whiskey in a teacup . com

I’m visiting some guy, and the first thing I notice when I get to his house is that he’s crouched on top of the blade of a giant ceiling fan and letting it spin him around. Next I see that he has a system of clear tubing that runs throughout the house, supplying fresh spring water to every room. One end of this tubing feeds into a room which is in fact a giant aquarium where he keeps large beasts of the sea, including a gigantic eel. He somehow entices the eel into the tubing (note: Freudian analysis is not welcome on this post), at which point it doubles back on itself and gets stuck. While trying to free itself, it splits in half, and the head-half takes off through the tubing while the butt-half flops out into the bathroom in a multi-colored bloody mess, which he tries to show to me. I’m watching from closed-circuit tv in another room, disgusted by the whole ordeal.

Interestingly, my occasional nightmares about being back in high school (weird Escher-esque staircases, no way out, etc) have been replaced with ones about being back at my old job. I had a vicious dream last night wherein my med cart was seven feet high, some patient on a G-tube insisted I give him his feeding through his anus, and no one was getting their medicine on time. It was quite traumatic, the sort of dream that seems horribly real until you just barely start to wake up and shake it off like an itchy blanket.

My new job is going much better, though I have some garden-variety worries that I’ll screw up in some way or just generally not be good enough. Today I was bandaging a patient’s hands and some of the other staff were marveling that he was not only letting me touch him, but was smiling at me, which apparently is not typical behavior for him. Those kinds of moments give me a good feeling, which goes a long way towards assuaging my fears about fucking up.

In other potentially terrifying news, check out my intended’s current post on the newly-live feralchimp.com!

I believe that yesterday was the first time in my twenty-four years as a Massachusetts resident that I was actually unable to drive my car due to weather. The “wintry mix” of Wednesday had been shoveled off the sidewalk into my wheel wells, where it froze into an impenetrable chunk of icy, icy ice by Thursday morning.

I spent several hours pouring hot water on the whole mess and bashing at it with a crap-ass plastic shovel, which was not terribly effective but which I continued to do for lack of any better ideas. After it became obvious that I was going to miss work, I decided that I wanted to free my car from the ice purely on general principle: I wanted to win this battle against nature, dammit.

So I bashed and bashed until I could bash no more, but I was making no progress and the car was not moving at all. I was getting weaker and my back was getting quite sore, but I refused to admit defeat. Somewhere around mid-day, as I headed out for another round, a group of townies randomly descended upon me and forcibly took over the whole operation. Barely speaking to me, they dumped sand around my tires, insulted my Ubiquitous Japanese Sedan, ordered me out of and away from my car, and managed to free it from its icy prison. I was slightly annoyed that they didn’t listen to anything I said and referred to me as a “woman driver” (since obviously my vagina is what was preventing me from simply cruising out of a five inch thick block of ice), but I’m not one to turn down free, un-asked-for labor.

Though they were obviously doing me a favor, I don’t think the townies saw our transaction as such: they recognized that a car was stuck in ice and that its owner was a small fool with a plastic shovel, and instinct dictated that they must step in. I thanked them when the deed was done, and they dispersed to their various homes in the neighborhood, and I went inside and fell asleep. Thank you, townies. I salute you.

Last night, while Jared and I were out to dinner, I felt something hit my foot. It barely registered as an occurrence until I noticed that the large group of girls at the table next to us had fallen silent and seemed to be staring at me.

“OH MY GOD I’M SO SORRY!” one of them yelped, as the rest covered their mouths in horror. Unsure why they were freaking out, I glanced at the floor and saw that they had somehow launched a steak knife in my general direction. Fortunately, I was wearing Doc Marten boots (as is my tendency in the cooler months) and was entirely unscathed.

Were it summertime, I would have been wearing girl shoes, and the whole thing could have gone a lot differently. It probably would have been a much better story. But it’s winter and I’ve got my shit-kickers to protect me from wayward flying knives, and that’s pretty great.

