Flogging a dead horse

The day you finish your year-long work-like-a-slave internship, you find yourself slightly delirious and roaming the streets at two in the morning, singing about happy days being here again. I was under the impression that this would be followed up by an entire year of just letting loose and chillin'.

I, of course, was wrong.

Being unemployed isn't all its cracked up to be. Especially if the said unemployment is justified by your intention to focus all of your energy on sincere and determined study to pass an examination in 6 months.

Not sufficient that the exam in question decides the specialty you're stuck with for the remainder of your sane lifespan, it's syllabus includes everything that you've "learnt" over the last five and a half years. And more.

To aid you in your impossible quest, you enroll yourself into an "Institute" that deals with this kind of thing. It's mildly disheartening that the price of this enrollment is approximately half of all the of money you made during the entirety of your 1-year internship.

You then find out that much like a meal at a restaurant, you're given a menu card of the different courses available. Calling myself an average student would be over-stating my abilities, so I skipped right past the "Achiever's batch" and the "Deligents batch" and went straight for the "Beginners batch" package. Unfortunately, and I say this with a touch of pride, I was over-qualified for this, having finished both my 3rd and 4th years of under-grad. I therefore settled for just plain old "Regular" (Yes that's what it's called, I kid you not)

"Regular" classes are a behemoth 11, or sometimes 12-hour session (with a 30-minute lunch break of course). I generally tend to start seeing stars somewhere about half an hour into the lecture, as evidenced by the sudden epileptiform discharges recorded in my class notes. I find that a lot of people in this class are surprisingly resistant to these hypnotic effects that I experience on a daily basis. I suppose they've either been rendered catatonic by their stint as interns or they were blessed at birth with all the emotion of a pot noodle.

While I was sitting there in Psychiatry class today, being told of the important differences between illusions and delusions and psychoses and neuroses, I was left thinking "We are all just prisoners here; Of our own device"