waiting for the rebirth of wonder

More things not to say to a lesbian

2012-01-16T21:32:00.001-05:00

4.Are you hitting on me/are you attracted to me? Unless this is a prelude to flowers and a kiss, save it. If I haven't expressed a romantic interest in you, I probably don't feel one (or I'm horribly afraid of the inevitable rejection and months of sobbing into a pint of Chunky Monkey that would follow). Please don't assume that I like ALL ladies, just like I don't assume that my straight sisters like ALL guys, or that my pansexual friends like ALL EVERYONE (though I do know one pan friend who would probably cop to that. She's even into trees).
5. So, what do lesbians think about (insert topic here)? I'm not the spokesperson for All Lesbiandom. My turn is the last week in March (of course we rotate turns; we're lesbians!)--ask again then. But seriously, there is no monolithic Lesbian Opinion, just like there isn't any monolithic Female Opinion, or Indigenous Peoples Opinion, or whatever. Feel free to ask about what I feel as an individual, though...I have lots of awesome opinions to share.
6. Were you sexually abused/did you have a domineering mother/blah blah blah? That's actually and emphatically none of your business, unless we're very close friends and I've indicated I'm interested in discussing this, or you're my therapist. Let's assume for the sake of this that you're neither. What I think you're getting at is: did I have some experience that 'turned' me? I think it's safe to say that nature plays a big role in sexual orientation (as opposed to nurture, which also plays a role, but probably a smaller one). Not to be crass, but if sexual abuse caused homosexuality, I would have a much easier time finding dates; as for the 'domineering mother' hypothesis, please--come with me into the twenty-first century. We have iPhones and fat-free frozen yogurt and a thousand other small miracles. Leave the seventies behind.
7. You just haven't met the right guy yet. Right. I've just been going through this little phase for the past fifteen years. I'm sure someday my prince will come to me on a white horse, in a cloud of Axe body spray, biceps bulging as he pulls open his shirt to reveal a chest forested with hair as thick as--hold on a minute, I just threw up in my mouth a little.
8. Can I watch? A ha ha ha...NO.
9. My girlfriend and I (ALWAYS asked by a guy) are looking for someone for a threesome..? Oh, fun. May I suggest you invite a close mutual friend to join you, or failing that, hire an escort/prostitute to assist you in your endeavor? Because, you see, I'm not into guys, I don't know either of you from Eve, and even if I either of those first two statements were incorrect, I'm still not a fantasy-fulfillment machine. I'm a person. Don't make me feel objectified and gross.
10. [Assorted anti-LGBT blustering...defend traditional marriage...homosexual agenda...blah blah...bluster bluster] Not even worth a response.

10 Things NOT to Say To A Lesbian

2012-01-16T14:26:00.002-05:00

I realize many, if not most, people are trying to be sensitive. The majority of these questions come from what I call 'the innocently clueless.' But that said, there are several things I'm tired of explaining, and a number of questions I'm tired of hearing. Genuine attempts to connect and honest efforts to understand are welcome; outmoded (ie, 1950s) expectations and outright asshattery are not. Clip this out and put it in your wallet or stick it on your fridge as a reference. So, in no particular order:
1. But you don't LOOK like a lesbian! Yeah, I had the giant 'Lez' tattoo zapped off my forehead recently...it didn't go with my glasses. All right, just kidding. I know what you mean: I don't look like a pre-op Chastity Bono. I have long hair, wear skirts on occasion, and have been known to keep lipstick and mascara in my bag (though it's a backpack and not a purse). Lesbians, just like straight and bi women, run the gamut from Portia-deRossi-femme to kd lang butch. Take-home message? Don't make assumptions. If you could tell just by looking, I wouldn't have such a hard time finding dates.
2. (In regards to a relationship): So which one of you is the man? -See also the next question. Um. Neither of us is 'the man.' That's what makes us lesbians, actually: the fact that both of us are ladies. Some women identify as butch (more masculine) and femme (more feminine) but if that's what you mean, then those are the terms you should use. There are also plenty of folks who don't subscribe to the whole butch/femme thing. Do you mean who's the dominant personality? Who opens doors and pulls out chairs? Who usually initiates sex? Quite possibly both or neither. Just like, y'know, lots of heterosexual relationships.
3. So how can two women have sex? With finesse and skill. As most people living in this century are aware, there are lots of things people can do in bed (or on the kitchen table, or in a secluded park) besides 'sticking it in.' There are, in fact--please sit down as I break this to you--many, many sex acts that do not depend on the presence of a penis. Though if we want a penis, we can generally drop by a novelty shop and pick one up in exactly the dimensions, textures and colors we want.
MORE TO COME.

2011-12-08T21:01:00.001-05:00

So I've realized it's finally time to stop screwing around and get back to work on the novel (coincidentally, I saw this falcon perched on a streetlamp while out for a run today--and as they are symbolically associated with FOCUS, I think Mr/Ms Falcon agrees with me).

What's odd is the way in which that realization came about. I was talking to one of the doctors I'm working with on the teen suicide screening project, and she asked me how my year was going. It's a weird question to answer; I'm in a sort of suspended-animation version of the usual fourth year of med school. I'm not applying to residencies this year, and so I'm not involved in the mad morass of interviewing/ranking/hoping/praying in which most of my cohort is currently entrenched. So I answered that I was enjoying working on the project (true), and getting in a lot of nice runs, maybe thinking about a half-marathon this spring (also true)...and then, what? What else am I doing? Some heavy lifting in therapy--true, but not something you tell a supervisor, necessarily. Assorted crafty things, like knitting caftans and making jewelery and doing a series of Georgia O'Keefe-esque watercolors of the innards of flowers that kinda look like ladyparts? Also true, but not totally compelling. Looking at lolcats and reading online comics? Not gonna cop to that. And so I said, "And with my extra time, I'm working on my novel." And then thought--what?
Now, this isn't a lie. I'm always working on my novel, to some degree. Usually it's fiddling with phrases in my head while I wait in line at the grocery store, or dashing down a quick description of a facial expression in my notebook while I'm at the coffee shop. But that's fiddling, dallying. It isn't WORK, which involves sitting my ass down and getting words committed to the page.
So, starting today, the goal is a page a day. I can do more if I feel up to it, but I don't have to. Less is not an option.

We'll see.

2011-10-05T18:58:00.004-04:00

Warrior (For All the Women Who...)
"I admire your witness. You are truly a warrior."--A friend, critiquing a personal essay

I write my pain and this is what you call me,
Even knowing
Less than half the story,
without the grim exhaustive catalog
Of battles braved, which I quickly dismiss,
and battles shared:
The twelve year old with blood
smeared on her thighs like warpaint,
or the sixteen year old
who left her home black eyed and spent a month
sleeping on floors, because she couldn't lie
Any longer about who she was.
And there are scars: the slash above the hip
Where his belt dug in, or the arm--
That scar beneath the skin
Bones broken which have healed themselves in time,
Knit together by agile hope and will.
My hands are open, weaponless,
and waiting for some next fear
to furl them into fists;
Mouth open, on the verge of screaming,
still tasting pain, the sweet salt tang
of blood on the tongue, lips cracked
and hemorrhaging meaning.
Beaten like metal
into some useful shape,
a blade, perhaps, with all that would entail--
Marked but striving and surviving
Anvil, water, fire:
A witness, and a warrior
Born again.
-AG, Oct 2011, written in honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month

2011-08-13T20:58:00.004-04:00

So, I'd never heard of the concept of a 'bucket list' before that mediocre movie with Jack Nicholson came out a few years ago. Over the past, say, five years I've found that many of the items I would have put on a bucket list as a younger person have now been accomplished; however, some still remain. What's on your list? What have you already accomplished that you are proud of? Is there anything that would have been there five years ago that you've now dismissed as unimportant?

Accomplished:
Publish something in a book (not a periodical)
Be part of an art show
Deliver a baby
Spend a summer on a commune (They were Quakers. It still counts.)
Publish a zine (The one-year run of Zenger's Daughter, named for Johann Zenger--google him--was a great success. Thanks, Center High School administration, for letting me distribute a zine with references to safer sex AND poorly-camouflaged digs at the Homecoming court!)
Publish a blog
Learn to bellydance (For PE credit at Cornell. No joke)
Learn to knit
Gain fluency in a language other than English (German. Also Middle High German and Old English, but damned if no one speaks them anymore. Thanks, Bachelor of Arts!)
Mentor youth
March in a gay pride parade (with people from my church here in StL. Episcopalians represent!)
Learn to bake bread from scratch (anything from a sourdough boule to a ciabatta loaf to an egg-glazed challah, I'm your woman)

Still to come:
Publish a book
Learn to sing Schubert's 'Ave Maria'
Earn an MD
Run a marathon (I've registered for two, and every time I get a stress fracture during training)
Find love (and get married...I'm old-fashioned that way)
Sell a painting
See the aurora borealis (thinking of going to Canada for this when I get time off...)
Visit Jerusalem
Visit Ireland (I want to see the Book of Kells)
Read the complete works of C.G. Jung
Go parasailing
Mentor more youth

2011-08-11T11:49:00.004-04:00

Jung, Inanna and the Harrowing of Hell

Every story worth telling is a story of transformation. As my high school English teacher said when explaining the ideas of plot and narrative arc: "At some point the protagonist experiences some kind of change--usually at the climax of the story." It can be a small thing, and is found (sometimes against the writer's will) everywhere; even in absurdist narratives that seem not to be narratives, like the characters who see leaves growing on a once-barren tree in Waiting for Godot. Other times it is earth-shattering, impossible to miss: Elijah, under the broom tree, is restored from suicidal anguish to a sense of purpose. Jesus rises from the dead after the harrowing of Hell, in which he rescues Adam, Eve, and the other 'righteous heathens' who came before his birth. Cinderella finds her prince, Sleeping Beauty awakes, Little Red Riding Hood is cut from the stomach of the wolf. What is common in these tales of transformation is that one must descend in order to ascend. It is the inverse of the idiom 'what goes up must come down': what would come up must first go down. As Nietzsche wrote at the beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra, "And so Zarathustra went down."

One of the first written narratives in the world--before Dante, before Jesus, before even the Torah--concerns the descent of the Goddess Inanna (the Sumerian Great Goddess, known as the Queen of Heaven and Earth) into cold dark of the Underworld. The reason for her descent is unclear, but it is clear the trip is necessary. As she passes through the seven gates of the underworld, moving ever closer to the dark Queen Ereshkigal, she is made to relinquish one article of her clothing and jewelry at each stop: her dress, her golden rings, her lapis lazuli necklace. When she finally stands before her sister, the Goddess Ereshkigal, she is stripped of all the material goods that signified her wealth and power. The Queen of Heaven and Earth has been reduced to Her core being, all outside accoutrement and titles given up--all cunning facades removed.

Inanna stands in the presence of Darkness naked and vulnerable; Ereshkigal slays her with a word and hangs her lifeless body from a hook. Meanwhile, in the world above, Inanna's absence means that the vital spark is gone from everything. Crops no longer grow, animals no longer mate, human lovers are no longer drawn into one another's arms. The lush fertility and creativity Inanna represented is gone, replaced by a cold sterility and a sense of hushed waiting. Meanwhile, in the womb of the earth, Inanna--dead--waits too. Yet, as human beings have known from time immemorial, what appears to be an end is in fact a new beginning. She is rescued by two beings sent by the god Enki, restored to life in the world above. Fertility is restored to the land; Inanna returns to her life 'above ground,' but one surmises She must have been transformed by such an experience, with a greater understanding of the dark places in the Universe, the shadows and vast caverns of emptiness which even gods experience. One can imagine that, having tasted utter desolation, Inanna's creative capacities matured still further, through the 'life experience' everyone must accrue. There is more to the story, involving Inanna's mate Dumuzi, but for my purposes it ends there.

Lately such tales have been much on my mind. I've been sick, and I've been reading Jung. Through wrestling with illness--my own and others'--I have been brought into unavoidable contact with the sorts of questions I (and most human beings, I think) try to avoid. What am I if I no longer identify myself by what I do? What would I answer if some prescient individual at a cocktail party were to ask me, "Who are you?" I would give my name, of course, then likely begin rattling off all my activities, roles and qualifications. I'm a medical student, an aspiring psychiatrist, a writer, a mental health and LGBT activist, an artist, a runner. I'm a daughter, an aunt, a friend, a lover.

What, then, if they were to reply (perhaps with a laugh), "No, no, I didn't ask what you do. I asked who you are." I'm a...woman? A human being? A sentient being?
Who are we with our robes, our rings, our doctorates removed?
What is the shadow we have to confront--even if it slays some part of us? The periods in our lives that feel sterile and bereft of life--are they truly? Or is there some part of us waiting, like Inanna on the hook, or a crocus beneath a blanket of snow, for the siren call of an unimagined spring?

2011-08-06T16:02:00.003-04:00

Encore une fois...Things (and People) that Piss Me Off...

There are a number of things I do well. I am a passable painter (with watercolors and acrylics). I am a writer of essays and poems with some limited success in publication. I have been told my mezzo soprano voice possesses a light, sweet timbre that is quite appealing. I have equal facility with the sciences and the arts. I am a good listener. I am patient and compassionate. I can run like...ok, I'm not leggy enough to run like a gazelle, but like a frightened jackrabbit certainly.
However, there are many things at which I do not excel, and with the residency application process upon us, all the little demons of self-doubt and recrimination that I'm usually able to sweep under one psychic rug or another have come out to play. And that is number one on the list--inferiority complexes.

2. Michele Bachmann. I managed to get through the past several years without encountering her as more than a mere blip on my 'Psychotic Politicians' radar screen...and I'm sure my blood pressure thanks me for that. But how are people taking seriously someone who spews forth such gems as "And what a bizarre time we're in, when a judge will say to little children that you can't say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it." Well, sexual orientation isn't really like trying flavors at the Coldstone Creamery (''Ooh, I wanna try Bisexual Boysenberry, Mom! Can I? Can I?" "Not until you've finished your Lesbian Lemon."), but maybe we caught Ms. Bachmann on a bad day. What else has she said? "If we took away the minimum wage - if conceivably it was gone, we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level." I'm sorry, what did you say? I couldn't hear you over the sound of the naivete--not to say stupidity. Ok, I will say stupidity. Never mind.

3. Again, the flagrant and aggressive abuse of...the English language. "Irregardless" is not a word, nor is "anyways." Also not words: "supposably" and "pecific" (unless you're referring to an ocean, or something incredibly tranquil and calm--in which case, mind the spelling). Please learn the difference between "when" and "whenever." If in doubt as to which is appropriate, consider using "when." If you say, "We couldn't find a parking space whenever we went to the store," you are conveying that on every occasion that you have visited said store, you have been unable to park your SUV. If you've only been to the store once, "whenever" is not appropriate. NB re: my obsession with grammar and punctuation--this is why my mother bought me a button that says "Grammar Gestapo." Yes, I have OCD personality traits. I am more or less OK with this.

4. Poorly conceived drug names, particularly psychotropic medications. What happened to the glory days of Abilify, Zoloft and Mellaril, promising in turn greater abilities, a lofty elevated mood and a delightful mellow calmness (and movement disorders...lots of movement disorders)? Now we have Latuda, which despite my attempts to pull my mind out of kindergarten makes me think of flatulence, and Viibryd, which sounds like either a marital aid or an electric car depending on my mood. For as much as patients will end up paying for these, they deserve to have names that won't inspire embarrassment at the pharmacy window.

2011-08-02T20:11:00.000-04:00

One to Ten

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best you’ve ever felt and one being the worst, how would you say you’re feeling today?—common psychiatrist’s query

The questions are beyond rote,

Like pennies turned over in so many hands

They’ve become featureless discs,

Lincoln’s head polished to a muted lump, the dates

And mottoes inscrutable.

Reduce your life, please, to a number.

The days that stretch on, painfully long

And bone-dry as a track of dust-rutted highway,

Red earth horizon to horizon, the heat choking you,

When even breathing is a chore.

The nights when winter comes all at once,

Bringing swirling snow and discontent,

And you find yourself trapped

beneath the clouded green ice of your sorrow,

Bare heels and palms banging at the cold of your confinement,

Searching for the sharp-edged black hole

That you must have left when you fell in.

Please rate the dust, and the dryness you feel

Coating your brain with its grit;

Please give us some objective measure

Of the sensation that comes before drowning

When your lungs spasm wildly and make your heart stutter

And slow.

We aren’t asking much. Just a number.

Just tell us, and then we’ll go.

--AG, Aug 2011

2011-07-23T08:42:00.003-04:00

Why I Hate Summer

It seems like everyone else in the known universe loves summer. Even on unknown exoplanets where the transition to summer means the seas of ammonia start boiling and the giant worms come out of hiding in their usual ice caves, the silicon-based creatures who live there probably say to each other, "Ah, summer...there's nothing like it." Well, I don't like it. Never have. As a kid, it meant school was out, and I LOVED school. Both my parents worked, so it meant I was consigned to daycare. My least favorite daycare was run by a woman who, God bless her, must have had some sort of adrenal or pituitary problem: she was maybe 5 feet tall, but I'd guess she weighed in at close to 350 pounds. She didn't really get up and interact with us much--just yelled at us from her Barcalounger, "You kids stop playin' grabass! It's time for snack." Snack being off-brand juiceboxes (though once in a while we did get Hi-C...anyone else remember 'Ectocooler,' that Ghostbusters-branded juice that was antifreeze-green and tasted, well, GREEN?) and stale Goldfish. Yum. Add to this the fact that I was the only person in my age group, and preferred reading in a corner to playing the aforementioned grabass, and, well, maybe you can imagine why Goldfish still taste, to me, of isolation and soul-crushing loneliness. And why I abhor summer.
Then there are the more practical reasons I disliked summer as a kid--ones not related to social isolation and boredom. Metal slides, unarguably the BEST playground equipment ever, were transformed by the blazing Missouri sun into huge George Foreman grills, which seared the backs of my thighs like chicken cutlets (and sometimes even burned my derriere through my shorts). During the summer it seemed that there were always squadrons of bees and wasps with nothing better to do than seek me out and sting the crap out of me. Poison ivy was lurking around every corner. Popsicles, while delicious, seemed specially designed to melt before actually making it to my mouth, covering my hands and clothes in a sticky syrup that attracted--surprise--more bees. My parents were thoughtful, cautious people, and every year my father delivered the Fourth of July lecture about how more fingers and eyes were lost during Fourth of July weekend than at any other time (except perhaps Sports Night at a leper colony). It wasn't until late elementary school that I got to go over to a friend's house for the Fourth, and having been robbed by dire threats of the childish joy of blowing shit up, contented myself with sparklers (and then only when I knew there was a bucket of water nearby). I'm still not a huge fan of the Fourth of July--all the red, white and blue crap, the mindless jingoism, the picnics and barbeques that aren't really over until someone vomits--either from alcohol poisoning or because of the unrefrigerated potato salad. I hate watermelon. I love sweet corn with butter but feel the need to floss between every few bites. I'm a vegetarian, so most of the joys of BBQ are beyond me, and beyond most of the people who organize communal cookouts to which I'm invited. I'll usually bring a box of Boca Burgers, but for the most part recognize that otherwise I'll be dining on potato chips and possibly a dessert of some description.

