i hate everyone.

To put you in the appropriate mood for this post, I suggest you listen to the band Get Set Go's single, "I hate everyone,":

All the people on the street, I hate you all
And the people that I meet, I hate you all
And the people that I know, I hate you all
And the people that I don't, I hate you all
Oh, I hate you all

And Rilo Kiley's Lyrics from "Portions For Foxes":

'Cause you're just damage control
for a walking corpse like me - like you

That's how being a nurse at Hell Hospital feels. Damage control. And poor damage control at that.

And it also feels exactly like The Roots sing it:

Somebody's gotta be there when it gets ugly
Somebody's gotta be there when it gets bloody
Somebody's gotta get their hands dirty
Yo, it's a fucked up job but somebody's gotta do it
Somebody's gotta come up with a plan
And be there when the shit hits the fan
I hope ya'll out there understand
Look man it's a fucked up job, but somebody's gotta do it

Yeah, it's a fucked up job, alright: this is work, niggas.

celebration.

This year, I'm going to find some "we pretend to like you stupid goys" reform
synagogue, and celebrate Passover.

Why, you ask?

Well, to me, the Jewish saga of being perpetually fucked over, massacred, enslaved, and all around general suffering in an often historically marginalized way seems much more appropriate and relevant to my life as a nurse than the happy shiny The-Easter-bunny-(whoops, I mean Jesus!)-died-for-your-sins-and-lo-and-behold-a-
chocolate-easter-bunny-was-reborn! Christian crap.

Plus, I need a good excuse to eat matza brei.

a moveable feast.

I had dinner at my Latin prof and wife's (French prof) house on Saturday. I brought in tow a friend from work--who stuck around after I'd made him view Wheelock's Latin website and subjected him to endless enthuasiatic rhapsody after rhapsody involving The Fifth Noble Truth That is Classical Latin, thus sealing his fate as Person Most Likely To Be Dragged to This Particular Dinner. We came bearing gifts of the non-Trojan horse pony kind for the couples' four-year-old daughter, who was born after I left New College. (If you need four year old girl gift ideas, I suggest standing around the toy aisle at your local department store, and watching other four year old girls. Ponies are a big hit, if you're too lazy to do that, or shop online.)

Dinner was, in contrast to work, absolutely lovely and charming. Being in the company of some of your favorite people in the world is, of course, one of the finer highlights of living, and any conversation where I get to mention Catallus and not have people ask me if that's a new rock band, or something, is a good conversation indeed.

time has come.

Today, at work, while doing my usual 'pre-home antimicrobial scrub down of all applicable personal affects,' my favorite watch band clasp broke.

This, I believe, is symbolic for other things that have recently broken, including the relationship that provided the occasion for the watch-giving. Coincidentally, it was a Valentine's Day gift from last year, and not only did it bring into relief the rich, ironic leitmotif which is the counterpoint to the cacophony that is my life--it also just made me sad because, Hey, I really liked that watch! And now, I don't have a watch that works, and this isn't a great strategy for someone whose night shift work disorder is gradually encroaching on every aspect of her life to the point where she's becoming just as disoriented to time as her geriatric patients.

sleep deprivation. it's not just a religious exercise any more!

Sometimes, when you have a really bad job, where pretty much everything sucks, and you're chronically sleep deprived, you start wondering about things. Philosophical, profound thoughts, such as:

"Is my body mass enough that flinging myself from the seventh floor would be of sufficient height to result in enough velocity and traumatic impact to thus precipitate permanent and instantaneous death, or should I just take the extra thirty second elevator ride in order to fling myself off the eleventh floor?"

And then you start working on the physics equation to determine exactly which floor to fling yourself from, because anything is better than pretending you are part of a morally sound profession, where people care about quality outcomes, and not just the amount of their salary, or ability to defraud Medicare for one's own income benefit.

emperor's new clothes

So, I went shopping today. For clothes.

Note, this is like saying, 'Ghandi went to McDonalds and ate a cheeseburger with fries."

