Who Says Marriage Holds You Back?: A Response to "23 Things To Do Instead of Getting Engaged Before You're 23"

Tonight, I've had several friends share an article on my Facebook news feed: 23 Things to Do Instead of Getting Engaged Before You're 23. And really, it's just the umpteenth in a series of articles and blogs decrying the Kardashian/Teen Mom approach to marriage and relationships. But just to change things up a little bit, I'd like to offer up my story, and my take on things.

Now, I get that the idea of being married before the age of 25 doesn't appeal to everyone. I'm 24. There are things in my life I still want to do. I just graduated from nursing school and matter of weeks ago with a bachelor's degree, and all of a sudden, there are so many new doors open to me. I'm smart, I'm capable, I'm driven - I've also been married since I was 19.

Again, I get it - it's not for everyone. Different strokes for different folks, people are entitled to their own decisions. The difference is, when people look at my decision, it's often with at least one of the following thoughts:

• Where's your baby?
• Poor thing, you'll never be able to live your life to the fullest now that you've tied yourself down!

The condescension that now comes towards marriage in your 20's has escalated to the point that everyone assumes that I've thrown my life away. I'd like to present the possibility that maybe I'm living my life better and more fully as a married 24-year-old than I would have as a single college student.

Vanessa Elizabeth, the author of "23 Things to Do Instead of Getting Engaged Before You're 23", says the following:

I have begun to notice a common thread amongst all these young unions: inexperience.  Inexperience with dating, traveling, risks, higher education, career direction, SEX, solitude, religious exploration, etc… and it’s insane that I have already experienced more of the world in the last 22 years than my married peers will ever experience in their life.

Perhaps I am not one of her peers, but being married hasn't deprived me of any of these things - and doesn't necessarily deprive others who take a similar path as I have.

Since it's written in all-caps, lets first address sex - if you know me personally and are grossed out by the idea of my talking about sex, feel free to skip this section. But why do marriage and experience with sex have to be mutually exclusive?

The first time having sex with anyone is bound to be awkward - no matter how experienced you are, no matter how many partner's you've had, completely synching your sexual habits with someone is not immediate, no matter what television and movies say. You don't know if he's going move his leg, or if she's going to move her knee all of a sudden. You don't know if she makes sounds that you can't keep a straight face through. You don't know if he's going to pull out, or where he's going to try and stick it in the first place. Sex isn't glamorous. It can be awkward and induce more laughter than moaning at times because honestly, you just can't tell what's going to happen. Having more partners doesn't change that.

Furthermore, when you're married, what do you think you do. There is sex. Believe me. For most newlyweds, there is plenty of sex - enough that after you while, you can't even do it as much as you did before; enough that you, funny enough, have to act like an old married couple and actually have other hobbies together. You can hardly call most married couples inexperienced at sex after they've been married for a while. Active with fewer partners? Maybe. Hopefully. But no less experienced.

For that matter, marriage doesn't necessarily mean a person will experience any of the valuable things that Vanessa Elizabeth listed any less than their single counterparts. Let me tell you my story.

I started dating my husband when I was 16, and when we were 18, he joined the Army and was stationed on the other side of the country. I stayed in California to go to college, while he built on his career. That November, he found out that he was going to be deployed to Iraq the following year - and the next July, we were married.

But that wasn't the end of my independence and new experiences. I continued living on the opposite side of the country from him to pursue an education. Marriage didn't make me last my goals, but instead, presented me with new challenges and new hurdles. The first time I ever traveled on an airplane alone was to fly to North Carolina to see him - and to be honest, I never would have dared to do it if not for him. I lived away from my parents, worked for the first time in my life, learned to take a bus and travel independently, all while going to school, and all because I was married and was on a new path in my life. I finished my associate's degree as class speaker, transferred to the university, and started on the path to nursing school. I made friends, hung out, tried new things, attended protests on campus, tried new hobbies, realized I sucked at them, performed in front of people.

Now, let me present to you another idea:

Being single is stressful.

The trouble of going out and being single, meeting and dating and sleeping with a wide variety of people, getting dolled up and being out on the town - none of those things ever really appealed to me. I really wanted to focus on growing as a person, and honestly, being married, I never had friends pressuring me to go out and do things I didn't want to do. I was the married friend. If I didn't want to go out drinking, it was always my ticket out. I could focus on growing and improving on things I wanted, because the social pressures of being a young 20-something weren't there anymore, at least not in the way they would have been if I was single. It allowed me to balance having friends with bettering myself academically and professionally.

Being married allowed me to focus on bettering myself and realizing my interests.

I'm not 25 yet, but I've already been married for about 5 and a half years - since getting married, I've traveled to 4 new states I've never been to, flown across the country alone (including one incident that including missing my flight and having to bounce through airports across the country, all by my lonesome), completed two college degrees, lived in and moved in and out of 4 different places, tried learning to drive, published my first novel, worked two jobs, made some friends, lost some friends, gotten into car accidents, paid hospital bills - I've been living fully. In the years to come, I'm going to work as a nurse, have a family, go on trips, buy a home... the list goes on. So as for the suggestions of things I should have done before getting engaged, thank you - I've done a lot of them since getting married, and if they interested me, I can still do most of the rest.

You don't need to worry about me lacking experiences in my life because marriage isn't the end of new experiences. Done correctly, it's the beginning.

Christmas Wish List: 2013 (under construction)

Mosby's Review Cards for the NCLEX-RN
The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien
Pilot Better Retractable Ballpoint Pens - Black Ink, Fine
Black Wristband USB Flash Drive

"Scrubbing In": Real People versus Reality Television

I will be the the first to admit that I am not a woman without by biases. When I first heard about "Scrubbing In" from a classmate about a month before its premiere, I was quick to sign the Change.org petition for its cancellation out of absolute indignation. I have spent the past two years of my life in nursing school. I have given most most semblance of a social life. I have spent days seeing so much suffering and sadness and pain that the last thing I want to do after a day on the floor is go out and get plastered. Even as a student, I have seen so much sadness that all I want to do is go home and hug the people I love, have a nice dinner with them, and sleep in my own bed in my own pajamas, because I realize just how lucky I am to be able to do any of those things - many of the patients I've worked with don't have the luxury. Many of them don't even have those things.

My first reaction when I saw the preview for "Scrubbing In" was... how dare they? I wasn't sure if I was angry at the nurses on the television set, or at MTV. I just knew that I was angry at something about this show, and that I was genuinely hurt that it was making a caricature of a profession that I was working so hard to get into.

Fast forward about a month. I decided that I would try to watch the show - weeks after its original air date, because I didn't want to contribute to its live viewership - to see if there was any possibility that the show could be redeemed. After all, I had looked up the cast members on the BRN license verification website. They are real nurses. They had been through nursing school, just like what I'm going through right now. They had learned about the struggle for nursing to be taken seriously.

When I turned on my television set, I realized what MTV was doing - exploiting real people, the way it always does nowadays. Hello, Teen Mom stars, I'm talking about you.

"Scrubbing In" takes real people - real nurses - and does what MTV is extremely good at in its reality shows: chopping and screwing footage to put people into neat little archetypal packages in order to tell a sensationalized story.

There is a lot of talk about the cast themselves - and yes, some of their behavior shown on the show has been less than amazing, to say the least. Telling a patient with suicidal thoughts to "stop thinking about all this stupid stuff" is not therapeutic. Flinging baby powder at each other in the supply room is waste of hospital resources. Practicing IV's on a coworker is a violation of hospital policy and a liability risk. But the "shame on you" goes more towards the show's producers than towards the cast. After all, haven't we all had moments where we realized, "Oh, god, I could have spoken to that patient so much more effectively, but I blanked out!", or "Dude. Why did I do that?"

It's part of the process of socialization into nursing practice, even for experienced nurses when they are coming to a new facility, starting from scratch, and I think that's something that a real nursing reality show could better address.