Of course, there's also the heat. A heat index over 100 degrees makes any activity--physical or mental--a struggle of epic proportions. Even with my trusty window unit cranked to 100%, thermal equilibrium is hard to find. It's too hot to actually pursue any meaningful activity, but lying still in bed only means sweating in silence. It's too hot to sleep with covers, but as everyone knows--or should--sleeping without covers leaves one dangerously vulnerable to attack by the monsters that live under the bed. With climate change, I can only expect the summers to get hotter and more objectionable. Maybe I'll move to Seattle, or Canada. I can see that happening--moving another 10 degrees north every decade or so, always chasing the cold, the winter where I am content.

2011-07-07T18:23:00.003-04:00

Living with a Chronic Disease

Ask a fourth year medical student to name as many chronic diseases as she can think of, and you'd better have a cup of coffee and some doodling paper at hand to keep you occupied. She'll start with the ones she sees every day: hypertension, diabetes, lupus, chronic kidney disease (it even has chronic in the name!). Maybe she'll start getting creative, reaching out into the diseases that are more exotic--that she's only seen once, in a specialized clinic, or read about while preparing for the boards: myasthenia gravis, Friedrich's ataxia, scleroderma, Lennox-Gestaut syndrome. She'll ramble on, thinking back, remembering all the rotations she's been through. There's a good chance, however, that when she finally falters and stops, there will be some significant holes--diseases that are incredibly common, but often forgotten. Depression, which 25% of the population of the US will struggle with at one time or another, and which is often a chronic condition (though of course there are some lucky folk--lucky being a relative term--who have one depressive episode and never have to deal with it again). Schizophrenia is rarely a here-today, gone-tomorrow affliction. Eating disorders are notoriously chronic. Of course, the chronic mental illness nearest (and paradoxically dearest) to my heart is bipolar disorder.

I've been struggling with depression since elementary school. I had a hypomanic (not quite as extreme as a manic episode, but with boundless energy, little need for sleep, lack of usual inhibition, and a general feeling that EVERYTHING IS SO F*CKING GREAT!!!) episode in high school, and another in college--and one that veered into true mania this year, after getting off mood stabilizers. I'm now back on them.
The highs have always been few and far between. The lows come much more often, and are much more extreme; at times I've been catatonically depressed, though much more often it's a general malaise, an extreme fatigue, a bleak certainty that nothing is worth doing and that I will fail at anything I attempt in any case. I wonder myself, from time to time, how I managed to get through college (and medical school--though of course I'm not done yet). Yet I know that, like anyone with a chronic illness, I've learned to adapt. I "make hay while the sun shines"--during breaks in the bleakness, I do as much as I can in terms of studying, cleaning, laundry and shopping. On good days, or during good periods, I work ahead, making preparations I hope will carry me through the darker days that inevitably come. When the black curtain drops over my life again, I ration my energy, willing myself through the day--at times pushing myself through the everyday tasks of clerk-and-studenthood requires the iron will and stamina of a marathoner. I force myself through eight or ten or twelve hours at the hospital then come home and collapse into bed, perhaps managing to read a few pages before exhaustion takes me.
The past few weeks have been rough, physically and emotionally. It is one of those dark times, though thankfully not the blackest I've ever seen. I'm portioning out what little energy I have. Adaptation has brought me a long way--I've managed like this for more than a decade now. Yet there's always the nagging doubt in the back of my mind that someday this won't be enough. I guess I can only be thankful that it seems to be enough for now.

2011-07-04T19:01:00.002-04:00

Why I Despise the Kindle

Someday I want to have a best-selling book, or two, or three. Critically acclaimed, National Book Award-winning...featured on Oprah. Damn, that's not an option any more. Just kidding, kids...that's a joke. I think my feelings on the Oprah Book Club have been addressed here previously. If not, take a guess--you'll probably be right.
I want to be able to lovingly stroke (and possibly more...how do you get to second base with a book?) the first copy that comes off the press. I want to smell that amazing new-book smell, a heady mixture of ink and grass and anticipation. I want to feel the stiffness of the uncracked spine and turn the gently textured pages. I want to be able to sign the front page--the one after the dedication, but before the table of contents--and give them away as the most narcissistic Christmas presents ever. I want to be able to heft a copy high in the air--on The Colbert Report, the morning news, on NPR (even though no one will be able to see it) and implore people to buy it. OK, maybe not all of these things.
However.
I have no desire to write a best selling text file.
I am not interested in something that could possibly electrocute me should I read it in the bathtub. I do a lot of my best reading in the bathtub. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how much of my coursework for college--and for medical school, for that matter--was completed in the midst of a bevy of lavender-scented bubbles.
I saw an ad for a Kindle that said, "Easy to read in bright light!" I was momentarily stunned. Um, so are books...pretty much by definition. Bright light and the act of reading go together like peaches and cream, no? It's sort of like having an ad for applesauce that says, "You can eat it without grinding your teeth to painful nubs!" That is one of the benefits of applesauce--you can eat it when you're unable or unwilling to chew. Calling attention to this as a notable benefit of your product makes me...wary.
You don't need to 'power up' books. They just...are. I have NEVER had to change the battery in my copy of American Gods or The Sandman.
Libraries and bookstores are literally my favorite places to be. I feel safe there. Happy. Content. Anything that f*cks with that gets my dander up.
Not everything has to be made up of light and pixels these days (she wrote on her blog). There is something to be said for the concrete, the real, the physical.
All I'm saying is--give books a chance.

2011-06-12T23:36:00.003-04:00

Who wants to have a positive attitude all the time? It's that time of the month again, and so it's also time for another edition...long in the making...of Things That Piss Me Off. Since it's been so long, we're going to make it an alphabetical extravaganza of annoyance. Any letters I left out have been culled intentionally, because I want to and because I can.

A is for Air conditioning that's cranked up so high in the med school library I have to carry a parka with me (in 90 degree heat) so that I don't freeze to death in the stacks. Like that Neolithic iceman who was flash-frozen in a glacier, only instead of a spear I'd be clutching a copy of 'Neuroanatomy Made Ridiculously Simple."
B is for Sam Brownback, R-Kansas. He knows why.
C is for cicadas, particularly the orange and black monstrosities currently holding StL hostage. When they all start humming together, it's like someone is taking a chainsaw to your nerves.
D is for Depakote, the magical mood stabilizer that can make you stable enough to pursue an intimate relationship, only to stymie you with side effects of hirsutism and weight gain. Good one.
E is for exclamation points--the most overused of the punctuation marks, in my opinion. If a comma is salt (good with everything), and a period is like ketchup (again, a hearty work-a-day character), the exclamation point is like wasabi. I don't want a peanut butter and wasabi sandwich, get it? Be a little more judicious with your punctuation.
F is for flares. Solar flares, lupus flares, emergency flares--the word 'flare' is rarely associated with anything good. Someone's cellular communications are screwed, someone's losing their hair or someone smashed into a guardrail at 80 miles per hour. Boo to flares.
G is for grammar, which is being misused, abused and outright ignored more today than ever before. Don't end your sentence with a preposition. When you come into the clinic and tell me pain is "more worser" today than yesterday, I feel bad for you; in part because you're in pain, but mostly because no one ever cared enough to teach you the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. Additionally, I judge you.
H is for headaches, particularly migraines. Or as I call them, "parties of tiny, meth-crazed elves wielding pickaxes inside my skull."
I is for ice-cream headaches. Because being hurt by ice cream is like being mauled by a Yorkie...you don't see it coming and that makes it even worse.
J is for July, rapidly approaching and my least favorite month of the year.
K is for the Kardashians. Against my will, I have had knowledge about these utterly pointless, spoiled people inserted into my consciousness. I can tell the Kardashian sisters apart. If this information were not occupying space in my brain I would be able to remember more about localizing strokes, or brain changes in depression. They are literally preventing me from finding the cure for cancer.
L is for localizing (specifically strokes). God gave us CTs so we could abandon centuries of methodical refinement of the neurological history and physical exam, right?
N is for NyanCat. Don't get it. Don't see the charm.
O is for OMGWTFBBQ!!! If you use abbreviations when you text, fine. I don't like it, but I'll survive. If you're going to the trouble of writing me a note, however, please write in complete words (this is a compromise...I used to ask for complete sentences, until I realized that was never going to happen).
P is for Peppercorn Ranch flavored Sunchips, which Frito Lay apparently decided were no longer worth making. They rank as my former favorite junk food EVER. This should probably be entered under Frito Lay, but I already have an entry for 'F.'
R is for raspberries. Delicious little bastards, but SO. MANY. SEEDS.
S is for summer. The heat, the profusion of red, white and blue CRAP every July, the bugs, the rashes, the bacne...it can all go to hell.
T is for ticks. As if sucking your blood weren't sufficiently horrifying, they also carry an overwhelming panoply of potentially fatal diseases! Swell (literally)!
U is for UV radiation. Fricking sunburn.
V is for video games. Am I the only person in my generation who doesn't 'game'? I feel like it sometimes. No, I don't play. I don't want to. I do other things with my time. Leave me alone.
W is for watermelon, that quintessential summer food (which is another reason to hate it). Messy, seedy and tastes like crap.
X is for XXX scandals. Good Lord, I am so tired of the whole "Weiner" thing (read also: the Schwarzenegger thing, the Bill Clinton thing, the 'every male politician/actor/some other brand of celebrity who has a hard time [ha ha, 'hard--that's a pun, son] keeping his reproductive apparatus in his pants).
Y is for yawning. It always happens at the most inopportune times. If you're like me, once you start it's difficult to stop, and once you think of yawning you start doing it. It's highly contagious, just like the common cold and herpes.

2011-06-09T18:43:00.001-04:00

Forest Park:

The emerald leaves
and the sky's bright blue expanse
Break my heart open.

2011-06-09T10:12:00.003-04:00

Other People's Funerals

I went to a funeral last night. It was at my church, and the choir (of which I'm a part) was singing an anthem. Some of my friends knew the deceased and I wanted to be there for them. These at least were the reasons I gave myself for going. Yet I also felt drawn there, somehow; drawn by something bigger than these reasons, which, serviceable though they are, could still be written off by a person with a busy schedule and an advanced degree in rationalization. I wanted to go. I needed to. And I wasn't completely sure why.

We sang a song during communion that I remembered from my days as a youngster at church camp--the kind that has accompanying hand motions. I am not generally comfortable with such things, but the singing...the familiar melody, the words known so well that they spill from the mouth without a thought...opened something in me. I am not a crier, but I was doing my damnedest to sniffle my way through without completely sobbing. And then I looked down at the program in my hands and saw the date. June 8th. And I remembered.

My uncle committed suicide on June 8th last year, after a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder. He was cremated, so there wasn't a funeral per se for a while. There was a 'memorial service' shortly after his death, but it was at an unfamiliar (to me) evangelical-to-the-nth-degree church. The pastor took the opportunity, in his sermon, to remind us that suicides go to hell, and especially "unsaved" suicides like my Uncle Jim. It was not an experience of closure. I did not leave feeling held and supported. It was not healing. It left me feeling angry, hurt and saddened.

In a way, this "other person's funeral" yesterday offered me a chance to grieve an old (but not so very old) wound in a familiar place, with people I love and who love me. It served as a Jahrzeit, the Jewish custom of remembering the anniversary of a death with prayers and blessings. Last night we buried Dee's ashes in the plot outside the church, and various people stepped forward to throw handfuls of earth into the grave. It was a poignant reminder that funerals are not so much for the dead as for the living; that even in small actions, like the willingness to dirty our hands to remember a friend who has passed, we stand together. We do not go out to the grave alone. We do not struggle to carry the coffin by ourselves. There are pallbearers; there is a procession out to the graveyard. And as we say during the Episcopal burial service, "Even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia."

2011-06-04T20:07:00.002-04:00

The Animal That, Next to Spiders, I Probably Hate the Most (And Really, I Love Almost All Animals)

This is a Canada goose (Branta canadensis) I managed to capture on film while on one of my usual runs in Forest Park. See how it's eyeing that jogger over there on the right? That's because it's trying to decide whether or not he's worth chasing. Canada geese are not, in fact, capable of eating human beings; that does not stop them from trying. They are evil beasts.
My hatred (is that too strong a word? Perhaps. I do not feel for them the loathing I feel for child-abusers or certain members of the cast of Real Housewives of New Jersey) began in middle school, where our outdoor track played host to dozens of these creatures. They would liberally coat the running surface with a layer of their green (really, it's green) excrement, then wait until we came outside for track practice and literally CHASE us around the track--which was probably good from a training perspective, but still...middle school is traumatic enough without worrying about winged death from above.
They incited a primal fear in me that I am afraid did me discredit as a member of the class Mammalia (mammals, unless they are very very small, are not supposed to be afraid of birds). However, my fur-bearing skin and mammary glands offered me little solace when faced with a demonically honking avian moving towards me, wings beating malevolently, at what I would estimate to be 10,000 miles per hour. They have very powerful wings, perfectly capable of breaking a human's arm under the right circumstances.
They are also foul-tempered, entitled (as evidenced by the aforementioned takeover of/crapping upon our track), and unreasonably large, coming into our country without the proper documentation and stealing the jobs of hardworking American geese. *The More You Know!*

PS. They're also endangered...but don't let this fool you; it's only an underhanded ploy for sympathy, intended to lull you into a false sense of security.

2011-06-04T13:37:00.002-04:00

One a.m.
(for ABB and CG Jung)

Again I awake
to find myself wide-eyed and trembling
at the edge of some terrible truth;
At the cusp, in that liminal land
where words are no longer of use
and there is only the silence that screams.

Where only heartbeat
and blood and bone remain,
that ancient answer
of the body
to the questions I dare not ask,
not even in dreams.
-AG

2011-05-29T23:22:00.002-04:00

I'm planning to write here more regularly now that I'm essentially out of third year (although I'm kicking myself because I think this could easily be considered the most INTERESTING year of med school--the year you'd pick if, say, you had aspirations to turn a journal of a year of medical school into a national bestseller), but now that I'm heading into fourth year I should have infinitely more time to devote to such niceties. I've been keeping a personal journal, of course; just haven't been putting all my business out here on Teh Interwebz (tm) for all to see.

Additionally, I've been fighting a pretty bone-crushing depression for the past few weeks, which saps me of my will to do much of anything besides 1) stay in bed, staring at the ceiling 2)stay in bed, sleeping, 3) stay in bed reading for about 20 minutes at a stretch before my inability to concentrate makes me throw down the book in disgust.

I had a manic episode at the beginning of March, which made what was essentially a presumptive diagnosis of bipolar disorder into a for-real diagnosis. Things are under control now and both my M.D. and I have learned that yes, I really DO need to be on a mood stabilizer. It's interesting; coming to terms with a serious diagnosis, whether of a physical or mental illness, really does seem to follow some of E. Kubler-Ross's 'Stages of Grief' model. Unfortunately, a lot of people end up stuck in denial and never move forward--and thus are never appropriately treated.

I'm running off at the mouth (or rather, the keyboard) a bit, but this was mainly a check-in to say, I'm back, and I look forward to seeing y'all more often.

2011-02-26T18:59:00.001-05:00

I Didn't Get Carded at Trader Joe's.

Cashier: Nah, I don't need to see your ID. I figure anyone who's buying fiber supplements is either old enough or responsible enough to purchase alcohol. The young don't realize the importance of bowel health.

Me: ...

2011-01-17T12:16:00.002-05:00

I'm back! Ulcerative colitis, medical school mayhem, and eating disorder craziness have all tried to keep me down...but I return, or to quote Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise."
(Is it awful if I admit here that I actually don't like Maya Angelou's poetry at all? Her prose is fine, but her poetry makes me want to carve out my eyeballs. Do I get double going-to-Hell points for saying that on MLK day? Whatevs. *Shrugs*)

So in my time off, I've discovered a lot of new things...about my psychological makeup, about my sexuality, about the world at large. I'll share a few of them here; some are very serious, while others are a tad more lighthearted.

1. Bikini waxing, if practiced on prisoners of war, would be considered a violation of the Geneva Convention. I'm almost positive about this. Additionally, you pay for it...and tip the 'aesthetician' when they're done, adding insult to injury.

2. Taking risks doesn't always lead to 1) falling flat on my face or 2) getting kicked in the teeth.

3. Transparency and honesty are always preferable to dishonesty...no matter how small the deception, or what rationalizations you provide yourself to account for it.

4. With 45 minutes, some New Belgium ale, an a youtube origami tutorial, and the patience of a three-year-old, I can make a really shitty-looking origami cat.

