mum does some funny things sometimes. here's mum cleaning out the gutter in a poncho.

life is better with nintendo

mike sent me this t-shirt.
now my life is one kick ass video game!

psych?

Other fields of medicine tend to be algorithmic, mechanical, leaving little freedom for creativity or variation in the way we treat our patients. Psychiatry allows for this creativity as every patient is different and there are certainly many ways to approach the problems encountered. Being a relatively new field we know, dare I say it, little about how the brain and behaviour work. The brain mind discontinuity is one of the biggest mysteries that has yet to be solved. And this is exciting. There are discoveries being made at a level far more fundamental to human medicine than anything other specialty fields have to offer. For example, finding chromosomes that may harbour a gene for autism, new drug treatments for kids predisposed to bipolar disorder, statins and cholesterol lowering drugs slowing progression of alzheimer's etc, the implication of specific regions of the brain in anorexia nervosa. The main reason why I am opting for psychiatry is that it is the only medical field, I believe, to be “speculative” in the way that the humanities are. It does not rely exclusively on a disease-biology model. I want to study something intrinsically enriching, something that will make me see Man and his environment in a different light. To study psychiatry is to gain understanding of humanity and its frailty.

Psychiatry is challenging, the people we often see are the “sickest of the sick” (some with both mental and ‘medical’ problems). Was it not the desire to help people that drew us to medicine in the first place? In my opinion people with mental illness need our help the most. We have the opportunity to help them achieve a level of functioning that will allow them to live fulfilling and independent lives. How is someone with type 1 diabetes going to survive if their mental state is in such a way that they cannot understand the importance of compliance? We can read about appendicitis or myocardial infarction and learn how to cure these by following specific steps in a mechanical fashion. But when you read about depression or psychosis and see it in our patients, something inherent in our own being is triggered. We begin to feel, and we are allowed to.

photo-oil on canvas-the scream-edvard munch

sans-arcade pronounced sawnh-

just damn sexy, damn it.

...so punk rock

So we were chillin’ at the local BK joint when a murder of fine young cannibals entered the place in linear fashion. Colour co-ordinated black shirts with eponymous band names, matching tapered Levi’s – worn almost too low and too tight (an attempt at producing an image just shy of cool). There was a striking contrast between their porcelain skin underneath their black cottons and eye liner. You know the kind, those “emo” kids, displaying a carefully manufactured aloofness. Wallflowers, more self assured than they actually are. Here it seemed that they wanted to say that they felt confident in their indifference to convention, that they are ‘different’. Oh…are they now? I’m not saying that you shouldn’t wear tight black jeans and black t-shirts, - if worn in good taste I think you’d look pretty cool. But it seems ridiculously delinquent when they claim creative individuality while dressing to look just like their mates. They’re really no different from anyone else. Insecurity I suppose is an intrinsic part of our humanness, I guess we all struggle with/for acceptance-whether we choose to admit it or not. I certainly do.

ego surfing

check these pages out...

www.davin.co.nz
www.davintan.com

love

i love!...that i don't have any real attachments to anything. i think i've realised the old adage that you should work to live and not live to work. although sometimes it feels like all i do is work, but nevermind that. i mean, i could pack up and leave for some obscure town offset from age old bratislava or maybe kirsk? anytime i want! no fixed abode, no fixed anything really. no real commitments. (you could argue against that). i've got itchy feet, no ring on my finger and no one latching onto my wallet. nice. selfish? ... probably. but i'm happy. i guess im a delayed gratifier.

was over at vince's and kylie's place the other night. some might say it was pretty much a non event, but i like to call it quality time. no need for flashing lights/loud music/or dashes of adrenaline, just time spent with good mates. oh by the way...now that i'm not moving out do you guys want your stuff back?

watched the new tarantino movie last night with shaun. the hairs on the back of my neck still feel pretty stiff.

hey check out these monkeys. see the big swollen thing? yup. that means the female is ready for mating! check it out, her poo is stuck mid-evacuation. yux!

time

time is a precious commodity. we can't get it back after we've spent it. sigh. i just got a text from my friend mike. he's just spent the last 3 or so weeks rockin' around the snowy slopes of the big colorado/?denver. merely a tame introduction to his big adventure into the wide and crazy world, i should think. and currently nursing a headache and recovering from the giddy flashing lights, reflecting off glistening "gyrating boobies!", of mardi gras in wild new orleans. i reckon we should spend our time, and good amount of it, enjoying new experiences. God gave most of us 5 senses, some more some less, we should be flooding them with all kinds of stimuli. "what's gotten into you whalefarmer?" (i hear you ask?), "why are you writing about this?"...well...i've just finished up my first day as a psychiatric house officer, and i have to say it was the best 9 hours of the week. its a specialty that allows us to spend TIME with the patient without having to answer a million bleeps at once. it allows us to actually get to know our patients, empathise, sympathise, love, like, hate, whatever. we get to practice good medicine. i think we agree that we don't enjoy doing a whole bunch of things badly. we'd much rather do one thing really well. well...maybe that's not true for all of us. for me, i prefer the latter.

boomerang+life=happiness

welcome to the blogging world my friend's!
two among five or six of my most favourite people in the world have just arrived onto our shores, as i have only just arrived myself...i am wetting my pants with excitement. lets build some electronic sand castles!

grobelhopper!

check out my man mike's blog

hopin' all ova da show-wuh!

snapple happle!

a few of you faithful followers have asked me "whalefarmer.? where did you accrue such splendid photos?" and i will promptly answer. "why, with my trusty Minolta SRT SLR of course!" a simple but most excellently awesome lightbox. the pictures it is capable of producing are fantastically magical. slammin' yo asses home beatches yayor!

?bored

yeah i know. i think if there was one thing i could wish for, for wishing's sake right now it would be this. i wish fluid prose could flow easily from my brain through my nimble fingers. pretty sentences and words would mix and mingle with punctuation so acute and yet not to be too angular so to sound pretentious. i enjoy the freedom of just being able to write rubbish and yet be somewhat satisfied with it. there's almost a calming effect that comes with letting your mind wander. here's how i do it. i start with a thought, just a thought. a small one will do, and then let the words just spill out one by one. a little bit like the beginning of a rain shower. a little drop here and there, and then a little spittle, and from a spittle to a spatter, and from a spatter to a torrent, blah blah blah, i could go on forever. ranting to no one and everyone at the same time. cyber space odyssey. adventures in public viewing platforms, made up of foundations of space, weirdness. weirdness is good. finite weirdness i think.

check out the picture of the galmi gang. adventures in spaced outness wildness!