Sleepless in LA

I just realized… this is my 10th year in college.  (Sigh)

Most people would’ve obtained their Ph.D. and then some after a decade at a university, but I guess you could say that I took the road less traveled.  Well, that’s really not accurate; I took a lot of detours on the way and had a few flat tires and accidents.

I really feel like I’m finally back on track.  Chemistry is challenging and mind-boggling, but I’m approaching it with the same fervor I had when I took chemistry for the very first time in the 10th grade.  After years of feeling stagnant, it feels like I am making some headway into the path I want to be on.  A sense of accomplishment does wonders for your self esteem.

It’s a little embarrassing to still be working toward a bachelor’s degree after 10 years in college, but I’m embracing all my shortcomings and bad lucks and chucking it up to a growing experience.  Some day, I’ll stop being a perpetual student…

I can’t post my research paper on Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.”  It’s a decent piece, I suppose, but for a piece that was supposed to have had more time and effort dedicated to it, it’s not something I can be proud of.  I could’ve done better, but the paper just dragged.  I get a good feeling about a piece of writing that I do when I can connect the dots… like a lightbulb that goes on.  You start brainstorming and all the brainstormed ideas turn into dots… a good paper comes in when you’ve thought it through enough that you start to connect the dots, and an explosive conclusion (which is one of the most critical points in any paper) happens when all the dot-connecting comes together into a Jackson Pollack-ish image.

For my research paper, I had some dots, but none were really connecting.  I think I needed more time for it to brew it my noggins.  It’s like a cup of coffee poured from the coffee press way too early — all the flavors are not quite captured.

I thrive better in a competitive environment.  I like it when instructors are challenging and critical (to an extent).  It provides a sense of drive for the entire class to move forward and a healthy dose of competition never hurt anyone.  But this was an online class, where I never saw any of my classmates.  I never saw any of my classmates’ papers and the comments/grades they got, and it brings about a lack of motivation for me.  I’ve actually read the poetry analysis, because they were posted on the web and we had to read two of our peers and comment on them.  A lot of them sucked.  Many were written in the first person format.  Many started off their essays with “I liked this poem” or “This was my favorite poem.”  For me to comment on an essay like that was no easy feat.

The worst was this one girl, who announced on the first days of class that she was a published writer, and yet had issues comprehending the instructor’s prompts on the papers we had to write.  Granted, the instructions for the class were hazy at best, but from the looks of her poetry analysis,  the only publication she could’ve gotten was having her letter printed in the Dear Abby section of the paper.

If I were to get a good grade on this research paper I wrote, I’d lose the small amount of respect I’ve had for this class.  It doesn’t do me any good (other than to raise my GPA) to have perfect 10s for grades on papers I personally feel shitty about.  I am, perhaps, my own critic.  But I know when I write a good piece of work that should deserve a high mark, and I know when I haven’t quite made the cut.

Lately, I’ve been a little cranky.

It all started with my birthday, and the lack of celebration.  First off, none of my friends were able to come up with a date to celebrate my birthday.  It would be one thing if such an event was never suggested in the first place, but it’s been nearly a month since I’ve come of age and the closest friends I’ve got haven’t seen each other.  Secondly, with the advent of text messaging, nobody called to congratulate me on my birthday.  I received a bunch of text messages, but apparently, I’m not worth wasting their breath on.

I just feel like I need to be loved.  I don’t feel like I register as a priority to anyone else.  I’m the girl who would always be there when you need her, so there’s no urgency to hang out.  It’s sad.  I think I carry a large empty bowl.  Nay, a bowl is too elegant of a vessel; I carry a large empty bucket.  It could be filled with meaningful relationships and the love and care other people have for me, but it’s empty.

Am I just a snotty broad destined to live and die alone?  Maybe.  We’ll see.

I had a moment of pride swell up.  I like to think of myself as a writer, but in reality, I haven’t written much at all since… well, for a good few years now.  I think I peaked when I took my last English Lit class… it covered from Beowulf and Chaucer to Swift and Pope, and I found that it really is my favorite chunk of literature.  Then I was motivated to write, and what I lacked in fine technique and organization, I made up for with brute force — I punched out word after word, and if I had spoken out loud that much, I would’ve gotten a whole lotta “can anyone shut that gal up?”

