Med School: The Ultimate Roundhouse Kick to the Head

So it's been a while since I've posted anything, but I've been stressing, fretting, sweating, and having nightmares about medical school admissions for the last several weeks. I interviewed at three different medical schools in October: Brown University, Case Western University, and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. I've been put on the waiting list at Brown and Case; I got accepted at the MD-PhD program at UTMB but turned it down because I'm not sure the MD-PhD is really the direction I want to go.

Do you have any idea how stressful it is to turn down a GREAT career opportunity because you feel like something that's a better fit might come down the line? I feel sometimes like I might have made the biggest mistake of my life. Of course I'll only feel that way until I get accepted somewhere else...oh yeah of little faith, right? Well, I don't exactly feel super confident after being wait-listed at two places (it's really just a nice way of saying no, right? Like saying "no thanks" instead of "aw hell no"). Plus, no other schools have even pretended to be interested. I'd really like to go to Colorado, but talking to them, they make you feel like they couldn't care less. I scored a 37Q on the MCAT! I've got a 3.84 GPA! I've done a lot of research! I'm a good person!!! What's wrong with me that I can't get in while morons all around me are getting accepted elsewhere?

I promise this will be my only rant about medical schools. Unless someone else interviews me and wait-lists me, then the floodgates may really open; nay, the dams will burst and I won't be able to hold my tongue. There's got to be a better way to do this.

On a lighter note, I'm trying to learn to fly fish. Fly fishing seems like a truly masculine art to me, one in which bearded Herculean giants can participate and not feel at all ashamed like they might as ballerinos. I've always enjoyed the arts, and I've always enjoyed the outdoors- fly fishing is the perfect marriage of those two passions. While I'm no Picasso out there on the water yet, in fact I've only been once, I hope to reach the point where I can feel the artistry in the way the rod sways and the line dances. Or at least, I hope to someday be good enough that others on the river will say, "You know, fly fishing seems like a truly masculine art to me." I wonder if Da Vinci's goal with a painting was every simply to inspire others to want to paint. How altruistic of me.