silent reverie

I've always been a very organized person - I love lists and schedules, calendars and agendas.  I used to make a schedule everyday during school for what I'd do after school (it would look like "3PM - Get home, 3:35 - Rest and eat a snack, 4PM - start Bio HW" all the way to "11PM Sleep!).  It gives me a strange sense of purpose and productivity and keeps me sane when there seems to be a lot on my plate. I received an email yesterday from the scheduling Chief PA that the December schedule was made, and with my heart pounding, I opened up the document and scanned the calendar for my name.  And when I found it, it was on for every single Sunday of December.   No Sundays for an entire month might as well be an entire month of Sundays.  As this all sunk in,  I began to wonder what that would mean not really for Blueprint because I'm sure that everything will run smoothly without me as it has many times, but for myself.  So much of what I do on Sundays is ...

I got a haircut two days ago.  After several years of having long hair, I had a sudden impulse to just chop it off at shoulder length and deal with the consequences later.  The last time my hair was this short was in high school.  But here I am now, 22 years old, officially out of school, and facing a lot of things that are scarier than a bad haircut.  So I suppose the question I have to explore now is why - why I felt the need for a change, to do something not entirely new but something that I haven't done in a long time. I wondered if it was the whole "getting rid of the past and all its baggage" act but I don't think that's it.  I didn't go through some traumatic breakup and decide to chop off my hair in an act of feminist defiance  to social norms of beauty.  I haven't been through such a difficult time in the last few years that I have a need to symbolically shed my past.  I keep going back to the fact that I had short hair in high school a...

It always surprises me how the correction of the Holy Spirit can be at once a painful and frightening event as well as a refreshing dose of loving attention.  Tim Keller said that when employees screw up, they get fired, but when a child misbehaves, loving parents pay the child more attention.  And that's how it feels - I'm important enough that God would take the time to reveal the sins in my heart in order for me to gain more peace, more joy, and above all else, a relationship with Him that is less hindered by the blinds of my sinful nature. Ever since I accepted a job here in NY that would be at least a two year gig, I found myself with a renewed sense of purpose with Blueprint.  In my mind, I resolved to make the most effort on my part to make my church the growing, spiritually vibrant community of young believers I envisioned it to be.  And so I squared my shoulders and plunged myself into worship sets, small group meetings, powerpoint slides, PrimeTime practi...

This morning I sat at my desk with the pointer of my mouse hovering over the "SEND" button of an email for a good minute or two.  With one simple click I would enter my first step of being in the "real world" - a world where everything is permissible and only you can decide if it'd be beneficial.  A world where I can afford to buy and do things I never could before, but where I am also expected to make more decisions with more consequences.   It is as if this world is finally beginning to require me to make something of myself and prove that I can stand on my own two feet, bring something to the table. About four days ago, I went to Montefiore Medical Center for a second interview with HR.  The position is for an Internal Medicine new graduate PA to join the close to 100 PAs on the Medicine team (not to mention about 300 more PAs in other subspecialties throughout the hospital).  I walked away from that interview with my head spinning with reasons the HR fello...

I'm writing the first entry of 2012 in a cold, bare examination room at the health clinic for my Primary Care rotation. It's an odd place to be writing, and I feel strange doing so in an environment so impersonal and different than anything I've ever identified myself with. And yet here I am, with a stained short white coat on, with some time in between patients, writing about how I'd rather be elsewhere. More than halfway into my clinical year as a physician assistant student, I have yet to overcome the nagging feeling that I don't belong in medicine. When people ask me what I study, or what I do and I say "PA", I almost feel like an impostor, as if I still don't really belong to the field of medicine and feel guilty for leading others to assume so. Many of my patients here at Covenant House are young and trying to figure out what they want to do in life (while the rest are fixed on becoming famous rappers or actors), and they often ask me if I...