Know what's cornier? Your cornea

Megs:

That's actually a very good idea!

I think I've been spinning in the opposite direction since last year ended. I've basically been coming home and flopping on the couch reading a novel or playing with my sister's NDS. And then watching Spongebob. And then finding some other reason to not study. Which is such a bad thing to do! These are high school habits that I've reverted to! (Looking back, it's no wonder I did so shoddily in Level 3 Calculus.)

But it's only because the papers haven't been insanely intense. The "jump up" from last year has just been a little step up. It's making me lazy!

Part I of BOptom goes like this:

• OPTOM171A Visual Science: Structure and Function of the eye. Really as the long name suggests. Just going looking at different parts of the eye in great detail, like the cornier cornea, sclera, eyelid, lens, etc etc etc. It's kind of bizarre how much time one can spend learning about a part of your body that's so puny that you could lose it if you put a pin on it (ha!!! Yay puns!). Today we looked at the Aqueous Humour. There was no humour involved at all (sorry!). I guess I like the content, it's just that the lectures are really tedious.

• OPTOM161 Optics of Lenses and Lens Systems. This is the physicsy paper! It's been really really straightforward so far. I guess I've always found Light and Waves of physics more enjoyable than any other part for some reason. Possibly because ray pathways are easy to visualise, and also the maths involved is very simple. This paper takes me back to Form 3 Science concepts, and Form 5 Physics equations. Snell's Law anyone?
  

Ha it's kind of funny how these papers are OPTOM1xx. When Renee and I were wandering around Grafton we went into an elevator full of third year Optom students who looked at us and said, "Oh... First years." I was quick to reply, "Actually we're Part II!" And then they said, "No, you're Part I. We're Part II. You guys are still first years to us!" Ha. I felt like a noob.

But yes, they were indeed Part II students. It was a very humbling experience. :P

• MEDSCI203 Mechanisms of Disease.Not like Medsci142 last year; this paper's been looking at microscopic ways we cope with pathogens. It's really all about how cells and bacteria fight each other, with all these rules and stuff. It's a bit like Lord of the Rings.
  

• STATS101G Statistics. Super easy; the concepts are all just common sense and all of the questions in the tests and exam will be multi-choice questions. Today we looked at Normal Distributions. We don't even have to calculate the areas under the graph like we did in Form 6, apparently Excel does all that for us.
  

So yes, that is a summary of what I'm doing with my life this semester. It's nowhere near as hardout as yours. I'm turning into a slacker.

AYO isn't much of a big commitment, especially right now. The programme's been divided into different pieces and I'm only playing in one of them. So it's about 45 minutes of rehearsing every week. Concert tomorrow at the town hall.

The animals are probably good. Haven't been out to the backyard in a bit. Nobody tidies it and it's such a mess that I'm getting tired of going. I think Leo's bored to be honest. Still loves his towels. We're not leaving food for him overnight because he craps everywhere inside at night, so now he gets dinner at lunchtime so he does his business outside in the afternoon.

Rah.

Linctuses and aromatics

Wil:

Greetings from the land of Otago!

Wow. Yes, I haven't posted in a very long time. I've been a very busy pharmer. I'm not entirely sure if anyone in the whole course takes studying as seriously as I do. People seem to have difficulty understanding the concept that some people like to study every day. Hmm possibly not to my extent..

Anyway, short recap of my papers and what we are currently studying in them. You should do the same, Megs! :

• PHCY251 (physiology): At the moment we're recapping the nervous system. This whole paper will be recapping everything we did in HUBS191 AND HUBS192 which is why i'm finding this incredibly boring and time consuming. Anterolateral pathway!
  
  
• PHCY231 (biochemistry): I'm rather enjoying biochemistry at the moment! We're covering nitrogen metabolism. I really like how terms like 'oxaloacetate' and 'alpha-ketoglutarate' just roll off the tongue.
  
  
• PHCY254 (physical pharmacy A): Last time we talked about Colligative Properties of solutions (which we talked about earlier :P), and how we're doing studying weak electrolytes. I really do not enjoy weak acids and bases. They always somehow manage to expand this seemingly straightforward and definite topic into something rather convoluted.
  In todays lab we played with various solvents like octan-1-ol. My lab coat still has a lingering smell...
  
