The Tory Party

From My Sister in Chicago

This is from an email my sister sent to her residency homies. She’s been working in the OB/GYN clinic at Northwestern, for which she learned Spanish kung-fu style in like six months. I got her permission to share this with y`all. Enjoy the medical shenanigans!

What I’ve Learned In One Month in Chicago:

• 1) ALWAYS go to the front of the line for a cab
• 2) if you ask for a vacuum at northwestern you`ll be handed forceps
  • a) corollary to #2 - if you ask again for a vacuum they`ll ask, “are you sure?”
  • b) corollary to #2a - if you actually get your hands on a vacuum you`ll have 1 resident doing the vacuum & 3 watching because they’ve never seen one…
  • c) corollary to #2 - after you vacuum yourself into a big dystocia there’s no one coming to help…

• 3) “tirar” is slang for “to [f*ck]” - use jalar instead (also learned in front of the 4 residents)
• 4) in Chicago instead of posters for “Park & Ride” in the buses there are ads for HIV medicines
• 5) at northwestern the residents stand on the patient’s left for c-sections (the wet side - hee hee!)
• 6) on “the magnificent mile” at night not only will you pass men sleeping on the street but women with their young children too…
  • a)corollary to #6 - i have yet to make it home with any money - or without sniffling…

• 7) Boystown is not where you take your sister to find a date…
• totally ridiculous words like “fob” have entered my daily conversation
  • a) corollary to #8 - at northwestern to log into their “cis” system you need your user id, password, and the number currently displayed on your “fob” which changes every 60 seconds! [I`m really glad I never had to program anything like this -T]

• 9) my cat IS smart enough to not jump off the 43rd floor balcony… now only if he can be toilet trained…
• 10) speaking another language 8 hours a day is far more exhausting than any of my clinic work - i have NEVER been so happy to see a skinny white girl sitting in my exam room

i don’t know if i`m smart enough or young enough to continue learning at this rate…

con abrazos y besos

[My Seestor]

Random Thoughts II

• When in the world did Prince Harry turn out to be so hot? It looked like he was going to be Alfred E. Neuman to Prince William’s Ralph Fiennes his whole life, and then SHA-POW he comes out the other side of adolescence smelling like a rose and looking a little like the dude who played Scut Farkus. You take these two and Danny Bonaduce and you got proof that even the goofiest-looking redheaded boy can turn out well. Speaking of Danny Bonaduce — hey, David Cassidy, who’s hot now? Hah? Who’s hot now?
• Better 80s Love Theme: Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” from The Karate Kid, or Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun?
• I took a tumble on pavement yesterday (long story, but my dog tripped me). This reminded me that I am exceedingly gifted buster-of-ass — due to many, many years of practice. I have a nice hard fall running maybe three times a year — more now that I have a dog. I`m hella klutzy– it’s a large part of why I prefer diet soda and synthetic fabrics.

  Anyway, I`m good at falling. I`d pay a dollar to have some footage of my falling technique; all I know is the last thing I see is my feet stuck out wa-a-ay over my head, and I end up in a sitting position with scrapes on the heels of my hands, bruised elbow, bruised shoulder, bruised hip. How do I even manage all that It’s like some kinda asphalt gremlin goes bop-bop-bop down the right side of my body — always the right side, which tells me there’s some subconscious technique at play. Same deal for taking a huge gravel-eating header off a bike, which I may or may not have done a few months ago (wear your helmet, kids). It was when I was learning to ride a bike (ripe age of 16) that a friend pointed out how good I am at falling. He meant it as a compliment. It’s true. But if my secret superpower is distributing impact along a series of soft tissues, I`m not sure I wouldn’t like to sign up for a better one. It’s not like Mystique transforms and then has to spend five minutes convincing bystanders that she’s fine.

• The worst part of buying things on eBay is what they put in the item title — indicating who the seller thinks this item would appeal to, and by extension indicating what the seller thinks of you. So all the vintage shirts I`m looking at have “emo” stuck on the end. Fine. That’s one thing. But I was looking for a copy of “Animalympics,” and, oh God, more than one says “furry.” EWWWWW! I`m just trying to have a little nostalgia and see the storyline with the goat and the lioness which without a doubt is part of why I`m a jogger today, and you gotta go and say “furry” like I`m some kind of fevered fur perv. Ew.
• Better grammatically-impaired theme from an 80s TV family sitcom in which the actress portraying the older daughter struggled with an eating disorder: Growing Pains` As Long As We Got Each Other or Family Ties` Without Us?
• My achilles is acting up again. The other one. Ah, mortality.
• A couple people have asked me what kind of movies I want to make. I don’t really know what kind. I just know specific movies I want to make. Like, you know how in zombie movies, a person gets zombified instantly — like instantly goes from smart and normal to stupid and zombie? I want to make a zombie movie where you go zombie re-e-e-al slow, so the person getting zombified at first just thinks they’re having an off day. Like maybe there’s camp counselors hanging around at the end of the session, when the kids have gone home. And they’re playing Trivial Pursuit, and the smartest one just can’t seem to get any questions right, and at first it’s just “oh ho, you’re not so smart” but then it gets really awkward and painful to watch. When the zombie stuff finally takes over (takes a while, so you have a chance to infect more people), all the victim can say are a few fixed sentences that disguise their zombieness, like “could I just sit with you a while?” and “I just like listening to you.”

  Or maybe a zombie movie where getting zombified makes you freakishly smart. I`m open to rewrites.

  Maybe I just like to say “zombie.” Zombie zombie zombie.

