The Invisible Hook

Sally Moseley, St. Matthew's University

Life as A Vet Student, Honorable Mention

Throughout any given day, between classes, on an isle in the grocery store, walking down to the end of an apartment complex, there are multiple occasions to indulge in apparently meaningless conversations.  Many of us take great advantage of these opportunities to have meaningless conversations for the greater part of our free-time.  This is a wonderful way to discover that meaningless conversations are really only ever seemingly meaningless. 

Sometimes it is the people, sometimes it is the words, and sometimes it is the effect those words have on us even years after they are spoken.  Whatever the reason, when we engage in others, we learn a little bit more about ourselves as human beings. 

Being a vet student, as many of us might have noticed, involves large amounts of time dedicated to academics.  Many times, the aforementioned “free-time” becomes time to get more experience at a clinic, with the ultrasound machine, or with suture materials.  Yet we are willing to do it all and exhaust our major resources: time and energy.  We have dreams, and we love what we do.

Every once in a while, though, we need to have a really good meaningless conversation.

This spring semester, I can recall a single moment captured in a meaningless conversation that will probably stick with me for quite some time.  A friend of mine, who managed to lose technological means of morning arousal, asked if I could wake him up before classes.  Except he did not just want to wake up before classes; he wanted to wake up at the time I got up around 5:00 am, hours before class began.  This coming from someone who had nearly accomplished the conversion into becoming completely nocturnal.

So I laughed.  I made fun of him.  He made fun of himself.  It was a joke, and there was no real point in anything we were saying.

It happened right after he said it was just something he “needed” to do.  I did not really think he “needed” to do anything.  That was until he said, yes, he did, “by the same desire that drives anyone to need to do anything, otherwise we wouldn’t have to do shit”. 

With a mixture of the person speaking, the words he spoke, and the effect those words are sure to have on me in the years to come, I realized what all of us were doing.  We can probably all say that, when it comes right down to it, we do not “need” to cut down on an hour of sleep each night to fit in that little bit of anatomy review before doing clinical rotations.  Maybe we do not “need” to spend lunch with a pile of notecards.

But, sometimes you might be nocturnal with a desire to change yourself.  And sometimes we want to become something that means we must sacrifice those things that do not arouse the same desire.  And sometimes we need a meaningless conversation to remind us that, for whatever reason, we are doing what we are driven to do because it is what we love the most.