Just taking a quick break from studying

Mid-terms are next week, so even more so than usual, my time has been spent with my nose in a book (or ebook, more accurately.)

Every week, we have "grand rounds," where we talk over the previous week's case, address unresolved questions, and talk about cases with similar presentations.  In yesterday's grand rounds, one of our professors said something about "can you believe you're only two months away from being third-years?"  Something about that phrasing put a knot in my stomach.  Sure, I know that logically, 2nd year is 3/4 of the way through.  However, thinking of it that way is much different than thinking of it the way the faculty put it.  Holy crap, in 2 months, we need to know what we're talking about!  I'm nervous about it - mostly about having to switch to a new clinic every two weeks, and having to battle the LA area freeways, but I am so excited to actually apply the past two years to something more hands-on.

On a completely unrelated subject, I was listening to Tool's Aenema a couple weeks ago.  If you're not familiar with the song, the lyrics are about how awful LA is, and how Maynard can't wait for California to fall into the ocean.  Anyway, because I'm a nerd, I'm sitting there listening to the song, and it occurs to me that I've lived here for a year and a half, and I'm completely unfamiliar with the geology of the surrounding area.  Sure, I know about the San Andreas fault, and the N. American and Pacific plates, but that was about it.  So I had to look up more detail as a distraction.  I did find out that the reason our mountains here run East-West instead of North-South is because they were on a chunk of land that got moved onto the pacific plate, and got rotated as the plate moved north.  And then I found out that since LA is technically part of the pacific plate, over time it will get dragged further and further North, but will not break off into the ocean.  Honestly, I'm a little bummed to find that out.  It's one of those things that you hear repeated so much, only to find out that it was based off of a misunderstanding of how tectonics works, that wormed its way into pop culture is kind of disappointing.