The Year in Review - 2011

Today is the last day of the year 2011.  In a sense, this doesn't matter much at all as a simply quirky day of an arbitrary calendar.  But for we mortals, the calendar gives rhythm to our lives and helps us understand this odd temporal bubble in which we find ourselves.


I'm musing on everything that's happened this year and how I'm different from the girl I was this time last year.

In January, I broke up with the man I really, truly, completely wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  If you haven't done that, I don't recommend it.  It gets really old to watch your friends get engaged and to hear platitudes from older married folks, and think, "When you found the person you wanted to spend every single day with for the rest of your life, you married him."
I was a complete mess.  I also went to Nebraska for a math conference, where I was a very cold complete mess.

In February, I got the lowest test grade I'd ever received in my life.  That was okay; everyone else did, too.  But this threw my medical school acceptance into jeopardy, and so for the next few months, all in the entire world that I wanted was to pass that class.

In March, my last Lent as a non-Catholic started.  I spent as much time as I could reading and studying, partly out of curiosity and partly out of obsession.  What can I say?  Converts are weird like that.

In April, I actually did become Catholic, and it was one of the best nights of my entire life.  At this point, life begins to get better imperceptibly slowly for me.  I credit the Eucharist.

In May, I passed that class by the grace of God.  My grandmother, who was a female mathematician and computer scientist in the 1960's, met my favorite math professor, who was the same thing except a professor instead. I rode home from graduation in an old Porsche driven by someone who knows how.  This was one of the high points of the year.

In June, I flew sixteen hours to Kenya and spent two weeks seeing things that still blow my mind, like elephantiasis, polio, and thyroglossal duct cysts.  I saw giraffes at dusk.  I snorkeled in the Indian Ocean and saw an octopus hiding in his den.  I drank chai and ate chapatis and rode in safari vans driving on the left side of the road.  I saw crocodiles being fed and watched a tiny premature baby learn how to nurse from his fifteen-year-old mother.  I gave injections and drained hydroceles and listened to the heartbeat of a baby in the womb. This was another of the high points of the year.

In July, I spent two weeks wandering around Europe alone.  This was a series of lots of high points of the year.  I saw London, the ancient and new city that is the beloved gem of all England.  I saw the great David Tennant in the theatre and got his autograph.  I saw the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge.  I adored London.
I saw the shores of France where the D-Day troops landed and walked through the castle of William the Conqueror.  I prayed a Rosary in Lourdes and brought back water from the spring that rose up there, as well as strolling through the beautiful town in the Pyrenees mountains where people spoke French and Spanish, but little English.  I rode trains through the south of France and stood in the Mediterranean Sea and watched the tide come in on the coast of Nice.  I took in the glories of the Italian countryside, each tiny village becoming the one I wanted to retire to someday, imagining watering the mounds of colorful flowers and herbs in the windowboxes and putting out bright white shirts to dry in the generous sun.
And then there was Rome.
I rode a train into the city of Rome, a city so used to being the center of the entire world that it's become part of the zeitgeist.  I saw the ruins of the ancient marketplace and photographed cats sleeping in the sun on the steps of the forum where Julius Caesar was killed.  I went to Mass in the oldest church in Rome (and therefore in one of the oldest churches in the history of Christianity).  I ate way too much pasta and drank red wine with every meal and learned how to make the most wonderful pasta recipe I've ever had.
I stood in line with an old Italian woman at 4:30 in the morning in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican.  We waited together, exchanging broken Italian and Spanish and English, then sat together during a beautiful Mass in St. Peter's Basilica celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI. I discovered that he looks like an adorable old man in person, and that the creepy photos you sometimes see are because he's not terribly photogenic, not because he actually is creepy.  I stood under the Colosseum and cried for the blood spilled there.  I went to Mass in Notre Dame in Paris and heard the beautiful liturgy in a beautiful language.  Back in England, I hiked up to Dover Castle and saw the French coast across the English Channel. I flew across the Atlantic Ocean, twice.

In August, I moved to Houston, Texas and started medical school.  It hit me like a battleship to the face.  I had never encountered any challenge so difficult in my entire life. In August, I met my best friend in medical school.

In September, first exams, first block week, first block party.

In October, Block 2 (of three) hit, and I was even less prepared than I was for block 1.  Block 2 was my worst block.

In November, I went home for Thanksgiving and realized how completely my day-to-day life had changed.  Thank you, medical school.  Also, Advent started, and we began using the new Roman Missal translation.

