Drowning in a sea of testosterone

Yesterday when I arrived in Antigua it was a little bit rainy but all the sights and smells were the same; it was like starting an adventure where all the little things were familiar but still unknown.
I had spent the night before alone in a little New York hotel room that smelled vaguely of smoke and carpet cleaner, and stared at the flickering tv, unable to sleep. Arriving in Antigua was like stepping into a cold refreshing shower (which I did have, incidentally, and it was amazing). I spent some time talking with the landlady and then after she left, unpacked and lay on the couch with the ocean breeze billowing in through the open porch doors. I was all alone.
I cooked some pasta for dinner and ate some, but I was too tired to stay up and finally locked the doors and turned out lights and went to bed. I lay there listening to the hum of the air conditioning unit and trying to find a comfortable position on the lumpy pillow, and thought about this month I have begun here and felt apprehensive. I tried to pray but I was too tired… too tired to sleep, really. I dozed on and off but then woke to the sounds of frogs and cicadas outside and the wind whistling around the corners of the house. I took a sleeping pill (melatonin, which is a natural hormone your body makes that helps you fall asleep and gets disrupted by jetlag).
Sometime in the night there was a banging on the door and someone shouting my name. I ran up the stairs and recognized a familiar southern drawl and opened the door for Burton and Asa, my housemates. They had flown in and gone grocery shopping and had more groceries than I have ever seen in one car. 9 containers of yogurt (He eats one a day, Asa told me). 5 cartons of eggs. 3 jugs of milk. 8 packages of ham. The list goes on and on.
We sat in the dining room and talked and laughed until pretty late. I felt out of my depth, to say the least and finally retreated to my room just to get away from the overwhelming overload of testosterone.
Burton was a football player and I thought he was huge until I met Asa, who used to be on the power team (a Christian body-building team). Next to the two of them I feel dwarfed (imagine Thomas and Christoph with an extra 200 lbs between the two of them and tell me you wouldn’t feel intimidated!) They are both self-confident, dynamic, outgoing, and very Southern: sort of the definition of redneck.
Asa is a naturopath and chiropractor and when he saw the jar of nutella I’d smuggled through customs, he read the ingredients out loud to me and began to explain to me why I shouldn’t eat it.
“Listen, young man,” I told him, “I’m a quarter your size and I eat nutella all the time. The last thing I’m worried about is getting fat.”
“Ah,” he said, flexing his muscles, “But do you have tickets?” (i.e. tickets to the gun show)
“You think I want to look like that?” I asked him, staring at his bulging guns and imagining myself with my veins popping out.
I pointed out to the two of them that no matter what I ate I was going to live longer than both of them by about 6 years (3 because I’m a woman and 3 because I’m a Canadian).
Burton started to laugh. “But at least we’re still American!!!!”
I gave up at that point.
I started to tell them a story about something sometime later and Asa interrupted me and I told him that he shouldn’t interrupt, it was my turn. He asked if I was always this bossy and I thought for a second and said, only when I feel threatened. As if I have to compensate for how very intimidated I feel by being mouthy, which is unusual for me (not the mouthiness: the being intimidated by men).
I’m not sure what the answer is to survive this month. The last few months I’ve been living with mostly girls (Dad is the only male in the house but he’s at work most of the time), and I’ve gotten used to a feminine way of dealing with things. This morning I got up and Asa’s things were spread through the house in every area he had been. The lights had been left on all night and the toilet seat was up and although they had washed their plates, I’m sure they didn’t noticed the other dirty dishes spread around the kitchen.
I need some more estrogen around here. I feel like I am drowning in a sea of manliness. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with men, because these guys are as gentlemanly and as godly as they could get, but what I wouldn’t do right now for a bit of female companionship. Somehow I am feeling as alone as I did before they arrived.

