evolution in green

my writing lately has been completely selfish. sort of like burping on the page in the key of G. hopefully i'll evolve out of this but it's feeling pretty good and sort of like my own personal therapy session.

luck in a pot

ever have days that just feel like they popped up out of a treasure chest and everything you experience is exactly as you've designed through your hard efforts at work or play? today was one of those days. everything went right and it felt expressively good, so much so that I'm almost confused by it. I'm fully riding some wooden rollercoaster that I never chose to get on.

I've been placed in the cath lab to start soon which I've been begging to gain experience in for ages and am about to begin a research project in the cardio department with a fellow who feels my passion for the field and eagerness to jump ahead despite my "a few years removed from fresh of the boat" greeny anglo embarrassment of immigrantness. I've been trying to foster a good relationship with the director of the cardiology department through various initiatives that I've started up. I don't want him to forget about me when it comes to that long desired for day when i'll apply for my fellowship in interventional and will need his enthusiastically supportive letter ( more so than from internal). Each and every department head and specialist that I approached to join our editorial pool joined on and so i had overwhelming feedback to give on my afternoon conference call. The only unfortunate part of the day was that I had to call in on my cell from work to meet my other job's obligations for a last minute conference call and my direct boss was in the U.S. meeting his requirements to maintain his board certification as an internist so I will have crazy long distance charges. Maybe I'll claim it as an expense at the end of this month. I'm not entirely sure how to imput these type of expenses on the EZlabour format that we use, but it's probably worth a dress from the august fashion fair in tel aviv... so I definitely ought to claim it back :-)

Jazzy Razzy Birthday Blowup

Unbelievable! This one goes down as one of my favourite birthdays ever! My friends are absolutely amazing and incomparable! Have I used enough exclamation marks yet?!!!!
It's about 530am and I'm just getting ready to start my training late today but I fell asleep not too long ago. I hardly wanted the day to end. It began with a kidnapping and a whisking away to be immersed in the mud and hot spring feeling of the dead sea waters on one of the hottest days of this summer by far. It was so fitting to my personality. The heat and the earth and the waters and everything in total confluence towards bringing me back together. Back in Tel Aviv, a friend had taken the liberty of organizing something special on my return...and there was only one person who i missed at the dead sea and it wasn't my ex!! :-) Small things can make such a difference in our lives.

Happy Un-Birthday

My birthday has made it's way round on the calender again today. It looks like despite the fact that I thought I might keel over and drop dead after my ex's last email to me and would surely be demonstrating rigor mortis by now, I am in fact alive and reasonably well.

Additional to that,despite my best efforts to resist any celebration, it looks like my close friends have planned to whisk me to the dead sea to recharge my batteries by the healing waters.

Last year at this time my ex refused to celebrate my birthday because my hebrew pronunciation wasnt improving as quickly as he would have liked. It was quite hard to learn pronunciation from a newspaper or book. So he avoided me all day and then in the evening spent 2 hours with me mostly yelling at me for being terrified to speak hebrew in front of him. Then he had me cancel my plans to celebrate and have ice cream with friends because he was tired and had to work the next day. All I wanted was to be embraced by him and have him throw me to the ground and make mad passionate love to me. I'm so messed up that my happiest moments were in his arms and all I wanted was his embrace and intimate attentions. It was not to be.

He had already satisfied himself for the day and his cowper glands were now resting, his pudental nerve long asleep.

no more

I don't know how anyone could be so vile and cruel and viscous. I feel like i'm going to dies. Seriously. He continues to knife away at me after 7 months. i think surely i'm going to die from this pain.

love as a pathology

It sneaks up on us insidiously, and weaves it's way into our neurochemistry so that whether we invite it in or not, the choice quickly becomes no longer our own.
I thought of the love that i was afflicted with as a parasite, making me physically sick and siphoning off my energies, but my understanding of what I let happen to me has changed and I no longer see it as such. Even better... I see it as a full on disease process. Love is a pathology. Even if the relationship was horrid, if love was involved the withdrawal is like coming off cocaine. It's a damn good thing that I don't do drugs and never have.

even plato seemed to believe way back when that love was a serious mental disorder. I don't really need to get into the actual neurotransmitters and/or hormones involved like oxytocin and vasopressin and the similarities between those suffering from hypomania and those afflicted with love or loss of love. It affects us like a raging disease running rampant on our brains with it's messed up circuitry masquerading as pleasure when we have it and pain when we lose it. Symptoms of sleep and eating disturbances come out of nowhere as the gremlins of illusion build themselves into willful personality disorders. Love is a personality disorder. All that oxytocin even allows us to overlook our lovers worst qualities because we see everything with rainbows superimposed on our retinas.