5. I lack the degree of OCD necessary to be a good anesthesiologist, and the upper body strength to be an orthopedic surgeon. Thank goodness neither of those were on my short list anyway.

2010-11-19T06:10:00.003-05:00

Onward and Upward...READ IT. It's about a young woman who was kicked off her high-school cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer for her rapist.

Anyone read "Cunt: A Declaration of Independence" by Inga Muscio? Anyone remember her advice on forming 'public retaliation' squads? Get a few dozen--or hundred--ladies to show up at a rapist's sporting event as cheerleaders of a different sort..."We can shout, we can yell, rapist pigs can go to hell..." Fill his car with eggs of the rotten variety. Put a big ol' sign (or seven) in his yard so all his neighbors know what kind of guy they've got in the neighborhood. To the 'voice of reason and moderation' folks: Yeah, these ideas are extreme. As a rape survivor I'd just offer that, y'know, rape is extreme. Taking some of these actions with fifty of my sisters at my side wouldn't have fixed everything--not by a longshot--but it would've been the start of a start. Rape culture has prevailed for too long. It's time for all of us to say loud and clear, with our actions and with our voices: Fuck that noise.

To quote Ms. Muscio: We don't need men to protect us. This is between women and rapists. More to the point, this is between women and ourselves...At present, the cultural reaction to rape is generally a negative, shame-filled silence. Fine, let the culture react that way. We have the power to put something else there.

2010-11-13T19:38:00.001-05:00

Having an eating disorder is bad, yeah, but what really blows is when your ED has you.

That's what I feel like right now. Bad headspace. Physically and emotionally ill. Blech.

2010-11-07T21:19:00.005-05:00

Flowers gathered in the morning,
Afternoon they blossom on;
Still are withered in the evening--
You can be me when I'm gone...

All around me darkness gathers,
Fading is the sun that shone.
We must speak of other matters:
You can be me when I'm gone.
--Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

2010-10-22T23:05:00.002-04:00

The bowels of Pseudonymous Medical Center, on a call night. Industrial beauty at 3 am. If Hopper had worked at a hospital, this is what we would have instead of Night Owls.

2010-10-18T20:56:00.008-04:00

It's art if I say it's art.

Achingly blue sky, gloriously golden leaves: of such things are autumn evenings made.

Living in a national historic district means that even the streetlights are old-school and fancy.
Streetlights part deux. I think they turned on about five seconds after I snapped this picture. Damn my impatience!
"Dead leaves and the dirty ground when I know you're not around..." White Stripes? Anyone? But seriously, wet, fallen leaves? How falltacular can you get? PS. If this is your house and you saw me loitering outside with my Nikon, and thought I was either casing the joint or getting ready to report you to the Neighborhood Association, I am very sorry.

2010-10-16T19:02:00.003-04:00

Saw a praying mantis on campus earlier this week and decided to take a picture. I like praying mantises...sphodromantis viridis...if for no other reason than that they're pretty effing cool. They make an art form of camoflage. They even rock rhythmically to imitate vegetation blowing in the wind. Some are even able to turn black after fires destroy their habitat, the better to blend in. They are completely predatory. They eat other insects mostly, but the biggest species (Australian species primarily) will even eat birds, fish and rodents that are small enough for them to catch and devour (ok, that IS kind of gross). The females are bigger than the males, and after they finish copulating (or even during...) the females frequently eat the males' heads. According to studies--no doubt involving tiny candlelit dinners and scientists playing the mantis equivalent of Barry Manilow--males who are sexually cannibalized have increased reproductive success--they are able to mate longer, thus increasing the odds that their reproductive material makes its way into a hot mantis female.
It's kind of a black widow setup, except praying mantises are true insects (six legs, distinct abdomen, thorax and head--yes, I realize I am an utter dork) and not arachnids. I hate arachnids. I have true arachnophobia--I don't just dislike them; being around one, even one the size of, say, a mustard seed, makes me break out in a cold sweat. I read once that the average-sized American room (whatever the hell that means) in a residential setting contains 2.8 spiders. I don't think I've slept well since. Maybe if I had a bed in a cleanroom--you know, the kind they use for putting together computer components.
And the praying mantis, enraged by the paparazzi, rushes the camera! Run! Run for your lives! Run if you value your head!

2010-10-11T22:46:00.005-04:00

It says, "Not here anymore. Return to sender." Which is sort of how I feel about the memorial service we had for my uncle on the first weekend of October. It was a chance to scatter his ashes on a hill at the farm where he and my father's siblings and other close kin (yes, in Missouri we can get away with using the word 'kin') spent a lot of time as children. It was an opportunity to laugh, cry, eat and drink; to do everything we do in life, together with family members that I don't know as well as I wish to, and thereby get to know them better. My other uncle gave a truly moving eulogy; my cousins and I embraced each other as we watched him toss what remained of his brother to the wind. I'm not sure if I feel Closure--we say that as if psychological closure is like surgical closure, just toss in a couple sutures and things will heal without incident--but it was a good way to say goodbye, if not to resolve everything all of us in the family have been feeling and thinking.

And then the drinking began (ok, my couisin already had some whiskey in his coffee before we started up the hill, and I'd already had a glass and a half of wine, but you know what I mean).
The barn at the farm in Bland, Missouri. Yes, that's right, Bland, Missouri. Go ahead. Type it in on Google maps. It exists.There are cows, too. One dropped a calf as we drove up the gravel road. Felt like a city slicker.

2010-10-09T20:59:00.002-04:00

One of the exits to the parking garage at Pseudonymous Teaching Hospital. It looks like something out of Star Trek, doesn't it? Says the girl who has only seen one or two episodes of Star Trek in her entire life.

2010-10-09T16:59:00.003-04:00

Deep things that I want
1. World peace.
2. A life partner who loves me as I am, body, mind and soul, and whom I also love utterly and completely.
3. A healthy relationship with food and my body
4. To be able to provide for my patients' needs, not only medically but through the power of the therapeutic relationship
5. To be fully at peace with myself
6. A closer relationship with my family--both immediate and extended
7. A cure for cancer (I don't have to discover it... I just want someone to find it).
8. To establish a foundation that provides scholarships for eating disorders treatment to those who can't afford it
9. The healing of the environment

Shallow things that I want
1. Longer legs and bigger breasts
2. Awesome, earth-shattering, even-the-neighbors-have-a-cig-afterward sex (I have a few specific partners in mind, but mentioning their names is too gauche even for me)
3. Some money. Not a lot. Just some.
4. To get my novel published, to both critical acclaim and economic windfall
5.Did I mention sex?

2010-10-07T20:33:00.002-04:00

Just for interest's sake (when I should be studying musculoskeletal surgery stuff): Apparently ducks have really weird genitalia. See here. A drake can have a phallus that's as long as he is. And is shaped like a corkscrew. Just another reminder that the universe has an effed-up sense of humor, and that nature regularly flies in the face of Occam's Razor.

2010-10-06T22:48:00.005-04:00

Around my neighborhood...This is the incredibly skanky diner (I use the word skanky not in a sexual sense, but in the sense of a place that is so incredibly dirty and decrepit that even the thought of going inside makes you want to scrub your entire body with steel wool and straight lye) not too far from my apartment. As you can see, they offer breakfast, and fried rice, all day (I would like to point out that the two are not mutually exclusive, but something about the 'or' suggests that if you attempted to order fried rice for breakfast, the owners wouldn't take too kindly to it). The fried rice will cost you, but the family-owned-diner taste (which is actually bugs) is thrown in for free. That and the salmonella.

In the two years I've walked by the place, they've never changed the sign in any way; it's a dry-erase board, but nothing has ever been added, and nothing has ever been erased. Isn't that the point of the dry-erase board? Its infinite alterability?Please, insert your own double-entendre/ penis joke here. *That's what she said!* Ahem. Apologies for that bit of juvenilia. But seriously, several times a year this specialty grocer has a 'massive meat sale.' For once I was carrying a camera when I happened upon the giant, burns-your-retinas-with-its-awesome-fluorescentness, hyperbolic sign.

2010-10-03T00:02:00.005-04:00

Happy photo fun time!What IS this? A bird? A butterfly? A very ugly beanie baby? Wrong (it could be made into the last, I suppose, but the marketing possibilities seem limited). It's a polyphemus moth, known to scientists by his alias Antheraea polyphemus. I saw him hanging out on the wall next to the front door of my apartment building, chillin', doing his little Saturniidae thing (or not so little, actually--as a member of the 'giant silk moths,' he is by definition not small; his wingspan is about six inches, one of the largest moths in Missouri, a distinction he shares with the fluorescent green Luna moth). He's named for his eyespots, after the cyclops Polyphemus of Greek myth. Why are you calling this moth a HIM, Anne?, you ask. I'm not just assuming everything is male unless proven otherwise; actually sexual dimorphism in A. polyphemus is pretty obvious (ie, males and females look very different). Males have super-bushy antennae, the better to detect the pheromones of hot, nubile females in search of steamy moth action. This particular moth stayed with us for about two days, then disappeared. Either he left of his own volition or, more likely, he shuffled off this mortal coil with the assistance of one of the shady pigeons in the neighborhood. Actually, I've noticed some very interesting color patterns in the pigeons of St. Louis...ah, urban flora and fauna. Anyway, if he'd stuck around longer, I might have named him...Mothra.
And then there's urban fauna redux. Random shot into some guy's office on Pseudonymous Medical School's campus. This, obviously, is Uncle Buck.

2010-10-02T22:56:00.005-04:00

Heirloom tomatoes purchased from the Farmer's Market outside Pseudonymous Major Midwestern Teaching Hospital where I am currently doing my 3rd year clerkship. I get to feel my warm, fuzzy sense of lefty superiority (I'm buying local! No migrant workers were exploited to bring me my tomatoes! They're organic! Good lord, my flight of latte-swilling, Marx reading liberal elitism has led me binge on exclamation points like Lindsay Lohan on cocaine!) and still reap the very selfish rewards of buying heirloom tomatoes. What are heirloom tomatoes? Glad you asked--they're old varieties with names like Brandywine and Big Boy (they don't all sound like strippers or sex toys...) that have fallen out of cultivation since the arrival of big agribusiness and factory farming. Why are they so fabulous? Unlike major commercial varieties, which are bred primarily to be shippable across long distances, these are bred for interesting color patterns, unusual shapes, and freaking awesome flavor. I'm not kidding about the flavor: heirloom tomatoes are to the mealy, wan varieties you find in the produce aisle as black tar heroin is to Pixy Stix.

I take previously mentioned tomatoes and make my (in)famous Asiago, Tomato and Basil Tart.I could give you the recipe. Maybe if you comment I will. Maybe I will enjoy withholding it, as I get to experience so few power trips in my everyday life.

But on to my colonoscopy (hey! great segue!) that I promised to discuss two weeks ago, and for which you've been waiting with baited breath, I'm sure. Results: inflammation of the lower foot or so of my colon. Differential diagnosis: Ulcerative colitis, random infectious nastiness, and ischemic bowel disease. Turns out there are 3 sorts of people who get ischemic bowel--the elderly, because they get everything; folks who are a little too fond of cocaine; and distance runners, particularly women. Well, I'm not that old, and I'm not a coke fiend, but around the time the abdominal pain and bleeding showed up, I had increased my weekly mileage from my standard 35 or so miles per week to 60. Apparently athletic colitis is like runner's trots, but to the 'n'th degree. Deprived of blood for a little while, your intestines freak out a bit, but you have a bout of diarrhea and then everything's cool again. Deprived for a longer period of time (on the order of hour(s), like when I do my 10-mile runs), you can get partial or even full-thickness necrosis (death) of the bowel wall. According to my research, something like 2% of all female marathoners are expelling visible blood when they finish their 26.2. I'm taking anti-inflammatory meds at the moment, and they seem to be helping. Hopefully this is over and done.

2010-09-17T20:35:00.003-04:00

So. Tuesday night I noticed I was having some abdominal pain. Meh, I said to myself, must've been running too hard, with not enough warm-up (the infamous runner's trots--supposedly caused by short-term ischemia to the bowels as all the blood goes rushing to your quads and hams--as a former cross country coach once said, "If you don't finish each race with a sprint to the bathroom, you haven't been pushing hard enough." But I digress). Pain continued throughout the night, along with the onset of...comment ce dit?...guess there's no polite way to put it...diarrhea. And, as the night progressed, increasingly large quantities of blood. Tried eating a little something and promptly vomited. Around six am I was doubled over in pain, and seriously considered getting my happy ass in the car and driving to the Barnes ER. "No, don't blow this out of proportion," I told myself. "Wait until eight and go to Student Health."

Went to SH. Reported severe abdominal pain and presence of blood. Was sent home with antibiotics and a presumptive diagnosis of C. diff colitis. Only problem: I've smelled C. difficile diarrhea on an ER rotation. It has what textbooks refer to as either a "foul" or an "offensive" odor; the resident I was working with in the ER described it as a "freaking nasty-ass smell that you will never, ever forget." I was not producing said smell. I was sent home with a prescription for Flagyl and a 'stool specimen collection kit' (so a C. diff assay could be sent for confirmation). Went home, took a day's worth of the prescribed metronidazole (a medication that is itself almost as nasty as what it's intended to treat). Couldn't eat; even the thought of eating made me want to hurl--though whether that was the abdominal pain, the Flagyl, or some sort of gastroenteritis component of the picture remains unclear. This continued for the next 24 hours; I could drink water and diet Sprite, but that was it. Not even my beloved diet Coke was a possibility. :(

Re-presented to Student Health Thursday morning, still in severe pain and still passing blood--and now orthostatic, having been unable to eat (and limited in my ability to drink) for more than a day. Received several liters of IV fluids and an abdominal CT. Had a colonoscopy scheduled for Friday. Got the results of Wednesday's C. diff assay back--negative, just as I'd suspected. Was sent home with a colonoscopy prep (I fear I may have been a little rude to the nurse when she gave me the large bottle of MiraLax for the bowel prep. I furrowed my brow and said, "This is a joke, right?" I mean, I'm running to the bathroom every few minutes, and at this point all I'm producing is blood--not to be grotesque, but essentially a period that took a wrong turn and ended up coming out the wrong orifice. And you're giving me a laxative? Get on with your bad self).

The colonoscopy itself will be the subject of the next entry in our series.

At this point I have missed more days of Surgery than I have attended; however, it would've been absolutely impossible to work 1) doubled over in pain and 2) running to the bathroom every 20 minutes.

On the plus side, after almost four days of virtually no intake, I think I've lost most (if not all) of the weight I put on last spring when I quit smoking. Not to spoil the surprise that comes with the results of the colonoscopy, but the New-Onset Ulcerative Colitis Diet, while freakishly painful and deeply disturbing, is also super effective.

2010-09-06T21:05:00.002-04:00

Poetry time!

I Often Make Deliberate Mistakes
(for N., who knows why)

You spell 'la coeur'
Liqueur
and drown in the difference.
Your best-laid design
and mine,
though born alike, become estranged
and strange
in their undoings.
Your shattered glass opposed my
shattered pasts--we know
they're separated by a line as fine,
an edge as diamond-sharp
as any shard you'd find there,
embedded in my heart and lead there
by its beating;
Creatures apart mapping the dark
together, sparking like flint
at the places of our meeting.
-AG

2010-09-04T22:24:00.002-04:00

Ten reasons Lady Gaga can't step to Madonna (who she consistently names as one of her major 'influences):

1. Gaga: a collection of sounds often uttered by babies, or a euphemism for being crazy/insensible. Madonna: another name for the Mother of Christ. Advantage: Madonna.

2: Madonna was one of the most influential style icons of the late 80s and early 90s. Lady Gaga dresses like an acid-addled street person who somehow gained access to an American Express Gold Card in a parallel universe. Or like architecture.

3. 'Bad Romance' vs. 'Express Yourself.' Or to be more explicit, in the 'how fatuous are these lyrics?' department--"Ra ra ah ah ah, Roma, roma ma, Gaga Oohlala..." vs. "Long stemmed roses are the way to your heart but he needs to start with your head...satin sheets are very romantic, what happens when you're not in bed?" Random syllables vs. feminist empowerment. Exactly.

4. Madonna's videos were subversive enough to get banned from TV and decried by the Vatican (the one where she made out with a black saint? Anyone remember?). Gaga's videos are subvers...oh, wait. They're not.

5. Even though she's old enough to be my mother, and even though she's got a weird Ms. Muscle-America/emaciated Buddha thing going on right now, I would still bite the bullet and make out with Madonna fifty times before I'd consider Lady Gaga.

2010-07-29T23:18:00.003-04:00

I was going to write a post every day. I was going to capture third year in all its glorious complexity, the mad fervor, the fear, the vindication.

Instead I ended up fighting off a sickening depressive episode, barely managing to secure an acceptable grade for my first rotation when in fact I thought getting through the six weeks without doing real, visceral damage to myself should be counted as an 'honors' of sorts. "Congratulations, you're alive, and not sobbing in the fetal position at the nurses' station or running down Euclid Avenue with nothing on but your scrub top and an isolation mask." You take what you can get.

It's not that I don't care. I do. But when I get depressed (not, 'oh, I'm having a bad day,' but really, truly depressed) I'm totally behind the eight ball. Screwed. Survival Mode.

2010-07-25T23:53:00.002-04:00

Maybe I'm not as crazy as I think. For the past few weeks, I've occasionally been seeing my uncle. No, not in dreams. In Forest Park, or on the train, or in the hospital cafeteria. And not just a flash of him, either--not a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, not a matter of seconds. I see him clearly, looking at me, smiling, and then vanishing into thin air. Now you see it, now you don't--a sleight of hand at once both comforting and cruel--and, apparently, quite common (though no one talks about it).

