Unexpected confectionary

Comic 31. Here's wishing that in 2008, you are surprised by cake.

i lessthanthree crimus

Here's the straight dope: my dad bought himself a silver SLK280 convertible, and being the geek that he is, he named it Gandalf the Grey. So what better Christmas present than a portrait of it and the Balrog locked in the legendary struggle on the bridge of Khazad-dum?

Avuncular Christmas wisdom: "The key to life is dying with your shoes off."

æfferents.

Comic 30! Apologies for the delay, see previous post for excuses. Johnny Mnemonic would have thrived in medical school; some days it feels like memory-tricks are all we do. He would be right there with us post exams: "I gotta get this shit out of my head!"

My favorite: the carpal bones of the wrist.
Some Lovers Try Positions That They Cannot Handle.

When I grow up, I want to be a rocket surgeon!

Comic 29! You might notice some changes. (You might not. Don't worry, it's the sort of thing like when a parent dresses their toddler up in a burgundy shirt instead of the usual red one.) I'm drawing each comic at double-size and then compressing for the web. It makes for much smoother, clean lines; same resolution, less pixelation. The font has changed again; I think this will be the last time. I liked the previous one...but sometimes a man has got to do what a man has got to do. And that means the ability to capitalize. Might not be able to churn out another comic for a while. The end of this semester looks heinous.

Happy December, people. Christmas season is open. Lock and load.

I play doctor to win.

Comic 28! With a nod to the great Calvin & Hobbes.

Fembellishments & Mandangles

Comic 27!

I'm glad that English words don't have genders. Sure, Latin and French and Spanish are beautiful and all, but I never have to lift the skirt on the word "physiognomy". It just means what it means...you know, without the burden of genitals.

I had help writing this comic - mad proper respects. You know who you are.

Exposed. Times two.

Try explaining this to the curious passerby.

Remember remember the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

"Though this be madness, yet there is method"

The other video from Cadaver Ball - la danse du Greg. Look at his face. Don't you want a taste of that happiness? Don't you want to FEEL what he FEELS? Don't you inexplicably have a CRAVING for fried chicken??

Soy un testículo.

Cadaver Ball was an inimitable good time. This video was part of the Quillen Jeopardy skit, and while context exists for it, I prefer to leave it enigmatic. Enjoy!

Think before you ink

Comic 25! (EDIT 10/28 - Aclepius-->Asclepius. Thanks Alyssa. Wow, my spelling is so bad that my blood type must be type O!)

Back in high school, we used to measure value in terms of Coke...or soda, or pop, depending on your region and predilections. I measured in units of Dr. Pepper; my veins ran maroon with that stuff. If a movie matinée was $6.00, that meant it was a 12 Coke movie. An evening flick was 16 Cokes. It was a good system, based on units that were meaningful to us. Like the hedon, or the util. All that is to say: I reach this point 3 more times and that's two Cokes.

Related images. To the fizzy tangent, not the tattoo thing. I said my piece.

Parenchyma Plenipotentiary

Comic 24! Hey, that's how old I am!

If you are quiet and listen deep within, you can hear the happy gland pumping n' squeezing.

*squish*

Ask your physician about Omphaloskepsipril.

comic twenty three.
back after long hiatus:
omphaloskepsis!

Yeech, almost a month between posts. Gives me a nails-on-chalkboard feeling. On a tangential note, talk about your really-useful-and-irreplaceable phrases that is about to have its swan song. The inexorable removal of the chalkboard from the classroom experience will doom a phrase that has no synonym, no semantic understudy, nothing to carry on its legacy of skin-crawly-heebie-jeebie-eerie-and-irritating-ness. What could take its place? "Knees on a Smartboard"? "Teeth on a PowerPoint"? "Nipples on a whiteboard"?

Is that a reflex hammer in your pocket?

Or did you just get a free pen at a pharmaceutical luncheon?

