I have been reminded by a dear friend that it's important to have big dreams. Its only minimally relevant that they might be impossible to achieve.

In any case, a long-shot idea of mine has resurface: space medicine. As far as I can tell, it involves a long and complicated path through family medicine, eventually leading through aerospace medicine.

And, lo and behold, why I didn't think about it before, but I have a non-zero probability of actually doing a 4th year clerkship in space medicine. (That non-zero probability might on the order of Planck's length, but hey, it's still non-zero.) You could do it at the Johnson Space Center in Houston or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I mean, yeah, it's a long shot, given that I've never done any research in aerospace medicine or space life sciences, and all I can say is that I've been into science fiction since I was a little kid. (And I'm not just talking Star Wars here. I seriously remember watching 2001 as a child and thinking that we really had colonized the solar system already, and that there were people living on the moons of Saturn.) And that I think that space exploration is one of the few things that can save humanity.

The more I think about it, the more I want to do it, and the more I realize that I probably won't get to, at least not this year. Damn. Just when I thought I had decided what I wanted to do with my life.