Ok, fine, I admit it: I’m constipated. What did you say? That’s too much information? No, no, I didn’t mean to begin the year with a scatological post. Who’d do that? What sort of sicko would bandy the state of their colonic motility on the internet? Hmm.. actually, I would and I have in the past, but, in this case, I meant to say is that I’m EMOTIONALLY constipated. Dark days are here and I don’t measure them in terms of light intensity. I’m currently in a temperate but unreasonably bright region of the world, Dubai. When I step out without my sunglasses during the day, it feels as though my eye is going to explode from an overload of photons entering it and the eye-juice is going to roll down my cheeks…ok, I’ll stop now.

 I meant dark in the sense that I, like my classmates, am studying for what could be called, esp. when considering the importance of initial conditions in chaos theory, the most important exam of my life, the step 1 of the US Medical Licensing Exam. It is, at times, an experience of great exhilaration and surprise as bits of information from seemingly disparate ends of the medical pantheon come together and go out on dates in my head (some get along better than others). At other times, I feel that my humanity has slipped into and drowned in an alphabet soup. For some surely masochistic reasons, the colourful chemicals within our cells all get boiled down to acronyms in medicine and science. For instance, TNF-a is a demonic molecule in our immune system that leaves us thin and skeletal and TGF-b actually paid half my salary the year I did research. But the point is this-- interesting as this stuff is, I find myself emotionally numbed and cerebrally overloaded on most days.

 Worse, even if I have some semblance of emotion at the end of the day, I find it nearly impossible to express it without medical slang such as contraindication, ipsilateral, etiology, prophylactically, and other such hideous products of the medical profession’s fetish for Greek and Latin. This state is what I call emotional constipation (a relative of verbal tenesmus, I suppose, but the etiology is different). The raison d’etre of this blog post is to overcome that. I think blogging more frequently will keep my emotional colon healthy and productive. Hmm… given the quality of my writing, I think the colon metaphor is quite appropriate.

  Moreover, it’ll be my new year’s resolution not to be as negligent of this blog as I have been of late. It struck me at the end of my second year that my colleagues in medical school and I were experiencing something that the majority of humans in the world never will. This obligates me as a wannabe writer to document it to the best of my wretched abilities for the nternet surfer who finds him/herself marooned on this desolate blog.

Ok, that’s it. Writing time’s over and I need to stop by the bathroom en route to my study desk. Oops, I did it again!

P.S: To my dear OS friends, I’m sorry I haven’t been around to comment and read. I fear that TNF-a might have its vengeance if I leave my studies for too long.