These are the parts of the cast's day that MTV wants you to see. "Scrubbing In" is carefully chopped and screwed to portray real people as characters - the redneck, the ghetto fab diva, the snooty white girl, and so on. If you read between the lines, you can see snippets of truth about real struggles in nursing practice - but you shouldn't need to read between the lines in a show that's supposed to be about nurses.

A show about nurses needs to communicate with nurses in order to see what part of their lives the public needs to know about - not what will get ratings and viewers. A real show about nursing needs to address real questions and problems that nurses face:

How do nurses cope with stress in healthy ways that don't involve drinking or irresponsible behavior?
What safety nets are in place to help new nurses who still need orientation to a new facility's policies and equipment?
Why do experienced nurses "eat their young"?
How do hospitals determine patient assignments and staffing ratios?
How are nurses and other staff members trained to deal with special populations such as homeless, immigrant, disabled, or drug-abusing individuals?

I have faith that the cast members, as licensed nurses in the state of California, see these things - they must think about them and cope with them. They must talk about them. They must feel strongly about them. But this is not what MTV shows us, and this is the problem.

"Scrubbing In" portrays nursing as just a job that goes away once you clock out, and that is the deepest cut of all - because nurses, and even nursing students, know that even if you don't get to take your work home with you, it's still there. As human beings, as people who see people at their lowest and are their primary source of compassion, these things don't simply get left at the sliding glass door of the hospital so you can go out and party. And that is what needs to be addressed in a show about nurses.

I see that. Numerous professional nursing associations see that. I'm sure even the cast of "Scrubbing In" sees that. But MTV executives most certainly do not.

Outcomes Count: A Criticism of the Revocation of CCSF's Accreditation

As a graduate of City College of San Francisco, it was with surprise and outrage that I responded to the news of the college's loss of accreditation. I have been open about the negative aspects of my experience as a student of CCSF, documented in a report by the Campaign for College Opportunity titled “Challenged from the Start: Stories of Student Perseverance and Determination in California's Community Colleges”. I will be the first to admit that the experience of a CCSF student is often a confusing, burdensome one – but the fact that such confusion and such burdens exist are only a testament to how much the school itself is needed in the community.

In the words of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), accreditation is “a voluntary system of self regulation developed to evaluate overall educational quality and institutional effectiveness”. Yet, by withdrawing accreditation entirely, the ACCJC is moving towards potentially replacing what they have deigned a sub-par education system with no education at all.

Perhaps the cruelest cut of all comes when comparing student outcomes of CCSF students to those of students statewide, and students attending other colleges in the Bay Area. As part of the Student Success Initiative, the Student Success Scorecard is a demographic overview of student outcomes viewable to the public in order to hold educational institutions accountable for the performance of their student bodies. As of 2013, CCSF's completion rate is 55.6%, over 5% above the national average of 49.2%. The neighboring Skyline College achieved a 2013 rate of 53.6%, and College of San Mateo, a rate of 55.1%. The section size of a credit course at CCSF is equal to the national average of 29 students. Of 47,870 credit students, 32,632 of them – about 68% - are enrolled full time, surpassing the statewide percentage of full time enrollment, which is 47%. Skyline College comes in at 48.9%, and CSM, 13.9%. Also, while CCSF falls over 7% below the state rate of successful math remediation, it is 5% above the statewide rate of 38% in successful English remediation, and more than double the state rate of 23.6% in successful English as a Second Language (ESL) remediation.

While we will all probably concede that a completion rate of just over half of a college's students is far from what we would like to see, it still stands that CCSF, despite being rife with inefficiencies, still produces outcomes on par with if not exceeding those of schools which are not losing their accreditation – and outcomes should be the be-all, end-all of accreditation. After all, what other purpose does accreditation serve, except for evaluating a school's ability to successfully bring students to outcomes that correlate with educational success?

