Update!

OK, I keep getting asked what I'm up to these days. I used to do Weeks In Review, which were fun, but honestly, my weeks currently are not as packed with excitement as they used to be. So...how about a like a month in review? With pictures!

Let me set this up by saying the sabbatical continues. Viva la pre-tirement! Yes, yes, I will find myself a 9-5 eventually, but for now I'm doing odd things here and there and continuing to live it up a bit.

So here we go: besides getting possible brain leaks (and the subsequent 2 weeks of migraines), I have been...

Travel cooking:

Falafel!

Patacones/tostones! 

Fried platanos! (mmm)

Syrian-style eggpant casserole!

Flan! x17...I will dominate flan making!

 (And thankfully I've pretty much talked the young adult small group that meets at my house on Sundays into testing out all my flans. Because even though I love it...a girl can only eat so much flan!)

Dusting off my inner artista: 

I finally got around to printing and putting up a photo project I'd been planning for a while

(and don't worry, they ended up much straighter than that!)

My mom bought a groupon for us to go to one of those painting night things. I'm not gonna lie...it was kind of stressful! But also a lot of fun. I know we didn't make Van Gogh jealous or anything, but I think we did decently! I hung mine (on the left) on a random nail in my kitchen to dry and ended up leaving it there. 

Ha, and another day, out of nowhere, I was in the mood to water-paint. So I wrote and painted my niece a book. There's no pictures of the end product, so I'll just let you imagine how that worked out : )

And taking some pictures around Fort Worth for a project with my mom. So many good looking buildings!

Reading!

I've been stowing away in libraries...

Having time to read was a large part of the "loafing" (Razor's Edge anyone?) I planned for on my sabbatical. While traveling I did conquer some giants (like all 900+ pages of Of Human Bondage) and lots of other good stuff, but with all the adventures and talking with strangers and naps, I didn't get as much reading in as I figured I would. 

I'm making up for lost time. 

Writing!

Postcards! What? Did you think I was gonna say a novel or something? ; )

Send me your addresses! 

And finally...Traveling!

(Of course! But just a little bit...) 

I made a weekend trip out to Albuquerque to have a little mini-reunion with some of the girls I lived in Spain with. Last year we met up in Austin for the weekend, and this year was even more fun! And look--we timed it so that we made it to the (world's largest) hot air balloon festival!

Then I took Greyhound bus (oh yes! I had been wanting to do that for a while now!) up to Denver, where again timing was perfect and David took me to see the Aspens changing colors. So beautiful! 

OK, and one more thing, aka, the real reason I am blogging (...procrastination!): 

Studying for the GRE!

Yep. I know. Strangely everyone around me is much less surprised than I am that I am thinking about applying to PhD programs. It was all getting overwhelming, so I took advice from soon to be Dr. Meredith and just decided I'd take the GRE, see how that goes and start from there. 

PSA: If a book's introduction feels the need to tell you that you shouldn't start hyperventilating...that's not a good sign. 

OK, so that's what I've been up to!

ER Adventures

So not long ago I ended up on a date with the Syrian Mr. Collins. This week? It was a date with the neurologist.

I should have never mentioned that the culture here reminded me of a Jane Austen novel. First the whole Mr. Collins thing, and then I also unwittingly acted out a scene from Persuasion. In the need of a brief novel to give my brain a break, I picked up Persuasion off of Janee's bookshelf. My mom and I are going to Bath in a couple of weeks, so I thought it would be a nice read. I hadn't realized a large portion of the plot revolved around one of the girls falling and knocking herself unconscious. I might would have avoided the book otherwise.

Anyway, we all know what I then preceded to do--I fell down the stairs and banged the back of my head into the concrete wall. That's nothing new though, I told you about that last week. Everyone kept insisting that I go get my head checked, but I refused. It wasn't that big of a deal. By Sunday though, I was feeling worse instead of better. The headaches were getting stronger, so much so that I thought I might pass out during church on Sunday. My vision was getting a little blurry and I was feeling dizzier than normal.

I started to rethink the idea of going to the doctor. (I've seen way too many medical shows where someone dies of an aneurysm all because they didnt go get their headaches checked out.) The system is a bit different here, so Janee suggested I go to the ER. At this point they were still at the hospital in the next town over, so I hitched a ride there with a couple from our church. After a 10 minute wait (!) I was back in the ER getting checked out, and then got to do one of my least favorite things--a CT scan. Thankfully it came back in the clear but the doctor scheduled me an appointment with the neurologist for an EEG the next day.

Really Lauren? I don't know how I get myself into these things.

