walking out in the rain

[raven]

It's been an interesting evening. I have allowed myself to be poked and prodded repeatedly and in various bits of the body by a butterfly needle, all in the interests of science and my mother needing someone to practise on. She's getting quite good at drawing blood from my visible veins, but she's in paediatrics at present and is bewailing the difficulty of getting blood from very small people. She's bewailing a lot of things at the moment, as she's currently doing thirteen-hour shifts, which generally entail her waking me up at eight thirty when I am too paralysed by sleep to do anything but babble incoherently, and then disappearing until ten at night, at which point she stumbles in with a thick layer of blood beneath her nails and mumbling about abandoned babies and twelve-year-old assault victims with human bites. She eats dinner and falls into bed only to do it all again the day after. I am very impressed, and very proud of her, and I wish I could do more to help, but all I can really do is cook her dinner and yell until she goes to bed. In some ways, I'm to blame for her doing this now - she left medicine when I was born - and I was too young to remember Pedar doing his turn as a house officer, although that would have been worse, something like a hundred working hours per week.

Pedar isn't here right now, because he's delivering a lecture in New Delhi, so it's fairly quiet round here. I've never seen what it's like to have both my parents on call, or at least I hadn't until last week. I was waiting for my mum to get back from an evening shift, and the phone rang at three am. Not a good sign. I padded in to find Pedar looking under the bed for shoes and socks. "Caesarean," he said succinctly, and then, "Grapes."

I got him some grapes, at which point he approached the sort of coherency level you'd like from a man who is shortly to be wielding a surgical scalpel and asked me what I was doing up. "Waiting for Mum," I said, "and watching old episodes of The X-Files."

"So what's the baseball bat in aid of?"

"In case the aliens come to take me away," I said truthfully.

"I'm so glad I didn't raise you to be paranoid," he muttered, and disappeared into the night. They both re-appeared when it was starting to get light, told me about the baby - whose name is Molly - and disappeared off back to do full working days. When I was growing up, I sort of took all this for granted; I mean, I was dimly aware that other people did nine-to-five jobs, but it's only recently that I've begun to really understand the enormity of what they do. There's a tendency round these parts, maybe my flist or on LJ in general, to vilify all doctors indiscriminately, or, more irritatingly, "Western medicine". I don't think you're allowed to dismiss Western medicine until you've been to medical school, and I don't think you're allowed to talk about shit doctors who are lazy and get paid too much until you've worked a hundred hours a week at expense of everything else.

Er, that wasn't supposed to become a rant. This entry is another mind-dump, of sorts. If right now you want coherency in your flist-reading experience, these are not the droids you are looking for. I've been having a holiday from life lately. I get up in the morning, I go to work, I work five or six hours, I get back, I procrastinate on my feminism paper, I go for long walks, I write. It's really not a very exciting existence, but it's nice, for a while. A word to the Oxonians on the flist: hi! How are you? I'm trying to think about you all (including me_ves_y_sufres - many, many congrats, you are marvellous!) because I'm beginning to forget about my real life. Tell me about your plans for Michaelmas, I'm trying to make it non-theoretical, something real. I know I'm going back, I just don't know it.

The only thing that's real at the moment is the weather. It won't stop raining, and I'm quite enjoying it. It started off as a real summer storm, with warmth underneath the water; the shop was a well-lit island in the puddles, full of people in shorts and sandals staring out at the lightning. A great ploy to get people to spend money is to provide where you can wring out your clothes. Since then it's started being properly cold and wet rather than summery, and consequently the number of customers has dropped off. For this reason, I've spent most of my week in work reading. I always mean to read things that are somehow enlightening or edifying or literary, but sadly all I've really read are soft, sticky family sagas by Jodi Picoult. They're just well-written enough to hang on to my attention, so I whipped my way through My Sister's Keeper, which was actually quite good - an interesting look at medical ethics, and it's a good story to boot - and right now I'm reading something called Perfect Match, which is written very similarly and has a similar family-focused plot. I didn't buy this one, though; it's borrowed from the shop under the guise of "product evaluation". I'll have to be careful not to break the spine.

Er, what else? I'm thoroughly enjoying the general chat about Snakes On A Plane, as everyone and their kitchen sink goes to see it. I wish I could go and see it just as an essentual fannish experience, but sadly I can't. I'm just going to reiterate something I've said before - if you're going to be using snake icons, please do tell me, and I'll defriend you and read you separately with images turned off. I am severely ophidiophobic and I can't make myself be rational about it. Argh. But still, I have the .wav of Samuel L. Jackson saying, "I have had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane!" because there are some things you've got to do.

