the trouble with studying in a library — which is commended to me by sondry folk as a good way of focusing (especially, they tell me, in a library not of your home department or faculty) — is that it is a library, and there is virtually no library in which i wouldn’t find something interesting with which to distract myself (unless, perhaps, it were a business school’s library, because heaven knows there’s nothing more tedious than business and finance and banking and what have you). i mean, i always knew that i never got as much work as i ought in grad school because they gave me a widener carrel near the children’s literature section.lately it is to the medical school library that I go to study for exams (having begun lunching regularly with julian, whose lab is next door) and something about my inner taxonomist is simply thrilled by medical shelf labels - urology, rheumatology, neurosurgery! what a lot of exciting things to read about! (i suspect this comes partly of a) dating too many medical students in my youth and b) having a pathologist as a best friend). today i was only sauntering safely past the medical journal section (en route to the study carrels) when out of the corner of my eye i spotted the yonsei journal of medicine (we have korean medical journals?) and backtracked and spent a good ten minutes reading about epidemiology in rural korea before guiltily remembering that i was supposed to be memorising provisions of the land titles act. this doesn’t tell you that I’m more interested in public health than the law, i daresay if i were a med student studying inthe law library i would be busy reading dworkin, or something..
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird