Commitments

Many people make commitments nowadays without following them. Gone are the days where someone can be killed for something they say. No, I don't believe it would be wise at all to petition for those days to return, more so to educate a younger generation about the importance of following through.

There are times when I guarantee things to patients in the hospital and the clinic. I've learned after a year of medicine to offer all guarantees as a statistic. I've learned to say "99% of the people we treat with this recover fully" or "I can say within 95% confidence that you're going to walk out of this hospital before the week is over". Saying "I am sure" or "I promise", these are expensive words that I've been taught not to use.

The same is not true, however, when we make commitments to others. I organize dinners for residency applicants this year, and I've had more than one person say, at a recruitment meeting, "People will sign up" "People will go" "You should have no trouble finding people to go". Someone suggested, a while ago, that there be a calendar for dinner, one on which people can sign up and commit to going to dinner, meeting applicants the night before their interview, and telling them all about the program. My resident colleagues said, during the meetings, "People will go", but they didn't specify who would go, and when they themselves would go. Filling up the first month took a lot of texting and emailing, but I managed to fill up an entire month in advance with people committed to dinner. Nobody has broken their commitments yet, possibly because there's an online accessible dinner calendar that everyone can view, possibly because there's an incentive, and possibly because this whole recruiting thing matters to them. It was, however, quite difficult to get people to commit to something more than a week in advance.

There have been many times in my life when my parents, my relatives, people I've hung out with in university, high school, have made "commitments" and have never kept them. The problem here is that, when someone says they're going to do something, the word "commitment" doesn't fall in line behind whatever statement they make. This becomes most painful when someone commits something to oneself, and realizes how far they've strayed later on. You promise yourself you'll learn a musical instrument, another language, you'll get thinner, you'll make more money, you'll eat better, you'll save more, you'll read, travel and create. A few months go by, and you see someone else jamming, you hear that foreign language, you double-look in the mirror, you groan one time too often while you're on the clock, you catch yourself before opening that small aromatic cardboard box, your bank account reads wrong, you see that book at the bottom of the clutter pile when the light shines on it at just the right angle, you see the travel ad and remind yourself of that place you thought of going a while ago but ended up going to "the cottage" or "the lake" or "up North", "Down south" in lieu of taking a vacation to somewhere completely unknown. And you made nothing.

I'm gonna try committing to one thing at a time. I'll start a new commitment when the old commitment becomes routine. Right now, my "routine" is to come home, eat too many PB and J sandwiches, watch too much Conan, get tired, have just enough energy to pack the bike bag for work, and then shower and go to bed without doing my physical therapy exercises. I don't know which commitment to start with, but I'm going to let myself decide by whatever feels most important right now.

There was one commitment which has become routine, almost. Since February, I've put 1537 bike commuting miles down, roughly $700 saved when adding gas, depreciation of vehicle, cost of car tires and cost of car maintenance. Sometimes I can commit. I wonder if I can commit to this blog.

Second thoughts

Sometimes I'll get an idea into my head, and I'll take some initiative and carry it a small distance .... and then I'll have second thoughts. These generally involve an idea being not worth my time, or too complicated to follow any further, or the idea being too stressful to undertake, and then they involve me quitting and doing something else. Chess is a good example of such an idea, where I stopped playing simply because being better at chess would require me to actually study the game, and I felt as though all that would lead to is being better at chess, nothing really life-applicable. Video games are another example of an abandoned pursuit, although that was moreso because I thought girls wouldn't be into them. The reasons for which I stopped playing video games back in the day were, I thought, fairly foolish, but in hindsight I'm glad I put them away because I'm not sure I would have discovered a hobby like cycling so easily if I were still playing. Strictly PC games, my parents never did agree to buying a console for the house and I'm glad they didn't.

Blogging is another idea about which I recently had second thoughts on a trip to Thailand. I was in Thailand for two weeks, and before I left, I thought to myself, " I should really write about this trip, I should blog about it every day, as much as I can". Then I actually went on the trip, and I found myself impossibly tired by the end of every day. Not as tired as I was in Europe, that was a whole different level of pain and fatigue, but tired enough that, by the time we all got back to the hotel rooms, all I really wanted to do was sleep or "pass out" as my friends often phrase it.

I entertained the idea of keeping a journal again, or typing stuff into a Word document, or keeping an audio or video journal. Then I knocked each of those ideas down because a written journal would mean slow writing versus fast typing, an audio/video journal would be completely unedited and nobody would ever be able to review it, least of all me, and a written Word document .... it's not like anybody actually sees this blog anyway, and when it came down to this versus a written Word document, I just didn't want this to be another thing on which I gave up. I also do enjoy the thought that people in China might actually be reading this, so I'd rather keep this up.

So I'm actually not going to write about Thailand, not for now anyway. I might do a "Recollections" piece on it at some point, but basically the plan for now is to write every day or as close to it as possible. When something interesting happens during the day, I'll write about that. When nothing interesting happens during the day, I'll let my mind cycle through memories until I find a "Recollections"-worthy memory and I'll write about that. For now, it's noteworthy to say that, since the last time I wrote in this journal, a fair bit has changed. I've met more women, I've done more cycling (I commute to work by bicycle now), I've made a more firm commitment to ameliorate my diet (which shall be tested tomorrow because the program always gives free lunch on Wednesdays, and lunch is usually nutritionally quite hopeless), but I'm still a fat-ass and I still don't have a girlfriend. Not to worry though, all good things take time. Great things, though ... great things happen all at once.

Recalibrating

  Sometimes things happen in life that cause us to shift from our normal routine. Sometimes those things are good, sometimes they are bad. Homeostasis is the idea that the human body finds a balance and, when something is added or removed to that balance, everything else realigns to a new state of balance.

That may be what's going on with my life right now. I have three or so months left in my first year of residency, and there's still lots of reading to be done and an entire in-service exam that needs correction, readings that need to be finished. I need to cut away time each day ( now that I'm on the easier rotations) to get these things done.

Then there's the relationship status, which right now is null. I have fun every now and then but I'm looking for something serious, something meaningful that will lead to something real. It's not easy finding someone who doesn't play games up front and act really immature, and while I know how to deal with that sort of nonsense nowadays vs in the past, I feel as though I shouldn't have to do so for the woman I would end up marrying one day.

Then there's the exercise and healthy eating front, both of which I simply have not been following. Recalibrating here would mean actually managing to sleep early enough in order to get up at 5 am and ride to the hospital, and then ride back home afterward. Eating healthy would actually mean buying ingredients, prepping, and baking and partitioning things into tupperware boxes. There's no set routine down for this sort of thing yet, I've just been doing whatever for the last two months in terms of food. I haven't gained a horrible amount of weight, but I haven't lost any either.

I had to hire a lawyer because of license suspension issues with my car, none of which were actually my fault. Knowing the American justice system, if it does indeed get suspended, then I may end up biking to work a lot more than I previously planned. I don't mind it though.

My overall level of anxiety is much lower than it was before the car accident, but I still stay up at night pondering my life. I'm on call this weekend, and so there's very little free time, definitely none with which to go out and meet people. Maybe those few hours I have when I go home before I go to sleep, is really time I can use to recalibrate.

Oh, and I'm going to write more. A lot more.