PART-TIME BASTARD - STEREOTYPICALLY SELLING OUT

This week, the writer trapped between her old left-wing paper and her new fascist one is being forced to think about how bloody imperfect women are. This is a column, by the way, and it's called Part-Time Bastard. She doesn't want to get in trouble while she's two-timing these newspapers so there's no byline. Now you know.

LONDON - A TOKEN OF MY GRIEF

 

 I’m all up for stoicism. Moaning little self-involved bitches make me feel ill. My granddad fought in a tank in a desert and saw his matey get eviscerated, then spent six months in a prisoner of war camp, and he wasn’t a little moaning bitch about it. Still though, once being stoic turns into a t-shirt that says, “My Husband Died of Cancer, and All I Got Was This Shitty Shirt,” you’ve officially gone too far and strayed into psychosis. You’ve also joined this company’s target audience.

BOLLOCKS TO THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH - FESTIVAL BREEDING GROUNDS

Tens of thousands of people rolling around in each other’s masticated filth while high on every household substance that the part-time dealers can successfully powder or pill is a recipe for self-harm. The entire festival site is an adult playpen designed to facilitate the sort of debauchery that normally ends in a hospital visit. Which is why, I thought, being a festival paramedic must suck. Not only are you forced to stay sober while everyone around you descends into gurning, grinning morons, but you have to fix them when it goes wrong.

MONTREAL - EAR NIBBLING

Stephen J. Shanabrook is an artist originally from Ohio who was traipsing around the globe for years before he decided to set up shop in New York. He makes chocolates using molds he's made from the corpses of human bodies he somehow got his hands on in a Russian morgue, and we were so excited/grossed out about it that we called him up for a chat.

BOLLOCKS TO THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH - DOCTORS CAN'T HELP YOU

You think doctors know what they’re doing? Well, it’s a myth. A lot of the time I have no idea what is wrong with my patient. The higher I progress in the medical profession, the more I realize that half of being a doctor is saying things with authority and hoping my patient doesn’t die–which most of the time works. The ones that do die would probably have died no matter what I did.

BERLIN - EXPERIMENTS IN DEPRESSION

My South Korean buddy, who I'm going to just call D., studied neuroscience in Germany, but because no one (assuming you don’t want to end up in jail or be forced to avoid your home country forever) can escape the mandatory two-year army service in South Korea, he’s currently doing research with tiny white mice on behalf of the Korean Army. Like all other male Koreans, he had to endure the hardcore basic training in which one is allowed to eat, take a piss, or go for any other human need only when the supervisor feels like allowing it, but now he’s occupied with the torture of cute little rodents.

DEATH'S BACK DOOR

A patient has had the better of me. On three separate occasions I have inserted my gloved hand up his anal passage in a way that I believed would cause him excruciating pain, but no, the kinky masochist loved every second. I was merely a pawn in realizing his sexual fantasies, which is certainly not in my job description. 

MILAN – HOOKERS, GAYS, DRUGGIES, AND DEATH

Elizabeth Pisani is a smart lady: a journalist-turned-scientist with a PhD in epidemiology who's worked for the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and UNAIDS. She is also the author of the whistleblowing The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, an international bestseller that outlines the myriad ways in which governments, NGOs, and the United Nations has wasted billions of dollars trying to fight HIV and AIDS because they like to ignore that the disease is largely spread by prostitutes, gay men, and drug injecting folk.

LONDON - I MADE A BABY COME OUT

I always regale you with stories of death, disease, sexual perversity, and self-destruction, which is pretty much what I deal with on a day-to-day basis in A&E. But sometimes there is a fleeting reprieve in the otherwise grim monotony of bodily failure. Last week I delivered my first baby, which, to be fair, was just as gruesome and proved humanity to be just as pitiless.

PARIS - FRANCE'S JIZZ DROUGHT

You shouldn’t mix your private life with your professional one. For instance, if my editor had not known I were the father of a 5-year-old he never would have proposed that I volunteer for a silly investigation into the reported sperm donor shortage in France. Of the 350 donors in 2006, only 250 were selected, giving birth to 1,122 babies. And despite a big ad campaign last year, the rate remains too low--parents asking for frozen cum will have to wait up to two years to get their hands on a sample. So of course I could not refuse the charitable opportunity to jerk off with a purpose or to potentially inseminate a famous Parisian actress dating an impotent French writer.