2010-06-29T20:54:00.004-04:00

Life, Death, Sex and the Nature of God

A lot to cover in one post, but I'm going to try. So just a few weeks ago, I lost a close relative to suicide (well, I shouldn't say lost--it isn't as if he's been misplaced or forgotten--but that's the best word I can think of at the moment). Now, most of my life I've assumed that the reason suicide is such a heart-rending way to lose someone is because of the stigma involved; if cousin Rick had a heart attack, you'd feel perfectly comfortable saying, "It was his heart." In this case, however, it just didn't seem right to say, "He shot himself in the head," or even the less graphic variant, "He committed suicide." It is that, in part; but another source of the pain is the fact that you question yourself--how you interacted with the person, whether you could have (by calling more often, offering some words of encouragement, somehow being more clued in to their state of mind) averted the catastrophe that occurred.

When my uncle killed himself, he left a package of his papers (including a DNR--do not resuscitate--order) for another member of our family to find. As I was running in Forest Park a few days ago, I started going over the ethical implications in my mind. If someone had found him in time to perform resuscitation, would his DNR stand? Ostensibly, if he was not of sound mind when it was drafted and signed, it shouldn't, and power should revert to his healthcare proxy. What if it was signed months ago? Some evidence (the person who told me didn't elaborate, and I honestly didn't want to know) suggested that he'd been planning this final denouement for the better part of a year. Had he been unremittingly suicidal all that time? "Merely" depressed? Can a person make a rational decision to die as an escape from psychological or existential pain?

Flash forward to the funeral/"memorial service." I'm in one of the front rows, listening skeptically as the sermon begins. I'm hoping that, despite the fact that the service was arranged by my more...evangelical family members, the overall message will be comforting and uplifting. And at first, it seemed to be. It's part of the human experience to wish for death from time to time, the pastor said, pulling up examples from Scripture: Moses, chafed by the complaints of the Israelites in the desert, asked God to put him to death. Jonah did much the same thing. Even the holiest among us at times feel so bad that death looks like a respite, he said. I breathed a sigh of relief. BUT, he said--and at this point I knew we were in for it--to act upon that wish is a mortal sin. There was some more exposition (which I could barely hear over the sound of my blood boiling in my ears), but the take home message was that my uncle, because he was not a professed Christian, and because he killed himself, was now writhing in the fires of hell. I walked out shortly after this statement was made (largely because I didn't trust myself not to stand up and attack both the pastor's parentage and exegesis in phrases thick with four-letter words) and didn't hear the rest of the sermon.

I called my other uncle a few nights ago, to ask him some questions that have been plaguing me, and just generally to build a better relationship with what remains of my family. He was the one that found the suicide note; I wanted to know what it said, and to check on how he was doing, and try to discover what exactly happened (my parents told me part of what happened several days after the fact, once I'd 1. taken my Boards and 2. had driven to KC, so I wouldn't be alone). We talked a long time. He emphasized that my uncle had been struggling with severe depression for a very long time--this is true--and that ultimately it was just too much for him to bear. That's what I wanted to yell at the pastor, to tell my relatives, to have emblazoned in skywriting above the church. My father, and every single one of his siblings, has a mood disorder (either major depression or bipolar disorder), an anxiety disorder, or both. Lucky girl that I am, I--through some combination of genetics and circumstance--have been blessed with both as well. We, of all people, should know better.
As one of my friends with depression (and an Episcopal priest) said when I told her about the service, "I hate smug sane people." Exactly. Because having been on the other side of suicidality, and more that cursorily, I can say it's not about 'presumption of God's mercy,' or 'willfulness,' or hurting those left behind. These are the furthest things from your mind. It's about the pain: the incessant, bone-crushing, soul-rending, heart-shattering pain, and the animal instinct to escape from it by any means possible. At the moment I'm doing pretty well, but I know that I am always at risk for relapse; my uncle had so many happy times, but he also ultimately killed himself. Depression, while not a sentence to a life of unhappiness, is not something to take lightly. I guess his death has made me more aware of my vulnerabilities, and more dedicated to vigilance in the face of this disease.

And then what of God? My definition of that word, even, is difficult to pin down; but as my uncle said to me on the phone (and I thought this was a very good point), what sense does it make to hold Ward Cleaver to a higher standard of compassion and forgiveness than the Creator of the Universe? Because what did Ward do when Wally or The Beav screwed up majorly? He sternly advised them to fix whatever it was they'd effed up, made sure they followed through on fixing their friend's bike/got the bandaids off the cat/ never hotwired a car again...and then tousled their hair and told them they were forgiven and loved (and also to make him a whiskey on the rocks...because, hey, it WAS 1950). Yet The Lord God, Creator of all that is, Seen and Unseen, gets so pissed off at disobedience/sin or a creature's disbelief that eternal damnation and torment is the answer? No chance for reprieve? No. Not my God.

2010-06-19T00:25:00.002-04:00

Today was orientation. We learned an ungodly amount and practiced putting in nasogastric--ie, feeding--tubes, and Foley catheters for males and females (best quote of the day is probably from the nurse that demonstrated the male catheterization, in response to my tentative grasp--"You're going to have to grab that penis like you mean it." Oops...hope that word doesn't get me put on some unsavory list). Then there was knot-tying, which apparently is an uber-important surgical skill, and suturing, at which I sucked tremendously. Of course, it probably didn't help that last night, in my forgetfulness and due to my recent space-cadet status, I took both the Thursday and Friday doses of my usual medications. And then proceeded to have a panic attack, and go to the ER, assured that my demise was only minutes away, only to be told that I was (essentially) being a one-woman freak show (though of course the doctors don't tell you that...perhaps more disturbing, I knew the attending who saw me from another context. Thankfully I don't think he recognized me). Why. am. I. such. a. freak? Then again, I guess I answered my own question when I told the resident the reason I take the medications I take--"for depression and PTSD."
To be fair, although it wasn't a massive overdose, it was a some pretty potent stuff, and I've felt essentially *gorked* all day today (I swear, that's hospital patois, not drug slang. Don't recognize the word 'patois'? Look it up and be edified!), which made paying attention to the two-hour presentation on the hospital computer system impossible rather than merely difficult. And which resulted in the suturing instructor telling me no fewer than six times, each time holding up his forceps as an example, and each time getting a look of utter incomprehension from me, to "hold your forceps like a pencil. Not like that. Like a pencil." Finally dude just came over and placed my fingers in the correct position around the forceps. Word on the street, however, is that such a stupid or lackadaisical response to commands in the OR will cause a surgeon to backhand you across the Mayo stand. Needless to say, on a day which ideally would have found me in top form, I was (or at least felt--let's cognitive-behaviorally reconstruct that thought, huh?) sadly lacking. On the other hand, it may have been all to the good that I was semi-sedated--this was a nervy, pressured day, and I actually *objectively* performed quite well in the sharps safety training, which was simulation-based and a lot more fun than I anticipated.
So in the sharps training we learned to perform--according to OSHA requirements--venipuncture/phlebotomy (ie, "taking blood") and IV starts. We also learned to stick for an arterial blood gas (which I hope I first get to practice on a comatose patient, because it hurts like a mother, though that may be a moot point because someone sick enough to be in a coma is probably already equipped with an arterial line).

2010-06-16T19:06:00.003-04:00

RIP. I'll think of you the next time I go to the Soulard Market, Uncle Jim. That's still one of my favorite St. Louis memories.

Jim Giedinghagen, age 58 of St. Charles, MO died on or about June 8, 2010. Jim was the son of Lewis A. and Anna I. Giedinghagen and was born on June 5, 1952. He will be missed by his mother; his brothers David and Dale; his sisters Marsha Bearden and Diane Stevens; his sisters-in-law June and Vicki; his brothers-in-law Rick Bearden and Bob Stevens; his nieces and nephews Beth & Willie Bray (& Will), Adam Bearden, Grant & Jennifer Bearden (& Riley), Joshua Bearden, Stephanie and Anne Giedinghagen, Melissa & Eric Trautman, Andrew and Rachel Giedinghagen; and close friends. Beloved, troubled son, brother and trusted friend. The memories of your kindness, empathy and gentle, caring spirit will always live in the hearts of those who love you, and will through the grace of a forgiving God, temper our profound grief. All the bright days, your abiding love and wonder in nature, your sharp wit and the laughter we shared will give us solace. Mercy, charity, forbearance and tolerance marked your path through this world. May they guide ours as well, as we acknowledge the darkness, yet watch for the breaking dawn. A memorial service for Jim will be held on Saturday, June 19th at 2:30 PM at the First Evangelical Free Church of Franklin County, located at 480 Hwy AT, Villa Ridge, MO 63089. In lieu of flowers, friends may honor Jim’s memory with contributions to Heifer International or the St. Charles Humane Society in care of Alternative Funeral & Cremation Services, 2115 Parkway Drive, St. Peters, MO 63376.

2010-06-08T22:32:00.004-04:00

Ok, so it shouldn't surprise me that Hooters has sexist business practices, but welcome to today's installment of YHTBFKM (You have to be f*cking kidding me) news!
A number of Hooters waitresses (you know, that place where you can ogle heavily made-up, fake-tanned, barely-legal women in shorts so tiny they require a preliminary bikini waxing...and where they serve, um, wings...yeah, it's all about the wings...) have come forward to say they have been placed on 'weight probation' by the company--given a 30 day gym membership and told they have a month to either shape up or ship out. Literally. Some--ie, Hooters management--have argued that this is no different from "the policies of such organizations as the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders or the Rockettes" (bastions of pro-woman sentiment and positive body image, no doubt). So what about this undershot even my snakebelly-low expectations for this particular corporation?
Here. A woman who is nearly 5'8" and 132 lbs--whose BMI is 19.8, for the love of Jeebus--has been told to lose weight or lose her job. If one were specifically writing a scenario designed to give someone an eating disorder, it would be difficult to do better. I don't know how much weight they wanted this young woman to lose, but she is already at the low, LOW end of normal for her height; in fact, losing even 10 lbs. would put her squarely in the "underweight" category. It's not enough that their business practices are themselves chauvinistic and exploitative, IMPLICITLY making workers feel insecure and encouraging unhealthy relationships with food and weight; now Hooters (I know it's not funny, but I still can't say/type 'Hooters' without wanting to giggle; I'm secretly 13 years old, so sue me) has to EXPLICITLY encourage young women to damage their health in pursuit of appearance and approval. I would imagine that no one who reads this on a regular basis (if in fact such people exist) is frequenting this particular business establishment, but if you are, I would implore you to boycott. No one should have to choose between being unhealthy and being unemployed.

2010-06-07T21:28:00.003-04:00

To shave...or not to shave?

So, as third year rotations rapidly approach, I have decided I'm going to take the leap and...gulp...shave my legs, and possibly my underarms as well (because I am much less likely to wear outfits that showcase my pits than my gams. Rowr.) I haven't shaved since I was fifteen--a full decade--and while once upon a time it was fine (both the hair and the grooming practice), it's become less so. As a teenager, and even in college, I'd occasionally have people tell me they thought it really brave, or rad, or some such adjective, that I wasn't giving in to the patriarchy, and we'd have a dialogue about my reasoning. That doesn't happen so much anymore--maybe because I have fewer hippie friends and acquaintances. Medical schools, like medical professionals, are not overly noted for their liberal leanings.

So why am I doing this? Primarily because I don't want to get marked down by an intern or disgust an attending. There. I said it. Also because a friend intimated that shaving might up my chances for getting laid. And because I pluck my eyebrows, which makes me feel a little hypocritical.

What were/are my reasons for not shaving? Well, there IS the laziness factor--I'm not going to lie. Also, it pisses me off that everyone acts like women's body hair--which grows there naturally, and will stay there unless you actively remove it--has an ick factor higher than 'Alien vs. Predator' and open heart surgery combined. Julia Roberts has a little fuzz under her arms? OMG, EWW to the max! Whereas I feel guys can, essentially, look like bears--and it's all ok. Granted, I know arguing that it's 'natural' not to shave can be struck down reductio ad absurdum--that is, by pointing out that in our natural state human beings don't wear clothes, don't shave anything and smell like a combo of donkey, Cheetos and feet. C'est vrai.

However, it seems like a slippery slope to me...perhaps because in the last 25 years the body has become the site of such anxiety, and has become such a domain to be mastered, that I wonder where this will all end (yes, I realize I sound like I'm 75 years old). It's practically de rigeur to shave underarms and legs. After that, in order of necessity, would probably come bikini waxing or shaving (do you realize it was only 10 years ago that the J Sisters Salon in NYC started performing the now-infamous Brazilian wax? O sisters, what have you wrought!?), and it's become less and less common to get just a 'little off the sides'--ie, so that it doesn't look like you bought a swimsuit with fur trim. Now EVERYTHING comes off. And then there are eyebrow waxings, upper lip waxings...when can we stop preening and pruning ourselves?

2010-05-26T00:49:00.004-04:00

This is why I'm so fascinated by psychiatry. What happens in a young brain to cause pain and pleasure to get confused? What is it, exactly, that 'turns someone's mind'? What pushes someone to make the jump from normalcy to freakdom? Because, rest assured, there is such a thing as a freak, such a thing as 'sick.' (As for why we brand certain things freakish and sick, that's a topic for a whole sociology library). For example, so-called "supermasochist" Bob Flanagan, the infamous early-90s arts grant recipient whose performances included nailing his manhood to a board onstage. He also happened to be (at the time of his death in 1996) the longest-living person with cystic fibrosis, a disease that generally kills people--horribly and painfully--in their teens if not earlier. Was he fighting the pain of his illness with pain that was self-inflicted, in order to finally have some control over the pain; to be able to say, "CF, I will hurt myself before you can"? Or did he eroticize the pain because it was the only way that his psyche could make his life with CF bearable? Did his masochism (admittedly extreme) have anything to do with his unusually long life, a way of fighting death by courting it? Flanagan attempted to answer this question (or at least a tongue-in-cheek send-up) in his poem 'why'. I almost linked directly to that poem--on second thought, just google it up. More about this soon, I think; I've been thinking about this a good deal lately.

Scientists find new role for ultrasound — as a male contraceptive - Times Online

2010-05-15T02:24:00.000-04:00

So imagine your guy could go in for a quick procedure--no, not even a procedure, really--every six months and you would both have zero worries about birth control.
It's time contraception caught up with the sexual equality thing that has (kinda) swept through most other areas of our lives. Or did in, like, 1970.
Now, I don't have to worry about this myself, but having just finished our OB/Gyn course it's definitely on my mind the extent to which contraceptives for women--especially hormonal contraceptives--can really screw with one's body (and mind). Granted, a lot of the pills are low-dose now and don't have nearly the side effects they used to, but how about something that requires no pills or invasive procedures whatsoever (included the 'invasive procedure' addendum after remembering a friend whose Copper-T IUD caused her so much pain and bleeding that when her doc told her to 'give it a few more months,' she told him he was either taking it out before her next period or she was finding someone who would)? Behold:
Scientists find new role for ultrasound — as a male contraceptive - Times Online

2010-05-04T21:19:00.003-04:00

Sorry it's been so long, folks. Studying. And studying. And, you know, stuff.

Boards, which apparently determine your fate for the rest of your days, are in a month. Despite the fact that many people (including a psychiatrist) have told me that, as a wannabe psychiatrist, my board scores don't matter, I still want to do well. Ok, not just well. Not to be hypercompetitive or anything, but I want to nail the test to the wall by its balls. So there.

Feeling a little cranky, studying this much. Want to complain about some things. So here we are, the things that have been pissing me off lately:

Having to drive out to the VA to get fingerprinting done so I can do rotations there. Granted, it's my own fault.

Allergies that not even Zyrtec can touch. Ok, "Wal-zyr," but whatever. It's spring and everyone's having sex. Even the plants are having sex, and that's getting up my nose (literally) and making my life a miserable orgy of antihistamines and tissues.

Cilantro. This is nothing new; I've never liked it. But especially lately, it seems like everyone thinks they have to tart up their cuisine with chipotle this and cilantro that. F*ck cilantro.

In the same vein, what are acai berries, and why have they found their way into my blueberry yogurt such that, in fact, there IS no blueberry Light and Fit, only blueberry-acai Light and Fit? The same goes for you, goji berries. I've got my eye on you.

2010-03-08T22:41:00.003-05:00

So apparently you can't say 'feel' while performing a breast or pelvic exam in the Standardized Patient suite. Not only can't you say, "I'm NOT going to feel you up, this is going to be a highly professional breast exam," which is probably just as well...you can't say "That FEELS normal," or "I'm going to FEEL for any abnormalities" or "Now I'm FEELING your ovaries."

"Look," it turns out, is also inappropriate. But think about it. That means no "That looks normal" or "I'm looking for abnormalities." It's not like I'm going to say, "Lookin' good," or anything.

So what verbs EXACTLY, I asked, my blepharospasm playing up out of annoyance, are allowed? Well, there's "Examine." Also "palpate," which for my money sounds filthier than either "look" or "feel." Really it seems to me that we're getting a little carried away with the Roget's Thesaurus and using 50-dollar words for the precise words we're not allowed. How would you define 'examine' to a five year old? "Looking at something carefully." What is palpation to a ten-year-old? Feeling very carefully. It's linguistic acrobatics, and in my opinion (as long as one is sensitive to the patient's needs and comfort) unnecessary; however, as I'm being graded on this, I shall palpate and examine until I'm working on patients I know, who are less litigious and with whom I have greater rapport--and then I will commence feeling and looking again. It also goes without saying, but in the SP suite as on Arrested Development--NO TOUCHING. (Not literally--you just don't call it touching).

The problem is, even knowing these rules, you WILL say both 'feel' and 'look.' Multiple times. Because that's what you say, and I'm pretty damn sure I've had health care providers use those words when performing exams on me. Ok, when Dr. W. (whom you all know and love) told me, "Looks good in there," I did sort of wrinkle my brow and fight the impulse to say something like, "Thanks, I had someone in to clean before my appointment." But otherwise her technique is unassailable, if a little blitzkrieg for some people's taste (possibly because few women like to think of their cervix playing the part of Czechoslovakia). It's the opposite of the slow approach we're being taught, but when it comes to the unpleasantness that is a pelvic exam, I personally would rather have a practitioner of the Ninja school--in and out in an instant, leaving no trace behind.

