Everyday I walk outside and see people. People mowing their lawn, taking their children to school, officers protecting those people from other people, and all of these people are physically present, they can be touched, heard, felt, smelled, whatever. They are the people that make up the world around me, and it is their actions that at many times determine the outcome of my day, mood, and philosophy. Or is it so? Sometimes, no most of the time, these people have no impact on me. Their feelings and needs I understand, or at least I think I understand, but the inevitable truth is that the importance of their feelings are at many times nothing to me. And for this reason maybe they bring their life, relationship, financial, etc, problems towards me, because I believe when one has no true connection with another the advice that is given is most often unbiased, to the point, and in the end usually helpful. But when the individual coming towards you is one with which you are connected beyond just that of just a physical presence, the mind wanders. You think of what to say, and how to say it..when to say it, and before saying it you want the words coming out to be of higher importance then anyone else’s. But what if this person does not even hold a physical presence with you, and what if they haven’t ever occupied the space around you, but yet they are the prime motive behind your thoughts, mood, and actions. The person’s every word and thought holds such vital importance that to keep your own thoughts and actions focused you must keep that person…’content?’. And when the person isn’t at his or her home I feel an emptiness inside of me. My humor, mood, and willingness to work decline, and the only thing I can think of, or imagine, is of what that person is doing at the moment, and when he or she will return, and what is weird is that they have never been physically present in the first place, so their displacement from point A to B shouldn’t make a difference in my mindset because it has not affected me in any known way, but it still does. The person’s mental presence holds a greater presence that any physical one ever has upon me. The connection is so strong that all others are kept at a distance.

Unedited. Unrevised writing.

Hmm.. I know the above sounds weird and probably makes no sense at all but their is great signficance behind it, and I just had to let out a flow of thought onto the blog.

I’m still sane.

Around the starting of the school year I joined TSA, where students from around the nation compete in various technology oriented projects. The competitions start at regionals, and individuals who place there make way to state level competition and then finally enter nationals. Well like always I joined the as many competitions as I could, and also like always started work the last minute..literally. For regionals I had to compete in Medical Technology, Biotechnology & Agriculture, and Promotional Design and phone calls from my group members and the school adviser started to roll in. It was Sunday afternoon and the event was to take place on that Thursday. The next five or so days were probably the busiest days of my life. The first two days I sat up all night researching and designing presentations for our Medical Technology competition. Our topic was Obesity, and I decided to throw together a few nice boards in photoshop. Designing the boards turned out to be the easier part of the project, finding someone that did oversize printing with understandable rates became the problem. Fedex Kinkos were charging around $50 per board and almost every other place I drove to wouldn’t print over 11×17.  Well in the end I finally found a small place in the corner of downtown that got the job done.  The next day and a half I spent throwing together another design for promotional graphics, and I really want to say thanks to my partner for doing most of the work for Agriculture & Biotechnology.

Even with our last minute efforts all the projects placed.  Medical technology won first, while the other two hit 3rd place, allowing me to go to state competitions for all three.

Here are the medical technology boards I threw together, most likely I am going to redesign and redo the entire project for state competitions.

It’s Christmas Eve and many families around the world are celebrating with extravagant dinners, parties, family get- togethers and etc, but many times I believe people forget what it is all about, not just Christmas time but what the real values of life are about. Today’s world lives in an information age where technology has made the exchange of information faster then ever. Within seconds we find out about new advances in science, natural disasters, or even whether or not Elizabeth and Johnny are still dating through the internet and wireless devices. I believe that in all this exchange some people at times forget that there are values in life that can’t be seen such as love, compassion, hope, faith, and friendship. People fall in and out ‘love’, have a new best-friend-forever, and have had sex 5 times with 3 different people all in a week. With all this how can anything ever be special. How can a first kiss be special? How can love at first site be possible? Is there even a such thing as true friendship? I beleive that sometimes we should all take time to ourselves and think about all that. I know that buying the newest most expensive in-style clothing helps boost our self-image and I do the same thing, but I’ve seen that so many people lose themselves in this world of materialism and do forget those real values that make them what they are. Anyway this issue can be taken very deeply and I’m sure other people have different opinions from me. For now I just want to share the below letter with all the viewers. It was written by a young 8 year old girl named Virginia to the Editor of The New York Sun in 1897. The editor sums up so many deep thoughts into a simple letter to a girl. I believe it is a masterpiece.

