Happy Easter

Easter is a magical time of the year. Somewhere near the North Pole, in his giant mansion made from the slave labour of three hundred underpaid elves, an overweight man enters a secret room with a secret machine. He walks into this machine, and upon exiting he is immediately about five feet shorter, his ears about three times as long, and that white beard of his is now all over his body. Yep, Santa Claus has morphed into the Easter Bunny. Back at his "toy factory" the elf slaves, in all their orange-faced glory, remove their cute little pointy elvish hats to reveal their thick, curly green hair. Yes that's right, the elves are in fact the Oompa Loompas, toy makers for six months of the year, chocolate bees for the other six. The entire clan was won by Santa off an inebriated Willy Wonka, in a game of high stakes texas poker that marked the epic downfall of an entire chocolate empire. In a last-ditched effort to salvage his pint-sized orange-coloured workers, Willy put his entire factory on the line in one last bet. He thought he had won, but someone forgot to tell the intoxicated chocolate king that having five cards of the same colour isn't actually a legitimate winning hand. With the Oompa Loompas and the plans for a chocolate empire now in the hands of Santa, the fat jolly man in a red suit decided to branch out.

And that's how the Easter Bunny was born.

For most, this is what Easter is all about - stuffing ourselves full with the goodness of milk chocolate, then running around the block a couple of times everyday because you feel guilty. You eventually get over it within about eight days, and accept the fact that you're always going to be a fat person simply because you live in a country full of fatties, you fatty fatty boomba.

Of course, there's the original reason behind having an Easter in the first place, which is the religious aspect to it. Christians celebrate this time of year in honour of a man who gets nailed to a cross. I'm supposedly one of them. I say 'supposedly' because most wouldn't think me as one... must be all the swearing, insulting, and violent tendencies that I have. Actually, I now realise why Christians are looked upon with an eye of oddity. Think about it. We celebrate an innocent person dying a painful and excruciating death. Somewhere along the line, logic and religion obviously had a falling out. Obviously the concept is not as simple as that, and to explain it now would put me at risk of looking like a man wearing a white shirt, and black tie, and knocking on your door with a thick book in one hand. (Speaking of which, someone's gotta teach those guys how to understand when a person just doesn't want to hear it right now so please let me go back to my lunch which is now cold because of you!! ... apologies to any Mormons)

In a nutshell, for us odd religious types, it's about appreciating when one gives up something for the benefit of others. And hey, religious or not, that stuff happens everywhere. Just look at all the people lining up to give blood at the Red Cross, or the people calling in on Good Friday to donate to the Royal Children's Hospital, or the people risking their lives as part of Medecins Sans Frontieres. Hey, us humans aren't so bad at all!!!

Whether you believe in the religious god, or the chocolate god...

Happy Easter!

Also ....

It's good to be home for the next entire week. Mmmmmmm, my own bed. :D

MED SCHOOL!

So at some point in time, between now and the last post, I quit my honest day job as a full-time torturer physio and woke up in Egypt. Then I found myself travelling through Jordan and Syria, doing my best Lawrence of Arabia meets Moses impersonation, before realising that I had reached Turkey, where no one can really work out whether they're Middle Eastern, European or Asian. Filled with hummus, and more bread than the stomach of a fat baker with an eating disorder, I came home, bummed around for a bit, then found myself in med school. Hooray!

How the hell did I end up here? I stand by the idea that I bullshitted my way into here ... literally. That GAMSAT result was pretty average for the science and humanities questions. The overall score was brought up by a decently high score on that essay section aka. how-long-can-you-write-for-without-your-hand-exploding section. Two essays worth of prime grade A bullshit in sixty minutes, and voila! here's your invitation to an interview. Of course, the rest is history. I'm sure the bullshitting resurfaced again for those ten or so mini-interviews I had to do. All I remember from that day, was explaining to one of the interviewers that it was ok for some lady to breastfeed a baby that was not hers. I don't know about you, but if I knew my doctor said that, I'd be hightailing it for the exit door even if I was bleeding profusely from all four of my limbs at the time.

So here I am, in what is one of the happiest stretches of my life, living in a house with eight other insane people doing the same med course with me. I say insane with great affection, but quite frankly, we're all exactly that - insane. The mere acceptance into med school has given me the greatest sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, and I have never been more excited about the future than I am now. Yet if you just pause for a second and take a closer look, I, along with the eight others under this roof and seventy or so others in the entire cohort, can be described in two words:

F*#@ing NUTS!!!

Don't get me wrong. There's plenty of good to be had here. But the logic of the here and now is as goes....

- Hi there. Would you like to give up your steady income and embark on a journey of poverty for the next half a decade or so?

- Would you like to be part of a university course that will destroy all the other aspects of your life?

- Would you like to go through another life of exams that cause you to freak out just because everyone else is freaking out too, even if the exam is about as worthless as a five cent coin in the pocket of a man walking into a Ferrari dealership?

- Would you like to go through another decade or so of scrutiny, judgement, inferiority to superiors, and more stress than a blind snail without its shell crossing ten lanes of peak-hour freeway?

- Would you like to be rewarded for your efforts on completing this course with a job that requires you to develop the sleeping patterns of a retarded, narcoleptic owl?

- Would you like to earn a job that promises great pay, only for you to realise in twenty years that, for the time, effort, and stress you put in, you'd get paid more by working the corporate ladder at Ernst and Young or working St. Kilda's streets?

- Would you like to have a career where innocently misreading '6.0' for '60' means you accidentally killed the poor little seven year old girl in bed 2A because you gave her ten times the amount of painkillers, and as a result you have to explain to her parents that their daughter is dead not because of your idiocy, but rather because your optometrist is crap? (or in my case, because I refuse to go see one in the first place!)

If, like me, you answered 'yes' to all of the above, you are probably here with me in Gippsland, doing the same uni course, procrastinating from the same exam that's going on tomorrow.

Yet the fact that you haven't snapped and decided to quit already means that, like me, you actually quite liked saying 'yes' to all of the above .......... you crazy weirdo.