Aesthetics

My roommate brought home a painting when she got back from Amsterdam. It's huge, 2 feet by 4 feet, and is composed of deep blue, a bruise-ish purple, brackish green and occasional strips of white. Also teal, which is a color I have always hated. Have I begun to convey the fact that I really don't like this painting? It's meant to be abstract, I think--just wavy lines emanating from a central blue circle. Where the hell did this come from? I asked myself. Surely she didn't lug it all the way from Europe. I noted with trepidation that it's about the size to be hung over a couch, and that the wall behind our futon is conspicuously bare. Shudder. I couldn't really say anything about hanging it in the living room--not directly, anyway, not until I knew where it came from, especially since no fewer than 3 of my own paintings are currently on display downstairs (the difference being of course that mine are actually attractive). Why is it that there's nothing so truly off-putting as bad art? Is it because art is meant to be appealing, or to convey a message, and that bad art fails to do either one? Can there really be such a thing as bad art, I mused philosophically? Yes, the resounding reply came, and if you aren't careful you're going to have a big hunk of it hanging in your apartment forever, and your friends who know you paint will think you are responsible, and it sounds bad to say, "Sweet Lord Jesus, I'm not the one who did that. I'm not the one currently despoiling your retinas with what looks like the kraken emerging from the depths of oceanic hell."
I discovered later, when Roomie's boyfriend was over, that it was his painting. "I did that," he said simply, as if it were no big deal, as if he had not essentially just copped to aesthetic murder. "Oh." I said, and since I had given up lying--even little white ones--for Lent, continued hesitantly (hoping to convey a sense of fraternity, one artist to another--and further hoping he'd accept that as a compliment of sorts), "It's so big. Where do you go to get canvas that size?" We talked for a bit about the relative merits of Hobby Lobby versus Dick Blick's, and finally I said, "It'll look really great in Roommate's room."
"Well, it'd take up the entire wall, though, wouldn't it?" he said.
I wanted to reply, "Yes, but it would take up an entire wall down here, too, dammit," but refrained. I'm hoping the fact that Roomie hasn't put it up anywhere yet is an indication that she has no desire to do so. She's not the type to put things off. But until I know for sure, the painting crouches beneath the stairs, and each time I pass it I can feel it ready to spring.

The Metro, Pornography, and My Self-Esteem

Sure, there are all the 'normal, sane, sensible' reasons to love St. Louis' Metro, despite their recent cutbacks in services...*I swear no one is paying me to say this, though if someone from the transportation department would like to cut me a check, drop me a line and I'll send you my address. Just kidding. Why not? Because if I were a stalker, that's exactly what I'd do to get my prey's location.*
It's almost always on time, though that still sometimes means waiting twenty minutes for the damn train. Fine in April, not so fine in January.
If you are affiliated with my particular university, you get a pass for unlimited travel each semester; a pass that's free (and I love free things, though I am often reminded of something my father once told me: "Nothing's really free but God's love and syphilis." Ah, the happy childhood memories of having an ultrareligious father who worked as an epidemiologist in an STD clinic). I use the metro round-trip four days a week, something that would cost me 2.50 a pop; thus I save forty dollars a month over 'retail.' Kaching, says my inherent Germanic cheapness.
Now, the real reasons: Interesting people ride the Metro. People like you, and people so different from you that you might as well be different species, a luna moth and a sugar glider eyeing each other across the aisle.
This is going to sound awful, but I'm going to say it anyway: when I am having a low self esteem day after being around my fantastically thin and healthy, ultra-intelligent, very rich (as evidenced by BMWs and Chanel sunglasses and Coach accessories) classmates, riding the Metro makes me feel better. I am not trying to corral three children under the age of six. I am not floridly schizophrenic. I am not at the north end of four hundred pounds. And, as the rest of this entry will indicate, I am not an unapologetic and complete perv.
Now, I will first say that I see very few cases in which it's worthwhile to judge, or attempt to change, the sexual practices of others. I'm gay; I have friends who are bisexual, gay and straight; I know several people who have (and have myself been involved in) May-December romances; I know masochists and sadists and people who are into costumes and role-playing. Some of these things aren't my cup of tea, but keep it in your own bedroom or dungeon or whatever and I'm fine. Keep your mitts off of children and animals and I'm cool.
I will further say that while I myself am not a conoisseur (I'm sure I spelled that incorrectly, but whatever) of pornography, I can understand that there are people for whom it's a part of a wider sexual picture. I'm sure there are addicts, too, but that's a whole different topic--let's just say that there are pornographic papyri dating back to the Old Dynasty of ancient Egypt, that people have enjoyed looking at porn for many millenia, and that they probably aren't going to stop any sooner than they're going to stop enjoying cannabis or alcohol or for that matter a good meal. These are all centuries-old pleasures, and enjoyed properly, they don't hurt anybody.
Where am I going with this, you ask? What does porn have to do with the St. Louis public transit system? You can probably guess, but if you can't, I'm going to ask you to sit tight a bit longer.

