Brad Martin

peace out........

2012-01-14T22:40:00.004-06:00

i haven't written in this for a couple of months and didn't think anybody would check it but it looks like some people still are so i'll post something real quick. so i have moved back to thatcher and graduated as "dr" martin. i wish i could say that everything has been smooth sailing since december 10 but that is far from the truth.
i used to keep a journal everyday since i was a freshman in high school but while i was in dallas i got lazy and too busy to keep it up. i tried to keep a journal on my computer but that only lasted for a couple of months. but luckily i did keep this blog sporadically enough to somewhat count as a journal of my time in dallas. so the past couple of days i have been copy and pasting everything onto a word document and will try to go from there. ultimately typing is the best option because it for one thing can be read, which most of my journals need a magic decoder ring to figure out what i wrote. but i'm just not sure what to save them to and if i some how lose them if my computer crashes or something, then obviously my old journals would be better. oh well.

as i was pasting all 99 posts into the document towards the end i got a message that said something like "there are too may grammar errors for Word to display" which kinda made me laugh. well, i don't think i'm going to be keeping up with this blog anymore for a while. there isn't much exciting happening in my life right now but i guess i'll keep it up incase something does happen. i wish i could say that i am a better man than the one that first arrived in dallas almost 4 years ago......i'm not sure if i can say that or not. it's been a crazy rollercoaster to say the least. i appologize to everyone for any of the hurtful things i may have done to you and ask for your forgiveness and prayers as i go wherever the wind takes me from here on. anyways.....

And so it begins/ends.....

2011-11-15T22:16:00.001-06:00

well, it's pretty much here.....i've got my car packed to the brim with stuff (but still have a bunch of stuff left here) and i'll be driving back to thatcher in the morning. national boards were this past weekend and they went good. it was all hands on stuff and i knew what to expect so it was the easiest out of all of them that i have taken so far.

I've got mixed feelings about leaving here. i have met a lot of awesome people and will miss them all, and i'm kinda terrified to step out of the "parker bubble" that i have been in for the past 3.5 years and out into the real world and get a real job.... but at the same time there is a little less pressure by not having a family depending on me. cause if i screw up it's just me that has to suffer not a wife or kids or anything. kinda random, but whatever. been a kinda nostalgic day going through all of my stuff and realizing how long i have been here, i've lived in this apartment for the last 3.5 years, i haven't done that since i was in high school living at home, but it has to happen, so there is no sense in trying to fight against it. hopefully the next place i live will have enough people my age that are friendly and not a bunch of 19 year old immature people, oh well.

not everything is doom and gloom.....i will get to see harry, whom i have not seen in over a year, so that will make me smile tomorrow night.......although dad got rid of kuli...... :-(

(Please pray for my car to not catch fire tomorrow!)

Graduation

2011-10-31T14:06:00.000-05:00

Well I don't expect any of you to show up for my graduation especially since you guys were just out here for ryans wedding a few weeks ago (too bad someone couldn't calm their hormones for a few weeks longer and could have done it the weekend of my graduation and we could have killed 2 birds with 1 stone). But my graduation is december 10th a Saturday. On a related note I didn't pass part 3 national boards so that blows. Been in board reviews all weekend and will be untill I take part4 on the 11th.

-- Post From My iPhone

national boards this weekend

2011-09-09T20:25:00.000-05:00

well, it's that time again. i take part 3, physiotherapy, general diagnosis and associated clinical sciences tests this weekend. to be honest i'm really nervous about these tests. i'm pretty sure that part 3 is not graded on a curve, so that adds to the difficulty. i think i'll be able to pass clinsci since i have 3 classes this past trimester that i had not taken before i took it last time, and i did bad on all 3 of those sections last time, so i should pass it the 2nd time around. general dx will probably be pretty tough. part 3 is all the same information as part 2 but now the questions are a lot harder. i'm nervous because i have yet to pass an entire set of tests on the first try. i failed 2 tests from part 1, and 2 tests from part 2. then i have part 4 boards a couple of weeks after i finish taking these tests, so there is a whole bunch of tests there i have to stress over.

i know i should have a positive attitude about it all and tell myself i'm going to do well on them, but it keeps me up at night some nights. i didn't get to sleep till after 4:45am last night. and my heart problems have been acting up again and that causes me to worry about everything even more. i kinda feel like i have spent too much time in the clinic instead of home studying. and when i get home at 7:30 i'm exhausted and barely even get a chance to study anything. if i fail anything i'll have to wait till around march to retake whatever i failed, which is dumb, but there is nothing i can do about that now. i've identified the areas that i did bad in and have figured out how many questions from each area are going to be on each test so that i have kinda narrowed down 3 key areas on each test to really focus on, but i still worry. most everyone i have talked to in my class has felt the same way, about not really being able to focus and study, so i guess that is comforting, i only hope all the other people taking the test with me are dumberer than me. anyways. i'm gonna get back to studying for a little bit and then try to see if i can watch the ASU game online somehow. please keep me in your prayers this weekend of if you guys go to the temple i would appreciate it if you could put my name on the prayer roll. these tests could have a dramatic affect on what i am doing in a couple of months after graduation. thanks.

2011-09-07T01:49:00.000-05:00

well, it's 1.20 am right now and i'm gonna get some sleep but the heart thing is acting a fool right now so i figured i'd watch some tv for a little bit then see if i can fall asleep in a little bit. you guys all left too early! it was beautiful weather here on monday, it was in the 70's in the morning and never got past the mid 80's the whole day. only lasted for a day and will be back in the 100's this weekend but it was nice while it lasted.

i am a few steps closer to finishing my clinical stuff. had a new patient last week and another one today. the guy today was a little bit of a drama queen and i felt like a bit of a malingerer (look it up....broaden your vocabulary) so hopefully i'll adjust him tomorrow then pass him off to another intern. i found a kid that i kinda knew (i made out with a girl that lived in the same house as this girl he liked but didn't get to make out with....if that makes sense).....which while i'm on that note (susan you're the only one that regularly reads these so you'll know who i am talking about).....her name was alicia, i don't remember her last name but i think her married name is deeds or deets? tad knows the guy. but we made out for like 2 weeks before i left on my mission, i wrote her a little bit, mostly cause when you live in tonga.....you have a lot of "down time". so anyways, i think she told me that she was moving on when i was in my second area (which i later found out that my buddies back home tried to help her move on a little bit quicker....like within a few weeks quicker, not even out of the mtc quicker....#cough# Ryan Standage #cough#...but it's all good). so i never heard from her again, and then tawna goostree (who i dated in high school and never talked to on my mission or anything) they both were there with their new husbands at my homecoming years later..........really? i found that very strange. i don't think i would ever go to an ex's whatever with my new wife......i may be misremembering tawna being there, but am too lazy to delete everything i just typed so whatever..... yeah, that was off on a little bit of a tangent....let me re-read where i was going with that....

ahhh yes.....so the kid that i met at eac before my mission and was in our ward back home when i was in mesa, his name is lance mcgee, from joseph city. anyways, i was online trying to find the son of one of my patients (speaking of "Sons" the new season of "Sons of Anarchy"starts tonight but it's too late to watch it right now) and came across Lance so i messaged him on facebook and we messaged back and forth about parker for a minute and told him to gimme a call if he had any questions....SOOOOO glad i am not in his shoes!!!!!

Segway............

I was in the registrars office today to apply for the "2 batchlors degrees" that PU (parker university....but we prefer to pronounce it pee-euw!) and they said "sure let me tell john you are here" and at that time "tits-mcgee" (no relation to lance) (but that's my nickname for anyone that has fake boobs....there is also a tits-mcgee that works in the clinic and is an embarasment to the clinic when she walks around with her mamary glands hanging out all the time) to Ms. McGee heard me talking about the two degrees and called me into her office and told me that there is only 1 degree but that i will have a double major....which is horse shi.......yeah, basically they lied to me and everyone else saying "come to parker! you'll get 2 degrees!" anyways, it doesn't really matter to me and i told her that and that it's not the most dissapointing thing that has happened to me at parker (which is the reason she called me into her office)....she tried to stop the bleeding but she could tell i really didn't care to hear her blow smoke up my @$$ about how they are trying to educate the staff to not say "2 degrees" so i said it's been told to me for the past 3 years and even as recent as a few weeks ago. she kinda realized that i'm kinda like a scored lover and nothing she says is gonna change my mind and i told her how everyone at parker feels like parker is imploding. to which she basically agreed. so not only was her appoligy pointless.......catfish lady at the front desk let other students go and talk to john so i had to sit back down and wait.....then about 30 tri 1 students bumrushed the front desk and i sat there for another 10 minutes just people watching in amazement at the type of people that were starting at parker and kinda predicting which ones of them would not end up sticking it out...finally catfish lady let me in and i got to talk to the overly feminine john....who i knew from working in the financial aid department (catfish and Ms. McGee were not working there when i was there) so we got the ball rolling on my "1 degree"......

so that brings me to right now....my roomate goes to sleep every night, and i mean EVERY NIGHT at 10pm, and he is asleep, but in the mornings he likes to run my blender like he's reving up a two stroke dirt bike for the first time....so i like to go in the kitchen and fill my glass up with water then go to the freezer and slide the switch from "cubed" to......."crushed"! and needlessly fill my cup all the way up with ice (like dad does) just to keep up the comensalism relationship we have.

anyways....i should probably get some sleep since i am gonna "try" to go to school at 7am with all the other boys and girls so i can study for 2 hours before the clinic opens up at 9. peace out!

(and where are all of my pictures from this weekend at!)

i swear i get dumber and dumber as i get older.....

2011-08-27T18:51:00.002-05:00

So it's 6:51pm on a saturday night and i got home from board reviews a few hours ago and am now a little hungry, so yesterday i went to the store and got some stuff among that was some chicken for my salad stuff and then i also got 2 steaks........enter exibit A-

the meat that i bought yesterday......and for the life of me could not find "in my fridge" so after a moment i realize that i forgot to put the bag of meat into the fridge....thinking "no big deal, it's still meat, and i'll be cooking it, so i'll kill all the enzymes and stuff that have no doubt been reproducing inside my slab of cow back..." yeah,......maybe if i was still in tonga i would do that but as soon as i opened up the bag flash backs of gross anatomy cadaver lab surfaced in my mind and i was done. so in the trash the bag went....now it looks like it might be old faithful "chipotle"....but a bunch of us went to Papasitos today for lunch during boards so i probably won't end up going to chipotle......

anyways, i have been consulting with my creative guru (mom) the past couple of days to try to get this painting done and i think i have finally come up with the final design ( i still might put "ALI" in the top left corner but i'm still undecided about it. i still need to do some more layers of red to make it darker but i think i'm going to keep the white line in the middle which was originally going to be an area where i faded the red into the black and made a kinda darker red, but at this point i don't want to risk anything and screw up the painting, so i'm going to go with that......anyways. i'll see most of you guys next week with the wedding so i'll keep this short cause i know some people were asking about the painting and stuff and i had to vent about leaving the bag of meat on my counter....oh well, atleast i didn't leave it in the trunk of my car or anything.....

-- Post From My iPhone

The devil is in the details...

2011-08-21T22:00:00.001-05:00

Well, i was painting for a little bit this evening and finally realized that if i numbered the containers that i have all my mixed paint in it would save me quite a bit of time trying to figure out which color goes where. there is a lot of little spaces to paint and i'm mostly done with the majority of the painting but i still have a few little spots that i need to figure out what color to paint them so i'm giving up for the night. these past couple of days have been pretty nice and relaxing. my sleeping schedule is still pretty screwed up due to staying up late and studying for the past couple of weeks.

i took brandt to the airport yesterday and when we were going through the toll booth (yes, dallas has a freaking toll booth to get into the dfw airport, such crap) i noticed the lady giving me my ticket and she looked tongan and i saw her name tag and it was Ofa which is a popular tongan name meaning love, so i asked her if she was tongan (in tongan) and talked to her for a second then dropped him off. it's always cool to see peoples faces when i randomly run into them and start talking to them in tongan. always brings a smile to their faces (especially the older people that are originally from tongan) so that was really cool to see yesterday.

on a side note, the beard is still going strong. i finally cut my hair, i'm going for the white Kimbo Slice minus the muscles and gold grill look. anyways, i'm gonna end this and either watch a movie or shoot some fat 12 year olds on my playstation. later!

-- Post From My iPhone

You can never trust a urinal....

2011-08-17T22:38:00.004-05:00

Well, today i took my unofficial "last final". I have a geriatrics final that i was able to not take cause my grade was high enough and then i have an applied kineseology test tomorrow that i
only need a 24 on to pass, so i'm not gonna study for that and should get a 75-80 fairly easy. i did well on my ob/gyn test that i had this morning and then took my pediatrics test later in the afternoon. it was probably one of the hardest tests i have ever taken. it was ridiculous. i needed to make a 60 percent on it in order to pass the class and had gone over and over each question numerous times to try to make sure i got the grade i needed. i ended up getting a 71 and then she emailed us (my teacher) and pretty much apologized for making a ridiculous test and that she added 10 points to every ones grade so hopefully not too many people failed that class cause there was a lot of people on the border in that class and the average on the final was a 61 which is failing. so that was a breath of fresh air to get those two tests out of the way cause i've been up so late stressing out over each of those two tests. all i have left now in my way is part3 and 4 national boards!

had a random thought today, i was listening to the dan patrick show on my phone and donovan mcnab (who i have pulled acupuncture needles out of his knee and face!) was telling him that he had a toilet and a urinal in his "man cave". i'm not the biggest fan of urinals and i feel that my reasons are very logical and legit.

1. EAC stadium- The "Horse trough". I think i've been traumatized from having to go pee in that long open bathtub and see the different hydration levels of each of the other participants as our liquid waste intermingled with each other on their way down to the big Soirée under the ground.

2. I am tall, and the dividing partitions are not always as tall as i would like them to be. Its just wierd to be staring at the wall a foot infront of me when half of my body is exposed and awkwardly higher than everyone else in there. the best is then i go into a stall and my head is sticking up over the door and walls and i can see everyone as they walk in. good times. Also in

our clinic we have these obnoxious shelves that i either have to try to break my distance world record each time or crouch down and laterally bend my head to fit it under that stupid shelve.

3. lastly (because i am tired and need some sleep or else i could go on all night)...Not all urinals are created equally. Meaning this.....sometimes its like i'm Larry Bird shooting a effortless shot off the corner of the glass that gracefully follows its predetermined path into the basket touching nothing but the bottom of the net.....and other times it's like i'm Shaq "The big shamrock" or "The big shaqctus" 'Oneil trying to clang in a free throw after the other team started up the ever present "hack a shaq" and might as well have tried to punt the ball into the basket. sometimes no matter powerful the stream, the porcelain of the urinal caresses it and there is no problems such as splash back or the dreaded "over flow". but other times it doesn't matter how good at geometry i am, it's like i'm trying to push the two polar ends of a magnet together and might as

well be sitting in the front row at the bottom of "Splash Mountain". Disclaimer- i don't ever have any real "back splash" but am very worried and have had a few close calls. So my solution to this is to multitask and hold down the flush handle as i am going at the same time, creating a "Water Slide" effect, whisking away the remnants of my mountain dew and energy drinks.

Which brings me to my point, it's almost just easier to find a stall and be "That guy" that goes and stands in a stall to go pee. Whatever, i don't care what people think, if it saves me from having to "Accidentally wipe my wet hands on my shirt and pants" then so be it. That or there needs to be some type of "Gold Standard" (pun intended) of engeneering and getting the slope and pitch the same with each urinal that is made no matter the manufacturor or style. it's not like you ever walk into a bathroom and one toilet is normal then the next is tilted like the leaning tower of pisa.....needs to be some industry standards!

Also why do guys think it's ok to not flush after they are done? Like they are so tree hugger/hippie that they are worried about the natural water reservoir so they are trying to conserve water every chance they get?

That is my rant and that is my rave. A little off topic yes, maybe a little juvenile, perhaps....but i guarantee you that every man in the world, especially the lucky tall ones, has thought about this very thing.

Above is a picture of what i have to deal with each and every time i go to the bathroom in the clinics. It's "vertical discrimination" at its ugliest............

Two posts in one day?????

2011-08-14T00:48:00.003-05:00

ok, so i'm really just posting this cause i'm tired of studying plus i told dad that i'd figure out when my graduation date and stuff was, and was reminded of all of that stuff since i was at graduation earlier today.

So i graduate Saturday December 10th, MARK YOUR CALENDARS (And be prepared for me to only respond to you after addressing me as Dr. Martin or Doc Martin, hehe). Seeing how this really only applies to dad and mom as i'm sure everyone else will be to "busy" to see the first "Doctor" in the family graduate i'll probably just end up emailing this to them, but if anyone else wants to join them let me know, i'd be more than happy to have you guys here. I'm thinking about paying for, or maybe most of, a ticket to Chad to come out here for it as well. That being said, there is a banquet on that Thursday the 8th that you two should come out for (and cause i've been paying my class dues for the past 3 years for the two tickets that they give us). It is at night time so you could fly out that morning/noonish time unless you wanted to come out earlier. I will be done with everything and so i should have a lot of free time on my hands that last month or so before i graduate (cross my fingers). There is a ton of hotels around my place and i think

the graduation will be in the same place as it was today, which was 5 minutes from my house, so i'll give you the address as well so you can go online and get a hotel in the area.

600 S. MacArthur Blvd, Coppell Texas 75019, infact i'll even post a picture from my phone for you just so there is no way of getting the wrong place

There, now you and every serial killer within 5 miles of my house will know were i live.

On a side note, the heart palpitations came back today. Most likely from the stress and what not, but i hadn't noticed them for a few weeks. plus i was eating a lot better the past few weeks except for this weekend we went out to eat for lunch today and last night, plus all the mountain dew probably has an affect.

Well, i'm gonna go over my flashcards one more time before bed so i'm gonna end this (gonna take a few minutes as there is about 130 of them so far). Later.

The lighter has been replaced by the cell phone...

2011-08-13T17:13:00.003-05:00

As anyone that has been to a rock concert in the past 5 years can attest to (ps is greg going through a midlife crysis with all these rock concerts he is just now going to?) the traditional lighter being held up during the "rock ballad" has been replaced by the cellphone light. i've seen it at pretty much every concert i've been to (which is a bitter topic to me right now because my favorite band of all time 311 is playing in dallas tonight and they just released a great cd too, but i have finals this week and can't afford to goof off and not pass a class).

So today me and my friend Robin were at our own little rock concert called graduation, and halfway through them calling the names of the students the power goes out. it had rained last night, and when i say rain i mean sprinkled, and somehow dallas' power grid could not handle the percipitation and the power cut out. it was out for probably 30 minutes. but as soon as the power went out everyone busted out their cellphones and lit up the room. it was actually pretty cool looking, cause the big church that we were in had no windows so everyone's cellphone actually made it so you could see around a little bit. somehow they manged to get an extension cord with some power and used a little pulpit speaker and opened the doors and had a bunch of candles on the steps of the stage and finished reading the names of the students. then as the president was addressing the students the only light that initially came back on was the spotlight which happened to be pointing directly on him. then the other lights came back on after a few seconds.

And on a side note (and i'm not racist by any means) but certain races have absolutely no shame in public places. a group of people behind us were yelling out things when their student came out onto stage when nobody else's family was doing it, and having the latest lil wayne rap song blast over their cellphone as their babydaddy was calling them, or just flat out talking obnoxiously loud during the graduation. yeah, some people have no shame. well i gotta get back to studying, just woke up from a nap and am eating some pretzels with a cheese log and the always delicious diet mountain dew. wish me luck!

as always....

2011-08-12T15:12:00.002-05:00

I officially took my last hour of lecture classes as a "Student" yesterday afternoon and now have only 8 finals, 300 clinic hours and 5 new patient recruits standing in my way of graduating in December. So as always your thoughts and prayers would be much appreciated these next couple of days. i actually have been doing very well in my classes and don't have to take one of them because my grades were high enough (it also was the only class i could test out of too, or else i would have done it in 2 other classes) but i have one class, well two classes, that are worrying me pretty good right now. i need to get a 69 in ob/gyn and a 60 in pediatrics. the final in ob/gyn is worth 50% of my grade, which is retarded, so i need to do the best in that class and her last test was ridiculously hard with about 15 maca (mark all correct answers) instead of the typical multiple choice questions. so i'll be studying it up this entire weekend except for tomorrow for a few hours i'll be at graduation watching some of my friends become "Doctors". thanks.

Adjustments all around!

