Another Pair Of Eyes

Macro Quiz 2

I’m off to Ireland for ten days, hopefully to have a grand time. Life is good. I will leave you with the second installment of the macro quiz – enjoy!

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Draft

Like many of you, I have a Drafts folder, and I’m sure that many of you, like me, have a Drafts folder filled with parts of posts unfinished or unpublishable, random excerpts of things, some posts which might just be titles. The Drafts folder is a refuge for the random and the hidden.

So here, for your viewing pleasure/suffering, are some odds and ends from out of this folder. There are some which are only titles (’Relief and Guilt’ is particularly intriguing, but I have no memory of what was to be written there) and others which are really quite long.

In no particular order, and just for fun:

Drunken Notes (9.02.2008)

When I get home after a night out, I write myself notes for me to find in the morning. This isn’t because I expect to forget everything (although occasionally people’s surnames for facebooking etc are there as reminders) but more to try and capture how I was thinking at the time I got in rather than

Cloudy Day (23.09.2008)

Some days are cloudy days.

Watch (05.06.2009)

I have finally bought a watch which I first saw in a shop window four years ago, which probably makes it the single thing I have waited longest to purchase in my entire life.

Parody

Sometimes it feels like instead of film being a parody of life, life is a parody of film. Take my life, for example. A typical romcom line is: girl fancies guy, gets with guy who turns out to be an arsehole, and then realises she loved her best guy mate who was helping her out of the goodness of his heart all along. Happy ending, blah-di-blah.

Styles (14.07.2008)

Today, I have mimicked people’s styles.

Everyone seems to have their distinct styles of writing, their own little rituals that go with every entry, with every interblag thought-dump.

Do you notice styles?

Moods (28.07.2008)

Sometimes, you are ‘not in the mood’.

This statement seems to bother a lot of people. Whether it be in regard to coming out, getting smashed, doing work, exercising, or anything else you can and have enjoyed, people just do not seem to get it. Drink, come have fun, they say, but that’s the point, it’s what you don’t feel like doing and while the cloud of sigh that is sitting there will pass by the next day

Brief Summary (21.03.2009)

Wednesday I:

1. Got up

(ed: a brief summary indeed!)

Out! (13.05.2009)

I’ve spent the whole of today wanting to be somewhere other than I am. I spent the time at home wishing I was in lectures, the time in lectures wishing I was in hospital, and seeing as I never got the call from the hospital I’m now in the garden as its slightly further away from the house than being in the house. I spent £14 in B&Q buying canes and nice pots (actual ceramic pots might be 50p each, but they are SO much nicer than those horrible ‘terracotta’ coloured plastic ones that its worth it) and plant food and wire and all sorts of other funtastic things, then spent an hour outside meticulously repotting 8 of my little chilli/pepper/other pepper (there are two types, the difference between them being how fat they are by the looks of it) plants. My climbing french beans are also carelessly shoving the earth aside in their quest for things to climb so the canes I bought are being wired together into planty climbing frames. I scattered a bunch of foxglove seeds into a big pot and around the garden – oh yes: now when swine flu comes not only will I be able to feed myself with peppers, beans, lettuce, sunflower seeds, cucumber and chillis, but I will also be able to use digoxin to treat atrial flutter, atrial  fibrillation and drug-resistant heart failure. Shame it’s got such a narrow therapeutic index (the window in which the drug has an effect, but is non-toxic).

All the above is well and good, but none of it addresses the fact that I am avoiding something and I suspect that is work of some sort or other. I’m even avoiding writing about it as evidenced by the spiel above, and the irony is that even writing is in itself a means of avoidance. I’m evading and procrastinating every way I know how to avoid being in the house.

In honour of this, I will be taking my notes, music, pens and pencils and textbooks OUT of the house instead of me having to go IN to it, and write about thyroid function here. The endocrine unit we finished a couple of weeks ago (hormones and the like) is really elegant, really satisfying stuff and a pleasure to learn. This is puzzling as it means that my reasons for fleeing the premises aren’t necessarily work related. Maybe going to see Star Trek tonight will recover me somewhat as two hours of chilling time – I hear it is good, despite never having been an enormous fan of the series…we shall see.

Mood: Quizzical.

also, apologies for great big life-gardening-medicine splurge, but it has to go SOMEWHERE

Misunderstandings (27.10.2008)

I am bored of misunderstandings.

That’s clearly enough drafty entries for today, I might throw some in later if anyone actually wants to see them! Incidentally, I didn’t end up liking Star Trek much – the effects were great but the complete failure to inject any suspense anywhere or, indeed, any kind of emotion at all was pretty shocking. Spock was easily the only interesting character in the whole film and was excellently cast. Otherwise it was pretty weak, really.

