I am taking a break from studying Immunology...which has made me appreciate the human body. The body's defense system is so friggin' complex and this class just scrapes the surface of it all. Astounding. I mean, if God created human beings AND everything else in the world in 7 days, He must be amazing. Then again, He is God. God would be amazing. Oh God I mixed science and religion in the same entry. Oh great I used God's name in vain while writing about God in the sentence before.
Speaking of God, two very pretty and really well dressed women of the Mormon faith knocked on my door the other day. They asked me if I was interested in the Church of Lather-Day Saints and then handed me a pretty postcard. I felt so honored. Now I have a solicitation story! I always felt like I was missing out on life because no Mormon ever tried to convert me before. I feel like I went through a Rite of Passage.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
I am reading this book for Sociology of Illness and Medicine titled The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. It's a true story about a Hmong family's interaction with the American Health Care system though their epileptic daughter.
This book is one of the most intense books I've ever read and I am only on chapter nine. Not intense in a edge-of-my-seat kind of way, but an eye-opening experience kind of way. The severely simplified basis of the story is how the Hmong and American cultures clash in terms of health care. Even though both sides have good intentions for the child in question, sincerely wanting only the best for her, the cultural conflict induced frustrations, misunderstandings, and complications on both sides.
I remember getting agitated while reading one of the chapters. The parents of the epileptic child do not understand American medicine. In fact, they believe that the medicine is making her worse and suspect that the doctors are trying to kill her. They don't give her the medicine to make her better. Plus, they aren't proficient in English so they don't understand why or how to give her the prescribed dosages.
At the same time, one of the doctors sent in a recommendation to the government to remove the child from the parents' care so the medication could be properly administered. The parent's aren't abusing the child. They love her and care for her more than anything. They just don't believe in American health care. Yet the government opted to remove the child from their custody.
The thing is, you come to understand the actions of both sides. You see both perspectives. You find that you can't cast blame to anyone. They are all doing what they think is best for the little girl with severe epilepsy. That's what makes the situation so aggravating.
Reading this challenged the whole notion that American medicine is indisputable, that doctors are always right. The idea that even good intentions could have adverse effects is a difficult one to process. All this mixed in with the unbelievable difference between the Hmong community and the one I am used to. In a world so full of different cultures, different practices, and different people, there really is no right or wrong answer to anything. That concept is difficult to process.
I daresay, if this perception of "the other" is ever achieved, we'd be much closer to the whole "world peace" notion of things.
This book is one of the most intense books I've ever read and I am only on chapter nine. Not intense in a edge-of-my-seat kind of way, but an eye-opening experience kind of way. The severely simplified basis of the story is how the Hmong and American cultures clash in terms of health care. Even though both sides have good intentions for the child in question, sincerely wanting only the best for her, the cultural conflict induced frustrations, misunderstandings, and complications on both sides.
I remember getting agitated while reading one of the chapters. The parents of the epileptic child do not understand American medicine. In fact, they believe that the medicine is making her worse and suspect that the doctors are trying to kill her. They don't give her the medicine to make her better. Plus, they aren't proficient in English so they don't understand why or how to give her the prescribed dosages.
At the same time, one of the doctors sent in a recommendation to the government to remove the child from the parents' care so the medication could be properly administered. The parent's aren't abusing the child. They love her and care for her more than anything. They just don't believe in American health care. Yet the government opted to remove the child from their custody.
The thing is, you come to understand the actions of both sides. You see both perspectives. You find that you can't cast blame to anyone. They are all doing what they think is best for the little girl with severe epilepsy. That's what makes the situation so aggravating.
Reading this challenged the whole notion that American medicine is indisputable, that doctors are always right. The idea that even good intentions could have adverse effects is a difficult one to process. All this mixed in with the unbelievable difference between the Hmong community and the one I am used to. In a world so full of different cultures, different practices, and different people, there really is no right or wrong answer to anything. That concept is difficult to process.
I daresay, if this perception of "the other" is ever achieved, we'd be much closer to the whole "world peace" notion of things.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Penny for My Thoughts
I check my facebook way too many times a day.
Remember when the librarian in elementary school taught us how to use card catalogs to find our books? Card catalogs! It's been less than a decade and already the library system and the rest of the modern world have become heavily dependent on the internet.
Hell, the fact that I can meet anyone on campus and 99.9% of the time they would have a facebook is a scary thought.
People who are homophobic annoy me.
I learned "Blackbird" on the guitar. This doesn't mean I am very good at it, it just means I know how to play it. It's been my life's goal to learn that song. I am not quite sure what to do with myself now.