2011-08-08T20:42:00.000-05:00

I talked to mom earlier today and she said that all of you guys will be staying in the same hotel and stuff. I have a table at my house (a decent one, not like the one we rigged up back in thatcher) so if any of you guys (depending on how far away you are staying) cab come over and get adjusted. I'd treat you in the clinic but I won't get any credits so there is no point in that. I'll have national board reviews starting that Friday but will probably just ditch it and borrow someone else's notes. I'm laying on the couch studying for my last practical of forever (not counting national boards and all the continuing education stuff) so that is a great feeling but also I'm fighting off senior-itis as well as sleep deprivation and have already dosed off on the couch so I'm writing this and then gonna sit up instead of laying down. Anyways, back to studying.
-- Post From My iPhone

Painting update

2011-08-06T00:33:00.000-05:00

Well since we aren't all friends on Facebook I thought I'd post this updated pic of my painting. This is from a few days ago after a day off from the clinic I decided to paint a little bit. We are sitting at a waffle house right now waiting for our food and me and some other guys had to play policeman just now and pull some little high school kids off each other that were fighting each other in the middle of the restaurant. Needless to say it's pretty ghetto here in Dallas. Anyways, gimme some ideas for the background color. I'm thinking red or blue and have the color darker around the edges and lighter in the middle if that makes sense. Later

-- Post From My iPhone

Fat, sick and nearly dead

2011-08-01T23:20:00.003-05:00

Well, i'm pretty tired. i haven't really written much about stuff lately so i though i would catch some stuff up. we only have 2 more weeks left in this trimester then we will have 2 weeks off (and i'll probably just stay here in dallas and work in the clinic like i did before and try to pick up some new patients since everyone will be coming to dallas in a few weeks for ryan's wedding). then we will have national boards part 3 which is a scantron test like the other two and then part 4 is a bunch of modules where you take patient histories and look at xrays and stuff like that. i'm a little worried about them just cause they are so expensive. part 4 alone was like 1,200 bucks so if i fail that and have to retake it thats a pretty penny wasted. i am almost done with most of my clinic requirements. i still need like 5 more new patients to come in but am almost done with my 200 adjustments and a bunch of the other paperwork stuff so that is a relief to not be like some of the people i know that are rushing down to the last few days trying to finish everything.

on a different note, Parker College of Chiropractic is now called Parker University, and to put it frankly, feels like it is imploding on itself. there has been a bunch of drama surrounding our young school president and why he makes over a million a year while most other chiro school presidents make less than half that. to be honest he seems like a greasy car salesman. but to be honest i could care less come december. the last time i will see dallas is in the rear view mirror of my car in late december. people in the real world could care less where i went to school at or what my gpa was or what clubs i was apart of or whatever, all it is is a springboard to getting me into the real world. i have some bitter feelings towards parker and some of the faculty and administrators here, because it's so small of a school there is no secrets and lots of rumors as well as a TON of changes that they do on the fly and put no research or thought into it, and just carpet bomb us the students and faculty and expect everyone to pick up on it in two days. its a joke, it really is. a bunch of doctors trying to run a school. oh well, like i said, as soon as i get me diploma (which is just a piece of paper rolled up, i have to pay parker 50 bucks for them to mail me my diploma a few months later, again its a freaking joke) oh yeah, and while i'm at it, they are raising our tuition another 900 dollars this next trimester. they have fired about 25 people in the school, and our student loan money has not been raised up at all. and the topper of it all is that I'M NOT EVEN IN FREAKING CLASS!!!!!!! yet i am still paying almost 10 thousand dollars tuition, for what i have no idea. and the best part is, if i decide to try and take an elective class this next trimester to further my education or a particular technique it costs me like 150 bucks a credit hour plus another 50 bucks per lab hour, so i'd be looking about probably another 500 bucks ontop of the tuition (for the classes i don't have) just to take one class. it's a joke. and the administration has never given a straight answer as to why we have to pay. then if i take out a loan to pay for my imaginary classes i have to be in the clinic at least 300 hours or else i have to pay for my own tuition. which is dumb. cause i'll more than likely have less than probably 50 hours that i will need to be in the clinic next trimester but will have to clock in and just sit there. a lot of people clock in and go work out in the gym, take a nap in the lounge, a couple of students even brought an xbox and tv into the lounge and were playing video games and watching movies. again....it's a freaking joke. so that is my little rant about parker and the bitter taste that it is leaving in my mouth. i don't know if i would have chosen a different school to go to had i known what i know now, but i probably would have chosen a school that was a little cheaper. oh well.

the beard is back. i'm not sure why i am growing it out, but have let it go for about a month and a half or longer. i'll probably shave here sometime soon, but who knows.

so the other day we watched a good documentary (that is on netflix if any of you guys have it, i told jeff about it). it is a little more up beat than the one about the diabetic people that went on the 30 day raw food diet and were no longer diabetic (*cough, cough* Dad *cough, cough*) and is about this guy that has a skin disease due to his obesity and starts to do a juice diet. and ends up doing it for like 60 days and he meets this obese truck driver as he is traveling the country that has the same rare condition and a few weeks later the truck driver calls the guy asking for his help and so the video starts to follow that guy and the transformation he undergoes. it was really good. the truck drivers brother even joins in on it. so i am thinking about doing something like that. not the 60 day thing, but a modified version of it. i've been eating out a lot lately and just feel like crap lately. i have no energy and my already often upset stomach (probably from all the parasites still living inside me from Tonga, jk) is even more upset. so i need to get a juicer.....my only problem is my roommate. home slice uses my blender everyday, and instead of putting all the liquid in first then adding all the dry stuff he does it opposite. and he puts nuts and beans and all this other weird crap in the blender and then sits there and throttles it like he's a 16 yr old sneaking out his dads old mustang and pumping the gas over and over revving the engine up. it's a touchy subject with me, cause he usually does it about 6:15am every morning while i am still asleep for another 15 minutes. i almost went as far as opening up my blender and pulling a wire out of it, but couldn't find a screwdriver in my room and didn't want to walk down to my car. but he is doing an internship with a cancer treatment center in tulsa Ok in a few weeks for next trimester so i'll have the house to myself (i think anyways). but yeah, i'm probably going to start that sometime this week when i can look at some more of the recipes and stuff online, and am able to get to the store to buy the juicer and food.

my birthday was last week (thanks for all the birthday calls and wishes) i'm not sure if i can say it was the worst birthday i have had, well, yeah, actually i can say that. it pretty much sucked juevos. i won't really get into that online here, but yeah, i've definitely had better days. well, i'm going to try to get some sleep tonight. check out the video if you have netflix for an fhe activity or something, it was definitely a interesting video to watch and to see just how fat and lazy people in america really are. later.

2011-07-30T05:13:00.001-05:00

Yes Incase you were wondering it is 5am in the morning on a Saturday. And no I'm not up early for anything, but have yet to go to sleep. I've always tried to see both side of things in all situations in my life and realize that nobody is perfect and everyone is a little bit crazy at one time or another. I've dated people that I thought were normal and I've dated people that I thought were crazy at times, and I'm sure that they have all felt that I was a little crazy at one time or another. Then there are times like right now when I start to wonder if maybe I'm the crazy one that everyone runs away from and tells their new boyfriends storys about "crazy brad". I don't know anymore. I wish I could fast forward life right now and just move past this awkward and uncomfortable time in my life. As each day passes by I see that reality drift further and further away. I know people that are older and never been married and seem like happy people, but it takes a special kind of person, someone a lot stronger than me to be able to go through that and to be happy. I already don't like myself much, I can't image what it would be like to be just me for the next 60 years. Guess that's why people buy dogs and cats. I should probably start saving up some money for that now. Dog or cat?....

-- Post From My iPhone4

2011-06-20T20:40:00.002-05:00

yep......that picture pretty much sums up how i'm feeling right about now. i'm so tired of school and tests and jumping through hoops in the clinic. sometimes i wonder how my life might be different had i done something different when i was a kid or whenever. if i would have made my way out here to dallas or even to get into chiropractic school at all. if i would be back in thatcher married with 10 kids or off living up the single life in a foreign country. i've gone a fair amount of places in my life thus far (for a mormon) but talking to people in my class that traveled all over the world and stuff makes me feel like i never left 8th ave.

i'm doing well in my classes (so far) but have a hard practical in the morning and a test and paper due in the afternoon, then another test on thursday. i had a practical this morning that i forgot a few things but still made an 85 so i'm not too bummed about that, but was talking with a friend about classes and stuff, and tried to explain to him when he asked me why i only get like 4 hours of sleep each night, that there are nights that i will have to study and will stay up till 2am or the entire night like i did last week just to study. but there are nights where i am done studying but will still stay up hours past when i know i should go to bed, just for the sole reason that i don't want the next day to come. it sounds kinda weird and illogical but i'm scared and uncertain of my future and am not ready to handle it just yet. i see time speeding up and don't want to face it. i know that staying up does nothing but make the next day that much more unbearable, but still i do it sometimes. i feel like i've already made too many mistakes in my short life and that i have yet to learn all i am supposed to learn from them, yet it's like a shot clock is steadily ticking down, day by day, month by month, year by year, forcing me to take a shot or hand the ball over only to look back on regret and failed opportunities. case in point right now....i should be studying for my practical/test/paper instead of writing on this blog, yet part of me knows that by doing this i won't have to face those things for a few minutes more, like they are still off in the future even though they are sitting right in front of me. i don't know, this may not make sense to anyone other than me, i just feel like time is speeding up faster and faster and that i missed a couple of turns a few miles back and am just trusting that this road will somehow lead me back to my original destination, yet as each mile goes by the terrain becomes more and more foreign to me, yet i can't turn around and backtrack and am forced to continue down this unchosen path.

i realize that i like to use analogies a lot, i don't really know where that originates from. probably Tonga, i remember making a couple of visual aids for different zone conferences and a lot of the missionaries and couple missionaries and even president Moleni complimented me on them and being able to relate the material to them in a different way than they had ever thought before. i also realize that it can be annoying to people, especially people i have dated when i am trying to explain something to them and use 2 or 3 different analogies in one conversation, like i am talking down to them cause i don't think they will understand unless i somehow relate it back to food or a dog or football or something minuscule like that. its really not like that.

i regret being pessimistic....seeing things as being half full. i think more so than that is that i regret not being able to recognize some of the times when i am seeing the negative in things or people. especially when someone points out my negative ignorance. anyways, i don't really know where all of this is coming from, i think i need to start writing in my journal like i used to, cause there are times i forget that this isn't really the same thing. oh well, i don't care. whoever wants to read this can read this, i have no skeletons in my closet, i bulldozed that house over long long ago.

To sleep or not to sleep.....

2011-06-13T03:36:00.002-05:00

It's 3:38am, i have a case manegment test in about 3 1/2 hours, and i'm debating on whether i should sleep right now and wake up and take my test, or if i should just stay up and keep studying and take the test. i know from a functional neurology standpoint that i'm better off going to sleep, but i always feel like crap if i only sleep for 2 hours. even when i take naps, it's gotta be atleast 3 hours or more or it's not worth even doing. i don't feel prepared for this test, i didn't take much time this weekend to study for it, and spent tonight watching the NBA finals as Dallas won (on a side note, i'm actually happy the Mavs won, i don't really like Lebron. Dirk has grown on me, and even though Jason Terry is a former Wildcat he started to wear on me these past couple of weeks and watching the Mavs play, although i do have a little bit of a beef with him always saying "i give thanks to God, he gave me the talent and skills to yada yada yada", i don't really think God gave him anything physically different from Tyrone that works down at the 7/11 (thats a racist typical black name that white people think of when thinking of a name for a black person i realize that, but it fits), i think it's more so that he has more of a desire and drive than the average person and has been trained much like Pavlov's dogs to not cower when given the oportunity to shoot a game winning shot. i think it's his motivation or any basketball players motivation to workout 2 times a day in the weight room, and to shoot 500 free throws and 300 jump shots, or for Tiger Woods to hit sand wedge after sand wedge to build and establish that neurological connection between his brains desires and his muscles functions. it's that whole "muscle memory" thing, and not only that but the more they do something and are successful at it the more likely they will attempt it and with more confidence. I follow a couple of celebrities, players, band members on twitter and the bass player for 311 is a big basketball fan and said something that made me laugh pretty good right after the interviewed jason terry and he dropped the "God" line he said "The mavs love God more than the heat"... haha. ummm............so where was i going with all of this.......

anyways, i hope you all could follow that limbic rollercoaster ride. i'm really not delusional right now, more so that i have a lot on my mind right now i guess, which isn't really anything new. i had a dream last night that i was playing golf with some people (can't remember right now, i think jeff was playing?" and i had hit a sand wedge and left my club leaning up against a yardage marker and then woke up in a panic and almost walked into the living room closet to check my bag and make sure it was still there.

anyways.....i just got on here so i could listen to some music and stop studying long enough to decide if i was going to go to sleep or not, still undecided, but whatever. i gotta read some articles on thyroid disorders that might be on this test. later!

Empathy-

2011-06-10T16:20:00.003-05:00

Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient or semi-sentient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion.

Well, the past couple of days have been unusually heartbreaking. today in the clinic one of my patients came in to get adjusted and we talked for a little bit before i adjusted her. she is middle aged, probably in her 60's, she was born and raised in Belise and moved to New Orleans when she was younger and then got evacuated out to dallas when Katrina hit. She doesn't have much money and for the past couple of years she has had really bad vertigo. she was just telling me about some things she has overcome and some of the monetary things she is struggling with like having to pay for a bridge to get fixed in her mouth and we talked about poor people and stuff, i told her about some things i saw and went through when i was in Tonga and we talked a little bit about religion. I told her that she looked like her vertigo was doing better today and she kinda stopped and smiled and told me how she has been praying and believes in prayers, and i told her i do too. it was nice, that even though we both don't believe in the same thing that we both believe in the power of prayer, something i need to be better at personally....

Then late last night i got a text from a friend who told me that her and her husband were going to get a divorce and that i was the first person outside her family that she was telling. she is my age, and in a similar situation with not having any kids or anything with her husband, but my heart broke for her. we text quite a bit last night and again today, and she's supposed to come over and talk. divorce is something that i wouldn't wish on anyone. it was the hardest thing i have had to go through in my life thus far. there are days when it all feels like a dream that never happened and couldn't be further from my memories.......then there are days when it feels like it was just yesterday, or nights with dreams of still being married....and happy....only to wake up... and for the next few seconds feel the happiness of my dreams fade away into the cold dark reality that i'm all alone...by myself in my bed. i've tried to block out memories from my past but many of them came rushing back when i got that text message from her. driving home today trying to think of what i would say to her to try to comfort her, brought tears to my eyes, and pain to my heart for what she is about to experience. i wish i could say that " i am a better and stronger person today for having gone through it and came out stronger" but there are days when i feel like i just want to give up. days when i feel worthless and have no idea what is next. days where i feel like no matter how hard i try, i'm not going to find someone, let alone someone that will be compatible with me. i feel bad for her, she like me was given up on by her spouse. i don't mean to be too "open" with everyone, but to be honest the only people that really ever read this is family members, so i think you guys have gotten used to me by now. i don't want you guys to think that i'm not "over" janene, i am....i just feel so bad for people that have to go through trials similar to ones i have or to see genuinely good people struggle when i've been so blessed with the comforts in life that i have. i need to get off of here soon so i hope all of you that have read this take a second out of your day today to tell the person that you chose to spend the rest of this life and then next with....that you love them....give them a hug longer than 3 seconds....and look them in the eyes when you do all of it...tell them how happy they have made you and how much of a better person you are because they are in your life...because you guys are lucky...not everyone is blessed to have someone like that in their life....

2011-05-30T15:43:00.002-05:00

well, just an update i guess....

here is my "painting" that i've been working on. it's been a bigger project than i expected. each day it sits on my floor propped up against my dresser mocking me and calling me names for not finishing it yet. i'm still undecided of what to do in the background, like what color and stuff. i originally wanted to do a darker color in the background and then somehow work in the phrase "i'ma show you how great i am" which was a phrase that Ali said in a pre-fight interview (can't remember which fight it was, but it's pretty awesome.) into the background as well. here is a link to the video i am thinking of, the interview is about half way in, but the whole clip is pretty cool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6xLYt265ZM&feature=related

things have been up and down out here in dallas, school is going ok. clinic is going ok. church stuff is going ok. i guess i just need a break from all of this stuff out here but don't really have much of a chance to get one. i guess that's why i turn to painting and stuff sometimes, as an escape from everything.

since it's memorial day and all, i've kinda been thinking about all of that stuff, this sounds selfish but i'm glad that nobody in our family is in the military. i have friends who are in it and some of them have had ok/good experiences but a lot of people have had pretty crappy experiences in it. So i'm glad that there are those out there for whatever reason have chosen to join the military, but i'm glad that none of us have. anyways, i gotta end this and head over to my friends pool for a bbq for our last day of freedom before classes and tests start up these next couple of weeks. take care!

2011-05-24T08:21:00.001-05:00

This is the 3rd time I've tried to write this post on my phone so I'm gonna be short and try to post this before my phone closes this again. Here are some pics from one of the art museums I went to a couple of weeks ago. It was a nice break from the norm and was pretty fun. One museum was a more traditional museum and the other had more modern sculptures and stuff.

The balloon room that you tried to walk through.

And yes, I still cut my own hair. Only I don't have a fancy mirror set up so I have to tape a mirror to my door in my bathroom so I can see behind my head when I'm cutting my hair.

so much for a "break".....

2011-05-03T20:59:00.002-05:00

Well, it's tuesday.....and we start classes up again on monday. i am NOT looking forward to it at all! it's "my last semester of school ever" but still, they won't be the last test i'll ever have to take, there will be national and state boards and then tests for other therapies and what not that i get certified in. i've been in the clinic for the most part every day from 9ish till 7ish. i have 4 patients this morning that were mostly patients of other interns that were out on break and 2 of them was a struggle to adjust their necks, (i kinda have the shanks in my left hand right now) and the other two went well. then this afternoon i was supposed to cover for a guy but the lady cancelled so i played a little Tiger Woods 2011 on my iPhone for a little bit then adjusted this guy and girl intern and then got adjusted and went to the gym.

that's pretty much been the extent of my "Vacation" and no dad i haven't even played video games at all this break!!!!!.....(mostly cause playstation got hacked into and i can't play anything online and lets be honest, it's only fun when you get to shoot fat little 12 yr olds and hear them get mad at you), but i kinda wish i would have done something vacation-like this trimester. i feel like i need a break more than i ever have, there was tentative plans to maybe go to san antonio and go to sea world and stuff but i don't think thats going to pan out which is kinda a bummer. i just need a day or two where i don't see my apartment, the school, or the clinic or the gym. maybe i'll just get in my car saturday morning and drive for a couple of hours in one direction and see what i find....doubtful, but whatever, i just need to do something this break. well, i think i might paint a little tonight and then call it a early night. i'm pretty tired and my tummy is finally recovering from last nights "cajun cuisine". peace!

Death by paintbrush

2011-05-02T22:59:00.002-05:00

Taking a little break and mom wanted to see an updated picture of the painting I'm doing so here one is as of 10:58pm on may 2nd of 2011. this has turned out to be a little more than i had wanted it to be. there is quite a bit of intricacy to the painting and lots of little nooks and crannies that are turning out to take a long time. i am about 70% done drawing everything and then i'll probably have a few layers of each color to put on, then the background, which i am still not sure what i'm going to be doing on it. i originally wanted to put "i'ma show you how great i am" based on an interview Ali did that was pretty cool, but i'm not sure how i'll do it yet.

So i'm sure everyone has heard that bin laden is dead. i find it intersting at some of the people that get on their moral high horse in the media and people i know on facebook that try to stick their nose up at people being happy he is dead. Sure we aren't supposed to wish harm on anyone but i'm sure the big guy upstairs wasn't too sad that a mass murderer clocked out for a last time. dude deserved it and i'm sure it has given some closure to the people that were affected by 9/11. hopefully it doesn't stir anything else up with any of the countries in the middle east. nobody is innocent in war. a couple of weeks ago i was reading online (when i should have been studying) and was on the site "wikileaks" that has been really hot on all the news stations for leaking government videos and stuff of the war and whatever and seeing some of the soldiers taking out innocent people from a chopper and laughing and joking as they shoot people that are crawling away from their van that was just blown up by the two soldiers in the chopper. i'm just glad there is not a draft right now, cause i'd have a really hard time being forced to go to war and the chance that i might take another mans life. reminds me of the movie "saints and soldiers" which is actually pretty good and is basically about a mormon soldier (i think in ww2?) that served a mission over there and then got stationed there and almost killed someone that he had baptised or something like that. it was pretty good. a kid i was comps with who's dad is a millionaire basically footed the bill to shoot the whole thing cause his son was friends with the guys that wrote the story. anyways....long story short....i'm glad our family is not a "military family". i support the troups and all of that, but i'm glad that we were all called on missions and not called to war.

well, it's monday night of my break at 11:11pm and i should be going to sleep cause i have a patient at 9am but i just got a text from some friends that are cooking "real cajun food" and having a little shindig so i'm about to go over there and see what all this fuss is about and taste their gator/crawfish and who knows what else food. later!

