It's not often that I get taken back. But for once I was. And strangely it was due to politics. As someone from Northern Ireland, politics is very important to me and at exactly the same time means very little to me. In this instance though it was a man from north wales who had the shocking effect on me. He is an independent candidate who was running for a counsellor position. He was running for the people, for their interests and for his community. He didn't give one damn about any of the major parties or what their agenda's were. He wouldn't fold to the majority in a far off constituency such as London. He would go along with any party and vote in whatever way he needed to so that his community was getting the best and the things that were most relevant to them.
It is just quite strange for me to see anything other than tribal politics, or majority politics. I don't think I've ever fully seen an independent candidate, well not one that was halfway sane and not standing for some ridiculous reason, or didn't have a multi-coloured goatee.
I thought it was quite refreshing to see someone wanting to fight for his own beliefs, being completely honest and doing what he thought was right for his community. If only everyone had some integrity like this, we wouldn't have corrupt governments, backhanders, expense rows, or communities suffering due to bad candidates, or people who will lie and say anything they can to get into power.
So i want to say thank you, to all of you who stand up for your community with truth and honour, to those of you who do what is right just for the fact it is right, I appreciate your effort, I applaud your morals, I envy your guile. So again thank you for restoring my belief in all things political.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Sunday, 5 July 2009
The figment writings continued..
I've decided to pop into you once again. I know I'm not invited, possibly not even wanted, but in all due respect, I come and go as I please, and you more than likely won't pay attention, or accept my presence, but that being said I am back to give my insights into another story.
Now I have said I have certain qualities, I have influence, but it is not a common feature for me to use this. I usually keep within myself, in the tiniest space possible, be it in the corner of your mind, in the end of a twig, or a rain drop. But sometimes I do get bored. Watching is amazing as I have said. I get to see the emotions fester from beginning to end, the outcome, the repercussions, the reverberations and so on. But every now and then I feel obliged to make a nudge, or a sign, or even if needs be a push.
It's not always for good, not always for bad, but for personal entertainment. I can play games with your emotions, I can give you ideas, and I can make you hear what is not really there. Now on this occasion it was a young girl who had caught my attention. She was happy, she had travelled, had a good education and a good job. But she had it too easy. Her father owned a massive company, had paid everything for her. Now looking at this young girl, and looking at a very similar one who lived on the other side of town, I noticed both to be very similar. Both the same height, age, both living nearly the same life, except one had worked for it. This other young female had worked two jobs, and paid for everything herself. Now as I've said before, no one ever really notices me, or acknowledges me, but when I want to be felt, certain things may happen. I felt this girl didn't appreciate what she had. She was slightly self obsessed, slightly arrogant. She seemed to have a certain air that she deserved to have everything.
Now for me this was disappointing, most of your planet has an excellent respect of that surrounding them, a work ethic, and an appreciation of what they can achieve. So this girl started to have a few nightmares. I won't claim credit, it's not in my nature. She had feelings of despair, hatred, poverty, desperation. She saw things that in her world didn't exist, things in her world she couldn't of imagined. Things that actually do exist on her planet, things people are dealing with day to day. Understandably this girl was worried by what she was seeing, she thought maybe it was a warning, that her life was going to get worse, she thought it could be a message that she needed to do more in the world. Now there was no meaning behind these dreams, other than that I wanted her to respect what she had, where she went from there was left open to her. She paid attention for a few weeks, made grand plans to go out and help, to reevaluate her life, but as usual this fell wayward eventually. So obviously being like I am, the dreams returned, and a few visions during the day as well. Now she began to feel that she was losing her mind a little, but the last vision I left her with was of the girl across town, who had worked so hard to have a similar life, without the easy money she had. This finally pushed her over the edge and she became better for it. She had more time for family, more time for friends, more money for charity, and more energy. Now I may have made her life hard, but in the end her life turned good, and she appreciated it a lot more. It's not that she wouldn't of achieved this eventually, but everyone needs that nudge or a push, and she just got hers early. I don't like to interfere, or have so much influence, but as I said, you can ignore me, you can walk around me, I am not physical and I am not domineering, but I am subtle and sharp. And with that, its just a hint, a tiny nudge to you, always follow whats right, and listen to yourself, even if its this little figment pushing you.
