Eel

Overlook

"We're just going to go through this PowerPoint real quickly," says the professor. "We should be done in about 10 minutes."
Then we proceed to sit in the class for 4 hours, because nursing school never fucks around. Apparently, 10 minutes is equivalent to 4 hours.
If only I could get through 4 hours of bullshit material within 10 minutes. Maybe then I wouldn't be such an extraordinary fuck-up.
Last year I spent class after class reading through textbooks and studying PowerPoint presentations. If you thought high school was boring, imagine having to sit in front of a computer for hours back-to-back. What exactly am I supposed to learn? Where am I supposed to apply my nursing skills? I'm more excited about going to photograph random strangers and returning home to smoke an incomprehensible amount of weed. It's only week 1 and I already want to graduate. I keep telling myself: one year left. Just one.

I'm sitting in class typing this while the professor drones on and on about improving the public health of the citizens of America. But honestly? Fuck America. So overrated with its capitalistic bullshit, built on historic slave labor, prejudice, racism, sexism, and whatever other types of discrimination you can think of. You would think that freedom would not have consequences. It's true, though - freedom does have consequences. For example, Americans are free to fuck up your entire life without fear of repercussions, only if their skin color is perceived as white, light, or pale. It still boggles me that people actually use the amount of pigment in your skin to justify and validate their hatred and bigotry. How unbe-fucking-lievably stupid. And I don't even know what pisses me off more: the fact that racism still exists, or what institutions do to promote diversity in response to racism. "I'm gonna put this random black guy on a college brochure to show just how diverse and amazing our institution is!" Fuck that tokenist bullshit. I see way too much of that in the city I'm currently going to school in. "Let's throw in a few black people to show that the white people at this school are not as racist as we advertise!"

I am tired of overlooking. I want to be a nurse, and yet, I don't want to deal with other people's problems on a daily basis. Maybe I overestimated the amount of compassion I have for other strangers. If I did, I'll be finding out the hard way, real soon.