Everything works out in the end.

Everything works out in the end.

The only thing that makes our lives feel truly substantive is the pain and suffering we feel from loss or longing. I've spent a great deal of time feeling those things; many would say I've felt them for too long. Earlier in my life I could feel nothing else, and it was a common fight to convince myself that such a life was worth the trouble of waking up for.

But then, I've felt happiness as well. And like a man stranded in a desert, I drank up as much as I could hold. I loved so hard that I went blind, and forgot what pain felt like. And I lost the ability to deal with that pain as well, because to someone that has spent so much time thinking, just thinking endlessly about what it means to be alive and to suffer, ignorance is nothing but blissful.

And, you know, I thought it meant everything had finally worked out. I thought it meant I could finally relax and coast through life, never again having to worry about the problems that plagued me years before. But I was wrong. Like a storm, it all came back to me, as if I'd flown too high and burnt my wings.

Everything works out in the end.

So many nights in the past couple months, I've walked or driven through the night, unable to sleep, telling myself that. Sometimes it makes me feel better, but sometimes I feel myself lying. Sometimes I feel like things will only work out for me when my life is over, an end that is overbearingly feasible. I know the difference between one year ago and today, and things have only gotten worse. My best friends are far away, I'm leaving my homes, I'm ridden with anxiety and sadness, I can't sleep at night and can barely eat during the day, and there's no one anymore who can make me feel loved or wanted or important or real. I thought everything had worked out?

If you can't love yourself then no one else can. That's the lesson, that's it. It's what I need to do. But it's hard. And I don't know where to start. I have plenty of positive qualities, and actually my only big negative one is my own negativity. But knowing you're a good person is very, very different from feeling it. And no matter how many good things I've done, it's hard to get past the few bad things without being wracked with guilt and shame.

Everything works out in the end.

There was a point in my life where I wanted nothing more than to be done with this life and this world. And I told this to myself every day, every time I had a momentary daydream of walking in front of a car or being shot by a psychopath in a mall. I told myself, "That's not what I want. That would stop my pain but it would prevent me from all the good things that have yet to happen in my life. And those things will happen, because everything works out in the end." And it got me through it. It got me through it. It got me through everything. There was a point in my life where I could see nothing but pain and it's over, I finished it, why is it coming back? Haven't I learned anything? What the fuck am I supposed to do this time?

Tell myself the exact same goddamn thing, that's what, because it's fucking right.

Everything works out in the end. I'm a good person, whether I feel like it every day or once a week, it's true. I am worthy of someone's appreciation, someone's admiration, someone's love. There will be days when  I feel that my life isn't what I want, there may even be days when I feel that my life is hopeless, or worthless, or some foolish masochistic journey that I'm putting myself through for God knows why. But that's wrong. No life is hopeless or worthless. Every life is worth living, if one can appreciate it. And that includes mine. Every minute I spend appreciating myself, what I've done, and what I'm going to do, is a minute worth having lived. And we make those experiences ourselves. And so I tell myself:

Everything works out in the end. It might not be done working out right now, but any good moment is one worth waiting for. If I just wait and work toward it, I'll come by those good moments again. Because everything works out in the end.

Haha, oh wow.

So much for being back out of retirement, I've been gone for forever. No more promises I guess. I'm just gonna post a song today that I've been kind of addicted to.

I got accepted into medical school, hence some of my sudden busy-ness, and I've also been mucking around getting my summer job set up. That all being right after I graduated from college and my girlfriend and I broke up. Overall it's been pretty crazy lately.

This song is by Every Time I Die. Now, that's gotta be one of my least favorite band names in the world, but ETID's last two albums were insanely amazing, delivering the hard kind of metal that will rock you without containing useless screams and vapid lyrics. I'm posting the lyrics to this song too, so if you'd like, read them and you might find that they're pretty fucking deep. Their best album, in my humble opinion, is their latest: New Junk Aesthetic. This song is, however, from the preceding The Big Dirty. Enjoy.



