my parents

can i just take a second to talk about my parents. i feel like my parents are the most amazing parents in the world. i'm sure lots of people feel that way, but that's just because of the propaganda that their nazi parents feed them. my parents are truly one in a million. they have always supported me from my days as a model scout (scam), my band days in l.a., pottery barn, redrock doors, and now med school. most people would think brooke and i were crazy with everything that we've done, but they've always believed in us, and have understood, that we've been very prayerful about everything we've done, and it's all been for a reason. they have given us our small business loan, we're living in their house, they help us out financially every month. they are just so faithful, and make me so proud. i'm sure its payback because i was such a good kid growing up i.e. getting suspended for acting gay on a band trip. (see previous reference to carlos). i just love them so much and am so grateful to them. and then we were in cedar with brooke's parents and they took us skiing, and bought the kids snowboard bindings and boots, and paid for our tickets. i just feel like brooke and i have the best parents ever.

my poor colon

so i had a colonoscopy this week. i've always wanted one, and it was great. turns out, my colon is pretty impressive and fully healthy. however, it may be housing some bacteria that like to make me bloat up like a kitty balloon that you would give to some old lady whose cat died in a scooter accident. it is the worst. but now i'm on some antibacterial meds, no bloating so far, and my doctor and i have become super close friends. what more can you ask. the best part was the gallon of fish water smelling electrolytes that i had to drink before hand, and the waterworks that resulted. it was actually kind of fun for the first hour, and since our house is especially small, we all got to join in together in appreciation of sweet, fasting-acting laxatives.

brianhead

on thursday, we got all packed up for our final trip to the mountain. we heard there was still snow on the mountain, so we were all excited. should have checked the wind report. the whole mountain was closed down except for the bunny hill. i was so bugged, but then... a flash of genius. brooke can talk anyone into anything, so she hooked us up with free snowboard rentals for cameron and rowan. we were going to teach them next year, along with getting jonas on skiis, but figured, if we can get this out of the way now, it saves us some frustration and self loathing next season. seriously, teaching kids how to ski/snowboard sucks my will to live. but when its done, it is so worth it. our kids could follow us anywhere this season, it was so amazing, so hopefully by the end of next season, everyone will be back up to speed. at lunch time, rowan wasn't feeling good and passed out on the floor, so brooke's mom stayed with her while we finished the day. what a super lady. just super. both of them did so well, and cam even said, "i'm never going to ski again, i'm a snowboarder". as a skiier, it gives me mixed emotions, but still, just to have your kid be happy and proud of themself at the end of the day is amazing. also, parker dropped my phone in a snowbank, where it continues to happily reside, causing me a great amount of stress. i think i'm going to get a palm pixi to replace it, but wonder if that name makes me less of a man. actually, i kissed a boy when i was 7, so it doesn't really matter. he was my best friend, and he was black, so i learned to appreciate diversity at an early age. plus bullies were going to kick our butt if we didn't. carlos, if you're out there, call me.

spring break '10

i can't believe its spring break!! i'm so bloody excited. i get 9 days with my family, including a trip to st. george, and possibly a ski day. i do have to fit a little homework in there, as well as some graphic design to finish up a website that i've been working on for my lame brother (just kidding my sweet little fig newton). i've also got to squeeze in a doctors visit on monday, because matties having some weird stomach/gas issues. ulcer maybe? we'll see. the doctor i've gone to in the past is kind of lame. he's a D.O. and looks to probably be my age, with my same haircut from junior year of high school. who has long hair on top with the sides shaved anymore? plus he wears doc martens and corduroys. so i decided to go to someone who didn't go to online med school, so hopefully that works out better. also, why am i dreaming about calculus and chemistry. it's like this never ending problem that i can't figure out, and makes me wake up multiple times during the night. can't i just do the normal dream of being naked in class or something? at least let me be naked in class working on an unsolvable problem. then it would at least be interesting. also, while i was working on a calculus problem in my dream last night, my 7 year old son was driving me in a car with the girl from twilight. stay tuned...