-- Post From My iPhone

Deja Vu

2011-04-30T10:19:00.001-05:00

Well, it's saturday morning and our board scores are in. i was gonna wait a few days and say my prayers extra hard, but i decided to check my scores and just like last time i failed two of them from part 2. i had to retake 2 from part 1 and all 6 from part 2. i passed the two retakes from part 2 which is nice, but failed general diagnosis which was the first test that was really hard and that our 500$ review covered absolutely none of the material that was on it, and the second test i failed was associated clinical sciences which has stuff from geriatrics, dermatology, std's, toxicology, psychology, obgyn, pediatrics, which were some classes that i hadn't taken or that i was currently taking,. oh well, it's my own fault i guess. i felt like i studied as hard as i could for these tests. i passed everything else by almost 100 points each which i guess is a good constilation prize, but am still pretty bummed.

on a different note, here is the painting below that i am trying to do right now. i don't think i'm going to finish it by the break but i am gonna try. i'm still drawing most of the parts to it, but had to atleast paint something on it, since drawing is the boring part of painting.

-- Post From My iPhone

You guys need to step your game up G-ma!

2011-04-25T15:47:00.001-05:00

So.....like any young 26 year old white mail does on a friday afternoon i was strolling the isles of Michael's craft store and ran across these and thought that mom and dad need to step their "bird house" game up and start rocking some of these bird houses outside the living room windows. what could be cooler than a pirate ship or rocket ship bird house....all the birds would spread the word......."bird is the word" anyone? and you'd have a packed house there. Anyways, thought those were kinda cool. i was trying to find a poster frame for my tongan matte thing that i have on my wall but couldn't find one big enough and i didn't want to fork out a couple hundred to have them make a custom frame for me so. also i finally got a big canvas to do my Ali painting on, it's not the picture i put up earlier, but i think it's still pretty cool. the blue tint in the middle is from my stupid iphone camera.

-- Post From My iPhone

Did Hell finally freeze over?......(literally)

2011-04-15T19:23:00.003-05:00

Well, last night it started to storm, and i didn't realize it, but we were expected to have a golf ball sized hail storm along with it, and i walked outside about 12:30 and looked at it and it didn't seam like the hail was that big, and my roomate already took our covered parking spot, and i didn't really feel like getting pelted with golf balls falling from thousands of feet out of the sky so i went back up stairs to study for the two finals i had this morning. My buddy Matt took some pictures and lives in the complex next to me so these are a couple of the golf ball sized hail stones that fell on my car last night.

at first this morning i didn't really notice any dents on my car, which is understandable considering i left for school at around 4:30am to study for my 7am test. but this afternoon i noticed a TON of dents in my car hood, roof, and trunk lid.......honestly i don't even care. my car is a piece of "ta'e" and i will not be able to resell it at all since it has been hit twice and is a "total loss" on my insurance and stuff now, so just as long as it gets me from point A to point B. I talked to dave yesterday and do want to go out there in a couple of weeks during break but i don't think my car will make it. when it was in the shop this last time a few weeks ago the guy tried to get me to replace my timing belt and a bunch of other belts saying they were cracked and stuff.....probably are, but i don't have time to do it right now. Well, i gotta get back to making flash cards for finals and study on this wonderful friday night! gotta love being a student........

Definitely worth watching....

2011-04-12T19:59:00.002-05:00

Well, i'll be the first to admit that me and nutrition don't really get along, but i have seen the benefits of eating more raw fruits and veggies, having done a 21 day cleanse twice since i've been here at parker. so we watched this video in nutrition that is a documentary about these 6 people (5 type 2 adult onset diabetes, and 1 type 1 adolescent diabetes) and they were from different places in the U.S. and different ages/backgrounds and they sent them to this ranch/camp out in patagonia AZ for a 30 day raw food boot camp thing, to see if nutrition could reverse diabetes. all of them were on insulin injections. all of the type2 were over weight and also were taking many other pills .......sound familiar dad???.....except one of the type2 people was a younger black guy in good shape (which seemed a little off to me, which i'll get to later).

so they sent them all here and one of the quit half way through, but all of the type2 people were able to get completely off taking insulin as well as lowering their blood pressure and cholesterol a ton, and getting off all of the medications associated with those. mind you they did lose some weight, but it's not like they dropped 100 pounds. i think the most anyone lost was like 30 ish, and that was simply a side effect of eating nothing but raw veggies and fruit. it's not the eassiest thing to do, but it was made a little easier for these people cause they had chefs there making them their meals and psychiatrists and doctors on staff to help them along the way, basically a scared straight boot camp. so the one kid in his 20's that was type 1 since he was 10 cut his insulin down by a ton (don't remember the exact amount) but almost to the point that he could get off of it, and the young black guy that was in good shape, and was thought to be type 2 got back after the 30 days and was actually told he was type 1 and his doctor was going to tell him when he got back, but the kid got completely off of insulin while he was out there and his body was able to produce and use his own insulin. which is pretty amazing, cause every medical doctor will tell you, type 2 can be prevented, but they will never tell you it can be reverse. but type 1 especially they will NEVER tell you that it can be reversed and this clinic in AZ has had like 5 cases that have been type 1 reverse and the patients no longer take insulin, which just baffles the "doctors" and kinda pisses them off cause they now lose a "life time" patient.

Anyways, adult diabetes is all the rage now and despite what "doctors" tell you that it is "genetic predisposition" for you to get adult onset diabetes, it couldn't be further from the truth. Adam and Eve never got diabetes....they never had gluten allergies.....they never had food allergies.....we have created these man made diseases because we have crappy nutrition....starting as a baby in the womb and all the way till we are on our dying bed. Anyways, i'm going to link the video, it's on a website that has a bunch of documentaries but this one is called "simply raw" and is DEFINITELY worth the watch. it's about an hour and a half, so take some time out to watch it, like for fhe??? or a date night??? it is really good, and lets face it, america is fat and only getting fatter unless we do something about it, let's not handicap our kids by getting them hooked on fast food before they are smart enough to learn what proper nutrition is, or else they'll end up fat with every food allergy, hormone deficiency you could possibly think of and be on 15 meds before the age of 30. let me know what you think!

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/simply-raw-reversing-diabetes-in-30-days/

Happy Birthday mom!

2011-04-10T14:04:00.003-05:00

Just wanted to take some time to say happy birthday to mom! I've been thinking about some of the stuff i'm grateful for that she has done and even emailed her and asked her some of her most memorable accomplishments. here is a little bit of my email to her....

Raised 7 boys, 7 Eagle Scouts, 7 H.S. grads, 7 Full-time missionaries, 7 Temple marriages, 7 bachelor degrees 2 masters and 1 doctor, 35 pine wood derby cars, and countless football/basketball/golf/wrestling/baseball practices and games, proof read countless english papers and was a walking spell checker.

Also i thought is was funny when she told me her earliest memory of acomplishing something was " I did think of probably my first big "achievement" . When I was two years old, I rescured a mouse from the jaws of my pet cat and although the mouse turned on me and bit me ( I still have the scar on my finger from the infection that set in), I think saving a life is a great accomplishment!"

Anyways, hope everyone takes the time to thank her for what she has done for the their entire life, cause let's face it, we wouldn't be half the people we are if she wasn't in our lives, i know that i will forever be in debt to her for all that she has ever done for me. Happy Birthday mom!

Thoughts on Conference....

2011-04-03T14:45:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting here between sessions and am listening to other talks from other conferences, Saturday morning, priesthood and other things on both YouTube and the church's website.

I can't imagine living in another time, a time where many people never even saw the face of the Prophet or any of the churches leaders. I felt a little bit of that when i was in Tonga, but even then, we were able to see general conference on the satellites that the church had. Maybe Dad or Rusty might have not been able to see a conference because of where they were on their mission (dad more likely than Rusty) but it's amazing how connected the church is now with the world. you can get on your computer and watch hours and hours of conference talks that are archived from years and years of conference, i can get on my phone and watch those same talks as well.

Something that i've noticed is the shift in speakers and more so their ethnicity. It still seams kinda weird when a mexian, japanese, chilean etc speaker gets up because there usually isn't that many that have spoken in conference in the past but realizing that there are more members outside the USA than inside, it only makes sense. Also it was kinda cool when President Monson said that 85% of the members of the church live within 200 miles of a temple. I don't think there is any church or really any business than can say that, (well except maybe walmart) but that isn't even counting the church buildings, i'm curious to know what that number is. Cause even on the tiniest of islands in Tonga.....there was an LDS church building. Almost EVERY single town had it's own building, even if two little villages were right next to each other there was probably 2 buildings. Also, i'v realized that i don't really know that newest 3 apostles that much, in my mind i still thing Bednar and Uchtdorf are still the two newest ones. But i can't help but feel like i relate to and learn more from a couple of the apostles. My favorites are Holland, Uchtdorf, Bendar, Eyring, and Monson. I know that everyone is important, but it seems like these guys are the main attractions of the 12 and get a lot more attention than the others. could be my own bias and preference, but it's just something i feel. i feel like i get more out of more of their talks than i do the other ones.

I remember hearing when i was a kid from dad or someone that would say something like "well i'll just wait for the conference edition of the Enzign to come out and read the talks then" if they missed a talk or conference......can't really say that now. you can hop online and watch any talk as it is streaming live or seconds after it was finished, AND for those of us cool enough to speak a second language.....can watch it in French, Spanish or Tongan. How many of you have done that? Greg, Rusty, Dave, Dad? Also an app i have on my phone lets me read the Tongan scriptures side by side with English scriptures, which is pretty awesome.

All of this makes me think of a talk that was given by an area authority when i was back in Tonga, i think he was Tahitian. He said something about Tongans not attending the temple when they have one on their islands and it can be applied to all of us since there is a temple within a few miles of each of us, as well as having the scriptures literally in the palm of our hand/computer/phone/scriptures 24/7....he compared that to " how Tongans use cocoa nut oil/cream to cook everything. every mean has cocoa nut oil/cream used in it, yet it's like having a bunch of cocoa nut trees in your back yard but going to the grocery store to buy a can of cocoa nut oil rather than using the ones in your back yard"....it don't know, it made sense in my mind, hope it makes a little sense to you.

Anyways, i need to get back to studying and watching conference but just wanted to write down some thoughts about how blessed we are with modern technology and how we really need to do a better job at taking advantage of it.

2011-03-24T02:55:00.001-05:00

Once more I find myself awake till 3am....haven't even studied for psychology test yet. Found myself talking to some Tongans on Facebook and some friends from back home and listening to some old Tongan hymn/songs and looked up to see it was almost 3pm.

Guess I should get some sleep. Susan post some more pics of my nephew!

-- Post From My iPhone

2011-03-23T21:30:00.007-05:00

Well, boards went ok. there was one REALLY hard test, two easy ones and the rest were in between. i'm just glad to have them done with. 8 of the hardest tests i'll ever take all in 3 days was insane.

So i've been wanting to do another painting for a while but with boards and stuff it's been hard. And when i was dating i didn't have any time to do it so i would try to do a painting or something everytime i've been on break. so i'm gonna try and do one while i'm still in class but don't know how far i'll get or if i'll finish it. i want to do the famous picture of Muhammad Ali when he knocked out Sonny Liston and stood over the top of him. I've always thought that was one of the most powerful photos of all time, sports or anything, it's an awesome picture and i want to try to paint it. I want to do a "multi panel" painting, but don't think it would look good using this picture so that'll have to wait. here is the picture as well as some of the pictures i've done while on breaks.

wood burning i did, from the show "Sons of Anarchy"

Anthony Kiedes, singer for The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Jimi Hendrix

So i think the painting might be in a similar style as the picture of Anthony, for a couple of reasons, i think it looks cool, and it's a cheap way for me to pain peoples faces and stuff, cause i'm not that good at painting, but i know how to "paint by number" and that's basically all there is to it once the design is drawn onto the canvas.

Also something i talked to mom about doing maybe in a couple of years is something similar to what this convert family in England (i think) has started doing. here is a portion of my email to mom (cause i'm lazy) as well as the link to their website.

http://www.miraclesmaps.com/

click on the link above. this family in england makes these "miracle maps" that look pretty cool. at first i thought about getting one since they are only 220, but then i got to thinking that there were more things that i would want to have on it from tonga than just the name and temple, seems like there is a basic template and they substitute the temple, name at the top, mission name and stuff like that. maybe when i get older and married and have made a little money i want to do something like this or something similar to it for all of us and dad. i think it would be cool for everyone to have something like this about their own mission and that we would all have a similar one, but also it would be kinda cool to do something with everyone's mission on one thing like the leather stuff or something else and have it at your house....kinda like how you have that big map with everyones pictures around it but something a little more personalized rather than just a map with pins in it.

Anyways, i gotta try and study for Clinical Psychology test that i have tomorrow.

Guilty!

2011-03-18T20:40:00.000-05:00

hahahaha, this made me laugh pretty good today amidst trying to study for the rest of my tests. i wish i had a dog right now.

some help this weekend...

2011-03-15T14:18:00.003-05:00

not that anyone besides susan and joy will read this by this weekend, but i could use your thoughts and prayers this weekend when i take national boards. i have to take all of part2 and 2 tests from part 1 that i didn't pass. totaling 8 tests in 3 days.....8 of the hardest tests i'll ever take i might add.

i haven't felt confident about anything lately and these tests are no exception. i feel like i've been so scatterbrained lately and have had a really hard time focusing my mind when i study. i don't feel like i'm retaining much of anything right now. i know your thoughts and prayers will help me out over this week and into this weekend. cause i need all i can get right now.

thank you

Fear of sleep......

2011-03-14T00:35:00.003-05:00

Hypnophobia^[1] or somniphobia is an abnormal fear of sleep. It may result from a feeling of control loss, or from repeating nightmares. The prefix Hypno- originates from the Greek word hupnos, which means sleep.^[2]

pretty much sums up how i feel right now and off and on for a while. i don't know how to describe it, maybe it's my fear of the future and not knowing what is in store for me but sometimes i can't fall asleep cause i don't want the next day to come cause i'm not ready for it. we have national boards this next weekend and i do not feel ready for them at all. these tests are very important and can keep me from practicing even if i pass all my normal classes.

i wish someone could develop a tivo for our minds for when we sleep at night to be able to record our dreams to watch them when we wake up. i used to write down my dreams a lot when i was in tonga and got really good at remembering a lot of my dreams on a regular basis and would write them in my journal when i woke up. to say that i have nightmares is quite the understatement. i know of numberous times where i would wake myself up from yelling in my dream and also doing it in real life and even had it happen on my mission which kinda freaked out my companions as well as when i was married. i've been having quite a few dreams of someone coming after me, i can't remember them specifically now (obviously) since i haven't written them down at all. then i have the typical dreams/nightmares depending on what type of tv show, movie or video game i just watched or played that night, then there are those dreams/nightmares that i have no idea where they come from. definetly someonthing i'm going to ask the big guy upstairs when i die. i don't sleep walk (as far as i know) nor do i really punch or kick anything i just have a hard time sleeping sometimes.

i kinda just wish time would stop right now.....i'm not ready nor prepared for it to move forward. i don't really know that i would want to go back in time....ok yeah, i think it would be cool to go back in time if i only knew then what i know now.....if i had to do it all over from scratch i'm not sure i'd want to go through some of the stuff i've been through. but yeah, if it could slow down right now that would be great!

Well, i should probably get some sleep.................cross your fingers!

2011-03-06T13:55:00.002-06:00

Well, i'm about to start a cleanse tomorrow. i did it once before probably a year or so ago, and just feel like it will help me get back into eating healthy again. it's been pretty tough to eat good with school and the clinic. being at the school from 7am-7pm is pretty hard to eat properly. so i'll be giving up sodas and stuff and eating raw veggies and fruits for the first week and a half then i can add a chicken breast of piece of fish in for the last week and a half.

we've got national boards coming up in a couple of weeks and a ton of tests this week, so i am a little hesitant on doing this cleanse cause last time i did it i felt like i didn't have much energy, but i think it'll work out.

i should probably get back to studying for a soft tissue pathology lab practical i have tomorrow....have no idea what to expect on this thing. it's all Greek to me....

and for those of you expecting any wedding invitations from me in the near future are gonna have to wait a little while longer, me and stephanie broke things off......looks like i might be giving Tad a run for his record, what was it 28, 29? Guess i have another 2-3 years to go.

anyways, i gotta get to studying.....kinda wish i had some ridalin right now to help me focus on studying right now. peace out

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure!

2011-02-20T19:32:00.004-06:00

well....if you read my last blog post i wrote, it was me saying how clinic camp was pretty lame so far (which it pretty much was, all we had done was sit in hard plastic chairs and listen to speakers talk about medicare or about how successful they are in their practice)....and i said "Don't you worry, i'm sure there will be plenty of 'trust falls'" which there was a trust fall....but it turned out to be my favorite part of the entire weekend.

So on friday we had more classes in the morning which were pretty lame-o, but then in the afternoon we did the obstacle course with our group. there was about 12-15 of us, not really a dominate personality in the group but plenty of individuals. we started out with simple things like leaning back on someone and having them catch us. then we made a "zipper" and people would get lifted up and back down and then we did some other activities. Then we made our way to the "power pole" which was a telephone pole that stuck out of the ground probably 30 feet into the air and had pegs that you climbed up and then jumped off the top of it and tried to touch a ball that was floating on a wire. i am deathly afraid of heights and have never been comfortable at doing stuff up in the air....case in point, the night before we did a zipline at night time that i honestly could have done, but i was still not willing to step out of my comfort zone so i didn't attempt it. and i had told people in my group that i wasn't going to climb the power pole and had honestly dreaded doing it for weeks. well, i finally got strapped in and decided to climb it. problem was, the harnesses are one-size-fits-most....and so i had a hard time lifting my feet up very high, so i was gonna have a hard time standing on top of the pole (again, that was me trying to psyc myself out of doing it) and so i started climbing the pole which wasn't too bad till i started to get to the top and it started to shake back and forth. i tried to put my foot on the top but the pole was so small both my feet would have hung off it, and me being so tall, i would have had a hard time keeping my balance (which a kid that had gone before me stood up and lost his balance) and i didn't want to climb all the way up there only to fall off and not get to hit the ball. so i climbed to the top step and then jumped off that and hit the ball no problem....still a big obstacle in and of itself that i didn't think i would be able to do.

Then we had a wall that was probably 15 feet tall and we had to get everyone over and onto the other side and could have 2 people stay at the top to help pull up but they had to rotate off the top everytime someone new got up there. now i'm going to take you back to when i was in the mtc and had an exit interview with my branch president before we left to tonga and he said something to me like "brother martin, i don't know you very well, but i'm going to say something to you that i feel impressed to say....you've had chances to step up and be a leader in different positions in you life...yet you have failed to step up to the challenge cause you are afraid of failure" which was pretty much spot on, and has still been the case for most of my life. and i had been thinking of that for a while as i was at camp. and it wasn't the fact that i was afraid people wouldn't listen to me or see me as a leader....it was more so that i was afraid to go out on a limb and out of my comfort zone, feeling like a hypocrite.....so when we got to the wall i just kinda let go of myself and started to kinda take the lead and organized everything and made a plan for everyone to get over the wall, then rather than stepping back and making everyone do the work i was the main guy that was boosting everyone over the wall (kinda helps that i'm 6'7" and almost 300lbs) and then we finished that activity and went to another one.

this one there was a bunch of numbers 1-30 on these little plastic discs spread out in a circle probably 10' in diameter with a rope marking the border. we all had to touch the numbers in order but couldn't touch two numbers in a row. so there was 13 of us and so i think i or someone came up with the idea to get everyone in line and number off people 1-30 so that we would all have 2-3 numbers to touch and to get back behind a line. so i called out all the numbers on everyone and sent us off and stuff. we did it pretty quick. the leader guy with us said it usually takes most groups 1.5-2 minutes the first time or two since you get a 5 second penalty for each mess up. we did it in like 40 seconds the first time then kept doing it and on our 4th try we broke his world record and got it done in like 23 seconds. which was pretty cool. i noticed that i had kinda taken over as the leader of the group but still felt a little awkward and didn't want to come off bossy or anything....