2010-02-08T21:27:00.003-05:00

It's that time of the month again (or of the quarter, or of the fiscal year, based on the regularity of my cycle): THINGS (AND PEOPLE) WHICH PISS ME OFF.

1. Ann Coulter. Not sure if she's a thing or a person. What makes it worse, she's hot. For some reason it's worse when mind-blowingly foul vitriol is spewed from a pretty little mouth. Like finding out that Carebears (tm, and a fond memory of my childhood) crap nuclear waste, and are secretly Fascists.

2. That on a cold crappy day like today I can't have a decent pot pie, because no one makes vegetarian pot pies, and even if I were willing to compromise my veggie convictions, a Marie Callender chicken pot pie runs over 1000 calories and more than 100% of a day's fat. Dammit, why are things that are so delicious (I remember eating these with relish as a kid) so horrible for you? And as they're a ConAgra product, so horrible for the political and agricultural environment?

3. Missing the train and standing in the snow for twenty minutes.

4. There being no fewer than two questions on the exam today that, on first seeing them, made me say quietly to myself, "We never f*cking covered that."

5. Rush Limbaugh.

6. Sudden bouts of panic that assault you in the frozen foods aisle of Schnucks.

7. Blargh.

2010-02-02T22:52:00.002-05:00

My panic attacks have been horrible lately--multiple times a day, some stretching past the usual five minute mark and into double-digit territory. Thirty minutes is a long time to be diaphoretic, tachycardic, dyspneic and nauseous, convinced that Something Terrible, which you can't actually name but which you dread as much as if not more than death itself, is coming for you.
I'm trying to study for Neuro and Psych (ha), but I can't help feeling...disgruntled that so many of my colleagues are procrastinating and studying and focusing, while my primary goal the past few days has been to get from waking up in the morning to falling asleep at night without being sucked into a black vortex of terror. It's killing my appetite. I've been living on ramen, diet coke and alprazolam (Xanax--for you kids currently studying the pharmacology of anxiolytics, it's a medium-short-acting benzodiazepine [parentheses within parentheses--faster onset than clonazepam, unless of course you have sublingually dissolving Klonopin wafers, and slower onset than lorazepam, ie Ativan]).

2010-01-29T01:25:00.002-05:00

I don't normally write poetry within confining forms; I often think of it as, as one of my favorite poets said, "Dancing in chains." On the other hand, one of my creative writing instructors once wrote on one of my poems, "You dance beautifully in chains. Now, the question: do you want to?" An existential question if ever there was one. All that aside, a sonnet. If you think it's for you...you're right.

Memorare

Remember, please, that all pain someday fades
And what is given you to understand
Is a small thing, much as the shifting shades
Which help define the greater and more grand
Entirety; Now see we through a glass
Darkly, but the time will come (and soon)
When pain and shades and even you will pass,
And earth, and sky; the sun, the quiet moon--
And finally the truth will be revealed
Which has so long desired to be known
And in that knowing, aching will be stilled
As truth is balm for brain and soul and bone.

I say this to assist you to recall:
Love and time, between them, conquer all.
-A Giedinghagen, Jan 2010

2010-01-23T22:08:00.003-05:00

Are you an "East Coast elitist" or "just folks?"

I was raised by 'just folks' and have since, apparently become (in the lexicon of Fox news media) a "latte-sipping, theory reading, liberal elitist." I even made a T-shirt to express this sentiment. But now I am bringing the quiz to you, to help you decide which camp you fall into. All assertions and results are strictly tongue-in-cheek. So have fun and, as my father would say, "don't get pissy."

1. Take the number of current Supreme Court justices you can name offhand. Subtract the number of Big Ten schools you can name.

2. Add one point for each of the following magazines/newspapers you subscribe to (add another point if you caught the grammatical error in the previous sentence): The New Yorker, The New York Times, Salon.com, Utne Reader, The Atlantic, Metropolis, Harper's (NOT, repeat NOT, Harper's Bazaar). Add 1/2 pt. for each you read on a regular (ie, more than six times a year) basis.

3. Subtract one point for each of the following magazines/newspapers to which you subscribe, and 1/2 pt. for each you read on a regular basis: Ladies Home Journal, Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, Field and Stream, Good Housekeeping, Quilting, People.

4. Add one point for each item you own: an automatic wine bottle opener, a pepper mill, a piece of original art, a crystal bud vase, a coffee table book featuring nude photography (two points for either Susan Sontag or Mapplethorpe--take five if you have both).

5. Subtract one point for each item you own: a shotgun, a crocheted doily and/or antimacassar (add one point if you recognize that word), a singing artificial bass, a bowling ball, any item featuring a Confederate flag that's less than twenty years old.

6. Add one point for any of the following cuisines you have PREPARED yourself: Indian, Thai, Provencal, Japanese/Asian fusion, tapas.

7. Subtract one point for each of the following you have eaten in the last month: chicken fried steak, green bean casserole, salted peanuts in a can of Coke, anything containing lard and/or fried in SAVED bacon grease (subtract two if you saved said grease in a coffee can like my grandma used to), anything from Waffle House (the Mason-Dixon line has become the defacto IHOP/Waffle House line, but in Missouri they are still mingled--that was one of the riders to the Missouri Compromise).

Take one point for each A, zero for each B, and subtract one for each C.

8. Your last credit card statement included purchases at
a. The MoMA store.
b. Starbucks.
c. Larry's Liquor, Bait and Ammo.

9. During your teenage rebellious phase, you
a. Began reading Ram Dass and refused to attend your parents' Episcopal church for six months.
b. Started skipping gym class to smoke cigarettes and drink behind the gym.
c. dropped out and opened a meth lab.

10. If you were forced at gunpoint to get a tattoo, it would be
a. A short Nietzsche quote.
b. A Celtic knot.
c. The name of your live-in boyfriend, but never mind the gun...you have it already. Along with the names of your last three boyfriends. If only laser removal weren't so expensive...

11. Veganism is...
a. Oh, yeah. I went vegan for a few weeks, but the brie at my parents' latest fundraiser was my downfall.
b. Avoiding all animal products, including dairy, eggs...even honey, I think.
c. Isn't that, like, some heathen religion?

As for the scoring...I don't care anymore. You know what you are. And I'm going to bed.

2010-01-14T00:10:00.002-05:00

After I first heard about the tragedy in Haiti (and donated a bit to Medicins sans Frontieres--seriously, donate) I began to wonder...how long before Pat Robertson opens his evangelical blowhole and lets fly with something simultaneously poisonous and awe-inspiring? And by awe-inspiring, I mean something that will make me think, "How could a man of eighty possibly have balls of that magnitude? Does he have to carry them in a wheelbarrow? Does he just sit on them, like a beanbag chair?" And oh, I hoped I would be wrong, but the answer was: less than 24 hours. I quote:

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about. They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the Prince.' True story. And so the Devil said, 'OK it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another."

"Napoleon the Third and whatever?" And people LISTEN to this man? The man who made similar, though slightly less schizophrenic-sounding, "WTF?" staements after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina?

People, if you are living under the spell of Pat Robertson and James Dobson and their Religious-Right cronies, please know there is a way out. There is life on the other side. I grew up (true story) watching the 700 Club (Robertson's crazy televangelist extravaganza). When I was eight, my dad decreed that we would have no more Halloween, because it was a Satanic holiday. I did not own a 'secular' CD until I received 'Jagged Little Pill' as a birthday gift (from a friend) when I was 13...and oh, what an introduction to the big, bad, secular world Alanis was! We went to church twice a week. My parents did not spare the rod (they kept a spare rod in case the first one broke, but that's another story). Guilt, shame, and another healthy helping of guilt and condemnation, that was the menu.

There are spiritual ways of relating to the world--to other people, to God, to yourself--that do not involve being a judgemental, self-righteous douchebag or a self-hating flagellant. "The greatest of these is love." Remember? The Bible? "Let he (sic) who is without sin cast the first stone?" "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?" Micah? Any of this ringing a bell?

And please, think of Haiti. Please, send money, good thoughts, prayers to whatever deity or Higher Order of Consciousness you believe in. Prove that not all Americans are as hard-hearted as the Unreverend Robertson.

2010-01-11T21:50:00.003-05:00

Just...bitching.

Over the weekend I was in a position to have to purchase feminine hygiene products. Drove to the store (with cramps so bad I almost threw up in the Walgreen's parking lot), went in and was confronted by a WALL of pads and tampons. WHY are there 50 different kinds? I understand, I guess, the super plus, super and regular demarcations; but why are there scented tampons (which make even less sense than scented pads, which already make very little sense?), and how do they differ from 'stayfresh' products (which makes me imagine putting a tiny box of baking soda up there, like you keep in the fridge?), and why do we need pads not only in the aforementioned super, regular, etc. strengths, but also in overnight, long, slender, ultrathin, and something new from Always called 'infinity?' WTF? And why is it that the grocery store has the organic, chlorine-free products I normally use, but Walgreens doesn't, forcing me to purchase ones with dioxins and probably pesticides? As I was looking, I said to myself (probably a bit too loudly, considering the response of the stockboy standing near me), "I just need something to BLEED ON, for God's sake!" Said stockboy scurried away immediately.

This probably explains some of the bad mood that's been trailing me the past few days, why Ive been so easily annoyed. Several pet peeves emerging in the past few days--

The word 'Anyways,' which--in fact--is NOT a word.
As usual, people forming plurals with apostrophes ("Nacho's 2.50").
Insomnia. Again, not unusual, but particularly needling.
The influx of people at the gym, attempting to keep their new year's resolutions which in 90% of cases will be gone by February, and which means I have to wait 30 minutes for someone walking 3 miles an hour to finish in order to put in my time at 7 mph...I know it's crappy of me to be upset by this, but I can't help it.

2010-01-08T17:58:00.002-05:00

Decriminalizing prostitution?

Apparently Dallas (Texas--one of the last places I would've expected this story to turn up) has started a program aimed at helping, rather than villifying, prostitutes. Right on!, I thought, reading the tagline on msn--"Dallas prostitutes offered help, not jail--prostitutes are treated as sex crimes victims, not criminals." Then I read the whole article. Then I slammed my head on the desk and tried to decide where I fell on this particular issue. You can read the article yourself here.

The women, once arrested (yes, they still get arrested--hmm, already it doesn't sound like they're being treated as victims, and yes, I realize that some (on both the left and the right) don't think prostitutes are victims)...well, maybe I should let you read it and insert my commentary as needed:

Police confiscate the prostitutes' property (so they ARE still criminals?) and interview them for information about criminal activity, such as whether pimps are running underage prostitutes out of area motels. Then social service workers assess the women's drug, alcohol and mental health counseling needs. The women get STD tests and other medical care at a mobile health clinic. (What happens if a woman doesn't want this assistance? I'm sure many could benefit from it, but why do I feel like a woman who asserts her agency over her body--ie, hey, dude, you're not getting a vaginal swab from me--which she is completely within her rights to do, is unlikely to get the gentle treatment any longer?)

The last stop of the night is the mobile courtroom. If the women have no felony warrants and seem sincere, (I'm sorry, but could this be a little more paternalistic, please? 'I'm really sorry, Daddy.' 'Do you really mean it?') the judge gives them the opportunity to avoid jail and enter rehab. After 45 days of inpatient counseling, they receive help with education, child care and housing. (Gee, 45 days involuntary committment to rehab or a night in jail, when I have kids to take care of. Wonder what I'll choose.)

I guess part of what irks me about this is the idea that these judges are being so magnanimous, taking care of these 'wayward women.' The article goes on and on about drugs, too. Yes, for a lot of women drugs are part of the sex-worker bag, but this focus on it seems calculated to widen the gap between Them (there are few female insults that rank above 'crack whore') and Us. It lets 'us'--the ordinary, law abiding citizens who have never sucked dick for crack--to feel better about ourselves. It also allows us to pin the blame firmly on these sex workers if they refuse 'help,' regardless of their circumstances--hey, lady, don't say we didn't give you a chance to redeem yourself. Then we don't have to deal with the social issues like pay inequity and lack of affordable childcare that foster disproportionate female poverty. We don't have to really digest the fact that (in some studies I've read...I'll link to them later) more than 50% of sex workers were sexually abused as children, or that johns are treated to a nudge and a wink while women are carted off to jail.

But Anne! you say (yes, I heard you). What kind of third-wave feminist are you? It's a choice! These women aren't victims, they're sex-positive goddess-women reasserting their agency over their bodies! Um. I hate to break it to you, but many--in fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say most--sex workers are not Annie Sprinkle. Nor are they Carol Queen, or Kate Bornstein (all of whom, don't get me wrong, are totally, rockingly awesome--google 'em if you don't know them). I will venture here that providing help rather than prison is the way I would go, were I in the cops' shoes--but without arrests or hearings. Community mental health, sexual health and substance abuse referrals, access to safe housing and childcare and jobs...these are the things I would aim to provide to those women who wanted them. Without intimidation or coercion.

Final note--the photo at the top of the MSN page shows a "17 year old arrested for prostitution" being comforted by social welfare workers. Hey, kids, guess what? Y'know what it's called when an adult has sex with a minor, even if he pays her? Statutory rape. And y'know what you should be arrested for if you're the minor that happens to? Not a goddamn thing.

2010-01-06T01:16:00.002-05:00

Eating disorders kill.

So I was at the grocery store today and I actually bought (shh!) an In-Touch magazine, something I have never previously done and which I will probably never do again. Brittany Murphy was on the cover: she died, apparently, and inside there were a number of pictures where she looked skinny as hell.
The 'doctor' cited in the article said a number of prescriptions were found at her home, including Topamax (used for mood stabilization and sedation in addition to its primary use as an anticonvulsant), Ativan and Klonipin (with which I am intimately familiar, having some anxiety issues myself--they're benzodiazepines), and some sedatives and hydrocodone. The doctor stated that Ativan and Klonopin, in high enough doses, can cause cardiac arrest. BZZZZZ. Incorrect. You have to take an assload of benzos to kill yourself, and you have to take them with alcohol. We're talking LOTS. Maybe it was the sedatives, or the opioids--but my money's on an eating disorder. Alarmingly, one of the commonest ways for anorexics (and bulimics) to die is just that way--cardiac arrest. Boom. Even if she were dabbling in pharmaceuticals, having a system weakened by severe eating disorder puts you at greater risk for "adverse events."

I've been having a flare-up of the old issues, myself. I know that article should serve as a wake-up call, but there's still the part of me that's looking at her pictures and thinking, "Damn, I wish my arms looked like that. I bet if I ran X miles a day and kept below X calories, I could be there in a few months...well, I've been on this new diet for a week now, and I've already lost X pounds..." It's sick and it's twisted, but it is also the way of the American woman--and a damn shame.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/american-christianism-in-africa.html

2010-01-05T02:25:00.000-05:00

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/american-christianism-in-africa.html

So some U.S. fundamentalists are finally helping Africa do what they've been trying to carry off in America for decades--kill all the gays.
I guess that gives a new meaning to 'mission trip,' not to mention 'intentionally lethal, holier-than-thou, bloodthirsty assholery.'

Words literally fail me. That someone would knowingly help make homosexuality not just a crime, but a hanging offense? You know that means people in Uganda are going to die, right? 'Mr.' Lively is threatened by people who lead lifestyles that are not his own--people do not share his worldview. And for this, he wants them to die and stop threatening the American Nuclear Family (which has pretty much blown itself up without any help from queermos like myself). Were this not so serious an issue, I might even ponder...could Lively possibly be trying to 'kill' some nascent homoerotic tendencies in himself? ("I will not think about dick. I won't, I won't, I won't! Hey--maybe if we rounded up some of those awful homosexuals and started killing them...yeah, that just the defense mechanism I need!") Could Uganda possibly be looking for a scapegoat for the sorry-ass shape their country is in? I smell a fourth reich--but this time they're coming for gays.

2010-01-04T23:50:00.002-05:00

One of my New Year's *intentions* (I decided that setting good intentions was a better paradigm than the more paternalistic 'there's something wrong with you' approach of resolutions) was to find a significant other.

However, since that has not yet occurred...The seeds of an 'anti-Valentine's Day Party' have been planted in my head. I'm thinking, unromantic foods--black stuff, sour stuff, salty stuff. Bitter(sweet) chocolate, even though chocolate should be off limits...I guess as long as no one at the party is passing chocolates tongue-to-tongue, it should be fine. Hmmm...

Swine & Dandy: What if we did as much to prevent rape as we do to prevent H1N1? | Bitch Magazine

2010-01-01T23:59:00.000-05:00

Swine & Dandy: What if we did as much to prevent rape as we do to prevent H1N1? | Bitch Magazine

2009-12-31T23:46:00.002-05:00

I knew something was wrong when the car started making that noise--like the lovechild of a bobcat and a Philip Glass concert. Then I noticed that despite having the accelerator pressed to the floor, I was only doing 50, and the car was bucking like a bronco, and suddenly there was a smell somewhere between skunk and burning Barbie hair (I wasn't a tomboy, per se, as a child--it was just that some Barbies were for dressing up, and others were for impromptu incendiary devices. By the way, I hope mentioning 'incendiary devices' on here doesn't get me put on some sort of government list). Luckily, I was right near the Sedalia exit off I-70 (Don't know where Sedalia is? Don't worry, almost no one does, and many who do wish they didn't). And as I switched lanes, trying valiantly to avoid the cars rushing around me, and rode past the rumble strip onto the shoulder, it came to me: with the utmost clarity, the result of years of contemplative study of both Western (Christian, Jewish) and Eastern (Buddhist, Taoist) religions and philosophies: Holy Fucking Christ, I Am Going to Die. Panic, in a word.

