My favorite website

I'm a bit of a wannabe health nut. I try to eat healthy and exercise, but I'm nowhere near fanatical or even terribly consistent. But I'm constantly on the lookout for good information about health and nutrition. And the best source I've found is http://drbenkim.com/ This website is in sort of a quasi blog format with lots of information about health and nutrition and recipes, and also an online natural health store. My boyfriend calls me a Dr. Ben groupie, and I guess I kind of am. I am a big fan of his overall philosophy about health. The more research I do about health care, and as a former pre-med student I've done a lot, the more convinced I am that simple steps to improve overall health are often the best and most effective. He advocates trying to make changes in daily habits or diets rather than turning to conventional medicine. Obviously, both he and I think there is a time and a place for conventional medicine, but perhaps I will get into that another time.

I first came across his website when I was just messing around looking for some sort of advice for managing chronic nose stuffiness. A number of years ago, I was diagnosed with non-allergic nasal rhinitis, meaning my nose was stuffy all the time for no reason. I tried a few different treatments, but none really worked that well, and I think my sniffles annoyed my family more then they bothered me anyways, so I just kind of lived with it. Then I came across an article by Dr. Ben noting that dairy allergies often caused chronic congestion. So, just for the heck of it, I tried cutting down on my dairy intake for a week, and magically, my congestion reduced. Now, I haven't tried to completely cut out dairy, so I still have some congestion, but it has definitely helped. So my non-allergic rhinitis isn't really non-allergic, it appears to be a mild dairy allergy.

He also stresses the connection between emotional and physical health--something I think is underestimated in modern medicine. However, I think this connection is slowly being given more consideration. I took a physiology course my junior year of college, and my professor was an endocrinologist. Whenever we studied a certain organ system, we would also study how it was controlled by the endocrine system, which is a very complicated system of hormones, chemical messengers, etc. And our emotions have a great impact over our endocrine systems. Perhaps sometime I'll write more on this. But for now I'd encourage you to go check out what Dr. Ben has to say.

Road trip

This summer, Isaac and I drove cross country from Minneapolis, MN to Los Angeles, CA. Here are some of the photos from our trip. I'm still getting the hang of this whole blogging thing, so these pics are in reverse chronological order. Most of them are from Yellowstone.

My job

So, since this thing is mostly to let people in my life know what I'm up to, among other things listed in my first post, I thought I'd write a bit about my job. For anyone who doesn't know, I work in a cancer research lab at UCLA, where I am effectively the lab manager, but my official title is staff research associate, which really is not very descriptive. While I don't think I'd want to do this sort of thing for the rest of my life, it's a pretty good job for straight out of college. And it's sure a heck of a lot easier and less stressful than college. It's kind of crazy that I replaced a guy who had been there for 16 years, which is kind of intimidating, but kind of cool. I maintain four mouse colonies, do all the ordering, monitor the lab's hazardous waste output, assist the grad students and post docs with a number of projects, and I have my own project that involves creating an assay based on microhomology-mediated recombination in yeast. Right now I am helping one grad student on a project to test the efficacy and toxicity of potential radioprotector drugs for chemo patients and astronauts, and helping another with a study on the effects of intestinal microflora on cancer risk. Some stuff is a bit tedious and annoying, but some stuff is really cool. But, really I feel like this job is helping me to figure out what I want in a career. I think I've at least tentatively decided to get a masters in public health. I may go on to get a PhD, but who knows. For a number of reasons I've more or less ruled out med school. Basically I'm just not sure I'd be happy living the sort of life that doctors must lead, and there are plenty of other ways I can use my talents to help people, and without going into hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt or spending the next eight years in school. The field of public health has so many opportunities to travel, work, and live abroad, to help people, the opportunity to lead and organize things, etc. And, I can do any combination of research, writing, administrative work, etc. Basically, everything I'm looking for in a career. However, I have absolutely no idea how it will all culminate into a career path.

First post

Hello friends, relatives, and random internet people who might stumble upon this. I finally caved to the blogging phenomenon. For a while, I had adopted a holier-than-thou attitude towards blogging, that it was just a bunch of self-absorbed individuals putting their opinions out there for the world to see. Then, I started to read some of my friends' blogs, and realized that while there were certainly enough people out there who fit my stereotype, it certainly wasn't that way for many. And I realized how much I enjoyed reading my friends blogs, especially now that I no longer get to see them on a daily basis. Also, now that I'm done with college I really need something to motivate me to continue writing on a regular basis so that my writing muscles won't atrophy. I feel that I'm already quite rusty only a few months after graduation. Plus, my boyfriend just left for a week and I'm going to need something to do to occupy my time. So I hope you all enjoy my thoughts, musings, rants, random occurrences, and occasional waxing philosophical.