Sorry for the delay in posts, but life was insanely busy the past few months, and the past few days I've just been lazy. In my travels to 9 states (13 if you include layovers) and 2 countries in the last two months I've come to realize several things. The first is I don't like traveling as much as I thought. Don't get me wrong, I still love traveling and there are so many places I would love to visit, but traveling for a job where you are somewhere different every week just isn't for me. And although I do much better on planes than my 6 foot 2 husband, flying gets old...especially when you don't have a window seat and there isn't much to see besides the seat in front of you.
The second thing I've realized. I've decided that I will never be able to be President of the USA or even any large company for that matter, I'll never be able to be Pope (for multiple reasons....), a successful moviestar or any other person that is under scrutiny more than most. For those of you who haven't been able to track the travels (which I'm sure is most considering Aaron often had no idea where I was going or when I'd be back...thank goodness for Google calendar) I spent mid October to mid November down in Dallas doing a Pediatric Emergency Room rotation at their huge children's hospital. While in Texas I had 3 residency interviews at Dallas, Austin and little middle of nowhere town in between them. On my way home I made a detour to Louisville Kentucky to attend an awesome global health missions conference, was in st louis for 12 hours and then flew to Seattle to interview at Univ of WA and hang out with my family for a few days. Home for a day, then flew to Arizona to see my ADORABLE one month old niece and get to be her sponsor with Aaron for her baptism. Back to STL for a few days for Thanksgiving and then Aaron and I drove up to Chicago to hang out with our wonderful friends Hannah and Landon for a day before I started my interview extravaganza: interviewing at four programs in four consecutive days. I think this is when I first began to realize I could never be President. Residency interviews are long...not just a couple hour deal, but more of a 7am to 3pm (or even 6pm) kinda thing normally with either a pre-interview dinner the night before or post-interview happy hour to talk to current residents in a less formal fashion. So basically for four straight days I had to be 'on'. Making sure I didn't say stupid things (though I'm pretty sure I did...multiple times), constantly smiling, thinking of intelligent questions to ask. And it was exhausting! I survived, but don't think I'd want to do it again (or wait, then I repeated the same thing the next week in Boston). It is important to always act in such a way that you represent yourself, your faith, your family, your school, your career or whatever well, but feeling like you have to be completely on your game at all times is just hard. I'm not cut out for it.
Anyways, after getting back from Chicago, home for about 4 days, then flew to Boston for another 3 interviews 3 consecutive days. Again....exhausting, but I did enjoy getting to tour around Boston a little bit as I've never been there but always had an odd obsession with it (maybe it is because I apparently had a very strong boston accent when I was 3, or maybe my obsession started in infancy and that is how it manifested at age 3?!?!). I was then home for another 3 days, a quick 2 day trip to interview at Emory in Atlanta, home for 2 days and then off to Mexico for Christmas vacation with my parents and sister and her husband. That traveling was definitely worth it!
Now I'm back, trying to get caught up on life, starting to think about how in the world to compare the programs I interviewed at way back in October and barely remember to those I was at a week and a half ago. I'm glad that the bulk of the traveling for residency is over. I made it through, saw some new places, got a lot of self-reflection time, and am glad that I did not previously have hopes of becoming president or pope or to become a successful actress (successful meaning those that don't make the front of the tabloids constantly because they're not 'on their game' a little too frequently), as those dreams would now be crushed. I guess a General Pediatrician will have to do, and I guess the last few months of craziness are worth it as they are part of the path I need to take to get there.
Sorry for such a long post of half thoughts/half update. Those of you who follow this can now know why Aaron was putting up so many pictures!
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