apocalypse, yesterday

I've come to the conclusion, based on the last two years of a Real Job, that I was never meant, on any level, to be a nurse.

I keep thinking there's something wrong with me.

Like, I'll be thinking, "Dude, I should like cleaning shit up off the floor more!"

Or, "Come on, Jamie, isn't lifting a 300 lb woman with weeping bilateral lower extremity cellulitis back into bed the highlight of your day!?"

Or the classic, ever-popular: "What don't you like about shitty power-play games with ingrate coworkers who don't want to do their jobs?"

But, mea culpa to all my peeps out there--I just wasn't cut out for this continual barrage of crap, burn out, endless demands, and pithy rewards ("Oh fucking yey, some person finally said 'Thank you.' You know what? That would mean a lot more if I got a big salary bonus and promotion at the end of the year like most people when they worked their fucking asses off.")

The way I know this simple truth is that I continually think longingly of Yesteryear Jamie, and how she used to be Good At Stuff, and now all she feels good for is wiping ass and running her own off.

Back in Ye Olden Days of Grad School, I never had back pain. I didn't have IBS. I didn't have frequent anxiety attacks, borderline anorexia, headaches that last for days, chronic insomnia, and a slew of other physical problems that have cropped up since I became a nurse.

I feel like I've aged about ten years in a mere two and that just can't be right, people.

It's like, you shouldn't spend three days at work and feel so burned out by the end of it that you need a two week vacation just to recover from your fucking stupid ass job.

And, I hate to say it, but I frequently miss Smug Academia Land, where people, are you know, continent of bowel and bladder, and if they aren't, they don't shit all over the bed, all over the floor, proceed to roll around in their own filth, and then request that you "lift their folds and look at that itchy rash down there."

Also, people in University Wurld are cultured, and learned, and stuff I really miss about people.

Because you see so much ugly and plain annoying about people in nursing, not to mention deal with so fucking much stupidity on a daily basis, that it can make you really miss when people made annoyingly erudite jokes about Derrida and told funny little jokes, the punch-lines of which were in Latin (even if when you graduated, you thought you'd never miss the snotty little gaggle of geeks with whom you matriculated.)

My academic training was focused on issues very different than the ones I find in nursing. For example, in college, I learned how to concentrate, and focus on textual analysis, and suffer through very long, very dry, and mostly completely incomprehensible English translations of complex 19th century German philosophical texts. I'm not saying I was great at it, but it's what I was used to doing, and I did it very diligently, for the most part.

Then, I became a nurse, and realized dude, none of these skills are necessary to be a nurse! Like, none of my patients want to learn about the Kantian phenomena/noumena dichtomy or make fun of the French language, or laud Latin! What the fuck?!

This revelation has come as a fairly large epiphany in some ways--because if you come from a background as self-absorbed in its own minutiae and esoterica (yes, I said esoterica, not erotica, people) as academia--you are always faintly aware that most people don't think like you've been taught to think. But, you also have this fatal Achilles heel: that stupid humanities-schmanities idea that you're gonna be the one to finally convert the American Idol watching slobs of the world to your own unique set of pedantic ideals, which includes forcing every one to read at a college level before they go to junior college and take remedial reading courses and making Rhetoric and Logic required courses in kindergarten.

And then you get on the floor, and all that learning just goes to complete shit. All your years of precious extremely expensive education is wasted on little old people who can't hear you any way, or young people who feign deafness whenever anyone tries to tell them simple truths like: 'crack use is really bad for you,' or'you shouldn't sleep with men twice your age and except they'll stick around to raise the resulting babies you make with said idiots.'

Your colleagues are pretty much all nice, sometimes very sharp, smart people, but generally too busy and fucked-up-the-ass with their own crappy nursing assignment to talk to you beyond some perfunctory shop talk, and most doctors don't think you're really worth talking to, except as a piece of furniture in the room, or they do so in very condescending teacher voices, possibly with hand puppets and some pantomime thrown in for good measure, because nurses are obviously too retarded to be talked to directly and plainly as free-thinking, educated adults, or something.

If I sound bitter, it's because I am. Of course, I have no one to blame but myself for choosing such a fruitless, frustrating career, but it doesn't mean I can't bitch about it, because by God, I will, until I've finally, at age 96, become the oldest person to earn a PhD in Career Regret.

Oh wait. I already have.