Peer Pressure, I’m very sensitive.
It has been a minute since I’ve used this space but two of my best friends have recently taken to the social media and now I’m gonna, too! Their excellent writing has impressed in me the importance of using the online to spread information about women’s health. Please check out this great blog: https://acrossthespeculum.tumblr.com/ and follow this twitter feed: @southern_stdtNM. These are two brilliant women who inspire me to be more but make me feel like I’m enough. It’s possible that I will write some about women’s health, but no promises.
A lot has happened since I’ve been away. We lived in Carolina while Jared did the MBA thing and then we backpacked around South America for a few months (cause when else are we going to have the time?) and now I live in Nashville where I’m studying to be a midwife (what?) and Jared lived in Seattle, where he works for Amazon. We also exchanged sarcastic nuptials in a bar last March. Mazel to us.
But back to being a student midwife and all the amazing women I get to grow into this role with. After spending a year becoming an RN, which included spending time with a lot of 22-year-old blonde women, I am proud to call one or two of them my friends. My other comrades in this program are older, wiser and more brunette (although the true geniuses among us remain defiantly blonde). We are a motley crew of individuals from all over the country with different goals and opinions about women’s health. How great is that?
Our group runs the gamut. We have die-hard liberals eager to take issue with the status quo as well as southern conservatives whose norms are being challenged. I believe the breadth of experiences each of us bring makes all of us better. Our differences are representative of the wide range of women we will be serving, all of whom deserve health care providers who will advocate for their wants and needs.
A brilliant friend once said, “If I’m ignorant about something don’t belittle me, educate me.” This knife cuts both ways because I know firsthand that liberal New Yorkers are just as capable of being closed-minded as conservative Texans. Being truly able to embrace newness without judgment is a skill I have yet to master, but it’s one I aspire to. We have only to gain from being open to learning from people who are different from us. It’s when we think we’ve figured it all out that we’re really missing opportunities to grow.
This program has shown me both that I know nothing, Jon Snow, and that I’m capable of literally anything. We all are. In 18 months Vanderbilt has turned 140 students, some fresh of out undergrad, into nurses on their way to becoming NPs. What’s an NP do again? They help the doctor, right? And midwives – are they really still a thing?
In a nutshell, a nurse-midwife is an advanced practice nurse just like a nurse practitioner. A nurse practitioner is an independent health care provider who can work with or without doctors in a variety of settings. Other types of nurse practitioners include those who work in primary care, those who work in acute care (the hospital), those who just see kids, those who just see older folks and those who specialize in mental health. 95% of CNMs (certified nurse midwives) work in hospitals attending vaginal births and our scope of practice includes primary care for women from puberty through menopause.
Pelvic exams, STI testing, contraception prescribing, IUD insertions, prenatal care, labor and birth support, sexual health needs, menopause symptom management — midwives do it all.
The more you know.
Filed under Midwifery
Last Cigarette Ever
I can remember my first cigarette ever, stolen from my mother’s pack of Virginia Slims 100s and enjoyed on the roof outside my teenaged window. It would mark the beginning of an era for me, one that would characterize both my adolescence and young adulthood. I can appreciate that only a handful of these cigarettes had a metaphysical impact on me rivaling the damage all of them were obviously doing to my body. But I was willing to gamble then and still believe now that the impact those important ones had on my being was stronger and more lasting than the physical harm they did to my lungs.
I’ve always been told that lungs regenerate and am learning now in school just how that occurs and it’s really quite remarkable. The skin lining the lungs has to go through four stages before the damage becomes irreversible, so as long as you don’t smoke long enough to get to that fourth stage, eventually your lungs will return to normal. It’s amazing to me that the trauma my lungs have been through can be righted with time, through no effort on my part other than simply no longer smoking. This is certainly something that physical damage has over emotional.