I thought I had takotsubo syndrome. Takutsubo is a type of cardiomyopathy. It's otherwise known as octopus heart syndrome. I was sure I had it. It happens when you experience so much grief over a loss that your heart responds with apical ballooning basically so it looks like an octopus squirting ink or like an octupus trap used in japan. The myocardial tissue becomes over fatigued and acts as though it's paralyzed preventing proper function although conductivity remains normal. The interesting aspect is that it even occurs in the absence of arterial disease or coronary blockage. It's possible to die or recover from it and women in general are the most at risk, although I have to admit it is fairly uncommon and I haven't even seen it ever in my clinical experience. But I was convinced that I had it. The extreme pain in my chest, the overwhelming fatigue, the shortness of breath.. I literally convinced myself that I was surely going to keel over any minute because my heart was turning into a live octupus. When did I turn into a grade A hypochondriac?

what we never get back

somethings will never be returned or repaired. Broken hearts or souls in heartwrenching disrepair may lay for years without healing attentions. I will never get back the pieces of myself that were scattered in the winter winds and i'm a differant person for it. But, sometimes we do find what was lost or stolen. This morning I got a call from the police.

I had two of my racing bikes stolen from my apartment with the metal locks completely severed, several months ago. A policewomen just called to tell me that they recovered one of the bikes and can return it to me today! It's a ten thousand dollar racing bike that my sponsor couldn't afford to replace for me and it wasn't covered by insurance.

I don't know what condition it's in but it was returned. I lost it around the same time that I lost my best friend, my lover, the batterer of my heart. This was an epic winter of loss. But a week away from my birthday, I'm given an early birthday present with the return of my bike.

sadness

my theme of the day is sadness. overwhelming and interfering.it has to get easier.

picnic with nasrallah

So, I'm thinking that I might take a trip across the border with lebanon. I was just in the north and am there very often with my cycling team. See: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3748350,00.html

I could just walk a few steps across the border and take a few bites of humous and pita from a lunch that I'll pack in my blue adidas napsack. I eat it, they eat it... it's healthy, made of beans...hahaha (I really need to see the new sbc movie). Just to say to Nasrallah, i hear you and subscribe to your interesting approach to peace. let's trample on those borders. Showing disrepect and undermining a country's sovereign borders is surely the best way to achieve it's goal to be a part of the new lebanese coalition government and have that same government accepted by the major players in the region.

two by one

two medals. one painful shoulder. two ice creams eaten. one spicy plate of shrimp shared between friends. two gorgeous ex flings. one happening post race blast on the beach. net outcome = a damn good way to spend a friday.

Haredim and their 12 little bears

I've found myself in the kinneret.... not literally but here i am preparing to race tommorow morning. Probably not entirely wise since my shoulder is held in place by mere strands of ligament but I'm going to give it a go and take it easy on the swim leg.

I have the most beautiful room looking out over the kinneret and the mountains in the distance towards the golan and since I arrived I've been over the moon catching up with all my friends from around the world who are here to compete. Two ex boyfriends or rather two ex flings are here as well and I'm so excited to see them. Cute as ever, one of them is now engaged to a lovely girl who I adore. Lucky girl. To think... I gave him up. I still have pangs for my shithead ex as I'm entranced by the land. Israel is so beautiful and he was one of the few people who could appreciate the earth to the same extent as I do. I often feel like I could wrap myself in the hills and valleys and rivers and dusty curves of this country. I want to touch it and breath it in as my own. The most contentious slab of teeny tinyness on the planet.

