Sullen summer day

I fell hard for the skater/fit-and-flare trend, and this garment is but one of my troop of dark blue dresses. The fabric, as you may be able to tell, is yet another trendy trait: scuba (neoprene), love it or hate it. It gives this dress structure, and while ZZ and I disagree whether it looks old-fashioned or futuristic, it looks different.

My issue with this dress was simply how do I even wear this? None of my shoes looked right with it, the material retains heat while the cut leaves me with cold shoulders, and the print demands attention. I saw a girl walking about campus with some brown fabric boots and a leather jacket over this dress and I was perplexed.

Once I found the right shoes, though, things became simple. Why complicate things at all? Dress + shoes = outfit. I own no accessories or jewelry, and this dress is articulate on its own. What does it say? It flatters my figure, which is to say, it hides where my legs begin and accentuates the length of my arms and neck. The fabric is heavy and sturdy enough where a gust of wind wouldn't faze me in the least. It's long enough where I can sit down in any way I please. With the right shoes, dresses like this are the easiest thing to wear: crawl through it and go (though the high collar does have two annoying-to-do buttons at the back).

There's an aesthetic and a MAC collection titled 'Moody Blooms,' which always comes to mind when I look at this dress. Though I wish the flowers were bigger and less Forever 21, I like the color and print just fine. As I try to move towards a more beloved and consistent wardrobe, I will analyze outfits that I feel confident, attractive, and happy in. To me, I am in power and comfortable in this kind of a get-up. It's something that doesn't take much thought to put on, and though I hesitated to wear it in spring semester because I thought it looked a bit too dressy, screw that. I wear what I like.

Though I think it looks vaguely sci-fi and futuristic, I do feel like this when I walk slowly and purposefully in this outfit.

Stationery acquisitions

Except for the leftmost journal and postcard, all items pictured here were acquired within the past few weeks. This rare rainfall of paper goods is worthy of a blog post, I insist.

Clockwise from the far left:

1. William Morris 'Windrush' midi format journal, Paperblanks: Vol. X of my life, spanning Feb. 6 2015 to Aug. 4 2015. Behold that cover. The gold catches the light beautifully, but towards the end of its use, I did notice some wear at the corners and spine where the plastic film overlay was spalling. Overall, it's a gorgeous book, holding gorgeous memories. In summary: unplanned romance, over-planned MD app cycle

2. Cork pocket-sized notebook, Tiger: a gift from a friend who studied abroad in London in the spring. Unlined, small, and perfect for everyday carry. Once I finish my Moleskine, I'll use this as my commonplace book. Speaking of CPB, I need to utilize it better

3. Celestial journal, Peter Pauper Press: described as 'beatific' on the PPP website, this gem of a journal will serve as Vol. XI of my life. The heft is incredible, the binding durable and reliable. The paper is impeccable, edged with gold, and has slightly less 'bite' than Paperblanks, much heavier than Moleskin. It was out of stock until right before the death of Vol. X; it did go on sale right after I bought it, but ~ $13 is still more than reasonable for a notebook of this quality (so I say right now, time will tell)

4. Kitty cat sticky notes: a gift from my boyfriend's mother. Very cute and good for little lists and reminders

5. Watercolor UC Berkeley postcards: purchased from Avant Card from a sour cashier. I needed a postcard to send to my boyfriend's family but ended up buying four in total to make the $5 credit/debit card minimum

6. Old library photograph postcard: I got this from a Doe librarian a few months back and just now wrote on it. At the end of each diary, I write a postcard to myself n+7 diaries in the future, and keep the card in Vol. n until the time comes to retrieve it

This is a rare accumulation of stationery, which I find precious and worth writing all this for. Many of these were gifts, for which I am grateful. Blank pages, beautiful covers, elegant design -- stationery is the category of consumable good that I truly could dragon-hoard.

I.B.'s Hoagies: French fry adventure

Damn right the fries are my way.

