Microcosm

Life is funny.  That sentence was completely meaningless, so let me explain one way in which life is funny.  You can easily summarize years of your life in a sentence, or even a sentence fragment.  What have I been doing for the last three years?  School, work, watching Homestarrunner.  That pretty accurately describes over a thousand days.  Alternatively I can spend page after page describing a single day.  I won’t exemplify this to the full extent, but here is an idea of what went on yesterday:

Earlier in the week I finally decided that I should go to the U of R instead of Stony Brook for medical school (this should warrant an entry in my blog, but honestly I don’t feel like writing it.  I thought, I prayed, I decided) This decision resulted in a bunch of extra paperwork and phone calls, all of which seemed highly unnecessary.  But the most immediate requirement was getting a physical.  It’s a bit odd that you must be examined by a doctor before going to train as one, but this seems to be standard procedure.  I had already filled out all my medical forms for Stony Brook and schedule a physical, then changed my plans.  Unfortunately this meant that I needed a whole new set of forms, and my physical was scheduled for Friday.  So I had to drive to the medical school to pick up the forms so I would have them in hand for my physical that afternoon.  I have yet to find the guest parking at the medical school, so brought my brother with me so I could just pull up to the curb, run in and get the forms without finding an actual parking place.  Of course to do this I needed incentive for him to come with me to Rochester, so we stopped at the new anime store on the way home.  My cunning plan went off without a hitch.

The anime store was a fun diversion.  I haven’t bought any anime merchandise in years, but still enjoy seeing what’s out there.  There were several items that were almost cool enough for me to spend money on, but not quite.  I nearly bought a couple movies, nearly bought a poster and nearly bought a t-shirt.  But miserliness beat out nerdiness yet again and I left empty handed.  The storekeeper probably wasn’t terribly happy with us since we were in there for at least thirty minutes and he had nothing to show for it.

I hate making multiple trips, so always bundle my errands together.  To accomplish this I often make up errands that don’t really need to be done, simply because I refuse to drive half an hour away to do just one task.  So I successfully combined the anime store with the med school trip, and tagged the YMCA on the end of the trip.  We weren’t able to stay at the Y for our usual length of time, but got a decent enough workout before returning home.

I was in a hurry because I had my doctor’s appointment to get to.  By far the worst news of the trip was that I was that the nurse recorded me as being 5’8”.  It’s a well known fact that I am in fact 5’9.3” so this was a grievous insult, and an indication that I need to watch my posture more closely.  My physical went fine and they gave me a couple new immunizations which have since made my arm quite sore.  Again I refused to simply return home after driving to Fairport, so decided to do some creative driving.

I have proven countless times over that my navigation skills are quite lacking.  Evidently the fact that I earned the orienteering merit badge doesn’t really mean much in the real world.  Without a map or any directions I attempted to drive from an area I’m not really familiar with to another area I’m not terribly familiar with (the dollar theater.)  In order to further challenge myself I spent most of the trip on the phone, only later remembering that this was illegal in New York.  Sadly I didn’t make it to the theater, so may never see Silent Hill.  But I enjoyed driving around the greater Rochester area and learning some new areas.

This much description only brings me up to 3 o’clock.  I could go on for another couple pages about music marathons, getting a job and losing it the same day, eating squid, risking meningitis (this has nothing to do with the squid) and cats eating éclairs.

The point is that A LOT of stuff happens every day of your life.  When pressed you can go on and on about all that you did in a 24 hour period.  When you add in everything you thought and felt during that period you could write whole novels.  Some of it is mundane, but a good portion of it is interesting and amusing, at least to those close to you.  I think it’s nice to be able to unload at least a portion of this massive quantity of information that you come across each day.  You can certainly survive keeping it all to yourself, but in the end I think it makes the day itself less enjoyable.  

Song of the moment: “A Little More Time” The Beautiful South