Comic 22! There are only two things that Freud said that I give any credence to. 1) Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And 2) The libido is polymorphously perverse. Remember in Jurassic Park, when chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by the inimitable Jeff Goldblum) is looking at the raptor eggs with Henry Wu?
"If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, it crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is!"
"You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will... breed?"
"No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way."
The libido is much the same. It is polymorphous; it finds a way out. Ignore it for too long (vis-a-vis copious booklearning), and...wow. A skeleton looks svelte.

Look for this feature in the next evolution of man...

Comic 21! Complete with penis jokes! Tee hee hee. Neurology is a cool course, albeit incapacitating for an over-processor like myself. I get stuck in existential tailspins - using the brain to think about the brain which is my tool for thinking about the brain which is on the page and also in my skull (both of those referring to the brain) which is teamed up with Pinky and the Brain Brain Brain Brain, Brain Brain Brain Brain...

[one stroke later] Neurology is a cool course, albeit...

Prophylaxis FTW

Comic 20! We were warned at the beginning of microbiology that after the course was over, the only "safe" food left would be lead paint. I'm not all that concerned. The issue was put to bed for me long ago...food is gross, people are grosser, and yet still an alleyway slopburger is pretty daggum delectable. And immunology taught me that my sentinel cells kick ass and stack pathogens ten high. A colony of bacteria may be as sinister as the Cobra Kai, but one neutrophil is Daniel-san. (paint eating = pica, a sign of iron anemia. another sign is pagophagia, ice-crunching. The More You Know!)

Obscuroast

Without coffee, the world would never have been created. No one, not even God, can work for six days straight without the miracle drink.

Life is bitter. Life is full of flavor. Life should be enjoyed one cup at a time.

Exsanguinate

Vampires, man. When I aver not to draw them, I only delay the inevitable. Check out the medical condition porphyria - real life vampires!

Atavism corner! A few of my favorites from All Real Numbers:

"Kitsch" is one of my Strangelovian doomsday-device rants.

Comic 17! Seriously, people. You can type in "PETA protest" as a Google Image Search string, and you'll be awash in civildisobedianceflesh. As long as the SafeSearch toggle is off. Do the right thing - turn it off, put your back is against a wall, and marvel at how everything of substance tends to get hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern. Fun to look at, not a whole lot going on underneath the surface.

Snacksby is a really neat recipe site!

Chekhov's sashimi

Comic 16! I was told in lecture today that I was "very smart" for knowing the medicalese word for hiccups: "singultus." I think the professor might have "jumped the gun" on that appraisal.

I'm sorry, what was that, Walt?

"O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities fill'd with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light--of the objects mean--of the struggle ever renew'd;
Of the poor results of all--of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest--with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here--that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse."

Ok, cool, that's what I thought you said. Peace out, player!

Accuratepuncture

My first go with the Needle involved a 10-second crash course while walking to the patient's room. This wasn't a mosquito-esque immunization shot either; it was a big honking hip needle, and to me (the uninitiate) it looked like it could gore a rhino. It went fine. A large part of medical school is deep-end moments - just over the concrete precipice, there's the dark blue of the 12-foot deep end in front of your flexing, nervous toes, the water made ominous by uncertainty. You got no way of knowing what's going to happen, and you got to jump in. There is another deep-ender looming on the horizon soon. I speak, of course, of the urogenital/rectal exam.


Best thing about August? Halloween is only two months away. Golly Moses, do I love costumes. If you read this, send me a message with your favorite costume - one you've worn or seen or wistfully hope to wear some day - IM, text, email, reply, doesn't matter. I'll check the vitals for your answer. One of my favorites: two guys roped back to back, wearing the same clothes and doing/saying the same things. They were a Palindrome. Exactly good!

Post-game analysis

This summer, I logged 20120 miles, by rough estimate, of plane travel and destination driving. This figure does not include miscellaneous mid-trip driving and/or sailing. Utah's national parks, Moscow, and the Grenadines.

I read 12 books somewhere in those 20K miles, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Wild At Heart, both of which I highly recommend.