Also, something else everyone should do is read this post, hth_the_first's field guide to slash. It's marvellous and rings a lot of bells for me. Most of all, it explains something I am slightly bugged about. Namely, why do I ship Mulder/Scully? Not in the this-is-mildly-interesting sort of way, but OMG-batshippy-OMG sort of way. And this is not something I do with het pairings. I have written het. In particular, I have written Remus Lupin with lots of female characters. Remus/Hermione, which was good fun, and I've tried but not finished Remus/Lily, and a few months ago, I did Remus/Tonks. I thought all of these pairings were interesting - I even did the Remus/Hermione ship_manifesto - and I actually considered writing lots more Remus/Tonks. (It was the fandom that put me off that; I found myself continually amazed by Remus/Tonks shippers who defined themselves not by the fact they shipped Remus/Tonks but by the fact they didn't ship Sirius/Remus. After a while I gave up letting myself in for further insult and wrote off the whole experiment. Urgh.)

But yes, Sirius/Remus is my OTP to end all OTPs. And according to Hth's categories, it's easy to see why: they are very, very much Weird About Each Other. This stems from the way they are the only two left, each is the only person of import in the other's life, and, er, the dominance issues. One of my favourite small details about OotP is the way Molly and Dumbledore and even Lucius Malfoy can't keep Sirius under control, bu Remus says, without raising his voice, "Sirius, sit down." And Sirius sits. It exemplifies a level of dependence Sirius would hate if it was anyone else. But it's him, and that's okay.

And this is the point: Mulder and Scully are just the same. So much so that they are included in the linked post without a mention of the fact they're not a slash pairing, because they are just that Weird About Each Other. They are everything to each other, and not in a good way; they've refined co-dependency to whole new levels. They love each other, but more than that, they need each other, and they're forever constrained by the dark and dangerous world they live in. (Which is not to say I don't like the idea of XF slash - I recently saw "The Red And The Black", where Krycek kisses Mulder and leaves him on the floor and dazed in the dark - but more on that anon.) And I want to write about that. Sigh.

But I still stand by my usual rejection of het pairings. I hated Sam/Jack because it destroyed the SG-1 team vibe, and other than that, I thought it was dull. It was dull. When it was on the table, it reduced Sam to a mere shadow of her former ass-kicking self (which is also an issue I have with Scully and the baby plot, but again, a rant for another time) and sort of shuffled Daniel and Teal'c away to a corner. And as further proof, I did ship Doctor/Rose back in the day. A lot of my Doctor Who fic features UST between them, because it was there and it was complicated and thus it was fun to play with. But with Nine gone, it lost the creepy co-dependent vibe (Dalek shows this nicely, when the nineteen-year-old ordinary girl from Earth stops the nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord from self-annihilation) and becomes Rose as Ten's groupie. And I love Ten every minute of the time that he's not on screen with Rose. Ten/Sarah Jane for teh win, yes.

Speaking of which, I need to finish my femgenficathon story soon liek woah. Yes. Am going to go and do that.

Comments

[rosariotijeras.livejournal.com]

Bewailing is a word of commendable use. Probably my favorite word ever.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*bewails at you*

[tau_sigma]

Er, that wasn't supposed to become a rant. Heh. What you call a rant, I call an interesting and perfectly valid view of the other side. A friend of mine is doing medicine, and her mum is a nurse, and goodness, it is tough. Which should, perhaps, be obvious, but I think perhaps we take doctors for granted. (And some are complete arses. But that's true of people in all walks of life, and a whole different rant.)

It won't stop raining, and I'm quite enjoying it. - oh, ditto! I bounced out of work in a thoroughly good mood on Thursday night, and I'm quite sure no-one understood why, but it was pouring. And then there was thunder and lightening, and the lights flickering light the electricity was about to go off, and it was wonderful. *g*

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I hate, hate people taking doctors for granted. They are put-upon, and overworked, and they have families waiting at home for them, and they are humans, too!

...sigh. Enough with the rants. Maybe it's time to go and play in the rain!

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's so much in here I want to respond to, but I'm in a verbal overload place because I'm doing so much LJ catch-up right now. So, in brief:

(1) Totally fair point about the rampant doctor bitchery. (I feel I may have done some of this, although more about certain types of specialists than doctors full stop; in any case, if I have, I apologize retroactively.) It's just easy, I suppose, to have that knee-jerk response to The Entire Medical Establishment if you unfairly extrapolate from bad individual experiences; but it's not fair and it's lazy reasoning and... yes. I have very few words on me right now.

