I See Dead People

You are all aware that I started PA school at the end of May, thus the absence of Bird blogs of late. Well, I happen to have a rare opportunity to write up our adventures, being that I just finished my first anatomy test (3 hours for written, 2 hours for practical) and I am actually home before 7:30pm. The test went well, by the way, although I won’t have the results until tomorrow, after which I will not be disclosing that information to anyone. Usually I have 12 hour days filled with anatomy lecture, a 3 hour gross anatomy lab, an hour for lunch then class until 5pm. After class we (my friends Kim and Lauren and I) can be found in The Hole (the room in the library where we hunker down) scrambling to complete assignments and reading and studying for the next day. Weekends also find me in either the cadaver lab, at a study session or at a blood drive earning some book money because it seems we have a new $50 book to buy every week. If you find that this sounds like a lot of boring work, I can assure you it is. It’s very hard, but also challenging and fun at times. I am also happy to report I have only cried once during the last three weeks and it mostly had to do with my frustration at not having time to go to Target. (see list below)
So what about Dan, you might ask? Dan has been great, making me dinners (some experimental) and lunches and doing the grocery shopping, laundry and most of the cleaning. He usually even does the dishes and cleans up after me when I go into study mode and forget to clean up after myself. (see list below)
He’s also been working a bit at Mannes and playing gigs randomly.
Oh, and it’s getting hot back here. And let me tell you that the hotter it gets in Brooklyn, the worse it smells. And the hotter I get and the worse everyone and everything around me smells, the angrier I get. Enter Dan and his A/C installation magic; he slaved away and now it’s nice and cool and somewhat bearable in Brooklyn.
In other news, we will be getting a shipment of birds (four of them!) from our friends Ben & Jara on Sunday because they will be in Alaska at a Music camp Jara works at every summer. The blessed event is scheduled for this Sunday until July 4th. Pictures to follow, of course…it will be a bit of a mad house. A Mad Bird House, if you will.
In conclusion, I will leave you with a list to give you a better understanding of my life now that I am in school. Should you see these signs in anyone you know, at least you can attribute it to something justifiable instead of insanity. Enjoy.

You may be in PA school if:
1. You never get home before 7:30 in the evening.
2. Your spouse just hands you food like the passing of a baton on your way in the door and leaves you alone to study for the rest of the night.
3. Your habits go from meticulously neat and tidy to leaving yogurt cups and cereal bowls lonely and abandoned in the place you were last studying.
4. Charts and graphs of anatomical origin pop up on bathroom mirrors, walls and cupboards in order to facilitate studying while flossing/cleaning/doing the dishes.
5. You only have one dream: your anatomy professor pointing out structure after structure on your cadaver and demanding, with increasing vehemence, “what is this? WHAT IS THIS?!”
6. When you wake up in the middle of the night you actually consider reaching over your sleeping spouse to get at your anatomy notes just to check that your answers in your dream were correct.
7. You feel guilty for taking a shower because that time could be spent studying.
8. You have a three-minute window between studying and sleeping and God help the person who interrupts this precious time.
9. It doesn’t bother you when someone taps you on the shoulder in your gross anatomy lab and it turns out to be the outstretched arm of the cadaver behind you.
10. It’s been three weeks since you’ve been to Target. Or any other store, for that matter.