Which way is up?

Step inside the mind that finds you
Count the moments 'til your breakthrough
They pour down like rain
They float down the drain
What's come to pass is gone now

Are we playing the waiting game?
The more things change the more they stay the same
And now it's too late
Tied in with your fate
But you don't believe it somehow

This is not the way it ends
You're too afraid to look around the bend
Fight the way it feels
Is it too real?
You're standing here looking down
Climbing up the slope
Chain your mind to hope
Reach the start of each new day
End the darkness, light the way

So make the promise, take the vow
Can't really lose
Can't really choose
Anything else but heights are deep
Run the race before you can sleep

You're on show so take a bow
Hear the applause
They've opened the doors
No longer is the way unguided
No longer are we undecided

Pharmacy Practice 3A (exciting stuff, I promise)

Well that was the most logistically complicated exam I've ever sat for in my life! Got shunted into no less than five different rooms!

I was scheduled to be at Rm N352 at 9:25am, along with twenty-something other people. We went in, sat in rows according to our index numbers (not even just student IDs, it's so complex we get special numbers just for this exam!) and were instructed not to talk. Some people got confused and thought we were doing the exam in that room and started unpacking, but actually it was just a "holding room" of sorts, and at approximately 9:35am, no's 56-60 (I was number 60!) filed out in order and followed our course coordinator upstairs (absolutely no talking). We were then placed briefly into another holding room, and given instructions on what would happen in the *real* exam room:

We sit in order at the designated computers, get a few minutes to unpack our books and log in and make sure all the programs are working (yes, it's open book and open computer!), and then have exactly 60 minutes to do the exam. At approximately 55 minutes, we will be warned to start packing up and to log out, as we will be leaving for the oral component of the exam at exactly 60 minutes. (Yes, there's an oral component as well! It just keeps getting better!)

So the five of us sat in the holding room for a few minutes, before being directed into the computer lab, where there were already people part way through their exams. So I sat down, got all set up and stuff, and at 9:45am the five of us started our exam.

From what other people said afterwards, I don't think I did those two case studies too well, didn't pick up a lot of things. Was a bit slow at finding stuff on the databases and even slower in my books. The first case study was on an elderly lady with rheumatoid arthritis, taking methotrexate and meloxicam, and the second one was on a lady taking nitrofurantoin for cystitis (hehe, sound familiar Kazzart? I can't believe blog reading during stuvac sort of helped me in my exam :P)

That hour went too fast...was vaguely aware of the next group coming in five minutes after we started, but was mainly too busy freaking out that I couldn't find the right info anywhere. Anyway, with time up for the written exam, no's 56-60 filed out in order again (no talking) and followed the same guy back downstairs. It must have looked really funny because we were all trying to prepare for our orals while we were walking down the stairs and through the corridors; five students walking single file behind a lecturer while frantically reading their exam papers. I nearly fell over someone sitting on the stairs!

Into another holding room before the oral....but only for less than a minute, while waiting for the previous group to leave, before being ushered into the fifth and final room for the oral exam. Five tables with five smiling examiners. Heh. I got the tall, skinny one with short brown hair and thick rimmed glasses....reminded me slightly of Professor Trelawney (?) from Harry Potter. (Don't know why.)

3 minutes begins. Tape recorder starts. Say your name, your index number and which case you will be speaking on. Introduce case. Discuss your findings and recommendations. Conclude.

My examiner kept smiling and looking at me strangely while I was talking, and I got the impression she was thinking "This girl has no idea what she's on about..." (which actually doesn't matter, because the marking criteria for the oral is not on what you say, but on clarity of speech and whether you have an appropriate intro and conclusion, etc, etc....but still, she unnerved me slightly.) And to make things worse, when I finished (way before the 3 minutes was up), she said to me "You were a bit nervous, weren't you?"....and I was like "Er, yeah, I guess, a little," but in actual fact that's the most relaxed I've ever been in an oral exam, and to have someone say you sounded nervous when you weren't that nervous at all (well, taking into account that we are sitting an exam here)...hey, I must suck!

And with the *ding* of the timer, it was all over.

*****

Wasn't that riveting? I told you it was exciting stuff, didn't I? Unfortunately, my other five exams are the *go in, sit down and come out when finished* type, so they won't be half as entertaining as this recount.

:P

Finding Normal

You point your point of view at me
You shoot your mouth off 'til I bleed
Inside my head, it makes no sense at all

I don't get where you're coming from
Time travels like a ticking bomb
Can't run away because I've hit the wall

You are me
And together we are freaks

We're fish inside a sea of current
trends can't define friendships
sailed across the waves
hello and bye
the way will soon come to an end

we're fish inside a sea of current
trends can't define friendships
sailed across the waves
hello and bye
the way will soon come to an end,
we'll soon come to an end.

We'll drown and live under the sea
We'll watch it all from underneath
And lie down when we get tired of it all

Cos normal's just another trend
Normal follows all its friends
Wake up and you will finally hear the call

You are me
And together we are free


You are me
You are me
You are me
This is me

We're fish inside a sea
Trends can't define me
Ships sail away
I wave hello
And by the way

We're fish inside a sea
Trends can't define me
Ships sail away
I wave hello
And by the way...