But as for always I cannot stay much longer, but I'm sure at some stage I shall return. But for now maybe I'm just a figment of your imagination....
Now I have said I have certain qualities, I have influence, but it is not a common feature for me to use this. I usually keep within myself, in the tiniest space possible, be it in the corner of your mind, in the end of a twig, or a rain drop. But sometimes I do get bored. Watching is amazing as I have said. I get to see the emotions fester from beginning to end, the outcome, the repercussions, the reverberations and so on. But every now and then I feel obliged to make a nudge, or a sign, or even if needs be a push.
It's not always for good, not always for bad, but for personal entertainment. I can play games with your emotions, I can give you ideas, and I can make you hear what is not really there. Now on this occasion it was a young girl who had caught my attention. She was happy, she had travelled, had a good education and a good job. But she had it too easy. Her father owned a massive company, had paid everything for her. Now looking at this young girl, and looking at a very similar one who lived on the other side of town, I noticed both to be very similar. Both the same height, age, both living nearly the same life, except one had worked for it. This other young female had worked two jobs, and paid for everything herself. Now as I've said before, no one ever really notices me, or acknowledges me, but when I want to be felt, certain things may happen. I felt this girl didn't appreciate what she had. She was slightly self obsessed, slightly arrogant. She seemed to have a certain air that she deserved to have everything.
Now for me this was disappointing, most of your planet has an excellent respect of that surrounding them, a work ethic, and an appreciation of what they can achieve. So this girl started to have a few nightmares. I won't claim credit, it's not in my nature. She had feelings of despair, hatred, poverty, desperation. She saw things that in her world didn't exist, things in her world she couldn't of imagined. Things that actually do exist on her planet, things people are dealing with day to day. Understandably this girl was worried by what she was seeing, she thought maybe it was a warning, that her life was going to get worse, she thought it could be a message that she needed to do more in the world. Now there was no meaning behind these dreams, other than that I wanted her to respect what she had, where she went from there was left open to her. She paid attention for a few weeks, made grand plans to go out and help, to reevaluate her life, but as usual this fell wayward eventually. So obviously being like I am, the dreams returned, and a few visions during the day as well. Now she began to feel that she was losing her mind a little, but the last vision I left her with was of the girl across town, who had worked so hard to have a similar life, without the easy money she had. This finally pushed her over the edge and she became better for it. She had more time for family, more time for friends, more money for charity, and more energy. Now I may have made her life hard, but in the end her life turned good, and she appreciated it a lot more. It's not that she wouldn't of achieved this eventually, but everyone needs that nudge or a push, and she just got hers early. I don't like to interfere, or have so much influence, but as I said, you can ignore me, you can walk around me, I am not physical and I am not domineering, but I am subtle and sharp. And with that, its just a hint, a tiny nudge to you, always follow whats right, and listen to yourself, even if its this little figment pushing you.
But as for always I cannot stay much longer, but I'm sure at some stage I shall return. But for now maybe I'm just a figment of your imagination....
The figment writings
I'd like to introduce myself. My name is whatever you wish, and my life is yours to dream. I am but a figment of any imagination. I am multicoloured and translucent all in one. My story is never ending and also always beginning. I come from the deepest ravine and the shallowest puddle.
Now that I've introduced myself, I believe it only mannerly to say hello, so "hello". I have wandered to many places on this earth, and many others for that fact also. I find it incredible to watch a species to evolve, to love, to live, to die, to grieve, to celebrate. A range of emotions I must confess that not everyone is privy too. But for the lucky few planets who do have this joyous range, it is nothing but inspirational. To grow within yourself and to grow physically and understanding what it all means in the one moment must be a complexity sure to baffle anyone, but you all seem to achieve it with different levels of success.
