Fin

And here shall be an end.

When I was 15 I flew to Kentucky with my FFA chapter (oh yes, I rocked the blue corduroy) for national convention. As I stood, groggy in the Atlanta airport, watching my advisor try to locate out connecting flight, a random woman darted out of the passing swarm and hugged me.

"You're Cherry Weber's daughter, aren't you?!"

Dear God in heaven, what just happened to me?!

"Um... perhaps?"

She wound up being an old friend of my mother's, and how she recognized me I have no idea. But to this day my mother laughs about my ability to find random people in a crowd. Whenever I step into an airport south of the Mason-Dixon line I keep waiting for someone I've never met to run up to me out of the crowd. I sat at gate J8 in Miami International keeping an eye out for excited strangers.

Princeton Review flew me back to Miami for two students. I had half a mind to tell them that when they showed up at my last class yesterday.

You have no idea how much my supervisors must love you.

To be honest, I didn't think anyone would show up, and I'd wind up entertaining myself in an empty classroom for three hours. My attendance slackened off considerably in the last three or so classes. School started again. People moved home, or away from home. Students already scheduled for the MCAT took their test and didn't feel the need to come anymore. It feels a little insulting to walk into a very empty class (Do I suck that badly??), at the same time, I really enjoy the ability to give my attending students such personalized attention. The fewer of us there are, the more fun we have.

After class I decided to find somewhere nice for dinner, and then go buy a few postcards for various people. Folks, there is not one postcard to be found anywhere in Miami. I must have bought the last one last week. I went to three gas stations. I checked a Publix a Winn-Dixie, and a Wal-Mart. Eventually I staggered into Walgreens, tired, and an hour behind schedule.

"Do you have postcards?"

"Spanishspanish cards?" Points at the greeting card aisle.

"No, postcards. With pictures of dolphins and pelicans and places I never actually visited or saw."

"Spanishspanishspanish, hombre." Points toward the photo counter.

How I know I am not a good person # 2: I stood there seriously considering grumbling back in unhappy French.

Mmes. Barnes and Grim would not be proud of you.

Sigh. "Thanks any ways."

So no postcards from Miami for anyone else (you lucky people who got the last postcard in the entire city of Miami know who you are. Guard that thing with your life, it's like an ancient relic.)

Each time I travel somewhere I keep hoping to have some sort of magical epiphany or realization before I leave. And then when I think back on the trip I can always remember "oh yeah, I learned that lesson the night we climbed the top of the Duomo tower in Florence and watched the sunset." (Incidentally, I did have an epiphany on that trip to Italy, and guarding one's wallet with one's life in a busy airport is probably the best lesson to learn, but I like stuff that's a little more profound.) Unfortunately, you can't force profundity, so if the best lesson I learned this summer was how to find lightning whelks under 5 feet of water, and that body powder and bar soap will take out oil stains, I guess I'll take that and be content.

I keep trying to figure out what exactly I'm going home to. I have no job, no school, and no prospects of either, probably for a long time. I have never been this free in my life, and I really have no idea what to do with it. Really, I could pick up and move to another country next month (in theory at least.) Or run off to Puerto Rico to teach.

Either way, I should probably figure something out soon. I mean, I have a blog to entertain now. :)

A Tale of Two Classes

Greetings from Florida, the bulls-eye in Isaac's scope!

In theory, this should be my last week in Miami, but I have a make up class my students are waiting on. The short story is that the teacher before me started one of my courses (we'll call it the Allen class) with lecture #4, not lecture #1 (cardinal numbers are so hard), and did a very poor job with it. So my whole course has been one lecture behind ever since I started. My supervisors, while not thrilled, understand the problem and are doing their best to find a time to stuff in that last class. It was originally going to be next week, on Monday or Tuesday, but everything's in the air now because of the hurricane.

I like having my courses winding down, but I miss my engaged, intuitive, Institutional students. It seems like I only ever get two different student types: questions-I-can't-answer, and note-gazers.

The Allen class is the former. It was highly apparent in today's lecture.

"So after the myosin head has let go of the actin filament, it hydrolyzes ATP, reconfigures to its high energy conformation, and..."

A hand shoots up.

