Wholesale Therapy

Big news today: Costco opened its first Australian warehouse in Melbourne today! That’s right, the American institution of purchasing stuff in packs of 50 right off the shipping pallet, all under an expansive industrial roof, has finally reached across the Pacific to this corner of the world. I know they have locations in Taiwan, Korea and Japan, but as arguably the most Americanized countries in the Asia-Pacific region, it is high time for Australia to finally have a Costco.

For people who are not familiar with Costco, it is a completely different shopping experience than any other place. The biggest difference is that it has done away with the whole pretense of presentation: aisles are flanked not by shelves, but by pallets on which items on offer are shipped. The whole place is a steel-and-concrete warehouse; there’s no pop Muzak playing in the background and no shop assistants helping you trying on the shirt you want to buy. What you see is what you get. Items range from clothes to diapers, from groceries to pet food, from toiletries to cleaning supplies. You won’t find fifty varieties of canned tuna, but what you do find comes in packs of thirty. Want to get some toothpaste? There are packs of five on sale. Toilet paper? How about the packs of fifty? Want some apples? They have 10-lb bags. The big draw is that, per item, the prices are usually quite a bit lower than what one can find in retail shops. Obviously, you don’t go to Costco to pick up some bread and milk, because you will invariably come out with a hundred other things and $300 poorer. It is a boon for budget-conscious and well-disciplined people, heaven on earth for hoarders, but a giant sink hole for the impulsive shopper.

Now, Australians, or rather Melbournians, at least for now, will be able to stock up on a year’s supply of toilet paper and laundry detergent in just one trip. Apparently, there was a two-hour wait for the checkout today. People everywhere just love a bargain.

I wonder when they will open one up in Sydney.

Thirty-roll packs of toilet paper on sale at the Livermore, California, Costco. I had this picture taken to show my friends in Australia because I didn’t think they would ever see such a sight.

Juicy Juice

The house I am renting this year has a few huge orange trees in the back. And now they are all fully laden with ripe oranges and mandarines. Everyday, a dozen or so of them drop from the trees. As my housemate is not big on citrus fruit, I now find myself with more oranges piling up than I can shake a stick at. I have to get through them in a more efficient way than simply eating them. I can eat until I get sick and still wouldn’t make a dent in the pile. Besides giving them away, juicing them would be the most efficient way of consuming the mountains of oranges before they become part of the compost pile.


Ah, drinking freshly made orange juice is one of the simple pleasures in life (I know, I don’t ask for much). I can’t drink the stuff from the supermarket anymore. Even the “not from concentrate” version tastes “preserved.” One and half liters of the juice wouldn’t even last me two days. I am drinking so much of it that I am sure I pee vitamin C every day. But here’s the good news: no scurvies for me!

Clothes Lines

For most Americans, the image of freshly laundered clothes hanging in the breeze, soaking up the warmth of the sun, evokes the feeling of a quaint bygone era. Today, the crude imitation of “fresh spring breeze” scent that comes from a dryer sheet would be about as close as most people get when it comes to drying their clothes outside. In the US, not only are clothes dryers part of the standard household appliances, in many parts of the country where home owners associations rule with an iron fist, clothes lines in the backyard are actually illegal. They somehow have come to be associated with poverty, are considered eye sores, and thus, have a negative impact on property values. People throughout the country have to fight tooth and nail the get the “right to dry” law passed.

In Australia, that stigma associated with clothes lines in the backyard never seemed to have existed. Clothes lines like this one in the backyard of the house I am renting are not only a standard fixture in almost all single homes in Australia, they often are placed right in the middle of the open yard as the most prominent feature. Neighbors don’t grumble about having to look at your skivvies flapping in the wind; no one hyperventilates over being mistaken for living in a poor house because of the clothes line in the back.


Being the stingy greenie that I am, I absolutely embrace the clothes line for saving me money and being good to the environment. Yes, it takes longer to hang the clothes up on a line than simply throwing them into the dryer and push a button. But I look at it as part of my morning stretches. Yes, the weather dictates when I can do my laundry. If it rains on my day off, I just wait until the next dry day; I have plenty of underwear and socks. Worse comes to worst, if I really need to do laundry when it is raining, I hang them up on a foldable drying rack under the patio cover. On nice sunny weekends, my morning sometimes starts with the ritual of me standing out in the yard under the warm sun, with blades of grass between my toes, pinning the wet laundry up on the spinning rack. I then go out to do whatever for the day, not having to worry about my clothes getting wrinkled for sitting in the dryer all day. In the afternoon before the sun sets, the clothes are ready to be taken down. The wind has done the ironing for most of the clothes. And that smell of fresh air and sun soaked into the clothes just feels so – natural.

