Category: Lamentations

The power of addiction

I have a problem.

I don’t sleep. I belay eating. I forgo important domestic and feline upkeep duties.

Instead, I stare fixedly as I impulsively watch episode after episode of the West Wing.

It’s starting to border on the ridiculous. It seems as though it is impossible to only watch one episode. As soon as one finishes I have to start the next one, until I have watched half a season in 2 days (while still managing to put in 10 hours work as well).
And the irritating thing is that with nothing else to do in Nambour, Simone is watching episodes even faster than I am, and so she is both ahead of me (which for reasons of general stupidity annoys my sense of competitiveness), and also keeps on buying new seasons, which means that this is only going to end when either I develop the will power to stop myself watching (and I think we all know that’s not likely to happen any time soon) or we reach the end of the series, in about 3 seasons time.

In the interim I don’t really need sleep do I…

Trial separation

After 14 months together we are having a trial separation.

Now before you all go getting startled, this is simply a stupid work thing.

Both being doctors on career paths, we knew and had discussed even before we got married the probability that at some point we would be sent to different places apart from one another for some period of time. It’s a sad reality, and it’s just a little irritating that it’s had to happen so soon.

Simone has finished her job doing paediatric surgery at the Mater, and is now set to spend the next 6 months doing general surgery at Nambour hospital, about 2 hours north of our house.
I’ve been scheming constantly for most of the last week, trying to figure out a last minute way out of it, since I frankly rather like having my girl around to come home to in the afternoons, do stuff with in the evenings, and snuggle with at night (and while Jack is admirably fluffy, friendly and cuddly, he isn’t quite up to the task of substitution).

It’s close enough that we can spend weekends together, and as it involves significantly less on call than the Paeds job did, we will hopefully be able to have good quality time on those weekends, but it still kinda sucks.

On weekdays however, since I no longer have a moderating female influence around, there will be frequent parties, poker nights and keg offs. Jack tells me he’s got a huge one in the works for wednesday already, and all his biker mates are coming, so if you don’t have other plans, drop in, bring some vodka, and don’t forget your pool cue for the inevitable end of party front lawn fight.

And when that’s done I’ve heard rumors about teddy organising jelly, handcuffs, and a limosine load of strippers – frankly I’m afraid to ask. Still, Jack and teddy do throw the most happening parties, so perhaps I shouldn’t question, and just go with the flow. 🙂

Joining the lads

I had my interview for surgical training, and although it probably didn’t go as badly as I currently feel that it did (if you must ask, ask me in a day or two when I’ve had time for some introspection and a few more glasses of whiskey), I did make something of an uncomfortable realisation while I sat in the waiting room: almost all the other applicants that I knew from medical school fell into what I would have called the “Lad” category. They were the guys who played rugby, drank beer, and in many instances if you didn’t know better you would suspect of dragging their knuckles on the ground.

Now the reason I find this disconcerting is that I wonder whether I fall into that category, only I just don’t realise it myself. Is that how other people view me? If they don’t see me that way now, will they begin to view me that way simply by guilt of association?

It’s all a little unnerving really.

Foolish things to do with cordial

A few weeks back I did something rather stupid.

I was drinking a glass of cordial and put it down on my desk as I was playing on my computer.

Jack being his usual rumbunctious self jumped up onto the desk, and started sniffing my cordial with a view to drinking it (he likes human drinks, but thankfully hasn’t figured out how to get into the grog cupboard yet).

Simone trying to be helpful shifted the drink closer to me so that I could stop Jack from drinking it, and somewhere in the subsequent confusion Jack moved, I reacted, and the cordial spilled onto my computer’s keyboard.

Now in the past I had heard stories about people drying their keyboards and continuing without any problems, but that didn’t seem to work.

Then I recalled some-one who swore that they had washed their keyboard and hung it out to dry, and had it back working the next day. Obviously they didn’t have a laptop keyboard, because that didn’t work either.

In the end I just had to bite the bullet and buy a replacement keyboard.

Turned out to be the most expensive cup of cordial I’ve ever had.

Anyway, for everyone’s amusement, here is a pretty picture of my keyboard in the bathroom sink. Kids, don’t try this without asking your parents first.

970

My dirty little secret

I think it is fair to say that I have always had a fairly strong aversion to four wheel drive vehicles, and so when Simone had a little accident in her Alfa and the insurance company gave her a Nissan X-Trail as a replacement car, I was a little uneasy.

I have always thought they were too big, too spectacularly environmentally unfreindly in their gas guzzling tendancies, and generally unnecessary (how many soccer mums with 4 wheel drives ever put them into 4 wheel drive mode?). Generally I maintained the view that the kinds of people who had them (in the city at least) were trying to compensate for something (kids, your parents will explain what I mean by this in about a decade..).