Sewing is for philanderers

Have you ever suddenly found yourself in a situation where you suddenly stopped and asked, what the heck am I doing?
It happened to me this week. I found myself at 2:00 in the morning, in my parent's basement, completely naked, completely drunk, trying to thread a sewing needle and talking to myself in French.
Like all good stories, it all started with a piece of turquoise silk from China. My mom was given this piece of fabric, and since she didn't like the color, bequeathed it to me. I decided that I wanted to show my domestic flair and that I was going to sew a dress out of it. (Why didn't I make a pillowcase? I don't know). I envisioned myself at my white coat ceremony next month, floating across the stage in a cloud of silk.
I went to the fabric store and asked for help finding a simple pattern for a summer dress. This one will be good, the sales lady showed me. Oh no, I said, I don't want anything with a zipper in it. I'm not a good sewer and I need it simple. Oh, this zipper will be easy to put in, she explained to me, and showed me briefly how to do it. You will need an invisible zipper, she said, so you can't see it after it's in. No problem, I thought, this is a snap! I can totally do it.
It took me about 2 weeks to figure out how to lay out the fabric and cut it out properly. But even then, the piece was a funny shape, so I had to mix and match a bit and skip a few useless pieces before I got it. Then I started sewing it together, ironing the pieces as I went.
The dress was fraught with difficulty from the start. I sewed the backing on backwards and had to take it out and start over. Then I realized I'd cut some pieces backwards and had to patch them together. Then my mom's sewing machine broke.
I had intended to finish the dress before I left for Antigua so a few nights ago, I decided that I just had to stay up as late as it took to get it done. I had just finished watching a movie with my sister and had the gas fireplace on and it was smoking hot in the basement. I was sitting there trying to pin and sew this slippery silk by hand and sweating bullets and I kept making mistakes and having to take out my stitches and try again. It was past 11 and I finally decided this was ridiculous, I had to take my clothes off or I'd get heat stroke.
I stabbed myself with a pin trying to get the zipper in. I basted the front inside out. Finally I stopped and decided that I needed to set up a system so that I wouldn't make mistakes. An appropriate punishment, I thought, would be to force myself to drink a shot of rum every time I made a mistake, since I hate doing shots. (I know what you're thinking.... Heather, what were you thinking.)
That darn zipper wouldn't go in properly. The shoulder seams were inside out. I accidentally poked the needle under my fingernail and it started bleeding. I sat there with a shot glass and a bottle and my sewing kit and all this turquoise silk and I started to mutter to myself in French so that no one would understand the bad words I was saying. I did not feel like a domestic goddess at all.
At 2 in the morning I put the dress on to see how it was fitting and I went into the bathroom to look in the mirror. I couldn't get the zipper up. It was hard to focus on the mirror as it was all blurry, but from what I could see, I'd have had to be an anorexic praying mantis to get the zipper done up. Not only that, I would probably need a whole other set of boobs just to fill the top out. And to top it all off, as I stood there blinking at my reflection, I realized that I hated turquoise.
When I couldn't thread the needle anymore I finally decided to go to bed. I lay in my bed and had just turned the light out when I heard the whine of a mosquito close to my ear. I turned on the light. There he was, on the ceiling. I got out of bed and climbed up on the arm of my armchair and thwacked the ceiling. Missed the mosquito, fell off the chair. Climbed up again, slammed my hand against the ceiling and killed him. Got back into bed, and then remembered the ceiling was the floor to my parent's bedroom.... then I heard the whine of another mosquito. I turned out the light, got up, but this time I couldn't stay on the arm of the chair. I climbed on the counter top and held onto the curtain rod to steady myself while I tried to lightly thump the ceiling where the mosquito was.
To keep things brief...it was 4:00 when I finally went to sleep.
I should've given up there on that dress, I'm telling you. But tonight I decided to finish the job and hem it. My Dad had politely suggested that I make a belt for it, a wide belt that covered the 'invisible' zipper. My Mom suggested an exercise routine to build up my pec muscles. My sister suggested padding.
I laid the dress on the carpet this evening and began to trim off the uneven bottom of the skirt so I could hem it. I'm still not really sure how domestic goddesses trim their hems, but I'm pretty sure there must be a better way to do it, because I kept trimming and the more I trimmed, the crookeder it got. I took off 4 inches and there was a 4 inch difference from side to side. So I evened it out. By the time I had taken 8 inches off, Alpha suggested I could just sew those pieces back on and it would be the right length.
I'm going to wear this dress, I told her, if it kills me. She started to laugh and I kept trimming the hem to even it out. By the time I had taken off 10 inches I was beginning to sweat bullets. I envisioned myself wearing it over jeans as a long shirt. It looks sort of even, Alpha said, except for those long bits hanging down.
In the end I took off about 12 inches before it was even. I started to pin it in place and stabbed my leg with a pin. I searched valiantly for an appropriate expletive and finally resorted to 'foozball!' Alpha hadn't stopped laughing.
Well, let me tell you, I am going to wear that dress if it's the last thing I do. If I can figure out a way to hold my breath long enough to zip it up, I'll take a picture and post it. Otherwise you'll just have to wait to see the pictures of my white coat ceremony. These days I'm trying to learn from my mistakes and I realize I made a number of significant ones through the course of this sewing experiment. I should've called Yvette in Kelowna and begged her to sew it for me. I shouldn't have tried to put in an invisible zipper. I should've cut the pieces out like the pattern said, not how I thought it should be done. And I probably shouldn't have tried to sew at all while drinking rum.

