Been busy since I last wrote. Traveled all the way to Portland, OR from Colorado Springs with only Emma in my old ’87 Ford Ranger truck. She danced and pranced throughout the entire trip. I loved it because she was so clearly loving it.

Portland is beautiful and green. The grey gets old, but the green is always welcome in my mind. The house we’re in is stately, in a fine and contemporary, upscale neighborhood. But ‘contemporary’ isn’t necessarily a compliment. These housing developments are filled with expensive houses that are blessed with square feet and cursed with poor design and minimalist yards. The grass of most yards is perfunctory to the point of being absurd. But here, at least, grass is appropriate. In Colorado, these housing tracts require a visible plot of Tennessee blue-grass, which is a plant that doesn’t naturally grow anywhere within about 1000 miles of the semi-arid state. Here this IS water to naturally and ecologically support the growth of blue-grass. ‘Course, with “yards” the size of coffee-can lids, I suppose you could water your “lawn” in the Mojave.

Of the places I’ve intereviewed for residency, I still like Dartmouth best. Undoubttadely this has partially to do with the Dartmouth name. I’m encouraged by the fact that a number of my classmates are also pestered by the “Big Name” demon. We all have “small penis” syndrome due to our attending a no-name medical school. We also all want to eventually run the planet (but in distinction to Hitler…we don’t plan on killing Jews), and we don’t want our no-name pedigree getting in the way. I would feel worse about my own fixation with getting in somewhere with A Name, except that I’m in good (and smarter) company.

Ultimately, however, I haven’t found a place that has as good of a training program for what I might want to do someday. It’s long; 5 years instead of the usual 3. But in the end, I actually might be in a position to box up an entire sub-group of citizens and send them to labor camps at the wave of my hand. I won’t, of course, because I am moral and power doesn’t intoxicate me like it has other, lesser, dictators and rulers of said world. But with the help of a Big Name like DARTMOUTH, I’ll probably end up somewhere where I CAN be evil if I want because I’ll have been granted so much power, prestige and influence among this world of *ahem*, well, lesser men.

Truth: I DO like the program and I believe we would be happy there. So far, the other programs don’t offer as many of the things I am hoping to find in residency. We’ll see. More interviews plus test results will determine many things.