OMG … mouth to beak resuscitation?!
“I breathed into its beak, and its dadgum eyes popped open,” Morris said. “I breathed into its beak again, and its eyes popped open again. I said, ‘I think this chicken’s alive now. Keep it warm.”‘
Dadgum, my stomach hurts from laughing!
I posted before about not having any “oomph” in my studies, and unfortunately, that still holds true. I need some major intervention here. I have a Histology midterm on Tuesday, and I’m barely halfway done with real studying for it. Sure, I’ve read all the chapters, but at a level of superficial glossing that allows me not to be totally lost in class, not snap-crackle-pop-ready with answers for any given moment. Of course, too often the bar I have for success is perfection; anything less is some degree of failure. That’s already a problem I need to work on, since I will never reach anything close to that. Do I force myself to memorize all 12 kinds of collagen, where they’re found, etc? Of course not, but I do expect to know and be prepared to answer all the basic things that I think are reasonably testable.
Niels has an interesting post on student performance. To share a story at my school, we get our pick of which community clinics we want based on GPA. Fine. I wasn’t sure how it’d be done, but I certainly didn’t expect to be in an auditorium with my entire class being called in order of GPA in front of everyone. That sucked. I’m not speaking from a sour grapes POV because I was easily in the top 10% of my class, but the whole exercise was unnecessary and fostered the very attitude that I detested with premeds before I was serious about coming to med school. I hated premeds with a passion…my being a “slacker” biophysics researcher aiming for a PhD, I looked upon such hypercompetitive students with disdain. I’m actually not a competitive person by nature. I’m content to wish someone well in their success (although perhaps with a tinge of understandable jealousy if it hits close to home) and not try to outdo them. However, when placed in an environment where I know I’m being watched, graded, scrutinized–I become competitive, aware of my place among others, etc. where before I didn’t care. I’m not talking backstabbing, sabotaging fellow collegues/classmates here; it’s just obvious how the shift in energy and awareness happens once “the spotlight is on,” so to speak. I don’t like it.
It’s even more frustrating to have that externally stimulated competitive drive clash with your own slackish-ness. It feels like having your foot on the brake and the gas at the same time. I don’t have to excel with an ‘A’ average to be an excellent doctor, nor do I think that because of that fact, I don’t need to excel. I strive to be more true to what I want and need, less caring of what others expect of me or are wondering about me. As long as I keep moving forward with every passed test, every objective learned, whether things were “mastered” or whether I kicked ass and took names should be irrelevant. Tell that to my school so we can just be.
We were in the middle of our Public Health class (taught by US profs) in a Maternal/Child Health lecture when a classmate of mine emailed me this picture:
I about died laughing… It’s not all that recent, so apologies if you’ve seen it. It was too sad funny not to post.