time rolls by...so slowly

sometimes it feels like eternity until i hit med school. my friend shane got accepted this week to the U med school. i was seriously so excited for him. it just made me so anxious to get to that step. i went and talked to my counselor this week, and she was very optimistic about my potential to get into some of the schools i'm looking at. which is good because when i first went in to talk to her last semester, she wasn't so optimistic. maybe its the beard. i'm not very impressive at first sight. most women and children are frightened at my general appearance, but a select few see through to my sweet cuddly side. i'm just so excited to move to the next step. i take my MCAT in a year and apply to schools right after that. then a year after that, hopefully, i start school. i'm taking physiology this summer, along with gen chem II so that by the fall, i'll be all caught up to start O chem. i'm excited about physiology, just because the teacher is matt linton who is the AED faculty advisor. so hopefully i can get in good with him and TA or something. i also got my research schedule figured out, so i'll be hitting that hardcore this summer. can't wait.

chem exam

so if you don't want to read any bragging, please avert your eyes. the main point of this blog is to catalog the things i've done so i can review for my med school application. so forgive a brotha for a little self appreciation. anyway...i got my chem exam back and was a little nervous because i heard there was only one A, and there are two classes, each with about 150 people in them. so the odds were a little stacked against me. to make a long story short, i got a 100 percent, which was the second one for me in that class. i talked to the teacher and he asked how i was doing in the class and i told him what i got on the exams and he told me that he'd never had someone get two 100s before in all his years of teaching. so i'm definitely going to be hitting him up for a letter of recommendation. its a far cry from sleeping through exams in high school, and getting a 0.9 GPA my senior year. anyway, it was a big relief.

the 811 acrobat

this is my amazing busdriver on the 9:30 PM bus. i had a picture of him earlier, but here is the full effect. enjoy.

loves of my life

there really isn't a story to this. i just love my family and wanted them to be on here. i miss them everyday. brookie, parker, cam, rowan and jonas. I LOVE YOU GUYS.

Lava Hot Springs

Daddy needed a vacation. this weekend was just what i needed. my sweet succulent brother rented a house in lava hot springs for our annual family trip. it was so great. the roads were perfect getting out there. it was so cold and then to jump in those warm pools was so amazing. i had seriously been looking forward to it for so long. the feeling of sitting in a hot pool with snow falling all around is amazing. however, the nights were a different story. jonas was sleeping on the floor and wasn't into it, so he decided to get up multiple times in the night. on the second night, my ulcer (if that's what it is) started acting up, giving me a bunch of stomach pain. parker had swimmers ear and couldn't sleep, cameron was coughing all night, and jonas did a repeat of the previous nights performance. so it was not a great night's sleep for matt. i finally unded up on the couch in parkers sleeping bag with my legs dangling off. this morning we went exploring in an ice cave. the kids loved it. we had perfect skies for the trip home, but i was so tired that brooke had to drive the last hour of the trip. we almost got run off the road by two crazy cars in the middle of a bout of road rage, so that kept the dream alive. but all in all, it was an amazing trip. i love my family!!

a week of exams

i can't believe my midterms are done. things didn't go quite as well as the first round. i made a couple dumb mistakes, but ended up with a 98 on my calc test, and a 96 in both my bio lab and biology evolution exam. i took my chem exam but haven't heard back on it yet. i feel good about it, but there were a lot of places to make mistakes. i wouldn't be surprised if i got a hundred, but i wouldn't be surprised if i missed twenty either. so hopefully somewhere in between. it was just a very stressful couple of weeks...so happy it's finished. i feel like i have given myself an ulcer which is worrying me a little. somehow i need to reduce my stress. but just when i feel like my life is super crazy, i meet this girl on the bus, who is close to my age, divorced, with seven kids, going to law school. me and my silly little problems...

