Back to School: Part 3 aka The Storm

I had my one and only class today. Biostats... and I may indeed be fucked. First of all, it was my only class for the day and I was already exhausted half an hour in. Second of all, it seems like it's going to be hard. There was a math review session offered today which I decided to attend after not being able to remember what the summation sign was for. I knew it was for summing things and I remember being fond of it in high school, but other than that, it meant nothing to me anymore. Now, after an hour of doing practice problems, I'm feeling more comfortable with my old friend the summation sign. But, seriously. Practice problems? Homework? School? Am I really doing this by choice? College was a given. I wanted to go, and really I had no choice in the matter. But grad school? I may in fact be having an existential grad school crisis (or maybe it's just my annual end of August general existential crisis). Ideally, I'm doing this to further my career. But will knowing Biostats further it? Quite possibly not. Thus, I don't have the same type of stressed feeling I had in college. I have more of a "what's the point?" feeling. Like I should care, but really I don't. I know what I'm learning is essentially a tool. But for what I want to do, can't I just hire someone who knows how to use the tool? Like a biostats plumber?

After class, I stopped by the activities fair, where I got tons of JHSPH swag, including a highlighter, a carabeener (sp?), and chip clip! I also stopped by a table that had a basket of chocolate and felt bad taking a piece without saying anything. So, I prefaced my candy grab with "Even though I'm not Latina, can I take a piece of chocolate?" I assumed they would say yes and send my on my way, but instead they responded with "Oh, you don't have to be Latino to join our group. You don't even have to speak Spanish. You just have to be interested in Latino things and what we do." Cut to ten minutes later, I'm still standing there, the chocolate melting in my pocket, listening to the Latino student group pitch, and trying to come up with a polite way to say "I am the farthest thing from Latina. I really have no interest in joining the Latino student group. I just wanted a piece of chocolate." I learned my lesson. The Muslim and Catholic tables had some nice looking candies, too, but I stayed away. (FYI-- there were no groups for Jews...Hello! ADL, where are you? They would have had some damn good food, I'm sure.)

Now I've got an hour to kill before the Meet and Greet, where I will continue to meet and greet my fellow classmates. I think there will be alcohol involved, which always helps with the meeting and greeting.

In the meantime, here's a little anecdote from yesterday, my day off. I decided to go shopping for back to school clothes (I love back to school clothes), so I headed off to The Avenue, a street in the neighborhood of Hampden. Baltimore has a good selection of quirky little boutiques. Not so many chain stores, which is nice, so I decided to explore. The Avenue is not a big street, so all the shop owners seem to know each other. While I was in one, a shop owner from another came in with her baby. The woman working in the store I was in offered to babysit for a while, and so the mother left. This woman now holding the baby struck me as the type who reads Bitch magazine, does downtown comedy in the badass Jewess, wannabe Sarah Silverman scene, and who will someday grow up to be a bona fide yenta. And she was obsessed with the baby, clearly, as she kept saying "Oh my god, I want to eat this baby. I fucking love this baby. Here, smell this baby." She brought the baby up to my nose and made me smell it. Yup, smells like a baby. "I just want to fucking eat this fucking baby." There were two guys in the store standing around, like myself, not knowing what to say. She kept going on and on "Oh my god, I want to eat this fucking baby. Don't you just want to eat it?" Yes, babies are cute, but dear god woman, chill the fuck out. "I love this baby. I just want to eat this fucking baby's tussie and vagina." Um, What? Did she really just say that? Should I call child services? Or at least this child's mother? What if I had been someone else other than me in the store, like someone with a slightly lower tolerance for that type of um, shock-humor, for lack of a better term? I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but for the record, this is not the first time I've been in a store in Baltimore where the conversation has quickly gone to wildly inappropriate in front of customers (me). Maybe I'm just becoming soft. Or, maybe that type of humor has its time and place, like in TV show offices, like not around children. Maybe it's just all about context, but I don't think so.