The Puerile Side of Medical Students

"To Err is Human, to Arr is Pirate."

Spotted on a T-shirt

Today before the orientation lecture for our Obstetrics and Gynaecology clinical postings, I crashed on the desk for those elusive extra minutes of forty-winks before the lecturer came in. These minutes are valuable. They are what let me stay way up every night following link breadcrumbs *tasty, tasty link breadcrumbs* from one article to the next to the next to the next at the Tropes Wiki till my eyesight's all blurry and I find myself drooling like a half-wit. Be warned! If you love movies and books and computer games and anime and manga and... basically anything that requires fictitious writing, you'd end up as trope zombie like me if you click on that link. And of course, everyone knows that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.

Shit, just by talking about this site got me sidetracked for an hour reading stuff from it!

And another hour just elapsed since the sentence above this was written. I swear I Am Not Making This Up!

Okay, I'll try to get back on track here. It's a funny story, really. Like I said, while I was napping a friend of mine, Jun Mun, kept tickling my ear with a... thing. I'd try to explain what it was except that it isn't really important to the narrative. All you need to know is it's long, thin and flexible and that supermarkets here in India use it to seal shopping bags in the place of cellophane tape or staples.

So yeah - have you tried sleeping when some monkey is tickling your ears with something? It drove me absolutely batshit crazy. I snapped at him the first time he did it but he's the sort of guy that takes childish disregard to whole new level. A minute later, he was back at it again. I growled. He persevered. I went all "Stop that shit, it's seriously pissing me off" on him. To no avail. And it continued till our matronly lecturer, Dr Parvati came in - leaving me completely robbed of the rest I really need in order to do stuff like write this post and read more stuff off the Tropes Wiki tonight (which I do anyway, in spite of how frankly bushed I am).

And would you believe that that clownlord kept doing that annoying shtick throughout the class?

At one point, I snatched the damned thing out of his hand while he was taking down notes and proceeded to do the same thing to him. Only, I did that much more frequently constantly without breaks. It was poetic justice. And nothing makes me any more determined to keep at something more than the pure drive for revenge.

So I kept doing it.

And doing it.

Every time Dr Parvati looked away, I got right back at it.

With glee.

Gosh, no wonder he was so persistent! It's such a great stress releaser!

Tickle tickle tickle...

At one point, he finally hit the roof of his tolerance bar and tried to snatch the plastic thingy back but alas, I was the quicker! He missed! Luckily, Dr Parvati missed the whole charade or we would both be verbally shamed and sent out of the class. These crusty old doctor types get pretty uptight about us medical students acting like 10-year-old school kids (gee, I wonder why).

Less luckily for Jun Mun however, he was caught smiling like an ass. Y'know, when you try to do something and having fail at that, you grin sheepishly to allay the embarrassment - Jun Mun was doing that. In medical school, smiling is quite fatal.

Maybe it's something about some of the lecturers here. They cannot stand being ridiculed in anyway at all and they are pathologically paranoid about any sign of mirth or merriment amongst the students. A stray laugh, a random smile or even just a sunny disposition - it would instantly strip them of all their big damn doctor dignity, exposing the insecure, squishy inside which is vigilantly fearful of even the smallest slights to their persons. A guy got brutally berated back in year one just because he was smiling at an Anatomy lecturer during class with the lecturer going "What's so funny?" over and over again in a dead serious voice while the atmosphere's tenseness increased exponentially with every syllable. It was a real life hostage situation.

To her credit, Dr Parvati is a lot more dignified than that, but it did make her lose her cool a bit. She asked Jun Mun why he was smiling and his answer was,

"I just smile a lot."

Wow, I sure was glad he didn't sell me out.

Anyhow, Dr Parvati then went on a full two minute spiel about how people don't smile for no reason, and that the face is connected to the brain yada yada, indirectly questioning Jun Mun's mental health to the class' amusement.

I was laughing till I was blue in the face and even after Dr Parvati went back to the subject matter, I couldn't stop. I had to bite my lips to wrestle down my internal cackling demon. However, no one else was finding the whole thing as funny as I did.

That's because no one else got the real punchline.

Jun Mun was apparently smiling to himself during a lecture about dead babies.



P.S. Being the nice guy I am, I just had to share with everyone the joke about Jun Mun's psychopathic smile when he was hearing about how stillborns sometimes are birthed when they are already in a relatively advance stage of decomposition, their skin black and green and peeling off in pieces. No one apparently made that connection on their own. Why is everyone's sense of humour so unsophisticated?! I still remember the times when Shaki (that guy who used to sit beside me) and I would continue to laugh long after everyone has stopped because we both simultaneously discovered another unintended layer to a joke shared in class by the lecturer. And people thought we were nuts.

P.P.S. Revenge is a dish best served awesome.

P.P.P.S. Now that I got this post out of the way, I can go back to Tropes Wiki. Yay.



Is also able to appreciate Dead Baby Comedy,
k0k s3n w4i