Sleepless on Study Leave

After just over two years of forgetting the existence of this blog, I have finally returned. It's so . . . orange!

I suppose I should get around to updating my profile page as well. I suppose I'm not technically an undergrad any longer. At least, now I am an undergrad again. An undergrad squared? At any rate, after graduating and framing my shiny new degree - all the better to gather dust with, my dear - Real Life terrified me so much that I fled back to the sanctuary of academia. I am now slogging my way through med school. Yes, it appears that I have a hitherto-unsuspected streak of masochism in me.

However, my habits have yet to mature alongside my aging. Even now, I have sunk to a new depth of boredom, rather than using my study leave for, you know, studying. I have created a twitter account, with a grand total of one tweet. Bloody hell, just typing out that banal word, 'tweet', chips away at my self-respect. 

I was mildly interested in the Twitter phenomenon when it started; it was the name - alongside many, many other things - that put me off. Now that I have turned my back on my principles and acquired an account, I must battle one of my great foes: my overwhelming tendency towards verbosity.

Conciseness, thou art a worthy adversary.

Lighten up, people!

"If only Africa had more mosquito nets, then every year we could save millions of mosquitoes from dying needlessly of Aids.” - Jimmy Carr


Offensive? Yes.
But so very, very funny,

Grrr.

Oh, God(s).

All morning people should be taken out and shot. At daybreak, just to drive in the hideousness of their perversion.

Microcosm

“There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.”
- Ian Hart

Oh, yes, much as I enjoy using the www as a platform to vent or chat or . . . whatever, I feel morally obliged to acknowledge that simply because one can write, does not mean that one should. For instance, I have personally been known to natter on ad infinitum, no, ad nauseam rather, on whatever floats into the cavity between my ears. Really, I wouldn't let me near a computer, if I were not me. Naturally, being myself, the argument is somewhat redundant, but you get the idea.

Having succumbed to the pressure of a thousand peers in high school (some years ago) and descended to the ranks of Facebook users, I need to actively weigh the pros and cons each time I steel myself to log in. On the one hand, I can read and respond to emails from friends I have little to no 'real' contact with otherwise. On the other, as soon as I glance at my Wall, I am treated to (I am looking at the damn thing right now) bull about how X 'luvs [Y] soooo much, snugglepoochies!', how M has farted at N's party, to the collective hilarity of all the guests and how G is asking friends to donate pets in the name of science. [All names have been changed to random initials, to prevent both unnecessary gossiping, and to preserve my safety from irate friends who know where I hide my chocolates.]

You see? You see?!

So, after I made a mental note to send an assassin after X, for being too disgustingly nauseating to be permitted to live, and sneak looks at the garlic chicken recipe Q has posted, while snorting at B's cruelly accurate characterizations of people we both know . . . It sucks you in!!!

This is what I mean! Even though 90 per cent of it is godawful shite, it's like a train wreck - no, actually, those are quite boring - it's like watching the autopsy of a particularly gruesome murder victim - horrific, but you can't take your eyes away.

Hmm. Or maybe that's just me.

In any case, there should be some minimum requirement of language, intelligence and interest that each would-be poster should possess, before being allowed to further defile the (highly) questionable integrity of the internet. Yes, I'll get right on that, just as soon as I find a way to make the taps in my apartment run chocolate - preferably milk chocolate fudge.

The lost art of the sestina

Tragedy is what it is, that so many people today appear not to even know what a sestina is, let alone recognise Auden's 'Paysage Moralise' as a sterling example. Par for the course is the reaction I got when I asked one of my friends for her opinion.

'Who the hell is Auden?'

Heresy! Sacrilege! Ready the bonfires, the racks, the Iron Maidens!
It is truly hideous that the above is a standard response in today's world. Not to know of Auden - the creator of such unimaginable beauty as 'If I could tell you', 'The Shield of Achilles' and 'Musee des beaux arts' - is akin to saying that one is unaware of the sublime aesthetic pleasure that words can bring. So much of the pretentious, yet dumbed-down, shite that's on bookshelves today is such utter rot that I wouldn't even use it as an alternative to toilet paper. People have learned to want a fast, action-packed story with little to no actual beauty in the words themselves.

However, I shall stop my 'meandering', as David Copperfield might put it, and return to the topic at hand: sestinas.
It is a strange predilection of today's reader that they are put off by structure in poetry, while something akin to verbal diarrhoea splattering all over the page is praised as being 'heartfelt' and 'unadulterated'. Well, if adulteration would result in something remotely aesthetically appealing and possessed of some meaning beyond 'Dude, I'm stoned - check out the pretty colours', I'm all for it.
Why is is that the rigid power of iambic pentameter is unappreciated, that the thrust of the trochee is looked down upon? Why is the exquisite detail and architecture of a sestina passed over as artificial and pretentious? Can they not see how much sheer talent it would take to compose a work of that style?

Clearly not.

Ah, well, at least this leaves more books in the library for me.

Hmm, really?

I attended the most intriguing little seminar the other day, the first of a series of colloquia at the place I'm studying.
To start with, I came prepared to make the obligatory single visit and run back to the lab at the first break. Imagine my surprise when the session was actually interesting! I was even able to recognize the first speaker! (Please note that this was due not to his celebrity - poor fellow - but to the fact that he was one of those friendly TAs for one of my courses last year.) I was most amused to find that his presentation style was heavily influenced by his teaching style - or was it the other way around? Somehow, I don't think the professor sitting at 'X position' found it equally entertaining. However, the topic he was discussing was rather impressive. How funny, to think that the nice, somewhat dopey-appearing guy who taught the tutorials was actually in the midst of rather impressive research. A filter to identify genes on islands of pathogenicity in any sample of bacteria would be quite cool, I believe. Once it exists . . .

The next fellow, while a charming presenter, was talking about something to do with trees and Bugs and rescuing the lumber industry. I'm afraid I zoned in and out of that one - it has to do with my aversion to Bugs, you see. While I am in full support of all things that eliminate the little bastards, the mere mention of them has the power to either send me running for the shower, clawing at my skin to remove the feeling of little phantom legs on me or to send me to the Happy Place in my head, where Bugs have never existed, I never have to step into the big, scary room with the blue ceiling, and 'there is lo-ots of cooooffeeeee all daaaaaayy'. Hmm. That was the worst adaptation of 'Home on the Range' ever.

It was the last speaker, though, that I found most thought-provoking. He had found, through fMRI scanning on seizure-prone rats using some contrast-creating technique I forget the name of, that there were more brain areas affected during seizures than we were previously aware of . Good stuff. I wonder if they'll be tweaking the anti-seizure meds to compensate.

I wonder . . . if I take anti-anti-seizure meds, to drastically increase brain activity (does such a thing exist?), will I get superpowers?

Things I have Stolen from the internet

(I couldn't resist - the character in the picture on the left is one of the most odious little twits on TV. That would be exactly the sort of thing he would say.)

Also, see below:
(This is what I find amusing when I am too tired to actually think.)
A cell walks into a bar and says to the barman “I’m really tired, do you have any energy for sale?”

The barman hands over a large glass of silvery energy which the cell promptly downs.

The cell passes the glass back and the barman says “That’ll be eighty pee please”