Monthly Archives: April 2011

What I Do When I Don’t Get On MTV

  By judene | April 15, 2011 - 9:13 pm | Uncategorized
2 Comments

When I was 15 and MTV still had shows worth watching, it was a dream of mine to a) marry a member of Blink-182, and b) be on MTV as a guest on Top 10 Favourite Videos. Between the two, I was always under the impression that the latter was more attainable. Never mind that I’ve wanted to be a doctor since the age of 6 and the only chance I’d probably ever get to be on MTV would be to make some lame-ass PSA about condoms and dental dams.

Regardless of this fact, I made my list and many revisions since its birth. Although I’ve got it in my head now that even the odds of me trying to make contraceptives sound like a barrel of fun on TV is slim to none, the list is alive and well. Call it a reminder of my youth, full of hopes and dreams of making out in Tom DeLonge’s tour bus.

During my daily hour (or two) of procrastination, I found myself on You Tube watching old music videos and was reminded of my list. Naturally, I had to share it here, because I believe that like the Gospel, good music videos should be shared. And I’ve convinced myself that you people are interested in my taste in stuff.

10. All The Small Things- Blink-182

There’s no way I’d make a list without including my all-time favourite band. This video parodies mainstream pop videos that were dominating pretty much every single channel on TV. Tom dressed as a Britney Spears always always ALWAYS does it for me.

9. Cherry Lips – Garbage

I love Garbage’s music. I think Shirley Manson is hot, especially in this video. Bonus: she takes her dress off.

8. New Friend Request – Gym Class Heroes

This video is cute because it’s all about MySpace, which is almost extinct, sort of like Friendster ( do people still have accounts there?).

7. Island In The Sun – Weezer

Anyone who has known me for more than a day will know that I love animals. I will pretty much touch anything that isn’t poisonous. So when Weezer (which has the adorkable Rivers Cuomo) made a video of themselves playing with all sorts of cute baby animals, I couldn’t help but fall in love.

6. Inside Of You – Hoobastank

This video is awesome because a bunch of hot chicks are very excitedly watching Hoobastank perform at one of those dodgy looking peep-show places. And Doug Robb looks very do-able here.

5. It’s Not Your Fault – New Found Glory

What I like about this video is the way it doesn’t show the process of two people hooking up, like many other videos. In fact, the ease between the two characters may lead one to believe that they’re a happy couple.

4. Pain – Jimmy Eat World

The guy in this video does all sorts of things just to feel something in the absence of the girl. There’s a certain madness about it all that appeals to me.

3. Warning – Green Day

When you’re 15 and trying to be rebellious and there’s a music video of a dude doing everything he’s not supposed to, a small part of you turns him into a hero. At least, that’s what happened with me.
(Embedding is disabled, so here’s the link instead.)
Warning – Green Day

2. Walkie Talkie Man – Steriogram

I love this video so much that I watched it and was so fascinated by it that I completely didn’t notice the name of the band or the song. I actually had to Google the term ‘yarn in music video’ just to find it. It’s cute and creative, a combo that works for me almost all the time.

1. Special Needs – Placebo

This video is a haunting sort of hot. I can watch it a million times and it doesn’t get any less arousing. It may seem like a creepy idea, and people may never want to sleep with me after watching this video, but it’s my all-time favourite and it will take a lot for me to change my mind about this.

There you have it, my half-fulfilled dream of telling people what I like watching. And to think, I didn’t even have to dress up to present this list.

Rinne, Highmore and Kiesselbach

  By judene | April 2, 2011 - 1:19 pm | Uncategorized
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(This was written 5 days ago, in a lecture I had no intention of paying attention to)

It’s amazing how some lectures inspire me to write anything but its related notes.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I completed my ENT cycle, and you would think that I’ve moved on. No, I wouldn’t be me if I move on sooner than 6 months. Besides, I promised myself that I’d write (read: bitch) about this subject, and by golly I will.

ENT as a subject by itself isn’t so bad. It’s when it is a subject in my University that things go downhill. Other departments start classes at 9 in the morning, this one starts it at 8.30, sharp. When you live on little sleep and it takes almost an hour to get to the hospital, that half an hour matters. Not a single professor is understanding (i.e. lenient, a slacker..not anal). All of them were in school during World War II, not all of them are fully present now, if you get what I mean.

The two things that bothered me the most were the dress code and the exams. It’s compulsory for us to dress in office wear. Sure, I have shirts and blouses and junk like that, but those things require ironing and using starch and whatnot, effectively killing about 15 minutes of sleep time. I’m more of a roll-out-of-bed-and-pull-on-a-hoodie-and-remember-to-wear-jeans sort of person. You can see how this was going to cramp my style, or the lack thereof.

Then there’s the exam. That bugger was going to be at the end of the cycle. Two miserable weeks to learn EVERYTHING there is to know about the ear, nose and throat. Okay, I’m going a little too far; two God-forsaken weeks to learn ALMOST everything there is to know about the ear, nose and throat.

I’m sure I would have been able to take things in stride if I had not seen my roommate during her ENT cycle last year. She wasn’t my roommate during that period of time; she was a zombie who went for class, came home, studied, had a meal, and slept for about 4 to 5 hours daily. These activities were not necessarily done in that order. Needless to say, watching her made me scared. Shitless.

Truth be told, the two weeks went by fast. I spent every single day being petrified. The only problem was, all that fear didn’t even come close to making me study as hard as I should have. I pretty much just listened to lectures and my professor (who drilled it into our heads that we were going to fail with the horse poop knowledge we had).

The day of the exam was a killer. The exam was divided in two parts: practical skills and theoretical knowledge.

I was fearing the worst because THEORETICALLY, I knew how to examine a patient, but my partner, Anna has a super sensitive gag reflex ( I see the possible humour. Don’t.) and it was virtually impossible for me to perform a posterior rhinoscopy and pharyngoscopy. I knew what I was supposed to see, I’d just never actually seen it before. Thankfully, the patient given to me was easy to deal with and the techniques I had to demonstrate had nothing to do with reflexes of any kind. I survived Part One.

Part Two was my next hurdle, because I knew practically nothing. At least, it felt that way at the time. In Russia, most departments have a list of exam questions prepared for the students. This list is usually up on a notice board, or students are given a copy of these questions. It’s a little hard to explain, but the summary is if a student has managed to find the answers for all the questions on the list, they’ve pretty much studied everything.

The ENT department gave us a list of 95 questions at the beginning of the cycle. Out of these 95 questions, only two will be asked along with a case question.Each student gets a different set of questions. Naturally, being me, I only prepared exactly four answers. FOUR. Out of ninety-five.

Obviously, the odds were against me. I don’t know how it happened, but thankfully my first question was one of the four that I had prepared, my second question was about rhinogenic meningitis (which was the question that I specifically declared wouldn’t be asked because the occurence was so rare) and my case was about a nosebleed. I didn’t choke and die while answering my questions. Okay, I choked a little, because answering in Russian will probably never stop being scary to me.

Of course, now I look back and think that it wasn’t so bad. Clearly, I don’t remember all the details anymore.