Now, I am a profoundly German person. The Germans have been accused--and not entirely unfairly--of being weird when it comes to sex. Out of all that Teutonic repression have come folks afraid of their own sexual shadows, but also people who glory in them. I will say that before today, with my own (admittedly quite limited) exposure to porn, the single most disturbing thing I have ever seen in my life was part of a sex scene in a German movie. It was mind-numbingly, profoundly dark and unsavory (at this point some of you are going to ask the name of the movie--and I'm not going to tell you, lest the contagion spread). It made me wish I could scrub my corneas with pure lye, and it occurred to me that if I did not devote the rest of my life to the service of humanity, I would end up in Hell, where I would be tied into a movie seat and forced to watch that scene on endless repeat. Now you know why I chose to become a physician. So there's that. But there is one group of people who have consistently and overwhelmingly beat out the Germans when it comes to inventiveness and pure perversion in pornography. I speak, of course, of the Japanese.
So, on my way home from therapy today (yeah, wanna make something of it?), because there weren't any unoccupied rows, I sat down next to what I assumed to be a nice fortyish gentleman reading a book. I glanced over briefly and noticed that he was reading manga--Japanese comics, essentially. I looked a bit closer, since I don't really like manga but enjoy graphic novels now and again (he obviously had no idea I was looking at his reading material or he would have--at least I hope to God he would have--concealed it somewhat) and saw it was what is known as hentai. Not run-of-the-mill anime porn, either. On the two pages that I could see were a series of acts that, despite my esoteric Ivy-League vocabulary, I lack the words to adequately describe. I was reminded of this Onion article which at the time I dismissed as hyperbolic. But no, it was there before me, in black and white, in the hands of this graying and unassuming fellow passenger. It made the German film I saw look like The Sound of Music. Orifices and fluids and medical devices and, for the love of all that is good and holy in the world, tentacles... so, as nauseous and doubtful about the existence of Ultimate Goodness as this whole escapade made me feel, it upped my self esteem somewhat on what was otherwise a low-ebb day. At least I do not read soul-crushingly, mind-bendingly profane pornography on public transportation as if it were the latest Tom Clancy novel.

So I'm not usually into fantasy, or perhaps more appropriately into milataristic bullshit, but I've been watching my roommate's Lord of The Rings DVDs lately (in fact I am at this very moment working on the last disc of "The Return of the King") and I have to say I've developed something of a fondness for it. It's an overly simplistic view of the world, of course--one in which the bad are utterly and supremely bad, beyond hope of redemption, and in which the good are beyond corruption; there's a paucity of moral ambiguity here. Perhaps after years of reading modern and postmodern novels, and watching modern and postmodern movies in which there is nothing BUT moral ambiguity, I'm happy for a change. Even history (there are many folk who say LOTR is a totally allegorical recounting of the World Wars, in particular WWII--think about it; Sauron as Hitler, Saruman as either Mussolini or Stalin, or perhaps one of the Nazgul. Mordor as Germany, the Shire as England, Rohan and Gondor as the various regions of France) is less morally absolute. The 'bad' are bad for different reasons, and all the forces of evil are not allied; Stalin and Hitler had a gentlemen's agreement for a while, but both knew even as they were signing it that they would break it as soon as the opportunity arose.
Though I'm not crazy about a movie in which the heroes slash their way through battle scenes keeping count of the corpses they leave behind (so that they can compare later and see who 'wins'), it is nice to know that there are definite sides and that in the end goodness is going to triumph. Eowyn and a Hobbit kill the Witch King (something 'no man' can do--yay for a little bit of feminist sensibility). That is why we love fairy tales and fantasies, why we tell them still and write them still--they offer something we never find in life, a reminder of never is and cannot be, but that we still wish for: the heroine's redeeming journey and ultimate reward, the vanquished Dark Lord, the end which is always another beginning.

I don't have anything to say about this right now, because I'm too furious to be coherent, but it's great to see that Halliburton essentially sanctions sexual assault. Makes me feel justified in my abject loathing.

So much of our lives are closed books to one another. I see you everyday, but I don't know your secret dreams, your hidden desires. Hell, I probably don't even know how you take your coffee. I am phenomenally good at keeping secrets; my own and other people's. I wonder sometimes how people feel who are professional secret keepers (who would those be? You ask. Priests. Doctors. Nurses. Therapists. Lawyers.) feel about this. What is it like to carry the secrets of not one or a dozen or a hundred but thousands and thousands of people? If you're a member of the Cabinet, what is it like to keep the secrets of an entire country? If you're a cardinal or Pope, what's it like to keep the secrets of an entire religion?
What would happen if we--not the professionals, bound both my law and ethics, but the everyday men and women on the street--told one another our hidden stories? What if we opened our shells just a little? Are we so afraid of being crushed that we'll cower behind walls of our own making forever rather than risk that soupcon of freedom? And some secrets are secret only because they aren't told, not because they're horrible or uncomfortable to share. Let someone know a little more about you. It's much more interesting to talk about real life than to hash over last night's Grey's Anatomy. Some secrets, both mine and others':

I know several women who have had abortions. One of them I held and massaged through her cramps and tears afterwards.