Then we had the trust fall. we hadn't really heard much about it and when we got there the platform that we were going to fall off of was only like 5 feet in the air...i remember falling off the armada roof tops at the thatcher park in scouts so i was kinda unimpressed by it. the guy running that station was a tall shaved head guy with a goatee with tattoos covering one are and looked kinda like a thug. he started talking to us and told us about how he grew up rough and been shot twice and stuff like that. he kinda called some of us out because we were crouching down cause we were tired and stuff...i was one of them and it kinda pissed me off cause he was saying that we would be that way in practice and stuff with our patients, which is kinda crap, so i spoke up and he kinda challenged me right back. so right away i was kinda turned off to him. so then we make out little "zipper" and the first person went up to fall off. one girl in our group had already started crying when he was talking about losing people he loved and what not cause this girl had a best friend die on her while she was in africa and she felt guilt for not making it back to her funeral and she'd been carrying it with her for 3 years......so the first couple of people got up there and he asked them what they were going to "leave behind them" as they fell back into us. a couple of people just kinda said some generic stuff like "procrastination" and stuff but then after a couple of people got up the mood started to change to some more serious and emotional stuff. i don't know if we were all just emotionally/physically exhausted or what but a lot of people started opening up about some things that they were struggling with and what not. all sorts of things like the girl feeling guilty for not being there for her best friends funeral, to a girl struggling with her body image and not feeling pretty, to people having problems with their dad or trusting others and even a girl who had felt guilt for her dad committing suicide 4 years ago and for the hurtful things he said to her in his final letter, to people afraid to get to know others and feeling shy and stuff like that. it was pretty hard to not get emotional. eventhough i know everyone in my group i wasn't really that close with any of them, we didn't really hangout outside of class and stuff like that, but it was really hard to hear some of the stories they shared and not feel for the pain they were going through. i of course ended up going last...i told the people in my group it was because i wanted to test their strength in catching me but really it was because i was still thinking about what i was going to say and not sure if i was going to open up and talk about some things that have been weighing down on me. i'm not going to share what i said there that day, mostly for a couple of different reasons and i don't really feel its the time or place to try and share something like that with anyone that has a computer.....but it was, like most of the others that went at the end....a pretty emotional experience. one i didn't think nor plan on having going into the whole weekend. i honestly felt like there was so much stuff i wanted to say up there but didn't want to spill my whole life story to them. but it was relieving falling back into their arms and letting just a little bit of those worries stay up there on that platform.........and realizing, that none of us really have it all together like it might appear sometimes.....and that we all kinda realized that we have a little more in common with people that we didn't realize we did. it's no secret that me and my dad have butt heads more than once in our life and i personally wish i had a better relationship with him and realize that a lot of it is also my fault. i am a very stubborn person who has a hard time forgiving people...even when i may be the one at fault. i struggle a lot of the time with guilt from my past and present....and have never really felt happy about the things i've accomplished in my life so far. i have a lot of regrets...with almost every relationship i have in my life from my parents, brothers, in-laws, friends, and exwife and girlfriends. i wish i could take a lot of things back or change things but can't. i can only try to do better in the future. and me and Robin the girl who lost her dad (i don't think she'll read this so i'll say her name, and if she does i hope she doesn't mind me talking about it) kinda uncovered a little bond that we didn't realize was there before. it was a pretty emotional experience for all of us yet i didn't really want it to be over....i wanted to just stay there floating in the arms of all these strangers that i just learned so much about......

we finished the trust fall and then had a few minutes to rest then we ate dinner. walking back to camp a kid in my class was telling me that he couldn't help but get attached to everyone that was up there opening up and was emotional the whole time....and i kinda felt bad for the few people that were "too cool for school" and didn't allow themselfs to drop there guard and open up to everyone like the rest of us did. we ate dinner and then met back in the gym and listened to the VP of our school talk to us about how the camp had changed him back when he went to it when he was a student....then he said that he was done talking but that he was giving us the mic to talk about people that impressed up that day on the obstabcle course. we had all kinda heard about the "testimony meeting" type of thing that they had a camp where people would get up and cry like babies and stuff, but it kinda caught me off guard and i wasn't really expecting it....i don't think any of us were. one or two people got up and then my friend Kayla got up and turned around and started talking about me and how she was impressed with how i lead our group and a bunch of other stuff and it was really a humbling experience and honestly it felt really nice and sincere and it made me feel good. i wanted to get up and so when she was done she gave me a hug and the mic and i talked mainly about the girls in my group and how all of the did everything that all the guys did and didn't miss a beat. when i was standing up there i looked back and saw robin sitting on one of the steps of the bleachers way in the back and so when i finished i just felt like i should go over there and sit with here. again...not really knowing her outside of class, but yet feeling a bond with her and things she went through with her dad and regrets i have with mine and i walked over to her and just put my arm around her and she layed her head on my shoulder and we sat there like that for the next 35-40 minutes as other people in our class got up and talked about people in their groups. we were all seperated into about 5 different groups that all did the obstacle course in our own groups so we didn't know what had happened with everyone else, but it seemed like everyone had the same type of experience that our group did and had a lot of amazing things happen in their groups and a lot of people got up and shared that. i wished that i could have been a fly on the wall and seen what some of the people got up and said to their group at the trust fall, but at the same time i felt like i wouldn't have wanted anyone else in our class to be there listening to "our group". then another girl in my group got up and said that she was impressed with me and said some other nice things about me taking charge of our group and what not. then the next person got up and said a lot of nice things about robin and she started crying again...and i was glad that i walked back there and sat with her. now don't get me wrong, i am happily dating stephanie and robin is happily married to a guy for the last 10 years, so there is no "attraction" there or anything, but i didn't really want that night to end. it felt like i was almost making up for every failed relationship from my past by being there and putting my arm around robin when she needed someone there and nobody was there....i don't know....it's really hard to describe or try to recreate the atmosphere, but it really was amazing to see all of these people that i've practically lived with for the last 2 1/2 years....and to see them all in a different light, and to see them get up and share the love and admiration that they have for other people....it really was amazing. i still get choked up right now thinking about it all, and wish that i was back there, but know that i need to take what i learned and apply it to my life right now. i've already take time out and emailed/text certain people in my class that i am close to or that i developed a new appreciation for and shared those feelings with them and have received in return their same love. there are a few "parker principles" that describe what i've been feeling a lot lately.......

-Love is the magic bullet of healing. I can optimize my Mission, Talent, and Destiny and attract the “naturally right” patients, people, places, things, events, and situations for me when I love each person as a mother, father, brother, sister, or child.

-To eliminate fear, worry, and anxiety, I must live in the present and let go and let God.

-We see things as we are, not necessarily as they are.

-What I see in the universe, the universe sees in me.

-Thought plus action equals feeling. Your feelings attract your life to you.

-Do not let the negative few overrule the positive many.

-Loving service is my first technique.

-Develop a compassion to serve that is greater then the compulsion to survive.

I really like those ones....anyways.....i apologize if i went into too much detail or may have offended anyone....it was not my intention....i simply wanted to share an experience that moved me in a way that i haven't felt in a very long time....i still have a lot to work on and am no where near the person i want to be, and i still appologize to those around me for my past, present and future mistakes and short comings....but i love you all and hope that you will all forgive me....

i'll post some pictures here cause i don't know if you'll be able to see them on facebook. thanks.

this was us trusting the people and letting them push us back and forth...

my group holding me up...Thy's face on the far left make me laugh, cause she's so short she couldn't hold me up.

this is a weird photo cause i was getting strapped in and that orange peg was loose and i was messing around with it and they took a picture...looks like i'm holding an orange.

me making my way up the 30' power pole.

me at the top of the pole. i was able to put my left foot up on the peg that i'm leaning on with my left arm but couldn't physically go any higher cause the harness was so small on me...

all of my group after we had all just climbed the power pole.

i'm not even sure if i'm jumping in this picture. Dr. Kapazna is the bald headed guy all juiced up on the right. my staff doc was taking the picture, her name is Dr. Lori Baggett.

this is a picture taken from the top of the wall

and finally me climbing up the wall....

Well....i gotta finally finish this cause i still need to study for 5 tests in 4 days next week on top of attending national board reviews all day monday and then tuesday and wednesday night after i get out of the clinic.....gonna be a rough couple of weeks....but i feel good about it!

Kumbaya my Lord!!!

2011-02-17T16:44:00.000-06:00

Well....I'm sitting on a hard plastic chair in a Baptist church camp cultural hall listening to this guy speak about Medicare at "clinic camp". I tried to get out of going but already signed up (not knowing that my board reviews were going on the same time) so they would have charged me 325$ to stay home and then another 325$ to go next trimester. I almost stayed home but decided to just go to avoid paying that much money. They are going to do a make up session of board reviews for all of us all day Monday and Tuesday night and Wednesday night. Which would be ok but we have 5 tests next week so that's gonna suck pretty bad to be in school from 7am till 9pm with boards and then go home and have to try and study for 5 tests.

The weather is nice but this camp has been pretty lame. We woke up at 6am and bused out here and got here at 7. Then we've. Been sitting in hard plastic chairs talking about Medicare and other stuff when all I want to do is sit outside in a lawn chair and relax in this weather. Nope. We did a little race for 10 min then got back in here. But don't you worry...there will be plenty of "trust falls" and stuff like that tomorrow. So I'll have to update it with some pics and what not. Well we're about to eat dinner so I'll end this.

-- Post From My iPhone

The Snow Bowl?

2011-02-04T12:51:00.000-06:00

Well....we ha a big ice storm Monday night that cancelled school then we were supposed to have class today (eventhough all the school districts in Dallas were closed) but last night we got about 3-5 inches of snow and they cancelled class again today. So I've had the past 4 days off which has been pretty nice. Here are some pics from my parking lot.

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Post From My iPhone

Anyone up for some hockey?

2011-02-02T16:32:00.000-06:00

Dallas has been under a blanket of ice for the past couple of days. Schools have been closed for the past 2 days an will probably be closed tomorrow as well. Which is fine by me. Just wish pizza hut would deliver right now!

-- Post From My iPhone

stuff.....

2011-01-18T22:59:00.004-06:00

First off, it's been a while since i posted something and i've noticed that all your blogs sound the same. i don't have a clue who "the martin clan", "the martin family", "martin moments", "our crazy life" is??? What ever happened to your names as the titles? anyways, just an observation i made just now as i looked at everyones blogs.

Also, does anyone else get all of these random locations throughout the world from people? i know nobody is looking at my blog in Turkey, and Istanbul or Australia, but i was just wondering if anyone else was getting pinged by some computer or something that randomly pings web addresses?

Next, who keeps a journal and what do you guys keep it on. i used to be REALLY good at keeping a journal and NEVER missed a day starting the first day of my freshmen year of high school but started to miss some days and stuff when i moved out to hawaii and then got all caught up but again am slacking since i have moved out to dallas. i tried to type it on my computer since i can type faster than i can write and it is readable and reproduceble, but i just never got hooked on it like i would be with an actual journal book that i'd write in everyday. still trying to figure things out but will ultimately probably default back to a computer since it is the most secure and easiest to read, and it's less work i will have to do later in life when i try to transfer all of my hand written stuff onto a computer.

i don't really have much to write about since i saw all of you except dave and susan during Christmas. Before the break stepanie and i (see mom! i still remember grammar!) went to ICE which is a small american basterdization of the China Ice City ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV6FJXFOLaI&feature=related ) check it out if you have never heard of it. pretty crazy. but they had some of the chinese sculpters flown out to dallas (so they say!) and they do a little exhibit in a giant tent that is kept at -5 degrees all the time this year they did a charley brown theme so we went to that. it was pretty cool, the line for it sucked and it was pretty unorganized, but still one of those things you do atleast once in your life.

well, i gotta get some sleep and can't really think of much else to write about. peace out!

Long over due

2010-11-16T07:41:00.000-06:00

Well it's been a while since I posted anything on here and have been meaning to get to it and figured my 7am bone pathology class was as good a time as any to post these. So the first picture was my pumpkin that I made with Stephanie and her friends. I was pretty proud of it although wanted to spend some more time on it.

Then these pictures are from my "accident". So I was driving to class Friday morning a couple of weeks ago at about 4:30 and kinda fell asleep and ran over a curb head on and off the road bending all 4 of my rims and messing up the tires. So I had to pull off the side of the freeway and these pics are of me taking off the tires cause one of the shops said they had tires and wheels....then when I get there turns out they didn't have any.

So I had to get it towed back to my house and wait a few days till wheelS and tires came in and then get ten on and realized my radiator had a crack in it and had o get that fixed. Then my suspension was jacked up and ha to get that fixed. All in all it cost a pretty penny....money that I didn't have and have had to take out another loan to cover it but at this point I don't even care and just wanted my car fixed.

And this picture is of my new "wheels". My car looks weird now to me but a little less ghetto which I guess is a good thing.

So just to update everyone on my dating life, me and Stephanie have decided to break things off. We both need to work on personal goals and stuff in our life before we are able to make any type of future choices so I'm not sure if there will be any future with her or not. Guess we are just going to see what happens in the future. Well it's almost break time so I'm gonna finish this. Hopefully I'll see some of you guys at Christmas break. Later

Bad news

2010-10-25T12:51:00.001-05:00

Well I got my national boards scores in today and found out that I failed microbiology and pathology by 7 and 10 points when I needed at 375. I thought I would have been fine but I guess I didn't guess as well on the questions I didn't know. Oh well. I'm pretty bummed out but also kinda don't care about it either. This whole trimester has been one giant ball of chaos and confusion. I guess it's a wake up call or whatever but seems like I've gotten quite a few of those lately that haven't helped much. I'm sure that it'll affect me being able to take part2 in march. I might be able to take most of them but probably won't be able to take all of them since I need to repeat the two I failed. I'll let you guys know more when I find out.

-- Post From My iPhone

3+ weeks sober!!!

2010-10-07T22:14:00.002-05:00

Well, it's been over 3 or 4 weeks now that i have not had any soda or caffiene. which may sound like no big deal (which i don't think any of you can say that except for mom). but i haven't had any energy drinks, or mnt dew or eat out during the weekdays. Had a constant headache for about a week or two but that has started to go away now. school has kinda been a drag lately with some of the teachers i have, but it is what it is so....

Texas State Fair

2010-10-02T16:39:00.004-05:00

Well.....we went to the Texas State Fair lastnight and it was fun. we didn't really ride on any rides cause the lines were so long, but we walked around and ate some stuff. Deep fried snickers with powered sugar was as far as we ventured out but i think "fried fritos pie" was the winner this year. the first picture is of these wood carvings that i thought were pretty cool and i wanted to test out my iphone camera's new settings. and the second pic is of me and Stephanie standing infront of "Big Tex" and me doing the pose. i feel much better about my life choices now after having walked around for 2 hours at the fair. ghetto people love them some texas state fair!

Trinity Football

2010-09-27T21:18:00.003-05:00

Well, this past weekend was alot of fun. Me and Stephanie went to a Trinity Trojans football game. They are the #1 team in the nation and like 50% of their team is made up of tongans and they've won the state championship 4 out of the past 6 years i think and will likely win state this year as well. They started out slow but ended up winning 45 to 7?

Then one of the nights we went to dad's favorite place on earth with her family to The Bass Pro Shop and messed around in there for a little bit. Then she made me dinner one of the nights and lastnight we had some good mexican food her dad made for everyone. The weather has been really nice the past couple of days and i wish it would stick around but it's going to go back up for a little bit before it cools off. hopefully the weather is still nice this weekend and we'll probably go to the Texas State fair for some fried ...(insert whatever you want here). Well, i gotta get some studying and sleep but wanted to put there up here real quick.

gonna vent just a little bit....

2010-09-13T20:16:00.002-05:00

Well, for those of you that didn't know i took part 1 of national boards this weekend, which were the 6 hardest tests i have ever taken all back to back in 2 days. i honestly don't even care what i got on them right now, but i'll have to wait anyways till the middle of october before i can find out my scores. most everyone at parker passes all of them the first try, only 4-5 people failed last time and they only failed 1 or 2 of the tests and so they only retake those tests and not the whole thing. i'm glad they are over, they left a bad taste in my mouth because the timing of them was kinda crappy with us having started school last week as well as working in the clinic now and having to do physicals on patients. but they are done....

so i skipped 2 out of 3 days last week to study for boards and so school has actually been pretty nice except for working in the clinic. i've always heard that the student clinic was a joke and that most people hated it and i can see why so far after just a day or so. there is no direction or "mentoring" at all, they just kinda throw you in there and let you try to figure out what forms and tests you are going to be doing because they assume that 1, you were taught all of these things already which some of the times is not the case, and 2, that you remember all of it, which is just rediculous. some of the stuff i had in tri3 and i've had like 130 tests since then so needless to say i have forgot alot of this stuff. so tomorrow i will have my first patient physical. i have 6 patients and 4 of them i know from church and one is a class mate, so that is atleast a little sunshine through the gray cloud that has been the clinic so far. i'm sure it will get better as time goes on and i understand everything and get into a routine, its all just a little overwhelming right now and i just wish there was more teaching and leading by these washed up doctors that call themselves teachers....

other than that things are going ok i guess....seems like i haven't really had much time for life outside of school these past 2 months or so, part of me was almost hoping to fail a class last trimester just to get on special schedule and have a little lighter load so things could kinda slow down a little bit but i'm glad i was able to take that final and pass that class. i see the draw sometimes as to why people like to drink, i kinda feel like drinking a beer or two to just mellow out a little but don't worry mom, i'm not going out and drinking or anything cause lets face it, if i was going to do all of that stuff i probably would have started a couple of years ago after the divorce.

well, my friend just got here and i'm going to practice some of the stuff for my physicals on her tonight to try to feel a little more comfortable with all of this stuff tomorrow and the rest of this week. if i don't answer the phone it's cause i'm pretty busy and stuff, so....don't take it personal.

National Boards...

2010-09-03T19:51:00.002-05:00

Well, this week and last week were my "break" from school but i've been in a classroom from last friday till this sunday from 8am-5pm going over national boards part 1 material with a couple of doctors that teach the review course. i'ts been pretty intense and overwhelming but hopefully i'll be able to pass all of them this first time and not have to take part 1 again.

we are tested over general anatomy, spinal anatomy (nervous system), pathology, physiology, microbiology and biochemistry. each test is 110 questions and we have 4 tests a week from today and 2 the next day. and from what i've been told by our teacher every 5 minutes, "your gonna get your eyes sucked out" cause they put tough questions in there to begin with but then they throw in 10 or more questions that are meant to frustrate you and make you want to give up and are pretty much impossible for any student to get them right. so that is what i have to look forward to. this trimester is going to be tough. we start working in the student clinic treating students in our school and from what everyone tells us and from what i've seen, it's pretty much like a bunch of chickens running around with their heads cut off depending on which staff doctor you get. so hopefully i get a good one that will take the time to help out and not be one of the many that are there for who knows what reasons.

well, i gotta start studying again, but just wanted to check in and let everyone know about school starting next week and national boards. later.

the calm before the storm....

2010-08-13T22:27:00.003-05:00

been a while. been pretty busy with school and life. i just finished organizing all of my old tests and notes/flash cards into the 10 classes that we will be tested on in 4 days next week. i should be fine in most of the classes but there are two or three that i am worried about. i need to get a 60 to pass those classes, so tomorrow and sunday and the rest of next week will be filled with late nights of studying.

i was reading some emails tonight and our dean of academics sends out his thought for the day, and i usually delete them since he sends out so many of them, but i liked this one so i'll end on that.

In this life you get what you see and you only see what you are looking for. I remember growing up we loved to get the prize out of the Cracker Jack box. One specific prize we would often get was the holographic picture cards. Depending at which angle you held the card you would see a different scenery. Holding it at one angle you might see the sun rising. And at another angle you might see the sun setting. It’s amazing how different life can be depending on which angle you look at it from. Whether the sun is shining and you’re on your way up or the sun is setting and you’re on your way down all hinges on your point of view. 90% of our experiences today will be determined by the perspectives we hold. Perspective is not what is happening but your take on what is happening. So often times new sceneries is not what’s needed for success but a new perspective. The novelist Marcel Proust said “the only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes”. So begin to call things that be not as though they were. Begin to see yourself in a better position. Imagine your dreams and goals as if they already existed. See your challenges as opportunities rather than opposition. And what you see is what you will get!

so far so good...