"Yes?"

"What causes muscle twitches? Like spasms when your eye twitches."

Oy.

I get these students. I used to be one of them, particularly in physiology and neuro. My professors didn't know me by name or face, they knew me by hand.

"Is that what causes comas? Why is the limbic system not a true lobe? How does the planning of the cerebrocerebellum relate to the planning of the frontal lobe?"

I make Hermione proud.

It was how my classmates knew me too.

"You're the one who sits on the far side of Tamkun's class and asks all the really good questions, aren't you?"

It shocked me. Honestly, I always thought that if any of my classmates could get their hands on me they would duct tape my mouth shut.

I love it when they ask me questions I can't answer. It shows they're engaged. I learn new things, I get to stay up late pouring over medical journals. I get to make up abysmal answers off the top of my head.

"Well, I'm not completely certain. Imbalances in ions could be one reason. There are some dopaminergic drugs that do unfortunate things to you regarding muscle movement. I'll look it up and come back to you with a better answer, okay?"

Student nods, scribbles something down on his notes, (Me: 1, Teacher: 0) and we resume the sliding filament theory.

I got questions on Tuberculosis (what exactly do you see in those radiographs?), what do medullary and medulla even mean, and the type of marrow in flat bones.* We were incredibly inquisitive today.

My second class, we'll call the Nova class, is full of note-gazers. It becomes highly apparent during practice question time when I'm trying to get an answer out of them.

"So given what we know about the nature of CO₂, how would we expect to see it cross the blood-brain barrier in question 3?"

My students all carefully scan their workbooks, avoiding eye contact at all costs. I feel like Medusa. Somewhere a cricket quartet begins.

"How about A and B? Are those the correct definitions for facilitated and simple diffusion?"

Someone coughs. A page flips. One of the crickets breaks an A string.

"And what about C? Do we need to actively transport CO₂ into the CSF?"

One lone soul slowly shakes her head.

"Exactly! Remember that blood gasses are hydrophobic, so they can diffuse right across the cell membrane."

I circle D on the board, and we drag ourselves onward.

For the life of me, I can't figure out what it is. Both classes are in the middle of the afternoon, which is never a good time for class, but one of them manages to pull itself through the post-lunch coma and call out a letter or two during passages. The other one seems intent on committing every word of their books to memory. If they did, I'd never know. They would never tell me.

Still, I'll miss both of them when next week rolls around and I'm on my last flight home. I don't think I've ever had quite the unique blend of backgrounds and nationalities in my classrooms before, and I'll miss the Creole, and stumbling over names that have too many vowels in them. Who knows, I may even miss riding out hurricanes.

Probably not.

*For those of you playing at home: I still haven't looked it up, middle from the Latin media, and red bone marrow, not yellow.

Bahia Honda

The summer after I graduated high school my family took a trip to Florida to visit relatives. It was a particularly memorable trip; my aunt had just been diagnosed with cancer, and seemed to be responding well to the chemotherapy. At least, that's what 18-year-old me gathered from what little I heard, and even littler I wanted to ask. We went to SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, walked on the boardwalk on Daytona beach, and eventually all loaded up in the car, complete with my three cousins, for a week or so in the Keys. We listened to the Beach Boy's "Kokomo" nonstop, took the obligatory photo at the "End of the United States" buoy on Key Largo, went deep sea fishing, and wrapped it all up with a day at Bahia Honda State Park. The name, I am told, means "deep bay" in Spanish.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls...

The beach is deep, with a long sandbar that runs parallel to the shore between two large strips of underwater vegetation. It was there that we found the two big queen conch shells. We brought them home across the country, wrapped in towels, frantically checking them at each rest stop. They sit in our house like pearly pink stars, out of place between the scrub oak and sage.

Before this July, I had not been to Florida in two years. A week after my 24th birthday found me huddled on a standby midnight flight to Orlando racing time before the tide rolled out. Because there is only so much time one can spend in a hospice room, and only so much time one can entertain well-meaning strangers, my brother I took one of my cousins to New Smyrna beach for one day of respite. While the two of them fished, I swam out further than I ever should have, and deeper than I'd ever been to watch the little round porpoises roll past us on the current. The next morning she left us to go further up and further in to places I have yet to see.

