Honolulu AIDS Walk

April 17th is the 20th annual Honolulu AIDS Walk!

This event benefitsThe Life Foundation is a local organization that does amazing things. They're the state's oldest and largest AIDS-related organization and, as such, serve over 75% of the state's people, providing rapid HIV testing, education and prevention programs, and support services for patients of HIV/AIDS. This doesn't just include counseling and medical care, but home care, groceries, and a wide variety of other essential services. They currently serve over 60% of all HIV/AIDS patients in the state including men, women, and children from every income level and ethnic group. They operate an extensive peer-to-peer prevention effort that targets people at the most risk for contracting HIV, offering support and education. They go out of their way to reach people in the community; if you need an HIV test but can't or don't want to go to their office, they will send an inconspicuous employee to meet you anywhere on island for your cheek swab.

I've volunteered for them in the past, and this is really amazing considering that they operate out of one tiny office the size of a small apartment in Honolulu. Now I'm the captain of team Psychic Unity of Anthropology. We're the UH anthropology department's team and, the event being so far in advance, we are woefully short on people and donations.

You can help by spreading the word about the event or donating directly to our team page. I don't receive any compensation for bringing in donations, this money goes directly to Life Foundation programs.

Thank you very much for anything you can give and any efforts to help us reach more people. You are helping us create a safer, healthier Hawaii and for that you have our great appreciation.

Update, Re: Hope

My optimism has waned considerably after three tries and vaguely-red-and-not-even-the-right-red hair. Why is it so easy to shake up my world views? I think all anthropologists are like this. If we weren't, there's no way we could use Warcraft to write on the creation of identity and the nature of human interaction. And certainly no one would give you tenure for it*.

If anything, the cognitive dissonance and guilt related to having to tell your perky stylist they messed up is just further proof that I am never going to change. And, more importantly, if I think dying my hair will make me change, I am dumb but probably also a fantastic ethnographer. Because in medical anthropology EVERYTHING MEANS EVERYTHING and no extrapolation is too generous. Take the last article I read, for example: People sharing food with each other in Fiji means that your body is communally owned and you are not your own individual person, nor do you have control over your own physicality.

So my excitement over the tattoo is combined now with a deep-seated fear of permanent disfigurement and a compulsion do just freaking do it anyway because like, come on. Really.

Though I guess it's not fair to say I'll never change, since I haven't turned in my last two weekly assignments in Ethnobotany and I don't even really care. Normally this would cause me to panic but these things are like, what, half a percent of the whole semester? And when I have a paper, presentation, project, or midterm nearly every day for three solid weeks, watching videos and giving trite summaries is just gonna have to go on the back burner. The fact that I'm okay with that is pretty interesting.



*If this does NOT make you want to quit your job and become an anthropologist, you better be a professional chocolates-massages-and-wine-at-the-same-time critic because I cannot imagine anything sweeter than getting paid to screw around in Warcraft and then tell people how to think about it.

In which I misinterpret Alice Cooper

YESSS THE SEMESTER IS OVER I'M DONE FOREVER AND EVER AND I WILL NEVER HAVE TO DO WORK EVER AGAIN AS FAR AS I AM CONCERNED RIGHT NOW OMG.

Time to eat cookies and jump on the bed and stay up AS LATE AS I WANT. HOT CRACKERS I AM SO EXCITED. I think my grade is effed in a couple of my classes I don't even caaaaare. Wait I care a little bit because I just got my Emory info packet in the mail and I really, reeeaaally want to go there but I don't know if I can possibly get in. I think if I don't I might as well go wait tables since there's nothing else I'd really like to do but ANYWAY FOR RIGHT NOW I'M GOING TO EAT ICE CREAMS AND WATCH MOVIES AND SLEEP FOREVER.

Actually I can't really get used to being done with work so I got a Chamorro language tape to study before I went to Guam but it's probably the most useless thing ever. It has a dude repeating phrases over and over and telling you to repeat them but it never tells you what they're saying. There's no accompanying book either, so I guess I'm just screwed. Normally I would just get some books but since I've never, ever heard someone speak Chamorro I don't know how to pronounce anything.

