as the world devolves.

I'm going to cop a line from one of my friends and just say that every time I go back to bedside nursing, even with the two-week reprieve, I just think:

Jesus Christ, how did my promising career devolve into a complete piece of shit?!

Then it goes even further, and I feel like my life has devolved into a complete piece of shit.

I mean, as someone else pointed out, you spend about a third of your life at work, and if work sucks, it typically carries over into other areas of your life.

One of the things I bitch about all the time is how I"m generally stuck in some hellish version of Sartre's No Exit meets The ABC After School Special meets General Hospital.

I work with people who talk about babies and weddings and cheating boyfriends, none of which I have any interest in talking about, especially at work, when I'm trying to do a job in an already chaotic environment that invites mistakes with each coming distraction. If I wish to talk about something outside of whose ass I have to kiss or wipe next, it's not going to be about how cute I think the transporter's ass looks in those scrubs; it'd be about books, pop culture trends, or maybe even current events.

Unfortunately, the level of intellectual stimulation I get at work, along with emotional maturity, makes junior high cliques look like bona fide meetings of The Blue Stockings.

I have gotten one intellectually rewarding reprieve in two years of nursing:

Yesterday, two Indian doctors were talking about Number Theory, and actually included me in the conversation for a change. It was almost like being at school again, with one of them getting increasingly fervered and worshipful of brilliant mathematicians, and bringing up the back story to The Hardy-Ramanujan number, the smallest number expressible by the sum of two cubes in two different ways:



(Nota bene: I'm not a mathematician, and have read somewhere that the actual correct terminology should be "positive cubes," so uh, forgive my mathematical bumpkiness).

The point of the whole thing is that someone was talking about Number Theory at work! Something elegant, brilliant, and philosophical, and worth having a conversation about, in my opinion.

Why can't I work with more people who get all excited about Number Theory?!

Why do I instead generally work with people who talk about how "Christina Applegate was totally frickin' hot when she was younger, but she's kind of lost it now." (Those were doctors having that particular conversation, just so you don't think I'm pinning the sin of Middle American Culture squarely on the shoulders of any one profession.)