Chicago-HESO (or, "Does anybody have a career they don't want?")

I remembered how to do high school algebra last night.

Not like I woke up at 3 am, sat up, and suddenly recalled what the quadradic formula was. This happened in a 4-hour span of time while sitting in a coffee shop after work, drinking a green tea latte.

Yes, folks, I did this to myself. ON PURPOSE. This is so I can score higher than a 2% on the GRE and go back to school. I think I'll get a Master's degree.

In what, you ask? Hmmm... I'm thinking some sort of medical career.


What???


Yes, you heard me. I'm going into the medical field. I'm not sure how this fell into my lap, nor do I know exactly what kind of medical career I want. I want to help people be healthy, and teach them how to stay healthy so they don't need me. (No, not good business practice, but good ethics.) I don't want to be a "doctor" doctor. (What I mean by that is, I don't want to be in med school until I'm 45.) I don't want to be in the you're-sick-so-here's-a-pill field of medicine. I'm more into preventative, keep-yourself-healthy-and-quit-being-afraid-of-germs medicine. So I'm thinking I can be a naturopathic doctor, a chiropractor, or a midwife.

Yeah. I know. "Those are three very different jobs, you know, and why in the world would you want to be a midwife?" you say. Well, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up yet, so don't get all worried about me yet. I figure I have some time to decide.

First I need to relearn algebra. Which, in algebra's defense, the first half of the 300-page book was fairly easy. I whipped through my 8th grade algebra class in a few hours last night. It's the algebra II, trig, and pre-calc that I'm going to have some problems with. All I remember from trigonometry class was me with my head in my hands, my teacher looking at my work, and her saying, "How in the world did you get that?" I followed the rules, I swear. I just never did a very good job of simplifying. I always wound up making things more complicated, somehow. I don't know how. And I think that was the problem.


Hopefully I'll be able to learn all of this darned math now that I'm older and wiser. (Or something.) Then I get to move on to the year's worth of biology, anatomy, chemistry, physics, and some other math/science prerequisite junk I didn't have to learn for my theatre degree.


Maybe I should just get an acting gig on ER. I could act like a doctor.



***On an unrelated side note, my car is going back to the shop again, because she doesn't think she's fixed. But D is taking care of it for me, because he's really great. :) And it's going to be 67 degrees today, so I'm wearing sandals, and that makes for a terrific day no matter what. Hooray for being happy!