Conversion

It's finals week, and I am at a coffee shop studying my little brain out. And by studying, I mean writing a new blog post. To be fair, though, I am just taking a short break. Then it will be back to heart valves and the many ways we can fuck them up.

Over the past week or so I've decided that maybe Cultural Diversity for Health Professionals was not such a dumb class after all. The reason behind my change of heart is not that I am encountering more and more patients of diverse backgrounds, but that the chapter on voodoo seems increasingly pertinent as I move through the world. There is so much to be said for private fake stabbings of soft dolls representing individuals. I feel that I would be more efficient as a person if I had a little more knife-wielding, or in this case, pin-wielding that poses as a metaphor for actual real violence, in my life. Rather than wasting mental energy on being irritated with the more obnoxious members of my cohort, I could just plan for an evening of vigorous stabbing, reveling in the private knowledge that I will later be releasing my ire upon a form which really doesn't look like them at all but you just use your imagination and then it works out.

I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to the voodoo than just stabbing, and I'm also pretty sure that the stabbing is not the main part of the religion. There are also gris-gris, which I am willing to explore. I could get some hairballs from the jiu jitsu mats (I admit that the hair on our mats is mainly mine, but still other people have hair too so I shouldn't always be blamed at clean up time) and tie them to sticks, then leave them on the chairs of the annoying. Without special voodoo blessings it probably wouldn't turn them into other stuff, but it would definitely gross them out which would be satisfying. Maybe that's the power of the gris-gris.

Back to the books. The respite has been good. But first, some haiku:

Stabbing with pins, yes
Dolls not real but still awesome
Poke poke poke poke poke

Study the systems
Think of the rectal exam
It's in the butt, yo

Endocarditis
Your heart is completely fucked
Sad but so are you