saying thank you

It seems strange to think that one would have to consider whether a thank you note can be deemed appropriate. I would guess there was a time when a handwritten thank you note was the norm if someone did something nice for you, where it would be considered poor manners if the note weren’t sent.

Nowadays, we send a hasty email. Fairly generic, maybe even with an automated signature. And I’m sure for most situations that an email will suffice.

But what about the situations where it doesn’t seem to be enough?

I’ve recently returned to college after a really long break, and I’m majoring in Biology. Not the easiest subject to jump back into. Remember asking yourself in high school when you would ever use calculus again? Well, I didn’t, so I forgot it, so I had to take it over. That and a myriad of other courses.

It’s been fairly routine for the past three semesters. Coasting through the classes, not really being inspired by much at all, just following the path with my head down, backpack heavy on my shoulders.

I started early in the semester doing review questions for my Plant Form & Function class. I just wasn’t getting what the professor was asking for. So I went to office hours, sat in the little chair across the big desk, and asked about the question. The professor looked at me, and then just sort of reiterated the question again. I again said that I just wasn’t getting what he was asking for. He tilted his head to the side a little, one of those looks that made me feel really small and insignificant, and again basically reiterated the question. But then there was a shift. He told me to try to work it through, and to come back with my ideas the next week and we would talk about what I had done.

I left frustrated and grumbling, quite possibly cursing silently, or not so silently.

And I went home and worked up the question. I crossed it out. Worked it up again. Read some scientific papers to see if I could figure it out, but only felt increasingly stupid. The next week rolled along and I showed up at his office with my scribbly paper in hand, along with another handful of questions that I had jotted into my notebook during class. I was nervous that he was going to give me that look again, the look that maybe I should have just kept answering phones or that I was out of my league.

Instead, he went over the scribbly paper with me. He talked about all the steps of the question. He answered all the little questions I had scrawled into the margins of my class notes. And it all made sense. But not only did it make sense, I wanted to learn more. I drove home puzzling the complexities of enzyme functions in my head. Instead of just plodding along on my path, I started to look around at all the opportunities around me and everything that I had the chance to learn. After every class, I would have a new page full of thoughts and questions that popped into my head during the lecture. And I looked forward to each time that I would get to sit down and talk science with him. He even wrote a letter of reference for me for a research program, which I never imagined I would get after only six weeks of classes.

I would imagine that hundreds of students pass through a class each semester without ever talking to the professors face to face, and would hope that a professor might want to know that there was one student that he really reached. But I find myself wondering if it’s okay to write that thank you note. He will still be my professor for another two weeks, until the Animal Physiology section of the course kicks in. An email seems horribly insufficient. A few lines thanking him for taking the time to write the letter of reference doesn’t seem enough. How do I thank a professor who has inspired me, sincerely and genuinely, without it seeming like I am jockeying for a grade?

Awesome squared

A double dose of awesome for the week:

Local awesome:

My friend’s brother, Joey Hagerty, was selected to be on the U.S. Men’s Gymnastics Olympic team! (That’s him, third from the right.) It’s even more delicious because he was pretty much written off a few years ago when he had shoulder surgery. He’s a total dark-horse contender this year, coming seemingly out of nowhere to be the third man named to the team. You probably won’t hear much about him during the coverage. He’s pretty low-key. But I’ll be wearing my “Team Joey” shirt during the Olympics. Yessiree.

and in the world of…
W W aWesome:

Those in the know have already gone through several changes of underpants in anticipation of…

Yes, that’s right. Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog! A Joss Whedon (swoon) production featuring Neil Patrick Harris (local swoon) as Dr. Horrible and Nathan Fillion (mega-super French accented le swoon) as Captain Hammer. Don’t believe me? Watch the trailer, foolish mortal.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Act One premieres FREE on July 15th at DrHorrible.com. Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up.

Gratitude

I was thinking the other day about why relationships don’t work out. Why you can be so in love with someone one day and then some time later there is nothing left but hurt and resentment.

I think that when you have so much of your emotional energy tied up into one person, it becomes more difficult as time passes to not associate every emotion with them, whether that person is the cause of the emotion or not. When you are happy, you attribute part of the happiness to them. And when you are angry, you do the same.