To make a long story ever so slightly shorter, I waited for an extended period of time for the tow truck to arrive. This included calling the Lafayette County Sheriff's department, walking about a mile back to the nearest sign to determine where exactly I was (with a wind chill in the single digits--swell!! Thank Goddess I was accompanied by Crazy's Little Helper, the panic attack, which gets the blood flowing beautifully), and an hour waiting in my car. I tried to remember everything I'd ever heard about surviving when stranded, and stuck with putting on more layers of clothing, wrapping myself in the electric--but un-plug-inable--blanket I'd gotten for Christmas, and trying to determine at what point rebreathing the air in the car (which must be almost all carbon dioxide by now, right?) was a greater threat than sacrificing a few degrees of warmth by opening the car door for a few seconds. Luckily, before I completely lost my mind--and I realize this is a relative measure--I was ferried (with my car) back to Betty's Garage, Truck Stop, Restaurant, Convenience Store, Gas Station and Motel (no kidding).

I had called my parents, as I was a mere ninety minutes outside of Kansas City, and they were driving there to meet me with their two cars--one in which I would continue on to St. Louis, the other to take them both home (any ill will I have ever felt toward either of my parents has been canceled by this act of love, in the same manner as Zen Buddhism allows lifetimes worth of karmic detritus to be cleared away in one moment of satori). In the meantime I went into the convenience store to look for a magazine, reasoning that I could read that while enjoying, say, a cup of coffee from the restaurant. Perhaps I am--comment se dit? Prejudiced--but I wasn't expecting to find Scientific American or anything. I would have settled for an US, hell, even a Woman's Day. I looked all over the convenience store, which was dark and wood-paneled. What I thought was a magazine rack was revealed to be a rack of signs, among them "Redneck Parking Only," "Parking for World's Greatest Beer Drinker," and a delightful line drawing of a woman who, right side up (and with the words 'Before Beer' painted over her head) appeared quite homely, but when flipped upside down (with the phrase 'After Six Beers' now emblazoned above) bore a striking resemblance to Trisha Yearwood. There were many other signs of this ilk (one featuring Barack Obama's face with a 'NO' sign through it, whose semiotic depths I did not dare to plumb), an entire aisle devoted to light beers and various jerkies--but no magazines. This was evidently not a reading sort of joint. Add the set of antlers mounted behind the cash register and the folksy wood plaque in the restaurant reading "Lord, bless this mess," and you've got the feel of the place. I skulked near the Corn Nuts, hoping the cashier couldn't smell the pinko-lesbo-hippie fumes that were undoubtedly wafting from me. Finally my parents arrived, and after much fussing, my things were loaded into another car and I set off again.

I should say that it was getting late by this point, and that I had only an hour or so of daylight left--but what an hour! Against the colors of mid-winter sunset--that cool rose, the wan yellow, the icy blue--I saw endless groups of geese flying in scraggly Vs across the floodplains of the Missouri river. After a brief stop for dinner, the sky was completely black--or so I thought until I reached the top of the nearest hill and saw the full moon (Her face shockingly large, as if near enough to touch) just over the scrubby horizon. She watched me the whole way home.

The only other kink in the works was halting at a rest stop around 7:oo. Normally rest stops don't bother me--yeah, I don't actually sit on the toilets, and I don't touch any of the doorknobs, and I slather myself in sanitizer afterward--but I basically feel safe, at least from things large enough to be seen with the naked eye. After dark, however, they all look like the Creepy McRaperson Memorial Rest Stop, now even more poorly lit, with even more trees to lurk behind and convenient E-Z-Dump ditches in back. Obviously I have survived to tell the tale, and there wasn't anything eminently creepy--but still.

Anyhow, I made it door-to-door in a record-setting eight hours. The experience was priceless: now I just have to decide whether it was priceless like a collection of Faberge eggs whose worth could never be counted, or like a losing lottery ticket that isn't worth a damn thing.

2009-12-18T03:14:00.002-05:00

Some 'serious' poetry--a reimagining of the Annunciation in time for Advent.

Gratia Plena

I was drawing water when
the angel she appeared
all white and gold
backlit by glory,
holding out a lily
as she said Shalom
and told me what she told me
and I said
I am not worthy
I am not
worthy / I am.
And the winged proclamation
Was a question
which I answered yes
Yes resonating
With my entire self,
my soul, each muscle
in my body bowstring-taut
so that I dropped the jug of water,
on my knees in wonder
For what woman
could resist a god's
entrance--God
enters resistance,
God enters.
And so I took God in
as one takes in an
orphan and
as cracked earth takes in
rain and
as surely as I myself am held
to God:
And I am filled with
grace
like water,
and I answered yes
though I am not worthy
yes although
my human love is clumsy,
And I felt the lips
of the Almighty
brush my neck
whispering Shalom
as I dissolved
in the sea of that love.

-AG

2009-12-17T04:23:00.003-05:00

Possible New Year's Resolutions--some real, some not (feel free to try and guess which are which...and to add your own [for yourself, not for me]). Because although it's the night before a big exam--one of few nights when I truly NEED the sleep--I have been visited by the Insomnia Fairy tonight. She's like the Sandman, but instead of dispensing mythical grains of soporific sand, she sprinkles you with crystalline caffeine...or if you're one of those chronically-exposed individuals for whom even caffeine has lost its punch (like a medical student), she uses crystal meth.

1. Decrease parentheticals in my writing.
2. Set aside time every day to write.
3. Try to submit a poem or essay somewhere at least once a month.
4. Quit smoking. Really this time.
5. Tell the people I care about that I care about them.
6. Work on my compulsive fire-starting.
7. Also my regrettable tendency to steal.
8. Enter and train for a road race (10-k or longer).
9. Eat more vegetables.
10. Learn how to cook a new national cuisine--Indian or Chinese would be nice.
11. Eat less fiber.

Is that sleep I feel tugging at my eyelids? Here's hoping...

2009-12-15T01:53:00.002-05:00

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/date.png

I've done this (not on a date, but still). If Martha Stewart and I had kids, they'd be blonde and blue-eyed with superior organizational skills, near-photographic memory, and great intuition and sensitivity. Or, with my luck, they'd come out with my organizational skills (those of a spider monkey on LSD) and get her emotional intelligence--which, according to sources I've read, approximately parallels that of a hammer.
Making Nativity scenes out of pinecones and leftover decoupage materials doesn't necessarily make you nice.

2009-12-09T22:07:00.005-05:00

Aaaaagh!

I found out today that I've been taking half my regular dose of Zoloft for the past week and a half (the pharmacy gave me 50 mg tabs instead of my usual 100s)...and as a result, though I now understand why I've been having panic attacks every damn day--well, in addition to approaching finals--(ever heard of SSRI withdrawal syndrome? Google it, it'll be fun) it doesn't mean I'm not now tightly wound as a three dollar watch and having some...difficulty focusing, and feeling really. effing. sad. So I've been trying to chill the hell out: difficult indeed, especially when channel K-FCKD is playing at a volume of 10 in my head--study, study, study! Yeah, yeah, bitch and moan.

So what do I do to try to relax?
Well, there's Xanax. And Ativan. But pharmacology can't be everything.
There's also taking a nice bath with some lavender and patchouli essential oils (yes, I'm a hippie. Shut up).
Petting my kitty (not a euphemism...or maybe).
Painting.
Kicking back with some herbal tea and a 'brain candy' book--Patricia Cornwell, Harry Potter, Terry Pratchett (whom I luuuurve) or something like that.
Reading Rumi, especially the Coleman Barks translations; also translations of Hafiz. Who knows why, but this little white girl really loves mystic Sufi poetry.
Looking at cuteoverload, failblog, somethingawful, or ichc. Good for those quasi-suicidal days.

2009-12-03T22:14:00.001-05:00

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/period.png

That is all.

2009-11-30T00:01:00.003-05:00

TMI Alert. Colonoscopy in t-minus eleven hours. After which I will be able to eat some damn food. Because you know it's gonna be fun when having a flexible tube inserted into your lower gastrointestinal tract (so as to avoid the obvious and vulgar descriptor, 'shoved up your ass') ISN'T the worst part of the overall experience.
So what is? Could be the colonoscopy prep (if you don't already know what that entails, don't google it. I would say it's something like amoebic dysentery, but as I have recently learned in my GI Pathology course, amoebic dysentery would actually result in LESS voluminous diarrhea). Could be the fact that the prep solution--of which I had to drink two liters--did NOT taste like ass. Ass would have been a profound improvement. It was somehow simultaneously salty and sweet and sour and after the first sip I felt certain I was going to vomit--which, fortunately, I did not. Just retching, which is like vomiting without the catharsis and satisfaction. Overall, though, it was just as well. Because, as I discovered later in the evening, I really couldn't have afforded to lose that fluid--or those electrolytes.
Could be that I've been on a clear liquid diet all day, which originally sounded like a good thing to my ED, but has now left me guessing at what precisely defines clear liquid, not to mention getting headachy and bitchy (more so than usual). Thus far that has meant: Coffee, yes. But with no skim milk. Vegetable bouillion, yes. But with no saltines. And, of course, diet coke. On the plus side: no abdominal pain this evening, which I'm attributing to the lack of food. On the minus side: dude, did you read this post at all?

2009-11-17T23:38:00.000-05:00

New post on medicalschoolmayhem!

2009-11-14T02:04:00.002-05:00

Things I'm loving right now

The Sixth Glass Quadrupel Ale from Boulevard Brewing Company (from Kansas City--woot). You've heard of the Belgian Trippel Ale...this is a step above, as I discovered when I had two glasses while reading Martha Stewart Living magazine, and suddenly started thinking that maybe I really COULD make a nativity scene out of pinecones and glitter. Also I couldn't walk a straight line when I got up. Sure enough--checked the bottle, and it's 10.5% alcohol. Full-bodied, though, delicious, assertive without being overpowering.

Martha Stewart Living magazine. Not just because I have a crush (she's really the ultimate power femme, isn't she?) but also because I love seeing the insanity that they come up with. Consider a recipe for a Croquenbouche--a tower of pastry--that has you make 200 pastry puffs from scratch and hand-fill them with caramel cream. It takes HOURS. They come right out and say it in the recipe. They admit it; they're not even trying to hide it. HOURS. Also, I started reading the latest issue today, and I was drinking at the time.

Waffles. I've been on a Kashi waffle kick lately. Eating them daily. They have tons of fiber and protein, so they're good for you, too.

"Are You Being Served?", a British comedy from the 70's. I've been watching the first three seasons (which I own) on repeat lately. I don't know why; there's just something about that era that's oddly comforting. And I've always liked British comedy.

2009-11-12T00:38:00.003-05:00

So it begins.

I know it's starting when food in my fridge starts to go bad...because I'm not eating it. When working out only once a day suddenly seems insufficient. When I start sizing up everyone I see (every woman, anyway) not in terms of friend-ability or date-ability, but literally--guessing at what size jeans she wears and comparing us (generally not in my favor). Everyone has certain twitches and issues that show up in times of stress, and food-and-body-weirdness is one of mine. The period around the time change, and segueing into the holidays, is always difficult for me in this respect. Maybe it's a way of dealing with a seasonal affective type issue; maybe it's something to do with the clash between Norman-Rockwellesque holiday expectations and the realities of a live, dynamic and (like most people's) dysfunctional family. Or, hell, world.

To be perfectly honest, it's not just a tic. It is, in fact (speaking diagnostically, clinically) an eating disorder. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's also not something of which I feel inordinately ashamed. I've been living with it for too long: more than half my life at this point. It's been worse than it is now--I've been hospitalized multiple times; I've ended up in the ER with electrolyte imbalances and arrhythmias. It's been better, too--for brief, shining moments, anyway. What's really alarming, though, is how easy it is to blend in--how similar I am (or manage to appear) to the Average (Middle Class) American Woman. Bitching about having a 'fat day' (I think almost all women will know exactly what I mean when I say this, even if they've never heard the term before): check. Though perhaps not to the same extent; if I'm having a fat day, it negates everything else that happens in those 24 hours. I am chagrined to say that the day I found out I got honors on Exam X was still a 'bad' day overall because I got an unfortunate view of my ass in the mirror at the gym. Speaking of which: Going to the gym every day? Check. Buying fat-free cheese, fat-free milk, fat-free butter (WTF, by the way)? Check.

Of course I know better. I can name drop all the slogans, watch: Health at Any Size, Riots not Diets, Fat Dykes are Revolting. Yet as we learned today in our 'Motivational Interviewing' exercise, knowing better and doing better are often separated by a large chasm, one that has to be bridged with patience and compassion (yes, I know I'm a hippie; I want to go into psych. So sue me). Here's hoping, forr all of us.

2009-11-05T23:50:00.003-05:00

Autumn and what comes after

Death
is the richest breeding ground
for life.
The gardener knows
this, piling loamy soil
thick with last year's harvest, over roots,
The soft scent of decay which underlies
the sweetness of the blossoms that will come;
The surgeon knows it too, at 3 am
lifting out the liver or the heart
from the body which outlasted life
for one at least, but which will surge again
with blood and gladness in some other chest,
another waiting, ribs splayed apart like hands
opening to receive the gift at once
both horrifying and magnificent,
and to close,
as hands and circles do.

-AG, Nov 2009

Wrote this, perhaps not so oddly, after talking to an acquaintance about her time on the transplant surgery rotation. The first few lines just came to me as I was walking home from school afterward, in the November dark with fallen leaves all around.

2009-10-31T00:30:00.003-04:00

If I am diabetic, I will punch someone in the face

Well, no, I won't actually punch anyone in the face--mostly because I wouldn't know to whom to do it (though one of the people on the street who always asks me if I have an 'extra cigarette' might be in for it...just a note: I do not have any 'extra' cigarettes. I do not have any 'extra' anything, except perhaps pounds in the region of my ass and room in the trunk of my car, which is of a capacity to serve the needs of any major crime family. Each pack has 20, which I divide in the following way: 20 for me. Et fin. At least until I quit on OFFICIAL FINAL QUIT DAY TO END ALL QUIT DAYS, NOV 9th 2009. Leave me alone).

So there have been myriad tests. Glucose tolerance tests, pelvic ultrasounds (which somehow manage to be even less fun than they sound), rounds of superfluous antibiotics ("Is there anything else that's been bothering you besides the fatigue?" Dr. W asked solicitously. "Anything at all?" I coughed--again, because I smoke--and said I'd been feeling a little sinus pressure...and won a 10 day round of Augmentin that accomplished precisely nothing), got a CBC, a TSH, a hormone panel, another hormone panel, a metabolic panel, a urinalysis...And suddenly the discovery of a high fasting glucose, and ketosis. Perhaps my immune system has decided it's tired of munching on my thyroid and has decided to feast upon my pancreas as well. I cannot effing possibly have Type II diabetes. Why? Because. Because my diet is composed of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat vegetarian protein. Because I exercise every day. Because it would be so unfair ("Life isn't fair," I can hear you saying, to which I reply: "Bite me").

So I'm kind of pissed, and wondering why this is all happening, and having the usual struggles that people have when accosted by illness. 'Why me?,' while of course the most prosaically human of questions, is also the most difficult to answer. OF COURSE I don't believe that people get sick as 'punishment' for things, or that being virtuous provides even the faintest protection from harm--though you have to admit, popular culture does feed into the assumption that if you eat enough veggies, don't smoke, exercise, limit your stress and sodium and fat intake and get lots of fiber and antioxidants...you'll never get sick, never age, never die. Having in some ways lost the moral imperative in the realm of the soul, it's been transferred to the realm of the body. Which still leaves me thinking that I shouldn't be having all these problems, because while I'm certainly not perfect there are also many people 'worse' than I. People who eat puppy sandwiches with kitten au jus. Go after one of them.

2009-10-12T18:03:00.003-04:00

What's the Big Secret?

Ok, they're not that big. They're actually little secrets. The ones you don't want people to know, not because you would be dragged before the tribunal at Nuremberg but rather because you know people would think of you a little differently--perhaps more negatively. Not the big, horrible, need-therapy-to-deal-with-it shames, but those things you wouldn't even tell your therapist. Because they're too small, but also because she'd think of you differently, too. The things that aren't crimes but rather matters of style, that would mark you as crass or a nympho or deeply un-PC. We all have them. Put up one or two of yours! Seriously. I know people read this but no one ever comments.

1. I love poetry. Love it to pieces. But...I really can't stand Maya Angelou's poems. I am aware that this makes me a bad person.
2. I have a thing for older women. Not 'elderly,' but older, and definitely powerful (Kissinger was right about power being an aphrodisiac. Was that Kissinger?). At various times in my life I've crushed out on Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Meryl Streep and Madonna. And on numerous female members of the Cornell and WUSM faculty.
3. In most areas of my life I am utterly nonjudgmental. You can be gay, bi, trans, straight; into SM or roleplaying or leather; you can smoke, drink and gamble. However, I cannot abide errors in punctuation or spelling. I have actually not entered restaurants just because of mispunctuated signs.
4. I haven't read Moby Dick, or The Grapes of Wrath, or Great Expectations. Nor do I particularly wish to. I can couch this in feminist ire by saying that literature by dead white men is overrated, but the truth is I'm too lazy. At the same time...
5. If I see you reading Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele on the Metro, I will judge you. Again, I realize this makes me a bad person.
6. I HAVE to exercise every day. If I don't, I am secretly convinced that I will gain 20 pounds and lose all my cardiovascular fitness. The only day this doesn't apply is the first day of my period, when I'm not in a condition to be exercising anyway.
7. I've been drinking it since college, but I still can't stand the taste of coffee. Vicious bitterness, that's what it is. Finishing the dregs in the bottom of the cup often makes me feel that I am literally about to vomit... which is why I often throw the last 1/4 to 1/6 of the cup away.
8. Speaking of beverages...before I got nice stemware (read: 1.49 a piece at World Market) I occasionally drank red wine out of a coffee mug. Classy.