I just heard the washing machine buzz. Better go hang them up.

A bee visiting the flowers in the yard

Halelujah

I guess I can say "Halelujah!" that it's almost the end of medical school. But this halelujah actually refers to one of my extracurricular activities - the Queensland Choir. We are singing Handel's Messiah this year and this is the final week of rehearsals. Last week, with my unlucky viral infection, my voice dropped an octave and I could only sing about two notes. Singing then would probably get me kicked out of the choir. So, with my voice recovering over the weekend, I feel like I should join the last two rehearsals before our concert at City Hall this coming Saturday.

This will be my final performance with the Queensland Choir. The Messiah is always fun to perform. It was one of the first concerts I had performed in during my undergraduate years with University Singers. In the following ten years or so, I had performed it with other groups a few times. The complexity and intricacy of the masterpiece makes it a challenge but also a joy to perform each time. And each time I gain a new appreciation for Handel's genius.

After this concert, the choir will break for the summer and next year, I will be far away from Brisbane. During the three years that I had been able to sing with the Choir, I had a lot of fun learning new music and making new friends. With no formal music education and not able to play any instrument, I can count on singing as the artistic complement to the scientific side of my life. Being able to sing with a dedicated group of enthusiastic singers and lose myself in the music is incredibly stress-relieving, even during rehearsals when we get yelled at by the conductor.

Halelujah!

A Historic Day

After lunch, I am on my way to the ward to find more information from a patient's chart for my case presentation when I decide to stop by the staff tea room for a cup of coffee. As I enter the room, I hear the TV on with sound at full volume. A couple of nurses are organizing charts while looking up occasionally at the TV. The local TV channel is carrying live coverage of the US election. I make my cup of coffee and see Barack Obama on the screen getting ready for a speech. At the bottom of the screen flashes the designation: "President-Elect." As he starts to speak, I sit down with apt attention and sip my coffee absentmindedly.

Earlier in the day, I looked up the election returns online whenever I could. As I watched one swing state after another going to Obama, first Pennsylvania, then Ohio, then Virginia and Florida were starting to look more and more blue, I became increasingly hopeful even though the results were only based on exit polls. It almost sounded too good to be true - what, no "too close to call", no outcries for recount? I wasn't going to get my hopes too high; I was almost anticipating that some of the swing states would turn yellow, and then we'd get bogged down in yet another round of law suits for recounts and countersuits to stop recounts. I was telling myself that I wouldn't be convinced until the official counts were confirmed. Now that McCain has made his congratulatory phone call to Obama, I am relieved that the drama that had followed the last two elections won't be repeated this time.

I watch as President-Elect Obama speaks in his trademark soaring oratorical style. I notice that my eyes grow moist as his infectiously hopeful speech goes on, his eloquence a stark contrast to what we have had to suffer through in the last eight years. Images of his elated supporters crying, singing, and celebrating flash on the screen. Obama's election has brought hope to me and to many people who feel the country is heading in the wrong direction. But this is only the beginning; we can't expect Obama to fix everything. The things that are going wrong in the US are beyond what any one person can do to fix. He is inheriting a country with its economy in the dumps, a health care system already running over the cliff, and the only thing constantly going up is the national debt. These problems won't be solved overnight, but I know the one thing Obama can do as soon as he takes office is to repair the United States' image internationally. To paraphrase a popular credit card commercial - one economic bailout package: $700 billion; fix the health care system: $50 gajillion, to have the United States regarded around the world as the beacon of freedom and democracy once again: priceless.

With Obama's speech over and the local station switching back to its regularly programming, I dab my eyes dry and start my way to the ward again. I walk out of the staff tea room with a slight spring to my steps; I, as an American, am standing taller today.

Burning Out

There is a recent article on the New York Times about medical students in the US feeling burned out and depressed that contains some alarming statistics: 11% of those surveyed have had suicidal thoughts from depression, almost half of medical students surveyed suffered from emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment. Among the factors cited are the constant lack of sleep, the pressure to excel, the hazing from senior students and residents, and having the firehose of information aimed at them non-stop. In the article, the author, an accomplished specialist herself, recounts her years in medical school when she felt miserable but unwilling to admit it because she did not want to admit to failure amidst the fierce competition among her fellow students. The article paints a picture of cut-throat competition and every-man-for-himself mentality in the US medical community.

