Lost In Me

It's been a slow week off, spent almost entirely by myself. I take lots of time to simply sit and think, and sometimes I even think about the physics problems I should be working on. I take occasional breaks to clean some part of the apartment or cook myself a meal, remembering to feed the cats before I feed myself.

When I get really bored, I try to coax the cats to catch the mouse in our storage closet. I can hear the mouse rustling around at night and tearing up our paper towels, but Indie and Callie are too well-fed and complacent to do anything about it. Instead of killing the mouse, they amuse themselves by helping the mouse tear up our supply of paper towels. Over the night, they pulled the little flower sitting on my desk out of its cup of water, for me to find shriveled up on my floor in the morning. Sometimes it seems like taking joy in ripping things apart is a characteristic shared by all mammals. The ability of the cats to increase the entropy of my apartment is impressive indeed.

I spent 10 hours Saturday working at the emergency room at the nearby hospital, as part of my training for my EMT class. Fortunately, it was a pretty slow day, with few serious patients coming in, so I didn't kill anybody... in fact three of the patients that day came in because of (gasp) cuts on their fingers. I mostly did vitals, and the most interesting thing that I did the whole day was to give an albuterol treatment to an elderly COPD patient with difficulty breathing. I think the hardest part of the day was not the work itself, but having to stand on my feet for 10 hours straight.

Despite all the standing around, I did learn something that I was never taught during lecture. A patient in his mid 20s came in complaining of severe back pain, claiming that he was supposed to be on pain killers prescribed by his doctor. Unfortunately, he lost his medicine bag, or they were stolen, so he wanted the ER doctors to give him more. When asked what he was on, he gave a long list of narcotic pain killers in very large doses. The nurse that gave him his initial assessment icily told him to go wait in the lobby to be called by a doctor, then told me that he was most likely a drug abuser. I saw the nurses whispering and snickering among themselves, and I'm not sure how they dealt with this patient, but I wouldn't be surprised if they made him wait in the lobby until he grew tired and went home.

One of the patients with a finger laceration was a three year old boy who had come in by ambulance, because of a half-inch cut on his thumb. By the time he arrived at the hospital the bleeding had long since stopped, and he seemed much more scared by the ambulance ride and being in a strange place, than by his cut. I asked the poor kid for his name as I took his brachial pulse, but all he could do was stare at me with wide open eyes. Another patient that came in with a cut finger was a flirtatious local college student who had hurt her thumb while doing dishes. When I informed her that I could not take her blood pressure through her jacket, she gave me a wink and told me that she couldn't take her jacket off with her injured hand, and that I would have to help her.

Dealing with such ridiculous patients for most of the day made my shift seem to last forever.

It seems to me that nurses have the most awful hours ever, working 10 hour shifts. The triage nurse that I tagged along with for part of the day confided to me that sometimes nurses will check themselves out of work, walk into the lobby of the ER, and check themselves back in as a patient. Apparently she herself had just had surgery for appendicitis, and the way these nurses work themselves it's not very surprising that they come down ill. I came home after my one day of work at the ER, made myself some instant noodles, and collapsed in bed before I could finish eating, I was so drained.

In any case, Saturday was an interesting way to start out my spring break. I have a to do list a mile long for this week, one of which is to clean this apartment out, since my housemates are now conveniently out of the way. On to that now.

My cell phone went out the window after the call I posted about, which in retrospect was a great decision, since the only calls I was getting was from my mother. I need time by myself away from her nagging, to get my thoughts sorted out and to concentrate on my schoolwork. Doing well in school does matter to me, but what my parents need to understand is that I do it for myself, and not to make up for their own feelings of inadequate academic achievement, now three decades in the past. I am starting to suspect that East Asian societies have their own mechanisms to keep their constituents trapped in feelings of inadequacy, though I doubt it could be as bad as the image-based Calvinist society we live in in America. It would be an "out of the frying pan and into the fire" type of scenario for my parents, if only they could speak English and begin to understand the society into which they immigrated and discarded their children. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

In any case, I've been keeping myself busy, mostly with various physics classes. It is not a bad way to live, this 100 mile-an-hour from the moment my eyes pop open, to when I collapse in bed some sixteen hours later. My contact with people remains limited to my physics study group. A few times a week I will meet Mike and Bess to work on our problem sets, where I sit and solve my differential equations, and answer the occasional question from Mike or nod at a random disparaging comment about physics majors from Bess. I suppose it would be quite a culture shock to transfer into the physics major senior year, so I don't really blame her for doting on the anti-social nature of her fellow physics majors. An outsider's viewpoint is always refreshing, at least to me.

I got a call from my mother last night, which went something like this:

Mom: How are you doing?
Lostin: What do you mean by that?
Mom: I mean how did you do on your exams?
Lostin: My grades were fine, but that's not really a measure of...
Mom: You are a student, school is your life.

etc.

Do you remember what you had for dinner yesterday? Do you remember who you had that meal with? I have a feeling that often we will answer "no" to the former question, but "yes" to the latter. And I think this shows that in this culture, having a meal is mostly a social event; the fact that we are engaging in the biomechanical act of eating is almost incidental to the fact that we are doing so in the company of friends and family. Meals are supposed to be the half an hour or so that you put aside to catch up with the people around you.

I sometimes think along those lines as I am eating lunch by myself, seating in my usual seat next to the windows in Oakenshields dining hall. Even though meals were supposed to be social events, I have had a total of two meals in the company of friends during the past two months, and looking around in the dining hall, I don't believe that my experience is in any way singular. On any given day, perhaps one-third of the diners at Oakenshields are sitting by themselves, hurriedly gobbling down their food while putting the last touches on their homework sets or finishing the reading for their next class. After lunch we run off to our classes, then the library, and if dinner happens at all it will be alone over some more homework, and the most important thing about the meal will be that it does not end up on our homework.

It seems ironic to me that the typical college student's lifestyle is in such contrast to what we usually take to be important. I suppose going to school is important but I'm not sure when it began to take precedence over being there for the people around me such as friends and family, when it became more important to finish that homework set than to have a decent meal with close friends. And observing those around me, as I always do, I get the vague feeling that I'm not the only one who has been making this kind of trade-off during college.