Random Stuff Before I Tackle Morocco.

02/06/09

So I realized a little bit ago I have completely neglected to talk to you all about my cabin steward Dalphon. Dalphon is a very small, possibly phillipino, faux-hawked man. He is lovely and comes in and cleans Allie and I’s room each and every morning –occasionally when we sleep in he opens our door, peeks his head in, sees that we are asleep in our beds still, and not-so-subtly shuts the door very quickly. He’s adorable. One time in Spain I came back from the club too drunk to properly pick up and put my clothes I wore out in the dirty drawer –instead I kind of flung them across the room, threw on my pajamas and passed out, the next morning I unthinkingly went out to breakfast off the ship and when I returned he’d lovingly folded my disgusting smoke and beer smelling outfit…Including my thong, and placed them on my bed. I’m terrible like that I guess. So anyways, when Allie and I were goofing around one night we rearranged the magnetic words from my bumper poetry set to write “I kiss you Dalfie in my dream. No don’t fight it.”In retrospect we might be the biggest creepers ever, but neither of us thought much about it besides how hilarious it was. So Allie leaves for Seville, and I go out around Cadiz, and one night I come back to find he’s rearranged the words to say beneath what we’d left for him “Go on. Why me?”

So I was running around the cabin geeking out but Allie wasn’t even there to share it with –later I find out she’d thought I might have written it! We decided it was better left there and that we should’ve never started this whole thing, haha. The weirdest thing about it was that we didn’t even ever really talk to him –the back of our painting (where students from each voyage write hilarious comments and advice –more about this later) said that Dalfie was awesome and that we should be good to him, and yet I’d never spoken more than a couple sentances with him, and after the magnet incident not much had changed, although there was one day where Allie and I left to go to lunch and passed Dalfie in someone else’s room and said hello, I noticed a minute or two later that I’d left my I.d. in our room so I went back to get it, but once I was in the room Dalfie was in there! Chilling out in our bathroom being sketchy! Who knows what his dirty little philipino self was up to…We now have a running joke that he tries on all our clothes and rubs himself all over the room while we’re gone.

Oh! And a shoutout to Ben –today my roommate played the rusted root Matilda song and I thought of you!

So. Moving on.

I’m going to have to work backwards to Morocco I think because it’s a daunting thing to tackle –so much happened. Instead I’ll talk about my day. Last night I popped a couple of (maybe) seasickness pills I got from a pharmacy in Morocco. I have no idea if they were meant to help with seasickness but I passed out almost as soon as I took them. So around Seven at night I curled up in my bed while Allie watched a movie and woke up a few hours later when we hit really rough waters. The drawers in our room were all slamming open and shut –the t.v. was rocking scarily and all the pens and stuff in our drawers were flying all over the room. Later I heard lots of horror stories or kids who had chairs and doors slam into/on them –a girl who cracked her head while running on the treadmill, and a guy who broke his wrist falling down some stairs. Mostly though it was superficial stuff and they really should’ve known better since the captain had made announcements about how bad it would be because we had to turn our stabilizers off. They got on the overhead and announced that it was a code blue which we later discovered meant all the nursing staff should get to the clinic asap because so many kids were all messed up –they even sent an email to our parents telling them what happened. Despite all this ruckus I really pretty much slept through it –I heard it, woke up briefly to see Allie freaking out and looking out our porthole, and then fell right back asleep. So today I slept allllll day it felt like. I pretty much slept from 7pm-9am. I went to global studies from 9:20-10:15, then came back and took a nap until noon. It was kind of awesome but now I’m worried I won’t sleep well tonight and I have all my classes tomorrow.

Speaking of classes, let me talk about my biomedical ethics class. It’s probably my favorite, it’s just ridiculously interesting (for instance today in my textbook I read about how African Americans and Euro. Americans value individuality and the power of personal decision more than anything and so they on average want to know everything about their diagnosis and courses of treatment, whereas Mexican Americans and Korean Americans tend to want to know as little as possible and even feel as though too much negative information if it’s a bad prognosis can hasten death and only cause suffering) and our professor is really baller –she’s now the dean at a law school (for Grace if you’re reading this: she used to do what the awkward balding character on scrubs with the crush on Elliot who sings all the time does.) Mostly the class is on the ethics of medicine and patient priviledge, doctor paternalism, and the Hippocratic oath. It’s so cool, but it’s also easily my most difficult class; she assigned us 116 pages of the textbook during the week we were in Spain and Morocco; pages like my personal fav. page 80, “To make tangible these abstract descriptions and to crystallize essential differences among the models (translation: to help you understand…), we will illustrate the responses they suggest in a clinical situation (trans: here’s a nutty situation…), that of a 43 year old premenopausal woman who has recently discovered a breast mass (trans: a relatively young woman has a lump in her breast…)Surgery reveals a 3.6-cm ductal carcinoma with no lymph node involvement that is estrogen receptor positive. Chest roentgenogram, bone scan, and liver function tests reveal no evidence of metastatic disease; what should the physician say to the patient? (trans: WHAT?)”

You see what I mean?

She also assigned us these interesting write-ups to do where we interview locals in a couple countries about medical/social issues and cross-reference them against other countries’opinions as well as our own –cool in theory but awkward considering how difficult it is to ask a man in morocco what his concept of the soul is according to his culture and how it’s influenced by Islam (I actually pulled this one off despite my crappy French through explaining how in the Qur’an God breathed into Adam and that breath is like the soul.) Regardless of language and cultural barriers it’s just not going to be okay to turn to the woman next to me on a train and ask how she and her society views abortion or the care and cause of the mentally retarded. How about how drugs are regulated in the country or organ donation policies? What about physician-assisted suicide? I mean, I would love to hear the answers to these questions too, but I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to ask them…Also, she’s splitting up our midterm into three parts, a multiple choice test, a 8-10 page paper, and a interview. Did I mention we only have 20 classes and are only 4 in? It’s so difficult reading while in-port too, and compared to every single person I’ve talked to I’m doing 6 billion times the work they are; it’s insane.

Ship food is kinda gross so now I’m munching on some paprika chips (from Morocco) after finishing a game of rummy –I had no idea what I was doing but I somehow came in second.

Also big news: my grandpa died the last day I was in Morocco. My dad’s dad, my Pap-pap wasn’t ever in good health while I was alive but I never really imagined him dying; I’m still not sure what I feel. Mostly I’m just worried about my grandma Jane; I don’t think she’s ever really been alone and I don’t know if she’s going to be able to handle it. I wish I could be back home for my Dad and my family.