After reading that article, I feel especially fortunate that I had decided to go to medical school in Australia. Now in the final month of medical school, I can say that I have not had any reason to feel burned out in the four years of medical school. Perhaps being a few years older than the average medical student has given me the emotional maturity to better deal with life's ups and downs, but if this article is an accurate reflection of the system in place in the US, I think my coping skills might have been pushed much closer to the limit there. Sure, the firehose of information has always been there, as was the pressure to excel, but to a much lesser degree because internship placements in Australia has nothing to do with one's rank in medical school. Any lack of sleep I have had was due to things unrelated to medical school; I don't remember any incidents of hazing by senior students and residents. In general, I never felt that I was alone in the course. Everyone I know has helped one another the whole time, whether it was to discuss the finer points of some intricate metabolic pathway or to lean on another's shoulder for emotional support. I would say camaraderie and cooperation are the better words to characterize the last four years.

I am not saying the medical school system in Australia is better than that in the US. The competitiveness of US medical schools is the impetus behind the constant innovation, for example. But for my own sanity and mental health, I am glad that I have been able to enjoy the relative tranquil four years in Australia.

Donating to a Good Cause

On Monday I had my car towed to a nearby garage. The mechanic called me the next day and broke the bad news. Just as I had suspected, the engine was completely fried. The cost of repair would come to be about the same as what I had paid for the car two years ago. After thinking about my options, I decided to cut my losses. I will probably only get a token amount if I sell it for scraps. So, just like what my parents did with their dead cars years ago, I decided to donate its corpse to charity. A quick Google search landed me on the website of the Cerebral Palsy League. A couple of phone calls later, my car is officially off my hands.

I hope they actually get some money out of it, because I’d like to think that someone with cerebral palsy will benefit, in whatever little amount, from the death of my car.

A Timely Death

This morning, my housemate borrowed my car to go down to the Gold Coast to pick up some of her stuff. In the afternoon, my phone rings. My housemate asks me how long ago I last put oil in my car. A couple of months ago, I guess. Well, the car is now sitting at a service station next to the freeway exit, completely dead.

I borrow a friend’s car and drive down to Coomera where my housemate is stranded with a carload of her stuff. I try starting my car. Wrrrrrrrr, wrrrrrrrr, wrrrrrrr… The starter works in vain, the engine won’t turn over. It sounds like the engine has had it and decided to call it quits today. Like many old cars, my car has been burning oil every since I got in almost two years ago. I have been anticipating its demise, but have been giving it palliative oil changes. It has surprised me by chugging along with no complaints for the last two years. And apparently, today it has decided to go out, not with a bang, just a lot of shakes and black smoke out of the tailpipe.

I help my housemate transfer her stuff to my friend’s car and head back to Brisbane. My disabled car will have to wait until tomorrow to be towed.

Casting My Ballot

Our election is coming up in exactly three weeks. Last year I put in my request for an absentee ballot just a little too late, so this year I made sure to send in my ballot application early. I spent the whole of last evening online looking up the positions of candidates and the details of all the ballot initiatives. This morning I fulfilled my democratic obligations by unceremoniously putting the completed ballot in the mail. I hope it gets there by November 4th.

Wait, does California count absentee ballots if the race is not too close to call?

Pre-Approved Straightjackets

Seeing how all of us are going to be doctors and earning an income in little more than three months, the university medical society organized a “Finance Evening 2008” tonight in case we don’t know what to do with all these money we’ll be making.

We gathered at the auditorium. A bunch of people in spiffy pin-striped suits took turn and gave us talks on the ins and outs of managing personal finances and services their companies offer. New words were being thrown around: salary packaging, superannuation, negative gearing, capital protected borrowing… I’ll have to look up these words later, but I did learn that, apparently, there are so many ways for these companies to minimize our taxes – and they are all legal. I’m listening, tell me more…

In the middle of their talks, almost every company told us about these pre-approved lines of credit up to $10,000 sitting there waiting for us as soon as we start working. And then there are car loans and 100% home loans. They are practically throwing money at us. I guess the credit crunch in the US has not come across the Pacific yet. Some may salivate at these “generous” offers, but, to me, each one of these pre-approved loans dangling in front of us looked like someone holding up a straightjacket, just waiting for us to turn around and put our arms through, then ziiiiiiip, we’re trapped for the next thirty years. I am already graduating with a bunch of mortgage-size student loans; the last thing I need is another loan on top of it, no matter how favorable the terms may appear to be.