Placeholders for 3000 words:


a slot canyon in the Escalante National Monument - Spooky Canyon


real-life foosball at camp in Tula, Russia


two of the Seven Sisters waterfalls in Grenada

Cutlets in the pressure cooker, or: The Unbearable Mental Casualty of Testtaking

What is remarkable is that I want to get back into the grind, despite knowing full well what a grind it is. Maybe it's the comfort of routine. Maybe I want to see my friends again. Maybe I'm just ready for the next step in becoming a palindrome. DMFMD, over and out.

Remov is Russian, appropriately.

It is, in all likelihood, a bad sign when you giggle at your own drawings. Panel 2 is one such sign, a portent that the hairline cracks in my sanity are becoming true rifts, choppy madness seeping out. And who is going to place a finger in that dike? Don't answer that.

Raptor Rampage

Comic 12. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Omph.

Heyo, I made it back more-or-less unscathed. It's kind of funny: the more places I travel in the world, the more they all look like Middle Tennessee. Call me biased, but this really is a great place to live. Russia was an odd trip - post-communism affluence coupled with outlying poverty, emotional ups-n-dips, car rides out of a John Woo film, and the Creme de la Kremlin. One of my favorite moments: the "Yeah, I am a medical student" line actually works on the rooski ladies, of which there were many and also bodacious. Seriously, downtown Moscow looks like a supermodel convention.

Happy 7-11 day! Go get a free slurpee.

Hail Valsalva, full of grace, the UNNGGGGG is with thee...

Comic 11. This may be the last comic for a good long while, i.e. about three weeks. I will be traveling to the American Southwest and to the Artist Formerly Known As USSR. Fear not, both I and the Transformers film will be here before you can spit. Then esoteric med humor and big-screen Rock-em-Sock-em Robots will commence, respectively. Do svidaniya!

undeadSOLO

His grip tightens. He breathes in the musty, acrid air.
"They are not human. Nothing remains of what once was. The only mercy is to be quick."
The blade and the G suspended 7 chord vibrate, in decrescendo, in expectation.
He exhales.
"Tonight I will tear this playhouse down."

A good vocabulary is a double-edged...something.

Comic 10. Double digits are titillating! I am going to have to print up some of the t-shirts that Murphy wears. Maybe once I establish a fanbase beyond my mom.
RARE MOMENT OF BLOGINASIA: Ok so I'm going to actually "blog" in my "blog," a part of the "blogosphere." The day's occurence was far too odd to go unmarked. Preface: Nashville has been in a severe climatological dry spell for a couple of weeks. Beautiful days, but very dry. So today, I was at the annual Gay Pride Festival with friends. We had only taken a few steps into the Festival, just enough time to see the garbage cans sponsored by a sexual lubricant, a guy in Gap Kids-sized daisy dukes, and a woman with a shirt reading "The Red Vag of Courage." The first fat drops of rain spat. No big deal. I ain't Elphaba. But within minutes, a full-scale apocalypse erupted. Torrential rain slashed the Festival to ribbons and scattered the hundreds of provocatively and colorfully dressed visitors. Crevasses of lightning torn in the sky and wardrums of thunder. Tree limbs the size of cars rained down. It was a whole-sale end of days. We had to be rescued by a friend who somehow had made it to his car, as the path to ours promised certain death - via drowning, electrocution, limb-crushery, or soggy fashion crisis. The cataclysmic epiphenomenon was apparently localized over the park, leaving the majority of Nashville still very dry. Was it the intervention of a diety or does the Middle Tennessee gay community just know how to throw a wild party? Needless to say, can't wait to see what next year's Festival will bring!

Hazards of academia

Comic 9! Fairies are an integral part of the medical world. Or am I looking for an excuse to draw something cute? The world is rife with mystery!

If you get "Aphgincop," I can truly call you friend.

Comic 8! The last post I make as a first year medical student. I know the dysphasia all too well. One time at my internal medicine preceptorship, I went into a room to talk to a patient. On her chart, under "Reason for visit," it read what I thought was "FLU." I began to ask about flu symptoms, coughing, scratchy throat, achey muscles. She denied all symptoms. I checked the chart again. "Are you sure?" "Yes." "You don't have the flu?" "Um, no." Long pause. "Why don't you just tell me what you are in for," I said, completely flummoxed. She then told me about some other problem, one that she was at the office to follow-up on. Follow-up. F/U.

