Thursday, August 31, 2006

I should be doing stuff.

Worked yesterday, came home TIRED as per usual.

Same psycho husband that refused to pick up his wife the day before (despite having the time to "visit" her that same day) made an ugly scene at the nurses station about my discharge instructions. Mind you, this was a sample of the discharge instructions prior to his complaint:

JAMIE:
[doing her friendly little teaching spiel]
So the visiting nurse will call tomorrow morning before she comes.

Husband:
[hostile]
Well, she has a cardiologist appointment tomorrow. What are we supposed to do about that?!

JAMIE:
[caught off guard]
Umm... I guess I'm going to have to leave it to your good judgment to make arrangements as you see fit.

Husband:
[ignoring my reply, now raising voice even more]
WE HAVE A CARDIOLOGIST APPOINTMENT TOMORROW.

JAMIE:
[silently wishing she had a less stressful job, like air traffic controller or double agent]

It was as if were speaking English, and he were speaking English, and yet one of us was being so incomprehensibly rude as to make it seem as if a puppet show might have been more effective teaching. Or maybe not, since the husband in his misdirected hostility would have probably ended up attacking and mutilating the poor puppets.

Any way, charge nurse/rest of nursing staff had a good laugh about him after he left, because everyone knew how ridiculous he was being (as opposed to the hellhole managerial style at my old hospital, where I would have probably been forced to go home with the psycho couple and manage their life in order to satisfy the ridiculous "customer service" initiative.)

Meanwhile, I feel like my days off are spent endlessly cleaning the house (which mysteriously seems to go to hell on my days off), doing laundry and running errands. I inadvertantly slept in until 1000 this a.m., and now can't be bothered to go anywhere. I'm tuckered out. Maybe later on tonight I"ll get my second wind.


Tuesday, August 29, 2006

O tempora! O mores!

Today's Adventure In Pointlessness, by Jamie, with apologies to Cicero for the title.

Jamie:
[to patient]
Well, the PA says you can go home today, isn't that great?

Patient:
[freaking out, flailing limbs]
Oh no! I cannot! My husband, he cannot come! Nor can my daughters!

Time passes.

Jamie:
[startled to see "the husband who couldn't pick up the patient," now in room visiting leisurely]
You know, your wife can go home today, since you're here...

Husband of patient:
[as if this settles everything]
No, I don't have time to bring her home. I have meetings. Tomorrow will be fine.

Jamie:
[backs out of room quietly and checks Reality Barometer, which apparently isn't working today]

Monday, August 28, 2006

You Look Happy and Proud

Make of it what you will, that's what my fortune cookie said. (Personally I think spammers get their subject heading ideas from fortune cookies.)

Notice the ambiguity: you look happy and proud. (The flip side of the coin: In reality, you are sad and demoralized.)

Equus.

I read somewhere, not to long ago, something that I wish to purge from my mind completely, but can't seem to.

So, there was an interview with the Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe. In that interview, he was talking about a play, Equus and how he'd been offered the role of the boy (you know, the one who gouges out the eyes of all his horses, or however it goes).

Then I went on to read that the play is traditionally played in the nude, and how Radcliffe went on to say he'd probably honor that tradition, because who was he to flout theatrical tradition?

And all I could think was, Ewwwww! Oh for the love of God and small children who idolize Harry Potter movies, please flout theatrical tradition!

Dude, the prefect bathroom scene with a lecherous Moaning Myrtle in Goblet of Fire was creepy enough.

I suppose first characters are a terrible thing for child actors to get over, and I suppose few transfer to adult roles--or adulthood, for that matter--without some difficulty (read: lots of drugs and alcohol).

Because, poor kid, it's going to be awhile before people stop mentioning his Harry Potter career. Imagine being his first real-life girlfriend, and all her friends shrieking, "Oh my God! You're dating Harry Potter?!"

Hair.

This morning I finally realized I'm Doomed.