I also checked out some books on Micronesian archaeology and got some unpublished research from the University of Guam on excavations done in the area we'll be looking into. What the hell why am I so determined to keep working now.

SCORE

I got early acceptance into the Guam field school :D WHO WANTS TO GO SHOPPING AT R.E.I.?!

Things-o-rama

I finally turned in my Guam application yesterday and he said he would get back to me today or tomorrow. I haven't heard back yet so I'm nervous. I imagine him sifting through all the work I turned in last semester, shaking his head and tsk-ing quietly to himself as he decides not to let me in.

By the way I'm still spending most of my time hunched over a computer writing about domestic abuse. I have a short paper due this weekend that involves critiquing and attempting to create a feminist ethic for interpreting and responding to sexual abuse, then next Wednesday (YES RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY SPRING BREAK) I have a 3000 word research project on the use of the idea of mental health as a form of gendered control. So if in the next week you find yourself thinking "hot crackers, I sure am having a shitty time!" I want you to picture the eleven books about systemic abuse I have sitting on my desk, and I want you to picture me reading each one of them and stuffing them with post-it notes instead of relaxing over the only break I will get for the rest of the semester during the only chance I'll have to see my dad in almost a year. Then I want you to think "WELL GOD DAMN I guess my time is not as shitty as it could be!" Because gals and pals this is SHIT-O-RAMA right here, yes it is.

In somewhat related news, pick a monkey and then try to find its family, subfamily, superfamily, suborder, & binomial nomenclature in less than fifteen minutes. YOU CAN'T DO IT, I TRIED. Now do this for every primate at the Honolulu Zoo one after the other. Have fun, kids.

Guamarama

Original post about the field school in Guam I'm applying to removed since it has been discussed and we decided that if I get accepted we'll figure out a way to pay for it. I am super freaking excited about this :D

More srs bsns

Okay on a more serious life update (which I guess is what I'm supposed to be doing here, not ranting about zombies or WoW but OH MAN YOU GUYS SHOULD PLAY ZOMBIE PANIC--) I have a new beef.* And you might be wondering if he suggest shopping and offers to hold my purse. Well, my friends, he does both of those things. He's local so he's chill and awesome and he plays WoW with me and today he helped me find resource materials for a research project. Happy Blossom :D He's great, you guys would like him a lot.

I'm also settling on medical anthropology after taking just one course on it this semester. I had solid anthropology courses, actually, and that's the one that really got me. The same prof only teaches one or two medical anth courses a semester so hopefully I can get in for at least one each time. He's really nerdy and cool and he's done field work everywhere which is great for a subject like this. Mostly he talks about when he was in South Africa or Australia but it's also come up that he's done work in various parts of the Pacific as well as Canada, China, and some other places that I can't remember off the top of my head

Goal at the moment is to get a job after graduation with the CDC in Atlanta as a public health analyst and then after a few years apply for the MPH program at Emory for Global Epidemiology. That means more biochem and microbio coursework now, eeeek! And it means I should probably be taking a language like Hindi since I want to intern at CHRP in India but I can barely fit the classes I need into my schedule with how booked up the classes are now.

Which reminds me, there is the potential for a strike at the university this academic year. I hope they do and I hope it forces the disgusting admins to do their damn job and stop trying to ream the uni for their personal benefit. I also hope it works quickly because seriously I NEED to get all my credits for every semester. N-E-E-D. If they strike and bone us out of credits it would be almost exactly the same as if they didn't strike and let the admins bone us out of credits... I hope they remember that.

