remix: notes outside the margin by a medical student seeking truth

I've decided to remix sidenote. Now it's, "notes outside the margin by a medical student seeking the truth." Part of what I originally wanted to establish through sidenote was a set of core themes for my life.  After sorting through all sorts of ideas for two years, I want to give sidenote a more distinct flavor.  I figure the main ideas I have to contribute will be as a married, early 20's, hippy-Christian, MD/PhD student, so for the time being I'm trying to focus sidenote on life during med school.  Anyways, the inagural post of sidenote v2.0 will be the updated "about" page.  Enjoy,

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"Humanity, which they loved as we did – was for them something complete that must be maintained and protected.  For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.”   - Max Demian

Sidenote is a concept originally invented in a summer email chain by Iyer, A* and Noguchi, K*, 2008. 

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Imagine you’re fourteen, puberty hormones are rushing through your veins, you’re stuck sitting in Sunday school, and all you can think about is sex.  The teacher is up there lecturing about Cain and Abel.  Abel was the good brother, Abel provided God with great offerings, Cain grew jealous, Cain murdered Abel, and in doing so he became the first human. 

You’re fourteen, so by now you’ve heard this story a million times, and you’re definitely zoning out.  Maybe your unconscious drifts off into that creative zone, and instead of writing in the margins, you start scribbling outside the margins, writing "Cain and Abel; The Remix". 

Behind closed doors, Abel had been threatening Cain and stealing his crops.  One day, Cain stood up for himself, fought back against his brother, and killed him.  Abel was everyone's homie, so everyone assumed Cain was the bad guy.  I’m not saying that’s the truth, but is it possible that there was more to it than the cut-and-dry story that everyone agrees on? 

Sidenote is about searching for the truth.  Sidenote believes that the truth is complex.  Sidenote believes you should listen to your heart.  What would the world look like if people took sidenotes seriously?

That is the sort of world Sidenote envisions.  It might be a better world, it might be a less productive world, it’s hard to say, but one thing is certain, it would be different.  At it’s core that’s all Sidenote envisions.  An alternative to the current reality.  

This blog chronicles my vain attempt to understand the truth.  I have chosen to discover the truth through marriage, medicine, relationships, Scrubs, Christianity, and basketball, so you'll mainly hear about those few topics.  They all have their ups and downs, but I believe they will eventually lead me to the truth.  At the very least, I'm hoping to become JD from Scrubs.

If you haven't had enough, read "about me!"

See you on the other side,

from ken

(*both authors contributed equally to this work)

Better Together

"Happiness is only real, when shared."

So for those of you that haven’t heard I recently got engaged to be married. Someone asked me the other day, “Do you mind if I ask why you chose to get married?”

I thought that was a good question, so here are some thoughts I had on relationships.

I have to admit, I am still a skeptic on marriage. That said, I am a full on believer on relationships.

For those friends who have been here for thick and thin, I assume you already know this, but I like friends. If I had to define myself as any one thing, I would say this about myself: I am just a person, who at one time, wanted to have some friends and tried to go out and make some. The rest of my life is just little details.

Sidenote: Friends is my most common label on my blog. And here are some posts I had on friends:

I'm gonna soak up the sun
Same as it ever was
New writers
All my friends (probably my favorite)

Thinking back on my friends from Needham, my friends from Kenyon, my friends from Wyoming. I miss them, and I love them, but the frustrating thing is that none of those friends are a part of my life now. Sure I talk to them every once in a while, but I don’t get to engage with them on the day-to-day scale. Basically, I don't get to sit with them, drink some coffee or Guiness, or eat an entire can of Pringles in fiftenn minutes, and talk shit about life, which is really all I ever want to do.

Here in Portland, I’ve been working on building relationships, and it’s been great, but even here in grown up life, inevitably, people move, people take new jobs, people attend new schools, some people just want to uproot their lives. On top of that, in about a year, I’ll probably be setting up a whole new life somewhere else.

And after that, I’ll probably move again two or three more times. And every time, I’ll have to uproot my entire friend support system, say good bye to another batch of friends, and struggle to meet more people that I can become friends with. I’m assuming this doesn’t get easier with time.

