So I’m taking The Boards tomorrow…

I’m hoping when I show up to the testing center there will literally be someone holding out a hoop, waiting for me to jump through.

Maybe the dumbest thing I’ve ever read

Or at least the most annoying to come across while I am spending six weeks busting my butt studying. Well, studying and uh, posting articles onto my blog…

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_17/b4081104183847.htm

I love you and miss you.

I’ll be back in June after I take the boards… or, in Business Week terms, after I solidify my own contribution the our nation’s looming shortage of physicians.

So I balanced my check book today…

Dear Bank Account,

I’m sorry.

Love, Pants

Can you smell that smell?

Dear Neighbors,

I sure hope whatever the hell it is you cook that makes our apartment reek like rancid ass tastes better than it smells.

Or, alternatively…

Dear Landlord,

I would like to request a maintenance investigation of a shared air duct wherein I’m very nearly sure some small creature who dunked itself in fatty diarrhea, rolled in the McDonalds’ refuse around the corner and rubbed the toenail clippings of a seventy-three year old man with fungal issues all over itself, has crawled into our apartment vent to consume a snack of sauerkraut before keeling over and rotting for dead.

Love, Pants

Food for Thought

Dear Erotic Cake Baking Company,

My, aren’t you clever. I particularly enjoyed the “To Have and To Hold,” inscription available for penis bachelorette cakes. There’s something so appropriately inappropriate about a pun scrawled across an edible Johnson that appeals to me (I think it’s my repressed writer-dom). So much so in fact, I ordered a “Mouthful,” for my cousin’s upcoming night of debauchery.

When the receptionist who took my order said, “Alright ma’am, I’ve got one ‘Mouthful’ down, would you like that to be coming?” I knew you meant business. I bet all your bakers wear business socks. You know, dedication to their art and all that.

Despite how impressed I am with your commitment to your jobs, I think you should seriously reconsider your web design. Specifically, you might want to relocate your “More Options,” cakes to a different part of your web page. When I consulted Mean Bean Green about which phallus was most appetizing, she asked to see the “More Options,” listed.

“Oh, you don’t want to see those. It’s all other specialty cakes, like Harry Potter and stuff.”

“HARRY POTTER?”

“Yeah, I assume for kids’ birthdays or something.”

“A CAKE OF HIS PENIS?”

“No, no no, I mean, they do cakes other than erotica evidently.”

“Ohhh… I was gonna say, how could you tell? Was there a lightning scar on it?”

Love, Pants

I’ll have to clean the bathroom for this.

Dear Mean Bean Green,

Nowhere in our housing contract does it indicate that living with me requires you become a utensil taster. Last night you went above and beyond the call of roomie.

Even though we were at a restaurant that was way out of our league, or perhaps, because of it, you willingly checked to see if the tines of my fork really did taste like straight up metal. You affirmed that yes, there was a reason my meal tasted like pennies. Thank you.

I knew it wasn’t just me.

Love, Your Roommate

A Fool for April

Dear April,

So. I hear you’re quite the wannabe. The Internet tells me you’re proffering a challenge, you saucy minx. A challenge that is uncannily similar to November’s proposition.

You too are attempting to entice bloggers to post every single day, although this time you’ve upped the ante. You’ve got a theme. Well. Aren’t we high maintenance, all hoity toity with imminent showers and promises of flowers.

Your theme is letters. Be they correspondance, typography, interesting signs… you just want letters. You remind me of me in the second grade when I tried to accrue as many pen pals as humanly possible because I was desperate to get mail. Although, I’d venture you’re a little more desperate, what with the whole soliciting the entire blogosphere and all.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to meet your needs, April… my second year of medical school is ending next week and then I’ll be descending into a hell of my own creation, better known as studying for the boards. These are things that demand time and, were I responsible student, all of my attention. But you are intriguing, April… I don’t know, something in your taunting overtures makes me want to try.

30 letters in 30 days, eh? I’ll give it a whirl… even though it is probably the last thing on Earth I should be doing with my time this month. You’re worth it. You boast the best birth stone of any month in the calendar.

And should I fail, I can always chalk this up to your yearly joke.

Love, Pants.

p.s. I realize Christmas doesn’t fall in your month… a more appropriate header is in the works.

Officially Compartmentalized

I ate a yogurt cup during a lecture on diarrhea today.

I think this means I’m ready for my M.D., yes?

Merry Christmas

“Do you want some nog with lunch?”

“Sure!”

“Alright, well, we’ve only got egg. I hope that’s okay.”

“They may be bitches, but they are skinny bitches.”

I gave up coffee nineteen days ago.

And just this moment I successfully walked away from a coffee percolator that looked suspiciously as though it were about to drip the sweet nectar of consciousness into my favorite mug.

I can’t imagine how it became so precariously perched. Maybe it had something to do with me putting it there.

Yes. I was about to throw nineteen days worth of withdrawal jitters and obtundent lecture attendance to nurse once more at the teat of blessed caffeination.

But I didn’t. I walked away and came to the keyboard instead.

My very sweet and ridiculously gorgeous cousin decided she and I should have our own personal book club spotlighting the “no nonsense tough love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous”: Skinny Bitch.

It reads like something I would write if I were a hungover drill sergeant on my period paging through science fiction (read: REALLY, REALLY CRANKY) and had no regard for my readers’ capacity for human emotion. There’s a certain, “C’mon you fat, lame fools, stop wrecking your body and wasting my time,” tone to the prose. The sarcasm leaps off the page and lambastes any preconceived notions of decency regarding my diet CLEAR OUT OF MY HEAD. The only way it could be more effective is if the sharp wit could come to life and actually slice the fat off my booty.

In short, the narrative manhandling scares the ever loving shit out of me. They aren’t kidding when they say, “no nonsense.”

I have read only Chapter One.

There were so many things within the “Give It Up” chapter that I need to work on I don’t think I yet deserve to go on to the rest of the book. Or rather, I don’t know that I can take the shame onslaught that will inevitably result if I read on and have to sustain more acerbic slaps to the face as I confront the truth that my diet suckity suck suck sucks.

So, because I want to keep reading the book, but don’t feel I can face the authors again until I’ve made some changes, I gave up coffee.

I realize as a member of both the medical profession and the Starbucks generation this effort amounts to sheer blasphemy. But the Skinny Bitches say that coffee’s acidity goads the body to produce fat cells to emulsify the coffee. The fat cells surround the uh, absorbed coffee, or what I envision as little piranha like Pac-men, and bar their destructive jaws from hurting the body. Now, this is all well and good, Go Body! with its adaptive mechanisms and all that, but I sure don’t need extra fat cells circulating about.

Particularly if they’re coming from something as second string luxurious as coffee. I’d rather save my fat cells for cheesecake. Or pizza. Mmmm… pizza…

So… I don’t know how effective this has been, because it’s but one small change I’ve made of about eighty three thousand I probably should, but that first week I gave up coffee… I WAS pretty bitchy. I assume that means it’s working. I had half of the skinny bitch-dom down.

Since parting with the dark roasted temptress I have also been getting fewer headaches and I’ve started sating my hot beverage cravings with all manners of tea that claim to be antioxidant laden. Overall these seem like two positives and… perhaps more valid measures of the authors’ advice.

To those of you who wonder why I’d listen to a book that makes me feel awful about myself I’d like to point out that I am a medical student. Masochism is how I roll.

In all honesty though, there’s promise of applicability. It cuts the crap and speaks to me in chick-lit language I can relate to and be influenced by. If you’re still looking for a stocking stuffer for someone who won’t be offended if you say, “Oh, the title made me think of you!” I highly recommend it.