Hard Palate

Today I had two dinners, one with one of my roommates and an almost roommate and one with some old fraternity brothers. Both dinners found me eating faster than I normally eat, and both were interesting in their content.

I found that my habits are slowly changing, possibly for the better. I can't sleep too late anymore, usually. Obviously, tonight and the last night may have been an interesting exception, but I feel as if I am finally making strides with what had once been a goal of self-discipline.

I am also now a vegetarian. To be specific, I am an ovo-lacto pescatarian, meaning I eat eggs, dairy products and seafood. I made this choice spontaneously. For those of you who don't know, I had already tried this diet for three-fourths of a year before I enrolled in college. However, upon seeing the dietary option available to me at the time, I chose not to continue that lifestyle. Now, though, a year removed from a new dining venue at my school, I feel that I have now been given an opportunity to pursue my previous lifestyle, just to see how it pans out.

I might start with eating meat only on Fridays, so as to keep myself in irony with the Catholic church, but after awhile, I might go full-time. We'll see.

I've been doing a lot of soul-searching, too. That is, I've been thinking a lot about what I want exactly and specifically. It has led me to some dark paths upon which I didn't really want to tread, but more importantly, it has forced me to think about myself, a pastime from which most of you now well know I will never shy away.

It's late, now, almost 6.

When I was younger, it would be just another day, but as it turns out, the combination of alcohol and good friends (and bad ones) has forced me to think further about my place in the social circle as well as my own public solitude.

I've learned a lot about myself.

Like when I'm hungry and tired, there is a very likely chance I am going to get hungrier and more tired trying to decide whether to eat or sleep.

Good night, dear friends. Nom nom.

Have No Fear Johnny Muir

My campus is located in central Northern California, in Stockton. It boasts a high crime rate and nationally recognized high foreclosure rate. It is consistently considered as among the most miserable places to live in the country.

However, in this hellhole of a city, there is a fairly isolated paradise.

I have yet to find it, since I'm stuck on campus.

Regardless, within the confines of my university's campus, there are numerous trees. In fact, just recently as I was driving on an overpass into the city, I got a good view of the skyline. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed to find that the city is extremely green. There were trees as far as I could see, which I thought was wonderful not for the environment but rather, for the pure aesthetics of the city.

Anyways, within this city is our campus, and our campus itself can claim ownership to hundreds of trees. Small as the University of the Pacific's campus is, its tree to area ratio is higher than most campuses I've visited.

Among the trees on campus is the redwood tree. Some know them as sequoias, but redwoods are a bit more distinct than the typical sequoia, even though they are in the same family. Sequoias are the largest trees on average, but redwoods are the species with the tallest trees right now.

But it isn't their height that makes the redwoods my favorite trees. It is their location. Redwoods only grow in coastal Northern California and a tiny bit in Oregon. They do not grow anywhere else in the world.

And in our humble campus, there is a copse of redwoods trees upon a forested foundation, with a few picnic tables and a large statue Mobius Strip statue, about three times the size of an average person. At first glance, this copse may seem random, and admittedly, in the context of the rest of the campus, the basketball court-sized area is strangely contrasting when juxtaposed with the rest of campus.

However, it is my favorite area on campus. All around it people walk by, and it's almost as if no one really sees it, like an isolated area within an isolated area. And these trees are as high-reaching as any trees can be.

A lot of our campus has gone through renovation. The lamps all have a certain look to them. The other day, though, as I walked by this particular copse of trees, I noticed that the two lamps there were different.

They were much more old-fashioned, and their light had a yellow glow, as opposed to the more "modern" white glow of the other lamps. I am certain that these two lamps are the only ones of their kind on campus, and there are dozens and dozens of lamps on campus.

It just further made this area unique to me, and along with the redwood trees, is just one more reason why Northern California will always be better than Southern California.

(Also, on the back of our state quarter is John Muir and Yosemite Valley, not SoCal beaches. So suck it, SoCal bitches.)

Be a Part of It

DATs are over. Don't ask how I did, please. I pulled out with an 18 Science and a 19 Academic Average, which isn't bad, I guess, but far, far below my expectations. My opinion on myself varies from time to time. We'll see how it affects long-term Andrew.

I want to blog about my trip to New York, among other things, but I don't know where to begin.

It's like life is somehow much more blurred and disheveled now. The schedules I've made before are somehow thrown out, my plans forgotten. All my grandiose ideas and self-induced responsibilities are out of reach, just beyond the tips of my fingers.

Yeah, like everything that was put in place in the past is disregarded in the present.

Like New York City, where the lines on the road seem only to be a formality, and rarely am I the one doing the driving.

Sooty Mangabey

"There is no room for complacency..." - from Evolutionary Analysis, 4th Ed. by Scott Freeman and Jon C. Herron

The quotation is taken completely out of context, and I found it awkwardly melodramatic in a textbook setting. Freeman was discussing the repercussions of HIV and its toll on human life. He says that we shouldn't be satisfied with the medical treatment of HIV/AIDS because it is still very prevalent. In fact, the life expectancy of Botswana went from 65 to 40 once HIV was introduced and is still declining (Freeman & Herron, 2007). So no, there is no room for complacency.

