So I'm a bit of a book snob....

This, I think, comes to the surprise of no one. Especially if you've ever had a conversation with me about books or you've seen my personal library. I am a voracious reader and I have a well rounded library and tastes in books, everything from comic books to books on theoretical physics to children's classics have made it into my collection. While my tastes in books is rather broad, there is one thing that is pretty constant in my collection and book history; I do not read garbage. That is to say, life is too short for bad writing, too short for terrible plots, too short for flat main characters.

This of course reminds me of a time when I was reading Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, something I should mention I am not proud of, but I thought it would humorous. Unfortunately it was terrible, it took a literary masterpiece and reduced it to a heaping pile of garbage. So when I accidentally spilled my cup of coffee on it, I unceremoniously chucked that sucker into the trash without a moment of hesitation. So without further ado, I present my list of books to avoid and the books you should read instead.

• The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer: If you want to read about vampires try anything by Anne Rice or The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. 

• Anything by Stephanie Meyer: She a terrible writer, read almost anything else. 

• Sense, Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters (who thinks it's ok to bastardize Jane Austen): Instead try Sense and Sensibility the classic novel by Jane Austen, it's fantastic.

• Pride, Prejudice and Zombies by Ben H. Winters (another bastardized classic): Instead try Pride and Prejudice, it's a literary classic. Also Mr. Darcy is one of the sexiest men in literature. 

• The Fifty Shades of Grey series by E.L. James: If you want to read erotica read almost anything ever written by Anais Nin, maybe start with Delta of Venus. 

• Anything by E. L. James: Anyone who can make domestic abuse, stalking, rape and a bastardization of S & M acceptable to the general public is not someone I would ever waste my time and money on. Also she makes me embarrassed to say that my alma mater is WSU Vancouver. 

• Romance Novels, I have to banish an entire genre because they are form letters pretending to be novels. They rot the mind, if you want to read a great love story try Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, One Day by David Nicholls, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 

• Broerature: This is a term I just made up, but it includes gems like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max. Basically anything that is deliberately shocking for the sake of supposed "humor". These books tend to be terribly written, have horrendous grammar mistakes, and exist only to entertain other Bros. Instead read something that empowers women and will probably make you a better human like The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, or Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit. 

** You'll notice that I only put links to books that I would recommend, I cannot support the reading of garbage. So I have not made it easier for you to locate it. 

** Image Credit: I found this lovely art print on Etsy by SacredandProfane.  

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Word of the Week

Image Credit: BuzzFeed

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Je Suis Parisien

Today, or rather yesterday, (with my rather odd sleep schedule I have not gone to bed yet) I awoke to the news that Paris had been attacked by terrorists. There were six attacks across the city leaving 128 people dead and at least 180 more injured. At this point it is believed that all the attackers died, most via suicide. French President François Hollande has declared a state of emergency for the first time since 2005, closing public places, imposing curfews and restricting the movement of people and traffic throughout the city. My heart weeps for Paris, we must all pray for Paris.

Image credit: I took this picture of the Eiffel Tower when I was in Paris in 2013.

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Writing advice from John Steinbeck

Image Credit: Word Painting

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National Novel Writing Month

November is National Novel Writing Month or #NaNoWaMo! I've written a novel in a semester before but I've never attempted to such a feat in one month. I'm not sure how much writing I will get done given that I have several secondary applications due in the next thirty days, a full time job, and have difficulty getting more than 6 hours of sleep each night. But this is (hopefully) the last time I have an opportunity to participate in #NaNoWaMo before I start medical school, and I think it's pretty unlikely that I will have time to write a novel while studying 70+ hours a week. Perhaps I should write a novel about the joys of applying to medical school and all of the hoops required to be a competitive candidate.

Sign up for NaNoWaMo here. 

Image credit: I took this picture of my coffee this morning, the mug can be purchased from  The Rumpus, the quote on the mug comes from Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed.

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Climbing out of the rabbit hole

My lack of new posts over the past 12 days can be largely attributed to my lack of energy and time to devote to things other than very adult obligations (laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, work, etc..). Any time not spent on basic adult obligations was devoted to working on a secondary application for a unnamed Medical School that was akin to a very intense therapy session. They asked the very standard questions about what I think will be my greatest difficulty in becoming a physician and experiences that would allow me to relate to my patients; but then they also asked about how I handled situations in which I was treated unfairly, had difficulty working with others, and about personal feedback that was difficult to swallow. I spent almost the entire month allotted working on these short essays, pondering about how to best answer these questions, and feeling like this particular set of essays was in a way booby-trapped. In the end I came to the realization that in order to answer these questions in a way that was both honest and representative of who I am at this point in my life I had to give extremely personal answers, I had to expose some of my most closely guarded secrets, thoughts and options.  In the end it seemed fitting that I should have to pay an additional fee to submit my secondary application simply because the process felt more like a productive therapy session than a medical school application. 