** Happy Birthday to-o-o Me-e-e!

I never used to be real goopy about my birthday. I think then I got this group of friends who “care” about me and like to have “fun” and thus “attach significance to the anniversary of my birth.” Not only does this enable me to be a self-indulgent peach-cobbler-eating pretty pretty princess all week, but it reminds me that I am a huge jerk because I can’t seem to devote the mental space to more than three of my friends` birthdays at a time. I am ridiculous.

I`m not going to drink Bacawwdi like it’s my burt-day, but when I get home I may have a snoot of JD.

Dubya and the Swift Boat Liars

“I keep hearing these Republicans trying to dismiss the three injuries Kerry got in Vietnam. You know, I didn’t see Ann Coulter out there. I didn’t see Rush Limbaugh out there. I didn’t see Dick Cheney, who got five deferments out there. …They turn their slime machine on John Kerry. They did it to John McCain. They did it to me. Don’t let them do it to John Kerry.” - Max Cleland (saw it on BartCop.com — from the Washington Post)

If you don’t know who Max Cleland is, he’s the Vietnam veteran with a Silver Star and three missing limbs who lost a Georgia Senate election thanks to GOP ads putting him alongside Osama Bin Laden for opposing the invasion of Iraq.

The 2004 Rove machine has started. I just keep flashing back to the nurse in The Verdict: These men… who were these men?

Quick story: My dad was washing dishes in the sink. There was weird evening light coming through the window, and it lit up this vicious-looking scar on the back of his neck that I`d never noticed before.

“God, dad, where`d you get that scar?”

“What scar?”

“There, on your neck.”

He stopped and looked over at me with this kind of wild glint in his eye, but his voice was normal and even when he said:

“Honey, I was in a war.”

Have you been in a war, Mister President? I sure haven’t. I got scars from falling off bikes — I guess you do, too. Maybe when you and your campaign people think of getting hurt, and what’s a significant injury and what’s not — maybe you’re thinking of slipping on ice, or spraining your ankle — maybe you’re thinking of what puts you out of commission for a week, or what hurts your 5K time. Maybe you think of a trip to the doctor and some medical bills. That’s how civilians think of getting hurt. That’s how I think of getting hurt.

Mister President, I think we’re about level in terms of what we understand about war. You — a fifty-something dude who got a deferment to a cushy National Guard unit for politicians` kids — and me, a twenty-six-year-old chick who’s never been nowhere never done nothing. So maybe I`m not the best person in the world to call you on your filthy stupid slimy ads. But Senator John Kerry — honey, he was in a war. So you shut your filthy mouth.

Lolita

The book I read this weekend, which I am embarrassed not to have read already, was “Lolita.” Something stands out to me about this book — what is it? Oh yes. It is DIRTY. Dirty as aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks. Dirty dirty dirty. It surprises me when classic literature is dirty. Actually, even modern books — I always get this “hey now” moment the first time a novel has sexual content or the eff word or anything. The reason for this is probably as simple and dense as the fact that there’s no MPAA rating on a book — if it’s not in the “romance” section (AKA “porn for girls”), you have no idea what you’re getting into. But I think for me there’s also an element that books are things in libraries and on shelves and maybe in bars if you’re trying to hit on someone wearing glasses.

Very, very carefully.

Probably this comes from the fact that, growing up, I didn’t read many classics unless they were on a school reading list. So you go from “Summer of My German Soldier” to “A Wrinkle in Time” to “Where the Red Fern Grows” to “The Once and Future King,” and nothing crosses your plate that would make your parents blush to know you were reading it. Maybe something mind-blowing shows up in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” or “The Invisible Man,” but it’s the exception and dealt with so OMG aren’t we progressive that it gets filed under “huzzah wha?”

I`m reminded of the fact that I had to read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” three times in my academic career. Three. Times. I don’t think it does much good to make sure your students are exposed to African-American authors if its practice is so totally perfunctory that it translates to the same one THRICE.

Where was I? “Lolita.” I expected Humbert Humbert to be more tragic and bewildered, and not so gleefully, remorselessly evil — probably because in that one version he was played by Jeremy Irons, and Jeremy Irons is Crown High Prince of Tragic and Bewildered. I expected there to be a lot of longing and maybe some seducing and not a non-stop travelogue of gratification and crime.

Orr-bit cleans up a duhty movie.

But what surprised me even more is how modern this book is. The humor, and the delivery, and the way it sets you up to like this horrible dude. All these Hollywood dudes who can’t pull off a dark comedy need a seminar with “Lolita” and A Life Less Ordinary and maybe if they behave the highlights from Clue. Seems to me dark makes everything better (see treatise on Spiderman 2) but dark for dark’s sake sucks me like a hurricane (see L.A. Confidential, which deserves a complete heckling, and The Man Who Wasn’t There, which managed to suck furiously despite having Billy Bob Thornton AND James Gandolfini AND Tony Shalhoub. Where’s the fraud, waste and abuse hotline for movies?)

I should be surprised I`m surprised. I read a kickin` article from MAD magazine (or maybe from when MAD was a comic), probably contemporary with this novel, that parodied the contrast between books and movies. F`rinstance the book’s murder is splattery and graphic, whereas the movie’s is bloodless and off-screen (also the book’s mistress is gangly, freckled and pigtailed, and the movie’s looks like Veronica Lake). It was illustrated by Jack Davis, so you know it was good.

I`m thoroughly off the subject now. That’s OK, I think — if I tried to offer a more formal critique of this little-known libertine tract called “Lolita” I`d embarrass myself to death. I keep writing down words I don’t know (etiolate, phocine and inutile among them — it weighs on my mind that someone should know more words in a third language than I in my first) so I can look them up later.