Personal Mythologies
Dec. 2nd, 2018 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraOne of those strange dreams with an internal logic so convoluted that it almost can’t be translated into English.
Dan Shostak was administering a survey test to me; the ostensible object of the survey was to determine how I felt about a possible Martian invasion. The answers to his questions had to be scribbled in ballpoint pen on various parts of my body, and the pen kept skipping and drying up, which was frustrating because it meant that I had to keep repeating my answers, and I never can remember anything I say from one moment to the next.
Half way through the survey, I realized what Shostak was really testing was my response to the inadequate ballpoint pen, my frustration with the ballpoint pen. So I began curbing my irritation.
Graduate school had somehow become mixed up with nursing school. So in addition to dealing with Dan Shostak (GSPP), I was also dealing with Mia Taylor (Samuel Merritt School of Nursing.) Mia was describing a group of judges who never wore black judicial robes. She talked about those judges as though they were some lost Amazonian tribe. They lived high on a cliff that resembled the Hudson Palisades…
###
Shostak was one of the members of my little GSPP/Public Health pod. I stayed with Eleanor B____ for three nights in California—she was my Official Best Friend at GSPP—and Max is currently enrolled at GSPP: I suppose that’s why GSPP is on my mind.
I had this strategy throughout most of my life that whenever I entered a new group, I would immediately look around for someone who I could conscript as a Best Friend in that social situation. Someone to whom I could vent. Groups are so inherently painful to me, so filled with bizarre pecking orders and sublimated dominance plays that this was really the only way I could survive any of them.
I grew to love Eleanor on her own merits, but there’s no denying that the reason I initially sought her out way back when was because I had decided, You! You’re gonna have my back!
There were six of us in the GSPP/Public Health pod: Nicole Smith who had gone to Brown and Laura Brown who had gone to Smith; Robin Hobart who was the daughter of a Unitarian minister and whose adolescent rebellion manifested as converting to Episcopalianism (!); Shostak who was quite the little macher; and the two nurses, me and Eleanor.
Of the six of us, only Nicole had a career in health policy worth noticing. She went on to head a division at the World Health Organization.
Robin did something with California’s Prop 99 monies. I worked for four years at California’s Department of Public Health and Department of Developmental Services (where one of my duties was tracking health outcomes for crack babies) before running off to work for People Magazine. Laura disappeared.
Eleanor eventually dropped out of the PhD program under circumstances that reflect the utter incompetence of the UCB registrar’s office.
Shostak did nada.
Of the six of us, Eleanor was definitely the one who was most in LUV with economics and these brave new statistical analysis tools that were being shoved down our throats. She was like a K-Pop-obsessed Seoul teenybopper whenever the phrase “marginal utility” arose in conversation—which it did with greater frequency than you might imagine since we were, after all, fledgling medical economists.
Thirty years after the fact, she’s still a goo-goo-eyed romantic.
“I have a friend,” she told Max when he dropped by her house to say goodbye to me, “who was talking about the ever-escalating costs of health care to a physician who managed an intensive care nursery. Unnecessary tests, expensive and redundant technology, non-profit hospitals but for-profit PPOs, etc, etc—she went down the list.
“He heard her out patiently, but finally, when she ran out of breath, he told her, ‘The question is really very simple.’ And he picked up one of the tiniest babies in the ICN, held it aloft, and looked at the woman. ‘Do you want this baby to die?' ”
Now, I had heard this story before!
In fact, it was a story Richard Scheffler, Distinguished Professor of Health Economics and Public Policy, had told us 30 years ago in one of his graduate seminars.
And I was kind of amazed by the way that Eleanor had conscripted it as a part of her own personal mythology.
Was she aware that there was some degree of misrepresentation in the story she was telling? Had she completely forgotten the original context in which she’d heard this anecdote? Did she honestly now believe that she’d had a friend to whom this had happened? And what would happen if I asked her for biographical details about that friend? Would she make them up?
Maybe she’d already made them up!
Anyway, it was kind of a weird little moment.
Because she certainly was not lying in any way that I might recognize a lie.
But neither was she telling the truth.