When it comes to French fries, consider me a professional. Let this post be something to cleanse your Internet palate of the lovely foodie posts on other blogs. I know for a fact that Berkeley is crawling with good food for low prices, but this is my blawg and I want to talk about I.B.'s. Also, consider this a middle finger to the Golden Bear Café, which has recently decreed that they will no longer sell fried foods. I only got to eat their chili cheese fries twice. I loved their French fries and tater tots. I worshiped at the altar of their deep fat fryer.

Anyways, it seems kind of foolish that I've never been to I.B.'s. Smoke's Poutinerie across the street used to be my fry fix, but they're overpriced and le poutine does not appeal to me. Their fries are flaccid and overly salty. They also look withered. I.B.'s better hold their shape, are a more appetizing golden color, and have better crisp-crunch. Imagery.

I claim to be a red-blooded, fast-food-eating, salt-of-the-earth gal that doesn't care about pretty plating and food trends, but I did, in fact, cut up an avocado and mix it about with my fries. I did it in broad daylight on Durant Ave with my Swiss Army knife, so I did redeem some of my dignity. Cheese curds and gravy a la Smoke's does not appeal to me, as I would like to still have some brain function after a meal.

By far the coolest thing about I.B.'s is their condiment bar. Behold:

I put horseradish, kimchi aioli, ranch, sriracha, and a blizzard of Tajín over those fries. Fuck le poutinerie for only having malt vinegar and ketchup. Avocado on top. By the way, I got the small order of fries in a large container for better ingredient mixing.

In summary: fuck GBC for getting rid of fries, but I.B.'s condiments are far superior; cheaper and better-tasting than le poutinerie; $2.49 for a small order of naked fries, customize to your heart's content.

I've been writing secondaries all month so this here was a bit of a writing break. Another remark: the regular fries are far superior to the sweet potato fries, which come with a bizarre garlic sauce. I am told to be suspicious of the hoagies, which are very reasonably priced.

Burnout

This summer, it seems I've had a cataclysmic weekend at every turn. I'll face a few days of relative calm, and then BAM disaster. Usually, it has to do with the clinic.

Here's something to think about: this past Friday + weekend, I have spent 18 hours at the clinic. No rounding up: 18 hours over three days. I went to two parties over those three days, which were seriously fun, but 18 hours is ridiculous. As a note, though I am a coordinator (read: an administrator on good days, an autocrat on bad days), I am still a volunteer. If I'd been paid at my high school part-time wage, I'd be pushing $200, which is about two secondary applications for medical schools.

All that was furthered by personnel issues and the fact that I have taken on a behemoth project to implement (read: force) my section to use our electronic medical records system correctly. I'm not entirely sure how this happened, but sometime in the winter, our section (either I decreed it or somebody pushed it onto us) became the one to pioneer EMR. Of course, all this is good fodder secondaries because it shows leadership and struggle and this and that, but good God is it a headache.

I am told that this is usually the responsibility of an IT team. Though I am sure their timeline is much shorter, I carry the burden for an agonizing amount of time. But what about delegation? Don't make me laugh. Delegating in a volunteer organization with a collective structure is tough shit. People are lazier here. People don't need to care because they don't have accountability. Furthermore, the oversight and accountability administrator is me. More responsibilities, more headaches.

Why the hell do I do this to myself? God complex? Masochism? Not sure.

As this lovely picture shows, this weekend was a mess of clinic obligations, personal deadlines for secondaries, and social engagements. I didn't really sleep much, and towards the end of Saturday, it was already pretty clear that I was in foul weather again.

The Han Solo to my Luke Skywalker when I was a wee trainee (and he was a coordinator) always warned me about burnout. My parents and boyfriend do it all the time, but when it comes from my peers at the clinic who were in my same training cohort and have watched me grow into this responsibility say so, I feel it. All weekend, I was griping about not being able to finish my Duke secondary on time, not being happy with anything I wrote; I was really complaining about being overextended.

I think I burn out quite often, and just after I submitted my Duke app today (!!!), I felt rejuvenated. Fair enough, but I still have a marathon ahead. I want to really change the clinic, and what sort of change is truly good enough if someone didn't have to get tired over it?

Summer refresher

I'm just beginning properly writing my secondaries for MD applications now, and nervously awaiting the downpour of emails that will surely (hopefully) come after the holiday weekend. However, I won't be writing about that here.

In the past few weeks, I've begun noticing some less-desirable attributes about myself and my surroundings. Particularly, I am annoyed/disgusted by the state of my apartment, and how generally, I tend to clutter up my work and living areas. Not to say I'm a hoarder, but I surely don't need to hold onto all my past midterms. Same thing goes for the various small things hanging around my desk. I'm at home right now, but when I return to my apartment tomorrow, I'll have to do a very thorough cleaning.

More seriously, I am inattentive to the cleanliness of our apartment. One roommate is fastidious and tends to keep to her own room, but another roommate and I have neglected to keep up the tidiness of our space. We left the apartment in a pretty bad state when the semester ended, and I still haven't gone through and cleaned out the fridge, which surely has some kinds of rotten vegetables and mold in it. I'm being honest here.

Dirty dishes, dirty floors as well. I try to clean around the apartment more often this summer, since clutter and dirt stress me out, but I need to make it more of a habit. In general, I have a lot of things hanging around the apartment that I should just toss or sell, and once August rolls around, I'll make a serious effort to sell off my old textbooks. Of course, that's not the most egregious contributor to the mess, but that's an actionable goal.

Next, I'm unsatisfied with my diet, exercise habits (or lack thereof), and schedule. Towards the end of the semester, I was less diligent with cooking, and ended up throwing together some meager and unhealthy meals. Lately, my boyfriend and I have been making a greater effort to cook more and actually enjoy food. I may have mentioned this before, but last semester, I both looked forward to and dreaded mealtimes: I would not be hungry, but then again, nothing I made tasted good. He's recently demonstrated his superior cooking skills, so here's hoping I learn something from him.

In the same vein, I want to start going to the gym. Last semester, I was flattened by boxing tryouts, and swore that I would work out to get in better shape. I was hoping to be actually put into an intercollegiate fight this year, but in general, I should increase my level of fitness. My goal is to run < 7:30 mile, increase my flexibility, and try lifting. More broadly, I'd like to get in the habit of exercising regularly. I do have a phobia of looking stupid in front of people at the gym, but if it's my boyfriend telling me I'm doing something wrong/have bad form/some other gym critique, I'll be more confident trying.

And finally, I need to go all-in for secondaries. I want to allocate more of my free time to fiction writing and seriously cut down on dead internet time. Wake up earlier, exercise regularly, eat healthier, drink more water, go on more hikes, write more articulate and intelligent secondaries, hang out more with old friends, etc, etc.

That's all for now.

*** Not really. I changed a tag from MD cycle 2015 to MD cycle 2016. This is because I plan on matriculating in 2016.

Some more frivolous thoughts

You may notice that I still consider all fashion/beauty/aesthetic-related thoughts to be frivol, but that's just the way things are. If I'm on Reddit, it's usually subreddits related to this frivol, and there was a thread on r/femalefashionadvice recently about this very idea. Anyways, here's another post about fashion.

Since my last fashion post, I have purchased 2/3 of the items I planned for, and one other shirt. I bought two knit crop tops from Forever 21, a navy-cream striped one and a rusty henley that would better suit my roommate, and the stone-wash denim shorts from American Apparel, for 20% off. I did it to congratulate myself for getting good grades this past semester. I tell myself these things.

Sometime last year, after getting really into lurking the whole minimalism/French wardrobe/capsule wardrobe/pseudo-Scandi/pseudo-gamine giga-trend (and it is a trend, for fuck's sake), I decided that I'd forever swear off fast fashion like Forever 21, H&M, and...actually, that's where 90% of my wardrobe is from. Oft repeated are the claims that the quality is shitty, sweatshop conditions, overly trendy, etc. Others put this more eloquently than I can.

Earlier this summer, my roommate and I were cleaning out our room. Mostly, this was her digging through the literal piles of clothes that she has and figuring out which things to keep and which things to donate. In this process, we found two of my grey shirts and three of my boyfriend's and multitudes of my black ankle socks. We heaped a ton of things into our donate pile and called it a day. When she left for her summer vacation, I tried to do the same to my clothes and realized that even the clothes I didn't want to keep weren't in condition fit to be donated.

