Indulgence III slept two hours
last night, but it really wasn't last night. It was this morning,
between 4:30 and about 6:30. I crashed on the couch with a lecture
transcript and a pillow over my face. Colorectal cancer and a shield
from the dawn. This was after a night of reviewing and learning for a
10:30 exam. And that was after a four hour session of doing
screening physicals for local high school students - a requirement for
our Introduction to Clinical Medicine course. And that was after
a Medical Education meeting about the grading system at the UASOM. So it
was another full day.
The exam went well - it felt like one of the clearer ones from this
series of correlative pathology exams; it was gastrointestinal. I
ploughed through it f a s t
; definitely less than a minute per question. I took less than an hour
for a hundred questions. I do better when I plough through it fast. For
me, it's a command of the material that doesn't hit me all the time.
Then I stayed at school and completed my financial aid forms. Then I
went home. Then I checked our tax forms, filled out the envelopes and
went to the Post Office and mailed them. So in a huge swoop of activity,
I completed a lot of pending tasks, and that feels good.
Then I totally indulged, and now I'm chuckling at my idea of
indulgence. I surrounded myself with what I enjoy. Estelle was watching
some TV in the living room, so I went down there. I carried my laptop,
and plugged it in next to the La-Z-Boy. Then I grabbed a two volume
series of new chess books I got through Amazon.
A few minutes later, Maggie came home, Estelle went up to take a
shower, and I popped Amélie
into the DVD player. Maggie was super kind enough to get me a book off
the shelf, Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, and she
got me a bowl of ice cream. Maggie and I started talking about her day,
and her plans for the afternoon. I've never done this before, that I
remember, but I fell asleep in the moments while she was talking to me.
The two hours of sleep that morning, preceded by three or four hours per
night the past four or five nights, were not cumulatively enough to keep
me conscious. Maggie tolerated me, amused, I think. We're really
enjoying the hard work and the moments of payoff and accomplishment like
today. With her makes it more worth it than I think it would be were I
alone.
At about 8:30 later this evening, Maggie and Estelle came back from
shopping. I didn't awake until they were downstairs in the living room,
checking the channels for whatever was on. The laptop was askew on my
lap, saved from falling to the floor by the arm rest of the couch next
to the chair. The chess books were down on the floor to my left.
Kidder's book - a prose biography of an infectious diseases doctor named
Paul Farmer - was on the head of the couch next to me, splayed open to a
description of his group at a Boston hospital following an HIV+ patient
who more than anything wanted a safe home where he could just live.
We ate some noodles that Estelle prepared, and we all chatted about
nothing, them in Nyanja and English, and I in strictly English, but with
a smidgen of understanding of my Mumbi women's langue. Then
Maggie and Estelle went up to bed. I continued to indulge. I checked my
email, listened to five voice mails that came through yesterday and
today that, in the focus of studying, I somehow missed. I called Justin
& Ashley back, and Clay & Alley.
So here we are. I popped in another DVD, called Save the Last
Dance. It's a story about a relationship between a young couple - a
Black man and White woman - with dance as a common theme they share.
He's going on to Georgetown for pre-med, and she's going on to Julliard
for ballet. It's Hollywood style, but despite that glaring weakness, I
enjoy it.