It is this watching that has inspired me to write to you and to explain what I have saw, what I have felt, what has moved me and what has shocked me.
The first experience I will retell was one that conveyed the story of hope:
The time to me does not matter, as I don't conceive your time frames, but I do notice daylight and moonlight. This was a particularly sunny day, and involved a young male of your species. He seemed to be a quite happy being, always smiling, always talking, always doing something. There was no time for sitting around and doing nothing, as this would be a waste of his many talents. He preferred this busy lifestyle in the outdoors or just generally with society. A noble quality I feel. Now i have watched this young male for many a moon fall, and always he was on the verge of achieving. His life was like a merry-go-round(a strange contraption really, always picking up pace but not actually going anywhere-actually quite a good way to describe his life). He was always getting some sort of acceptance, or just beginning to gain momentum when eventually some incident would happen to stop it all. Be it a death, an accident, an illness, every road he was taking, inevitably ended in a dead end. It was like a puppet master was playing a cruel show with his life, or a bad TV show was always ending so we could pick it up again on the next show. It was fate. Now I'm not one to take credit, I'm not that sort of creature, I neither exist in this world or another, but for how I do exist I do exert an influence. Not that he will ever know this of course, I am merely but a flutter, a figment, a fringe, but I do have a certain guiding quality. Now it so happened that this puppet master "fate" had her strings cut and that dear boy bulldozed his way through those walls and finally took a step through his dare to be great moment, his epiphany and he ran with it. Now not all stories will end this way, not everyone gets what they deserve, but hope is a great thing, and to those who deserve it, to those with that unwavering confidence and to those who take what life deals them without a pinch of annoyance, maybe that figment in the corner of your eye will glint that much brighter and get you where you need to go. But as for always I cannot stay much longer, but I'm sure at some stage I shall return. But for now maybe I'm just a figment of your imagination....
Now that I've introduced myself, I believe it only mannerly to say hello, so "hello". I have wandered to many places on this earth, and many others for that fact also. I find it incredible to watch a species to evolve, to love, to live, to die, to grieve, to celebrate. A range of emotions I must confess that not everyone is privy too. But for the lucky few planets who do have this joyous range, it is nothing but inspirational. To grow within yourself and to grow physically and understanding what it all means in the one moment must be a complexity sure to baffle anyone, but you all seem to achieve it with different levels of success.
It is this watching that has inspired me to write to you and to explain what I have saw, what I have felt, what has moved me and what has shocked me.
The first experience I will retell was one that conveyed the story of hope:
The time to me does not matter, as I don't conceive your time frames, but I do notice daylight and moonlight. This was a particularly sunny day, and involved a young male of your species. He seemed to be a quite happy being, always smiling, always talking, always doing something. There was no time for sitting around and doing nothing, as this would be a waste of his many talents. He preferred this busy lifestyle in the outdoors or just generally with society. A noble quality I feel. Now i have watched this young male for many a moon fall, and always he was on the verge of achieving. His life was like a merry-go-round(a strange contraption really, always picking up pace but not actually going anywhere-actually quite a good way to describe his life). He was always getting some sort of acceptance, or just beginning to gain momentum when eventually some incident would happen to stop it all. Be it a death, an accident, an illness, every road he was taking, inevitably ended in a dead end. It was like a puppet master was playing a cruel show with his life, or a bad TV show was always ending so we could pick it up again on the next show. It was fate. Now I'm not one to take credit, I'm not that sort of creature, I neither exist in this world or another, but for how I do exist I do exert an influence. Not that he will ever know this of course, I am merely but a flutter, a figment, a fringe, but I do have a certain guiding quality. Now it so happened that this puppet master "fate" had her strings cut and that dear boy bulldozed his way through those walls and finally took a step through his dare to be great moment, his epiphany and he ran with it. Now not all stories will end this way, not everyone gets what they deserve, but hope is a great thing, and to those who deserve it, to those with that unwavering confidence and to those who take what life deals them without a pinch of annoyance, maybe that figment in the corner of your eye will glint that much brighter and get you where you need to go. But as for always I cannot stay much longer, but I'm sure at some stage I shall return. But for now maybe I'm just a figment of your imagination....
