friendly neighborhood demon

One of the main things a resident is expected to do is teach interns and students. And Mohan is interestingly pretty bad at this. I just watched the episode where Santos says one awkward thing to a patient. She’s a new intern and she didn’t handle a patient’s overwhelming emotions perfectly. She wasn’t particularly bad, just not ideal. This isn’t surprising. This is a learned skill for many people.

Mohan takes Santos out of the room and dresses her down her in the middle of the hall. She doesn’t invite a conversation where Santos can reflect and learn. Samira speaks over Santos, shames her, and lectures her. She does the same with Whitaker and the sickle cell patient when she shames him in the middle of the hall rather than encourage him to learn from a common mistake. Both times she’s right in pointing out what her trainee did wrong, but she’s so aggressive and condescending that she’s going to alienate her trainees rather than let them reflect and grow from her feedback. Then she lets Santos take the fall for her mistake with the hyponatremia patient, which is quite a choice for a resident to make.

☽ checking your phone and not registering the time. checking it again. still nothing. putting it away anyway

☽ the half-smile you do when you're trying not to cry in public

☽ looking at your hands during a hard conversation instead of the person

☽ laughing at something right after you say it like you surprised yourself

☽ going to say something and then deciding not to and the moment is gone and it's too late and you think about it for three days

☽ the way you hold your breath without knowing when something's loading

☽ saying "no yeah totally" when you absolutely did not follow what they said

☽ the very specific tired where you're staring at a wall and your face just. stops doing things

☽ nodding while on the phone even though they cannot see you

Any film featuring the US military is paid for by the US military. They have the final word on what comes out. These films are recruitment tools. Same applies to TV shows, and doubtless many will soon be showing up.

Do not be fooled by these films and shows. They are designed to bring in new recruits. When these are released, there is a surge in new people enlisting in the military. These recruits swiftly discover they were fed bullshit, but now they're stuck due to a contract. Going AWOL, away without leave, is desertion. You will be caught and put on trial for desertion, and they are not light with the sentencing.

Please, for the love of fuck, do not enlist with the military. You are cannon fodder. They do not care about you.

Recruiters are told to lie. To do whatever it fucking takes to enlist new people. Do not fucking fall for it.

One of my friends in high school changed his named as soon as he turned 18, so that the ethnic name his family gave him was finally the name reflected on all of his paperwork. He told me that he understood why his parents had given him an “English” name, but that he felt that if he needed to assimilate in order to succeed, then that was a type of success that he didn’t want.

When I was on my way home from the courthouse after changing my own name, I got into a conversation with my rideshare driver, who was extremely interested once I told him what I was in court for, and wanted to know how I’d done it, how much it cost, was it difficult, etc. It turned out that his girlfriend had chosen the name “Yo-yo” when she came to the United States, unaware of how rare that was as a name, and that she was frequently made fun of because of it. Neither one of them had realized that a name change was so easy, and he told me he was excited to let her know that she had options.

There was an intern at a summer job I had once, who changed her name to be the same name, but a different spelling. She said that she had no idea why her parents had spelled her name so oddly to begin with, and suspected that it was just an honest mistake either by them or by some nurse, but it had been a headache for her entire life, and it was a huge relief to not need to be correcting people’s spelling on important documents anymore.

One of my exes legally changed his name to have an exclamation point, because he liked to sign his name with an exclamation point.

The pencil tucked behind his ear.

The bratty look over his glasses.

Eva Stratt the woman that you are <333