a very hot and crowded room, hardly ventilated, and the obnoxious smell of the dead cats... maybe the last thing to enjoy a beautiful summer. but then again i have to face expediency as usual so as to attain what i deem is a higher purpose. yeah right, this is exactly an expedient course, otherwise when can i wear the sablay then? so this is summer 2006 for me: aggressively skinning dead cats, cutting relentlessly through the depths of their viscera, irritatingly looking for such a minute duct, mistaking a mesentery for a vein, memorizing an array of seemingly latin terminologies, crying and sniffing caused by a wiping solution, bombarding a professor with too many questions ranging from sheer nothings or of an honest curiosity, and finally cramming for an exam every other two days. errgh! expediency, period!
this is the only subject that made me cry. honest. i cried the night before the first lec exam because i can't seem to memorize the taxanomy of the vertebrates. i can't even completely understand why the heck do i have to do this. again, i convinced myself saying "expediency, dear friend!" i cried so hard because all i wanted is to get a fair standing but it seemed to me that by those times i can't even compose myself or find a clear and senseful motivation. i read the books not to learn but to memorize for the immediate exam the next day. i missed the thrill of truly learning biology because time constraint seem to be a big and extraneous factor in my learning process. consolidation of memory is best achieved when the brain is at its utmost functioning- by that i mean, good metacognition and genuine motivation. and that i didn't have by those days.
so i told my mother that i want to drop this killer subject, primarily because i was really suffering from what i deemed to be an irrational (could be rational too) fear of failing. but she said that i have to keep going and should care less if i got a failing grade in the first exam as long as i would try to do better for the rest. the truth is i don't want to fail or be the lowest in our class because that would really make me feel so inferior. i don't want to feel that i'm the least. that's honest. but i decided to pursue the course so that i could finally overcome such fear. lately, i am enjoying dissecting cat- at least close to our anatomy, which i am more interested in. though i am not that interested in comparative anatomy of vertebrates, i convinced myself again with the same thought: for expediency's sake!
so now, my summer 2006 will soon end.
(Written 4 May 2006)
