Our Triumphant Return to Canada, or Five Ways We've Both Changed

So….as a few of you have pointed out to me, I have kind of been lacking on the blog so far this year.  Well, fear not!  This entry (hopefully) marks my triumphant return to blogging!!!  Mark suggested we each write about all the ways we’ve changed since leaving Canada back in August of 2010.   Seems like a nice sentiment, so here it goes. My list is first, and Mark's is below.

1. I’m half a doctor

As indicated by our first blog, Sixteen Months, medical school so far has been shenanigans.  Lots of stress, lots of reward.  This past semester (i.e., the semester where I didn’t write on the blog at all) was WAY different from semesters 1 – 4 on Dominica.  It involved me getting a lot more time with patients, including doing my first pelvic exam and my first emergency room shift.  The next hurdle is this beast of a test called the USMLE Step 1.  It is an 8 hour exam that tests me on everything I have (theoretically) learned since starting medical school.  

8 HOURS!?!?!?!?

I was originally scheduled to take it on May 7^th, but, I decided to move it to after the wedding since I wasn’t done studying by the May 7^th date.  This sounds dramatic, but most kids in my class are taking the test in June, or even July.  It is the single most important test of my entire life (except maybe eventually for my boards), so I want to make sure I do it right.  Once that exam is done, I will have the summer off!  No studying.  No classes.   Nothing.  Just legit hanging out in Vancouver in our sweet Kitsilano apartment.  Come September, I will be back in the hospitals doing rotations, and by May 2014, I will be graduating.   Hopefully the next 2 years fly by as fast as the last 2!

2. I’ve pretty much settled on a specialty I was never even considering before starting med school.

When I went into med school, I wanted to be a pediatrician.  Or a family doctor.  In my 4^th semester on Dominica, we were studying the female reproductive system, and I found it fascinating.  I’m not going to get into all the geeky things about it that I like, but suffice it to say that by the time that semester was over and we were flying back to Canada for Christmas, ObGyn (Obstetrics and Gynaecology, as in pregnant women and non-pregnant women) was DEFINITELY a contender.  Fast forward 4 months and I am in love with the specialty.  

During 5^th, I did my first pelvic exam and pap smear on a real patient. Although I’m sure a lot of you just cringed reading that, I have to say that it was actually one of the greatest experiences of my life.  I am so thankful that I live in a country that acknowledges women’s health issues.  A simple 10 minute exam has the potential to save a woman’s life, or at the very least improve the quality of it.  Why wouldn’t I want to do that every day?  A few weeks after that, I got to deliver a baby.  A robot baby.  From a robot mom with volume control settings.  With a robot placenta.  That experience pretty much sealed the deal for me and I was sold on ObGyn.

A beautiful healthy baby robot.

3. I’m married (almost)

I am getting married in 7 days, 13 hours and 52 minutes from when I’m writing this.  It’s insane.  I thought I was super organized and on top of things, but I think that no matter how prepared you think you are, the 2 weeks before a wedding are a gong show.  I have so many little things left to do.  And I don’t mean little as in unimportant, I mean little as in testing my fine motor skills, like the 165 place cards I just stamped and wrote out.  I know (hope?) that it will all be worth it in the end.  I know that my wedding planner has my back, so here’s hoping it’s the most awesome wedding ever in the history of life.  I have definitely had a few “oh my God holy shit what the what make time slow down” moments this week.  Like when I went for my last wedding dress fitting.  Or when Mark and I wrote our vows.  Or picking out a dress for my bachelorette party.  I am DEFINITELY looking forward to hitting up our Denny’s at 2am after our wedding and just being able to relax.

Expectation.

Reality.

4. I have discovered an exercise class that I LOVE.

Like, seriously love.  Like get-up-at-5am-to-go-work-out love.  It’s called Pure Barre.  It’s like a ballet class on steroids.  It involves a lot of squats and a lot of sit ups and lots of pointed toes.  I usually hate group exercise classes, but I adore this one.  The music is always awesome, and every class is different, so I never get bored.  All the instructors are great and none of the girls in the class are bitchy.  It’s  fantastic.   There is a Pure Barre studio in Vancouver, but, of course since it’s in Vancouver, it costs 1398320x more than it did in Michigan.  Mark insists that I start going anyway.  The classes were super helpful for my back pain and sleeping problems while we were in the States, so I might just bite the financial bullet.  Anywho, if any of you are looking for a new workout, Pure Barre.  Check it out.

A little bit of this....

And a little bit of this....

And maybe one day I'll be able to do this.....

5. I’ve discovered that living is America is sometimes pretty freakin’ awesome...but I'd still rather be in Vancouver....

I was seriously terrified to live in the States. But…you know what I DO like???  24 hour grocery stores.  Free shipping from my favourite online stores.  Cheap cheap groceries.  Netflix USA.  The best burger of my life.  Sure, the things I ended up liking may be of the superficial variety, but I loved Chicago, and I’ve always loved Las Vegas and New York.  So who knows, maybe we’ll have a future there at some point.  But for right now, I am super happy to be back in Vancouver, surrounded by all my fellow Starbucks drinking, Lululemon wearing, organic-locally-grown-free-trade eating  Vancouverites.  But I still hate the Canucks.

As if this isn't the prettiest city in the whole freakin' world....

Denise.

Tip of the hat to my almost-wife for getting it together to write in the blog. She's a busy lady and I've been bugging her for months to write something, and she's kind of got a lot on her plate these days, so it's impressive. Well done.

