Beefcaaaake!

I find it very difficult to sit at a desk all day and study. It's heaps of fun for the first hour because the cat sits on my lap and I play with her, and I check my email and read various other blogs and online forumae and write stupid stuff on facebook and drink the tea I made and eat a little snack as an anticipatory reward for all the hard work I'm going to do next semester when I stop procrastinating. But after that it just gets tedious. So I go check those blogs again.

You may have gotten the impression that I approach my studies in a flippant and dismissive way. That's because I'm a boy-genius writer who has cleverly created that facade for your passing entertainment. In reality I am a tortured, talentless hack who agonizes constantly at the time I am frittering away and the opportunities I am squandering. It gets especially bad around exam time because The Fear makes me extremely susceptible to finding other interests apart from medicine to occupy my time with and divert my attention away from the pain of the approaching cataclysm.

The latest internet fad I have thrown myself into is One Hundred Pushups! It's an exercise program designed to increase your strength so that after 6 weeks you'll be able to do 100 pushups in a row. Sounds mental eh?! Sounds totally implausible eh?!

Here's what I like about it:

• You only do it for 10 minutes a day, three days a week. This seriously limits the amount of time that I waste by doing it. (The time that I am wasting by writing about it here is obviously considered in a separate account.)
• It gives me a sense of making progress. Often with study, the more you learn the more you realize there's a lot you don't understand so you feel like you're going backwards. After doing pushups I do not torture myself with the thought of all the pushups I didn't do. Some simple, straightforward, positive feedback is a nice thing to have at the moment.
• I will actually get something out of this, as opposed to most of the other things I do which are totally pointless. In the short term I will get hypoxic euphoria, in the long term I will be totally buff. To the max!
• It's strengthening my marriage. My Smaller Half is also embarking on this great triceps adventure. Otherwise I think I'd get slack and skip days. Soon we'll start applying walnut-coloured fake tan, wearing tiny swimsuits, and entering bodybuilding competitions. I can hardly wait!
• For ten minutes a day, three days a week, I don't have to think. In fact, the less I think, the better I do. It's kind of like living in Queensland!
  

Anyway, that's pretty much it for today from me. I've been reasonably diligent today and have kind of got to the point where my panic concerning the gastrointestinal exam on Monday is exceeding my terror concerning the endocrine exam on Tuesday, so I think I'll switch books.

Pump it!