Piggies!

Today was our last day (EVER!) of PBL.  We still have classes tomorrow and friday before finals (anatomy, and a clinical skills lecture,) but no more sitting around in small groups brainstorming over cases.  Except for when we're on rotations, and brainstorming over cases with other students and DVMs.  Or when we're in practice and consulting with colleagues over cases. But ignoring the "PBL" we'll be doing the rest of our lives, this was our last structured PBL session of vet school.  

The class of 2015 was doing a fundraiser selling finals survival gift baskets, and our facilitator bought one for our group.  It had a bunch of goodies in it, but the best part was a squeezy stress ball piggy.  

Bwahahaha!  I love him! 

Speaking of pigs, there was another fundraiser the class of 2015 did today.  They were charging people to vote for a faculty member to have to kiss a pig.  The local potbelly pig rescue showed up with not one, but THREE pigs.  One 2 year old potbelly, a 7 month old, and one that was only a couple weeks old.  Cuteness overload!  I got to give the babies skritches, and the oldest one would "shake" on command.  Sorry, I didn't think to take pictures of baby piggy goodness, and I don't want to rip of other people's pictures off of facebook.  

After filling up on piglet cuteness, I went with my friend Christine to the Banfield, where she's boarding her 

3.5 week old kitten she's bottle feeding while she's in class.  Not only did I get to hold her adorable munchkin, but there were 3 other kittens in there I got to say "hi" to through their cages.  It was a little too much adorableness crammed into one lunch hour.  

But yeah.  I made it through 2 years of PBL.  8 separate groups of 6-8 students + 1 faculty member.  And I managed to get 8 great groups, never hitting the "dud" mix of classmates or a bad facilitator.  I lucked out. 

You know what I'm not going to miss about being in class?

Formaldehyde.  We were looking at some horse lungs in class today, that were particularly pungent.  I kept leaning over them to look at different structures, so I got quite a mouthful of fumes.  I can still taste the formaldehyde.  At least when I worked as an embalmer, we used a lower index arterial fluid, and I'm pretty sure it was scented - it smelled like Sprite Remix tasted.

Here's something that's absolutely disgusting that nobody wants to know about - I kept forgetting to bring my lab coat home from anatomy lab to wash it, so around December, I just brought another one to school.  I keep bumping the sleeves into specimens, and they're both absolutely disgusting, but I keep forgetting to wash them. So now, I'm looking forward to the end of the year, when I'm going to burn them.  Because they're that bad.

Not Sure What to Feel

So today marks the first day of our very last week of PBL.  It's a short case - we only have PBL today and Wednesday, and we only have one BSL lab this week, plus two clinical skills talks.  We're done with our molecular and cellular biology class, and we'll be done with our ethics and law class on Wednesday.

This week is such a weird mixture of everything - excitement to be done, sadness about being done, bewilderment that two years has passed in such a blur, stress over finals, and excitement/terror at the prospect of beginning clinical rotations in August.

I've mentioned this to people before, but I'm pretty sure vet school involves some kind of wormhole, because there's no other way to explain how the past two years moved by as quickly as they did.  And as bitchy as I've sounded in recent posts, they really have been an amazing two years.

New feature!

Look to the top right of the page, right beneath the horse picture in the header.  See that new link?  I'm setting up a store for clawspawsscales.com.  I ask that if there's something on there from amazon that you would have purchased anyway; for instance, textbooks, for those of you in the incoming class, or NAVLE prep materials, a new stethoscope, or an extremely cute mustache toy for your pooch, that you click the link to the store to buy it, instead of going straight through amazon.  It doesn't cost you any extra, and helps me out a bit.

I was contemplating taking down the post from earlier today

Because, let's face it.  It was kind of hostile.  But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, "fuck it.  the hostility was deserved."

Here's what happened.  Last Friday, and Wednesday, we had a clinical skills class.  Before each class, the instructor decided that they needed to plug their laptop into the loudspeakers in the classroom, and blare shitty pop music at us.  Then today during molecular and cellular biology, one of our groups of classmates decided to do their powerpoint presentation on heartworm with the title of each song a pun based off a pop song.  Which was kind of cute.  Until they decided to aurally assault the whole class with a 10 second clip of "Quit Playing Games With my Heart."  There is nothing cute about forcing a captive audience to listen to boy bands, no matter how brief.  I'm pretty sure had they played that music at Guantanamo instead of waterboarding people, there would have been a public outcry, and actual war crime sanctions against the US.  Even though I got a gawdawful earworm before I was fully awake today, I did misdirect some hostility at my classmates, who were in all fairness, trying to be cute, and trying to make a boring presentation more entertaining.  (FYI, stick with veterinary medicine - I'm sure you'll be a great doctor, but comedy is not your strong point.)

