Growl...

Its done and gone, its been over a month, and I don't even remember the person's name. But his pretentious comments are still bothering me. After realizing that he wasn't going to listen to my voice of reason, I shut my mouth, but I still sometimes daydream about correcting his ignorance with verbal abuse. He made my view of his professional field drop about 12 notches.

Studying for my test

I have a test on chapters 8 & 9 (Cardiovascular and Lymphatic systems). I'm reading over the section talking about the heart.

"The two atria are separated by the interatrial septum. In the fetus, the two atria communicate with each other through an oval opening, the foramen ovale, shunting the blood from the right to left because the lungs do not function and the placenta takes the place of lungs. This opening closes at birth when the baby takes its first breath and remains as an oval depression (fossa ovalis)." (Emphasis mine.)

Ok, so it makes perfect sense to do it that way. If the lungs aren't working yet, it is useless to send blood there to be oxygenated. But it makes sense to me, a thinking, intelligent being. Considering that this whole entire course has been focused on the chemical reactions that cause cells and parts of cells (that are non-intelligent) to do things that cause muscle contraction, blood clotting, hormone release, and phagocytosis (immune system cells "eating" foreign bodies), I don't think the developing human body does anything "because the lungs do not function." Using those terms implies that the developing heart has some sort of plan or thought process or intelligence behind its actions, rather than a response to a chemical that the pituitary or hypothalamus has released. I'm willing to accept that there's an intelligence behind the wonders of the human body. But I highly doubt the authors of my textbook are willing to accept it.

Oh well.

Education

At church yesterday, they asked all veterans or current servicemen to stand so that we could recognize their service to the country.  That's great, I'm thankful they served (every day, not just holidays).  But that's not what this particular holiday is about.  The living veterans can have Veteran's Day and Armed Forces Day (although, it can be argued they don't even get Veteran's Day since that day was originally called Remembrance Day to remember those who died in wartime).  But Memorial Day, once called Decoration Day is: "designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country".  I wish more people would understand the meaning behind the days they celebrate.  (Cinco de Mayo is another perfect example).

Leesport PA

So, Friday morning I stayed up till 5 am trying to fix my computer. While waiting for things to load on it, I was simultaneously packing for the weekend, making lists of things my car needs done to it, and putting away my winter clothes/having a sneezing fit.

3.5 hours later, I was up and at the student clinic, massaging ungrateful wretches, I mean poor poor people with lots of shoulder injuries. As soon as clinic was over I turned on my trusty Tomtom (which by the end of the trip I desired to throw out the window on the Turnpike) and began to program it to tell me how to get to the jujitsu clinic in Pennsylvania. As it turns out, the address I got from the clinic website does not exist, according to Tomtom, but a quick call to mom to look up the address I used last year set things straight. Its a good thing I don't throw crap out and am somewhat organized about where I keep googlemaps directions.

I arrived safe and sound, and opted out of the "pay-$20-a-night-for-a-cabin-with-no-electricity-and-no-heat-and-no-locking-door-and-no carpeting-and-bugs" deal, and chose to sleep on the mats in the dojo. That was a better experience than last year, where I felt that the "martial" spirit had never left the mat and therefore kept me awake all night. This year air was peaceful. Perhaps it was not the mat that changed, but me.

Sheela working with a green belt.


Cara and I-forgot-his-name-already! working on some judo stuff after classes.


Peter... every time we turned around he was on the mat with someone. Or so it seemed.


After classes, we were stuck in the dojo avoiding torrential rain. We grabbed a deck of cards and began Rorshack tests on ourselves (Cara's idea- psychology major that she is.) Apparently, I keep all my assets hidden. Some are organized, some are scattered, and a good deal of them are all in one big pile of crap (sound like my bedroom to anyone else?)


Peter has a scorpion. But at the risk of revealing everyone's innermost psyche, I'm not going to share their card-psycho-analysis. Read into it whatever you want to. We did.


Cara's horseshoe.


Wu's whatever-shape-that-is.


Done with the psychology class, we began a game called heart attack which ended up being almost as violent as jujitsu. Maybe it was because we were on a mat, and it was easy to hit people without thinking about it.


The dojo picture. Wu, me, Barb, Peter, Sheela. And Professor Okazaki above the mantel piece.


Last year, the clinic was in the same location. Ben and Amish got it in their heads that we were all going to go visit a Chinese Pagoda that happened to be somewhere in Pennsylvania. I was following them in my own car and as it turned out, they left me in the middle of Reading at a stoplight. I managed to get lost enough to make it to the "other" side of the tracks, where no one spoke English and I had to keep my doors locked, drive slowly, and avoid one-way streets. As you can tell, I made it out alive, and decided that THIS year, Tomtom was going to bring me to that darned Pagoda if it killed me.


