Medicine and War
Medicine is really like waging war. While reading my biochemistry textbook, all that comes to mind are targets for drug action.
Part of the cure involves the attack of a weak point in the pathway. How interesting that this field that we're battling in has so many nuances that one can only find in a GOOD biochemistry textbook.
Bill Clinton and Ideology
"We believe in a politics...dominated by evidence and argument. There is a big difference between a philosophy and an ideology on the right or the left. If you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another. But like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning. And you are certainly open to debate the practical applications of your philosophy."
"The problem with ideology is if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up, you know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results."
I want to breath inspired air.
Well. In Ho Ting Fei's lecture again. Upgraded my laptop to 2gb of RAM and finally, I've got a machine that keeps up with me.
Haven't been doing much with it though. It is just there, after all my work understanding amino acids. Ready to take on DNA.
Inspiration and Expiration. The rise and fall of breath. I was thinking about goodness and badness the other day, and about guilablity and shrewedness. And without idealistic people, how good could never come about. While with shrewed people, how they could ever be happy, always getting more than their fair share.
Reading about the New Atheist movement, where people get together to declare that they don't believe in a God. That it is not rational to believe in a God, when all signs point otherwise. But it's not rational to be truly altruistic either, and we do know some people are, and we do know that sometimes, we give without expectation of reward.
Perhaps rationality and logic is a subset of a greater philosophical framework which includes morality, and altruism, and belief.
Just as we say that God, doesn't exist, we should keep our eyes open for signs that say, well, maybe he does.
Technology!
Ooh I'm checking out this bloging widget from my mac. It's suposed to send my text directly to the blog or something. Makes it easier to type stuff directly I think, or secretly at least instead of keeping an obvious blogger window open.
Well it's a nice note pad kind of thing and I can access it anytime I press F12, so that makes it so much likelier that I'll blog now.
Anyway been doing the Waltz, and it's a really nice kind of dance. I could do it all forever with the girl I love. I guess I'm getting older/more mature/less fun. I'd rather do dances that are more satisfying and less difficult, than to do dances that are fast paced and beautiful but really take a lot from you and your partner to do well.
Watched the Hall Dance and Wushu item yesterday night by chance after Tennis training, and they were so amazing. I love the Dance item. Somehow they managed to put up a very convincing item after only 5 weeks or so of work. It was very beautiful because it controlled the pace and the movements so well. As an audience member, it seemed like a visualization of the music, there wasn't this emphasis on one or two particularly good dancers, but this general flow, and organicness to the dance. Like the rhythm of life, except for chinese dances, it's an organic rhythm, instead of the staccato beats of the african drums, or the ponderous bass beat of the waltz, or the mishmash of rhythms that is salsa.
I was just thinking I love chinese dance, while watching the performance, and I love chinese dance because it so reflects my philosophy of life. It's not about constant, beautiful motion, but moment of brilliance with the music, and slow segments to juxtapose and bring out the contrasts in the movements. I loved how the hall dancers managed to incorporate the meaningfulness into the movements, which i never got in salsa anyway.
Listening to Queen's Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy, and it's such a beautiful perfect song. Check it out on YouTube.
Someone i barely know.
I was just telling Geri today about not sleeping. Feeling lost because in my mind there's someone I barely know who feels like home to me. And I think that's what i've been looking for all this time. A place that feels like home.
I've been to a few friend's places, and they all have great cozy homes. But to me home isn't a place. Home isn't in the people around me. Home isn't a sound, or a type of decor, or a smell. My first home is always the inner home of my head, the close second, a home in my heart. A third home maybe, in this person I've glimpsed and barely spoken to.
Where is home for you? What is home to you?
During Physio
Well when you have a high level of inspiration, it will depress your vasomotor centre. Conversely, expiration(Desperation I thought) occurs after inspiration.
A lifetime in a Heartbeat.
