Dinner at 6

We had 15 people for dinner tonight. Generally a good time, although I need to learn how to tone down the effort. After 5 or so hours slaving over a lasagna (a la the Julie/Julia blog), the results were lukewarm. I am in serious need of a vacation.

Maybe I was tired, or maybe it was the wine, or maybe it's simply what I'm wont to do, but I spilled some lasagna on my roommate's placemats. I washed them, along with a placemat of mine. Drying the contents of the drainer, I realized that I had missed strawberry mousse on the back of my what-I-thought-was-clean placemat. Apparently, I missed some lasagna on my roommate's, too. I stepped away from the sink as I watched her scrub and scurb and scrub what really was a very clean thing. She paid a total of $4 for the set, promise. Her efforts were worth more. Earlier, she washed a pepper with dishsoap.

The point being not that my roommate is aggressively or incompatibly clean. Rather, I think I'm beginning to slip into dirt. Sleep deprivation deprives you of your full faculties, but I sense that, in actuality, I'm not tired. I'm rebeling against clean. The hardest part of the anatomy lab is the sterility. I find the bright lights and antiseptic confining and sometimes I visualize dust - honestly - to soothe myself during the emotional parts of the dissection. That's some of what I was getting at in my "Fragments" post yesterday.

Tomorrow we will do an EKG demonstration. Rather, the male students will demonstrate the use of the machine because female students are not allowed to, for fear of "violating our privacy." But what if I decide that I don't want privacy? What if I want to share in the demand made of the boys? Are their chests not sexual? I tried to discuss this at my AD meeting. My advisor, a psychiatrist, sensed something in me and stated that "Sex is no less erotic with medical training." I wonder if his wife agrees?

It seems hypocritical to me that we strip patients to johnnies in cold rooms and insist upon lines of privacy for ourselves. Especially with classmates with whom we stare death in the face, several times a week. Sometimes, it even gets in our hair. It's certainly been on my glasses.

Why do we doctors inisist upon a clean and private world? Were one to exist, no longer would our profession.