omg, nyc

All I can think about is how good it is to be home, and it’s VERY distracting from my...

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 02:53:00 -0400

All I can think about is how good it is to be home, and it’s VERY distracting from my studies.

I went to the Temescal Street Fair today, and wandered the street in perfect weather…when I was supposed to be working on my paper.

Yesterday I went on a hike at Wunderlich Park in Woodside…when I was supposed to be working on my case presentation.

I’m working on a case presentation on molar pregnancy, which is so gross and weird and fascinating! I had a patient a few weeks ago who was being monitored after having the mole evacuated, and it was the first time I’d come across it. But I wasn’t as stoked about her as I was about seeing trichomonads swimming around under the microscope! It’s awful, I know, to be excited about things that are wrong with other people, but dude! Little protozoans swimming around! And they’re very easy to destroy with Flagyl, so it’s not like I’m squealing over some great misfortune.

It’s amazing how actually being interested in the subject matter does pretty much nothing for my work ethic. Serious burnout. And serious distracting happiness. I think I’ve been grinding my teeth a lot, maybe chomping at the bit in my sleep, just trying to make it across the finish line.

I have so much school work piling up in the homestretch, so obviously it’s time to get back...

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:22:00 -0400

I have so much school work piling up in the homestretch, so obviously it’s time to get back to the blog.

I struggle with prenatal visits. While I’m totally fascinated by all the physiological changes a woman’s body goes through in pregnancy, I’m so much more interested in gynecology than obstetrics. I’ve been trying to explain my disinterest, but it’s difficult for some reason. Maybe part of it is that I’ve been seeing most of my pregnant patients in a practice where all that happens at every visit is weight, blood pressure, sonogram. Sometimes they have a little blood taken, but that’s basically it. In most practices, women only get like 2 or 3 sonograms in their entire pregnancies. Maybe I’d be more into it if I were measuring the height of the uterus and listening to fetal heart tones. But I don’t think so. Prenatal visits have such a predictable sequence, but if something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong and it scares the crap out of me.

Routine gynecological visits have so much potential to be so interesting! You’re checking in with women about everything that is going on below the belt. You get to talk to her about her sex life! And her life in general. It’s great. All of the problems that come up at gyn appointments seem so much more manageable to me, or at least puzzles that I’m interested in solving. I totally look forward to working with women on resolving mysterious pelvic pain or crazy periods or chronic BV. Things like preeclampsia or cholestasis of pregnancy? Too fucking crazy.

I love when Bill is in town! He got in on Thursday, and in a few short days we went to: The Levee:...

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 14:17:52 -0400

I love when Bill is in town! He got in on Thursday, and in a few short days we went to:

The Levee: We tried to go to the beer garden across the street, but even on a Thursday, it was too crowded and intolerable, so we went to the reliable Levee and drank Jim Beam and cream soda. It’s better than it sounds, I swear.
The Commodore: Also totally crowded on a Thursday! Clearly I need to get out more.
The Metropolitan: Of course we had to attack the photobooth at the divey gay bar. Of course.
Dean Street: Pulled pork for brunch? Yes please! Worth venturing out of the house in the pouring rain.
Brooklyn Brewery: Brewery tour! Totally fun and interesting.
Eastern Bloc: Such an elaborate website for such a tiny bar. I was kind of disappointed that I was not the only girl in the bar, as we thought might be the case.
Crif Dogs: I finally branched out from the chihuahua I usually get, and I got the “casually attired” dog with cheese and sauteed onions. Oh DAYUMN.
Blue and Gold: $3 drink in Manhattan: they exist.
Crocodile Lounge: Free pizza with every beer. We might have a junk food eating disorder.

So much fun, so little time. I couldn’t resist making a list to keep track. After all the eating we did yesterday, I feel like I need to eat nothing but vegetables for a whole week.

Now I just have to get back to packing and school work and…

Well, after weeks of rigmarole, I finally started my clinical rotation at Harlem Hospital today....