This blog isn’t exemplary of my finest written work, of course.  This is my writing in the rough, unrevised, unfiltered!  And it’s been a while since I passionately typed away on my antediluvian keyboard.  My keyboard requires good strength to press the keys; the newer ones are so sensitive to pressure that sometimes just resting my fingers on them presses the keys and I don’t like that.  And mine’s loud.  It really makes the art of writing seem livelier and more exciting when you’ve got a steady soundtrack of fingers clucking away on plastic.

The last few years I’ve been busy.  In prior years, I spent too much time with my PC.  I had so much time that I even beefed up my blog by designing my own website, and pursuing a career (albeit a brief stint) in webdesign!  And I wrote.  I wrote about stuff.  Any stuff.  But nursing really seemed counterintuitive to a writer.  In nursing, complete sentences are discouraged.  Segues are unncessary.  Nobody spells out anything.  The last absurd abbreviation I’ve seen was “ATC.”  I had to ask around for that one.  Finally, a pharmacy tech told me it stood for “around the clock.”  As in “Pls give Ativan 1mg IVP q 4 ATC start now.”   It’s sad.

Another thing was that nursing ate up a lot of time.  Nursing school, especially.  Between going to lectures and clinical rotations and working to pay for my school habit, I was pooped and did not have the energy to punch out words on my keyboard.  And of course the result was that I was a very frustrated and unhappy individual those two years.

Although it’s been 1.5 years since I graduated, I still find nursing to be anti-writing.  After a long 12 hour shift, I don’t even have the energy to sit upright, much less type or think.  But last night, I was inspired.  Even though I had about 5 hours of sleep a night the last week or two due to the Olympics being on so late and needing to wake up early for work, I sat in front of my comp and wrote out over 1700 words in homage to Michael Phelps.  Surely if writing (in quantity) was a sport, I’d be making records.  I’m not saying all of it’s good, because I wasn’t even attempting to write well.  I was just writing for the sake of writing.

And today, I will have to write some more.  I have a much-procrastinated research paper due tomorrow by midnight.  Since I’ll be at the Dodgers game tomorrow evening, my deadline comes even earlier.  Four to Five pages analyzing a short story, contemp, of course.

For my selection, I have chosen “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien.   Two reasons: Number one, because I am familiar with the story.  Rather than to pick out something totally foreign, I picked this one, because I was supposed to have read it in the 10th grade for English class.  While most kids perused the Cliff Notes or other aids, I found Cliff Notes to be much too lengthy… it’s almost like doing more work than needed to get the job done, and I’m never for something like that.  No… I just asked around dependable classmates who had actually done the reading, eavesdropped in discussions during lunch and breaks, and during class discussions, I managed to connect the dots and appear to have carefully studied the piece on my own.  I’m pretty good at stuff like that.  Not proud of it, but hey, it’s a survival skill for an overachieving high schooler in an academically competitive pool.

Second reason was to redeem myself.  In the 10th grade, I’ve never even opened the story.  I remember, because I’m looking at the first lines now and it’s completely foreign to me.  I remember back in the 10th grade, being surprised that the story was actually about the stuff soldiers carried.  It wasn’t some strange metaphorical title.  The story is relatively straight forward, about what guys carried.  So this time, I’ll actually read it, study it, research about it, and then write a 4-5 pager on it.  Redeem myself from the way I cheated out of work back in high school.  Sounds like a plan to me.

Except I’m a little hesitant to get started.  It’s Monday.  There’s a reason why I never choose to work Mondays (as a RN, I get that luxury).  Manic Mondays.  I’m not a manic person and just hate that the week begins like that.  So I’d rather work hard on the weekends for the sake of an easy start on Monday.  Yeah, it really doesn’t matter what day of the week it is… if the work week begins for you on Friday, then theoretically, it’s manic Friday for you.  But I digress.