TRAX accident (TRAXident)

i had a crazy experience on thursday night. i was riding on trax to go home at about 8 o'clock at night, and all of a sudden it felt like the conductor slammed on the brakes, and we got jostled for a minute and then kind of jolted to a stop. the conductor said there was a problem and he would give us more info as he could and to stay on the train. after about 5 minutes he said medical was coming and we realized that we had hit something. then after about 30 seconds about 40 ambulances, fire trucks and cop cars showed up. so we figured at this point that someone was hurt. at one point i saw them carrying someone away on a stretcher. i could tell he was at least, really hurt, because his arm was just flopping off the side. but then they took out another backboard from the ambulance, so i could tell that it wasn't just one person. after about 40 minutes some people got on the train and asked if we were hurt, and then evacuated us from the train onto a different train so we could catch our connections. so we drove by the front of the train and saw, for the first time, what had happened. a car, carrying four 18-20 year olds, had tried to squeeze through the railway gates to beat the trax. the car was destroyed, and that night when i got home, i turned on the news and heard that the two people on the drivers side had died and the other two were in critical condition. it just makes me so mad. its so useless. the other three passengers might not even have had a say in what the driver was doing. he just wanted to save two minutes. i couldn't stop thinking about it. to be in a vehicle that caused people to die is just a crazy emotion. i hope the other two will be okay, but it doesn't look good. and the poor conductor will have that image in his head for the rest of his life. hopefully people will wake up and get a little patience.

AED and old ladies

i feel like AED and i have become special life partners this week. we had a lot of stuff going on. monday and wednesday i got to go knit with old people. surprisingly enough, i knit a mean hat. i was pleasantly surprised at my old lady knitting skills. it was supposed to be to teach old people how to make these hats and then they would make a bunch of them and then we would donate all of them to a homeless shelter. well they were kind of tired and the jazz game was on, so interest was not at an all time high. but that was okay with me because those old ladies were kind of cramping my style. trying to tell me how to knit hats right...whatever. i had my own little technique and it was working for me. granted my first infant hat turned out a little thick, and may be a hazard to a baby's soft spot, but at least that baby will look good when it starts bleeding out its ears. then i started a new, bigger hat that i didn't finish but is equally impressive. i brought it home with me to finish because i didn't trust anyone to finish it for me. cuckoo...

also, we had dr. samuelson's lecture on personal statements this week. i couldn't make it because of my bio lab, but we had our new signs out advertising it, and that was pretty exciting to see, i must say. they turned out really well. everyone stole the flyers out of them at first, but then we made new flyers with "do not remove" on them, and that did the trick. add a member meeting in there on monday, and it was a full week of AED. but it was actually kind of nice to get to know everyone better. one girl whipped out her guitar and started singing, the student advisor was trying to hook up with the old ladies...lots of fun.

so many exams, so little time

crazy, crazy week. so glad this one is almost done. it started off so carefree. we were in st. george for brooke's 100 miler bike ride. we got to stay with our friends the stewarts, and it was just a really nice, relaxing weekend. it always feels totally like home at their house, and we're just completely comfortable. brooke was puking the day before her race, so she was a little nervous, but felt great on the big day, and they didn't get rained on until they were about 20 or 30 miles from the finish line. could have been a lot worse, it was supposed to rain all day. anyway, on sunday, we went to our old ward, and it was so fun to see all of our old friends. it made me kind of homesick. that and it was like 75 degrees outside. i miss wearing shorts in the winter time. but the easy times couldn't last long. by the time we got home from church, i was starting to feel gross. we stopped in cedar to see brooke's parents and i threw up and passed out on the couch for a couple of hours. i don't know if i even said hi to anyone. it was so bizarre. but it made me feel a little better. brooke drove on the way home so i could read some literature on the research i'm going to be working on. by the time we got home i felt better but just kind of wiped out. i knew i needed to get some sleep because of the hellish week that lay ahead...