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:58:00 -0500

Well, after weeks of rigmarole, I finally started my clinical rotation at Harlem Hospital today. The process of getting “clearance” was arduous. It took a month of emails and phone calls before I even heard back from the woman who was supposed to set up the process, and when I did hear from her, it was in the form of a terse email that simply told me my appointment was for 8:30 the next day. My appointment for what? It turned out it was for a physical, which involved taking titers to make sure I’d had all my immunizations, a drug test, and a chat with a kind of bitchy PA who was like, “You studied English? You should become a teacher.” Seriously, lady?

After the physical, which somehow involved like 3 hours of waiting around in between different people seeing me, I had to go to the volunteer office and fill out a stack of paperwork for a background check. This involved listing every address I’ve had for the past TWENTY EIGHT YEARS. Of course.

I finally got all this done and then had to wait a week before I could pick up the ID that would actually allow me to start clinical. But when I went to pick up the ID during the time window the volunteer office gave me, they were mysteriously closed. I called, and the person I talked to (who answered the phone while they were closed…) told me I’d have to go to an orientation, which was of course during my midterm the next week.

Writing all this out, it sounds really dumb.

Anyway, I decided I would just show up on Monday and see what I could accomplish. At every step of the way, it seemed like the people I talked to suspected that I was somehow trying to be sneaky and subvert their process, when really I was just doing what I’d been told I needed to do. After sitting through like half the orientation (because I needed to learn how to wash my hands, right?) they decided I would be allowed to get my damn ID. Phew!

So I started today. I’m working with a doctor who quizzes me on prenatal stuff! Crap! I explained that my sometimes stupid answers are because my focus is more on family planning than pregnancy, and then I started getting his questions right. Ha. Look at me, I know about Rhogam.

And to put it all in perspective, I saw two patients today who’d been the victims of female genital mutilation. I’d been kind of aware that I might see this, because I knew that there is a study being conducted about this at Harlem Hospital, but it didn’t hit me quite how common it is. They were both pregnant women who had moved here from West African countries. One woman’s clitoral hood had been removed, and one didn’t have a clitoris at all.

Suddenly nothing that I’d been bitching about seemed important at all.

Yesterday, I had a three hour break between classes, so of course I used that time as any...

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:53:00 -0500

Yesterday, I had a three hour break between classes, so of course I used that time as any productive member of society would choose to: I came home and took a nap.

I didn’t fall asleep right away, and it seemed like I was just going to lay there with my eyes closed for the whole hour I had allotted, when suddenly I was walking with Margaux under great redwood trees. It was just her and me, attached by a long rope leash. We were walking downhill, approaching a coastline, which Margaux was very excited to reach. At one point, she jumped off a cliff, and landed on a small ledge. She growled at me to follow her, but instead I tossed her the leash and found another way down. It seemed treacherous, but was surprisingly easy to run down. Margaux met me at the bottom, holding the leash in her mouth for me to take back. Just as we were nearing the sand, my alarm went off, so Dream Margaux didn’t get to go swimming.

The dream walk was so vivid when I woke up. I wondered if it had some subconscious meaning about overcoming obstacles on the way to something beautiful and awesome, or about enjoying the journey, or if it was just about missing my dog and the Pacific Ocean. Maybe some combination of all those.

Can you see the benches, all buried in snow? This was on my walk...

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:31:16 -0500

Can you see the benches, all buried in snow? This was on my walk home yesterday. Today the sun is out and everything is melting. We have some serious icicles forming on the deck.

Last night, I went out to see my friend Whitney play music in the LES. Totally fun! Of course,...

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:58:00 -0500

Last night, I went out to see my friend Whitney play music in the LES. Totally fun! Of course, though, the punishment for having fun late at night is that it takes me like a year to get home. I took the D to the 3 to the 1, relatively painlessly, except for some longish late night wait times. Whatevs.

When the 1 went above ground at 125th St., I saw that the rumored snowstorm was beginning. There was a thick swirl of flakes fluttering outside the train, and things were quickly getting covered in white. At 157th, the train stopped, stayed in the station for a minute, and then pulled out without ever opening the doors. Everyone who had stood up to get off the train was like, “Whyyyyy???” Including me. Come on, MTA, get it together! At 168th, I momentarily debated waiting for a downtown train to bring me back to my stop, but decided to just walk the ten blocks home instead of waiting some stupid amount of time for a train to carry me a distance that I walk like twice a day anyway.

