The End (or Beginning) is Nigh (or Not)

So one of the Boston schools I applied to is supposed to call accepted students in the next 2-3 days. I'm trying to play it cool, but I am not feeling cool at all. I think that this med school is one of my best chances at acceptance, so if it doesn't work out, I will be really on edge for the next 8 months until all the waitlists resolve themselves.

So yeah, by Friday of next week, I will either be cruising down easy street with an acceptance to a great school close to home, or else I will have my back against the wall hoping that one of the other schools throws me a bone.

I feel ill. But you know what? This is stupid. If I don't get in to med school, I will go work for some biotech company, or go get a PhD, and I'll get a band together and write some music, play out, and become a rockstar/biomedical entrepreneur.

Listening to: Crusade by Trivium. A true work of genius by any standards. Especially the title track - incredible. Inspiring. One of those rare pieces of pure musical expression that shocks you in to a state of submissive wonder.

Busses: Public Menace or Necessary Evil?

This is how you learn a lesson.

This morning, I woke up at 7:40am, the usual time for work, and just couldn't force myself out of bed. I normally take the 8:15 bus that stops right outside my house, but after a long night of filling out secondary apps (only 3 left!), I thought, What the heck, I'll sleep another half hour and catch the next bus. So I slept.

I stepped out of my house at 8:27am this morning, and arrived at work at 10:44am. Yes. It took me more than 2 hours to get here. It's about 5 miles away. I could have literally crawled to work faster. Thank you bus system. Go **** yourself.

On a happier note, I only have 3 weeks left till I get to move to New England! So excited. The southwest has been good to me, but I am so ready to leave - it's just too goddamn hot all the time. Also, did I mention that In Waves by Trivium just came out? It deflowered my ear-holes.

A Sincere Prayer

Lord Bhal, what dwelleth beneath
Metal be thy game
Thy bills have come
I will be done
Unless I can get some cash up in here.

Give me this day a couple bucks
And forgive me my credit card debts
As I forgave that guy in college who still owes me a beer.
And lead me not in to further poverty,
But deliver me from Ramen.

For mine is the bank account
With sixty-three fifty in it
For ever and ever.

Word up.

Me + Sunshine = That marshmallow you forgot in the fire

I have come to learn about myself the following fact:

My body hates sunshine.

To let the proverbial cat out of the bag regarding my race, my people come from the north. The far, far north. If I had to choose an environment to camouflage perfectly in to, I would choose to stand stark-balls naked in front of a fresh snowfall. I would disappear. My people are used to winters where the sun literally disappears for a few days a year. And you know what? I love it that way. I enjoy the sun more as a concept than as a thing.

Which is why living in the American Southwest does not agree with me. I can't go outside without burning, and every weekend I get heat stroke from playing soccer for a couple hours on Saturday mornings. Literally, I play soccer every Saturday morning, and I spend the rest of the weekend with a headache due to sun exposure. It sucks. This morning, I waited for the bus for 15 minutes, and now I feel dizzy and disorientated. Sun-drunk.

Anyways, this all makes me very pleased to announce that I am officially moving to New England, where the summers are short, the winters are cold, and the people are warm (some of you might think that I am being facetious, but all three of those statements are true!). The people of the Southwest are very warm too, but mostly I'm tired of spending my life running from AC to AC, and sweltering like Satan's taint in between. I miss shoveling snow! I miss scraping ice off my windshield! I miss going shirtless in the summer and not getting any browner at all!

Holy F*(&$h#T Batman!

Wow. When it rains, it effin' innundates me in a shitstorm of ridiculousness.

(deep inhale)

Yesterday I spent 8 hours on 3 planes to go 800 miles on a trip that should have taken me 2 hours on 1 plane had it not been for bad weather on my layover and then I got home at 2am, slept for 5-6 hours, then went to the cat boarding house to pick up Bobbins Chookums Magellan Mouse-Destroyer 3000 so that they wouldn't charge me a whole nother day of rent and then I turned around and went straight to work where I found that I was late for my phone appointment with the dean of admissions at University of Derp-derpistan so I called her and apologized profusely and had a good discussion about how sad my previous application was and how I promised that this one would rock her balls off and then I went back up to my lab and did an experiment and while the experiment was going I completed two out of the 16 trillion secondary applications that were sent to me over the long weekend and now I am doing another experiment and then I will go home and show the piano to a potential buyer and then finish up two more secondary apps that were due in 42 BC and then I will poop and then I will do laundry and shower because I smell like a fart because I havent had time to clean myself from the 8 hours of travel yesterday.

(inhale)

I need some down time. If the weekend comes at the end of this week, then I will sleep...