Oh lord, I am saved
Judge says I am fit to swing
'bout time I have prayed
My woman just might wear my ring


Oh you know I'm no good
You know I'm no good at court-ordered goodbyes
But when I'm gone, you'll see;
I'll be a better man yet
For the dispossessed get taken back into your arms
Better keep me close to your heart
You'd better keep me close to your heart


The divine had me cornered in a storm
And he let me walk out the front door at the scene of the crime


Hang 'em high; keep your vows brief
Let 'em swing
Make his swindle an art
And if you still believe that men guilty of love can survive,
Then hang 'em high or not at all


Oh you know it gets hard
It just gets so hard going limp in your arms
I am clutching a smoking gun
There is no chance of me walking out of here alive
This is all very literal (Okay, this lyric should not be here, it's stupid)
I can't bring myself around to write an excuse this time


We're liberated by the hearts that imprison us
We're taken hostage by the ones that we break
Throw the book, throw the book


You had me strung up by the tail and you put me back
Hang 'em high; keep your vows brief
Let 'em swing
Make his swindle an art.
And if you still believe that men guilty of love can survive,
Then hang 'em high or not at all


Where did you get the privilege to pardon me?

Bad Year for a Focus

Lab report, research presentation, and an oral exam all in the next two days, I'm posting again anyway. Aren't you all special. :)

I thought I'd share a random little story:

So I have a Ford Focus. Not exactly a sports car, but it certainly gets the job done, and not too shabbily if I may say so myself. But apparently Madison has its own reservations about Foci.

About two months ago, I went out to my car to go... drive it somewhere I guess, and as I got closer to it I noticed that the driver side mirror had been broken. As in, broken the fuck off, hanging by a wire. After staring dumbly at it for a minute, I ended up repairing it with half a roll of duct tape and some tears. Not so bad, and it hung on for highway drives. So I figured, well, at least I got some bad karma out of the way and good luck should be on the horizon.

About two weeks ago, I went out to my car to change parking spots (goddamn 48-hr parking limit). This time, I noticed something else. My windshield was fucked. FUCKED. Like FUCK fucked. Spiderweb cracks made the passenger half nearly opaque. I called up a policeman whom had apparently already noticed the damage and begun filing a report. The theoretical story, according to him, went something like this: some drunk people got drunker, jumped on my car, danced on the hood (what a good cop, he even noted the pattern of one of the shoeprints), and kicked my windshield to death. Also, my tire was flat. Coincidence probably, because why not.

Holy shit, why is that picture so big?

I'm not sure whether my car is having a bad luck streak or is secretly suicidal, but hopefully this shit stops. I can't complain too much, really-- at least all the damage has happened while I was outside the car. I'd rather drunk people kick my windshield than a drunk driver fuck my whole car, and me inside of it.

Still though, come on. I better have a titload of good karma saved up.

Out of Retirement

Okay guys, I've been gone for forever now, but I'm going to get back to making some posts.

Pic unrelated, but a cool tattoo from  crazy-tattoo-designs.com

I've been waitlisted at University of Minnesota Medical School, and hopefully I get in because that's the last application I have that I really care about...

Little bit of venting: I can barely begin to explain how frustrated I am with medical school applications. So many applicants are very qualified people, but the system is so flawed it's ridiculous. Applying to medical school has become much more about self-marketing than real preparation; depending on the med school, an application reviewer will care only about 1) volunteer experience, 2) clinical volunteer experience, or 3) diversity (and I don't just mean personal ethnicity, but moreso work with diverse communities). These are all important things... but are they as important as they seem? Volunteer experience is rarely beneficial to the applicant as far as professional preparation goes (case in point: I spent a while shoveling goat shit for a self-sustaining farm in Milwaukee, which got me nothing but sore shoulders and application points). A "good" applicant spends hundreds of hours doing these useless tasks for free generally not because s/he cares about helping the needy, but rather because they have time on their hands and reply to the countless college emails offering these "opportunities". Clinical volunteer experience? Typically, the only thing a hospital will let you do is deliver packages to patients or man a desk somewhere. Although I'd love to get REAL clinic experience, I have little interest in being free labor for an institution that knows it's taking advantage of pre-med students looking to decorate a CV. Diversity? The most legitimate one for sure, but as a white male, I always have a lot of ground to catch up on here. And it's kind of difficult to convince a reviewer or interviewer that I'm not afraid of minorities.