The snow was a serious factor to consider. Would it be beautiful or excruciating to walk ten blocks in snow?

At first, beautiful. Broadway was about as quiet and New York gets, and the snow was mostly undisturbed. Snow really is as quiet as they say, especially when you’re so used to the cacophony of rain in the winter. It was kind of cool getting to make footprints in new snow, before it turns all brown and cityfied. I was walking along thinking, “OK, this is kind of magical.”

But after about five blocks, the beautiful, serene white flakes that had been landing on me were starting to melt, turning into icy water that was seeping through my hat. So, I think I’ve scientifically determined that snow is pretty for five blocks. I’ve also scientifically determined that I should pretty much always be wearing my sleeping bag coat in the winter.

I remember going for hikes in the rain when I was a little girl, and I really liked the way...

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:18:00 -0500

I remember going for hikes in the rain when I was a little girl, and I really liked the way everything sounded inside the hood of my raincoat. There was this sort of magical effect added both to sounds I made and sounds that came from outside my hood. For some reason, it’s hard to describe childhood sense memories, even when I re-experience them as an adult.

I was walking down the street today in my full length sleeping bag coat, which I love way more than I expected to. I decided I could start wearing it early this year since there were “flurries” yesterday. It was pretty windy, so I had my hood up and the neck snaps fastened so it would stay in place. I also had the thing snapped all the way down to the bottom to keep my legs warm. This makes my stride a little shorter, but it’s totally worth it.

As I thumped along down Fort Washington from school back to my house, something about the rhythm of my shorter stride and the quality of sounds within my hood reminded me of taking hikes in the rain as a little girl. The environment around me could not have been any more different from Mt. Tam, all traffic and sirens and concrete and 35 degree weather, but the feeling was there. It made me really excited to come home again next week.

Man, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I totally love the subway. I guess...

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 14:05:07 -0500

Man, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I totally love the subway. I guess that’s why I don’t really mind so much that I live an hour away from everything. I love that it runs all night, I love that you always see crazy people, I love watching people fighting to stay awake, I love getting up to offer my seat to a pregnant lady, I love watching tourists be all confused or freaked out. OK, I don’t totally love seeing dudes spit on the floor of the car, or being in subway stations in July. But I love everything else.

Yesterday, I was on the A train going downtown, and a couple who were obviously from out of town got on the train. You can identify people who come from a land of driving by the way they refuse to move on the train without tightly clutching onto something with both hands. It’s kind of amazing. Some kids got on the train at the same time, and it was obvious that they were going to start dancing. Of course, not to the tourists. I guess the boombox wasn’t enough of a tip off. They stood, huddled together, grabbing the pole nearest to them. The kids politely asked them to move, and they just squished themselves closer together instead of moving further down the car. As soon as the kids started dancing, the tourist dude pulled out his cellphone to take a video. He kept being like, “I’m gonna put you guys on YouTube!” in his amazing out-of-town accent. (Midwest? Florida? Who knows!) The best part was watching these two scramble for seats when they became available; they seemed so afraid of falling down, so they moved really fast to sit. New York must be so exciting and huge and fast-paced to them.

Part of me is starting to wonder if I’ll miss New York when I move back to California…but I’m guessing not too much.

I had this great experience for a moment today on the subway. I was coming back from Trader...

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:23:52 -0500

I had this great experience for a moment today on the subway. I was coming back from Trader Joe’s on the 1 this afternoon, and at 103rd Street, I suddenly heard really loud trumpeting. I thought it was probably someone playing music in the station for money. But I looked towards the sound, and saw a woman leaning out of the car with her trumpet, playing a quick fraction of a tune at someone in the station. They yelled to each other, and then she leaned back in, sat down and put her trumpet back in her case. I was at the other end of the car smiling. OK, New York is a pretty great place sometimes. I feel like you wouldn’t see that on BART.

Upper West Side Trader Joe’s has not lost its sparkle for me! Going in the middle of the day on a week day is always fascinating, in addition to being delicious. (Hello? Samples?) Last time I was there, it was around noon on a Tuesday, which is apparently the old people hour. Today, I was there around 2:30, and it seems that that is when the small children take over. Seriously, every adult in the store was tethered to a couple toddlers. Two of said toddlers were arguing over who got to load the cart onto the cartscalator as I was leaving, and I debated in my mind whether little kids arguing over something totally inconsequential is a better show than the old lady talking about how she could stare at the cheese all day. When is the cranky 20-something time slot?