With really long relationships, and maybe the reason divorce is so common, we all go into relationships with a set of expectations about our lives and what they are going to be. Then, when the expectations (about our jobs, our lives, anything) aren’t fulfilled, the person closest to you can become the target of that misplaced disappointment. If you always dreamed of becoming an author, then years later it hasn’t happened, it’s easier to blame the person you are with for holding you back or to direct your anger at them than to be grateful to them for sticking around while you were flailing about being miserable.

And maybe once you start hurting each other, you start pushing each other further and further away until nothing is left between you but space. How do you bridge that gap once it is created, and how do you mend the places that don’t seem to fit together anymore?

It would be a much different world if we could somehow try gratitude in place of bitterness.

it might be broken

I’ve been feeling a little bit off for the last few weeks. I’m not sure what it is. The sun is shining, my serotonin levels are up, I just bought new sandals. Life is good. But something feels broken, or at the very least a little bruised.

This happens periodically. I’m not the most consistently chipper girl on the planet, by any stretch of the imagination. What is strange about this time is that my usual fix isn’t working. It used to be that there was certain music that I could listen to that would act as the Neosporin on all the little scrapes and bruises of my psyche. It didn’t fix them, but it made them heal a little faster, with slightly less scarring.

And my music isn’t working anymore. In fact, it feels a little foreign to me right now, like somehow it changed, or maybe I changed. But it’s not the right fit. And instead of making me feel better, it’s just making me feel sad.

I think maybe it’s because the music reminds me too much of a friendship. Well, not even really a friendship, per se. Have you ever met someone that you liked to be around, but the friendship was always more important to you than it was to the other person? Where you are always left feeling like maybe you aren’t funny enough, or smart enough, or special enough to qualify to be that person’s friend? Who needs friendships like that, right? And for this person, I always feel like I am always held at arms length, like I am allowed to exist on the periphery of their existence, but not any closer. And that was enough, for such a long time, that I convinced myself that it was all I was worthy of.

Then I spent time with other friends who brought me in as family, with open arms and open hearts. And I think maybe the contrast between the two made me realize that I’m not only worthy of true, honest friendships, but also that maybe the other relationship isn’t worth all of my energy.

It’s not that the person is a bad person, by any stretch of the imagination. And the person will probably always be a part of my life, but I’ve started to accept the limits of where our relationship lies. I’m done making all the effort though. It’s too exhausting.

Back to the broken – How do you heal when your favorite comfort reminds you of your sadness?

welcome to my new blog.

have a cookie!

maternal duty vs. civic duty

i signed up a few weeks ago to chaperone my daughter’s field trip this morning. which is always fun, but it’s at the same time that barack obama is speaking down at the university. i really would have loved to have been able to hear him speak. damn.

p.s. for those following the saga with my brother – he’s doing much better. thank you for asking.

on the importance of assertiveness

First off, thanks to everyone who has expressed concern about my brother. Here’s the story.

Day one: Monday 6 AM he goes to the E.R. because he had been diagnosed with pneumonia a week before, but is now coughing up blood. They run some tests and say, well it looks like your pneumonia is gone, but you’re in congestive heart failure. Apparently he had approx. 20 pounds of fluid around his heart and lungs. I go in to visit him at 8 PM, and he’s still sitting in the E.R. On a gurney. Peeing into disposable urinals. And a doctor hadn’t been in to see him for nearly nine hours.

I take it upon myself to start harrassing the hospital staff. I have to harrass the nurse twice before she comes in. Then, finally after I was there for two hours, a doctor came in. I start grilling her about him coughing up blood. I’m not dumb. I know that coughing up blood is one of the first signs of TB. She doesn’t think that it’s an issue. She looked at his chart, poked at him a little, and left. Frustrating.

Day two: Still sitting on a gurney in the E.R. Tiny room. No television, no telephone, still not allowed to leave the room to use the toilet. Around noon, they tell him that he finally has been assigned a room, they’re just getting it ready for him. Then another doctor comes in and he has to give his entire history again. This doctor hears “coughing up blood” and decides that now (after 36 hours in the E.R.) that my brother should be tested for TB before he is moved. So, he is taken off the list for a room, and put on a new list for a negative pressure room (of which there are only four rooms in the entire hospital) just in case he has TB.