*If you are still unsure what I mean, this is a nice internet thing in which we take words and make them abbreviations like "bf" and then we start writing that instead of the word. Then one day we get bored of that and we start writing words out of the abbreviations as if pronouncing the aforementioned acronym, and then it's "beef." I am going to say "beef" instead of "boyfriend" forever, by the way, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

RIP you old structuralist coot

Well, Lévi-Strauss died on October 30th and somehow I didn't hear about it at all until today. It wasn't really on the news for some reason-- I guess anthropology isn't a hot topic anymore. Just earlier that week our history of anth prof was telling us he woke up every morning waiting to hear the news that Lévi-Strauss was dead, so we're blaming him for jinxing it. We all also got a horrible icy feeling when it was suggested that some of our professors might assign something on him in the interest of current events but so far none of them have mentioned it so hopefully it won't happen. I do not want to have to either BS my love for the guy or do the research necessary to come up with an essay-worthy argument against his ideas because he had a lot of them and most aren't very interesting. Sorry Claude, I'm happy for you and imma let you finish but Michael Jackson still had the best death this year.

In related news I saw Paranormal Activity on Halloween and I think it's the perfect example of why encouraging women to be unassertive is so extremely dangerous... And I'm only partially joking. The first time a freaking demon came and loomed over me in my sleep I would have taken the boyfriend's video camera and stuck it where the sun don't shine. LOL I'M A MAN MY SCROTUM WILL SOLVE THIS PROBLEM BECAUSE I'M A MANLY MAN AND I CAN PROTECT MY FEMALE WITHOUT DOING WHAT ALL THE EXPERTS TELL ME. What the eff ever.

(Man who thought I would ever get more than one use out of this Kanye West tag?)

It was just ghastly

So Isaac and I broke up earlier this week. I guess he finally realized I didn't have any intention of changing my plans again to move to somewhere he wanted to live and then I realized he had no intention of ever living anywhere other than NYC. So yeah. I imagine he will tell his Ivy League friends about it kinda like this.

In similarly lame news, I am getting the worst breakout I have ever had in my entire life on my cheeks right now and as it's healing it's leaving behind little marks. The kind of little marks that do not go away for a good year and even then require extensive chemical peels to remove. This is an unhappy blossom. Sad face :(

In happier news I'm going to see Where The Wild Things Are tomorrow (yaaaaay) followed by yakiniku for dinner (yaaaaay) with Ikemen buddy (yaaaaay) and two people I don't know, one of which is visiting from Japan. He's begun trying to convince me to do an ethnography of some kind of intense nerdy subculture like LARPers or furries with an emphasis on participant observation. He says, and this is a direct quote, "it really speaks to the tension between the nature/culture divide and the problems people have when other people transgress it." He says I should be a mongoose. THIS IS HOW WE ROLL IN ANTHROPOLOGY.

We've also spent the last week staying up most of the night and commiserating each other on our various midterm projects and his thesis. We have two classes together so a lot of that is "Man, can you believe this class? Man. This class. Geeze." Before our History of Anthropology midterm this morning we pledged psychic unity of study guide information. ANTHRO HUMOR.

He's been working on his thesis outline for like two months solid now. At some point tonight he realized that he was actually putting like five times as much detail as was necessary into the outline and could have had it finished a few weeks ago. He found this out as I was doing the third draft of my study guide for my History of Japan to 1700 midterm. And the road to perfection is strewn with our bodies.

Sleepy sleepy sleepy

The flu has been going around here and, while I don't feel like I have the flu, I am tired all the time. I have been for a week running now and it's getting old FAST. Time for 500% RDA doses of vitamin C.

I bought an epilator. In other news, MY LEGS ARE ON FIRE.

I also applied for a job as a medical office assistant at a pediatrician's office. Sent in the resume tonight-- I plan on calling tomorrow to see if they got it / see if they want me to come in for an interview. I am scared like WOAH. I really want this job and I think I'd be good at it so I'm going to be really upset if I don't get it. There aren't any other similar jobs around at the moment, either.

