Saturday > Friday

Okay, so things have kind of sucked a bit recently so I don't really have anything to write about. I notice that I haven't been writing about uni so much as I used to. Maybe I'm just becoming habituated to the bizarrity of the place, or perhaps I'm starting to get paranoid that my non-Esteemed Colleagues are reading this and one day I'll wake up from a tonsillectomy to find my legs missing. Or maybe it's just been boring.

Yesterday fell fairly firmly into that category. There was a lecture on how to do an abdominal exam, which we learned back in February. There was a lecture on what will be in the psychiatry section of the upcoming exam, during which people asked all sorts of irrelevant questions, like "Will all of the psychiatry questions be separated from the neurology questions?". I dunno - maybe that's not a stupid question. I just don't see why it matters.

I was tempted to ask what font the exam would be in, or at least if he could indicate if it was serif or sans serif. Fortunately I decided that this was too flippant even for me so I didn't, and just satisfied myself with asking if it would be theoretically possible to pass the exam by not answering any of the psychiatry questions at all, since they were only worth 45% of the total. Considering the guy I asked was the coordinator of the psychiatry block I thought it did him great credit that he didn't even scowl at me.

After that we had a couple of hours of lectures about how to do good, focussed, meaningful, helpful, ethical research. Sadly, none of what was mentioned was practical for us to apply to the foolish, misguided, impromptu, shallow projects that we have to get in to the ethics committe for approval by next week. Maybe I'm being too cynical about it, but basically it's a total waste of time.

And finally, in the afternoon we had two hours from a psychiatrist about somatization disorder, which as far as I can see is a diagnosis that gets tacked onto people who the rest of medicine can't figure out or gets irritated by. The whole thing was packed to the gunwhales with mixed messages for us. "It's a real syndrome!" vs "Look at these things that used to be considered psychiatric disorders that now are known to be due to physical causes, like peptic ulcers!". Or "It's all in their head, what a bunch of complainers!" vs "You have to have great respect for your patients!". It's possible that my perception was skewed by the fact that I was asleep for some of the time but if something is so confusing that my brain would prefer to just shut down, I don't think it's being taught right.

Since I don't know how to wrap this post up in a relevant way, I'll just finish with a list of search terms that Google tells me have led people to this blog:

• removalist
  
• giraffe kidneys
• fourier song for nerds
• avoiding group work
• pastali sextube (???)
  
• book cover sketch of young boy in beanie with propeller

I'd say that's a pretty good summary so far.