For All it's Worth!

I've been meaning to pen something down for quite a while. But I was too caught up trying to keep up with my study schedule. For once in a very long time, I actually constructed a revision time table on an Excel spread sheet, specifically on the 6th of April which I called "My Race to the Finish".

Am I managing to stick to it? Not as much as I would like to. But it's there... As though I need it to remind me that after a tiring day of tutorials, ward rounds and seeing patients, I have to hit the textbooks.... That in exactly one months time, I would have already finished my surgery written and would be one hour into my medicine paper.

It's been like that for the past many years of my life (7+ years) that I feel like a ping pong ball bouncing from one desk bench to another, from one pack of notes to another and from one exam to the next (with a few, very intermittent, extracurricular activities in between). Devoting 90% of my waking time at home studying seemed like the natural thing to do...

Then came in the greatest procrastinator tool of all time... Facebook! Now, I don't have Facebook and don't intend to ever have Facebook, reasons for which require another blog post. But my other medicine friends who hang around with me in the library do, and they pay it a visit every now and again in between periods of study. (And on a very bad day, people study every now and again between very long periods of Facebook.)

Hearing them giggling stupidly at their laptop screens stirs up my curiosity and slowly, slowly I am lured into this display of photos and Facebook walls of people living a very different sort of life. During holidays and weekends, people go to parties, go on picnics and camping trips, go swimming in Easter (and sometimes even in February, you know, out of tradition). You get people making time to enjoy the sun, talking about the Pope and everything that's going on whilst I'm cocooned around the four walls of the hospital.

And people tag photos, type silly things on their Facebook walls... And I look at my books and ponder on the hours I spent with them and wonder to myself... At the end of the day, is it really worth it?