It's been a great week of relaxation. Med school is interesting like that. It's busy for a little while, and then it eases off. I don't mind the cycles, because there's never an intolerably long stretch of craziness. Two out of the however many weeks of school thus far have been busier than I would have liked, but overall, I can honestly say that I was busier for at least half of my college career than I've been during this first semester at UMC. Junior year at Belhaven I literally didn't have time to sleep much more than 6 hours a night. That's back when I was an overly ambitious, new pre-med doing everything. In med school thus far, I've realized that I'm pretty much going to get nothing done unless I have a test in the next few days. I try to study, but nothing really goes in. So I've been skimming notes as things are taught, then I cram for a few days before the test. It's not ideal, but it will have to do until I can get myself to do more when there is no pressure.

Next few days I'll be studying for our Biochem test on Wednesday, then directly after that I'll be embarking on my four-day road trip to Houston and Austin. As much as possible, I'm going to try and forget completely about studying during that time, but if Pedro needs to study some (which he probably will), we might hit up a bookstore for a couple of hours a day. For the most part, though, I hope to eat some good food (Texas de Brazil!), see the sights, take some pictures (if the digital camera I ordered gets here by Wednesday), and chill.

Let's see, what have I done last few weeks?

Hmm... Running has been going well. Last 3 weeks my mileage has been between 56 and 60 miles per week. A number of friends from Belhaven (including the men's and women's cross country teams) are going to be running the Madison Half Marathon on December 12, and I've challenged some of them to beat me. Should be a fun race, haha.

I've seen a number of movies, most of them mediocre. I watched New Moon on Friday night (there wasn't anything else out worth seeing that I hadn't seen), and it was shocking to see how crazed people were about it. The lines were insanely long, and when they started letting people into the theater, a lot of the females in line began squealing/screaming. Pretty ridiculous. There were a few women ahead of us in line probably in their fifties who were saying they couldn't wait to see Jacob shirtless. Weird.

I haven't been around the UMC campus too much recently. Physiology classes have started back up, but other than that and a few random mandatory classes and labs, I haven't been going to much. In hindsight, I am extremely happy that I wasn't elected president of our class. If I had been, I probably could not be this uninvolved without feeling guilty. The Free Clinic is always fun when I go, but more often than not, I'm the only one from my class there, so that doesn't help me socialize with the class. I definitely like all of my classmates, but I'm not going to go to class just to see people. And I enjoy studying with Belhaven friends because they're very laid back (e.g. Pedro, haha).

Anyways, I need to go to sleep. I have a mandatory Phys class at 8AM. I went to the early service at Church this morning, so this will be two consecutive days of waking up at 7. It's been a long time since that's happened (1st week of med school maybe?)

Things are chugging right along. Time is flying by, and that's fine with me. Every day that passes is getting me closer to Thanksgiving break and then the big one, Christmas! I'm not sick of school, I just really want to get out of Jackson and be spontaneous for a change.

During Thanksgiving break I'm loosely "planning" on either going to Atlanta for 4 days or to Houston and Austin for 2 days each. This'll be with Pedro, a friend of mine from Belhaven. See the sights, maybe go to a concert or two, maybe an NBA game, etc. Basically, the goal will be to get my mind off of med school for 4 days before we have to get back and start cramming for cumulative finals and board exams.

The last week has been the most hectic of med school for me thus far. It wasn't stressful, but I did study more than usual. And did it pay off? We'll see. I felt like the anatomy tests today went fairly well, but the grade improvement (if there is one) will probably not be big enough to justify the extra time spent studying.

So, after a good post-test workout and run, I was on my way to the store to do some shopping, and I got to thinking. Is there really any reason to go all out for As in classes? I don't think so. There's a huge amount of material covered on each exam, and in order to get an A on a test, you need to study a whole lot and know almost all of the material (unless you're lucky or the test happens to be easy). However, making a B on a test is not that difficult, and doesn't require nearly as much studying. This is because every test has a good number of easy questions, and then several questions that test minutiae that you probably won't know unless you've put a lot of work in. Yes, there are people in my class who study relentlessly and make all As. I'm happy for them. But I don't want to be like that. As for me, my goal will be to get a B in every class, have minimal stress, and still be a human being outside of medical school (which means taking part in the activities listed in prior blogs). I think this has been my mindset this whole semester, but I just hadn't thought about it. And I'm sure I'll get some As this semester and next, but that'll just be icing on the top of the cake. But no Cs. If that happened, I'd have to change things up.

So that's that. Nothing much of note has happened. I watched the New York City Marathon on Sunday morning, and that was highly motivational. I've made up my mind to run the New Orleans Half Marathon in late February, and then possibly the Boston Marathon in late April. I really want to run Boston, since that's THE marathon to do, but I don't want to go by myself. Finding someone to run it with would be ideal, but I'd settle for a friend who would just accompany me up there for a good time. I'm not in terrible shape right now, but I've just been maintaining a base of between 40 and 50 miles per week. Not really killing myself in workouts. Now I'm excited about running again. I might go out and run 10 tomorrow afternoon, because the weather is absolutely gorgeous here these days.