Oscars 2006

I'm so glad that Reese won the Oscar for Best Actress. She's a triple threat: a Harvard lawyer, a doctor, and an Oscar winner!
She's so cool. I love how she used that June Carter quote: I'm just trying to matter. That's so true. We just want our lives to have meaning, no matter what we do.




On the law school front, I went to a Pre-Law Forum sponsored by The Princeton Review. I sat in on a mock first year law school property class (the case had been emailed to us a few days before). The prof was a woman and I found the class and the way that she presented the material to be so enjoyable. Later we had a panel of reps from SMU, TX Wesleyan, and Berkeley law. The thing that really got me was when they said what qualities they wanted: analytical thinking and problem solving. Those were the exact qualities I had been writing about in all of my med school secondaries - finally, here is an institution that would appreciate those qualities!

I think I would be happy as a doctor and as a lawyer. I like them because it will let me help people using research and intellect, and they play up my skills. Hopefully, I can get into an SMP and then later apply MD/JD. That way I can be sure that I have no regrets about giving up on my dream of med school or regrets that I let a great field like law go unnoticed.

Hena

Here's a video by Cameron Cartio, a Persian guy who grew up in Spain and Sweden, and Cheb Khaled, the father of Rai, a French/Algerian musical fusion. Cameron sings in Farsi and Cheb sings in Arabic. Enjoy!



Video code provided by www.Bia2.com

22nd Bday

Today's my 22nd birthday. I got a whole bunch of birthday greetings on my Facebook wall, which was tyte. I thought my birthday would be more eventful, but we celebrated more over the weekend. You know, I miss how birthdays were really big deals in grade school. Everyone's bday was on the bulletin board and you brought cookies to class and people would sing. Now it's just like any day. You can't really tell ppl in class that it's your bday, cuz that's just weird. So you have to rely on Facebook to tell everyone. I hope my 22nd year on this earth will be better than my turbulent 21st. Geez Louise, talk about your emotional roller coaster. I thought it would be a good time to let y'all know what I've been up to lately:

I took a practice LSAT two weeks ago and scored a 158. Not bad, it was so good that I think I'm gonna take the real thing in a couple years and apply to some MD/JD and DO/JD programs, as well as straight-up JD. I think law is pretty cool, and it let's me use the skills I've honed as an English major to help people.

I took a practice DAT last week and scored a 14. Yeah, not so good. I had no idea the DAT covered botany and that they used science passages in the reading comprehension. This test was a lot harder than I though it would be. I have to give mad props to the pre-dents and apologize for dogging on the DAT all these years.

I want to take a practice GRE at some point and take the real one before the BIG CHANGE in October. Hopefully I'll be able to find one now that the Kaplan Test Drive is over.

I'm still waiting on 6 out of state med schools.

I'm applying to Special Masters Programs. Hopefully, I'll get into one of those. If not, hello second Bachelor's...and no, it won't be as much fun as The Bachelor in Paris.

I'm gonna try to devote more time to my neglected blog. I'll try to use cool colors and spruce it up with pics.

Skin

I have to agree with this. I have definitely been able to identify with this song with all the pain I've been through lately. I'm looking for solutions, but I just want to hide away a lot of the time. I keep going to workshops and meeting with advisors, but I just...well, let's just say that "Skin" certainly hits home. I hope everything will work out in a couple years.

And We're Back!

OK, definitely update time. I have begun my last term at SMU, yes! This term I'm taking:

• 18th Century Lit - the prof calls it Sex and the City in the 18th century; it seems like we're going to be reading a lot of old porn...I'm serious
  
• Seminar: Novels of Manners - I'm the only undergrad in a room full of Masters students
• Minority-Dominant Relations - we watch a lot of movies about how minorities in the US are put down by The Man...tell me something I don't know
• Abnormal Psychology - people are crazy...again, tell me something I don't know
• Power Yoga - Finally, something I don't know!

That's right, I have no science classes! I'm finally going to have a nice, normal college term where I can relax and have fun.

9 days till the match...I'm totally freaking out, and I hope I get in.

Winter Break

So today's the last day of the Fall 2005 term. I took my last final, Earlier Romantic Lit. Since it's Saturday, there was no one to watch my sis, so she came with me to the final. She was disappointed cuz I told her how my prof always wears a bow tie, but he didn't today. And he wore a sweater vest instead of a jacket! Wow, he really does get casual on Saturdays. It was nice having her sit next to me reading The Bell-Jar while I took my final. The final was like all Wordsworth, and he didn't have a single Jane Austen question on it! Then my sis and I had fun at Northpark (they had ballroom dancers!) and at Mockingbird Station.