So, no, I don’t need a new car, my little three-cylinder Daihatsu with 240,000 km on it will do just fine, until it dies. House? I’ll be okay living in my rented hovel as long as my net worth is in the red. No, I don’t need a line of credit either. Now, about that tax minimization…

Full Moon Cake

Around this time every year is the Mid-Autumn Festival in the Chinese culture. The exact date is the 15th of the eighth month – on the Chinese lunar calendar. So, just like Chinese New Year, that day shifts around every year, which means I have no idea when it is in any given year. All I know is that, for this year, the Festival has just passed. It still feels a little weird to have the Mid-Autumn Festival in the spring, but then again, it can’t be weirder than Christmas in the middle of summer.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, much like the Chinese New Year, is a time for families that have scattered all over the land to re-unite, feast together, and reinforce the familial bond. For families like ours in which one member of the family seems to move farther and farther away from home, that tradition has long ago died an unceremonious death, along with the family get-together during Chinese New Year, ancestral tomb sweeping during Qingming, and various other family activities that are, per tradition, spread throughout the lunar calendar year. Now we squeeze what activities we can into the couple of weeks every couple of years when my family actually gets together. During those couple of weeks, we’d make up for the reunions and family feasts we missed in the previous couple of years, visit the family grave plot, and do everything else completely out of season.

Okay, I am the guilty party in all of this. Whereas I used to be “only” at the other side of the country, now I am at the other side of the world from my family. My annual visits to my family are now taking place about every eighteen months. And now that, for several major reasons, I am planning on staying in Australia for good, we will have to make up for lost times every eighteen months or so. In the mean time, my mom will have to be content with my weekly phone calls.

Actually, the only reason I know that the Mid-Autumn Festival has passed was that, while picking up my ethnic grocery supplies at one of the Asian grocery stores in Chinatown today, I saw all those moon cakes on sale. I always have a soft spot for moon cakes, even though I can only eat about half of one before the sickly sweet cake becomes overwhelming.

This moon cake contains sweet red bean paste and a whole preserved duck egg yolk in the middle.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Whenever that was.

Bring Down the House

Te, te Deum laudamus;
Te, te Dominum confitemur:
Te aeternum Patrem
omnis terra vene ratur.

For the last two weeks, I have been humming this opening phrase and other segments of Haydn’s Te Deum. They just form a loop, playing over and over in my head, whether I am reading, commuting, showering, sitting on the toilet, or even watching surgeries. Whenever I am not concentrating one hundred percent on what I am doing, this soundtrack wedges its way through to the front of my brain and starts the automatic loop. I must look like a lunatic on the bus sometimes, staring out the window with my head bobbing and feet tapping, but without the ubiquitous headphones sticking out of my ears.

I sing in the bass section of The Queensland Choir and, like what happens three or four times a year, it’s around concert time again. This time, we are doing Haydn’s Te Deum and Puccini’s Messa di Gloria. With rehearsals twice a week for a month before concerts and increasing familiarity with the music, it is inevitable that the music becomes a temporary fixture in the jumble of information swirling around my head. The music is beautiful and I really enjoy singing it, but having it played in a continuous loop can become a drag. Mercifully, I tend to be able to file it deep into the recesses of my mind after each concert so it does not become a nuisance.

Last Sunday we went down to Bangalow, New South Wales, just inland from Byron Bay, to do the Puccini piece to a full house. It was good to see in the audience a good number of dark spots in the sea of silvery white hair. I know, performances of classical music, with its formal, stiff-upper-lip settings, traditionally high-brow and inaccessible attitude, and strictly no interaction between the audience and performers and no improvisation, can hardly pose any threat to rock concerts. For our concert, we performed at a small Catholic cathedral with the audience filling every pew. With the warm afternoon glow streaming through the windows, we rocked the house. Well, as much as one can rock with classical music.

Our concert tomorrow will be in the Cathedral of St. Stephen in the middle of Brisbane. I am sure we will follow last weekend’s performance and bring down the house once again. What’s the music equivalent of “break a leg”? Strain a vocal cord?

