I Like White People!

Life continues to throw us around like rag dolls out here in NYC. We have been busy with school and work and a continuous stream of visitors, beginning with my sister’s surprise visit about a month ago. Her second visit to NY since our move, she seemed to be a bit more relaxed about the neighborhood and we had a lot of fun and many mango margaritas (minus the one Dan sloshed across the dinner table and then attempted to hoover clean with his mouth).

About a week after my sister was here, Dan's Uncle Rob came to Long Island for a quick business trip. It was snowing/sleeting/freezing raining all day, but the trains were working, so we were able to get out there and meet him for a Friday night dinner. We spent quite a while in pleasant conversation, mediated by good wine and lots of seafood. By the time we were finished, there were about 5 inches of snow. Yikes! But the roads were plowed okay and he gave us a ride to the train station. From this nice reprieve we went back to Brooklyn, with its work and school obligations.

School for me is a lot like prison: we are in the same, windowless room for 8 hours of lecture a day, trying with all our might not to let the other 30 people in the room get on our nerves while attempting to commit an entire textbook of medicine to memory. I have one more semester of academics to conquer this summer, after which we start our clinical rotations. Hopefully this will lend itself to a more regular, somewhat enjoyable kind of existence. It's not all so serious: some of my friends from school and I did take one night early this week to do some extracurricular activities at a certain bar in NYC; this was a much needed reprieve and we were only slightly hazy the next morning.

Quick subway story: riding home the other day there was a little black girl, maybe six years old who I was playing hide-and-seek with…very cute. As she was getting off she waved to me, I waved back and she proclaimed very loudly to her mother: “Mommy, I like white people!” Score one for the white people!

In other news, we are considering the installation of a revolving door to accommodate the visitor traffic we are experiencing. Rachel was here again for one night. We went out to a new place in the city that only serves mac n’ cheese. Also making an appearance were our bird friends Ben and Jara. They were here this week while I was on spring break and Dan’s brother, Alan, has finally made an appearance after many close calls in the past. They all overlapped for one night making the overnight total in our apartment five…we set a record! Next week we expect Tom and Ellen, followed by Ragan and finally Dan’s sister Gayle. At this point we will put up the “No Vacancy” sign and I leave mid-May to flip the tables and become a houseguest myself in Portland for about 10 days. Dan has a lot of stuff going on, too, but I will leave you all now to allow him to expound upon his teaching, gigs, food choices and baseball obsession.