  
• PHCY256 (biopharmaceutical chemistry): Don't let its name fool you. It's only really organic chemistry and then some. We finished stereochemistry and are now learning about acid-base chemistry. People sure like to come up with some crazy theories about very little things that we can't see... >.>
  
  
• PHCY263 (principles of pharmacy practice): Our group presentation is coming along nicely. We have to present a scientific paper about a psychology study done with children. It shows how people (in general) adapt their speech style depending on their conversational partner. For example, a male might speak to another male in one way, but differently to a female. It also covers how females tend to converse in order to maintain relationships, using language features such as compliments and mitigated questions. Boys, however, use speech to assert dominance. They tend to use more threats, insults, expressions of opinion, and direct commands.
  In lectures, we're just getting talks about "good communicatoin", being active listeners and learning to shape well-rounded questions to optimise response information. It's rather boring really. Who doesn't know how to communicate properly when required?
  Ooh, in our next Dispensing lab we get to make a linctus. A linctus is also known as 'cough syrup'. The active ingredient will be codeine phosphate!
  

Yup, so that's me.

It is getting very cold here. You can definitely tell that the wind coming up as been by the Antarctic. The air gets real chilled down and on your walk to lecture your face goes numb.
Note to self: Don't live so far away next year...

I really hope your 'good luck' points go up within the next few days. It would suck if your streak of "bad luck" continued. As I said, it's probably just a transient glitch in the cosmos. Maybe mercury is in retrograde...

How is AYO going? I could never be committed to something so big like that while at uni. Again, maybe it has something to do with the amount of study I do... *priorities*

How is your rabbit? How is he enjoying roaming the jungle that is your backyard everyday? How is your mysterious little fish pond that you have out back?

I really should get to bed now and stop with this frivelocity. I'm going to be too tired again tomorrow. I have 5 lectures in a row again and they're all in different places. Going to be doing a bit of running.

I'll chat with you later!


Mission Complete!

Yay official usernames / Day of Bad Luck

Megs:

Ha about time; I finally bothered to look for the setting on Blogger where you enable other authors to post in the blog. So yay! Now my posts will actually be credited to me, as megniscus, and Wil's posts will be under his username which will be whatever he decides on later. It just feels more formal that way :D

-

awelifgakwuefawfe

Today has been a day of such exceptionally bad luck!

I honestly feel like the universe just surprised me by showing me the hard way how bad a day can be, but obviously when you remove the extreme cases of natural disasters or road traffic injuries or like suddenly finding out you urgently need an organ donor but there's a year long waiting list. Anyway it's been such an amazing day crap-wise that I have to put this down.

This morning I received a text from Tim saying he'll be in uni at 9am, and since I'm selling my text books to him I said that 9am was perfect for me - I figured I would have an extra hour to walk to Grafton after I gave him the book. Strike 1.

7.50am: Imagine leaving the house on time and thinking YAY I'm in time for the bus for once, then getting to the bus stop and realizing you've left your ID card and your Grafton access card behind. These used to be kept in my wallet but are now attached to the convenient pulley you can hang on your pants. Convenient my ass. Strike 2!

7.55am: So I go home to get those, but I know I've missed the bus. I attempt to sit down on a chair but knock it over. (FML moment)

I manage to get a lift to Sunnynook again but guess what, the bus that requires least walking to the campus (Bus #881) after you get off is delayed.

At this time I also realize that my cell phone has only a half-charged battery. Why? Why? I charged it last night!

I see the 900X come and go. I could catch this bus, but go against catching this bus because it requires some walking to the campus. I didn't know it yet, but strike 3.

8.31am: The 881 gets to the bus stop, only it isn't a bus, it's like tin of sardines, except not with sardines, but people. It was similar to something you would see if you were trying to board a train in Japan (I find it quite funny how the station staff have to push the people in so the doors can shut). I'm pretty certain it's the biggest crammage that's happened to students so far this year.

BUT ANYWAY they couldn't let any more people on the bus so I quickly took the Northern Express.

On the bus I'm thinking, "I should have known that today I would end up catching the bus that requires the longest walking distance to City Campus...!"

9am-ish: The bus does its thing and is nearing Britomart station when I get a text from Renee saying, "Where are you? Is our lab going to be in the Anatomy Museum today?"