Okay, so this is the 4,576,489,000 time I've realized, over the course of my life, that I'm Doomed.

The reason I'm now presently Doomed is ostensibly a fairly superficial one: my short hair cut has gone from Natalie Portman chic (okay, so pseudo-you-wish-it-was- Natalie Portman chic) to tangled-mop-of-disillusioned-feed-the-
orphans-Harry-Potter-perpetually-untidy tousle in the last few months. It looks like chicken feathers most of the time! It's ungodly!

And, as short as it is, it's going to take the next five million years or so to grow out, during which time I will just have to resign myself to looking goofy/like a crack ho.

This is the part where wish my life had that fantastic one-episode-for-every-month-of-on-screen-pregnancy phenomenon dear to producers of old school night soaps like Dynasty, except less about pregnancy and more about hair growth. Okay, so no pregnancy and all about hair growth.

Don't ask, but this summer before I moved, I got hooked on Dynasty. Don't laugh--it was an insidious process! Okay, laugh. It is kind of ridiculous. First you think, aw, well, at least I'm keeping mom company. And then you start laughing at the eighties hairdos and overacting. And pretty soon, you're actually listening when mom explains how Joan Collins' Alex and her on screen daughter Farron are plotting to undo Crystal Carrington's life. And then you think! Good God! I know their names! What's next, researching Soap Digest back issues to find out more?

I no longer watch Dynasty, of course, and it's a relatively easy addiction to shake off, unlike the loss of Court TV, of which I'm still in sulky withdrawal over. I patently refuse to believe my life has been better off without nightly episodes of Dale' Hinmon's Cold Case Files and Dominic Dunne's "Power, Privilege and Justice." It pains me how I used to get my fix from mere basic cable programming, and now I'd have to buy the Super Deluxe Cable Package for approximately $1,000 dollars a month just to have my fix.

Any way, if I want to grow out my hair (and I'm not sure it's worth the bother) it's going to take at least a year just to get it all the same length, and then another year for any length. WTF?! I'll be thirty two then! That's practically retirement age! (Just kidding. But I wish it was, some days.)

I suppose, on the other hand, that I don't want to be one of those scary forty-year-old women you see working behind the counters of gas stations in rural highway stops, sucking on a cigarette, in a halter top and flipflops, with a mane of limp hair hanging resignedly down their back. You know the kind I'm talking about. With the croaky frog voice that says "Hand over the cash, sweetheart--me and my malignant lung tumors don't got all day." (However, if I continue in the nursing profession, this pathetic vision well may be a window into my future if I don't get my act together pretty soon).

Alas, someone in my gene pool (and we won't say who that person is, because well, frankly, we don't know) endowed me curly hair, and I will never aspire to that cool sheet of ebony silk-like mane you see on most Asian women who also happen to be on Pantene commercials. I am somewhat embittered by this fact, because no matter what I do, once I grow out my hair, it loses its curl and hangs like a frizzy triangle around my face. Not so attractive. I can't even put it up properly when it's long, because the front part breaks off and won't stay in a hair clip. Its like, the "Ha ha! Fuck you, you'll never be able to style it properly!" hair texture from hell.

The hair thing makes me realize, in my slippery-slope, free-association way, that I've lost touch with pop culture and thus, with the majority of youth culture. Not that that's a bad thing, because I don't think of myself as a touchy-feely sort of person even on my best, most personable days. And youth culture has gotten a little freakishly grown up these days.

It also makes me feel slightly panic-struck, because am I not supposed to be working on retirement already, and not broke and still eating ramen noodles for dinner? Shouldn't I know how to host and cook elaborate holidays meals for a dozen? Shouldn't I have a PhD in something by now, instead of collecting stool samples and measuring the amount, color and consistency of vomit? Shouldn't I have a house with a yard, and maybe a kid or two?