These are a few of my favorite things

The crisis has passed..... I removed my run-away bag from my car. (Actually, I needed some of the clothes that were in it and I had to start packing for leaving the country again.)
I didn't work yesterday (I slept in until 11) and I didn't work today and I probably won't work tomorrow, unless I get called (which would be awesome, since I'd make double time), but strangely enough, I'm not bothered by it at all. Okay, I'm completely broke. But last night I was looking through a book on photography that had some awesome pictures of kids in slums in India and I started thinking. There was this little girl standing in the middle of a monsoon flood and she had a purple sari wrapped around her so that all you could see was her huge brown eyes and her little open mouth. She was completely filthy and beautiful and I wanted to wrap my arms around her and take her home.
It's really the little unimportant things in life that are so important, that are worth fighting for. I found a list that I'd written a long time ago of 35 of my favorite things- completely random, but it got me pondering quite deeply. So here it is.... the abridged version, since there are a lot of things that I love and that make me feel alive, and since my censor (Alpha) made me edit it. But I challenge you to read it, and think of the things that make you feel alive, and make a list, and see if you can go experience some of them this week... and maybe leave a comment telling me what some of your favorites are.
Snowflakes
Drinking eggnog
The color red
Sailing on a wild ocean (or lake)
Jazz
Juicy, ripe mangos
The sound of Italian words
Running in bare feet
Spicy food
Inserting IV's
Traveling (anywhere!)
Lying in the sand
Warm tapioca pudding
Trombones and tubas
Swimming
Black tea with milk
Frangipani blossoms
Explosions (when I'm far enough away!)
Colorful skirts
Praying
Wide open fields
The exhilaration of starting a new adventure
Any kind of flowers
Babies... as long as they don't leak on me
Ice skating on a lake
Books
Going for walks
Watching the sun rise
Sleeping outside under the stars
Donuts
Ripe passion fruit
Polymer chemistry equations
Debussy's Claire de lune
Ice cream.... any kind
Being in the middle of a crazy, wild storm
Dinner with my whole family
Hanging laundry on a line

Are you enough without the gold?

In the last day I learned three important things that totally lifted my spirits.
1)The rest of my class also failed yesterday's exam, so at least I'm not the only stupid one.
2)Coffee makes the world go around. I don't know how I survived 5 days without it.
3)Last night I watched parts of 'cool runnings' with Alpha and learned something important. The Jamaican bobsled team was preparing for their Olympic run, and the night before their big race, the sled driver had a chat with the coach. He asked the coach why he had cheated, many years past, while competing. The coach said that even though he had already won a gold medal, winning was so important to him that he would do whatever it took to win another one, including cheating. He told him, if you're not enough without the gold, you'll never be enough with the gold. How will I know if I'm enough without the gold, coach? The driver asked. You'll know when you cross the finish line tomorrow, the coach told him. And the next day while on their run the bobsled crashed with the world watching. Instead of walking away in despair, that driver got up, and told his teammates they had to finish anyway, and they picked up that bobsled and carried it across the finish line. He was enough without the gold.
I thought about that last night while I studied for my microbiology exam today. Am I enough without the gold? Or does doing well matter so much to me, that I'll cheat, or spazz out, or give up, or become one of those obsessive-compulsive people that no-one wants to live with?
Isaiah 49:4- But I said, “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.”...Yet what is due me is in the Lord's hand, and my reward is with my God.

The coach was right, you know. I studied like a braniac most of the night and when I crossed the finish line this morning and found I also did badly on my microbiology exam, I thought, it's okay. I'm enough without the gold.
I'm sorry to be exposing my emotions like this to everyone. It's a hard lesson to learn. I have one more exam tomorrow and then I can lick my wounds for a few days before heading back to Antigua. But I want to share it with you because I think we are all on the same journey, just in different ways, and we can learn from each other and encourage each other. It's a glorious thing to fight for something and to win, but it's an even more amazing thing to fail at something and still have the grace to pick yourself up and keep going on.

