Anything you can do . . .

One of the more annoying tendencies I've noticed in myself is the defensiveness whenever someone makes a disparaging comment towards me. For example, whenever someone asks me, when does your summer break start? I explain, that it starts in late May, but its not really a break because I have to study for a board exam in July the whole time. Inevitably, my response is ignored by the nostalgic mental break in my partner in dialogue. Followed by, "man, I wish I was in school." and the inevitable, "yeah, enjoy it while it lasts, because the real world doesn't give breaks."

Generally I am pretty good at ignoring the urge to backhand the other person, but I always embarrassingly try to one up them with something like "yeah, but I'm not going to miss seven hours of lecture a day," or "yeah, but you know I'm going to have to put in those crazy 100 hour resident shifts" or something otherwise ridiculous. Because honestly, I am in still a student, and all of my stress is pretty much self induced as of right now. And I have no idea whether or not my experiences are more difficult than anyone else's and the truth is that it is completely irrelevant (or should be).

And even if my experience in school is way harder or easier than someone else gives me credit for, trying to prove it during a five minute conversation simply won't work. And what would be so bad if either a) my life was easier than the other person's or b) that other person held a misconceived belief about my, as Darryl from the office put it to Michael, "Nerf" life. All I know is I'm not going to start throwing watermelon's onto trampolines about it.