Plan to be surprised

So, as I think I mentioned earlier, tomorrow night I start night float. It should technically be tonight (usually night float is Sunday to Thursday), but, gosh darn it, it's a holiday weekend. Shucks. So in the interest of being functional for my overnights, I've been trying to stay up and work on flipping my circadian rhythms around.

Last night I went out with my co-intern from Neurology, whom I haven't seen in a few months. We went to this brick oven pizza place for dinner. I came home, I puttered around, I started a new, really basic (and thus quick) sock. I called my friend in California sometime in the middle of the night (heck, it wasn't the middle of the night there). He kept me busy for a while and introduced me to Yacht Rock, which was apparently this phenomenon out on the other coast for a while a couple years ago, produced by this Stone-and-Parker-esque group down in LA. I watched the rest of the episodes today, and highly recommend it. My particular favorites are episodes 7 and 10 (the latter of which demonstrates that the days of lyrical feuding way predate Biggie and Tupac). I promise this is less ridiculous and more actually funny than my previous recommendation, like, say, Trapped in the Closet (although, if you're looking for ridiculous, there on the same site you can find House of Cosbys....).

Ahh, the things you learn when rattling about in the middle of the night....

I ultimately fell asleep sometime around 6:30, woke up briefly when Little Maxine vaulted herself off my bed three hours later (when Sparrow stuck her head through the dog door and said, "Maxiiiiiiiine!!"), and woke up at 5 this evening. I was a little confused. Maggie was a little confused. My parents (who'd been calling me since noon, not that my phone rang, and not that I would've heard it anyway with my trusty earplugs in) thought I was dead in a ditch somewhere.

So, tonight's been a similar bit of random puttering. Maggie and I took a ride and got some dinner...er, breakfast....um, something. I unpacked a few boxes in the office and determined I need about three more bookcases. And, I watched one of the sweetest, funniest movies I've seen in a while, Dan in Real Life. It's one of those romantic comedies about how life sort of does what it wants, regardless of what you think it should do, how it brings people into your life when it wants to (and precisely when they need to be there) rather than when you'd like them to show up.

The last line of the movie is, of course, the title of today's post.

I pondered that for a good long while whilst I was unpacking. When I was in grade school, I planned to get married after high school (or maybe in college) and then start having babies around 21 or 22, because that was just so old. For much of high school I planned to go to a small liberal arts college in Ohio near my family there and major in music education, and then head into a life as a high school band director. When I graduated from medical school, I firmly intended to do my four years of generalist OB/GYN training, then do a 3 year fellowship in high risk obstetrics, and begin a nice long career and write some very smart scientific papers and maybe a book or two that may or may not have anything to do with obstetrics.

At no point in my life prior to, say, a couple of years ago, would I have believed you for a moment if you'd told me that, now, six weeks before I turned thirty, I'd be living in a little house I didn't own in a Southern college town, with a dog; that I'd be a single, second-year psychiatry resident in North Carolina; that I'd be writing in a very public forum about my life, being reasonably frank and up-front about being single, being a psychiatrist, being a trauma survivor and recovering bulimic and the million other things that I am; that I'd be planning on a child and adolescent psych fellowship; that I'd have dear, dear friends all across the country that I'd never met and that I'd be so far away from the people who were most familiar to me; that I'd have the people in my life that I do, and the ways they came into my life....not to mention the people who are gone in one respect or another whom I assumed would always be in my life... It really amazes me, sometimes, my life and what it is and how much I generally like it. And how it is always, invariably, so incredibly not what I had planned.

Hmm.