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

Category: Life

Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.

  • Nights for Days

    Night shifts generate strong opinions: are they desirable or miserable, easier or more difficult? Regardless, residency has a fair number of them, and unlike our colleagues we don’t get paid any extra. Personally I don’t mind them, although to be fair, I don’t currently have difficulty sleeping during the day or catching naps during slow…

  • Boxed

  • The Pool of Narcissus

    All too often, someone expresses a nonstandard thought (or even one that is simply incongruent with group norms), and the responses center around how well others can relate the concept to themselves. When they encounter internal resistance, they feel the need to express how the hypothetical does not agree with them. I’m sure some of…

  • How I’m Spending the Next-Next Decade

    Mark recently remarked that it has been about…oh, hey, a decade…since I last attempted to lead my family and friends through the masochistic labyrinth of my poor life choices. Having now reached the “Post-Graduate” heading of that infamous post, I suppose an update would be beneficial. Regrettably, despite my prior efforts, many of my loved…

  • Feline Obligations

    Feline Obligations

    Reluctantly, I must admit to the world that we have a cat. I have tried to reach this place of acceptance many times, beginning with a first draft of this post on October 3, 2018. I continued it in July of 2019 and again in February 2020. Now here we are, approximately three and a…

  • Retrospection

    Going through my old oughties-era writing has been quite the adventure. I realized that it has been fourteen years since my final post on Deviant Art, which means that everything else is older than that. As I explored, I took the liberty of fixing misspellings, typos, and adding some commentary to now-dead links where appropriate.…

  • Shelter in Displacement

    As my vacation drew to a close, I walked into the kitchen one morning to find water dripping down the light fixture and onto the couch from bubbles in the ceiling, an observation that set events into motion that now require us to temporarily vacate the condo. The residence above ours developed a leak in…

  • Confounding, Perplexing, Conclusion

    Today, I gave my CPC presentation. I think it’s supposed to stand for Clinical Pathological Correlation…or was it Case Presentation Conference? Despite my lack of certainty on the acronym’s meaning, a CPC is kind of a capstone project for the Pediatrics component of my residency program. An attending physician assigns a senior resident the task…