Real Style Inspiration

Since I'm currently wearing sweatpants that were purchased for $3 in 1996 in accordance with my pre-test study day, I thought I'd share some of my favorite outfits I've run across on the internet recently. And maybe inspire myself to get out of said sweatpants one of these days. Or not.

Karla's Closet

The Glamouri

The Sartorialist.
The Sartorialist hit up ATLANTA, and LOVED it! Way to represent ATL, especially this girl.

Coco Sumner during London Fashion Week via Design Lovefest.
I am obsessed with this look. I'm not sure what it is, but she looks so cool. Not my usual style, but I might have to try it.

This makes me excited for the day hats will fit on my head again...you know, post-dreadlocks.

What is Reality Anyway?
This looks like the most perfect, comfortable fall outfit.

Huck Finn Dreams

I went for a walk along the river the other day and stumbled upon this...

I immediately thought of this...

And how jealous I was of whoever owned this floating house contraption...
How great would it be to live on raft for a while?
So much simplicity, freedom, adventure, and raw interaction with your environment.

And I was reminded that when I was 10 I wanted to live on a raft with him...
who's with me?

"We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."
Amen, Huck and Jim, amen.

Then I started looking up real live houseboats, because I have a test on Friday, and that is the best way to prepare for a pulmonology test.

Here are a few, in order of swank.

Amazon style. Exotica!

This is a bike boat! Check this guy out here. He's Swiss and is biking his boat down the Amazon. Sounds fabulous.
Ooo! Maybe I can be a bike boat DOCTOR one day...
If that's not good motivation to study tuberculosis, I don't know what is.

Herb laden den in the Amsterdam canals.

Green-roofed water haven.

Really stepping up the swank here!

Such beauteous design.

I guess fall in Vermont is neither the time nor place to live on a raft, but that's definitely one I'm going to have to add to the Life List.

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"I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before."
-Huck Finn

Love Tires.

These wonderful creations were brought to my attention by the dapper, ipad-toting, karaoke-superstar talent of Med School Tech.
I love anything that takes the ordinary and makes it beautiful, magical, something to smile about.
(Especially when hearts are involved.)
I used to dream that places like the department of transportation would grow a sense of humor and made road signs beautiful, creative, amusing.
Although apparently they do it without trying sometimes.

I hope they still have singles available.

Uhhhh....huh.

I'm......confused. So is Toto.

Hahahahaha...oh man, I love this one. Best.Mental.Image.Ever.

And this one was at my college! I found these on Google and this popped up!

This alley was across the street from my house...I would go down Butts Wynd to the computer lab to use a computer, because I didn't have one my senior year...because I plugged it into a voltage converter AND flipped the converter switch on the back of the tower...computers tend not to work very well after they start smoking out of the back...and that, Med School Tech, you can post on your site, in return for finding me bicycle tires with hearts on them.

[Bet you didn't see that coming full circle! Don't worry, I didn't either.]

Things We Forget...

I love this.

This person writes lovely post-it messages of things we forget as we rush around our days.


And then leaves them around Singapore for people to find.



Inspiring.

krista terminalis shout out!

*image sent to my by my friend Kathleen...can't remember its source.

Krista terminalis got a shout out in class last week. Ok, it wasn't my blog, but the actual anatomical landmark in your heart after which this little place is named. Which is probably fine, because it would've been all kinds of awkward if my blog had gotten a shout out in class. Especially after my med school confessions, admissions, and just general crazy I've been pumping (pun intended) out lately.

So I thought now that I had an official LOGO thanks to my supertalented cousin, Nathan, who by the way is posting a new design on his website everyday for the next year, check it out, I would (yes, I'm just continuing this already run-on sentence full o' tangents. It it what it is.) explain my blog title to anyone who hasn't taken human anatomy.

When I tell med school friends about my blog they don't ask me what 'krista terminalis' is, they ask "wait, which chamber is that in?" or "what was its function?" or "oh, that's the one in the heart? what's the one in the brain?" [Answer: Crista (Krista) Galli. That's right, I have not one but two anatomical landmarks with my name in them. Don't be jealous.] Oh the weird, conversations of med students. But that's fodder for many other blog posts...

So what is 'crista terminalis' (the official spelling, unless you learn anatomy in German...)?

I'll let Wikipedia tell you, because, well, that's where I get all the answers to my med school questions! (Don't worry guys, I'm gonna be a great doctor...promise...heh heh...)

"The crista terminalis is generally a smooth-surfaced, thick portion of heart muscle in a crescent shape at the opening into the right auricle. On the external aspect of the right atrium, corresponding to the crista terminalis is the sulcus terminalis. The Crista Terminalis provides the origin for the pectinate muscles."

I thought it was a perfect blog title for so many reasons:
1. It's a medical term.
2. It has my name in it...(I guess that should've been #1)
3. Terminalis reminds me of a terminal or station. Atlanta, where I'm from used to be called Terminus, because it was end of the railway line. I liked the idea of this blog being a station, a stop over, a place to get out and stretch your legs on your journey.
4. It's in everyone's heart. Mine, yours, everyone's, and I would like to add a little something to everyone's heart that comes through here.
5. It's my heart station.

So welcome.

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"Every man, from the highest to the lowest station, ought to warm his heart and animate his endeavours with the hopes of being useful to the world, by advancing the art which it is his lot to exercise"
-Samuel Johnson

"Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young."
-Samuel Ullman

Sweet addiction.

On a scale of 1 to desperate, I had a Mountain Dew at 9am yesterday.

