allure; affair

"i love it. i love everything about it."

i've said it aloud to two or three people now. once to a guy i hardly know, once to a coworker or two.

it's true. and the more i think about it, the more true it becomes.

i am drawn to everything musical. i adore its ins and outs— hauling equipment, setting up and tearing down (wrapping cords!), talking theory, working publicity, booking gigs, hours and hours and hours of practice— i love it. i don't even mind sitting through a guitarist's trippy tangents during practice (i think they still like to call it "jamming". by the way, remember jams? and by that i mean those weird colorful long shorts, not fruity spreads. i never owned a pair of jams, and felt very awkward on "jams day" in elementary school. i do remember being stung by a bee that day. on my left thumb. it sucked) if we end up making good music in the end.

i currently feel no such unconditional love for medicine. i can't say that i love everything about practicing it. i don't like paperwork, i don't like having to answer pages, i detest inter- and intradepartmental politics. i don't like my hours. i don't like cardiologists' bad attitudes. i don't like being "junior". (and i REALLY don't like being called "nurse", but that's a different story for another day.) i don't like it when my patients' families are crazy or manipulative or abusive or even excessively needy. i don't like spending hours on end in the icu. i don't like wearing lead and standing for hours in one little spot in a stifling hot catheterization laboratory.

or do i?

i am still proud to be a doctor, after all, and i love helping sick kids. the question is, would i have it any other way? would i be happy in anything else? i can honestly say that at every step along the way— in medical school, throughout residency, while i was an attending pediatrician, and now— i've wondered if i could ever leave medicine for music. is it just that i know medicine too well, and am all too familiar with its flaws? is it like when people get married, and they really get to know each others' flaws, and suddenly their spouses are not as appealing and their eyes and hearts begin to wander? were i to become so intimately acquainted with musicianship, would i become disillusioned with it as well?

probably.

guess i'll never know.

but still,

i'm getting a piano.

isn't that wonderful news?

[grin]