I love having my friends around me but could kick myself for not being able to kick my longing for shithead himself.

temptations and distractions

sometimes we can easily hone our ability to resist material temptations.. to resist buying that summer dress that we're longing for, or that square of lindt dark chocolate that sits so beseechingly cradled by an open wrapper. It's the ability to control our personalities or natural behaviours that can take far more effort to develop.

early in the year I got dumped. In the cruelest harshest way possible he cut me to pieces and relished the act of total destruction. he cared nothing for me and this was evident throughout but i worked very hard to ignore the obvious. i willingly engaged in self delusion to pretend that he felt warmth for me where there was only cold sharper than that of the frozen canadian tundra. i forced myself to go out and run when each falling step prompted a monsoon of tears, so much that my shirt was equally saturated from tears as from sweat. For months, my sobs interfered with my breathing and i found will to continue somewhat from the drenched soil in the yarkon park since I was lacking it in my soul.

and then it stopped. and then the sun came out from behind the heavy cloud cover.

i'm slowly teaching myself to create walls in my mind and control the placing of memories so that i don't fall backwards into the memory abyss. one resolution is for certain.. I will never again allow myself to be that exposed ever again, nor will I ever allow myself to fall in love again. I don't really need it. I hadn't intended on falling in love at all. It's just a mindless distraction that I don't think I need. Over and onwards to the next phase of my life.

serves me right...

So they call my name to reach the platform for the start of the time trial. I'm supposed to hit the ramp at 9.39am exactly. The starter grabs ahold of my seat or as israelis like to call it, my chair..and he promptly slips and knocks me right over still attached to my bike by my pedals and still in the time trial position. So there I am lying on the elevated platform laughing like mad and I clip out of my pedals, stand up and clip back in again and realize my chain has fallen off. so I hop off again and reset my chain but no the officials think they can do it better. All israelis think that they can do it better. They couldn't and I asked to please hold on a second and had it straightened and back on in a breath. Finally I'm off. Heading down the ramp and I realize that during the fall my gear had completely broken off my bar end shifters on my time trial bars.

But into the race I went. Gear smashing at 70 rpm instead of my time trial revs at standard 95 rpms. Rough as hell. I finished and used every ounce of glycogen in my muscles because I couldn't get my cadence high enough to utilize my VO2 max. Crossing the finish line brought an instant sensation of literally not being able to stand. It was in the middle of the desert and the heat was almost poisonous. The entire time all I was thinking is just get going. Everyone is hurting so just be as efficient as possible and put in the work. Time trials are about redlining and consistancy throughout the effort. Newby's generally put in a pretty J line effort where the hardest effort is at the beginning and then tapers off and then they realize that they didn't go hard enough and sprint at the end but it's not enough for a time trial.

Anyway, I got a massive time penalty because while I was dealing with my mechanical issues..9.39 had long gone by and that is my official start time. Anything that happens to prevent you from starting at your official start time is added as a time penalty. I was sent off last because I was the fastest split but wasted my placing with all the time I had wasted before the start.

It does feel crappy but it felt good to get a really hard effort in. You can always go harder in a competition than in training on your own so I value races and the specific fitness that they bring forward. I do love to race. Funny how I could have just walked away from competitive sport because my heart was too broken to want to continue doing anything. I wonder if we could invent a drug to affect the chemistry of love so that it doesn't affect womens brains to such a great extent... Maybe control the oxytocin, block certain receptors... not such a bad idea. Anything's possible.

PMS precludes peace

This is not a love song...I have the song from waltz with bashir playing in my head. This is not a love song... just the same line like a guitar string springing free over and over.

I'm not really a big pms sufferer for the only reason that my neurons are usually heavily dosed with endorphins from training and that seems to protect me from the mood swings that would probably hit me with the power of an american judoka.

But, I was thinking about peace in general last night. i didn't have time to finish the discussion with myself because I went out with friends who aren't into entertaining notions of peaceplayers. hahahaha. sometimes I rock the kingdom of goofy.

anyway, I decided to partially commit to the maccabiah games by racing the cycling time trial tommorow morning. I have a feeling that I will completely get my ass kicked. i wish I could say that I plan on rising to the occasion but I'm not particularly prepared. My heart isn't into it. like enemy was saying... I haven't really recovered yet and my state of inbetween extends to my sporting career too.
So, I'm racing in the south about a few kilometres from gaza.