This adulthood gig is about as confusing and exhausting as being a kid, in my opinion. It's a big myth that grown ups have all the answers, and one day, when we're past the glasses, braces and pimples, we'll have it all figured out too. Most of my young adult life has been spent in utter cluelessness, fumbling around and screwing stuff up, which is frankly not how the teenage-me envisioned the adult-me. And as for becoming a senior citizen... well, I've seen old age, and believe me, about the only blessing is that you eventually lose your mind and aren't too fussed about getting it back.


Who wants to be a recluse?

I wish I could invent a gameshow called "Who wants to be a recluse?" I could be the only one to show up and win the grand prize, which of course, is being a recluse (because if you want to be a recluse, you're probably not going to try out for a gameshow in front of a lot of people, and then go on national t.v.)

Any way, I went to the bookstore today, and rediscovered how much I dislike crowds. I also thought, "Either there's a lot of people who do shift work or work part time, or a lot of people played hooky from work today." I mean, come on people, it's Monday. No reason why you couldn't have boarded the Metro like everybody else and push paper at the Pentagon, or whatever other people do for a living around here. There were simply too many people in the shopping center, and I almost got run over by a car backing out of a parking spot. I mean like my person, not my car. I thought maybe if it had happened, it would take my mind off of my back pain, which has me feeling like an arthritic old lady lately.

Back to my nice, quiet apartment where from my window I can sit and watch the mechanics in the car shop sit and take their cigarette breaks just down the knoll from the parking lot, listen to the faint rumble of the Metro in the distance, and the ever-present squeak and protesting clatter of the stupid parking lot gate, which is completely pointless because there are other, very obvious ways into the apartment complex, and since when did gates stop serial killers?

I did see copies of D'Aulieres Book of Greek Myths (with the orange cover, and I think, Athena on the cover) which I read avidly as a second grader (I read everything back then, and no, it wasn't for school). I love the children's sections of bookstores, because it reminds me of my fondness for reading, when said reading is not peppered with words like "postmodern deontological perspectives" and "Derrida."

I also tried reading Harry Potter in Spanish, and then realized I don't read Spanish, but it was fun any way.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, the dog and the rabbit continue in some bizarre form of inter-species sibling rivalry. Bunny now likes to "ask" to go outside on the porch and then "asks" to come inside (when she wants to come in, she hops over the sliding glass door and stares inside balefully. If that doesn't get my attention, she starts scratching on the glass. Honest to God). Rabbit eats dog food whenever she can, so dog has retaliated by stealing and eating bunny's hay/vegetables. Dog doesn't realize hay gets stuck in his whiskers--a tell-tale sign he's been at it. Both of them now beg for treats when I go into the kitchen, and I often feel as if I'm mother of two naughty little children who follow me around the house and pout if they don't get their way.

Off to fish out the ibuprofen--back starting to go again... Ninety, here I come!






As I Lay Dying

So, bear with me.

Sometime last night, I was thinking about stuff, and counting on my fingers (because I can't do real math. If I could, I'd be a scientist. Or maybe a mad scientist. Wait, if I was a mad scientist, I wouldn't need to do real math. Wait! I can be a mad scientist now! Splendid!)

So I realized it's been five whole years since I graduated college. Of course, that realization begged the question: What have you been doing all this time? And then I thought: oh yeah, grad school. Then some more grad school. Then taking nursing boards and getting a job that nearly killed me.

Oh yeah. All that stuff.

But still, who cares? (Hint. Answer: No one).

The sad thing is, I do feel older (saying "mature" sounds too pompous for this occasion). Work has had a lot to do with that feeling. Watching people die slow and painful deaths, putting up with life-and-death stress, managing pscyho patients and placating even more psychotic family members, dealing with dismissive and rude--not to mention sometimes downright negligent--attendings, cleaning up poo off the floor and walls because "housekeeping won't do it, it's not their job" and dealing with every piece of petty rubbish no one else wants to... it's taken its toll.

