oh what a wonderful way to spend your life, not needing anything, just walk around and sing (suburban kids with biblical names)

+ The Swedes just get it. They have echeveria, my most favorite succulent plants of all time, everywhere - tiny ones and big ones sold at the flower stores, in office windows that you can see from the street, etc. I didn't really discover echeveria until I moved to California since it is obviously not a New York type of species, but despite their prevalence in California when I started telling people that I want to have them at the wedding (along with a more lush type of flower, like white freesia) they acted like that was a little bit weird. But even though Sweden is probably an even less hospitable climate for succulents than New York, they get it! Gorgeous, elegant echeveria everywhere. One point for Stockholm.



+ I hate this phrase, but it truly fits here: the elephant in the room that is my life is the fact that I am in the process of applying to medical schools. In fact, 17 out of 22 secondary applications are complete and the remaining ones are schools I am really lackadaisical about (although I am going to finish them up by tomorrow at the latest). The ones I care most about have been in for weeks. People who submitted applications a bit earlier than me are starting to hear about interviews, and I am peeled to my email. I have writtens tens and tens of essays, and it has been a grueling process. I met a girl who recently graduated from medical school at the Karolinska Institute here in Stockholm, and the way it works in Sweden is that a percentage of students get in based simply on having top grades - no essays, no interviews, nothing - and if you don't have top grades there are some options for being admitted by going through a more elaborate process with interviews and things. I think both systems probably have their merits, and I certainly appreciate the fact that many US med schools make an honest effort to admit interesting, well-rounded people, not just those with 43S's, but the process has just been mind-numbing. And in a day or two, once the last ones are in, I will get to sit back and wait. I have literally no idea how many interviews I'll be offered. Will it be 5 or 15? Will Michigan and UCSF break my heart? In the end, am I actually going to have a choice between schools? Will I get into 1, or 3, or 8? The applications have been weighing over me and creating a constant underlying cloud of guilt and panic for the past however many months, basically it took over the former role of the MCAT, but aside from sporadic whimsical conversations with Jake (UCSF over Michigan? Harvard over UCLA? Madison over UC-San Diego? Columbia over NYU? and countless other permutations and combinations) and the hours when I am hunched over the keyboard writing yet another variation on the same topic, and especially since I am so far away in Sweden, I basically ignore the entire thing. When I submit secondaries, it's like throwing them into a black hole. But things are going to start happening. This is deeply exciting and tremendously unsettling. I'm prepared for some rejection, but I'm not sure how much I'll be able to take before starting to feel disheartened. Conversely, I feel like one positive response from one of my top choices will be enough to satisfy me. I sort of side-stepped the whole rejection/acceptance roller coaster during the college admissions process since I got in early to Columbia, and it feels weird to be waiting for judgments and pronouncements from 22 schools. Anyway, that's it for now since this is boring, it just occurred to me that it's a little strange that my coping mechanism appears to be ignoring everything (I guess it's healthier than obsessing).

+ When I was writing about echeveria I tried to look up the word for flower shop (blomsteraffär) in Swedish, and I came up with all sorts of good things. I already knew blomma (flower) and blommor (blossom), but I did not know:

Blomsterprakt ("floral splendour, profusion of flowers")
Blomsterspråk (literally language of flowers, but "flowery language")
Blomsterströ (to strew with flowers)
Blomsterur (flower clock. what is a flower clock?!)
Blomstervän (flower lover)
And, finally, blomsterflicka, or flower girl. It is a cool enough word to make me want to have a flower girl at the wedding even though I don't have any relatives or friends with kids who are the right age to be en blomsterflicka and will be able to "blomsterströ" the aisle at the bröllop (wedding). Nice pigeon Swedish, huh?