2010-06-08T20:36:00.002-05:00

well, we have started taking tests this trimester and there is good news this tri in that we don't have as many tests despite having 10 classes and 6 labs (freakin crazy) but it makes each of the tests worth about 25% of your in each of the classes which can be a little intimidating.

so we had a pathology test last week, got a 89 on it, a phamacology/toxicology test yesterday, got a 91, and then a lab diagnosis test today and i got a 90 on that. so it has been a pretty good start so far. but tomorrow i have a clinical neurology test that is scaring me pretty bad. not because i don't have a decent understanding of the material, but because the teacher is kinda a jerk and is one of those smart people that lets you know how smart they are and how dumb you are and won't really give us any help on what to expect. he just says "everything you have learned in this class and all the other classes like embryology, neuroscience, anatomy etc..." so this could be pretty interesting come tomorrow morning at 7am. needless to say i'll probably be up pretty late and wake up early to study tomorrow. i forgot how much being sleep deprived is. anyways, just wanted to update my report card for mom and dad so they know that when i say that i am studying i actually am studying. it's been super humid here the past couple of days, i miss that "dry heat". back to studying.

Back for a limited time only!!!

2010-05-26T17:45:00.002-05:00

Well, the beard is back. probably not for much longer though. i tell people that it's my rally/playoff beard for the suns. kinda like the hockey players do when their team enters the playoffs. it's kinda working, they tied it up 2-2 last night. anyways, i'll probably shave after this weekend after a group of us goes floating down a river about 2 hours sw of here. we went last year and had a lot of fun, so we're doing it again.
Classes are going pretty good so far. we have 10 classes! so come finals week we are going to have 10 finals in 4 days, that's not gonna be too much fun, and then as soon as that is over i'll spend all break studying for part 1 national boards. but hopefully the tests won't be too bad. i can already tell i'm gonna struggle in my clinical neurology class cause the teacher is a smart guy and he lets you know that everyday and so far he's just kinda told us stories and then at the end of class will say, oh yeh, read up on all of this and that. and it's one of the only classes that we don't have notes printed out for us so it might be kinda interesting to see how that class goes.

we had assembly today and had 2 recent graduates come and talk to us about transitioning from school into a practice. the first girl was not that great at public speaking so she lost my attention pretty fast and the 2nd speaker was a guy that also lost my interest for most of it but at the end he started to explain the type of practice he has which is mainly focused on neurological disorders in children. now let me make my disclaimer: i am just as skeptical as the next person when it comes to chiropractors thinking they can cure every disease on earth, and there are some out there that think that but never go the extra mile to educate themselves in neurology and stuff like that to be able to back up and provide the services needed to actually have an impact on some disorders.

but this guy had some videos that were pretty impressive showing the results of just a couple of weeks to a month or so of treatments and rehab with children that were autistic and were diagnosed with adhd. and seeing how those are the "hot diagnosis" of our time (they are the two most misdiagnosed things in children) it's pretty likely that many or you guys will have a kid that is diagnosed with adhd or autism. i'd like to think that none of us want to start giving our kids mild tranquilizers at the age of 8-10, so i'd think everyone would like to find a more natural way to help them focus and interact. he showed videos of kids on balance boards (adhd deals with the right frontal cortex which controls the left side of our body) and showed the kid able to balance on the right side but he couldn't stay up for more than a few seconds on the left leg. then after a month of treatment which included adjustments and neurological rehab with activities designed to train certain parts of the brain that are inhibited with adhd and made even worse by the medications they give kids, and after a month the kid was able to stay standing on the moving balance board on his left leg with no problem. he also showed a kid and did a eye test on him " h in space" and the kid was not able to do it but then after treatment he was able to focus and complete the test. he had another video of a grandma and aunt of a severe autistic kid and they were talking about how the kid is now doing a lot better with making eye contact and responding to when people talk to him and not secluding himself in his room whenever there was people over at the house and that he interacts better with kids his own age and stuff like that. i looked on his webpage for the videos but couldn't find anything which was a big disappointment. but if i find them i'll post them up here, cause you can't really disprove evidence you can see with your own two eyes.

i still am kinda skeptical about adjusting little kids, mostly cause i have no experience in it and that is a pretty big risk if you are not able to help the kid, parents are pretty protective and can sometimes be unrealistic with their expectations. so, the take home message for the day is that there are other ways to treat the body and to allow the body to heal itself, which i think we all can agree that the body is very complex and is able to cure itself from any type of disease if it is God's will. most of you haven't studied the body to the extent i have and a traditional medical education doesn't really address the things that we learn here, they learn that the body is in a constant state of being sick from our environment and so they use drugs and surgeries to try to get rid of things, which many times may fix the problem but cause a side effect which is just as bad. anyways, if i find any good literature i'll forward it along, but just take a step back and think, God loves us and its not like he has made new body models for us in this generation than he did back in the day, and they lived healthy lives, and the body is mean to heal itself. well, i gotta try to study a little, just wanted to write something since it's been a while since i had posted anything. later.
-- Post From My iPhone

i'm a slacker, what can i say....

2010-03-22T21:13:00.003-05:00

so it's been a while since i've been very consistent in updating this blog. i'm gonna try to get better at it, i think it's cause i haven't been writing in my journal for a while and i want to get back to that so i think this will help me out.

this trimester has been kinda bipolar. i've done really well in most of my classes and have gotten more A's (like 8 or so?) and two 100's on two of my practicals, but also i got a 48, 52, and 60 on three of my tests, which i either got an A in the test before or after each of those. so it's been a hectic roller coaster with my grades but i'm doing good in all but one class, and i'll study my butt off to get a good grade on the next test to help pull that grade up so.

well, i tried my hand again at that thing called love and ended up dating this girl for a couple of months. we had fun for the most part, i just wasn't feeling it and am in a situation in my life where i don't really have the time to "just date" someone for the fun of it. she was fun, but i'm very busy and don't have a lot of time to spend on someone (sounds shallow i know, but it's not) and so i broke things off this past weekend and told her that i didn't feel like things were going anywhere so it was easier to break things off before they got too serious, so far things have still been really friendly between the two of us, which is what i wanted so that is good.

i got home from class today and was mentally beat, i've come down with some respiratory virus that has been going around and have been sick for the past 3-4 weeks, with the worse cough of my life, and sore throat, migraine, body aches etc, and two seperate times it looks like it's gone and comes back (just this afternoon my throat is starting to get sore again!) so i was tired and decided to kinda zone out/meditate and listen to some segments of "The Four Agreements" which is an amazing book. i highly recommend it to any of you that read books. my marriage councelor told me and janene to read it, which ended up being just me reading it, and it's is basically 4 laws that the ancient toltec indians (the lamenite) tried to live by.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Agreements and i really liked it when i was going through the divorce and after, and still do. i'll let you guys read about it since i need to get back to studying, but i recomend it, you'll probably be able to find it at the library or i can probably burn the audio tracks onto a cd and send it to you. changed my life.

so, some health care bill passed and i don't know anything about it, but aparently everyone at parker is all pissed about it and thinks it's gonna send the usa into an appocalypse, i think it's kinda stupid. ultimately God has his hands in everything, and if he sees fit that the usa needs to suffer cause of it's pride and corruption just like people in the bible/bofm had to then it doesn't really matter what happens, as long as we are doing what is right. i'm not worried about being able to find patients or how i'm going to get paid. people will gladly pay for my services if i do a good job and get people better, doesn't matter how much it will cost them out of their pocket, just as long as i am honest and do my best to help them get better. the longer i've been at parker the more i kinda have to let somethings go in one ear and out the other. there is a lot of "health and wellness care" talk and to be honest chiropractors can't heal everything, contrary to what some people in my school think. but oh well, i think it'll be good to listen to some of their blind faith to help me solidify my goals as a doctor.

well, i need to get back to studying for a physio3 quiz i have tomorrow. had a clin ortho test today that covered 118 pages of material and about 194 orthopedic tests that i pulled a 86 out on which made me happy so hopefully my inner chi is still balanced out and will radiate through my fingers and onto my scantron for this test. i hope i never have to see another scantron sheet after i get out of here, i think we end up taking like over 675 tests when it is all said and done. anyways, i'm out!

so..........

2010-02-17T16:08:00.002-06:00

it's been a while since i last posted on here so i thought i'de put something up, i know how worried tad gets when he doesn't hear from me. so school started out a little sketchy, i failed my first test but have kinda bounced back these past couple of tests and the last two tests i got a 91 and a 92, felt good, haven't done that in a while. we have a bunch of tests these next couple of weeks ( i guess it's kinda like midterms, only they last for about 3-4 weeks, and when those are done you have more tests ). i'm taking Physical Diagnosis, Clinical Orthopedics, Neuroscience 2, Physiology 3, Biochem 2, Gonstead (adjusting technique) Pathology 1, and have 5 labs in the afternoons. our teachers are kinda.....well, they've been teaching for a lonnnngggg time, some 15-20 years, so they don't really have a lot of "modern real world" experiences and most of the time the old saying rings true "those who can, do...those who can't, teach" but we are almost 1/2 way through this trimester, which seems kinda crazy, well, i gotta study for a practical i have tomorrow and a couple of tests on friday, this picture below pretty much sums up how i feel about most of my brothers....and myself most of the time as well.

and these other pictures are from "Ultra Super Crazy Blizzard 2010" that we got last week. atleast they closed school half of thursday and all of friday. our school has a new system that sends out and email, text message, voicemail, and another email to your regular email, to notify if school is going to be closed due to weather (which may happen once or twice a year, but i've gotten probably 7 different notifications saying "this is a test"). the top picture is of the golf course i live on the and bottom one is of my friend stephanie's back yard. it was the most snow dallas has gotten in a 24 hour period in like 110 years.

-- Post From My iPhone

SNOW!!!!! .........for about an hour

2009-12-02T19:42:00.003-06:00

well, it was raining all day yesterday and into the night and was pretty cold, so i got to class about 6:15 and it was still raining and then towards the end of our first class some people said that their friends text them telling them it was snowing outside, but it was still dark so we couldn't see anything. but at the break we all went outside and it was actually snowing, and it was actual snow, but snow flakes, but within an hour it had stopped, but it was still pretty cool and kept me entertained during class for a little bit. didn't have a camera with me and didn't feel like taking a picture with my phone since i figured everyone has seen what snow looks like....well, except for this guy in our class from puerto rico, who was outside running around in it because it was the first time he had seen snow in real life. back to studying.

yes dad, i'm still alive

2009-11-29T18:17:00.000-06:00

i guess sometimes the only way to humble someone is when they've just fallen flat on their face

2009-11-09T19:43:00.002-06:00

Well, school has been rough as usual with a bunch of tests, for some reason this trimester has been a lot harder. my attitude towards school has not been the best and it makes studying and retaining any material harder, of course having 13 tests in two weeks doesn't help either. but i just finished taking a physio2 test from the same teacher that taught me biochem which i struggled with last trimester. this time she had 20 out of 50 questions fill in the blank and needless to say i absolutely bombed it. i'm frustrated with her for how she tests us knowing that we are here to be chiropractors not cardiologists and that we have tons of tests each week. i haven't talked to anyone else but i'm sure there were a lot of people that failed it. she never grades on a curve or gives points back and she is the only teacher that uses fill in the blank with no type of word bank or anything.

so.....looks like this is the class that i am going to be studying for the next month, failing this class is not going to be an option nor a comforting thought to have to be on special schedule. so wish me luck......cause i'm definitely going to need it.

Vegeterian Halloween.

2009-10-25T18:03:00.001-05:00

Well since I'm on a detox that only let's me eat veggies and fruit (and since I had been studying for probably 5 hours and was going crazy) I was making my salad and decided to make a jackolantern out of a bell pepper. I didn't have a little candle or else I would have put that in there too.

I just bought a ticket back home for Christmas break so I'll be there from the 17th of December till the 8th of January.

-- Post From My iPhone

update on detox

2009-10-19T23:54:00.002-05:00

well, to sum it up shortly.....CHEATING IS BAD.... i had done really well for the first 8 days or so and i came home from the gym and was going to take a 1 hour nap that ended up being almost 5 hours and i was pretty tired still but have a test and a practical tomorrow to study for so i compromised and decided to get some caffeine to help me stay awake to study.

well, while i went to the gas station i crossed by a taco bell, and of course i had to stop in. i don't feel bad for having a cheat day, i had done everything well and deserved a little reward, but after the two 1/2 lb cheesy bean and rice burrito and the energy drink ( if i'm gonna get caffeine i'm gonna go all the way) and it did taste really really good to eat everything, but here i am about 4 hours later and i feel like i'm about to give birth to twins. and while my stomach didn't really feel the best in the early stages of this detox (mind you it hasn't felt good for many many years, not sure if it was from tonga but i'm pretty sure it was even before then) but the past couple of days my stomach didn't hurt as much nor did it have a gassy feeling to it. it was actually kinda nice to not feel like that anymore.

so it was good to see how my body would react to adding back in "normal food for every fat american" and it definetly (again help with the spelling) has a big effect on it. so i think i might be giving up caffeine sodas for good......hopefully. the alternative is that i have been drinking a lot more power aide and gatoraide, usually tried to get poweaide zero that doesn't have any calories and a lot less sugar, but i've gotten into the habit of drinking a lot of water with this detox so hopefully that will also carry over.

so to anyone that has thought about doing this (mind you it's probably easier for me to do this because i don't have a spouse or kids that might not be doing it and would be eating normal food) and feel like they have any type of stomach problems ide say try it. there are a lot of supplements that i take with this and a powder shake, but honestly you could just do the raw veggies and fruit and you'd probably notice a change. it'll take a couple of days, but you should feel better. i'm going to start adding protein into my diet tomorrow so hopefully that will help out with the lack of energy (and only getting 2 hours of sleep last night doesn't help either) and help curb the boredness of eating the same thing every day, which has consisted of vegetable stew, salad, shake, or a little brown rice and some fruit.

well, i need to get back to studying seeing as how it is midnight and i still have a LOT of studying to do, probably won't get to bed till around 4 if i do get some sleep. oh well, it's what ya gotta do sometimes and better to sacrifice now and see the reward later than look back and regret not putting as much effort into it. i'll update this after a couple of days of eating some protein like chicken and fish to see how i'm feeling.

Life lesson #67. Detoxes SUCK!!!

2009-10-14T21:22:00.002-05:00

So a couple of days ago i started a 21day detox cleanse that is put out by Standard Process. They are a supplement/vitamin company that pumps a ton of money into our school (just gave us 1mill to redo the activity center) and a bunch of people in my class started it as well and i had wanted to do one cause we did our class report on this detox diet for biochem last tri.

So far.....it's pretty much sucked. For the first 10 days you can only eat vegies and fruits. and you are supposed to eat twice as much veggies as fruit, and should try to eat atleast 1/2 raw. Can't have anything else other than a handful of veggies and fruits they have listed and have to drink a ton of water and take a bunch of their supplements (think i take between 30-39 pills each day plus 2-3 shakes)....and the kicker for me........NO SODAS OR CAFFEINE!!!!

Honestly the thing that i miss most right now is energy. i haven't worked out in almost a week (ive been kinda sick with a cough and headache as weel) and so i haven't been into the gym. i come home and take a nap and they try to study for a little bit. Hopefully this may help me figure out what is wrong with my GI tact cause ever since Tonga and even before, ive always had stomach problems and pain. plus i did drink a lot of energy drinks at the end of last trimester, so it's been good to get off of all of that stuff. Oh yeh..on day 11 you can add protein like chicken and fish but only 4-6oz twice a day i think? I'll have to let you guys know if i have any "life changing experiences" (probably won't) but i mostly did it just to say that i have done one and if a patient asks me about one i won't be ignorant.

Well, i gotta get to studying. have a public health/microbiology 2 test that is going to absolutely punish me tomorrow.

There's a new girl in my life!!!

2009-10-08T16:29:00.001-05:00

-- Post From My iPhone

Her name is Daisy. No she isn't mine. My friend got her a couple of weeks ago and I'm watching her for a couple days while him and his wife are out of town.

She is a "bug" a boxer/pug mix. She's a typical puppy barking at every little thing and chewing on anything she can. Makes me wish I had a dog right now but I don't have the space or time for one.

Texas State Fair

2009-10-04T20:59:00.004-05:00

Well, i decided to actually try and take some pictures to put up here to show everyone that i still have a social life.......no mom i don't have a girlfriend.......yes mom i'm still out there looking for one.

So a group of us from class went to the fair this weekend. i went last year with some people from my ward last year and last year was a little more ghetto than this year and i think i had a little more fun this year. didn't ride any rides cause each one was between 5$-10$ and i wasn't ready to cry in public cause i'm a little sissy when it comes to carnival rides. but it was still fun.

these three decided to race down the slide, i think jenna on the left beat the other jenna and her husband.

the infamous texas star ferris wheel. nothing like being trapped in a coffin a couple hundred feet in the air. i had a dream once that i was in a ferris wheel and at the top it came off the hinges and went rolling around.....hence why i took the picture from the safe comfort of the solid ground and not a hundred feet up in the air.
i swear i really did enjoy going to the carnival as a kid, but looking at these pics brings back all the scary memories. like this ride called "the yo-yo" for some reason always terrified me. i think i only rode it once as a kid. i was always afraid that once it started swinging full speed one of the links in the swing set was going to break (maybe because our swing set back home was never the sturdiest?)
once saw a girl throw up on people below her as she was at the top. probably one of my favorite memories from a fair.
guess the economy has hit the fluorescent lighting business pretty hard this year. the fair is in the same complex as the cotton bowl. we went last year the friday night before they played the "red river rivalry" between OU and Texas, which is probably why it was packed last year and not as bad this year.
this is "tex" he's kinda creepy. and we all came to the realization that he has "gynecomastia" enlarged male breasts. i think he has speakers in his chest, but they also had his arms really awkwardly positioned. all in all he is just flat out creepy.

Walmart never ceases to amaze me and the stuff they do. i saw this the other day. "free nerve scans" haha. wow. on so many different levels. i wanted to go over and kinda talk to them or pretend to be a patient just to see what they did and said to do if they found something. cause really chiropractic is the only way to remove nerve interference, yet i highly doubt that was what they were recommending people to do. oh well.

Well, i have a test tomorrow morning that i have yet to study for, so i'm gonna end this and see if i can get a little studying done before bed.

sometimes people that try to "Think outside the box" have never even seen the box.

2009-09-20T18:05:00.003-05:00

So this is something ive been thinking a lot about lately with all of the media coverage that it has been getting and also it is often covered and talked about in my classes and teachers. Vaccinations. i talked to mom earlier this week just to get a sanity check on myself to make sure i'm not the only person who sees all the good things that have come from vaccinations and hasn't taken the bait that the media and youtube puts up with the 3 kids out of 35,000 that had an adverse affect or death from a shot. i see both sides, nothing in this world is 100% safe. people that wear their seatbelts can still die in a 20 mph car wreck. more people probably have died from shark attacks than shots, ( i'm just being sarcastic there, although i would not be surprised). but there are a lot of people in my class that are very young and inexperienced in life and believe almost everything our teachers throw out there at them, which is unfortunate.

99% of them have never been to a foriegn country and seen children and elderly die from a common cold. I'm sure that their anncestors hundrends of years ago, that had a life expectancy of 28 would have done anything to have the opportunities that we have through modern medacine. The internet will probably go into history as mankinds greatest invention, but i think it'll also be the thing that will be the downfall of mankind. so much of the things people read online have no backing to them, anyone can write anything or say that they are a "qualified expert" and stuff like that.

Talked to a guy tonight for a while and it was nice to know i'm not the only one that thinks these people in our class that think "vaccines will kill your children, NEVER get you kids vaccinated" and stuff like that are a little ignorant and naive. i'm sure all of us can think of a time when modern medicine helped or even saved someones life, yet very few if any can think of a time when a "Dr." or medicine hurt us. I realize this might sound kinda funny coming from "the chiropractic student" where some people think that chiropractors believe that you can cure cancer by adjusting a patients toe (again, sarcasm there, you can't cure cancer by adjusting a toe, it's the pinky finger that cures cancer, the toe is used to make you lose weight and look prettier), but i get bombarded sometimes with people bashing on "medicine" at the same time that they are swallowing their 37 "herbal all natural" pills and stuff like that. (I only take about 8-12 "natural" pills a day).

Well, i think that is enough of a rant for now. All i'm asking is to educate yourself, with reliable sources that show the "big picture" and not just a small sample or something like that, and for peetsake, go to a reliable source, not Youtube, cause in the "youtube-world" people can jump over cars going 45mph and little aliens really do exist. Anyways, gotta end this so i can watch the Giants pound the Cowboys.

And so it begins....again

2009-09-13T14:06:00.001-05:00

Well, we started classes again this past week. We had Monday and Friday off so we never really got going in any class. So I too haven't really gotten geared up for class. Especially with all the college football and NFL games on this weekend. Hopefully this trimester will be a little easier than last tri. I'm taking gross anatomy 2, physiology 2, neurology 1, clinical documentation, diversified adjusting, extra spinal anaysis, public health/microbiology 2, and chiropractic phylosiphy 2. We have like 6 labs so that's not going to be too fun. I'll be at the school till 5pm everyday but we don't start till 8am so I guess it's a give and take. Well, I should probably end this since sacrament meeting is almost over.