Today in clinical, I actually got to do a bunch of speculum exams. So exciting! It’s not...

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 02:34:00 -0400

Today in clinical, I actually got to do a bunch of speculum exams. So exciting! It’s not always so easy to find the cervix right away, but I’m getting better at it. I was commiserating with a classmate the other day about how the cervices can be sneaky, which made both of us feel a little better.

One patient in the afternoon was on the exam table, and as I was inserting the speculum, she said, “I always wonder what makes people get into this line of work.” Without hesitating, I replied, “Oh, I’m obsessed with the female reproductive system.”

Yep.

I finally paid a visit to the new Upper West Side Trader Joe’s today. It probably made me...

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:22:00 -0400

I finally paid a visit to the new Upper West Side Trader Joe’s today. It probably made me happier than any grocery trip should. Picking out all my familiar California snacks…ahhhhh, yum. I’ve been to the Trader Joe’s at Union Square twice since I moved here, and the experience was insane enough to keep from going more than once every 6 months. Grocery stores in New York are fascinatingly different than grocery stores in the Bay Area. At Whole Foods for instance, they have this line system where they set up three lines for about twenty registers. When you’re in line (or “on line” as they say here, which annoys me for some reason), you stare up at a big TV screen and wait for it to flash a register number in the color that corresponds to the line you’re waiting in. Pretty efficient, actually. At the Trader Joe’s in Union Square, they do something similar, only it’s one long line with a dude at the front of the line directing you to a register. The line is so long that it wraps all the way around the back of the store, and there’s another dude at the back of the line with a sign that says “End of the Line.” Madness.

The new TJ is pretty glorious. It’s right across the street from the 72nd Street stop on the 1, which makes it insanely convenient. Since space will always be an issue in Manhattan, most of the store is subterranean. You walk in and immediately board an escalator down, and then there’s another level below that. Their line system is kind of a hybrid of the two described above, with two long lines, an “End of the Line” sign at the end, and a nice lady standing up front directing you to a register. But oh man, there was this cranky old dude in the line next to me, bitching to his friend about how having two lines doesn’t make it go any faster and they should just have one and he doesn’t understand why he’s not at a register already. Dude, I only waited in line for a total of like five minutes. I’d say it was quite reasonable.

Oh man, I’m so excited to have my favorite trail mix back in my cupboard. Just another way that I’m trying to recreate my Oakland existence. And in homage to my former domestic partner, I totally bought two kinds of tea.

So, this is dumb: I didn’t realize until just the other day that when my professor said,...

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:35:00 -0400

So, this is dumb: I didn’t realize until just the other day that when my professor said, “Progesterone is the hormone of pregnancy,” she really meant it. Pro-gestational hormone. Progesterone. Duh. Somehow I never noticed this obvious meaning until I was reading something about medication abortions that described mifepristone as “antiprogestational.” I hate when I can’t see really clear word meanings.

Last Wednesday, I was feeling pretty lame after clinical. I spent almost all day just observing medication abortions, meaning that I was listening to girls receiving counseling, signing consent forms, and swallowing the first pill (aforementioned mifepristone, previously known as RU-486). I did get to read the entire stack of consent forms to an interpreter for a Japanese-speaking patient, so I got pretty familiar with just what these girls are agreeing to, which was cool. At the end of the day, we had a patient who mentioned almost as an afterthought that she had a lump in her breast. My preceptor wanted me to do the breast exam, and somehow I hesitated just long enough that she just took over. I don’t know, something about there being an actual lump…I just balked.

On Thursday, I had resolved to be more on top of it. And I was! I got to perform a speculum exam to check for IUD strings, AND I got to fit a diaphragm. I was pretty surprised that that came up, but totally pleased since I had just learned how to fit a diaphragm like three days earlier. Thursday was also the day that I got to hear about a provider in the Bronx finding a bag of weed in a woman’s vagina, as well as the day that I taught my preceptor about vajazzling. She was totally entertained. See, even if I’m a little incompetent sometimes, at least I’m kinda funny.