Whoops.

No hawk like a faux hawk.

Comic 7. Sorry for the delay in posts; I have had a phalanx of tests to thwart off of late, and the battered shield and nicked sword must again wearily rise to meet the second wave of my enemy. Namely biochemistry. Which I should have been studying today as opposed to drawing comics.

The C-word...no, the other one

Comic 6. I have no idea where that woman's arms are. Or maybe I just don't want to know.

Auscultate 'em if you got 'em

Comic 5. Introducing Rebecca, alluded to earlier as Beck. Everything that happens in Omphaloskepsis is true and has happened in the medical world - even something as sinister as facius inversus. I realize now how limited ARN was in terms of facial expressions and the humor to be derived therefrom. The third panel here may well be my favorite expression I've drawn. I guess I should quit while I'm ahead. Announcing the premature end of OPS! Thanks for reading! Close your browser, and don't let the html hit you on the way out!



Psyche. Totally got you with that one. ZING

REVEAL!

Dobri! Comic 4. Now I'm back in a comfortable place: the badinage of sarcastic friends. I am really enjoying this new style of comicing; the tablet plus Photoshop makes for a zesty composition experience. I'm going to have to be careful - this is some of the most fun I've had while drawing, and finals are breathing down my neck, and not amorously.

As with any comic series that circumvents the bland universal appeal of Garfield (wait, is he fat AND lazy? Jim Davis your shit is wound TIGHT), this baby is going to have some esoteric medical humor. I'll let any head-scratchers off the hook just this once: Oxytocin is the archetypal mommy hormone, and levels rise tremendously during birth and lactation. The lesser known and more notorious spike occurs during orgasm. Watch out ladies...you can't fake out a hematologist.

The fairy is a fairy. Her name is Leigh Lee.

At least it's not a catgirl.

Comic 3! So I splurged a bit today and drew more than I should have. But you need a critical mass to detonate a nuclear warhead, and comics follow much the same principles. Two more characters, and lots of words. Guess whom the feline is based on.

A clivus in the hand...

Happy day! Comic numero dos. Let's see how long this "shading" business lasts. Beginnings of comic strips are great fun - character introductions! I won't say too much about these peeps, as I'm just getting to know them myself. Suffice is to say, this is the first but definitely not the last time you will see them.

Anatomy lab was a bucket of fun/viscera.

In the Beginning, there was the Word. And the word was "omphaloskepsis." Go look it up.

Once more into the breach, o brothers and sisters. This marks my second foray into comicing. Comic stripping? Stripping. All Real Numbers is but a memory, a whispered echo of some dream in deepest winter, sparked by scintillating...stuff. And so I press on, like a banker who has lost all his daughters to snakebite and cholera on the Oregon trail, I press on to Omphaloskepsis! My newest and most recent comic, presented live on the InterWeb. Now in THX surround sound and Technicolor.

I had an inkling that I would draw comics again, having had such a blast on the first odyssey. The med school schedule has proven to be cumbersome and unwieldly for consistent art projects, and so I buried the intimation. However, Jenny asked me to draw a medically-themed comic for a publication for QCOM, and it got me all nostalgic 'n' shit. So I produced the comic above, the new face of my humor. No refunds for claims of the putative "new humor" being very similar to the "old humor." Not without a receipt, of course.

Omphaloskepsis will be a medical school and medical-world-in-general comic strip, because as the muse said, you write what you know. In all likelihood, it will spiral off to various madnesses, as my insanity is no longer checked by moveable-typeface editors. I hope to post a comic or two during slow weeks, at least one new one per week. This is my goal; I want to stick to it, but don't be surprised if gaps appear. My studies can be ignored for only so long before they bristle and start gurgling, "braaaiiiinnnss..." Since all writing, sketching, and inking are done on the tablet PC now, I hope that the process will be expedited.

At any rate, I have a new comic! Hope you like it.