notageek

I have a German last name. The only parts of me that look even remotely German are my nose and my chest, and since I have bronchitis and have been wearing a preponderance of wooly sweaters lately, most people can’t tell about the chest. That leaves the nose and the name, which, in the mishmash of Europeana that is the US, might well have converged just by chance.

Except. Except, you know, I look neither especially German nor especially anything else, so people don’t notice the combined force of name and nose and do what people have pretty much always done: assume. My class of P1s is composed largely of young women of Asian descent. It’s the first time I’ve been tall, true–but it is also the first time I haven’t been particularly Asian. One of my classmates, from (the) Ukraine, assumed I was Polynesian. Another, from Vietnam, assumed I was Native American. I wonder if the Native American Center of Excellence director assumed the same thing when I stopped by her office to pick up a copy of the syllbus the other day, or if she smiles that gentle smile at everybody.

I wonder if it would chafe if people could make the correct assumption about my ethnicity, or if the assumption itself is what’s jarring. I wonder if it would matter as much if I actually had an ethnic in-group, even one on the other side of the fucking world.

There’s a big hunky blonde Russian guy in my class. I wonder if he sees an “oh, Russian” click in people’s faces. I wonder if it’s jarring.

But it doesn’t really matter, because I need to get to cadaver lab–where older is better, where sex is defleshed and signs of race, ethnicity, size and pathology are literally stripped away.

I just want some durable dishes with a red band on the edge or the outside, so I can add them to my fucking registry and wait in vain for people to snap them up on my behalf. Why is that so hard? Why are dishes all covered in flowers and shit? Maybe it makes the egg-yolk stains harder to see.

My Gnu Ear’s resolution for this quarter is to get through this quarter. It’s not that I’m falling all to pieces like last quarter because I have no friends no family no anybody in town and my live-in landlady is psycho and I slept through a medchem test and and and and oh god I’m totally falling apart.

No, thankfully it’s an entirely different and more managable type of getting through–the one that involves gritting teeth and saying “motherfuck” a lot, rather than the kind that involves trying really hard not to cry in the middle of class just beCAUSE and mostly succeeding, kind of.

No, the resolution this quarter is breathing with open nostrils in the midst of the towering piles of bullshit that have been shoved my way this quarter. The good classes this term include the cadaver lab–and for reference I should explain that I don’t yet have the courage to study alone in the lab where Stinky sleeps.

I have to volunteer this quarter. That’s a little tooth-gritting, given that all the choices given for volunteering were rather on the sucky side, and that three hours plus travel time out of the week of someone taking 18 credits is non-negligible, but it’s certainly tolerable, and barely within the scope of relevance. What isn’t tolerable is a crappily-organized class with hourlong student-facilitated seminars every week for which we have to read dozens of pages AND turn in reflective journals and papers on our crap unpaid jobs. Oh, excuse me, service learning opportunity.

I have never been so agitated or seen so much wasted time in a class before. I wonder if low bullshit tolerance is a documentable disability.

There’s two other BS classes which independently would be not so bad (I do find “professionalism points” belittling and condescending), but they’ve combined with the above class to form a new and unbelievably powerful automaton of suckiness. Quit it with the motherfucking professionalism bullshit, already. I spent my undergraduate education stepping out of my frames of reference and shifting my fucking paradigm and learning to approach people where they stand. I am an excellent counselour, a decent compounder and I am very eager to become a pharmacist and improve the system by meeting people’s pharmaceutical care needs, not learning by learning to understand them by washing motherfucking dishes at 10:30 on friday night and writing reflective motherfucking papers about the crappy experience.

My resolution for this quarter, refactored, is to say “motherfuck” as many times as necessary to get through this motherfucking goddamn bullshit quarter.

My class had to generate a long pledge of professionalism, recite it in a ceremony and sign it, and it is posted outside the office of student affairs. We also get downgraded on assignments in a certain lab for unprofessional behaviour or dress, and lectured on how our off-time behaviour reflects on our career becase (lest we forget) we are now professional students, and shouldn’t be doing naughty recreational things like swearing or showing cleavage.

All of this emphasis on professionalism is in part because the practice of pharmacy was somewhat deprofessionalised during the middle of the, er, last century. The trend was more and more away from extemporaneous compounding, which used to be the bulk of all apothecary duties, and towards dispensing orders of premanufactured tablets, capsules and creams. Patient counseling on drug administration was at this time mainly a physician duty, or was ignored altogether, and the pharmacist role was shrinking, much like the god outside of science, down to pillcounting and dispensing. The renaissance came in the sixties with patient counselling and clinical pharmacy, and is continuing to come now with in-depth consults, greater education and patient demand. (“Patient demand” seems to invariably mean “the Baby Boomers want it, so it pays to give it.”)

Part of professionalism is projecting an image consistent with a clearly delineated role in the public’s mind–being The Person to Turn To in certain situations. I feel it was entirely professional of me to take my flappy-rear-tire loose-headset bike in to the bike shop this morning, even though I am entirely capable of patching an inner tube and tightening a headset. Or perhaps it was professional of the bike shop that I thought of them when I realised I was rolling on my rim. In any case, I have neither the skill nor the facility to fix a flat in 10 minutes, and I probably would not have noticed the slit in my tire. Nor would I have been able to figure out that the wedge in my stem was very nearly rusted into place and needed easing out and replacing so that the stripped headset nut could be removed.

Anyway, Dad, the point is that even if you can do it yourself, the professionals probably do a better job. Even if they are not making sure that your robot-counted pills won’t kill you.