031

This past week in my Nonprescription Therapy - Self-Care class we discussed oral pain such as recurrent aphthous stomatitis which is the fancy word for "canker sore". Interestingly enough, canker sores have no known cause while cold sores are caused by the herpes simplex virus-1, the same virus that can be found around your "hoo-ha" if you're not careful or are into that sort of thing.

As of now, I now know how to screen for cholesterol, blood-glucose, blood pressure, bone density, am CPR certified and am able to administer immunizations. It's only been a month and I can only imagine what other cool things we're going to learn in the coming months.

030

Last night Mariham showed me a dress that I have been looking for awhile. I emailed my mom to tell her what I have been looking for and she emailed me back with this response:

Dr (Candidate) Dinh,

The style is very elegant :). Good for the Dr to be. I just remember when you were young you had couple dresses similar to this dress and you were look real good on back days with those dresses. Now I know what abjectly you have been looking for, I will pay more attention when I'm shopping may be I will find this dress for you.

About the clubbing, of course you can take a break from studying but not in before midterm or final. Why don't you go after midterm?

Will see you this Saturday,

Love
Mom of Dr (Candidate) Dinh.

Haha, I don't know what I find more amusing. The fact that she refers to herself and me as "Dr (Candidate) Dinh" or that I'm still trying to figure out what "abjectly" means. My mom is a fob.

029

This is Alex Salazar (vocals). I discovered him a little more than a year ago when my friend posted a link to one of his covers of Musiq Soulchild's "Just Friends (Sunny)" which I have listened to over 100 times today. My roommate is going to teach me how to play it on the guitar. His voice is so soothing. <3

028

Dr. Chan is a beast. He teaches my Molecular Cellular Biology class. This man speaks a billion words a minute, never seems to make a mistake, and knows all there is to biochemistry. At the same time, he looks like an Asian Mr. Rogers.

Midterm for this class is probably going to be killer but I'm a champ just like Chan. Let's do this.

027

One of my roommates gave me a moist towelette from Hooters today. On the back of the package it reads, "Bartender: Pharmacist with limited inventory". I thought it was pretty amusing.

Midterms are coming up in less than three weeks and I am expecting my life to get less than adventurous in the next few weeks. I've been trying to squeeze in as much social life I can muster before I cloister myself in my room where I'll probably turn two shades paler than I already am. This first year in pharmacy school feels like I am reliving my freshman year as an undergraduate all over again. This past weekend I attended my first ever toga party that the Greek life on the undergraduate side was hosting. Being surrounded by scantily-clad, post-pubescent teens with raging hormones straight out of high school made me feel really out of place.

Not relating to the picture but a thought-provoking question Pastor Brad asked us in church on Sunday, "What would you do for God, if you knew you could not fail?" I definitely wouldn't be a bartender but the first image that popped into my head was my parents.

They came up this weekend to drop off homemade food for me and to see how I was doing. When I have kids, I want to be as good as parents as they are.

026

Ever since my freshman year of undergrad, my engineering friends would always poke fun at us pre-pharms. I recently took my written test to see whether I would be certified to administer immunizations to patients and I feel pretty good about it. This one is for Todd, who's having a blast at NASA right now.

025

It's almost 2:30AM here and I just covered material on acne and fungal infections for my OTC and Non-Prescription Drugs class for...this morning. It's funny how stress is a factor in worsening one's acne. And then you stress out on your appearance and then you stress out how to cover it up and stress out more about the other 4 quizzes and exams you have this week and when you go about treating the problem, the darn acne just flares up again because you're cold and clammy from malnutrition and in an attempt to keep yourself warm and comforted, you rub your face with your nasty hands that's taken out the trash and the P. acnes are just having a ball with all the buffet of contaminants that you just served them. It's a vicious cycle I say and I don't think I am making a lot sense right now because I would prefer to be snuggled up in bed with my pillow pet. But here I am, drawing a comic about acne when I have an interview in about 5 hours. My roommate is beside me and she just asked me something about undecylenic acid and I think I just drooled from staring blankly at her.

In other exciting news, I took my skills assessment test today where I injected my partner with saline solution and I passed. Hip-hip-hurray!

024

Cosplay. According to the internet, cosplay or costume play is a form of art in which people dress up as characters or ideas. This past weekend, a couple of friends of mine and I cosplayed for SacAnime. So my friend and I have been wanting to cosplay since our freshman year of high school and we finally hit the local fabric store and whipped out the sewing machine to make sailor fukus, a Japanese school girl uniform. We even had a couple people who wanted to take pictures with us.

It was pretty fun and now I get to cross off "cosplay" on my bucket list of things I want to do. Costumes are fun to wear because it allows you to be someone else while you're wearing it but by the end of the day, I am glad I can just be me.

Photo courtesy of Elaina Khoo