We're fish inside a sea of current
trends can't define friendships
sailed across the waves
hello and bye
the way will soon come to an end

We'll soon come to an end

"Whoever digs a pit may fall into it..." (Ecc 10:8)

I came home last night from youth group, and had a minor disagreement with my mum (like, it was over something really trivial). And then I felt it happening again. Only this time I was vaguely aware of the process as it was occurring: firstly, feeling a tightness around your chest, so that you can feel every heart beat and you have to put in more effort to breathe; and then having your head start to think things: Why don't you just kill yourself now? You are so worthless. Do something to hurt yourself.

And then some other part of my head was thinking, noooooo, not this again. Don't be stupid. It doesn't make sense to think like this.

I've noticed that quite frequently I come home on Friday nights and feel like crap. Don't get me wrong, I love going to youth group and I usually feel great when I'm there. But there's just something about all the social activity, all these people, smiling, laughing, talking...it's almost like a buzz or a high...and then coming home to a quiet house....everything just plummets. What goes up must come down...? Something to do with loneliness? Or maybe just tiredness after a long week.

Of course it doesn't just happen on Friday nights. The nights before assignments are due. The night before an exam. During this semester, the nights before I had to go into the pharmacy to do my weekly externship placement, and the nights before pharmacy practice tutorials. I always felt sick going into those.

It must be to do with feeling a lack of control. Knowing you're wrong. Feeling like you don't know enough to do something. Having no time to prepare for something. Having to be rushed.

(So why don't I organise my time better? Prepare earlier? Hehe, I don't know. I put off what I hate doing...but then one of the reasons why I hate it in the first place is because I always feel so stressed at the last minute.)

So just little things like that...that push my mind over the edge again.

Now that it's happened so much over the past few months, I have to start getting some logic out of it all. Work out when and why it happens. So that I can control my feelings and not let them control me.

It's difficult to think about it objectively though. I feel like such a freak sometimes, but I know there's got to be other people who go through something similar, and probably even worse than what I feel. A few weeks ago, the women's group at church had an afternoon where the speakers talked about Christianity and depression...heaps of people turned up. The talks were helpful and informative...but for me, it still feels like you're doing something wrong if you personally admit to it. I mean, I have a really blessed life, and because I don't get it all the time, I'm pretty sure the chemicals in my brain are fine....so maybe it's my fault, a character flaw I just have to fix up?

We've been studying Ecclesiastes in our bible study this term, and one of the questions last night really jumped out at me...well, actually it was two questions. The first one was 'Where would you plot yourself on a scale showing attitude to life under the sun?'...and there was this scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being 'despair of life', 3 being 'balanced', and 5 being 'live life to the full'. The next question was 'Is it possible to experience the attitudes at both ends of the scale simultaneously? Which do you think is better: to have a balanced approach to life, or one holding two extremes at the same time?'

And I smiled at the second question, because I remember writing something like "is it possible to feel certain hope and the deepest depths of despair simultaneously?" (or something to that effect) in a post I did ages ago. I think we came to the conclusion that yes, it is possible to have both attitudes simultaneously - but how does that work? How should you live, if you are reconciled with both despair of the meaninglessness, and joy of the goodness?

We also learnt that "wisdom is living in harmony with reality" (not directly from the Bible but from an assumedly wise, Bible-knowing guy). If that is the case, then I am one of the biggest fools in the world, because I have spent a lot of my life trying to escape reality. It must be very hard to be wise because reality is ugly. Well, a large part of it anyway.

Thinking about the first half of Ecclesiastes 10:8, "Whoever digs a pit may fall into it..." - perhaps that is what I have done in my life. I've just let the pit get deeper and darker because I thought there was nothing I could do about it. Running away from your problems only causes more problems. If you dig your own emotional black hole, how can you expect not to fall in?

So, I've kind of digressed from what I was originally writing about, and this post is now very long. I don't know if any of this is going to help me, but at least it's a start. Of a long and very slow journey. I'm already predicting what I'm going to be feeling like on Tuesday night, before my first exam (the dreaded pharmacy practice subject, complete with oral component). Oh well, at least now I'm consciously aware of what will happen before it overtakes me.

It feels strange to be posting this on the internet - the world wide web of both interconnectedness and personal distance. The last thing I want is for people to think I'm more abnormal than they already think I am. But I had to write about this sooner or later. In a less cryptic way than I have been doing already. I've been thinking about it for a while. I think I've realised that I don't want to push people away anymore. It doesn't help. I might keep to myself a lot, but just because I don't talk to you doesn't mean that I don't want you to talk to me :)

Oh, and acknowledgements go to the person who drew attention to Ecc. 10:8 and how *profound* it is :P

And that's the way I like it

So I was sitting in someone's car on Monday night and Ben Lee's song, "Catch My Disease", came on to the radio. He must have written those lyrics in about 5 minutes. But I have to admit, it was pretty, erm, catchy (no pun intended). Random, repetitive, minimally poetic, and rather meaningless...but very catchy. What songwriting genius.

