I forgot I was in paradise...

After the midterms rush, you find yourself... well, I find myself, in this state where it's a bit like when I first arrived here and keep looking around at all the scenery saying "Wow... pretty!"

There's a bit of a breather post-midterms. While I'm staying up in my classes, the course material doesn't seem as bad right now and the schedule isn't as horrible, I believe, in preparation for Sandblast and with the knowledge that since Unifieds were sufficient to get half the school to vegetate for a week, midterms instills pure laziness post-event.

In some senses, there's almost a sleepy atmosphere as people try and regain bits of their pre-midterm lives. Some people almost seem in a higher state of depression, independently of how they did in midterms, and others, like me, are still trying to get their heads back into NORMAL study hours. The burn out was tremendous.

So the few days since have seemed lazy island-like. If I had a hammock, I'd be swinging in it sipping coconut milk, though I'd probably have some Netter flashcards in front of me as an appeasement to the study gods. Unfortunately, I'd have to get my coconuts at upper campus, where I usually am right before class, and they won't let you have food in the lecture hall, including a coconut with a straw shoved in it, but I love that you can just pick them up three stories up from where I sleep. Ah, Caribbean life.

Monday, we had a histo lecture that I'd actually pre-studied for, and I was sitting in the front row, which made me feel all prepared and such.

Biochem, I think everyone hated except for me. I like DNA replication because I've studied it before and I'm a dork for molecular biology, plus Dr. C put up animations and I am *that* starved for television.

I keep having mixed feelings on the man. He kept smiling at the beginning of lecture, almost awkwardly in a perhaps projected "please like me" way, and I found myself really wanting to like the man. Other times, I feel like he hates our guts, so I'm conflicted. I'll go with trying for "like" though. Better uhh... I'll use "karma" for lack of a better word. Can you tell I feel oddly sedated?

My presence was requested (ie, I was invited) at De Big Fish again, this time with Randy, Kristin, Nina, David and a couple others, and where we couldn't get kicked out (hypothetically) by party coordinators. Did I go? Oh yes I did.

Another fun night, though unlike last time, service was lacking, all the tabs were mixed up, and a *polite* complaint by Kristin about removing the beer she didn't drink from her tab was met with some pretty damn extreme rudeness from the owner, I suppose, but I guess when your customers are transient year to year students stuck on a small island with few options, you can treat them like shit with impunity. Thanks, dude.

But we did run into Phil, Helen, and some of the others from the dive shop, who always seem to know when I'm being bad, as in Vodka/Red Bull bad, which I love because it's the speedballing of drinking. With a few winks and a hug, they were on their way. I love Dive Grenada. Anyhoo...

Back to campus... I was thinking about going to a Monday night party at Banana's but ended up having heavy innuendo laced funning with Randy, Nina, and David as we all blew off post-midterm steam. We decided to pick on Nina because she's ostensibly the second shortest, and I'm too self-deprecating to easily pick on, which means my diabolical strategy worked.

To bed to bed to morning to afternoon to be met with a REALLY good anatomy lecture by Dr. H. I'm not usually the guy's biggest fan, but today really felt like doctor training. I mean, anatomy is relevant to clinical practice anyway, but as he's talking about how *we're* going to use a speculum and the right method for inserting one, it crystallized the practice of it--that we're going to need to know how to do it without injuring the urethra.

That may be high on the squick factor for some of you, but like I said, it was kind of neat when I wasn't wincing at the uterine prolapse. Yai.

Then another lecture on the winding network of electrical cables that is the blood supply and innervation of the pelvis followed by a patient history clinical skills lecture that was extremely easy for me since I've already had the training, but was one of the more *potentially* useful clinical skills lectures I've been to (not that I've been to a lot of them) but it blew ethics away. I even got the differential diagnosis of the bat, because it 'seemed' right. Ectopic pregnancy in the house... or in the fallopian tube, to be precise.

And House! I got the last episode of House, and thank you to my helpers on here, and I did think it was awesome despite the fact that I don't like Dave Matthews. I did a little prestudy to maintain some work ethic, then worked out (and it felt alarmingly good after a week of next to nothing), and came back to my dorm to be industrious/studious and... watched Futurama instead. Penguins with shotguns are funny.

So to bed soon. I don't feel behind, but like I said, I just feel ahhhh, and like most of the rest of the student body, I feel like I am damn sure getting out of here for Easter (four days). The question is where... Curacao? Jamaica? Isla de Margarita? Guyana? Decisions decisions.