Your pain means nothing to me.

Pain is subjective. It is highly personal, different for every person. Hospitals have pain charts with number scales and facial expressions as indicators of pain for verbal and nonverbal patients. If you’re intubated (a breathing tube down your throat) you can’t speak. Though uncomfortable, you may or may not be medicated enough to experience pain. You will want a nonverbal pointing chart to tell your doctors to increase or change the meds. When people ask if getting tattoos hurt, I tell them no. Not really. But I know people who found getting their tattoos excruciating. Why? Pain is personal. It is this very subjectivity that confuses people when talking about sCAMs (Complimentary and Alternative Medicine). “Acupuncture took my pain away!” is a frequent anecdotal response. The data is clear – when done in a proper, double blinded study, acupuncture performs no better than placebo or sham acupuncture (twirling randomly placed toothpicks). Someone who practices acupuncture obviously doesn’t understand or care about modern medical practices (or more likely they willingly reject facts). If the practitioner believes in ancient magic (nonscientific), then they don’t necessarily understand or embrace germ theory (scientific). Why risk having them stick needles in your body if you get the same effect with toothpicks?

Bio dad.

Sit down and write your bio. I’ve read many resumes and thrown out most of them. The people I’ve hired don’t necessarily have all of the paper requirements the job demands but all of their resumes showed that there was an interesting person beyond the page. I’d rather work with someone who is interesting and has a hungry mind than someone who can simply do a particular task really well. Maybe that is my liberal arts bias, maybe it’s that I’m perpetually looking for people who remind me of me. But when I turn the question inward I hobble myself by disallowing internal definitions of success.