I do feel "older." Seeing a basically dead, already necrotizing kid in multi-system organ failure having also suffered a massive brain stroke, kept on a ventilator and max pressors for a week before his power-of-attorney decides to withdraw care... it'll do that to a person.

Caring for that kid when he was conscious was almost worse, because you knew no matter what you did, the kid was going to die. His name should have been Lazarus, he'd been coded so many times. I said to a nurse, "You know this is going to end in one of two scenarios: Either the kid codes and dies on our floor, or we transfer him back to ICU again and he codes and dies there." Turns out his course of death chose door number two, except he didn't really code, because we hadn't left anything viable enough to code.

I remember pulling thick, leathery calluses of dead skin off of his sore-ridden, rotting feet and thinking, 'Jamie, what in the hell are you doing?! It's not like he's ever going to get out of bed again."

But I felt I had to, because what mother would want to see her son's feet like that, all corpse like? And then I remembered, he was rumored to be an illegal immigrant, and as far as I know, no blood relative ever came to visit him the entire hospital stay, and it was months. (It's a bad sign when, during report, the ICU nurse says, "Don't write the length-of-stay history down; we've got it all on a calendar we'll send over with the patient's chart.")

That's the kind of stuff that can get down inside of you and whittle away every bit of faith you have in humanity, let alone a Being greater than yourself.

I can't remember what it was like to be naiive of this kind of suffering. The conversations I had in divinity school about "human and divine suffering" sound even more artificial and arrogant than they did back before my daily job description often involved dealing with situations of moral and mortal peril.

Ironically, the other day a patient's son said to me, "God is good!"

He obviously hadn't met the daughter of a patient who was in that same room two days later, whose husband was diagnosed with a cancer that was stage four by the time he felt ill, and died a few months before their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Both were young, in their forties, with teenage children. They were planning a vow renewal ceremony this summer. Her mother told me all this, sadly, when her daughter had left the room after a painful, stilted visit. I could sense bitterness and hurt radiating from the daughter, but couldn't think of why until her mother told me the backstory.

I have no idea what to make of all this, and can only look to "The Roots" lyrics for inspiration:

The crack can only kill you if you let it.






Thursday, August 24, 2006

Better Than College Girls Gone Wild. I promise.

So work was suckage this past weekend, and when I mean suckage, I mean SUCKAGE.

Yesterday I was in a better mood, even though I had the immense pleasure to have, as part of my assignment, a forty-year-old domestic violence survivor with her jaw wired shut (yeah, it's like, figure out how that one got on a cardiac surgery stepdown unit. Because the jaw, you know, is, uh... kind of near the heart. Sort of. Hint: the magic word is: CHEST PAIN. These days, even if it's totally fake chest pain, it'll still buy you a tele bed.)

Hint: Just remember those two sweet little words, in case you hate being slated for a medical floor as much as the nurses there despise working on one. It's like, insta-tele bed! I'm totally gonna have to remember that when I come in for my fake "pre-syncopa"l episode--which also oddly enough seems to warrant telemetry admissions--if I don't get a tele bed to start with and they're thinking about putting me on some crappy medical floor, I'm going to start talking about my 11/10 chest pain and "EKG changes" from a previous physical. And if I don't like my roommate, I'm going for the "I had MRSA when I was hospitalized in Taipei last year," comment just so I can get my own private room. (Yeah, she tried a version of that one, too.)

Said patient was, nonetheless, able to somehow scream--albeit in a muffled, lispy sounding way--at staff (meaning me) for a couple of hours regarding what she thought was insufficient pain control, despite multiple pushes of IV narcs in the ER that would have had Andre The Giant--were he alive, bless his gentle, bonecrushing soul--down for the count for the rest of the week.

Also, curiously enough, even with her jaw wired shut she managed to have ETOH positive labs, which makes me think dear God, she had drink to her beer/vodka/rubbing alcohol with a straw.