So far I know I got a B in Biochem (although I did make an A on final), an A in Dante's Poetic Vision, and an A in Health Psychology. Access is down for maintenance until 8 pm tomorrow, so I won't know until then what I got in Seminar: Literary Theory or Earlier Romantic Lit. Now that I don't have classes, I don't know what to do to occupy my time. We'll just have to see.

Queer Theory

Last email:

Dollimore’s essay chronicles the perception and definitions of perversion throughout history. He begins with Freud and Foucault’s definitions of perversions, which are both in regards to sexual perversion, commonly known as homosexuality. Here, the idea is that perversion is the natural state, while normality is the result of repressing our perverse selves. To better understand the controversial nature of Freud’s statements, Dollimore turns to the first appearance and use of the term in literature. St. Augustine defines perversion as “turning away from God’s path.” Incidentally, in the 1300s, Dante would use this word again to signify the “turning away from God’s love.” For Dante and St. Augustine, perversion equals sin; it is not the resulting action that is the sin, but the act of turning away from the straight path. Dante considered sodomy to be a sin because it was a violation of God’s nature. In the sodomy circle of Hell, Dante places his professor Brunetto Latini, whose sin of sodomy is magnified by the fact that he persuaded his students to partake in sodomy with him. Dante’s condemnation mirrors St. Augustine’s remarks that the magnitude of perversion is based on “the innocence of those being perverted.” Thus, Latini taking advantage of his students merits his placement in Hell.

On page 17, Dollimore says, “in its splitting the natural produces the perverse as a disavowal of itself and as a displacement of an opposite (the unnatural) which, because of the binary interdependence of the two (the natural and the unnatural), is also an inextricable part of itself.” Interestingly, this is the same language that Silverman uses to describe women in films. Like Silverman, Dollimore places women in the position of the perverse, a tradition he claims began with Eve. Dollimore seems to be using the same tactic as the ethnic studies literary critics by appealing to the Feminist literary critics and white women in the case of Desdemona. He aligns the plight of homosexuals with those of women thereby connecting the two groups as victims of the label of “pervert.” He presents the struggles of the two groups as trials that all “perverts” endure, which in turn takes away the stigma attached to pervert by making it an arbitrary term oppressively attached to women and homosexuals by patriarchy and ideology, respectively.

Feminisms

Email:

On page 8, Silverman says that a man in a film's audience "traces his suffering ... to his being out of touch with the breathing world about him, that stream of things and events which, were it flowing through him, would render his existence more exciting and significant. He misses 'life.' And he is attracted to cinema because it gives him the illusion of vicariously partaking of life in its fullness." In Silverman's films, the women are subordinate and dependent on men. They need rescuing and, lo and behold, the only brave soul that can do it is a man. But living vicariously through film implies that you are living a life that you do not have. So does this mean that in real life men are dependent on women and rescued by them? Maybe they are: Behind every good man is a great woman who provides stability and nourishment for her husband. And many women are attracted to "bad boys" with the hopes that they can change them and turn them into their own Pygmalion (another film that men live "vicariously" through). Maybe these films reinforce the patriarchy because men know that it's crumbling, that they're really not in charge, that they would be nowhere without the women in their lives. The head of my medical practice says, "Every doctor needs a wife. I would be nowhere without mine. I'm sorry that you as a women can't have a wife. You'll have to find a suitable substitute...maybe your mother."

Iranian-American Literary Studies

Email 7:

Ahh! I had just written a whole bunch of stuff and somehow it got deleted. I guess I'll start with my second paragraph.

The way that African-American women writers used Feminism to get their work noticed is being paralled today in Iranian-Americans studies, which has only existed since 2003. In that year, Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" was published to wide acclaim. It made Laura Bush's must-read list and was a New York Times Reading Group Pick. Nafisi marketed the book as a women's rights book exposing the injustice of women in Iran, a hot topic in the post-Taliban world. Instead the book is more of a history of revolutionary Iran (honestly, the only one of its kind in its very honest portrayal of what went down) and the role of English literature in shaping the lives of non-English native speakers...with the obligatory discussion of women's rights. Americans loved it and a year later our own Dr. Hopkins, Chair of the SMU History Dept, was proud to tell me that he had added it to the history reading syllabus.