Recently, a friend revealed that she once had a sex dream about Jamie Hyneman. This admission was met with laughter and condemnation. As of this morning, however, she is no longer alone in her unique shame.

Don’t get me wrong–I love Jamie and all, but his doughy physique, bald head, and walrus mustache don’t exactly make me crazy in the pants. I do tend to watch MythBusters before going to bed, so perhaps that’s the root of this whole ordeal.

I haven’t been remembering many of my dreams lately, but this one was vivid and detailed and I recall pretty much all of it. Jamie and I had found ourselves embroiled in a passionate affair and spent most of the dream making out on a bed that, disturbingly, seemed to be located in my childhood home. He was in love with me and spoke of marriage–but, as Jared will be happy to learn, even in the Land of Nod I remained faithful, and stopped short of consummating my relationship with Jamie.

Although in the end of the dream I did take some narcotics and return to Jamie, declaring that Jared would just have to understand, it was too late.  My earlier rejection had crushed him, and he packed his things and rode away across the Zakim bridge in the back of a cab, lamenting the sad end of our affair. So, yes, I technically remained faithful, and woke up confused.

From now on, I’ll never be able to watch the promo clip of him saying “Jamie wants a big boom!” without fondly remembering our brief, imaginary love.

As you all know, my job has become increasingly unbearable. As some of you have noted with concern, it’s taking an actual toll on my general well-being. As most of you don’t know, I’m starting a new job next week.

First, the good news: I’ll be working part-time at a cerebral palsy program and also returning to school. When I went to interview for the job, I was truly impressed by the program and the staff, and I was thrilled when they offered me the position (though not too surprised, since the first thing my interviewer said when she met me was “I love your shoes!” which tends to bode well).

And the bad news: I may continue working per diem (a couple shifts a week) at my current job. Things may be getting less insane there in the near future. Also, as much as that place makes me want to punch myself in the fucking face, it does give me ample opportunity to work on skills that I won’t be using much at my new job. Plus, I am madly in love with some of the patients and can hardly bear to leave them. I believe that my presence (and willingness to complain about things on their behalf) makes things temporarily better for some of them, and it’s hard to give that up.

That is, if I don’t get fired (which would be pretty fucking ironic!) I’ve been calling in sick lately, due to 1) being sick and 2) being unwilling to work in totally unsafe conditions. They also could fire me for getting rough with the administrator on Monday, though I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t dare. Basically what happened was I arrived on the floor, noted the twenty-one patient load, and was approached by the administrator who told me I’d be getting two admissions that night. “This is totally ridiculous,” I said, to which he responded by walking away.

So, I paged him. And paged him again. He finally called me and I said, “This is getting really unsafe and if you do this to me, I’m not taking the keys, and I’m going home.” A couple of patients were shifted around, which seemed like it would help…until one of my new admits came in needing an oxygen tank and all the tanks in our 02 room were fucking empty. Until she needed a nebulizer to help her breathe and our only spare neb machine was broken. Shit like that makes my blood boil, and it only got worse when the other nurses started bitching and moaning right in front of me about how “SOME people can’t handle their patient load and have to go causing trouble.”

Here’s the thing. I have a pretty damned solid work ethic. I enjoy working my ass off and being busy and having to find ways to become more efficient. But as a nurse, you don’t win any points or any glory for taking on a ridiculous assignment. This isn’t a factory or a restaurant where being overworked is merely stressful. These are people’s lives that are handed over to us, and the notion that I’m not a hard worker because I take my responsibilities seriously is so absurd that I don’t even bother defending myself. Things started out bad and they’ve only gotten worse, and I’ve raised a big enough stink that the administration is getting sick of me.

But you know what? Almost all of my co-workers really like me, and my patients routinely tell me I’m the only nurse who pays this much attention to them, who’s this nice to them, who they miss when I’m not there, etc. Clearly I’m not a perfect nurse, and I’m still new and inexperienced, but I do my damnedest and I think I do it well. I can handle being treated like a dog by my employer; I can handle not having time to eat or piss. But I can’t handle being forced to short-change my patients because my employer won’t staff the building properly.

