You’re gone–

At first, I was numb the first two days.  I didn’t eat for 2 days.  I lost two pounds.

Then, reality sunk in.  Strangely, I didn’t cry this third time.

I miss you, but I know you made the right decision.  No one has the patience to wait 5 years like I suggested.

When you dumped me, I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel.  Now, I feel ennui.  I think hoping to move to be with you gave me a goal to shoot for.

Now, I don’t know why I’m working.  I want to tell people that I feel some kind of higher calling, but I’m not grandiose enough to think of myself that way.

I feel lost.

I hope you’re doing all right.

Live like no one is watching you because no one is.  How much time in your day do you spend thinking about yourself?  Probably 90% right? We are innately selfish, just admit it.  And selfish isn’t a bad thing; it’s a survival mechanism.

That leaves 10% for significant other, friends, family, and the world.

I have wasted eons of time worrying how I am inferior to other people in other positions (never really how much better I am than other people because we’re always looking up aren’t we?), when in fact they spend ZERO time thinking about me.  They are probably spending their time looking up at the person right above them too.

No one gives a damn about you.  And I mean that in the kindest way.  You think your parents care about you, but half of it is that they want you to fulfill their fantasy of you.  Every couple days when I talk to my mom on the phone, she keeps asking me about a potential boyfriend.

I am in zero position to have a relationship, and she knows that, but she cannot help but dream.  WHY?!

I repeat.  No one gives a damn about you.

Isn’t that liberating?

My dad and I let our emotions with 5% of our patients ruin our experience with medicine and business.

Some of them weasel their way out of paying.  And I feel for them because I know they want to pay, but they cannot afford to.  They are in survival mode.

When patients walk in wearing a polo of the Chinese restaurant they work at across the street, or they come in wearing a neon yellow tshirt and a sweatshirt with holes in it, you know they don’t have money.

For your services, they had to labor an entire day.  For other dentists’ services, they have to labor weeks to months.

The median family income is $50k.  How do doctors and dentists expect people to pay for basic services?

I’m torn on both sides of the coin.  I want to get paid well, but I don’t want to bankrupt people.  Perhaps doctors in hospitals do not face this guilt because they are not trained in billing and collecting.

We live in an economy that daily, persistently asks, “What can you bring to the table?”

What can you do that no one else can do better or for a lower price?

This realization smacks me hard in the face every day as I field calls every day at work, inquiring about prices.

At first, I felt debased, thinking that my services, training, and spirit are reduced daily to a number.  An anonymous, soulless number.

But I get it.

A price is a proxy for how hard someone has to labor in order to receive your services.

The world is harsh.

And thus, every day intellectually feels like an arms race.  The world is constantly running ten steps ahead of you.  You have to get better, or you’ll risk falling a mile behind.

In that regard, I keep learning not out of interest, but out of fear.  Fear of falling behind.  I know it sounds pessimistic to say that, but it’s probably a primary, if not the biggest, motivator.

Stephen Hawking died today.

It made me ponder whether his life was better than someone else’s who is fully able bodied.

Would you rather contribute to society forever so that your memory lives on time immemorial, or would you rather be a fart in the wake of existence but be able to have sex?

I asked two of my friends, and they would both rather live average lives and have fully able bodies.

When I asked myself this, I was on the fence..  It would be extremely cool to leave a mark on society.  But sex is pretty great…

I would think that, after I’m dead, I won’t care that much about what society thinks of me, because I’ll already be dead.

But changing the world is pretty damn cool.

Man, I dunno..

I admire monks and nuns, otherwise known as people who subscribe to the ascetic lifestyle.  They don’t want anything, except maybe to glorify God.

Sometimes I think that we’re all on this hamster wheel, huffing and puffing to no end, running our little hearts out.  Possibly running to death.

My friend who has one of the most coveted jobs in today’s first world is miserable and lost.  He told me that he’s not sure where he wants to go with the job, although I wonder if other problems are bothering him more that he’s not willing to admit to.

Listening to him complain makes me do a double-take.  For whatever reason, I deem people who are quantitatively gifted and have six figure quantitative jobs as higher than me.  They’re smarter, will be more successful, and will thus be happier than me.  But hearing him, with his perfect job, causes me to realize that even people with the “best” jobs can be unhappy.

I think he’s unhappy because he has been single for quite a long time, perhaps one to two years.  I don’t blame him for his singledom; he lives in a city that is predisposed to hosting many straight white males because of tech jobs.  The disparity in the ratio between men and women is even greater in tech than it is in infamous Wall Street!  He’s having a hard time dating in San Francisco because women can’t even afford to live there!

