2007.

This past year has easily been the most eventful of my life to date, which explains the paucity of posts here. To pay my literary penance, I think I'll just compile the highlights (and some lowlighs) of the past 12 months here. Feel free to follow along. These aren't in any particular order, just as my brain remembers them.

Work in 2007 was relatively easy but very rewarding to me, yet also very frustrating. I worked as an MCAT instructor as well as a Tutor for the athletics department at Florida State. I'll talk about the former first.

January saw the first group of my MCAT students actually taking the test, and to mixed results. The problem I saw was that right off the bat, certain students had no interest in putting in the necessary effort to get the job done, something I found INCREDIBLY frustrating. No matter how much effort I put into my lectures, it didn't phase them. Fortunately, they weren't all my students. They weren't even the majority. It was the ones who did care, who attentively hung on my every word, who really wanted to bust their asses and do everything they could to do well on that test and make it into medical school - those were the kids that kept me going. The rewarding part was seeing some of them take their tests, do incredibly well, and land themselves slots in med schools.

Work also found me some travel opportunities in 2007, just like 2006. In 2006, I traveled with the FSU Women's Soccer team as the traveling tutor, which netted me trips to Raleigh, Boston, and DC. This year, work found me traveling to San Juan, Puerto Rico for two weekends in a row to teach Physics for two MCAT classes. Those kids were great, the island was a lot of fun, and my boss/host was incredible. I hope to go back some time, maybe next summer. My Spanish was good enough to get by (I took Spanish II in the spring, Spanish III in the summer) but was far from good enough to converse for a long time. Unfortunately not getting to use it much over the last 6 months hasn't helped. I really wanted to learn the language too. Damn.

Well the obvious big news of this year was my application to, interviewing at, acceptance to, and enrollment in medical school. I won't lie, I didn't end up at the school of my dreams, or even a school in the middle ranks of my list. I'm sure my past academic performance at a certain engineering school made it difficult for admissions counselors at those other schools to take a chance on me, but fortunately one did. The school's been great for me as it tends to focus in on a more independent learning style and doesn't force me to spend an eternity in the classroom. The fellow students are great, as is the vast majority of the faculty - but the institution and the administration, well, they're neither here nor there. That I can live with, though.

One thing I will say is that now, at 26, I feel like I'm finally learning for the first time in my life. Now granted, that might seem like an idiotic thing to say - obviously my years in public school, college, and even my time as a professional I learned many things. But it's only been in the past couple years with my return to school that I've really been able to focus, give my school work the requisite attention it's deserved for years (but never been given), and get the most out of my studies. I guess it comes with age, but I think it mainly comes with the maturity of finally knowing exactly what it is that I want to do with my life. When I first decided to enroll at FSU and take those necessary classes for medical school, I didn't think of getting a degree - but when I found out that the map I'd made for myself was only 4 classes away from a second Bachelor's degree, I decided to go for it. Why? What good was another degree gonna do for me? Why bother working for something that will serve no purpose other than looking pretty in a nice frame on my wall? I did it for me. As a reminder that I can not only do well in whatever I put my mind to, but also to keep focus. I've got one more of those fancy pieces of paper to hang in a nice frame yet to earn, after all.

Now one of the most terrifying things I've had to deal with in the past is picking up roots and going somewhere new. Like leaving for Atlanta, Knoxville, or Detroit in the past, this year I left a place where I had friends, was familiar with, and was incredibly comfortable in - all for something new and unfamiliar. I had been to Bradenton once, my interview in February, for a whopping 6 hours. I'd never met my roommate in person, never seen the apartment complex. But I figured if you leave yourself no other option, you've got no choice but to accept what you've got and make the best of it. Fortunately, everything turned out well. I ended up in a good apartment with a friendly roommate that I get along with, in a town that's boring yet manageable. Tallahassee isn't exactly the most exciting place in the world, but Bradenton sure as hell is no hotspot either. I like the close availability of the beach, but the fact that the entire town shuts down at 9pm is a wee bit annoying to a night owl like me.

The best part of medical school, other than finally getting to focus on one thing - the one thing that interests me, has been the friends I've met. I was paired up with 7 complete strangers and forced to work with them for the past half-year, and to my luck they were great. I've made some great friends down there, a few of which have made a tremendous impact on my life whether they know it or not. They've taught me to steal joy whenever I can, that even a smile can make an entire day worthwhile, that I shouldn't apologize for my beliefs but instead embrace them, that I should never be surprised with what life throws at me, and that when I least expect it, something incredible happens. I hope I keep some of these friends for the rest of my life - even though they've only been my friends for a matter of months, I feel like they're incredibly valuable parts of my life.

