Saturday, April 09, 2005

Why Elle-elle?

The medical faculty is up in arms over the recent sudden change of nomenclature for our medical school to a most unpleasant-sounding Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, because of a 100 million dollar donation. Which part of the name change strikes you as being totally illogical and asinine? Everything. Gratitude to a donor is one thing, changing your school's name is another. You could always name some building or facility after the donor, but the entire school? It almost shows that we have no character, simply changing our name like that. Is the name of the School of Medicine an object given to the highest bidder, or in this case the largest donor? In addition, the name sounds decidedly un-classy and rough on the tongue, and I definitely won't be calling the school by the "official" name, however politically correct I may be sometimes. Let's not even start to think about where that humongous sum of money is going. Definitely not to the students. So they're going to hire more clinician scientists to do research and make the school famous, but what of teaching? It is a school, after all, not a pure research facility. But well we have yet to see where the money will go, and I may stand corrected, but likely not.

You can see that, yes, I'm pretty worked up over the name change. It's just not right. If only the administration had bothered to think about it or bothered to ask any medical student, they would have known that. This is going to go down in history as one of the most irreversibly stupid thing ever done. The woe, the woe.

Sigh, well, that's that, and I can't change it. It doesn't stop me from being really peeved, and of course part of me wonders if this is the post that's going to get me kicked out of medical school or something, but whatever. On to happier things.

Yesterday was great. I could possibly call it the highlight of post-exam activities, because sitting for four hours at Settler's Cafe playing board games with a bunch of good friends is completely relaxing and enjoyable. Well I can't help but be childishly excited at the thought of playing board games, because I had very few chances to ever play board games with friends when I was young. So much so that I never knew how Cluedo was played until J2, and even now I've only played 4 games or so of Cluedo. I'm so deprived. So yes please ask me out to Settler's again I will gladly agree.

Most of what happened in the day has been chronicled on Hope's blog, and he's better at chronicling than I am because he's crappier (that's a compliment, albeit a weird one), but yeah, the belly dancing episode was so funny I still chuckle when I think of it. The best thing was the two of them were standing in the middle of the cafe and everyone could see them trying to belly-dance. Four hours just wasn't enough to play as many games as we wanted to (any amount of time wouldn't be enough actually). Well after that we headed for dinner and then Darryl, Jiabin and me headed to Wee Ming's place since his parents were away for a holiday. There, we played Cluedo, about which I am still completely baffled, and made a bold guess only to get it wrong. We only played one game! But our brains were all half dead, so we couldn't possibly play any more. So we went on to play Payday, for which I had insane luck and won lots of money at. Haha. If only it were real money.

Sigh I'm really spaced out lately, and sometimes I can just stare into space for long periods of time. Not sure why. I do hope my brain is not degenerating. Maybe I should sleep less; I find that sleeping so much every day makes me more lethargic because I dream too much and don't sleep well. So do forgive me if you're trying to talk to me and I'm not responding. I'm not too capable of conversation these days, but I try my best.

I went to the library today and borrowed more books! Now there are 5 books on my table, and I hope I'll be able to finish all of them before the end of the holidays. See I'm packing my time again, but I love reading, so it's ok I guess. As long as I don't try to be overambitious and go around borrowing more books, I'm quite sure I should be able to finish them, but I'm probably not going to have time to touch any clinical textbooks (am I mad?). Drawing is coming along nicely; I've done Athrun's head and will add Cagalli in soon. Thinking of the colouring makes me lazy, though, because Athrun's hair is so dark it's hard to differentiate between the different shades, and it's terrible trying to colour dark colours with colour pencil because there are always tiny white spots that won't pick up the colour.

I got inspiration for another short story today. Don't know if it will work though. I have to flesh out the characters in my head and see how the story develops.

I'm starting tuition tomorrow, because my senior has gone to Canada for electives (he's M4 going on M5) and he asked me to help him take his student for two months. It's a great arrangement for me because I would like the extra income, yet I really can't cope with the stress of having a full-time student. I'm the kind of person who wants everything to be done perfectly, so I spend half my time trying to think of good ways of explaining concepts, and the other half setting questions. This drove me mad last year when I was tutoring my cousin, and I was only doing it for a measly 60 bucks a month. I think I'm not cut out for tuition, it's too stressful for me. Now I have to go and dig out my JC Chem notes and revise Inorganic Chem. Oh well.

15 days left.

Avaris / 4/09/2005 11:27:00 PM

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