The EEG in itself was an odd experience. She started taping probes on my wrists and ears and then pulled out a giant syringe. I panicked--nobody had mentioned injections! Thankfully it was just to squirt gel. She then pulled a cap with about 87 wires attached onto my head and started filling all the little holes in the cap with the gel. (Which I am still trying to wash you of my hair...) Once the test started it was a lot of open your eyes, close them, breathe through your mouth, breathe through your nose, and then a lot of try not to go into a seizure as we blink all kinds of colored lights in your face.

Anyway, I finally got to see the neurologist, who was incredibly nice. After doing a couple dozen little tests (and him squeezing the bruise on my foot!) he showed me my CT and EEG results. All in the clear. (Hamdula) He said since I have had migraines before it is probable that the trauma has triggered them. He said that Post Concussion Syndrome can explain all of my symptoms, and that it could last a week or two or a month or two (lets all pray for weeks not months!).

In the end he prescribed me some good painkillers (which I should probably mention I am taking at the moment...so if none of this makes sense, now we know why), we chatted about healthcare and Belgian and US politics, and he mentioned that if life were like Grey's Anatomy that by that time I "would have been whisked away to the OR for brain surgery with McDreamy." He then followed it up with "or whatever his name is." But it was too late, he was caught.

So in the end, it has been a long, strange week. My head feels like someone is massaging my brain with brass knuckles. But on the upside, they gave me my CT scan on a CD. How cool is that? And while I lament my ability to do the most ridiculous things, I figure everyone who's traveled to Brussels has seen the Grand Place and the Atomium. But how many have seen the inside of the neurology department?

That's right, probably just me.

Depth Perception

After I wrote it, I realized that it was a lie. Last week I said that I hadn't finished a single non-school related book since I got here. That's not actually true. My first month here I finished this guy: 

Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions by Susan R. Barry 

I had been wanting to read it for a while and remembered at the last minute to pick up a copy before I left Texas. It was a little more scientific than I bargained for, but it was fascinating. 

It might seem like an odd book to read unless you know that (drumroll please) I am stereoblind. 

Yep. You've probably heard me talk about it endlessly or not at all. Basically it means that your two eyes don't necessarily compute and combine the slight differences they see resulting in a lack of depth perception. Now before you start lining up cups and asking me if the blue one or the red one is in front, I can do that kind of stuff. No need to take away my driver's license. It's not that I can't see that something is in front of something else. It's just that I can't see the space between things. 

I had been trying to tell people about this for years. The only reason I knew that I didn't have depth perception was because every once in a while I did. Occasionally, when walking home or dashing around campus, especially if it was a sunny day, I would notice the leaves on the trees were really defined. All of a sudden it is like stepping into a pop up book. It always seemed like magic. I remember the fist time I saw why it's called looking through the looking glass. I had always seen myself flat on the plane of the mirror. 

I would usually confuse people by saying, Oh look. I have depth perception today! For a while I tried to explain it by saying that I basically saw the world like a regular movie, while other people saw the world like a 3D movie (which probably helps to explain why I never really understood 3D movies). After reading the book though, this doesn't really help either: apparently the eyes of people with stereovision (those with depth perception and 3D vision) actually create 3D when they watch regular films as well. 

Anyway, I believe it was the crunch time of the Spring semester that led me to procrastinate by researching my vision online (I think it was also after I had tried to explain it to a friend...who told me that was not how normal people saw). I was surprised to find out that other people had the same experience, and found a review of this book online. 

As it turns out, stereoblindness is not that uncommon. Some people who are cross-eyed or have a lazy eye (or did as a child) or even just don't have eyes that are perfectly aligned have the same problem. Sometimes it is just because one eye is much stronger than the other. It's kind of funny because I always said that I felt like my center of gravity was over to one side of my body--I am constantly ramming my shoulders into door panes and walls. Turns out, it might just be that my eyes use images from one eye predominately. 

The fun part of the book is that there are lots of little exercises to help you practice your vision. Sitting around in airports and offices I am sure there were plenty of people confused by my squinting and focusing. I had already figured out that if I tried really hard I could conjure up a bit of depth perception. If I close my left eye, focus the right one well, and then open the left one, sometimes I can get the images to merge. When I am just sitting around, I try to practice. This came in handy when I drove back and forth between Abilene and FW two dozen times this summer (watching the hawks flying through the air is fascinating when you have depth perception!) or when I got bored in class (I would try to make a desk, or a pencil pop out,  or even sometimes I would just stare at the professor and try to see his nose in 3D. Ha!) (Apologies to any professors reading, I'm sure it wasn't your class!)

All of this to say that when I was little and wondered if what I saw as blue, was really what you saw as blue, or if we all saw things a bit differently, might have a bit of truth in it after all. (Cue some postmodern philosophy and situated hermeneutics!)

So now you know.