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Do we have anything to say? Is our generation ready to step to the front and say what they think? What they feel? Is that possibly too much to ask? To show emotion, to show a part of ourselves, to let our guard down? People seem more obsessed with hiding behind masks, stereotypes, images, "reps".
If we were to come out from behind this, what would we talk about? What are our concerns? Who would this generation be moved to save, or to fight for?
The next battle to be fought in Ireland and the UK is foreign nationals. We have seen from the past that acceptance is always the way forward, otherwise it inspires hate, violence, crime and pushing a part of society down to the underbelly of society. We saw it with the Catholics in Ireland, we've saw it with any ethnic minority in any majority country, especially the black man in America.
But where is the voice? Where are our own leaders helping to lead this acceptance? Why not now? Why later? Is it ok to leave ignorance on the streets, in our children?
Does the future not look brighter for the more multi-cultural basis it will have in one or two generations?
As a white man, I have been reading about Malcolm X, his autobiography and other works surrounding his work. I cannot deny he speaks a lot of the truth. I disagree with his teachers view and also his on seperation from the country, even segregation I disagree with. I believe in a partial integration, a tolerance, a new basis for our country to move forward with. People from Poland, Romania, and other eastern european countries are coming her for a better life, some in my own encounters have been far better educated than myself and have merely come here to work so they can improve their english, by being surrounded by it all the time. Is this not highly honorable?
Surely the people from the British Isles can understand this thirst for travel, as we are a collection of countries who seem to produce mass amounts of travellers. You can go anywhere in the world and bump into an Irish, a Scot, An English or a Welsh man, we go to these countries to learn their languages, see what they have to offer, experience there ways of life. And more often than not I'm sure we are faced by friendly faces and welcoming hearts. People glad to see "tourists" or even culture seekers. But yet in here we are so ignorant and arrogant. We mis-trust anyone who can't speak english fluently, we expect everyone from another country to speak english. We go to their countries with the knowledge of "hello", "where is the bar?" and other tiny phrases without a half inch of understanding of the rest of the language. Its a sad and depressing day when you meet a man who can speak five language, and you can only claim to speak one, with tit-bits of others.
It is time we accept these peoples into our community, time to make more of an effort to get to know them and their culture. Don't we want these people to fall in love with our country? To stay for good, adding an extra dimension to our culture? Or are we still too young and naive to want this, still to afraid of change? Still believing that with more cultures our own will only become weaker? Our own culture will only become weaker if we allow it too. Loving our traditions and passing them on and celebrating them, and sharing them is the only way forward.
Lets hope its not too late..
If we were to come out from behind this, what would we talk about? What are our concerns? Who would this generation be moved to save, or to fight for?
The next battle to be fought in Ireland and the UK is foreign nationals. We have seen from the past that acceptance is always the way forward, otherwise it inspires hate, violence, crime and pushing a part of society down to the underbelly of society. We saw it with the Catholics in Ireland, we've saw it with any ethnic minority in any majority country, especially the black man in America.
But where is the voice? Where are our own leaders helping to lead this acceptance? Why not now? Why later? Is it ok to leave ignorance on the streets, in our children?
Does the future not look brighter for the more multi-cultural basis it will have in one or two generations?