** Image Credit: Breakfast at Yurman's

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I'm young, hot and full of crippling debt

I was talking with my youngest sister the other day about the value of an education. She just started her sophomore year of high school and is tremendously bored with her studies, but her teachers will not put her into more difficult courses because although she is smart enough for honors classes she will not do the work required. I have told her countless times that doing well in school and acquiring scholarships is one of the best ways to get out of her current situation. She generally suggests easier options that would work reasonably well for a very short period of time, but ultimately would very likely land her in a heap of trouble or stuck with a life that she didn't want in the first place.

While I am giving her all this advise about how furthering her education is the best way to improve both yourself as a human being and your life, I can't help but wonder if that is true anymore. Currently we are living in an environment where getting a job in your chosen field immediately out of college is extremely difficult, where students leave college with an average of $30,000 of debt or more for just their bachelor's degree, and tuition rates are rising faster than the federal and state subsidies which help students less and less every year. By the time I graduate medical school I will very likely have somewhere between $200,000-$300,000 of student loan debt, and I am told that this not something that I should worry about at this point because once I am a doctor I'll be able to pay it back. Which is very similar rhetoric to what I was told when I started my undergrad degree, and yet two years after graduation I am working at a job that just barely covers my living expenses and my outrageous student loan payments.

While I still think that education is the best way to better oneself, most of the things I learned while getting my bachelor's degree I could learn for free on the internet. In fact that is how I learned calculus or at least how I got an A in calculus. It's also how I learned and studied chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, physics, and so many other subjects. I'm not saying that my time in college was a waste, because I certainly did learn a great deal, but I'm not sure it was worth the $30,000 I paid for it.

Which brings me to my most important point, the educational system in this country is extremely flawed in that it puts so much financial strain on those that so desperately need this system to work, the students themselves. Trying to find a job with a living wage in this economy without a college degree is nearly impossible and so many people choose not to persue higher education because of the cost associated. We have created a system in which the young and the poor are buried in debt, how can we ever expect our economy and our society to recover from this system if we continue in this manner?


*** Image credit: This fantastic article about Cards Against Humanity on BuzzFeed.

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Hello from Secondary Application Hell

I have not been particularly great about updating this blog, as is evidenced from the several month gap between my last post and this one but I have a very good excuse, or at least I think it's a good excuse. I recently applied to medical school and since I submitted my preliminary application I have received five requests for secondary applications, one request for a pre-secondary application essay, and there are still several schools I have yet to hear from. Thus far I have had positive responses from the schools I am most interested in, who shall remain nameless should they stumble on this blog I'd rather not single out the schools I applied to as a precaution. Although all the schools I applied to are pretty excellent and I would be happy to attend any of them; at this point I've been trying not to get too terribly attached to any one school for fear of getting my heart broken by a medical school.

Many of my friends and family have been asking for frequent updates in regard to my medical school status and seem to get frustrated when I tell them that nothing has changed in the last few weeks because most schools are at the secondary application phase and I won't know for several months and I will have to go though a rigorous interview process before that happens. Frequently I have people give one of two reactions, either "you are far more patient than I am" or "how are you not in medical school yet?". To both statements I have the same response, becoming a doctor is a marathon not a sprint. I have been actively working toward the goal of getting into medical school for the past five years during that time I have graduated with my Bachelor's degree, spent the past five years working in the medical field, spent over a year working in a lab, took my MCAT, researched medical schools, filled out applications, and written countless essays. I still have a very long road ahead of me and I am so very ready to start.

*** Image Credit: This excellent article about Discworld quotes I found on BuzzFeed.

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Are these your underwear? And other awkward situations in the laundry room...

Recently I have had a few rather awkward situations regarding the laundry facilities in my apartment complex, I'll start with the less awkward of the two stations and ease into the awkwardness.

Situation 1: Abandoned Laundry:  I typically do my laundry very late at night because I work nights, so I'm up anyway on my days off and then I don't have to fight for use of the only washer and dryer in my building. Except of course when my neighbors forget to take their laundry out of the dryer and then it sits for hours, sometimes for days. So I've started just putting the abandoned laundry on top of the dryer and hoping who ever abandoned their laundry comes back to claim it. As much as I feel like a jerk for moving mystery neighbor's abandoned laundry, I feel they are being a bit of a jerk by leaving the laundry in dryer and so they have forced my unneighborly actions and thus my jerkishness is a moot point.

