Lots of activity this weekend…first, one of my classmates got married in beautiful, beautiful Marin County, and the wedding was tremendous fun…we had to traverse a cow pasture to get to the wedding site:

The cow patties weren’t much of a problem, but after V said her vows, several of these guys decided to voice their approval:

They had a cake decorating contest for their wedding cake, readers who read what guests wrote about love and marriage, a Latin-American flava band (thanks to her Peace Corps connections), and home-grown and bottled wine. V’s mom, who despite being crazed with all the wedding planning, found time to embroider blankets for each of the JMP graduates, and I’m so glad the bride even found a moment to say “hi” to me.

I had not one, but six pieces of wedding cake, of the 11 cakes available (designed and decorated by various guests.) We danced all night long. It was cold, so I wore socks. Ignore the geeky dancing and admire the socks-n-sandals combo!

The next day, we managed to drag our butts out of bed and ran the Bay to Breakers. Or rather, managed to finish the race without getting hit by flying tortillas. I was surprised by the fact I finished considering how much I drank the night before. (Yeah, I just recently learned that the “headaches” I get the day after drinking actually are “hangovers”. Whatev. I also figured out what an “eye opener” was after realizing that I felt better after the race after drinking some more.) We ran behind some dude dressed up as “Tarzan” in a leopard-print thong, for probably about a mile and a half of the race, and I couldn’t help but stare at his sixty-year old saggy butt cheeks the whole time. Joe also saw a penis ramming a vagina. Pictures too graphic to post directly, but you can go to Amy’s site to see some more amazing costumes or complete lack thereof.

Our apartment has been taken over with boxes! It’s a lot of work, as you can clearly see by how tuckered out Manzie is from all her “helping.”

Whoa, that was weird to write…”I’m a doctor.” Graduation was pretty nice — before we walked onto the stage, they entrusted us with the tremendous task of lining ourselves up semi-alphabetically according to a list of names posted on two columns in the basement of Masonic Hall. How many soon-to-be doctors does it take to alphabetize 150 soon-to-be-doctors? 150 of them! (silence as my joke drops to the floor.) After we were all anointed with our MD hoods and outfitted like 13th century barons, about 30 of us got up on stage to say the first line of the Oath in our “native” languages. I just loved butchering “I swear, to the best of my ability and judgment, to fulfill this covenant” in Cantonese.

The highlight of graduation for my dad probably wasn’t me graduating…it wasn’t even getting to shake Dean David Kessler’s hand (former head of the FDA)…it was meeting Kevin McCarthy, whom my dad immediately recognized from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and other random t.v. shows of the 60’s and 70’s. I guess Mr. McCarthy was there for his step-granddaughter, who was in my class. How my dad recognized him and proceeded to make a beeline towards this man who was sitting in the corner of the reception room is beyond me.

Sort of.  I mean, there will be other lectures and noon-time conferences and workshops and maybe even teach-ins to attend.  And I have the suspicion that I will be back in the classroom probably doing some teaching of some sort, too, but even so.  The last Powerpoint presentation for at least another 4 weeks was finished today, and I was so ready for it!  Lots of partying, packing and graduatin’ to do over the next several days.

Also, I am having two beauty issues.  (1) The mortarboard.  The flat hat thingy you’re supposed to wear at graduation. It smooshes my bangs down into my eyeballs.  I could cut my bangs short, but then I look like a third grader.  The last several graduations where I had to wear a mortarboard, this didn’t seem to be an issue because there was a frog attached to my first hat, and the International Space Station was affixed to the second, so the state of my bangs was a secondary issue.  This time, graduation appears to be a rather stiff, formal affair.  (2) The bites I got from the bed bugs in Guatemala are still as red and inflammed and itchy as ever.  I’ve been applying hydrocortisone like there’s a shortage at Walgreen’s.  But they’re still itchy and big and red.  How friggin’ long is this going to take?

We’ve been having some ridiculously great weather in the bay area, and on Sunday, we hosted brunch outside on our deck. In fact, it was almost too hot, but Joe made an orange-lemon sorbet that we scooped into glasses of prosecco, topped with a mint leaf, and everything was a-okay.

The only sad thing is that our apartment is a heat-retaining box in the summer, and with every single window flung open, it still was not enough to bring the temperature under 95 degrees Fahrenheit in there. The cats spent all day prostrate on the hardwood. Every time we looked at Manzie on the floor, she would look up and make accusatory meowing sounds. This weekend, we also had a JMP dinner at another classmate’s house, and the food was Guatemalan-themed and yummy.

