PJ and i went to Acadia National Park in Maine several weekends ago, and it was unbelievable.
we saw puffins and finback whales, ate deliciously and learned that lobsters (like cattle) are territorial, grazers "and you can fatten 'em up rather easy, and harvet when need be."
Need being not often for those of us who are pushing a decade of being vegetarian.
it's the first time in my life i really, really, want to put together a scrap book.

For the past two days, i've had a song in my head: "because it's your kiss, your kiss, is all i miss - because your kiss, your kiss, i can't resist. because your kiss is all i miss, when i turn out the liii-iiights."
just a song in my head, with no particular bearings. currently, 'The Last Unicorn' is playing from my VCR and one particular song from that movie is much more fitting of my situation. This does not reference "the king is in his counting house, counting house, counting house, counting."

this is actually the second time the movie has played in my apartment today - but the first time i was making shredded fillo baklava, and now i am here, joining and updating flickr.

Last week was clinic orientation and the start of the clinic i'll start working at every Thursday evening for the next year. Although, i find it frightening to be listed as a patient's primary care physician at this point in my studies (don't worry, we do have attendings who sign off for all prescriptions and on lab results, etc. etc.) it's so great - truly, the first time i've been really excited about being a doctor since starting school. My epiphany was that maybe primary care really is a fit for me. it would certainly fit in with my social medicine and international interests. and i think i could be really really good at it. not in surgery, not in some crazy sub-speciality, but somewhere i can really interact with patients, and discuss with one how to get his or her health on track.

obviously - there is quite some time before i need to think about deciding - and considering how lab is going, there will be more time than less.

last weekend, i went to the annual meeting of a group i belong to called Doctors for Global Health. The individual key note speakers each day were pretty spectacular. Charlie Clements recalled when he visited Iraq during the height of the sanctions, and he visited a hospital in Baghdad with an Iraqi doctor and an interpreter and came across a girl with leishmaniasis and her mother. The translator explained from the doctor that the mother and child had walked for days from another town far away because there were rumours that this hospital had medicine that would treat the leishmaniasis. Quite suddenly, the doctor broke out for the first time in perfect english and explained to Charlie that 'there are no medicines here for leishmaniasis. The most humane thing for me to do right now is to take a gun and shoot this girl in the head rather than send her home to the death that awaits her.' Then, equally surprising, and devastating, the translator turned around and explained back to the mother, in perfect Iraqi, what the doctor had just said.
The other speaker was a human shield at the start of the first gulf war, and obviously invoked her own experiences - and resulting passions.

i am so angry, locally, politically, academically, nationally - you name it. it can eat you up. but i'd rather know and be charged, then know and think it's beyond me, or know and pretend i didn't. There's no way to not know the situation at hand.

The way is through the clock.

Looks like Fu Jow wants some tea.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/77282163@N00/