Next Time You Try to Slit Your Wrists, Please Remember: Vertical Strokes

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Only reason I didn’t spend all day yesterday in my pajamas is because I have a standing date to Zoom-tutor Nafisa every day at 11.

Two weeks or so ago, Nafisa got very nervous about landing an internal medicine residency for 2021. So, she decided to take the USMLE on November 6 instead of in January—a real mistake from my vantage point, but hey! I’m not the boss of her, so whatevs.

Anyway, because I’m such a Kind and Wonderful Human Being (but really because my time is my own, more or less, and I’m the boss of me!), I told her I would meet with her every day during the countdown to the test to work with her on her English writing skills. I like Nafisa!

(As a sidebar, I’ll note that I don’t think I’d be able to successfully tutor someone I didn’t like—which is one of the reasons I’ve been resisting suggestions from various quarters to commercialize this tutoring gig since I do seem to have developed a potentially lucrative tutoring niche, namely USMLE prep for foreign MDs. I quite admire the therapists I know socially who are able to do successful work with clients they dislike. I would be telling those clients, Next time you try to slit your wrists, please remember: Vertical strokes!)

Nafisa has three kids for whom it is impossible to find daycare because—Covid! Her husband is a mechanical engineer who post-Covid has only been able to find work in Virginia (ulp!) He does come back on weekends. But her life is pretty much Stress City.

She’s quite fluent in English conversationally and is very, very smart! For tests like this one, that latter is both an advantage and a disadvantage. I had to kinda break her spirit: You won’t be able to coast through this one on smarts alone!

The four main things I’ve been hammering into her:

• Follow the instructions.
• Short sentences! Subject->Verb->Object
• Take the last 10 minutes you’re given for the assignment to review
• Read the whole thing aloud to yourself before you hit Submit

Nothing fancy, in other words. Because she is so smart, the real challenge is to get her to slow down so that she won’t make the types of stooooopid mistakes everyone makes when they rush through things.

Anyway, her writing scores on the practice tests have come up from 30% to 70% (which is passing), whether because of my amazing teaching abilities or her innate smarts, I do not know.

She is still scoring in the 30% range in reading comprehension and what the testers call listening (which is basically dictation.) I haven’t worked with her on either of those two subjects.

I am fairly certain there’s a residency in Michigan with her name on it if she can only pass this test. There are huge Sudanese communities in Detroit and Grand Rapids with doctors and healthcare facilities; and the Sudanese community believes in supporting its own. So, you know. It’s only a matter of passing this test.

###

As soon as I Zoom-over-and-out-ed with Nafisa, the phone rang.

Neighbor Ed!

“Put the pills back in the bottle!” I said by way of greeting. “The situation is far from dire.”

He laughed. “I know. In fact, I spent the night working out the path to victory state by state, and it’s all coming down exactly the way I thought it would!”

We spent about an hour and a half chatting about the election as in, What does it really change?

Not a whole lot so far as I can see.

A new name goes up on the agency window. A new portrait in the boardroom.

The fundamentals remain the same.

###

It was a gorgeous day. The temps decided to flirt with the high 60°s here in the Valley, so I dragged myself out on a tromp:



For the remainder of the day, I honed my dictator skills in Tropico while watching The Tutors, which—yes—I have seen before. Jonathan Rhys Meyers makes an excellent young Henry VIII, very… sinister, and Sam Neill is an excellent Woolsey although, on the whole, I prefer the Wolf Hall version of the Tutor court: fewer breasts but more nuance.

Oh, yeah—Ichabod called.

And I took the opportunity to babble on and on and on about everything I hate about Social Justice Warriors under the pretense of explaining to him why so many people voted for Trump: Like if someone with a penis can decide, “My new pronoun is she,” why can’t Rachel Dolezal decide she’s black? Where’s the consistency in that? Talk to any biologist, and they’ll tell you: Race is entirely a social construct. Sex on the other hand is not a social construct; there are obvious biological differences. Rightthink and wrongthink are just so arbitrary for Woke Millnnials!

He allowed me to babble on and on and on without coming down too harshly because I am still enhaloed with the radiant glow of having put in 16 fucking hours to serve the social good!

###

I did not do one iota of useful work yesterday!

But that must change today.

Clients are practically coming out of the woodwork. And one never knows how long that will last, so I gotta buckle down.