In Which Our Author Reveals His Superpower to the World (and is Vaguely Racist)

I have a secret to confess, the Internet.  You see, I'm not like you.  I have special. . . abilities.  Abilities that I struggle everyday to control.  I constantly face the temptation to use my powers for selfish gains, but I remember what every public speaker since 2002 once told me.  They said, "Remember what Spider-Man says: With great power comes great responsibility."  I then told them that Uncle Ben is actually the one who says that, and they gave me a blank look, but their words stuck with me forever.  Especially when they were all gunned down later that night.

To keep myself from temptation and to protect the ones I love, I've kept my powers a secret, but I'm ready now to face the world and all its cruelty.  I, Joe Flores, have a superpower.  I can change my ethnicity at will.  With subtle shifts in syntax, posture, clothing, and hair gel, I can become any of the vast amounts of races between black and white.  Except East Asian.  It's like my kryptonite.

Born to normal parents, I was raised Hispanic.  But just as the yellow sun of Earth changed Superman's alien DNA, Indiana's cultural homogeneity acted on my brown body in unexpected ways.

My powers first manifested during puberty, but I finally began to realize them in ninth grade.  While practicing with the cross-country team one day, I fell behind the rest, and the football players practicing nearby yelled out to me, "Run, little Abu!"  

"Odd," I thought.  "I'm not Arabian," but I put it out of my mind.  Later that year, in gym class, I thought I had made a friend in Siddarth, an Indian kid who talked to me every day and competed with me good-naturedly.  But when I mentioned that I loved my mom's Puerto Rican cooking, he gave me a look of shock and betrayal.  He called me a freak, and the rest of the class joined him, laughing as the camera panned quickly around my head.  Panicking, I pushed through the crowd and ran home to get away from their silently-mouthed jeers.  As I ran, I heard Sid shout after me, "But you're too smart to be Mexican!"

When I got home, I ran to my room, happy that both parents were at work.  I should have seen this coming, I thought.  Flashbacks came at me one after another.  Elementary school teachers unsure how to pronounce my very phonetically-spelled name.  Airport security taking me out of line while letting the rest of my family go by.  Strangers saying things in weird languages and giving me candy for no reason.  But there was no time to collect my thoughts, as I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion.  I barely managed to get my clothes off and make it into bed before collapsing unceremoniously as the screen faded to black.  

When I came to, I felt a new power coursing just under my skin.  I looked in the mirror and was startled to find that I did not recognize the person staring back at me.  Without my glasses, standing there in my white undershirt, I looked almost Mexican.  I put on the gold crucifix my mom had given me for my birthday, grabbed a denim jacket from my dad's closet and, concentrating, willed myself to grow a thin mustache.  I felt a little dizzy, but I'd done it!  Excited, I went through a deliberately-paced montage of discovery.  I realized that, in addition to being able to take on the appearance of numerous races, I could also gain their powers for short periods of time.  I had the medical expertise of the Indian, the shy invisibility of the Mexican, the histrionics of the Puerto Rican, the unconscious intimidation of the Arab, the guilt-inducing sadness of the Native American, and the Mediterranean's talent for mob leadership (a skill I only used once).

Frightened by my abilities,I suppressed them, only using them in emergencies.  But they've only gotten stronger as I've gotten older and more adept at growing facial hair.  This year I have made five Indian friends merely by walking through campus, but they've all abandoned me on learning that I was not from India but Indiana.  A week ago my roommate introduced me to a friend of his, saying, "This is my roommate Joe."  His friend held out his hand to shake mine and politely asked, "I'm sorry, how do you pronounce it?"

I have come to realize that my powers have grown too strong to keep selfishly to myself.  I have decided to take up the mantle of the crime-fighter, donning my sari, sombrero, keffiyah, eagle feathers, and beard to battle the forces of evil as Brownout, the Master of Casual Racism.

