May 3, 2007 2:20am

So tonight I went to a first year student's house for a discussion group I joined on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). It's something I'm really interested in and have been doing quite a bit of personal research on.

My interest stems from not wanting to get sick. I've been given a shitty genetic mixture and I'd like to not end up with the miserable health problems my dad had.

I recently bought a kick ass text book called Integrative Medicine. It outlines all the standard and alternative treatments for various diseases. Unline some other CAM-related books, it has no problem citing actual studies to back up the effectiveness of treatments and also citing those studies which show no effect (or possibly a harmful one) for other treatments. I really like that it integrates what we consider traditional "western" medicine (ie drugs, surgery, etc) with alternative therapies.

But here is why this all makes for an interesting story. Remember I told you all about Nathan giving me crap about my food and recycling and all that other stuff?

Well, tonight I came face to face with what I refuse to become.

I arrived at this house to meet with our CAm discussion group. I was offered cucumber water, which I learned is just plain water with slices of cucumber floating in it. I had expected some sort of weird slurry, but was pleasantly surprised.

I was the only person who didn't take their shoes off at the door. I don't know why. I wasn't entering a mosque, so it never occurred to me that shoes were not allowed or even optional. Granted, I was wearing my Birkenstocks so that might be as close to shoeless as one can get in the Hippie world without actually not wearing shoes.

We all introduced ourselves. I was only 1 of 2 2nd year students. There were also 6 1st year students and 2 faculty members (both clinicians). Everyone gave a brief introduction to why they were interested in this topic. Some things I learned......

Birkenstocks are probably the only thing I share in common with these people
I was likely the only person in the room who has consumed meat (aka animal flesh) in the past 5 years
I was likely the only person who felt like 10 minutes of meditation felt like 3 hours of agonizing silence
Sarcasm is not appreciated by those in the free spirit community
Finding inner peace and being able to project that healing feeling onto your patients requires you to wear gaucho pants.

I will now discuss Gaucho pants. I don't like them. I don't need something to make my legs look fatter than they are. However, I was the only female there not wearing some variation of the Gaucho pant. From what I could tell, very loose fitting pants are necessary to achieve some level of Zen/Scientology/Level IV Dungeon Master excellence. The only practical reason for this that I can figure is that it makes it easier to do that meditation sitting position where your feet are crossed over the opposite thighs and you're sitting up. I don't know who popularized this barbaric position, but I bet they spent some time in Haight-Ashbury.

We meditated. I didn't sit in the funny position, but others did. Every minute or two, I opened one eye at a time and glanced around that side of the room that I could see through the corresponding eye. They were all depp in a trance except for me. It was 10 minutes, but I was just aching to say something. Maybe silence makes me uncomfortable. Maybe I was amused by the funny stomach noises coming from the guy across the table from me.

We then made a list of topics we would like to cover and determined that we would pick a new topic for each week. The vote was that next week's topic will be on the Macrobiotic Diet.

I'll keep going until I leave for the summer. It's interesting and will make for a fun social experiment. :-)

I am crazy tired right now. Goodnight.