I buy clothes about once or twice a year, mostly because I spend a good deal of my time in scrubs, and in my occupation, "gowning up" has nothing to do with going to a ball, and everything to do with cleaning up something nasty and biohazardous.

But I'm going to a little informal dinner party tomorrow, and realized I couldn't wear surgical green scrubs with "Hospital of St. Elsewhere" stamped on the ass without being socially shunned in the academic circles of Sarasota (or should I say "circle," as there's really not a lot of colleges around here).

So, now I have some new clothes, and have relieved my coffers of some of their burgeoning wealth (ooo! five... no... ten cents still left).

I wish I wasn't trading my soul and sanity for money, but sometimes, when you realize you can then trade the money for the cutest, most gratuitous black cocktail dress ever, you can delude yourself into thinking you won't miss your soul/sanity that much.

trade secrets

One of my friends from My First Staff Nurse Job and I have a common goal: to get the hell out of bedside nursing.

Well, she's out of bedside nursing, and I'm still stuck here, albeit by choice, and not-so-much-choice, i.e. massive student loan debt.

It's not that I hate my job, it's just that I'd like the idea that I don't have to be beholden to the same career for years and years and years. I'd eventually like to do something else, perhaps something more morally sound and aesthetically pleasing, like shovel chicken shit, or hunt and club baby seals to death (which is coincidentally quite a bit like acute care nursing, so maybe I need to think of better examples).

So I e-mailed her in one of my now-random moments of semi-lucidness and said, "Hey! We should start up an internet dating service for nurses!"

Okay, it's probably already been done, but the reason why I mentioned it at all is because the job is pretty socially isolating. Most people don't talk about other people's bowel movements or vomit and eat their dinner at the same time. Nor do they stop eating dinner, go and clean up someone else's bowel movement or vomit, wash their hands, and go back to eating their dinner like they didn't just see and handle the digested products of someone else's dinner.

When you try to explain to non-nurses how this feat is possible, they look at you as if you've just plopped a dead baby seal on the dining room table and invited them to dig in, mate.

But other nurses get it.

This New Crackpot Idea comes from a list of get-rich-slowly schemes such as our Bladder Scanner Emporium Outlet Idea (because it's our theory that the former Soviet Bloc seems to have a monopoly on bladder scanners, which any nurse with her/his salt thinks is just a random number generator, as opposed to an actual usefully accurate and precise tool of measurement).

Meanwhile, I have got to find a way to sleep through the night. Five more weeks of being undead. Five more weeks.

Egh.

good thing, where have you gone?

So, I interviewed for another travel position, on an open heart stepdown unit, which I hope isn't a fake open heart stepdown unit, like my current unit is a fake acute/progressive cardiac floor.

Well, scratch that; I've watched lots of patients acutely progress from bad to worse to dead. I can't wait to go somewhere else, frankly, because I'm getting burnt out on the suffering and indifference-to-suffering I've seen lately at my job.

The New Job doesn't pay as well, and I'm taking a substantial pay cut to sign a contract there, but sometimes, money really isn't everything. Sometimes, feeling good about your job is a nice thing--and I haven't felt that way since I started back on medical fake cardiac telemetry. It makes me remember why I quit my first fake cardiac tele job.

Besides, working with nights is making me more of a sleep-deprived wench than ever; I worked three twelve hour shifts in a row, and only got four hours of sleep the day before each shift. I have decided, ergo, that if evolution had designed homo sapiens to be nocturnal, we'd all be super heroes like Batman, with the nifty crime-fighting weapons. And a Bat Cave! And a Bat Car!

Dude, I'm not doing night shift again unless I can have nifty crime-fighting weapons.

Scratch that, just give me Wayne Manor.

expiration date

Working in a hospital has its share of quirks--probably more than it should--one of which is that we don't say people die, we say they expire.

I think this is weird, and dehumanizing. I mean, okay, I understand the literal meaning of "expire," but I also think of cartons of milk and eggs expiring; whilst I think of people as dying, or dead.

Maybe it sounds more professional than "dead" to say "expire," but I always have a picture of a carton of milk souring when I hear that word. And, I guess we do go sour after we die, in a manner of speaking.

