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?)