So when I was forced to drive one, I discovered that while my above assertions may not be inaccurate, they aren’t the whole story, and there may in fact be something to be said for (particularly recreational) four wheel drives, and those things can generally be summed up in one word: Features.
I loved the Fully electric chairs. I loved the sun roof (although it meant I had to wear my hat so I didn’t get a burned head). I loved the cruise control (it made the drive when we visited Simone’s parents on the Sunshine coast seem soooo easy..). I loved the wide angle side mirrors.

In short I rather enjoyed myself, and felt rather naughty and hipocritical about it all.

So I suppose all I have to do is find a “normal” car which has these features in it, and then I can go back to taking the moral high ground against all the people trying to intimidate me in their 4×4 polution-mobiles.

Unpleasant epiphany

I caught the train out to the airport the other day, at about end of school time in the afternoon, and came to a disconcerting realisation: There were high school students everywhere, and they were so small and young, and I could remember being that young myself, but now… oh crap, I’m probably twice their age. Stoopid adulthood sneaking up on me again.

One season in one day

Last weeks I continued my first pay year trend of recklessly impulse buying DVDs that catch my eye, and bought online the first season of a british drama that I had seen half an episode of on TV about a year ago.

And as with my previous impulse buys I have not regretted it at all.

Well almost not at all.

You see British TV being what it is, the episodes are really high quality, but you only get 6 episodes per season (as opposed to American TV where you get twenty-something episodes a season, but half of them are crap, and the other half vary between tolerable and possibly rewatchable).

As such the problem arises that when you sit down with a season on DVD you end up watching the entire season in one go (as I did yesterday), and then you lamenting the fact that you don’t have any more to watch.

….maybe I can import the next season or two from the UK..

Welcome to 10 hour days

I’ve started into my surgery rotation, and while I’m enjoying getting to get into theatre a lot and do a fair bit of hands on stuff, both in theatre and on the ward, I’m already a little sick of the fact that because of the way my team functions (or dysfunctions as the case may be) I am basically doing minimum 10 hours each day.

This is good for my credit card repayments, but bad for just about every other aspect of my life.

Stroke ignorance

All the TV coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hospitalisation after his stroke has been something of a depressing reminder of the general ignorance within the average population of health matters.
Journalists, politicians, and well-wishers alike have been commenting on his condition and recovery progress as though they expect him to be back leading the country in a few weeks or months.
What they seem blissfully clueless about is that people who have major bleeds into their brains (and Sharon has had at least two from what I can tell from the new reports) are generally lucky if they return to being able to tie their own shoelaces, let alone leading a country.
The statistics on stroke alone are depressing enough: 1/3 die in at the time of the stroke, 1/3 die within 1 month, and overall only 10% return to living at home.

What’s so bad about torture?

In what is becoming an depressingly common manifestation of both general populational ignorance and an infuriating tendancy by many people to unquestioningly accept as gopsel whatever tripe the government spouts I had to listen this morning to a generally well respected morning television show host ask a question to the effect of “But these are terrorist we’re talking about here. What’s so bad about torturing them?”

I can’t understand how people are unable to work through in their heads the following train of thought:

1. Terrorists are bad (because they seek to deny people life, liberty and freedom without the foundation of laws, or recourse to a legitimately appointed judicial system to argue their case(s).)
2. We are good (because we base our actions upon universal laws and protection of human rights)
3. If terrorists do bad things we arrest and imprison them, both to protect ourselves, and to illustrate that we have retained both our moral superiority and the moral justification for our actions by:

a) Allowing the terrorists to defend themselves in open court against defined charges under defined laws
b) Finding them guilty of a those defined crime based on evidence and due process
c) Imprisoning them in a way that punishes them while still protecting their human rights (which, by their nature, every human retains regardless of innocence or guilt).

4. When we act this way we also protect those who are genuinely innocent, those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or those who the government may choose to label terrorists simply because it does not like them (eg. Political opponents, common criminals, racial or religious groups).

As such, if we fail to do any of the above (for example by torturing them to confess to a crime, or by torturing them as part of their eventual punishment) then we become no better than the terrorists, and cannot claim that we are justified in our outrage at their “terrorist” acts, or in our reactions to those acts.

We also leave ourselves open to having the terrorists say “such and such a nation summarily kills and tortures us, so we are quite reasonably justified in defending ourselves by summarily killing and torturing them back…”, which is what is happening to America at the moment because they refuse to conduct either their interrogations or their military tribunal trials in an open and fair fashion. They may not actually be doing anything wrong, but their unwillingness to be open makes it look very suspiciously as though they have something to hide.