In December, I took block 3 exams and finals back-to-back: nine exams in two weeks.  Spoiler alert: I passed, by the grace of God.

Now here I am, wondering about the upcoming  year.  When I think back over my college career, I tend to recall individual semesters and wince at how difficult they were.  I don't remember a positive semester since freshman year.  But I remember individual good things happening.  And more than that, I remember the grace.  Even before I knew what I was asking for, the grace to handle the situation was always there when I asked for it.  Even when I didn't ask for it.

So here's to the really bad years that make you beg for the grace.  Here's to not being where you thought you would. Here's to the semesters that contribute to holiness, not to happiness.  Here's to the life that ebbs and flows and sometimes is not fair.  Here's to the God who gives all the grace.  Thank You, as always.

Tiny Sharp Sins

If you have ever had a splinter, you will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Imagine having a bad, crooked splinter stuck in your skin, so that you couldn't move, couldn't do anything without feeling it.  Imagine if it were impinging on a nerve, so that it was either numb or intensely painful all the time.

Sometimes I don't even realize it's a splinter.

If you can, try to imagine that feeling growing and growing, so that it's not just in one finger but spreading throughout your body in waves of numbness and pain.  Then imagine that it's not a physical pain, but an emotional one, alternating through waves of numbness and pain and fear and feeling empty and dead inside.  Sometimes emotional pain is far more excruciating than any physical pain I've had.  You've probably been there.

But if you followed the first part of the metaphor, you probably also know the feeling of finally gripping the splinter with tweezers and extricating it.  It hurts, but then the skin relaxes back where the splinter was.  The whole limb seems to breathe a deep sigh of relief, feeling the blessed absence of the horrid sharp thing that caused so much pain.  Every few minutes you remember where the splinter was and feel such a depth of gratitude that it's finally, finally gone.

It's not always easy to tell a priest how long (or how not-so-long) it's been since my last confession, and then to tell him I did this, and this, and this, and this.  But nothing in all the world can replace that deep, quiet peace that remains once the dark, crooked splinter is finally pulled.  Much of the time, I'm surprised how much pain that tiny, nasty splinter caused; usually I had blamed the pain on everything in the world but the splinter.  But once it is finally out, I have to pause every few minutes and marvel that it's really, truly gone.  

Once again, how did I ever live before Confession?

The Light and the Blind

Hello.  I am the automated robot that writes blog posts for Sarah in the event of her death at the hands of nasty medical school exams.

Just kidding, it's me.  

I said I had things to say after exams, so here I am; let the saying commence.

I left off in Sirens of Insanity by explaining how, for me, the use of reason leads to the death of reason at its own hands.  But I realized a few days after I posted it that I only explained why I don't think we can reason our way to ultimate truth; I did not actually explain what I do think.  The whole post left my inner editor-skeptic thinking, "Well, that's nice that you don't trust reason, but reason is humanity's only way to think about the world and come to conclusions.  So we had better trust it anyway, or else just accept our ignorance and stop trying."

(On the one hand, this is true.  Even though we know reason is ultimately flawed, we still use it to deal with the vast majority of the situations of life.  We know Newtonian mechanics is flawed. But we still use it for the vast majority of problems, because it works most of the time and only breaks down around the edges.  It's the same thing.  I think it is a mistake to turn against reason, and much of the Western world over the last three hundred years agrees.)  

So where do we go from here?  We cannot expect to derive all truths from observation and reason.  As I explained, there must be aspects of the ultimate truth that are immutably inscrutable to us and will therefore always seem illogical despite being completely true. 

Here is my metaphor.

Imagine that humanity was born into a giant biosphere that was utterly dark.  Because of the dark, we used our senses of hearing and touch to interact with the world and invented lots of tools to help us understand the world and not stub our toes on things in the dark.
(Of course, in such a situation, we would probably eventually invent flashlights, or even just fire.  But this is one place where the metaphor breaks down; no metaphor is perfect. I don't think it affects the conclusion.)

Now imagine that one day in one isolated little corner of the biosphere, light was found streaming in from the outside through a pinprick.  People couldn't touch it or hear it, but they have a seeing organ, the eye.  A part of them is sensitive to the light.

Some people would see it, but shrug it off as a weird... something.  Some people would see it and be forever moved by it in some way.  But some people would hold firmly to their senses of hearing and touch and remember all those principles had done for humanity. Then when the light remained silent and non-material, they would reject it.  Maybe it was a hallucination; many disease processes can cause flashes of light to appear.  Maybe it was a conspiracy.  Maybe it was wishful thinking.  Maybe it was an unsolvable mystery. In any case, they would see no reason to trust their sense of sight, especially when it seemed completely uncorroborated by hearing, touch, or common sense.

