Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Long Reads

Stories that take a bit longer to get through.

  • Nine Disappointments

    I saw the movie 9 on Saturday night, after being sufficiently excited for it by the trailer. As the title of this post reveals, I left the movie with a richer understanding of its 56% on RottenTomatoes. The animation and action sequences were great; in fact, the movie was oozing with potential. Unfortunately, thanks to…

  • Castle Crashers and Cramping

    Writing essays for med school secondary applications has been “cramping my style,” so to speak (if one is speaking as a bit actor in a late-night infomercial). The necessity of completing these assignments takes priority over a number of other activities I would much rather be doing. I often wonder if anybody actually bothers to…

  • VirginFest

    After the tickets sold out practically immediately, I didn’t think was going to get to go to VirginFest. However, earlier last week one of my friends gave me a tip that a few thousand tickets had been made available directly from the Merriweather Post Pavilion box office (limit 2 per person), which kicked off a…

  • Thoughts on Health Care Reform

    I think the best thing you can do for health care is have a baseline option that is given to everybody, and make the private people compete for customers to switch to their service instead. That’s the general idea behind having a “public option,” and why it’s so important. Creating competition is a way of…

  • Refocusing

    For some time now I’ve been feeling like I’ve been busy all the time and working hard but not really getting anywhere. Yesterday, Rachel and I took a much-needed break from our typical rushing around and just slept in and hung around the house. Unlike some other times when we each do our own thing,…

  • Conversational Betrayal

    I am sure everybody has had a similar experience at one point or another: you reveal something marginally embarrassing but common about yourself, and those around you react as if they’ve never encountered such a horrible thing before, and good heavens why are you so strange? One of the best examples of this is peeing…

  • First Secondaries

    So far, I’ve only navigated the first few of the many  frustrating and agonizing stages of the med school application process. I’ve already submitted my  centralized application via AMCAS (using IE8’s compatibility view since no other browsers work). While I wait for AMCAS to get around to looking at my application and verify that I…

  • Concert Aftermath

    I had an amazing time at the Silversun Pickups concert at Rams Head Live in Baltimore this past Monday night. Perhaps a little too much of my enthusiasm went to twitter, and ultimately to Facebook, because several Facebook friends were upset on Tuesday about my flood of status updates. I’ve since switched to the Selective…