In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”
Being nice to someone you don’t like is not manipulation btw it’s being civil
Mmm no, this is like seeking validation. Ofc it’s best to be nice but if I don’t like you or we both dislike eachother, then there’s no reason for us to communicate or be around eachother. It’s not about being immature, I would much rather not put myself in such a situation.
I don’t want my cellphone to have AI I want it to have 3 days of battery time. I don’t want my computer to have AI preinstalled I want it to have seven usb ports and high ram at affordable price. I don’t want my games to have AI built levels I want them to be so optimized I could run them on a nokia.
A code status is what you want the hospital to do if your heart or breathing stops, and we’ve got two basic options: full code which means we do EVERYTHING and Do Not Resuscitate or DNR which means we do less than everything. There’s like little add-ons like intubated or not intubated, or blood products or no blood products, but that’s basic gist of it. Do you want us to try everything we can to save your life or if your heart stops, is that it? And then we take that information and put it in your chart and make it very prominent in case we need to find it quickly in an emergency. Jane Doe, 72 years old, DNR. John Whatsisname, 49 years old, full code. Like that.
Anyway I’d like to propose a third code status that we’ll call “DNR!!!” This is when you not only don’t want heroic measures to extend your life, you are so excited to die. I thought of this recently when getting report on a patient, and the day nurse talking to me was like, “Alice Smith, 80 years old, DNR and she will tell you that herself.” And I was like, “I don’t think code status is gonna come up organically,” and the nurse was like, “It won’t, but she’ll tell you anyway.” And then I introduced myself to the patient, and like three minutes in as we’re talking about pain meds, she goes, “and by the way, when I’m dead, I’m DEAD. Don’t be bringing me back! Every woman in my family has lived past 90, and I’m here to break that tradition! NO one needs to live that long, and I certainly don’t, and frankly it’s indecent for me to have made it this far. God willing the reaper will come for me any day now. I would never take actions to make him come sooner, but I’m not moving that fast and he is DAWDLING. Disgusting. No work ethic these days. And don’t bother with a grave, just chuck me out the window and let the birds at me.”
And I’m like “so is that a no to the tylenol”
And she was like “oh no, I’d love some tylenol and a warm blanket too. Now look at me. I’ve done everything I could possibly want to do in this world and quite a few things I didn’t want to do, and personally I don’t think I should have to keep doing things. I’d also love a cranberry juice.”
Anyway. DNR!! I’m sorry to say she made it through the night completely unscathed.
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