(2) Oh, I love that post you linked, especially because it actually cites fannish examples with which I'm familiar! SN, Oz, SPN, etc! This so rarely happens. And it also articulates my OTP preferences, which seem to be similar to yours--particularly the us-against-the-world element, the two-person-universe theory. I love that; I guess it ties into my fondness for stories about bonding in the face of trauma/disaster/apocalypse. (I also like the little side-thread in comments to the post about incest in fandom--very interesting.) Thanks for the heads up.

(3) There is no (3). Except to say god, but I have missed you and your posts, and I wish your Internet were working better. And two weeks and a day!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

1. Some doctors are arseholes. (In fact, one of Pedar's colleagues is such an arsehole that the rest of the clinical faculty refer to him as "Nero" and keep trying to run him over.) But they're really not all like that. And watching her working a hundred hours in a week is making my heart hurt.

2. "Two-person-universe-theory" - yes. That's it! I mean to work through all the comments too, as I'd be interested in that incest thing as well.

3. My internet is HORROR and WOE. I've never seen it quite as awful as it was last night. I ended up yelling at it and giving up in disgust.

And in case I hadn't said it before: I missed you like crazy. And two weeks! Seems unreal.

[kismeteve.livejournal.com]

I found myself continually amazed by Remus/Tonks shippers who defined themselves not by the fact they shipped Remus/Tonks but by the fact they didn't ship Sirius/Remus.

I shipped R/T from the moment I read the two of them together, and then once HBP came out, canonised the ship and made the batshitters emerge in full force, I ran away. Why are two of my favorite HP ships defined by the crazy?

After a while I gave up letting myself in for further insult and wrote off the whole experiment.

Sadly, I don't blame you, though I mourn the lack of future R/T fic from you. :(

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

What's the other HP ship defined by the crazy? *g* I guess Sirius/Remus must have its fair share, but I am thoroughly acclimatised to that.

Sadly, I don't blame you, though I mourn the lack of future R/T fic from you. :(

Don't tell anyone, but I do actually have one last one in the works. Sort of a companion to Lucy In The Sky..., with Remus's side of the last few scenes.

[kismeteve.livejournal.com]

Harry/Hermione of course. Not that I frequently admit, considering the lunacy of Harmonians.

I do actually have one last one in the works.

*dances*

[insaneizzi.livejournal.com]

Apparently butterfly needles are the easiest kind to draw blood from invisible veins, but I find that it's the worst kind for the patient. (ie, me).

There's a tendency...to vilify all doctors indiscriminately I've tended to not like GP's, just because of the tendency to say 'There's nothing wrong with you' and tell you to go home. Even if you do have something wrong with you. I do realise why they say this, and GP's have to know a lot of things, and usually they do, but that doesn't stop me being annoyed with quite a few of them.
It's very easy to get annoyed with medical practises, because there is so much out there that one person cannot know, even specialists can't know everything about their special subject, and now I'm kinda freaked because that's the direction I want to head in, ie medicine. And this has become quite rambly.


Mulder/Scully is just, erm. Yes. I don't like the characters by themselves, Mulder is a fruitcake and Scully has no opinions of her own, but together they seem to make some sort of actual entity worth watching and writing about. Because, as you said, they're the same. They can't live without each other, as a canon sense, and as a character sense, because if you split them, they don't work anymore.

(I sometimes wonder why I like the X-Files, because I don't like the main characters, and I don't like most of the subject material, and I can't understand the running plot. But I do like it! It's a mystery to me...)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I think they give something to grip on. I'm certainly used to them after last night! *g* Although what she's going to do with all the blood she's collected, I don't know.

The thing is, a GP will never deliberately send you home when there's something wrong with you, because that constitutes a breach of ethics. They make mistakes, though. My mum is living in fear of doing this at the moment; she's convinced her batch of babies will drop dead the moment she discharges them!

Mulder is a fruitcake and Scully has no opinions of her own

That's kinda harsh, don't you think? Mulder's pretty much mental, but he's interesting because he's mental. And Scully has opinions of her own every time the two of them have a slanging match. I guess that's it, though; the two of them come the most alive when they're sparring. And there's a whole bunch of chemistry there! Maybe that's why you like it? *g*

[insaneizzi.livejournal.com]

Although what she's going to do with all the blood she's collected, I don't know.
Perhaps the black market? :P

Mulder is a fruitcake, but my version of the word might be less harsh than yours. But even if he is a fruitcake (which he is) he still has opinions of his own.
Scully on the hand only has other peoples' opinions. Take for example, the religious aspect. Yes she wears the cross around her neck, and goes to confession, but then you get to Biogenisis, and there she is spouting about evolution. All her opinions are ones that she's adopted because she thinks they are what she should believe, but she doesn't actually believe in them. That's what bugs me about her.
(Yay! that made sense). (And then I'll find out it doesn't because I'm half asleep, but oh well).