I don’t know how to chip in. Joe’s been doing most of the packing. He wrapped all the picture frames up, all the good china and vases, and he’s packed and shipped all our books and DVDs by media mail. My biggest contribution has been putting my shoes and purses in a box and taping it shut. I’ve also been rastling with putting our furniture up on Craigslist, which Joe thinks is a big waste of time: he thinks the amount of money you get for each item isn’t worth the hassle, which I am beginning to agree with. There was a woman who scuffed my walls and put a huge dent in the stairwell when her boyfriend lugged my file cabinet downstairs, and then proceeded to stiff me for the wine rack I sold her (she handed me a wad of one dollar bills that was about $20 short of what we agreed upon). There was the woman who made me babysit her daughter as she ran off in her Mercedes SUV for a latte, and then tried to bargain down what was already cheap furniture to even cheaper furniture. There was the dude (who was actually quite nice) who I helped take apart a bookshelf in the middle of the street at night — I kept on thinking if he wasn’t so nice, he might just put that screwdriver through my skull. There was the other dude who said he’d swing by on a Wednesday night and didn’t pop up until four days later, but he turned out to be totally normal: didn’t try to rip me off, didn’t put dents in my walls, didn’t try to make me babysit his offspring. Ahh, Craigslist, where-oh-where do all you Craigslisters come from?

We gathered this morning at the conference center, and at 9 AM on the nose, with friends and family all around, they let us open our envelopes. Contrary to my fears that I matched at Disneyland or in forensic pathology, I matched at my first choice, and we’re going back to Boston! A lot of my classmates were lucky enough to match at their top choices, too, and there was much celebrating and happiness.  It’s a wonderful relief to know where I’ll be for the next three years, and I’m ready for the change. Of course, it’s 65 degrees and a sunny blue-sky day here in San Francisco, so it’s making it awfully hard for me to feel as excited as I should be to go back to Massachusetts.

Joe and I are watching Pulp Fiction right now, which isn’t exactly a celebration movie, but a little bit of stylized violence seems just as randomly appropriate at this moment as any other.

Happy Halloween. I should have taken a picture of Amy’s costume. It had a fan in the caboose to keep it inflated!

The point of the cheap gray suit and the mustachios on Joe was to make him look like Borat, the TV journalist from Kazakstan, a.k.a. Sacha Baron Cohen. And his movie is coming out on Friday, and, to paraphrase the Pointer Sisters, I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it. Although I think Joe was a little less than thrilled to be dressed up as Borat. I would have gladly done it, except when you slap a moustache on me, I look less like a tall vaguely Jewish man impersonating a Kazak, and more like a small Asian woman impersonating Frito Bandito.

My mom turns…35…today. Yes. Happy birthday!!! I have an old picture of her as a baby, wearing a white frock and looking kind of cranky, circa…black and white photography times…but I can’t get my scanner to work. But this is a more recent photo, taken at the wedding:

My mom has this kind of strange and amazing obsession with sports, and I have no idea where it came from, since my dad knows jack squat about any sport, and my brothers and I didn’t grow up particularly athletic or sports-crazed. I remember Peter doing a lot of round-house kicks aimed at Tony, after watching Walker, Texas Ranger, on T.V. And I had a very brief and glorious middle school career as a stopper on a town soccer league, but that’s about it. Mostly, I just ran, as did my brothers, since this involved not very much teamwork and not very much coordination or athletic “stuff” like balls or sticks. My mom’s main involvement with our athletic endeavors was picking us up from practice or telling us to eat more protein and milk.

But she likes all sorts of organized sports. Primarily baseball, football and basketball. She listens to sports radio, uses her TiVo to record games, and knows the stats on a lot of the major teams and players. She asked me about last weekend’s Giants game, since she only got the tail end of it, and I was like, “Giants? Football? For Cleveland? Huh-wah-hoo?” My brother got her tickets for a Red Sox game this summer, but in addition to being an obsessive sports fanatic, my mom is a cheap, obsessive sports fanatic. She refused the ticket because it was too expensive! She’s one of those people who can manage to put together 3 different coupons at a Macy’s sale to buy something on clearance, and they will end up owing her $4.32 as a result. It’s hard getting her Christmas presents because you have to convince her you got it on discount, with a coupon, at a garage sale. In any case, happy birthday, Mommy, and I know you think the best birthday present from your daughter will be seeing me study hard and getting into residency, preferably closer to home, so I can live at home and it’ll be cheaper that way.

This may sound awful, but I don’t know my dad’s birthday. It’s either February X or February Y, and since we never celebrate it and he doesn’t even really ever remember, we just kind of throw cards at him, buy him a cake and eat noodles during that general time period. (Noodles = longevity, for Ye Olde Chinese Superstitions.) I remember him once explaining that they went by the Chinese lunar calendar back then in those black-and-white photography days. So his birthday on the Christian calendar is something of an estimate, or so he claimed. Hmm. I’m a little suspicious, because my dad also says Ben & Jerry’s makes organic canned chicken.

Hey everyone, Joe turns 27 today! Still a young ‘un. I was getting ready this morning, and heard him wake up and walk down the hall singing, “Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me.”

Hey honey, you can lick all the batter you want today! Just don’t get salmonella.