But no one goes around saying, "My pet parakeet expired last night."

Unless maybe you smuggled your pet parakeet into the hospital, and it died there.

towering inferno

Work's been sucky lately, and when I say "sucky" I mean sucky.

I'm not even going to go into detail, because it's been just too sucky. To quote Eric Cartman, of South Park fame:

"You know the feeling when the huge dump you just took shoots back up
your ass?"

I actually don't know what that feels like, but I'm pretty sure that's how I feel about my job on a metaphoric level.

At least I'll be done with this contract in... uh, five weeks, and can move on to something else, where I can live once in midst of the light loving mortals, and not amongst the loup garoux (oh no! It's French! And as per usual, I'm not sure I spelled it right. But it's French, so whatever) like now.

pain in the ass

So, I literally have a "pain in the ass."

My lower right back has a major spasm going on, and it hurts.

I'm thirty, and already I need a chiropractor.

SIgh.

fresh.

One of my friends has an aunt in her nineties. She lives in a nursing home, and my friend visits her often, and comes away with these hilarious gems of unconventional wisdom.

I don't really have much in the way of a story to tell you, but I do have to record some of her funnier statements for posterity.

On early , young marriage:
"What can I say, I was milk-fed and easily led."

On dating:
"A fresh piece of ass is always appealing. Wait a month, and see what it's like then."

Don't you wish you had an aunt that cool?

bermuda triangle

I've always wondered about love triangles, and if it's really proper--mathematically--to discuss them in terms of one or two dimensions only.

Why does it have to be expressed in Euclidean terms at all?

What if it's really calculus-based, and it's really a differential equation? Or an integral? Or topologic?

I wish I was a mathematician sometimes, because I know nothing about math, and am horrible at it, and that makes me said in a way, because I am illiterate of such a complex multitude of languages that could perhaps help me understand life a little better. Or think about it differently, instead of staring at the sun, and wondering.

within the limits of reason alone

One thing I love about Enlightenment Thought is the pervading idea that rationality and reason can provide a meaningful framework for human existence.

And the other thing I Iove about Englightenment Thought is that when its proponets argued for rationality and reason as the sine qua non of human reality, what those philosophers actually ended up proving was no more than the very limits of their beloved belief in rationality and reason.

Ironically, their staunch belief in the power of reason often underscored the extreme paucity of human intellect when it comes the certain domains of human existence that were once considered--and maybe still are regarded as such--Grand Concepts, like Fear and Hope; Love and Death. Things, in other words, that are wild and untamable and mysterious to most human beings, except maybe kids, who seem to intuit secrets about life that their grown-up counterparts spend large sums of money and time on doctoral education arduously researching to no avail.

Philosophy does me jack as a nurse, because I seem to be thrown into all kinds of situations that seem to resist neat Venn diagrams and the kinds of conditional sentences that Enlightenment thinkers liked to try to impose upon them, and therefore, my undergrad and grad training in Useless Big Thoughts does nothing but torture me with the moral implications of my chosen profession.

Incidentally, the one thing that keeps me from chucking it all in after a bad day at work is my solace in my belief that Kierkegaard and his leap of faith has it right, and a philosopher like Kant has it really, really wrong. (And even Kant seems to disagree with himself on the limits of rational thought and reason, but who doesn't have some internal logical inconsistencies when one writes in German and frequently uses six paragraph sentences to explain that which a more succint writer could write in a perfectly parsable ten word declaration).

In a related noted I think one of my recent, favorite patients of all time died today, and I'm afraid to have that confirmed, because a small selfish part of me wanted to be there when he died, so I could say good bye properly.

I probably sound like an evil bitch, but I'm hoping if it was him that coded on the floor today, that he kicked the bucket and stayed down for the count, and that we didn't intubate him and ship him to the unit all ER style, just for him to die over there a few hours later.

The last night I was there, I wasn't his primary nurse, but was passing his room, and noticed he looked askance in the bed. I went in to help him, and he grabbed onto my hand, and didn't want to let go. He couldn't talk, but there was this horrible fear and desperation in his eyes. I've seen it before in patients when they finally realize they are going to die.

