sharpie

I love the many ways you can easily identify PT students. A good sign is a green Rehab Med lanyard hanging out of their back pocket just waiting to be commented on. Another one is that PT students are always carrying around a box of bones for at least the next two weeks. We have open bone labs, so you'll see us lugging around either a rectangular clear plastic bin with a number written on top or a rectangular ghetto cardboard box with a number on top. It's quite easy to spot actually. More signs include that PT students palpate themselves on the bus 95% more often than the general public, especially if they're reviewing lecture notes. Then might even lift their arm up randomly and poke at their armpit, but don't worry they're not looking to surface palpate the inferior aspect of the head of the humerus, their armpit is just itchy. This one's time limited, but PT students just recently had a biomechanics lab, and as such, were required to identify some structures and draw the axes of rotation of major joints with a permanent marker. If you were looking at a student and you see a dot right in the center between their collarbones, that's a PT student. If you're like my doctor who was examining three blue moles on my left hand, don't worry it's not melanoma, you just have to finish my health assessment because I'm a PT student.

So on the topic of permanent markers, Cool Calm Pete has this epic line in his song Lost which goes: "It's like you write with a Sharpie / you made a fine point". I'm not sure why that line is so etched into my mind right now, but every time I hear it I get excited. I just think it's really clever, that's all.

Tangential offshoot of our discussion together: I think that if there was a drug category I could get addicted to real easily, it would be opiates. I find my mood of the day is largely dependent on whether or not I get an endorphin rush from my run, and I'm wondering if this is an addiction type thing to the feel-good ways of endogenous opiates. They probably don't act in the exact same manner, but I'm speculating that there'd be some transferability in the results and their addictive potential.

I hate to say something really lame like this, but I feel more and more like Henry as the days go by. I run every morning, I feel older than everyone else, and as he says to Ben, "I like opiates." I often think Henry is my escape when I'm not interested in being myself, just because he's so darn complex and so incredibly cool.

Food for thought: When I'm chasing Henry, am I running towards a tangible goal or am I running away from myself?