Pathology exam (the censored version)

So....I've come to the conclusion that when those Israelite guys said they only ate vegetables and water, 'vegetables' was a code word for 'Jewish food' or 'what we normally eat'. Because I'm telling you, eating only vegetables and water did nothing good for me.
Last night was my 5th day. I'd done well on my first exam (15% higher than the class average, apparently) and was studying for my second exam and all I could think about was toast, or eggs, or coffee, or anything but vegetables. I lost 8 lbs this week and as time was going on I felt stupider and stupider. I've battled nausea for about 3 days and I thought if I even looked at another carrot I was going to throw up. I've been studying SO hard, for hours on end, not sleeping much, and I felt like I was getting a handle on things, but I was crashing fast. Last night at about 10:00 I couldn't take it any more. Alpha suggested blueberries and I wanted to throw my textbook at her head but I didn't have the energy to pick it up so I crawled into the kitchen and ate some cold leftovers and made a cup of tea.
Wow. I seriously don't know how I made it 5 days on just vegetables and water.
I studied for a few more hours and then went to bed, praying for my pathology exam (at 7 this morning!) Some time in the night I woke up and had this intense pseudo-religious experience- it was a vision of me preparing for my exam and sitting down to write it- I sat bolt upright and I said, “I am ready to discharge all my emotional energy and everything I am into this exam”. I felt filled with joy. It was pretty crazy. When my alarm went off at 5:30 I bounced out of bed, prayed and read my bible for a bit, then studied, then ate some cereal (YES!!!!) and tea and settled down at the computer to conquer the beast.
The exam was a gong show. About 50% of the questions had spelling mistakes and poor grammar but they were super easy questions. About 10% of the questions were so totally random and based on things I had no clue about. About 10% of the questions were justifiably tough but I felt like I reasoned them out well. I took my time, purposely went through all the choices even if I knew instantly what the answer was. I double checked my answers. After a couple of hours I submitted the test. YES!!!! I could taste victory on my tongue. I had studied pathology like it was going out of style this summer. I had made hundreds of colored flow charts and flashcards and had gone through almost all the practice questions in a review book and studied the textbooks.
You can imagine my shock when my mark popped up on the screen. I know I have revealed many embarrassing things about myself on my blogs (and I'm about to reveal more!), but I am honestly too ashamed of that mark to even tell you what it is. Suffice to say it was below the passing mark. I blinked a few times. What the ****. I've ******* studied this ******* pathology until I ****** **** *****. (Actually I don't remember what I said but it was something unrepeatable).
I sent a very upset email to my professor telling him that his answer key must be wrong and could he recheck it. Then I walked into my bedroom, climbed under my blankets and curled up in a corner of my bed and cried my eyes out.
I don't handle failure very well. I've never done anything with the intention of losing, even stupid things like skipping grade 12, running a marathon without training, picking fights with big guys, or entering a cook-off with fake poo. I lay there all curled up and tried to imagine why I could have failed after I had literally studied my guts out for this test. I honestly feel like I know the material.... I will be a good doctor..... but maybe I am deluding myself. Perhaps I don't have what it takes to get through medical school after all. Dropping out of school cause I'm not smart enough has never been on my agenda. I thought God was in it. For goodness sakes, I've been praying up a storm over it. I know lots of people fail exams, but how many people care as much as I do? I couldn't stop crying.
I fell asleep. So many intense moments in my life have been followed by me falling asleep and waking up feeling different- and this was no exception.
I bounced out of bed and into the shower and was almost mad at myself. Right there was the one stupid reason why I was actually in med school in the first place. Every time I failed at something and got knocked down, I was stupid enough to get up and try again. Man, Heather, can't you learn? Can't you just give up?
I played scrabble with my mom the other day and she had to leave halfway through to go shopping. She tallied up the points and declared that she was in the lead, so she had won. You didn't win! I shouted at her. You quit! There's a difference! I won because I didn't quit!!!!
Well, telling you all this has been an emotional release for me. I'm ready to study for next exam tomorrow. This one is just as much a beast and I am just as scared. But I'm not a quitter. I'll figure out something with pathology- I dunno, maybe the rest of the class failed too, and we'll get our marks scaled. Maybe there is a problem with the answer key. Maybe I did well enough on the homework to pass the course anyway (actually it is well-known that professor never gives anything but 'pass' to all his students, no matter how well they do on the tests). Maybe I'll get kicked out of school and can start my own university.
At any rate, I'm going to win eventually..... if only because I refuse to quit.

*Consoling chocolates and cards can be sent to my home address.