The hostility comes from a place of helplessness and frustration.  I pay to go to school, and learn veterinary medicine.  I pay a lot for that privilege.  The classes I attend have required attendance, (unless you're a certain person who I have ranted about recently.)  If I'm subjected to something that is most definitely NOT veterinary medicine related, and I stand up and walk out of the class, I risk getting in trouble for it.  However, somehow it's perfectly ok for somebody else to ear fuck and entire room of people with their "music," and that's ok.  And I interpret forcing your personal musical taste on people as an act of hostility.

For instance, take my next door neighbors (the douchnozzle ones, not the amazing D.O. students).  One of them likes to work on cars in their driveway.  Which is literally 2 feet from my bedroom window.  They like to blare mariachi from their car speakers at what has to be at least 100 decibels.  It shakes my entire house.  Listening to the bass lines makes me ashamed to be a bass player (because I might get lumped in with these people who think that a bassline consists of C, G, C, G, repeated on tempo for 5 minutes straight.)  And I can only come up with two explanations for my neighbors playing the musical abortions they play at the volume they play it at.  Theory #1 - they're so self-absorbed, that it never occurred to them that sound travels, they're not the center of the universe, and they're absolutely clueless that anybody might find their actions objectionable.  Basically, they're so narcissistic that nobody exists within hearing range except them.  Theory #2 - It's an act of outright hostility.  Much like a dog pissing on somebody's leg, the neighbors are saying "I own this airspace, and I will fill it with the most foul sounding shit I can, because fuck you."  So basically the options are either clinical narcissism or sociopathy.

That's also how I felt during class last week.  I'm trapped in my seat, and I just want to learn about thoracic radiology and get on with my life.  But no.  Instead, I'm subjected to loud, inescapable music and bullshit self-help pop psychology quackery that has no basis is peer-reviewed science.  Once again, I'm left to my theories.  Theory #1 - this person thinks that everything they love must be so wonderful, and must be shared, and everybody will love it because they do.  Basically, they have no concept that other people have different taste, and that their ideas and music aren't the only things out there.  And they're having so much "fun," so the "fun" must be shared with EVERYBODY! i.e. Narcissism.  Theory #2 - They secretly hate us, and like a dog pissing to mark it's territory, they decide to fill the air of the classroom with their piss to mark their place in the pecking order.  i.e. Hostility.  I can't come up with a flattering theory.

So yes, I'm hostile about music.  I listen to all sorts of music that doesn't suck.  Classical.  Metal.  Jazz.  Bluegrass.  Classic rock.  BUT, I also learned from a very young age that not everybody has the same taste as me, and I've always made it a point to not force my choices on other people, because that would be rude.  Apparently, not everybody got that memo, or doesn't have the empathy to figure it out for themselves.  But I've always made it a point to turn down the volume in my car if my windows are open, or to pop in earphones if I'm listening to something and somebody else is in the room.  It strikes me that it takes either extreme hubris or indifference to others to do otherwise. But maybe that's because I make it a point to not do rude things to other people.  Unless you count passive-aggressively calling them rude online, but guess what?  They can choose whether or not to read this.  I could not choose whether or not to sit through class.

News Flash

It doesn't matter if you're a student, or a faculty member. It's a dick move to play your shitty music during a lecture to a captive audience. Frankly, your taste in music sucks, and people who possess empathy have the ability to recognize that not everybody appreciates the same things as you. People who aren't narcissists don't force their personal taste on other people. This has been a public service announcement. Making a captive audience listen to pop music makes you a dick. That is all.

The buttcrack of dawn and I don't get along

Tuesdays, Thursdays, and some Fridays classes start at 8 am.  Those days kill me.  If I'm lucky, I'll be asleep by 2am the night before, but that's a best case scenario.  It's not that I have insomnia, either - I have no problems falling asleep, it's just that my circadian rhythm is backwards, and if left to my own devices, I have no problems going to sleep at 5am, then sleeping for 8 hours.  When I worked night shifts, they always warned us about "night shift syndrome," where you have all these ill effects from having to live backwards your natural circadian rhythm. That's how I feel all the time, but those 8am days especially kill me.  (And I'm not just whining - it's a real syndrome) It's the main reason why I've always considered emergency work a strong option - so I can actually feel like a normal person.

Anyway, so today, I stumble into class at 8, expecting a physiology lecture/Q&A from one of our internal medicine specialists.  But for some reason, I see a familiar face sitting off to the side of the room.  It's our old physiologist who left at the end of last year to go work at one of the Caribbean schools.  And for some ungodly reason, he decided that while on vacation in Cali, that he would visit us, and do a guest lecture.  It's a helluva good way to make 8 am seem that much more tolerable.

Today's Tyler's birthday, and he requested a strawberry birthday cake.  I've never met a strawberry cake I liked, so I kind of cheated. I made a vanilla cake and dyed it pink,so it's a psycho-somatic strawberry cake.  But I made this straberry frosting for it.  I don't care if you don't have a cake to put it on - just go make it, and eat it plain.  It is the best frosting I have ever tasted.  Hopefully good enough that Tyler won't notice that it's on a pink vanilla cake.