Day three: Yup. Still sitting on a gurney in the E.R. but in a new fancy isolated room. I show up at 9:30 AM, and a doctor hasn’t seen my brother since 8 PM the night before. I crack my knuckles and go into attack mode. I tell the nurses that we need to see the doctor. Then I call the patient advocacy office. I do this in rotation for a couple hours before a charge nurse finally comes in and says the TB precaution has been removed so he’s back on the list for a regular room, but that the doctor assigned to see my brother “is too busy to come see him” and another doctor will be on after 2 PM that will come check on him. I flip my shit just a little and call the patient advocacy office again and give the girl on the other end a very calm ass ripping. A few minutes later, his nurse comes in, they have a room for him and he should be transferred some time that evening.

I don’t know if my constant harrassment had anything to do with them finally taking care of him, but I’d like to think that maybe it did. Apparently, since my brother hadn’t chosen a primary care physician on his insurance plan, there wasn’t anyone to push his labs through and get things done. What a pile of horse shit.

Day four: I go to visit my brother in his brand-spanking new hospital room. He was transferred about an hour after I left the E.R. the day before. Since arriving at the new hospital, he had an ultrasound of his heart, saw five different doctors, nurses checked on him all the time, he had a flat screen television and access to a telephone. It was like being released from prison and checking into the Ritz-Carlton.

So, they think he probably got a viral infection in his heart, exacerbated by the pneumonia and other health issues (weight and smoking) which basically made his heart start to fail. When they did the ultrasound, it was pumping at only about 20% efficiency, and the entire heart was enlarged. They have him on all sorts of meds to try to get the heart strong again.

Day five: A pulmonologist looked at his CAT scan because there were some abnormalities in the lung. There’s some fluid in his left lung and some swelling in his lymph nodes, so now they are deciding whether to do a biopsy to rule out lymphoma or sarcoidosis.

I swear, this is like an episode of House. But without the grumpy (yet strangely attractive) gimpy doc.

feeling like rodney dangerfield

nope, i still get plenty of respect. but i’m going back to school.

quick history, because i don’t want to get into the details. i was, once upon a time, a straight A student. i went into boston university to study marine biology, but had to leave one semester into my sophomore year. i started working full time to support myself, got married, had kids, and just never got around to finishing.

the whole unfinished school thing has always been the albatross around my neck, but life’s necessities were keeping me from finishing up. everything has finally aligned (due in no small part to our recent move to NM) and i’m officially a student again.

most of my old credits aren’t going to transfer for my degree, so i’m basically starting from scratch. i’m going to go to the community college here for a year, then transfer over to UNM. another thing that really blows is that my math skills have disappeared from many years of non-use, so i have to take a lower level math course just to get into the math classes i need for my degree. that is a fat load of suck.

i’m loading up on the classes though, because i want to get this shit done with. five classes plus a lab. if you don’t see updates from me much, or if i don’t answer my phone, or if i start posting random gibberish at 2 a.m., just assume that i’m studying too much.

random moment of the day

we were leaving the airport after picking up some people, and had to pull over to the side because the car that was following us didn’t get through the traffic signal, and they didn’t know where they were going.

next thing we see is a police car pull behind us with its lights flashing. i think “oh shit. they think we’re terrorists pulled over near the airport.”

the officer walks up to the car and he’s holding a lasso in his hand. yes. a lasso.

one word flashes through my head: hogtie.

he leans over and says, “are you stopped because of the sheep?” we explain the reason we are stopped and he says, “ok. there’s a sheep running loose somewhere around here. carry on.”

this shit doesn’t happen in chicago, i’ll tell you what.

5 awesome things for the week

yeah, it’s only wednesday. so what?

1. the cupcake shop up the road has strawberries that are stuffed with cheesecake, then dipped in chocolate. yeah, i said it. cheesecake-stuffed chocolate-dipped strawberries.

2. the lady at the sandwich shop who wondered aloud if they would make her sandwich in a bowl, with no bread. nothing like carb-fear to ruin a genius sandwich.

3. my dyson. i vacuum every day now just to see what will go flying around its crazy cyclone.

4. making mix cds. it brings me joy to impose my musical taste on other people.

5. the incredibly fit, handsome, muscular man who jogs shirtless down my road every morning. thank you.