It's not fear of death, exactly. Most people, when they are that sick, actually wish for death. So the death part doesn't scare them. No, it's not death. It's dying that scares the shit out of them. Or, more specifically, it's fear of dying like this; that is, stuck in a hospital bed, half naked, tubes shoved in practically every one of your orifices, in the midst of a room full of strangers who mean absolutely nothing to you, with the weird noises and smells and excruciating pain permeating every last moment of your existence.

So even though he couldn't vocalize all this fear, I knew what he was saying.

He was saying, "Please let me die. I don't want this shit any more. I trust you; you listened to me before. You'll tell them I don't want this life anymore, won't you?"

My response was lame; I told him I'd be back in thirty seconds, mumbling that I had to get his nurse to help straighten him out, and tried to let go of his hand, even though my instinct was just to sit there and hold his hand. I tried to let go again, but he grabbed on to my hand again, and squeezed it tightly, and stared at me soundlessly, mouthing silent words like a gasping fish.

I held his hand some more, ashamed that we couldn't do more for him.

I couldn't tell him the terrible, ugly truth: that we were going to leave him there to die, slowly, without any real comfort or help at all.

Eventually, I had to let go of his hand, and walk away. I hated myself for it.

God help me. How long do I have to go on doing this shit and calling it my life's work?

heartbreak ridge

Sometimes, I really hate my job.

Really, really hate it.

Like last night, I noticed one of my patients had taken what seems like a major turn for the worst. I don't think he's going to get better. I don't even think he wants to get better. And while I've seen stranger things happen, I think he might die soon.

I also think whatever part of him is still on this planet in any meaningful way--and I don't mean physically--wants to be with his wife, wherever in the cosmic universe she is.

And, just so we're clear, I also kind of like to think that when we die, we just sort of jostle around in the universe, like bright bits of lights, knocking into each other to say "Hello!" and "Haven't seen you in awhile! How're the kids?" and "Hey! Looks like you lost some weight there, buddy! Looks good!"

I like to think the happiness we had in life--whatever it was--remains, somewhere, cosmically.

Which is kind of stupid, and antithetical to Doses of Reality As I've Come to Know Them, but seeing over and over and over again how lonely and fucking pathetic death is, I like to hold out the hope that we get a little bit of a reprieve, somehow, when all is said and done.

As for me, I think I need a new job. Maybe something a little more life-affirming than what I do for a living now, like put the "inspected by number 21" stickers on Gap jeans, or train to be an assassin-for-hire. At least, as an assassin, I'd be giving people quick, relatively painless deaths, instead of these long, humiliating, drawn-out carnival shows we put on at the hospital.

trivial pursuit of happiness

At the beginning of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, he quotes from Horace's Satires:

Quid statis?
Nolint.
Atqui licet esse beatis.

Like everything else I read in undergrad that made some kind of impression on me at the time; I've thought about this quote on and off ever since, and wished that I'd actually read Horace's Satires.

I'm not sure what I want to write about in this post, exactly. It's just that happiness of the human variety comes seems to me to come with some pretty heavy limitations, and consequences.

And if you're me, or any one with a moral conscience, you spend a lot of time probing those limitations and consequences, instead of just being happy--which sigfinicantly affects one's overall happiness score, let me tell you.

Maybe that's what Horace and Kant meant by the above quoted works.

Or maybe it's not, but I think it's what I mean to say, any way.

Happiness is not as facile a choice as New Age gurus would like us to believe. Rather, happiness seems to be comprised of a fragile, delicately balanced and nearly infinite series of choices, each of which could produce an unhappy consequence--and thus, unhappiness. There's a measure of uncontrollable fate in decision making, and thus, happiness.

So what makes us pursue happiness, if the pursuit is so fickle, and often, ends us producing the exact opposite of happiness?

Why the hell is it so hard to be happy, goddamit?!

I suppose if philosophers had figured that one out to any one's satisifaction, we'd have a lot less vegetables on our plates, and a lot more of our favorite dessert.

cheat! liar! scandal!

