The download

I just recently completed a three-week stint in general and gastrointestinal surgery, during which two notable things occurred:

1. While performing my first mini surgery, I got squirted in the face with a creamy immunologic substance that had been previously surrounding the sebaceous cyst underlying my patient's scalp.

2. I made a new Italian language connection on the verb "scaricare". 

Let me just rewind for a second to preface this anecdote by saying that my classmates and I use the online storage network Dropbox to share notes and other school documents. It was here that I first became acquainted with the word "scarica", which through trial-and-error taught me its significance as the present tense, third-person conjugation of the verb "scaricare" which means "to download". (stay with me)

Back to the surgical ward, while doing the rounds one morning, I noticed a surfacing trend in the physician-patient dialogue, hinging on the question "Si é scaricato?"- which effectively begs the question: "Have you had a bowel movement?" In a moment when everything became illuminated, I realized "scaricato" was derived from the same great grandfather "scaricare" I had previously encountered on Dropbox, only this time it was being used to communicate an entirely different message. I have read before that the english language has something like 250,000 words (even if Southern Californians use but five: "awesome", "rad" "like" (as a filler), "burrito", and "totally") whereas the romance languages have something closer to 100,000. I don't know how accurate these kinds of estimations are, but I do know what a relief I experience every time I get lexical permission to recycle a word, particularly in the face of the daily funerals I attend for my rapidly expiring neurons. Now my favorite phrase of the month is to replace "have you pooped/defecated/crapped/taken a dump today?" with: "Have you downloaded today?" 

Which reminds me of another new word I learned and love: "GUARDONE." It's the equivalent of "lurker", "voyeur", "creeper" "skulker", and I love it for all its literality. "Guardare" in Italian means to look or watch, and when you add "one" (pronounced O-NAY) to the end of something it implies the bigger version of it. For instance. "bacio" means "kiss", "bacione" means "big kiss". GUARDONE --> big watcher. 

Speaking of creepers/guardones, I received this scandal-precipitating text from a certain curly-haired nose-pierced, shark-loving girlfriend of mine who shall remain nameless:

Today (while seated intentionally far away from the front row of our lecture hall), our opthalmology professor captured my attention by staring me down as a prelude to the life bomb I could tell he was about to drop on me (he hasn't the foggiest what my name could be and has even addressed me as "Ciao California" in passing). This morning he seemed to take a sinister pleasure in publicly inquiring whether or not I knew "I had an exotropia of my left eye."

First of all, I had drifted off into thoughts of something else and had no idea what exo-whatever was. Thankfully my computer was already open so I did a quick google image search for "exotropia". Basically what he was saying to me was:

"YO, CALIFORNIA. Your left eye is so damn googly, it makes Paris Hilton's look legit."

My friends immediately came to the rescue by generously petting my hair and lavishing me with any kind of desperation-fueled compliment. It was like they knew I was premenstrual and I could spontaneously burst into tears at any moment. But I held it together until I came home that afternoon, at which point I started my frantic iPhoto search for evidence of my rogue left eye. I'm sorry to say, that he was right:

So it seems as if I share more in common than just a locust-like avidity for cookies with this other freak of an apparently shared gene pool: 

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got an eyepatch to buy and something important to download.