Buying some fun and selling my soul

I think I did a terrible thing on Sunday. I bought an XBox 360. I got it for 20% off, which was ridiculously sweet, but now I'm not quite sure what to do with it besides write about not knowing what to do with it. I mean, I was going to buy it eventually, and I figured I should probably avoid the holiday rush. I'm terrible when it comes to putting things off until the last minute, but for some reason that wasn't such a problem when it came buying a 360.

The first-year med students just finished a hellish week of exams last week, and we have one more test this Thursday. I view this purchase as an early Christmas present for myself and as a reward for surviving last week intact. I definitely did worse than on the first round of exams, but nothing worth crying over. The torment did warrant buying a new toy, however. Luckily, Microsoft recently decided to be generous and package a couple of games with the system, and I can still play my old XBox games, but I still need Halo3 for my life to be complete. I put the unopened box in the back of my closet to keep myself from breaking it out before my exam this Thursday. If I make it through this test of self-control with my sanity intact, I'll be a real man, for sure. I purposefully didn't get Halo3 because having both the XBox and Halo3 in my closet would surely spell the end of my med school education. It's all about timing. Maybe over Thankgiving break or winter break might be a safe time to get it all out of my system. It's kind of like taking a leak when you've had several beers (not that I'm even physically capable of doing that). The point is, once you break the seal, it's all over.

Hardly Working

Attempting to write more around exam time was probably a bad idea. Let's just say med school is as hard or as easy as you want it to be. If it weren't for the dang fact that I'm considering some sort of surgical specialty down the road, I don't know if I would be working as hard as I am now. I've also been considering pediatrics, which is a lot less competitive, and recently, I've found emergency medicine somewhat attractive as well. More on these later. Right now, the only field I should be considering is biochem. I love 8 am exams!

Blink of an Eye

I love it when I take a nap expecting it to still be light outside when I wake up... and then it's not. I guess this is why it's so dangerous for me to take naps in my room. I get too comfortable and a nap turns into a coma. When I sleep in public places, like the study lounge or the library or in class, a part of my body eventually goes numb. Actually, I can sleep through the numbness, but the instinctive shifting of my body weight nudges me with a minutia of consciousness. Sometimes I'm conscious enough to feel guilt, which might drive me to actually wake up when I'm sleeping in the second row in lecture. So anyway, the point is I wish I were as good at studying as I am at napping.

It's raining outside right now. I wish I had time to enjoy it. Too bad it's 2:30 am. Time to hit the books.

"It's just one point."

The point of coming to the Daly center was to be more productive. Too bad I have my computer in front of me. Well, at least I can kind of be productive and work towards my goal of writing more. I've hit a temporary roadblock in my studying at the moment, so I won't try to hurt myself by powering through it. That's kind of my goal in med school now... to just try not to hurt myself.

We finished up the second half of our Concepts of Health and Disease (CHD) exam today. It's a team-based learning course, so we did our exam in groups of seven. It's nice to only have to do 1/7 of the total thinking because I don't think I can muster much more out of my brain at this point. Yeah, I know, 1/8 through med school and going strong. At this rate, I'll be using 1/56 of my original brainpower by the time I graduate.

The nice thing about our CHD class is that it's pass/fail, and the questions on our exam all had point values assigned. Our team motto became "It's just one point." I mean, we could answer all the questions, but they also demanded complete rationales. You get to a certain point where you're all rationaled out, and that one point doesn't seem so important in the grand scheme of things. Don't worry, though, we answered all the questions completely, only because we're med students and don't know when to quit.

I've got 2 quizzes on Thursday and 4 exams the next couple of weeks. This is going to be awesome. I feel more on top of the material than I did before our first round of exams, but at the same time, I also feel like I'm a lot farther behind than before. I'm not quite sure how to summarize what I'm feeling right now. Maybe... impending doom?