I’ve had my morning coffee, which is kind of unusual because I’ve learned to skip the morning dose on a regular basis.  Nursing requires that I kick off my day at a 100 miles and hour (quite literally, since that’s how fast I drive to work to avoid being TOO late).  No time for coffee.  But anyway. Hopefully the shot of caffeine can help me breeze through this exercise of literary analysis.  This may very well be the last English paper I write forever… at least for the rest of my undergrad career.  This is my last general education requirement.  The last non-math, non-science class I will be taking.  It does kind of stink that it was such a poor excuse of a class (on-line course that was extremely poorly executed) and that the topic was contemp lit which I did not enjoy much at all.  But regardless, it’s the last class.  The last paper.  Gotta go write it. No more procrastination.

Go.

In the recent few days, I’ve been very vocal about my adoration for the incredible athletic phenom, Michael Phelps.  For those who have lived under a rock in the last two weeks or so, he is what is referred to as “the most winningest Olympian athlete” of all time.  He’s a U.S. swimmer who has competed in 17 races, 8 of which were for medals.  Out of the 8 races for the medal, he’s won the gold in all 8, 7 of them in world record.  “Eight-for-eight” is another phrase that is associated with him.

Numbers are one thing; watching the phenom in action is quite another.  He blows the competition out of the water.  He is in a league of his own.  His body is an efficient machine that glibly glides across the water at break neck speed.  His amazing wingspan of 6′7″ divides the water into streams.  Before he jumps into the water, his eyes twinkle with determination and an unbelievable amount of focus, especially for a man who as a child was diagnosed with ADHD.

Obviously the man’s physique is one of the first things that draws the eye.  It’s finely chiseled like a Greek marble, and one can just imagine the guy outswim a dolphin by looking at his streamlined body.  But that isn’t all the reasons why I have a celebrity crush on Michael Phelps.

Phelps is an inspiration.  It made me realize the obtuse lull my own life has taken.  I’ve set goals for my life as well and have been working constantly to reach it.  Many people have discouraged me because my primary goal is one that is time consuming and unworthy of such efforts (for them, anyway).  I have always claimed that the journey is more important.  And it is.  People have asked me if I were to die mere months before reaching my goal, if it would have been worth it.  And I have always responded with much confidence that I cannot imagine myself regretting the direction I have taken for my life, because I find each and every day of the journey just as important as the destination.

But why am I in such awe of Phelps?  It could be because instead of giving it my all every day, I’ve sat on my ass and watched too much telly and pumped my body full of nasty fried junk food and the most inorganic man-made materials.  In the travels of life, you only get one vehicle and you should really care well for your body.  You only get one body and while I don’t think I’ll ever have the physical prowess that Phelps has, physical fitness is one that everyone can and should strive for.

Physical fitness aside, I haven’t trained like an Olympian.  A writer should write.  A scholar should study.  A swimmer should swim.  Phelps swam.  I don’t do my thing.  There’s a difference in being good, which I am, and being great, which Phelps is.  And I believe I have what it takes to be great.  But I do believe I lack the motivation that can push one to greatness.

One might argue that I’m just living life as a regular human being… at any rate, I do much more than the average joe.  I hold down a full time career and a full time course load at school, and still manage to squeeze in more time with the telly than the average joe does!  A lot of people tell me that I’m amazing.  I appreciate the compliments, but remain humble and rightly so.

Phelps excels in the freestyle, the breaststroke, and the butterfly (he’s fabulous in the others too, but I feel that those are his strong points).  The breaststroke is supposed to be his weakest point, but that really doesn’t hinder the guy from going for the gold.  He’s even good as a member of a team, as shown in the relays.  I, too, can be great at my job and be great in school and still manage a wonderful relationship with my mom as Phelps does with his.  But I don’t give it my all in all the things I do.  Well, except watch TV.  Hell, if that were a sport, I could easily make world records too.  Unfortunately for me, watching TV isn’t a sport recognized by the Olympic federation (or whatever the determining organization is called).

To those tuning into just the Olympics, it may seem as though Phelps just swims and makes world records.  But behind the scenes, he’s swum hardcore for four years in preparation for Beijing.  Four years before that he swum for another four years in preparation for Athens.  And before that he trained to join the US Olympic swim team.  I’m sure before that he put in great efforts to make the swim version of the little leagues.  He wasn’t born swimming the 200m freestyle in  1:42.96 (WR). He didn’t win every race he participated in, not even in the last Olympics held in Greece.  He worked his way up.