Emotional trauma has long been a reason to start or keep smoking. With that said, emotional trauma is often one of the things that shapes us the most. I can remember more than a few extra cigarettes smoked on nights of tears or too much drinking, but I also remember the ones that started friendships that would become life-long bonds. Smokers bond faster than non-smokers because we have this wonderfully terrible habit in common that leaves us with nothing else to do but chat. The friends I made smoking on the stoop my freshman year of college are still some of the best people I know. They are the people who know me, inside and out, the ones from whom I could hide little because we’ve shared so much.
It was a cigarette that introduced me to the love of my life and one that marked the moment when my mother passed. Both of these events impacted me in irreversible ways and I’m not sorry to have them marked in my memory with a cigarette. The first gave him and me what seemed to us infinite time to get to know one another and, for that, he remains my best friend seven years later. The latter gave me a moment of pure existence to truly appreciate the gravity of my mother’s passing and the numerous amazing, hilarious and heartbreaking moments that preceded it. Had it not been my instinct to reach for an American Spirit at that moment, I would have been robbed of something that has probably shaped me more than any life experience thus far.
That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Quitting smoking comes in second.
It has now been more than a year since my last cigarette and that era in my life has come to a close. My body is on its way to repairing itself, but thankfully the impact the cigarettes had on my existence will be mine forever. The truth is, as hard as it all was, I wouldn’t trade my smoking days for anything. They made me who I am and they were fabulous.
Filed under Uncategorized
Sugar Magnolia
Allow me to paint you a word picture…
We’ve been living in Carrboro for about two weeks and after spending some time with a sweet kitty named Johnson, we decided that we were going to adopt a cat! Because most kittens are like crackheads, we decided to adopt an adult cat. The Orange County Animal Services people were lovely and after visiting with a couple of felines, we settled on a sweet orange and white kitty named Sugar. She was a stray before coming to the shelter very pregnant and, after all of her babies were adopted, she remained in the shelter. We were in love. She was spayed and we brought her home, after which we decided to add the Magnolia to her name and proceeded to play her the Grateful Dead song in alternate with “Sugar, Sugar” (the Bob Marley version). After a few days of her being terrified of us and sleeping all the time, now she has taken to sleeping all day and wanting to play all night. I know what you’re thinking: cats are nocturnal, why are you surprised?
Well, I’m not sure… we had the cats I grew up with since kitten-hood and they developed to be very human-like. They knew when bedtime was and they hopped right in and cuddled up. This is a stray cat, an alley-cat if you will, and she doesn’t understand why she’s not allowed to go outside. I really empathize with her because my cats were always allowed to go and come as they pleased, so as far as they knew, the entire world was at their disposal. However, this is an apartment kitty and we’re not ready to let her on the patio until we’re sure she knows where the food comes from. She’s sweet and wonderful, but we haven’t slept properly in days, so I’m wondering: does anyone have any advice for how to get a kitty on a schedule or how to stop them from crying all flipping night long?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions and in return, just in case my word picture is insufficient, here is a real one:
Sugar Magnolia, Fireplace Kitty.
Filed under Uncategorized
Our Magical World
I do apologize for my gap in posting. As sorry an excuse as it is, this has been a busy summer. I am now settled in Carrboro, North Carolina with my person and we are loving it. There is a veritable cornucopia of dining options and cooking options for us to explore in the coming months as this town is known for its love of local food and is famous for its year-round Farmers Market. More on both of these to come, but first I’d like to share a video I shot with my fella in SE Asia last fall. With the editing expertise of Curt Fissel, we were able to complete this project, so please let me know what you think!
P.S. If I haven’t mentioned it, my guy is a magician (a really incredible one) so enjoy!
