I was washing my grandmother’s dishes after a dinner to which I had brought my SO.
“When you get married?” she demanded. I, for once, was prepared.
“Four years. After school.”
“Aiyaa, four years? Too long! I dead by then!”
Which, along with the tin of Danish butter cookies, is how I know that my grandparents like my boyfriend.
I also got to hear the “woosh-woosh” of blood moving through my heart valves and see the doppler readings that show the direction the blood is moving.
The machine used for an echocardiogram is the same machine used for a fetal sonogram; the tool is a different shape, probably to penetrate better between the ribs, and the technician has to work around the electrodes on the chest, which are hooked up like a partial EKG. When you’re so used to seeing other people’s babies in that grainy black-and-white wedge, it can be disconcerting to see something else, and even more so to realise then that the something else is you.
So yeah. My heart, on the monitor, looks like a series of chambers with valves in between, and that’s pretty much all I can tell you. The technician measured all the wall thicknesses and chamber dimensions for the four views she took, each for a different valve, and then left me to peel away the gel-soaked hospital gown off and rub my torso off with scratchy washcloths.
I never expected to see my own insides up on a monitor, and fear rises, a dull ache, from my chest to my throat. At this resolution my own valves flapping in the ventricular breeze are suddenly rendered fragile, mortal and tragic.
What did the hydroxyl say to the carbonyl?
“Oh, let’s not be so formyl.”
I don’t think the meme even deserves a formal refutation, so I’ll just say that the USian Thanksgiving turkey is not stuffed with the rape and murder of Native peoples, the table does not rest on the backs of bodies on the Trail of Tears, and cranberry sauce is not the blood of Geronimo. Thank you, Margaret Cho, and thank you, everybody else busy ranting and whining; you can all stuff the turkey with your goddamned overblown rhetoric and leaps of logic.
I don’t like turkey, but I used Thanksgiving to spend time with my family, forget about school for a few days, and count my motherfucking blessings. I didn’t commemorate the sacrifices of some fanatic Christian whitefolk, and I didn’t idolise the altruism of the Native folk who put up with them. I don’t hold modern Japanese responsible for the rape of Nanking, I don’t tell modern Germans that they’re stepping all over Jewish gayboy graves, and neither can I berate myself for the death rained down on earlier inhabitatants of this continent by half of my ancestors.
Ackowledgement of those wrongs does not mean that I have to wallow in shame for acts I did not commit and cannot rectify. Most people’s ancestors have comitted genocide; to claim that USian Thanksgiving is a holiday commemorating historically recent acts of racial slaughter is to insult those of us aware of the shameful acts that accompanied the formation of the US, and to ignore any reasons real USians have for continuing to celebrate the holiday.
In my undergraduate career, that is.
It’s a pretty tame dead week, all told; it should be a pretty tame finals week, too. I have two finals, both on the same day, and I plan on getting plenty of slacking done after next tuesday.
Non-class things I must do between then and now:
Then, once exams are done, perhaps I can be arsed to write an entry that isn’t a giant list.