middle age!

September 4, 2004

this is my 40th blog post (although that’s cheating a little, because there was that photo-only post with the shoes). does that mean i’m entering ‘middle age’ in blogging terms? when i was blog surfing that other day (i’ve since toned down that voyeuristic hobby, because it was an enormous time-suck), i noticed how many of these online journals ended after several entries. i am proud of the fact that even though i have nothing significant to talk about most of the time, i have plodded on relentlessly. and apparently, someone is still reading it (or maybe i have ever-evolving new sets of readers), according to the site-meter i so expertly installed.

enough with the self-celebration.

so we went out and saw “collateral” tonight, with gray-haired tom cruise and practically unrecognizable latino mark ruffalo. it had some good scenes, but . . . well, i’ll give it a 6/10 on my rating scale. i never felt completely sucked into the action or plot; i thought it was a bit predictable and i found myself impatiently waiting for things to unfold at the end. but i give it 6 rather than 5 because i did manage to stay completely awake through the whole thing, which is kind of rare for an action movie, and also because there were some interesting themes (for example, about how no one pays attention to one another anymore) that made the movie more thought-provoking than many others of its genre.

josh suggested that maybe i just don’t like movies with guns, but that’s not true. i have no bias against movies with guns. however, i have a problem when a movie relies on chase scenes and shootings to stay interesting (and sell more tickets to men, both adolescent and full-grown), because i don’t find those things interesting when there’s not a compelling story or emotional backdrop behind them.

probably because i have more estrogen than the target audiences for these movies.

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in other news, i managed to open my biochemistry book today and actually read a chapter. this boards studying is going to be hard, i’m afraid. it makes me mad when i’m expected to memorize things that are completely useless to me other than for an exam. things like: ‘which amino acids are basic and which are acidic?’. if someone could tell me how i am going to use that information practically, i would love to be enlightened. i think medical students have to learn a lot of these things today because there is this idea of a traditional “fund of knowledge” that we are supposed to acquire. in my opinion, the fund’s contents need to be revised to make it more practical and less esoteric, and perhaps more individualized to each student’s interests. that way, i could avoid most of anatomy as well as amino acids!

for now, though, i am going to be a compliant little medical student and try to learn what they want. i just paid $445 of my own money to register to take this test, and i refuse to pay for a crappy score. take that, national board of medical examiners.

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