She Wants The Z

I have to quit saying that I’m tired. I say that phrase on a daily basis. It gets to the point that it honestly doesn’t have any meaning. I usually am actually tired. I don’t get the qualified amount of sleep hours. Personally, ten hours would be perfect, but I can get by with five hours without looking like a total zombie. My sleeping habits are awful. I watch TV since I had a TV installed directly on the wall across from my bed. We have charter spectrum. My thumb hits the green ON DEMAND button and I’m gone. Lately, I’ve been watching feel good movies. I am a sucker for the ones with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. HBO family was featuring You’ve Got Mail at 1 a.m. one time. And of course the commercials seem to last longer than the actual segments of the movie. Stayed up until 3 a.m. on a school night, absorbing the movie that I have seen countless of times. Makes sense. I usually die a little after one in the morning. Then become alive with the light of my screen beaming on me interrupting my short blackout. I shuffle through my sheets to find the remote wanting to shut off the factor of my disappointing REM sleep. 

I also stay up doing all this school work that I should have done during the day when I have free time. But instead, I spend time watching episodes of the office on Netflix, because of course that is the real pathway to success. The thing is, I don’t have my own set of workers that can forge my homework. So my homework has to get done at some point, and that is usually at around eleven at night. What’s really unfortunate is I can’t remember the last time I went to bed before ten. I know I don’t get to sleep in. I wake up at six every morning during the weekdays. My family likes to have breakfast in the morning, together. Every single morning. I make sure to brew the coffee. Don’t expect me to function if I do not have coffee in my system. I will slowly shut down. So saying that I am tired all the time needs to stop. That means I gotta lay off the television before I go to bed and figure out my schoolwork schedule. Will this happen? Not probable. But it is a goal that has been on mind for quite some time. 

Unraveling the Inner D.O.

Going into college I have had one focus for my profession. I aspire to become a physician. Currently working on achieving my associates in science and will then move on from there. I have dreamed of working in the medical field for a while now. I remember for career day in grade school, I wore my mother’s white lab jacket, which encrypted the words “grey’s anatomy” on the front pocket. I was boss.

I once wrote a paper for an essay contest on why I want to be a physician in my county. The paper included how I wanted to make a difference in the community. I would like to better the health of individuals with my knowledge and expertise. The goal of any physician, hopefully. I specifically would like to become a D.O. (doctor of osteopathic medicine). My family has three generations of earning a degree in Osteopathic medicine. Osteopathic medicine involves a hands on approach of looking at the patient, not just observing a set of percentages or a pathology report. D.O.’s will talk one on one with a patient and will consider the structure of the body a major factor in what may be causing an injury or illness (hence “osteo” meaning for bone).

This small town called Kirksville is located in Missouri, where osteopathic medicine was founded in the late 1800’s. Kirksville is an extremely small town. My family used to travel to Kirksville to visit my nana. The only things that kept us kids intrigued were fishing, eating nana’s cookies, and well that’s about it. Kirksville is such a small town that going to Walmart was a high light. We used to drive by the first institution of Osteopathy when we visited. This is the building where my great grandfather, my grandfather, and my mother all earned their degrees in Osteopathy. How cool would it be if earned this degree, setting a four generation achievement?!

Osteopathic medicine is a major degree which can branch out into all sort of medical fields. I am not exactly sure what specific field I would go into… People always ask me if I am going to take over my mother’s practice, which is dermatology. Of course I have considered this option. The thing is I don’t want to have a narrow focus. I want to keep my options open, because what if I fall in love with a different specialty? There is a process called rotations, where a medical student has the opportunity to practice all sorts of medical fields. I hope I know my calling by then. I hope I make it that far.

AT Still University- Kirksville, MO

Electric Pigments

For my English course, we spent one class participating in the human library. The human library is an event that consists of stations where you meet people who have dealt with some sort of thing in their life. This is very general, but only because this certain thing could be something like being a community organizer to recovering from a deadly car accident. I listened to several stories from my chosen stations. One particular person caught my attention. I met the tattooed professor. 85% of this man’s body is covered with designs, each one meaning something special to him. From my observation, I saw that he had procedures done on his knuckles, arms, neck, and back of the head. I couldn’t get a good look at all of the visible tattoos, but on one arm he had this abstract design. It looks like one section was overlapping the other. I thought the design was cool. I asked him how much money he has spent on all of the procedures. He replied a ball park of $25,000. Quite the investment… It then hit me that this man is extremely passionate about this particular art form. One thing comes to mind immediately about tattoos, pain. Having a needle inject your skin isn’t the most luxurious feeling. He said some were painful, most were not. One time, he had fallen asleep when going under the needle. How is that even possible! It’s as if his body became immune to getting tattoos. I envy his pain tolerance.

