Apropos of the earlier, separate annotations about Didion and fugu, I saw that Diodon is a species of fish called fugu. And I read it as Didion. Maybe that’s how the Sixties ended, in this sort of liminal nonsense language mutation. Which is something someone who hadn’t read deep enough into Didion to know she wrote for National Review might say. Anyway. None of that has to do with anything, but is interesting to me personally, which was my point with this essay.

The editors here like you to try to write your own headers, but I didn’t write this one, I don’t think. I like that “on point” sounds like “smart take” and also sounds like en pointe, because ballet is for-girlz-by-girlz. That does not scan to FUGU as I was hoping, in order to make a toxicology non-sequitur that demonstrated my interest in toxicology on GIRLS. At the time of this writing, I was taking a poison control center elective and they would often roll out the fugu incident on The Simpsons, another show that is terrific about portraying medicine.

Gotta love the dactyls, tho(ugh):

H!-bee-oh’s GIRLS are-on POINT!

The scare parentheses were for show. I really do love the dactyls.

You will note that prompt is to “Say something interesting.” That was the title of a poem I wrote in 2001 about a high school friend, with whom I thought I was romantically involved until he didn’t. It won some award and was published in an anthology. I was so embarrassed by it and my post-9/11 poetry to a different high school friend that I never wrote poetry again. Until Genius.

Another attempt to sound like I felt I was supposed to sound as a young woman writing about a young woman

It’s Pat was a formative film for me growing up and an outstanding depiction of the logical consequences of the lack of empathy. “Pat” also causes the reader to visualize a pillow to hit someone with playfully, or smear a butter pad with sensually, in an effort to promote better displays of intimacies and empathy. “Pat” is everything “gross” should be.

Noticing as I prepare these annotations that I don’t talk about health policy, patients, or praxis. That is a problem as a pathologist. Really feel like I should be citing more medical humanities literature here, and am probably capable of doing so, but so many others do it that – well, that is my point! The more traditional rigor has its uses, trust me, and you have to master the basics before you go out side it, go slow to go fast, I mean… but what if you didn’t? What this short essay proposes is, maybe the GIRLS writing staff didn’t? Think outside the autoclaved sterile instruments box. Annotate outside the normal string of text. It is why I’m not “likeminded,” but “-ikeminded.”

Re-promoting this piece as GIRLS turns to the MFA program as psychotherapy for the new season

She was in the Columbia University Narrative Medicine program. We were at Bellevue, home of the Literary Review. Maybe if I used “eponymous” more, I could get published in there. My stuff is a little out-there and unpolished for that audience.

Used cathartic to evoke toxicology applications to expel vomitus, bile, excrement – all the stuff of GIRLS!

Fairly sure this was not the original ending. The first sentence was in there, but the rest was an edit I made to sound clearer. In blog posts for large organizations, keep in mind that you are offering the reader a brand or an argument she can use as her own with the good association of your brand. Op-eds are extremely difficult for me to write.

Honestly, I hate personal essays and hate that editors seem only to like my personal essays. Had I the chloroform cloths of heaven, I would be a historian along the lines of Christopher Lasch, though I didn’t go that route because I can’t concentrate on books anymore. I only started writing in the first person because readers like it better, and I am a perfectionist who breaks down when I am pushed to organize third-person research. When I was a student journalist and historian, I was a pretty exhaustive reporter-researcher. Under self-imposed time pressure, I would sometimes get sloppy reconstructing my notes. That would lead to problems with editors making constructive revisions, and I lived in constant terror of making factual errors to the point where I stopped trying to write journalism at all. That continues today, but I hope to return to it when I get over myself. Medicine helps with that.

My handwriting looks like doctor’s handwriting not because I’m a doctor, but because I devised it in shorthand as a college student in order to conduct journalism interviews. People will say more if you don’t record them, but will also say you misquoted them. And I wasn’t emotionally prepared for that even when I could defend it based on my sourcing, which was usually the case.

You know who I learned that from? Janet Dunham.