Ugh, no mas

Man oh MAN am I burned out! I've been on the island less than a year and I find myself running after airplanes screaming "take me with you!!!!"

The latent stress seems to be finding this sort of stomach-pit apathy where part of me is working my gosh darned hardest to be the best overall medical student I can be, so I can be on all the "Become a doctor" commercial giving a toothy grin and a big thumbs up, but most of me is like "Just let me get the 57% I need to pass these classes so I can get out of this term and set my notes on fire."

And we won't even talk about physio. What physio? Hence my policy of only putting my best effort into my first exam, no matter what it is, and then merely hoping to ride through the second. Plus, I spent so long doing respiratory physiology and understood so little of it, that I finally abandoned panic and settled into a state of "if it's gonna be that hard, screw it; I'm never going to understand it". Tres healthy, no?

So instead, all I can think is that next Tuesday I'll be on a plane to see snow, family, and a blissful but brief period where I don't have to study or feel guilty about not studying.

This term's been a rough one for almost everyone, as the spike of incidences on the crime reports would suggest. A fight in the library? Geeze!

I'm also beginning to be able to differentiate people by term. The first termers still seem a bit wide-eyed at the island/school itself, and their stress seems to be a lot more acute, like a slightly less pathological version of what I was last term, but still a very hyper anxiety.

My fellow second termers seem to be in a wide, glassy, humorless fog of underlying depression and anxiety with a grim determination to just get this term over with. At least that's the emotion I'm projecting onto them. I've met a couple people that are like "I like this term so much more than last one", but not most of them. About half, like me, rarely leave their apartments, including to go to lecture, and instead sit watching Sonic Foundry, occasionally cursing. Island stuff has gotten far more normalized (like no longer looking up when you here a reggae bus burn off its tires on the roundabouts), but may still be distracted by larger things. They trade ideas on professions to pursue when they fail out of medical school. Mine is "Alaskan crab fisherman(woman)".

Fourth termers seem to have a more stressed second term vibe, but it seems to be overlaid with a sort of 'coping' humor of "wow, I thought things couldn't possibly get worse, but now it's fourth term." A lot of them seem to smoke. Or started smoking. Or are trying to kill themselves in an incredibly passive aggressive way. Generally unphased by everything on the island, possibly because they don't notice with their heads buried in the Robbins book.

Sixth termers seem in half disgust with the island, remain unphased by everything, but may "fsst!" cows out of their ways and into the streets because why go around the thing. They seem to primarily be focused on getting the stuff they've collected over the last two years out of their apartments and marking days off on their "DAYS UNTIL I LEAVE THE ROCK" countdown.

Back to muscle spindles. They're about as fascinating as they sound.