So go figure. The test last Wednesday was the one I felt least prepared for, the most gaps in my retention of the material presented.  I still feel a bit fuzzy about the muscles of the forearm - there's so many of them with similar sounding names.  Who knew that such are relatively small piece of the body was so densely populated? The portion of the test that was most difficult was the infamous chart.  By way of explaining what it is we need to know let me first say that for every muscle we learn we must: *build it in clay*identify and color it in diagrams*find magazine photos that display the muscle (the superficial ones anyway)*know its location in the body and the origins and insertions (the places where it attaches) Fortunately we don't have to name the action each muscle performs, that comes in Anatomy II (a couple months from now).  The aforementioned infamous chart is the one where all the memoriztion is called into play.  The grid contains the muscle name, location, origin and insertion... except that any several pieces of the grid could be missing and we have to fill it in.  It was the page I had to keep leaving and coming back to while the fetid flotsam of assimilated anatomical information randomly resurfaced to my consciously cogitating mind.  It is tricky to remember which muscle attaches where when you aren't looking at a picture.  By some miraculous twist of fate, my score was 100. Holy f... s... batman, how the f... did I pull that one off? And, truth be told, it probably should have been a 98, because one of the fill-in-the-blanks asked for the insertion of a muscle and I supplied the origin.  I wonder if he gave me credit for it because it was correctly labeled elsewhere on the exam (we don't get to keep them after the review). I suppose I could just feel smart and smug about it, but honestly, it feels like dumb luck - there were any number of other factoids that could have been requested on the paper that I would not have been able to supply. Eh - and all this rumination when I KNOW that the truest test of my knowledge isn't the paper and pencil stuff but how well this translates to my hands when I give a massage. Which I won't be able to assess for a while because there's a fairly big body of knowledge I'll need to amass before I'm truly able to connect those two sets of knowledge.  It comes in pieces, like leggos, I think.  Or one of those puzzles that occupy the entire dining room table for months on end before you've finally mastered The Big Picture. I gave two massages today, one to a friend of mine who recently became a massage therapist herself.  Both folks gave me very helpful feedback.  If I had to sum up what I think I need to think about in a massage: center myself.  Okay, time to go to bed.  School tomorrow!