So apparently they're going to be paying me for the next month to teach the Kines class. It's not going to make me rich or anything, but it's definitely a nice way to compensate me for missing two good days of sleeping in. :-D They put me in the system as an Adjunct Faculty member. Hahaha! I found it funny.

I've been watching a lot of cardiovascular procedures and surgeries recently. It's definitely cool stuff, and I think Cardiology might just have moved to the top of the list of future specialties I'm considering. That would go perfectly with my graduate work! I know it's a long training period (3-year residency plus 3- or 4-year fellowship), but oh well. If it's what I end up wanting to do, it'll be worth it.

Nothing much else of note to report on. God is good, and he continues to work in my life through people and circumstances to draw me closer to Himself.

It's been a busy week here in Jacktown during "Spring Break." All but a few students have left and gone to beaches or mountains or somewhere else nice. I'm not complaining, though.

I've been able to get extra hours at my work to stay busy, and that additional money will be nice. I can always use it, and lately I've been spending some of it on books for medical school. The growing stack of books is getting me excited about starting up, and I'll be honest, the temptation to start reading them is ever present. Resisting this urge is not difficult, however, as there is always something else to distract me in this college dorm.

It's been fun looking at the Match Lists of various medical schools today. Multiple times I caught myself daydreaming about where I'll end up, but then I had to knock myself back into reality. 7 more years!! There's absolutely no sense in making plans or even thinking about that period of my life. Sometimes I wish I could just live in the present more and not think so much about the future. Right now I just need to try and do my best in everything, for the glory of God.

My running is going fairly well these days. I've been trying to increase my weekly mileage gradually in preparation for the Nashville Marathon on April 25. This week I'm hoping to hit 48 miles. That is a good number fewer (Ideal would be a consistent 65 or 70) than is necessary for me to feel adequately fit to run a good marathon, but oh well. This is just a stepping-stone race that I hope will catapult me into some strong summer training and a few faster fall marathons. That's the goal, at least. If I can stay injury-free and train like I did last summer, it should be doable. Also, I need to find some races that I can work around my medical school schedule. Chicago would be nice to do again in October, but we'll see.

Work was interesting/fun today. At my research job I work with a Romanian doctor who is a strong Christian, adamantly opposed to the doctrine of predestination. We discussed it and other things for over two hours. It was a great discussion, and it showed me that I need to be able to back my beliefs up Biblically. I found myself telling her what I believe, and quoting some verse incompletely, without knowing exactly where to find that passage in the Bible. I need to work on that.

Anyways, that's about all that's been going on. Nothing too exciting, but things are good...

Class was fun today! Again, only 4 out of the 10 people showed up, but I think they had fun, and the material was clicking with them. I chose to go more with a highly interactive teaching style, and found that it definitely works a lot better for this class. One of the guys in the class fell asleep for the last few minutes, but he had an A & P test directly after the Kinesiology course I was teaching, so I wouldn't guess that he got much sleep last night.

Today should be a fun day. I have a RD meeting in a little while, then I'll go to work for the afternoon, then we have the annual Welbertson Film Festival that the men's residence halls sponsor. I get to be the popcorn man, which is always fun.

Well, the first day of teaching wasn't too bad. I'll say this - it could have been better, but it also could have been a lot worse. Only 4 out of the 12 people in the class showed up, but that had nothing to do with me. They didn't have class at all last week because the regular teacher had been out, so maybe they thought their good fortune would continue. Since I was a student so recently, it was weird to have students asking me what would and would not be on the test. I guess most people don't like learning for the sake of learning; they only care about what they'll be tested on.

I only ended up using 45 out of the 75 minutes that I could have lectured, but I really didn't have too much to go over. Most of the stuff is rote memorization, and I wanted to give them more time for self-study. Next lecture we'll go longer, because I'll have them learning the origins and insertions of the muscles using a skeleton. I don't want to spoil them, because I doubt that they went and studied when I let them go early. I never did.

My volunteering at the hospital went well today. I have to admit that I only started volunteering at the hospital a few years ago because I thought it was just one of those things that pre-meds were expected to do. Never would I have guessed that I would grow to enjoy it as much as I do. It's definitely one of the highlights of my week. The volunteers I work with are incredible.

I had a great meeting with my (likely) future graduate school mentor today. He is the most laid back guy ever, and I like that. We talked for about half an hour and he showed me his lab. He and his lab have very recently moved into the new research building, which is an incredible facility. This past Wednesday he received word that his grant application was accepted, so we will have plenty of money to do research over the next 5 years or so.

