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From today’s twittersphere:

OliviaFong: I <3 Htown & I’m a bandwagon hockey fan…but it would be great to be in a city that has a championship-winning pro sports team. Go B’s!

andrew_fong: @OliviaFong honestly, when watching hockey, do you even know what you are looking at? I don’t #texasforever

OliviaFong: @andrew_fong i’m just looking for the puck to hit the back of the net. that, and for all the in-game fights between grown, toothless men.

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Today was a Liz Lemon kind of morning around the Chat-o-sphere:

EH:  i wanted to tell you something important.

jalapeno farmers have developed their jalapenos now to fit maximum cheese

me: !!!!

god bless the jalapeno farmers.

i like that you prefaced it with “i wanted to tell you something important.”

because really, what news could be more important than any news about the amount of cheese you can fit into produce

EH:  http://www.good.is/post/new-jalapeno-bred-specifically-to-hold-more-cheese/.

i knew this would be significant for you.

i merely wanted to prime you for the news

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Comps craziness is over. Too bad I found out that I don’t get access to the gym with part-time student status and there’s only reruns and no March Madness on TV. #FirstWorldProblems

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Today’s email of the day:

Sweetie,

I watched the last part of the Cats/Horns game.  A 5 second inbound violation and a three-point play??  That’s too tough to swallow.

Hope you are hanging in there and not just hanging.

Love,

dad

My response:

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As my friend ZL said, March is one of the best months of the year: It’s crawfish season, the weather is warming up, spring break is smack dab in the middle, and the rodeo is in town (I can’t believe I’m missing giant corn dogs, $10 concerts, and mutton busting this year). And of course, it’s the month of my favorite sporting event of the year- the NCAA tournament. Cinderella stories, upsets by schools you’ve never heard of, and nail-biting finishes, what’s not to love? Here’s a graphic that pretty much describes brackets this year thus far:

From stumbledupon.com

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For Lent this year, I decided to give up fried foods, frozen foods, and caffeine, which currently make up approximately 94% of my diet.

Immediate responses:

TTHdoesntloveme: @OliviaFong whoa. what are you gonna eat?

angryjlau: @TTHdoesntloveme @oliviafong is gonna starve…

Haters gonna hate.

Come Easter, expect a leaner (maybe), meaner (without those foods? most likely) Ofo.

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On the 11th and 24th, I will be taking comprehensive exams that will determine whether or not I graduate from BU this May, meaning that I will be attempting to cram about 5 years of information into my brain in the next 5 days.

A few of my favorite mnemonic devices for models/stages in language development, courtesy of SL:

Dogs and raccoons are cute, cuddly elephants.

Push cats down igloos.

What these are supposed to help me remember, I don’t know (I realize the irony). But if I start laughing out loud while taking comps, it’s because I’m visualizing some jackass shoving Garfield down a frozen ice sculpture.

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She loves me, she really really loves me.

Okay, so maybe IF required coaching from SI to say that she misses/loves me. And maybe she doesn’t even really know what those words mean yet. But considering that last time I saw her, I was dismissed during her bedtime story and my declaration of love was met by a blank stare, I’ll take it.

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From an article by Atul Gawande that appeared in the New Yorker last year (long, but well worth the read):

This is a modern tragedy, replayed millions of times over. When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run—and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do—our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something. We want these choices. We don’t want anyone—certainly not bureaucrats or the marketplace—to limit them. But that doesn’t mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something.

Last week, my pastor at CCFC remarked how there is a disconnect in between how Hollywood portrays the process of death and how it actually occurs in real life. Even a person who dies in a violent or graphic manner somehow manages to go in a relatively quick and graceful fashion. But very rarely does a perfectly healthy person quietly pass in the night. Instead, there is often an uncomfortable and unglamorous deterioration cycle that seems to accelerate as a person ages. People collect diagnoses like basketball cards, trading up and down and exchanging this for that as they enter a carousel of hospitals and rehab centers and skilled nursing facilities, never completely recovering from one injury before having to endure the next.

It would be impossible to spend any amount of time with medically fragile patients, the youngest of whom are in their 70s, without thinking about end of life issues. Indeed, in the past 6 weeks, 3 people on my caseload have died.

My first encounter with death of a patient occurred during my first week. Rather, she “expired” due to a “failure to thrive.” In her final days, her body’s systems were breaking down, she wasn’t eating, and she was barely conscious, even when awake. In crude, unfeeling terms, she was circling the drain.

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In a new, slightly more productive procrastination tactic, I’ve taken to cooking.

Okay, so one day of cooking does not a habit make, but if you know me at all, you can appreciate these baby steps toward domesticity.

For lunches this week, I made a curry chicken salad with almonds and apples (secret ingredient: soy sauce and mango chutney), similar to the recipe found here, as well as an artichoke-lemon-garlic aioli to go in a sandwich with proscuitto, shredded mozarella and parmesan cheese, and baby spinach. Pretentiousdouchebagsthrowyourhandsupatme.