Maybe it's not melodramatic after all.

I, however, took it differently. What I realized from the reading was that progress, while positive, does not necessarily equate to success. As truistic as it sounds, only success can be success. So while we pander to ourselves about how much better we're getting or how we have been improving, it cannot be forgotten that these concepts, while under the guise of sycophantic praise, can be retrogressive in nature, at least in terms of attaining a goal.

There is no room for complacency if success is not reached.

My DAT is this Friday, and slowly I am realizing the difference between progress and success. School is in full swing, my dental application awaits just yonder, behind the horizon of "the test". Stress is inescapable, and while I think of myself as a relaxed person, my mental and emotional flexibility is constantly being tested even before the actual exam.

So maybe I was just looking for some words to thrust me into confidence, but somehow, even if it did seem like extra information I didn't need to know before something so monumentally important, reading for my Evolution quiz helped me study for my DAT. I took something completely out of context and meditated on it. A simple sentence that, if put into another context, could have such powerful significance, or, if you're reading an Evolution textbook for a class, mean next to nothing at all.

Maybe we just need to meditate on things more, even if the intentions of those statements are obvious or self-evident ("homo-evident").

Maybe we already know these things in our minds but forget their worth in the daily chaos of our lives.

Maybe we don't really need these little ditties and motivational lines to drive us because we are already driven.

Maybe we do. Maybe we need reminders. Maybe we need something beyond ourselves to succeed.

And maybe some days we are satisfied with our lives, happy to be living simply because it is life, reaching for our goals that we'll attain sometime in an impersonal future.

But, in my own experience at least, we must remember how crowded our lives can be, like a car that's moving your possessions from one residence to another.

And in this car, there is no more room for complacency.

Will Someone Please Call a Surgeon

So the hot topic right now is health care. I'm torn in my opinion of the reform, as you'll see. Obama's administration is proposing a major reform to the current "system" that insures millions of people in this fine and flawed country.

From what little I understand about the issue, what we have in right now is not really a true system. A system in the political sense means to me there are rules set by the government, and there is some governmental control. While there is an FDA and a number of complicated and specific laws in order to control health insurance, it doesn't seem too different than the way the government controls Wall Street. There are some rules to prevent one corporation taking over and to allow justice to prevail economically, but, as was the agenda of the Bush administration, the economy is rather laissez-faire.

That's how I view health insurance in America right now. The major health insurers have a huge say as to who or what gets insured, and they control coverage by how much people can pay. Companies provide health care for their employees to some extent, but this is barely enough to survive as healthily as possible. It is a travesty that millions of our citizens go uninsured and thus receive fewer benefits as their richer counterparts. It says in the Declaration of Independence that everyone deserves "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Life is an unalienable right, according to ol' Ben and Tommy.

That people are opposed to "socialistic" health care is appalling. Every citizen deserves an equal opportunity to the health benefits as the next citizen, regardless of race, class and gender. The current "system" that exists is denying these people of their rights, saying that they are not worth those health benefits, and in some cases, not worth living. If a person dies because he was uninsured while a person in the same circumstance is saved because he IS insured, because he can pay for it, is that not an inherent problem with the system? Whoever pays more lives longer, survival of the fittest? Are we animals, stuck in some Darwinian Twilight Zone where only the rich survive while the poor continue to die simply because they are poor?

Yeah, you say, that's just the way of things. To some extent, I agree. That's just life. It's unfair, but never has anyone preached to me the fairness of life. Never has anyone truly advocated "karma" in the Western sense of the word as a fair way of settling things. That's just life, that the weak don't survive.

But does it have to be?

I often oscillate between opinions as to whether we are animals or something better, and one of the arguments is empathy. Only humans are truly empathetic. Animal sympathy comes from an instinctual desire to insure survival. Human empathy revolves not only survival but happiness as well. We can want others to live happily, not only survive.

We can prevent poor people from dying because they are arguably trapped in a system that works against them, but as a people, Americans are largely against that. Reform means change. Most Americans aren't convinced we need the change, but we do. We need it to save potentially millions of people's lives because they can't afford to save themselves. And it's not like these people are far away, either. Sure African kids and Cambodian kids are dying and all that jazz, but the problem that exists is OUR people are dying. Moreover, we are LETTING them die.

That's why we need a health care reform, so that privatized insurance can stop pulling in billions of cash at the expense of the American people. I'm not saying that a public option, which is pretty much what Obama is going to establish, will be perfect, but I want to do something, to change something, that may be a step in the right direction, because if there is no reform, the standard of life in America will remain stagnant, not improving.

The public option will let people be covered by the government. In a sense, the government is paying for those who can't pay for themselves the health care. It's going to hurt the private insurers a lot. There's no denying it. They'll probably lose billions of dollars, but their lost equates to our health. A few people losing money so the majority, well actually, ALL the American people can live better is worth the change.

And this is where I'm torn. I'm planning to be a dentist. This change will mean the government will probably give me less money than private insurers would for my work. Health care reform will save millions of people, but in all likelihood, those in the medical field will be paid less.



So yeah, fuck health care reform.