Animal Husbandry and Moi

LOL.

I recently discovered that the term "animal husbandry" is hardly as naughty as first impressions might suggest.

Animal husbandry, also called animal science, stockbreeding or simple husbandry, is the agricultural practice of breeding and raising livestock. It has been practiced for thousands of years, since the first domestication of animals. The science of animal husbandry is taught in many universities and colleges around the world.

Hehehe. OK, moment is very much over.

Listening: Earth Wind & Fire (I have to thank Yoong for introducing me to the pure funky groove of the oldies); The Ting Tings; other miscellaneous stuff.

Reading: Monster Blood Tattoo 2 - Lamplighter (thank youuu Tash for the lend!); Sylvia by Bryce Courtenay (I actually tried to read this about 2 years ago, struggled, got completely stuck at ~page 300. This time I read it straight through in 3 days! Maybe my reading tastes have changed? Or maybe I've just developed a fondness for old men writing about often graphic/shocking, sometimes sexual things...eek). I also finished Things We Couldn't Say, whic was a really amazing autobiography of a Dutch girl in WW2...tears galore. Thanks Shirley for the lend.

Watched: Northanger Abbey (courtesy of a "girls' night in movie with mum thing at midnight")

Want to get my hands on: more of Kate Miller-Heidke's music. So far I've only heard Can't Shake It but her sound is beautifully quirky. I'm also utterly LOVING Dance Wiv Me by Dizzee Rascal and Calvin Harris--does that count as R&B, Amandalim? I would also DIE if someone put an MGMT ticket in my hand; then I would resuscitate myself and go to the concert of course. Since I'm totally going on a rant here, I'll also say I'm eager to get a copy of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's (the whole series), and possibly Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (and you'd have thought I had enough of paedophilic undertones...um yeah), The Golden Ass aka The Metamorphoses (which was, like, written in the 2nd century and is the only Latin novel to have survived in its entirety...how insane is that ? ! ? ! ? !). But before I splurge I should probably read some of those untouched novels still sitting on my bookshelf. I just get overexcited sometimes...

fig. 1. Kate Miller-Heidke

On a side note, Megan, why did you give me Beyonce's If I Were a Boy?! It's giving me weird ideas.

Oh! And I finally ordered Friends. It should be arriving tomorrow/Tuesday, so YAY. And wow, I can't believe Christmas is in less than a month. I can't believe I'm turning 20 in two weeks! Ew, oldness! I also bought a Little Red Riding Hood jacket from Torquay that makes me feel like I just stepped out of a fairytale. I need shoes. I want white heels. I would like to have a homely, family-ish Christmas holiday.

I seriously have flight of thought! This was an entirely self-absorbed, rambling entry. Ah, meaninglessness. Holidays are pleasant. I think the following picture does nicely to encapsulate the random essence of my holiday thus far. TTFN!

My Swotvac Thus Far.

All right, all right, I caved! I just couldn't help it. There was this unseen force compelling me towards the laptop, urging my fingers to type in the letters http://www.blogspot.com/ ...
I figure it's probably a record, anyway; this far into SWOTVAC and no blog post till now! Yay...? This definitely calls for a celebration with...a whole lot of RANDOMNESS! To that end, here's a brief excerpt of the past couple of days of my life...-plays suspenseful music-

"Hmm, does the vagus or hypoglossal supply palatoglossus?"

This is how happy SWOTVAC makes me.

My den of power.

Pretending to study.

The view from my window. Isn't it fabulously exotic? Yes, that is a car under the clothes line, on the grass. We have three cars and a garage that's only big enough for one.

This is for the Agyness-Deyn-wannabe who asked me to take photos of the clothes I bought. Gray's Anatomy is to point out that I haven't completely forgotten about study...

The 3/4 pants.

The dress and cardigan. I think my wardrobe looks better in them than I do.

Study companions.

YAY! Thanks Megan and Mel for many, many, many hours of enjoyment. And procrastination. I find it's still funny the third time you watch an ep.

Awesome book. Also I have non-curvy thumbs. They're so weird. They make people scream when I show them. I love this book. It's great. I've almost finished it.

I forgot to rotate this pic. Ah, me. It's my brother figuring out his new FOUR-BY-FOUR RUBIC'S CUBE. That boy is insane. Look what MHS has done to him.

A cute blue squishy pillow, amongst some bigger, more threatening, scary-looking pillows, wearing a sparkly white summer hat I also recently purchased. Um. Yeah! I'm kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Back to work!

(All the best for exams, everyone.)