Two years from that day I sat across a kitchen table, listening to a woman with eyes like a Verreaux's eagle rejoice over her son gradually conquering chemotherapy. I brought them dinner, celebrated with root beer floats, and marveled. The whole night tasted of sea water and phoenix fire, pressed down and running over.

I returned to Bahia Honda looking for something. The beach is still as I remember, and the signs, admonishing people against removing live shells. I could not find any dead ones. The live coral grows on the dead. Barnacles cling to empty shells. Waving grass sprouts from every nook and cranny in the rocks. The ocean eats itself and lives forever.

I dove until my back blistered, and my sinuses burned. I swam out further than I ever should have, and deeper than I'd ever been, but there was nothing this time. Little pearly pink shards glistened in the sand and under my fingers, but the whole, perfect shell eluded me. Nothing happens the same way twice.

I'd like to say that I saw a dolphin, or touched a ray, or found a huge sand dollar, something like that, but there was nothing big or elegant waiting for me. Little shoals of side-striped and spotted fish scattered under my hands, returning to graze in the wake of everything I kicked up. Once I startled a pufferfish and a barracuda, and I frequently turned around to find myself being trailed by flocks of little butterfly fish. It felt like some sort of strange undersea Narnia. I found myself gradually getting distracted by a royal gramma, bright purple and yellow against the drab sand. It was enough.

God, of your goodness give me yourself, for you are sufficient for me.

I drove home through flocks of sleek white ibis, rising out of the Everglades on either side of the road. I crawled through Miami traffic until I made it back to the hotel, and then I laid on my bed all evening, my back an inch deep in aloe and lavender. You win some, you lose some. :) Maybe I'll never find another conch. Maybe I'll find ten tomorrow. But I know I'll see something beautiful as long as I'm watching.

Fight of the Navigator

Week... what, five now? I had an excellent week off to rest and unpack and catch my breath after the past four weeks. The sabbath is over, though, and I have three more weeks of classes ahead of me. I can't decide if that is a lot of time or not. So far I haven't been mugged, or sunburned to a crisp, my mother's two main concerns going into this venture (I hope you didn't place any bets on that.)

Before this trip my experience with Miami consisted of one round trip through the city on my way to the Keys with my family, over 5 years ago. On the first leg of the trip, one of my parents (no names, protecting the innocent) decided it would be a good idea for my 16-year-old sister to practice her driving skills through Miami. On the return leg, I got to navigate through the city (this was before the time of GPS, kids.) You can imagine then, that when I found out I'd be driving myself through this city I was a little less than excited. All I could think of was dodging cars and trucks in Costa Rica just to cross the street for a roasted ear of corn. I expressed this unease to my supervisor, and she promised me I'd get a GPS with my rental car. Hello, Mayhem.

I love that GPS, except when I don't. For the most part it's not the technology's fault. The roads in Miami all seem to have at least three names: County Road 453, Highway 776, Sgt. John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt Boulevard. The GPS never knows all three of them.

GPS: In point4miles. Turn right. On. CountyRoad453.

Me: Yeah, sure. Hey look, Vizcaya!

GPS: Prepare to. Turn right.

Me: Who was Sgt John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt? Wait... you didn't mean that road did you?

GPS: Turn. Right. Now.

Me: But, but... there are five different roads coming into this intersection!! (No kidding. Who thought that up?)

GPS: Recalculating. Turn right. On. Highway778.

Me: How do they fit so many roads into one intersection???!!

GPS: Are. You. Blind?

Me: *wails*

GPS: Recalculating. You. Moron.

Out of pure frustration I switched that condescending voice to the French one. Now I get condescended to in French, but at least I'm learning something at the same time.

All my classes this week will be for just one course, we'll touch on genetics, neuroanatomy, and the renal and digestive systems. Neuro and genetics have always been two of my favorite subjects. I particularly like teaching neuro because it's quite a heavy topic, and overwhelming to learn, let alone teach. My mother, from day one of my first neuro class, kept telling me the only people she ever knew who understood and enjoyed the topic were incurably strange.

I'll take that for what it's worth. So far it's got me to Miami.