I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I feel very strongly that my mind has suffered from being put through the narrow view of a British degree. Not that the specific subject matter was particularly bad of course, but the absence of the kind of "general education requirements" found in US universities has meant that I haven't done a literature class for 6 years. I was good at literature. Hell, it was the writing prizes I won at school, not the science ones.

I went for a science degree not particularly because it was my strongest subject, but because I knew I'd be able to pull it off, and a science based degree seemed vastly more likely to lead into a career than a humanities degree. (Unless you're like my Dad and a quiet genius in your own field, which he has turned scientific anyway...) Now I find myself feeling uneducated, because though I'm still relatively well read for someone of my age, I'm no longer spectacularly well read compared to my peer group. My friends doing biochem degrees are working so incredibly hard, and on top of all the structural, molecular and metabolic whatnots, they are doing political science and literature classes. Again and again I come up against my utter lack of knowledge in fields I am interested in. I suppose it's better than assuming I know more than everyone does, but I need to get this lump of neurons on top of my spinal cord to start working properly again. I will never know if it was the depression of the past years or the medication that helped me shed the worst of it that's affected my learning abilities so, but I need to kickstart my language zones again.

I need to learn more about the possibilities of my chosen religious path, that's part of the path itself after all. I need to stop feeling so damned slug-brained. When I think back on it I really don't remember studying effectively since I was last in San Diego, and that frightens me. I've seen how age changes learning abilities and I'm 22. The longer I delay now, the less likely I will be to ever learn French, or upgrade my German from "Ich verstehe nichts" to conversational levels.

I've had the feeling of needing to get my body in shape most of my life, now for the first time I'm realising that it's not just my muscles that could do with a workout, it's my neurons too.