Last night, I had a total nightmare.

I dreamt I was taking a Latin exam that I hadn't prepared for, and was failing miserably.

It was horrible, because I have never taken a Latin exam for which I didn't spend hours arduously sitting on my ass in some straightbacked library chair, pouring over handwritten flashcards and copying declensions over-and-over-and-over until I'd given myself carpal tunnel syndrome.

Coming into an exam unprepared I reserved exclusively for my trademarked depressive funks, eg the Depressive Funk Circa 11th Grade Pre-Calcululs (the only time I've ever turned in a blank exam after five minutes of doodling absentmindedly on the answer sheet). I also winged my Reformation exam in graduate school (I answered the questions; just didn't prepare for the exam) and for a French midterm exam in undergrad. Oh, and my GREs.

But Latin?! You would have had to have dragged me forcibly from my little library carrel after massive doses of thorazine and locked me up in a padded room for me not to have prepared for an exam.

The dream was also horrible, because it had some weird declension I'd never heard of before, and I actually resorted to cheating.

Incidentally, this is is the first time I've ever had a nightmare about Latin and I am devastated. My dreams about Latin always involve receiving books about Cicero, or the second declension, or winning university honors. Sometimes i just dream I'm declining nouns, just like back in undergrad.

I'm scandalized, and slightly puzzled.

There's a metaphor here for something else, but I can't figure out what it is.

Or I can, and just don't want to admit it.

wailing and gnashing: the sequel!

So, I'm still sick.

This cold is a moveable feast of suckiness, let me tell you.

First, it was the sore throat. Then we moved from the sore throat to the congestion. Now we're stuck in congestion land, and have added "irritating, hacking, non productive cough" to the fray.

So. very. deeply. annoying.

Plus, I'm back to work in less than three hours.

(The only good part about that scenario is the money.)

wailing and gnashing.

so. very. tired.

and sick.

so. sick.

and going to work tonight.

the pain!

the suffering!

the wailing and gnashing of teeth!

(any one else feel sorry for me?)

oh, the guilt!

I'm just throwing this out there, to see if any one else cares. Which they probably don't. So, you know. Throwing commenced:

Have you ever had one of those Cardinal Rules that you've lived by all your life, and never, somehow, despite many, many other personal and professional failings, never seemed to break that one stupid rule?

I'm obviously not talking about obvious things like, "Don't murder people, even your jerky asshole boss who demoted you in absentia at the most recent staff meeting." or "Don't abuse defenseless animals. Because one day, if you leave them alone and someone else abuses them, they just might haul off and attack your jerky asshole boss."

I'm talking about those Quirky Cardinal Rules that are important to you--as opposed to society in general--for some reason, like, "Don't go around telling people you think Stalin was one hot-looking twenty-year-old. Because they will think you're crazy."

That kind of Cardinal Rule.

Okay.

So what if one day, you woke up and realized that you were breaking one of your Quirky Cardinal Rules, and had been, for some time?

And what if that rule involved other people, who may--or may not--be hurt by your breaking of that rule?

And then you realize your Quirky Cardinal Rule is really more of a General Cardinal Rule, which is germane to the preservation of civilized human interactions as we know them, such as: "Don't eat the last bowl of Cocoa Puffs if you aren't going to buy more."

But then, you think about your rule-breaking some more, and you can't decide: is it a Quirky Cardinal Rule only you care about in your finite moral universe, or is it really a General Cardinal Rule that applies, in true Kantian fashion--although one supposes we would have to start talking about moral maxims if that were the case--to everyone?

Does context and complicity matter in appropriating guilt and recrimination?

Well, I was just wondering.

I wonder about a lot of things, after all.

Things that don't seem to have easy answers.

Or answers at all, for that matter.

sick as a dog

I have finally succumbed to a combination of exhaustion, poor sleep hygiene, and being around pneumonia-ridden elderly, plus nurses who come into work hacking up half a lung but claiming to be "fine! really! just fine!"