If City College of San Francisco does in fact lose its accreditation in July of next year, the school would no longer be eligible to receive state taxpayer funds, nor would students be able to receive financial aid in the same capacity that I was able to access as a student and that many continue to access today. There are speculations that the college may even face shutting down entirely, leaving the over 40,000 credit students – not to mention another 40,000 non-credit students – to seek their education elsewhere. Serving over double the population of Skyline College and over triple the population of CSM, the closure of a school the size of CCSF could effectively double class sizes in the area, or decimate already dwindling retention rates. The numerous police officers, nurses, and other healthcare employees that come out of CCSF's programs every year would have to seek out the qualifications needed for employment elsewhere.

If, on the other hand, City College is privatized – its fate is very much up in the air. Will it go the route of many other private institutions and raise tuition on its students? If so, it would effectively reduce accessibility to education almost as much as shutting the school down entirely. It would also do away with the ability of many members of the community to take non-credit enrichment courses at prices within their means – at yet another institution, it will be fundamentally forgotten that education is valuable in more ways than simply being a tool for economic success.

And yet, the economic aspect cannot be minimized when thinking about the weight of this decision. At so crucial a juncture in the evolution of the American economy at which acquiring employment is more and more reliant upon the acquisition of education and technical skills, the closure of a major Bay Area educational institution is nothing short of outrageous. Despite its shortcomings – and admittedly, there are many – City College of San Francisco is meeting the economic need of the city of San Francisco and the Greater Bay Area by producing degree- and certificate-holding employees who are prepared to work and possibly seek out further education when financially able. It is meeting the need of tens of thousands of people for affordable, accessible education.

City College of San Francisco will need an overhaul. It will need to reevaluate its procedures and its use of resources. It is an effort that will take a great deal of time, effort, and – yes – money in order to create a structure which can sustain its tens of thousands of students. It will require taking up the mantle of commitment of the city and the state to investing in education, even at a cost.

But the alternative – closing the doors of one of the most relied upon educational resources of the Bay Area – places an unbearable burden on the students, the schools who must strive to accommodate them once they are displaced, and the State of California.

The United States is a College Freshman

A college freshman, newly moved into the dorms and out of their parents' care, thinks everything about this is just awesome. You can do what you want, crash anyone's party, go where you want live how you want. You can do what you want because you finally don't have anyone to stop you.

And then you realize that the stuff you really want to do is expensive - but you want to keep on doing it anyway. So, you start trimming the fat elsewhere. You don't need to eat well. There's always Cup-O-Noodles. That's like a quarter for something you would otherwise need to pay at least a few dollars for. And who needs to do laundry? Keeping things clean can wait, right?

And then you start finding it a little harder to make ends meet. Tuition looks like it's wearing a bigger hole in your pocket. So is health insurance. Maybe I can skimp on them a little, you think. Or take out a loan and worry about it later.

And then later comes. And you still can't pay for it.

Eventually, you realize that maybe you need to accept the truth - you want to buy all the shiny things, all the gadgets. You want the biggest collection of video games, you want to crash everyone's parties. But the truth is, you can't afford all of that.

Now, you are the United States. You think you can do what you want, crash anyone's party, go where you want live how you want.

And then you realize all of those things are really expensive - but you want to keep doing them anyway. So you start trimming the fat elsewhere. There's always mass production in Asia. That's like a quarter for something you would otherwise need to pay at least a few dollars for. And who needs to think about investing in green technology? Keeping things clean can wait, right?

And then you start finding it a little harder to make ends meet. Your education system looks like it's wearing a bigger hole in you pocket. So is the healthcare system. Maybe I can skimp on them a little, you think. Or take out a loan and worry about it later.

And then later comes. And you still can't pay for it.

Eventually, you will realize that maybe you need to accept the truth - you want to buy all the shiny things, all the gadgets. You want the biggest military, you want to crash everyone's parties. But the truth is, you can't afford all of that.

Unfortunately, we as a country have not yet realized that truth. We still want to have the biggest collection. We still want to crash everyone's parties. We still are willing to skimp on things we need in order to please our whims and impulses. We, as a country, have been freshman for a long time. I think it's about time to graduate.