That, my friends, is what I call desperation.

You know you're becoming a crotchety old hag of a nurse when, at seven thirty in the morning, you're doing the whole fake therapeutic response psych crap they taught you in nursing school is the way to handle angry, abusive patients in ETOH withdrawal, while secretely wondering if your patient isn't that same chic you saw on last night's episode of Cops.

Yeah, that shit doesn't bother me any more. I'm so used to crazy patients I could go in a room and talk to any one short of a psychotic serial killer and come out a minute later and just laugh my ass off because, dude, did that guy really just call us "a bunch of fucking quacks?" (If you're not a nurse, you probably think I just made that part up. But I didn't. Seriously.)

I feel obligated to tell the general public that if you ever do go into a hospital and your nurse/doctor/whomever is more than six weeks off of orientation, when we walk into your room with that great big phony smile on our face and forced air of calm, what we're really thinking is, "Okay, here's another potential nutjob. Wonder what interesting new street vocabularly and bodily substance I'm gonna have flung at me today."

Just kidding. Not really.


Saturday, August 19, 2006

Pimp My Med Student, or Why I Love Poor Med Students

Or at least feel desperately sorry for them.

More on that later.

First: I had a bad day. So bad, that hands down, the least of the bad things that happened was that my stethoscope fell (bell/diaphragm first, not the earpieces, thank GOD) into a container of stale urine sitting in a commode.

I need a new stethoscope.

I don't even want to mention the other bad things that happened today, because I am beginning to enjoy my beer buzz, and if I dwell on it any longer, I'm going to stop enjoying my beer buzz, which might possibly be THE WORST THING EVER to happen, despite the sheer suckiness of my day.

Okay.

Back to Med Students, and Why I Pity Them.

There is this med student (discernable by the short white coat apparel) who has a rotation with the vascular group's residents. I've seen him around before, not paid much attention to him, actually, because hey, he's a med student, whatever. But today I got to work early, and there he was, poor thing, being all earnest and trying so hard to be nice... while his resident/intern mercilessly "pimped" him. I sat on the other side of the charts and scowled irritably at the resident, who was being a general all around prick to the kid, who was so flustered he kept looking like a buffoon--not that his intern was giving him anything but a rope with which to hang himself.

"Pimping," in the land of medical argot, means "riding your med student/intern/resident's ass so hard at the end of the day they look like they've been rode hard and put up wet." It's the whole "brass balls" shitty medical model of training--generations of ego and militaristic garbage hazing which is so incredibly counterproductive it's astounding they haven't done evidence based research that it's not a very effective method.

His intern/resident was so cruel to this poor kid I wanted to say something to him like, "Hey, asshole, give the kid a break; he's trying really hard!" but I"m sure that only make the kid's life harder, not better. It's not character building and it doesn't make you a better future doctor to be constantly told you're a worthless piece of shit, fit only to write notes (on patients you don't even get to see--so what's the point?!) The poor med student was like, "So I can go in the room, right?" and the intern said, "Ummm, no, you don't get to go in the room, I do. You can stay out here and write my notes [read: do my scutwork, bitch!}" Like, okay, I'm just a stupid nurse not fit to lick even a med student's toes, but uh, how's he supposed to learn if he can't go in rooms and see the assessment, dumbass?!

So His Highness got to swish around in his long white coat, going into the rooms doing his "history and physical" (I've read some of their notes and orders, and believe me, howeverly lordly and medical savvy they may seem to med students (who don't know any better); we nurses laugh when they try to write orders for the first time as an MD. And groan. And point it out to them, so they don't kill the patient). Then the resident, who I was beginning to believe was related to the Marquis de Sade, started torturing the kid by not letting him take notes on his dictated report. It was like watching that scene in Schindler's List. You know, the one in Auschwitz, when the poor souls are being led to the gas chambers, and the others are watching them wondering what their fate is.