Today, I realized that I am willing to eat a lot of things I would not be willing to eat when I am at home and my mom does all the cooking. My mom is our family vacuum cleaner. She makes odd leftover concoctions. Now, living on my own, shopping, buying, and making my own food, I have to be my own vacuum cleaner.
I wrote most of the last paragraph in past tense, then changed it. (I.e. ...when i WAS at home and my mom DID all the cooking.) Does that suggest that I don't view "home" as "home" anymore?
Yesterday, I had the most intense craving for a tomato-basil salad. It was insanely intense. I couldn't concentrate on the article I was reading for class and I practically salivated all over my keyboard. So I looked up the recipe (there's more to it than tomato and basil) and went to Safeway today because I don't have tomatoes. I had it for dinner and it was AMAZING.
Just in case any of you suffer from chronic tomato-basil cravings, here's the really simple recipe with the most basic "I-am-a-poor-college-student-who-is-hungry-and-lazy" ingredients.
1. Cut up tomatoes, either in slices or apple style. You could chop it finely, but that's just super messy and then you have to do extra cleaning. I chopping up the tomatoes in the bowl I ended up eating from.
2. Remove basil leaves from stem and add in bowl. You could chop that up too but that's just super messy (see above).
3. Mix extra virgin olive oil (EVO, as we who like other people to think we know what we are talking about call it) with a dash of pepper and salt. This is your dressing.
4. Drizzle dressing on tomatoes and basil. Mix with fork that you will later use to eat your dish so you don't have to wash more eating utensils than necessary.
5. Top with grated mozzarella cheese. You can find in it packages at Safeway
6. Saran wrap the bowl, put it in the fridge to chill and marinate and stick a post-it on the bowl addressed to your roommates saying "DO NOT EAT."
7. Honestly, I don't know if marinating did anything. I put mine in the fridge for an hour and couldn't taste the difference between that and just eating it after it's prepared. Maybe I should have added more salt or waited longer. Or maybe I don't have a fine enough palate to tell. So, if you are like me and don't really care, Just skip step 6.
Remember when the librarian in elementary school taught us how to use card catalogs to find our books? Card catalogs! It's been less than a decade and already the library system and the rest of the modern world have become heavily dependent on the internet.
Hell, the fact that I can meet anyone on campus and 99.9% of the time they would have a facebook is a scary thought.
People who are homophobic annoy me.
I learned "Blackbird" on the guitar. This doesn't mean I am very good at it, it just means I know how to play it. It's been my life's goal to learn that song. I am not quite sure what to do with myself now.
Today, I realized that I am willing to eat a lot of things I would not be willing to eat when I am at home and my mom does all the cooking. My mom is our family vacuum cleaner. She makes odd leftover concoctions. Now, living on my own, shopping, buying, and making my own food, I have to be my own vacuum cleaner.
I wrote most of the last paragraph in past tense, then changed it. (I.e. ...when i WAS at home and my mom DID all the cooking.) Does that suggest that I don't view "home" as "home" anymore?
Yesterday, I had the most intense craving for a tomato-basil salad. It was insanely intense. I couldn't concentrate on the article I was reading for class and I practically salivated all over my keyboard. So I looked up the recipe (there's more to it than tomato and basil) and went to Safeway today because I don't have tomatoes. I had it for dinner and it was AMAZING.
Just in case any of you suffer from chronic tomato-basil cravings, here's the really simple recipe with the most basic "I-am-a-poor-college-student-who-is-hungry-and-lazy" ingredients.
1. Cut up tomatoes, either in slices or apple style. You could chop it finely, but that's just super messy and then you have to do extra cleaning. I chopping up the tomatoes in the bowl I ended up eating from.
2. Remove basil leaves from stem and add in bowl. You could chop that up too but that's just super messy (see above).
3. Mix extra virgin olive oil (EVO, as we who like other people to think we know what we are talking about call it) with a dash of pepper and salt. This is your dressing.
4. Drizzle dressing on tomatoes and basil. Mix with fork that you will later use to eat your dish so you don't have to wash more eating utensils than necessary.
5. Top with grated mozzarella cheese. You can find in it packages at Safeway
6. Saran wrap the bowl, put it in the fridge to chill and marinate and stick a post-it on the bowl addressed to your roommates saying "DO NOT EAT."
7. Honestly, I don't know if marinating did anything. I put mine in the fridge for an hour and couldn't taste the difference between that and just eating it after it's prepared. Maybe I should have added more salt or waited longer. Or maybe I don't have a fine enough palate to tell. So, if you are like me and don't really care, Just skip step 6.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
S.A.D.