Qui tollis peccata,
peccata mundi
suscipe deprecationem
deprecationem nostram…

Tape-Delayed Live Coverage

Last night’s Olympics opening ceremony was really impressive. I know, I watched it live on TV.

So this morning I called my mom in California and asked her what she thought of it.

“Don’t know, we can’t watch it until tonight.”

“What? What do you mean?” I was incredulous. How on earth wouldn’t NBC broadcast it live like every other country on earth? “What about on the satellite dish?” I asked.

“No, couldn’t watch it. I even got up at 5 this morning [which would have been 8 pm Beijing time] and tried to see if it was on TV, but it wasn’t on, not even CCTV [the Chinese channel from mainland China].”

I went online to see why that would be. Wouldn’t you know it, NBC, which has the exclusive rights to broadcast the Games, had decided to delay showing the opening ceremony by twelve hours so it would be shown during prime time in the US.

Well, with the internet these days, people can just go online and watch it, right? Wrong! NBC has borrowed a page on information control from the Chinese government’s playbook. As this article on the New York Times described, NBC took down unauthorized videos of the ceremony from host servers and used geographic blocking technology to limit the best they could the number of videos that could be accessed from the US. The reason they cited was the $1 billion of advertising revenue at stake.

The Chinese government has gotten a bad rap for their internet censoring, their control of the flow of information for the purpose of maintaining political power. They have caught a lot of flak for it, and I think they should. But this is the first time I have heard of any organization in the West, be it governments or NGOs or corporations, so openly control the flow of information, albeit for a different purpose – commercial gains. Okay, the information at stake here is a show, not dissenting voice. But does it mean that it is okay to control the flow of information for commercial purposes, for profit? Is a corporation’s restriction on people’s access to information in order to gain commercial profit any more benign than a government’s restriction on access to information in order to maintain power?

I should have told my mom the little secret for accessing “unauthorized” websites I learned from local college students while I was traveling in China: proxy servers.

Book, Blanket, and Blues

It’s been raining since last night. I woke up to the sound of a fine drizzle that seems to be here to stay, at least for the day. Gray, wet, and cold – not exactly the normal warm and dry winter days in Brisbane that I am used to. Now to think of it, it has been raining quite a bit lately, which is good for the water level of the reservoirs supplying Brisbane. We may actually see the loosening of water restriction at some point. But for me, being on my precious one-week break between rotations, the rain is a major bummer. I had originally planned to do a sixty-kilometer cycling trip to a couple of mountains nearby today. But the rain basically just killed that plan.

