I am Invincible

Hi there! It's good to see everyone in here on such a fine late-August day, getting fit and stronger. Go you! I admire your dedication. However, I can't help but notice that some of you are having a little trouble. Let me see if I can help you out. Here's a few little tricks I like to use to optimize my workout.


-Variety

One component of a good exercise session is moving around. You can practice this now, by moving away from your machine after more than five minutes of use. To the couple that was tag-teaming various machines for multiple sets - good try, but the idea is to move more than three steps away.


- Pacing

To the young man in the my-balls-are-huge wrestling braggadocio shirt: I'm not sure you should be making sounds like that on every single rep. Unless you were actually a very flat-chested, masculine, and muscular pregnant woman in the throes of labor, in which case, by all means, make whatever noise you want. Go to the hospital first, though! No workout is worth continuing if you've already started to give birth.


- Reading
This is what lets you make sense of that colorful little sticker on the side of the machine. Do you see that large-font label, right next to the diagram of the guy with a few highlighted muscle groups? This is what we call the 'name of the machine.' Name examples you may see around you are 'biceps curl,' 'triceps extension,' 'ab crunch,' and 'leg extension.'

Once you've looked around the weight room and gotten yourself acquainted, you may have noticed that we are lacking a few machines. I'm sorry - this is a YMCA, and thus may not be as well-funded as your last gym. As such, the following machines are not available at this time.
- picking nails and staring off into space
- looking into the mirror with an expression of profound mid-life-crisis despair
- talking about offspring
- playing with an iPod/iPhone
- flirting

I know that the 'flirting' machine is in especially high demand, and I applaud your valiant effort to make do by repurposing the machines for obliques, pecs, rear deltoids, chin-ups, and lateral pulls. However, you may find that with a little ingenuity, the seats off to the side can be used just as well as a substitute for all of the currently-unavailable machines listed above. As an added bonus, using the sidelines seating area does not result in the rest of the lifters in the room trying to aerate your skull via mind bullets.




I hope this helps! If you need anything else, I'll be the girl with the short blond hair and black-and-pink fingerless gloves, dodging your fist as you stretch your muscular, godlike arms by swinging them without looking.

*Scene - e_corgi 's party and pig-roast extravaganza*

e_corgi : *coming up to my table* Hey, [new_fedora ]. I pulled this out of the pig's head. What is it?
me: *looks up from a beer* Is- is that smeared on bread?
e_corgi : Yeah, but you took anatomy. What is it?
me: *exasperated* It's a smear. How am I supposed to know?
e_corgi : *helpfully* It tastes like butter!
me: YES. BECAUSE I TASTED ALL OF MY CADAVERS.
e_corgi : . . . :(
me: . . fine. Show me where you found it.
e_corgi : :D !


Brainstem tastes like butter, ladies and gentlemen.

Here's the rules for playing with this toy. You turn off the music on the first video, keep in on with the second.

Here's mine, but every last one of you has to try thing thing out. It's great.

chocobo :D

I'm studying, and you know what that means?

Yup. Meme time.

Look up the date of your birthday in Wikipedia. From the date page, pick three interesting historical events that occurred on that date, two births, and one death.

(links included, since I tried to pick things that Kate Beaton would make comics about would be cool to read about. )

1805 - Muhammad Ali became Wāli of Egypt.

1902 - Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais discovers the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient mechanical analog computer.

1970 - Thor Heyerdahl sets sail from Morocco on the papyrus boat Ra II to sail the Atlantic Ocean.



1682 - Bartholomew Roberts, Welsh pirate (d. 1722)

1749 - Edward Jenner, English medical researcher (d. 1823)



1829 - John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States (b. 1745)




Man, that last one was hard. so many interesting people died on my birthday.

Quarter's end approaches, and with it a slew of tests. My life is best summarized in brief:

I seriously just need to get a Twitter for the nerdy, stupid, should-not-be humorous things that snipafist  and I say. I just caught the fellow singing the latest Heroes-inspired ditty:

Spiderman, spiderman,
Has a centrifuge in his lab.
Sleeps with tards no one knows;
Gets real strong and he rips off clothes.
Look out! Here comes spiderman!


