Artbreak

Just finished 2 exams on Monday; gearing up for another round of exams this coming Tuesday. We have at least 1 exam every week now, until the end of the semester. I can't say that I have as much free time now as I did at the beginning of the year, but substantive changes to my routines are minimal. The exams have not gotten harder, just simply more material to cover in one sitting. Honestly, one really should never have to be that intimate with phosphofructokinase I, like--ever. I'm glad I know what makes enzymes in the cycles of intermediate metabolism tick--really, it's a great novelty. Having to memorizing all of their names, functions, products, and pathways however, was just masochistic.

The weekly visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, and the art class, is keeping me sane. As a friend and fellow medical student in the program said, "Every week, this is my 3 hours of relaxation. It's so great to just be able to engage your brain in a different way..." I couldn't agree with her more.

We had a visitation today by a poet, Erica Funkhouser. She's currently teaching at MIT, and studied under Robert Lowell at one point. Her poems remind me of Elizabeth Bishop's, but less multifaceted. She didn't really answer any of my questions about her poetry, really, which was a bit frustrating, but I guess that not all poets have developed philosphies about their artform's engagement with other artforms. What I really wanted to get from her was her sense of the differences/sameness between poetic imagery and photography/the visual arts, because so much of her work seems (in a cinch) to invoke the visual language of the photograph--in terms of framing, details, and visual metaphors.

Oh well.

I have to start seriously thinking about my art installation pretty soon. I'll do that after the Immunology & Cell-Tissue Biology exams next week.