It looks like I will have a good amount of flexibility and independence in my graduate work, but I also got the impression that Dr. RH (trying to keep it somewhat anonymous, since anyone can see this) would be available whenever I need help. Of course, he'll be there to guide me in making a decision, but he told me that I am free to research the topic of my choosing. Things are shaping up nicely. Praise God!

Earlier today, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to occupy 75 minutes of lecture time tomorrow morning, but after reviewing the material, I feel a lot better about it. Since I took the class relatively recently (within the last 2 years) and remember learning the material for the first time, I feel like I can present it in a better way than my teacher did in the class. Not to say that I'm a better teacher than he is (of course not! I've never done it), but I did learn a trick or two the hard way about organizing all this information. I would appreciate prayer for this opportunity. I'm not worried about it, but I can't say I know how it's going to turn out.

Mornings have always been interesting to me. Particularly the first 30 minutes or so. I've never been the type to be garrulous or ebullient immediately upon waking up, and I'm always envious of those who LOVE to wake up early. Often when I wake up I'm slightly disoriented, and I tell myself that I would do or give anything if I could only curl back up into my comforter and go back to sleep for a few more hours. Other days (today, for example) I have no trouble waking up, and I'm alert and ready to go almost I guess it has to do with sleep cycles and such, but I still find it weird.

Another factor that compounds the problem is that I tend to stay up too late. Maybe next year when I've finally moved out of the dorms I'll be able to go to bed early. My problem is, I like to socialize, and I have trouble going to bed if I think anything exciting may be happening anywhere near me. I need to force myself to have a more regular sleep schedule. That would help things.

As far as news goes, I e-mailed a physiology faculty member (Dr. RH) I'd like to have as my advisor in my PhD work. He wrote me back promptly and asked if I would meet with him this upcoming Monday to discuss things, and said he would be very interested in being my mentor. That's exciting, because I would love to work under him. He's a great guy, his research interests me (studies obesity, and how it affects blood flow in exercise), he has solid funding, he just had an MD/PhD student in his lab (so he'd know what to do with me), and he's an outdoors enthusiast! I hope things work out with him.

On another note, it looks like I might be teaching a kinesiology course at Belhaven over the next few months. The Chair of the Sports Medicine Department, a close friend of mine, asked if I would sub for one of the professors that will be in and out for the rest of the semester. The only downside to this is that the class is on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8, and those are the only two days I get to sleep in. It should be a good experience for me. It'll force me to go back and review all the muscles in the body, and to re-familiarize myself with the origins, insertions, actions, and innervations of each one. This should make gross anatomy a bit easier this fall. Also, I've never taught in a classroom setting before, so that'll be interesting.

I was out of town on Thursday and Friday on a trip up to Olive Branch to the annual Mississippi Academy of Science conference. It was a good time, as usual. This was my third time attending, and I'm sure I'll be going every year for the next five or six years. We were supposed to present our poster for our Trypanosome research, but things got messed up and no judges ended up coming by our poster.

Needless to say, we didn't win any awards. I don't care, but for the sake of the Bio Profs at Belhaven, I wish we had improved on our second-place award from last year. We had a good presentation ready for them, and we knew the material. Oh well, things like that happen. I feel like I've had a decent bit of experience presenting research, and I'm sure that will come in handy in the future.

Before the conference, I had been feeling a bit worried about the graduate/research portion of my future schooling. I still am slightly scared, not knowing what exactly to expect, but the conference did get me excited; I really do like interacting with researchers and hearing about their work. One thing that always amazes me is how much knowledge is out there, concerning pretty much every single subject. I could earn a Ph.D. in physiology, and still know nothing about so many things in the field. I don't know if most researchers struggle with this, but it's hard to see 100 research posters, each about some minute cell or enzyme or channel, and genuinely care about every one of them. I love to learn new things, but I don't have time to learn about everything. Guess I just need to come to grips with the fact that I don't (and won't) know everything, ever.

This summer will be hard. I'm scheduled to do eight, 1-week rotations in the labs of physiology faculty members. I don't know if they expect me to learn many lab techniques in a week. I hope not. If I can get a good grasp of the different types of research going on in the department, I'll be content. I'm fairly certain that I know who I want my advisor to be. He just had an MD/PhD student in his lab for the last three years, so he'll know what to do with me, and his student did quite well. He had several publications, and I believe that two or three of them were as a first author.