Foresight

Andy is in Pittsburgh for the weekend, which means I have 400 square feet all to myself with which to study and clean and eat big salads. So naturally, after coming home from my last day of my last core rotation*, I took a five-hour nap, futzed around with some practice questions while watching a very scary movie alone in my apartment, and ate a third of a pound of edamame**. This was compounded by the consumption of way too many of these.

I have made sweet potato cinnamon rolls in the past. Then and now, I eschewed butter in favor of olive oil and used half whole-wheat flour in the dough. I have no idea what recipe I used (and I don't seem to have blogged about it), but I don't like the way this one came out. People reassured me that they were delicious, and the pastry portion was soft and light; no tough, dense whole-wheat dough up in here! But I was hoping to get a richness even without using butter, not that I was expecting anything like the product Joanne Chang came up with. I tried using an extra egg yolk on top of an egg, which helped, but this stuff still needs work. Ergo, I am not posting the recipe until I have experimented sufficiently.

*Surprisingly emotional. For one thing, I worked with a great attending who also happens to be a great human being. I'm going to miss her guidance and the enormous respect she gave me. For another, there's a patient who ended up on our unit for unusual, organic reasons; I've been working with her closely, both psychiatrically and medically, and unfortunately I did not get to see her through to discharge. For a third, we found out today that a patient who seemed to be a success story in the making has had a huge setback very, very soon after discharge. Feels bad, man. These things happen, of course, especially in addiction psychiatry, but I think everyone had counted on this being one of those stories that carries them through other dark times in their careers.
**After bemoaning to Andy that my diet isn't what I want it to be, and my study habits aren't what I want them to be, and my housekeeping isn't what I want it to be, he says, "'Be perfect at everything' is a refusal to decide, not a choice." I'm going to have to ruminate on that one, particularly in the context of still not nailing down what I am doing after graduation.