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

Category: Life

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

  • RATM Cover

    A kid named Audrey and her dad cover Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of.” I expect this to be the best video I will see this week.

  • Reclamation

    My first foray into “writing stuff online” was through the “journal” feature on a little website called DeviantArt (then stylized as deviantART). This despite having previously avoided LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, and extensive AIM profile updates. It might have been because I had started a physical journal some time before, or perhaps due to growing tired…

  • 2πr(aspberry)

    Vacations for residents at my stage of training are scheduled almost a year in advance. Among all the different rotations are nestled two consolidated bits of time off to enjoy and do with it as one pleases. I have tried to use it for travel if I can, as any trip longer than a few…

  • Shelter in Place

    I am starting to feel as though I am not getting the same “quarantine experience” as everyone else. Following California’s lead, many states have been enacting official shelter in place orders, leaving people sitting at home with nothing to do but stream media and learn new skills. It kind of seems like fun, minus the…

  • Sword of Damocles

    By now you may already be aware that COVID-19 thing sweeping the world—I heard it’s pretty trendy. Over the past several weeks I’ve felt as though I’m a sandpiper running ahead of incoming waves. I went to a concert Wednesday of last week; by Thursday they were cancelling concerts. Saturday and Sunday I went out…

  • Modern Medicine

    I am a fan of technology, it says so right in my tagline. I also think that finding ways to apply developing technology to medicine is pretty cool, and is something I enjoy doing myself when the opportunities arrive. That being said, technology hasn’t always lived up to its promise of making life easier, and…

  • Fetch Quests

    My friends who play RPGs will be familiar with the concept of “fetch quests.” For the rest of you, they’re sort of in the same family as a MacGuffin, that largely interchangeable noun valued by a story’s characters in order to drive the plot. In games, the character must go out and collect an arbitrary…

  • Urine Output

    In the hospital we care a lot about urine. While we no longer taste the sweetness of diabetes mellitus compared to the flavorless diabetes insipidus, we measure urine output (UOP), volume (per kilo per hour), color, red cells, white cells, nitrites, bacteria… Pee-related reasons for sticking around the hospital range from the anatomic (a kid…