A Year In a Life

[cornerofmadness]

From midnightsjane

She selected 1989 for me and what a year that was. I graduated from Waynesburg College that year with two degrees, one in chemisty and one in biology. It was so hard to leave. I never fit in in high school but I utterly blossomed in college. Within a year I was not only in a sorority but an officer, I was in three bands (marching, symphonic and jazz), I was both acting and/or stage managing three plays a year, had various other clubs and I was working three jobs. I had so many friends there and I was about to leave them behind. I knew that I would never see most of them again and would only keep in touch with a few no matter what I said but it was also time to go.

Because I left there to go to Cleveland OH. I had never lived that far from home before but I wasn't afraid. I was jazzed. I had my own two bedroom high rise condo set up with a roommate by the podiatric medical school I was entering. 1989 saw me going into med school. For the first time in my life I was living and functioning in a city. My undergrad was practically as bucolic as my home town. But now I was in Cleveland, the mistake on the lake as Pittsburghers called it and I was, if nothing else, under Pittsburgh's influence.

In 1989 I met a whole new set of friends. I joined a medical fraternity. I learned that my skills of drinking beer from a bong would not go to waste. I learned that I had known NOTHING about how hard college was and am to this day pitiless on whining undergrads as a result. I was carrying some 32 credit hours. We gave all SIX exams on the same day to prepare us for the rigors of national medical boards. It was hell.

I also for the first time in my life got to spend quality time in clubs I had only seen on TV, down in the Flats. I got spoiled by a condo suite that had two pools and it's own weight room (it is still the finest place I've ever lived but not the friendliest by far)

I got to dissect my first human and found out it didn't disgust me. It fascinated me. I couldn't get enough of lab no matter how horribly hard it was and how much I was convinced at the time that I would wash out and never be a doctor.
midnightsjane couldn't have picked a better year if she had known.

Want to tell me about a year in your life? I'll pick a number out of my hat for you.