Sometimes life just likes to hijak you and take you for a ride, no matter how much you might protest. And that’s pretty much what it’s been doing to me recently. Luckily, life has been a pretty nice hijacker and hasn’t thrown too much abuse my way, but it has been keeping me running around like a chicken with my head cut off, hence the lack of blog updates.

For starters, yours truly, formerly known as a creature of the night, is now getting up at 8:30 every morning for a 9:30am class that meets every freaking day of the week. Starting this week, I’m going to be going to labs for this class in the afternoons as well. More info on that to come…

I’m preparing for my last qualifying exam (to be taken on the 25th) so that I can finally propose my dissertation.

I’m still sitting on a committee that’s supposed to be hammering out ways to improve the (financial) quality of life of current grad students at my university.

I’m still working for moolah at the library.

So the short version is that I’ve been on campus every day of the week, usually spending more than 8 hours there at a time. Booooo!

On the plus side, part of that excessive amount of time on campus this week was spent hanging out with infamous partner-in-crime Celia who took a short sabbatical from her time in Germany to visit. Yay! This meant I had a great time shooting the breeze, eating good food, and drawing hilaiously terrible pictures with good friends. It also means I was putting in the overtime today trying to catch up on two rather tedious subjects: philosophy of science and histology. Doesn’t help that between ten and midnight is pretty much my bedtime these days. I’m such an old lady!!!

And the real coup de grace is the Halloween party that I’ve got to start pulling together soon. I think this is the first time I’ve ever greeted Halloween as a burden rather than a joy. Poo! :-(

As some of you may know, I’ve been auditing a Human Morphology class this term. FYI-human morphology is just a fancy way of saying anatomy class. Anyway, it’s basically the class that all the first year med school students take, which means that 1) I don’t know anyone in it and 2) they sometimes forget that there’s one non-med school student in the class and neglect to mention helpful details to me. What this means is that for the past few weeks I’ve been sitting in the back areas of the lecture hall, keeping to myself and anticipating/dreading what was coming today: the first dissection lab. Now mind you, the dissections are, in some ways, the real reason why I’m even sitting in on the course. Granted the modern dissection process is a wee bit different than what it was 200 years ago, but anatomy and dissection are actually the few components of modern medicine that aren’t earth-shatteringly different than they were back in ye olden times. However, what was making me nervous about going to the labs for the first time today was the fact that, until today, the class had been giving me this weird wow-its-like-being-back-in-high-school vibe. That is, the med school students all know each other and have these weird little cliques going on, and I wasn’t really sure how they’d react to my being in the lab today.

It is therefore to my huge relief that I can say the lab went really well! The dissections themselves are, fortunately, much more fascinating than they are creepy. And as a bonus, I got a few moments of moderate fame today by getting an introduction by the prof to the pre-lab guest lecturer, being mentioned by the lecturer in the lecture, and by having mutual friends with the TA at our lab table. That’s right baby, having been at this school for 5 years has its advantages, little smarty pants first-year med students! ;-) But honestly, I feel glad that even though I’m still a bit of an outsider in the class, I’m still hanging in there and getting to have a really amazing experience. This is something that very few people outside of medicine ever really get to be a part of, and I’m genuinely grateful to have the opportunity to participate in this.

Seems everyone is busy these days. And while I realize I haven’t exactly been good about posting lately, the relatively blog silence out there is driving me bonkers! How can I procrastinate in my limited time before bed if people aren’t providing me with exciting new content to read? Okay, so there’s perez and thesuperficial. But seriously, one can only read so much about Britney Spears and Linsay Lohan before just wanting to drive your head through a wall. And while studying anatomy could technically be considered a way of avoiding studying for my much dreaded philosophy of science exam this Thursday, it’s still studying. So how about we make a deal? I’ll try to write more to help you busy folks out there in cyberland procrastinate. In turn, you people will also write more to help me procrastinate. That seems like a fair trade, right?

I’ll even start things off on the right foot by actually writing more than just a complaint about other people’s lack of writing. See, I’m being what people like to call a “team player.” ::pats self on back::

1. I am very excited to hear that Okami is coming to the Wii next year. I never played the game on the PS2, but I have read about it and it sounds really interesting and innovative. I feel like it’s the Samurai Jack of video games. Not that I ever really watched Samurai Jack much… but I appreciate it just the same. That’s possible, right?

2. I have a new best friend. I think it will be even more my best friend when I go freeze my buns off at a Bears game in December. Now if the Bears would just stop sucking (sigh). One thing at a time, I guess.

Okay, now it’s your turn amigos!

Having just finished one of the phil sci books I needed to read this weekend, I felt entitled to a brief study break. And in keeping with my promise to post more, I am posting, even if it’s news that you’ve probably heard by now.

Rowling says Dumbledore is gay.

