While thumb twiddling in the elevator hoping that the day would end soon (it wouldn’t, it was just 9 am), who should come in when the elevator doors opened but…. The Daw! The Daw was visibly frantic, because she had to take a second look at my smirking face before she recognized me. Before she could make up some excuse (ie, “Errr, I am just here for my annual colonoscopy”), I immediately pointed out: “Whattup, The Daw, is that…. a brown envelope full of requirements you’re carrying?!?”

Brown envelopes rule, because they can carry papers and stuff, but they are also a status of transit. Ooooh, pretentious. In my wilderness year back in 2006 when I’ve just passed the med boards and was trying to make some money in moonlighting I realized that I felt like a total aplikante as I rode jeepney rides after jeepney rides going from one clinic or hospital to the next for a fucking raket carrying, what else, a brown envelope.

The wilderness year, for all the sense of streamlessness it has brought, still had its blessings and… craptastic joy. For instance, I was thankful for that gig in the clinic in Enchanted Kingdom. Well not really, it bored the crap out of me. Or maybe it was still some sort of a blessing, because I got to read a boatload of books and comicbooks while sitting in the clinic waiting for someone to be wheeled in after getting dizzy from Space Shuttle (a.k.a. Post-Ride Vertigo, what the hell right). In what was supposedly the only exciting moment the friend (who was also a doctor) of a patient who got a “Post-Ride Vertigo” said:

“Baka nag-aarrhythmia na sya!!!!!”

She wasn’t having an arrhythmia. She was just having…. a post-ride vertigo.

Wilderness year.

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