From the ashes new things may arise. Maybe.

Lectures

It’s been weird at the end of this [academic] year, in that all my friends who didn’t take gap years and did 3-year courses are now Finished. They are out in the big wide world for the rest of their lives, and I am still 3 years away from even qualifying, let alone finishing my foundation training.* It’s a weird thing to think about, that comparison, but I’m not entirely decided on why. I’m walking the long road though, no question about that, and it’s going to wind for a while.

However, in terms of endings it’s not all other people’s parties. My lecture-based section of my course is done – next year we get one a week, after that I think even less than that. Next year is all about attachments and surgical blocks and being scattered all over the south, and it will be exciting, and I shall learn much. It’s all change, and we’ll have to see where it goes and what happens.

Assuming, of course, I pass my exams. 51% club anyone?

Flames to dust.

*Once you finish medicine, you then have two foundation years (F1 and F2, imaginatively) after which you begin specialty training etc etc -

Limbo

It’s been an eventful few days; this post might not make much sense. We were talking last night, as you do, about what was the ‘best hormone’ (give us a break, we were all mildly intoxicated and have spent the last 2 months studying them). One gentleman came out with prolactin, for some reason involving breasts, another testosterone (testicular atrophy? really?), but to me the clear answer is adrenaline:* for just a few seconds, it can make you more than just human. Uncanny reflexes, ridiculous strength, sprintworthy stamina, you name it: adrenaline can make it happen.

The reason I came out with this is because it happened to me a couple of days before, when I was going over the wall in the back of my garden and the top layer of concrete blocks ripped away as I was doing so. I was hanging in space for what felt like 5 or 6 seconds, contemplating the way the bricks were going to fall, how I’d end up with broken shins at the least, and then I was lying on the ground, having pushed out away from it hard enough to land a couple of metres away. I assume that’s what I did, I have no memory of it, but its the only logical explanation. Magic. I just wish I could voluntarily trigger that slowdown where the world just glides around you – badminton would become epic.

The exams were nothing special. They didn’t go fantastically, they weren’t TOO awful, I am hopeful but not sure. The world keeps turning, we’ll see how it went soon enough. Jug of Pimm’s afterwards in the sun made it all worth it.

I got to bed about half three last night, and woke up at quarter to seven this morning, as expected. I always find that the workload of revision and exams doesn’t fade after they finish for a few days, and you spend those days alternating between thinking you should be doing work and trying to forget about it. Tick tock.

The comedown is draining.

*it really bugs me that they are renaming adrenaline epinephrine – its just stupid. Is it produced in your epinephral gland? NO. Do you get an epinephrine rush? NO. What on earth was wrong with adrenaline? Hmmm?

Resignation

I resign. I resign from the waiting and the hoping, the endless up-down oscillation that is always underlying my life, bringing me up and casting me down on a whim. I resign from it.

I reject. I reject the stereotyping, the fact that talking becomes Something, the way that it is impossible to hold a normal conversation with someone other than those you know without some people being stupid. I reject it.

I disregard. I disregard the adrenaline, the pitter-patter of a pulse, the silent signs that wait in the depths of your mind to entrap you, to give you ideas and airs and graces which reality shreds into pieces. I disregard them.

I accept. I accept that things do not work out always, and that there will be other things in other times despite the ever-extending wait. I accept patience.

I wish.

24

“…twen-ty-four hours they’ll be/lay-ing flow-ers/on my life”

Not quite that dramatic, perhaps. Still, 24 hours and I will be in an examination room, and from then on we can only wait and see what happens. I’m better set up than I was for neuro, but that isn’t saying much at all.

I’m off to the library now, so this is my last broadcast before things get fun. I plan to stay there for a Long Time, and then go over everything tonight. Then tomorrow are two rounds of fun exams, followed by some ultimate anatomy fun the day after (that’s where the main concern lies).

I’d never been in the Hartley library before, not really – its massive. You could get lost in there, and its a little bit magic. It’s the sort of place I feel like I could wander around absent mindedly for hours just running my hand along the shelf edges and watching the dust. I don’t think I’d like it so much busy, but at half 11 last night it was wonderful. It did remind me a little bit of the Doctor Who ‘Silence in the Library’ though. Hmm.

The others are almost ready. It’s time to go!

Wish me luck.

This post was set to the music ‘Doomsday’ by Murray Gold.

News and Sighs

Sigh. Sickeningly controlling.

This post will get a lot longer in the oncoming days.