Am I really expecting to reach my goal all of a sudden without striving each hour of my life for each milestone?  I must be kididng myself.  Greatness must come straight out of honed discipline.  I can’t expect to wake up years from now having reached my goal when I haven’t toiled and hauled ass.  I can only expect to go so far with luck and genes and naive optimism.

Lately I’ve been dragging my feet to work, arriving late, charting half-assedly, and providing the bare minimally competent patient care.  I’ve always been <a href=”http://cafeloo.com/?p=1920″>Ibuprofen</a>.  I put in the bare minimum amount of juice needed to acquire the desired result.  That’s why I am not great.  I’m just good.  Sometimes I’m just barely OK.  I shouldn’t be OK with that.  This summer I’ve really dragged my feet with my final GE courses.  I’ve complained.  I’ve whined.  I’ve left assignments until the last minute.  I could’ve analyzed the hell out of those Postmodern (aka Pomo) short stories.  But I only wrote papers upto a level I felt the instructor designated as an “A.”  Could’ve really blown people away with my poetry analyzing skills.  Could’ve exercised my critical writing abilities.  Nope.  Didn’t do it.

Another Phelps trait I have to admire is his human-ness.  Although he’s frequently compared to various fish and marine mammal species, he’s very human in terms of how he deals with things.  He’s genuinely likable from his interviews.  He’s a celebrated athlete who has done the near-impossible, every barrier that existed.  He could’ve afforded a bit of cockiness, but he’s grounded and humble, but not upto the point of annoying people.  He graciously accepts his medals with genuine joy.  He is celebratory and embraces each of his successes with pride.  And then he goes and hugs his mom and calls her his hero.  I’m hardly that likable.  I’m more dislikable than likable, in many ways.  I’m too modest and arrogant at the same time.  And I can’t afford either of those things, since I don’t have any world record titles to my name.  Ha.

Any job worth doing is a job worth doing well.  If I’m going to do something, I might as well be the best at it.  Those are words I tell myself over and over, but somehow they haven’t quite sunken in.

I’ve never been an athlete.  I’ve never really even enjoyed sports, watching or doing.  I’m a shameful disgrace on the field or in the courts.  I’ve served tennis balls into the backs of peoples heads.  I’ve sprained both my thumbs (at the same time!) playing volleyball, and both my pinky fingers playing softball (thus grotesquely shortening them and diminishing any violin skill I possessed).  Since the days of high school gym, I’ve stayed away from anything that involves a ball or places a stick in my hands (because it can potentially become a weapon of ineffective but still dangerous destruction).

But what I find fascinating with swimming, as well as a few other sports which carry the similarities, is that it is essentially a race against yourself.  You’re your own competitor, and your only competitor.  You just gotta jump in the pool and swim the fastest that you possibly can.  It really doesn’t matter too much whether Milorad Cavic swims a hundredth of a second faster than you or slower than you.  All you do is swim the fastest you can go.  Unless you decide to be fowl and do something to sabotage another athlete’s race, you really don’t make any impact on anyone else’s race, as they don’t make any impact on yours.  You don’t spike a volleyball fast and hard in a sharp angle so that the opponent doesn’t get a chance to make a play for it.  You don’t swing a bat and hit a home run that can’t be caught by the left fielder.  You don’t dribble a basketball away from your opponent or knock it out of his hands as he tries to make a shot.

It’s the same in life.  Eventually, it just comes down to doing the best you can do, and then trying your darnest to outdo yourself.  The cheese stands alone.  Phelps is one heck of a cheese.  He’s like <a href=”http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/18/214808.php”>Moose Milk Cheese</a> ($500 per pound).  I’m like a Kraft Singles.