In fact, some people might have been born blind, and others might never have figured out how to open their eyes.  Some people's eyes might have atrophied.  Some of those people might believe it anyway.

Studies might be devised to see if consistent exposure to the light could cause any heat changes in a material.  Results would be mixed and probably not very impressive, and the methodology would be questioned extensively. Scientists would show that exposure to the light causes certain brain changes that are also observed under such-and-such other conditions.  They would show that people seem genetically programmed to see the light.

People would use the light and the perceived lack of light as excuses to indulge various hideous parts of themselves and as inspiration to do great things.

But the light would remain, and the sensation of sight would remain, and the objections would remain, and the arguments would remain.

This is how I see humanity.  We were born into a physical world.  But part of us responds to something that is not of the physical world.  This is why the vast majority of the people who have ever lived have believed in a spiritual reality.

One interesting part of this metaphor is that it illustrates how sincerely sympathetic I am to atheists, the people who maintain that there is no reason to believe in the pinprick of light far over our heads.  It would probably be the scientists, the academics, the educated people in the metaphor who would have the sense to not accept what they see at face value. I think their position makes sense. I see their point, I understand their reasoning, and I think they're being very smart about the whole thing.  But at the end of the day, I also think they're mistaken.

Some people just don't seem to respond to non-material things at all, like people in the metaphor who are blind.  The other failure of this metaphor is that a light is non-personal and has no way of knowing of or caring about the people in the dark.  Most world religions, on the other hand, believe in a much more personal being.  In the metaphor and in real life, I hope and believe that those who simply cannot see the light will not be punished for it.  Same thing for those who ignore the light without malice, from a genuine desire for truth.

This is why I believe in God.  I am one of those people who sees the light and is moved to tears by it.  I see in the light something from beyond the physical world, something that transcends reason, and something that offers a way to know truth that does not depend on reason.  This something just might be the answer to the fatal flaws in reason that I mentioned in Sirens of Insanity.

Take my belief for what it is worth, and do what you will with the light.  But just in case, don't keep your eyes shut.  It takes practice to learn how to focus them.  Don't give up.

Hi, everyone!

I'm in the middle of block week (that is, six exams in five days), so I don't have much to say right now.

I'm writing to give a heads-up that I do have stuff to say after block week.  I've had some thoughts and experiences I want to share.

So thanks for reading, and have a lovely week.

A Penguin's Life

Do you ever see something and just get wowed by what you saw?  That happened to me at least a half-dozen times in the last half hour.

This video is long (about 33 minutes).  But it's worth it.  You're probably going to watch at least an hour of TV this week.  Make some time for me and watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y2KsU_dhwI

You don't have to agree.  Just see the connections and think it through. That's all I'm asking.

The Sirens of Insanity (or, Why I Believe in God)

Hello, everyone.  I have a problem when it comes to thinking about my faith.

One thing theists and atheists have always seemed to agree on is the idea that a person ought to believe what he does for a reason.  Everyone agrees on this so strongly that no one I have ever met seems to question it at all; the idea of supported, reasonable belief is so obvious that no one even discusses it.

Yet I am not convinced.

(I see the irony of such an inquiry into the reasonableness of reason itself.  If I claim that I do not believe in reason, then I will have to stop trying to support my claims at all, it seems.  To do so would require reason.  But I will make an attempt.)

The universe is full of matter and energy and things behaving in certain ways and causing other things to behave in their ways.  Understanding the goings-on of this universe requires some investigation and learning.  But something with a brain can start to notice patterns and see causes and effects, then use this to predict what will happen under similar patterns and with similar causes.  This thinking is not always a higher-level or conscious function.  Ants manage to carry things (largely by instinct), which requires some instinctive understanding of physics.  They know, consciously or not, that if they pick something up and walk, the thing will accompany them.
  However, if you put them in an area outside their experience, their conclusions about the world do not pan out.  An ant would become as profoundly frustrated as an ant-brain can be by a laser point, which would probably appear as a thing to be picked up but would defy all attempts at carrying it.  (Even cats do not understand that a laser point is not a real object, as many funny Youtube videos will demonstrate.)

In fact, an ant's brain may or may not be capable of understanding the concept of something like a laser point that appears real but is not.  (Perhaps they are; surely somewhere in their instinct is experience with points of light on a jungle floor, for example.  But the idea remains whether they do or do not understand laser points, specifically.)  My point is, their brains are simply incapable of understanding very complex concepts.  Their patterning of neurons just cannot deal with some ideas.