Catch My Disease - Ben Lee
my head is a box filled with nothing
and that's the way i like it
my garden's a secret compartment
and that's the way i like it
and that's the way i like it
your body's a dream that turns violent
and that's the way i like it
and that's the way i like it
the winter is long in the city
and that's the way i like it

so please
baby please
open your heart
and catch my disease

i was backstage in pomona
and that's the way i like it
she drank beer with coca-cola
and that's the way i like it
and that's the way i like it
she told me about the winds from santa ana
and that's the way i like it
and that's the way i like it
she told me she'd love me like fireworks
and that's the way i like it

so please
baby please
open your eyes
and catch my disease

so please
baby please
cmon
and catch my disease

they play good charlotte on the radio
and that's the way i like it
they play sleepy jackson on the radio
and that's the way i like it
and that's the way i like it
i hear beyonce on the radio
and that's the way i like it
and that's the way i like it
they don't play me on the radio
but that's the way i like it

so please
baby please
open your heart
and catch my disease

so please
baby please
cmon
and catch my disease

Did I mention it was repetitive?

And he also has a blog like everyone else. But I think this bio is more interesting.

Towards the end of the car ride, they also played Green Day on the radio, and I liked it :P
But we arrived at our destination before the end of the song, so didn't get to hear the whole thing.

Wake me up when September ends...

It's that time of year again...

...no, not Christmas. Exams *sigh*. Hehe, I remember starting this blog in the middle of my last set of exams because I was so bored of studying. Now that we are near the end of a semester, I don't think I hate my course as much as I did earlier in the year. I might not have worked very hard, but as we approach the end of week 13, even pharmacokinetics is starting to make a little bit of sense. (Wow, I never thought I'd say that.) And you know, it is quite useful to be learning about drugs...I mean, they are what is keeping a large proportion of the population from dropping dead any minute. And as we learnt from the EU public meeting this week (on the *bodily* resurrection of Jesus from the dead), it makes sense for us to not only be concerned about the spiritual, but also for the physical. Physicality can be grieved, and rejoiced over.

I guess the thing about pharmacy is that it's all very concerned with maximising people's quality of life. (I suppose this would be similar for lots of other courses as well...) Whether it's just treating something symptomatically, or slowing the progression of the disease, it's about giving people the right treatment so they can have a better and longer life. Which I suppose is a very noble cause and everything, but in the end, no matter how many drugs you take, there is no drug that can save you from death. You can delay it, you can make it less painful, but it still happens.

Yayness.

Now on to brighter things that have been happening...Pharmacy in EU is getting big enough to become it's own EU faculty! :) In the past we've been rolled in with all the people in the Science faculty (which has been good, since as the biggest faculty in EU, Science are guaranteed to get non-dodgy rooms at Ancon, plus they've won the Lukabyo Cup for like three years in a row...), but now with a whole stack of first years having joined EU this year, four pharmacy small groups and the setting up of a pharmacy faculty planting team, we have started on the road to independence. And we get our own faculty time at Ancon this year! Awww...we'll miss you science people...

It's so cool that as first years, we were the first real pharmacy small group in ages, and now just two years later, we're big enough to be thinking of starting our own EU faculty! Yay for God and yay for pharmacy! Hehe, how exciting :)

Static

Unfeeling of the pain,
As sunlight shines through rain,
She smiles through her tears;
A melancholy rainbow appears.

Neither highs nor lows are epic,
Like emotional anaesthetic;
Cold and numbing ice,
Indiscriminate of unpleasant and nice.

Sadness, laughter, beauty,
Or strange and wondrous mystery,
It all feels the same;
Nothingness all feels the same.

Well, it's kind of like a metaphor...

The planets have danced
almost since time began,
Twirling, shining
In the great cosmic ballroom of the universe,
Keeping in time
to the music of emptiness,
the sound of a vacuum.

Where do I belong in eternity?
Can my voice be heard in nothingness?
Am I a piece in the puzzle, trying to work out where I fit in?
Do I belong here, there or somewhere else?

Am I in the right puzzle?


God is so much bigger than me.

Sometimes I think that when He made the world, it was like painting a beautiful picture, with every detail perfect, the smallest brush stroke and the tiniest dab placed there for a reason. And then sin came along and turned the painting into a jigsaw puzzle. Everything in the picture is still there, it's just all broken up, and mixed around.

Occasionally you come across a piece of the puzzle that makes you think, "Hey, this is really good, it's wonderful. I'm so glad I found it." Other times you'll find a piece that makes you think, "What on earth is this doing here? It doesn't fit in anywhere. This makes no sense at all."

Slowly you build your own little part of the picture (your very tiny part, I should say), and around the edges you have pieces that you share with other people, pieces that connect to other parts of the big picture. Sometimes they break apart, sometimes they just don't fit in the first place, no matter how hard you try to jam them together. Your incomplete part of the picture is always riddled with holes...which is the right piece to fill it? Can you imagine what it should look like? It's a tricky puzzle to work with - all the pieces keep changing shape. Just when you think you've got it....

Why else is it so hard to work out? Is it because we can never see the whole picture the way God can? Is it because we're trying to put it together with all the pieces upside-down?


OK, someone start questioning my sanity please....