09/14/07

Shanah Tova U’metuka?

What a joke. Really.
Still, I wish the rest of you a happy new year.

There’s nothing too exciting here. I am having a lot of trouble studying for my boards—I cannot sit down and concentrate. Never in my life have I encountered such difficulties with concentrating—if I needed to study I just would get it done. Nowadays I feel like the poster child for ADHD. You already know that I postponed the test by two months—I didn’t feel prepared at the beginning of August and thought some extra time and rotations would help me. I don’t know if the extra time helped or not. Sheesh. The test is next week and I’ll be happy to be done with it, and yet I'm to the point that I just don’t care about it, which is never a good thing.

When I was about 13 I participated in ‘Pitzuchim’—which is the Israeli equivalent of Jeopardy. I remember not telling any of my friends about it, and the only people who knew were in my family. To prepare for it I grabbed a stack (and I mean a stack that was taller than me) of books from the library and I studied the books for several weeks. If I could only reproduce this type of concentration and excitement when preparing for my test, I’d be in no trouble at all. To those who are curious, I won 2nd place in the finals. It was a pretty cool experience, and my first time in a television studio.

In the time I spent not studying this week, I found some really cool thing about “Zehu-Zeh”—I finally figured out the words (yes, I could have asked ‘Dr. Google’ and ‘Professor Wikipedia’ about it but obviously my mind needed to solve the mystery on its own.) To those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, just move on to the next section… it won’t make sense if you didn’t grow up in Israel.
So the part I never could make out is this: האוויר הזה, שאף מלוא חזה here, you can see it in the opening bit and see that I’m right—way cool, huh?


What other cool exciting thing? Well, I have a Vega story! I was studying and just got done completing a test when I heard Vega running from side to side on the balcony and then heard a very loud buzzing sound. I took a look outside and saw Ms. Vega with a HUGE cicada in her mouth!!!! EWWWWW! I didn’t want her to bring the bug into the house, so I shut the door before she could enter and she just stood there and pawed the door until I gave in and let her come inside. She dropped the bug (it was about 4 inches long) and I thought it was dead. She then smacked it with her paws and all of the sudden it just ran outside and got away. She ran after it but the cicada really wanted to live so it made an excellent run for it. Vega was very disappointed but completely intrigued for the rest of the day. Way to go Vega!

Dad said that Vega would probably have survived in the wild, but KC would not have. I tend to agree with that :o) Vega is truly a huntress while KC is a big baby.

On Tuesday I went over to another hospital to see a cath being done. I never seen one before and it was very interesting. Despite that exciting day, cardiology is not growing on me. My next rotation is peds-cardiology and I am hoping that it would be a good experience.

On Wednesday—the eve of Rosh Hashana, I had tears in my eyes after hearing a message my cousin Irit left me. It was a very sweet message and it caught me unprepared. I wasn’t planning to do anything for the holiday; I didn’t want to go to services, and knew I’d just be irritated by people if I went to a dinner somewhere. And since I feel like I have absolutely nothing to celebrate, why should I even pretend?

But, at about 5:30 in the afternoon I felt so miserable that I decided I had to see one of my close friends who happened to be in town. Deepa did a two week rotation at a nearby hospital and I didn’t get to see her until that point. So I called her up and invited her over for dinner. She came and we had a good time eating at an Italian restaurant and chatting about this and that.

So there. This is not an exciting entry…
‘Good happy thing’ for today—I bought some wonderful tomatoes at the farm! Yeah! They’ll be gone before Monday, but I was happy to see the season was not quite over yet.

That’s about it.

Reut

I didn't have a picture of Vega with the cicada, but here is KC being a baby.