Yesterday was Valentine's Day. To celebrate, I went on a date with the most important person in the world. In fact, without this person, I would cease to exist. That person is me.
I did something I've been meaning to do for a while: go to the theaters and watch a movie by myself.
So I watched Milk. It was AMAZING. Absolutely brilliant. I cried due to happiness. I cried due to sadness. And I thanked God that no one is with me to see me cry so viciously. I grew to respect everyone in the cast who played a gay character...which is pretty much everyone in the cast. I always had this feeling that James Franco is a prick. He just looks like a prick. Now I am more or less in love with him because he made out with Sean Penn.
I know. I have issues.
There's this part in the movie when they were fighting against prop 6, which would mandate the firing public school teachers on the basis of their sexual orientation. The people for it argued that homosexuals corrupt children, destroy "family values," and are unholy. Prop 6 painfully reminded me of Prop 8. The arguments are the same. It's been a whole generation since and nothing has really changed. I have no doubt that anyone and everyone, regardless of sexual preference, would have the right to marriage in my lifetime. But the depressing fact is it takes a really long time to achieve absolute equality of any kind. Perhaps it is something impossible to obtain because we, as human beings, are extremely bad at seeing things from someone else's perspective.
I did something I've been meaning to do for a while: go to the theaters and watch a movie by myself.
So I watched Milk. It was AMAZING. Absolutely brilliant. I cried due to happiness. I cried due to sadness. And I thanked God that no one is with me to see me cry so viciously. I grew to respect everyone in the cast who played a gay character...which is pretty much everyone in the cast. I always had this feeling that James Franco is a prick. He just looks like a prick. Now I am more or less in love with him because he made out with Sean Penn.
I know. I have issues.
There's this part in the movie when they were fighting against prop 6, which would mandate the firing public school teachers on the basis of their sexual orientation. The people for it argued that homosexuals corrupt children, destroy "family values," and are unholy. Prop 6 painfully reminded me of Prop 8. The arguments are the same. It's been a whole generation since and nothing has really changed. I have no doubt that anyone and everyone, regardless of sexual preference, would have the right to marriage in my lifetime. But the depressing fact is it takes a really long time to achieve absolute equality of any kind. Perhaps it is something impossible to obtain because we, as human beings, are extremely bad at seeing things from someone else's perspective.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
d3ath 2 3nGli5h
First of all, I just want to say that I was once the girl who tYped lYke dIs. It peaked in middle school when I was a notorious note passer (I knew 7 different ways to fold a note).
But shorthand has gotten to a point where I seriously cannot follow it anymore. If I am reading something by a shorthand writer, I have to have Urban dictionary open in a separate window. It is worse than reading Dickens. Along with having to look up every other "word," I am peeved by the fact that it is not English. There aren't suppose to be numbers mixed in with the letters. Unless you have a speech impediment, "th" does not make the "d" sound. And yes, Y is sometimes a vowel, but not quite as often as you think.
1337. I had to look it up earlier. It is the numerical representation of "leet." Leet, or sometimes eleet (31337) comes from the word "elite" meaning superior. As in "I am hella 1337 at WoW."
But it goes further than that. 1337 is actually a language first created by computer hackers. They misspell words, spell words phonetically, replace letters with numbers, and basically make up a bunch of crap that then get proliferated across the computer-using network.
Technology is destroying English.
You know what this is like? This is like Newspeak in 1984. Now there's a scary thought.
But shorthand has gotten to a point where I seriously cannot follow it anymore. If I am reading something by a shorthand writer, I have to have Urban dictionary open in a separate window. It is worse than reading Dickens. Along with having to look up every other "word," I am peeved by the fact that it is not English. There aren't suppose to be numbers mixed in with the letters. Unless you have a speech impediment, "th" does not make the "d" sound. And yes, Y is sometimes a vowel, but not quite as often as you think.
1337. I had to look it up earlier. It is the numerical representation of "leet." Leet, or sometimes eleet (31337) comes from the word "elite" meaning superior. As in "I am hella 1337 at WoW."
But it goes further than that. 1337 is actually a language first created by computer hackers. They misspell words, spell words phonetically, replace letters with numbers, and basically make up a bunch of crap that then get proliferated across the computer-using network.
Technology is destroying English.
You know what this is like? This is like Newspeak in 1984. Now there's a scary thought.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Gaydars and Numbed Holidays
So I just found out where and when this cute GSI for one of my classes holds his office hours. It is conveniently located somewhere I frequent.
