And I Thought Manhattan Real Estate Was Bad!

I'm watching HouseHunters International and laughing hysterically. A couple is going to buy a 735-square-foot apartment in Tokyo with no dishwasher, a clothes washer sitting at the end of the bathtub, and a refrigerator the size of the one I had in my college dormroom. The bargain price? $500,000!

What Color Is Your Puke?

I'm reading up on "ileus," which is a bowel obstruction, because my patient yesterday had one, and I didn't know anything about it. I learned that when a patient vomits, what their puke looks like can tell you a little about where the bowel obstruction might be. For instance, clear liquid means it's probably right up by their stomach, and if it's bile-colored and liquidy, that means the obstruction is in the upper small instestine.


Then I got to this:


"Feculent vomitus indicates bacterial overgrowth proximal to the obstruction and is a poor prognostic sign."

It made me laugh. It's terrible, but that statement might be the world's best understatement. Yeah, I would think that if a patient is puking up feces, that probably is a pretty bad sign, prognosis-wise.

Letter to the Charge Nurse: Clinical Day 1

Dear Charge Nurse,


Today was my very first clinical day as a student nurse. Please, in the future, do not ask me to change the bedsheets on a woman who has an unsplinted broken arm that is just wrapped up in a soft bandage because she is having surgery on it tonight. I know you gave her some kind of painkiller, but it didn't work, and her shrieks of pain as I attempted to roll her over in bed to get the new sheets on were extremely distressing. For all of us--me, her, the people passing in the hallway, and the other nursing students who were helping me. That shit could have waited until she went to surgery and her bed was unoccupied.


Sincerely,
Queenjulie

I'm Totally Famous

STFU, Jezzies, just posted a comment I sent in. I am ridiculously excited about this.

Victim Blaming: Mommy Edition

Jezebel has a post up today on birth rape that is causing quite a stir. According to the commenters on there, it's not okay to tell a rape victim, "Well, at least you weren't murdered! What are you complaining about?" However, if a woman says that her doctor sexually assaulted her while she was giving birth, say, by strapping her legs into stirrups and then shoving both hands in her vagina with no warning or consent, it's fine to tell her, "He was just trying to deliver your baby! What are you complaining about?" After all, doctors know best! No doctor has ever done an unnecessary cesarean, or a totally unneeded episiotomy, or tied a woman down during birth!

Or, say, offered a medical student a chance to do a fucking pelvic exam on an unconscious woman who was having surgery, just to practice, because, hey, the lady would never know the difference, right?!

Yeah. Go read these stories and then tell me birth rape doesn't exist.

Scent-sation

I think onions gently sauteeing in butter might be the very best smell ever. Really.

Lamest. Hurricane. Ever.

Whatever, Earl! I bought $100 worth of junk food that doesn't need cooking and enough bottled water to float the entire Navy, and what do I get? No trees down, no shingles lost, not even a power outage! I still have to go to school today! What's up with that, huh? I do appreciate getting to take the kids to school today, since they're going to be home on Monday for the holiday, and three straight days of full-time children makes me sort of insane. But since we still have electricity, how am I going to have an excuse to eat the 18 chocolate/peanut butter granola bars that I bought? Answer me that, dumbass loser hurricane.

Fuck This Noise

The Fuck-It List is an absolutely genius idea. Instead of a stupid "bucket list" of crap you want to do before you kick the bucket (which is such an annoying name awkwardly taken from a stupid idiom) but haven't gotten around to doing yet, how about a list of stuff you aren't going to do, say, or tolerate? Yeah! Way more fun!

My Fuck-It List

I will not:

1. Skydive. That shit might be a rush, but risking death for an adrenaline surge is fucking stupid.

2. Let people spew racist speech in my home or in my e-mail. I used to tolerate it on my computer, and figured it wasn't too much trouble to delete it, but I'm done with that. If you send me hateful e-mail forwards (or anything praising Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin), or if your Facebook status is a series of screeds about how the Muslim president is going to steal all your guns, I'm done with you.

3. Eat escargot. I've done this before. Snails are fucking gross. The only thing good about escargot is that it's floating in a puddle of melted butter and garlic. You know what's not gross? Just melting some butter with garlic and eating it! Maybe with a crab cake or some toast points! Yum!

4. Enjoy reading Moby Dick, anything by Charles Dickens, or Jane Eyre.

5. Enjoy watching baseball. That crap is boring.

6. Jog.

7. Teach my kids that you have to believe in God to be a good person.

8. Quit drinking. I enjoy alcohol, and I'm not going to feel guilty about that.

9. Let my dentist make me feel guilty for not flossing.

Clouds Rolling In

Hurricane Earl is announcing his arrival--the sky was clear and blue this morning, but now the clouds are rolling in and it's starting to get breezy. It won't be here until late tonight, but he's definitely on his way.

