Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

It seems that every so often, life beats me down with a spiked club enough so that I disappear to all but my closest friends and family, sometimes even to some of them. The last 2-3 weeks have been one of those times. Honestly, it’s not that I’ve had nothing to write about or even that I was too depressed or whatever to write, it was just that I’ve been living day-to-day and have been unable to make sense of why I’m so out of sorts and out of time. It can also be attributed to three things, specifically:

1. Living with a newborn and all the changes involved
2. Classes themselves (academic)
3. Delusional classmates that unfortuately have chosen me most recently as an outlet for their love of conflict and misery

It seems weird to say that adjusting to a newborn (now 3 months and doing great) is a lot harder than I thought (“Well duh!”), but I still didn’t think it would be this hard, especially with the piercing cries that often penetrate earplugs from across the house. Don’t get me wrong–I looooove spending time w/my daughter, but there are times I need to focus, and I’m so distractable, most especially to noise. You can flash a strobe light in front of me before I’d start to get affected, but the slightest non-conducive sound derails my mental train…it’s almost like the cartoon mouse scaring the elephant in the ridiculousness of the disproportion.

School is kicking my ass. And I don’t mean difficult, I mean Hebrew-slave-in-the-time-of-Pharoh hard work. I’d say easily 75% of this feeling comes from neurosciences. How I hate that class with the heat of a thousand suns. To quote Melville:

…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Yes, that’s also from Star Trek II:Wrath of Khan, for those complaining I’m not giving true credit where it’s due. I’m not chasing neuro as my white whale, trust me–I’m trying to run the hell away. We’ve had a wonderful visiting professor from UT Houston for neurophysiology that has given us great lectures and exceptional class materials used @UTH, but the best instruction in this subject still leaves me in a fetal position in the corner after studying it for a few hours. As if I were made of Teflon, the information doesn’t stick and slides right off me. It’s not a subject that lends itself to flash cards or easy forms of brute-force memorization, so I’m trudging through. Slowly.

Lastly, there has been a lot of upheaval at my school. Just as I thought things were dying down from the Grand Rounds “bad press” I gave, one particular student decided to decided to complain once again about things in the class, only this time mail was sent anonymously. Since I manage the email lists and have had many run-ins with this individual (as well as a low tolerance for bullshit in general), I decided to publicly expose this attempt to anonymously cause trouble while simultaneously sending ingratiating emails to the student body publicly. Oh. My. God. What a firestorm this caused, and in true mentally unbalanced fashion, this person proceeded to become unhinged more and more, causing more and more problems. I could have left well enough alone, but part of me was stupid and didn’t, and part of me was obligated to reply when said individual would accuse me of things that were patently false.

To make matters worse, there was an incident involving a successful attempt to steal questions from an exam of a visiting professor via a fake email. As a class officer, I was somewhat involved, then fully involved because of my IT background. I don’t know where it’s going to go, but attorneys at both school are involved dealing with both theft of intellectual property and fraud. Academic honesty/honor code is the least of this person’s worries. I won’t go into more detail, but said unstable student now says I had something to do with it with no evidence whatsoever. I feel like I’m in junior high. It scares the living hell out of me that people this unstable and disconnected from reality will actually be in a position to tangibly affect people’s physical lives in less than 2 years. I truly hope this person grows up, gets psychiatric help, or chooses another career–whatever it takes.

So that’s the short verison of what’s been going on. For those who have emailed me privately without a reply, please don’t think I’ve ignored you…I promise to reply soon. After my neurophysiology exam on Monday, we move on to neuropharm, and my life will be a bit better for a while (pharm is so much more my cup of tea). I’ll be more communicative after the weekend, I promise.

As I’m writing this, I’m listening to an interesting recording of Mozart’s Requiem that I downloaded (more of an “early music” interpretation with thinner orchestration and faster tempos), and I already feel better. Even ending with a driving in a fugue in a minor key, my spirits are lifted along with the prayers sung in the text. Thanks Wolfie.

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UPDATE: I decided to finally upload the flash music player plugin to allow me to share music clips, like I tried to do more crudely w/Grand Rounds. So, to inagurate this, I’ll share the clip I referred to above, except this is the Kyrie that appears earlier, but musically it’s identical; the only difference is the text–Kyrie eleison/Christe eleison (Lord have mercy/Christ have mercy) in this section as opposed to cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, que pius es. (…with thy saints forever, for thou art merciful). Enjoy!

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  By Sid Schwab, September 2, 2006 @ 5:23 pm

  Jesus! Like you don’t have enough on your plate already. I hope you can hang in there. I got in trouble in med school once (well, would have, if anyone had figured it out:). As must be true everywhere, students tended to claim particular seats in the main lecture hall, certain cliques would develop, and the non-assigned seating became assigned by default and carved in stone. So before classes started for the second year, I sneaked into the hall with a Dymo labeller, and labelled each chair with a name, placing everyone exactly where they’d not want to be, sitting with people they’d otherwise have avoided at all costs (well, even med students are humans, meaning potentially venal and stupid.) As class opened and people wandered in, pandemonioum slowly developed, and ended with a march on the dean’s office. The dean came to the hall and assured everyone it was not official. I remained silent.

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