M’s last medical residency interview was Friday. Her rank order list isn’t due until February 22, but she’s already separated the group into “desirables” and “less desirables”. Above the fold are Brown in Providence, BU and Mt. Auburn in the Boston area, and George Washington in DC.

Stay tuned for more developments as they happen!

My mind tends to wander. The other day it wandered to the following question: “What is the oldest surviving piece of written music?” I knew that modern musical notation was a relatively recent creation (probably less than a thousand years old), but I was certain that there must have been earlier techniques for writing down music.

The answer is the Seikilos epitaph, a 2000-year-old tombstone in Turkey with a song written on it, even including Greek lyrics. The way the music was written quickly reminded me of cantillation, the symbols written above the Hebrew in the Torah that guides the chant.

I wrote Three words, five minutes this morning after about a year of procrastinating. It was initially going to be big and complicated, but since that was the source of the procrastination, I made it a single frameset with Writeboard as the writing interface. TWFM makes it surprisingly easy to just go and get a little writing exercise, and even if it doesn’t inspire something longer, then it was worth it.

Nomad has been ignoring work with it all day.

Among my New Years resolutions this year is to resume writing. I wrote a lot of angsty poetry and some short stories in high school and college. It tapered off, though, and this year, my goal is to write a 1000+ word story every week. I’d also like to participate in NaNoWriMo in November.

If it’s not too terrible, I might post some of the stories here.