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Ssaeed2
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Name: Sarah
Birthday: 9/22/1986
Gender: Female
Interests: Spiritual enrichment, dua', reading newspapers, midnight dinners at 1038 Taylor, shoes, kamikaze jetskiing, purification of the heart, cleaning at inoppurtune moments, and cooking with my family.
Expertise: very Useless.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Medical
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  w1ldflower22
Member Since:
9/22/2004
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| Of Life and ZenThere are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
-O. Wilde
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| Can You Rub My Feet?
Baba doesn't say that very often, but when he does, he finds slicker and slicker ways to slip it into the conversation. Today, he called me on the way home from school to ask if I'd seen his black-leather encased grooming kit because it had been "a long time since [he'd] last used it."
Sometimes I think he drops a subtle hint because he thinks I might turn him down if he asks me straight up. "I have too much homework," one of my siblings would (aka always) say. Another one makes no secret that she thinks touching feet is disgusting. But she thinks touching anything is disgusting, so no offense taken. So his attempts at winning my favor are endearing and cute. Shhh dont tell him, but I would never, ever turn down Baba's request to rub his feet.
There's quite the generation gap between him and I. He is the product of another country, another generation, another set of values that elude concrete verbalization but manifest themselves ever so clearly in the supermarket sales he rushes to, and the insistence that television is the reason why six out of seven of his children wear glasses, and the expanse of cultural adhab that dictate his views on marriage and sibling responsibility. I could not and would not define myself concretely, but suffice it to say it is not the supermarket variety of sales that I rush to, and I'm much more concerned with the evolving nature of the American Travel narrative than with the clearly genetic cause of my family's poor eyesight.
But the generation gap spawns strange things, and is perhaps the least likely candidate for reminding one of Allah's (SWT) blessings. Today I rubbed his feet as we
watched Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN. He were discussing the Potomac
Primary, which Barack Muslim Obama sweeped, and the resulting neck and
neck battle with Billary Clinton. I ended up having a discussion with
my father about who would win, just who was ruining whose chances at
winning, and just how difficult it would be to predict the next nine
months, let alone the next three weeks. For all my complaints that
apathy be the opiate of choice these days, I found a stimulating and engaging discussion from the person I'd expected it least.
So instead of sitting down to finish On the Road, I'd gladly sit and rub my father's callused feet (callused being the understatement). Maybe it's because years (okay months) of changing diapers and years of dealing with babies has worn away my squeamishness altogether, or maybe its because I cherish those spontaneously fufilling moments. Maybe its because of, not despite, our generation gap that I like to sit with him and rub his feet. I know that I could spend weeks catering to his every whim and I could never make up for the one night he rubbed my infant back while I wailed endlessly. I can never possibly look at him with the same amount love he has showered on me even before I was born. I can never, ever make up to him all that he has done for me.
But I can rub his feet.
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| I was walking the Quad at UChicago when it hit me...How does one actually decide what to do with their life?
Yesterday was the first day of my last semester of Undergrad. When I compare yesterday to its counterpart in high school, I realize how little I am truly attached to UIC. True, I love the people there, but most of them have graduated and the other anchors--the teachers, the buildings, the laughter, the pranks (!!)-- just dont have that weight of familiarity and affection. End stage analysis is always more telling than that of the initial stage: freshman year is so difficult to pin down because it's new and exciting and it's everything high school wasn't. Oh the irony, ye Freshmen, when you realize senior year of undergrad is nothing and everything like your last year of high school you thought you'd left behind..
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| New Years ReprieveAnother year gone by, and I am ambivalent.
That's all.
And the book I'm reading is far more interesting because of who wrote it, and where she came from, and what she did when she got here. Not because of the title.
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| For the hopelessly despairing Pre-Med student...And the rest of the haters who think we've doomed ourselves
to life of cut-and-dry chemistry and desiccated scientific jargon...a light at
the end of the tunnel, if you will.
As a freshman, UIC-COM assigned us to read A Life in Medicine, a (gasp!)
literary anthology about working in the medical field written by doctors,
nurses, psychiatrists, and like. It was the first time, after perhaps a
lifetime of narrow perceptions, that I saw the very real and vibrant
intersection between literature and medicine.One young medical student wrote about the experience of dissecting the heart of a fellow classmate that had died one year earlier, while another psychiatrist wrote about the experience of treating a mental disorder she once suffered from herself. A nurse placed into her poetry the demands of her job, while another mused on the modern interpretation of the Hippocratic oath. Wait a second, doctors know how to write???
Yes. They do. At least some do  And their existence is proof that medicine cannot (entirely) preclude a love of things within the Humanities realm.
Take the writings of Dr. Atul Gawande, one smart cat if
there ever was one. This man, apart from being a certified genius surgeon,
writes beautifully and elegantly and somehow succeeds in evoking a response
perhaps never before pioneered in the minds of despairing, parental-placating pre-med majors: genuine excitement. Not only
does he rhapsodize eloquently beyond the scalpel and into the mind wielding it,
but he uncovered a dimension within medicine that exercises the flairs for
critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and social acumen we’ve somehow come
to think doctors lack the need to flex entirely.
Medicine
isn’t entirely the robotic grind my Rotations-weary brother characterizes it
as, and it certainly isn’t as subjective as analyzing Ceasar’s socio-political intentions
in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
But it’s more than we give it credit for; more than I gave it credit for. And
on rainy days, when a life in medicine seems daunting, there’s
nothing like Dr. Gawande’s writings to remind that medicine is vibrant, alive,
and yes, difficult, but worth it.
Dr. Gawande's writings in the New Yorker
If you can find The Learning Curve online (I couldn't), I highly recommend reading it
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A Penny for your thoughts...
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