Away with Type A

*Disclaimer: For some reason this post is really hard on engineers, residents and people from Kingston. I’m still going to post it because I think it’s kind of funny, but to those included in those groups please realize a lot of it has to do with me having a bad week.*

It's been a while.

I've actually been away from Trisha, Otto and Ralph for five straight days. It was kind of tough. Otto was kind enough to learn how to smile about an hour and a half before I got on a plane. So for about eight hours of travel time (with lay overs) I got to picture all the smiles Trisha was getting without me. I would have been jealous if I didn't consider all the diapers she was getting without me.

The one thing I thought I might benefit from was four nights of uninterrupted sleep. I thought I would come home rested and ready to study and parent and doctor. I was wrong.

Let me explain. This "vacation" was in Kingston. Why does anyone go to Kingston, you ask? Great question.

I'm from Winnipeg. I get it, it's not that rad for a lot of reasons, especially to people who have never been here. But Kingston is a whole different kind of joke. Kingston, it would seem, is not really a city at all. It's a city sized frat house.

The entire population exists in Ugg boots and jogging pants by day. By night, it's a mix of jersey shore-esque douchery, hippy dippy stoner prep ware, or the foreign grad student look. Over lunch I heard a group of thirty-somethings discussing their favourite ultimate Frisbee tournaments. We walked passed several houses with enough boxes of empty beer bottles out front to build a fort. One such house had three young men who had obviously just woken up. They were sitting out front staring blankly and speechlessly into the two PM daylight. At least one of them appeared to have slept in the back of his father's Suburban, which sat open next to them half on the lawn. This SUV contained about four pounds of whey protein/creatine, a pillow and an economics text book.

The sidewalks are peppered with splatter marks and on at least three occasions these splatter marks still contained fresh vomit. It is easy to presume that most of those splatter other marks were also made by some sort of bodily fluid. At least all the old buildings are classy.

Everyone wears school jackets. I didn't think anyone wore school jackets. Not only do they wear them, they torture and dye them by faculty-specific colours in some sort of ritualized dorkishness. On a nerdiness scale it makes Comic Con look like the Super Bowl. At first I thought it was just the engineers. This seemed acceptable to me because in general that faculty has a well known, nation wide communal thought/personality disorder. But it goes beyond engineering and even includes...medicine. If you ask me, there is a severe vacuum for a counter culture movement. If you’re wanting to start a revolution, Queens University is in desperate need of someone with independent thought and who ISN'T willing to sacrifice personal safety or fashion sense in the name of school spirit.

I think a great tag line for Queens university might be, "Queens: Is this the real life?" or, "Queens: I don't want to break free."

The reason I was at Queens was for a national review course for the Royal College licensing exam i have coming up in May. If you think it's stressful spending time around a one month old, try spending 5 days crammed in a room with overconfident, type A personalities from across the country that are either:

A) discovering that they don't know everything or,

B) trying to prove they do know everything.

I can make fun because I'm in no way immune to this, but on the "stressed out" spectrum of emergency medical residents I can pretty confidently say I'm way below average.

In all, a lot of people were able to put their neuroticism aside and I got to meet some descent people and I also got to spend some quality time with my fellow Winnipeg residents. That said, I missed Otto and Trisha and even Ralph like crazy.

It's really nice to be home. Otto is HUGE! It's amazing what can happen in 5 days. If it weren't for FaceTime and being able to see him for a few seconds each day, I may not have recognized him. He's still smiling a lot, which is a lot of fun. Today is Halloween. We dressed up. Don't you just hate it when parents force their own nerdy agenda on their children?