This is my boyfriend - Ikuta Toma. Wouldn't you just love to hold hands with him in the cold rain?

Yes.

Summer! There's too much to do in too little time. Work takes up most of my waking hours...and I spend the rest of my time trying to get some sleep...to get ready for more days of work. It's a vicious cycle. Not that I'm complaining or anything. I love my job. What's not to love about a job that practically landed on my lap while I tried to keep my mouth open to probing alien dental instruments. It was like Christmas, but with money. Haha. Ahh. Sorry.

I honestly love my job, though. On lazy days, I get paid to read F. Sionil Jose's Mass, but let's keep that a secret [okay, internets?]. I get to say that I work in the medical field, and by that I mean...I hound insurance people for claims and make sure that patients still have $$ left in their annual maximums so we can keep the $$ coming in by the loads. But it ain't as grand as it sounds.

What makes me uncomfortable is the constant stereotyping and categorizing that's essentially inseparable to the job description. We give out goodie bags filled with toothbrushes, toothpaste, and dental floss, and it's my assignment to separate these items into bags for either "men," "women," or "kids." Okay, so for the kids it's pretty dang obvious that they get the Spongebob stuff [which I like!], but it's pretty awkward to separate the pink from the blue when you've taken Anthro 3AC like I did. For an entire semester, it was drilled in our heads that the distinction between genders is a societal creation, and by doing my job at the dental office, I was propagating this norm. As whats-her-face [a theorist we read in RS 90B] said, norms are violent because they are, for certain, going to exclude some category. This little girl, for instance, surprised me when she declined my offer of Disney princess stickers after she got her teeth cleaned. She opted for Superman stickers.

"I know Superman's for boys, but I like Superman," she said to her mom.

Awww, the little anthropologist.

I hated Anthro, btw.

Anyway, the stereotyping goes on with the profuse magazine-offering that is part of my job. When the patients are seated in the...room, I have to offer them magazines so they won't be bored. For Filipinas who speak Tagalog, I grab one of the many Star Studio or Yes! magazines from the shelves, never mind that almost all of them are several years old. For Mr. X, who walked in in a dress shirt that spoke "business intellectual" to me, I chose a copy of the National Geographic and Food and Wine. In some cases, the doctor intervenes when he knows what the patient prefers; "Give him a sports magazine," he'd say. And we'd have very little to choose from save for bundles of cycling magazines and ESPN in Spanish.

Is stereotyping in the workplace bad? What if you're all the same ethnicity?

Either way, I still feel awkward when put in a position where I have to stereotype or categorize, but I guess it's all part of the job.