Weinergate

OK so normally I create all my own awesome stuff for this blog, but the flowchart on the left is courtesy of good.is. It's a flowchart to help you decide if you should tweeter your peeter pic. Very useful! Don't try to expand it...(insert weiner joke here)...that is literally the whole flowchart lol.

The Latest Goings-On

Ugh where to begin...

1) My scientific paper on a craniofacial syndrome needs to be submitted by Friday. Which means that it has to be written today. Not from scratch, but still.

2) My personal statement for AMCAS/AACOMAS is nearing a final state, but it still needs work before I can submit said AMCAS/AACOMAS. But before THAT, I need my goddamn effin...

3) Committee Letter!!!! This is the source of all my frustration right now. The premed advisor at my undergrad school has gone totally AWOL. Like, I have been trying to reach her for weeks, and she's nowhere to be found. And until she writes me a committee letter, I'm stuck sittin' around with my genoa salami in my hands. Like a frikkin sad little kid with his kite lying on the ground in the middle of a field. Just waitin for a little breeze. I'm not asking for the pre-med advisor to give me a reacharound while she recites Hamlet, just a frikkin letter - ugh!!

Anyways, that is the state of affairs. This weekend, I'm partyin' like it's friday, friday, gittin down on friday...I hate that song so deeply. Axl out.

New Rule

New Rule- You have to stop doing this:

(through texting)

Heavy Metal Vixen: "OMG, huge news! It's so big!"

Me: "Cool whats up?"

HMV: "I can't tell you right now, I'll tell you later."

Me: "Boo. Fine"


(2 minutes later)

HMV: "OMG I dont even know what to do with this info! It's so huge!"

Me: "Well tell me already jeez!"

HMV: "No, I can't! Later"

Me: "Fine"

(2 minutes later)

HMV: "If I don't tell someone my face is going to explode and brains are going to squoosh out of my ears and I'ma shit my chones!! Holy blue chipmunks are going to come tearing out of my cornhole unless I tell someone! Ahhhhhhhh!! Ahhhhhh!! OMG ZOMG! The world is going to end if I don't tell somebody right this instant! Its the (best/worst dont know which) news of my life!" etc.

Me: (kill myself)

Too much $hit

Yup, that's me. I'm the ass trying to carry too much stuff. Also, the title of this post reflects the state of affairs in my house last week. Specifically in my bathroom last week. While I was at home, ill. Yeah, now you got it.

Oh yeah, so it was my Berfday this past week! I had an awesome one, mostly because of a) sweet gifts, b) a sweet MCAT score, and c) awesome microbrews.

The application process has begun in earnest, which means that I am starting to get even busier than I already was. Right now, I am trying to get my personal statement together whilst editing a paper that I am trying to submit to a scientific journal for publication. All in all, it's truly going to be a bumpy-ass ride (made just a little smoother by my 36). But whatever, if I get where I'm trying to go this year, well, that'll be the tits.

P.S. You all correctly guessed my MCAT score in the poll, on average! To the doubters who voted that I would get less-than-32, I say nany-nany-boo-boo. To the lovely people who voted that I would get more-than-37, I say thanks for your vote of confidence, and if I had not gone down a point in verbal I would have had it! Not that I'm complaining :) To the person who voted that I would score some blow on my MCAT, grow up dude. This is a high-brow blog for high-brow, serious, serious people. We only discuss serious internets business on here.

Cause that's what you all have come to expect of me...

And by Monday...

I of course meant Tuesday.

The interruption in production of poignant and hilarious metical school (yes, metical) application process updates was brought to you by the letter F. Due to lax security, Axl's anonymity was threatened and indeed breached. This made Axl sad, because the glorious thing about anonymity is that you can say whatever the hell you want without repercussions. Without that anonymity, I can't be as honest or nearly as hilarious as I actually am. In meatspace, I am just a person with regular obligations and with people around me who would be shocked at the semi-fictional life of the character Axl Rose who is the author of this blog. The meat of the stories on here are all true. The claims about sex, drugs, and/or rock and roll are nunayabizness, false, and true, respectively. To the party or parties that caused this breach accidentally, all is forgiven, just don't let it happen again! The situation has been contained.

With that out of the way, my MCAT results come back in a week! The AMCAS application system opens any day now! It's all happening now folks. And, thanks to the anonymity granted by the internet, I will be happy to share with you my MCAT scores, my grades, and updated drafts of my personal statement (see draft 1 and draft 2).

It's going to be a bumpy-ass ride, so strap your ass to something and hold on!

Let me guess: they were closed when you swallowed them?

I was cruising the internets, minding my own business, when I came across this little gem. It's genius really, cause they're safe. They're safety pins...