So I guess I think of marriage as a kind of agreement. It’s like making a friend, but with the agreement that you’ll be friends forever.

You’ll have the courage to be honest and confront problems you have, forever.

You’ll get on each other’s nerves over little things like the way the towels are folded, forever.

You’ll have fun playing together, forever.

You’ll just enjoy sitting together talking about the minutia of life, forever.

And I guess that’s what I wanted. I just wanted a friend that would be willing to put up with me, and spend time with me, forever.

from ken

Are you thinking about something? Write about it and post it here! Email me! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

Random Thoughts

I didn’t really have time to finish a post this week. I’ve been too busy following my dream and working on my med school apps, neglecting my alternate dream of sitting in trendy coffee shops and becoming a professional blogger. Instead, here’s a few thoughts I had this week.

In a church plant fantasy draft who would you take first, Donald Miller or the Pope? How do enthusiastic young single people compare with older experienced post-child couples? Where would you rank the Dalai Lama, you know, just in case you could get him to buy in?

Would it be possible to be married with child and still bury other med students at the USMLE’s?

Kevin Durant wears his polo’s all the way buttoned up. Does that ensure his nice guy status? Is that cool now?

If I were to be re-incarnated, what would I come back as? If Toy Story rules were in effect, probably a stuffed animal, but probably not a pillow-pet. I would probably choose something more re-usable and gender neutral.

How can I make my life more like Scrubs?

If you have any answers, please let me know. I may or may not have lost sleep over this.

from ken

Are you thinking about something? Write about it and post it here! Email me! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

How's life today?

Have you ever thought, I should make an attempt to talk to (insert person you interact with but don’t actually talk to, like a grocery store cashier or bus driver)? Did you decide to make small talk with them by asking, “How’s it going?” or “How are you?” Was their verbal response, “Fine” or “Good, you?” but their body language sounded more like, “Move it along, nothing to see here.”

I’ve been thinking about this dilemma for a while, wondering how I can avoid too much awkwardness, but also get an actual answer instead of a programmed response.

Sidenote: I’ve been thinking about this situation a lot because I volunteer at a needle exchange.

Sidenote again: For those of you who don’t know, a needle exchange is a public health program that provides injection drug users with free clean needles. In Portland, heroin is the drug of choice, and there’s a lot of Hep C and HIV carriers walking around, so we’re trying to reduce the transmission of these diseases. We’re also secretly trying to get everybody addicted to heroin, but do us a favor and don’t tell the needle exchange haters. Just kidding.

Basically, here’s what happens: my volunteer buddy and I sit in a room chatting until a client walks in, counts out their dirty needles, drops them off in a biohazard bin, we swap them out for clean needles, ask their age, and they go on with their day. Repeat for about 200 clients, and that’s a day in the life.

I’m all about the needle exchange kool-aid, but not because of its hotly debated public health benefits. I love it because it provides a safe-haven for people who have been told by society that they are failures and useless.

“But Ken!”, you might be thinking, “Don’t drug users deserve to be shit on by society because they made a bad choice?” That can be argued, of course. But as someone who has had to make a choice before, I think it’s hard to make the right choice all the time, or even a right choice. It’s even harder when it feels like nobody cares about your decision or their consequences.

Having just one person be nice to you, even if it’s only for a short two-minute interaction, can snap you back into a totally shifted view of reality. I know lots of times I find myself feeling alone in the lab, grinding out a gel-running-pipetting-tissue-harvesting session, completely forgetting that people exist. Then, I’ll take a break to get coffee, the barista will be nice to me, and it stupidly feels like a total shock to the system, “Whoa, I forgot that people exist in the world, and that people can be nice. Well, I guess I should be nice too.”

But it’s hard to make people feel cared for, right? Especially in such a robotic interaction like our needle exchange where the regulars have the routine down and are in out and within a minute.

I recently got some fantastic advice: to ask the question, “How’s life today?” This was a huge breakthrough for me.