[cedara]

I really hated Sam/Jack - the ship war back in season four destroyed a lot of things. IMHO, season one to three are still the best in regards of SG-1. As much as I like Claudia Black and Ben Browder, they haven't managed to top that.

Yes, I did ship Doctor/Rose when he was Nine, but I wasn't able to write open ship fic this season, which is odd, as I like Ten lots. (I won't blame munchkinott's comments who doesn't like Rose for my not shipping them!*g*)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, definite word on that. I got into the show during season two, and I don't think it's scaled those dizzy heights since. I'm serious! I more or less gave up after season eight, so I don't know anything about the post-classic team, so to speak. I like Ten lots too, more than Nine, but I don't like Ten/Rose. Odd, that!

[pinkishmew.livejournal.com]

I do rant about doctors quite a lot. It's largely a childish, reactionary smack against the people who - quite clearly - cannot cure something incureable and [gasp] don't think I'm the most special person in the world, so largely treat me with disinterest and hand me painkillers. I accept it's all they can do; I just don't like it. This is GPs, though. And I have met one nice doctor this year. He can't actually make the pain go away or make me any better, but at least he speaks to me nicely and acts like he cares. I think this is why I get on better with my counsellor. She acts like my pain is in some way important, when really it's only important to me.

My best friend is taking Medicine next year, and I've already told her I'm going to buy her a hipflask, 'for your inevitable decline into alcoholism'. She's been saying she's going to be a brain surgeon since she was five, and she's been preparing for it since then too. I definitely admire her; I know I couldn't work with that dedication.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

They have to be disinterested, I think. They see too many people in a day not to be. As in, your pain is important, and they wish it could be more important, but there's only one doctor per thousand of the population or whatever the statistic is. My mum is a GP, or at least she will be. I think she's looking forward to getting out of hospital rotation.

I couldn't work with this dedication, either. I think growing up with this has put me off for life.

[pinkishmew.livejournal.com]

Yes. I think I'll add it to my list of, "Well, I simply don't like it, and I wish it could change, but I don't really have an alternative or solution." It joins war, testing on animals, and the exams system on that particular list of things. I'm allowed not to like them but grudgingly accept there are few alternatives and even fewer viable ones.

I was lazy enough before the illness-that-means-I-can-sit-down-all-day-and-relax-in-baths-for-hours-with-a-legitimate-excuse came along. I'm not entirely sure I'm cut out for a life in teaching, to be honest.

[thecapitalc.livejournal.com]

Boo. Am Holidaying. Michaelmas seems a world away. Work is on very high priority, as is cramming. Urgh. Picnic someday to distract me from woe? Where are you living, by the way?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I'm off near St Cross, in a flat on Jowett. Where are you? (And YES on picnic. I'll be freaking during noughth week, I know.)

[thecapitalc.livejournal.com]

Up Cowley, so will be needing a base ;) (lol, joking). But definitely picnic. I'll probably be up before noughth anyway because our house lease has already started!

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're allowed to dismiss Western medicine until you've been to medical school, and I don't think you're allowed to talk about shit doctors who are lazy and get paid too much until you've worked a hundred hours a week at expense of everything else.

It's not Western medicine or GPs that bug me (except when I start thinking 'now if this was a dog we'd have done ultrasound -- or whatever -- by now') so much as the way the system works. And the fact that I should be more assertive when it comes to problems rather than just agreeing to the same repeat prescription because the Health Centre is running behind that day.

[deepbluemermaid.livejournal.com]

When will you be back in Oxford? It would be nice to actually meet you at some point. I am leaving to spend the year in Italy on the Monday of 0th week, however, so perhaps we will not coincide.

I am not so phobic about snakes, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to deal with SoaP. Closing my eyes whenever the snakes come into view would rather lessen the experience, I'm sure!

You're brave about being a human pincushion - I'm definitely not so good with needles. My veins are apparently rather reluctant; it takes even an experienced phlebotomist quite a while to find a vein. I have low blood pressure, and I get quite dizzy and sick after blood tests. So I've been advised that blood donation would not be a good idea...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

If I'm around, I will get in touch! Hopefully I will make it to Oxford before you leave and we can bond over snakes and phlebotomy!

[avendya.livejournal.com]

Er, is there any chance I could get a copy of that .wav of Samuel L. Jackson?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I was all ready to upload it for you - but I have deleted it! Ack. So sorry.