The Sickbay Logs

I am up earlier already than most people would consider healthy given the fact that lessons don't start before eight thirty and I only have to go four floors down and one up to my classroom. I'm dressed in a blue-white-chequered blouse over a light blue T-Shirt, completed by my starfleet pin, the blue necklace I bought in france last summer and the silver bracelet I got from my dad for successfully passing my exams last year.
It doesn't fit together quite well, and my hair is still rather messy for I didn't want to use a hair dryer at nine thirty yesterday night, but I don't care. I grab my blue trechcoat-like jacket out of my closet, thinking dammit, man, it's spring, no matter how cold it is outside and rejoyce about the fact that we all have to bring a blanket to school today.

I already pre-celebrated yesterday with a meal of fish 'n' chips when I went shopping downtown. It wasn't quite as good as it would have been in Ireland or England, but it was acceptable for German standards.
The shopping didn't go without obstacles. I couldn't find any washing-up-soap, and although it's a quite small shop in the middle of the city, they only seemed to have dish-washing-sponges in packs of ten which would serve me for more than a year. So instead of buying that I ended up with a can of fish and two bottles of coke, so I can celebrate tomorrow without having to worry about cooking or dish-washing.
On the way back to the bus I stopped by on the only Multi-Media-Shop I know in the city center. Since I can't expect to get a nerdy present from most of my family, and I had decided to collect the soundtracks of several movies, I thought about buying myself a present right there.
Although the rack with movie-soundtracks there is quite small, I couldn't really decide. They had an astonishing diversity of good stuff for the little they had over all, all three Lord of the Rings movies, all four of the Pirates of the Caribbean, Michaels scores from Into Darkness, Narnia which I have already love as a kid when I stayed at a friend's and we sat there staring at the menu screen for eterneties every time we had watched the movie, because the music was so awsome, Star Wars - The Phantom Menace and a lot others.
In the end I bought soundtrack from Top Gun and a complete collection of Back to the Future, as well as ordering a compilation of TOS episode-soundtracks. That was after I had asked the clerk there if the old Star Trek movie soundtracks were still available. Of course they were not, the earliest available being that of Generations, but at least the clerk was acceptably astonished after I prooved to be able to identify the Star Trek movies by the composers of the music.

But I will come by those soundtracks somehow. I even composed the plan to find an old record player somewhere and then collect the soundtracks on vinyl. Star Trek music is so awsome I would really do that for it. (But that, once again, is a story for another time.)

And, when I go to collect my order, I will bring my birthday money (or what will be left of it after I collected my other orders - you remember, the thing with the two-and-a-half-weeks?), and buy myself some more great movie soundtracks.

It was on a Thursday night near the end of last November, the last week before we had our first days in practical work. Earlier that evening the second years had thrown a welcome-party for us after which we all had gone to a bar. Two cocktails later and somwhat nearer to midnight I had then found myself in an Irish Pub, together with two of my classmates, one of which had promised to drive us home, but only if we go to the Pub together first.
On the way to the other bar she had met a guy she had learned to know a few weeks earlier under circumstances I still don't understand completely. They had agreed to meet later in said pub and so we ended up, me, her and one of our two male classmates, together with her aquaintance and two of his friends. I don't know how, but it didn't take long until I had a drawn out discussion with the friends about Star Trek, Star Wars and several other franchises, but mainly Star Trek.
The evening ended with all six of us somehow squeezed together in my classmates rather small car.

A week later I somehow once again found myself in said pub with the same people, although I had the first late-shift-early-shift-day of my life. We didn't stay long thus, because somewhen around twelve I complained I had to get up around half past four in order to be awake at work at six. But I had spent the evening talking about Star Trek, this time rather only with one of those friends of the guy who somehow knows my classmate, and at the end of the evening we both had each others numbers.

From this developed a series of meetings, usually starting out with going to a bar with the best combination of burgers, fries and music you can get for less than ten bucks this side of the Atlantic. After that we usually went to the place of one of us with the mission of him showing Lord of the Rings to me (we already got two of the three movies) or me showing Stargate to him (nearly halfway through the first season).
Yesterday however we had decided to watch one of the old movies, since it was the first time we had met in, well, a month, and somehow we even ended up with Wrath of Khan (and of course The Search for Spock afterwards). And once again it confirmed to me that this movie is just the best in Star Trek history.

But that is a topic for another time.

It was monday, in the first break. I had taken out the novelization of Star Trek - The Motionpicture which by now I have finished reading and found back into the story. McCoy had just beamed aboard on the refitted USS Enterprise after a lot of protesting from his side and was now veering off about engineers and how they most likely had changed everything in his sick-bay and how Chaple was an MD now, but he needed a head nurse instead.
A classic Star Trek scene, that inadvertently made me smile. I read a little more slowly to bathe in the glory of the moment, while with one ear I was listening to the conversations around me, something I have made a habit of since the time when the boys in my class were always throwing around things, or rather taking stuff from other peoples desk to throw around.
Then suddelny a shadow appeared above me. I didn't stop reading, I can look up enough to see, what is in front of me, without stopping, one of the reasons I can read while I walk. And I saw one of the other girls leaning at my desk, and constantly typing on her smartphone, when suddenly she stared at me, her eyes wide with shock and she said:

"You did not honestly just laugh at that book?"

She actually said your book, but that didn't make it any better the way she emphasized book she included most of the other coments I've heard over the years including:

"Oh my God, she's reading a book."
"Why do you read that? You can watch it on TV."
or
"What is so funny about a book?"

That last one, together with the one from Monday and "Why are you laughing about a book?" always make me wonder about what has happened to our society.
Most of all, since when is it forbidden to laugh about a book? Or in generally to laugh about something you read? People don't laugh about books anymore, granted, they don't even read books anymore. They don't laugh about movies either. So what do they laugh about? People in reality shows who eat snails? Have we really come that far?
Or do those people never laugh at all anymore? Except maybe about people like me, who are so retarded that they still read books.

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