-- Post From My iPhone

"traveling to the south will bring you unexpected happiness"

2009-08-25T21:45:00.004-05:00

I can't even make this stuff up. Today as i was driving back to dallas i stopped at a chinese buffet place to enjoy my last free day before my detox/cutting cycle and my fortune cookie said "traveling to the south will bring you unexpected happiness"

This actually kinda made me laugh considering all that happened this weekend.

So I PASSED ALL OF MY CLASSES!!!!!!!!!!!! actually did pretty well on all of my finals, passed all of them, two were in the 90's most were in the 80's and a couple in the 70's. So i was pretty happy with that. and the entire time in memphis/mississippi was fun except the last two days. I met Dave, Ryan and Jeff at Neeley's BBQ for lunch monday and Ryan pulled up saying "dude, whats up with the back of your car?" and that is when i noticed the first giant dent in the side of my car. Of corse the person didn't say anything to us or contact dave, so i was hopeless of ever seeing a penny of money from her.

So i go out to Jeffs and the next morning joleen wakes me up telling me that her neighbor backed into me and took off. of course, i was pretty pissed off by now and joleen tried to cool me down and we finally got the son in law to call his mother-in-law to come home and about an hour later she walked out and said sorry for hitting me, then we asked her if she realized she hit me and said yes, but that she had to take her granddaughter to school, i about went off on her multiple times but grabbed her information and took pictures and wrote everything down.

Here is pictures of retard #2's damage.

So now i was in a prediciment. ***DISCLAIMER TO TAD AND JOY*** before you get on your high moral horse and lecture me on what i did by making the #2 lady think she caused damage that #1 did was wrong and i'm a bad mormon for doing it......my mind is clear and completely guilt free. she hit me hard enough that it would have caused the same damage if not more than the first lady did. plus to make things even more interesting, 5 minutes after i left jeff's dave called and said lady #1 came over and had all of her information ready to exchange and stuff, but i am still going through #2's insurance since she caused the most/recent damage. Hopefully everything goes smooth tomorrow with some quotes and stuff like that.

So that was my trip to memphis in a nutshell, and archie ate my headphones. Well, wish me luck and hopefully i can atleast get some money out of this and that my suspension isn't screwed up.

Shaving something cool out of you beard is like trimming a Bonzai tree.

2009-08-16T22:29:00.005-05:00

So.....i was going to wait to shave till i got back from Memphis but as i was studying today i started to get trigger happy and decided to shave something into my beard. I was going to do some "mutton chops" or the "Wolverine" style initially but as i started shaving i wasn't satisfied and kept taking a little more off each side (hence the bonzai reference) and was in danger of shaving everything off. keep in mind that i was not blessed with the best of genetics when it comes to facial hair.

I had grown out the beard for just under 4 months i think, i liked having a beard, i think every man should do it atleast once in their life, i plan on doing it when i am older, but i figured that this trimester was the only one where i wasn't working in the clinic and once i graduate i won't have a beard when i'm running my own clinic, so it was now or never.

This pic was taken just moments before i decided to shave. You can see the hesitation in my eyes, it literaly took me a good 3 minutes to psych myself up enough to just shave it, stupid i know, but i grew to love that beard.

This was at pitstop #1, i thought about going with some form of the "friendly mutton chops" but wasn't really happy with it, i didn't want to trip it shorter and didn't like how long the edges were, so i kept going. No i didn't decide to wrap black electrical tape all over my shoulder to be cool. it's kenisio tape, i'm trying it to see if it will help my shoulder get better faster, same stuff that volleball girl had on her shoulder in the olypics.

This was at pitstop #2, this was really hard to keep going from this point cause i felt like i was losing the shock value of my sideburns if i kept shaving them, cause anyone can grow long sideburns, but not everyone can or will grow mutton chops that cover your entire face. looking back i probably should have kept these for like 1 day or so, but i kept going.

This was the final product. Since i was making a trip out to Memphis this week i decided to end off with the Elivs sideburns to pay my respects to the King. and dave/susan and jeff/joleen, any pride or self respect you had for your little brother is going out the window cause i'm keeping these bad boys the entire time im out in memphis. They look a little better now that i cleaned up with a razor and *couch* used beard coloring stuff *couch*. like i said i was blessed with weird genes and have blonde hair with a red beard, not too cool with the ladies.

Well, this is all for now, i'm sure this was more information about my facial hair excapades that anyone wanted to know about, but i felt like i had to log this special day in my life.

Back to studying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

pretty much sums it up right now.....

2009-08-13T22:31:00.002-05:00

Well, i think this photo is pretty fitting for how i feel right now. except if it was a picture of me i would be throwing my laptop down the stairs and then dropping an Atomic Elbow off the top step onto it.

My little netbook, which has been really useful to have at school and during class, as well as counter productive at times, got a virus on it. luckily i was able to restore it but lost the powerpoint that i was studying when it decided to self implode on me. luckily a budy of mine had a similar powerpoint with xray anomolies on it and sent me a copy, but i just wasted the last hour reinstalling office and some stuff on my computer.

Well, i got a 70 on the last biochem test, so i have a 75 going into the final and i think i have to get like a 30-35 to fail it? so i feel fairly confident i'll pass that class and am doing fine in all the other classes. well, i was going to rant on some more about my teachers grading us on our presentation but i should get back to studying now that everything is back up and running.

Heartbroken

2009-08-09T13:49:00.001-05:00

Well, today was kinda a sad day. As you all know (if you checked your email) there was a boat that sunk in tonga just outside Nomuka an island I worked on. At first they said that there was only 27 people lost at sea but over the past couple of days that numbe has jumped up to over 93 people and is probably going to go a little bit higher.

Reports say that the ship was taking on water and then a big wave hit that pushed all the forklifts and machines to one side and caused it to capsize. some of the survivors said that the ship was completely sunk in less than a minute. Sadly, only about 24 of the crew and 23 men made it off the boat because they were out on the deck at the time and not inside like all of the women and children were. Thats been the hardest thing to think about, is that none of the women or children or elderly people made it off that boat, they all went down with it and will forever be barried inside that boat.

Ive been pretty sad about everything but hadn't really allowed myself to think about it because i have been studying all the time, but this morning i talked to Adam Patterson who served with me and we both started talking about the number of people that died and that there had to have been people on that boat that we knew. i served on ever island group and when i was in the office i got to know alot of the other people in other stakes as almost everynight we would go out and help other missionaries with programs that they had. so thats when it kinda hit me. i wanted to go to one of the tongan wards nearby today but had to give the opening prayer so i decided to wear putu cloths to honor those that died. i started the prayer off ok, but then started to ask a blessing on Tonga and all of a sudden everything just kinda hit me. all the people that i loved and miss. i started crying and the only thing i could was to finish my prayer in tongan, which seemed to help calm me down a little bit.

I'm sure i got some weird looks before i said the prayer (especially from all the new people that are here for the summer since they don't know i served in tonga) but i sat there in my seat for a little while longer and got up and left. i didn't feel like talking to everyone about it or have people make light of my "outfit" since none of them really know the history or respect of the tupenu or tau'ovala. it would have just made me mad (as it did when one guy came up to me before church and asked me who died jokingly, then he looked like an idiot when i told him over 100 tongans did).

i know 100 people doesn't really seem like much, but to these little islands it's probably the most devistating tragedy that has hit them in many many years. Ko u 'ofa lahi ki ate ki nautolu kotoa pe kuo mole he'enau fa'e, fanau pe matu'a. te u manatu'i ma'u ai pe Tonga.

-- Post From My iPhone

a little somethin somethin for everyone

2009-08-05T14:54:00.000-05:00

To be continued..........hopefully

2009-07-22T21:33:00.002-05:00

Well, ive been giving some thought to this whole "blog" stuff and i think i'm gonna give it a little break for a while. Like untill i get married and have kids, that way i'll have more "blog appropriate" stuff to write about, since a lot of the time i'de forget that it wasn't my journal and maybe shared too much. So as for the moment i think i'm gonna stop posting stuff. I'll keep it open, so that i can still access all of your guys' blogs. thanks.

Don't really know what to say right now

2009-07-21T13:44:00.002-05:00

Well,......i'm kinda at a loss for words right now. I studied my @$$ off this last week+ and knew glycolysis, tca, and glycogen cycles front and back and walked out of that test the most confident ive ever felt taking one of her biochem tests. Figured i would atleast get no lower than an 85%. Ended up with a 72% This is just frustrating. i really have no desire to do anything right now. Dave, i know you know how i feel, when you study and study and it doesn't work out. I still have a 75 in the class and need to keep a 70% to pass the class. I feel like i can, but have to change some things.

In the words of my former boss Trent Mosteart, "chalk this one up to a cheap lessons learned". While i'm sure some of you guys were praying for me and thinking about me this last fast sunday, i was not. I did not pray, nor go to church these last 2 weeks and tried to do this all on my own. On paper it looked like i had it all down and was going to ace this test since so much of it was just about memorizing these 3 cycles and understanding them, but as i learned, it doesn't always work that way. Ide like to say that i am going to "turn over a new leaf" but honestly don't feel like that will be an easy process. I know one of you guys wrote me an email telling me to "get over janene", like it was some easy thing, but this divorce has had an affect on me and my faith in everything, myself, other people, and even the church. Trust me....I am trying to "get over janene"....it's just not that simple, and i don't think you will really understand what it feels like and how it affects you until you actually go through it yourself. it's not really even about her as much anymore as it is about myself and i don't really know. i'll just end this now, as to not offend anyone or cause anymore drama in this family.

Don't worry about calling or anything, as i will more than likely not answer it. Thanks.

the moment of truth

2009-07-20T17:42:00.002-05:00

Well.....i take my biochem test tomorrow. i feel pretty good about it. i'm still gonna study till hopefully around 2-3am then head to the school by 6 and study for 2 more hours. i want to ace this test so that i can have a little breathing room going into the last test and final. i don't want to just pass it.

I was finally able to start back working out lastweek after hurting my back. it sucks cause a lot of the stuff i do used my core muscles so ive had to kinda hobble through some make-shift routines till i feel like i can load my back muscles. hopefully by next week or the end of this week i'll be close to normal.

The beard is still going strong. only have about 5 more weeks till the end of the trimester, think it's been going on for 2 - 2 1/2 months now?

Well.......im kinda brain dead right now.....which usually means it's time to start studying again, so...

Just like the Holy Ghost, Sushi goes to bed at midnight on Saturday nights.

2009-07-12T14:55:00.001-05:00

Well, lastnight a group of us from school went to Yucatan Beach Club and watched UFC 100 (cage fighting) and had a blast. There was about 10 of us and the fights were pretty good but one fight was awesome. So we chilled there for a while after the fights then decided to go eat at this sushi place the is open really late. Bad move. It was good. But I woke up at noon today to get ready for church and as soon as I got to church I started to feel dizzy and nauseas and had a bad migraine. So I got home and just in time to see what sushi looks like halfway digested as I puked it back up into my toilet.

YouTube "Henderson knocks out bisping ufc 100" for a clip of one of the best knockouts I've seen. It was awesome.

-- Post From My iPhone

Ouch!!!!!

2009-07-05T23:17:00.001-05:00

Well, I finally know what my future patients may feel like when they come into my office. This weekend I switched up my workout routine and my back was kinda sore, but I was still able to move ok. Well today I wokeup and was stretching and my lower/mid back started to hurt pretty back. But I was still able to drive to church and sit there. Well I went to pull some doors shut as these guys were walking in the church and as soon as I grabbed the handle and went to pull back I felt a sharp pain in my back and it about brought me to my knees. I imedietly had to make my way to the couch and sat there for 10 minutes trying to see if I could get up or move.
I couldn't sit down or walk very well so I made it out to my car and tried to drive home (which wasn't very easy cause I couldn't turn the wheel very fast and ended up driving up on a curb trying to make one of the turns. But my car is ok...I think) so I got
Home and text my roomates brother who is my intern at the clinic and he came over a couple of hours after they got out of church. We figured out that it is probably muscle related and not a rib out of place. He is just a student afterall and so in my biomechanics class I'm going to ask my teacher If he can check me out and see if he can find something wrong.
But yeh, this sucks. It hurts to do anything right now. Hopefully I can get some sleep and dr. Tom can fix me tomorrow. Guess well just have to wait and see.

-- Post From My iPhone

very random post.......

2009-07-03T20:58:00.003-05:00

Well, it is a friday night and im posting this (in my defense i am going out in a little bit, but have tried to study a little bit today....not too successful, but was able to clean my room and get some other stuff done today). But figured ide post some random stuff on here....

So yesterday this girl text me asking me how it felt to be a free man. i didn't recognize the number other than it was from AZ so figured it was someone from high school. This girl tells me it's Christy my niece (which ironically i do have a niece (wait....just realized she is a cousin, not a neice) name Christy but i think she spells it "Kristie"?) so we were texting for a little bit untill she asked me if my girlfriend was mad at me.....i realized that she had the wrong person.....and realizing that she didn't know who i was.....i decided to mess with her. I made up some stuff like how "my girlfriend" was super pissed and we got into a big argument and she scratched my car up and then ran into it with her car and stuff like that. the little girl believed every word of it. it was pretty entertaining for me, not gonna lie.

A kid from my mission posted this video to facebook and i liked it, and can't figure out how to put youtube videos in a post so i'll just put the link to it and you can go watch it if you want. it's of Glenn Beck talking about how he joined the church and stuff. i think a couple of you guys watch his show so i thought ide post it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKtAPT9KEfM

The beard is still going strong. I should have kept a record of it by taking a picture of myself like every day or every couple of days....oh well. I get moments where i want to shave it, but i'm over half way to the end of the trimester so i think i can hold out and grow it out the rest of the time. this of course is subject to change...ie a girlfriend...which there aren't really "prospects" on the horizon so i think i'll be good in that area.

The workouts are still going good. i missed 2 days this week, was kinda bumbed out about that, but one day i was tired and had to stay up late studying, and the next day was cause i had pink eye and was tired and could hardly keep my eye open (we had our gross anatomy practicle that day and i spent an hour in a small room with about 30-35 dead bodies....yeh, my eyes were on FIRE!!!). me and a budy of mine are getting ready to take it to the next level and have a cycle of supplements set up that we are going to start next week we should see a lot of progress these next couple of weeks if we stick to the plan.

and last but not least, we spent 5 hours a day in the same classroom and many time we fall victim to the elusive "sleep enducing elvs" that hide in our classrooms waiting for unsuspecting vitims to close their eyes for a split second and then they strike and make you fall asleep. Well, while you are asleep you are fair game for the people around you to mess with you, so here are some pictures of some people sleeping in class.

Ross ironically giving the "Chinese thumbs up" sign to Tommy, but in Tommy's defense he's Vietnamese.

Of course i couldn't leave myself out of this, although (and im not sure where or how i learned this skill....a skill for which i am thankful for) usually when i "sleep" i sit up straight in my chair and am able to keep my head balanced while i dose in and out of my "happy place" which is a place far far away from Parker High, my friend Nhuygen must have taken this when i was "Resting" not "sleeping"

Well, gotta get ready to go.......

kinda glad i don't have cable right now

2009-06-29T08:21:00.001-05:00

Well, i'm not going to lie......im sitting here in biomechanics kinda borred, so...... i was thinking yesterday that im actually kinda glad that i don't have cable right now. im sure ide get tired of seeing news coverage of michael jackson's death (which im sorry, it doesn't matter how "great" his music was, the guy was a psycho and probably should have been locked up multiple times) or watching on espn all the same stuff about brett farve, or seeing comercial for transformers, and im sure that there are even still advertisment for the los angles lakers winning the nba championship.

This week is going to be kinda brutal. we have friday off for the 4th of july, but i have a biochem test tomorrow that will be really hard, then wednesday i have a gross anatomy practicle, which shouldn't be too bad, i spent a little time in the open lab on saturday so i feel alright about it. then we have a microbiology practicle on thursday, so this week should be, as all the weeks have been in tri 2, filled with late nights and tiredness. back to studying....................................

Tragic day at Parker CC

2009-06-22T23:45:00.002-05:00

Well, i went to class this morning a couple of hours early to finish studying up for a test i had today and at the end of our first class the president of student affairs walked in with one of the student body officers and told us that a guy in Trimester 7 took his life yesterday. It was kinda sad. I didn't know the guy and didn't recognize him when i looked at a picture of him on the school webpage, but still felt for him and his family. People were kinda talking about it off and on throughout the day, some feeling sympathy, others criticizing him for "being selfish" or "taking the easy way out". I can't really agree with those last ones. While i myself have never had someone close to me take their own life i know it has affected more people than we realize, even in our "perfect little mormon world". Do i think that the guy is looking down and regretting his decision....of course. Do i think that he will be held accountable for what he did....i do, he was of a sound state of mind (obviously a smart person if he made it through 6.5 trimesters of medical school) so in that sense i think he will be held accountable because he knew right and wrong, unlike someone who is mentally handicapped and may not have understood really what they were about to do. Honestly, i don't think anyone who takes their own life truely understands the conciquences of what they have done. I by no means am planning on taking a shower with my toaster anytime soon but i wen't and still feel like im going through a very dark and hard portion of my life right now ( realizing that other trials and tests will come my way that may or may not make this time feel like but a moment....but i really hope to not have to go through anything like this again with losing my best friend and "eternal companion" ) but i can honstley see why people might consider taking their own life as a means to an end. I don't think they understand everything nor do they really have an understanding of the gospel, but it's not my place to chastize that person, especially cause no one really knows what was going on in their minds and how they precieved reality.

I don't know......it just kinda has gotten me into a thinking mood right now. just goes to show that you have to have a support group as well as a way to break away from all this mundane stress that Parker loads on you. I honestly hope that it has a positive affect on our school and class in general. there is this one kid that most of the people in class make fun of, (and in their defense this kid sits in the front of the class and asks about 8 questions each hour, and most of them are off topic or distracting) but ive said a couple of times that i can't bag on the kid if that is how he needs to learn, but hopefully it will give everyone a chance to kinda look inwards and reflect on things if only but for a minute....kinda like 9/11 did to this country, i kinda have mixed feelings about how "we as a country" have reacted to the bombings but that is a whole nother can of worms we won't open up.

As far as school goes, had a test today that i got an 80 on, felt like i should have done better, but then i had a motion palpation lab practicle and walked out with a 96 so i guess that makes up for it in the long run. A couple of us are going to the midnight showing of Transformers 2 (not gonna lie....im pretty pumped to see it) but we were too late in getting our tickets online and the IMAX was sold out, so we are going to see it on a regular screen, which will still be cool, especially cause ive never seen a movie on an IMAX so i don't really know what im missing out on.

Well, im going to go to sleep now (even though i took a 3 hour nap after class today). Hopefully we all can be a little more mindful of others and what they might be going through, as well as be less judgeful and more forgiving....definetly have struggled in forving others throughout my life, especially with janene and with myself as well. Life really is not as bad as me sometimes make it out to be, and no matter how hard we think our life might be, there is always someone who has it harder. i found some quotes on a website ive used before called thinkexist.com that i really liked about forgiveness....

“There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love.”

“Most of us can forgive and forget; we just don't want the other person to forget that we forgave”

“You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.”

“We achieve inner health only through forgiveness - the forgiveness not only of others but also of ourselves”

“He who is devoid of the power to forgive, is devoid of the power to love.”

The beard is coming back!!!

2009-06-21T19:18:00.001-05:00

Well I'm growing the beard back out. In honor of not having to observe in the clinic a group of us started to grow out our beards. Originally started out with about 5-6 of us and we were planning on going till the trimester. Well 3 have bailed already cause their girlfriend/wife didn't like it (don't think I'm going to have a problem in that area) so our rule was if you shave the group gets to decide what you have to shave into your beard first and you have to come to school like that one day. So one of them shaved the "wolverine" style beard for a couple of days and another did the really long handle bar mustach like the dad from American chopper. So I thought IDE include some pics of the progress so far. I know your jealous tad.

That last one was strictly for the ladies.

Living by yourself (I have a roomate that I see maybe every other day for 5 minutes) gives you a lot of time to think. Kinda sucks...but luckily school keeps me pretty busy, but these past couple of weeks have been kinda rough. It was about this time last year that the divorce went through and I found out that janene was getting married less than 2 1/2 months after the divorce.