The Women

All in all, the movie was not bad! The most interesting aspect of it was, of course, the fact that not a single man was on screen for the entire movie. The only male was the little baby boy that Debra Messing gave birth to in the final scene (MOST HIILARIOUS AND REALISTIC LABOUR/GIVING BIRTH SCENE I'VE EVER SEEN IN A MOVIE. Props to Debra Messing for her Neanderthalean groaning!) Nice storyline, pretty clever jokes that were definitely written for women--only bad thing was no eye candy at all, heh heh (and they say girls don't hit their sexual peak until 30...OK kidding).

After spending two hours in a theatre with 198 other females, and watching a movie dominated by a cast of women, with women supporting actors and women extras and basically everywhere you look on the streets of New York suddenly there are swarms of leggy, boob-endowed people in skirts--yeah, something weird has happened to my mind and I'm in a strangely girly mood (mug of hot drink, spotty PJs, rugged cardigan) and I'm imagining I live in a world populated by only women. How wacky would that be! In any case, I'm really sleepy now because I just did a lecture on embryological development of genital tracts where all the pictures looked like jelly and my English is going all frizzy so I am going to sleep. Guten nacht! <3

So we've been studying endocrinology.

And I thought, what with all the images our lecturers have inundated us with over the past couple of weeks, I can't not write a post about it. Malformed genitalia, overgrown genitalia, wrong sex, both sexes in one, little boys with Herculean bodies (my goodness, how many times have we seen that slide? Isn't it starting to border on slightly dodgy? And are the poor boy's ankles really tied together or am I imagining things?!)--yeeeeeah, for the first time I'm really glad that I sit at the back of the lecture theatre and most of the time my vision is blurry because my contact lenses slide in all sorts of wacky places and I can't be bothered putting eyedrops in because I'll only lament about my poor damaged short-sighted Asian eyes when I'm sixty plus.

Despite all the aforementioned, endocrinology really is reasonably interesting, not least because of the gender-related diseases. I hope I'm not the only one who finds these bits (ew! bits! -giggles like a schoolgirl-) fascinating in an uneasy way. Maybe I am. Maybe I have some deep-seated, voyeuristic, sex-obsessed Freudian complex! Or, maybe I'm just a pervert.

I didn't expect it to be so common. 1 in 500 people have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, where genetically they are male (XY sex genes) but their cells don't respond to testosterone and other male hormones. The result depends on how insensitive they are. In some it's only partial, so they develop as intersex, with both male and female characteristics.

Others are completely insensitive, and they have fully female features. In fact, many people with complete AIS tend to grow very tall (180cm), with long limbs, big boobs, ie. the typical femme fatale. Which is why lots go into careers like modelling, acting, athletics, etc. Apparently a number of famous females have AIS. Jamie Lee Curtis? (Or at least my friend Google says so.) And others! Like this lady athlete who underwent sex testing at the Olympics and found out she was genetically male. She was allowed to compete but when she went home she lost her job and her boyfriend. Now they don't do sex testing at the Olympics anymore.

I guess what really struck me about all this was that I hardly knew about the existence (and certainly not the prevalence) of such syndromes before now. And to imagine it--being seriously confused about your gender would completely undermine your personality. The little M and F letters with bubbles/checkboxes next to them are absolutely everywhere. Facebook profiles, enrolment forms, the front page of exams booklets, online surveys. Having to choose your gender would be so different from being born with one. And imagine being a little girl who hits puberty and suddenly starts becoming a man. (Note to self: look up Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex.)

So yeah! See? You can excuse me for blogging a bit about academia, because surely it's worth a thought or twenty. Methinks we are next going to learn about conditions where people are phenotypically male but genetically female--the other way around, I suppose.

Ooh-ooh, yeah! There was also this stuff about how sex hormones influence the way our brains work and our conception of our own gender, but I won't go into that because I'm starting to sound like an overexcited, bespectacled adorable little nerd (ie. my true self!)...=D

Disclaimer: Yeah, I may have got stuff wrong. Don't trust me. Use Wikipedia...=D

Life is sweet when

every song you hear sounds like summer.
you wake up smiling.
the book's too good to put down.
you fall in love with a movie.
you fall in love.
there's no awkwardness with old friends.
surprises happen.
driving with the windows down and breeze everywhere and not sneezing from pollen.
there's no awkwardness with new friends.
your stomach is flat.
a stranger holds the door for you.
you sing in the shower.
it's all done.
the bed is snug and dry and clean and soft.
stumbling upon old photos/letters/notes.
you're greeted with a hug.
you fall asleep smiling.
you take a dare.
all the traffic lights are green.
after twenty minutes, the Rubic's cube works.
MGMT comes on the radio.
it has a happy ending.
rolling down a grassy hill.
all the words fit.
it's a beautiful quote.
you succeed at something terrifying.
dancing.
seeing that there's still good out there, somewhere.