Doing my clinical rotation at Planned Parenthood has gotten this...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 20:04:17 -0400

Doing my clinical rotation at Planned Parenthood has gotten this song pretty much permanently stuck in my head.

The rain totally made me want to stay in bed forever and ever yesterday morning. But then I...

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:29:21 -0400

The rain totally made me want to stay in bed forever and ever yesterday morning. But then I remembered that it was diaphragm fitting day! I squirmed my way through two long classes in cramped auditoriums, both taught by a professor who repeatedly mispronounced the word “pharynx.” You’d think if you used this word professionally all the time, you’d know that it’s not “far-nicks” but rather “fair-inks.” Maybe I’m just being a jerk.

Anyway. When it was announced a little while ago that the women’s health students could attend the peer diaphragm fitting session, I was pretty stoked. I’ve written before about how the midwifery students get to practice everything on each other, but that the women’s health students aren’t given that option. So, you know, it was exciting, even if we weren’t going to be palpating any ovaries. We’d had a very brief instructional lecture about fitting diaphragms last week, so we were all a little surprised when we got to the session yesterday and were told to just go ahead and get started. Ummm…

I got into a group with three other girls. All four of us are in women’s health, which means that this was our first experience with the whole peer pelvic thing. We had our set of five different diaphragms and two handouts about how to fit them, and that was it. One girl decided to be the first guinea pig, and I volunteered to do the first fitting. The technique for fitting is that you reach into the vagina, all the way back to the posterior fornix behind the cervix, then lift your fingers a little to see where the pubic bone hits your hand. You make a mental note of where that is, or use your thumb as a marker, and then compare your fingers to the different sizes of diaphragms. It’s not the most exact science, but I think it’s pretty cool to use your hand as a ruler.

We got comfortable with each other very quickly. Through the course of the one hour session, we each got up on the table, and we each had everyone else’s fingers in our business, and there was a lot of laughing. There was also a lot of, “Hm…I think this is the right size…why don’t you feel? What do you think?” We were all pretty impressed by how far the instructor could bend her ring and pinky fingers back so that they stay out of the way when she’s giving a pelvic exam. We determined that we all need to do more finger yoga.

Ephemeral New York

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 01:07:34 -0400

Ephemeral New York:

Old timey New York pictures and stories! Thanks, Zacho! Of particular interest, since I was just in Barcelona, is Gaudi’s vision for a really tall building in Manhattan.

This week in Comprehensive Women’s Health, we covered cervical cytology, which of course...

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:57:00 -0400

This week in Comprehensive Women’s Health, we covered cervical cytology, which of course includes a long discussion about HPV, one of my favorite party topics. Since I had my own personal cervical dysplasia debacle several years ago, I’ve gotten a little uppity about the subject, wondering loudly why HPV isn’t one of the standard STI tests, and why there isn’t a test at all for men. Perhaps you’ll recall that a provider told me that it’s “too prevalent and too uninteresting,” and that someone else likened cervical cancer to skin cancer, in that you can’t really help putting yourself at risk.

ACOG’s recommendations for Pap smears have recently changed, and the new protocol is to start Pap’ing women at age 21, regardless of the age of what my professor refers to as “sexual debut,” then Pap every 2 years until age 30, and every 3 years after that, assuming everything’s normal. (“Sexual debut” always makes me think of the Diana Ross song, “I’m Coming Out.” One friend asked if she also used the term “sexual sophomore slump.”)

ANYWAY. The understanding these days is that pretty much every girl has HPV on her cervix soon after she becomes sexually active, and that pretty much all of these girls’ immune systems get rid of HPV within three years. According to ACOG’s December 2009 practice bulletin on the subject, 91% percent of HPV infections in young women are gone by the time three years have passed. This is a big reason why there’s much more of a wait-and-see approach to dysplasia treatment these days.