I feel pretty lousy in one of those vague "I'm glad I don't have to work today" ways, which means I probably should be lying in bed, getting rest, but am so bored by day one of this schedule already that the forecast of daily activities looks bleak for me indeed.

I have a terrible sore throat and generalized malaise (the latter is not necesarily new, but rather, intensified) and my borderline-anorexic appetite has plummeted even further into hitherto untapped depths of "not hungry." I'm living off of around-the-clock prn doses of Halls Defense cough drops and blearily poking around in the refrigerator for unexpired cups of yogurt, which seem to be egregiously lacking, for some reason.

A trip to the grocery store seems unthinkably tiring at this point. Who knows, perhaps I will summon the energy later. Stranger things have happened.

A Teaching Hospital Employee's Guide to Interpreting Your Coworkers' Statements

Attendings
 
What they say: "You're incompetent!" 
What they mean: "Page someone who cares."

PAs
 
What they say: "Yes, I agree, that patient might have an emergent problem. I'll
look into it." 
What they mean: "It's five o'clock, the house officer can deal with that shit,
I'm out of here."

House officers
 
What they say: "I'll be up to evaluate your active chest pain/GI
bleed/hypotensive patient in five minutes." 
What they mean: "I'll be up in an hour, after you've paged me an additional half
a dozen times for worsening condition, or when the code is called, whichever
comes first."


What they say: "I'll put those orders in the computer right now."
What they mean: "You'll have to take a verbal order."

What they say: "The pager system was down."
What they mean: "I turned off my pager/flushed it down the toilet."

Interns/Residents
 
What they say: "Let's just watch the patient for now."
What they mean: "I have no fucking clue what to do next."

What they say: "Let's do a "rule out sepsis." work-up."
What they mean: "I really have no clue what to do."

What they say: "That isn't my patient."
What they mean: "That patient is thirty seconds away from coding."

What they say: "I'm surgical service; you'll have to page the medical resident for orders."
What they mean: "Fuck off, bitch."

Nurses
 
What they say: "Oh! That's a bad assignment you have! Good luck!"
What they mean: "Ha ha! I had that crap ass assignment yesterday, you sorry
bastard."

What they say: "I'm sorry, I didn't have time to do the admission database/give
an enema/digitally disimpact the patient/give the Golytely."
What they mean: "Do I look like I'm stupid?"

What they say: "I had a great day with the demented patient; s/he's really sweet."
What they mean: "The patient will need four point leather restraints fifteen minutes into your shift."

What they say: "The patient is stable, alert and oriented X3."
What they mean: "The patient is swirling the drain and crazy as a jaybird."

Techs
 
What they say: "Yes, I cleaned up that patient."
What they mean: "Except, I really didn't"

What they say: "The patient is asleep."
What they mean: "The patient is totally awake and hungry, I just don't want to go in there and feed him/her."

Housekeeping:
 
What they say: "That's not my room to clean. Page someone else."
What they mean: 'That's not my room to clean. Page someone else."

What they say: "I already cleaned that room!"
What they mean: "The room isn't cleaned."

Transport
 
What they say: "We're sending someone."
What they mean: "When hell freezes over."

Unit Clerks
 
What they say: "What's that noise?"
What they mean: "The phone is ringing. Somebody should pick up the line."

Pharmacy
 
What they say: "That med should really be in pyxis, look again."
What they mean: "I have no idea when we're going to restock that med so quit
calling me."

Midlevel management
What they say: "Yes, I understand your concerns and will look into them."
What they mean: "Fuck you."

Upper level management
What they say :"We care about everyone's point of view and well-being."
What they mean: "Except yours, of course."

What they say: "We all have to work as a team to solve our problems."
What they mean: "Nursing will have to work harder than ever to solve everyone else's problems."

What they say: "We hold everyone accountability to the highest standards of excellence in patient care."
What they mean: "We hold nurses accountable to the highest standards of excellence in patient care. Every one else can fuck up at will."

What they say: "We are preparing for a new and exciting era of productivity and growth."
What they mean: "Get ready for a fifty percent increase in paperwork and bullshit."

