19 December 2008

smart enough to know i'm a fool.

This may be a daft thing to do given some of my readership, but what can i do; being smart enough to know i'm thick doesn't make me smart enough to not be thick... if you follow.

Assignments, essays and word counts are killing me and here's why: I understand enough to know that i don't know much. In other words, i get it; i don't get it.
The immediately preceeding 7 words seem to me to sum up one of the main purposes of my education i.e. to be able to gather enough contradictory information on any given subject to understand the arguments without having any unhumbly held resolutions to them. So assignment after assignment gets charged my way and the content seems to be centred around the principle of 'but we can't be sure' or 'we don't know'.

I get it. What i don't get is how i'm supposed to spin out my 7 word mantra into the 50 odd thousand words required for me to complete my formal education.

3 December 2008

Knee news is good news

I'd recommend tearing knee ligaments to anyone, it's fantastic. You get to do all sorts of things you otherwise wouldn't.
Ok, so there are down sides, not least the sheer number of medics who queue up to take it in turns sitting on your foot and seeing how far they can pull your lower leg away from the rest of your body. Other than that and the pain, the immobility and the inconvenience, it's pretty good.

For example, MRI scans are brilliant. Alright, so you wait 8 weeks for an appointment and then they give you 12 hours notice for one, but once you get there - oh boy! The machine has the all around hum of a tank rolling by, interspersed with very loud bangs and occasional spurts of what sound like machine gun fire. It's quite something. Because of all this noise they give you headphones. These headphones play music(ish), except this doesn't block out the noise at all really. My experience was having to lie still for 20min, laughing out loud at the surreality of being played Phil Collins' Take A Look At Me Now, Lionel Richie's All Night Long and Sexual Healing, and Diana Ross' Chain Reaction - all in what sounded like the middle of a war zone. Where else could one participate in such a this as this?

Another top note of the whole ordeal was this morning. I'm at the stage now where i took part in my first 'leg class' that the physiotherapy dept run. It was basically an hour long class of a couple of circuits of leg based exercises. It's for those approaching full recovery. The brilliant bit was at the end of the class we had a game of uni-hoc; you know, the hockey for kids, with the big plastic sticks. I played this with 5 other adults of varying ability who i'd never met before, all of whom have very serious jobs i'm sure, and all of whom completely disregarded themselves in order to join in the fun. Where else could one find an experience like this?

Torn ligaments; they're the new black.