A brief summary of my application: I've spent over two years doing clinical hepatitis research for patient studies of liver transplantation and immunosuppressive treatment. The summer before last I worked in a biochemical genetics lab to help diagnose metabolic disorders. Last summer I worked 50-60 hrs/week at the university of Cambridge studying parasitology and post-transcriptional gene regulation. For the past year and a half I've been working to design and organize a customized clinic to be built in an underserved sector of Rwanda (being underserved in Rwanda means you've got problems). As per the medical or scientific details of all these projects... I was asked nothing by any of my interviewers.

During one of the interviews, I was asked to present an ethical dilemma that I'd dealt with recently. I drew kind of a blank at first; ethical dilemmas don't exactly occur everyday. But I thought of something. I told her that there was a large rush of encouragement-- through AMSA, Kaplan, word of mouth-- that a competitive medical school applicant showed community service above all else to prove they were worthy of becoming doctors. I told her that I took a risk: I denied this pseudo-educational pre-med path and pursued one that would actually benefit me. I studied, took difficult and extra classes, completed two entirely separate majors, and focused on a few important and effective extracurricular groups rather than passing through one major, doing a bunch of educationally unrelated community service activities and joining every group on campus only to attend monthly meetings and pay dues. I abandoned the traditional "look, I'm going to be a good doctor, see?" idea and went through experiences that would prepare me for my future in medicine and in research.

She gave me a pretty strange look, and was admittedly surprised. She said the admissions board often wondered about the honesty of some applicants when they took the path I didn't. That leap of faith got me waitlisted. Otherwise maybe I would've been rejected... or, hell, maybe accepted. We'll see if they find me to be "good enough" yet.

I should say that I don't blame anyone who took the path I didn't; it's kind of what we're supposed to do. And besides that, there are plenty who took rigorously educational paths while still putting tons of time into community service. I am by no means an unbelievably amazing person compared to the pool of those accepted into good medical schools like this. But I hope my honesty and adhesion to principle is worth enough.

Boy, a whole post without any music videos or anything? Fuck that. Every Time I Die released a new album not to long ago and it's the tits. Take a look at this video, and another song posted below this. If you like some thrashing vocals with solid metal, you'll enjoy ETID.



Okay, one strike against them, I can't embed the first video. You can find it here.

"Morals are simply a matter of time,
And where you lay your head's a question of pride.
But when it's said and done you'll find in the light,
That privilege and wit make me misfortune's child.





And for the other song I like:

Three more songs for you

So I've interviewed for medical school and hopefully I get in... Until then I'm applying for countless research positions in medical science... sigh. And I've got three papers and one midterm... all by Tuesday.

I've already posted a little of these two bands, but you guys could use some more...

A nice little Pink Floyd cover:



Intense, catchy:



Also really catchy, and lighter than the last song::

Quick post.

I just found this band and it's pretty cool. The name is I:Scintilla. Check them out a bit.

I haven't actually watched these videos yet, and I'm currently in a library so I hope the audio isn't bad. If so then woops.

brb

I'm not dead, guys. I have a med school interview on Friday and about twelve million other things to do before next week, so I won't be posting much until this hill is over. Wish me luck, and once I return I'll bring some interesting stuff with me and finally have time to see how all of your blogs are doing.

Just for the hell of it, here is a funny video I found this weekend... I guarantee you'll enjoy it if you're a fellow Minecraft fiend...