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Well exams are over and now I am departing into the great unknowns of Africa. Of course it’s not entirely unknown, but I am operating on a pretty limited quantity of information, and it will be interesting to see the extent to which information and reality match up, and what stuff simply falls completely outside both my pre-departure advice and my scope of personal life experience up until now. No doubt the trip will spawn a plethora (I really do love that word) of additional blog entries, so stay tuned…

Well providing I pass, I have just finished my last exam for medicine (touch wood). I had initially intended for this to be entitled “Finé”, as in “Complete” but (initially at least) I couldn’t find the fancy é thing. It occurred to me however that the title worked just as well without the accentuation, becuase with the weight of exams off my shoulders the universe certainly feels mighty fine as well!

It’s a pathetic sign of the times when I head a radio competition today were you could win petrol vouchers. I mean people were getting quite significantly excited about the prospect of winning petrol whose total value was probably only about $100. It frankly seemed bloody pathetic.

It has been rather cynically amusing watching all the dumber and more reactionary members of the public respond to the rising cost of petrol. They almost universally behave as though cheap petrol is an inalienable human right, rather than something that is controlled by the markets under the control of simple supply/demand economics.

They don’t seem to understand that oil is a finite resource, and that we have been lucky to have petrol as cheap as we have had it for so long (most Europeans pay about double what we do in Australia, and have done so for years). They also don’t seem to understand that this is not something that the government can (or even should) intervene with to alter prices.

They also clearly don’t have a clue as to what the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) actually does (which is to prevent price fixing, insider trading, or other anti-competitive corporate behaviors), or that just because prices are rising it does not by default mean that the petrol companies are colluding or price gouging.

I really wonder what they will do when significant supply side restrictions (ie. when oil fields start running dry, and prospecting stops finding new fields) start affecting oil prices…

It would appear that I am finally at the pivotal turning point in the much grumbled about time-money disequilibrium.

I have a job offer from Logan, and so I am about to transition from having a fair ammount of discretionary time (between lectures etc) and relatively little discretionary money, to having income, but comparatively little time in which to enjoy spending it. In the interim I seem to be adopting something a a foolish halfway mindset whereby I am spending far more money in a discretionary fashion than I traditionally have, and certainly more than I probably should, while still living the low income low cares high galavanting lifestyle.

I am not really looking forward to when this situation comes to a rather abrupt end, at the hands of undeniable and inescapable fiscal realities.

For an engagement present we got these great new knives (whose praises I have sung previously), and today, while doing some post exam procrastinative/rewardative shopping I wandered through Myer (where the knives came from) and went looking for an additional knife to fill the one gap I percieve in the set’s capabilities.

As I was doing it I realised what an amusingly mature and adult activity it was that I was enjoying shopping for kitchen implements. Whatever happened to the foolish and hedonistic days of my youth? 🙂

For almost my entire life so far I have operated on relatively limited finances (I have had enough to live quite comfortably by general standards, but never enough to do many of the things I would have liked to have done) and so have been forced into a mindset of very stringent fiscal rationalism, a self imposed reality that at many times I have found myself violently resenting.

With the end of exams looming I have taken to rewarding myself for my study efforts by buying a present for myself after each exam (a CD or a book or some such thing).

I think that my actions represent something of a fiscal kneejerk reaction against the feelings that I was investing so much time, money and effort in my education to better myself and ultimately my society, but that I was recieving little in the way of encouragement, support or reward from government, faculty or family/friends/associates for my percieved scarifices. Now this is of course a quite selfish feeling, but none-the-less this was how I often felt, and when you consider that I get less support from the government and society as a medical student than I would if I were unemployed, it is perhaps not an entirely unjustified reaction on my part.

Of course it is going to be very bad next year when I am in a position to properly react against the years of consumer repression and buy (within reason) pretty much anything that I want.

I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere I became “the man”. I had always tried to maintain some vicarious association with the hedonistic days of my teenagehood (OK, so those of you who knew me then are busy laughing right now….) but this seems to have finally failed.

I went off to med school, and (despite the drunken excesses associated with that) somewhere along the line my youthfullness slipped, to the point yesterday where I was in a shop and a little kid was running around, and his mother looked at me, then turned to the kid and said “Look out for the man”.

Gutting

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.

News just came in that Simone got onto the advanced surgical training program. Yay. Of course this does mean that whatever else happens, I am going to be married to a surgeon….

Now we just have to wait and see where she gets posted to next year, and hope that it’s vaguely close to Logan where I will be all year.