Med school can really screw with your emotions. While Case certainly isn't a cutthroat academic environment, there is always a fair amount of underlying competition that merely reflects the ridiculously large quantity of material to be learned. Even if you're not competing with your classmates, you're nearly always competing with yourself. It's impossible to learn everything that we're supposed to know, let alone learning it all in just a matter of weeks (each academic block is just a few weeks, so you can't put off learning the material for more than a couple days). No matter how hard you work, you will never learn it all. Never. The idea of "catching up" is just a poor excuse for a coping mechanism. "I'm almost caught up" is a common phrase around here...but what does it mean? You've reviewed the absolute bare minimum content for each lecture? Please. I'm just thankful that most of my friends and I have absolutely no clue as to how many times we'll actually need to cover this material until it gains the most meager foothold on our long term memories.
And most of all, I've never been this busy before. Not even close. Maybe during junior year when I was going 60+ hours of extracurricular junk each week and sleeping 4ish hours each weeknight. But that still doesn't compare with this. I've been trying to finish this entry for nearly two weeks, but free time really is a thing of the past. 10 or 15 minutes free here or there? Not really. If you think of walking home from school as free time, then maybe you're right. Tonight I brought a textbook to the gym for the first time, theoretically to read while I was on a stationary bike. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. It reminds me of a book I read a few years ago about students going through medical school. At one point, the author's roommate makes the fantastic discovery that if she puts each of her notecards in a plastic bag, she can study them while she's in the shower. That passage didn't sit well with me at the time, and it still doesn't now...but now I'm starting to understand it. And it seems like a very slippery slope.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Thursday, February 02, 2006
State of the Union: 24 hours later
I've been too busy to blog recently, but this article was too good to pass up:
Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports
By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.
What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.
But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.
The president's State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that "America is addicted to oil" and his call to "break this addiction."
Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."
He pledged to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."
Not exactly, though, it turns out.
"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.
Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.
Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports
By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.
What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.
But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.
The president's State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that "America is addicted to oil" and his call to "break this addiction."
Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."
He pledged to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."
Not exactly, though, it turns out.
"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.
Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.
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