So I'm done with the residency program as of this morning. I went in this morning and I presented my research project (along with the two other women I worked with) and we did it and it's done and I'm done. I hate to say it, but the residency was a waste of time. It did not focus at all, not one minute, on care of psychiatric patients. I did get to sit through hours and hours of how to diaper premature infants, how to troubleshoot nebulizers, how to apply different kinds of wound care vacs, things like that, things that have nothing to do with the kind of work I'm doing now. (Of course, I love knowledge for knowledge sake, but on some mornings, those four hour seminars were a tough haul.)
I'm sitting in the kitchen of the casita now. There's a repair guy here in the casita (I hate having any service people inside) to repair the AC unit. He seems fine. Showed up with a mask, is not wandering about or anything, but I'm still nervous. I hate this part of being an adult, dealing with repair people. It's a weird safety issue thing. So I'm sitting in the kitchen, around the corner where he can't really see me, and letting Dave deal with him. Hopefully he can fix something. The AC unit has been keeping the place at about 77-79 degrees, no matter the setting. It's fine, but that's not a thing that's working as advertised, you know? So let's see how this goes.
If nothing else, it did get me to tidy my sewing table, which sits almost directly under the AC unit. I recently made a run of masks for my therapist and her family (and a couple extra for me and Dave), so everything was a mess at my sewing table. I'm planning on making a few more masks in the coming days, and I want to cut into the fabric that Dave gave me for my birthday and start a new quilt.
The new fabric a lot of interesting solids, like 40+ different colors. But I'm doing that thing where I have to fight The Brain to let me use something, like, because if I use it and it doesn't come out great, then I "wasted" it. I have a lot of tricks to combat this--the most recent one is telling myself that I don't want to die of Covid without having cut into the fabric that I wanted to use--but I actually have to employ those tricks instead of just sitting across the room letting The Brain control every little aspect of my life.
So maybe when the repair guy is gone, I'll get out my stuff and sew awhile. Or maybe I'll get back into bed and take a long nap. I did not sleep very much last night. I worked on Monday night, came home and got a scant handful of hours of poor quality sleep throughout the day, then I worked on my presentation until about one a.m., then I slept until about 5:00 or so and got up and got ready. When I came home, I had to clean up in preparation for the repair guy, then I just...stayed up.
Lots of things are making me tired. Allergens are really bad right now. Working nights, not great on my energy level. Health-related woes. Random sleep patterns...the list is endless. Or at least the list feels endless. Everything feels endless right now.
But I had a small bump of hope yesterday when Kamala Harris was named as VP pick for the Democratic Party ticket. A woman and a woman of color! Hooray!
Almost immediately, the racism and misogyny started up, but that's to be expected. republicans have no morals and no boundaries. The KKK is in the white house and right-wing racists rejoice. Every time I see a trump voter whose wife or husband was deported by the current administration, I think, GOOD. You did it to yourself. Suffer.
This is not a great attitude. But I'm sick of people who want to blame brown and black people for their problems. Rich conservatives have too many idiots convinced that it is brown and black people stealing our jobs and driving down wages. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos, a trillionaire who has made billions during the pandemic, pays Amazon workers pennies and the Waltons, a whole family of billionaires, pay Walmart workers minimum wage--and neither company provides affordable insurance or benefits for their workers and both companies could afford to easily--and yet conservatives have idiots convinced that the problem is brown and black people and not rich leeches like Bezos and the Waltons. And don't get me started on the FaceBook guy, who got rich off of selling your information to the highest bidder. Keep posting the details of your lives on FaceBook, rubes.
And maybe look up the meaning of "hoisted by your own petard."
It's disgusting. The French had it right with the guillotines.
I see the same thing at the hospital. One of the reasons I work where I work is because we care for people regardless of their ability to pay. But we are, for example, chronically short of PPE and the lowest tech--someone who may be risking their life caring for Covid patients--only makes about $15/hr (around $28,000 a year) while the CEO makes $620,000 a year plus biannual bonuses of $60,000 to $70,000. The tech makes less than 4% of what the CEO makes in a year. Does that make any sense?
And yet, we allow it.
I remember a professor I had in college. When I started college, it was relatively affordable, around $119 per credit hour and I was paying about $1,200 a semester. Then the costs started to rise. When I finished up this last time, I paid almost $400 per credit hour, plus fees, plus a premium per semester to take medical-related courses. My last semester cost over $8,000, not including books and scrubs and so on. This old-school professor, as education costs were starting to rise, told us, "There are twenty-seven thousand of you"--the number of students at the university--"if you wanted to, you could do something about it."
Did we? No. But why didn't we?
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