I'll see you in the ICU!

I'm a guy's gal...

I always have been.

My older brother was my hero when I was a kid, and I pretty much grew up trying to please and impress him. At the age of five, he had taught me the names of all the tools he used when working on his car, so I like a surgical nurse, would sit on the sidelines next to his tool box and wait for him, under the car, laying on a scrap of cardboard or a carpet remnant, to say "five eighths combination..." holding out his hand, expecting a 5/8ths combination wrench to be placed there.

I remember that teaching me the fractions was the hardest part for him, and nearly where he gave up on me. Did I mention I was about FIVE?

Through my adolescence, there was only one really close GIRL friend, and we were like twins--went everywhere together, dressed alike...we even had our own language that we had made up--hillarious.

We eventually grew up and apart as is common, but it was mostly a major rift between us that stemmed over lies and lying that tore our nearly lifelong friendship apart. I can't forgive ethical and moral flaws. Flaws are one thing...to find out things about someone's moral fiber that deeply goes against yours is sometimes too much.

Having spent so much of my life surrounded by male things--cars, sports, and so on, I've not been encultured properly to the world of women. I even chose a very male-dominated profession which I hadn't realized, was pretty hassle-free and laid back for the most part.

Nursing, for the most part, is still a very female dominated profession. While I do work with a few men, and find that it's easier to interact with them, largely I find I'm spending most of my time trying to decipher what the hell things mean when they are said the way they are.

I got into trouble the other day when my preceptor said "we need to call Dr. S and ask her _____." OK, I thought. :| right?

Think about that comment coming from a guy: "We need to ______." It means absolutely NOTHING. It's a statement like "the sky is blue" or "the cat is in the yard." This is a form of PASSIVE speech which doesn't effectively communicate to the listener anything. It's great for prose, and fiction (again--stupid paperback books women spend endless hours reading...what is the POINT of fiction writing for crying out loud?! You might as well be wasting your time in front of the televion, while you're at it!)

But, I digress.

Passive speech: "We need to do this and that."
Active speech: "Call Dr. So-and-So and tell her this and that." THAT would have at least conveyed to me that it was an expectation for me to handle this task. At the end of the day it was "did you call Dr. So and so to tell her____?"

"Uh, No, I thought you were going to do that." What I really wanted to say is "What's this 'WE' shit...what are you, Queen Elizabeth?" But I didn't.

A militant lesbian I once worked with pointed out how women almost always speak passively, and that she liked that I didn't do this. "You ever notice that women will talk AROUND what they really want, rather than just coming out and SAYING what they want? They will say 'It's cold in here' when what they really mean is 'Shut the window.' Why is that? Why?"

When I had to write papers for AFROTC, we were severely marked down for using a passive voice EVER. The simplest thing was analysed. The book is on the desk. Period...not "the desk, upon which the book had been placed..."

Men are more direct. Men speak actively. "Get the fuck out of my way" not "I can't see the television" or "you make a better door than a window..."

I need a woman to English dictionary. Perhaps I need to write it. "We need to..." translates as a direct order. Come to think of it, the mafia uses indirect speech to communicate. This eliminates blame on anyone giving an order. "That guy makes a lot of noise" might translate to "kill that bastard before he talks too much."

Come to think of it, women are like a mafia. One is definitely either in or out, and I'm always on the out. But, I'd rather be. My life is much happier without being part of the whisper pow-wows that take place in corners of the nurses' station, about he said/she said, he did/she did, or any OTHER type of unneccessary BS. "Who gives a RAT'S ASS?!" I keep wanting to say when I hear anything like this...If you only knew how much time out of a womman's life is wasted on talking shit that does NOT MATTER in any way...life is too short to be spending my time watching "Desperate Housewives" or "Grey's Anatomy", then talking about it all the next day as if they're real people (UGH!) or reading fiction, or talking shit about other people behind their backs.



In short, the few women that I've come to be close friends with over the years (my mom especially) are NOTHING like the archetypal woman; I really hate women, usually. I don't understand them, don't like their company, don't love working with them for the most part. The thing I'm starting to realize is how rare it is to find a female who does not belong to this she-wolf pack of catty, vicious beasts.



Working with these types has certainly made me appreciate my female friends as being exceptions to the catty woman norm, and I salute them for being bigger and better than that, for talking about more than television, or fiction novels, or other people behind their backs (ah, my preceptor was also busted talking shit about one of the female docs, whom I think is great, but they hate her, inside our locker area when the doc had come in to the lounge to have lunch, and was on the other side of the door hearing what they really thought of her...how embarrassing--you think this would cure her of ever talking shit behind someone's back? It would cure me, but she probably got over it quickly.)

I'm selling out the sisterhood here, I've been told. Fuck the sisterhood.
Bros before Hoes, I say.

posted by sketchmonkey @ 10:28 AM