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Brand name of bottled water seen yesterday:  “Ethos”.

On a lighter note…

I saw “The Prestige” earlier this week, and I have to say that I was surprised by how good it was. Nay, how great it was. Although, you really can’t go wrong with the cast: Christian Bale (Batman!), Hugh Jackman (Wolverine!), Michael Caine (…yeah!), Andy Serkis (Gollum!), and most importantly, David Bowie (!!!). It was unsettling to see that the Queen of Rock himself had aged significantly since last I saw him, but his portrayal of Nikola Tesla was pretty diesel. Not that I know what Tesla was like in real life, but I’ve spent many an afternoon staring in wonderment at the lightning machine at the Museum of Science and thinking, “This Tesla dude seems like a whole lot of all right.” I’m not sure if I would have cast Scarlett Johansson in this movie, especially after her dreadful performance in the last Woody Allen flick, but she is quite lovely and has gigantic, buoyant breasts. Sometimes a cast of glorious men and an awesome script aren’t enough to get asses in the seats, I guess. (There is a fitting moment in the film when someone says of her character “She’s inexperienced, but really knows how to present herself!”)

Anyway, see this movie. It twists! It turns! It’s rife with symbolism and devious trickery that serves as metaphor for other forms of devious trickery! And did I mention that David Bowie is in the movie?

Official score: righteous.

Last night was awful. It would be impossible to try and explain the sheer difficulty of getting through it, the number of directions I was pulled in at once, the patients and their families screaming, and the treacherous headache that followed me through the night and into today. So I’ll just describe the thing that affected me the most.

Earlier in the week we got a new patient. I’d never seen a person look so sick before in my life; I’d also never seen any cinematic monster makeup or digital effect produce an appearance as shocking as his. His diagnosis was liver cancer and hepatitis, status post IV drug abuse. He had long straggly hair, no teeth, technicolor jaundiced skin, and a skinny body with a giant abdomen from the ascites. A site from a previous paracentesis was draining yellow fluid into a colostomy bag attached to his side. His face and arms were covered in crusty bruised areas, and even the whites of his eyes were yellow. He was my patient for one shift a few nights ago, and when I approached him I had to lean in close to hear his soft, breathy voice. He was vague but sweet and I liked him immediately, and throughout the night I would pass by him and smile and he would smile back, his mouth huge and empty except for a swollen bright-red tongue. I did what I could to keep him comfortable, drained the fluid from his failing liver into a container, and squeezed his arm in solidarity. For the next few nights, including last night, I worked the other side of the floor and didn’t have him as a patient, but still saw him frequently because he stayed out in the hall in a chair so he could be monitored (he was too weak to walk but tried to get up frequently, making him a fall risk). When I saw him yesterday I felt compelled to hug him or try to have some sort of conversation, because I sensed it was going to be his last night. Then I got so incredibly busy and stressed that I only ever asked him how he was and saw his gaping grin once, and then he died.

I learned that the reaper had come for him when I was headed out to cry in my car for a few minutes (aka “take my dinner break”) and I heard someone say that another nurse’s patient had just died. I went down to his room and there he was, looking essentially as he had when he was alive, except for the thick red fluid pouring out of his mouth. I helped his nurse and aides position him on a clean sheet so he could drain for a while before the post-mortem care. I reached out to hold his hand and it was freezing. His eyes were open and staring at me, the color and shape of his body all the more alarming now that he was naked. Then it was time for the unit manager to call his family and make arrangements, so I went for my crying break and returned a few minutes later for several more hours of hell on wheels. My manager said that she had contacted the patient’s daughter, who stated that his remains weren’t her responsibility. It occurred to me that someday my father will die, and our estrangement will probably leave me as unmoved as this man’s daughter was by her father’s passing. I actually found this comforting, because although this patient effectively had no family, he did have us to care for him, and me to be delighted at the ability to make him smile, and there will be nurses and aides to care for my father should I remain unwilling to see him. I am truly glad that part of my job is to love the unloved.

At half past midnight I was finally able to leave, shell-shocked from my shift. A DJ somewhere deemed it necessary to play “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight” on the radio. I was too exhausted and confused to cry anymore. At home I soothed my headache and fell asleep, waking up several times during the night to an unsettling feeling that I didn’t want to open my eyes and make sure it was actually the cat making those rustling noises in the bedroom. The caveat to this was that, with my eyes closed, all I could see was the departed’s death mask. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but I believe in the horrible chills I felt throughout my body when I first looked at that patient while he was living, and the fear I feel when I contemplate what it must have been like to die his particular death.

I woke up this morning and my headache returned, and I feel like his yellow eyes are still looking right into mine, but I have tonight off and that’s good enough for me.

My boyfriend and my best girl are currently passed out on the couch, leaving me free to expound upon the cruelty they exhibited tonight.

We were at a Popular Irish Bar/Restaurant earlier, seated next to a group of middle-aged musicians (guitar, violin, etc) who were throwing off a folky/country-rock vibe, which we were essentially digging. At one point I remarked that at the end of the next number, I was going to ask the band to play “Going Up the Country” by Canned Heat. Both members of my party nixed this idea vehemently, stating that it would be inappropriate, and that it would even offend the music-makers. I have a special relationship with this song because once, during a long car trip, I attempted to sing it to Jared but couldn’t get the melody quite right, so I left a voicemail at a specific satellite radio station, and within minutes they were playing the song. I felt at that moment that I controlled the universe, that I could force the airwaves to bend to my will and play strange, silly tunes sung entirely in falsetto. (This, despite the fact that satellite radio never again honored any of my requests.) So when told that it would be a faux pas to request this song of a real live band, I was perplexed and annoyed. Yet I obeyed the wishes of my company, and we eventually left, and now my beloveds are dead asleep on my sofa, unaware that I am in the next room bitterly describing their killjoy ways so that the world may know my suffering. Those bastards.