In Which Our Author Takes a Very Long Time to Introduce His Latest Puns

Hello, the Internet! Now that I've decided to return to my blogge, I have so very many things to talk about. It's like that first time you eat dinner with your friend after going to or coming back from college. Both of you have changed enough that each is fascinating to the other. Then time passes, and you fall into a routine again, which is sometimes great.

The first thing I'm going to talk about is my disappointment regarding the stereotypes surrounding my newly-chosen profession. I say newly-chosen because the start of pharmacy school has invigorated my commitment to the practice. Where my professors used to treat me like I was one of 500 people who were probably going to fail, they treat me now like one of 159 future colleagues. I feel like I actually belong, and it's exciting and wonderful. Except for the aforementioned stereotypes.

You see, my friend Kelsey is studying anthropology. She is studying anthropology largely because she wants to be Indiana Jones. Technically speaking, I think Prof. Jones was an archaeologist, but he was also a boy and fictional, and I'm not going to hold any of those against Kelsey. But this got me thinking about phictional pharmaceutical (I'm not going to stop doing that) role models, and I realized that there aren't any. On the contrary, most memorable pharmacists in popular culture have been criminally negligent and generally creepy. Both are grounds for suspension.

The first one I thought of was the Apothecary in Romeo & Juliet, the one who sold Romeo that fateful dram (31.1g) of poison. Now, the play makes it clear that he sells the drugs reluctantly and only because he is dangerously poor, but I still don't think anyone can argue that he is a model of good practice. He doesn't even do a good job of counseling!

"Put this in any liquid thing you will, 
And drink it off; and, if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight."


Those are pretty vague directions. How many mL of liquid thing should he use? Are some liquid things better than others? Should he take it with meals? It's all pretty unclear. Plus, in any production I've seen, he is played as a pretty sketchy-looking dude. 

(Not Professional Dress)

The second phamous pharmacist (told you) that comes to mind is Mr. Gower from It's a Wonderful Life. He, like the apothecary, is a generally good guy who gets caught in a moment of weakness. A moment of weakness in which he compounds cold medicine from a bottle labeled POISON and then beats up a crippled kid. Now in any pharmacy I've ever worked in, we keep POISON pretty far from TYLENOL, but that may not be universal.

"Gee, Mr. Gower, you're pretty darn retarded."

But what's with this trend of pharmacists being miserable and pathetic? At 100 grand a year starting salary, I'm going to get over my son's death, not by drunkenly committing manslaughter, but by buying a boat. A really big boat.  I think these stories illustrate one reason for the pharmacist's high salary.  "Worse poison to men's souls" my ass. Poverty made the apothecary sell those mortal drugs. If he had half what I'm gonna have, he'd have told Romeo to rectally administer his forty ducats and btfu about his girlfriend. But I digress.


I am disturbed by the ease with which writers make a connection between "death by poisoning" and "pharmacists." Exterminators have poison too, and those guys are hella sketchy. Biochemists have tons of poison on hand, but no one writes meetings in a dark alley with a biochemist. Doctors and nurses are ten times more likely to kill you than pharmacists, but it seems that when a writer needs to poison some dude, he turns on his friends behind the counter. And I'm going to change that.


See I figure with my training in theater and pharmacy, I am uniquely suited to change the perception of pharmacists in artistic media. To that end, I plan on writing and producing a new television drama about a pharmacist who is also a sexy government agent protecting the nation from biological warfare with her unique knowledge of drug interactions and delivery routes.  The working title is "Over the Counterterrorism." I'm also planning a spin-off tentatively titled "Mortar-Fire and Pestle."

You can't see it, but her name-tag actually says, "Pharmacist: Dr. Anita Hardon."
I wish I was making that up.

Update:
A friend of mine in pharmacy school read my blog and sent me a message letting me know that she was actually working on a screenplay/novel very much like mine, only real.  I thought this was great, and I told my English major friend Melissa who went and said something super Englishy like, "It's interesting that people use fiction to take control of the way they are perceived," or something.  Anyway, I thought that was indeed pretty interesting, and I thought maybe you might too.