Easter colour

There’s something about Easter that gets me feeling incredibly festive, even more so that the sound is finally out around these parts! I’d love to tell you that I’ve been baking easter cakes and blowing eggs (which is what I’d rather be doing) but I’ve been staggering through night shift, a whole world of pain I’ll go into another time. The day they invent nightshift doctor robots will be cause for celebration worldwide. Who on earth is good at decision making at 3am?

That hasn’t stopped me embracing colour and life in my days off.

I’m so into clashing prints at the moment it hurts.

I love multicoloured roses in a small bunch – these ones smell just beautiful and are making me so happy right now!

I bought this Marc by Marc Jacobs bracelet as a post horror shift present recently. I love the turnlock clasp and bright colours!

My favourite thing to do on Good Friday is go to the fish market and eat a seafood platter. This year the queues were horrible and while my blood pressure was rising, I thought of The Happiness Project and realised I didn’t want to feel angry. Then it occurred to me, how lucky I am to go out on a sunny day and buy a plate of seafood when so many places in the world are undergoing a debt crisis and people are worrying about their jobs. Waiting in a queue for fresh seafood is a very first world problem. It was a small and happy moment to turn my anger into something better.

What are you doing over Easter?

Embracing monochrome (+ a whinge)

After a good ten years of swearing off black and it’s counterparts, for some reason this winter I have headed full ball into this monochrome utilitarian urban-cool thing not seen in my neck of the woods since the late 90s.  You know, when Stussy (the second coming), Mooks and M-1-11 all had their heyday, well before their shitty warehouse sales and cheap fabrics.  They used to be good.  Am I showing my age?

Anyway, Mr G bought me this for birthday earlier in the year – I love it to death but only take it out to places where it’s in full sight all the time, i.e. it can’t get pinched.

My work doesn’t have lockers.  The nurses have lockers.  The cleaning staff have lockers.  The junior doctors don’t get lockers so I daren’t take my bag.  But I digress.  The inside of the bag is clever too:

I bought myself this coat after freezing my way to and from nightshift.  It was a bit of a gamble but it paid off – it’s really thick and has impressive looking hardware on it.  Bluefly have done a terrible job photographing it.

I was never really interested in Kenneth Cole as a brand before but I am interested in being warm – and now I can’t stop wearing this all the time.  With the above bag.  And a great big scarf.

Then on another fortnight I did so much overtime I could barely see straight (one of those weeks had 70 hours in it by Saturday) and with the resulting double-time I bought the Marc Jacobs Mouse shoes.  I still remember when the original brown-and-cream pony hair variety came out something like 5 years ago, and I wanted them so badly.  I couldn’t afford them on my student budget for such a long time – these seemed like a nice reward.  They’re the Marc by Marc Jacobs variety and not as high end as the originals, but good god I love looking at my feet!

They’re a cute and cheeky offset to the utilitarianism – I never take clothes too seriously.

In all honesty, I’d much prefer not to have bought them and to have had the free time and less money.  Junior doctors can’t really complain about their jobs – the minute you do, the newspapers will go and post a picture of a fat neurosurgeon next to his three Mercedes and the public goes ape and calls all doctors greedy charlatans who are mind-controlled by the pharmaceutical industry.

The sad truth is that junior doctors earn the Australian average (which is still good, no complaints there), and any money you make on top of that comes with the sacrifice of your free time, family, and friends.   It’s not worth it.  It’s not worth standing bleary eyed at the 16th hour of your double shift because some other exhausted person called in sick, trying to work out if someone’s chest pain is a heart attack or a muscle spasm.  It’s not worth the fear involved when you walk out of the hospital at the 20 hour mark crossing your fingers and praying up at the sky that you didn’t, in all your fog, make a decision that could harm someone.  The system is designed to prevent that from happening but things slip through sometimes.  The put-up-and-shut-up mentality perpetuated by the upper echelons of the field seems so outdated – they come from a time when there was no computers, no CT scanners, and a body of knowledge a tenth of what it is now.  In this environment, with this much knowledge and this many options at our fingertips for treatment, we shouldn’t be working this much.  The margin for error frightens me.

But you know, I’m just a lazy greedy fatcat doctor* who is going to drive home in her Mercedes and have dinner and her next holiday paid for by a pharmaceutical** company 😉

*translation:  a hardworking and mostly starving doctor who is driving home in her Toyota Echo to a dinner of whatever I cooked and froze last week, with her next holiday paid for with a fatigued credit card.

**pharmacetuical company:  something the media talks about brainwashing me but I’ve never even come across so much as a pen this year.  Let alone dinner.  And as far as natural therapy and vitamin companies go…I’m not sure that with the prices they charge,  they have your health and wellbeing at the forefront of their minds 😉