However, I have a strong suspicion he is gay. His jeans flare. They flare out a good 25 degrees from his knee cap. I measured with a protractor during class.
Haha protractors. Good times.
Anyways, unknown fact about me. 70% of the guys I meet, I suspect are gay. It is unavoidable and most of the time I am wrong. But that 30% of whom I didn't suspect are gay, 15% actually are.
This skewed gay-dar of mine resulted from the fact that I'd fall in love with someone (usually a stranger I've never met) only to find out (usually through facebook) that we share the same taste in movies, music, and men.
Valentine's Day is coming up the day after Friday the Thirteenth. Here's the worst case scenario that I can think of. Someone finally gets asked out by that special someone on the 12th. That special someone breaks up with him/her on the thirteenth. Then the 14th is spent wearing a Crown Royal and getting to know Captain Morgan and Don Julio while enjoying the the Absolut pleasures of Southern Comfort and petting a Grey Goose.
However, I have a strong suspicion he is gay. His jeans flare. They flare out a good 25 degrees from his knee cap. I measured with a protractor during class.
Haha protractors. Good times.
Anyways, unknown fact about me. 70% of the guys I meet, I suspect are gay. It is unavoidable and most of the time I am wrong. But that 30% of whom I didn't suspect are gay, 15% actually are.
This skewed gay-dar of mine resulted from the fact that I'd fall in love with someone (usually a stranger I've never met) only to find out (usually through facebook) that we share the same taste in movies, music, and men.
Valentine's Day is coming up the day after Friday the Thirteenth. Here's the worst case scenario that I can think of. Someone finally gets asked out by that special someone on the 12th. That special someone breaks up with him/her on the thirteenth. Then the 14th is spent wearing a Crown Royal and getting to know Captain Morgan and Don Julio while enjoying the the Absolut pleasures of Southern Comfort and petting a Grey Goose.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Sociology = Crazy Awesome
This is what I recently learned from one of the articles I had to read from my soc. class.
So there's this thing called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance is when you simultaneously have two conflicting ideas, attitudes or beliefs. This is an uncomfortable feeling. When you experience cognitive dissonance, you deal with it by altering your perception of one idea or the other to make it make sense.
The article talked about hazing. Hazing is basically when some exclusive club or fraternity makes potential members do ridiculous, embarrassing, and sometimes painful things to gain entry into the group. This is suppose to build solidarity. But how?
Hazing causes a person to hold two opposing ideas. The club/fraternity is awesome... but hazing is really horrible. Why would this awesome club make me do these horrible things? Thus, cognitive dissonance is formed.
The potential member in question can do one of two things. S/He can convince himself that the hazing process isn't that bad, therefore altering the perception of the hazing process making the experience easier to deal with. But usually, hazing is so horrible that it makes it really hard to just shrug off as "Eh, that wasn't so bad." So the other perception is changed. The club/fraternity is awesome. Really really awesome. It has to be. I wouldn't go through all that shit if it wasn't really really awesome. It was worth it.
Ta-da! We have solidarity!
Mind-blowing, I know.
I should probably cite this just in case...I don't want to get sued when I am actually praising the sociologists who came up with this.
Aronson and Mills (1959) The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181
So there's this thing called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance is when you simultaneously have two conflicting ideas, attitudes or beliefs. This is an uncomfortable feeling. When you experience cognitive dissonance, you deal with it by altering your perception of one idea or the other to make it make sense.
The article talked about hazing. Hazing is basically when some exclusive club or fraternity makes potential members do ridiculous, embarrassing, and sometimes painful things to gain entry into the group. This is suppose to build solidarity. But how?
Hazing causes a person to hold two opposing ideas. The club/fraternity is awesome... but hazing is really horrible. Why would this awesome club make me do these horrible things? Thus, cognitive dissonance is formed.
The potential member in question can do one of two things. S/He can convince himself that the hazing process isn't that bad, therefore altering the perception of the hazing process making the experience easier to deal with. But usually, hazing is so horrible that it makes it really hard to just shrug off as "Eh, that wasn't so bad." So the other perception is changed. The club/fraternity is awesome. Really really awesome. It has to be. I wouldn't go through all that shit if it wasn't really really awesome. It was worth it.
Ta-da! We have solidarity!
Mind-blowing, I know.
I should probably cite this just in case...I don't want to get sued when I am actually praising the sociologists who came up with this.
Aronson and Mills (1959) The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181
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