Every Wednesday night, the eye department holds Grand Rounds.
"Rounds" because the group discusses interesting patient cases, like back in the good old days when a medical team would walk 'round the hospital ward from patient to patient, talking about them together. "Grand" because we say so.
Tonight's Grand Rounds included a presentation regarding a psychotic man who had pulled out his own eyes with his bare hands. The thought of such a devastating act of deliberate self harm is disturbing to say the least. From a seat in the back, I could see waves of squirming uneasiness roll across the people in the room.
The presenters had invited a psychiatrist in to comment at the end of the talk. When someone asked him why he thought this particular patient had done such a thing, he said something epically wonderful:
And there you have it. The mysteries of human motivation and behavior clarified. At least the mysteries of psychotic human motivation and behavior, which arguably aren't quite the same thing as all human motivation and behavior, but surely there's got to be some overlap in that Venn diagram.
So here's a challenge: For your major decisions and actions today, can you feasibly find a way to connect them all back to religion, sex, or aliens?
With that in mind, this is my day in review:
7:00am Wake up to an alarm clock. (Aliens. Pretty sure alarm clock technology was brought to us by aliens, via the pyramids.)
7:15am Eat breakfast. (Religious praises to whichever divine omnipotent power created Raisin Bran Crunch and commanded that thou shalt eat it for breakfast.)
8:00am Go to work. (Religion again. Most religions, at their core, seem to share the idea that in the name of goodness and decency you should look at the world around you, see how you might be able to help, and do it. ...It would've been super creepy if I had found a way to pin this one on aliens or sex.)
11:16am A gnarly old vet tells me I'm pretty. (Sex... his motive, not mine.) Momentarily flattered, then I remember his vision is only good enough to tell whether a hand waving in front of his face is moving side-to-side or up-and-down. He can't tell what I look like. He can just tell I'm probably-ish female.
3:48pm Eat. (I guess I'll have to file this under "Other Stuff: Hungry.")
5:00pm Go to the aforementioned Grand Rounds. (Nary a sexy, religious alien in sight.)
Tell me about your day.
"Rounds" because the group discusses interesting patient cases, like back in the good old days when a medical team would walk 'round the hospital ward from patient to patient, talking about them together. "Grand" because we say so.
Tonight's Grand Rounds included a presentation regarding a psychotic man who had pulled out his own eyes with his bare hands. The thought of such a devastating act of deliberate self harm is disturbing to say the least. From a seat in the back, I could see waves of squirming uneasiness roll across the people in the room.
The presenters had invited a psychiatrist in to comment at the end of the talk. When someone asked him why he thought this particular patient had done such a thing, he said something epically wonderful:
"In psychiatry,
it always comes down to
religion, sex, or aliens.
Always."
And there you have it. The mysteries of human motivation and behavior clarified. At least the mysteries of psychotic human motivation and behavior, which arguably aren't quite the same thing as all human motivation and behavior, but surely there's got to be some overlap in that Venn diagram.
So here's a challenge: For your major decisions and actions today, can you feasibly find a way to connect them all back to religion, sex, or aliens?
With that in mind, this is my day in review:
7:00am Wake up to an alarm clock. (Aliens. Pretty sure alarm clock technology was brought to us by aliens, via the pyramids.)
7:15am Eat breakfast. (Religious praises to whichever divine omnipotent power created Raisin Bran Crunch and commanded that thou shalt eat it for breakfast.)
8:00am Go to work. (Religion again. Most religions, at their core, seem to share the idea that in the name of goodness and decency you should look at the world around you, see how you might be able to help, and do it. ...It would've been super creepy if I had found a way to pin this one on aliens or sex.)
11:16am A gnarly old vet tells me I'm pretty. (Sex... his motive, not mine.) Momentarily flattered, then I remember his vision is only good enough to tell whether a hand waving in front of his face is moving side-to-side or up-and-down. He can't tell what I look like. He can just tell I'm probably-ish female.
3:48pm Eat. (I guess I'll have to file this under "Other Stuff: Hungry.")
5:00pm Go to the aforementioned Grand Rounds. (Nary a sexy, religious alien in sight.)
Tell me about your day.
I found your blog via Better After, and your gentle sense of humor keeps me coming back. Thank you for one of the most human places on the web.
ReplyDeleteMy day:
6:40 Wake up (Sex. Our 5 year old was poking me, she is the result of sex. And the reason we have less of it now.)
6:50 Make breakfast for the family (Religion. Neither my wife nor my daughter are morning people, and eggs & OJ are ritual sacrifices to placate their wrath.)
8:30 Drop 5 yo off at kindergarten (Religion. Lots of sacrifices on the Altar of Education.)
9:00-5:30 Work (Aliens and Religion. I work in IT, and there's no humanity there. Although if you get an Android/iOS/Windows discussion going, the zealotry makes "Clash of Civilizations" seem tame.)
6:00 Pick up 23 yo daughter (Religion, Sex, and Aliens. My grandparents drug me to church where I met her mother, we had sex, then her mother became a Soul-Sucking Alien Entity from Another Dimension.)
7:00 Take eldest to a William Beckett concert (Aliens. Some sort of Mind-Control ray was obviously involved in getting me to agree to go. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the only way to explain some of the people I see at these venues.)
This. Is. Hilarious.
DeleteI honestly laughed out loud. Multiple times. Love it!