So it might get better, and it might not…but I’m not going in tonight, and I’m fully prepared to walk out and not take the keys if I think that’s what necessary. And if I did that, they would fire me, and I would take it as a compliment.

Since the winter began, it’s been really cold in our kitchen. You’ll be in the toasty sauna of our living room, step over the threshold into the kitchen, and instantly enter a deep freeze. I noticed this phenomenon a while ago, and after guests started to complain about it, I concocted a multi-faceted theory involving 1) a potentially drafty door, 2) unusual placement of large appliances near the heating vent, thus blocking the flow of warm air, and 3) voodoo. I learned not to attempt to walk on the kitchen floor with bare feet, and generally went on with my life.

Today, however, I made a shocking discovery, something so outrageously enlightening that I started searching for the giant black monolith I must have touched to receive this superhuman moment of clarity and insight:

One of the windows in the kitchen was open.

For the past few months, I’ve been very slowly but steadily losing weight. This initially struck me as unusual, since my weight has been more or less the same for the past decade, and never really changes whether or not I work out, eat well, etc. I’m a skinny jew from a family of skinny jews, and that’s just the way it goes. However, a couple of weeks ago, people actually starting remarking to me that I looked smaller, which I guess is the sort of thing that certain populations would die to hear, but to me it was quite bizarre. I weighed myself at the scale at work, and it turned out I was down maybe five to seven pounds, which, when you start out as a skinny jew, is enough to show.

My theory is that work was getting so stressful that I really was becoming somewhat depressed, and my appetite was waning. Also, since I work in the evenings, I don’t eat a real dinner most days (just a pb&j and a snack, usually), plus I’m physically moving for pretty much eight hours straight. That’ll do it, apparently.

The point of all this is not to gloat; I personally don’t give two craps whether I weigh five pounds more or less as long as I stay roughly within the confines of “healthy and fit”, which is pretty likely to happen since I lead a non-idiotic lifestyle. The point is that last night I did some serious damage to my accidental weight loss, and I’d like to tell you how:

It all started in the morning, when a perceived lack of coffee filters lead to a trip to Dunkies which lead to a breakfast that I would never normally eat, involving a croissant. Then there was some snacking throughout the day. Then Julia showed up with a wild salmon and a teriyaki marinade that made me denounce all my false gods and worship only teriyaki marinade. She also brought a baguette that was still warm from the baker’s oven, and some carrots and honey which she combined into a tasty dish called “honey carrots”. After we shoveled the aforementioned into our gaping maws, we feasted on a selection of gourmet desserts, and then rolled ourselves onto the couch, where we sat moaning in pleasure for some time. When I had digested to the point that my stomach was no longer distended like a hot-air balloon, I requested and received Julia’s wonderful eggie in the basket, which I love with the intensity of a thousand suns.

Look out, food: I’m back, and I’m coming to get you.

Walking into work this evening was like wading into a veritable sea of diarrhea and low-grade fevers. I had twenty patients. TWENTY PATIENTS. What the fuck did y’all do tonight? Yeah, whatever. Whatever you did could not possibly step to what I did.

For all the times patients and their families pat me on the shoulder and thank me for my hard work, for all those genuine moments of intimacy I share with people and all the glory and love the job sometimes brings…sometimes it’s just a bunch of fucking bull shit. And, as we all know, shit rolls downhill, and the administration just does not care how difficult things get for its nurses or how the quality of care drops off when the staff is overworked.

I wouldn’t normally be posting this, but I’m somewhat drunk off of three-quarters of a beer and my veggie burger isn’t quite ready yet and I don’t have much else to do. Meh.

“Hi, dear, what can I get you?”

“Do you have tuna today?”

“I have everything.”

“A tuna sub, please.”

“What size?  Small?”

“How big is your small?”

“Oh, it’s big enough for you.”