Mr Chua vs. Faraday
Mr. Chua was my physics and chemistry tutor for all of 1.5 years. A skinny, tiny man often sporting baggy shirts in muted tones, heavyset glasses and a delicate combover that gradually undid itself by the end of class. I still credit this man for pulling me out of the depths of Physics hell and into A1 heaven in a very short amount of time. My mother, as you can imagine, is eternally grateful.
His favourite physics fairytale was of him and Mr. Michael Faraday playing chess in a giant electric metal cage, a story he used to explain the concept of electric fields to us. It was a wondrous tale with loud electric cracking noises, electric bolts, tea and biscuits, golden stopwatches and Mr. Chua leaping off the tables and chairs (sometimes he’d actually jump off table onto chairs as he told this tale for the upteenth time). The sort of tale that one could build to epic proportions with a little imagination. The Faraday cage does exist in real life of course, the principles of which have real life applications, not quite the actual venue for two eccentric men and their board game.
Thank you Mr. Chua for your fantastical tales 
Here’s a real life application, a rather jaw dropping one.
Our branches
What is morality?
It is a set of rules, a guide to life, if you will, manifesting itself like blinders, keeping one on the straight and narrow. And what creates the very foundation, the soil that our core beliefs take root in? Family? Culture? Society? Religion? Specifically; through lessons meted out by law? values taught at home and in school? lessons delivered through religion? And what shapes how our branches grow in various differing ways? It is to a large extent, guided our personal ethos, our own guidebook to life, conclusions we have drawn based on having studied all that was laid out before us from the time we were born.
What then when one’s personal ethos, ever changing, ever evolving, branches twisting, reaching, leaves dying and growing, roots creeping out from under the ground, spreading upwards, falls out of line with that of family, peers and the state?
Do we allow our branches to be pruned, do we allow ourselves to be unearthed, roots crammed back into a pot to be shaped and moulded into uniform shrubbery, back to dotting the idealistic pristine landscape from where we first came? We are a tree! Surely we should be allowed to grow? Surely we are all different?
But the state is powerful, no? They are after all the caregivers, the ones tending to the land.
But landscapes too must change, trees will continue to grow, regardless of the amount of pruning done week after week.
Landscapes will change, will it in this lifetime?
Distance
For some odd reason, I really miss home today.
You’d think after years of practise one should be good at these things.
Mom was right, we all never really leave the womb, the umbilical cord, ever present.
Plod, plod, plod.
All the space without you in it, is empty.
-iwrotethisforyou
Morning tea
“Tea can refer to any of several different meals or mealtimes, depending on a country’s customs and its history of drinking tea. However, in those countries where the term’s use is common, the influences are generally those of the former British Empire (now the Commonwealth of Nations). The tea meal can be small or large and used, for example in the phrase, “to take tea”.”
Source
GP
Ok, so today marks the day I officially administered an intramuscular injection into a patient’s deltoid muscle, for real! Not on Paul/Nicholas/thomas the dummies (yes, I named them all) or on synthetic foam. I can only imagine the trepidation the sweet ‘ol war veteran felt when the clinic nurse asked “is it ok if one of our senior medical students give you your flu shot?”. Bless him and his lovely relaxed deltoid muscle.
And! As an added bonus, my GP let me freeze a seborrheic keratosis with liquid nitrogen on the forearm of another lovely old male patient.
Med student cheap thrills.
Jo VS the rock
I simply cannot begin to describe the intense childlike wonderment and profound appreciation for mother nature that filled every fibre of my being as I stood in rapture for a solid few minutes staring at, a rock. My little brain could not comprehend what was before my eyes, perfect metallic cubic structures embedded within organic rock, formed, by mother nature herself. I read the little card in front of the rock: Pyrite- Spain.
It confounded me!
I felt as if I was staring at an element from the mystical planet kypton or the like. How did such perfect structures result completely unaided by human intervention/creation? Pure natural creation! From nothing! From the earth! Where did I come from? What did it all mean? I had an existential crisis right there, while standing between rows of glass display cabinets filled with the most wonderfully curated scientific curiosities and taxidermy.
Rock sits on my beside table now, a physical reminder of the beauty and wonder of creation.
PS: Pyrite was found in Wunderkammer a little shop of scientific curiosities artefacts & ephemera. Visit if you are ever in the city, hours of fun, and who knows, you might have a smilar crisis I did right there, between the taxidermized bear and cabinet of rocks.
PPS: The top cube is perfect (ok I measured, don’t judge)! Measuring 2.2×2.2×2.2cm!
Cinnamon buns
…in place of hot cross buns for easter.
The housemates reckon I get a little obsessive compulsive when it comes to baking. But I think it necessary to follow methodology to a tee to obtain desired outcomes, a little inflexible when it comes to baking? Perhaps
