Saturday, November 29, 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
Give thanks, dammit!
Thanksgiving is a holiday of lethargy and blah. It's that time of the year we all gather together and give thanks we're not as fat as the that bald uncle who insists that he sit at the head of the table every year.
My aunt put it best when she plopped down on the couch after dinner and declared herself a "beached whale". Which was a completely appropriate description for many of us, on many levels. I consider myself much like a whale in the sense that I feel enormous, much like the mass of a whale, but also by the fact that I feel a little stuck.
I brought home 50 pages of ethics reading and a jarbled page of notes, hoping to get to work on that inevitable final paper that always comes too soon, and I can't do a damn thing. I'm convinced that I've become "beached" on the food, family, readily warm shower water, remarkably soft toilet paper, and overall roominess of non-dorm living. Similar to a beach in its luxuriousness, different in the sense that there is no sand.
I try to understand Republicans; really I do. George Lakoff opened the door for me a bit with an excerpt from his book (link!), but damn them all if they still don't befuddle the hell out of me. It's kind of like (and forgive me for generalizing and simplifying the crap out of this): "Look! There's a man over there who is working 12 hour days to feed his family, has no health insurance, and is still struggling to get everything paid some months. I think I should give him a lecture about the American Dream, and point to radical examples of people who seemingly came out of nowhere to become millionaires! Yes!" or "Let's give the people making a few digits more than him a tax break and wait for the rebates to trickle down in the form of country club golf rounds and italian leather shoes!" or "Hey! I'm a self-made person with an innocent upper-middleclass caucasian background. If I can do it, he can too."
And my theory is that this train of thought comes from over-thinking. Maybe, just maybe if we put that person in the same house or neighborhood as a struggling family, and asked them to stay there for a few hours. Get personable. Sit down, have some coffee. I think there would be some primal form of empathy that would rise to the surface and want this man to have all the means to succeed in life that were available to him. Maybe a tax break. Or some kind of health care he didn't have to pay a quarter of his salary for.
But people are immersed in their own lives. I'm immersed in the noble, self-righteous, typical college student one right now! Maybe what we're immersed in are like little pools. Kiddy pools, we'll say that have a three foot radius and are 7 feet deep. And we're working to stay afloat, but we can see other people's pools. Some closer than others. You can't really get a good feel for what is going on in the other kiddy pools, only what you can see.
So maybe it is better to be beached; to pull yourself out of your safe kiddy pool and flop on the group between the pools. You lose the comfort of immersion, but the view sure is better.
My aunt put it best when she plopped down on the couch after dinner and declared herself a "beached whale". Which was a completely appropriate description for many of us, on many levels. I consider myself much like a whale in the sense that I feel enormous, much like the mass of a whale, but also by the fact that I feel a little stuck.
I brought home 50 pages of ethics reading and a jarbled page of notes, hoping to get to work on that inevitable final paper that always comes too soon, and I can't do a damn thing. I'm convinced that I've become "beached" on the food, family, readily warm shower water, remarkably soft toilet paper, and overall roominess of non-dorm living. Similar to a beach in its luxuriousness, different in the sense that there is no sand.
I try to understand Republicans; really I do. George Lakoff opened the door for me a bit with an excerpt from his book (link!), but damn them all if they still don't befuddle the hell out of me. It's kind of like (and forgive me for generalizing and simplifying the crap out of this): "Look! There's a man over there who is working 12 hour days to feed his family, has no health insurance, and is still struggling to get everything paid some months. I think I should give him a lecture about the American Dream, and point to radical examples of people who seemingly came out of nowhere to become millionaires! Yes!" or "Let's give the people making a few digits more than him a tax break and wait for the rebates to trickle down in the form of country club golf rounds and italian leather shoes!" or "Hey! I'm a self-made person with an innocent upper-middleclass caucasian background. If I can do it, he can too."
And my theory is that this train of thought comes from over-thinking. Maybe, just maybe if we put that person in the same house or neighborhood as a struggling family, and asked them to stay there for a few hours. Get personable. Sit down, have some coffee. I think there would be some primal form of empathy that would rise to the surface and want this man to have all the means to succeed in life that were available to him. Maybe a tax break. Or some kind of health care he didn't have to pay a quarter of his salary for.
But people are immersed in their own lives. I'm immersed in the noble, self-righteous, typical college student one right now! Maybe what we're immersed in are like little pools. Kiddy pools, we'll say that have a three foot radius and are 7 feet deep. And we're working to stay afloat, but we can see other people's pools. Some closer than others. You can't really get a good feel for what is going on in the other kiddy pools, only what you can see.
So maybe it is better to be beached; to pull yourself out of your safe kiddy pool and flop on the group between the pools. You lose the comfort of immersion, but the view sure is better.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Oh dear...
Can we talk about the Gardasil vaccine for a moment. Just a minute, I swear. And I will try my darndest to avoid using such shallow terms as "sexist", "self-righteous", and "flaming fucknut".
Today we discussed the Gardasil vaccine in the Ethics in Medicine course I'm taking. It fell into a lecture about public health, and the true definition of authonomy and what it means to cause harm to others. And of course the subject always comes up about possible side effects, and the discussion is always the same: "They've only tested it for 8 years, what if there are side effects? What if a whole generation of girls is infertile and sickly because of a recommendation from doctors?"
Except it's never phrased like that. It always runs more along the lines of "But there has only been 8 years of clinical trials, and that's not enough, you know? And then there's this worry that there will be this whole generation of infertile females with terrible side effects."
So now it sounds like there is valid worry going around, and we should all be fretting for our lives and uteri because of some imagined health crisis that has only been postulated as a worst of circumstances.