As a white man, I have been reading about Malcolm X, his autobiography and other works surrounding his work. I cannot deny he speaks a lot of the truth. I disagree with his teachers view and also his on seperation from the country, even segregation I disagree with. I believe in a partial integration, a tolerance, a new basis for our country to move forward with. People from Poland, Romania, and other eastern european countries are coming her for a better life, some in my own encounters have been far better educated than myself and have merely come here to work so they can improve their english, by being surrounded by it all the time. Is this not highly honorable?
Surely the people from the British Isles can understand this thirst for travel, as we are a collection of countries who seem to produce mass amounts of travellers. You can go anywhere in the world and bump into an Irish, a Scot, An English or a Welsh man, we go to these countries to learn their languages, see what they have to offer, experience there ways of life. And more often than not I'm sure we are faced by friendly faces and welcoming hearts. People glad to see "tourists" or even culture seekers. But yet in here we are so ignorant and arrogant. We mis-trust anyone who can't speak english fluently, we expect everyone from another country to speak english. We go to their countries with the knowledge of "hello", "where is the bar?" and other tiny phrases without a half inch of understanding of the rest of the language. Its a sad and depressing day when you meet a man who can speak five language, and you can only claim to speak one, with tit-bits of others.
It is time we accept these peoples into our community, time to make more of an effort to get to know them and their culture. Don't we want these people to fall in love with our country? To stay for good, adding an extra dimension to our culture? Or are we still too young and naive to want this, still to afraid of change? Still believing that with more cultures our own will only become weaker? Our own culture will only become weaker if we allow it too. Loving our traditions and passing them on and celebrating them, and sharing them is the only way forward.
Lets hope its not too late..
Monday, 25 May 2009
Pharmacy in 2030?
So where do I think pharmacy in 2030 will be?
The year is 2030, the streets are busy, and one thing missing from every street is a pharmacy. Where have they gone you might ask? It all happened around 2009. Pharmacists were made to become Responsible with the option of not being present at the pharmacy. This led to a major change in the upcoming years. Pharmacists decided to use the loophole not to be present at the shop, with this evolving to them never being present. This caused a massive mistrust in the profession and a massive slip in patient care, and most importantly to the companies, profits. Pharmacists were starting to be forced to go to work but they decided they still didn’t want to deal with the stress of travelling to work, dealing with customers face to face and not getting their lunch breaks. They were enjoying the quiet life.
So how is the profession still around? Well a computer company and a pharmacist came together to decide how to get around all this. In 2012 there was the development of a Pharmacy dispensing machine or a PDM (a fancy cash machine pretty much). This resulted in most pharmacists converting their premises into health stores without any prescription medicines or pharmacy only medicines- they may as well still make money from the front of their shop. With the dispensing robots now common place, all you had to do was insert your prescription into the machine along with your id, and a camera would give a live feed to a pharmacist in a control room (usually in their house or at a head office facility) and would check the script clinically and legally, and then the robot would do the rest. The PDM had an interactive menu which meant the customer could ask advice on the medication, these were all stored on the computer, but if the computer wasn’t giving the patient what they wanted they could ask the pharmacist some questions via the live feed, but this would require a credit card to be entered into the PDM first for a counselling fee-why would we give up our free time for free?
With this effectively killing off the independents, the multiples took over all the shops. Converted them into their own type of health store and inserted the PDM’s at the back of the store. So what happened to pharmacists? Well most got a nice pay off from the multiples, and the rest joined up to be control room pharmacists. All they had to do was sit in a room and check prescriptions for possibly 20 stores. This cut down the amount of pharmacists needed and made the multiples a lot more money. It also meant that the two schools of pharmacy in northern Ireland were grinding to a stop, as over the years people realised with this new control room, only 1 pharmacist was needed for a range of stores rather than just one per store, this made jobs even more scarce than they already were and made the schools less appealing and students moved to other professions rather than the over saturated one of pharmacy.
