Find out what animal fills Eric Garcetti with terror and the most bruising campaign he’s ever experienced (hint: it wasn’t this one) here.

Find out how Wendy Greuel would defend herself from a SoCal zombie apocalypse and the biggest surprises from her time as city controller here.

For all the spin on how Prop 30 was supposed to rescue our schools, the reality has been less sunny. Between the 2007-2008 school year and today, California’s K-12 school budgets lost $7 billion, or 10 percent, of their total revenues, according to EdSource. Prop 30 doesn’t reverse that. At best, the money raised by Prop 30 is just enough to keep schools where they are: gutted.

Just two years before Prop 30, I worked with our local education foundation in my San Gabriel Valley town to save two educators and our award-winning elementary music education program from elimination. The next year, we were asked to save those music teachers again—and to save our (also) award-winning elementary physical education program and to protect the jobs of our media staff so that our school libraries and computer labs could remain open.

We couldn’t raise enough money to do it, so we lost our district’s sole elementary P.E. teacher, who, because of previous cuts, was already shared between four schools.

If there is anything we’ve learned, it’s that once something disappears from school budgets, it doesn’t come back. Even when money is restored, the people you couldn’t afford to pay—the people who make things work, and work well—move on to other jobs. Since Prop 30 was approved seven months ago, my children have had three different temporary replacements for that P.E. teacher, each of whom has left our district for a better deal elsewhere. Our P.E. classes swelled from 50 children to 200, with aides shouting at the students through megaphones. One parent told me that our P.E. classes reminded him of a prison lot. Prop 30 hasn’t changed that.

State policymakers paint a brighter picture. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office recently projected a 24 percent increase in school funding over the next five years. But, again, that allows us to do little more than stay in place. In the past five years, California laid off 32,000 teachers, 11 percent of the teacher workforce, statewide. We have a long way to go to get back to where we were, and I have yet to hear about any hiring.

Prop 30 was not the fiscal cure for all that ails the schools. Think of it instead as an emergency blood transfusion. Perhaps it will give the public schools enough fiscal strength to get back on their feet eventually, but I wonder how.

Meanwhile, parents, educators, and students should catch our collective breath and prepare for the next battle. Because once people start to think that the schools are flush, they’ll say our students don’t really need all that money, and we’ll have to start defending a status quo that’s already unacceptable. So rather than rejoice in budget projections that may never materialize, let’s rest up and plan for how to bring some improvements that we can see, hear, and feel in our classrooms and schoolyards.

And then I didn’t.

It happened on a warm July morning on one of my first calls as a volunteer EMT in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. As I stood on a dock on Fire Island, attempting to teach a group of 7-year-olds how to swim, my fire department pager went off. A voice crackled, “Cardiac event, delta response.” I raced to the firehouse and careened into the ambulance bay. When I learned the address of where we were headed, I knew it was the home of my friend Jack. I’d known him all my life. He was my age, and throughout that summer Jack and I had whittled away countless afternoons on his Boston Whaler, listening to Bob Marley and soaking up warmth through our tanned, freckled skin and sun-bleached hair.

On a barrier island, light and air combine on certain days to make colors unnaturally vivid. Everything—leaves, clouds, grains of sand—seems to have more defined edges and an almost liquid clarity. That July morning was one of those days: hot, clear, and—up until that moment—completely ordinary.

When I arrived at Jack’s house, laden with equipment and mentally reviewing everything I knew about cardiac events, I pulled open the door and saw a group of people standing in a bedroom doorway. I suddenly felt very, very cold. Jack was on the floor, the sheets of his bed tangled around his legs. Two other EMTs were doing CPR. Another EMT grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out of the room. I walked out of the house, stood for a moment in that clear, liquid light and, unsure of what else to do, got back into the ambulance. I watched the medical examiner enter the house, and, when I heard the guttural, animalistic scream of Jack’s mom, knew he was gone.

I never learned the cause of Jack’s heart attack, but during the few seconds I’d stood in that bedroom, Jack’s face—mottled and covered in vomit—had been etched into my memory in perfect detail. It haunted me for months: every time I closed my eyes, every time I started to relax, every time I sat down to study.

Over the next few weeks, my initial shock turned into crippling grief. I blamed myself for not getting to Jack sooner, for freezing under pressure, and for having been useless to him and his family. My certitude about becoming a doctor began to dissolve: maybe I couldn’t function under pressure; maybe I couldn’t help people; maybe I would be a horrible doctor.

I headed back to Georgetown that fall wanting to forget everything that had happened over the summer. I was taking General Chemistry and going through the motions of studying, but my brain felt like it had been coated with Teflon. I’d lost Jack. My father was at home, battling cancer. Previously driven and meticulous, I found myself unable to commit anything to memory, unable to focus, and unable to care. I lost my appetite and rarely slept. My grades slipped, and I told myself that someone who got a C+ in Chemistry and couldn’t handle the loss of a single patient would make a lousy doctor. Reluctantly, I abandoned the pre-med path.

After college, I took a job at a law firm in Manhattan, purely to have work. Several tedious months and many paper cuts later, I was out to dinner discussing life goals with a friend when a woman sitting at a neighboring table handed me a napkin on which she’d written the words “post-bac pre-med.” I did some research on such programs, picked a few that seemed reputable, and dropped some applications in the mail.