Filed under Uncategorized
W a i t i n g
This is a post I wrote weeks after graduating college and I think it applies to my current state of transition. Perhaps you will find something relatable in it, too…
Whilst I was reading Anderson’s introduction to Heidegger’s Discourse On Thinking the notion of an ontological “waiting,” struck a chord in me. Being in a bit of a personal limbo between college and whatever else life has to offer made this notion call to me loudly; too loudly to ignore. We, qua humans, wait in line, in traffic, at bus stops, to order food, to get a job, to fall in love, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Is the time between waiting for this and waiting for that spent waiting for something b i g g e r?
A friend once told me she thought it the most human thing to set a goal for oneself and to reach it. Is this time in between goal setting and goal reaching the waiting? If I set the goal for myself to make it to the gym before work and I complete that goal, am I no longer waiting? What if the next item on my agenda is the train ride to work. During this, let’s say forty five minute, train ride am I waiting to get to work? Maybe yes, maybe no. If I’m doing the crossword or reading a book on the train then I am doing and not waiting. Or am I still waiting?
Anderson makes a distinction between a shallower “waiting for” and a deeper “waiting upon.” These seemed to me to be not unlike Heidegger’s “Ontic” and “Ontological,” respectively, so is this waiting I’ve been referring to the ontological waiting?
Ontically, I am currently waiting for my laundry to finish. Ontologically, however, I am waiting for _______. It is a blank I have yet to fill in, so for now I must simply say I am still waiting. There is one waiting for which each person waits for all of his or her life, and that waiting is death. This answers the “what,” of the question, for what do I wait upon? But it’s not the whole answer because waiting consists in more than just a what. How am I waiting upon? Who am I waiting upon? When am I waiting upon? Where am I waiting upon? And most interestingly why am I waiting upon? These are the questions worth asking.
Even if I could answer some of these questions, the form of my answers would have to be mutable, for places, people, and feelings all change constantly. To say that today I am waiting happily on myself, in Boston, to finish my laundry hasn’t revealed very much of my waiting, ontologically as it were. And furthermore, these entities would each be different tomorrow because I will be different tomorrow. If even the ontic things change second to second, how am I expected to answer questions about how, when, where, who and why I am waiting in life? How is anyone expected to be able to answer these questions?
Perhaps we aren’t, and perhaps failure to realize that is why people end up at jobs and in relationships with which they are dissatisfied. Maybe I want something today that I’ll no longer want in ten years. In fact, the chances are incredibly high that things I want today I will not want in ten years, so maybe we’re asking the wrong questions of ourselves at this, such an important transitory, time in life.
If the “what” I’m waiting for is death, then what I do for a job doesn’t really make much of a difference. This question, however, is the one people rely the most heavily on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked what I plan on doing now that I’m not in school anymore. I always chuckle to myself because I’m not sure it makes any difference. I am sure, however, that how and why I do things does make a difference. For me, these a r e the questioning of waiting.
Even if I could answer these questions for myself, they would certainly do you no good, as both your questions and your answers are different from mine because your World is different from mine. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to finish this musing with glorious and grandiose answers to this ontological line of questioning but that would undermine my entire argument. How am I waiting? Why am I waiting? The questioning is the answering…
Filed under Books and Movies
Marriage Equality: A Long Road
This morning I awoke to a text message from my sister reading: It’s all happening…
As I pulled up CNN on my phone, tears began streaming down my face. The Supreme Court of the United States has deemed key parts of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional in a 5-4 vote. From the time I could understand what love and marriage were, I couldn’t understand why some people were allowed to participate and some weren’t. This comes in large part from growing up in the family I did; there was never a distinction made between the straight couples and the gay couples in mine and my parents’ lives. There was never even a label put on anyone because my mother, being the free-spirited soul that she was, frankly did not care for labels. Even as a child, I knew this was an injustice and I dreamed of the day it would be righted.
Two weeks after my 18th birthday, my mother informed me that this mid-term election, the first I’d be eligible to vote in, would include a ban on “non-traditional” forms of marriage in the State of Texas. We volunteered for an organization called No Nonsense in November, which worked tirelessly to prevent the law from passing. It was a lesson in community activism. It was also a lesson in disappointment; the bill passed overwhelmingly in every county except for Travis (where my hometown of Austin lies).