The set of things an ant "knows" and finds "logical" might or might not hold if it were moved to a more complex scenario.  For example, an ant "knows" that if it steps off a tree branch, it falls.  If placed in zero-gravity, the ant would not be able to make the leap of understanding and realize that this, too, is logical and reasonable.  The smartest ant that ever lived could not.  Many generations of ants could not.  They would remain befuddled.

The same is true of a cat.  A cat can understand cause-and-effect and even perhaps some emotions.  But it cannot understand calculus.  Cat brains just don't have the wiring to get it.  A cat's brain would not be equipped to handle the dynamics of movement in deep water or in zero gravity; cats are land animals.  Their sense of what is true or logical or reasonable is a product of their evolution and does not encompass all the experiences the universe can offer.

In other words, there are parts of the universe that do not and will not ever make sense to an ant's brain or a cat's brain.  So in essence, my conundrum is this: why are we all then convinced that the universe's workings lie in that narrow range of complexity that a human brain can understand?


The universe clearly is not accessible to an ant's brain, or a cat's brain, or a lobster's brain.  Why do we suppose it is accessible to ours?
It would seem extremely unlikely that the universe is just complex enough to be accessible in its every fact to the brains of the hominids that evolved on the third planet from one of the billions of stars in one of the billions of galaxies that exist. To believe that we will someday understand it all, or ever could, just does not make sense to me.

The implications have shaken me as I have thought them through in the last few months.  If humans cannot understand all things about the universe, then there must exist at least one thing about the universe that will eternally be inscrutable to us no matter how hard we try.
In other words, facts are out there that will always seem wrong and false and illogical to us.  After all, what does it mean when we say that something is logically true?  We mean that we reasoned it out by making logical leap after logical leap, none of which set off the "untrue warning bell" feeling in our brains. Or maybe we simply got the "true" sensation about this particular fact from the beginning.

Where did we get our sense of logic or truth or our untrue warning bell?  Is it not the result of the environment our brains grew up in?

In fact, that is exactly what we have seen.  Our brains evolved in Newtonian mechanics.  But over the last couple of hundred years, small discrepancies started to appear.  Our sensation of "this-is-not-right" began to go off.  With time, we discovered quantum mechanics, a realm of reality that is very much true but very much illogical to us.  Parts of our reasoning, such mathematics, still hold.  But much of it does not.  Particles can pop into and out of existence.  Tunneling can occur. Cause-and-effect breaks down.

My big conundrum is this.  Why are we convinced that we must only believe what is reasonable to us?  Why is our sense of logic the final arbiter in what is and is not true?  Why not decide instead to believe whatever makes sense to a chimp?  Really, why not?  Is it because we believe we are the smartest creatures that could possibly exist? If we do, what are the odds of that, and why do we think so? If we do not, why do we remain convinced that nothing illogical could be true?

When I find myself thinking differently from other people, particularly if we seem to be talking past each other or if it seems like we are speaking different languages, I find that I am either completely on the wrong track or really on to something.  

So here I am, befuddled by my own brain's insistence that I rationalize my belief in God.  I think I can.  I've tried before with some success.  But why must I?  That's my question.

The Little Penguin that Could

Hello, everyone!  I so much appreciate all the great comments.  You know who you are.


I really, really do not have time to write much.  I'll try to put something on here after my block exams.

Block exams mean four exams in five days.  This happens about every six weeks throughout the first semester of medical school here.  It means pretty much non-stop studying for about a week-and-a-half solid.

But what I really wanted to put on the record here is that I don't mind it.  Medical students told me that they had plenty of time to have lives, that they often took weekends off, and all sorts of associated nonsense.  I don't want to say that to the kids who are interviewing now.  I want to level with them.

"Listen, guys.  Medical school is hard.  You will learn more facts than you thought possible in less time than you thought possible.  It will take at least 60 or 65 hours per week of your time in classes, labs, and studying. You really can't do it in much less time than that; if you do, you're doing it wrong.  No way around it.
"And putting in that much work would be really painful and awful... if this were not exactly what we want with our lives.  It's so exciting to learn it all.  So yes, medical school is as hard as everyone says.   But it's also as great as everyone says."

I find myself gladly making sacrifices I would have begrudged in college.  Just like waiting for a stranger is annoying but waiting for the person you love is oddly a pleasure, sacrificing for medical school is gladly done.

Have a good week!