the first time in the past five years that I'm holding a print copy of my poem in my hand. I almost squealed when I picked up the envelope today.

Vacation is almost over and I think I'm ready to go back to work. I'm starting on the peds inpatient service, a sudden change to my schedule. I don't mind the change, but I'm scared. And nervous. And terrified that when I have to draw blood, I'll completely fail and burst into tears. Hopefully, though, I will be better than that. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Sunshine and smiles, atleast while the sunshine lasts!

I started a 30:30 on Splash. It was surprisingly easy to take charge and lead. I'm not a take charge person most of the time, I'm content to let others take charge and hand me a responsibility - I'll take charge of that. But this time, I started something and so far, I have two well-standing people on my list.

I was thinking about it this morning. In my chosen career, I will end up taking charge of people's lives. Asking them to change their lifestyles to suit their health. Basically, I'll be taking charge of their lives in a big way, though we'll pretend that they did it. I'm actually already doing that, now that I try to be objective about it.

In other news, my brother now has a blog. My decidedly non-literary, non-journaling, non-writing brother. Its got to be the joke of a lifetime, even if he never updates it again. Now that hes got at least one legitimate post, I can tease him about it the rest of his life. Hahahaha. I love you, bro.

I started a series of poems called Open Letters. It is, as the title suggests, a series of letters to people who either have been or are a part of my life. I don't know how many of them will recognise themselves or others that these letters are addressed to. I dont know that any of them will even read these letters. But I'm writing them for myself, imagining myself telling these people some of my thoughts about them.

I'll post the collection here later, some day when I have nothing to blog about.

:)
me.