Sunday, October 19, 2003
The Speed Of Life
I lie in bed at night sometimes and wonder what the hell I'm doing here. It gets boring after a while: lectures, books, studying, more lectures, more studying. . . not to mention that I see the same people seven or more hours a day, five days a week (nothing personal--I love you guys) without much more than the
Daily Illini to remind me that there is a world outside vet school.
Life runs at two speeds here:
1) Warp Speed
My life
outside of vet school speeds past me as I realize it's been months since I've spoke to many of my friends. I think about babies I worked with last year (at a day care center) realizing by now they are walking and talking. I look at my guitar in the corner of my room, collecting dust, realizing that it's been three weeks since I've touched it. I haven't gone camping all of Septmeber or October, the prime camping months out here. I feel like the outside world is passing me by at a million miles an hour, as my parents plan for retirement, as normal people are going to work, enjoying their weekends, living normal lives, as conflicts are coming and going around the country and around the world, as kids are growing up. . . and here I am spending hours on end with my nose in a book.
2) Ultra-Concentrated
But time here
within the vet school world passes slowly, in a weird way: a day feels like a week, a week feels like a month, and as I lie in bed, I realize how much I've done in the few short months I've been here. I guess it's the result of an "ultra-concentrated" education. While life since late August may have been just a few more months of Great Paper Chase for some, I look at my life since then and realize how much I have to tell. I recieved my last paycheck from my former boss in early September with a little post-it note asking "how's it going?" and I couldn't believe how much that little question brought to my mind. I couldn't believe it had only been two weeks since I saw her. It felt like I had so much to tell her, with all I had learned, all the people I had met, all the goals I had set.
Now I realize that the sacrifice of a few short years spent in this microcosm of vet school is not much of a sacrifice at all; these one-hundred classmates I see every day of my life are going to be my professional contemporaries I call for consultation, advice and friendship for the rest of my career; the things I'm learning now are the basis for what I'll love doing for the remainder of my healthy life. And I realize I
LOVE learning about brains and cell function and hormonal messengers and biochemical cascades. I love listening to Dr. O talk about surgical techniques ("you scoop out the pulp"). I
love drawing my little charts and coloring them and closing my eyes and visualizing the three-dimensional structure of the inside of a dog abdomen.
Yes, I'm a nerd, I know.
But for now, I
love being a nerd.
