Thursday, March 23, 2006
Herr Doktor, put down your copy of Mein Kampf and give me my fucking contact prescription
I was already pissed because he was running a little late for my 1:15 appointment. In fact, when I finally saw him at THREE FUCKING FORTY-FIVE, I was annoyed. However, since I work across the street, I fortunately didn't have to spend those two and a half hours in his zoo-like waiting room (which was infested with screaming children). Rather than bitch at him about the wait (I figured that the myriad of "Oh-no-you-DID-unt" urban teenage mothers outside would handle that), I decided to be pleasant so I could get my shit dilated, read some eye charts, and get my contact prescription as fast as possible.
So the doctor starts checking me out, and he goes, "Ah, blue eyes. It's not very often you see blue eyes around here." This is true, because Washington Heights is overwhelmingly a Dominican neighborhood and most of the people there do not share my Scandinavian phenotype. I am indeed a novelty, both in Washington Heights where I work, and in Harlem where I live, because of my Aryan features. It's all superficial, though, because my outwardly physical similarity to a poster girl for the Hitler youth belies my propensity for banging Jewish, black, Hispanic, and otherwise swarthy, dark men.
I decide to make conversation. So I say, "I know, my eyes get a lot of attention. I live in Harlem, and I've been told by some of my neighbors that I'm 'exotic.'"
He laughs and says conspiratorially, "Right. When we both know, it should be the other way around."
What?! Did he just imply that blue-eyed people should be thinking that brown-eyed people are "exotic"? If you follow that argument to its logical endpoint, he was saying that blue-eyed people should outnumber brown-eyed people to the point where brown-eyed people are a rarity. In discussion, that sentiment is normally followed up with a lusty shout of "white power!" and a cross burning. Somebody call the Mossad, because I think I just had my eyes examined by Dr. Josef Mengele. All I wanted was more contacts, not a lesson in racial hygiene from the National Socialist point of view. And what's with this "we both know" bullshit? Sorry, Reichsminister Goebbels, but you're not tricking me into a big blue-eyed Aryan lovefest with your inclusive little pronouns. Don't think we have some sort of convivial rapport just because a little over a thousand years ago some shared barbarian progenitors of ours crawled out of the same fucking fjord, dipshit.
It's very rare that in the course of conducting a normal business transaction with an educated professional (like a physician), he/she says something that is just out of control inappropriate. And by "inappropriate," I mean that similar statements have been used to encourage national complicity in mass genocide. Next time I need some vision correction, I think I'll be calling a different doctor. Preferably one with brown eyes.
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