We aren't evacuating; they aren't recommending evacuations for our town, and I think we'll be safe. I'm sure we'll be out of power and maybe water for a while, but I've got supplies. My main worry is the big, tall, gorgeous trees that surround our house; if they fall, they could hurt us. But hopefully we'll be just fine.

Bad Day

Sorry for the lack of postiness today. It's the anniversary of my mother's death. My husband is at work until some future date, setting up hurricane relief efforts. I spent most of the evening trying to convince my crying kids--and myself--that the hurricane isn't going to kill us tomorrow night.

All I really want to do is lie in bed with about six beers and look at pictures of my mom.

Thank You, Mr. Obama: From a Military Wife

"The American combat mission in Iraq has ended."


I am crying. I remember exactly where I was the night President Bush announced that we were going to war with Iraq. I was in a bar with a friend, staring in disbelief at one of the tv screens above the bar, watching Bush announce a new war, and I burst into tears and sobbed in the middle of the bar.


My husband was already in Afghanistan. It was six months after our wedding; he deployed two weeks after our wedding, six days after we got home from our honeymoon. I spent every single day terrified that I would never see him again. That I would become a war widow before I'd even had an anniversary. I knew the Iraq war meant that he would deploy again, and again, and again, and that he would be at risk even longer.


He came home safe to me twice, from two separate combat deployments. I was lucky. So many people haven't come home, or have come home forever changed by what happened to them over there. The end of this war means the beginning of new hope for military families. There is still another war, one that has gotten much more dangerous lately, and one that is incredibly important. But at least it's only one war.


One is enough. Thank you, Mr. President.

Help, Please

Please go to Learning to Hope, where Tashi has set up a Paypal account for her and her husband (the direct link is here). He has terminal brain cancer and cannot work, and she has to care for him full time. They could really use a hand, and I'm posting this to spread the word. I know money is tight for everyone these days--even if it's just five dollars, it will make a difference to them. Newspaper coverage of their story is here. Please help.

Hurricane Update

Hurricane Earl has become a Category 3 storm, and may be a Category 4 by tonight. I am in a corner, hyperventilating. My kids are watching tv while my husband prepares to leave. He's deploying tomorrow morning, and then I'll be on my own with the kids until the hurricane is over. I've made hotel reservations in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, in case we have to evacuate. We've got food and bottled water, and a generator. My husband is outside, reinforcing the hurricane straps that hold our not-yet-finished toolshed, which he has been building by hand for the past three months. It's almost done, and I'm afraid all his hundreds of hours of work are going to be demolished. Not to mention our home.


:breathing into a paper bag

I'm Afraid.

This post was meant to be funny, but now I'm really freaking out. Tropical Storm Earl has become Hurricane Earl, and my house is well within the estimated storm track. I've been obsessively checking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's website to see the updates. I keep thinking, "I just bought this house. We haven't even been here a year. I have school! I can't miss that! What will I tell my kids if we have to evacuate, or if our house is destroyed?"

Did I mention that my husband is an emergency manager? He gets all the storm updates instantly, so I get to hear all the bad news before most people, and if we do evacuate, he stays here and helps save lives. So I'm on my own to keep the kids safe and get everything we need, and ourselves, to safety.

I'm from California; we don't have hurricanes there. I'm scared.

Racism? No way! Not Us! Sexism? Hell to the Yeah!

This Wonkette post has a very funny list of quotes from people's Facebook statuses using the misspelled word "mosk," regarding the community center in New York. You can read them yourself and be baffled by people's hatred and virulent stupidity.


I'm writing, however, about the commenters on the post. They seem to be fully aware of the racism in the post and are using it as an excellent springboard from which to criticize that racism. They also seem totally happy to do so while spewing completely uncensored, hateful sexism. For instance, in response to "Wow, watching NCIS. Do we really want the mosk in the city?" with a photo of a fairly large woman, Wonkette's commenters include the following lovely gems:

That last woman looks like she needs to stop watching NCIS and get her tub-o-lard ass outside to exercise, the fat is making it impossible for her to smile while she spews her hatred.

Wow watching NCIS and showing off my grotesquely fat and wrinkly rack.

And a woman whose photo shows her holding a little girl, we get:

"Nice example to set for your tardling, Debra. Unless Debra is the pictured tardling, in which case she’s setting a terrible example for her momma-sister."

Nice. Racism? Not here! We hate those racist assholes! Sexism? Oh, heck yeah! We hate women, too! 