Maybe it'll be the missile that kickstarts the fire in my belly for racing again... The organization sure chose a strange place to hold the time trial. Time trials are actually my favourite form of bike racing because it's just me against the clock. I get to push past my limits and really test my intestinal fortitude. I love time trials and include efforts like this in my training but haven't ever done a time trial race. The cycling federation wants me in the mix because they're trying to build up womens cycling in israel. We almost had a full national team last year but this year we actually have a lot of depth in the field and the international olympians will be strong.

internal tornado

maybe i'm just premenstrual. politics swirl around me and i hear it or read it but am oblivious to it's effect today. i'm so uncharacteristically internal right now and it's like i ate a handful of pop rocks and drank diet coke creating internal fission.

i am so lucky to have such an amazing circle of close friends but at the same time after 7 months i can't seem to totally eliminate my ex from my mind. i don't know how not to feel bad and offer something, anything, an ear maybe. nope. I've got to hold myself back from calling not him but... I don't know. what am i to him now anyway ( not that I was anything before either i'm sure)? nothing. efes. denada. what about eternal sunshine of the spotless mind? I think about that quite a bit too. But which is worse.. deleting a mind completely or having the painful memories along with the beautiful ones?

against better judgement

I am completely lacking in the ability to stay angry at someone. I just can't do it. Yes, I have my flaring moments of full on passion but most of the time I can keep my temper under control. My anger tends to lean on a hidden simmer during the times that i'm upset about someone or something. But my simmer dies quickly, especially when it comes to people, even the people I want to be angry with.

Right now I'm feeling reluctantly empathetic as I battle my own default to empathy. Everyone passes through the cosmic trashbin of life experiences but that doesn't make it any more comforting during the dirtiest times. I feel bad for someone in particular who is now feeling deep pain but has no idea how to reach out. I also can't help but be astounded by those who find it in themselves to separate their rational self from their emotional self for the purpose of reflection. Maybe it's not as much reflection as it is a mechanism to cope. I'm not criticizing at all. I see people in shades and half shades of colour and light and feel that there are very few who are truly bad including those who treat us truly poorly. Tonight as I come home at 1am from a long day, capped by a fashionably late dinner with an out of town colleague at tel aviv's herbert samual (where the food is actually too pretty to eat but smells too good not to eat), I feel a deep sadness that displaces the anger that was once powerful and at the same time I know that I don't wish any sorrow on anyone.

Chanukah in July

i've been ruminating a lot lately because it seems that when things start to flow, they really gain momentum. it's like all it takes is some consistently applied effort. Even if there isn't instant gratification, for me there often isn't, within time the benefits will be there.

When I broke up with ex, it felt like my whole life was in upheaval and he did his best to really shoot me down throughout the relationship and long afterward in my vulnerability despite my love for him (so bizarre to have felt this kind of love for someone despite being treated so awfully). So I basically kept forcing myself to suck it up and grasp at random opportunities that came my way, not one night stand kind of opportunities, but the kind that ideally would keep my mind focused and I could fit in to my clinical obligations and etc...

I had started doing some medical writing and editing for a local nasdaq listed company based in jerusalem and by default i basically created myself the opportunity to jump up from a peon position to a peon position at the head of my division :-)

Actually, it's not so much this specifically that i'm referring to but everything happening in my life at the macro and micro level. whether we appreciate it or not everything that we touch, no matter how insignificant we think we are, is affected by us either positively or negatively. I think we can choose to have a neutral effect but that in itself can be positive or negative if it results in a very specific outcome.

I had a conversation with a colleague the other day about instant gratification as it relates to the middle east peace process. He felt strongly that nothing good could come before another 40-50 years of change, and I challenged this. But then his immediate response was that he didn't care to do anything now if he wouldn't personally see the results until 40-50 years from now, so that he felt that it was up to the children of the region to do something since they'll benefit not him. But the children aren't the ones who structure the programmes of normalization or put down the stones so that there are paths to walk across the river of resistance in this region. The children have a role, but so does he. I asserted the basic truism that some of the most valuable things in life take time to mature for us to benefit from and enjoy, not unlike the process of developing a good wine or cheese.

