Tough month

Another month has ended. These days, I only force myself to blog whenever the month ends, if only to place bookends to chapters of personal experiences inside and outside the hospital for the past 30 or so days. For sure, I have many stories to tell, but I no longer have the drive to write about them every time they happen. In college, I used to write almost twice a week—those entries can be accessed to this day. Admittedly, many of the posts embarrass me if you read them to me aloud. Really—I wrote about my Biology exam that way?
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Books and movies

1. Finished Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Book Two: A Man In Love. I don't understand why I'm drawn to reading his memoir even if it's all just about himself, but the writing is captivating. We end the volume with three kids in his household. I like reading about his best friend Geir or his morning coffee or when he bursts into tears.

2. I'm down to the last three episodes of Breaking Bad. I'm saving up the last episodes for better days, when I can watch them without much distraction. That scene that showed a group of hired mobsters shoot Hank was too heavy to bear. Hank, second to Mister White, is my favorite, and seeing him lifeless in that desolate New Mexico desert broke my heart.

3. Friday Night Lights, a series about the life of a high school football coach in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas, is my new pastime. Just the right kind of drama, it's made up of characters that all bear noticing. Coach Taylor is a moral, loving, kind man who cares for his players' welfare. He wins many matches, too.

Dog bites

YOU know I got bitten by a dog when I was young. What you probably don’t know is that it happened thrice. I still remember, quite painfully, the dogs’ names by heart—and not just their names, mind you, but their fierce growls as their sharp incisors dug deep into my feet: Pluto, Rocky, and Rocky II. (My brother, Sean, named the dogs in my house; when I took over the naming, I called one dog “Benjamin” and another "David").

[Read this and this.]

It’s funny then that you’ll be seeing me at the Anti-Rabies Unit (ARU), manning the clinic on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. I totally get what my patients are going through. At some point, when my mother dragged me to the hospital to have my shots—I never had them; the doctors said they were unnecessary given my minimal injuries—I thought I was going to die.
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Welcoming 2016—Happy New Year!

I spent the New Year’s Eve the way I have spent it in previous years—asleep, alone, oblivious to the sound of firecrackers. December 31st found me inside my room, catching up on sleep, reading random websites, trying if I could finish a Faulkner story ("The Fire and The Hearth" in “Go Down, Moses”), and changing my bed sheets. Outside was balmy, the skies dark, and I got the feeling that it would rain any time. It was the perfect weather for sleep and meditation. The only bad thing was that I had to cancel my tennis appointment. A soaked clay court is no good for bouncing tennis balls.

I loved the solitude inside my dorm room. My roommate was away with his family, so I had all the space to myself and all the silence I needed to think things through. In a way, I am introverted this way—a fact that will amuse even my closest friends. I’m actually quiet when I’m left alone. It was so silent, by the way, that I could hear my stomach grumble, an observation that led me to snack at a nearby convenience store—one of the very few times when I went out.
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