- I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.

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Dear Editor—

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
-Francis P. Church

It connects the masses, it connects individuals who would never get to meet or even know of the others existence. A pharmacist in the States can read about the miseries and joys of a Junior Doctor in the United Kingdom. An artist can portray his life in words to us, and an everyday user can just rant on about his or her problems knowing that out of the billion people surfing the web atleast someone has read and sympathized with him. Some use blogs as an online journal, others use them as a source to output useful information, either way once the blog is online with articles ready to go it is part of “The Blog World”, an intricate online network of users and communities that go beyond just a website. It is like a Yahoo! chatroom only with a slower pacer, and instead of just chatting to the other users you know of a part of there everyday life. A part that even those who have physically know this person may not know of. When I first began to blog, around two months ago, it seemed like a pretty simple little idea to me and pretty pointless. Open a site and rant on and on about your everyday life that no one is going to read about unless you just found the cure for cancer, however, it is much more then that. A few weeks after blogging I noticed how well many bloggers knew each other. They could relate with each other on many issues and it was a virtual community. In most instances there was no online portal or forums connecting one blogger to another and unlike a website these bloggers did not compete with one another. I noticed that they would constantly link and refer to other blog throughout their posts. “The Blog World” is a online virtual world of everday people — doctors, soldiers, artists, designers, walmart clerks, and who knows whom else. Medilogy is just another new citizen of this large and complex world and I hope it can become a larger and more well-known part of “The Blog World”

And as a new blogger I must say it is pretty addicting. I don’t know if anyone even reads my posts and I’m certainly not getting any kind of capital from it, however, for some reason I still come to my blog everyday to see if there is a new comment or to think of new articles to post, and I don’t think anyone but another blogger knows of this feeling.

Ever had the cough that just never ends. It starts kicking in everyday around 8p.m and wakes you up 5x a night eventually ruining your mood, taking away vital hours of sleep, and keeping the rest of the house awake. Well if your one of those people I know exactly how you feel, and after reading a few blogs I came across an interesting article that brought upon a theory that I have always held true. That cough medicines DO NOT HELP. They bring a small period of relaxation similar to what a Halls cough drop may do, and in that time period the throat can relax from the constant irritation making it less susceptible to more coughing. Coughs are a viral infection and cure when they complete their cycle, similar to a cold, and most people including myself decide to take Buckley’s guaranteed cough medicine on the last day of the cycle and VOILA cough is gone,the credit goes to the cough medicine, and more users rush to get it. Cough medicine can at times be looked to as a placebo for many individuals.  Studies show that a sugar coated pill has the same long-term effect on a cough that a actual medicine would. Even in my two years of not taking cough medicines the cycles of my coughs remain the same and they still last as long as they did when I did take medicines. Also overtime my coughs have reduced, now I doubt this is because I have quit taking the medicines but hey if not taking them cures it then I’ll go for it. Now with all this said I’m not trying to say lets all quit on medicines, because there are still those nights when I take a teaspoon of nyquil to relieve the irritation in my throat and, of course, to get a good night’s sleep, however, I do believe that most individuals depend to heavily on medicines. A small cough hits them and they rush to their medicine cabinet.

The full article on this issue can be found here.

Money & Medicine is one thing that is constantly put together. I hear other students always telling me that they are entering the medical field for the financial factor, and inside I just think about the big mistake they are making. So today as I was reading a few blogs I came across the information below at Mad About Medicine, it isn’t factual data, but personally, it just seems so very true. Most of the public doesn’t consider the different costs a doctor has to go through before he can take his check home and buy a new Rolls Royce *sarcasm*. Becoming a specialized doctor itself is extremely costly itself, in addition to that the insurance, taxes, etc also add up. If one doesn’t have pure passion to medicine..I think its better to just stay out. Anyway now to the table:
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A few postulates about the public:

1. The public has absolutely no clue how much their own doctor gets paid
2. The public has no clue how much the average doctor gets paid
3. The public has no clue how much even the wealthiest doctors make.

A few postulates about doctors:

1. Doctors have no clue how much the doctor across town is making ( or how much their patients make for their jobs)
2. Doctors have no clue what their services are actually worth in a free market
3. Doctors have no clue what their worth is as compared to other professions

But wait, there’s more…

1. The public thinks that doctors are grossly overpaid.
2. Doctors think they are grossly underpaid.

Now let’s look at cost:

1. The public has no idea how much it costs to support and run a medical office
2. The public has no idea of the cost of training a doctor
3. The public has no idea of the amount of time their own doctor spends treating patients

Of course, the other side:

1. Doctors are not the most savvy businessmen and have no idea how to efficiently run a service company *
2. Doctors think the world owes them forever for the financial and personal sacrifice they made to go to medical school
3. Doctors think that they are entitled to a huge amount of money for every service they do with the patient.

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Now the doctors not being businessmen thing…I disagree with that when it comes to me personally. Lets see if business techniques can be mixed in with medicine, will find out in around 10 years.

A new national survey by the American Psychological Association (APA) suggests that one third of Americans are living with extreme stress while nearly half believe stress is damaging their health, their relationships, and work productivity, and that it has got worse in the last 5 years.

Three quarters of Americans (compared with 60 per cent last year) said money and work caused them the most stress, with half mentioning housing costs such as rent and mortgage as a big factor, a result that the APA suggests is linked to the US housing crisis.

Stress had a negative effect on personal and working life, was the view of nearly 50 per cent of Americans, and about one third said it was difficult to manage the responsibilities of work and family.

One quarter of Americans said that stress alienated them from a friend or family member and 8 per cent linked it to divorce or separation.. - Read Full Article

I started writing this article as “Stress in America” but slowly it changed to what my own personal theory and philosophy on the problem was.. Mastery of the mind is the key to all problems

My Thoughts..
Living in a household, where the father works 10+ hours daily at times, and the mother suffers from high cholesterol and low blood pressure, I’ve learned that stress is one thing that can slowly take down an individual’s health. It seems as if it is a kind of atrophy (not literally) in more extreme cases, where it slowly degenerates an individual mentally, and at times also physically. I personally believe, from what I have seen and from personal experience that stress becomes such a major factor in so many people’s lives. It holds many back from fulfilling their dreams and others from making an important move or decision in life. I look back 5 years, when my dad was booming in business, however, it took one loss, just one, to put a fear in his mind. The fear led to indecisiveness. Bills stacked up and it all resulted in rapidly growing stress, and I watched as it grew and spread. Many times I have noticed, when one spouse becomes a victim of stress, making it a regular part of his or her life it results in the other spouse suffering from the same problem (Stress I believe can be contagious). I don’t want to divulge deeply into this topic right now since I can talk about it for days and days (will have a in-depth article on stress soon). I just wanted to share that my personal belief on this is that individuals need to control their own mind. One can make heaven out of a prison cell and create hell from his own home. Everyone is a king, the king of their thoughts, the king of their actions, and the king of their beliefs. Bills, financial problems, emotional problems, are all a part of life and will never leave. I hear people constantly telling me that as soon as this happens or that happens or monkeys learn to fly, or if they win the lottery all their problems will be solved, and I firmly believe that is NOT TRUE. Everything is created in a person’s mind — fear, love, and stress, and one is strong enough they can tame their emotions to run as they wish. They key to problem solving is the mastery of one’s own mind. I personally struggled in a kind of depression and stress myself, and one night it ‘clicked’. I sat their thinking for hours about what my problems were, and I realized it is not the problems that are causing me pain but how I perceive the problems and what I make out of them. Now when I am stuck in a major problem, whether it be financially or emotionally I look to it as a challenge, and I know I am the king and it can’t overtake me, and if I ever do lose, whether it is to a person or to my problems I hold a type of respect and admiration for it, that hey you were able to beat a king, but it wont happen again.

For all those suffering from problems, sit there and think to yourself once more, and make that hell into a heaven.

“Managing stress is all about taking charge: taking charge of your thoughts, your emotions, your schedule, your environment, and the way you deal with problems. ”

Links:
Stress - An Epidemic
More Stress, Less Rest in America
AIS - Official Website