Impassioned by rage and informed by facts, the FACT was that this was discrimination; no other way to put it, I wrote my college essay on this topic and was accepted into Northeastern University in Boston, MA. At the time, Massachusetts was the only state in the union that recognized marriage equality. While I was in school, I attended the Pride Parade where I saw Gov. Deval Patrick marching with his daughter. This was something I never could have imagined growing up. We were moving forward.
This was also the time I met the love of my life, but without equality for everyone, I knew I couldn’t participate in marriage as it was defined in the US. Luckily for me, most college-aged men are terrified of marriage so this was not a problem. After graduation, we moved to NYC, where one year later marriage equality was approved in the State of New York. It being the 6th state to do so, I told my person that we only had 44 more states to go and I would get down on my knees and ask him to be my husband. He laughed and assured me he would say no.
We’re in love.
Today I am writing this from West Hollywood, CA where residents can celebrate the return of marriage equality and I couldn’t be prouder to celebrate with them. I have love in my heart and goosebumps on my arms. We didn’t get everything we wanted today, but the train has left the station. My advice to those still holding onto what they deem “traditional” marriage: get on board or get the hell out of the way.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Beauty of Being Home
It’s funny how being around people from your past makes you revert, in a way, to who you were when you first knew them. I feel so grateful to have reconnected with a few friends from my childhood now that we’re all grown up. The really stark contrast I notice is how much I, and they, have changed over the past decade and how, in a way, we are all still the same. The mannerisms of these adults seem no different to me than their pre-teen counterparts when, in truth, they have undergone massive transformations for which I was not there. It saddens me a bit to see how much I have missed out on having moved so far away after high school. With that said, I may be even more overjoyed by the knowledge that, for some friends, time and distance are irrelevant.
During this trip to Texas, and being on the verge of yet another transition as my person and I prepare to move to North Carolina, I have been blessed to spend real quality time with friends I have known since they days of sleepovers and school dances. There must be some kind of unbreakable bond formed with people you go through puberty with because, even with years and miles between us, I feel myself falling back into the same skin I wore at age 12. The conversation feels the same, the laughter feels the same and the beautiful, indescribable sense of belonging has made me sure that, regardless of no longer having a house here, this will always be my home.
Home is a loaded word. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, myself included. I just left a home in Queens that I loved and am about to move into a new home in North Carolina, which I’m incredibly excited about. My mom’s home is in heaven and my dad’s home is whichever trout stream he’s standing in and yet, somehow, Austin remains the home in my heart. I guess that’s one of the funny things about life; no matter how much you move or how many homes you rack up, there will always be the one from which you came that, if you’re lucky, you can always return to and find the person you started out as on your way to becoming who you are. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll find a few of the people you started out with and be a part of each other’s journeys yet again. I’m one of the really lucky ones.
Filed under Uncategorized
Mac and Cheese Steak
It’s exactly what it sounds like.
My person has been going on for weeks about how incredible a cheesesteak made with mac and cheese instead of cheese sauce would be. This week, I gave in…
First, I marinated the steak in olive oil, balsamic, a little soy sauce, garlic, and SPCC (salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne, otherwise known as the names of my future children). I used skirt steak and there is some debate about how long to let this particular cut of meat marinate for. If you have an opinion on this, please share in the comments!
Then, while the steak was a-marinating, I started the cheese sauce. I will be honest, this turned out a little strange, so if anyone has a better method, I’d be thrilled to hear of it. I started by sautéing some garlic, onions and jalapeños.
Then I added equal parts butter and flour until I got a ‘lil rue going. Finally, once the rue turned brown, I started adding the milk and the cheese. I used a mixture of cheddar, fontina and gruyere cheeses — again, if anyone has better cheeses for mac and cheese, I am enthusiastically accepting suggestions 🙂
The sauce was creamy and it tasted good, but the consistency was a little thin, that’s all. Perhaps I should have simply used less milk, but I managed by just adding more cheese. In the end, I had way too much cheese sauce, but who’s complaining?
