A Full Couple of Days.

The past two days have been interesting, to say the very least. It is now Friday evening, so I'll begin with Thursday morning, when I decided to run some errands. I had laundry to do, and was listening to some podcasts on my Palm, when I decided I wanted to listen to them on my iPod, instead. The only hitch in the plan was that I did not, at the time, own an iPod. Three hours and one trip to Best Buy later, I did own an iPod, and was listening to podcasts on it.

Work that evening was a little slow, and made slower by the fact that I wanted to get home to play with my shiny new toy.

I didn't sleep very well last night, because I realized that, while I was getting a paycheck this morning, I had also written a check to be cashed today, and if those two competing forces on my bank account didn't happen in the order in which I mentioned them, I would go severely into debt for a few minutes. Fortunately, when I checked my account this morning, I found that they had hit it in the preferred chronocity. Or something.

In a newfound desire to feed music to my iPod, I went to the used CD store down the street, where I found a most excellent album for nine bucks. This, I feel, was well worth the effort. Now, if only they had audiobooks...

Work today was not what I would've expected. Normally, when I am on blood-draw duty, I either have a good day (in which I get a lot of blood) or a bad day (in which I can barely get any blood). Today started off bad, and I was not getting very much blood at all. I went off to break, meditated on the problem, decided I was not going to let past failures influence future duties, and started getting every draw I went on. The other phlebotomist on duty was relieved at this turn-around, and everybody in the lab was surprised as hell. I'm not sure anyone has managed to simply decide not to continue having a bad day in the lab, or for that matter, anywhere ever. Or at least, not successfully. But now that I have, I am filled with a deep-seated desire to give overpriced inspirational speeches. Feel the empowerment of assertiveness paradigm-shift, or something. (Literally, "Give me money now, darnit".)

The SciFi Channel picked up Passions. I have to wonder: do they even take themselves seriously anymore?

Why do we still have cable?

I was checking some things out on iTunes, and I noticed that we can now download entire seasons of our favorite shows (assuming your favorite shows include only two or three select shows from about eight different networks, four of them MTV-owned) onto an iPod video. Between that and DVD versions of almost every show ever made, there is simply no need for cable, is there? But now without cable, how would we ever see commercials?

It's on its deathbed. Not really, but one can dream, right?

How did their day go?

When I got to work today, I found out that the computer system had gone down early in the morning, and had only kicked back in a little bit before I showed up. How does this affect me? Well, the system tells us whose blood we need to draw, and when. If it goes down, we can't really get anything done, unless we go up to the patient's rooms and randomly stick needles in people until we hit someone who actually needs tests. Good for practice; bad for the legal department.

Anyway, those of us on second shift had to cover not only our own draws, but those that had been scheduled for earlier in the day. It was madness for several hours.

On the plus side, I did manage to get my oil changed today. Hooray for a better-running car! And by the end of next week, I hope to have my very own HDD-based large-capacity MP3 player. I'm looking at one in particular; though the cult of Mac is seductive...

So for now, I have a little while to decide. Ultimately, I'll just go to the store, ask to test drive both models, and make my decision based on that. For now, though, visions of sugar plums (downloaded and displayed on a 2.5" screen) dance through my head.

Wow.

It was an intense day at work today. Two of my coworkers were incapacitated during the day, one emotionally, the other medically. It was quite an experience, since the two events happened within about fifteen minutes of each other. I have learned much from today, though: 1. Never get pregnant. 2. Never hope for anything. That's about all I feel comfortable saying about it in this forum, though.

I barely got any sleep last night. Tonight, I hope to do better; I may enlist the aid of drowse-inducing allergy tablets. Meijer makes some very nice knock-off pharmaceuticals.

Just another day.

Yesterday felt like a null-set day. A placeholder. Although I did talk some things out with my roommates, and now I'm feeling better about them; I'm never quite sure whether they like me or not, but I am mollified that they have little or no malicious intent toward me.

Relationships aren't my specialty, I suppose. Maybe I'm just too much of an individual. Maybe I just don't know how to get along with people. Whatever it is, I just don't have the knack. Today is supposed to be about love, or about commercialization of our feelings for each other, or something, but really, it just feels like a day to me. I can't even summon the passion to be bitter about being single; today just doesn't make that much of an impression on me. C'est la vie.

Hey, French! The language of romance. Maybe today's special take on love is infecting me. Next year: inoculations.

Exhausted.

I was on phlebotomy duty today at work. That meant lugging an admittedly lightweight tray of blood-collecting supplies up and down the floors of the hospital, finding patients, and hoping against hope that I'd be able to actually get blood from their vein into the vial it needed to go into. This is harder than you'd think, and frankly, I'm not as good at it as I ought to be. In short, I made a lot of unnecessary holes in people today, so I feel pretty bad. I have decided that alcohol will help my problems, but not good alcohol. I don't deserve Guinness, or even Sam Adams. So I'm drinking Mike's Hard Lemonade, because hey, I'm not a savage.

Frankly, my greatest successes tonight weren't the patients I found out I wouldn't have to draw. There were a couple of patients who told me they didn't even feel the needle go into their arms, so I get to give myself a little credit. But all in all, it wasn't a pleasant evening. I'm going to bed; I have to get up tomorrow and do it all over again. Hopefully, it will go better.

No work today!