This morning's guest lecturer was an old man who spoke to us on the cardiovascular system. His enthusiasm about the heart was really infectious. He cut the heart up with his echocardiographic tools, dissected it in numerous ways. Spoke about the arteries supplying the haeart as fondly as if they were his own children. When the heart beat on his echocardiogram, he would enthusiastically call out Sys, Dy, Sys, Dy, Sys, Dy. All the while, valves were closing, ventricles were clasping, and atria were dialating. The violence of systoli juxtaposed with the feminity of diastole.
The cadence of the heartbeat on screen merged with the rhythm of his voice. And his years of examining the root of life came through to me. It's impossible to say what exactly is so moving about the pulsation of the heart on screen.
Tribal afternoons millenia ago, the beat of the drums, and the chants of a long gone age. Surf music. Hip hop, the heavy bass beats in 4/4 time. The flutter of a newborn, a heartbeat that sounds like the flapping of wings. The pulse of my grandmother, slow but obstinately strong.
The stream of blood flows. The stream of life, that flows through every one of us today, just as it has flowed yesterday and will keep on flowing tomorrow.
When prof was younger, did he imagine the future today? When he was poring over his books, his atlases in the formalin-perfumed anatomy halls of the past, dissecting a piece of dead flesh, broken machinery, and imagining how it once danced with the pulse of life. Did he see how it must have danced in his patients? Did he imagine, that one day, he might see the heart live, not through the barbarity of a open chest operation, but through the magic of waves invisible to the eye, in three dimensional colour, with superlative detail?
An old man told his children stories today. About a journey through the unknown, with revelations at every corner. A jigsaw, which took a lifetime to piece together. And in the end, to see with his very own eyes, what he always knew was there.
Feeling like a cog in a machine
Well, I've been feeling like a cog in a machine. Somehow, the events of the past few days reminded me again that maybe we're just pearls strung up on this string of time. The Nobel Prize winning father pairs, our own lovely Medical Profs in med school. We start and end and slip away. And really, we don't leave anything behind.
Been thinking about motive and purpose. How purpose gives men the strength to climb mountains and move oceans. But eventually, purpose should not be the reason for anyone's existence. Else, there'd be people who live their lives looking for the next big purpose, or various purposes to bring meaning to their lives. Which is wrong because then they're slaves to these ideas that they thought up, and the meaning of life looking for purpose is perverted into a purposeful day to day existence, in order to feel alive.
It's really hard to express ideas in English now. I need a language course soon.
Taking a break!
Haha yesterday was a really good day. I bought a PS2 finally, my first console ever, while I started a new RPG (The Legend Of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time) and listened to lots of music. There was this instance yesterday where I realized some TV programme started with this series of chords, and I could feel the music in my head, Like see it on the keyboard. But I've forgotten the chords to that. Oops. Haha it's a silly Kenneth thing. I'd make up a song and forget the melody afterwards. Or I'd write down the chords and forget the rhythm and how many bars to play each chord. But part of life is coming to terms with your own limitations and working around it isn't it?
Hmm yesterday was emo Thursday. Somehow I felt really accepted by others on wednesday, and it kinda carried over to Thursday which was a self declared break. After playing Zelda, the theme just stuck in my head and the entire plot of the story just came crashing down. The Legend of Zelda is this series in which a young boy named Link meets up with this prophetic princess, rescues her and saves the world. Part of the charm of playing this game is the feeling of being young again. I was reading these essays about Nintendo game creators, and the experience of the Zelda series was about his experiences as a youth, exploring a cave near his home with a torch. I haven't been in touch with those ideas in a while now, that of a young boy of 12, alone, brave, seeking adventure and a friend and saving the world. Perhaps my view of the world is shaped by one too many RPGs, one too many Japanese stories of adventuring and seeking the unknown. But what really made me very touched about the game was how they succeded in putting in all the idiosyncrasies of youth. You hold a wooden sword and a wooden shield. Climbing around a forst with faeries and elves. Sneaking around palace guards, climbing walls and keeping silent. Shooting at spiders with a catapult. My sister was watching me play, and at parts she was ordering my character around while I played, especially through the sneaking bits. And when I finally met the princess, it was just such a magical moment. I haven't been so touched in ages.