It was sad, people. My heart bled for this kid, and I don't even think he's a "kid". I think he's probably older than me. Or he looks it, any way.

The only bit of solidarity I could offer (being one of the Untouchable class myself, as a dumb nurse) was to whisper to him, "Don't worry, it'll get better [translation: one day you get to do the pimping]" and addressograph some progress notes for him, something I would never do for an attending or resident unless she had treated me like a human being rather than a slavish troll, which practically none of them do.

I remember what it was like to be a scared shitless student, and a scared shitless new nurse. Hell, I know what it's like to be scared shitless and have some experience! If I didn't have understanding, caring teachers who taught me how to overcome my fear, I would have probably dropped out of nursing, and never had the pleasure of oozing stool and suctioning sputum. And what a tragic loss that would have been, n'est pas?

No seriously, to paraphrase that John Mayer song, "Interns be good to your med students.. They become interns, who turn into residents, so residents be good to your interns, too!"

Sunday, August 13, 2006

I now own more theology books than God

I'm sure I have you all wondering, "What do geeks do for fun?"

Well, I am about to tell you.

They unpack years worth of theology books from divinity school and undergrad, lovingly caressing each cover with utmost tenderness, squealing in delight when they come across a long lost collection of Kirkegaard's works, and sighing in affection at a bunch of paperback works of George Eliot.

Then, they arrange their collection according to theme, and find they can't quite rid themselves of Milbank's "Truth in Aquinas" even though they think radical orthodoxy is a load of dragon dung, and the book should probably be placed on the list of Banned Books and used instead as a interrogation technique when confronting captured spies. (Make me read the damn thing again and you'd have me spilling my guts in about ten seconds flat, five if you make me discuss it with PhD candidates).

Any way, I wonder if God every reads the stuff that's been written about Him. If He does, I'll bet he chuckles and says, "My, they've really gotten that part all wrong!" and "Hey, St. Paul, come over here! You've got to see what David Tracey wrote this time. And that Graham Ward--he cracks me up! What a joker! Cities of God, indeed..."




Monday, August 07, 2006

Various and Asundry

Okay, so time to cram in a few more random observations, kind of like Dumbledore's Pensieve, except less detailed and a lot more pointless.

1) Somewhere along the lines, my friend Katy mentioned on her blog the ridiculousness of SPAM headers, said silliness prompting the rational thought, "Why on earth would I be compelled to open a piece of mail from someone I don't know, the subject header of which is entirely incomprehensible and so obviously SPAM it's pathetic?"

Ever since then, I've taken an informal survey of Random SPAM headers that seem to pile up in my university e-mail account with an alarming regularity. My favorite from last week? "Enormous Chignon." I'm thinking there must be a postmodern SPAM generator working overtime out there somewhere in the internet galaxy, generating infinite amounts of random word permutations just as somewhere, a computer infinitely spits out the sequence of pi. Or they've got a bunch of monkeys/high school drop outs trained to type nonesense on computers. (Hint: monkeys are cheaper to employ, and more reliable/intelligent than most humans).

2) Why do people call the hospital after they're discharged and ask questions about their discharge? We specifically ask you at the time of discharge whether or not you have any questions, and you're so busy trying to get the hell out of there you say "no." Does it ever occur to you that once you're discharged, your chart leaves our floor, and we are no longer legally responsible for your care? Does it ever occur to you that we aren't omniscent mind readers when you call for your spouse two weeks after discharge and say, "My husband was a patient there two weeks ago and he was supposed to get some test as an outpatient? Do you know what test that is?"

Or that when you don't understand that there's a generic name for a prescription and that it's the same drug as the brand name, and you call five hours after being discharged and tie up a nurse on the phone for fifteen minutes saying "You just don't understand" that maybe it's time to um... talk to a pharmacist and stop freaking out?

