Full Circle – End of Week 7 – 30-31st December 2013

On the eve of the New Year, I sat on top of a mountain overlooking my city, witnessing the fireworks display.

Though I felt I should have thought of something profound, that I should have expressed some sort of meaningful sentiment, that I should have reflected on the year just past in the most serious way possible, nothing came up. In previous years, I would romanticize the recent past, portraying the previous 12 moths as some kind of noble, heroic struggle of growth and achievement.

But I couldn’t. I knew there was nothing to be said, that this arbitrary change of year had little personal significance, that the change in the course of my life was to be found not in the resolutions made at the stroke of midnight, but rather the countless ‘forgotten and uneventful’ days throughout the year. As I heard the music raging around the bay below, while I gazed across the vast expanse of bright and flashing lights signalling raucous celebrations, I felt no envy or melancholy. I did not want to be down there with them. I simply wished to retreat to bed, and rest in preparation for a day that would be spent in a way practically indistinguishable from hundreds to come.

One day, I might return to this city, to these lights, this music, this mountain; one day I might return to join the others down in the bay.

PhysDev – Log – #1 – 28th December 2013

With my gym membership finalised and my diet/sleeping patterns becoming more stable, weightlifting has become an exceedingly joyous activity.

Currently, I’m easing into the training, slowly working up from three days a week to six. I have to be very careful with how I approach the structure of each workout. Right now,I’m taking it easy to avoid burnout. The program is as follows, with exercises in brackets being those that are still being phased in.

Music: Serenity

Resensitization – End of Week 6 – 23rd December 2013

It’s finally starting to pay off.

The potency of my previous pitfalls has begun to decrease. It feels like I’ve scoured every inch of the internet for something that satisfies the conditions of ‘interesting, entertaining and unproductive’; I’m struggling to find anything new.

Online dating has sated my ego. Save for one person, I don’t reply to anyone on OkCupid anymore. 99% of the profiles have blurred together into an endless stream of unsatisfactory candidates. The good-looking ones are boring and inarticulate. The smart ones are fat or ugly. The interesting ones are intriguing because they have mountains of baggage. The funny ones restrict their wit to ironic one-liners; they’re way too cool for this shit anyway. I’m only on the site to fuck around and to keep talking to the one girl who ticks all the boxes because I don’t have Facebook. I’m planning on meeting her in July when I head to New York for a congress. If shit does go well, I’ll probably only see her for a few weeks at the most, which makes this kind of pointless. Fuck it; it’s something.

YouTube can’t keep me around for long either. Watching E-sports casting channels drives me away with feelings of boredom and guilt. Screenjunkies and Cinemasins don’t release content often enough. Brosciencelife makes me want to go to the gym. PUA/game channels can’t tell me anything I don’t know already. JennaMarbles either makes me want to look up porn or ask myself why I’m spending my life listening to a middle-aged woman explain the finer details of female nuisances.

Reddit and forums are filled with egotistic circle-jerks. 4chan is angsty and juvenile. Twitter consists entirely of advertising or tryhards attempting outwit each other. I have a morbid fear of reactivating my Facebook account because my ex was unblocked when I deactivated it, which means I’ll have a fucking heart attack when I see her name and thumbnail in the ‘People you may know’ panel.

And as for video games:

I’ve Got Balls of Feel – End of Week 5 – 16th December 2013

 Shit, two three days overdue for the weekly log. I should really start remembering that this shit needs to be entered every Monday. This is less an operational log than it is an expression of what’s keeping me going through this process.

In my view, there are only two things any living organism has to accomplish: survival and reproduction. Of course, the latter requirement isn’t strictly necessary, but the species as a whole is going to be biologically engineered to give massive fucks about producing offspring, no pun intended. For almost the entirety of human history, both criteria were of concern and had to  be fought for on a daily basis. Now, however, in the midst of modern civilization, there is no pressing concern to not die.

Our environment readily provides food, water, shelter and sanitation. I mean, jesus, morbid obesity is a fucking epidemic in developed countries. Not too long ago, a person had no guarantee that they would survive that day or that week or that month or that season: they could be ripped apart by predators, dying from thirst or starvation or shitting their guts out from some horrible disease, not to mention being raped, killed and tortured by their fellow man in the absence of law and justice. Now, they have the time and energy and fucks to give about the most trivial, absurd shit imaginable. There is no more need to survive and reproduce. Laugh and grow fat, having images of cats on the internet burned into your retinas. Even if you don’t reproduce, you’ll be so numbed out by mindless entertainment that you’ll be hard-pressed to care.