One of the most amazing things that I've ever seen actually happened early this week when I got to scrub in for an open heart surgery. While in anatomy, I got to look inside the cadavers and become familiar with where everything is in the body but it wasn't until I got to see a heart actually beating - something possible only after cutting through the chest, spreading the sternum, and opening the pericardium - that I understood how incredible what I was doing actually was. I saw the surgeon and his team stop the heart, cut open the aorta, and replace two valves. I actually got to look INSIDE a human heart, a live person's freaking heart. Absolutely incredible. You can look at all the x-rays, CTs, MRIs, and ultrasounds in the world to see inside a living person, but actually getting to see it with your own eyes? Wow.

I've picked up a few welcomed distractions this year. My Nintendo DS serves as brain relief in small spurts, but lately the combination of Rock Band and the two Guitar Hero games for the Xbox 360 have been the holiday du jour for my neurons. I brought the later games home for the break, and have had a blast with the family and friends in multiplayer mode. Hopefully I can rope in some of my classmates into blowing off some steam with it over at my place next semester.

In 2007 I also finally got my first new Mac, a black MacBook from the Apple Store in Tampa. While I'm far past the point in my life where I feel that a piece of electronics can "change my life", I've really enjoyed the machine. It's been a great little laptop. Also, I switched to a Treo 700p smartphone this year, something I never would've thought I would do.

2007 also found me making some political changes too. I ended my 8 year affiliation with the Republican party and joined its redheaded bastard stepbrother, the Libertarian party. Why? Because when I sat down and looked at it, they're the party that most exactly matched my beliefs. I don't have the religious fervor as my Republican compatriots (see below) but I am still a far cry from the liberalism of the Democratic party. Nothing trumps person freedoms in my book. Of course, the way that my life goes - I leave the Republican party and almost immediately fall for a Republican presidential candidate, congressman Ron Paul of Texas. The guy's a straight shooter, isn't full of shit, and know what? I actually really respect him. If you've got the time, and you possess the ability to sift through the mindless fanboy-isms and the bashers, hop on YouTube and hear some of the man's words. Maybe it'll make you look at your vote more carefully, maybe it won't.

Of course, one of the most substantial changes I made in my life this year was a complete overhaul of my spiritual philosophy. For 25 years I considered myself pious, a follower of the Lord. I was raised in the church, my family and friends were almost all Christian, and actually prayed every night before I went to bed. So what happened? I finally took a look at myself and asked one key question: "why do you believe?" The thing that surprised me is that I didn't have an answer. But the signs were there. I "believed" because I didn't want to face the obvious dissatisfaction with the answers I'd been given and the conclusions I'd already drawn. I stopped going to church at 16, when I was old enough to drive and given the opportunity to make my own choices about how I spent my Sunday mornings. I felt like I'd heard everything the preacher had to say, I lodged it in my mind, and didn't need to hear it again.

At first I thought my problem was just with organized religion. To say that all organized religion is a bad thing - that's idiotic. Organized religion has done many great things, but at the same time, countless wars and terrible deeds have been perpetrated in the name of religion. Is that the reason why I turned from the church? No. I did that because I felt like while the word of God was absolute and good, it was the forced interpretation of that word by man and the development of church policies that seemed to go against that very message they were trying to convey. That's why I still prayed at night, that's why I still thought I was religious.

That all changed though. I came to see my beliefs not as something that gave me strength or clarity, but as a crutch. I wasn't a Christian because I truly believed, I was one because I didn't want to address the questions I'd had all my life. I've never been one content with answers that came with a "just because" - faith was a concept that I could never fully comprehend. I'm not a man of faith, I'm a man of science. I woke up one day and I finally had clarity - I realized that I am an Atheist. With that, I felt a weight lifted - a sense of freedom from a self-administered mental oppression. But at the same time with this new-found intellectual enlightenment, I almost right away found a new form of oppression - a cultural stigma. All my friends are religious, including most of my new good friends from med school - and as the "atheist guy" I found myself looked at in a different way than I'd been looked at before. Would my lack of faith scare friends or perspective girlfriends away? What happens when I meet the most amazing woman in the world and while we're a perfect fit in almost every way, she can't make me any substantial part of her life because she's religious and I'm not? I guess that's a bridge I'll cross if it ever comes to that. Though I will say it's incredibly hard to find somebody in that same spiritual minority as me, especially here in the Bible Belt.

The year in sports was a bit sparse for me. The highlight was easily the Red Sox picking up their second World Series title in five years, looking incredibly dominant the entire season. Georgia Tech's big win over Notre Dame in South Bend was another highlight, but it was deceiving as GT went on to another lackluster season. Seeing my Thrashers and Bucs both with their respective divisions was nice, but without championships what does that really mean?

That's all I've got for now - the only other thing I've really got left to talk about are my albums of the year, which I'll get to some time in January (once the dust of 2007 settles).

I hope everybody out there has a wonderful, happy, and healthy New Year.