Situation 2: Accidentally abandoned laundry...that somehow gets mixed in with my laundry. There is this odd little spot under the lint catcher thing in the dryer where small things get stuck, my socks have a habit of getting stuck under that little spot and disappearing forever. Well the other day when folding my laundry I found a pair of very cute black undies that probably where hiding in the dryer lint nook when I put my clothes in the dryer, they look very much like something I would own but I'm quite certain they are not mine because they are the wrong size and I have never purchased underwear from The Gap. Although I may in the future, they are incredibly soft. But I now have in my possession a pair of my neighbor's underwear, so what the hell do I do with them? Do I put them back in the laundry room and hope that they make it back to their rightful owner like someone did with one of my lost socks the other day? Do I throw them out because attempting to find their rightful owner could mean asking my neighbors the question "are these your underwear?" Do I pin them to the bulletin board in the laundry room and risk shaming their owner but increase the chance that they will be found? Until I decide exactly what to do I think they will live in my laundry basket with the socks that are missing their mate, all hopelessly abandoned under the dryer lint holder.

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What I'm currently reading...

I am currently reading Love In A Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford and I feel the need to share this delightful description with anyone who has not had the pleasure of reading these marvelous words:

"Her curtsies, owing to the solid quality of her frame, did not recall the graceful movement of wheat before the wind. She scrambled down like a camel, rising again backside foremost like a cow, a strange performance, painful might be supposed to the performer, the expression on whose face, however, belied this thought. Her knees cracked like revolver shots but her smile was heavenly."

** To anyone interested in the Popular Penguin Pink editions they are, as far as I have been able to ascertain through many wasted moments on the internet, only available in Australia. I purchased my copy of this book and Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote on eBay and paid a exorbitant amount in shipping, they are worth every penny.

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Grannyism #4

Here is a list of funny things I found on the internet to keep you occupied while I am at work for the next several days:

Saddest Cookbooks Ever, including the I Can't Chew Cookbook.

Quiz on Buzzfeed, that has concluded that I am an alien.

21 Victorian Slang terms that need to be revived.

This beautiful pair of flats I need to add to my collection.

This amazing vintage teapot that I need in my life.

Possibly my next craft project.

More beautiful books to add to my collection.

One of my current favorite shops in Portland, other than the Goodwill on Hawthorne and Powells.

Excellent news for women in comic books Female Thor is outselling male Thor by 30%.

A recent study shows that 80% of cervical cancers are preventible with the latest HPV Vaccine.

102 year old pictures add a bit more beauty to the sometimes ugly world of the internet.

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Word of the Week

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: Fear of big words

*Image credit: "Don't be a dick" (like who ever created the word of the week) from With Grace & Guts

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Vanilla Almond Granola

I've been making granola for a few years now and I recently stumbled on a recipe that I've modified to make what may be my favorite granola recipe yet. The original recipe is from Sally's Baking Addiction is super simple and delicious, my modified recipe is listed below.

2 1/2 cups old-fashioned oats
3/4 cup chopped almonds
1 cup rinsed quinoa
1 cup dried coconut flakes
1/8 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup melted coconut oil
1/4 tsp almond extract
1 Tbsp vanilla extract

1. Mix oats, quinoa, almonds, salt, and cinnamon in a large bowl.
2. Mix honey, coconut oil, almond extract and vanilla in a small bowl. Stir until combined.
3. Pour wet ingredients (honey, etc...) over dry ingredients (oats, etc..), stir until combined. 
4. Spread evenly on a baking an oiled baking sheet (I put a little bit of coconut oil on a paper towel and rub it on the baking sheet)
5. Bake at 300 degrees for 30-45 minutes, stirring every 10-15 minutes. 

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Finding myself

Its been a while since I last wrote anything on this blog, actually its been quite some time since I wrote anything at all except for the small daily entries in my journal or work related things. Recently I have felt that familiar tug demanding that I create something substantial with my words. Before I delve into hermit mode and crank out some prose, I thought it would be a grand idea to work on this blog a bit and to provide an update on myself. Some pretty big things have happened since I last posted anything on this blog:

• I applied to medical school and all of the schools I applied to requested secondary applications, unfortunately due to things going on in my personal life I had to post-pone my medical school endeavors. 
• I moved to Portland, OR, which has proved to be one of the better decisions I've made in recent years.
• I ended a four year relationship that had become toxic.
• I am adjusting to living alone again and realizing how much I've missed having so much privacy. 
• I am reading voraciously as I have not in years and it is marvelous. 
• I started training for a half-marathon but unfortunately am currently on running hiatus due to stress fractures in my lower legs. 
• I am working on finding out who I am outside of a relationship that for the past few years had come to define me in a way that I abhor. 

Although the past several months have been challenging and I do wish on some level that I had done things differently in the past; if I could do it all over again I would not change it because I have grown so much as a person and I believe that I am a better person today for that experience.

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