The book cracked open a previously unexplored topic, and suddenly books about Iranian women flooded the shelves. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (a graphic novel that is being taught in ENGL 2327 next term) and its 2 sequels, Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No (which describes the Iranian-Jewish experience), and Afschineh Latifi's Even After All this Time all described Iranian women who had lived in Iran during the revolution and had to leave to come to America and were all published within a year after Nafisi's book. The group that was still silent was Iranian-Americans, the children of the aforementioned generation, people like me. We got our turn with 2004's "Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America" by Firoozeh Dumas, which I first heard about on NPR the day it came out. It was the first good news I had heard about Iran on NPR. 2005's Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni was much more serious and is the most accurate reflection of the Iranian-American experience I've ever read, especially since I was in Iran the same year she went: 1997. I think in the coming years we will hear much more from this generation as they gain the courage these women have. And maybe the guys will learn from the girls and speak up. This will only happen once Iranian-American studies jumps out from under the umbrella of Feminism and stands on its own just like African-American studies did.

Marxista

Email 6:

One thing that bothers me about Marxism is the idea that consciousness comes from modes of production and that production is what distinguishes man from beast. I don't believe this to be true. There are plenty of animals that also build and produce things. Par example, bees make honey in a very systematic division of labor. There are the bees that hunt down the flowers, the ones that grab the nectar, the ones that collect it, etc. The actual honey-making process is still a bit of a mystery, but that just shows how complex their production is. Beavers build dams, sometimes highly convoluted dams. Some primates can make tools and silk worms and spiders spin fibers into fabric. So we're not that unique in our ability to make things.

We are unique in our ability to reflect on the world around us and categorize it. I completely agree with the idea of a false consciousness and seeing life solely through the lens of ideology. I don't believe that all people think this way, but there are plenty who do. The key to overcoming the effects of ideology, however, is through education, not a classless society. I cannot tell you how many misconceptions there are about Islam and the Middle East. When people find out where I'm from, they ask all sorts of questions like, "Is your dad oppressive? Why don't you wear a scarf on your head? Do you believe in the Bible? Do you support terrorism?" These are questions out of ignorance that come from an ideology that doesn't include people like me. It isn't that these people are bad or that they think they're better than me. If we lived in a society where we were the same class (whatever that means), I don't think that these questions would necessarily go away. I think through education and teaching each other in order to understand one another, we can see how great it is that we are all so unique. As a child, I escaped a country that tried to make all women the same in order to come to a country where I was free to be myself. Marxism, paradoxically, has an ideology of its own which excludes individuality. As Americans, we know that this is a very high price to pay in the name of classlessness. If our own immune system knows to recognize non-self antigens, our minds should be free for us to know and express ourselves.

Badass?

Rash --> Mono?

I broke out in a terrible rash yesterday! From 7 am to 2pm my entire body was covered with itchy red pox-like dots. It was awful. I figured that it was an allergic reaction to the Amoxicillin. So I called my cousin and she told me to come over and check it out. When I did, she looked at my arms and was like, yup that's a drug rash. She called some other doctors to check if she should send me to the emergency room in case of anaphylaxis. Thankfully, they said it wasn't necessary since I've been taking the Amoxicillin for 8 days and the rash only started that day. So she gave me a cortisone shot and a script for Prednisone and told me to take Benadryl and Zantac 75. So I have been medicating and itching.

Today I came to work and told one of the doctors about this. He said that this was a classic sign that I had mono. He pulled mono up on the computer and, sure enough, a symptom of mono is that when the patient takes antibiotics, she breaks out in a rash. This is not an allergic response because later in life the patient is not allergic to the same antibiotic. The mono would explain why I've been so tired, but I thought that I was tired from the drugs I've been taking.

This is so crazy. I have no idea what's wrong with me. Everyday there's a new problem and I'm just so frustrated with all of this. I can barely study with all the pain and discomfort these diseases have been giving me. The doctor today told me to rest and relax, but how can I? I have to work 3 times a week and go to school everyday. There's no way around it. So tired now...must sleep...

Which Degrassi Guy Should You Date?

Yay, I got Craig! He's dreamy...

