Category Archives: slices of life

The Evil Demon in the OR

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

EVS Journal 8: More Scenes from Life on Call in the OR

Up to this point, what I have accepted as very true I have derived either from the senses or through the senses. However, sometimes I have discovered that these are mistaken, and it is prudent never to place one’s entire trust in things which have deceived us even once.

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation 1

I’m on call in the OR for New Year’s Day, 8 am to midnight–an irritation after a long sleep-deprived week of work, including all of New Year’s Eve spent in the OR. I wake up on New Year’s Day, and decide, on a mere hunch or whim, to drive to the hospital mid-morning, pre-empting the phone call that calls me in to the hospital, operating instead (so to speak) on the premonition that if I go to the OR unbidden, there’ll inevitably be a case waiting for me to do, which I’ll then be in a position to “head off at the pass,” whatever that’s supposed to mean in this non-cowboy context. Continue reading →

Secure Your Own Homeland

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Fatwas, libertarianism, slices of life

ICE showed up at my workplace today–or rather, ICE in the guise of DHS, “The Department of Homeland Security.” The agent flashed a badge and started asking about some people with Spanish names. Did I know anything about them? I had nothing to say.

The only thing I have for ICE or DHS–the only product I can promise–is wholehearted, undying hostility. I doubt they want to hear me talk about that. So there’s nothing to say. In any case, the Homeland they’re securing isn’t mine to worry about, and the land that I live in isn’t theirs to secure. Not a promising basis for a meeting of minds–the only kind that interests me.

I opened the door this time because I didn’t know who was ringing. Next time, as far as I’m concerned, they can stand there for as long as it takes to induce someone else to open the door. I’m not the doorman. So it won’t be me.

The Crooked Timbre of Humanity

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

EVS Journal 6
December 16, 2020

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.”
–Rabbi Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Another Hava Nagila incident in the OR today. Was playing it pretty loud on repeat, twirling my rag as they used to do back in my shtetl. Nineteen year old co-worker Ron goes, “Oh man, turn that Arabic shit off!” Arabic! 😂

Ron keeps ordering Alexa to stop, but she won’t listen. Once it starts,  there’s no stopping Hava Nagila. And if Alexa is on shuffle-repeat? We’re talking eternal musical recurrence. Either you love your fate, or you don’t. I do. Ron doesn’t. 

I’m celebrating the vicissitudes of fate when the Director of the OR walks in unannounced. She seems flustered, startled, even annoyed. I don’t know what she expected out of a cystoscopy turnaround in OR 1 by her crack EVS unit, but Employee #1027742 twirling a rag to Hava Nagila and pretending to be Tevye the Fiddler was perhaps not it. Continue reading →

Fiddlers in the OR

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

I started an “EVS Journal” back in 2020, when I worked in environmental services in the operating room of a small community hospital in west-central New Jersey. I’ve decided to start posting edited versions of them here, for whatever interest they might still have. 

EVS Journal #5
December 15, 2020

Seth, Bilal, and I are doing a late turnover in OR 2. Alexa is playing Christmas carols. I get annoyed.

“Two Muslims and a Jew in here, and we’re listening to Christmas carols. Why?”

Without a word or reaction, Seth commands Alexa to play “Hava Nagila.”

“That’s better,” I say.

“I hate this fucking song,” Seth rejoins. Hava Nagila continues. Continue reading →

Bienvenidos a la Resistencia

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, liberty and the left, slices of life

Witherspoon Presbyterian Church
Princeton, New Jersey

I joined the Defensa del Barrio committee yesterday of my local Resistencia chapter–in “defense of the neighborhood,” also known by its slogan, ICE Out of Princeton. It reminds me that when I was in fifth grade, I wrote a short story in which my friends and I were forced to some woodland redoubt just outside of town, to organize resistance to hostile forces that had somehow taken over. I guess the adults had dropped the ball, leaving the defense of the town in our hands. I don’t remember who the hostile forces in my story were, or what we ended up doing about them. I just find myself wondering whether the story was coincidence or prescience.

Continue reading →

A Dispiriting Day in the OR

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

I started an “EVS Journal” back in 2020, when I worked in environmental services in the operating room of a small community hospital in west-central New Jersey. I ended up posting the first three entries of the Journal here at Policy of Truth (1, 2, 3), but posted the majority on Facebook under a private setting, largely to avoid repercussions at work. I’ve decided to start posting edited versions of them here, for whatever interest they might still have.

EVS Journal #4
December 4, 2020

A dispiriting day in the OR. It had nothing to do with the case load, which was moderately heavy in a normal way, but arose from something I’ve so far avoided mentioning in my daily missives here: the War Between the Shifts. I trained on the day shift (8:30-5) but now work on the night shift (technically, 3-11:30, but more like 3 to midnight). Each shift has a different supervisor, but the de jure supervisor of the day shift outranks the de facto supervisor at night. Continue reading →

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Genocide

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine, slices of life

Work colleague A asserted the following in all seriousness to work colleague B, who related it to me:

All Palestinians are terrorists, and should be killed.

Granted, he was TUI at the time: talking under the influence of Fox News.

This is a slice of life from the “woke” corporation, where DEI mandates supposedly rule the day, and everyone supposedly cowers in fear that some innocuous comment of theirs might offend someone. In other words, welcome to the real-world corporate workplace, where 99.44% of the time, that woke-totalitarian scenario is just a right-wing fever dream.

Clearly, we need a new acronym. Call it “DEI + G”–Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Genocide.

Nothing new, really. Nothing I haven’t heard for the last fifty years. Just never thought to blog it before. A slice of life from a pie that some of us have been forced to eat all our lives.

No Questions, No Justice

Posted on by under slices of life

I have no interest in professional sports, much less boxing, much less the life and times of Mike Tyson. So I have nothing of substance to say about his recent bout with Jake Paul or much of anything else about him, but I was stopped short by a sleeper of a Mike Tyson story, his interview with Jazlyn “Jazzy” Guerra, a thirteen-year-old online journalist (scroll all the way down for it). Continue reading →

The Soft Domination of Everyday Life

Posted on by under cancel culture, ethics, moralism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism, slices of life

Consider this post an unplanned addendum to my earlier series on domination and at-will employment.

A friend of mine just got “fired”–you’ll see in a minute why the word is in scare quotes–and we’re disagreeing about what it all means. Naturally, I thought I’d share tidbits of our discussion here. My friend blames himself; I blame his employer. Which of us is right? I’ll give you an impeccably impartial account below; you decide. Then feel free to chime in either way.

Let’s call my friend “Claude.” Claude was caught vaping on the job. There’s no explicit rule in his company’s handbook against vaping on the job. It’s simply understood that “one does not vape on the job.” It’s not clear why this is so. “It is what it is.” Argument is not invited, and evidence is not required. We all know evil when we see it. Continue reading →