THIS is why I want to be a doctor. I want to be the first guy to see this x-ray, just because, come one. Now, I have no medical knowledge at all, but I'm guessing this is a baby, cause those ribs look pretty small right? I want to be the guy to put this baby under, slice him open, pull those suckers out of his esophagus, and save his effin' life. That's a pretty bad-ass day's work.

And seriously, how are you going to get bored when kids like this find such innovative ways to hurt themselves? Why, there must be a million hilarious but very grave ways to hurt yourself just by swallowing stuff! As a side note, I would feel more guilty about jesting at this kid's misfortune, but I am assured by my sources at the Mutter Museum that the pins were safely extracted, and he was OK in the end. Thus, it's totally open season on Young Captain Einstein here.

On a side note, yes, this x-ray is from the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. I have actually been to this museum when I lived in Filthadelphia, and it's pretty bad-ass. It's a museum full of medical oddities - giant skeletons, siamese twins stuff, and (one that sticks out in my mind) this giant colon filled with poo. Seriously, some guy had a medical condition whereby he didn't poo for like months. He died, and they stuck his giant-ass colon full of poo in a museum!

What a shitty way to go!!

(a-thank you)

"I have a secret - I pooped my pants"

OK - it's Friday, I'm tired, not feeling at all witty, and I need to get some infantile humour out of my system. So here it is. This guy, Joseph Ducreux, was a painter dude in the olden days, and for some reason, he insisted on creating paintings that, when taken out of context, are just hilarious. Here are a couple that caught my eye. Enjoyez-vous.

You've seen this fellow before. What can I say? Brilliant. I'm a sucker for that winning grill. My woman is indeed a heavy metal miner!!

You've seen this fellow before as well. What can I say? I'm a sucker for subaquatic pineapple.




OK, that's it. Got it all out of my system. I promise that in my next post, we shall be returning to high-quality, informative posts all about the med school application process, sprinkled with only the highest-of-brow humour, and a minimum number of metal-related tangents...

...cause that's what you've all come to expect of me...

Everafter and Forevermore, we shall inbreed...

Wow, David Coverdale is still at it. I'm impressed. The guy must be at least 70 years old (maybe 60? Oh, 60 even- thanks wikipedia), and he's still leading Whitesnake, and their new album, Forevermore is actually quite good. Touché Mr. Coverdale, touché. This is just one of those feel-good 80's bands: awesome, wholesome, classy. Love it, I really do.

I know a lot about metal, I think it's fair to say, and I've come to realize that heavy metal is a lot like the Habsburgs, i.e. super inbred. The Habsburgs were a European royal family who were distinguished by their awesome "Habsburg Chin" mutation that they all had, and by their overall good looks (the picture below is of a Habsburg ruler who was literally called Philip the Handsome).

So I'm listening to this new Whitesnake album, and running through the inbred genealogy of 80's metal:

-Whitesnake's current guitar player is Reb Beach who also played in...
-Winger (yes!), Alice Cooper band, and Dokken, whose guitar player was...
-Doug Aldrich, who also played guitar in...
-Dio!! Whose lead singer and namesake Ronnie James Dio also sang for...
-Black Sabbath, whose former singer was...
-Ozzy! Who, in his solo career, employed my favorite guitar player of all time...
-Steve Vai! Who was in David Lee Roth band, Zappa, and...
-Yep, Whitesnake.

It all comes full circle. Not convinced at the inbredness of metal? Here's another path back to Whitesnake:

-Whitenake has Reb Beach who played in...
-Dokken, whose bass player was...
-Jeff Pilson, who then started a band called War and Peace whose guitar player was...
-Satchel! who is currently in Steel Panther, which was formerly a tribute band to...
-Van Halen! Whose former lead singer was...
-David Lee Roth, who had his own band with guitar player...
-Steve Vai!! Who was in Whitesnake!

I'm tellin you man...Habsburgs. For your viewing pleasure, here is a picture of Charles II (yes, a dude) of the Habsburgs, displaying a lovely example of the mighty Habsburg Lip.

Trapped Under Ice

That's right - state of emergency declared in my home state of New Mexico! It's so cold that we are running out of natural gas, so the university and all the schools have shut down to save energy. Crazy. I've had most of the week off, so I've been catching up on MCAT stuff.

On a side note, you may have noticed, gentle reader, a theme emerging in this blog (besides the pursuit of med school): heavy metal!! I like to tie in whatever is going on in my life to my love for metal. For this particular post, all I could come up with is that Albuquerque is "Trapped Under Ice", one of the more obscure tracks on Metallica's seminal "Ride The Lightning", which is an album that everybody should listen to. Your boyfriend should listen to it, your girlfriend, your mom, your dog, and your grandma should listen to it. Twice.

What I have actually been listening to lately is Devildriver! If you like metal, you will like this band. Great MCAT studying music. See, tying it all together... gimme a break. Its late.