To do: Absolutely nothing!

My goal for this summer break is to undo all the tension-filled harassment and unhinging my brain and body have experienced that were primarily precipitated by a school year's worth of academic torture. O mas lalong kilala sa katawagang “medical school”.

Update? Has been hitting the bummerific bull’s eye quite consistently so far. :D

Bum bum bum bum.

My daily existence can be summed up in the following cycle of activities: waking up, exercising, preparing breakfast, catching up on local and national news the old-school way (it’s amusingly disorienting to hold a newspaper with your bare hands after a year of not doing it), finishing that tedious-in-an-awesome-way David Foster Wallace novel, watching a movie or two (or three or more haha), Tumblr-ing, Facebook-ing, Twitter-ing, sleeping. Sometimes, a bit of variation is put in the mix, such as pigging out and/or getting wasted with old friends.

Now that I laid it all out there, I guess you could say my summer hiatus has been adopting a monotonous motif. But after a year of frenzied scrambling and juggling of numerous responsibilities (or the inability thereof), and keeping up with your ridiculously high (verging on the impossible) set of academic and personal standards, “monotony” is a much-needed, and a very welcome respite.

PS It’s exciting to hear about friends starting their transitional summer program in ASMPH. A year ago, I participated in that “program” too, wondering what the h is the point of all the month-long arts and crafts and instant role-playing activities we have been doing. Answer: A little bit close to zero, medically speaking. But it had its awesome highlights too: being able to assist in circumcisions, going house-to-house in a barangay in Tondo to inject kids with the measle and polio vaccine (with the assistance of the barangay health workers who so graciously taught us the proper technique of doing subcutaneous injections), being taught by an impossibly hot ophthalmologist about the role of management in medicine, and most importantly, getting to know your batch mates sans all the mental baggage, neuroses, drama, and doubts that are typical (and almost universally) brought about by the “real” first year of medical school. :)