Affront, a front

So this is Sunday morning and I've yet to even start on the textbook, which the mentor expects us to finish cover to cover, remember all the facts and figures and etc in a weekend. It's an absurd proposition, along with many others.

Why do I even bother. I'd just assume that it's an impossible task, and then decide not to do it. That's way easier.

In life, sometimes circumstances make us do things that we think are impossible. We push ourselves because we get motivation, and we want to challenge ourselves. But right now, I just don't have the drive, ya see?

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My pancakes are getting better and really, the trick is adding more milk, and honing in the cooking technique. Yay. And I finished cooking a thick stack of them in barely an hour.

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My JC class met up on Saturday over Swensens, and there was the fair share of fun, and crapping with our previous Maths teacher who's now back from the UK with a PhD in mathematics. He did this cool paper on functional programming, which is, like: conventional programming means doing a mathematical function on a variable, then storing the variable ready as the input for the next function. Functional programming piggybacks all the functions together in a chain, so that you don't have to store intermediate values in memory every time.

I can't claim to know exactly what it implies, but perhaps stuff like audio or photo editing (where there's so much mathematics done on samples that you end up getting rounding errors that degrade the quality) it might be worthwhile using such a concept?

But hey, on second thought, why go through all that agony when all it takes is upping the precision of the values, doing all the mathematics, then using dithering to bring it back to lower precision, which is already being done these days.

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It's paranoia time, and I dunno, but no matter how hard I try, it seems like I can't make everyone comfortable around me. Or maybe I try too hard. It's a front I have to put up. Otherwise I'd be a loony in their eyes or something. Maybe they can SMELL it, that I'm faking it all and am a charlatan.

A few guys in the class study in the USA and are having a ball of a great time over there, soaking in the culture and stuff. While all the meddies have to share is their cynicism.

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Well, everyone's still more or less the same. Sorta. Actually not really. While they behave the same way, it seems like there's this difference under the hood. It's like, different things make them tick. The motivations, the experiences, they're all so vastly different for each person, it's only reasonable to expect that everyone's going to drift apart. Somehow. Sometime.

So, how have I changed? Mainly, I've become a cynical old bastard who makes crude jokes and secretly sneers at everything. Studying what I study makes me cold and pessimistic. You can't not get scarred by the fact that so many of the patients that you've some come across the way have now taken new roles fertilising the grass around their tombstones, hidden behind a marble plaque collecting dust, or as fish food.

Disappointments, unreasonable demands, et cetra. I've heard of one definition of 'job strain' being high job stress and low potential for decision making. If my student work were a job, job strain would definitely be shooting through the roof. What, we don't even get to decide how we want to learn? And everyone knows how absurd the curriculum and associated paperwork and all are, but like in any bureaucracy, bad things never change.

Our teachers are doctors in actual practice, and behind the veneer of well-pressed shirts and shiny stethoscope, they're ridiculously childish. More so than, let's say, in teaching or in administration. The office politicking they engage in, well, it's like your usual playground quibbles. And it makes them feel good when they put somebody junior down. The big boys beat up the senior trainees beat up the junior trainees beat up the students. Even trainees go bitching about their colleagues to their bosses like whiney schoolgirls.

It's so damn ridiculous, is this really the career path that I had chosen? They don't talk about which surgical trainee has the steadiest hands and the keenest judgement. They talk about which trainee sucks up to which consultant, which trainee has a bigshot daddy who's able to pull the strings.

Quitting is not a choice. There's way too much to lose. And on the other hand, there's nothing to say that I'd do any better in other fields.

And becoming a cynical old bastard is an irreversible process.

Maybe it might be possible to do a career switch in the end, after all, but it's not easy, and I don't have exceedingly good playwrighting skills.

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Oh well. I guess the things that attracted me to the field still stands. At least I'm doing something purposeful. And it's a decent rice bowl I guess. And the science in it is something that really interests me.

You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you might find you get what you need. - Rolling Stones