I've been told to pick my battles. Things that fell off the radar:
not drinking caffeine
laundry (justkiddingthatwasneverontheradar)
returning emails
canceling my debit card I lost over the weekend (here's hopin' I still have money on friday!)
sanity
sleeping more than 6 hours
showering (ok, fine, that wasn't on the list either...heh heh...oh man).

This Friday test cannot come soon enough.

In the meantime, focus on this pretty picture (because that's what I'm going to be doing):

Taken this summer on the roadtrip in Arches National Park, Moab, UT (aka Heaven).

Med School Ironies.

What I can't remember: Drug names. Actually, scratch that, I can't even pronounce them. Diltiazem. Guanethidine. Trastuzumab. Exsqueeze me? Is that Elvish? Did they hire Tolkien to make up a new language of drug names impenetrable to the race of man? Bleomycin, son of Lepirudin, from the land of Isoniazid.

What I can remember: Where I got any article of clothing. Ever. Even socks and underwear. I have not discovered in which graduate school program this would be useful.

Reasons I might have ADD: I can't focus on studying a lecture for more than 15 minutes. Fact.

Reasons I don't have ADD: I can read blogs for hours when I'm supposed to be studying.

What I'm supposed to be doing here: Learning medicine to treat patients.

What I'm actually doing here: Cramming random information into my head to pass tests.

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"A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself" -Jessamyn West

Goodbye Summer Sun.

This morning was gray and cold and drizzly. Looks like summer's busting a move on out of here. Well, it was a great fling summer. I really enjoyed your company. I like what you did with the place, all that sunshine and what not. I love your style, bikinis, barefeet, sundresses and cut-off. And remember that roadtrip we went on along the pacific ocean, over snow-capped mountains, and through red deserts? Yeah, I'll never forget that either. You're gonna be a hard one to get over...

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

-Mary Oliver

Heart strings.

Danny & Annie from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

This. Pulling on them. Oh man, if you haven't watched it yet. Do. With tissues.

The heart of it.

I don't blog about medical school much, but I promise that is what I do with most of my time.

When I started the blog I wanted it to be an escape from all the hard science I was learning and to focus on the art of living.

Truth be told, I had trouble seeing myself in the science, in the medical field, so I wanted to make sure I was still being heard (somewhere in the ether) about things I connected with....fashion, design, food.

I still have trouble seeing myself in the medical field as it is, which is an awkward position to be in throughout these learning years when you're the low man on the totem pole and are just trying to stay afloat in this constant stream of knowledge in a system you didn't and would never design.

But there are occasional flashes of recognition that this is where I want to be. That there is an art to all this science after all.

This week we started learning about the heart. My friend Erica who blogs wonderfully about our medical school experience had talked about how dermatology is hard because we all know what healthy skin looks like, so when something goes wrong it looks really wrong to us.

Not many people get the chance to see or hold a human heart though, so it's not always apparent which ones are healthy or not. But this week we had a lab, where pathologist showed us different hearts . They were hypertrophic, had artificial valves, and had huge thrombi (blood clots) among other things.

One of the hearts though was from a child. The pathologist thought it was from an 8-year-old based on the size, but it was tiny, and let me tell you even if you don't know anything about the heart, it feels wrong to see such a tiny heart in your hand. A tiny heart that should be beating in a little boy playing baseball.

Unfortunately by this point, we've already become so desensitized that these visits to the pathology lab become just another stop in our 8-hour information overload days, something else we have to learn and be tested on, and the specimens are just interesting pathologies, not someone's heart that used to quicken at the sight of her handsome husband.

I am even guiltier than most of this. I've gone past desensitized and even started to resent how much we have to learn, how relentless the tide of information is, how imbalanced our lives our being forced to be.

But when I held that too small heart in my hand, I had one of those rare moments where I could see the full scope of this experience. That I was holding a human heart. That I was learning what had caused this and how it could be prevented. That ultimately this experience would lead me to a place where I could help people with this knowledge and hopefully practice the art of medicine.

And I could, for a second, see my place in all of this.

And that will keep me going until the next glimpse.

We are headed North.

Load the car and write the note.

Grab your bag and grab your coat.
Tell the ones that need to know.
We are headed north.
-The Avett Brothers
"I and Love and You"




(Belated) scenes from the drive from Atlanta to Vermont with my friend Michael...

Watched the sunrise over the lake with my sister to start the day off right
Morning faces! Also, you can't quite tell in this picture, but Kara's shirt has aliens on it. She also went to Space Camp. Twice. But she's really cool, I promise! Love you sissy!
Yes, we drove with a bed on top of our car.
Yes, I got judged.
By a woman in a van.
With a confederate flag license plate.
Klassssy!
We stopped for dinner in Burlington, VIRGINIA!
I know, I was confused too.
We stayed with a friend outside of Charlottesville, and awoke to this...
Hello morning swim! Nice to meet you. What are you doing for the rest of my life?
I know. Ridiculous. This place is getting its whole own post, don't worry. Suffice it to say, said friend lives in the caretakers cottage on a plantation on the James River and the owner is never there. Swoon.

Happy face.

Another happy face. One last Waffle House stop before we got too far north.

We got stuck in a huge downpour. With a bed on top of the car. Luckily Michael had a tarp! So we pulled over, covered up the beds, and read for a bit. Who travels with a tarp you might ask? But this man doesn't go anywhere without a tarp, a knife, and a lighter, because you know, you never know. He's also the guy who made the french onion soup AND did the dishes. I know, if I didn't have a picture of him, I would've believe he existed either.