After a relatively calm night in the PICU, I headed over to to Upper East Side for my usual drive-by OB appointment, in which my doctor basically sticks her head out of a moving car and shouts at me "Everything looks fine baby sounds good see you in two weeeeeeks..." while speeding on by to the next examining room. Hopefully I'll get a little more individual attention when, you know, Cal is actually emerging from my womb. At the same time, as someone who's dealt with clinic time pressures, I can't really say that I can totally fault her. I mean, when there's nothing more to say, there's nothing more to say, right? I just think that one of the true arts of medicine is making the patient feel like you're spending more time with them than you actually are. Little things like sitting down when you talk to them. Or taking your hand off the doorknob.
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So, it's the big ten-year high school reunion tonight! To celebrate, or perhaps to torture you all, I've decided to share some of the photos from my high school archive. Warning: Bad home highlighting jobs and bangs ahead.
Here was the center of my high school social scene--at least when it was warm out--the courtyard. See, most high schools have sports fields and lawns. In Manhattan, we had poured concrete courtyards. It was basically a basketball court surrounded by some brick steps and arches. But underestimate not ye the brick steps! Where you sat on the steps designated your clique affiliation. I think we used to sit at the middle left of the steps, but we may have moved around some. There's me in the middle row of the cluster, all the way to the right. And no, you're not seeing things, there were a lot of Asian kids at my high school.
I took this picture in my eight grade science lab. This is to show how our school was basically falling apart. It was a good high school, don't get me wrong, we just didn't have a lot of money for frivolities like ceiling repair or, oh, asbestos removal. I think the kid who has his head through the ceiling actually attempted to climb up into the ceiling space before the teacher showed up.
I think this picture is from the eighth grade too. My friends came over to my apartment to Trick-or-Treat on Halloween. And before you say that we were too old to Trick-or-Treat, let me just remind you: free candy. And there you are. From left to right is me (yes, that's me) dressed as Gilligan from "Gilligan's Island,"; Maria dressed as...a vampire, I think?; Sumi dressed as "a crazy person" (I think she's supposed to be in a straightjacket, unclear what the wig was about); Melissa's younger sister dressed as a hobo; Julie dressed as a scary doll; and Melissa dressed as a hippie.
Remember how I said that there were a lot of Asians in my high school? Well, there was this thing called the Asian Cultural Society (ACS), which was basically this school club which served an unclear purpose. Most of the year, it seems that they just sat around and gossiped about people, or occasionally planned a bake sale, but once a year, they would put on a cultural show for the Lunar New Year. I was a member of ACS only around this time of year, basically because I wanted to be in the show. This is a shot from the show when I was in tenth grade, where I was a performer in the "Chinese Flag Dance" number. (I'm the chick in red all the way on the left.) The dance was fun, but with all the loud Chinese music and waving swaths of red silk, there was a strange element of "Yay, Communism!" about it all.
Here's me with Jamal at the prom. We didn't go together--Jamal went with this JUNIOR that we knew, I went with the person I was dating at the time, who has been, shall we say, "lost to follow-up" in the intervening years. I was one of the co-presidents of the senior class (yes yes, NERD ALERT), so I had spent a lot of time helping to plan this prom. It was originally supposed to be at the New York Palace (formerly known as "The Helmsley Palace" prior to the whole Leona Helmsley tax-evasion thing), but then the ceiling collapsed in their ballroom--I'm not making this up--so we had to change venues at the last second. We managed in the end to secure space at the Waldorf-Astoria, which I think worked out nicer in the end. Plus, it was fun, because all these old people who were staying at the hotel kind of crashed our prom, and it was fun dancing with them.
Finally, a picture from graduation. That's me at the podium, giving the class speech. I just need to clarify that the fact that I was giving the class speech DID NOT mean that I was smart or popular in high school. I wish I had been a better student--or barring that, at least a sparkling social butterfly--but the fact of it is that everyone else at my high school was so smart that I ended up being kind of mediocre in that milieu. However, like with many things at Hunter, election of the class speaker was very egalitarian. Basically, everyone who wanted to speak at graduation wrote their own speech and presented it to the class during some lunchtime assembly, and then everyone voted on which speech they liked the best. (Or hated the least, I guess.) I'm trying to figure out why everyone in this picture is smiling or laughing instead of looking bored out of their minds. I figure I either just said something kind of funny, or they're all laughing at my mauve platform Mary Janes.
Ah, high school memories. It'll be fun to see everyone tonight.
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So congratulations to George Stephanopoulos and...uh...wife of George Stephanopoulos...for the new addition to their family! The reason that this announcement caught my eye in the maelstrom of celebrity gestations and births (it seems that pregnant is the new black these days) is that they decided to name their baby girl "Harper." Which is exactly the name that I was trying to convince Joe to have us name Cal back in the day before we knew Cal was all penile. After Harper Lee, you see. But Joe nixed it in the end because he said it was "kind of weird." Weird like a fox.
Currently reading: The New York Times review of "Cinderella Man." Sounds pretty milquetoast. They should have just called this movie "Human Seabiscuit," because that's what it basically is.
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