I get the day off from work, because I work this weekend. This is very good, since I didn't get any sleep last night, for no reason whatsoever. I also went to campus, to talk about going back to school, and found out that the Bio sciences advisor doesn't have walk-in hours until next week. Since she has, thus far, ignored the e-mail I sent her, I can already feel the tendrils of bureaucracy wrapping around my ankles, chest, and throat. I fear that I am not going to be able to survive a second college education with them, which also gives me cause for a limited kind of hope.

In my twisted mind, I'm already preparing for a BS in some biological science. If it's not here in town, it'll be somewhere else, which may give me reason to move back in with my awesomest roommates ever. At any rate, I'm all about getting this degree, so we'll just have to see how willing I am to part with my cool job in a few months. But first things first; I feel I must give the local university the benefit of... um... I'm not sure what. There is simply no doubt in my mind that getting another degree from them would be a twisted nightmare of endless loopholes and lost forms, so I cannot give them the benefit of any doubt. Furthermore, during my years spent there for my first degree, the university showed an actual decline in quality, in my opinion. What, really, are the odds that this trend would not only reverse itself, but do so to such a dramatic degree that studying there would be a pleasureable experience? Answer: I have no idea. I'm not a statistician. So I guess I'm just giving them the benefit of my own personal generosity. Sometimes, being a good person sucks. No, that's not true; it sucks almost all of the time.

Obligatory.

Your Superhero Profile

Your Superhero Name is The Sea Tiger Your Superpower is Gadgets Your Weakness is Toilet Paper Your Weapon is Your Power Army Your Mode of Transportation is Portal

What's your Superhero Name?

I drove 200 miles... each way.

I went to my parents' house today. Got to see my nephew, who is awesome. He is two years old, and has already developed a concept of separation, along with a heartbreaking facial expression to accompany it. I had to make a few practice good-byes just to get him used to the idea that I was going to leave him; I think he took it well.... eventually.

I also saw Brokeback Mountain. With my mother. Yeah.

It is Superbowl Sunday, so the theater was pretty empty. (If you want a review of the movie, you can find one here or you can go see it yourself. I'm not a movie reviewer, so I'll be talking about the audience.) Every showing of that film is required, by law, to contain at least one gay man whose date is his mother. Check.

Everyone else in the theater consisted of three elderly couples who honestly couldn't think of a better thing to do on Superbowl Sunday than go see Brokeback Mountain, and in one case, sit right in front of the legally mandated gay-man-and-his-mother couple. Bastards. Still, like everyone else in the theater, they would rather see openly gay cowboys than closeted gay football players (which, I assume, is all of them), so they can't be chalked up as all bad. I expect, though, every single couple who watched the film had the following conversation in the car home:

Her: So, Stanley, what were you really doing on those fishing trips? (Sarcastic chuckle)
Him: Damnit, Mildred, you think everyone's gay ever since those Queer Eye boys came on the TV.

This, I believe, illustrates an important point: All elderly couples are named Stanley and Mildred.

Okay, I can't resist talking a little about the movie. I will limit my comments to two questions and one answer:

Q. How do you take a 20-page short story, and make it into a two and a half hour movie?
A. Have one line of dialogue every fifteen minutes.

Q. What the hell was up with Heath Ledger's face? Was he chewing on a popsicle stick, or what?

Is it me?

I don't feel that paranoia is particularly bad for you, usually. Conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, Men in Black, and Atlantis are great entertainment, and probably a healthy release for those who, let's face it, nobody wants to deal with anyway. But after a certain point, one starts to get the idea that a particular person or group is after you. Watching. Waiting.

For me, that group is ER doctors. If you cast your eyes bottomward, you will see my account of an ER doctor berating me for not having run tests on a specimen, when we had no tests to run. It is not my job to order tests to be run. If I were to order tests without explicit written directives to do so from a doctor, with several other conditions applying, it would be illegal. So, when I say I can't order tests, that's because I don't like being arrested and slapped with several lawsuits. It's a pet peeve.

Anyway, my boss pulled me aside today, asking me about the call I received, and the trauma that caused it. I hadn't mentioned it to him, and as far as I know, nobody actually reads my blog, so the only way for him to have heard about it was from the ER. Which means they filed a complaint. About me. You wouldn't complain about me, would you? At least, not formally? Of course you wouldn't.

But hey, I'm not the sort to hold a grudge, and I would never do anything to hurt a patient. But if I even need an ER, damned if I'll go to my hospital; I'm rolling the dice with the other hospital in town. They say, "Better the devil you know than the one you don't", but that assumes the devil you know isn't out to get you, specifically. At least the devil you've never met doesn't have any interest in you specifically.

Okay then.

Weird day at work today. At least six people called in sick, or what have you, and the rest of us were left scrambling a bit. Fortunately, we weren't all that busy, so we managed to meet the challenge thrown at us, mostly by snatching people to help us from other shifts. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

So that was work. I bet now you're expecting me to talk about home. Well, I'm changing things up a bit today; I've fallen into a bit of a rut, so now I'm going to hop out of it: Monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys monkeys.

And now, home. The girls I live with have applied new shelving to a couple of places around the apartment. It actually does improve things a little, with the only exception being that my PS2 is of the new, top-loading design, and has been placed directly below a shelf, so that I will have to pull it out of the shelf in order to change games. A little inconvenient, but hey, it's my own fault for, y'know, living here.