Once again,

Sleep became my enemy.

While I slept yesterday, three things happened:

My downstairs neighbor moved away.
My best friend left town.
My shift at work started.

I was only really prepared for the first event. Damn you, stupid body! Damn you, third shift work! I work because I need the money, not because of any inherent night-owlyness. I need to find a job where I am awake during the day, when (apparently) things happen, and sleep during the night, when nurses get angry.

Okay, I'm learning that that last bit isn't really fair; it's only the occasional nurse who gets mad at me, and I can deal with that, since they usually aren't mad at me so much as the patient who refuses to breathe on their own or something. But last night I had to deal with a nurse who called me, angrily demanding test results (which she would have gotten, had her phone not been busy with yelling at me), and it's a little irritating to get interrupted from a busy morning to field a useless phone call. This nurse needs to learn to think before she acts.

On the other hand, I did manage to have a nice little conversation with some people from other departments in the hospital during my break, and I think I improved the political status of the lab in the hospital, if only by a bit. I explained a little of what we do there to people who don't get to see how exactly the lab works, and so hopefully, they will be more patient with us in the future. And by us, I mean me, since I don't really care about phone calls I don't have to answer. And by patient, I mean not yelling.

Another thing happened yesterday: I looked up an old friend online. She is getting her PhD, so I e-mailed her to say hi and see if she was single. She was, it turns out, not. This is a girl I've known since elementary school (and the only person I've ever met who got a higher ACT score than I), and it's been about seven years since I've talked to her. Ah, nostalgia. Of course, now I don't really know how to proceed; do we suddenly become best friends? Do I politely respond to her e-mail? Do I snub her entirely? I have enough social training to nix that last option, but that's about the point where my expertise runs out. I feel woefully underprepared for interpersonal relationships of any kind, really; does everyone feel this way?

Speaking of my impending hermitdom, my internet connection has been pretty bad lately; I can't really get a reliable connection. It's not any of the machines inside my apartment; I knew enough to set up the network, and I know enough to check it for errors. So the trouble must be with the cable company that provides my internet, right? Wrong. I have been sneaking data use from one of my neighbor's networks, and that's been going just fine. I don't know that they get internet from the same source as I do, but I'm pretty sure; they're about the only game in town. Right now I'm using a coffee shop's network. I think I may be doing that a great deal in the future, especially since coffee is the natural enemy of sleep, which I'm finding is the natural enemy of me leading a semi-normal life.