So the date is March 29, 2009 (which is obvious enough thanks to the top right corner)

Spring has started, the birds are back, we can see the grass again. Everyone has put away their winter jackets in favor of spring coats and sweaters.

My friends and I were at somerset mall. We are walking towards the mall doors and,

” IS IT SNOWING?!”

Me, “Noo…that’s probably rain……Oh no…wait….it is snow…huh”

Group silence

…………………

So, it snowed today. Only it wasn’t like a slight flurry, the one you might get when it feels like winter is saying goodbye. It was basically a blizzard. We should be used to it, but every time, everyone goes into shock and starts complaining.

For example today, of course there is a mass change in facebook and gmail statuses to, “WHY IS IT SNOWING?”. I could try and respond with, “Well,  clouds that are made out of water droplets form  ice crystals under freezing temperatures…”

But I’m pretty sure that’s not what they’re looking for. Heck, I was  actuallywondering the same question too.

I think the best way to summarize the winter experience at Wayne State would be a quote (roughly) from my psychology professor, ” When I moved here, I wondered for the longest time why is that while most colleges started their spring semester in January,  Wayne State is the only college to consider it the winter semester. And, it lasts until June. What is that? Why was spring semester starting when it is clearly supposed to be summer?  Then whenI saw  it was snowing in April,  I was like, oh this is why“

Hello,

You know those days that start out pretty crapy and you go like,

Man its going to be one of those days.

Sigh

Yeah, well, yesterday was that day (bet you didn’t see that coming).

The night before, I was trying to study for my psychology exam. But I ended up falling asleep and never finished studying.

I wake up in panic mode with an incredible headache.  I’m lying in bed trying to convince myself I’ll feel better, and the dizziness will go away. It turns out mind over matter doesn’t work for me, and I resigned myself to to going back to sleep, no matter how I was going to ruin my life with this exam, my body wouldn’t respond.

And I thought, “SIGH. It’s going to be one of those days. I’m going to fail this exam and my life is going to be over”

Yeh, I tend to be overdramatic.

I’m driving to school, slightly late, trying to study while driving. I think I almost got myself killed 4 times. And I kept thinking,”Argh. Why does it have to be one of those days?!”

I’m sitting in my classroom, look at the time and realize that the exam is about to start, but my friend isn’t there yet. I get worried that she slept in, so I try calling her, but I can’ t find my phone. And once again, ” Stupid-one-of-those-days!”

Later on while discussing the exam with my friend I realized I had an easier time with it than with the first one.

(NOTE: I did not say it was EASY for me, just that I had an EASIER time)

I eat a sandwich with my friends and head to the lab I volunteer at. I’ve been harassing the people I work in the lab with, that I had to take them out for lunch. So they choose that day as the perfect day. And I agree, hoping that my sandwich will be digested in that 10 minute walk to the buffet at the Towers ( dorms at Wayne).

Apparently the buffet at the Towers is one of their favorite places. And I’m going like, Really? Dorm food?

We walk in, and as I look at all the food, trying to figure out how much I can fit into my already full stomach, I decide my mom isn’t going to recognize me when I get home.

Even though I tried, Oh I tried SO HARD, to try and take as little as possible, I ended up with waaaaay too  much food. It wasn’t my fault! It all looked soo good!

And of coure, being a firm believer of not wasting food, I stuffed my stomach, no sorry, my esophagus with everything on my plates. I was in so much pain I thought I was going to cry. But when I saw I was the only to finish all my food. It gave  me this weird satisfaction. You see I’m the competitve type, so considering that I was the only not hungry and still managing to not waste any food, gave me the feeling of victory.

(Oh and picturing myself in a food eating contest while trying to push the food down might also have something to do with it)

I got out early from my lab and decided to go and work out with my friends at the Wayne Fitness Center. Things didn’t go as we planned and we ended up rolling around laughing on the mats.  Who says laughing on the ground  isn’t a workout ?

The weather was nice and I ended up skipping class to hang out with a friend who I don’t get to chill with very often. We went back to Troy, got a couple of drinks from Caribou Coffee.

(I had this crazy hot apple something drink. It was good. I kept picturing myself out on a porch in rocking chair, on a cold winter morning, with a slice of crumb cake. Without the grey hair and wrinkles of course. PLEASE, I’m only ::cough 20 cough::)

We roamed around the park taking pictures. Me for the blog, and my friend for her flickr. Everything looked so amazing that we just wanted to keep capturing it.

I even raced my friend through a kid’s jungle gym to see who could get across the fastest. It took her 18 seconds, and

of course I won (My time: 10 seconds). I think we scared the kids in the jungle gym away.  I just wanted to say Hi, I mean the kid was staring at me first.

Me: Hi

Kid looking confused: …HI……

Kid runs of to mom looking terrified. Far, far away from jungle gym.

Mom throws me a look

Anyways so the point of the post isn’t that I managed to scare a kid away with a  hi.

It was while I was taking my pictures that I realized that I was feeling pretty great, and when I looked back at my day, I realized, once again, that I had a pretty amazing day. Friends, food, laughs, winning, scaring away a kid by doing nothing. Yep my, what I thought to be a crappy day, didn’t turn out to be a bad day at all. My cell phone was in my purse the whole time.

THE END

P.S. I didn’t make those cute funny animations of me studying. They were in an email forward. So credit goes to whoever made them. AND I’m sad I didn’t get to post all my amazing pictures.

So I commute from Troy to school everyday.

