-- After my English teaching job in Ehime ended last August, I went back to Seattle for three months to do some job shadowing in an assisted living facility and a couple of community clinics.
-- In October, I jetted all over the place doing medical school interviews. For the most part, everything went okay, besides one trip to the east coast where my luggage got lost somewhere in between Seattle and Pennsylvania. That night, I finally got to my hotel around 1 AM, borrowed deodorant and toothpaste from the front desk, brushed my teeth with my index finger, and climbed into bed. I ended up going to my interview the next morning in the same t-shirt and jeans I had worn on the plane because my suit was still MIA. I stuck out just a bit amid the group of other interviewees dressed in freshly pressed black suits, but luckily the interviewers were very nice about it, and plus I was very comfortable. Tennis shoes are a beautiful thing. :D
-- In November, I got back to Japan and have been working in a laboratory growing amoeba in little plastic dishes all day. Here are some of my favorite pets, named after some of my favorite people.
Actually, I spend most of my time soaking these little guys in different contact lens solutions and trying to figure out how to kill them. (They're awfully cute, but if they infect your eye, they eat up your cornea and can even blind you.) Several brands of contact lens solutions have no effect on these guys at all, so my task for the next couple of months is to find out which ingredients in the contact lens solutions are preventing the disinfectant from doing its job. Hopefully I'll have some Nobel Prize worthy results to present at the Japanese contact lens conference I'm supposed to go to in July...
-- According to the existing medical literature on these amoeba, they most often cause eye infections in contact lens wearers. The other at risk population includes people who have "experienced traumatic eye injury involving vegetative matter." ... That'll make you think twice the next time you have a sudden urge to fling a cabbage at your best pal's head, won't it!
-- I'm still playing trombone and singing with a couple bands here. My hope is to become a Japanese gaijin pop star extraordinaire like this guy within the next three months.
-- I've finally been accepted to medical school, so I'm bound for Cornell starting the end of this August! Come to NYC and visit me!
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With all of the uncertainty about medical school behind me and my year(s) abroad quickly coming to an end, I've been in a weird mushy, philosophical mood lately. I can't quite put my thoughts into coherent English at the moment, but I'm very thankful both for my family and friends in the states, and for all of the people I've met in Japan. I feel like my heart is stretched out across several different continents right now. I wonder what will happen when I go back to the US this fall and start over in yet another new place...
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On a slightly different note, I really like this quote:
"Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood." ~Leonardo da Vinci.
Like most people, I think that I tend to make quick unconscious judgments about things and people based on first impressions, but recently, I've realized how dangerous and hurtful that can be. Too often I find myself thinking in terms of labels -- "good kid," "bad kid," "smart kid," "drunk," "trouble-maker," "Christian," "Japanese" etc. -- but real people are more complicated than that, and it's a shame to condense them down to something less than they actually are.
...So, my goal over the next few months is to try harder to see things through other people's eyes, rather than just making assumptions. That's the way people deserve to be treated, and the way I think I would want to be treated myself. 頑張ろう！
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Stay tuned, O faithful reader(s?), for more posts in the near future (hopefully less rambling and vague than this one) as I finish out my last three months in Japan. :D
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