Endurance (A Rant With No Paragraphs)

/start rant/

I hate this time of year! As soon as you start counting down to exams in weeks rather than months, the fun is OVER! And now we're supposed to buckle down and start revising things and practising bazillions of OSCEs and blah. I'm so sick of lectures and exams and exams and lectures. I wonder why we all force ourselves to endure so much stuff that we don't want to do and will simply forget the moment we walk out of the exam hall. Sure, yeah, I want to pass my degree, establish a financially secure career, etc. But I used to be motivated for other reasons, too. I think. I can't remember. I used to think medicine would be my life. But now I'm feel like when I'm studying I'm hardly living--it's all the other stuff you do outside that's really living. It's a sort of Natural Law that you can't stand doing what you're supposed to do, and what you're not supposed to be doing is almost certainly the most entertaining activity in the world at that present moment. But then I wonder--in the future, are we going to look back on all these years spent slaving away at our desks and feel like they were an absolute waste of time? When I'm nineteen, spending a couple of decades studying to become a doctor doesn't seem like so much when I've got my entire life ahead of me. But when I'm old and I may only have a few years left to live, a couple of decades will seem like the Fountain of Life. What I'm trying to say, really, is very simple and stupid and brilliantly enticing: I wish I could throw everything out the window and live a life of whims. I think there's a bit of all of us that just wants to be ungrateful and selfish. In fact I wish it were possible for everyone to throw everything into the air and just live. Why do we force ourselves to do all these things that make us unhappy, bored, irritated, exhausted, deflated? And why am I being all idealistic and impossible again? And, why do I keep asking why? I know I say this a lot, but oh-oh-oh...I CANNOT WAIT FOR HOLIDAYS! SUMMER. FREEDOM! BLISS...on second thoughts, though, I'm not sure that a life of whims would be the way to happiness/satisfaction/meaning, I suppose (as my rational self kicks in). I suppose it's not the sort of life we're supposed to lead. Who knows what that is.

/end rant/

Mood: Tired
Watching: Season Three of Friends.
Reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. This book is great so far. It reminds me in some ways of Jonathan's Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy, which is my ultimate favourite-est most awesomest fantasy-comedy-adventure series ever!
Listening: Kelsey by Metro Station. Go cheap catchy dance-y stuff and whiney emo boy voices!

Yesterday, I went swimming! For the first time in, like, almost two years. I was breaststroking most enthusiastically up and down the lane until I popped my knee. From kicking too hard. I can never find enough ways to fail! Anyway, there was a sharp pain on the medial joint aspect which was aggravated by sudden flailing movements (such as those I perform when trying to breaststroke), so I think I may have stretched that medial ligament. Funfun. ALSO, for anyone who doesn't yet know, the women's changerooms at Monash are NUDE BONANZA. Great if you're bad at holding up your towel/like to flaunt your stuff/like to watch other people flaunting their stuff.

Ooh, what else? Oh yes. I think often I judge people too harshly and too quickly. 'Cause I find that most times when I get to know people better my opinion of them rises almost immediately. So, final note: less judging.

Long post, but I blame it on my sleepiness.

Why do I blog?

It's not like I have a whole flock of readers. And yet--it is strangely addictive. It's like picking your bellybutton fluff: the more you do it, the more you want to do it. Ew...I should have used eating Pringles as a less grimy example.

Maybe it's something to do with organising bits and pieces of my life. In any case, it's going to be nice to have posts to look back on after a few months, or even a few years.

Reading: Horseradish, by Lemony Snicket. (OOH-HOO, YES, I finished Monte Cristo! And it was totally worth it. Drool. I now adore plump, deceased French authors.)
Listening: MGMT on repeat. Yu-um.
Watching: Season 2 of Friends.
Mood: buoyant. For now, at least :]

On a less pleasant note, I have decided that I hate arrogance. No--that doesn't do my feeling justice. I looooooaaaaathe arrogance. It has even earned itself a spot on my NAY list! Shock! But honestly--so they may be good people, well-intentioned, clever, with humanitarian views and philanthropic tendencies...BUT GOOD GRIEF. Get off your pedestal. Gosh.

Yes, I am mostly referring to arrogant grads. Oh dear, it's not good to have pent-up anger. Release. Breathe. Scatter negative emotions to the cosmos...