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?

TTT

How to play Time Traveler Trivia (TTT):

1. Assemble a group of friends who are fanatical about Time Traveler's Wife.

2. Obtain a copy of Time Traveler's Wife - either your own or from one of your fanatical friends.

3. The person who has read Time Traveler's Wife the most times goes first. Peruse your dog-eared copy of the book and find a piece of trivia that you will ask your friends. For example:

Easy: "What is the name of Claire's mother?" (Answer: Lucille)
Difficult: "What is Gomez's real name?" (Answer: Jan Gomolinski)
Very difficult: "What is the name of the dish that Henry makes when he meets Charisse and Gomez for the first time?" (Answer: Chicken and shiitake risotto with winter squash and pine nut dressing)

You can tailor the difficulty of the question to suit your companions.

4. Ask away. The person who gets the question right gets to receive the book and ask a question of their own. If nobody answers your question correctly, inform them of the correct answer and ask another question. If nobody gets the question right after two questions are asked, you pass the book to the next person and it is their turn to ask.

5. Play until exhausted.

X

Those who know me know that I love The Time Traveller's Wife with all my heart. I'm going on my tenth full reading right now from front to back, specifically to refresh myself before seeing the movie which will be coming out on August 14th, featuring Rachel McAdams of Notebook fame and Eric Bana. I've seen the trailer, and I'm not going to lie, it's possibly going to be one of those movie adaptations of the book that you just wish they never made. Look, I hate those people that are always like, "You should read the book it's always better" because that's not true, sometimes the movie is better than the book, but in this case they would have to do something truly Jesus + Goku + Obama + Schwarzenegger + Rocky Balboa miraculous to save this one. I'm really going to hate it when people who have just seen the movie read the book and then it becomes a huge overrated hype when the book came out long ago and deserved your respect when it first came out.



Rant over.

Everytime I read The Time Traveller's Wife, I always notice something different which makes the book profoundly amazing. For example, I just realized how much Henry likes Helen but he never ever gets with her because he stays with Claire. Anyways, I also notice every single time I read the book that I don't understand the German poet Rilke. At all. The Hundreds discussed a tee that hosted a Rilke tribute and The Time Traveller's Wife features Rilke about a half of a dozen times throughout, so at least pop culturally his influence seems to be rather large. Maybe I'm just not as much of an intellect that is required to understand Rilke, or maybe I'm just not aesthetically sensitive enough to acquire this taste, but I have consistently had my difficulties and I wonder if that will ever pass.



I must admit, however, that I recently found myself relating to one of his lines. At one point, Claire and Henry are discussing religion and science. Henry talks about St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed in both Aristotle and angels, and tried to move towards synthesizing order and reason and God, much like I am trying to do so. I have always said I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive, but it's very difficult to find rational evidence beyond faith and conjecture that the two worlds intertwine. Realists want cold, hard evidence that is scientifically based, and aren't willing to believe that the scientific method is just that - a method - and that many things can fall outside the bounds as simple confounds of being unable to be measured by the scientific method. Anything beyond that is just blind faith and deemed to be ignorance, and it really doesn't help that some people truly ARE ignorant about believing in God and haven't really thought it over, which gives people that have mulled it over a bad name. I really do think God is a confound, and a beautiful one. Speculation, perhaps, but hey I'm entitled to an opinion.

Which leads me to Rilke:

Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Every angel is terrifying.

Maybe only Rilke would think to make the central star of Touched By An Angel and Angels in the Outfield terrifying, as if with one word he could spin an entire stereotype of what an angel should be 180 degrees. What a powerful line, that an angel in all its glory and majesty can be such a powerful symbol for turning our world of apathy and Bill 44s on its ear.

have time, will travel

I just finished watching S. Darko, the sequel to 2001's cult classic Donnie Darko. While Donnie Darko featured Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore and the younger, less mature versions of zomg Seth Rogen and Ashley Tisdale (omg really?!), this time around it's Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) from Gossip Girl and Nathan Scott (James Lafferty) from One Tree Hill holding fort.

Look, I love movies about time travel, I'm a total sucker for them. There's just something so mysterious about wormholes and relativity, physics and the chance to do something all over again. I mean look at all these movies: Butterfly Effect, Click, Donnie Darko, Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban, Primer, The Jacket, Star Trek - time travel is their one commonality. Why is Time Traveller's Wife my favourite book? ZOMG I'm onto something!

What interests me the most about time travel is what I was talking to Ian a few days ago when he was talking to me and Jen about the upcoming Terminator movie. Apparently John Connor has to go back in time to when his dad was a kid to create an alternate reality. Basically Ian and I were discussing the two theories of time travel:

1. You can go back in time, but events are predetermined. Anything you do has no effect because everything that comes in the future has been predecided. There is no free will, a philosophical position known as determinism. In Time Traveller's Wife, there's this part where Henry comes from the future and is in the position to determine whether his father will walk in on him and himself naked, but no matter what he does, the door will always be unlocked and his father will always open the door. In the same way, he is never able to change the car crash that kills his mother, even if he tries to stop it.

