New Year, New Blog

So it's been a few years... I often think that if I had a higher tolerance for the sight of my own handwriting (and if the idea of sitting down and writing sentences by hand in a journal didn't feel so reflexively revolting after many years of in-class essays and other schoolwork that more or less required the same general mechanics) I'd be an avid old-fashioned notebook-type journaler. 

But alas, I type much more quickly and more *legibly* than I could ever hope to write by hand. I also tend to compose things far less linearly than might work well for paper-format thought dumping. So here we are.

So much has happened since the last time I committed anything to blog form -- I finished medical school, spent an internship year out in the middle of nowhere while C worked as a post-doc a couple time zones away, at long long last I moved back home(-ish) to finish the rest of residency which started out with C at that point initially working in another city far away (but at least in the same time zone for a stretch) and quickly (too quickly?) turned into C moving in right as the world-wide quarantine started clamping down. 

Looking back on things at this point, a lot of residency is already starting to feel... hazy. I had started a post here or there during residency but ultimately never posted any of them. Some might say that rather than staying trapped behind a camera lens or a blog post interface I was too busy experiencing things in the moment during those years, but the relentless documentarian in me knows that that's not true. No. What happened was four years of soul-sucking exhaustion, and I didn't have it in me to write let alone reflect during most of that time.

But I miss it -- the journaling. And as much as my imperfect posts from years past showcase how much of an imperfect person I was when I wrote them, even the ones documenting relatively mundane things feel valuable. They remind me of how things were, who I was, what it all felt like before the dampening effects of time started to settle in. 

The past year alone has been so full of so many things for which I wish I'd had the shit-togetherness to commit thoughts into text form about at the time: 

• Getting oriented in lab and making new work friends
  
• Graduating residency / starting fellowship
  
• Finding our new place and moving out of our little moldy shoebox (the shoebox was good to us, but they were about to raise our rent  anyway, and the additional space was sorely needed).
  
• Taking and passing the board exam 
• Being able to spend holidays with family again

So with residency behind me and a substantial decompression period, why not see how long it sticks this time around? We spent the new year sleeping in, having hot pot for lunch, and taking care of small chores at home. Aside from taking out the trash, I don't think either of us even left the unit throughout the entire 12/31-1/1 weekend. The perfect weekend -- or one version of it, anyway. 

Interested to see what 2023 will bring us.