2009-09-30T00:19:00.004-04:00

Anniversary--Six Years Is a Long Time.

A lot has changed since September 2003: I've graduated from Cornell, started medical school, had a job in the interim, had several relationships.
Since then I've become fluent in German, lost 60 pounds, competed in road races, had essays published in several anthologies.
Since then I've become an Anglican, become an activist, marched in a gay pride parade, have grown more comfortable being 'out' about both my spirituality and my sexual orientation. Yes, a lot has changed.

Six years ago today I was raped by a stranger. It was violent. It was terrifying. It was painful. I was injured both physically and emotionally. "Why talk about it?" I can hear people asking. "Keep that stuff to yourself. It's too dark, too personal. No one wants to know. It makes us uncomfortable." Even the word itself--rape--makes people wince; its single syllable falls like a blow. 'Sexual assault' is gentler; it spreads the impact over multiple words. It is less explosive, less primal. This is precisely why I make the effort (though it is still difficult for me) to call what happened to me rape.

It makes me uncomfortable too, but I don't have the luxury of expunging it from my memory and living free of any consequences. I cannot forget. And as long as women are being victimized--as long as I know my sisters are being hurt and humiliated and then, on top of that, shamed into silence--it is my intent to prevent anyone from forgetting it. I don't think people ignore issues like rape out of callousness (though perhaps some do); it is rather a need to protect their delicate human hearts. It is frightening to witness another person's pain, especially a pain of this intensity. It is uncomfortable to face injustice and violence--to know, not at a superficial level but to acknowledge in a way that can only produce horror, that there are human beings who intentionally hurt other human beings to gratify their own drives.

Tonight I went for a run in the park. I misjudged the sunset and ended up halfway through my run with almost no daylight left. The rape happened under similar circumstances. I was freaking slightly. It felt like a fairy tale, where someone is always warned at the beginning, "Don't touch the pumpkin," or "Stay away from this room at midnight," and at the end of the story finds themselves doing precisely what they were told not to, and thus bringing disaster upon themselves. I peered through the darkness, checking every tree for figures, running along the road (where the lights are). By the time I crossed Kingshighway, though, a peculiar joy was running through my veins. The moon was a waxing gibbous; waxing moons are auspicious, and I could practically feel her beaming down at me as I ran the last few blocks home, my footfalls and heartbeat synchronized with my breathing and the drone of cicadas, like a symphony of flesh. I have made it through six years. Not without pain or injury; not without bouts of choking sadness or ragged anxiety, but also not without hope.
Tonight is also the feast of St. Michael and All Angels. As autumn descends, as the days shorten, everyone gets caught up in the universal drama of dark vs. light. It's a constant struggle. That's the point. Who will win is not a foregone conclusion. But then that's what hope is about.

2009-09-23T04:47:00.002-04:00

I took a glucose tolerance test today, and as a result spent the day riding the blood-sugar rollercoaster from hell. A glucose tolerance test (GTT, for those in the know) involves drinking 75 grams of sugar in one go in the form of a delectable 10 0z of "orange flavor glucose tolerance beverage." Hummingbirds love the stuff, I'm sure; me not so much. It didn't help that the promised orange flavor was in fact a bizarre hybrid of grapefruit and ass. And that they took 6 tubes of blood at the beginning. And another one two hours later.
Nothing terribly exciting to report--no convulsions, no fainting--just a profound feeling of fatigue, some nausea, and a headache.
All this in an attempt to figure out what's going on. More poking and prodding Friday. And then: answers. I hope.

2009-09-13T00:10:00.003-04:00

"Cosmetic intervention" are-you-f*cking-kidding-me corner

So I'm flipping through O magazine in a doctor's waiting room, and I happen upon a full-page ad featuring Brooke Shields. Oh, yeah, I remember her from the 80s and 90s. Cute kid, heavy on the eyebrows. Cool. Then I notice that the ad is for--I kid you not--an ACTUAL DRUG (did you get that? A pharmaceutical formulation. A drug) called Latisse, intended to cure the life-shattering ill that is hypotrichosis. Waitaminit, I say to myself. Trichosis--that's 'hair.' As in trichotillomania, when people compulsively pull their hair out (knew a girl in high school who did this--she had a cute side-part all the time, and it was only when I spent the night at her house that I discovered it was covering a silver-dollar sized bald spot), or hypertrichosis, the overgrowth of fine downy body hair that I experienced when I was way underweight in college. So hypertrichosis is...not enough hair?

Right enough, but in this case it refers to--as the makers of Latisse say on their web site--'inadequate eyelashes.' Wow. Now the ballsiness of this alone was almost sufficient to send me into conniptions. Now not having the lush, luxuriant lashes of a mascara model is a clinical disorder. "Once you begin treatment," the site promises--TREATMENT, for the love of Christ--you will begin to see increases in eyelash darkness, thickness and length within four months (I will say that it appears to work--Brooke's eyelashes look downright shaggy). In the 'safety' section, it is mentioned that some people experience eye irritation and redness. Or darkening of the eyelids. Or eye infections, if it isn't applied correctly. Also it may darken your irises permanently, and you have to keep using it for as long as you would like to remain in possession of your newly bat-worthy eyelashes. Mostly the folks at Allergan just wanted to remind you that deviations from the standard of Western female beauty, no matter how small, can be considered illnesses, and that you're never good enough as you are.

Oh my goddess, this is so lame I almost had a seizure.

2009-09-08T01:36:00.002-04:00

Exams of any kind make me nervous, yet they're also sort of like sporting events. Me vs. the test, me vs. me, me making a last-minute three-pointer at the buzzer (is it a hyperplastic polyp or a serrated adenoma? She shoots...she scores!). In college I even had a set of little rituals that went along with test-taking--put on the lucky shirt, drink the optimum blend of caffeine (for energy and clear-headedness) and gingko biloba tea (for, you know, more clear-headedness).

This week is an exam week--ENT, general pathology and pharmacology. I feel prepared for the first two, not completely ready for the last.

Hopefully by Friday I'll have all the adrenergic and cholinergic and everything else -ergic drugs committed to memory (I'm 90% there, I think--just a little more work around the edges). This is all absolutely cool stuff to get to be learning. Hey, here's how aspirin works; hey, this is the reason selective COX-2 inhibitors like Vioxx--and Celebrex, may it rest in peace--don't eat holes in your stomach lining as readily as ibuprofen! As for learning antidotes, that was just a piece of practically shamanic coolness. Give Narcan for heroin OD. N-acetylcysteine, if given early enough, can protect the liver from acetominophen overdose. A kid ate some Jimson weed--try physostigmine. It's like a throwback to The Olden Days, when you'd give feverfew to someone with (duh) a fever, or black cohosh tea to someone with dysmenorrhea--except, y'know, now we know why things work. And we use fewer plants (although vinca alkaloids and Taxol are both plant-derived, and are used in cancer treatment). Just rambling.

2009-08-29T01:21:00.003-04:00

So for the last few days I have been in...a bitchy phase. Premenstrual. Cheez-it cravings (for someone whose normal diet includes foods that sound like the punch line to an uncharitable joke about hippies--lentil loaf, bulghur salad, soy burgers--and for whom eating saturated fat is akin to promising my firstborn child to the dread lord Satan). Profound lethargy. Tearing up at the thought that someday my dog is going to die. And, most surprising and uncharacteristic of all, being visited with the urge to bludgeon a sizeable percentage of the people around me with blunt objects.
Wednesday night roomie brings boyfriend over at 11 pm. Fine. Whatever. I'm trying to sleep. Our rooms are on either side of the bathroom, and the heating/cooling ducts connect all 3 rooms, but most particularly hers and mine, so that one can hear, through the ducts, exactly what is going on in the next room. Roomie and boy are talking. Annoying, but what am I going to do, tell them to shut up? Plug in white noise machine, turn it to 'waterfall,' crank it. Then they start...well, I don't even know for certain what they were doing. It sounded like it might have been one of those little 'personal' shredders, or like they were using hair clippers for Christ only knows what reason. Turn up waterfall. Apply pillow to head. Imagine applying pillow to roomie's head, at high speed.
Sitting in class, watching as five (literally, simultaneously, five) people take out apples and start eating them. Feel guilty about having Cheez-Its for breakfast. Wish people at this school weren't so damn health-obsessed all the time (it's not like it's a medical sch--oh, wait). Listen to the crunching. Feel my last nerve being plucked, dangerously, about to give way. I am not a huge fan of eating sounds, in myself or others. Let's be honest, especially not in others. Two people sitting behind me begin to talk, cramming as many polysyllabic, pretentious words into their back-and-forth as humanly possible--which makes it not only distracting but grating and prickish. If I wanted to watch two pricks in action I'd rent a porno, I think to myself.

Jung said we must all confront our shadow sides in order to be truly whole. One week a month I see mine. I am generally well-controlled enough to prevent my bile from spilling into the world at large (I say perhaps 1% of the truly appalling things I think-- I don't know if this is a larger or smaller percentage than the average).

2009-08-24T00:29:00.003-04:00

I'm not usually super-forward about being of the Christian persuasion (I'm probably more out about my gayness than I am about my Christianity), for two reasons:
1) I hate the idea that people might automatically assume I am the same 'brand' of Christian as Pat Robertson, or James Dobson, or for that matter the Pope (who, God help me, I still think looks a lot like Senator Palpatine from the Star Wars movies)...'cause in fact I'm pro-choice, anti-death penalty, feminist, sex-positive...
2) My views could perhaps be better explained as Quaker/Episcopalian/Wiccan/Buddhist. I don't know that that makes me un-Christian; maybe I'm just not a very good Christian.

But I received in my email inbox an invite to the Christian Medical Association's first meeting this year (I attended briefly last year) and the focus of discussion is going to be on processing the first-years' initial experiences with their cadavers in anatomy. And I started to thinking--for all the anti-body, 'Satanic urges of the flesh' B.S. that's been appended to Christianity over the years, it is at its core a profoundly embodied religion. The center--the lynchpin--of the faith is the physical death, and later physical resurrection, of a facet of God. The most sacred of the sacraments is communion, a physical meeting of God with human--an act of ingestion. The very definition of 'sacrament,' according to the church, is "an outward and physical sign of an inward, invisible grace." The body is described as 'fearfully and wonderfully made' in the Psalms, not as a dirty thing to be denigrated or ignored. The Jews, to be honest (even with the observation of restrictions like niddah) are much more body-comfy than Christians are: be fruitful and multiply is a requirement, not an 'extra.' Rabbis should be married--a much more reasonable position, to my mind, than requiring priests to be celibate. Just doing a little thinking. It doesn't seem coincidental that a disproportionate number of the women I've met in eating disorders treatment have been Catholic...again, just thinking.

2009-08-21T23:42:00.002-04:00

Sweet suffering Jesus, I can tell you I'm not going to be an ENT specialist (ear nose and throat--though it sounds much less impressive than 'otolaryngology,' which is the official title of one of our courses this block, and which I remember learning to spell when I went to the state spelling bee in middle school. Yes, I was as impossibly dorky then as I am now).
Granted, a lot of ENTs spend time doing hearing tests, prescribing antibiotics for refractory sinus infections, and cleaning the cerumen (fifty-dollar word for earwax) out of people's auditory canals.
But they also deal with things that are...I can't really put it any other way...disgrossting.
Para ejemplo, in our first lecture we saw a case of sinusitis complicated by orbital infection (imagine your eye socket getting filled with pus) and a trauma case in which a motorcyclist had his face ripped off and crushed in. Which was exactly as stomach-churning as it sounds. And which was a joy to look at half an hour after lunch.

2009-08-21T23:41:00.001-04:00

Hey you. Yeah, you. My other blog is medicalschoolmayhem.blogspot.com. You should totally go there.

2009-08-16T05:32:00.003-04:00

Somehow my sleep cycle has gotten totally out of whack, to the point that I am currently awake, and that for a while now I've been falling asleep around dawn, then waking up (at last) around 2:00 pm. Obviously, with the coming of school and 9 am lectures, that's going to have to stop. Insomnia has been my bete noir since childhood; my pineal gland and suprachiasmatic nucleus seem to think it's funny to set themselves to Tokyo time despite my physical presence in the Midwestern United States. I hate it when I feel like my organs are putting one over on me.

In my experience, it is possible to 'reset' the circadian rhythm in one of two ways: either by sleeping your way through (last fall I really did have a weekend when, except for a few bathroom and food breaks, I slept 24 hours consecutively...and more than 36 hours total, when it was all tallied up...God knows why; maybe I was fighting off an infection or something), or by staying up a full 24 to 36 hours. Considering that I'm awake now--despite having taken Ambien at midnight-- and I have things I need to accomplish tomorrow, I think I'm going to end up taking the second option. Bonus: I'm quitting smoking (for real this time, really and truly, honest, I swear) and when you stay up for extended periods of time sometimes something clicks in your brain and it's possible to rewire the ol' neural circuits. For example, the first time I ever did the up-all-night thing, for the next six months or so I couldn't handle caffeine very well. I would have a soda with lunch and feel positively wired (keep in mind that prior to this I was drinking about 2 liters of soda a day and barely felt any effects). It's weird--sleep deprivation leaves you in this very 'limbo' place where it seems like lots of things--quitting smoking, or falling asleep standing up--are not only possible, but likely. Doable. Let's hope this turns out to be the case. And if I look like an extra from Night of the Living Dead tomorrow...well, at least you'll know why.

2009-08-14T17:58:00.002-04:00

Why Men Go For Guns, or the George Sodini Massacre...heard of it?

Probably, because I've heard of it, and I'm generally the last to know about current events now that I'm in med school (and never watch TV). I learned about the attack, which happened a few weeks ago now, via Dan Savage's current "Savage Love" column. Go read it. So what exactly happened?

Dude had been rejected by lots of women. Worked out at a fitness club in Pittsburgh and thus was in a position to see a lot of fit, 'objectively attractive' (if such a thing can be said to exist, and it can't) women, in tight workout clothes, panting and sweating and...well, deal is, a fair number of people have said (without realizing exactly how much like the Taliban they sound) that the poor guy just couldn't help himself. To be sexually rejected and at the same time surrounded by those sweating, gyrating, nubile gym tarts...seriously, isn't a woman in bike shorts and a sports bra just asking to get shot in the face? (HEAVY, HEAVY SARCASM ALERT). Oh, they say they're just trying to get to their target heart rates, but I think we all know they're just wanton temptresses in Spandex (not that the occasional woman in my yoga class hasn't gotten my heart pounding a little faster than the asanas alone, but damn...). Sodini hadn't had sex in almost twenty years (he put this on his website, in an angry, neanderthal 'journal' that detailed his plans). Maybe because people intuited what a creepy-ass person he was. So he walks into the fitness club, into an aerobics class, and kills three women and injures nine others. That'll teach 'em. Then he kills himself, which is sad but probably just as well.

All these shootings...the Virginia Tech, Columbine, Paducah, the Amish school shooting in 2006 (where, again, the shooter specifically targeted females, though in this case they were little girls--all prepubescent--and the shooter additionally brought restraint devices and lubricant with him, which he seems not to have used before finally killing himself)...people talk about the epidemic of 'school shootings' or 'senseless violence' and what never gets said is that THE. SHOOTERS. ARE. MALE. Granted, they are all also quite mentally ill, but you'd think in a country that claims to want to know "the reason for this violence," someone would have looked for a pattern and found the smoking guns, so to speak, that are testosterone and societal imprinting. Sondini was raised, as a white male in America, to feel entitled--perhaps most especially, through the influence of sources ranging from advertising to the book "How To Date Young Women: For Men Over 35" (it was found on a table at his house), to the woman and sex of his dreams--and he didn't get it. In a society where greiving, or 'settling,' or acknowledging the primary fucked-upedness of the paradigm is impossible, the response most readily available for men is rage, and unchecked/unsublimated rage leads to aggression, as any armchair psychologist (me, for example) can tell you. So Sodini, while obviously a bastard, is also a symptom of a sickness that preys on the Western male, and finds its most heinous and vicious expression in attacks like these on the unsuspecting and powerless (see also wife-beating and child abuse, but those unfortunately don't make headlines).

This isn't to say that women don't rage, but for most, conditioning (and the fundamental LACK of entitlement that most women are inculcated with--yes, I ended with a preposition, deal with it) leads them to direct rage and aggression inwards rather than out. So while school shootings and such aren't so much female territory (which again isn't to say that they couldn't be), self-mutilation, depression, self hatred--particularly directed at the body--and eating disorders are how the ladies act things out.

2009-08-06T01:20:00.002-04:00

So the story cuntinues. HA!

I'm feeling dispirited. I'm certain this is NOT the etymology I remember from Ms. Muscio, which was empowering and kick-ass, while this one is tepid and passive, akin to the (very real) origin of the word 'vagina,' which is ancient Latin and means 'sheath for a sword.' I'll keep pointy bits away from my genitalia, thanks.

So I went further, and typed "cunt etymology" into Google, praying to the good Lord that the inclusion of the second word would decrease my probability of being swamped by the nastier sites associated with the first. And, lo and behold, I found this. It's convincing, but not as convincing as Barbara Walker's entry in "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets," which, coincidentally, is another fantastic book very much worth owning. It says that 'cunt,' far from being a slur, was originally a word of positive power, a title of respect; furthermore, it
-comes from the same root as county, kin and kind.
-is related to cunning, kenning, and ken (ken=Brit-ism for 'know')
-is, and here I quote Walker directly, "Derivative of the Great Goddess as Cunti, or Kunda, the Yoni of the universe."

A far cry from something you'd see scrawled on a bathroom wall, no?

2009-08-06T00:46:00.004-04:00

It's not offensive. It's etymology (no, not bugs. That's entomology). Let's have fun learning about words!

