Look at me

Wow, life is so easy now. I just pulled up my old blog, on my laptop, on a wireless network, while I'm just sitting here in the library (yeah, these days I can occasionally be found actually sitting in a library). And I was remembering how much more trouble it would have been to post down in Guatemala. And, after rereading (damn I am boring and long winded...) a bit, and realizing how easy it would be, I decided to post something. I've had a busy few weeks here.
I'm in med school, my wife's pregnant, and we're buying a house. I want to squeeze in here how absolutely excited I am about all this, especially the ectoderm in the oven part, before I start making fun of myself. I mean, if you know me from my old life, maybe from the ten minute breaks we used to take between double-block chem, or Friday nights in the Woods, or the Hovey Lane house or Burning Man, then maybe you are having a bit of trouble believing that I am talking about the same guy. In a way, I'm not. But we have the same name: Jake Danger Kissel. (Speaking of names, anybody have any good ideas for the spawn?) Saying those three life events are happening to me (all within a three week period, mind you) makes me feel kind of old. Like I might as well have said "Gee willickers, guys and gals, my knees started aching, I'm scheduled for a colonoscopy, and me and the missus invested in neighboring plots down at ol' Oaken Fairmeadow Glendale Granite Heights Cemetary." Actually, you could all probably have seen it coming when I started a blog, which, as everybody knows, is the beginning of the end.
Med school is hard. I know I told everyone, including myself, that it was going to be a breeze, that nothing could be as hard as working full time at the hospital, taking classes at night, and volunteering on the weekends. That it is only school, and out at noon every day, and so I would have plenty of free time. In actuality, I've found that I can have plenty of free time, along with an F- as a GPA. And here, a C avg is failing (which is shitty- if you get too many C's, they send you to some committee which decides if you have to repeat the year or not- there is no hard and fast cutoff). So, in order not to repeat my Dartmouth experience of shitting in a hole, jumping in, then spending the next 3.5 years trying to climb up the slippery walls, I have actually started studying my ass off. Which is why I can be found in the library, right now. When not here, I spend time with Mr. Bouncie, our cadaver (so named because of a tattoo on his arm that said Bouncie, in cursive, with the "i" dotted with a little heart...), trying to identify the flaps of jerky that we've reflected off his thorax and upper limbs. We've just finished dissecting the heart, which is amazing. Anatomy in general is awesome. At first it took some getting used to slicing up a dead person, but I can tell I'm comfortable now because the sight of those well-marbled muscles actually makes me hungry these days.
Buying a house is fun, especially when you're already as far in the hole as we are. What's another $100K? And that is how much our 3 bedroom place is costing us- eat your hearts out, Manhattanites.
Mariam is pregnant. I have to say, I still don't know anyone (maybe Mike and Emily?) our age who has had a kid on purpose. We were close, but we were planning on settling in here, buying the house, getting health insurance, getting Mars off the rock. Oh well. The worst part is that I'm taking embryology, which is pretty much following exactly the course of our pregnancy. Sounds great, you say? First, we learn about all the gajillion little things that happen as that little pile of ectoplasm develops- miracle of miracles that it happens at all. Then, we learn the name of the gajillion syndromes that you get if each of those little noodly appendages doesn't plug in exactly where it should. Then we look at pictures. I have something they call an "Embryology" textbook, that I paid $37 for. It is actually just a big dead baby picture book. It is a frigging horror show.
But really, it is so cool, being pregnant. She's got a little baby in there. It's gonna come out and grow up and call me Pa or Dad or Babba or something (assuming it doesn't have a foot where its mouth should be: podo-oro-switchesia), and drool, and smile, and listen to music (again, hopefully doesn't have podo-auro-rearrangia), and see the ocean for the first time. It's going to be born in Kentucky, in the South, and yet still be a Red Sox fan. It'll be all smooth and helpless and smell like babies smell. So, we're very excited, and feeling blessed and miraculous. And hungry. Well, Mariam is hungry, and I just use it as an excuse to eat more. We take a picture of her belly every Sunday- you can't see any difference yet, hardly. But she's gonna have one of those big old pregnant bellies that sticks way out and hopefully she'll show off. Kid's due in mid April, so I guess her belly might get cold if she's showing it off too much in the middle of winter. I'll post a picture when it's worth it.