Sounds bad? Not really. When it’s not rush time, I make it to school in 20 minutes

The key is to avoid rush hour, Young Grasshopper

Anyways so sometimes it’s really frustrating to have to come to school from Troy. Like it can be EXTREMELY annoying. But usually it’s fine. Not to mention that there’s a lot of benefits to commuting and waiting to move out till later. For example, there’s costs (a biggie- tuition isn’t getting cheaper and we’re not getting richer), fresh home made food ( What? I sound like Martha Stewart? How dare you!) and of course being able to stay with your family. Like If I was living on campus I would miss out on incidents like this one; and introducing my younger brother ‘C’.

I was cleaning my kitchen one day and I hear a scream. A high pitched scream, coming from C, from the garage. I look up to see my Dad, drop the knife he was cutting the vegetables with  and run to the garage while tripping and jumping over my shoes. (I really should pick them up)

“What? What’s wrong?!”

“AHHHAHAHAHAHHH”

My dad looks around trying to find the cause of the agonizing scream. My brother looked okay enough, except for the screaming and the foot clutched in pain.

“I think I STEPPED ON SOMETHING”

“You scared me. I thought something had happened.” (That’s an Indian parent for you, nothing has happened to you until you get a B in school or at least passed out. Relax I’m joking. )

C looks down to discover blood flowing and then comes the loudest scream ever.

“AHHHHHHNNNNNNN OOOAHHHH OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD”

And of course he won’t let my Dad near him to examine his foot. And just like on several different occasions, he starts begging for his life, like you might do IF my dad was Hitler or something.

“No I’m begging you. Please don’t. Please Dad don’t touch it . I’m begging you. Please. Oh My God. Please. I’ll do anything.Please.”
Such a drama queen

My dad looks at him, tries to reach for my brother again, who then looks like he’s about to yell his head off. So Dad changes his mind and decides to finish getting the groceries my brother had dropped in his frenzy. He calls me over to take care of our drama queen. Of course at this point we were both smiling to ourselves.
Promise we’re not heartless.

To C’s defense, the blood was coming heavier. I walk over, ignoring his protests and pleadings to spare him.
Apparently now I’m Hitler.

I pick him up and have him hop on one foot to a chair in the kitchen. All the while he’s screaming about blood and just overall freaking out to spare him etc. Like he was dying.

“Ok seriously. Is it hurting that badly for you to be yelling???”

Pause

“No”

I think I’m about to give him a reason to be yelling in actual pain.
Apparently he picked up on that.

” No it’s just there’s so much blood. Look at that blood. Oh my God, your hands are bloody”

No they really were, he wasn’t just saying that to escape for me.
Some of his blood had come on to my hands. But at least the screaming had stopped.
I wiped his foot, cleaned the cut, put on a band-aid and decided my 12 year old brother is the funniest thing in this house. Ok not the funniest, my cat beats him sometimes.

P.S. For anyone that may be concerned. My brother ‘C’ was perfectly fine….later on. He stepped on a stone in the garage… We cleaned up the garage that weekend.

Dear (probably non-existent) reader (not including my only actual commentators)

I’ve been checking out the other Wayne State blogs and have been wondering if I’ve been doing this whole Wayne State blog thing completely wrong. I know I really can’t actually go wrong, but I can’t help and wonder. Everyone else seems to have taken a much more mature approach to this whole Wayne State blogs thing. So I’m going to try to as well (or at least for now..meh)

One of the biggest advantages of Wayne State would have to be Wayne State’s affiliations to several hospitals (and no, it’s not because you would need to be admitted to them). Wayne Sate is the largest single-campus medical school in the country. Just being affiliated to DMC (Detroit Medical Center) means Wayne State has 9 affiliated hospitals. (http://home.med.wayne.edu/affiliated-hospitals/)So whether or not you’re looking into the medical field, Wayne offers you a lot of opportunites to volunteer at hospitals.

My sophomore year, I started volunteering at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan (DMC). A friend of mine was actually the one who recommended that I start volunteering there, talking about how it was such a fun and rewarding experience. So I started, and I still volunteer there every week.

I’ve made a lot of fun and crazy stuff with the kids at the hospital.

A lot of them are just usually scared and become really quiet and withdrawn. So it helps when you walk in with a cart full of art supplies; and that’s what I do. I walk around with an Arts n’ Crafts cart.

Sometimes they don’t want to do anything, other times they get so excited they jump out of their beds.  And other times you’re just there to give the parents a break.

You learn a lot from these kids. They can surprise you with their never breaking optimism, no matter what the rest of the people around them might think. It’s their never faultering optimism that throws me off a lot of the times, especially when you learn the reason they are in the hospital. Some of these kids have been there for a very long time, and will probably keep coming back for the rest of their lives. Others come in for a week or so, and will probably never come back in again.

You also learn a lot about how kids think, and most of them seem to have their own unique way of processing things. One day you think you finally know how to handle a certain situation, you meet another kid who throws you into that situation, and BAM…You start all over again.

And then you wonder,

There has to be something I could do for her, to make her happy

Was I like this when I was a kid?

Where did she come up with that from?

How the heck did he know that?

And then the thoughts that bother you the most,

..I hope to God there’s something that can be done. A cure or something…I wonder if he knows…

Why is that I have trouble being optimistic?

I don’t know if I can do this.

Some of the times you succeed, and you’re able to make the child smile, open up and talk, or not be so frightened of the doctors. It’s usually those times that family members let you know how much of an impact you’ve made. Sometimes the kids are perfectly fine and you make no more of an impact than a movie.  And it’s the times when you manage to actually make a difference, that you remember, all over again, why you wanted to do this in the first place.

The pictures in this post show a couple of things I’ve helped kids make.(We named the first one, The Bear with the Fro, and around it is a bracelet we made) We smiled after we finished working on them. And I still smile when I look at them.

Cards I made with a little girl

P.S. If you WANT more info on WSU med schools check out