I’m already used to the fact that any weight gain a woman might experience is immediately interpreted as a sign of pregnancy. “No, I’m not pregnant, I’m just fat” I keep saying to people who come up to me in the street to tell me that drinking coffee in my condition is dangerous to the baby.

Now, however, I discovered that one’s weight loss makes people suspect the same thing.

I’ve lost about 10 pounds since I got sick with this virus. One of the symptoms is a very sore throat, so I can eat nothing except raspberries and some peaches.

“Oh, Clarissa! You look so slim!” a colleague exclaimed today in the office. “What happened? Are you pregnant?”

There is just no winning here. Maybe I need to buy a “Still Not Pregnant” T-shirt.

To everybody concerned: the stubborn Jew has been to the doctor and now feels much better. 🙂

Long live the American healthcare system.

Jonathan was the first to notice this article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed that is very indicative of how we infantilize students. He blogged about it here. In his post, Jonathan looked at the article from the perspective of a professor. Now I would like to consider it from the viewpoint of a student.

Imagine that the day you begin to attend college, you are subjected to the following procedures:

The first day students enter college, many are in the throes of a developmental crisis. They should be assessed in several areas, including their academic ability, social skills, study skills, vocabulary, general knowledge, work history, and community involvement. The results of these assessments would be used to identify the types of support they will need to succeed. This data and interviews with the student can lead to a learning contract between the student and the institution. Participation should be voluntary, but students who opt out would be required to sign a waiver stating they were informed about any concerns and offered appropriate services. This individualized approach would bolster many students and increase their chances for academic success.

I don’t know if I was “in the throes of a developmental crisis” when I went to college. Usually, young women are already past the crisis by the age of 18, so, once again, we are talking about an article whose author pretends that women are still not allowed to attend college.

Leaving that aside, however, I can say that I would have been very annoyed had the university where I got my BA tried to assess my social skills, work history, and community involvement. I never had and still don’t have any community involvement because the word “community” makes me cringe. I’m an autistic, so my social skills have always been quite poor. Nevertheless, I was a stellar student. During the graduation ceremony, I couldn’t leave the stage for several minutes, as the Provost kept enumerating my awards, distinctions, and prizes.

The kind of assessment this article proposes is also extremely invasive. As a student, I didn’t expect my professors to judge my life. I wanted them to impart knowledge, grade my progress, and – with all due respect to my wonderful teachers – keep away from the personal and social aspects of my existence.

I’m quite surprised that the author refers to this approach as “individualized.” What’s so individualized about judging all students on the basis of some imaginary standard of good social skills and appropriate community involvement?

Another problem with this suggestion is that it seems to imply that every student should need some kind of “support.” In case you don’t want support and feel like you are capable of dealing with the demands of college on your own, you are required to sign a waiver to this effect. In this way, self-reliant, independent, mature students are pathologized, while the overgrown babies who will need to be “supported” well into adulthood are positioned as the norm.

It’s mind-boggling what passes for science in some fields and what kind of pseudo-scientific studies get published and picked up by the media:

Researchers from the University of New Hampshire and Yale University wanted to understand more concretely how people gauge the monetary value of their belongings in relation to how loved and secure they feel. So researchers asked 185 study participants, average age 35, to complete a couple of exercises. First, they asked half the group to recall a time when they felt supported and cared for; the other half were asked to think about a fun experience, such as eating at a really great restaurant. Then, both groups were asked to put a money value on the blankets currently on their beds. The group who recalled a good dining experience valued their blankets at $173.30 on average, but the group who had thought about an experience of being loved valued their bedspreads at a paltry $33.38.

I know exactly how much the blanket on my bed costs because I paid for it. And that amount doesn’t change irrespective of which experiences I recall. I’m also kind of puzzled by the mention of the “paltry $33.38”. My blanket costs less than that, and I’m now asking myself what kind of a spoiled rich brat wrote this article.

What is really funny, though, is the way the scholar who conducted this study explains its usefulness:

“These findings seem particularly relevant to understanding why people may hang onto goods that are no longer useful. They also may be relevant to understanding why family members often fight over items from estates that they feel are rightfully theirs and to which they are already attached. Inherited items may be especially valued because the associated death threatens a person’s sense of personal security,” Lemay said.

Is there really anybody who doesn’t know the answers to these very simple questions? It is sad to see how much money is wasted on conducting so-called studies that demonstrate what already is painfully obvious.