What wasn’t realised was that the only keeping most of these pharmacists fit in the past was the fact they were on their feet for 9 hours a day without being allowed to sit down for lunch, and this new control room pharmacist began to become overweight and over the 20 years since it was introduced bred a new obese pharmacist. In the late 2020’s Alli signed a deal with all pharmacies to supply their tablet for free to control room pharmacists to help deal with the epidemic.
So where did the pharmacists who didn’t get the control room jobs go? A lot have moved into the museum business or moved into teaching the history of pharmacy at universities across the UK and Ireland. The museum business meant they kept their pharmacy intact and they would role-play with tourists how they used to act with customers. Some of these pharmacies still exist in rural locations as a tourist attraction. They are also good history trips for children at local schools as well, who have been raised on the PDM system of pharmacy. The rest either retired with their lump sums from multiples or joined the dole queue, hoping and dreaming of a job some day.
A possibility or just bad pharmacy fiction? Who knows?
The year is 2030, the streets are busy, and one thing missing from every street is a pharmacy. Where have they gone you might ask? It all happened around 2009. Pharmacists were made to become Responsible with the option of not being present at the pharmacy. This led to a major change in the upcoming years. Pharmacists decided to use the loophole not to be present at the shop, with this evolving to them never being present. This caused a massive mistrust in the profession and a massive slip in patient care, and most importantly to the companies, profits. Pharmacists were starting to be forced to go to work but they decided they still didn’t want to deal with the stress of travelling to work, dealing with customers face to face and not getting their lunch breaks. They were enjoying the quiet life.
So how is the profession still around? Well a computer company and a pharmacist came together to decide how to get around all this. In 2012 there was the development of a Pharmacy dispensing machine or a PDM (a fancy cash machine pretty much). This resulted in most pharmacists converting their premises into health stores without any prescription medicines or pharmacy only medicines- they may as well still make money from the front of their shop. With the dispensing robots now common place, all you had to do was insert your prescription into the machine along with your id, and a camera would give a live feed to a pharmacist in a control room (usually in their house or at a head office facility) and would check the script clinically and legally, and then the robot would do the rest. The PDM had an interactive menu which meant the customer could ask advice on the medication, these were all stored on the computer, but if the computer wasn’t giving the patient what they wanted they could ask the pharmacist some questions via the live feed, but this would require a credit card to be entered into the PDM first for a counselling fee-why would we give up our free time for free?
With this effectively killing off the independents, the multiples took over all the shops. Converted them into their own type of health store and inserted the PDM’s at the back of the store. So what happened to pharmacists? Well most got a nice pay off from the multiples, and the rest joined up to be control room pharmacists. All they had to do was sit in a room and check prescriptions for possibly 20 stores. This cut down the amount of pharmacists needed and made the multiples a lot more money. It also meant that the two schools of pharmacy in northern Ireland were grinding to a stop, as over the years people realised with this new control room, only 1 pharmacist was needed for a range of stores rather than just one per store, this made jobs even more scarce than they already were and made the schools less appealing and students moved to other professions rather than the over saturated one of pharmacy.
What wasn’t realised was that the only keeping most of these pharmacists fit in the past was the fact they were on their feet for 9 hours a day without being allowed to sit down for lunch, and this new control room pharmacist began to become overweight and over the 20 years since it was introduced bred a new obese pharmacist. In the late 2020’s Alli signed a deal with all pharmacies to supply their tablet for free to control room pharmacists to help deal with the epidemic.
So where did the pharmacists who didn’t get the control room jobs go? A lot have moved into the museum business or moved into teaching the history of pharmacy at universities across the UK and Ireland. The museum business meant they kept their pharmacy intact and they would role-play with tourists how they used to act with customers. Some of these pharmacies still exist in rural locations as a tourist attraction. They are also good history trips for children at local schools as well, who have been raised on the PDM system of pharmacy. The rest either retired with their lump sums from multiples or joined the dole queue, hoping and dreaming of a job some day.
A possibility or just bad pharmacy fiction? Who knows?
