1) Maybe codine just makes me edgy and hostile.
2) Or maybe it's the fact that this is my second sickness in a month. Two weeks of February spent being sick. That is fucking. ridiculous. Doesn't my body know I've got shit to do and people to see and things to study? Doesn't it know that all the time spent indoors instead of outside in the sun means a spiral into late-winter SAD???? WHAT THE FUCK IMMUNE SYSTEM?! COME ON!
2a) I also find it really interesting how sensitive I am to the comments about how I am "always" sick. Seriously. If you want to piss me right off, tell me that I'm always sick. I had swine flu in November and then I've been sick for two weeks in February. Maybe to SOME people that's "always" sick, but to me, that's called winter. Working in a hospital. See how defensive it makes me? Why is that? Is having a shit immune system somehow equated with being a "weak" human being in my brain? I'm also sensitive when people rib me about taking medication when I'm sick. Like toughing it out through an illness is so much better than taking some fucking Mucinex and being able to function. Why do people think that toughing it out is better than taking meds? Do they think that if some future apocalypse should hit and the pharmaceutical companies should be blown to smithereens that suddenly I would shrivel and die upon catching cold, while they would laugh heartily in the face of illness and go do something tough, like chop wood and birth babies? Or maybe both at the same time. Guess what? Toughing it out through a fucking flu virus doesn't make you Paul Fucking Bunyan.
3) Today we were talking about gender differences in healthcare. Which sort of bothers me. It's kind of like this destructive cycle. You take a researched little factoid like "men are less likely to be diagnosed and treated for depression" and we talk about reasons why that might be. We talk about how men are socialized to ignore pain, socialized to "not talk" about their feelings, socialized to not go to the doctor for psychological illness, socialized to think mental illness is a weakness, etc. And then we talk about public health initiatives that might encourage more men to go to the doctor. But what's problematic to me is that by building upon stereotypes in order to extend care (someone suggested creating a support group for depressed men but disguising it so that it wouldn't involve the words "talking" or "feeling" and would instead use the word "doing"), we're just further contributing to the stereotypes that have created the problem in the first place. My professor didn't particularly care for this observation btw. This however, is the man who described all women as "empathizers" and all men as "systematizers." He's got his positive points, but gender neutral conceptualization isn't one of them. God, gender stereotypes piss me the fuck off. What pisses me off even more is when people in my life actually ABIDE by them. Blurg. Blurg indeed.
4) I now have a Facebook friend who is also a school colleague. For some reason, that makes me feel vulnerable. I have no idea why. Good thing there aren't that many people in my program.
5) I think Top Gear is one of the funniest television shows of all time. Seriously. I watched an episode tonight and laughed my guts out. Who knew that three British dudes talking about cars could be so funny? I've also learned a lot about cars and can now say big impressive car words like "Bugatti" and can tell you that an M5 is faster than the new Jag due to the fact that the M5 doesn't waste speed (whatever that means), but that the Jag has 80 pounds more torque than the M5 does. Are you impressed with my car verbage? No? You should be. I drive an 11-year old Toyota Echo. It's the only car I've ever owned and the most work I've ever done on it personally is to help change the brake pads and once I replaced a tail light. Weeeee. Cars....
6) I think my favorite food is the french fry. Honestly. Or, more honester (wahahahaha! grammar!), the sweet potato fry. Those things are the BEST THINGS EVER. And I never have them. It's like the tease of the food world. I rarely eat at places that offer fries and when I do, I rarely get them. But god they are good. Sooooooo delectable. Michael Pollan says that you should only eat junk food that you make yourself, mostly because it's all so goldarn difficult to make, that you'll only make it once in a blue moon. He's right. Good fries are hard to make. Also hard to make but delicious: eclairs. I once had the dream of swimming in a vat of eclair cream, like they do in jello in that Disney adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk.
Alright, it's now been 64 minutes since the taking of the codine and I'm not feeling at all tired, but I'm stopping because I ran out of coherent and interesting things to talk about 6 numbers ago. (Takes a bow)