The grace period on my student loans will end in forty-three days. Though my monthly payments will be relatively low since I qualify for income-based repayment, I plan to pay at least double that every month. And I owe a lot of money. A lot. I've been enjoying the last few months of no payments, by which I mean climbing out of the hole I was in during the penniless period between finishing medical school and starting residency. I paid off my lonely credit card, bought new clothes, a new winter jacket, and even a new pair of sneakers. Living that doctor life and all.
In all fairness, I've made enough that I also got to see plenty of movies at the theater. I've gone out to eat with friends and family fairly often, and most of the time I even bought desert. Usually, I default to the warmed-up chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream option, but yesterday I went for a fancy passion fruit gelato with white chocolate:
Enough ice cream for four people right there. $8.00 USD
It was good, but certainly not worth as much as I paid for it. The tangy edge to the gelato totally overwhelmed the white chocolate crust, and since there was no warm portion to the desert, I lost an entire dimension of sensation. If that makes sense. I suppose there's something to be said about the price of information. This restaurant is right down my block, and now I know that I don't think their fancy "Italian" treat is worth it. I tried their tres leches a couple of weeks back, and it didn't compare with the tres leches from another restaurant further down the block.
In a move that I'm sure any restaurant owner would appreciate, I will share some pictures of menstruating/very late secretory endometrium under the cut, though the desert and period blood are in no way connected.
Last week, no particular movie caught my eye. I got conservative with my money and decided to save the $1 dollars for the ticket, and also went to hang out with my brother and his wife. Morgan originally caught my eye, but I'm not fond of the actress in the preview (the one who played the invisible woman in the new, atrocious Fantastic Four movie). She makes me not want to watch stuff she's in for some irrational reason.
This is not quite the image I mean. When I went to see Kubo and the Two Strings at Times Square movie theater, there was a cardboard, 3D poster that almost looked tough enough to take a few people's weight a server as a bench. It had an outline of the Old West town around it. I was about to use it as a bench myself, then noticed a much cheaper cardboard sign at it's base that said something like Warning: Not a bench; will not take your weight. Since the palate of the film is so brown, that cardboard sign almost looked like a part of the proper poster. I laughed because I'd almost made a fool out of myself. Somehow, that cemented the movie in my head.
I'd planned to go to the hospital to get some work done today, but I forgot it's 9/11 and I live close enough to NYC that I saw the towers fall from my seventh grade English class. It appears there's going to be some march or parade today, and the main road to the hospital is closed. I could've gone via an alternate route, but traffic is about to get horrid, so I just went back to my basement. Since I don't have the equipment necessary in said basement, I grabbed for my DS and opened up another file for Fire Emblem: Fates.
I could've chosen to play either the Nohr or Hoshido route, especially since my DS thinks I haven't played either since this debacle, but the truth is that both those routes are depressing as hell. I like the royal siblings, and don't want to see any of them die. So back to Revelations it is, even though I won't have enough room to get everyone married without significant grinding. I've said it before (probably), but this game would have been so much better if instead of the multiple routes gimmick, they had just created one long, integrated story line.
I chose to play as male Corrin because I didn't like the voice acting for female Corrin. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten how much I dislike this particular voice:
It's the breathyness that gets me
I'll keep updates on the dumb pairings I select this time.
Yesterday, I made the mistake of going to see the 10:10 pm showing of When The Bough Breaks. That kind of behavior is out of my life henceforth because I was exhausted by the time I was driving home. I'm up by 5:30 AM most days to get to work by seven, so by the end of the movie I'd been awake for eighteen hours. Which may not sound that bad, but I couldn't even go to dinner afterwards, and in fact should not have been driving. At red lights, some of which I almost missed, I tried to take mini-naps. Many people do that, I know, but I'm not one of them. In fact, I take the bust to work because I don't want to risk having to drive when I'm post call. I've seen too many horrific accidents to not be a very cautious driver.
Anyway, the movie. Very few people seem to have reviewed it, but I can't tell if that's because no one went to see it, or because of some critics embargo. Somehow, I doubt it was the latter. This movie didn't strike me as having delusions of grandeur:
This is the rare trailer that lets me know exactly what kind of movie this will be without spoiling every little thing that happens, though that might be because When the Bough Breaks makes no attempts to be deep or controversial despite its premise. Still, I'm surprised that it has a 0% on RottenTomatoes. The leads are charming enough, and the first two acts build excellent suspense. That should be enough to earn it some praise, even though the third act is a severe disappointment.
Last weekend, I went to see Don't Breathe like a woman in a desert, by which I mean I'm desperate for something that isn't a superhero movie. I hate to be one of Those People bemoaning the death cinema because all anyone seems to care about is men in tights. . . but hot damn, you can't step into a theater these days without drowning in some superhero or other bemoaning that they can't be normal, or that the government is trying to tell them what to do and infringe on their rights or whatever. So Don't Breathe looked intriguing.
I would share the trailer, but the one I watched goes right ahead and spoils one of the movie's twists. Though perhaps it's more accurate to call it a plot point, since it happens relatively early in the movie and it's only one of several satisfying twists and turns. Still, it is a spoiler, so instead I will share this ridiculous commercial I keep seeing at the movies with "real" people, "not" actors:
What are you doing Chevy? Literally no one cares about cars this much, in this way. Even car buffs don't care about silly awards (I assume), and if they do, I highly doubt they're talking about it like that. Come on. You sell somewhat affordable cars for suburban people, not BMWs.
I used to think I had little free time in medical school, but clearly I'd forgotten what it's like to have a real job with a fixed schedule. This month, I haven't had time to do much outside work, except try to maintain my skeletal social life with a couple of friends, one of them from work. I'm more-or-less satisfied, but I can't imagine what residency would do to someone more outgoing than myself. Or someone married with kids.
Anyway, since this blog has an audience of maybe ten people, I'm keeping it as a project for my future self. It's something for sixty-year-old me (hopefully I make it that long to peruse if she wonders what her twenty-something self was doing. So here goes:
1. Work: lots of cancer, and becoming more independent. Three autopsies so far. Learning to recognize simple things under the microscope:
Epithelial inclusion cyst of the ovary; from before I worked out how to use the microscope camera
Hyperplastic polyp of the colon, after my picture-taking skills improved
I didn't watch the original Ghostbusters. Not the movies, the cartoon, or any of the other stuff that was apparently a huge part of so many people's childhood. Apparently. I don't now if it's because I'm too young, or because I wasn't in the US during the nineties. Either way, the new Ghostbusters movie didn't mean much to me. I was vaguely aware of some hoopla going on online because the new movie has women on it, and that's like destroying the original film with feminism and social justice. Or perhaps attacking men and boys with. . . something. I learned long ago not to pay too much attention to any random thing the internet decides is significant.
Still, as I sat at the theater, musing about the ridiculous internet flamewars about this film, I couldn't help but remember that one of our many mass shooters attacked a movie theater during a genre film. For a moment, I considered leaving the theater to sneak into Star Trek, a film that I hadn't heard any "controversy" about. I didn't do that, but at the second I had to exercise a degree of courage to sit down and watch a dumb movie. I don't know when we got to this point as a nation, but it depresses me.
Anyway, Ghostbusters. The trailer. . . well, it starts with the thirty years ago Ghostbusters thing that I don't care about:
Worst, I didn't laugh once. For something that's trying to be a comedy, that's a pretty bad sign. So why did I watch it?
Because Chris Hemsworth is hot. I wish I could say that I was making some kind of feminist political statement, but the truth really is that simple. He's my favorite Avenger. Because he's hot. He had like one shot in the trailer and didn't get to say anything, and he's probably the least cool part of this poster:
