Wow. This is a completely useless but awesome post because it was done from my iphone. All those keyboard naysayers…yeah, you were wrong. I suppose that it might take impossibly long to write a real post, but this is still way cool.
Monthly Archive for September, 2007
Yeah, so I meant to write last night. Really, I did. It’s just that my talk didn’t go so well. So I was too bitter and angry to write. Yes, it was really that bad. But let’s not linger on things past. Let’s talk about how I cured my utter shame and embarrassment (no, it didn’t involve consuming large amounts of alcohol, although it was tempting).
I now present to you the ultimate cure for public humiliation:
Yep, I’ve been coveting this little thing here since it came out and now I have it because my husband likes to reward failure. Eh, not that I’m complaining here. Though the mere thought of how bad yesterday was still makes me cringe. It’s times like these when I wish I had a “delete” button in my brain for those memories I can’t forget fast enough.
Don’t forget to check out Grand Rounds today at Kevin, MD. On another note, I’ve been a little absent here lately, but that’s because I’m hard at work (for once). I’ll be back once I get through the public humiliation that will be my talk tomorrow.
I’m really tired. We repeated our experiment from yesterday to confirm that my treatment agent is in fact…how do we put it now…toxic. And confirm it we did. Then I come home tired and hungry (I usually don’t have time to eat at all on my experiment days) to have my husband decide that he wants us to go out to eat again with his friend who lives behind us. I tell him that I look and feel like crap so I don’t want to go out and that we’ve been eating out way too much when we have plenty of food at home. And what does he do? He calls his friend up and arranges for us to go out anyway. Then I get mad at him for what he did and we argued. Then we decided to leave since his friend was waiting. And I was really tired and grumpy. So I didn’t grab my keys. Since you know, my husband was going to drive. You can probably guess what happened next. He gets into the car and then gets back out because he doesn’t have his keys either. And of course, he locked the door behind him as we left. So he locked us out of our house again. After the last two times, I always made sure to have my keys because I knew better. The one time I was too tired to be all careful, it bites me in the ass. But this incident also made me realize that my husband is way too dependent on me. I do everything. He’s a half-assed kind of guy (trust me, this didn’t come out until after we got married) and doesn’t believe in that whole “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” philosophy. So because of his laziness, I take care of all of the “being careful.”  He even goes so far as to assume that he can depend on me to help him with all of his prerequisites for med school as well as that whole getting-into-med-school part. Instead of reading his book or referring to his lecture notes, when he has a question about something, he’ll just ask me as if I’m his personal TA. When he needs to write a lab report or an essay, he half-asses them as fast as he can and hands them to me, assuming that I’ll just make them all better for him.
And I’m damn tired of it. I didn’t get married so that I could be someone’s personal crutch. So my song for this week is Matchbox Twenty – Crutch.
Song suggestions? Send them to me here.
So in a last ditch effort to actually have data for the talk I’m giving next week, I’m squeezing two experiments in this week. I was all ready for a super hardcore weekend analyzing data, but the amount of data I’m going to need to analyze has already been cut by 50% because today’s experiment failed miserably. And not even in the usual ways, such as by pulmonary embolus or overzealous induction of our disease state. This time, we failed because the treatment agent we’re testing outright killed the animal. Which can’t be good for my thesis. Nope. Not at all. I’m going to go panic now.
Don’t tell me the reason why you’re in town is that you want to visit and hang out with me and your brother when it’s not true. Because then I’m led to conclude that all you really wanted was a private room and bed in which to do the nasty with your concubine #5 since your crazy mom (in a rare moment of non-craziness) removed the locks from all the doors at home to prevent being a party to such activities. Ah, I knew that it wouldn’t be long before charismatic brother-in-law ended up on my shitlist too. I think by now we can conclude that if you’re in any way related to my husband, be it by blood or otherwise, you will end up on my shitlist. It’s not a matter of if, but rather a matter of when. Anyway, so charismatic brother-in-law brought concubine #5 (he has so many that I really don’t remember if she’s #5 or not, but I do know that she is the current favored one) into town claiming that she wanted to get to know us better. I was against this visit in the first place because the husband was supposed to spend this weekend studying for an impending midterm, but agreed against my better judgment after extracting a no-nasty-business-in-my-house promise from charismatic brother-in-law.
