the underwear drawer

term paper

This is like high school again. It's 9:30 on a Wednesday night and I'm sitting in front of my computer trying hastily to pound out a written assignment that's due early tomorrow morning. Only I'm not in high school. Or college. Or even med school. I'm old, dammit. Why are they making me hand in a writing assignment? And am I expected to hand it over in a plastic report cover?

I suspect the real answer (well, to the first question, not the second) is because my outpatient block is ending this week, and there has to be some tangible proof that progress was made or that some learning or self-reflection took place in order for the program to justify the funding that paid for various and sundry activities in which I took part. My writing assignment is about a "house call" that I made to a patient's apartment, and what I learned from that experience. I know I'm supposed to write about how much I can learn from seeing a family in its own space, about my patient's culture and living situation and giving power back to the patient in a non-medical setting, blah blah blah--but really what I learned that it is possible for people to sleep quite soundly even when the TV is blasting Spanish soap operas at the highest possible volume. I don't know how that dad did it. Probably years of practice.

So I'm doing the writing assignment but really resenting the fact that I have to do this writing assignment, because what am I, twelve years old? And I know that my preceptors couldn't care less about the assignment itself, as long as I have something to hand in tomorrow morning, but that makes it even worse, because who really does care about this assignment anyway? And why am I doing it? And did I really just use the word "paradigm" twice in the same sentence? Aargh. Where's my thesaurus?

Oh my god, this really is high school.

Currently reading: Just finished "Breakfast After Noon," and just started "Clyde Fans, Book 1." I'm working through the slew of books I ordered with the Barnes and Noble gift certificate I got for Christmas, and I have to admit, many of the books I bought are comic books--or "graphic novels," if you need to be more elitist about the genre, which I don't.