Life is what it is I guess. I need to get back to studying, have 3 tests these next 2 days and another on Friday. I'm starting to feel kinda beaten down by this constant onslaught of tests and school and studying. That motivation and drive I had a couple of months ago feels like it's slowely fading away. I need something to force me out of this funk....
-- Post From My iPhone

koe lau'anga oe ki'i tamasi'i

2009-06-16T22:33:00.002-05:00

well.....'i he taimi'ni ko u 'ongi'i ki'i lotosi'i. Oku hange pe 'e ikai te u lava ke fiefia, pe 'e ikai te u lava o 'ikuna'i 'ae u ahi'ahi o setani. neongo pe ko u tui ki he ongoongolelei, 'oku kei vaivai pe he'eku tui. ne u talanoa moe ta'ahine ko kotini he aneafi pea ko u ongo'i lotomamahi i he'ene fili ki he kovi. 'kuo ne toe foki pe ki ke inu mo ifi, pea 'oku ikai ke ne fie tuku, ne pehe'i mai "'Oku ikai ke u fie tuku, ko u ma'u ha taimi fiefie he taimi kotoa pe", pea ne u 'ilo foki 'oku ne loi pe kiate ia, pea 'oku totonu ke ne tuku'ange hono ulungangafakatamaiki, he koe ta'u 24 ia, ka 'oku ne hange koe ta'u 16. ko u ongo'i toko taha pe lahi taha 'oe taimi. ko u 'ilo ko au pe 'ia, 'oku tatali mai 'ae 'Eiki ke ne tokoni mai kiate au, ka 'e 'ikai te ne fakamalohi'i au ke u fili mo fai lelei. ko u ongo'i ta'eoli he taimi'ni. ko u ongo'i ta'eaonga. ko u fiemohea.......pea te u tuku'i 'ae laulaunoa'ia ko'eni. Tokoni mai ha taha........fakahaofi'i au ha taha......

it wouldn't be called graduate school if it wasn't hard right?????

2009-06-11T23:28:00.004-05:00

well, im starting to feel the wear and tear of trimester 2. We have had atleast 2 tests each week starting back on week 3 and i'm kinda feeling burnt out right now. I had two tests this week and got a 93 on one and a 60 on this one today, which technichally is a failing grade, but luckily in that class (biochemistry) there is like 5 tests and we have homework every week and quizes and so there is a lot of areas that i can improve my grade in, not like my biomechanics class that has 2 tests and a final (which is the class that i got a 93 in). i wanna get a 100% on a test sometime, not sure if i have ever done that before. So yesterday there was a tornado about 10 minutes from my house and our power was out from 7:30pm till around 2:30am (and i had to study for biochem...which is also my excuse for why i didn't do very well on it, cause i was distracted multiple times with this storm and the tornado sirens going off non-stop.) So i went over to a friends house and studied for a little bit, but he had been studying all day so he just wanted to watch baseball and talk, so i left around 10 and the power was still out so i went to walmart and got one of those flashlights you strap to your head and tried to study for a little while like that. i had to take my chair out into the stairway cause it was so hot in my room with no a/c. that only lasted about an hour cause of the misquitos. so i woke up at 4am when the power was back on and tried to study.

Then last weekend a group of us from school went and floated down this river about 45 minutes south of fort worth. there was a few spots where the water was pretty shallow but all in all it was a blast. took us about 5 hours to float down it....some areas i swear we were moving backwards or not moving at all. there was 15 of us, most everyone was from my class except 3 guys and a girlfriend. i of course was the only sober person on the entire river. i got a little burnt on my back and chest but it wasn't too bad. in honor of my mexican brothers to the south i decided to wear a sombrero to protect me from the sun.....best 3.50 i have spent in a long time.

So im sitting here with the electric stim on my right jaw. my tmj has been kinda sensitive lately with all this studying and staying up late. Ive been growing out my beard with a couple of other guys in my class ( i think some of the girls in my class could give us all a run for our money ) in honor of not having to be in the clinic as an observer this trimester, and so since i have a beard the electrode patches don't really stick to my face so i have to put them on my face and then wrap an ace bandage around my face to keep them stuck to me. atleast it all works and seams to be helping.

Well, not much else going on as far as everything else is going. No i don't have a girlfriend. Yes i would date someone if the opportunity arised. Yes i still like girls, no worries there, just haven't really met anyone here in dallas yet that i feel there could possibly be something more than just a friend. I do have a social life ( and even posted pictures to prove that im not just making up these imaginary people ).

Im gonna keep going since i am not too tired and don't have class till 9am tomorrow. So since january ive been going to the gym 6 days a week and have maybe missed less than 8-9 days. I saw a lot of improvement at times and at other times felt like nothing was happening. But this past week ive been pushing myself the hardest i have ever done. Talking with one of my teachers who used to do bodybuilding and has shot up more steroids than A-rod or Barry Bonds, and he was telling me how to do some workouts where on the last set you try to do as much weight as you can untill your muscles can't do anymore, all while trying to keep it to around 10 reps. So this entire week my body has been more sore than it ever has, but hopefully i'll start to see faster results and that will feed the fire. If not i can always resort to steroids like everyone else does.

Well, im going to get to bed and try to catch up on some much needed sleep......

2009-06-05T01:03:00.001-05:00

Well it's about 1am and I need a break from studying. This week was pretty good. We got to flip our cadavers face up and open up the chest and look at the lungs and heart. Pretty awsome. School has been good. I need to step it up a little more on my studying. Started off strong with a 94 but got a 78 on my last test. The good thing about Parker is that if you do bad on one test there is always another one a day or two away to try and redeem yourself.
My tmj has already started to get tight and hurt so I bought a TENS electric stimulation machine from the bookstore and have used it on my jaw. It works, but I haven't shaved and so I have to wrap ace bandages around my face so that the electrodes don't fall off. Hopefully by doing this every couple of days for 20 minutes it will keep it in check and not let it flair up too bad.
Still haven't fixed the blog, which is why I'm writing this from my phone because I can't figure out how to get back to my account page.
I've been doing a bit of retrospective thinking lately and just kinds thinking about life and where I'm at right now. Not really sure what I've figured out yet, ide like to think that I'm so much a better person now than I was a year ago or two or three years ago, but sometimes i'm not sure about any of that. I don't know. I don't feel like I can relate to anybody out here. Or that they can relate to me and understand me or who I really am. Part of me doesn't want to even let them try to figure out who I am cause in the back of my mind I hve never fully gotten over janene or what has happened with us. Guess I've just never forced myself to do it like she did by marrying someone right away. Oh well. Should probably end this, it's late and sometimes I forget that this isn't my journal and will write things that the whole world doesn't need to read.
I'm not big into reading poems, but I love music and a lot of music is poems set to music. So here is a line from one of the songs I was listening to tonight while studying.
"I know one day, all our scars will disappear, like the stars at dawn. And all of our pain, will fade away when morning comes. And on that day when we look backwards we will see, that everything is changed, and all of our trials, will be as milestones on the way"

-- Post From My iPhone

Been a while

2009-05-30T16:00:00.001-05:00

Well it's been a while since I last posted anything. I need to redo this layout cause for some reason you can't leave comments. But that's not exactly on my list of things to do right now so it may take a while. We started our tests. We have atleast 2 each week from here on out. Which sucks but oh well. I got a 92 and 84 on my microbiology and biochemistry classes. We have phisiology and gross anatomy Monday and Tuesday.
I've been spending a lot of time at pools and hanging out with friends from school but that all will have to end soon with all these tests. Well I'm gonna get back to studying.

-- Post From My iPhone

"I see dead people"..........every Wednesday from 1-5pm

2009-05-15T16:38:00.001-05:00

Wellwe started our gross anatomy lab. Wasn't too bad this week, but we start into the disection this next week so well see how I feel where there are 8-10 bodies being worked on. It's actually a pretty good oportunity. Most other school, chiro or medical or whatever, usually have one body for the whole class and they watch
An instructor do everything or there is 20 people to each of the bodies. We have 4-5 people in each group and we do EVERYTHING! So it should be fun.

I've been real busy with school and really tired from having to wake back up at 6am. But next week should be a little better. That's about it. Just letting everyone know I'm still alive.

-- Post From My iPhone

Is a "dirty white boy" with "double vision"

2009-05-10T12:04:00.000-05:00

Well lastnight I relived the early 80's that I never had. A group of us went to this food festival called "taste of Addison". A lot of restaurants set up booths there and there was some carnival rides and some other stuff. We didn't get there in time to see much of the stuff before the music started.

The first band was called "bowling for soup" who I guess they are from Denton, a suburb of Dallas. I had heard of them but wasn't a fan of their music. They were kinds like the Backstreet Boys with guitars. But I'm sure all the eleventeen year olds girls liked it. They definetly were not the best show I have seen.

The main band was Foreigner. I was actually surprised at how good they were. I could only tell you a handfull of their songs off the top of my head before the show, but as they played I recognized almost all of them, atleast the chorus anyways.

At first I was ok with being back a little bit from the front, but I kinda wanted to go up to the front. Every concert I've been to we always make our way up to the front (usually I bulldoze through people and my friends would get behind me as we made our way to the front). But it was still a lot of fun.

5 hour boat ride (aka fishing)

2009-05-04T15:23:00.002-05:00

Well, last week we went fishing. We spent about 5 hours on the lake and only had 3 bites the whole time. So we decided to take some "action shots" with dad's camera so that it wasn't a complete waste of the morning.

So i spent a little while trying to find a "manly" background online, since most people that have blogs are soccor moms or girls, it was a little harder than i thought. I finally gave up and chose this one for the time being since the ASU one had a tendency to induce epileptic seizures while trying to read it.

I'm flying back to Dallas in 2 days and am trying to get myself ready to go back to school and back into studying all the time. I think that this next trimester won't be as bad as the 1st one. I just hope that i don't blackout during the cadaver lab, i heard the first couple of times is pretty crazy when your peeling back the skin and stuff, but once you open everything up and dig deeper it's not so bad. I guess we'll have to see when the time arrives.

My 2 week "Vacation", hope your picking up on that sarcasm

2009-04-30T17:52:00.008-05:00

So for my 2 week break from Parker CC I flew out to Arizona to vistit the family. I spent a couple of days in Mesa and hungout with Rusty and Greg's family and then came back to Thatcher for the rest of the time. Figured that right now would be a good time to do this before Tad and Joy and their "3 little angels" get here (again, notice the "quotation marks", usually infers my sarcastic touch). So i got here and have taken things pretty chill, watching lots of tv and sleeping a lot, going to the gym, and haning out with some friends.

Of course ive gotta catch up on Sportscenter, but like i said in my last post ive found myself watching the foodnetwork and travel chanel a lot. Also catching up on American Chopper and any other car/motorcycle shows.

Also have to make a couple of trips to Los Jiliberto's, may not have the friendliest service or be the most sanitary place to eat, but it tastes awsome.

So, mom thought it would be a good time to order some more rocks to spread around the side of the rent house, we only needed about a pickup truck load, but we got a dumptruck load, so i had them dump half in the back (because someone wouldn't move the broken truck or even more broken sand rail so that the truck could back up to the spot and dump it, instead i have to wheelbarrel it around and under the truck to the spot mom wanted it at.

The other half i had him dump infront of the street between our house and the rent house to try and cover the gap with rock as well as fill in some spots infront of our house.

"I AM MAN" with a very very sore back. atleast it got me out of having to finish shoveling the other half today, tomorrow is a different story.

And the finished project, only tooke 3 hours and a couple of 44oz cups of ice water. So i think for the rest of the time here im gonna keep watching some more tv and some movies. Just got my laptop fixed so hopefully i can sell it when i get back to Dallas, and i think we're going to go fishing on Saturday.

So here is a little history of Brad Martin and fishing. As a kid, he did not have the patience to be a "Fisherman" and most of the time would throw rocks in the water or find something else to entertain him with. As a teenager he would go fishing but never really caught anything, eventhough "we just caught 23 fish in this exact spot yesterday". As a missionary he would go fishing with a bottle and a big hook and would catch 2 foot tuna and all sorts of fish. Even caught little baby sharks. And as a young adult has had a few times where he has caught a couple of fish but most of the time it is only 2-3, minus a fishing pole that slipped out of his hands and went into the water, that his dad will never let him forget. So hopefully this Saturday will be the start of a new era of fishing, but im not so sure that will be the case. We'll just have to see.

The grass is always greener???

2009-04-28T12:42:00.001-05:00

So I'm sitting in my basement watching tv, something I haven't been able to do for the past couple of months of school and I'm not quite ready to get back to Dallas and into school, but I'm having a hard time filling my day with meaningful things.

I'll hit the gym up around 3pm (cause if I go before then there will only be old people and no college girls) then hangout with some friends. But I found myself watching like 5 hours of "food network cake challenge" which sounds pretty girly but actually was pretty cool, hence the 5 hours.

So far this morning it's been standup on comedy central, and now it's No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain and Bizarre foods.

But don't get it twisted, I'm not ready to go back to Dallas or school, moms cooking is too good and sleeping in till 10am only to wake up and watch a couple of hours of tv is...well...still pretty fun. We'll see how I feel in another week of this tough regimen.

-- Post From My iPhone

No idea how I failed 2 classes?????????

2009-04-21T17:31:00.000-05:00

Just kidding. I passed all my classes with B's and 2 A's. I'm sitting in the airport killing time and decide to try this program out that let's me post to my blog from my phone. I still haven't been able to unwind and destress myself. I've been running nonstop for probably the last 2 months with
Multiple tests each week and 8 tests in 4 days this week. Luckily I was sitting good going into the finals and the highest grade I ha to get to pass a class was 45% and the rest were around 10-30% so that helped a lot.

Well, I'm gonna catch up and listen to "The Dan Patrick Show" (thanks dave for getting me hooked to it) so I'll see some of you tomorrow and the rest.....well......when I see you I guess.

(the picture was from my phone, just testing to see if it would let me post pics, and it does)

-- Post From My iPhone

Sleepless nights and the reason why pills are shaped like pills......

2009-04-20T15:53:00.000-05:00

So on Saturday i woke up to go workout and normally when i take my suppliments i take them in the mid-morning on an empty stomach so they kick in. it says to take them atleast 45 minutes before your workout in order to dialate the blood vessels. So i didn't have that kind of time so i thought ide smart and resort back to my drug hazed teenage years (that i never got) and cut the ginormous horse pills in half. I normally take 4, cut those in half and that give you...yes 8. So i downed the first 2 pills semi-ok. The next two...not so much. they kinda got stuck but they evenutally through paristalsis made it down. The next two... well, it's 3 days later and i still have a sore throught from all the endothelium that i ripped up when gagged on the pills and almost threw up in my kitchen. So... life lesson from before was to not accidently bite open a fish oil pill and "Life Lesson #42" is ...." Pills are shaped like pills for a good reason "

I took my 1st of 7 finals this morning and got a 90% on it, which barely gave me an A. but lastnight i laid in bed from about 10:15pm till around 2pm and could not get to sleep. I even laid off the Diet Mnt. Dew around 7pm so that it wouldn't still be firing in my system. I had a tension headache because my mind would not shut up, so i put an ice pack under my neck and one on my forehead. Even tried using one of the "binaural beats" applications that i have on my phone that plays 2 tones that are slightly different frequencies and are supposed to lower your brainwaves....riiiiiiggggghhhhhhtttttt.

So i laid there for a couple of hours thinking about my finals, but mostly about my life. My life has been.........very different from anything that i could have ever thought it would be. I never imagined ide be married by 22 and divorced by 23. But it's not only that, there are a lot of things that have happend in my life that i feel like "if i could just go back in time and change that ONE thing.... how my life would be so much better" But you know what, no matter how green that grass may be on the other side, you will always have to dodge the cow patties. We all will step in the poop, or get pushed into it, but i think that secret of life is that once you step in the crap, wipe your feet off and look out next time for the cow patties. nobody wants to be around someone that stinks like cow crap, and thats the same thing for someone that keeps making the same mistakes in life. now obviously things will happen to us that are out of our control, and some trials may take but a moment while others may seem like they will take a life time.....believe me.....i feel like ive gone through and am going through all of those things. I can't say that i am at the place in my life that i want to be, but i can say that there are other things in my life that i never thought ide be able to do. I never thought that ide be the type of person that looks forward to going to the gym. Ive missed maybe 4 days this entire trimester (except sundays of course) and i also never thought that ide be able to be successful in an accelerated medical school, taking 30 credits when most college students take 15 at the most. But i think that i still got some poop on my shoes and need to not put off the spiritual things so that i can do the worldly things like school and the gym.

But all in all ( i might not be able to say this with 100% conviction, but atleast im to the point that i can say it) im content with the things ive experienced in my life. Yeh the divorce sucked and still sucks, but i learned from it. It's much better to have gone through what i have and am going through than to have been married to Janene for all eternity, sure things could have worked out, but she had one foot in and one out before things ever got started. But looking back im glad that i was born into the family that i am in. I know we have not always gotten along, and to this day there are still disputes going on between brothers or inlaws, but ide hope that when it comes down to it, we will support eachother and love eachother and more important.......forgive eachother. Thats something i struggle with eachday, forgiving janene, and forgiving myself. Hatred knows no end, and will consume everything in it's path unless we learn to forgive. Days will turn into weeks, into months and into years, and before you know it you will be at the funeral of someone....wishing you could take back those things you said so many years ago. But we wont be able to.

I remember one missionary (who we never saw eye to eye, and i ended up not really liking or respecting him for how he handled himself as a missionary and person) but he said one thing that has stuck with ME....the eternal pesemist. we were on the island of 'Eua and he said to me that "no matter how crappy the day is, or how homesick, how much he hated his companion or how much he missed his girlfriend......there was atleast 1 thing that happened to him out there that happened to nobody else on the face of the earth at that moment." That kinda hit me during the last couple of days of my mission when i was out in the middle of the ocean on a boat going to visit some Elders on some of our smaller islands. I was the only missionary in the world that was experiencing what "I" was experiencing. There were other elders on the boat, but none of them were experiencing what i was. That has helped when things get manotenous and seem borring. there is always one thing in each day that makes it worth it all.

Yeh i have regrets.....but i also have goals. Friendships, marriages and lives are destroyed by the past. By something that can never be changed, yet it has an enourmous effect on our future. so why do we let it? if anyone has an answer please tell me, cause i haven't figured it out yet.

Well......that kinda all just came out of me whithout really meaning to. Hopefully whoever reads this can take something from it without getting offended, there were no stones thrown at anyone except myself. Im gonna end this with a quote i found a little while ago that i really liked.

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” -- Anais Nin

By just thiiiiiisssssssss much

2009-04-16T18:54:00.000-05:00

Well, im not really feeling like studying right now so i thought ide update my progress on mylast couple of tests. This past week was pretty brutal and exhausting. I now know what it feels like to be in the "fight of flight" sympathetic mode ALL the time. i feel like i could sleep for days and days right now, but can't afford to till next thursday at around 6:30 when my plane leaves the runway at Love Field, exatly 1 week from this very moment.....soooooo close.

So a couple of my classes you can 90/90 out of the final ( have a 90% grade and attend 90% of classes) which is a nice little prize to bribe people with to keep them from ditching class. So i started out pretty strong in most of my classes, some have dropped off a little bit, but all in all they have all started to finish pretty strong. So going into these last couple of tests i needed to get in the 90's since a couple of my grades were 89, 88, 87. well, some of my classes i did really well in, but a couple of them i should have done better. i missed out on 3 classes 90/90 by a less than 1-2% (got an 89.1 and 88.5 and 88.7) so.....i'll have to take all of my finals. but the comforting thing to know is that i can take the tests in japanese and still probably pass the class, i think the highest score i have to get on any of my finals in order to pass with a 70% is a 54, and a couple of them i only have to get 5-10% on my final. but needless to say, i'll still be staying home this weekend and studying instead of going out with friends. it's just one more weekend, so it's not that big of a sacrafice.

Well, i need to get back to studying, i'll see a couple of you guys next week when im in phoenix and thatcher.

sometimes i feel like i was born in the wrong country...

2009-04-12T19:13:00.000-05:00

Well, i had a very humbling/painful/spiritual/sad/happy moment today at church. it had nothing to do with our sacrament meeting or any of the classes that we had. As i was leaving the chapel i saw this large man that i knew was Polynesian. He is one of the couple missionaries that is serving in the bishops storehouse, but i had never met him or knew his name so i wasn't sure if he was Tongan or Samoan. So i walked by him and saw his last name was Moala, which i knew was Tongan so i stopped and started talking to him.

It was awsome. He was from an island that i had sereved on in Ha'apai called Ha'ano. It was one of the poorer islands and we lived in one of the little classrooms at the church and showered in the janetors closet where they rinsed the mops and we shaved and stuff in the restrooms of the chapel. We had no electricity and so we had to do everything by flashlight or candle light. Which worked ok.....untill you ran out of candles and all of the little town stores ran out as well. we had to walk a lot on that island cause we covered 4 villiages and most of them were about an hour walk away from our house.