Studying time
Yes it may well be studying time, but this inevitably means one thing, procrastination.
It's unbelievable how interesting things get when your supposed to sit down and study. I had convinced myself a year ago that I had finished my life of exams and I had no more studying to do. How I was wrong. I now have one final exam, my registration exam. Its the exam that will allow me to practice as a Pharmacist. It encompasses all of what I learnt during my Masters course at Queens and also everything I've learned this year(or to put another way, everything I was supposed to be learning this year). So in essence it's a pretty big exam. Now the one thing I have found most interesting in my time spent "trying" to study is my window. I've lived in this room for 12 years, and I never really seem to look out it, other than to see how the weather is or to see what is happening in my back garden. Every exam time however it becomes a portal to another world. I get to see other families and what they are doing, I can see the park(or some of it) and see the kids playing their games, I can see rolling hills, trees, houses in the distance and the sky. It's pretty normal stuff for an Irish window. But my imagination really does run wild when I look out my new "portal". I'm seeing talking animals, tree creatures, battles, talking cars, transformers, pretty much anything I've seen on tv, and anything that I can make talk will soon discover it's consciousness. Yes it sounds like I'm slightly crazy or deluded, and maybe I am, but I think this is quite a normal thing.
"Anything but", this is a decent enough phrase to express my feelings towards studying, I will check my facebook who knows how many times, check my hotmail, check my watch, mobile, the window, anything I can find for a distraction. I'll even clean my room, or organise my notes, cds, books, dvds. I become a pretty good domesticated animal in such times.
The one thing I have learned though over the past 12 years of my life in my academic career, is that when it comes to it, all i need is pressure. I know it sounds weird, but I actually enjoy studying when I get into it. Its a challenge. I have a timescale to work against to learn as much as I can, or refresh it, or to understand it. Whichever way it works, it is my tiny challenge for that timeframe. I will do anything to keep away from it, and postpone it, and I am awful for taking breaks every 20 minutes or every hour, depending on what excuse I can come up with, but when I can finally sit down and read and try to absolve the information in front of me, I do enjoy it. That is until I find out about a week or two later that I haven't actually taken anything in, and then I have to cram everything in as quickly as possible.
During my school years this wasn't the case. I think the main reason was homework. It kept it fresh in my mind. I was hearing about it in school, then I was going home and reading about it again and then trying to answer questions on this topic. This was constantly reinforcing the topic in my head, and meant I had to understand it at the time. When you move up into higher education this certainly isn't the case. The lecturers really don't care if you are listening as long as you are quiet, and if you don't do your assignments, its your life and down to you to get it done. So half the time in Uni I wasn't listening and then I was going home forgetting I was even in class, and then to come at the end of the year/semester and trying to revise was so much harder, as I was nearly teaching myself the material, when I didn't fully understand what I was learning.
Luckily somehow I managed to learn what I needed back then and get through and do quite well, and all i can think now is that I've started to write a blog, is 1) I can't believe I'm writing about something so boring and 2) it must be because I should be studying.
It's unbelievable how interesting things get when your supposed to sit down and study. I had convinced myself a year ago that I had finished my life of exams and I had no more studying to do. How I was wrong. I now have one final exam, my registration exam. Its the exam that will allow me to practice as a Pharmacist. It encompasses all of what I learnt during my Masters course at Queens and also everything I've learned this year(or to put another way, everything I was supposed to be learning this year). So in essence it's a pretty big exam. Now the one thing I have found most interesting in my time spent "trying" to study is my window. I've lived in this room for 12 years, and I never really seem to look out it, other than to see how the weather is or to see what is happening in my back garden. Every exam time however it becomes a portal to another world. I get to see other families and what they are doing, I can see the park(or some of it) and see the kids playing their games, I can see rolling hills, trees, houses in the distance and the sky. It's pretty normal stuff for an Irish window. But my imagination really does run wild when I look out my new "portal". I'm seeing talking animals, tree creatures, battles, talking cars, transformers, pretty much anything I've seen on tv, and anything that I can make talk will soon discover it's consciousness. Yes it sounds like I'm slightly crazy or deluded, and maybe I am, but I think this is quite a normal thing.