... at which point the word FUCK runs through my mind with the lovely dawning of realization that the lab starts at 9, NOT at 10am like all the Grafton labs were last year.

9.08am: I decide against running up to the City campus and risking winding myself (which takes 12 minutes if I sprint up the massive hill). Plus anyway, running to Grafton from City campus would take another 20 minutes. It'd make me roughly 30 minutes late to lab. I wait for the Link bus, which comes, and I figured it would get me to the hospital in roughly 15-20 minutes. Strike 4.

9.09-9.45am: The bus takes me on this big useless loop through Ponsonby. It gets to City campus.
Now I realize that I should have sprinted up the hill (12 minutes) and caught the Link bus from the city to Grafton (3-ish minutes without traffic).

9.55am: The bus stops by the Hospital, where I was due an hour ago.
(PS, your text about telling me to think about waking up an hour earlier? Funny's older cousin, but not Funny. But it's okay, I can appreciate the irony now. :P)

Woo! I'd never been this late to a lab session.

-

But today wasn't only a day of bad luck for me it seemed - this one girl came running up to the Link bus because she had to go to the City campus, but she was 20c short of the bus fare. And even though I gave her 20c she missed the Link (and 15 minutes of her next lecture) anyway.

-

So I was meant to go practise driving today, but I told my mother I should stay at home because with my luck/smarty-points for the day, strike 5 would probably involve me hitting a Rolls Royce or a small child on the road. So I stayed in.

Rotten cherry on top? Just now after finishing watching Spongebob, I pointed the remote at the TV to turn it off and walked into the arm of the sofa. I was carrying my friend's novel in my other hand and managed to squish the front cover in half and the first couple of pages. Strike 5.

Call me superstitious, but I think I was right not to go driving.

**

Silver lining - the lab demonstrator wasn't pissed, she just asked me with an amused expression where I lived. Also, since today was the first lab I'd only missed out on all that Introductory-mumbo jumbo. Still probably learnt more bones of the skull than heaps of other people in my class today, who just scribbled down the names of everything and pretended to be finished so they could wander around the museum. But I don't blame them.

The Anatomy Museum is beautiful, by the way. I don't have photos and I don't think we're allowed cameras, sorry :P You can have this link instead.

http://www.medicalresearch.co.nz/

I'm not sure the extent to which we're disallowed from describing the things that are on display (because it is human tissue, and because Med students have to treat cadaver-dissection as a sensitive subject, and because I missed the Intro), but I will say that gallbladder stones look as if you could push them on Crystal Mountain and get a decent price for them. :D

At least I made new mates in Optom today...yay!

Sigh. So that's my day. It was kind of entertaining in a very bizarrely crap way.

PS. Still have to find out why cell phone wasn't charged. But I looked in my room after I got home and the other end of the charger wasn't plugged in. Someone had removed it!!

PSS. Also, I didn't find Tim because I was in Ponsonby, so I'd uselessly lugged a fat textbook around town for the day.

Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring

Megs:
Banana phone! It's a song. I like it. :D



I made a phone call today!

A brief explanation for those who don't know, and which you don't have to read, before I get to the mundane thing I did today:

If I have a weakness, it's falling over my own tongue when I have to make a phone call.

It ONLY happens when it's me who's making the phone call (I have no problem picking up), and when the subject matter is the arrangement of some important business, as opposed to chatting.

It's a bit annoying. I have to leave the room so I'm alone when I call. And when I get through I stumble and forget what to say. So I write things down in the order I want to say them and read off the piece of paper when I'm talking.

Forget about leaving a message via Voicemail. Generally, I just hang up when the recorded message about "please leave a message" starts playing.

Apparently it's called telephobia! It's silly and irrational but I'm getting over it gradually.

-end explanation-

So today I had to arrange for City Mission to come to my house to pick up clothes. For those who don't know, the Auckland City Mission clothes the homeless (they came last Tuesday but picked up nothing because I hadn't sorted out the clothes yet. This is because Marianne arranged everything with them and either she forgot to tell me, or she told me and I forgot about it altogether. I really really think it's the first and not the latter, but the fact that I don't remember her telling me makes a pretty flimsy argument. LOL).

Which means I had to make a phone call. And since I'm trying to go through this whole second puberty thing (reference to previous blog post) I decided I would start using the phone without having to rely on a script. And wouldn't you know it, they put me on voicemail.

