Kivrin

Email from my advisor.

Not only did I pass the MA exams, but apparently I did "an excellent job."

*reads email again*

Nope, didn't hallucinate that part. It says excellent.

Wow.

WOW.

MA exams over.

As I was telling glimmergirl on the phone, I had always imagined that I would walk out of the room either ecstatic (done! donedonedonedone!) or an emotional wreck (fuck! fuckfuckfuckfuck!). I also entertained the possibility that I'd leave the room and pass out. As it was, however, I just walked out. Went outside. Called Glim. Went to see my advisor to show her that I survived. Called Glim back. Walked home. Ate crackers. Talked to my parents. Watched the last episode of Tipping The Velvet. Ate some more. Watched the extras, such as they are. And here I am.

It was, without doubt, the fastest four hours I've spent in a very long time.

Maybe tomorrow morning I'll realize that it's over. Nothing left to go but the paper that I already have outlined.

Have a new and less-lame thesis for the Cadet Nurse Corps paper. It's pretty much the same thesis from my undergraduate thesis, and the thesis from Margaret Darrow's Disruptive Acts, which is that altering an existing social role is not only more often successful than putting forward a competing role or definition of a role, but also more destabilizing because by changing the boundaries of the role it brings the whole nature of 'social roles' into question.

Having recorded this development, can now go eat lunch and probably fall out of the school!brainspace, before embarking on the actual rewriting.

After much internal debate, I took myself out to lunch at the noodle place today. The internal debate, which was enacted while I wandered up and down the strip mall , consisted mainly of "Self, you said you'd take me out to lunch if I was brave and went to see my advisor today, and I did, so pay up! And I'll even do reading! I'll be more productive than if I go home and sit in front of Buffy Season Three (en francais)* while eating peanut butter crackers!" versus "No! No spending money! You'll be eating out this weekend. NO SPENDO!"

I caved and got a mediterranean salad and an iced tea, and read fifty pages about Lydia Pinkham and her vegetable compound, which interestingly was still being sold in the late seventies.. whodathunk?

The beauty of doing exams in a concentration not shared by anyone in the department is an unusual freedom in defining the reading list. The horror is having no idea whether or not some vital literature has been omitted. Particularly since bibliographies are optional in published books. FOO! It is strange, however, to find myself being grateful for end notes. If you have to mine the notes for bibliographical suggestions, it does help for them to be all together. *looks around at the turrets of books on Women and Medicine from 1850-1950* It helps some, at least.

In other news, a Michelle Branch song came on while I was in the restaurant, and I reflected that between songvids and glimmergirl I now recognize about 500% more songs that come on Store Radio. Now it's about one per shopping expedition - it used to be one to every five or more expeditions, that being about how often Paul Simon turns up.

*no, the humor really doesn't translate, but I never fail to be amused by Willow saying 'Mon oeuf est juif!' or Giles saying "Moi, je suis l'Observateur.'

I spent much of today at the Library of Congress, reading nineteenth-century home medical guides, looking at how they constructed and addressed the mother-as-family-medical-care-provider. It wasn't the world's most productive day, as only two of the five books I paged were the sort of thing I needed. One turned out to be the 1870 equivalent of a supermarket checkout line pamphlet. One was a memoir that incorporated a lot of information about How The Indians Do Their Doctoring, and What Dr. Benjamin Rush Said. Another was a text for some sort of low-budget knockoff of Christian Science.

The other two were much more along the lines of what I was looking for - diseases and their treatments, with instructions for when to call a physician, surgeon, or generic medical man. All the books had grandiose nineteenth-century turns of phrase, the sort of thing that I relish so plainly that Jason-at-work has commented on the fact that conversation with me elicits the most archaic words in his vocabulary. But one passage made me nearly laugh out loud, and indeed made me recall the laughing-silently-til-the-tears-come technique I at one time had mastered.

I like to think that I'm too sophisticated for bodily-function humor. But when I found the first remedy suggested for a bloody nose, in Cooper's Domestic Medicine (1824) to be "pour cold water on the genitals," I was hard pressed to not put my head down among the books and become hysterical.

To pour... I mean, it would certainly be a shock... but... and how inconvenient, to have to get undressed... especially for a woman in a dress, she'd get it bloody and washing was torturous in those days... and... and... ack! I mean, I thought I had personally been subjected to most of the weirdo cures for nosebleed, as I got a lot of spontaneous ones as a tyke. (One of the few good things my original pediatrician did after her inexplicable transformation (c. 1987) to a raging bitch, was to figure out that it was an oddball reaction to seasonal allergies.) Cold stuff on my face. Cold stuff on the back of my neck (I particularly remember a liter bottle of ginger ale.) Lemon juice to drink. Tissues up my nose. Leaning back. Leaning forward. Lying on the floor - memorable because it made the blood start to come out of my eyes. But no one ever dumped a bucket of icewater in my lap. For which I am profoundly grateful.

Okay, so I'm in a seminar with two other grad students and a number of undergrads and two of the undergrads are just really annoying me with their self-involvement and their... well, mainly their self-involvement. There's BlondeChick, who feels the need to go on long wandering monologues about how, for example, someone's race does not affect his or her ability to be a good, effective representative for any community, and she should know because she's been a senate page. This is when we're talking about depictions of Chinese-Americans in popular culture.

Then there's HawaiianChick, who needs us all to listen to how much she was disappointed in the reading because it discussed "stupid miner songs" and "history" instead of "popular culture" because "pop culture didn't come until there was media. Like, there were songs in the fifties, but I can't relate to them. That's not pop culture."

KIVRIN: [Offers a somewhat more useful definition of 'popular culture' as something produced for mass consumption and widely distributed, and suggests that the songs written in the late nineteenth century about conflict between European-Americans and Chinese immigrants in California during the gold rush period and distributed in popular magazines fall under that definition.]

HAWAIIANCHICK: Yeah, but it's history. Not pop culture. And the book says on the cover that it's going to be about pop culture. I really didn't like it.

KIVRIN: [Considers throwing her paper cup of rosehip tea at HawaiianChick's head.]

It doesn't help that HawaiianChick has cast herself as The Arbiter of the Asian-American Experience, over the other six or seven people in the room of Asian background.

I like many of the readings in this class. I like the prof. And after the first jarring half-hour, I'm usually okay with my classmates. But today, oh, today I wanted to boot the chicks out the door.

Paper is printing.

I'm going up to campus to turn it in, and turn in the course evaluations from Legal Issues class, and then I'm going to get a smoothie and a video and come home and lie on the floor for a while.