Well, first off, they arrive at some ungodly hour. Then we asked them if they had eaten and concubine #5 replied that she hadn’t. So I offered her three different food choices.
Me: Well, we have porkchops, stir fry noodles, or beef.
Concubine #5 [doesn't respond and looks away at charismatic brother-in-law]
Me [after scooping rice into a container to put away in order to give concubine #5 some time to respond]: So, what do you want to eat?
Concubine #5 [testily]: I don’t know.
At that point, I really wanted to shove some food in her face, but instead I just put the food away and went somewhere else. But, tell me, what kind of guest acts like that? What kind of guest who should be trying to ingratiate herself with the family acts like that? And she’s charismatic brother-in-law’s current favorite (even though she’s the ugliest of his batch of concubines; tell me, what’s with my husband’s family and ugly chicks?) because of her good manners. Riiiiiight. That must have been some kind of code for how good she is in bed. After that, I pretty much decided that I would make no effort whatsoever with her and that she would have to initiate any further interactions. You would think that seeing how boisterous she was with my sister-in-law, that she would have had no problem. But she did not even try.
Then the following day, we decided to take them out to lunch. Yes, that meant we paid. And we didn’t even get a “Thanks for lunch” out of either of them. Not only that, but even with my super extroverted husband around, the conversation went nowhere. My husband’s valiant attempts to make conversation were met with impenetrable resistance so we ended up eating in silence. Talk about awkward. It was bad. I rank it right up there with how awkward it was to eat with not-so-dear brother-in-law and his super-psycho-super-fugly girlfriend since you could cut through the silence with a knife then too. I thought that charismatic brother-in-law’s concubine #1 (his first and the prettiest of the lot) was hard to talk to, but damn was I wrong. Her quietness was no match for my husband’s extroversion and he easily got her to talk. We spent four-plus hours sitting outside of a deli with her and charismatic brother-in-law with none of the awkwardness that pervaded our mere 45-minute lunch with him and concubine #5.
I couldn’t get away fast enough (or was it them?) and looked forward to some nice not-having-them-around time since charismatic brother-in-law wanted to show her around town while my husband studied. Imagine how displeased I was when they returned home not 45 minutes after we parted ways. And then proceeded to hole themselves up in our guest room for the rest of the day as if they were at some sort of hotel. Suffice it to say, I had to try really hard to contain my relief when they finally left later that night.
So much for coming to hang out with us, huh? Trust me, I’m never allowing it again, so the moral of the story is: don’t tell me you’re visiting me when you’re just using me and my house as a safe haven away from your mom’s crazy intrusiveness. Unless you enjoy being on my shitlist, of course.
…to keep the house clean. All you really have to do is always clean up any mess you make immediately. Because the longer you leave it, the more it piles up and the more daunting the task becomes, which just makes you avoid it more. I’m by no means a clean freak. But I’ve adopted the above mentality in order to force myself to not be a complete slob. Unfortunately, that strategy just doesn’t work when your other half (read: husband) doesn’t quite comply. I really don’t have time to clean up both my mess and then his too. And the worst part is that he will go and make messes right where I’ve cleaned up, completely undermining all of my hard work. Because of that, I’ll give up and just let the mess pile up. And then we’ll have guests. And I end up having to storm through the house cleaning everything up as fast as I can when I’m already exhausted from a long week of not getting enough sleep because he’s still insisting on being a slimy premed. Can you tell that I have to go clean the house now for a visit from the in-laws this weekend? Double fun!
