Now I remember why I hate med school applications...

In bed real early last night and felt surprisingly refreshed when I got up at about 5:00 am this morning. Well, for those of you who don't know, I tend to wake up early, but am definitely not a "morning person." Despite this, I managed to have one of the more productive mornings I've ever had as I slogged through the emails in my inbox inviting me to complete secondary applications. As I opened them and proceeded to examine said secondaries, I rediscovered the bane of every pre-med, the "why are you special/why do you want to go to _____/why do you want to be a doctor/why should we accept you?" essays. Plus, as this is my second shot at applying, I get to heap on some variation of the "what are you doing from June 2006 to August 2007/what have you done to improve your application since the last time you applies/why should we take you now when we rejected you once already?" essays to each of the applications. This put a noticeable damper on the morning.

Fortunately, work was a nice respite as I gave tours to a group of very pregnant expatriate women, a couple from Minneapolis, MN, and a really funny woman who somehow managed to keep a running conversation going with me with her four children in tow. I also finally got my plane tickets and booked my hotel for my trip to Qingdao (which leaves tomorrow... lotta pre-planning went into this one.) So I'll be out of touch for a few days as I enjoy the beer festival, many cultural/historical sites and the sunny beaches (which the city conveniently named Beach 1, Beach 2, Beach 3, etc.) Tossing a load of laundry into my ridiculously small washing machine and hoping that when I get back from happy hour my clothes aren't permanently ruined. Have a great day everybody!