As you can see, it did.


So anyway... I had a good time at the clinic, took quite a few bodywork and therapy classes, and got a whole brainful of stimulating information to mull over during the drive back. Speaking of which... I mentioned an incident with my Tomtom. It cost me $.75 to get to Camp Joy via Interstate 78. Instead of sending me back the way I came, which would have been intelligent, Tomtom sent me from 78 past Philadelphia, to the NJ Turnpike, which cost me $8.55 and 25 minutes of stop-and-go traffic. I should have trusted my instincts and taken 78 to 287.

But at least I didn't get lost in Reading this year (twice last year!). Thats the important part. That, and learning jujitsu.

I know too much...

So, a friend of mine posted this picture on her blog:


My reaction was this: "Wow, look at how perfectly the bicep fits under the deltiod. Oh wow, look at that brachioradialis. I didn't know you could develop that muscle enough to be able to see it from a distance. Ok so then the brachialis is THERE and the coracobrachialis is THERE..."

Somehow, I don't think that was the reaction K was fishing for when she put that picture on her blog.

I feel like I am taking this Anatomy and Physiology thing way too far.

Old Movies Vs. New Movies

On hulu.com, there is an hour-long video called "The Best of Abbott and Costello Live." Around the 50-54 minute mark, Abbott pushes Costello backwards. He staggers into the side of a waitress who is cleaning a nearby table. She proceeds to do a stime over the table and flying dishes, and sits up, straightening her blouse. Costello comes behind her to see if she is ok, and she reaches up and throws him with a seated version of Kesa Nage. It is things like this that make old movies so wonderful. Old movies use no bad language, no raunchy jokes, and no flashy fancy martial arts moves. They stick to the unadorned jujitsu throws, and make us laugh with a bucket of nails and a mouthful of milk.

Now for my observation of new movies. They're good. They're entertaining. But what's with the actors who accidentally slip into past roles? Take Orlando Bloom. He played Legolas, a sharpshooting archer elf. Then he was cast in Troy. Ok, good he's got a nice role he can sink his teeth into and he actually kind of looked masculine in it. But all of a sudden his character has a bow and arrow. And then all of a sudden, he was wearing the Legolas face. Ok we mess up, it happens to all of us, but why didn't the director catch it and refilm? Here I am, and the movie has brought me to ancient Greece, and my brain suddenly is expecting him to shout some Elvish curse at an orc.

It happened again last night. Zachary Quinto plays Sylar, the evil bad guy stealing the superpowers of our favorite genetic mutants (Heroes, not X-Men). We watch with baited breath as he seduces our favorite character only to pick their brains (quite literally) to gain more understanding and power. So then last night I went to see Star Trek (first time in a theater since maybe August with Dark Knight) and there's Zachary Quinto playing Spock. Excellent job. But then, Uhura follows Spock into the elevator, and looked him in the eyes asking, "What do you want from me, Spock?" Something about the way he looked at her, made my brain scream, "He's going to cut open your skull and absorb your powers! RUN!!" Then the moment was gone and he was Spock again.

What do you think? Do you think this is something actors do accidentally? Or do you think this is something my brain creates because I have seen them in other movies before?

Massage Clinic

If you didn't already know, I'm working for credit in a student massage clinic at my school. In order to "further the profession," and for insurance purposes, we have to be able to speak medical, just like anyone else who is required to wear scrubs for their profession. This means that the medical abbreviations used on insurance forms and by doctors and nurses are the same abbreviations we use in clinic. Usually. Today, there was a clerical error discovered.

In case you are not aware of basic anatomy, the Erector Spinae group is a set of three muscles (Iliocostalis, Longisimis, Spinalis) that runs up the side of the spine. It keeps your spine erect. If a therapist finds any muscle to be tense on a client, we are supposed to note it in their chart. Today, Janna was handed the chart of Client C, and looked back on the previous massage session to see if there were any problems.

The last therapist to work on C happened to make a mistake. Instead of marking that there was "(Mild/Moderate/Severe) tension in the erectors," this therapist wrote, "Tight erection." The clinic supervisor, Sandy, was called in to have a look. It took her half a second to process it, and the look on her face as she came to the realization of what it said was priceless. She then had a knee-jerk reaction somewhere between getting a tooth pulled and grabbing a high-voltage wire. Then she sighed and said, "One of these days I'm going to lose my job..." And walked out.