Me Bashing

I really have a hard time figuring out what to do when I hear my dad laughing at a gay-denigrating comment. I mean, I know my dad loves me. He's generally not afraid to tell me so or to show me with a nice heartfelt hug. But he has this friend and when they get together it's like the "good ol' boys" hanging out, telling un-PC jokes and laughing about them for way too long.

I don't know why being gay is such a horribly negative thing in our culture. Why does anybody give a shit really? I mean, the whole fucking country is petrified of being called gay. Seems like a silly thing to waste your energy being afraid of. If someone called me a sheep fucker I think I'd probably laugh at them. But since I'm a gay person and not a "bestialist" I suppose it doesn't push my buttons in the same way.

Today my dad, his friend and I were having lunch together. We were getting along fine and laughing at stupid stuff until the conversation turned to this psychic woman that my dad's friend had gone to see. Apparently she told him lots of "impressive" things, including that he and my dad had been friends in a previous life. This of course led to a full 30 minutes about how they weren't "that kind of friends", and that "I hope that's not what she meant." And I was sitting right there thinking "ummm... my dad and his friend are now arguing about how horrible and repulsive it would be to be me."

Now I'm not stupid. I know that's not literally what they were thinking, and I know they were just joking around with each other. Still, I couldn't help feeling like the retarded kid they were telling retard jokes about.

So should I just let it slide and try to be secure enough in my dad's love for me to know that he didn't really mean it? Or should I tell him that I didn't like being in that situation? I'm afraid that'll just make my dad think I'm being a little pussy whose feelings are always in danger of being hurt.

The irony is that this friend of my dad's has a 28 year old son who was staring at me uncomfortably for several hours the other day. So somewhere in the back of my mind I'm wondering if they both try to mask their fear of the other one finding out about their shameful gay son by spouting their macho, gay-maligning humor and nervously laughing at each other?

Filed in: Angst • Homosexuality • Psychology

My first semester of med school

Hi. I know I've been gone for a while, but that's only because I've been in medical school. It's about the best excuse I've ever heard, besides being dead.

So med school is simultaneously awesome and anti-awesome. The awesome part is that I've been exposed to some really incredible situations, some world class professors and a whole new group of friends. The anti-awesome part is that every waking moment is spent studying because you know you're going to get another lifetime's worth of knowledge to memorize in lecture the next day.

Incredible Situation Example - For the past 6 weeks we've been doing Gross Anatomy. Think brightly lit room with stainless steel cabinets, rough linoleum floor pockmarked with drains, loud exhaust fans, 33 clueless students in puke green scrubs and 8 dead people marinading in blue zippered-up body bags. We're put in groups with color and number designations. I was in group Blue 3. On Blue dissection days, only members of Blue groups would dissect. And on the next dissection day, the Blue team would present what we'd dissected to the rest of the class while the next color would begin their own dissections. Since the presentations were made in shifts, we really had multiple opportunities to learn our anatomy. After all, who wants to present something without knowing what they're talking about?

Anyway, the particular dissections you are assigned is just the luck of the draw. Sometimes you get a good one, sometimes you get a bad one. For instance, my buddy and I were assigned Male Genitalia and even though I had cut into our cadaver many times in the past, I still found myself apologizing to him just before I slit his scrotum open with a scalpel. Of course, 2 hours later we were pulling and ripping things in there like unskilled day laborers pulling up shag carpeting. BUT... we were also fortunate enough to be assigned the brain dissection. This is fantastic because I got to combine my love of body spelunking with my love for power tools. Yes, I had a big whirring power saw in my gloved hands, which I slowly worked all the way around my cadaver's skull; juices and powdered bone flying all over the place. I thought I was in heaven, but I was only in the waiting room. The real thing was when I was given a large, steel flat-head screwdriver with a T-handle and told to insert it into the cut I had just made with the power saw and then "keep twisting it until the skull cap loosens." I stood back with a goofy smile on my face thinking about how lucky I was to be doing something that the majority of the world will never experience. Then my buddy asked me what the hell I was doing. He agreed that we were lucky but he also reminded me that we still needed to remove the brain and identify all 12 cranial nerves. It was a good day.

Filed in: Contented • MedSchool • Mindfulness