Giving credit where credit's due, e_corgi  came up with the first two lines and has been singing them delightedly for the past two weeks. But the rest of the magic is new, as far as I know.

It occurs to me that I could be a more faithful blogger, until I remember that what I'm doing right now is a series of things that nobody holds an especial interest in. The things that hold the most conversational value in my day-to-day study are also the things unsuited for dinner-table conversation, the interesting inquinal hernia in gross anatomy lab or the details of a particularly novel carcinoma. The retelling of everything else relies on a specialized vocabulary that most of my friends and family just lack, to the point where relating anything of interest that I've studied requires a preface that is at least twice as long as whatever anecdote I wanted to share.

A study reported in the March 2008 issue of Academic Medicine followed medical students from matriculation through graduation and found a significant decrease in vicarious empathy (i.e. a visceral empathic response) during the course of the students' schooling. I can't say that I'm surprised. There seems to be a process of isolation inherent in this type of education, one that operates at a very basic level. There came a point where I recognized the futility of trying to explain the better part of my day to most of the people I know. I could tell them about the newest metabolic pathway I'd learned about in biochemistry, or the interesting points I took away from the speaker on arthroscopic surgery, but outside of the context of study these things lose all popular interest. "I read about how chemicals interact," is what people hear. "I listened to a man talk about performing a shoulder surgery that uses a tiny little camera." The details are tiresome, as they should be to anyone with no deep interest in the field. But without details, most of what I do on a daily basis is meaningless.

I know that the communication divide is only going to get worse. So I glean what I can, the anecdotes and useful general facts. I generalize, I laugh off the inevitable eye-rolls when I forget myself and fall back into jargon. People ask what I've done today and I say, "studying." I remember full well two hours wrist-deep in viscera and an hour rediscovering the minutae of endocrine cells and a long group session spent arguing over a hypothetical diabetic, and I'm still not lying when I chuff a not-quite-laugh and add, "Yeah. Nothing interesting. "



However, everyone should be able to get into the fact that there's now a small quantity of fresh ink in my dermis. Check it out.

( dagaz )

I'm still in medical school, despite my catastrophic fears of failing spectacularly/being voted off the island/spontaneously combusting within the first month. Things are really starting to pick up speed -- I'm finally in gross anatomy lab proper, and now that I'm past the initial session of "I am skinning! :D / I AM TAKING OFF A PERSON'S SKIN. D: ", everything is the business of usual of compulsively consulting atlases, clearing fascia, cursing the muscle groups that exist as little more than tendon on a very old man, teasing out nerves, and did I mention clearing fascia? I've learned to get used to the smell when I am in lab, and have learned to love vigorous scrubbing, double-washing my hair, incense, and perfume when I am out of lab. Judging by my impressions of the rest of my class, I'm not the only one -- a lot of us seem to be taking pains to define ourselves in opposition to the newfound experience of driving home with the stale-sweet chemical smell of preservatives clinging to our hair and sunk into every square centimeter of our sinus cavities.

-----

snipafist : *indicating a car with a liscense plate reading JESUS9* I wonder how Jesus would feel about having his name branded across the back end of a Kia Sportage?
new_fedora : I like to imagine that the person driving that car is the producer of an anime called "Jesus 9!" It would probably have Jesus and eight disciples piloting fighting robots.
snipafist : Perhaps you're forgetting that Xenosaga has already been made.

I began medical school this week. I feel that it's too early to make any sort of assessment yet, but I'm enjoying things that I didn't anticipate that I'd enjoy, which I take as a good sign. There are a bunch of lovely people in my class, and the courses are daunting, but not overwhelming. Here goes nothing.

* * * * *

At my husband's behest, I was relating bits and pieces of Egyptian mythology while I drove us around on errands, and came to the never-ending slapfight contendings of Horus and Set, including the semantic ambiguity as to whether or not Set was, at some point, actually impregnated.

"How does that feel?" I asked, partially out of curiosity but mostly with no intent but gleeful malice. "To know that one of the great luminary civilizations invented Mpreg?" (NSFW)

He was silent a moment, looking out the window, then replied soberly. "It feels discouraging." He nodded a little, as if confirming the fact to himself. "You can't fight an evil like that. Its roots are too deep."

WOOO-OAH! CAT WITH TWO HEADS FACES!