My love affair with dermatology is only skin-deep. I met some people in the dermatology interest group here on campus, and let me just say that they seemed a little odd. They were all women, and they must all have horrible skin diseases because I have never seen so much make-up in my life. Dare I say dermatologists are superficial?

I stared dissection in the anatomy lab this week. Our body is a huge fat lady. You wouldn't believe how much fat there is in a person until you have to cut through it all to get to their muscles. It really makes the task difficult. She was oozing all over the place. Luckily, she was built like a linebacker and her muscles are huge compared to some of the other groups' bodies.

My uncle owns a little 150 acre ranch somewhere in southern Oklahoma where he raises horses and shoots endangered turtles. About a year ago an oil company called him up and asked him if they could put an oil well on his property for 15,000 dollars. He told them to "shove it" and so they explained to him that the oil well was going up regardless of what he thought.

It turns out that oil companies have figured out how to play the courts so that drilling is considered an act "for the greater public good" which means that if they adequately compensate you, they can put a well anywhere they like on anyone's property with the help of the government. This shit has been going on since the 70s as far as I know, and I think they were only not allowed to drill one time. T Boone Pickens Jr. tried to put a well in some dude's living room, and that ended up being thought a little extreme, so it ended up in his backyard instead.

The weirdest part is that these are "wildcat wells" that arent expected to produce oil. they are longshots by drilling standards, and it costs about 15 million to set one up. Bunch of crooks.

my dumps have been floating more recently. maybe i should eat less fruit.

Med school is easy, don't let anyone fool you. I'm actually worried that I'm not learning enough, or not drinking enough. Maybe it gets worse as we go on here.

My mother knows my faculty mentor through work and she thinks he's an asshole. This remains to be determined, but he IS a surgeon.

Montana

I went to Montana for a couple weeks. Here are the highlights:

-On the way down, the person across the aisle from me was a transvestite, post op from what it looks like. The weirdest part was that "she" looked remarkably similar to Condi Rice. Condi Rice with an Adams Apple.

-Bert told me a story about how he and some of my other cousins and uncles stumbled across a huge field of pot while duck hunting in Bob Dole's hometown. Like, a FIELD of it. Needless to say they got the fuck out of there fast.

-Bert is a veterinarian, and he was storing his toiletries in an "arm condom" for inseminating horses. Imagine my surprise when he first pulled it out and brushed his teeth with the contents.

-I went to a PRCA sanctioned rodeo in Thermopolis, WY. Rodeos are the bomb, but the patriotism and ridiculousness surrounding it is annoying. After the rodeo we went to the bar (Shorty's) that sponsored the event, except it looked like a good place to get shot, so we backed off.

-I spent a few days on an Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Indians are really good at acquiring a lot of shit that is rusty and doesn't work and depositing it on their lawns. Also they have a lot of trash piles out front. This is 100% not an exaggeration. You can tell the color of someone's skin by looking at the amount of shit on their yard. It is partly our fault for giving them so much money.

-Indians take a while to get started in the morning. I dont think we ever did anything before 10 in the morning.

-On the way to the res, our Arapaho buddy told us to be careful on the highway, because it was August 3rd, and that means plenty of Indians were still drunk from Allotment day when they get their checks. I laughed, but he was completely serious. If you get hit by a drunk Indian car, you still have to pay for damages. None of them have insurance because they don't have to. It's kind of like diplomatic immunity.

-The big lake in the Grand Tetons is a man made dam lake. It's a national park, and it has a man made lake. Is that legal?

-We killed and buried a horse. Best way to do that? A .22 and a bulldozer.

I'm going to start school again soon, which means I'm going to be poor for a long while.