You Should Date: Craig

				Craig is troubled. And high maintenance. And tends to be clueless about other people's feelings. Oh, and he has a little problem with monogamy. But hey: he plays the guitar and looks good in a leather jacket. These are the trade-offs we make in life. Have fun! Click here to check out Craig's video timeline 20% of the people who tooks this quiz got the same evaluation.

Strep

So from last Wednesday (like in October) I had this sore throat. Two days later I asked one of docs at work to take a look at it cuz I noticed that my throat was white. He said it was mucus and no big deal. So I toughed it out through the weekend. By Monday, it had gotten really bad and I felt like I couldn't eat anything from the pain and my voice was starting to go. I told that same doc that I hadn't gotten better, and he said that I should take a decongestant cuz it sounded like I had a cold. By Wednesday I had dealt with too many sleepless nights and too much pain, so I asked a different doc at work to look at it. She said I had a huge infection with a risk of abscess and that she would talk to our head doc about getting me a sample of antibiotic. When he looked at it, he said that I did need the antibiotic, but that it was his policy to not treat his employees. So I had to go to someone else. Then I remembered that my cousin's office (she's an MD) was in the same hospital, so I called the hospital directory and got her number. She said I could come right over and when I did she said that my infection was pretty nasty and wrote me a script for Amoxicillin. She said that if I didn't feel better w/i 48 hours I should call her. Well, I'm happy to report that it has been over 48 hrs, and I feel a lot better. I have some fatigue from the antibiotic, but other than that I am healing.

Jane Eyre

Email 5:

I've always preferred Jane Austen's realism to the supernatural darkness of Bronte novels (both sisters). I just don't get why the ending could be considered a happy one. Jane, who has reached the sole possibility of female empowerment through her inheritance, throws away all of the possibilities that that inheritance presents to marry herself to a freak with a castrated arm. I mean seriously! This sooo would not happen. Part of why Jane is happy to be with Rochester is because she's so plain and has nothing to offer and is totally flattered that this rich, charming guy is noticing her. She hasn't been involved with any man before, so this is quite thrilling for her. The second guy she's with seems okay to marry, except he's weird, and she would have married him if she didn't know that she could have done better (cuz she was able to catch Rochester).

But a woman with money is in a unique position to actually have a choice as to who to marry, and Jane has the opportunity to see the world and find the right man for her. This man cannot be the maimed Rochester. There's just no way. Not the guy to made his first wife crazy and then stuck her in an attic. Not the guy who dresses up like a gypsy. Not the guy who has no problem being a bigamist. There has got to be a better man in England! And now she has a chance to find that man because she has that money. It's just like Jude the Obscure and how he can't find the right woman, he just meets the two and thinks he has to choose. At least in Jane Austen the right guy is there somewhere, you just have to figure out which one he is. I'd take a Darcy over a Rochester any old day.

Lacan's "The Mirror Stage"

Email 6:

Lacon begins his essay with a definition of the “mirror stage”. This is the stage of childhood development when the child is first able to recognize his own image in the mirror, even though the child’s brain is no more developed than a chimp’s brain. The chimp, however, quickly tires of his reflection, while the human child sees the mirror as a continuous interacting stimulus. It is through this special stimulus that the child begins identification and the development of the self. The reflection of the child in the mirror serves as an example of Gestalt, the concept that objects embody certain qualities of the viewer.

Lacon claims that the function of the mirror-stage is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality – the same function that all images serve. The mirror is the reflection of the self just as much as art is a reflection of the artist and his world. During the mirror stage, the child begins to see himself as a subject and object simultaneously, a concept similar to the “reflexive” part of speech. Thus the child sees not only himself in the mirror, but also the way that others see him. The mirror begins his initiation into the social world, with all of the self-consciousness and insecurities that come with it. His word, méconnaissance, cleverly expresses self-knowledge as it literally translates as “knowing me.” While the mirror stage may seem idealistically revelatory in this regard, it may also be the beginning of psychopathology. No matter how much this child will want to know himself, he cannot completely do that. And suppose, years later, the child sees something about himself that he does not like. This leads to self-loathing and a desire to change himself into something he can never be in order to satisfy others or himself.

