Sunday, 06 May 2007

• Currently Watching Stand and Deliver By Edward James Olmos, Estelle Harris, Mark Phelan, Virginia Paris, Mark Eliot see related

  THE REASON

  I was once told by one of my professors in optometric school, Dr. Aisha Wang, that I should not specialize in ocular disease in my career.  She said that my colorblindness put me at a disadvantage which would make it impossible for me to detect hemorrhages or other types of retinopathy in the eye.  Dr. Wang said that I should pursue other avenues in optometry, such as contact lenses or vision therapy, because specializing in ocular disease would be dangerous to my patients. 

  Dr. Wang had a mean streak of making condescending remarks to interns and patients.  Because of this, no one liked her.  She was a cold-hearted professor who commanded the respect of no one, and all of her students simply saw her as a grumpy middle-aged old maid who no self-respecting man would ever touch with a ten-foot pole.  So, perhaps I would have taken her remarks more seriously if I didn’t disdain her so much.   Dr. Wang, of course, was wrong.  I have no problems examining the ocular fundus, and my color deficiency has not hindered my performance as a diagnostician.  So fuck you, Dr. Wang from Gainesville, Florida.

  I suppose it’s possible that Dr. Wang was not trying to be a bitch at all, but she was legitimately concerned about my abilities to see different colors.   I can tell you that I have a red/green color deficiency, but I can never really tell you what that exactly is.  I can describe for you what is physiologically different about my eyes, but I can’t really explain to you what that means to me.  Whenever I tell someone I am colorblind, they usually follow with a response like, “Then what do you see?”  I hate this question because I don’t know how to answer it.  I can’t describe what I see because I don’t know what you see.  I see the same thing you’re seeing.  I just see it differently.

  This may or may not have anything to do with why I think differently from most people.  Perhaps my physiology redefines the limits of my mental capacity.  I believe that God is a woman, but I can understand why most people think God is a man (or doesn’t exist).  I don’t believe that dinosaurs existed (and it has nothing to do with religion), but I can see why most people do.  I find GreenTeaGirlie fascinating, but it’s understandable that most people think she is unremarkable.  I think differently, but I can understand most people.  But one thing I cannot understand is when people say that “everything happens for a reason”.

  I can’t stand it when people say that.  I suppose people say it to make light of some unfortunate event.  But this statement merely creates a sense of false hope.  No one really knows why bad things happen to people.  I suppose that it’s nice to believe that there is some greater force at work that allows unfortunate events to happen as part of some master plan for a better world.  People who believe that “everything happens for a reason” have a sense of entitlement and believe that the universe is on their side.  And I suppose that is the leap of faith that people of faith take.  But I’d rather believe that bad things happen because bad things happen.  I don’t believe that the universe owes me anything, so I’m not going to believe that things happen “for a reason”.  The universe doesn’t owe me anything, and the universe doesn’t owe you anything either.  The only reason bad things happen to you is because people screw you over to make good things happen to them.  This may sound defeatist, and it probably is.  The universe doesn’t owe me anything, but I owe myself the universe.  “Everything happens for a reason” is the shallowest aphorism in human history.

  What do you see?

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