satellites

We are living off dial up, fanning the wind power of some very narrow bandwidth. I have two hours of life at home: one hour before work and one hour after, the remaining bits used up at the hospital or traveling to it. In the mornings, with coffee and milk and two lumps of sugar, I give myself 42 minutes to tend to the neglected, pixelated portions of my life. Cluttered inboxes of spam, emails to friends, unenthusiastic job queries. In the 42 minutes allotted I can usually download about 5 pages, more if I don't actually read any of them.

And so I've been left without the cantilever---reading, writing, communing, conversing in my small little community of bloggerly women---nascently assembled to steady the scales.

red

The halls are immaculate. Everything is put into place. Above and below, the whole huge hulking thing feels like a solarium, an open aviary completely devoid of fluorescence and decay. The business of medicine hums along uneventfully, a well oiled machine of laptops and templates and accessible resources. Printers are abundant and centrally located, shelves of supplies tucked away neatly, obediently, without chaos. Nothing, it seems, is left to need or neglect.

I follow him around, from room to room, for ten, sometimes eleven, hours a day. Occasionally he has me go in, talk, gather a history, perform a minor, perfunctory exam. Invariably we go back in together, me behind him, dutifully, and then I am shuttled quietly into the corner by the sink to sit in silence so he can complete the decisions. It is hard to determine if it's chauvinism, egotism, mistrust or laziness but it is, without a doubt, a most expensive and worthless use of my time. Following him around, from room to room to office, sitting behind him, watching him write a note, answer an email, occasionally privy to some varnished clinical pearls, my resentment and boredom accumulating into a thing of its own, I have mentally departed. He tells me I will never get a job in this town, nonetheless here. I keep quiet and dress conservatively, searching my closet for clothes that do not betray me, inside or out.

To be fair he is mostly the minority and I am not stuck with him exclusively. It is rare but not uncommon to be subjected to his conversations about hunting in excess and for sheer pleasure, his views on homosexuality, gender or politics. I smile and bite down, willfully silent and clearly outnumbered.

second sex

It's not that I'm so much unattractive but rather that I never quite learned how to play my sex. It's not that I'm not feminine as much as that I am headstrong and obstinate and I walk with my shoulders, not with my hips. It's not that I'm not a girl, it's just that I never quite learned how to be expectedly frilly and silly and soft and pink. It's not that I'm unkind, it's just that you would never describe me as sweet. It's not that I'm disrespectful, it's just that I never learned that I should quietly defer to men. It's not that I'm aggressive, it's just that I had to learn how to do it alone. It's not that I didn't have a father so much as it is that I never had a daddy. It's not that I'm ugly, it's just that I know that pretty is what I am not. It's not that I'm unpretty, it's just that people are often surprised to realize it.

It's not that I'm surprised to find that I can be taken seriously here as sex or intellect, it's just that I've never been told so overtly to choose.