I haven't been taking pictures because I've mostly been in my dorm reading. The readings for my Pacific Island Cultures class are getting old FAST. The one that finally tipped me over to the "to hell with you and your damn islands" was the chapter mocking microloans and the efforts by nonprofits from Australia, America, and Japan to create jobs and industry by helping people start businesses. I don't just mean in Melanesia (where honestly it's not needed a lot of the time) but everywhere. Alright you ethnocentric rubes. Go throw your satire at Myanmar and see if they laugh.

Anyway, in place of photos here's a doll:



Yep.

Yeah right.

So I started doing these broad searches for schools with MPH programs, then narrowed that down by the type of program, academic standards etc. and narrowed my options down to just one. Are you ready for this? Because you might hurt yourself laughing.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

For the first time ever I am suddenly intensely remorseful for how much I have not given a crap about academics. I can't find any statistics as to what percentages of people are admitted to the program but I'm relatively sure it's somewhere between fat chance and no way.

Unfortunately now that I've looked at the Health in Crisis & Humanitarian Assistance concentration I can't settle for anything less in depth. Look at how specialized the course work is. Water and Sanitation Needs in Complex Humanitarian Emergencies, Assessing Epidemiologic Impact of Human Rights Violations, Ethics of Public Health Practice in Developing Countries, and my personal favorite, Issues in Maternal Mortality Reduction in Developing Countries. Compare that to U Penn's Global Health track and maybe you will understand why I've got my heart set on this now. Critical Appraisal of Occupational and Environmental Health Literature-- REALLY, GUYS? You're gonna make me live in West Philly and then make me read occupational and environmental health literature? Why don't you strap me to a damn rack while you're at it?

I'm going to go ahead and apply to see if I can't get in-- they require work experience so I couldn't apply for at least two years after graduation anyway, so I have a long time to think about this. Unfortunately that also puts me up against medical doctors and established health care workers, which is... Bad for me, to say the least. Wish me luck?

In case of emergency...

... You better hope I like you! :D

Because I am, as they so delightfully phrased it in The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, a disasterist. I am determined to learn things that will allow me to function in case of a city/state/country-wide disaster and potentially be self-sufficient thereafter. I can build fires, build shelters, forage for food, and help treat injuries, and so on. I intend to be able to field dress game, drive 18-wheeler trucks and boats, repair necessary electronics, etc.

Why?

Because if anything crazy happens you're really going to wish you knew how to do a lot of things you don't know now. I'm not gonna say that I'm planning on a zombie apocalypse or anything, but I am gonna say that if that ever happens I am going to rock because I am scrappy lady. I will ninja in your damn window armed with a fire poker and a really heavy lamp base and be like COME ON THE BUS IS WAITING and then you will pile in with the other survivors and then I will drive you all to a heavily fortified hiding place up in the mountains. THIS IS THE APOCALYPSE OF MY DREAMS, GUYS. I'm not gonna say I want a zombie apocalypse, I'm just saying that if there was a zombie apocalypse I wouldn't be all that upset.

Of course it might not turn out that way, but this is my fantasy world and I choose to believe that I will be a badass. So there.

Fun fact: While looking for that comic in the archive, I ctrl+f-ed for "side" and when I found "The Tasty Side" as the name of a comic I knew that must be it. looool forever.

Since there will never be a zombie apocalypse (QUESTION MARK) I guess I will just learn that stuff to be a bigger badass in the real (read: boring) world. Although actually that may all come in handy if I really do decide to go to some insane place to do public health (I'm looking at yoooou Myanmar) or in the entirely likely event of World War III. And it would definitely be handy in case of a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.

Now you all think I'm insane, I'm sure, but I'm really just an ESFJ. Or, more appropriately for this scenario, an ENTJ. I tend to get one or the other when tested depending on how excited I am about a zombie apocalypse. I guess I'm walking the line somewhere between "Do you folks want some homemade cookies?" and "TUCK IN THAT SHIRT, SOLDIER."


P.S.
There's still hope!
A small warning about A Softer World: Most of the comics are either funny or just plainly poignant, but some of them can be downright upsetting. Each one tells a whole story and sometimes those stories are very dark. It may not always be for the faint of heart. Just a note.