Month

Was that really less than a month ago that I was considering failure and running away and hiding? Btw I PASSED I PASSED I PASSED!!!! Victory is a little diminished by the suspicion that they wanted to pass us all because of the change in the curriculum. Whatever. The hell of academic semester is over.

Global Health Conference was full on. I can't remember the detailed stats about climate change and AIDS and the exact Millennium Development Goals, but I'm left with the troubling sense of the enormity of the challenges facing our generation, and the necessity of finding out how my own small life can fit in with the solutions. Nelson Mandela, that old fella, has a nice turn of phrase. It's all a bit overwhelming really...fuel crises, food crises, global warming, conflict, epidemics. It'd be easy to throw up your hands and succumb to fatalism, but as one of our speakers said, "we cannot afford the luxury of despair".

After that was Convention...a little ironic, after the heady inspirational rhetoric of global responsibility, to spend a week in drunken stupor and mindless hedonism. You know those Clubbing Montages in movies with the DUBDUBDUBDUBDUBDUB music and the flashy lights and jam-packed semi-naked bodies writhing rhythmically and making out and you go "pffft I'd rather be reading Jane"? Yeah. A week of that. Don't get me wrong, those nights were a blast in a "what inhibitions?!" kind of way (slightly afraid of and slightly looking forward to what photos surface on Facebook), but it's definitely a one-off for me.

There were other things. GP week was good. I didn't want to stab myself in the eye, the work of a rural GP is actually interesting and the area is one I can envision myself working in one day...although occasionally I do panic at the thought of the vast as-yet-unexplored wider world out there, countries I've never seen, whole classes of people I've never come in contact with. The peaceful country life appeals, but so too the call of adventure and worldliness that once made me want to be a languages, politics and law major aiming for DFAT or the UN or whatever the pipe dream of the moment was.

Anyway. My grandma is wise. Whether or not 2008 is actually celestially destined to be a good year, telling me that makes me determined to make it so.