Made Me Giggle

Happy Friday! :)

Dr. Cleese

Neuro is going ok... keeping me busy, as you may have noticed.  Super interesting stuff, although as I keep telling people, I think I like it better in theory, as an intellectual/academic sort of problem to think about than I do in real life... so many neurological disorders are so devastating for the patients who have them and for their loved ones, as well, and in many cases, there is just not a lot we can really do for them...

Anyway, neuroscience in general also makes me feel pretty profoundly dumb on a near-constant basis. It's like a whole 'nother language all on its own, man.  Many of my classmates/colleagues were neuroscience majors in college or at least took some classes... I had literally never heard or seen 99% of these words before I got to med school.  Now, even with a little bit of neuro during first and second years and two weeks of the neurology rotation under my belt, I still literally feel like the people around me are talking exactly like Dr. Cleese is in this classic gem.

(I think I may have already posted this during our first year neuroscience unit, but even if I did, it is good enough to post twice.  Enjoy!)

Pretending

Oh, nothing much today... but I just saw this picture and thought it summed up my life so well I had to share.

Also, anyone else get a secret tiny amount of joy when you look at the clock right when it says 12:34?  I see this twice a day because no matter how much I promise myself that for real, I am going to start getting to bed earlier, seriously this time, I am still always up after midnight.

... No?  Um, right.  No, me either.

Happy Friday, friends!

Top Ten Things Making Me Happy Right Now

1. Tonight's sunset from my neighborhood:

2. Coming home after a long day to wet, sloppy kisses from a sweet, wiggly, overly-excited puppy 

(this picture is clearly not doing a good job of demonstrating this, it was just the only one I had.)

3. Back on the bandwagon.  For the past month, maybe longer, I have been abusing my body: way too much drinking, way too much eating really crap food, way too much stress, way too little sleep, way too little exercise.  But I now have new resolve to get my shit together in that department, so today is day two of committed FitWit attendance and eating right.  Dinner tonight was a giant delicious salad that was about 50% avocado.  Yum.  :)  My muscles are also sore again, finally, which I secretly love. 

4. The new Imagine Dragons album.

5. The cheapest and most self-restrained visit to Target I have ever made in my life: $6.42!

6. Keeping in touch the old-fashioned way:

8. More hilarious patient stories.  Today, in clinic:

Me, totally overwhelmed after listening to an incredible litany of medical issues going on with a Parkinson's patient: "And what would you say is your BIGGEST concern today?" 

Parkinson's patient, totally deadpan, without missing a beat: "That Romney might get elected."

Swear, I do not make this stuff up.  I am not trying to be apolitical on this blog, but I'm also not trying to wave my opinions around or incite any sort of political discussions, either.  I am sure there are just as many snarky patient comments that go the other way every day, but these are just the ones I've heard personally.  And I think they are an absolute riot.  :)

9. A story I just heard from a friend who shall remain anonymous about how when she was in college she used to date the drummer of a band that has recently made it big and how she took his v-card.  And then he wrote a song about it.  And that song got him some sort of prestigious scholarship for some music school, or something like that.  This is probably funnier if you know the person and the band involved.  Sorry, I know this blog is usually a little more family-friendly, but for some reason this is just cracking me up right now.

10. This postcard from my sister:

Happy Wednesday!

How I Keep Up a Blog in Medical School

Listen, I don't get enough readers on this blog to have an FAQ, but if I did, I can assure you that the number one question would be, "How do you have time to write a blog in medical school?"

Well, friends, this is the reason.  (See below.)  This article from the Wall Street Journal is hilarious, and true, and makes me feel so much better about both my procrastinator nature and my blogging in medical school.  And that makes me happy.  :)

How to Be a Better Procrastinator
Don't be fooled: People who dawdle are often very productive. They just need to refine their delaying tactics.

August 10, 2012, 7:25 p.m. ET

You may ask: Why should I want to know how to be a better procrastinator? Being a procrastinator isn't as bad as being, say, a serial killer. But isn't it on the same level as being a shirker, a lazy slug, a worthless idler? Procrastinators are unproductive. No one should want to know how to be more unproductive, right?

But are procrastinators truly unproductive? In most cases, the exact opposite is true. They are people who not only get a lot done but have a reputation for getting a lot done. They don't have neat desks or even neat desktops on their laptops. They spend a lot of time playing catch-up. But they are likely to be creative and on the whole amiable. After all, if you tend to keep people waiting, it makes them crabby; it doesn't pay to make things worse by being crabby yourself.

The truth is that most procrastinators are structured procrastinators. This means that although they may be putting off something deemed important, their way of not doing the important thing is to do something else. Like reading instead of completing their expense report before it's due. Nevertheless, such people feel bad about being procrastinators and often annoy others. That is where I think I have something helpful to say.

First, don't listen to most of the advice offered to procrastinators by people who don't have this particular flaw. For example: "Keep your commitments to a minimum, so you won't be distracted." This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being. If a procrastinator doesn't want to work on something, it won't help to have nothing else to do. It's better to have lots of things to do, so you can work on some of them as a way of not doing the task that, for whatever reason, you seek to avoid.

Second, don't sit around feeling bad because you lack willpower. That will make you a depressed procrastinator but won't help you get anything done. Most of us lack all kinds of powers. I can't lift my car by the bumper in order to change a tire. That's what jacks are for. I can't add long columns of figures in my head. That's what calculators are for. Tools give us the ability to make up for what we lack in native powers. The procrastinator has tools that allow him to manipulate himself to achieve results he can't get with willpower alone.

Suppose you are like me, and once you fire up your laptop to check your email, you are in danger of spending the whole morning on the Net, doing increasingly useless things. Some correspondent mentions Tajikistan; you don't know much about Tajikistan, so you Google it. You read the Wikipedia article. Which leads you to the Basmarchi Revolt. Before long the morning is mostly gone; you have learned a lot about the history of Central Asia but haven't done your expense report, or even finished reading your email.

The key here is to unplug your laptop when you open your email. After a while, the battery will die. That will break the spell. You won't need to rely on willpower to quit your Net surfing; lack of battery power will do it for you. If you don't use a laptop, take a big drink of water before settling in to answer your email. Your natural alarm clock will break the spell before the whole day is gone.

A third bit of advice: avoid perfectionism. I don't mean avoid doing things perfectly. If you are at all like me, that's not a problem. I mean avoid fantasizing about doing things perfectly. Often procrastination is just a way of giving ourselves permission to do a less-than-perfect job on something that doesn't require a perfect job anyway. Or maybe it's a way of getting those we work with to the point where they say, "For crying out loud, just give me something!" You need to give your boss a memo that provides the basic facts; it doesn't need to read like Hemingway.

Last, but perhaps most important: Learn how to be less annoying to the non-procrastinators around you. For starters, be honest. Admit that you are a procrastinator, and admit that it is a flaw. Maybe someday you will no longer be a procrastinator. After you lose 20 pounds, get in shape, polish up your high-school French, and write that novel, you may get around to pursuing some self-help regimen that will eliminate this flaw from your personality. But for now, don't compound the flaw with denial. If you admit to being a procrastinator, others will probably try hard to find something nice to say about you.

—Dr. Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University, is the author of "The Art of Procrastination," to be published by Workman later this month.