So I have to settle for the next best thing – brew a cup of hot tea, queue up some blues music on my computer, curl up in bed under a warm blanket, and read a book, one that has nothing to do with medicine.

~~~~~~~~~~

Today’s lunch: pita pockets filled with guacamole and sautéed chicken and mushrooms with a side salad.

Earth Hour

Tonight at eight o’clock, Brisbane will join the world to observe Earth Hour by turning off its lights for one hour. And the city has urged everyone to do the same.

Well, I’ve got other plans. I just found a place to live and I am moving today. As my stuff is scattered among a few friends’ places, I need to gather them and move them to my new digs. After moving all my boxes and suitcases with my little car all day, I finish the day by shoving my bed into the Little Car That Could and drive back to my new home. It is already eight o’clock when I leave my friend’s place. As I drive along the freeway past the city center, an eerie scene of darkened skyscrapers, punctuated by an occasional bright window here and there, unfolds before me. This is the only time I have seen Brisbane like this – no neon lights on building tops, no floodlighting on the bridges, not even the reflection of the skyline in the Brisbane River. I can’t help but think of my friends in Lubwe, Zambia, who would no doubt be having their Earth Hour when it’s their turn; and they observe it everyday! Soon, I am home and unpacking – with the lights burning bright in my room.

It’s not that I don’t care about the environment; to the contrary, I care so much, I have earned a reputation among my friends for being a tree-hugging, tofu-eating, and organic-munching hippie. To me, the purpose of Earth Hour is to raise awareness of our collective voracious appetite for energy and how it affects our lives and where we live, both locally and globally speaking. We all know that by turning off our lights for one measly hour will do nothing, in the long run, for the environment. It will be a success only if the event convinces people to start conserving energy. I have already been doing my part for a long time, especially since I moved to Brisbane three years ago. I turn off the lights when I leave the room. I line dry my clothes. I eat as local as possible by getting my fruits and vegetables from a community-supported agriculture club and by shopping at the local farmer’s market. I take my own reusable bags to go grocery shopping. I recycle and reuse jars and containers – oh, I am so famous for this one, my friends make fun of me to no end; apparently I am not wasteful enough to be considered “normal” in a developed country. I get around Brisbane by riding my bike almost all of the time and drive only if it’s not practical to ride or to take public transport – like when I am moving.

That’s why I feel like they are preaching to the choir and, to me, Earth Hour is a non-event.

Why Is Everyone...

Staring at me? What? Like you’ve never seen anyone walking around with reverse raccoon eyes before? They’re called tan lines, people! Sheesh!

Black Friday Frenzy

It is three o'clock in the morning, snow is falling, covering everything in sight in a light blanket of ghostly white powder. The faint moonlight reflects off the snow, casting eerie shadows on the long line of people waiting outside the store. The line of people have been there for a while now. Some are covered in heavy blankets, asleep but mindful of their surroundings lest someone cuts in line, some are huddling together, some are stomping their feet to wake up their frozen toes, some are sipping on cups of fast cooling coffee. Just one more hour before the store opens, inside is what these people have been waiting for, something so essential that people would forgo their dinner the night before just so they can wait at the head of the line. As the clock strikes four, the doors to the store clank open. The people surge forward, eagerly lurch inside, and elbow their way through before everything is sold out.

This may sound like people in the Soviet Union waiting in line for bread, but it is actually how I imagine the scenes of people waiting in line for the Black Friday sale in the United States.

I was reading the news online and came across articles describing the frenzy of shopping the day after Thanksgiving. I couldn't help but notice the parallel between the bread lines of the Soviet Union and the "electronics lines" of the United States. In both cases, line are created when demand outstrips supply. The main difference is our "electronics lines" are formed voluntarily. The demand is not for basic necessities of life, but perceived need created by advertising and our way of life. The lengths people would go to "save" money are astonishing: missing Thanksgiving dinner, braving the cold, risking bodily harm, and generally enduring self-inflicted misery. Is buying something you don't need for half off really saving money?

It's Only A Five-Step Job

I see this sign everyday. It is posted in one of the staff toilets on the medical ward at the hospital where I am doing my medicine rotation.

It only takes five-steps!? And with illustrated instructions!! To change a roll of toilet paper? I wonder how many toilet-paper-roll-changing mishaps it took for someone to take the time to make and post these instructions. But it gets better. Someone else must have thought, “Five steps? That’s too complicated. I’ll simplify things a bit,” and wrote down the “Alternative Directions” next to the printed instructions.

Every time I look at it, I feel like I am reading a manual for defusing bombs. Okay, maybe not, but this is definitely the first time I’ve seen a toilet paper roll holder that needs an owner’s manual.

~~~~~~~~~~

Tonight’s dinner: herbed chicken risotto with green beans, and a salad.

Might Have Been, Could Have Been

I am currently reading Fresh-Air Fiend by Paul Theroux, one of my favorite non-fiction and travel writers. Fresh-Air Fiend is a collection of short stories Theroux has written between 1985 and 2000.

In one of the stories, Theroux recounts his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi in the 1960s. As I am reading it, I suddenly remember that I had toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps seven years ago. It was a year after I finished college; I was living in Washington, DC, and had a full-time job. Having just been rejected by all the medical schools I applied to around the country, I was asking myself, “What next?” At the time, the adventurous side of me and the conventional side of me were fighting a battle.

It might have been a poster I saw on the street, it might have been something I had in the back of my head all along, or it might have been just something I came across on the internet at the time, I decided to look into the Peace Corps as the next step. I even went to one of their information sessions, which, replete with tales from an enthusiastic volunteer who had just returned from Vladivostok, had the quality of an infomercial at 2 a.m. My interest was piqued nonetheless. I continued to gather information and looked online at discussion forums about the Peace Corps. So the adventurous side of me was gaining an upper hand.

The conventional side of me, not to be outdone, took me to look at PhD and masters programs at graduate schools. I contacted a few professors and flew to a couple of the school to check them out. What they were doing were interesting stuff: things like tissue engineering and research on exercise in microgravity; but none of them made me slap my forehead and say, “Ah-hah! That’s what I want to do!” I returned home feeling ambivalent about what I had seen. Then one day, I heard about a part-time masters program at Johns Hopkins University and decided to drive to their open house after work. And here, the conventional side of me caught up to the adventurous side of me, then passed it. I decided to start the part-time masters program in biomedical engineering at Hopkins.