so the week began, i got to start at my new research job, and that was really interesting. the immunology research they do is with zebra fish, so i got my first taste of the fish lab. i got trained on how to sex fish, divide them up into ma

ting pairs and then collect the eggs(embryos) from fish that were mated a few days earlier. then we took the eggs into a microscopy room, where i got to sort through them, under a microscope and find the fertilized embryos and separate them from the unfertilized ones, which would just start decomposing and killing all of the viable ones. so it was pretty interesting and i'm excited to learn more. the only problem i'm having right now, is that i just don't have big open chunks of time to be able to go over there to do the research, so i may just have to spend the rest of this semester training, as i have time, and then just make sure and schedule open times on the days that i need to for research for summer semester. but anyway, that was a highlight.

however, it wasn't all fish embryos and microscopes. i had 3 exams to stress about as well. my biology lab exam was on tuesday. that was crazy, just because it was all basically an exam to see how well we kept our lab notebooks. the whole thing was based on our notes and drawings, so if we didn't draw it, we wouldn't recognize it and if we didn't have good notes, we wouldn't know how to answer the questions. so there were about 100 questions and it took almost three hours to complete. but i feel pretty confident. i took a lot of notes and drew a lot of extra pics and life cycles, and googled extra info. so it was pretty easy, but the preparation was just hours of drawing, so kind of tedious. but it felt good to get that out of the way.

my next worries were calculus and biology which were both on friday. i felt pretty prepared for calculus. his tests are never as hard as the homework, which is kind of his strategy. the homework took me about 25 hours to complete. his questions are just so freaking hard. even the math lab TAs are surprised at how hard they are. here is a sample answer from one of the crazier ones:

but it feels so good to get it done, and it's like running a marathon, you just feel so accomplished when you finish. so i took the test on friday, and got everything right except the last one, where i made the dumbest mistake. i actually did it right at first, using the equation for the area of a circle which is pi(r)squared. but then i got something in the back of my head saying no it's 4pi(r)squared, i remembered seeing it on my homework. so i redid it, and got it wrong. the stupid 4pi(r)squared is the surface area of a sphere, not the area of a circle. but it won't count off too much, because that formula was just a tiny part of a much bigger problem, involving related rates, and implicit differentiation, all of which i got right, but still, it's the dumb mistakes that kill you. i was so frustrated. settle...

then my bio exam. i did fine on it, maybe missed one or two, so i'm excited to just have those done. i felt like i spent so long on the bio lab and the calculus that i was cramming for the bio exam. but i was really calm, and i'm happy with how i did. the calm thing is so important. on my first trig exam, i almost had a heart attack, i was so nervous. so i've learned that if i'm prepared, i don't need to worry. sometimes i'm my biggest problem. but anyway, it feels so good to have those behind me. now i just need to get prepared for wednesdays chemistry exam. then i have a great weekend at lava hot springs with my family to look forward to. i seriously can't wait.

one or two random notes:

#1-we got a free car this week. brooke's former triathlon "coach" asked us if we wanted a car. his mom passed away, i think, and no one wanted to mess around with selling it. so we are the proud owners of a 1997 (?) toyota camry. it's actually in seemingly great shape. a little old lady smell, but that should come right out. i don't know if i mentioned that someone opened their car door into the impala and put a big dent in the side, but that is really bugging me right now. people are so lame. but it would be nice to drive a different car and not rack up the dents and miles on our sweet little impala. plus if something breaks down, it's nice to have a backup, since we're not exactly rolling in the benjamins right now.

#2-why was a guy on my 6 am bus rocking out to chicago and earth wind and fire so early? he had his headphones so loud and was gyrating in his seat. chicago? that was like 1993 prom date music. poor guy.

#3-i seriously saw a guy put his cigarette out on a trash can, and then throw the cigarette on the ground. i wanted to go rub it in his face and then punch him in it. people wonder why i'm antisocial.