All hospital employees
 
What they say: "Have a nice day!"
What they mean: "Fuck you!"

what money can't buy.

Total U.S. health care costs for the year 2004: greater than 1.9 trillion dollars
Price of rarely used PET Scanner: 2.5 million dollars
Average salary of average hospital CEO: $350,000-1 million /year
Price of recruiting and training a new graduate nurse: $30,000
Average salary of a new graduate RN: $43,000
Average salary of a medical intern: $24,000/year
Cost of a new bladder scanner: $17,000

A doctor that answers his STAT pages promptly: priceless.

it is later than you think

So, one month into night shift, and I'm already feeling like a vampire.

My days off are incredibly pointless, and are mostly spent either trying to force myself to wake up enough to deal with errands during the daylight hours (with the other, light-loving mortals) or else springing into action at 1 a.m., mercilessly cleaning every surface of my home for lack of anything to do. Or sleeping, and waking up at odd hours wondering what day it is, and feeling as if I've spent the last month in a sensory deprivation chamber.

Today I indulged in a TNT sponsored Law and Order fest. It was all old school Law and Order, back when Adam Schiff and Ben Stone ruled with a tyrannically moralistic cold fist of justice. So beautiful, it made me want to weep. (Although I have to say, except for lack of the weird 80's flattop, Isiah Washington--now of Preston Burke, MD Grey's Anatomy heartthrob fame--looks and sounds the same as he did ten years ago. Was he cryogenically frozen, or something? Because that's scary!)

I'd seen most of the episodes, but the thing with Law and Order is, it doesn't really matter if you've seen them before, even three or four times before. It's all about the tried-and-true formula of murder/cops/lawyers/trials. It's a beautiful thing. Heartbreakingly beautiful, really.

Then I slept, and woke up at 1 a.m. And cleaned the house, and did laundry, and ironed, and wondered why there isn't an underground city here, like at Disney World, that's open twenty four hours a day, so people who work nights actually have something to do in the middle of the night on their days off.

Latin, actually.

I have to hand it to spammers, friggin' annoying as they are, they're getting more cultured by the day.

I've often wondered if they get paid anything to think up subject headers, and if so, could I get in on the deal?

I have a lot of spam-header samples if any one is interested in paying me, say, a couple bucks a title. For instance:

Hegel intrudes.
Periphrastic party.
reeks. Kierkegaard anomalies.
sandwiches for godot. free.
St. Paul snorts.

See, that'd be ten dollars right there! Ordinarily, I'd have to work nearly 20 minutes to get paid that kind of money!

This kind of a job would be much more fun that what I currently do, which isn't fun, and which only makes sense to continue because I am contracted to do so. And I have a lot of bills to pay.

One day, though, I'm going to look back on my life, sigh and think, "I don't remember any of it. Was I a pirate? Or a go-go-dancer? Shall I eat a peach?" etc.

Because I'll be crazy as batshit by then.

the dead rabbits

Several years ago, when I was a wee lass (okay, I was not a wee lass), I watched Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002).

Among the most memorable of things about this movie was the fact that Daniel Day Lewis in plaid pants looked an awful lot like my twenty plus year old stuffed monkey in red plaid overalls:

Behold:

Mr. Day Lewis.

And behold, again:

The monkey.
See what I'm saying?

All my monkey needs is a top hat, and a handle bar moustache.

In fact, I'm not so sure my plush monkey didn't star in Gangs of New York.

Also, because I am geeky, I had to read up on The Dead Rabbits.

Little did I know, a couple years later, I would have a rabbit who could play dead:



Lest you think I am some monster who has just committed lagomorphocide, I haven't. She does this about five times a day. She flips over on her side (thus her name, "Flip flop") and zonks out. Once I came home from work and she was sleeping under a table near the door. I slammed the door, and she didn't even wake up. I've never seen an animal play dead so convincingly.

Except maybe Piper:



And me. I did a damn fine job of replicating a comatose person this weekend. It's been all kinds of crazy deadness around here.

This night shift thing, man, it's brutal.