nllcltr

DO/MD or bust.

Most likely DO (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine).

Right now I’m planning on going into Family Medicine, since I want to work with a broad spectrum of patients and diseases. The residency is shorter (3 years) and relatively uncompetitive. A uncompetitive residency is important to me, since I want to stay close to my family and California is known to be hard to land a residency in. Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Pathology would also be really interesting, I think. Those are also known to be less competitive and pretty low in hours (50 hrs/week as opposed to 80 in residency).

Ever since I started taking Bio classes again, I’ve got med school on the brain. I’ve been obsessing over it every single day, tormenting myself over the practicality of doing a post-bacc and entering med school at my age. Best case scenario, I won’t practice until I’m 34. To me, that is ages away and definitely not where I expected to be years ago. It also means I’ll be having children during residency, and I can barely imagine working 80 hours per week, much less be pregnant throughout it and raise an infant.

But unfortunately, this is the path that I carved out for myself years ago in undergrad when I lacked the focus and maturity to excel in my classes. They were monstrous classes, sure, but I definitely didn’t try hard enough. At this point, it’s hard for me to envision myself pursuing another path though. I tried the middle road with PT, and I’m not sure it’s for me. I think a bit too much patient contact and downtime, and the income-to-debt ratio is astronomical. The only other viable option is to become a Nurse Practitioner, and call it pride, but I don’t like the idea of being “nurse” anything.

I know I can’t plan out my life…I mean, look at where I am despite all the planning I’ve done. From when I thought about becoming an optometrist (too boring, weekend hours), to pursuing a psych graduate degree (research is too dry, no other real viable career paths), to pursuing a career in the marketing industry (hours too unpredictable, work unsatisfying, an inherently selfish industry). I’m back at square one after all of that. But I hope I’m getting there…two steps forward, one step back, right? I’m thinking it would still be possible for me to have a baby in my 2nd/3rd year as a resident at 33 years old, and then try to squeeze one out after residency. And if we don’t get the second baby, then adoption is always an option. I’ve always wanted to adopt!

4 months ago I was scoring interviews with companies like MTV, and signed on to a job for a company that’s pretty notorious in the social gaming industry. Immediately after taking the job, I received multiple interview requests from poachers on Linkedin. That’s how big this company was in the industry. I was being contacted via Facebook by advertising start-ups that wanted me to use their services. I was a fucking bad ass.

I was expected to monetize our games through ads, sourcing and placing the ad networks myself. I was expected to provide pre-launch marketing support to key games, and to triple one game’s revenue in three months. I was expected to completely revamp an app, to proofread and write promotional copy, and to optimize the inventory within our games, striking a balance between internal promotions, external cross promotions, and ad inventory. I was thinking about buying a house, and was ready to go to B-school and have children before 30. I was on track towards my dream of having 3 kids, a nice place to live, a decent car, and a 6 figure salary.

I quit because 1) I didn’t want to dedicate my life solely to squeezing dollars out of virtual consumers and 2) I wanted to eventually be my own boss and have some level of autonomy. In a business setting, unless you’re at the executive level, you pretty much have someone to always answer to, and will sometimes have to sacrifice your own opinions to please the person above you. At least in a scientific world, you can debate differences of opinion in a more scientific manner, instead of just saying, “but this feeeeeels right.”

Now, I’m postponing my career until I turn 30 and the only chance of me making a 6 figure salary is if I open my own practice—which I would love to do, actually. I’m hoping that I won’t have to work on the weekends or extremely odd hours if I do open up my own practice.

But I’m taking classes at a community college to get into Physical Therapy school, and I am so uninspired by my classmates and my professors right now. When you think you’re smarter than your professors, something must be wrong. At least I’m pretty sure I can teach better than them, given the same body of knowledge. I’ve been through this curriculum before, so I know what it’s like to receive quality education. I’m sure they’ve experienced that themselves too, so I have no idea why their teaching is so lackluster.

I miss Berkeley. Sure the competition was fierce, but at least I knew that I could rely on my classmates, professors, and TAs to be able to field my questions if I needed them to. I could collaborate with my lab partner and trust that they could keep up, if not challenge my intelligence. And if they couldn’t keep up, at least they weren’t THAT far behind.

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawd.

Weirdest pervy pickup attempt ever from a few years back.

• Him: Hey Annie, sit with me. *pulls me onto the couch next to him by my hand before I can react, puts a pillow on top of our laps, and tries to caress the outside of my thigh*
• Me: *overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of what was going on especially considering that I had rejected his advances all night, stands up and leaves without saying anything*

Weirdest nonpervy pickup attempt ever from a few years back.

• Me: *emo, greasy-haired, makeup-smeared waiting for the BART since I was too lazy to take it off before bed last night*
• Him: *tip-toes into my peripheral vision* Oh hey...did you do your eye makeup like that on purpose?
• Me: No, I just didn't have time to fix it last night or this morning. *secretly afraid that he can tell how emo I am*
• Him: Oh OK, just wondering. I like girls who do their eye makeup in weird and interesting ways. *smiles*
• Me: Oh...oh look, there's my train.
• Him: *follows me onto the train, sits next to me* So where are you from?
• Me: I'm going to San Jose right now, I go to school in Berkeley.
• Him: Oh I'm from a city right outside San Francisco *continues to try to make small talk with me for two stops* Anyways, here's my card... *hands me his moocard* Feel free to contact me if you want to.
• Me: Ok... *still emo, but at least somewhat distracted*

Trying to learn to forgive…

but how do you forgive someone who wanted you to feel insignificant or unimportant in comparison to other girls,

or someone who betrayed your trust in a crucial, sensitive moment after he promised that he would never want to hurt you in that way again,

or someone who was supposed to be one of your closest friends but couldn’t remain loyal to you and has seemingly been constantly putting you down…and refuses to apologize for everything in a meaningful way when you finally confront her about it,

or someone who never took responsibility for her actions, stating that she was just joking when she told your boyfriend that she would sleep with him among other things…and claiming that you wouldn’t have cared if she were a gay guy instead of a straight female, implying that you were unreasonable for being as mad as you were.

UGH. What is wrong with people…it’s so infuriating that these people’s insecurities get taken out on me in one way or another, and now I have to pick up the broken pieces by myself for my own sanity.

And FYI girl, yes I would still care if you were a gay guy, but it wouldn’t have been as harmful to my relationship with my boyfriend since he’s not gay or bisexual, so it wouldn’t have affected me as much and thusly I’d have less to be angry about. I think that’s fair. If he were bisexual instead of straight, then I would be just as pissed. DUH. You were infringing on what was supposed to be a monogamous relationship—none of this has anything to do with my feelings about myself, other females, or YOU. Who the hell do you think you are? If you had done it as a straight female, gay guy, bisexual transexual, or purple moon monster with five heads and tentacle penises, or what-the-fuck-ever, and my boyfriend and you still engaged in THAT kind of flirting for as long as you guys did—guess what? I would STILL be pissed.

And for someone who’s supposed to be so liberally minded, accepting of all types of people, and nonjudgmental, you sure as hell like to point out supposed differences between groups of people like straight and gay, and male and female; and IMO you seem pretty fucking ignorant when it comes to the complexities of sexuality as well.