The one with the Lounge Games

It is currently 12:03 AM and I've just gotten back from a night of studying for ISF (screw you kidney, nobody ever told you to be complicated!). Ironically, whilst studying the properties of the wonderful limabean shaped organs that clean our blood, I drank so much caffeine that I demonstrated very well all of the properties of the collecting tubules. Ok thats enough with the nerd talk.

Anybody ever remember that episode of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" where Will got hustled at a pool hall? Uncle Phil turns up to save the day and starts getting his ass handed to him. Eventually the hustler gets bored and decides to raise the ante to $100 a ball and then all of a sudden Uncle Phil gets serious and tells Jeffrey to "bust out Lucille." All of a sudden Uncle Phil is a beast at pool and it turns out he's the biggest hustler in the history of the sport (the one handed shot he takes while eating a sub still has me rolling on the floor). I've always wondered how Uncle Phil got so good at pool, now I know: dude obviously went to med school before going to law school.

The lounge at my school has two pool tables and at most hours of the day there is somebody playing there. More often than not, its somebody who should be studying but desperately needs a distraction. I count myself amongst this group of people because whenever I get sick and tired of staring at a book, nothing is better than a game of pool or darts or mario kart or etc. Hell if they had a shuffleboard set down there I'd probably play that too.

It doesn't matter what your interest is, if you want a distraction the lounge has it. It wouldn't shock me one bit if the next billiard world champion is an MD. Seriously, most nights watching the really good people play is like watching ESPN 2 at 3 in the morning.

Whats more is that pool isn't even the most followed game in the lounge, that honor is reserved for the king of all medschool distractions: Ping Pong.

There is a rumor floating around that a pre-requisite for admission to our school is being beastly at Ping Pong. I believe it. It seems to me that 99.999999% of our student body has some talent at this ludicrous game. Hell the lounge event of the year is the singles ping pong tournament, or as most people call it, "The Battle For the Paddle."

Night and day you'll find Colin, Shudan, Vivek, Lee, Neil, Kareem, (insert any name here) downstairs playing pong. And trust me, these guys are good. Take all the anal tendencies that go into creating a medical student and now apply them to ping pong and what you get is a beast that even ESPN is scared to cover.

If you move a little bit over from ping pong you'll find the THREE (!!!) TV's lined up against the wall that are host to most of the consoles in the lounge. Here is where the Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Gears of War, Halo, etc. matches live. I hear that the South Korean Video Game TV Channels are in negotiations with the Lounge Lords over exclusive rights to broadcast the ridiculous matches that take place here.

All I'm saying is, for all of you hustlers out there, if you ever find yourself at a bar playing against a kid that looks like he/she should be studying instead of being hustled, walk away. Because I guarantee you that if its a doctor/med student, you WILL get hustled.

I'll end this on the lounge game of my choice: darts. I used to suck at this game, but these days I'm like those assassins from "Wanted" (that Angelina Jolie film with the curving bullets). I can make this darts do whatever the hell I want. One day while playing Jeff, I needed to get 12 bullseyes before he got 3 to win. I hit that 12th one before he got his first.