Lacon’s final statement is a quite poignant comment on the limits of psychoanalysis, as well as all other clinical practices. As clinicians, we can help our patient know himself and his disease, but we cannot go back in time to correct it. We can only perform an intervention at the primary, secondary, or tertiary levels. Just as scar tissue remains in the body after medical procedures, the mind also remains scarred after intervention. The best that we can hope to do as clinical psychologists/psychiatrists is to expose the disorder to the patient so that he may come to understand it and cope with it. The disorder will not go away; it is naïve to think that it will. Psych disorders are preventable precisely because their origins can be traced. But this can only be done through the benefit of hindsight, and there is no guarantee that if a different path had been taken the disorder would not have occurred anyway or that a different psychopathology would have emerged altogether.

Deconstructionism

Email 4:

To me, deconstruction really drives to the meat of literary criticism: the identification of critical problems and the resolution of them. Without binaries, we would not see the aspects of a literary work that do not fit into them. And aren't those anomalies what we as literary critics are most interested in? It's so interesting how the structuralist notion of binaries is portrayed as an inherent part of Western culture, while the deconstructionist idea of anomalies is painted as something often only an intellectual can see. Deconstructionism encourages the mind to push the envelope and keep looking at the text. When the lay-reader reads a text, he is only understanding it at plot level. But when we as trained literary critics read it, we find that certain aspects of the text nag at us, and that is the time when deconstruction can provide us with guidance as to how to treat textual anomalies.

Who Are You From Instant Star?

Tommy

				Lord knows you'll pay if you call him Little Tommy Q to his face, because with his boy band past firmly behind him, Tommy demands respect from everyone around him -- without throwing tantrums about it. While he's a little more jaded than Jude (as in realistic about just how much crap one has to put up with to keep moving forward in the music industry), he's still confident (uh, VERY confident) in his own decisions, directions, and tastes. 29% of the people who tooks this quiz got the same evaluation.

How I Used Biochemistry to Interpret Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"

This is an email I privately sent another English prof, that he promptly forwarded to the rest of the class.

I had an epiphany of what rhymes with dulcimer...multimer! OK, so the rhyming dictionary says that there are no perfect rhymes for the word, but multimer sounds close, as do its derivatives: homomultimer and heteromultimer. So what is a multimer, you ask? It is a protein with more than one peptide chain. A homomultimer has multiples of the same kind of chain, while a heteromultimer has different kind of chains - Hemoglobin is made of 2 alpha helices and 2 beta sheets, thus it is a heteromultimer. My fall break Tuesday was spent making up a biochemistry exam over this material because I missed it due to my interview, which went extremely well, and I thank you for your constant support in my medical school journey.

Could Coleridge have used the word multimer to rhyme with dulcimer? The answer is a resounding no. Alpha helices and beta sheets were not discovered until the 1950s by the great Linus Pauling, therefore combinations of them to create secondary protein structures would not have been known nor named in 1798. But the description of the intricacies of Kubla Khan's infrastructure does sound awfully close to the intricacies of protein structure, however unintentional that may be. The Alph river sounds like an alpha helix to me, and alpha helices often shoot up in the middle of a large protein for the purpose of protein signalling. Maybe C.P. Snow would appreciate my analysis, but perhaps I should not mix disciplines so. Just thought I would share my thoughts.

I Even Worked a Med School Rant in Literary Theory!

Email Five

I'm with William on this one. In class we talked about how Heidegger's stages of human being parallel the struggle of students. I can totally relate. In high school, I worked really hard to make perfect scores on my AP exams. Then in college I worked really hard to make A's and do well on the MCAT so that I could go to medical school. This summer I worked really hard on my med school applications, and all the money I made working really hard at the hospital went to my applications (around $3000). Now I have my first med school interview this Friday at UT Houston, and I have tons of pressure to perform well there as well. Then once I get into med school there will be boards (a series of three licensing examinations) and the science classes of the first two years, and then after med school there's residency with 48 hour shifts and call nights. It seems like it will be forever until I'm an actual doctor who can just chill.

The reason I am going through all of these obstacles is so that I can find something like what Heidegger calls "forfeiture," what we Persians call "aramesh." I want that moment when I can rest on my laurels and bask in the glory of success and achievement instead of this constant state of anxiety about my future and if I'm really ever going to make it. Yes, Herr Heidegger, I do agree that creating meaning out of my life before I am dead is a fantastic motivating factor, but so is the chance to relax and not have to work so hard. I don't want to work myself into the grave! But that seems to be exactly what Heidegger says I am doing. Maybe he's right, but that's certainly not my intention.