"Never let HR interfere with your education" - Arthur

It has been a long few days. Very frustrating, hair-pulling, bikini-waxing, administration-calling, landlord-yelling, traffic-negotiating few days.

Let me start with the first success I've had here.

First off...some of you may remember that on the island, I had difficulties sleeping. It took me months to find a setting in my first apartment that produced a good nights sleep occasionally, and during my fourth semester I never caught a wink of sleep. My grades, energy, and mood suffered enormously. For those that have studied well, its common knowledge that sleep and depression are tightly linked. A person that develops depression often starts having sleep disorders, and a person that develops sleeping disorders may start developing depression.

So when I came down to Miami and started having sleep difficulties again, I was worried. I noticed the pattern suggesting I only woke up between 4-7am. I quickly tried testing out my old theories on the cause of my own sleep problems.
a) noise levels caused by the mini-fridge & window A/C in my room
b) as the temperature rises, it kicks off my physiological 'wake the fuck up' routine.

What tools did I have now that I didn't have on the island, though?

1) Amazon.com
2) credit card

I wanted to order a timer switch (in addition to books and a shiny new case for my shiny new phone) that has programmable hours. Downstream devices turn on and off only within the hours I set. However,  having used mechanical versions of these timers before, I knew they themselves could be annoyingly loud. So I found a silent electronic version (this model) and set it up last night.

I woke up at 8 am this morning. First full 8 hours of sleep in weeks. This is a promising result!

So there you have it.. I prevented depression for $17. Now if I can just write this down as a hypothesis and record some data points, I can write a research paper.


Other one-offs:
1) tap water in miami tastes really wierd. i dont usually use bottled water, but this is the first time I don't feel particularly bad creating plastic waste.

2) Frank's Red Hot Sauce is basically just red sauce. There is no hot in your hot sauce, Frank. I am disappointed. Still tastes decent though.

3) My car's air-conditioner broke again halfway through my 3-day trip to Miami. Arthur, I am disappointed at your attempt towards a repair job. Maybe next time  I will use the actual spray I was supposed to, instead of just grabbing something from my garage >.>

4) At target, I saw 2 lbs of chicken breast sell for $10. At GFS near my hosue, I saw 10 lbs of chicken breast sell for $20. Guess where I bought a months supply of chicken :D

5) I have a tendency to over-salt my chickens while they fry. or bake. or boil. I have yet to broil chickens.

6) I dealt with a nice young man working in the American TD bank that helped me get a credit card. He somehow managed to print the wrong information out four times that I caught by reviewing the application. How do you type a name wrong when you are literally copying it off a driver's licence? Hell, the application only had 14 fields you could input. Not surprisingly, I received a notice yesterday stating the application was rejected because I needed to supply more information.

7) CHS. Center for Haitian Studies. Basically, the organization that handles a large majority of the Ross and AUC students rotating in South Florida. They have 5-6 administrators between then juggling hundreds of students and paperwork, often leaving students in extremely shitty situations. I refer to CHS as the Titanic, because they are one iceberg away from leaving hundreds of students floundering. Also, because CHS lacks lifeboats. And also because I'm in the mood to watch Titanic again.

Yes Titanic, I kind of noticed that you knew my scheduled location for a month and didn't tell me until the last possible day, after everyone had already rented a place to stay that may be up to 2 hours away from their clinic. Thanks a lot, dickweed.

Yes Titanic, I kind of noticed that it takes you six weeks to issue a hospital badge for a rotation that lasts exactly six weeks. Or 2 weeks. or 3 months. Not cool brah, not cool.

I know the five administrators at CHS are working hard and on limited resources. But they are over-leveraged and have the potential to create extremely poor learning rotations as a result. One student confided that during his IM rotation at CHS, his physician was on vacation for 5 weeks, so he was told to study at home. After the physician returned, she saw about one patient per day. And that it took him 3 months to get his hospital badge. This is bordering on fraud on the part of CHS. Accepting money to schedule students for a medical education while failing to provide either is about as fraud as it gets.

As for the badge....jesus, what a cock-up. Medical education in the U.S. seems to be 95% liability and 5% signing paperwork.
I have updated the maxim "not allowing his schooling to interfere with his education," oft attributed to Grant Allen or Mark Twain, to modern times. It proudly sits atop this blog post as the title.

8) I have loads more I can write about (read: complain, whine, praise, suggest, waste both your time and mine) but I should get working! And also I finished eating breakfast 30 minutes ago.