So I organised in my head the 4 points I would say to them:

1. Hi, I would like to donate some clothes

2. My address is... (I nearly put that in but then realised that strange pedos lurk on the internet and it would be unsafe especially since I'm going through 2nd puberty.)

3. I would like to apologise for the mix-up last week when you came to my house but there was nothing to pick up

4. If you need to contact me my phone numbers are ###-####

So I said all of that, and I was pretty pleased with it, except I remembered afterward that I hadn't left my name.

Sigh.

I guess it's better than saying "Amen" at the end. I know someone's done it in their hurry to finish talking.

*

Other interesting things of the day:

-My bus whacking into another bus this morning
-Finding out I was on the wrong campus for the library book I wanted
-Fire alarm going off in Grafton campus
-Hanging with buddies who are now in Med
-Learning the names of the muscles surrounding the femur with Olive (More on this later!)
-Going for a drive for the first time in 7 months

Yay!

Blah, I haven't done my hour long practice for viola today! awefhalwebiuafwe Must do now.

Things I've been putting off

Megs:

So I've figured that I have four years to get my act together and go out and go wild while I still can, before Med school calls me back and I go back once again to a period of intense study and then becoming Tony Ryall's [the Health Minister's] bitch (fantastic quote from our university magazine Craccum, ha!) :D

Sooo - below's a list of things I've been putting off, plus things I'd like to do in this time of, hopefully, intense growth. Just think of it as a second puberty, or something.

- Sit and pass Grade 5 Theory of Music

- Actually get good at viola; I think I owe it to more than just myself. Practiiiise!

- Sit and pass my Restricted (and then Full) driver's license

- Get work experience by joining a particular marketing firm -> I'm very interested in the change I'd see in myself if I worked for this lot; from getting big companies to support charities such as Save The Children, to door-to-door knocking

- Travel. Keen about the idea of going to India; visiting monasteries and holy landmarks, getting to grips with seeing the more chaotic, livelier, harsher aspects of the world and how people live. Plus all-you-can-eat butter chicken curry for the equivalent of NZ 80c? I'm there!

- Learn to cook. I admire people who can cook!

- Get fit. Go for runs? Walks on the beach? Hmmm. Not an easy one. :P


Might add more later.

Got to catch up with Olive today!! Went to visit her and her new apartment and she showed me all the shinanigans she's been up to, and wandered the Hall of Residence and just hung out for two hours :D <333 Yay! xoxo

PS. Happy Birthday Nawar, you're awesome and here's to another fantastic year, buddy :D

Quarterlife crisis

Megs:

aewhawelifawelfkbaewkb

Random rant addressed to nobody and which I don't really expect anyone to read (which is just as well.)

Nowhere to start, really. Sometimes, I think that I'm over the fact that I would have been the very next person to be accepted into the medical progamme. (Or, since there were two left on the waitlist, at the most the next next person.) It's okay; I know how close I was, so I made it to somewhere.

These days, I'm finding something odd, and intriguing. I've never ever really missed people - when people go away I'm never too bothered because I know I'll see them again, and I get on with my life. As a general rule, my holidays are okay with or without meeting up with others, though of course I prefer the former.

So I'm not sure why, now after university's started, I miss everyone. Maybe it's because we've all come back and it's now how I pictured second year to be.

I miss Olive, who's in Med and so now we can't run crazily to the next lecture or cram/stress for the same things together anymore; I miss Marianne, who's going to Sydney for an indefinite while, and leaving behind - for the time being - her dreams which are similar to mine; I think I miss Wil (:P haha), though since we're texting everyday it makes it a bit better. I miss the older students who offered so much help and advice; I miss those who've left AYO; I miss those who have gone off to do Biomed and Pharmacy and heavens know what else, and I miss the faces of those who I met and said hi to last year but won't get to know.

What I'm missing is everyone, now that we've gone our separate ways.

I'm not warming up to the people in my class this year all that much, although that's more my problem than the actual people. I'm sure they're lovely, but I just haven't felt so much like I can't relate to a group of people in such a long time.

It's a little awkward, and very bizzare, how the thing I'm happiest about in life at the moment is Statistics.

Just going to go off and listen to Littlest Things for now.