I have a lot of hopes with the person I’m kind of sort of dating right now, but with so many unknowns, and my fear that he will grow impatient or grow out of love with me, I’m not holding my breath.

I’m trying to be okay with either outcome–life with him, or life without him.  And that’s the way life should be I think.  Our happiness shouldn’t hinge on things that we cannot control.  I would like to achieve a steady state of mild contentedness on a daily basis.

Lately, I have been feeling more confident in my job.  I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on continuing education, but I think I am starting to see the returns.  I look at someone’s mouth, and I see things much more differently than I did before.

Being given a new pair of eyes has made me hunger for more education.

I have to be okay with waiting years to decades for return on certain sorts of education though, but college and dental school were the same way right?

I don’t want to say that we are 100% compatible, because that would be like two concentric circles.

We’re more like a Venn Diagram, with a lot of overlap.

Between two people, I think it’s difficult to have a lot of shared interests; what’s more important, I think, is a shared vantage point.

Is your point of view of the world similar to mine?  Are both looking from the Earth, the bottom of the ocean, or from the moon?

Is the world headed towards an apocalypse, towards heaven, or is it vacillating around in purgatory?

And, perhaps most importantly, do you prefer orange juice with or without pulp?

And maybe we don’t even want to strive to be concentric circles, because that would be boring right?

I want you to help me to grow, and I want to be able to help you grow too.

Before meeting you, I felt like my heart was under lock and key.  And somehow, you found a tiny little crack, and you jimmied it open with a wedge.

And now my heart has escaped out of the crack that you pried open, vulnerable, glorious, and glittering for the world to see.

Watch out world.

Every time we make love, I want to say something poetic, dramatic, and memorable.  I want to encapsulate all of the action into something movie quote-esque for you.

But I just end up saying nothing.

The moment is ineffable.

Enough of the politically correct Dove ads.  Enough of the feminist rhetoric about feeling good in your own body.  And I’m not anorexic, so don’t worry.

The truth is, save for anorexic extremes, we like being thin.  Thin does not necessarily equal healthy, but very broadly speaking, thin is a better sign for decent health than overweight.  We can say that, can’t we?  I’m not a medical doctor, but you don’t need to be a doctor to have common sense.

They say that the Victorian welcomed women with more curves, which signals the arbitrariness of sexual selection and culture, but I believe that that is a slight exaggeration.  It’s like pop culture went from preferring Kim Kardashian to Nicole Kidman.  But really, in westernized culture, right now we like both body types!

There are so many advantages to being thin, for instance:

• Better fit on airplanes.  I never have to pay for Economy Plus.  The person next to me is never upset to see that I am sitting next to them, since I won’t be encroaching on their precious cubic metrage with my lack of guttage.
• Rock climbing.  For nature’s version of American Ninja Warrior obstacle courses, meaning the real thing, it is good for fitting through narrow crevices.  I have reached pinnacles that I doubt any obese person could reach since I could fit through holes that only children should be able to (I’m small by western adult standards).
• Food Costs Less.  You eat less, you spend less money.  I seldom order appetizers or desserts at restaurants.  Waitresses must roll their eyes every time they see a small framed woman sitting at one of their assigned tables.

I think we should all acknowledge that being thin is being better than being over weight, and it shouldn’t be politically incorrect to say that.

“Hm, I wonder what will happen if I do this?”

He drops a rock off a cliff.

An hour later, at a different cliff.

“Hm, I wonder what will happen?”

He drops another rock off of a cliff.

“Where did that pool of water come from?”

I stare at a pool of water the width of a dinner plate and the depth of a penny.

I respond, “Geez, I don’t know, the sky?”

I respond, “Ah, yeah, you’re probably right.”

..I resist the urge to explode since we have been climbing for at least one and half hours.  We are traversing what feels like the earth’s jungle gym, except there’s no escape route except to turn around whence we came from.

I wonder what happens if you fall and break a leg?  A helicopter has nowhere to land.   How are the paramedics going to get me if I’m a 50 minute hike from the road?  Can they carry a stretcher that far?

“I think these rocks here fell from these walls.”

He points to a random pile of rocks the size of bowling balls or greater in our path and then points to the walls of the canyon that surround us.

Who gives a fuck where the rocks came from?  It almost seems obvious that these rocks fell from the walls.

I have to hand it to my friend the quantitative genius; his sense of wonder and curiosity permeates throughout all aspects of his life.

I’m half exasperated, half enervated by his zest for life.

Why can’t I wonder where rocks and water came from?

I trudge on, hoping to make it out alive out of the Ice Box hike in Red Rock National Canyon Park to further contemplate my friend’s seemingly self-evident questions.