It's not so much waiting for more data before deciding you want to inject something into yourself or completely shunning the vaccine all together that bother me. It's the science fiction/thriller rumors that people haphazardly throw out there that make me want to bludgeon something. I could spread all kinds of nasty rumors about all kinds of nasty things (flu vaccines, soy, flouride, diet soda, florescent lightbulbs, exposure to dogs, exposure to cats, pork, perfume [you would not believe what that stuff does to your ovaries!], salt, pepper, rap music), but I don't. Because for the most part it's silly. And inconclusive. And the studies are conducted by scientists backed by parties with special interests with particular agendas that they want to promote.
And don't even get me started on the "vaccination leads to permiscuous acts of sexy-time and evil!" argument. Because I'd rather have a healthy cervix than chastity anyday, bitches.
Today we discussed the Gardasil vaccine in the Ethics in Medicine course I'm taking. It fell into a lecture about public health, and the true definition of authonomy and what it means to cause harm to others. And of course the subject always comes up about possible side effects, and the discussion is always the same: "They've only tested it for 8 years, what if there are side effects? What if a whole generation of girls is infertile and sickly because of a recommendation from doctors?"
Except it's never phrased like that. It always runs more along the lines of "But there has only been 8 years of clinical trials, and that's not enough, you know? And then there's this worry that there will be this whole generation of infertile females with terrible side effects."
So now it sounds like there is valid worry going around, and we should all be fretting for our lives and uteri because of some imagined health crisis that has only been postulated as a worst of circumstances.
It's not so much waiting for more data before deciding you want to inject something into yourself or completely shunning the vaccine all together that bother me. It's the science fiction/thriller rumors that people haphazardly throw out there that make me want to bludgeon something. I could spread all kinds of nasty rumors about all kinds of nasty things (flu vaccines, soy, flouride, diet soda, florescent lightbulbs, exposure to dogs, exposure to cats, pork, perfume [you would not believe what that stuff does to your ovaries!], salt, pepper, rap music), but I don't. Because for the most part it's silly. And inconclusive. And the studies are conducted by scientists backed by parties with special interests with particular agendas that they want to promote.
And don't even get me started on the "vaccination leads to permiscuous acts of sexy-time and evil!" argument. Because I'd rather have a healthy cervix than chastity anyday, bitches.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
The Halloween Post
I went this entire Halloween without once hearing "Monster Mash". Part of me wants to be thankful that that godawful song has finally fallen from the position of esteem it once held on the Oldies and Light Rock stations that covetted it, but the other part of me (you know, I divide cleanly in two if you work hard enough) kind of misses it. I have no applicable analogies at this point. Go ahead and fill in your own here.
There was also a lot less candy in my life this time around. I wonder why that is. It's probably the busy-ness, and the fact that without trick-or-treating, you get much less variety. Sure, you'll go to the grocery store and buy yourself an economy-sized bag thinking you'll be able to eat the entire thing of Reese's pumpkins, but after the third or fourth or nineth, you realize you are human, and you just can't do it. Curse mortality and all its limitations!
A friend of mine (actually, he's not really a friend... more like "a forced aquaintance"; I never know how to describe those people) said that I would probably end up being something sexy for Halloween. Because that's what the college girls do these days, they dress up in a predictable (and occasionally unpredictable) outfit, but make it sexy. So I refused to be sexy, and dressed up as a candy corn (yellow t-shirt, orange pants, white knee-high socks and various accessories with candy corn hot glued to them [note: candy corn does not enjoy being hot glued to anything ever; if attempted the corn that tastes like candy will rebel and fly off of your homemade jewelry all night, and hit people in the eye]). And I have to admit, I felt pretty unsexy... all night long.
The day after Halloween I was at an event for my service fraternity (don't ask... just call me "Brother Lisa"), and a girl there was dressed up like candy corn too! Except her outfit involved a mini-skirt and a plunging neckline. I don't know what the means, or what lessons can and should be drawn; I just thought I'd throw it out there.
In conclusion, Halloween was a scary event in which I witnessed people having sex (or one very involved make-out session) on the Arts Quad and concluded that any costume (seriously, any) can be made in such a way that a college girl will look like a fruity tooty lil sex kitten.
There was also a lot less candy in my life this time around. I wonder why that is. It's probably the busy-ness, and the fact that without trick-or-treating, you get much less variety. Sure, you'll go to the grocery store and buy yourself an economy-sized bag thinking you'll be able to eat the entire thing of Reese's pumpkins, but after the third or fourth or nineth, you realize you are human, and you just can't do it. Curse mortality and all its limitations!
A friend of mine (actually, he's not really a friend... more like "a forced aquaintance"; I never know how to describe those people) said that I would probably end up being something sexy for Halloween. Because that's what the college girls do these days, they dress up in a predictable (and occasionally unpredictable) outfit, but make it sexy. So I refused to be sexy, and dressed up as a candy corn (yellow t-shirt, orange pants, white knee-high socks and various accessories with candy corn hot glued to them [note: candy corn does not enjoy being hot glued to anything ever; if attempted the corn that tastes like candy will rebel and fly off of your homemade jewelry all night, and hit people in the eye]). And I have to admit, I felt pretty unsexy... all night long.
The day after Halloween I was at an event for my service fraternity (don't ask... just call me "Brother Lisa"), and a girl there was dressed up like candy corn too! Except her outfit involved a mini-skirt and a plunging neckline. I don't know what the means, or what lessons can and should be drawn; I just thought I'd throw it out there.
In conclusion, Halloween was a scary event in which I witnessed people having sex (or one very involved make-out session) on the Arts Quad and concluded that any costume (seriously, any) can be made in such a way that a college girl will look like a fruity tooty lil sex kitten.
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