Unless I was the one who was misremembering.
Which, of course, is another possibility.
Dan Shostak was administering a survey test to me; the ostensible object of the survey was to determine how I felt about a possible Martian invasion. The answers to his questions had to be scribbled in ballpoint pen on various parts of my body, and the pen kept skipping and drying up, which was frustrating because it meant that I had to keep repeating my answers, and I never can remember anything I say from one moment to the next.
Half way through the survey, I realized what Shostak was really testing was my response to the inadequate ballpoint pen, my frustration with the ballpoint pen. So I began curbing my irritation.
Graduate school had somehow become mixed up with nursing school. So in addition to dealing with Dan Shostak (GSPP), I was also dealing with Mia Taylor (Samuel Merritt School of Nursing.) Mia was describing a group of judges who never wore black judicial robes. She talked about those judges as though they were some lost Amazonian tribe. They lived high on a cliff that resembled the Hudson Palisades…
###
Shostak was one of the members of my little GSPP/Public Health pod. I stayed with Eleanor B____ for three nights in California—she was my Official Best Friend at GSPP—and Max is currently enrolled at GSPP: I suppose that’s why GSPP is on my mind.
I had this strategy throughout most of my life that whenever I entered a new group, I would immediately look around for someone who I could conscript as a Best Friend in that social situation. Someone to whom I could vent. Groups are so inherently painful to me, so filled with bizarre pecking orders and sublimated dominance plays that this was really the only way I could survive any of them.
I grew to love Eleanor on her own merits, but there’s no denying that the reason I initially sought her out way back when was because I had decided, You! You’re gonna have my back!
There were six of us in the GSPP/Public Health pod: Nicole Smith who had gone to Brown and Laura Brown who had gone to Smith; Robin Hobart who was the daughter of a Unitarian minister and whose adolescent rebellion manifested as converting to Episcopalianism (!); Shostak who was quite the little macher; and the two nurses, me and Eleanor.
Of the six of us, only Nicole had a career in health policy worth noticing. She went on to head a division at the World Health Organization.
Robin did something with California’s Prop 99 monies. I worked for four years at California’s Department of Public Health and Department of Developmental Services (where one of my duties was tracking health outcomes for crack babies) before running off to work for People Magazine. Laura disappeared.
Eleanor eventually dropped out of the PhD program under circumstances that reflect the utter incompetence of the UCB registrar’s office.
Shostak did nada.
Of the six of us, Eleanor was definitely the one who was most in LUV with economics and these brave new statistical analysis tools that were being shoved down our throats. She was like a K-Pop-obsessed Seoul teenybopper whenever the phrase “marginal utility” arose in conversation—which it did with greater frequency than you might imagine since we were, after all, fledgling medical economists.
Thirty years after the fact, she’s still a goo-goo-eyed romantic.
“I have a friend,” she told Max when he dropped by her house to say goodbye to me, “who was talking about the ever-escalating costs of health care to a physician who managed an intensive care nursery. Unnecessary tests, expensive and redundant technology, non-profit hospitals but for-profit PPOs, etc, etc—she went down the list.
“He heard her out patiently, but finally, when she ran out of breath, he told her, ‘The question is really very simple.’ And he picked up one of the tiniest babies in the ICN, held it aloft, and looked at the woman. ‘Do you want this baby to die?' ”
Now, I had heard this story before!
In fact, it was a story Richard Scheffler, Distinguished Professor of Health Economics and Public Policy, had told us 30 years ago in one of his graduate seminars.
And I was kind of amazed by the way that Eleanor had conscripted it as a part of her own personal mythology.
Was she aware that there was some degree of misrepresentation in the story she was telling? Had she completely forgotten the original context in which she’d heard this anecdote? Did she honestly now believe that she’d had a friend to whom this had happened? And what would happen if I asked her for biographical details about that friend? Would she make them up?
Maybe she’d already made them up!
Anyway, it was kind of a weird little moment.
Because she certainly was not lying in any way that I might recognize a lie.
But neither was she telling the truth.
Unless I was the one who was misremembering.
Which, of course, is another possibility.