I’ve been testing this question out at the needle exchange, at Trader Joe’s, and people definitely gave me a more personal response to: “How’s life today?” One of our needle exchange regulars that I’ve started to establish some rapport with replied with a pained twang in his voice, “It’s been tough today.. but thanks a lot for asking man. How’s your’s?” It was a small victory, but it made my day.

Anyways, that’s what I’ve been thinking about for the past week.

from ken

Are you thinking about something? Write about it and post it here! Email me! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

The Wisdom of Surfers

Jack Johnson once asked, “Where’d all the good people go?”

Several times on this blog, I’ve tried to work through my thoughts on what angle I want to take on social justice. [What is Social Justice?, From the one who has been entrusted with much] I’ve been involved from several different angles ranging from global poverty awareness, biomedical research, homelessness, to drug addiction. Seeing this range of problems, and combining that with the introspection that goes into this blog has really focused my eyes on an overarching question.

“Where’d all the good people go?”

I think the world lacks virtuous human beings, those that my friend Mooks and I would refer to as beasts at life.

Sidenote: Mooks and I once did a beasts at life fantasy draft over email, which was mostly to discuss people we knew, and the qualities that made them good at life. We did this to emphasize to ourselves, that there were traditional metrics used to measure human beings like physical appearance, income, popularity, number of cars, hotness of trophy wife, etc., and then there was a separate set of qualities we thought made you a beast at life.

Reading this book reminded me of something I said to myself last summer. I had just wrapped up my undergrad and I was planning on taking two years off before heading back to med school. I thought about why I wanted to take those two years off, and I reached the conclusion: I am at an academic level necessary to be the doctor I want to be, but I hadn’t attained the level of human being, aka beast of life status, that I needed.

Sidenote: you might think it’s cocky to try to be a “beast at life,” and you are probably right.

Anyways, I recently heard of Ben Franklin’s quest to attain moral perfection, which he started as a twenty year old. He took a systematic approach by listing out thirteen essential virtues and the days of the week. Each day he failed at one of the virtues he would put an x next to that box, with the goal of attaining as few x’s as possible.

The combination of the Jack Johnson’s song, Mooks’ idea of “beast at life”, and Ben Franklin’s systematic approach to attaining moral perfection, has motivated me to make a similar list of virtues. But instead of having the goal of attaining moral perfection, I would like to attain, being a beast at life. Mostly because I think it sounds better.

Anyways, based on qualities Mooks and I loved in others, here’s my list

Humility – Prioritize others, swallow pride.
Moderation – Some is good, more is not better.
Independence – A Ken can only be a good Ken.
Sacrifice – I want to sacrifice, but without placing this sort of burden on others: “FINE! I’ll do this for you, but you owe me a BIG one.”
Working Hard – When I die, I want my friends and enemies to say two things about me. 1- Yeah, he was a good guy, he helped me once. 2- Yeah, I don’t know if he was a good guy, but he sure worked hard. In fact, I might just want to hear the second one.
Gratitude – Keep on the sunny side.
Control – Have emotions, don’t let them have you.
Humility, again – Accept my limits.

To bring this back to social justice, the word radical and the word radish come from the same latin word meaning root. And so, a radical, like a radish, must always be concerned with its roots. I think the root cause of the global AIDS epidemic, homelessness, drug addiction, and maybe all social justice issues is that there are not enough good people in the world. I think we as humans need to be stronger.

I want to know what makes a beast at life, a beast, and more importantly, I want to know what prevents people from becoming a beast at life.

Arthur Lydiard, a legendary running coach who revolutionized distance running, was famous for having initially experimented his radical training methods on himself, an average runner. So, I figured it would be appropriate for me to experiment different aspects and angles on being a beast at life on myself, an average human being.

I have no deceptions about this, and I don’t expect to ever attain moral perfection, or maybe even reach a level of human being that I can accept as beast at life, but, I think I will have a lot of fun trying.

Worst case scenario, to turn back to the words of Jack Johnson:

“I want to turn the whole thing upside down, and I’ll share this love I find with everyone.”

from ken

Are you thinking about something? Write about it and post it here! Email me! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com