2. You can go back in time and create an alternate path for events to follow. Basically, if an event happened, you could theoretically go back and change things so that it wouldn't happen. Most of the successful movies have gone with this theory. In this new path, there are consequences, but at least you can change what you didn't wish to happen.

So I think I'm going to start an entire time travel movie marathon now.

dennis the menace pt. I

I apologize for the late Friday post - obviously I do have a life and I would hope that on a Friday night I wouldn't be blogging but would actually be out, you know, doing things. Case in point, I had a really busy day yesterday, so let's get to the mayhem now, shall we?

First off, I want to start with a few maintenance-type issues: I've been receiving a few concerns that people are having difficulty commenting? If you should feel the urge to voice your appreciation that I tackled a certain subject, disagree with me wholeheartedly on my verbal blasphemy, or simply want to spam my comments box with ads proclaiming you are a Nigerian president and need my credit card number to transfer funds, please scroll down to under my post and click comments. You'll receive a comment box where you can type your information, then to post it, click on the list beside "Comment as" and select either your ID type (if you're an existing blogger), Name/URL (if you're not an existing blogger but just want to comment), or Anonymous (if you're one of those silent types that likes to remain secretive about your creeping.

Moving on, you'll notice I added a list on the side pertaining to Heschl's Gyrus, which happens to be the primary auditory cortex in the brain. I chose it to be eloquent, since it's the first point of interaction with your brain that auditory stimulation makes (note I said BRAIN not CNS, don't get all semantic on me neuro kids), but I suppose I could substitute Wernicke's & Broca's Area for the language content, planum temporale for pitch perception, or even the whole right hemisphere for prosody? That's not the point though, the point is this section is so you can share my terrible taste in music. I'll try to keep it up-to-date with everything I'm interested in at the moment. I was actually driving over to Mag's house and The Clash's Rock The Casbah came on full force via The Bear, bringing up years of nostalgia. Will Smith sampled it in Will2K, which was a song that in itself defined a generation. The Clash was just a phenomenal band that really questioned the integrity of mainstream music during their day, and have been timelessly idolized in modern day pop culture from Gilmore Girls to Time Traveller's (and you thought I couldn't go a post without giving a nod to Niffenegger).

henry

As I was showering this morning, I found myself where I usually find myself when I'm thinking about myself. That is, I ended up floating in third person omniscient, and while this could very well be a case for depersonalization, I feel that I'm simply exercising a product of consciousness. That being said, when I was examining myself and the status I am at and the identity I have carved out for myself, it struck me that I reminded myself of someone I knew. Of course, he's a fictional character, but I found myself sympathizing with Henry DeTamble (omg just a moment, that was SO cool he has his own myspace!) from Time Traveller's Wife.

Audrey Niffenegger puts Henry down as a modern age Pheidippides in a time-travelling, punk-loving, Rilke-quoting librarian body (with a casual attitude toward opoids as an added twist). Okay, so let's analyze this: I don't time travel I don't listen to punk I don't read Rilke I don't do drugs I am not a librarian. So then what is it about Henry that I associate with?

How lovely process of elimination is. Niffenegger uses this consistent metaphor throughout the book of Henry running, running, running. He's always behind, as if he is chasing everything: "Had we but world enough, and time...". Let us superimpose this upon me, and we find that I too am running, running, running. I too am behind, I too chase everything, Mr. DeTamble: "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near". We are old friends with Mr. Rabbit and his pocketwatch, with Salvador Dalí and his melting clocks, with JT and Madonna as they count down four minutes and nothing more.

As Mrs. Jones says, "Ain't no time two people staring at each other, or standing still, loving both with their eyes are equal." She then pauses a moment, then remarks, "Who's chasing?" The answer is here: I am chasing the world, I am chasing time and I am chasing myself. I am always chasing, because there are always places to be and I cannot run as fast as you, Edward Cullen. I am chasing the money to afford a mortgage, a family, a puppy. I am chasing health so that one day we may live in said house and live till we are both old and happily confused. I am scrambling after knowledge which seems to elude me as my friends and colleagues get their acceptance letters to medicine, law, Julliard. I struggle behind those before me who have scraped out a path towards opera, to photography, to friendship, to physical affection, to paintball, to strength, to motivation and being the best you can be.

You see, I run in all directions, yet at the same time find myself traversing to no point. I am Zeno's paradox in human form. I am relative to everything, yet absolute to nothing.

Or am I?

What I forgot, is that I am also chasing love. It is the first of my priorities, yet at the same time it is the last thing to reach on my list. Why? Because when I get all these things I am chasing, I want to bring them to the most important thing I am chasing, which is you my love, so that you can see that I have traversed the whole world, through barriers and space and time to bring you these things I have chased for and to share them with you. I want only just to stand next to you with these so that I am absolute, corporeal, tangible. You and I, superimposed as a single point, a fixed entity, so that people can regale, "There they are, not chasing anymore, because they are together." You and I drawing the line that is our future, together from Point A to Point B. Eluding everything because now that we are together with everything we have ever wanted, now that you and I are comfortable and I have foreseen to bringing you everything you could ever wish for, now that I have fulfilled my role as your soulmate and soon-to-be-husband, everyone will be chasing us.

Though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.