Hey Ladies!

The moment I fell in love with The Toast as my internet home started with the words “Hey Ladies.”
The moment that I had second thoughts about going into pediatrics also started with “Hey Ladies!” In fact, in my previous life as a computer scientist, no one would ever have referred to a professional group as “ladies,” for gender reasons alone. But, as a senior medical student, all of my peers considering pediatrics were women, as was the altogether too cheery chief resident standing in front of us, gathering our professional attention with her false-friendly greeting: “hey, ladies!”

And, yeah, honestly, I love being a pediatrician, but my professional life is one where gender performance is scrupulously policed, and semi-social professional interactions are full of gender declarations, passive aggressive behavior and subtle status cues. So the way that Markowitz and Moss really capture a way in which women of a certain demographic interact with each other, and the nuance captured in a signature really spoke to me. (Normal conversations I have with my husband include lines like: “We can't hang out with her after she was so mean.” Him: “When was she mean?” Me: “In that e-mail you just read? Did you not see her punctuation marks??”) And no, it's not me and it's not my day-to-day life, but it completely captures where my professional and social life intersect. Perhaps because I am mostly an outsider, cleverly camouflaged to make my way onto these e-mail threads, I find seeing them exposed, dissected and ultimately lampooned hilarious.

But? I thought the blog entries were funnier. I think the pacing was better spread out over months (I binge read the book in two one hour sittings over two days) and that limiting the e-mails to one year lost some of the nuance that, for instance the Jen/Brad relationship took on in the blogs.