3) Okay, so slam me for this one if you will. I know it's a cultural thing, but sometimes I think men really take advantage of the "cultural thing" swinging in their favor. Yesterday I had this young guy from a conservative culture. And when I say young, I don't mean fifty. I mean within five years of my age. He was married to a pretty wife who looked even younger than he was, and she was about five to six months pregnant by the look of he tummy. He had a minor surgery, and was basically doing just spiffy, getting around on his own, independent as all get-out.

Well, in theory.

He wouldn't wash up until "his wife got there" and when he got dressed for discharge, she dressed him. She took his prescriptions and discharge instructions and acted as if she was his personal assistant/secretary instead of his wife.

It's one thing when you're dressing your elderly spouse/relative with some motor limitations who's just gone through a debilitating surgery. But a guy barely out of his twenties with full command of all of his faculties?! And his wife is pregnant and in need of some TLC herself? HUH?!

Like, okay, I said it before, I know this is a cultural thing for these folks and who am I to judge. I have to say that because I was indoctrinated in the bullshit culture of political correctness.

But I have to say, it makes me glad I'm not obligated to that kind of mollycoddling, because unless my spouse was in a full body cast or was actively dying, I'd be like, wash your own damn self, boyfriend!

I suck at being someone's slave, I guess.

4) Why do attendings ask you how the patient is doing if they don't want to even pretend to listen to you, and walk so fast you practically have to run to keep up with them, until you realize he's probably thinking about his golf game later on that afternoon, but he certainly hasn't been listening to you?

That shit pisses me off, because you know, I had better things to be doing with my time than flapping my mouth to a useless attending who asked a question he obviously didn't want answered in any detailed meaningful way.

This is one of the reasons why I prefer working at a teaching hospital. Interns/residents tend to be easier to work with on the whole, PAs and NPs are usually godsends, and I'd be out of my fur at the end of the day if I had to page out-of-house attendings the entire shift.

5) I"m getting hungry. I wonder what starch products I can rustle up for lunch.

Monday, monday.

Well, it's Monday. The rest of the work-a-day world has gone off to the rat race, while I, lowly nurse, have already spent my time "on the inside" and now I sit... uh... inside the house, wondering why I have to be broke and still in debt.

It was a nasty feeling to realize last night, "Hey! All I have is a pizza and mac 'n cheese to eat until I get paid on Friday." And then realize, "Hey! At least pizza is like, five meals worth of food!"

Then I found out I didn't care for the pizza I had bought at Trader Joe's, and remembered I had Trader Joe naan bread in the freezer, but that was like eating pizza without the sauce, so I just went to bed.

Any way. I've become quite regimented in my third decade of life. Well, kind of. Not really. What I mean to say by that bit of tish-tosh is that I automatically wake up on my day off and robotically scrub the house and do laundry. Perhaps this is occurring now because I'm not suicidally depressed about my working conditions, and thus can actually manage to do more with my sorry ass life than actively plot my imminent, tragic demise by my own hand. Or else I'm just too poor to do anything else, but hey, I've got cleaning products!

Whatever the impetus, the house is cleaner as a result, and we're all happy about that.

Otherwise, I'm kind of in a weird social limbo right now. Work is a friendly place to be, but it takes me a while to meet good friends. And I'm kind of shy, when you get right down to it. Yeah, I'll gibber on and on and on here, in the privately public/ publically private internet sphere of blog, but that's different than actually wanting to leave the comfort of my home and do something.

I'm a Cancer, you see. No one's going to pull me out my shell without a good fight! (Likewise, I have the bad habit of hanging on to stuff until it's the equivalent of a vented vegetable no one wants to pull the plug on, for fear of engendering bad otherworldly vibes. I have a stuffed animal that is nearly thirty years old, for example. This is what I consider a Priceless Heirloom Possession and others call a useless piece of old shit. If, however, I had the choice between saving a $10,000 diamond ring and ragged old Puppy Love from a burning building--well, I suppose I can scavange through the rubble later for the ring. I laugh to think my kids are going to inherit old shitty stuffed animals, books every one else has scanned into their electronic library, and old-fashioned moth-ridden, half finished knitting projects. No doubt this will drive my future kids nutty, especially when they realize I've left all my money to a trust fund for the dog.)

