The Get Down Countdown

More thoughts on my 25 year college reunion:

I was in a crazy senior dorm in college, Pearsons Annex. There were 13 of us in the most desirable dorm on campus. I had a conversation this evening with Jan "Scoop" Snyder about our escapades.

My favorite Pearsons Annex activity:

At the end of our weekly dorm meetings we would review (drum roll please) The Get Down Countdown.

The Get Down Countdown was a scoring system for our sex lives. Here's how it worked:

Making out: 1 point
Home plate: 3 points 1 scratch mark plus a solid black box
Somewhere between first and home: 2 points (scratch mark plus a dashed black box)
Too intoxicated to recall specifics: 2 points (scratch mark plus a dashed line black box and question mark)
Amherst: purple points
Dartmouth: green points
Harvard: crimson points
All others: black points

A maximum of 9 points could be earned per sex partner, per person, so monogamous competitors couldn't win the game by having regular sex with their longterm boyfriend, but they could get on the board.

We had our own term for sex. The traditional male oriented terms such as nailing, banging, screwing were anathema to us, so we preferred "strapping", i.e. strapping one's legs around a hot dude. Our favorite comment when overworked: "I'd rather be drunk and strapping."

We had sexy code names to protect our identity in case someone found the chart. Mine, since I was a bike racer was "Pump."

I can't say I ever strapped anyone simply to raise my ranking, my score was just an honest reflection of what I was doing anyway.

I jumped to an early lead in September which held until the end of the fall semester by doing the following:

1) flying in my Marine Corps boyfriend for the first weekend: 9 points but only black points
2) reuniting with my freshman year boyfriend from Amherst: 9 purple points
3) finally strapping that crew guy from Harvard who drove me nuts emotionally all year and for several years afterwards. I got an A in poetry writing second semester because of the torture: 9 crimson points

Unfortunately, and unknown to me at the time I was already maxed for the year, and fell in the category of monogamous also-rans, even though I had 3 going simultaneously. I was way too busy juggling 3 guys, premed, rowing and cycling to put any effort into one-nighters. Even the townie lumberjack from Junior year got the cold shoulder.

I thought I was in good shape but I was overtaken by a competitor who got drunk at a Christmas party and made out with 8 guys. We argued vociferously but witnesses at the party verified that these were all slutty kisses.

After the winter break, the competition became way out of my league. The other girls had a taste for Dartmouth flavor, and we had to implement the dashed line connecting duplicated partners among different competitors.

One girl had a 3 way on acid in a Winnebago in March. No way could I compete with that. Drunk and strapping was one thing, but I could never emotionally handle mixing drugs and sex. If I was going to an Amherst art party for the evening, I would disable (leave my diaphragm at home).

It became a tangled web as the year progressed, and I was left in the dust. I finished in the middle of the pack.

xxoo

Pump

Guest blog by Parke: Dawn's 25 year college reunion is tomorrow

By the way - I have a suggestion for your reunion:

When they give you the name tag to fill out - you know, the one that starts with the preprinted "hello, my name is"...Well, you just fill in:"Irrelevant. All you need to know is that I'm a successful MD, former pro athlete and musician, caring mom, and I get my pipes cleaned every night by a trophy husband 8 years younger. Who the fuck are you?"

You can have an arrow pointing to Curtis a la "I'm with stupid" if you like.


God bless you Parke. This really puts it all into perspective.

in search of the perfect eyebrow high

My eyebrow situation has been getting out of control. As much as I like freaky Puerto Rican numerologist West End Ana, she keeps fucking up my eyebrows. Last time she took some length off my right eyebrow and that was the last straw. I've never had to pencil in length and I'm not about to start.

I live in the high rent district and and have been secretly slumming my salon stuff at my friend's salon in the West End. A girl has to save money somewhere.

Well screw that. I had a full acetone East Side French pedicure yesterday. It's the first one this season that isn't fucked up and it was worth every penny. Damn my feet looked pretty in my stilettos last night.

So today I went in search of the perfect eyebrow high and I know where to get it. Big Scary Karen.

Under the 300 pound exterior is a very sweet girl with the fine motor control of a brain surgeon and the visual judgment of a master sculptor. She moves around alot so at the end of my bike ride this morning I went to the last salon where I knew she worked. She was one street over and about 10 streets down. I stopped by in full kit to try to book an appointment. Her book was stacked but she had just finished up a facial early and took me right in.

