Tales from the Steppes

2005-03-09

9:32 p.m.
It's not confidential, I've got potential

Today I had my CT scan. No big deal. In fact, the biggest pain about the experience was the parking. And not looking at the laser. It was just so tempting to follow it around with my eyes that I finally just had to shut them. Tomorrow I go see an otolaryngologist for the first time in my life. I have only had about 3 sinus infections in my life and they were well-behaved houseguests. They left at the proper time, threw no late parties, and they took their shit with them.

Because I have nothing better to do, I studied my CT scans to see if I could predict what the doctor would say. Usually when I play this game, I am looking at someone else's radiology. Like the SU's. My stuff has been very clear cut, on the order of "Oh, there is the break in my bone" and "Hey look what's behind my kneecap now." The SU's films have always been more challenging as he has intense radiation scarring and adhesives.

This might seem like a strange hobby but one finds fun where one can. And there is an extremely practical benefit to this dweebish pastime - I don't sound like a moron when I go talk to the doctor. In order to read the scan, you have to learn the anatomy of whatever the hell you are looking at. This allows me to actually have a conversation with the doctor instead of me sitting there going "Duh" and thinking of questions to ask later, after I am home.

The danger with this hobby is that I am very obviously not a doctor and have no training whatsoever. While my mother is a nurse, I do not believe these sorts of things osmose through the umbillical cord. A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.

With these things in mind, here are my predictions for what the ENT guy will say tomorrow:

1. I have gunk (this is the technical term) in my left maxillary sinus.
2. My left maxillary sinus ostium is mostly blocked. By gunk.
3. My right maxillary sinus is enlarged. (Which is not good given the fact that I had a bone graft on that side at the beginning of my dental adventure. Fortunately, I already had an appointment with my dentist in the morning.)
4. My left frontal sinus appear merged with the ethmoid sinus. (ok, I might really be wrong on this one. Such are the dangers of being an armchair physician.)
5. I have teeny tiny turbinates, as compared with the "normals" shown. Of course, they could be chosen for having nice large ones, so this might just be par for the course.

So tomorrow we will see just how wrong I am, given that I don't know what I am talking about.

On a completely different topic, my school is trying to hire a full-time professor for the program. This is always an interesting undertaking for a number of reasons. First, it is a small program that uses a lot of adjuncts. So any full-time faculty member can exert enormous influence. Second, we are at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and landscape architecture is an incredibly white field. It looks very bad for the university to not have any black faculty in this program. So there is a bit of pressure to hire any African Americans that apply. I am being subtle here.

Fortunately, our professors actually care what we think about the candidates and we have a voice in the selection process. Tomorrow is the first candidate's luncheon and interview. I was planning on skipping it because I have gunk that needs to be dealt with, but now I am seriously reconsidering. It seems that our first candidate was one that interviewed several years ago and was a real dick when he sat in during a crit. Not a good sign. I remember him but as with all of my memories, it is only a vague rememberance - mediocre. The old program coordinator, Claudia, did not hire him and basically had to write a letter of explanation. The woman she did hire, Yasmine, was African American and she still had to explain her decision.

But now all of the professors are white men. No women are in the interview pool and this candidate is the only minority. And he behaved like an asshole last time. So my classmates called me to convince me to come up to school to have lunch with this guy to find out if he is still that person. They want me to assess whether he is truly mediocre (I am better read than most of my compatriots) and I suspect that they would like me to push a few buttons, in a nice way, to see if he explodes again. On the one hand, it is a nice compliment. I am probably the least likely person to lose my cool in a crit (yes, I am off the steroids)or assign much personal meaning to it. On the other hand, I have a busy day already and I don't need to get Paul pissed at me right now. And I will never take a class with this guy. But I will probably still do it, unless the dwarf gets fitted with hobnail boots tonight. In case you are wondering, no I am not older than the other students. I am about middle of the pack. I'm just meaner.

While many people would find the issue of race in a hiring decision to be troubling, I do not. If we were talking about an objective field of study, than it does not matter if you are a Martian. There is no Martian perspective of chemistry, just chemistry. But in a field where the person and product go hand in hand, who you are and where you have been makes a huge difference. We are the products of our social, cultural and physical environments, which in turn dictate the production of new social, cultural, and physical environments. Having a different world view is a necessary component to any subjective program. There is no one history, sociology, or art. No one landscape.

All of this seems so obvious at this point in my studies but I know it was a long learning process to internalize this lesson. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts I have gotten from being a minority at an HBCU - you have to learn to see through others' eyes. Too often we tend to frame things only through the narrow confines of our own experience and not see that others set completely different, equally valid, values. So I see my job tomorrow as being two-fold. One being to see if he truly is abusive to students. The second is to make sure that his viewpoint is given adequate consideration in the hiring process and he is not dismissed because he is African American and the school is pushing for him.