So, where were we?

It’s been awhile, so there’s some catching up to do. How am I doing? Well, I’m currently in wrapped in a Slanket, learning way too much about the human colon while studying for my community college medical terminology test tomorrow, and a great deal of my loved ones seem to no longer be speaking to me. How’s your Fall been?

I should probably talk about my continuing stint in community college first, as it has pretty much been the dominating force in my life since September. I’m studying to become a pharmacy technician (…should they someday let me into their program….) so I can once again become a functioning and contributing member of society. Unless of course my writing career really takes off first (pause for cruel, mocking laughter). At any rate, it involves me going to perhaps the most depressing school in the world, that seems to be built entirely out of recycled industrial concrete. I’m taking the basic classes right now while I wait for the Pharmaceutical Council of Doom to decide whether or not I’m worthy for admission next year. Unfortunately, this means I’m in two giant classes chocked full of the rest of the teeming masses awaiting their fates at the hands of various medical programs. Frankly, I have never been more afraid for the future of American medicine.

These people are stupid at a competitive level. Remember the people at my last job? Remember how stupid they were? They seem like astrophysicists compared to the people in my classes. And all THOSE people had to do was answer phones! This new batch of God’s lost bets will, ostensibly, one day be in charge of thankfully minor aspects of medical care. Most of them have managed to score below 50% on every test we’ve had, even though they’ve all been multiple choice scantrons, but one day they might be responsible for distributing medications to an entire hospital.

The highlights of the lowlights? Well…

-Juno: I don’t know her actual name, and I don’t care to. I call her Juno because she’s an 18 year old new mother and talks like she has part of a railroad spike lodged in her frontal lobe. Things come out of her mouth that, if heard by a licensed mental health professional, could probably get her declared legally retarded. She once spent an entire ten minutes describing to the guy next to her the, and I quote, “sounds her doggy makes.” She then acted them out. Later, while our instructor was discussing the exceedingly disturbing condition known as anal fissures (it’s not a pleasant subject, sure, but we should probably learn about it), she went into absolute hysterics, laughing uproariously and repeating “That means a crack…a crack in your butthole! A crack!” over and over again, to the point that the rest of the class had to wait for her to regain composure. Also, her recent unintentional reproduction has not discouraged her from completely, and how to I put this nicely…whoring it up. She’s already hooked up with one of our classmates, whom I call…

-Jag: I call him this because he’s a complete and total jag. Spiked up greased hair, leather cuffs, Ed Hardy shirts…the whole uniform. Now, one would think that, even in the face of overwhelming horniness, Juno’s overwhelming stupidity and acrid personality would have sent him scurrying to one of the myriad of other slut-tastic girls in our class. Of course, that assumption does not account for the fact that Jag makes Juno seem like Stephen Hawking. For example, at the beginning of our gastrointestinal unit, Jag raised his hand, stopping our instructor so she could answer for him the pressing question, “Huh-huh-huh….does that mean your butt?” Given Juno’s apparently super-fertility, I fear that we will soon have to invent a new word to describe the level of idiocy that their inevitable children will reach.

-The Sisterhood of the Traveling Uterine Disorders: Being a community college, my classes contain large numbers of middle-aged women who are here to “Show you….show ALL of you!” despite the fact that no one has ever questioned their ‘showing’ ability. This is all well and good until they start playing their daily game of, “My uterus has more horrifying problems than yours.” The game is played by one woman (a different one every day) stopping class to inform everyone about some grotesque issue going on within her reproductive system under the guise of it being connected to what we are discussing (despite the fact that we have yet to actually reach the unit dealing with the reproductive system). After the serve, another member of the Sisterhood will then drop all pretenses and volley back, sharing some even more repulsive story about her uterine misfortune. The other members will then join in, ceasing all control of the class from our instructor and spinning increasingly unbelievable yarns about the caustic wastelands that are the lower halves of their bodies, which, if allowed to continue long enough, would no doubt eventually involve their fallopian tubes being haunted by the ghost of a dead confederate general.

-The All Girl Russian Mafia: The All Girl Russian Mafia is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a group of women from ages eighteen to sixty who cluster in the upper corner of my human anatomy class and jabber at each other in Russian until the instructor tells them to shut up, then are quiet for five minutes before beginning again. Naturally, they miss everything that is said, so they are constantly making us stop so the instructor can repeat what she just said while they were busy texting and chittering away at each other. Their matriarch, a large, prison-matronly woman in her sixties who has about the same grasp of English as I do of Klingon, is easily the most disruptive, as she understands almost nothing anyone is saying and will compensate for her confusion by yelling out whatever stray thought wanders through her mind. For instance, today, while we were discussing difficulty swallowing, she yells out, “HA HA HA! MASHED POTATOES!” In any other class, this would have brought things to a screeching confusion-halt, but we’ve all become so used to her nonsensical eruptions that we all just took it in stride. At least it was better than last week when, during our test review (and, apparently, a rare lucid moment) she stood up and yelled, “HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER ALL OF THIS?” at our instructor. I’m pretty sure she expected our instructor to just say, “Why, you’re right! It is ridiculous that I would expect people going into medical fields to learn basic human anatomy! The test will now be one question that involves correctly distinguishing the human skull from a box of marshmallow peeps.”

There are others, and I will write about them eventually, but right now I have to get to sleep so I can wake up early and throw the curve and make everyone pissed off at me again.

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