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Today, for the last few weeks, in recent months, and for a few years, I have been feeling pretty down, but today in particular. I definitely don't have the same burning desire to be a nurse that some of my classmates seem to have, and, by getting absorbed into the field, I often feel that I am losing myself. I think I am pretty much immune to the "professional socialization" process that we are supposed to be going through, but I can become branded (in the western sense). Part of the reason I didn't pursue the medical field from the start is that I see it as a type of labor, like "hyper-plumbers." Nursing is even worse in that in addition to being defined by your labor, there are extremely strong societal associations and pressure for conformity. Although I'm sure most nursing instructors and organizers don't see it, their desire to create a highly defined professional profile actually puts a ceiling on the amount of respect they can garner as a profession from other professionals. Several of my nursing instructors like to repeat the fact that nursing is the public's "most trusted" profession. The connection they don't make is that people trust nurses because they think of nurses as robotic dispensers of safe medical care. The public doesn't trust uncertainty, ambiguity, and experimentation. They do trust nurses because when nurses tell them to eat a certain way, they never qualify their statements by discussing the state of nutritional science. For biologists, anthropologists, or philosophers, the qualification would be more true and useful.
Anyhow, I was looking at Manolo's Shoeblog today, and he linked to this CD by one Philippe Jaroussky. As soon as I started listening to the samples, I was immediately transported back to myself. Yes, our lives are lived in the dirty, selective, unjust world of nature, but there is also a higher identity that comes from our internal lives. I may have to work in this uniformed, institutionalized, modern, conformist profession to make a living, but it is not who I am.
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