Homo Universalis I ain't

Slammo! Today I whammed right into a brick wall, study-wise. Hugely unmotivated.

Had a three hour tute this morning for which I had done exactly zero preparation. So I just sat there and contributed the odd factoid that I'd picked up, but mostly I just ate the Tim Tams and tried to keep a low profile. Fortunately the Good People in my tute group are not only tolerant of me, they also know lots of stuff about genetics so I actually learned quite a lot.

This was followed by a lecture about hypersensitivity, for example anaphylaxis and various auto-immune conditions. It was given by my favourite lecturer. She's my favourite because her slides have very few words on them and she says things like, "If you remember nothing else from my lecture, I want you to remember histamine". So my brain remembers histamine. And then its work is done for the day.

Unfortunately, that's literally true. For the rest of today I've been sitting around twiddling my thumbs. Well, only metaphorically. Literally I have been playing chess online, playing scrabble online (very pleased with myself, played cwms today, an awesome vowel-less word. If you remember nothing else from my blog I want you to remember cwms), reading the newspaper online, browsing Wikipedia on such topics as:

• notable world war 2 flying boats, such as the Sunderland and Catalina,
• sinaesthesia in its various forms,
• the RNA-world hypothesis that postulates that life originated with RNA-based lifeforms that used RNA instead of both DNA and proteins,
• the Australian contribution to the Iraq War,
• the spleen,
• Alexander Luria, the Russian neurologist,
• Salvador Luria, the Italian-American microbiologist,
• emoticons, especially the infamous OGC, and
  
• how ribosomes work,

and generally goofing off.

As you can imagine, this is all really interesting stuff, and will one day be either very useful to me or really annoying to someone I am playing Trivial Pursuit against. But it won't really help me in my exams next week (except maybe for the thing about the spleen). Focus! Focus!

On the plus side, at about 11:30 pm I got fed up with trying to make myself learn new things and just reviewed some stuff I did over the weekend. And lo there was Good News! I still remember about 60% of it! That's great! 60% is enough to pass.

Good night and good luck.