Considering that half of the plasmids in lab contains the promoter of a member of herpes virus family (cytomegalovirus, in case anyone's wondering) and that all non-undergrad members have to do regular animal husbandry, breeding, and colony maintenance, it's a wonder that I haven't posted anything more risque up to this point.
Well, time to amend that, I suppose.
So after being nagged for years and years (it's literally been years, yes, and I know this is terrible but I kept pushing off because there's so much else that I need to do) (they do say for a woman to have a career she'd have to give up either her family or her friend or her health and sadly I can all too easily see how this might happen) I finally scheduled a physical. The issue with this is that, due to my x chromosomes, I'm due for a woman's comprehensive health exam as well. Which means health questionnaires. Which turned up the requirement that I'm not allowed to schedule an appointment until I've sat through a session on sexual health--
(which is, by the way, listed as required for women but only recommended for men. After consideration, I chose to interpret this difference in standards as a result of the fact that sex has higher health risks for women than men because only women can get pregnant, and even without miscarriage or with abortion, it still carries a lot more risks, both physiologically and psychologically. I chose to interpret it this way because the other two interpretations I thought up got my inner feminist all up in arms and someone at some point had instructed me to try to think more positively)
--which means sitting through a session with a bunch of undergrads (yeah, putting it off for years, bad idea) which just -- no. No. I wouldn't want to sit through a session even if I were an undergrad. My brain curdles in protest at the idea.
So after some clicking around I, with the aid of Wendy (who is thankfully a lot more familiar with the online system than I am), found a work-around for breaks & summer vacations, where I can just go through the slides on my own and take a quiz and present the quiz to the nurse practitioner when I go in.
Not too bad, right? I could do a quiz. I am good at quizzes.
I downloaded the slide. Then Wendy and I spent some time snickering (and we're not even in the reproductive med division of biomed!) at the 70+ slides (seriously overkill) because, in addition to being a truly audacious shade of pink that'd put the pink lady from Sherlock to shame, it's just...a marvel of a collision between terrible contraception puns and sex-for-dummies. Did you know that female bodies produce hormones? And that women have ovaries?
Please keep in mind this presentation is targeted toward students of a fairly high ranking university.
One of these days this sort of thing will no longer fill me with despair. Though I'm not sure if resignation is a better alternative.
To be fair, we did learn one interesting fact: it's theoretically possible for a woman to get pregnant during her menstrual period. The pink slides failed to explain how this was possible and we were very confused because how is this physiologically possible? So with some literature hunt we uncovered that fact that if a woman has a really long period (as in bleeding for seven days) (God that must really suck) and a really short cycle (closer to 20 days than the average of 28) (so seven days out of every 20; yeah her life is pretty much Awful), then she will ovulate almost immediately after her period, and so due to the fact that a sperm can survive for up to five days, the woman can theoretically get pregnant from an intercourse that happened during her period. It's rare, of course, but possible. Like ectopic pregnancy. Which Wendy cheerfully shared her knowledge of, probably from the lectures she received while getting pregnant and ugh. Bad, bad fusion of cancer biology and something out of a horror story.
...so in conclusion that was not at all sexy. A bit traumatic, though.
Would it help if I added that I saw pole-dancing for the first time yesterday?
Yeah I really wanted to type that up so I can imagine the reactions of my friends and laugh to myself.
It also has the benefit of being true: I went to a classmate's birthday barbeque yesterday and one of her friend is competing (there are apparently competitions) in the advanced division next month and had decided, I think, to use the party as a venue to both entertain and to practice. Apparently pole-dancing and other acrobatics (she was hanging upside-down from a metal pole by her ankles, so yes, I consider it acrobatic) is what happens when you merge ballet with martial arts and then someone had to explain what jazz dancing is to me because, as we all know, I live under a rock (not literally). I also learned that the poles are portable (though assembling it at the edge of the canyon still strikes me as photogenic but entirely unsafe), that goldfish in ponds keep down mosquito larvae as effectively as guppies, a brand new way to dissect a grapefruit, and how to completely fail to accidentally elbow anyone in the face during the rather complicated being-grabbed-from-behind maneuver we were instructed to do, earlier in the day. And that I'm going to New Orleans in November for a conference.
It was a good day.
What'd you expect? It's me who's writing here.
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