 Most first impressions of a person with that numerous permanent designs is one thing. Bad ass. He also wore ear gauges, so that adds to the assumption. When getting to know him, my assumption lead further and further away from the original. His profession is an economics professor. He said that most people want to take his class because they think he is a cool, laid back kind of guy. In reality, he considers his course to be one of the hardest courses that is offered where he teaches. Another fact sadly surprised me. This man had worked at another place for several years. He had gotten more and more tattoos that were visible. His work place changed their description for the job and had fired him. They fired him because of his tattoos. This was bothersome because his credentials were more than qualified for the job. I guess tattoos come with a price, not only does it hurt, for most people at least. It also has a discriminatory factor. This man is normal like everyone else, he was easy to talk to. He wore a nice suit and tie and was a genuinely pleasant person to get to know. It is too bad that appearances have such a heavy impact in society. I wish I wouldn’t have made assumptions when sitting at his station. He wasn’t this bad ass guy holding an impressive backstory. He is a man teaching economics for college students; enjoying life with just a bit more color. 

Roughin' It in the Grand Canyon

I think anyone who has graduated high school should be really proud of themselves. It is a big accomplishment. My goal was to finish strong. Ever since I was a kid, my mother said that if you keep your grades up, you can choose anywhere in the United States to travel to after you finish high school. If anyone knows my mother, she keeps her word. So of course I kept up my grades, for the most part. Taking AP classes my senior year was probably not the best decision I have ever made. If I were to do it over again, I would have enjoyed my last year without the overload of my school work. But I pulled myself together and graduated with a pretty decent GPA.

So before my graduation, my mother presented me two options:

1) Throw a big grad party  

2) Plan a trip anywhere in the U.S.

I am no fool. I chose to travel. Duh. So we researched some of my desired destinations, but both decided that the Grand Canyon was the place to go. I had never been to the Grand Canyon and wanted to do something active. We booked a hot air balloon ride for the first day. It wasn’t as scary as I imagined it would be. It was very peaceful, and of course the view was incredible. Then for the next three days, we would be hiking the Grand Canyon with the AOA tour group. The trip included camping near the Havasupai Village at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the oldest Native American civilization located in the US. Neat right?

The first day of hiking, our tour guide told us that the level of hiking wouldn’t be too extraneous. My definition of extraneous was on a different level than his. I seriously was not expecting the difficultly of the hike. My mother and I did not train for the hiking, which was a poor choice. I don’t know what we were thinking when we signed up for the tour. I was feeling it within the first twenty minutes and that was only going downhill. The scorching sun also felt really great when we had to hike for ten miles out in the open. If we didn’t stay hydrated, we would have died. There is no question about it. We were really happy to reach our campsite at the end of the first day.

There was one slight problem for my mother and me though. Our bags had been kept in the trailer... at the top of the freaking Grand Canyon! Our bags that contained all our clothes, toothbrush, socks, etc. We had none of it. All I can say is that we got a true camping experience. In all of our pictures, we are in the same disgusting clothing. We visited three waterfalls and got to go in the water, which was refreshing for our consecutive three day filth. I jumped off this one waterfall, which was exhilarating. The cliff was slippery and I almost decided not to jump off. I was really proud of myself for taking a leap of faith, literally.

The last day, there was an option to be taken up to the top via helicopter. My mom told me I could either take the helicopter or hike to the top. Although the helicopter would have been cool, I wanted to hike. I wanted to be able to say that I hiked to top of the Grand Canyon. Also we got to go at our own pace, which meant we could take as many pictures and rest stops as we pleased. We were really happy to see our bags once we reached the top, but by then it didn’t really matter. I was just happy to have had an adventure with my mom, celebrating my graduation.