I also learned that a lady’s cervix changes as she gets older, making it less susceptible to HPV infection! The area that is most likely to harbor precancerous lesions is called the transformation zone. This is just inside the cervical opening, where there is a transition between endocervix (inside the cervical canal that leads to the uterus) and ectocervix (the exposed part at the top of the vagina). Ecto- and endocervix are made of two different kinds of cells. In younger women, this area is closer to the outside of the cervix, but as we get older, it retracts further inside the cervical canal, making it less accessible to cooties. But even though younger women are more vulnerable to infection, their immune systems usually take care of it, like a cold. It’s the infections that stick around until you’re in your mid-twenties and beyond that require further monitoring and treatment, because those are the persistent strains that are more likely to develop into something bad.

Ass-kicking immune systems and structural changes are two physiological reasons that I can get behind for chilling out about HPV infection until women are a little older. The cellular changes caused by HPV also develop extremely slowly, so it makes sense to do Pap smears less frequently.

But still, ladies, I implore you: get yer junk checked on some kind of schedule. Cervical cancer is usually pretty easy to nip in the bud…as it were.

Aaaahhhh, the replacement carafe for my French press arrived...

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:47:22 -0400

Aaaahhhh, the replacement carafe for my French press arrived yesterday! The demise of the last carafe was a tragedy: I was getting ready for my last day of summer finals, and I was all sleepy-shaky. Somehow, I jostled the French press in such a way that it tipped over and shattered. At least it wasn’t full of coffee, but I was still like, “WHYYYYY??” I meant to order a new carafe while I was in Europe so that there would be no lapse in my ability to properly caffeinate, but I never got around to it because I was too busy looking at ruins and stuff. But now it’s here, and everything is right with the world.

I’m quickly getting back in the swing of things here. I found out a few days before I came...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:33:00 -0400

I’m quickly getting back in the swing of things here. I found out a few days before I came back that I’d be at Planned Parenthood for my clinical rotation this fall, which had me pretty stoked about the coming semester. I flew back from Rome on Monday night, and started classes again on Tuesday afternoon, leaving me enough time to get myself together on Tuesday morning, but not enough time for the day of moping that usually happens when I get back from California.

My first class was Comprehensive Women’s Health (awesome!). I found out when I got there that we had a whole day of learning about IUDs planned for the next day. Some people were a little alarmed by a surprise extra day of class, but like a nerd, I was totally excited. This is partly for selfish reasons, because I’m a little fixated on the goings-on of my own uterus, but of course also because I want to become an awesome provider.

IUD Day was largely a sales pitch from reps for ParaGard (the non-hormonal, copper-based IUD). Most of their information was accurate, but the woman was claiming that it doesn’t hurt at all when it’s inserted (IT DOES, though not for very long). When she was talking about selection criteria to determine whether a patient is a good candidate for an IUD, she was making some judgmental comments about “frequent flyers” who come in “all the time” for STD testing. I wanted to raise my hand and ask, “What, exactly, is ‘all the time?’ And are you referring to women coming in for STD screening or STD treatment?” I decided that it wouldn’t be very fruitful to argue with a company rep.

Luckily, one of my friends pointed out that the woman had just said that having an IUD doesn’t actually increase a woman’s risk of getting pelvic inflammatory disease, so why would it be more advisable to prescribe birth control pills to the so-called “frequent flyers” instead of an IUD? The woman didn’t really have a solid answer for this, and moved on. Hm.

Overall though, it was a great day of inserting little pieces of plastic into model pelvises. Oh, and the picture above kinda makes me laugh: when I got my IUD, I was joking around saying, “Would I get the same effect if I just stuck a penny in there?” Heh…I might to have to work on my professional demeanor.

So, I’ve been in Europe for a month. It was a totally...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:14:00 -0400

So, I’ve been in Europe for a month. It was a totally awesome trip, and definitely kept me away from the internets for the most part. Since this blog is about New York, nursing school and my Life Path (TM), I figured that the vag’-centric pictures above would be good to post. We were in Berlin the same weekend that a couple of friends of ours were there, so we heard about this event called Pussy Salon (which I of course kept calling “Pussy Control”). It was basically this feminist group that invited people to make vagina art out of a variety of materials. Jana and I made potato stamps; mine is the totally weird asymmetrical one that looks like it has a mustache. (I blame the carving utensil.) The other picture is of a quilt that had been made at a previous event. They played a short movie that was made in the Mission in SF, which definitely made a few of us sigh wistfully.