This comes back to Forever 21. About 75% of my wardrobe comes from before college. I have very few items from middle school, but enough where I really do have to broaden that category. I have a difficult time letting go of clothes. This is a relic of the fact that I've been about the same height and weight since I was 14, and that even then, I recognized that I would be doomed to jeans and t-shirts and skater dresses (even before they were called such) for all eternity.

That is to say, I'm pretty happy with the way I dress, and I actually do like how Forever 21 t-shirts fit on me. The problem is that I use this to justify keeping clothes past their expiration date. My jeans from pre-AP classes are napkin thin. My crimson ribbed (sounds gruesome) polo from seventh grade should have been retired three years ago. All my $3 basics from Forever 21 and H&M inevitably lose their shape after the first year. I know this. I bought two tops from Forever 21 just a few weeks ago. I know better.

I also know better than to buy low-waist shorts or jeans, but thankfully I stopped that nonsense in college. Also, you don't have to wash your jeans after ever wear. Repeating pants gave me way too much anxiety in middle/high school.

Anyways, this post was sort of just about how I have an overblown wardrobe problem that stems not from over-consumption but from keeping clothes that are far too old/were low quality to begin with. Every once in awhile, I realize that I'm 20 fucking years old, applying to med school, and consistently wear clothes that I had back in the fucking day.

As a final note, mend and make do and all that, but probably buy things that can hold up to some wear before they start looking like napkins in the first place.

Ready for review

Post-AMCAS celebratory lunch + recreational reading

Just a smattering of thoughts without a prevailing theme.

I submitted AMCAS yesterday morning with little trouble. My transcripts were received surprisingly quickly, especially since there was a delay with my community college one, and I my application was 'ready for review' when I woke up from my nap. Naptime, of course, is just one of the many leisurely activities I did yesterday. Alarmingly enough, I started and finished a recreational, non-meducational book (The Triple Package, by tiger mom Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld) and also spent an absurd time on Reddit. I added one other American history/politics/economics/society book (A Call to Action, by Jimmy Carter, a president I very vaguely know as being the fella whose presidency correlated with the Iran hostage crisis) to my summer reading list. I'm about 80% through The House of God, and surprisingly haven't touched The Once and Future King.

To return to my favorite topic (the MD application cycle, of course), I'm still in the process of finalizing The List, which is not anywhere near finalized. Even so, I'm sort of letting myself kick back and relax this weekend -- and just this weekend -- before I go all in with pre-writing secondaries and burning my eyes out staring at MSAR. Oh, and I have jury duty on Tuesday.

In my leisure, I've been picking back up with my interest in frivolous things like clothes and makeup because I am a vain creature. My latest fixation has been the pursuit of a suit for med school interviews, which I will hopefully get. My suit shopping, however, is hindered by the fact that Reddit has convinced me (r/mfa, those well-dressed bastards) that my suit should be wool, should be lined. Easy enough for MFA! Women's suits, I've learned, are usually synthetic and usually feature flared trousers, which do not look good on me.

In other news, I'm restarting my independent research project. Last summer, I made some good progress on it, but we were hindered by the data collection method. This summer, the machine shop has new toys, and hopefully by the end of summer, I'll be trained to play with them on my own. I'll have to spend some serious time thinking about how to go about with this inquiry, since I don't know how and where this whole thing will be impactful. I need to be more prudent about planning out this project, planning out how much and what kind of code I'll need to write in MATLAB, planning out what models I need to make on SolidWorks, planning out what to do with the vast cloud of data that I get -- quite literally, since it's a point cloud of coordinates. Really, that's the crux of it. At this point, I'm just collecting coordinates without a good plan.

One final thing: I'm getting back into writing, amazingly enough. I'm hoping to regularly post on r/nosleep, and to get a long-term high fantasy project resurrected. This is all, of course, me dreaming about not writing secondaries.

Nothing else to report.