I am motivated and that’s another thing Phelps does.  It’s exceptional to see such a young guy carry himself in the way that he does, all while sweeping the race for the medals in a seemingly effortless manner.  I felt small watching him on my even smaller television screen.  He embodied what a human being can do, and I’m not just talking about his fantastic dolphin kick.  It’s evident that he has practiced long and hard to get to the place that he’s at, and he will practice even harder to make his performance even more perfect.  He says he wants to go home to Baltimore and get just 5 minutes to himself, after the overwhelming schedule he’s had in Beijing; I have no doubt that this 6′4″ giant will take no time to jump back in the pool to train for his next swim meet.

He is admirable and  inspirational.  I don’t know if I’ll ever experience the human pinnacle that he has reached and will surpass.  But I am motivated to be all that I can be.  And I don’t mean join the US Army.  And that’s what I meant by the Michael Phelps Phenomenon.

I am a Phelps Phan.

Just got through watching the gut-wrenching 200 m swim in the Beijing Olympics, where Michael Phelps won his 9th Gold Medal, 3rd in this Olympics… 3 for 3.

His mom was sitting in the stands… she looked like she was about to burst a brain aneurysm! His body is just so efficient… it’s almost surreal that a human body works so well in water.  It looks like he gets around better and faster in water than on dry land.  He’s a tad cocky too, but with good reason.  If you’re constantly breaking World Records (some of which are your own!), you kinda get to be a little cocky.

Man, oh man, Michael Phelps is just red hot!

Ibuprofen: “The smallest effective dose should be used.”

I am utilizing my on-line class time to blog.  As if discussing contemporary literature (aforementioned short stories) ad nauseum wasn’t enough, the class crawls across time at the slowest pace ever, dragging every minute out.  I get by paying about a quarter of my attention… usually I use the time to iron my scrubs, dry my hair, watch TV, or surf the web.  Occasionally I glance at the screen and type up some commentary to feign interest in the topic being discussed.

Which got me thinking… I don’t usually try my best at anything.  I’ve been told, any job worth doing is a job worth doing well, but really, I just do the bare minimum to achieve what I deem desirable.  I am ibuprofen: I do the smallest amount of work for the desired effect.  So  I never really get the most out of an activity because I do it without the passion and zeal.  I’ve been blessed with an intelligence that allows me to do a job half-assed and still make out alright.  I agree, there have been things in my life I’ve had to struggle to accomplish — sure — but compared to the rest of my life, those are far and few in between.

I wonder if my life would change for the better if I really tried my best at all that I did.  Instead of showing up to work late and just getting the tasks done, wake up early and really work hard.  Rather than to throw my socks on the floor after I take them off, promptly put them in the hamper.  Stop nibbling on junk food with the fridge door open, wondering what to eat, and fix myself a good meal.  Sounds better, but also sounds like more effort too.  But how much more effort is required?  I feel like much of my effort is diffused by procrastination and trying to get out of trying harder.  If I stopped procrastinating, would the work really just be the same?

Procrastination is a psychological barrier.  It’s just hard to get over it… I really don’t know.  I see people who work hard and always try to make the best of things, even if it is something as simple as putting socks in the hamper.  Their lives seem much better… they’re more organized and more efficient, and they still have time to play too.  I don’t know why I get in the habit of comparing myself with others all the time.  And I’m rambling… maybe I’ll fix myself that nice meal now.

I turned 28 today.  I have a hard time aging because of my issues with mortality.  Let’s face it; when people get old, eventually they die.  It’s one of the two certainties in life: death and taxes.  Let’s just say, taxes, I can deal with (despite the fact that they take off a good third of my paycheck!).

But after turning 28, it didn’t feel too bad.  The sky was sunny as always, my desk was still just as messy, and my walk-in closet is still un-walk-in-able.  I still liked to sleep in and I still felt hungry, and coffee in the morning still tasted spectacular.  Could it be that life just goes on as it always had?  Other than the ground-shaking quake from Tuesday, everything seemed as it were.

I thought about it and came to the conclusion that turning 28 was better than turning 27, because I am finally at a place I can come to terms with.  I have a pretty good job, one that I’m not ashamed to tell people about… I’m well on my way to getting a B.S. and I weigh 20 pounds less than I did exactly last year.  Last year, my life was full of unmended questions.  Would I ever work as a nurse? Would I ever get my green card?  Would my life turn out even remotely as I’d like it to?  But now, some of those answers have been squared away, and I am on a path, going places I want to go.  So turning 28 was considerably easier on my soul than turning 27.