After I added my whole wheat elbows, which I recognize is a little like adding lettuce to a double cheese burger, but we all carry our little delusions. So, after I made this a healthy meal through the addition of whole wheat pasta, it was time to get that skillet hot and ready for the steak. 
Since skirt steak is not a thick cut of meat, a searing-hot pan is paramount. Once that baby’s practically smoking, slam that steak down and hear that devilishly good hiss. …. Do you hear it? If not, next time the pan needs to be hotter. I only cooked this for two minutes on each side and then I let it rest for 10 minutes. Then I sliced it as thin as my knife would slice and it looked like this:
If you like your meat cooked more than that, leave it on another minute or two. Then, after toasting the hero, I assembled this heart attack of a sammie: 
And I saw that it was good.
Game of Thrones: A Gift
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or are truly closed to the possibility that a fantasy series might in fact be “your thing,” you’ve probably been exposed to this little story Game of Thrones. Most of us have recently come into contact with this epic series thanks to HBO, however there are many tried and true fans for whom this televised version is a gift from author George RR Martin, who also writes the show. This gift he hath bestowed on them is a sort of a payment in return for more than a decade of frustrated fanship. Why frustrated, you ask? Because although the first installment of A Song of Ice and Fire was released in 1996, the subsequent volumes have been published at such a sporadic rate, with the latest one, A Dance With Dragons (Volume 5), taking nearly five years to complete.
Now is this a problem for me? No! I’m like you; I just started reading the books after I saw the first two seasons of the show. What’s worse is I skipped the first two books and went right to the third, because I had to know what happened next. Now that I’ve completed the fifth, A Dance With Dragons, my person cooly stated that he would have no sympathy for me, for having read the first 4 books as a youth, he had to wait out each of those long five years until this last one was finally released. I responded with equal sass as I respond to any of you who thinks it’s lame I skipped the first two: at least I can go back and read the first two books, you are all going to have to wait until late 2015 for any more of this man’s incredible storytelling. But before this gets heated, let me pivot to my point about the HBO series being a gift to true fans…
There are countless fantasy series out there and a very dedicated audience for whom they have been written. A Song of Ice and Fire is one of capital E-P-I-C proportions. To have read this book as a youth and conjured your own images of Arya dancing with Needle or of Tyrion tramping through King’s Landing is something I will never know. But I imagine for such intense (dare I say obsessed) fans, to actually see this expansive story realized on television must be truly incredible. Likewise, I have to imagine that this is also a gift for the author, George RR (we’re pals).
Having initially intended for this series to be a trilogy and then expanding it to a seven-parter tells me that Martin wasn’t entirely certain where each of the numerous story lines would go when he started writing them. Because of this there are certain characters whose stories disappear and then reappear sometimes books later; Theon, I’m looking at you. Now, with the television series, Martin has the opportunity to creatively explore in real time that which, in the books, he only recollects for the audience after the fact. He is able to do what all artists must want to do, improve upon his work, but he gets to do it in a way that the audience respects rather than reviles. Poor George Lucas was not so lucky.
Lucas made the crucial mistake of taking away a piece of the art from its consumers. As one said consumer, I speak for us when I say we will not abide that shit. No, we will not. Lucas took away the original Star Wars and left us only with the altered version. Martin gets a pass because, while the television show takes significant creative liberties, the books themselves remain untouched. I do have to wonder, however, if Martin’s writing of the final two books will be influenced by his writing and producing the television show. What do you all think? And what do fans of the books think of the show’s casting? I’m very curious; did Jon Snow really look like such a pretty boy in your heads? Surely not…
Filed under Books and Movies
Eat. Read. Ask. Do. Be. 