Psych. She pulverized my moustache and soul patch too.

So other than the redness and swelling, I look pretty.

Tomorrow: dermatologist.

Why the sudden paralytic vanity?

Friday/Saturday: College 25th reunion.

end the recession! get a pedicure!

The owner of the Cambodian nail joint down the street says business is down.

Ladies, let's band together to fight the recession and thumb our noses at murderous Republican 1970's foreign policy at the same time.

Get a pedicure!

Send your husbands to get their backs waxed while you're at it!

you can't make this shit up

Today at work I got bodychecked into the nurses station and called a bitch by a deaf-mute drug addict.

why Obama will be our next president

I'm not really into roleplaying in the bedroom, but last night I proposed a round of "Low Self-Esteem College Girl and Lacrosse Captain."

I understand from a campus nurse that girls are handing out unreciprocated blowjobs to jocks to climb the social ladder. This is why women under 30 won't vote for Hillary.

wow...this is embarrassing

I was climbing a local hill by myself and singing loudly along to Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" on my Ipod.
The men's group ride rolled past me.
Umm, hi guys....
Note to self: I really need to be climbing a bit harder so I'm rendered incapable of sound.

Best job EVER!!!

Endoscopy suite recovery room nurse.
Why?
Because farting always cracks me up no matter how old I get.
In the recovery room you get to point and laugh at unconscious people farting loudly all day long after colonoscopies.
Plus if you have gas just stand next to one of them, let fly, and blame it on them.

small town country doc vicissitudes

It's a weird adjustment doing the small town doc thing. Every day I hear secondhand about someone I took care of, like, "My daughter was drunk and smashed her finger in a car door Saturday night and you fixed it." People know about me before I meet them. I called one of the docs to admit a patient and he started telling me his patients, my in-laws, told him I had started working there.
The nurses at the small town ER call me "the Shit Magnet" because someone hardcore crazy sick usually comes in whenever I'm on. I've always had a white cloud so I haven't accepted the shit magnet label yet.
I'm used to a complete disconnect between my work life and social life. Not here.
The weirdest of all happened Monday. There was a lady who fell hiking and hurt her ribs. She had come in Sunday and was told she bruised her ribs and prescribed pain medication. She had returned because the pain was worse and she was short of breath. I walked in the room and it was someone I know well from the ski hill. Up to that point she had no idea what my day job was.
She was in extremis and I couldn't hear breath sounds on the right. This meant she had dropped a lung. I ordered a chest X-ray and ran over to radiology to review her X-ray from the day before. It had been read as negative by the ER doc on duty, but still unread on the radiologists desk. We looked at it together and a small pneumothorax was present. It was small enough that it probably would have been watched as an outpatient, so not the most egregious miss, but still a miss. I always take it personally when I'm the one who missed it.
The new X-ray was much worse. The lung was so deflated that she was starting to get tension pneumothorax, a life-threatening emergency. I heard that the surgeon on call had left the hospital. We tried his office, the OR, his house and his beeper and nobody could find him.
I had to pull the trigger. Dilly-dallying any longer would have killed her. Ideally a pigtail catheter should be used but I've never done one, so I opted for the old school chest tube, which I've done hundreds of times in the ghettos of Philly and Providence. I've been living in a pay-for-performance world for the past few years, so I've been farming out the chest tubes to PAs and surgeons lately in the interest of time management. I do them maybe once every couple years now.
I will never get over putting in chest tubes. You're really stabbing someone in the chest in slow motion, and you have their life in your hands.
The last one I did the patient and his brother were counting the rosary. It was surreal.
There's a point in chest tube insertion where you use blunt forceps to push through the rib muscles and into the plueral space. No matter how much sedation and local anaesthetic you use, it still hurts the patient like a bastard. In tension pneumothroax there is a dramatic woosh of air as the tension is released when you get into the pleural space.
So I'm stabbing this lady I know, and she's talking to me about my kids inbetween groans. She trusts me completely, and I'm scared to death.
Woosh. I'm in.
I got the chest tube in and she immediately looked and felt better. The lung was back up on the chest X-ray.
The surgeon had been on an afternoon bike ride and couldn't hear his beeper.
This was one of those moments I longed for when I applied to medical school, the opportunity to intervene in badness and fix it. To do this for someone I know socially is an unbelievable honor.
I think I'm going to hear all about this at the ski hill.