And abruptly, Peace Corps fell to the wayside. The glossy brochures and the application packet sat in a pile, forgotten, and when I moved house, went to the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. Not long after that, I’d even forgotten that I gave the Peace Corps serious consideration when I was in the crossroads of life in my early twenties. Looking back, I can see that of course the conventional side of me won – it had society and all the cultural weight behind it. The giant arrow painted on the road of life that says, “This way to happiness” – the non-stop conditioning since childhood by both the Chinese and American cultures – made it easy to follow it and assume it to be correct but difficult to see if there were any alternatives. I had gone back to following the giant arrow after veering ever so slightly down a side trail. This is not to say I regret going to grad school. To the contrary, I am glad I did. I am where I am today partly because I chose that path then.

After two years of grad school and full-time work, I asked myself again, “What next?” I could not find an answer. I had the inevitable burn-out at the time. It did not happen overnight. Rather, the feeling had been brewing steadily toward the end of the two years. Graduation was more like a valve that suddenly let out all the steam. I quit my job, sold or gave away most of my worldly possessions, packed my car, and drove back to California. The adventurous side of me had finally taken revenge. What followed was two years of wandering, on and off, in unfamiliar and remote parts of the world. It was one of those “finding oneself” kind of trip, as clichéd as it sounds. I lived out of a backpack and slept in countless nameless hostels and cheap hotels, I ate street food, I took the cheapest public transport I could find. Materially, it was the poorest I’d been, physically, it was the most uncomfortable I’d felt, but it was the period of time when I felt the most alive. Maybe it was the adventurous side of me saying, “See, you should’ve listen to me last time.”

Looking back, I wonder what would have happened if I had listened to the adventurous side of me earlier and joined the Peace Corps instead. I would have learned another language, I would have been sent to some out-of-the-way community in some obscure country to teach or to help set up a community clinic or help in whatever project, I would have been the farthest away from physical comfort and what was familiar. And I would have loved it. That experienced would definitely have changed my life and my life’s trajectory, as it did Theroux’s. I could have settled down somewhere, I could have gone on to other professions, I could have become a constant nomad who incessantly roams the world for the next patch of pasture, I could have…

Instead, I ended up studying medicine in Australia. It was the result of a series of decision-making since high school without looking too far into the future. And it seems to have worked incredibly well for me. Now, the adventurous side of me and the conventional side of me are not fighting a battle, but are playing complementary roles to each other. My rumination on “what if…” is an exercise of imagination on the outcome of a different path I might have taken in life and a reflection of the fact that every choice I make today, no matter how minute it seems at the time, will have an effect on the options I will have in the future. I don’t think I would be any happier now had I chosen to join the Peace Corps seven years ago, nor am I any less happy now for having decided to go to grad school instead. I have absolutely no regrets on any of the life-changing decisions I have made. Dumb luck? Perhaps. But maybe a dash of a sense of adventure, a pinch of embracing the unknown, and a heap of travelers’ optimism all had something to do with it too.

Shamu!

After a week of gray and wet weather, the sky cleared up again today and the weather returned to the normal winter day in Hervey Bay - dry, sunny, and warm. I felt like I was coming down with cabin fever after a week of being indoors - I tried to study but I couldn't sit still and had the attention span of a nat. So I went to the pool and had a swim to get it out of my system.

The Hervey Bay Aquatic Centre, with a 50-meter pool open for the summer and a heated 25-meter pool open year-round, is where I go for a splash every few days. A lot of people consider swimming pretty boring. In a way, I guess it is: all you see is the black line at the bottom of the pool, all you hear is water sloshing around, and you don't get to listen to your tunes during the work out. But that's the appeal for me; it's a sort of sensory deprivation that I find therapeutic. Also, you don't get sweaty as your sweat is constantly being washed off. No music? No problem. I just set my mind free and let it wander. At some point, a soundtrack would come out. I don't pick the tunes, it just plays. Today's soundtrack consisted of the leitmotif of Requiem for a Dream, which morphed into Carmina Burana, which then turned into Santana, and then Branford Marsalis popped up, which carried me through the cooldown lap. See, who needs an iPod when you've already got one built in?

Feeling spent after the 2-km swim, I made myself a protein shake, then started making dinner. I know I am going to sleep like a coma patient tonight.

~~~~~~~~~~

Dinner: simple but tasty stir-fried lamb and broccoli