"Anything but", this is a decent enough phrase to express my feelings towards studying, I will check my facebook who knows how many times, check my hotmail, check my watch, mobile, the window, anything I can find for a distraction. I'll even clean my room, or organise my notes, cds, books, dvds. I become a pretty good domesticated animal in such times.
The one thing I have learned though over the past 12 years of my life in my academic career, is that when it comes to it, all i need is pressure. I know it sounds weird, but I actually enjoy studying when I get into it. Its a challenge. I have a timescale to work against to learn as much as I can, or refresh it, or to understand it. Whichever way it works, it is my tiny challenge for that timeframe. I will do anything to keep away from it, and postpone it, and I am awful for taking breaks every 20 minutes or every hour, depending on what excuse I can come up with, but when I can finally sit down and read and try to absolve the information in front of me, I do enjoy it. That is until I find out about a week or two later that I haven't actually taken anything in, and then I have to cram everything in as quickly as possible.
During my school years this wasn't the case. I think the main reason was homework. It kept it fresh in my mind. I was hearing about it in school, then I was going home and reading about it again and then trying to answer questions on this topic. This was constantly reinforcing the topic in my head, and meant I had to understand it at the time. When you move up into higher education this certainly isn't the case. The lecturers really don't care if you are listening as long as you are quiet, and if you don't do your assignments, its your life and down to you to get it done. So half the time in Uni I wasn't listening and then I was going home forgetting I was even in class, and then to come at the end of the year/semester and trying to revise was so much harder, as I was nearly teaching myself the material, when I didn't fully understand what I was learning.
Luckily somehow I managed to learn what I needed back then and get through and do quite well, and all i can think now is that I've started to write a blog, is 1) I can't believe I'm writing about something so boring and 2) it must be because I should be studying.
Home
Ok, so by no standards would i ever count myself a home bird. I'm usually spending more time dreaming or planning how to get out of the country other than thinking of being here. But today while flying home from a week in Bulgaria, was the first time I've ever thought "YAY home!" and I've spent 3 months in america on 2 separate occasions and been to many other countries for a longer length of time. I don't know why i was happy to be back in the country i was born in. To me the word "home" is a strange concept. Yes i have moved around a lot, and I've always called home the place where I am currently living. I don't feel a massive affinity to it like other people i know do. I've always argued the point that home will be where I end up, be it in another country, or another town. I have no massive urge to spend the rest of my life in northern ireland or ireland, or anywhere else. I feel more liberated with the fact i could live anywhere, i could end up in australia, new zealand, canada(yes all english speaking countries, but thats all i can deal with due to my ignorance of languages). At the moment i should be in north state new york at a summer camp, that is where my home is during the summer, and it pains me not to be there, but so far i've had an incredible summer, with dublin, salou, my mums wedding, and bulgaria all being involved. To date i can say i have counted 4 places my home due to my mum, and 4 places home due to university and 1 summer camp home. Which to me i think possibly dilutes the word and makes it have less of an impact for me. Yes i think i fit in here in northern ireland, as i know our ways and i know how to act. But there is definitely something else out there. I always thought i should of been born in america, and therefore ive always dreamt of living there.
What makes home? other than a place you feel comfortable, you have the people you care around you and your happiness. Yes that could mean where your extended family live, but to me that just means a house anywhere in the world, where i have my wife and kids(if i'm lucky) and a job and a good circle of friends. I have met people who find that concept hard, but i know when and if i do come back to ireland, that my family and real friends will always be here for me. Some might say absence makes the heart grow fonder, i say it makes it grow stronger. I don't know what life holds in store for me, but what i do know is, no matter where i am, i'll be home
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