Re.: Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck, crazy right-wing racist tv personality and gold salesman, is holding a rally today. A friend reminded me of this:


"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. " 


--Martin Luther King, Jr. 


Please don't keep silent. Write letters to your Congressional representatives. Vote. Go to the counter-protests if you're in the DC area. Talk to your friends. Please.


Sincerely,
Queenjulie

Cutting People Open!

Did I forget to mention that I found out that next semester, we get to observe a surgery?!! Whoo hoo! Cutting people open! I have been dying to watch a surgery since I first decided to go to nursing school. Now I just have to make it through the first semester so I can get that far!

So Fucking True

From: http://survivingtheworld.net/Lesson698.html

Nudity and Othering: National Geographic

I was getting ready to write about the colonial gaze and how nonwhite women's bodies (particularly African women's bodies) are considered more available for public view than white women's bodies. The example that immediately came to mind was National Geographic Magazine; after all, who doesn't remember flipping through it, looking for scandalous pictures of bare-chested African women, because it's okay to show them naked, right? They're primitives!


So I hopped over to the NatGeo site to see what recent examples of colonial gazing I might find, and came upon this Q&A in their NGC Blog, about their show, "Taboo":

Q: I was extremely disappointed in this episode of naked taboo where National Geographic considered it acceptable to show the breasts of the African women but censored those of the white women in the United States and Australia. Too many times I have to be disgusted by this blatant form of bias where one considers a culture or race to be superior to another. I hope National Geographic makes a greater attempt to stop this form of bias.

A: Thank your for your recent question about our Taboo program on nudity. It's a good question that we've wrestled with and we've worked to develop a policy that we believe is consistent and respectful. Our policy for showing naked breasts, and when, is based on decency standards for broadcast television here in the U.S., and on the cultural norms of the people we are featuring. It is not based on race. Generally we will show nudity when the broader local culture sanctions it as part of daily, regular public life, and we obscure it when it is not part of the regular public culture. In the Taboo: Nudity show, as you noted, we see blurred female Caucasian breasts and unblurred female African breasts. While there may seem to be an inconsistency here, the distinction lies in the culture in which the practice was filmed. In this program, the societies in which the Caucasian women were filmed (various states in the U.S. and Sydney, Australia) regard female breasts as private parts of the body. In these societies, it's generally not accepted for women to appear in public, daily life without covering their breasts. Yet the society in which the African women were filmed (the Hamar of southern Ethiopia) female breasts aren't viewed in the same private manner. Because our presentation of nudity is dictated by local customs, a program that covered a nude public beach in a Caucasian country where those beaches are legal and normal, for example, might include some shots of unblurred female Caucasian breasts. Interestingly, in another Taboo episode, "Body Modification", we profile the practice of breast ironing in Cameroon. In that story, the breasts of the featured young African woman are blurred, since we filmed the segment in a private home, and within that Cameroonian society, female breasts (whether African or Caucasian) are kept covered. Again, thank you for this excellent question; I hope this clarifies our policy.

I have mixed feelings about this. I am glad that the people at NatGeo have thought about this issue and attempted to create a coherent policy for dealing with it. (I can't find an actual copy of the police online, but that's not surprising, given than it's for internal, editorial use.) And I appreciate their noting that they blurred out Cameroonian women's breasts because those women do not show their breasts publicly, so at least they seem to be following the policy.


But is this policy any different than the colonial gaze? That is, if we view breasts as private, sexual parts, why is is okay to look at them on people who don't feel that way? If we look at breasts with a sexual intent, aren't we in a sense sexually violating the women who are filmed, because they did not consent to show their bodies in a sexual manner? I realize we cannot legislate people's thoughts, and I cannot force people to watch this show without feeling titillated, any more than I can force a man who accidentally sees down my blouse if I bend over to not have a sexual thought about me. But it seems like we are still violating these women by allowing them to be viewed in a sexual manner that they are not expecting, when non-African women would know that showing their breasts on camera would be a sexual act and would presumably not consent to it.

Screw You, Tropical Storm Earl!

What the hell, Tropical Storm Earl? Hurricane Danielle finally turned right and decided not to screw my life all up, so you gotta be jumping up outta nowhere and frontin' like you're gonna come knock my freaking house down? Whatever, jackass! You think you can scare me, just because I can't afford flood insurance? Ha! My carpet is ugly anyway! And so's your face! Stupid, weak-sauce, wannabe hurricane. Screw you and the warm front you rode in on.


And you, potential tropical cyclone formation? Whatever. Kiss my ass with your "vigorous tropical wave accompanied by a broad low pressure system." You know what I'm going do to your vigorous tropical waves, loser? Get a big-assed piece of fiberglass and SURF ON YOUR STUPID FACE! So there!