I was somewhat upset recently when I saw a Volkswagen commercial in which Christopher Guest reprises the Nigel Tufnel character from This Is Spinal Tap, one of my all-time favorite movies. I always harbored secret affections for Nigel, and to see him whore himself out in this way was at least a bit unsettling. I tried to put the incident out of my mind until I saw another in what is apparently a series of “rock star guitar solo” VW ads, this one featuring John Mayer noodling away near a shiny new vee-dub.

I dislike John Mayer more than I dislike any other person that I do not actually know. I haven’t listened to any of his music besides the bits that have assaulted my ears during my searches through radio stations, but that has proved enough for me to develop an intense aversion towards him. My hatred was always relatively benign because I simply avoided him the way I avoid all awful musicians, until the day I heard him doing an interview on NPR. He was describing the authoring of the song “Daughters”, and I have transcribed his self-important blather for your review:

“I wrote this song in a hotel room in New Zealand and I was supposed to be downstairs for an on-camera interview and I was an hour and a half late and I knew I was an hour and a half late and I just excused myself because if you’re late to talk about music because you’re writing music then I think you get a pass. I remember coming downstairs and my tour manager was pretty mad and I was just like ‘Ken, don’t even worry about it’.”

The insinuation being, of course, “I will be forgiven for missing the interview because I have just created a work of such genius that all who hear it will find religion and worship at the altar of my assinine lyrics and garbled singing style”. Here are some more of his musings on the writing process:

“…it was one of the fewest times in my life when I’ve ever said to myself, ‘This is so good, something bad’s gonna happen to me’. I don’t expect anyone else to understand it. It’s a moment of creation where something is leaving so quickly and so well and so effortlessly that you just feel like you owe something karmically…”

I can think of something else that leaves quickly and effortlessly: projectile diarrhea. Which, incidentally, is something I enjoy slightly more than I enjoy Mayer’s terrible songs.

True story: once I was stuck in traffic, exhausted and stressed, an emotional wreck, flipping through radio stations in a desperate attempt to find something to lift my spirits. The only thing I could find other than commercials was the above-mentioned “Daughters”, and the sound of it was so vile to my ears that I literally leaned over the steering wheel and dry-heaved. It was an automatic reflex, as instinctive to me as breathing. This is the depth of my ire.

So you can imagine the pain I feel knowing that not only has my beloved Nigel Tufnel sold out, but he has done so in the company of The Enemy himself. I’m living in a hell hole, indeed.

The hot topic on the Boston streets these days is “Question 1″. Of all the potential laws affecting our fair city, the direly important Number One concerns whether or not wine should be sold in supermarkets. Liquor stores are begging us to vote no, fearing they’ll lose business. Political groups (I’m not really sure if I should lump them into the “conservative” category, but I will do so in the name of brevity) also want a nay, lest packs of teenagers drunk on cheap Shaw’s wine take to the streets, thus welcoming the dawn of the Apocalypse.

I don’t drink wine. I think it tastes like garbage. So this is not really my battle to fight. But I feel that this is a classic case of the Commonwealth refusing to eject the gigantic stick from its half-Puritan half-progressive ass, and therefore I must weigh in. Let me state that 1) Trader Joe’s already sells wine, which is considered affordable and good, and the earth has not yet spun off of its axis; 2) Wine snobs are always going to drop serious cash in liquor stores for exotic brands since mainly boxed swill will be available at Stop & Shop; 3) Boston’s youth will likely not become any more inebriated if this law goes on the books, because since when do kids consider wine a cool way to get shit-faced, and since when is any type of alcohol difficult for them to obtain anyway? I spent my teen years on the straight and narrow, so I may be wrong about this…but I doubt it.

Unfortunately, this is a college town. It’s also a sports-obsessed, ‘working for the weekend’ type of town. No packie in the metro area need fear the loss of revenue even if Dunkies starts a “free nips with any donut” campaign.

That is my official stance.

Perusing the MAC website (MAC as in makeup, but stay with me, male readers!), I noticed they have created yet another sub-genre of lip gloss that they describe as “a wildly sensual XXX synergy” of two of their other lip gloss products. I get it; as a female, my lips are visually suggestive of my vagina and that’s why I have the biological urge to purchase products to make them all pink and shiny-like. We’re on the same page, MAC, and I have given you a shameful sum of money over the years because you make me pretty and I like you. But I must say, I think you’ve taken things too far with the new color swatches. That’s a bit much, even by my standards.

It’s supergood!

I have updated my “about” page with a photo of myself, my new insufferably hip yet hilarious and therefore defensible t-shirt, and my stealth kitten who didn’t tell me she was going to be in the photo.

…until you’ve tried to straight cath an eldery woman who has no clitoris and no discernable urethral meatus, and the person holding her legs apart for you is someone you clashed viciously with in nursing school.  Also noteworthy:  you can’t held but bond with someone, even your enemy, after standing there together staring deep and confused into an anatomically incorrect vulva.