Everyday I'm Shufflin pt 2: Library Muscle Club

 #2

Everyday I'm Shufflin is a series of posts chronicling life as a med student.

Study week #4 just started. Done with lectures for a week - except for the lucky few who still have hospital visits and small group - nothing to do but study, for a whole week. 

sidenote - here's how studying usually progresses: the first time I look at material I'm confused, the second time I'm familiar with the words, and the third time the concepts start to click, and at this point it's kind of fun. Study week is terrible because you've already read this material a few times, and it's not fun anymore. You have to force feed words like glutamine phosphoribosylamidowtftransferase into your brain. No one is happy about it, and you can feel the tension in the air. It's no wonder physicians self-medicate. 

The beginning of study week is by far the worst, when everyone's dead serious and gunning for honors. Usually the tension wanes away by the end of study week, when everyone's in burned-out-zombie mode. At that point it becomes fun again because you spend all your time procrastinating.

But to get to the end of study week, the only way we can survive is through camaraderie. We can only do this together. Enter - Library Muscle Club (LMC). 

look at that form

I hate push ups. I'm a long distance runner. My optimal race distance is probably somewhere between 15 and 50 miles. Fast twitch muscle fibers are not my thing, but about a month ago, through peer pressure, which is always good, I was forced into doing 25 push ups in the library. It reminded me that I hate push ups, so I decided one of my New Year's Resolutions would be 10,000 pushups during the calendar year of 2013. That probably says a lot about me..

Anyways, a few of us have been gathering in the stairway between the third and fourth floors of the library to do pushups as a study break. We're trying to actively recruit new members. Fortunately, Sudeep is a master of peer pressure. You can't say no to that guy. I feel like we've peaked at about ten people. It's funny to have ten people doing push ups in a library corridor, you can't get that anywhere else.

You might be wondering if the library is a weird place to do push ups. It is. But we have to do them. Here's why: because it builds camaraderie, which is the only way to survive this god forsaken place. It also keeps you awake. And it intersperses exercise throughout your day, which should help keep your stress levels manageable. And because, fuck uroporphyrinogen decarboxylase. 

If you want to join us Library Muscle Club, you can find us here:

See you on the other side,

from ken

taking requests for future blog posts. please comment or email.