As for how I've changed, my experiences in the last two years have obviously differed quite a bit from Denise's, and most of them have been chronicled here or in Sixteen Months in Dominica. Regardless, here are the greatest hits:

1. I now eat meat.

When I left for Dominica two years ago, I was a pseudo-vegetarian rocking a diet I'd had for almost a decade. Though I'd already had my misgivings about vegetarianism at the time, at some point I acknowledged that the diet no longer made sense to me. Since then I've been rediscovering a lot of different meals that I hadn't had since puberty. What I've found? I love chicken wings as hot as they come, I can live without beef for weeks until I suddenly want a steak, ham has a strong and pleasant nostalgic value for me, and turkey bacon is better than regular bacon.

 This was a piece of meat that was labelled as a turkey leg but tasted like ham. When I asked for clarification from the waiter, more out of curiosity in case I happened to be Jewish or a Muslim, he disappeared for a few minutes, and came back with the following explanation: "It's not ham, but it's also not turkey. The chef wasn't sure." One thing was certain: it was delicious.

2. I got engaged.

Denise summed up the experience nicely up top. It's been a crazy time, being engaged. From the second I proposed, it's been a roller coaster ride of stress, money, negotiations, and the occasional bout of excitement. When our roommate Ned got engaged and asked for advice, I told him, "Weddings are about pissing off as few people as you can." A few days later he was freaking out and he said, "I thought you were joking. You should have told me you were serious."

For as stressful as the process has been, there have been moments where it becomes clear why this is such an important custom. It feels like it has brought my family closer together, as they're all invested in making sure Denise and I start off our marriage right. It tests the mettle of my relationship with Denise, as we figure out what we want, what we're happy to cave on, and as it makes us consider what we want in our own future. I have no doubt that we're stronger for it, and I find myself excited to see my loved ones all in one place, spend the day celebrating, and finally being about to call Denise my wife.

Definitely my favourite picture of us. I didn't know what to do for much of the photo shoot so I just tried to make Denise laugh. I expect the wedding will be much of the same.

3. I'm rather fond of writing.

As many of you are no doubt already annoyed by, this should come as no surprise: I like to write. When we left Canada, I was nearly done the first draft of Losing Dominion. Since then I have published it and sold nearly a hundred copies, thanks to the help of my sister. Denise and I started a travel blog which turned into our current website, and it proved to be a fun way to update our friends and family. I wrote a second book, which I hope to publish in the coming months. Finally, with pride, I began the Of Our Parents project, which will hopefully continue beyond the end of the year if, fingers crossed, others start writing for the website as well.

4. My perception of my career path has changed.

One of the things they taught us in Education was that, if we have an image of where we'll be in five years, forget it: teaching takes you all over the map. This has turned out to be true for me. I've discovered a lot about my own style that I didn't know, and I expect to keep learning for quite a while. I enjoy teaching the very young ages much more than I thought I would, and I do a great job of it. I'm not as driven to hurry into public schools, and am currently happy to be working for a small teaching center. I'm interested to see what I'll think about the profession in two years time, and what kind of a teacher I'll be then.

5. I have a wealth of experiences behind me.

My brother Greg recently noted that between the ages of 23 and 26, you mature like crazy. I'd have to agree. Something about the last couple of years has aged me, in a deeply pleasant way. I've met some amazing friends that I'll have for years to come, not to mention couches to crash on in Ontario, Kansas, Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Kentucky, and many more. I've created a business from the ground up. I've walked along a quiet Caribbean beach to get to work. I've logged more hours in the air than I care to count. I've seen much of the world, and have a thirst to see more. I've learned to be far more assertive when it comes to what I want. I've learned to value and maintain the friendships that are important to me. And, perhaps mostly importantly, I've discovered that I can grow some decent, if patchy, facial hair. It's been a crazy couple of years.

Look at that beautiful beard.

Scratch 'em off the list.

To my great relief, I finished two important goals this week. One of them was long term and, by happy circumstance, I happened to stumble upon. Another was an short term goal that I'm extremely relieved to have resolved.

The first was to find a comprehensive history of the Bible. This has been frustrating me for a long time, because it doesn't sound like it should be this difficult, but it has been: there are several histories of Christianity (giant tomes that would take my entire life to read), and there are plenty of religiously-inspired texts about the Bible that cited the Bible itself. But an (at least moderately) secular account of how the Bible was put together has been surprisingly elusive. Thankfully, I found it this week at Barnes and Noble, on sale as I walked out the door.

It's really quite charming. It's a coffee table book with large and fascinating illustrations, concise chapters that outline clear stages of the Bible's history, and little pouches where you can pull out large images of important historical finds, like high-resolution scans of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most importantly, it points me in the direction of good sources for further study. For anyone interested in learning how the Bible got put together, this is a good start.

Finding a book like this has been on my plate for some time - I had almost given up the search. Among my other super long-term goals: a similar book about the creation of the U.S. constitution (also curiously difficult to find: lots of books about U.S. History, and about the Revolutionary War, and about the Declaration of Independence, but not so much about the process of creating the most important legal document in the world), and the perfect watch (found something pretty close with Longines, but it costs about 1000$). The search goes on.

Sigh.

The second thing to scratch off the list: I got a freaking job. This was a gigantic relief. I have spent the last three months inundating the Vancouver job market with my resume, and only got one disappointing nibble. In the end, thanks to sending my old boss an email a few months back, I now have a position at my old work place, Little Mountain Learning Academy. I loved my job then, a position I had before leaving for Dominica, and I'm pumped to get back to it now. Sitting around unemployed for four months, with no response to what I considered a pretty sexy resume, eats away at a man's confidence. It'll be good to get back to work, especially since it's in a classroom setting. It does, however, complicate honeymoon plans. We'll figure that one out soon enough.