Sometimes I think the world I am in now takes itself too seriously. When did I lose my sense of adventure? My sense of adventure and that youthful desire to just surprise someone. When did we lose our sense of imagination?
I have weird taste in games, cos I bought the PS2 to play this violent heavy metal music based fighting game called Guilty Gear XX. What I love about it is the heavy metal background music, and the character design. I don't really want to describe it here, but it is really a blast to play. You can read about the various character designs on the web.
Fighting games is my new hobby. I'm starting to understand the passion people have for fighting games. It's really like chess, when you play with the right equipment and everything just works (i.e at an arcade) Playing with my younger brother now, and we're pretty much evenly matched. We play differently though. He's more offensive, and just rains attacks on me, while i look for openings, watching the screen for a particular animation frame and counterattacking. I lose more often than not though. I'm a bit over the hill for twitch games, and my brother's at his peak.
Medical school has been stressful. It's a strange feeling to be repeating the same lectures again, but I realize that last year I didn't really learn what was most important about the whole medical process. I found it really dreary to just keep memorizing and memorizing facts, which as you can see above, isn't really my strong point. Putting meaning to the facts that I am learning really helps, and so I'm going through all my notes again and making sense of the assorted facts and classifying them for better understanding. The human body is really well designed, and there are all these limitations that the body has found a way around. I'm really loving the biochemistry component this year, especially the textbook of Biochemistry by Devlin, but the profs are also great sources of information on the function of the parts. In the end, the human body is really just a machine, which doctors attempt to maintain its proper function at different levels (chemical level and physical level).
It's like a good story/bad story. I read a few segments of plays to my tutee on Thursday night, and part of his literature exam is on plays. Just reading out the plays with him was so much fun as we were really into it. Our voices took on different tones as we played different characters, and he picked up the cadence of the lines after I emphasized the rhythm during my parts. My tongue has slowed though, partially because I haven't been talking much with proper English pronunciation, partially because I haven't been reading aloud for quite some time. But they were really good plays, compared to some other plays I'm supposed to produce. I don't know if I've become too critical about plays, I realize I've watched a great number of production over the years and they've just become part of my theatre vocabulary. Really thankful to Geraldine for dragging me to these shows. Just reading a script allows me to see the action on stage, and it is so easy to draw sketches of the action.
Really regret not helping out in the hall plays and medicine plays taking place this year, but I'm not really ready for a directing or acting role. I think it takes a lot of time, time that I can't afford. Life is a bunch of choices, and I don't think I can sacrifice the amount of time and energy that some other director might be willing to sacrifice. Plus, I'm probably a bit too picky and crazy. Probably will drive the other creatives mad. I don't mind working alone though. Like if I only had an actor or actress and write a play I could film. And I'll do all of the directing and filming work and someone else will take up all the production details. Haha but that's just a dream yah. No one will take a silly chance on that.
Well so I've spent my anatomy time typing all this out, since people have wondered what has happened to me. :D good luck guys!
Sacrifice
Anything is possible as long as you are willing to make the sacrifices necessary.
Nothing worthy comes without worthy sacrifice.
What is the meaning of sacrifice? I'm looking for a copy of the documentary Jesus Camp, which will probably not be shown in Singapore as it is religious in nature. But there was a sentence said by the protagonist, which I paraphrase, talks about educating Christian youths at church camps to be as committed as their counterparts in Muslim countries. She argues, people in those countries are able to produce people with such commitment to their faith that they are willing to strap a bomb to themselves to prove it, and that is what we need in the Christians of the next generation.
How true is this idea? Are the true value of things in the world what you're willing to sacrifice for them?
Is sacrifice meaningful only if one has free will in deciding that? That is, are sacrifices we have choice over, more meaningful than sacrifices in which we have not?
Why do men choose the harder roads over the easier ones?