So we started talking and he is pretty big, about an inch or two shorter than me but maybe 15-20 pounds bigger and we got to talking about me serving and it was so interesting to interact with him. it's kinda hard to describe but tongans don't usually just "talk to you" like white people do. if they talk to me usually they will be really close to me or holding my arm and stuff, which was the case with Elder Moala. It's a sign of love and respect. So he held my arm and we talked for about 10 minutes. My Tongan was nowhere as fluent as i had wished it was, but i was able to talk to him about a lot of things.

But the end of our conversation really had an effect on me. As i told him i needed to leave to go to a class he grabbed my arm and said thank you. he then started to cry and told me thank you for serving the lord in his poor islands, and that angels like me from america came over back in 1971 and baptised him and his family. I honestly can't describe it. we just stood there and hugged eachother in the fouyer of the church for a couple minutes while we both cried and he continually thanked me. I told him that i was in debt to Tonga and all of the things that i have learned from Tonga, and that not a day goes by that i don't think about those people and those islands. I can't recite for you the 4th principle of the 2nd missionary lesson....but i can tell you about love and sacrafice that those poeple showed me. I can't tell you word for word "Joseph Smith's first vision" but i can tell you of a people that truely lived the law of consecration, and of a people who truely loved and served

their fellow men, no matter the religion.

After i walked away from him i sat in sunday school class dazed and in a transe of thought. i felt like a failure and like i had let the Tongan people down. They had done so much and shown so much love to me by teaching me their culture, their life, their language and their history. They all held us white missionaries so high in their hearts and minds and thought so highly of us, when really it was them that were showing the most rightous example and it was them who would have an everlasting impact on me. All of those things he said to me, about being an angel and for serving and loving his people, i felt like i had let them down by not living my life like i should and like they think that i do. it was a very humbling experience, one that ide rather not experience again, but one that was very much needed. I owe so much of who i am to those people on those poor, isolated islands. I hope that they stay that way, and don't become "americanized" and that they keep their history and their culture. They truely are the most blessed and rightous people on this earth. I only hope to have a small portion of the love and kindness that they have.

ive attached some pictures from Tonga that i really like. im trying to attach an audio file with some quartet songs on it but im not sure if it will work.

Well, the picture just loaded up, so.......

2009-04-07T16:58:00.000-05:00

Well, i had a funny picture for this but for some reason this thing is not letting me post any pictures to this....so text only will have to due for now. Well, tomorrow is the kick off of all our tests, all 15 tests in 11 days. But im ready for it and ready for it to be over for a couple of weeks. This definetly has been different to adjust to being at such a fast pace for ALL of my classes. Ive taken summer classes a couple of times but it was only 2 or 3 classes, not 8 classes and 4 labs. So hopefully Tri 2 will be a little easier to adjust to, cause that one is supposed to have the most tests and is usually the hardest one out of the 9 trimesters.

So i fly in on the 23rd which is a thursday and dad said that he will be up there that night till saturday afternoon. So i was thinking we could kill two birds with one stone (and since both greg and rusty work during the day and jake and garrett are in school ) we could all get together friday night at someones house? doesn't have to be food or anything, just hanging out. That way i don't have to bounce around between houses the whole day (plus tad is not in mesa anymore and that would piss him off to know that we had a "family get-together" without him. Anyways, let me know what you guys think (or dad, since he'll be my ride).

Health update:

So i was taking a Nitrous Oxide suppliment called "N.O

. Explode" which was a powder that you take before workouts, wasn't the best tasting thing but also wasn't the worst, but i didn't really notice much difference and it was a hassel to have to bring a mixer with me to class and the powder, so a friend of mine has been taking a similar product but it's a pill. So i just started my 2nd bottle of N.O.2 Black, and im just now starting to really feel a difference in my workouts. It has also helped out with my blood pressure. I think that they told me i had "slightly high blood pressure" at the begining of this trimester? or last trimester. Can't remember exactly but i think it was something like 135/92? not sure, and my heart rate was mid-high around 85 ( i remember taking my pulse and it was around 98-100 resting sometimes ) and so the other day i was in walmart (and have done this a couple other times) and took my BP and it was down to 114/70-ish? and my pulse was around 65 after having walked around walmart for a little bit. So that was kinda cool. (grandted the NO2 is a Nitric Oxide booster which is a vasodialater, so im sure some of

it is from that, but also getting in shape helps as well)

So the take home message of the day is...... you can't "cram the night before" in Chiropractic school, and exercise and eat healthy, cause i don't want to take care of you kids if you kick the bucket at 55! Well, i gotta get to studying for my Embryology test tomorrow.

Flying back to ARIZONA!!!!!!!!!!

2009-03-31T18:54:00.000-05:00

No i haven't flunked out of school.....yet. Tomorrow is the drop day for this trimester and there are a couple of people that i have noticed have dropped out of classes. I should be good. On my lowest class all i have to do is get a 55% on the final to pass with a 70. So that is kinda comforting. So i was debating on staying here for the break or going back to AZ and it was kinda hinging on a girl.....which hasn't exactly worked out.....so im coming back to AZ for just under 2 weeks. i'll be in on the 24th of april and leave on the 5th of may. i think i might need somone to take me to globe to meet mom or day. i don't get in untill like 6:30 so there should be no excuse that someone is "busy" or "working". Im not sure what i am going to be doing, but more than likely i'll just be at home sleeping for the first couple of days. We have this week with one test and next week with two, then that third week we have 5 in 4 days, then finals week we have 8 in 4 days. should be loads of fun.........

"Golf is a good walk spoiled" - Mark Twain

2009-03-21T15:20:00.000-05:00

Well, i went golfing yesterday for the first time since i went back in thatcher with Chad last August. Wasn't all bad, but as Dad can probably tell you by my phone call to him asking him how to get rid of a pull/hook on my drives....its been better. But i wasn't too mad since i haven't touched my clubs in almost 8 months. im trying to upload some videos that i took with my phone of the guy from my class that i went with, but im not sure if they are going to load up for me.
So to set up these two pictures the top one is of me shanking my drive dead left. i was about pin high on a par 4 after my drive, but i was about 60 yrds left. That sign that im hitting over is by the freeway that runs by the course and is nowhere near the hole. The other picture is of Ross, i was actually impressed with my phone camera taking this picture at the right time so i thought ide put it up here too.

life lesson #37

2009-03-10T22:28:00.000-05:00

Well, today i learned that its not the best idea to accidentally bite and break open a fish oil liquid capsule pill in your mouth......doesn't taste so good, nor is it easy to get that taste of fish scales out of your mouth. So im on another study break, i should be in bed now like most other normal people but ive got one last test (for this week anyways) tomorrow morning. so i'll be up for probably another couple hours if i can. this past month has been VERY exhausting. i hit a wall yesterday (mom pointed out and so has joy, that i don't capatalize my "i", like i told them, there is no spell checker on the internet, so untill then, you'll have to bear with it) but yeh, i hit a emotional brick wall yesterday and found myself wandering around the isles of Tom Thumb for about 35 minutes. I didn't really need any food, nor was i sure what i went there for, but somehow i walked around the isles just kinda in a daze. Ive done pretty well on the past couple of tests, 86, 84, 95, 90, 89? i felt like i did well today on two of them and they ended up being the 84 and 86, so that was kinda frustrating.

So i set this up with the intent to let everyone "keep tabs on me" without having to actually call me, cause we all know how good we are at that, (with the acception of Dad, who has called me even more these past couple of days than i think he has in my entire life! Think he's worried im going to go AWOL or something), but i realize today that i haven't had any type of social life for the past month or so. I have gone out on the weekends maybe 3-4 times this past month, and wake up, go to school, go to the gym, maybe walmart, then home and study. So i appologize for not having that many pictures or cool stuff for you all to look at. But this weekend a group of us are going to go golfing cause we have friday off (no spring break) so that will be fun, and the first time i'll have played since i left Mesa.

BACK TO STUDYING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A whole new defenition to the word "Pain"

2009-03-02T20:08:00.000-06:00

So i went into the clinic today for an "adjustment" and had one of my teachers, who is my tri 6 interns staff Dr. (and she will be my staff Dr. when i get into tri 6) i told her about my TMJ (Temporalmandibularjunction) that had been bothering me lately. A couple of days ago it got to the point that i could not close my back teeth because my masseter muscle and lateral pteregoids were so tight and inflamed. When i worked for Dr. Brown in Tempe we hoocked up some electrical stim to my cheeks to try to massage out the knots. It probably would have been helpful except we didn't treat it consistently, and it was kinda uncomfortable to do since the electric stimulation would also contract other muscles of your face and eye lids, so it kinda hurt.

Segway to today and my staff doctor is one of those people that has "little man syndrome" only she is a girl and she if Canadian, so she has even more to "prove". But she is short, around 5'1" and ide say weighs no more than 90lbs. So she starts to "massage" (i put that in "quotes" cause it was far from enjoyable.) she dug out some knots on the outside of my jaw, which hurt, but was nothing compared to when she moved to the edge of my masseter by my teeth and then started to dig inside (this would all make sense if i just said that she palpated the posterior aspect of the masseter then moved rostrally and palapeted Ant-Post and Med-Lat, but it would only make sense to me and probably Joy) So just when i think the fun is over she gets out a glove and goes inside my mouth to "massage" the lateral pteregoid muscles, which connect your jaw to the underside of your skull (sphenoid bone to be precise...i have a anatomy lab practical tomorrow so all these words are running through my head.) and she begins to massage those muscles. I wanted to cry or bite her finger off, but figured it wouldn't be good since she still hadn't graded my test that i took from her earlier today. And to make matters worse there were about 5 other tri 6 interns standing watching her bring the pain. Luckily the adreanaline started to kick in (was actually quite cool) and i was able to tough it out. I came home and put some heat on it cause she didn't want to restrict the blood flow with ice. It hurt, but i think i'll have her do it again next week, and maybe another time or two if it helps. i was talking to a girl in my ward that had surgery cause her tmj was really bad, which i have also heard lots of happy endings when people went to a chiropractor instead of having to go under the knife. So anyways, long story short, a tiny lady almost made me cry infront of a group of people, and i experienced a pain like no other.

The Irony that is my life

2009-02-25T22:52:00.000-06:00

Before any of you freak out, this is not what my cervical spine looks like.....it just feels like that. I'm on a study break so i thought ide add this. So before i came to "Chiropractic School" my back didn't ever really hurt, nor did my neck. Now that ive been at "Chiro School" and have been getting "treated/adjusted" my neck is more sore than it has ever been. Before you all go anti-chiropractic let me explain the cause of it. So one of my labs is a Static Palpation class. Which basically we go in and try to find "palpate" different parts of the body, like different parts of vertebra or skeletal bones. Well, since everyone is new at this, and it's a little tricky to find a boney process that is the size of a pencil eraser burried under 2 inches of tissue, you can imagine all the "digging around" we have had to do. We all are good sports about it since there is really no other way to know what you are feeling until you have felt it, but needless to say ive had my fair share of finger tips jabbed and probed into my neck and back. We had to palpate everyones "sympysis pubis", interesting. So the other part that is a cause is that my intern has barely gotten to adjust me one time this trimester, where as last tri my other intern had atleast seen me 2 times a week for about a month or two. And we have been having atleast 3 tests each week for the past 3 weeks, which has made for many, many late nights and early mornings, stairing down at a book on a desk, so i just bought a "Easy reader" book stand to help out a little. And combine al that with working out my upper shoulders/neck out at the gym. So there is a rather lengthy explanation to why my neck hurts right now. Well, i gotta get back to studying for my history test.....yeh, we are taught all about the history of Chiropractic and all the "other, real doctors" in the medical field.

What "Studying" looks like....

2009-02-17T17:22:00.000-06:00

So....i am on a study break and took a look around my room and thought that you guys (mostly mom and dad) would get a kick out of it, seeing how they used to call me when i was in Hawaii and Mesa just to ask me if my room was clean. This is not a "Dramatization" it's what my room looks like most of them time, of course at night time i move the books onto the floor and take a nap for a couple of hours ( can't call it "sleeping" if it's less than 4-5 hours a night) then wake up and take the books that i need for that day and the rest stay on my bed....waiting for me to return and read them.

Please take notice the number of empty Diet Mountain Dew's that are on the shelf, don't worry, i know what your all thinking, Caffiene is bad for you, yeh, it is, but so is falling asleep early the night before a big test, so i'll take my chances with the Diet Dew.

And Mom, yes i do clean my room up, occasionally. And it is always clean for "the ladies", which by looking at these pictures......i haven't had to do that too much these past couple of days. So we had a lab class cancelled today, which free'd up my afternoon and a kid next to me said "you know your in Chiro school when a class gets cancelled and the first thing that goes through your mind is " cool, now i can have so time to go home and study for the rest of the day". Sad thing is that is exactly what i was thinking, and doing, except for the gym of course. Watch out "pound for pound", im gunning for you! Well, it's back to studying the wonderful world of Epithelial Tissue!!!

Round 1 down, 10 more to go!

2009-02-16T10:48:00.000-06:00

Well, this past week we started our first round of exams, i had 3: Systemic Anatomy, Embryology and Fundementals of Diagnostic Imaging. I got a 89%, 76% and 96% (spent most my time studying for SA and not Embryo) so im pretty happy with the results and now know how much time i need to spend studying. We have atleast 2-4 tests each week from here on till finals week, then i have 8 tests in 4 days for finals week.

So i randomly ran into Kristi Blanchard at the BYU vs. TCU game here in Fort Worth, kinda awkward since ive only met her maybe 2 times before that. Well, it's back to studying on my day off :(

FEAR THE BEARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2009-02-05T20:58:00.000-06:00

Well, i thought that ide get a picture up here since most of you haven't seen me or use your web cam thing (greg, rusty, ryan, dave). so ive let the facial hair run wild since right before christmas. this is "tamed". it looks a lot worse when i wake up. not sure how much longer im going to let it go, i figure that i can keep it going and eventually have a "beard comb-over" for when i go bald, which isn't too far off in my future. And yes dad, this is your shirt, i did steal it from you before i moved out to dallas, no your not getting it back.

I had to buy a new computer with some of Uncle Sam's money since mine got a virus thanks to the IT guys at my school and i didn't have the energy nor ability to clean it all off and add everything back on it, so i went to best buy and got a really nice HP with a huge monitor that is about as big as our tv, but much better piture (cloths hangers don't pick up realy good reception), so that has been a fun toy to unwrap this week.

So, we start our first tests next week. ive been kinda panicing cause at times i don't feel like im retaining ANYTHING. but ive been going over some practice tests for Systemic Anatomy today and have suprisingly been able to do pretty well. the trick now is to time myself taking the test. its 100 quesions and we only get 90 minutes on it! he told us that on the first test a lot of people get surprised and don't finish the test, so that's what im going to be doing these next couple of days. All your prayers are much appreciated, cause this schooling as WAY harder than anything ive ever done before, there is just so much information that we cover in each class. in Systemic we average about 8 pages front and back each day, and are quized every other day over that material, most of which we cover the day of so we are supposed to study the stuff we went over from yesterday as well as the stuff we are going to go over cause it's all fair game on the quizes. as you can imagine my social life has had to come to an abrupt hault, which isn't too bad, i need to study, plus im with a lot of fun people for most of the day during class.

On a side note, does anyone know if Patty has a blog? I still need to call Susan or Tad and have you guys walk me through on how to do some of the stuff. Anyways, hope you all are doing well, i'm thinking about coming back to AZ for my 2 week break the last week of april first week of may. If i do we'll have to get together in Gilbert for something when i fly in (since it's just rusty and greg now). any word on when they break ground for the temple there in gilbert or phoenix?

2009-01-28T12:03:00.000-06:00

Here are some pics from "The Great Ice Storm of 2009!" I haven't been outside so these are just some pics i grabbed off the internet, but my car was covered lastnight when i went to get some stuff from it. Class was cancelled yesterday afternoon and all day today, so i can't complain. It is starting to melt pretty fast, so hopefully when i hit the gym in a little bit it will all be melted.

2009-01-23T16:55:00.000-06:00

So here is some random pics of stuff since ive moved out to dallas.

This was at one of the karaoke places weve gone to.

A group that went to this Thai restaurant for the girls birthday lastweek.

Me writting on the wall outside of Graceland. What else would i have put???

Me and Dave at the Lakers vs. Grizzlies game during the Christmas break

The first post

2009-01-23T16:05:00.000-06:00

Well, it's a Friday afternoon and im not really feeling like studying, so i thought that ide try to figure out this blog thing. here's a little update on the past couple months.

SCHOOL:
School is starting to pick up speed. Im taking 32 credit hours and start school at 7am everyday, but have wednesday and friday afternoons off, which is kinda nice. The school so far is really good, have a few teachers that are a little hard to listen to, and a couple classes that im sure will make me lose all my hair by the end of this tri, but all should go well. Luckily my roomate is a grade level above me and so he gives me old tests/books to go off of cause one of the bad things about email systems is that people don't realize how annoying it is to get 5 billion of them each day and so a bunch of the students in my class have started emailing stuff that they use to study and stuff, which to me personally is kind of an overload of info, there is SOOO much to study that they don't get anything done. I once again have to sacrifice my body for the greater good by going to the student clinic. My last intern in tri 6 was a member and a pretty big guy so it actually was ok, this kid ive got now seems pretty good. Im getting a little more comfortable with the idea of being a Chiropractor. To be honest i still have days that i wake up and wonder what the hell im doing in Dallas Texas of all places, but the more im learning about Chiropractic (yes, they are actual real doctors, infact they have more schooling than regular family MD's), not so much what they do (cause working for Dr. Brown i got to see that every day) but to understand what happens in the body and why Chiropractic should get more attention than it does. There are some hardcore people that their parents and grandparents were chiropractors and they think you can cure cancer and make the blind see and crap like that, which is funny, and there are the people that think they are going to make a billion dollars a year, but one good think with Dr. B was he never sugar coated anything. So that's just a brief bit about school. ive got like 100 kids in my class, i knew half of them from undergrad, so this tri has been a lot more fun cause i know and am comfortable around more people.

Life in general:
So....there are a lot of "nice" girls out here in Dallas. I am actually friends with a lot of people, which most of them are girls. Dated one girl back in October, which just confused me even more about the opposite sex, and have kinda been "hit and miss" with a couple othere girls but nobody has really caught my eye yet since being here, which is good, cause im not ready to get seirous with someone, nor really can afford the time away from school. The singles branch (basically its the size of a ward) is pretty good. lots of sweet spirits, but alot of fun people. there is always something going on. We've gone to like 3-4 Dallas Stars games cause our branch president is the president/ceo of the american airlines center so he gives people tickets to the games all the time. Um.....we've recently gotten into going to Karaoke, i of course don't really get into this cause most of the people are (as tad would say, aquaintances, not really friends), but its fun, the best is when we've gone to a place that serves alcohol and to watch as the night goes on the singers get more and more entertaining. I'm still growing out the beard, for those of you that haven't seen me in a while. I refer to is as my "drought beard". Also ive started to get back into working out pretty consistently. I was doing real good the last semester at MCC but witht the summer and moving i kinda lost anything i had gained, plus i ate out WAY too much last Tri, but a buddy of mine has been working hard and has dropped some weight and gotten in good shape, and seeing how my profession is to promote "Healthly living" can't really do that if im fat and out of shape (although you wouldn't think that by looking at some of the people in my class). So my stumbling blocks before were that ide work out really well, but ide eat crap, so it was a slow process. So ive talked to some people and some teachers and got some suppliments and am sticking to a somewhat strick diet. Just started this week, so i'll let you all know how it goes. Yes Tad, im taking steroids and shrinking my balls..jk. but im taking CLA, N.O. Explode and some Whey Protein. What else....oh yeh, so i finally bought a bed a couple of days ago. kinda nice to be able to sleep on a bed and not the ground like i had been doing the past 5 months.

So a couple weeks ago we went out to this house and as we pulled into the drive way i had that feeling of Deja Vu and asked someone whos house it was and they said the name and the last name was Packard. hahaha. so i stayed outside and avoided going inside cause i was pretty sure they were related to janene. there was a bonfire outside and i ran into David Grant, a kid that i served with in Tonga, so that was cool. but i went into the house and imedietly realized that it was like her aunt and uncle i think and that we did Christmas Eve there a couple years ago. haha. i tried to avoid eyecontact for the 5 seconds that the parents saw me, but im sure if they saw me they knew who i was. oh well. just thought you guys would get a kick out of that. so far haven't run into any former inlaws, which is good, not really sure what ide do if i ran into her mom.

Well, im going to end this and try to maybe write on this thing often, no gaurentees, but atleast it's better than nothing.