Le Tour Eiffel

One of the features of iGoogle is the ability to "personalize" my internet homepage. So I have a little bit of everything, with my Gmail view, a YouTube search engine, a wikipedia search engine, some Google news displays that change every 15 minutes, and of course, the time and weather in Paris, France right now. Why Paris, France you might ask? Well, I guess this would be a good time for me to basically explain that I am obsessed (to a some-what strange degree) with France and all things French. French food, music, wine, culture, kissing...all of these things fascinate me to the core and fill me with joy from within (don't ask me why, because I have yet to find out myself). The goal is to eventually live and possibly, retire, in that wonderful country of 35-hour work work weeks and the best damn wine in the world. How I'll be able to do that with an American medical degree I have no idea, but I do know that the headquarters for Doctors Without Borders is located in Paris, so that may be a starting point. Holy crap, that would probably make me the first person ever to want to join Doctors without Borders for a reason other than wanting to help people in third-world countries. Is that even possible?

Anyway, back to the point. The last feature on my computer is a 24-hour live-cam of the Eiffel Tower. Yes, I know this is a bit excessive but it really makes me feel wonderful to be able to look at the Eiffel Tower light up at midnight, while I'm sitting in lecture learning about epidemiology or biochemistry (my two worst enemies, btw) at 9AM in the morning. Unfortunately, the most spectacular and breath-taking views of the Eiffel Tower come during sunrise 7 and 8 AM, Paris time. That would make it between 10 and 11 PM here on the West Coast of the United States. So, think about that. As I sit down to study my dense, dense, and oh so dense science lectures in the late hours of the evening (by 10PM I am exhausted, mind you), and I decide to take a quick glance at my email before I get to work, I am TAUNTED by this gorgeous sunrise image of the Eiffel Tower with all of God's glory in the background (city and peach-colored sky) just telling me in a dirty French accent, "oh, too bad for you! this iz what you get for being ze kind of person who attends med school!" When I look at that sunrise, in one single moment, my breath is taken away and yet, simultaneously I also feel a tinge of bitterness that I can't be there at this moment, that instead I have to learn about elastic cartilage and how brown fat contains more mitochondria than white fat. I chose fat over Paris.

God, I hope this is worth it...