I guess there is instant gratification in the peace process too and that we see in the immediate response in events like the hug across jerusalem or to a greater effect in all the music for peace events that are so popular.

Next week the Maccabiah Games start in Israel. I used to be a quasi-professional athlete (up until 7 months ago) and have competed in every Maccabiah Games since I was a kid in 1993. My first games I went to compete in swimming and then after that became a triathlete. 7 months ago, while on a trip with the ex (shithead of any other name), I tore a ligament in my shoulder and it prevented me from swimming or lifting my arm for 7 months. I just got back in the water this week for the first time. The triathlon igud (association) offered to let me compete but I'm not entirely sure what I should do. If I miss it, it'll be the first games that I'll have missed since 93 despite the cancellation in 2001 for the intifada. But, I haven't been able to train in the pool so I'll have a lot of ground to make up time for on the bike and run. Then again, the Maccabiah is a huge social event and one of my major sponsors has donated 3 million to this years games. I should compete. but my shoulder isn't entirely healed and I don't have the millions of hours of training behind me that I've had in previous years.

Nevertheless, if I'm in or out, the Games will go on and it'll be hugely exciting in Israel this summer in more ways than one.

gifts of any other kind

so today brought some interesting progressions as my usual 4am to 11pm schedule took a bit of a twist and I spent the day working at kaplan hospital instead of my home hospital in tel aviv. It doesn't have the greatest reputation and colleagues of mine in tel aviv has mentioned in passing that it's the hospital where patients go to die. A beautiful sentiment if I may say so. Despite it's shoddy reputation and dilapidated appearance, I loved working with the internal medicine bet department. The director is amazing and said to me.."I'm here to help you be successful in your career. Just tell me you'll commit to our team and I'll personalize your residency program to begin whenever you're ready to start. I want to do what it takes to make you happy".

What Israeli have I ever met who has that approach? It's never what can we do for you. In this case, it's true enough that medicine in Israel is akin to barely paid slave labour, but it really helps to have a supportive department director behind you, especially when it comes to applying for that crucial post residency fellowship in the U.S....

I loved being in that department. I could take my time with the patients and not feel like a dunce speaking in henglish or fractured hebrew ( a disgrace to israelkind as my ex used to say as I regularly mispronounced words that I had taught myself from my dictionary.) My hospital in tel aviv is much faster paced as we have a larger feeder group and similar low staff numbers so we have far less time to consult with the patients, do intakes and write up reports.

I committed to the residency program at my hospital months ago but I'm having second thoughts about either doing it at Kaplan or applying for this next cycle of residency matching in the US to hopefully get into my choice program in Boston to begin next july. Going back to north american would be a huge move for me, but I would have to get in first anyway. I don't really want to leave but life leads us down bizarre paths sometimes. I believe the saying goes that we make plans and g-d just laughs.

This director of the department at kaplan was so cool and approachable that he really made me reconsider my options and then after my day, he even drove me back to tel aviv. It seems at Kaplan at least that I have a tiny advantage over the doctors from russia who don't speak either hebrew or english ( the language of academic medicine).

Anyway, when I reached tel aviv, I had an immediate meeting with an old sports sponsor of mine who is now helping me faciliate some funding for some of my NGO's peace oriented projects. We figured out how to apply full funding to a music oriented project similar to one being run by heartbeat in jerusalem. This was an icing on my cake kind of moment.

fresh soil on clean floors

The past year has been among the worst in my life. I was writing in this blog mostly to myself so that I could have a forum for my own thought mediation. But, today I've decided to dump everything from my blog archive and start anew. I held back from writing in the public blogosphere for a while because I didn't want to infringe on the territory assumed by my ex from hell who from here forth will be known as shithead(TM). But now, I think enough time has passed that I can freely claim a place in this great mass of blogomanic informatzia.