Category: Lamentations

Well I’m definitely getting into exam mode. This means that I am not able to concentrate for more than 5 minutes at a time, I am not leaving the house all day, and I am eating relatively horrendously. If only I were one of those people who could procrastinate by going to the gym…

As it is I can already feel the exam period fattening up starting. Ick.

I was poking around looking at Queensland astronomy sites this afternoon, and found this sad sad sight.

It really is foolish when legal fears curtail such benign activities as amateur astronomy….

Today we had the day off, thanks to the Exhibition show day holiday.

This coincided nicely with one of my old friends from my college days being back in town from her PhD in Scotland, and so we decided to catch up for a bit of coffee.

A few of her other friends came along too, and what had started as a cup of coffee became three hours of exhuberant chin wagging.

When we finished up there Simone and I wandered up the road to a non-mainstream book store, where I browsed books about alternative history, environmentally sound house design, art history and… well you get the idea.

Upon arriving home I realised that for the first time in weeks I had not been thinking about my exams and instead was raving about the exciting things I’d read, the discussions I’d had, and the ideas that both of these had spawned in my head. In summary I was buzzing and I felt vibrant and alive.

The sad realisation that accompanied this however was that thanks to the self-imposted limitations that my studies had placed on my life this was what I was missing out on while I was stitting at home and studying, and worse than feeling depressed, simply feeling nothing at all.

I hope that once the exams are over I will find myself with more opportunities like this to feel vibrant again.

I don’t know how much I could stand travelling through life feeling nothing at all…

As I have commented on and whinged about before, I find myself yearning for more from life. I keen for more adventure. I desire to be more significant. I loathe the notion of dying as nothing more than a piece of unnecessary punctuation buried unread within the tomes of history. I want to be a tome (or at least a paragraph).

I watch TV, I read books, I play games, I see movies, and they always leave me wanting to take up swords, or guns, or fists, or armies, and fight the valiant fight, right the myriad injustices, and make of myself a leader and a hero. More than just a man.

At this point it is interesting to note that while my mind rales against my mediocrity, my mundanity, and my lifes predictable sustainability, my brain points out that the very uneventfulness of my life has seen me already outlast the average life expectancy of humans only a few hundred years ago, and sees me in good health, with food on the plate, a house to live in, and all the commodities and conveniences that a stable, structured (and inherently boring-enough-to-make-you-cry) society affords.

(But sometimes that predictability and convenience really is quite spectacularly depressing)

Today I went to grand rounds at my hospital (for non-med types Grand rounds is basically a journal club / research presentation meeting), and despite Queensland Health’s aim of improving the health of Queenslanders, they appeared to be trying pretty hard to do the exact opposite to their staff. The lunch which was put on was largely deep fried: Spring rolls, Curry puffs, dim sims, etc. , although I suppose the orange juice was quite healthy.

Of course as an impoverished student (Oh, woe is me :-)) I could not resist the draw of free food. But if your doctor drops dead from a heart attack from having his or her arteries clogged by fatty foods, we may now know why…

Having long been a part of the whinging generation of New Zealand youth who believed that student loans would do more harm than good to the country by driving young graduates overseas in order to pay back their loans, I saw an article on stuff today which unfortunately added to the mounting piles of evidence that suggests we were right all along.

Not only are doctors (with their average loan of NZ$68,000), dentists and other with a fairly high earning potential leaving NZ in order to repay their huge loans, it also seems that prefessions with more modest earning potentials such as teachers are also leaving to repay their student loans, which for teachers average NZ$23,000.

The sad thing is that not only are the repayments driving NZ’s best and brightest overseas, it is also depriving NZ of skilled workers in areas that are already experiencing critical staffing shortages such as health and education.

Woke up this morning to find it grey and raining outside (on our washing too… Grrr). Cool, I thought, I can wear my jacket, but It became readily apparent that actually I probably couldn’t, because while it was wet, it wasn’t cold, and if I were to step outside in my “I’ll need this big goretex jacket in Queensland because it’s wet there” jacket (I may have been extensively mis-informed about Queensland when I made that particular purchase before arriving for med) I would stay dry from the rain but become saturated from perspiration pretty quickly. I miss the good old days of New Zealand cold and wet (sometimes…).

I have been having a few issues with my trousers. It all began when I went home for christmas, discovered a chocolate factory down the road from the beach house, and reduced my incidental (and intentional) exercise levels to something which may have at several point become a negative figure, and resided pretty close to zero much of the rest of the time…

As such I arrived back in Oz in January feeling dicidedly blimpish (and looking it too). It was at that point that I discovered that most dreaded of fashion problems: my regular trousers, several pairs of which formed the basis of my hospital dress, no longer fitted. Too tight around the waist you see. Luckily I could squeeze into one pair (don’t try and imagine it, you’ll just hurt yourself), and found a second pair of more seldom used but still respectable trousers that I could wear as well. Problem solved I thought, and challenge set: Loose some kilos!

As such I started to try (with highly variable degrees of success) to control my dietary energy intake, and to increase my daily energy expenditure by going on semi-epic bike rides, and later just riding to and from the hospital each day. And just as the theory suggested, I started to slim down a little (no record setting losses here, but enough to make me feel better and a little more comfortable in myself), but I soon discovered that my pants were once again causing me troubling. Not at the waist level this time, but rather at the thighs, which all my cycling had clearly caused to bulk up somewhat, and which had subsequently started to make the legs on my pants seem awfully snug. Now if I was a hot little latin dancer (named Julio, for argument’s sake…) pants that were tight across the thighs and (to a lesser extent) bum would not represent a problem, but I don’t find tight pants comfortable, and I don’t think my arse is much worth looking at, so seeing as I quite like the slowly shrinking nature of my puku (tummy for the non NZers out there) this time I may have to cave and buy some new pants.

What a fiasco, and all because of chocolate and a bicycle.