dumber and "dumberest"

Orientation, day two, was today.

It wasn't a very good day, first of all, because I learned at 1230 this morning that someone I care about is being deployed to Iraq for a year.

I knew this was coming, and somehow, knew to pick up the phone that late at night, even if I didn't recognize the number.

It was horribly disturbing news, knowing someone was about 12 hours from boarding a plane, possibly en route to his death, and I was powerless to do anything about it, but the fucking President is, and still insists we keep sending young men and women to their deaths and lifetime disfigurements and dysfunctions.

Then, this morning, I got stuck in traffic, and a twenty minute commute became a seventy minute bumper-to-bumper excursion in Why Everyone Should Give Up Commuting, and Stay At Home.

Then I actually got to orientation, which was so stultifying I spent a majority of the time declining Latin nouns and drawing pictures of my dog on the orientation manual.

At one of the lowest points in the whole day, we were required to make up a skit about a hospital policy, and present it to the group. My table had to do a presentation on "how to clock in and out with your badge." No, I'm not kidding. Yes, I'm serious.

I thought, "No fucking wonder doctors treat us like infantile idiots! That's how we treat our own colleagues!"

It felt like the equivalent of, I don't know, earning a master's degree and a nursing degree, and then being forced to redo kindergarten and learn your colors, and then do a skit about learning your colors. Except I wasn't learning anything, and I knew my colors by the time I was three, as well as how to read at a kindergarten level by the time I went to preschool.

(The preschool teacher phoned my mom a couple months into the school year, saying basically, she thought I was retarded because I didn't know how to tie my shows, the alphabet, my phone number or my colors, like all the other four year olds. I was being a little pre-school slacker! So, my mom asked me why I was refusing to do these things in school, because she knew I could read and do all those other things. Cheeky little monkey hat I was, I said, "Mom, I already know how to do those things. Why should I do them again?!"

My parents pulled me out of that nursery school, and enrolled me in kindgergarten instead. In first grade, I had my IQ tested to see if I should be promoted and skip a grade. I had no idea what the hell that Nice Psychology Lady was actually doing, I just thought it was great, exciting fun to be pulled out of class and do this interesting stuff, like solve puzzles and use my brain. I had so much fun!

The concurrence was that I should be skipped a grade ahead, but my mother held off, thinking it would impede my social skills if I were a couple years younger than the rest of the second graders with their seven-year-old growth spurts and all that fancy developmental advancement.

Well! I showed her! I was socially inept as hell, any way, and still miserably bored and underchallenged in most subjects through most of my primary schooling.

This feeling of underwhelming mediocrity is how I feel about nursing, in general. It's kind of also how I feel about our president, who uses non-words like "misunderestimate" to illustrate not only in a verbally obtunded but also completely illogical way "how pointless wars in foreign countries is good for democracy."

At the end of the day, it was all I could do to pull my shit together and decide o come back for more mind-bludgeoning crap tomorrow.