Now, as far as the character goes, I don’t really have feelings about this one way or another, since Dumbledore’s sexuality was never really something I wondered about. It just isn’t relevant at all–neither in the books, or now. But as for Rowling’s ‘outing’ her fictional character on a book tour… I’m sorry, if it’s not in the book, it doesn’t really count. You can’t have your cake and eat it too: “Oh, I’m so liberal and committed to cultural diversity and tolerance that I’m going to have a gay character in my books, but I want to sell as many books as possible and not offend anyone so I’m not actually going to put that detail in my books.” If she saw it as being fundamental to Dumbledore’s character, or if she was really committed to teaching a lesson about diversity and acceptance, then you should have had the guts to actually make it a part of the story! (Not that the Lupin the reviled werewolf subplot wasn’t a fairly transparent allegory…) Frankly, I think the whole thing is a completely unnecessary “fact” aimed at drumming up a little publicity now that she’s in the I-finished-the-series doldrums. Or maybe she’s just trying to make people forget that her book ended with the worst epilogue ever written. Lily, and Hugo, and Scorpius, oh my!

Okay, no more cynical musings from me. Time to move on and read about The Fate of Knowledge!

So, in keeping with my pledge to post more, that means you dear readers get to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly in my life. And today, I’ve got nothing but ugly to report.

As some of you may recall, since about late July/early August, I’ve been suffering from dysosmia.* I’ve been to various doctors (all from my “at the forefront of medicine,” “here, the teams of expert physicians and scientists that develop breakthrough therapies create an individualized treatment plan just for you” university hospital) to investigate this dysosmia and have had various different crappy results.

Today, however, took the cake as far as crappiness goes. The ENT specialist that I had been referred to (the one who stuck a camera up my nose on my first visit), who had completely jerked me around at my last appointment 3 weeks ago by telling me he couldn’t really do anything for me until I got a CT scan (which neither he nor his assistant had mentioned at all on my previous visit), finally looked at my CT scan today and said he couldn’t see anything wrong and there was nothing more he could do for me. Basically, after a month and a half of doing pretty much nothing except costing me an assload of money (conveniently, I got my first bill today for my first visit back in September), he tells me that there isn’t anything he can do and maybe it will go away in a year.

I believe the only appropriate response at this point in time is the following:
OMG!! WTF???? THANKS FOR NOTHING YOU OVERPAID ASSHOLE!!!!! SCREW YOU!!! SCREW YOUR MOTHER!!! SCREW YOUR MOTHER’S MOTHER!!!! AAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Thank you. The End.

*English translation: normal things smell like ass for no apparent reason.

At last, it’s over. I did it. I took and passed my last oral exam. This means that now, if I can just get my dissertation committee members to get their acts together, I can propose my dissertation. And that means that I’ll finally get to be ABD. And you know what ABD means, right? That’s right. All But Dissertation. And you know what that means, right? That’s right. It means just me, myself, and I stitting down to write a 250 page history paper.

Crap.

Ah well, I get to take a little time off to celebrate, right? Yes. The answer to that question is yes :-) I also want to say thanks to all you guys who’ve been sending me emails and little motivational notes to pump me up for this exam. I personally am just so glad to finally be done, but the support coming from everyone has just been really awesome. Really, it warms my flinty little heart, kids. Thanks!

Curses! Someone explain to me why it is that I pledged to write more? Because now that I’m not studying for my philosophy comps, writing to the blog is starting to reek of effort. Alas, I guess that’s how the principle of structured procrastination works, now isn’t it? Still, I don’t exactly relish the idea of adding more work to my plate to replace the time I had to spend preparing for my exam. I’m perfectly content to spend a few days/weeks just enjoying some mindless entertainment and languishing in my own laziness.

In the vein of mindless entertainment, some friends and I went to see The Host last night. I had no idea what to expect from this film given that it looked like your godzilla-for-a-new-generation type monster movie, and yet critics as persnickety as Anthony Lane were giving it rather glowing reviews. But I needed some way to celebrate and for $5 at our student run theater, didn’t seem like there was much to lose. And in fact, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. Even with some bad cgi effects in places, I found the whole mood of it so enjoyable that I was willing to forgive the obvious cgi, even thought that’s usually a major turn-off for me. Overall, The Host just had a great way of treating rather serious themes with a certain self-aware tongue-in-cheekness that just really worked in the film. Not to mention it was well-paced, and happily didn’t follow the traditional trite formula that most action/sci-fi films take. I guess that’s the vitrue of seeing a film made outside the cookie-cutter style of the Hollywood film industry. Needless to say, I do recommend it. And just as with any classic sci-fi film, expect as much laughter as thrills when you watch this one.

Is it possible to be bored and anxious at the same time? Because that’s kind of how I’m feeling right now. The bored part seems really strange to me. I’ve been running around for the past month or so like a chicken with my head cut off, so the idea of actually having spare time for myself seemed fantastic about a week ago. But now that I have it, I’m sitting around freaking out about what I need to do next. I thought I’d be able to take some time to relax, and to enjoy relaxing. Lord knows I’ve had plenty of entertaining things that I wanted to do/see/read that I put on hold for my studying. And indeed I feel really burned out as though I need to relax. But instead of feeling a kind of calm relief, I find myself feeling nervous and distracted. I spend a lot of time just nervously flitting around from website to website, looking for distraction, rather than settling down to enjoy something I’ve missed these past weeks. I’m almost starting to think that I should have scheduled a week vacation right after my comps so that I could decompress completely. Then maybe going back to business as usual wouldn’t feel so damn unusual!