I'm so going to end up abandoned in a nursing home when I'm old.



Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Hot Town, Summer in the City

This heat wave has got to stop... umm... waving quite so much.

And heating, for that matter.

I mean, what gives?! It was 91 degrees Farenheight at 12:01p.m. today, and got all the way up to 101 F today. That's just wrong this far north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Luckily, lazy people like myself aren't to be bothered with the out-of-doors at its most hellaciously infero-esque. I kept my errands at a priority minimum this a.m.: get my PPD (my agency has been very, uh... vigiliant about reminding me it's due now! the sky is falling! the sky is falling!) and buy some groceries at Trader Joe's. One of my friends at work turned me on to Trader Joe's Garlic Naan bread and well, I had to have some. That, and New York Style Cheesecake. I was appalled to find out that a quarter of the cake = 420 calories, all of which, no doubt, derive from fat, because what is a cheese cake if not blubber calories.

Fortunately for me, a quarter of a cheesecake is a simply an unthinkably large portion, and I contented myself with a 1/32 slice of cake.

Meanwhile, I've sunk to a new low in slothfulness and taken to buying hay for the rabbit on ebay. In order to offset the can't-get-off-my-ass-in-this-heat factor, I've decided buying on ebay is cheaper, even with shipping. Also, there's something particularily postmodern about buying farm-fresh hay off the internet, but I digress...

Also, for the record, I've noticed a general overall decline in the quality of my blog. It's not nearly as funny as before (not that lamenting about how my former place of employment kept killing its clientele is all that amusing, but it at least gave me something to whine at length about) and it's... well, pictureless. Which isn't a bad trait, necessarily, but pictures do jazz things up a bit when the Interesting Stuff goes mysteriously missing.

Apologies all around. If you've been with me this long, you're likely to have realized many moons ago that my life is rather dull and not worth blogging about, really. You read my blog to humor me, and probably, subconsciously, to make yourself feel better about your life because geez, at least it doesn't suck like Jamie's, poor thing.

I also regret to inform my readers that my digital camera has bitten the dust and has past the point of any kind of troubleshooting options available to me, the technologically retarded. (Said troubleshooting options comprise of all of two: one, turn the device off and then back on again and hope for the best, and two, buy a new one. In my present incarnation as America's Model Child for the Working Poor, option two is more of a fantasy as opposed to a real alternative, so you do the math as to why there haven't been any pictures on this blog yet).

Back to knitting an endless array of baby blankets for unspecified Pregnant People that seem to all decide to have their babies wherever I see fit to become gainfully employeed...




Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Dream Date

I woke up this morning at quarter after five, feeling all warm and fuzzy and happy inside.

In my dream, I had been in an art museum, and Liam Neeson was my date. I think we were in the hall with the Romantic paintings, of which frankly I could care less, except Carvaggio was next on the agenda. Liam was saying something witty and informative, and bent to kiss my hand, for some reason. I was in delighted geek mode, because... oooo! Carvaggio! Sexy!

Yeah, that was like, the entire dream. Me. Liam. Museum. Then me, waking up, thinking, "Dude, what a great dream... I really need to visit the Smithsonian!"

Perhaps tonight I'll dream about Adrian Brody, and we'll tour The Library of Congress and get stuck in the section on Continental Philosophy, and by the time I'm through reading up on the latest Kant scholarship, Adrian will be all dead and mummified at my feet.

And tomorrow, I'll wake up, and have turned into Miss Marple, or else find I'm eighty years old and like to watch Miss Marple on PBS BBC, while knitting Red Heart acrylic kleenex box covers for my church's annual Christmas bazaar.