I know someone who actually won a red convertible from the McDonald's Monopoly instant-win game.

I know at least a dozen women who have been sexually assaulted--by friends, fathers, uncles, strangers, husbands. In no way did I think less of them after I knew. In fact, I was inspired by their fortitude and courage in surviving, and in telling me.

In middle school, I went to the national spelling bee in Washington, D.C. I was eliminated on the word "indefatigable."

I know a lesbian nun.

I started smoking with some regularity when I was 13.

I knew someone who died in a plane crash.

My second college roommate was Susan Sontag's niece.

In high school, someone scratched "Dyke" into the paint on my locker. I suspect it was the same kid who later called me "Lesbo" and hit me in the stomach. No one ever did anything about it.

One of my high school friends killed himself right after he loaned me Mark Twain's "Stories from Earth." I still have the book; I don't have Josh.

One of my friends found out she had 'dysplastic cells' from HPV in high school. Two years later her mother died of cervical cancer. I know she must be frightened, but we've never talked about it. Maybe we should...

Of my med school class, I know at least 4 of us have eating disorders, and that many more than that have what might be termed 'alcohol problems.'

Sharing a secret with another human being is one of the quickest ways to diminish its power. It also forges a bond between you and that other person. It doesn't have to be your deepest, darkest desire; it can be that you were the 'weird kid' in elementary school, or that you make your own kim-chi, or that you've always been afraid of dogs. Face your secrets, then share them.

Psychiatric Diagnosis--who decides?

The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.--Thomas Szasz (a psychiatrist himself!)

So, I've been reading a lot about PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) recently, and noting some interesting things. Yes, psychiatric diagnosis is useful to the extent that it guides treatment, helps someone understand themselves (or others) better, or provides insurance benefits. When is it not beneficial? When it's used as Szasz describes, of course, or when it becomes the sole focus of the therapeutic endeavor--ie, the psychiatrist begins to treat a diagnosis rather than a patient. But the very process of diagnosis can be biased and inappropriate to the particular circumstances. For instance: who is primarily diagnosed with PTSD? Yes, soldiers, but who else? If you guessed sexual assault survivors, good job.

So, what are the symptoms of PTSD? Some are arguably pathological, yes, and to the extent that any of these symptoms cause suffering it may be appropriate to approach them as treatable dysfunction, BUT I think it is essential to recognize that these are not pathologies inherent to the individual, but to the traumatic situation itself. The patient is having a normal reaction to a profoundly abnormal situation. Labeling with a psychiatric diagnosis may cause undue stigma and further suffering in addition to the "condition" the patient is perceived to have. So what about PTSD symptomatology, particularly as it pertains to rape survivors? Some of the symptoms seem not to be pathological at all when viewed from a female perspective (yes, I know men can be raped too, but roll with me here--I guess what I mean by the 'female' perspective is the 'constant awareness of being a potential target' perspective).For instance, 'hypervigilance' is one symptom of PTSD; being victimized DOES make a person more aware of their surroundings. Once bitten, twice shy, as the saying goes--and who decides what constitutes HYPERvigilance anyway? I would think being traumatized would make you pretty effing vigilant, to try and keep it from happening again (even though, of course, it wasn't your fault), and who the hell am I to tell you how vigilant you should be? Irritability--hell yes. Trauma and suffering tends not to bring out the best in anyone, and if I've been raped and you tell me I'm being excessively irritable, you're suddenly going to have a whole lot more irritability to deal with (and possibly head trauma). Intense psychological distress at reminders of the event, and subsequent efforts to avoid such triggers--well, if you have a panic attack every time you smell cigarette smoke, you're probably not going to be hanging out at a lot of bars. I mean, it doesn't take a Mensa member to figure that one out. And intense psychological distress at reminders--well, isn't that kind of a given? Does the average person, who has undergone much less acutely traumatic events, not have similar reactions? Who likes being reminded of their messy divorce, the time they broke their arm, their first car accident when they were sure their parents were going to kill them and bury them in the backyard? Yes, of course, it's a matter of degree; but it's also a matter of perspective. I wouldn't go out for a run at dusk; if I were a man, that might be considered hypervigilance. Since I have a vagina, it's just business as usual, and a man who tried to give me a psychiatric diagnosis based on my desire to protect myself from potential pervs in Forest Park would earn himself either an impromptu lesson on gender sensitivity or, failing that, a swift kick to the groin.

So this has been an awesome weekend.

Got an email from the doctor saying, yeah, we need to do an MRI. To check for--no shit!--a brain tumor.
Had a respiratory physiology take-home exam.
Couldn't start my car Saturday because it was too cold and the gas line had frozen up.
Went outside today to discover that someone had broken into my f*cking car.
And this week looks to be like a baguette--long and hard (well, maybe not AS long, since it's only 4 days).

Seriously, God. Not cool.