I don't know if I ever mentioned it, but I passed the 2nd med surg exam; there are only two left in the semester! I have an exam every week for the next 5 weeks (excluding Thanksgiving), starting this week with Pharmacology. I'm up to my elbows in flash cards.
We got our new clinical rotations. I'm at a hospital in a different city, and I'm not at all excited about the commute. I have been assigned to the cardiology floor, Thursday and Friday evenings, with a very laid back preceptor. I'm glad I am going from a tough preceptor to an easier preceptor and not the other way around, like the group we're switching with! My old preceptor will be expecting so much from them and I hear (my neighbor was in this group) that they just haven't had the experiences to gain the skills. And this is precisely why I kept my first preceptor despite others telling me to run; it is always better to be prepared, than to take the easy route and not know as much as you could know. Yeah, it was a long six weeks, but we all survived - and we can write careplans like nobody's business! Oh, and all the shows I thought I'd miss on Thursday night (Grey's Anatomy and Ugly Betty) can be seen at abc.com in full, without commercials, isn't that awesome?!
In other news, I found yet another coffee shop I like. It's a chocolate bar, and since I like hot chocolate more than I like coffee, it's the best coffee shop I've been to! I won't be able to study there though because it's a hot spot for nursing students, and no studying ever gets done.
I went to a Halloween party at the Medical dorms. It was crazy, lots of costumes, lots of dirinking. I didn't wear a costume, but when got there I thought it was interesting that at least 3 people (white people) had costumes that included big black afros (like Beyonce from the Gold Member video, and another a rapper complete with fro, pick and bling, etc), and another 3 or 4 were obiously wearing costumes of black people without afros (Run of RunDMC complete with track suit, gold link chain, and black hat, rastifarians with black dreads and rainbow hats, etc.) All I could think was thank god they didn't come black-faced. That would have really done me in. So, of course I ended up thinking about this as I was people-watching at the party, and it gave me an idea. I wore some black pants and a black casual it jacket with a shirt underneath to the party since I didn't wear a costume. But I also wore some white Pumba-ish tennis shoes because I was going for comfort, not cuteness. So, I started telling people I was ELLEN DEGENERES for Halloween, just to see their reaction. Ellen always dresses something like her doll. Little black suit with tennis shoes. People got it, but they thought it was sooooo funny that I would come to a Halloween party as a white woman. They couldn't stop laughing! But nobody seemed to make the correlation to those dressed as black people. I don't know where I was going with this, except to ask "is there a difference?" There was something very weird about having my culture be portrayed as a Halloween costume. But then again, Hip Hop and rap belongs to a whole generation, not just my culture...it seemed weird (and a little inappropriate) for me to be a lesbian white woman for Halloween! I don't know, anyway, it's just a train of thought...
4 comments:
Some simplistic thoughts from my school-fried brain (and admittedly, I'm not really that intellectual anyway)....
Isn't it interesting that nearly all cultures outside the white Caucasian-American norm are so easily mocked?
I won't pretend to understand what you're feeling. But, Asian women have a bunch of cultural stereotype baggage to contend with as well.
No, I am not a "china doll", nor am I a "dragon lady". And yes, I *do* speak English quite well, thank you! It's really amazing, considering that I was born in this country!
*grimace*
Minority groups have some interesting things to contend with.
I am irritated by the fact that even though I am American, born and raised in the US, I will always "look foreign" to some people.
And BTW, I love that you dressed as Ellen Degeneres. :) Not because it's inappropriate or weird, but because I love her.
Sounds like you have some (ahem) interesting classmates.
((Sigh)) the infamous "Dragon Lady," I can spot that streotype a mile away when watching a movie! I was talking to a girl in my class about this and she was saying she also gets frustrated when people ask her where she's from because when she tells them "Deleware" they say, "No, where are you *really, from*" like it's supposed to be somewhere in Asia.
What frustrates me most is that people have *no clue* about the effect that all of those "little" incidents have on our everyday lives!
That's true - I get that too.
"So where are you from?"
"Northern California."
"No, where are you really from?"
and I name the town ...
*sigh*
It sucks that I learned to just say, "I'm from northern California, but my parents are from Taiwan." I'm just tired of playing the game.
Post a Comment