That was me somewhere along the line: having my emotional umbilical cord jammed into a USB port, video games having a vice grip on my attention in-between viewings of pornography. I passed the time in the insulated bubble of my bedroom while my peers were out drinking their first beer and having sex. But then something changed.

OkCupid – Part 2

Turns out women girls are also capable of hamhanded virtual advances.

As someone who once struggled to even get profile views, let alone replies, this is fucking surreal.

Thoughts: Problems

So many things have crossed my mind recently that I’ve wanted to write about.

The huge ego boost that comes with unsolicited messages and high response rates on OkCupid.

How video games and the Internet are perhaps the greatest scourge of my neurological function.

The painful thoughts and reminders of my ex that stem from the fact that I’m trying to live the old deadbeat life without the redeeming factor of having an attractive person to have regular sex with.

However, all of these have a common theme of having the same solution (yes, OkCupid needs a solution, since I don’t actually live on the same continent as the cities I’m listed in).

A few months ago I traced the root cause of any trouble I had to not staying the course. Those three words, staying the course, encompassed a way of living where nothing could go wrong, where there was no grief, no regret, no disappointment. There was loads of pain, sure, but following that path, day after day, could only lead to a positive outcome; a life devoid of suffering.

I’ve distinguished between pain and suffering before, in my perspective. It’s been said before with sayings like “Trials and tribulations are mandatory in life; pain and suffrage are optional.” However, I think it’s especially pertinent to the set of circumstances I find myself in. Raised on escapism, I was under the impression that ‘living well’ meant leading a life devoid of any kind of pain, instead of the reality of being wise enough to subject oneself to the right kinds of pain.

And that is effectively what staying the course meant.

Academics: Slow Progress with Anki Musculoskeletal Decks

Constructing flashcards using Anki, MS Paint, lecture PDFs and textbooks.

I’m starting to fall somewhat behind on the schedule I drew up for the anatomy exam in January. While I’d like to attribute it to my 11-hour days in the offices of the Psychiatry wing of another university, it pretty much comes down to procrastination and poor time management.

For the time being, I’m doing my best to get the anatomy done while still allocating enough time for the work I’ve elected to do for the university.

UPDATE: Joints and Osteology of the Upper Limb is finally done, thank fuck.

Steady Slope – End of Week 4 – 9th December 2013

And that’s the end of Month 1.

I received the last of my results for the exams I just wrote. While I was relieved that I’d passed everything, I could not help but feel disappointed:

Anatomy                     61%
Biochemistry              71%
Genetics                     56%
Physiology                  72%

Which gives an average of 65%. Compared with the average of 58% of the exams of last semester (where I failed a course), it’s a definitive improvement. However, a big part of me still regrets not having done better. I was and am fully capable of achieving a final result in excess of 90% for each course; I should never settle for sub-standard outcomes.

Nevertheless, it’s important to keep an accurate perspective. Last semester, I was emotionally and mentally crippled. My first experience of crushing heartbreak occurred a few days before a major anatomy test and a month before the final exams. Fortunately, I scraped by on all but one of my examinations. I got lucky by failing a selective course whereby the conveners would rather have you write again during the break than fail you outright in an attempt to keep what little students they have in the course. This meant that there was effectively no disruption of the three-year program: I could proceed as normal. This set the stage for the second semester.

Academics: Anki – Shared Decks – Anatomy – Musculoskeletal

Schedule

Joints and Osteology

Bone Markings – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1131053439
Cranial – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1000551308
Joints, Joints of the Thoracic Wall – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/882236101
Vertebral Column- https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1825938659
Upper Limb – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/102251019
Pelvis and Hip Joint – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/818166000
Lower Limb (Includes Knee and Ankle Joints) – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1158313769

Musculature

Back/Vertebral Column – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/635023616
Shoulder Girdle – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/478830633
Upper Limb (Arm)* – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/742129751
Forearm* ** – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1618576910

* Requires structural revision of blood vessels (veins?)

** Compartmentalisation of synovial tendon sheaths

Neurology

Axilla and Brachial Plexus – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1012913355
Lumbar and Sacral Plexuses – https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/458248097