One evening, not long after that dinner, I was on a treadmill listening to Bruce Springsteen belt out “Born to Run” when a clearly panicked woman ran up to me and began tugging on my sleeve. (In retrospect, I suppose the red “Ocean Rescue” emblazoned on the back of my old lifeguarding shirt suggested that I knew some basic first aid.) I turned to see the body of a fit, middle-aged man wedged between two stationary bikes. Despite my previous misgivings about my medical abilities, I stepped off the treadmill and knelt over the man. One set of compressions, two shocks from a defibrillator, and several prayers later, I handed the gentleman, now breathing, with a strong, steady pulse, over to medics and headed home in a whirlwind of adrenaline and disbelief. As I walked (OK, more like bounced) home, I realized, when I was honest with myself, that it didn’t particularly matter to me whether that man lived or died. What mattered was that I had done everything I could possibly do to help him; I hadn’t frozen under the pressure.

Today, I am wrapping up my Masters in Public Health at Dartmouth’s Institute for Heath Policy and Clinical Practice, and next fall, when I start at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine, I’ll be on the path to becoming a physician. I can’t tell you that I don’t still have moments of self-doubt: Am I smart enough? Will I really become a good doctor? Will I be able to practice the kind of medicine I want to practice in our current healthcare system? But what I can tell you is this: I have held a 90-year-old woman’s hip in traction for 40 minutes while she cried in pain; I have immobilized a 10-year-old boy, numb below his chest after a swimming accident, while his mother screamed over my shoulder; I have comforted a mother who just realized her child was dead; and I have held the hand of a woman experiencing a late-pregnancy miscarriage. Most importantly, though, I have learned that there are times when empathy is the most valuable treatment I can offer a patient.

This journey has not been an easy one, but it has made me more aware of how great a privilege it is to practice medicine. It has also been full of ups, downs, and unexpected detours that have made me more humble, more cautious, and more inclined to ask “why?” But it is these experiences, this knowledge, that I hope will—eventually—help me become as good a doctor as I can possibly become.

But Can Our Governor Handle a Mule? California political debate is dead, says Joe Mathews. It’s time to put our candidates through some truly Californian tests: Jeopardy quizzes, Google interview questions, garlic-cooking competitions, Rose Parade float construction, and let’s not forget mule herding.

Settle Up, Settle In, Settle For—Just Settle! We’ve always been told never to settle, but what if settling might do us some good? In Squaring Off, we pose questions to Australia National University political philosopher Robert E. Goodin, author of On Settling, who argues, “The reason you need to settle in some dimensions is to achieve what you are striving for in other dimensions.”

The Glittering Lens That Brought Me Back to Alaska. Alaska’s Cape Spencer lighthouse is one of the most remote in the world, and its original Fresnel lens is on display in the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. Theresa Levitt, who grew up admiring that lens, recently returned to Alaska to attempt to visit the lonely lighthouse from which it came.

VA Chief Dean Norman in the green room. Before participating on a panel on how on how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are changing medicine, Dean Norman dished about how the ugliest piece of furniture he owns, the best part about running a hospital, and his irrational fear of missing an episode of Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead.

Next week …

Catherine Jameson chronicles her fears and doubts of becoming a doctor.

Summer is just around the corner. Pick your beach read from Zócalo’s summer reading list.

Decades later, as a historian of science writing a book about the invention of the Fresnel lens and living far away from Alaska, the strange example in the museum took on a new importance. The glittering lenses, which permitted lighthouses to transmit light over longer distances and with more varied patterns, had been some of the first harbingers of my home state’s entrance into the modern world. The first Fresnel lenses had been ordered for Alaska within weeks of the discovery of gold in the Klondike, and the new, lighted shipping lanes linked Alaska to a global market.

As I studied the use of the lenses around the world, I saw this story repeating itself, with the Fresnel heralding a new global connectedness—literal beacons of a modern age. These painstaking, expensive pieces were sent by the thousands to the remotest, most inaccessible corners of the earth.

I got it in my mind that I wanted to visit Cape Spencer, the original location of my childhood lens. This was one of the few Alaskan lighthouses that braved the waters of the open ocean, sitting on the coast of the panhandle in the state’s southeastern corner to mark the spot where ships would turn in to the safer waters of the Inside Passage, an island-protected path down the coast to Washington state.

Photographs of the Cape Spencer lighthouse reveal a structure atop a jagged scrap of rock striking in its desolation, sitting a good ways offshore amid a number of other jagged scraps of rock. With cliffs too steep to land a boat, Cape Spencer’s tenders had to be hauled up in a box attached to a crane. As Coast Guard lore has it, no one ever showed up sober to their year-long tour of duty there. Unmanned by the 1970s, the lighthouse was a particularly lonely example of a technology that has become an icon of loneliness. I wanted to go.

I thought it would not be too hard. I visit my family in Alaska most summers, and my father lived about as close to the spot as humanly possible, in a small town called Gustavus on the inland entrance to Glacier Bay. He also owned both a boat and an airplane. As we loaded the boat to go fishing near the beginning of my visit, I mentioned that it would be cool to go check out Cape Spencer.

“That’s probably not a good idea,” my father replied, with the slight smile Alaskans often resort to when dealing with lower 48-ers who have obviously not yet realized how easily nature can kill you. Lighthouses, after all, are for warning ships away from the dangerous rocks waiting to scuttle them. Moreover, our little boat was no match for the rough waters of the open ocean. We stayed, instead, in the relative refuge of Icy Strait.

He offered to fly me by it in his airplane instead, and added that we could also see the spot close by where a tsunami had leveled trees over a quarter mile up the side of a mountain. I was all in.

Activities in Alaska are always a negotiation with the weather, however, and we found ourselves grounded with rain and zero-visibility cloud cover. A few more days of this, and it was time for me to head back home to Mississippi, lighthouse unseen. Remoteness and inaccessibility had won.

Still, I think of Cape Spencer when asked if I have any favorite lighthouses. Sometimes the places that stick in our minds are the ones we have never visited at all.