One of the things my first girlfriend left me (besides a few words of Chinese and a broken heart) was a book. I've had it nearly ten years now. I love it--it's one of my favorite books ever. However, I have to keep it on a bookshelf in my room. I can't leave it lying around in the living room, or put it on the bookshelf downstairs. When I went into the hospital last time, I brought the book with me, and when one of the therapists met with me in my room she looked at the book on my bedside table and said, "Excuse me, but does that book say cunt?"
It does indeed. The book is "Cunt: a declaration of independence" by Inga Muscio. One of the most engaging, inspiring feminist books I've ever read, taking into account the combined sister-powerhood of Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Betty Friedan. Go buy it, now...NOT at amazon, damn it. Go to your local, independent bookstore, or failing that, hit up powells.com.

So how did I get into the sort of frame of mind, on this particular evening, that would lead me to write about the origins of the C-word? Well, it goes like this (skip this paragraph if you don't care about my life or any humorous references thereto and want to get down to business, as it were). I was researching a Traffic song online, which had popped into my head this evening and which I had just purchased. Said song is entitled "John Barleycorn Must Die." I heard it for the first time in my dad's old Honda when we were driving together on I-70. I must have been seven or so, and I remember it was the most haunting (ie, beautiful, but also...um...disturbing) song I'd heard in my young life. Seriously, go look up the lyrics and tell me they aren't BEYOND sick. Barley, the crop, is personified, and said anthropomorphic personification is 'cut off at the knees,' stabbed with pitchforks, bound to a cart, pulled skin from bone, ground between stones...to make whiskey, y'see.

According to Wikipedia this folksong is positively ancient...the earliest version roughly 500 years old. There have been suggestions that this song is related to the ancient practice of sacrificing a king (or a 'king,' ie, a commoner conned into wearing a funny hat for the proceedings ["Wow, this robe is nice, and this crown, and this mead you keep pouring me--'s terrific...Why are you looking at me like that, guys? Guys? Let's put down the knives, guys. Oh, fu---" THUD.]) at some suitable solstice to ensure the continued/returning fertility of the land.

And there's a hyperlink to an article on human sacrifice. And from there to Norse practices in that regard more specifically (the Germanic peoples weren't as into it as, say, the Celts or the Aztecs...if the Aztecs told you there was something really great to see at the top of all those temple stairs, you would be well advised to take a rain check). And there, in the middle of a description of hangin' and immolatin' I saw a word I'd never seen before: apparently the word for 'wise woman' in some Nordic tongue, "volva." Pretend there's an umlaut over the o. What's this? I thought. Some etymologic relationship? The trip from volva to vulva is short (though thrilling, I'm sure...after all, it's the quality, not the quantity).

So I look up "vulva" in the online etymology dictionary I use, and it tries to feed me a line of BS about Latin, 'vulva' from older Latin 'volva,' related to turning and returning, an enclosure or pouch, twisting about, related to modern Spanish volver, to return...and I said, fool, what?

2009-07-20T18:34:00.002-04:00

Damn, I didn't know anyone actually read my blog.

Anyway. Before everyone freaks out permanently. It was Henrique.

I don't know that much about what happened. Probably you should talk to someone who knows more about it, if you don't already know yourself. Apparently there isn't a lot of information.

2009-07-18T16:35:00.002-04:00

RIP

I got a phone call this afternoon. A friend of mine from college is dead. He killed himself.

I have a picture of us, in a big group, from freshman year. We're all so young, all smiling, on the front steps of our house. It's spring; you can see the sunlight shimmering on the leaves behind our heads. We are at the beginning of something big, our salad days, the spring of our own lives. Hope drips from us like honey.

I want to ask why. I don't know the answer. I would ask how someone could come to that place, to a place where death seems like comforting respite, where it becomes a thing desired rather than ignored or feared...but I know how--it's a place I've been as well, and recently. A place where the dark is completely enveloping, where the moon is eclipsed, where it seems like there is no hope for any dawn. But I also know it's a monstrous untruth, a lie of the highest (or lowest) order. It denies that most basic of human instincts, one as powerful as the drive to eat and drink and breathe: the drive to hope. As Emily Dickinson wrote (who I would appoint to sainthood were I ever put to the task of developing my own religion):

Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all

and sweetest in the gale is heard
and sore must be the storm
that could abash the little bird
that kept so many warm...

2009-07-15T17:32:00.004-04:00

Gay gay gay. Gaydee gay gay.

The Matthew Shepard Act (see this) is up for a vote this week in Congress. So if you've read my stuff for a while, and think that someone who bashes my head in for being a lesbo (or for thinking that I'm a dude dressed like a lady, something I'll get into a little later) should be charged with a hate crime, and pursued by the federal government even if the local law enforcement lets it slide...then by all means contact your Congresspeople. "Dr." James Dobson has been calling it the Pedophile Protection Act, and if it's got his panties in a wad you know it has to be good...this from the man who recommends, essentially, 'beating the will' out of your child. Like I said, quality stuff (did I mention my parents owned all his books?). I apply the word 'hate' very, very sparingly--things may piss me off, or cause me to take umbrage, but the 'hate' bar is set pretty high. "Dr." Dobson clears it with a flying leap. I hate him. Almost as much as I love Helen Mirren (see previous post).

The Episcopal Church (of which I am a member...damn, I hope that was grammatically correct) has just passed DO25 at its General Convention, meaning that the moratorium on consecration of same-sex loving folk to ministry (priesthood, the deaconate, the episcopate) is over. So even gay folks can serve Jeebus (he doesn't mind that I call him that. I asked). If you're a church nerd, you can read the text of the proposal here. )

And last but not least, I dug up an old Atlantic article about queer folk in Saudi Arabia that I remember reading with a great deal of interest in college...it's only from 2005. Read it here, and decide for yourself if you want to make Riyadh your next vacation destination. They could stone you...but then again, you could also get super-laid.

Only 15 days late for Pride, or Queer Awareness, or whatever June is nowadays,
Anne

2009-07-09T22:15:00.002-04:00

Helen Mirren...in a bikini (?!?) at 63

So apparently this picture was published to the world at large in Dec. of last year, and I just wasn't paying attention. Go ahead and google "Helen Mirren bikini." I'll wait.

Holy Mary Mother of Christ, is she not gorgeous? I had previously set my "attract-dar" at an upper limit of 40, with a few notable exceptions (exemplia gratiae: Dame Mirren herself, the lovely Catherine Deneuve, the ravishing Isabelle Huppert, and the incomparable Meryl Streep). But looking at old magazines in my therapist's waiting room today, I was accosted--that is really the only appropriate word--by that photo of Helen Mirren, who is old enough not just to be my mother, but in fact to be my grandmother. So, as the kids say, what gives?

One could, if one were bloody-minded, point to my own psychological pecadilloes and mommy-issues. However. There remains another option: hotness is not in fact a package with a sell-by date. Self-confidence, good health, a sense of humor (and good Goddess, those ode-worthy breasts that would have moved even Homer, and we all know how those Greeks were)...these are the makings of attractiveness. I am not ashamed to say it. Even on my 200 mg of notoriously libido-killing Zoloft, today in that waiting room, a photograph of a 'mature woman' gave me serious physical needs.

Further disclosure: This issue of People (for such it was) had pictures of other "older women"--defined in Hollywood parlance as anyone significantly post-pubertal--who had undergone cosmetic surgery, or had other assorted procedures in order to 'age gracefully.' 30 year olds getting Botox. Poor body-obsessed Janice Dickinson, who should by now (at least in my opinion) be focused more on her legacy, such as it is, than her legs, with full-body lifts and Lord knows what else. None of these women--especially not those who'd been tucked and implanted and sanded into oblivion--held a candle to the au naturel (as far as I know) Ms. Mirren. So there.

2009-04-25T13:17:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-04-24T19:30:00.004-04:00

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.

2009-03-13T01:14:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-03-04T08:56:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-02-22T20:34:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-02-14T02:17:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-01-19T20:07:00.001-05:00

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.

2009-01-15T21:12:00.002-05:00

Everyone comes to terms with adversity in their own way. I'm usually a joker, occasionally a moper, always a writer.
About a month ago I began having some bizarre symptoms--the most family-appropriate being killer headaches, but others...well, I'll put these in medicalese and hope those with vested interest either already know what I'm talking about or have the motivation and intellectual capacity to consult a dictionary...amenorrhea (which I've had quite a while...occupational hazard of ED/distance running, and speaking of which, the marathon training has been going phenomenally, thanks for asking!) and galactorrhea. Well. I'm definitely not pregnant--nor have I been, ever, and I'm not on birth cotrol. So, what's high-ish on a differential diagnosis for such a set of symptoms? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? (See? Joker). That's right, Virginia, this weird little thing called a prolactinoma--a prolactin (the hormone that causes women--and sometimes men--to secrete milk from the mammary glands) secreting tumor on the pituitary.

Usually benign, generally treatable with medication--though the medication has a not-so-cheery side effect profile, including inducing depression, which is at the top of a long list called "Shit I don't need to deal with, especially during my medical education, thank you SO much." And then there's, y'know, brain surgery. But of course I'm putting the cart before the horse. The preliminary tests come back tomorrow. We'll see what they show.

2009-01-02T00:26:00.003-05:00

In celebration of the new year, a list of some of the best advice I've ever received.

By no means complete, but interesting all the same.

Sometimes you've just got to say, "fuck it." --Deb Linderblood, a dietitian at the EDU, on what to do when the battle in my head just won't wind down. It became our code, for instance when I was staring warily at a huge dessert that was part of my meal plan...

When you're done peeing, what do you do? Shake your dick off. When you're done pumping gas, what do you do? Shake your dick off. --Amina Omari, describing how to get those last precious drops off the nozzle

That high-speed, slumped-over walk you do on campus? That's the dork walk. Slow down. --Amina Omari again

Oh, honey, don't mix red with white!--Suzanne Guthrie, some years ago, on wine consumption and the probable consequences of having shiraz and chardonnay in the same evening. Believe it or not, we were having dinner with a bunch of kick-ass nuns at the time.

The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen. --Antoine de St. Exupery

"Are you like this about everything?"
"Like what?" (me)
"Do you have to control everything in the world?"--Taryn Mattice on letting go

It's not the things I've gone and done/ I'll regret or be ashamed/ but the things I did not say or do/ because I was afraid --Carrie Newcomer

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. --the Bible, somewhere, via Elizabeth Peters

I want you to breathe. You look like you're not breathing. --Beth Parker

Anxiety is excitement without breath. Breathe. --Lucinda Ramberg (anyone noticing a pattern?)

Think outside the mouth! --Suzanne Guthrie again, yay!

Moshe says you're not a failure. --Addie L-Z, my best pal. It's an inside joke.

Do not multiply entities beyond necessity. --Sir Occam; his razor specifically. Good advice for philosophy, even better advice for writing. Someone needs to have a talk with the biochem faculty about this.

Never negotiate from a place of desperation. --Niccolo Machiavelli (So was he saying always always have some dirt on the other person that you can use for leverage, or was he advocating taking a .45 in a calf holster to the bargaining table?)

People here stress themselves out so much. They use the word 'fail' all the time--'I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail!' Well, I've come up with a nice rhyme to address that. It's easy--if you fail, you go to Kahl. --N. G. with another inside joke

2008-12-31T22:30:00.002-05:00

HOPE

And you ask me what I want this year
And I try to make this kind and clear
Just a chance that maybe we'll find better days
Cause I don't need boxes wrapped in strings
And designer love and empty things
Just a chance that maybe we'll find better days

So take these words
And sing out loud
Cause everyone is forgiven now
Cause tonight's the night the world begins again
--Better Days, by a band whose name I am too embarrassed to mention.

After 2008, arguably one of the worst years of my life (at least the first half).
For 2009. Happy New Year. Here's hoping.

2008-12-31T19:46:00.002-05:00

Geographic preferences

The state of the world leaves a lot to be desired as we look into 2009. Yet let's look at the things that are good, the gems that each country has to offer...in a slightly less dirge-y and dignified way. The economy's going to hell and we may be running out of oil, but let's have a little fun. Here are my two cents, anyway.

Country: Germany.
Pros: Beer, Angela Merkel, green technology, exacting standards, the poetry of Goethe and Schiller.
Cons: Neo-Nazis, exacting standards, people from former East Germany who are still economically depressed and pissed off, a resume that would be red-flagged in an instant ("You were doing what from 1939 to 1945?") PS. Sorry resume is spelled with a regular "e" but I can't be bothered to add the accent right now, 'k?

Country: France
Pros: Wine, several of my favorite actresses (Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche), 'progressive' sexual mores (see also STDs, under 'cons'...)
Cons: General demeanor, second-hand smoke

Country: Italy
Pros: Cuisine (especially angel-hair pasta, limoncello and tiramisu), long leisurely lunches, fashion, olive oil, Isabella Rossellini (twenty years ago...not that I still wouldn't, but, you know...), Roman ruins and generally an assload of historically interesting sites
Cons: Riding scooters without helmets=brain injury, the Vatican (which is really a separate country, I know), Mafia wars

Country: Sweden
Pros: Democratic socialism, the occasional reindeer, same-sex unions, a profusion of 6'6'' blondes
Cons: It's always cold as balls, and the seasonal affective disorder is so rampant that Sweden (or is it Norway? You can see this has been exhaustively researched) has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

Country: UK
Pros: History, and did I mention history? Also more minsters and cathedrals than you can shake a stick at. A fantastic literary tradition. Pubs. British humor.
Cons: A less-fantastic history of colonization and forced conquest. British food.

Country: Iceland
Pros: Bjork (Sorry for the lack of umlaut; see note on accent grave, above). Wealth and peace and happiness. Geothermal energy and hot springs.
Cons: Bjork. Long, unpronounceable and constantly-morphing last names.

Country: Canada
Pros: Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morrissette, the health-care system, and the fact that with one very notable exception, every Canadian I've ever known has been a great human being--real mensches. Ever since I saw the segment on Canada in "Bowling for Columbine," I've thought it must be a stand-up kind of place...just nifty, y'know?
Cons: Proximity to Sarah Palin, marauding moose, marauding Quebecois.

2008-12-20T01:25:00.004-05:00

Finals are over. I realize I haven't written here in a long time, nor on my sister blog, medicalschoolmayhem.blogspot.com but here I am, returning, always returning. I haven't written much this semester, online or off, and that bothers me, because it is always returning to the steady stream of words, the artesian well of verbiage, that makes me feel refreshed and alive. Not that there's no life in science; there is, of course, but it's a different brand of magic, cold and polished, where words are organic and rowdy and allow for the holding of multiple truths at once; language never moves beyond hypothesis into certainty, and of course I (indecisive as I am) find this a great comfort. Today I told a story at a party and mentioned Judith Butler (I'm sure those of you with liberal arts backgrounds know her) and no one knew who I was talking about--biochem and biology majors all, of course--and I felt a pang of longing for those days in gender studies classes and German literature courses when spending an hour arguing Schiller's turn of phrase or Spivak's elucidation of the hegemonic discourse was a noble and worthwhile pursuit. It still is, of course, it's just not what I'm doing now.

And now the semester is over, and I realize I've really committed myself to this path of servant leadership--to doctoring, in other words--and I am at once gratified, terrified, euphoric and nonplussed. What have I accomplished, really? I've learned a great deal, of course; I can tell you the three different types of intercranial hematomas, I know the difference between a macrophage and a lymphocyte on visual inspection, I can do a basic musculoskeletal exam. But what life have I changed? Whose heart have I touched? Of course we all do those things all the time, without knowing; silly ambitious me, even in altruism I want to be the best. So in a museful and (slightly inebriated, I will readily admit) state, I looked through the books on my shelf--the ones I haven't had time to read in four months because I've been staring at pictures of dissected pelvises and physiology diagrams--and took down W. H. Auden, and turned to a rather melancholy poem I've loved since I first read it: "September 1, 1939," written of course in response to Germany's invasion of Poland, but also an uncovering of basic human truths and desires. Two of the last stanzas have really become manifestos of mine:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-on-the-street,
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or police:
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the light
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

2008-11-09T19:39:00.004-05:00

The "father" language of the Church has always given me problems--not only because of its inherent sexism (and insistence that G-d is similar enough to humanity that it even makes sense to assign a sex to Divinity). And the Episcopal church, at least, insists that the Lord's (!) prayer is the perfect prayer--it begins with "Our Father who art in Heaven," emphasizing not just Divinity's maleness but separateness from all our affairs; God is in heaven, far far away, and moreover a man. The Nicene Creed is the "sufficient statement of faith," and I can't even say it in good conscience, because it begins with "I believe in God the Father."
I found this at http://among.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/our-mother/ , a Quaker website, and it really connected. It made sense. I could say that in church and not feel conflicted or awkward or ashamed.

Our Mother who art among us, holy do we name thee.Thy home be here,thy grace appear in Act as it does in Spirit. Prepare with us our daily bread, and heal us of wrongdoing as we learn to free those that wrong us. Test us not beyond our ability, but keep our souls from destruction, for in thee is our home, and our strength, and our beauty, now and always. Amen.

2008-11-07T20:38:00.004-05:00

In what may or may not become a regular feature, this is what I had for dinner last night...feeding yourself as a medical student (not to mention one with an ED) is difficult. I base most of my food decisions on 3 criteria--and I realize I am more discerning than many have the luxury of being. But here it is: fast, cheap, and healthy. So without further ado, Anne's Healthy Eating for Medical Students (and other folk with little money and even less free time) Recipe 1.

Huevos Rancheros Wraps--great for any meal!
Take a corn tortilla or two (not made with lard--check the package).
Sprinkle it with a little low-fat cheese and microwave the sucker.
While it's in the micro, scramble yourself some EggBeaters, or whole eggs if you're not worried about your cholesterol (and eggs, in moderation, don't really spike your cholesterol...so don't fret, chitlins!)
Pull the tortilla out, pile the scrambled eggs on there, and top with salsa.
Roll and eat.
Roll your eyes in orgasmic delight and know you've gotten some lean protein and some fiber to fuel your insane-ane-ane lifestyle.
Go study.