I’m 28 years old.

If there’s a genre of writing I hate more than poetry, it’s short stories.  I guess it’s not so much a genre, but a type of writing.  I like some poems, but it’s rare.  I hate almost all short stories.  I think writers who write short stories (fiction) are those who can’t commit to writing something longer.  Poets, too.  I hate poems that go on for pages and pages.  That’s worse!  You just can’t go on for pages and pages writing in brief segments of phrases segmented in awkward ways.  But that’s just my point of view.

I like the long stuff.  Les Miserables.  Gone with the Wind.  Even the Da Vinci Code.  Is a word from East of Eden worth any less than a word from Emily Dickinson?  Just by mathematical equivalencies, Steinbeck outweighs Dickinson, no?  There are some poets I can appreciate though.  Sylvia Plath, for one — although I think it’s more about my beliefs that all young, female, confused, conflicted writer wannabes need to be engrossed with Plath at one time or another.  e e cummings is an interesting one.  Shakespeare is I guess best known as a playwright but he’s cooked up some nice sonnets in his day.

But either way, anyway, any how, whatever, writers should flat out write what they mean, preferably in complete sentences.  Yeah, you can try all you want to be artsy fartsy, but if it don’t make no sense, you’ve just wasted your breath.  No way, no how I can appreciate something like that.

On the other hand, I’ve learned that I can still muster up a sizeable chunk of literary analysis — of fairly good quality too — whether in regards to short stories or poems.  Most of it, I feel is BS that is eloquently written.  Even though I analyze them as though I feel they’re worthy to be analyzed, what I really feel is that they’re commitmentphobes.

It doesn’t feel too great to be so negative.  But I knew from the beginning that contemporary literature and I wouldn’t get along.  The first novel I’ve ever read (unabridged) was Jane Eyre in the 5th grade, and that was the kind of thing I’ve grown accustomed to enjoy.  Well, the class is only 6 weeks long.  I suppose I can grin and bear it.

Currently, I am reading the New Testament of the Bible (I finished the Old a couple of years back — it’s time to finish the tome).  I guess that’s kind of an anthology of short stories, too.  Blech.

I took an art history class this summer.  I normally enjoy art history, but this one wasn’t all that enjoyable.  It was okay.  Just okay.  But it did inspire me to visit LACMA and MoCA.  LACMA is having an exhibition called “The Art of Imagination” which holds Japanese art.  It’s a pretty good collection of scrolls and wall partition thingis.  I even bought a postcard of a painting of a tiger.  It’s very stylized and detail oriented and just beautiful!  Learned that I liked Japanese art… especially the netsukes.

In terms of art, I am able to enjoy ancient and “older” art more so than modern/contemporary art.  In fact, I cannot understand most post-modern/contemporary art at all.  I visited the MoCA today.  The exhibition of Marlene Dumas’ “Measuring your own grave” was interesting, but everything else was pretty much over my head.  Especially the sculptures!  What are those things and what on god’s green earth is it supposed to signify?

In the art history class, I felt pressured to agree that Jackson Pollack’s “Lucifer” is a work of art, but deep down, I still feel as though it could easily be duplicated by a child with ADHD.

I have moved on from the art class, and into an English class.  I am taking one on contemporary fiction — not my favorite genre, but this is going to be my last G.E. class, which means it may very well be my final English class of my college career.  I tend to do alright in English classes, but I can feel myself being out of that loop.  I haven’t taken a writing-intensive English class in ages!  And I haven’t written anything significant in the last year or perhaps even more.

We had to write a diagnostic essay, which would tell the instructor what our relative writing level is.  I had a great deal of trouble writing the diagnostic essay.  It’s been so long since I wrote any kind of literary analysis that I just simply forgot how to write’em.  The prompt stated to write a mere 250 words, so it didn’t take too long, but when it was all done, I read it and it felt pedantic and flat.  I felt I could’ve written something better.  I never liked literary analysis and technical writing like that, but more often than not, I am satisfied with the paper I’ve written.  I can see that this course is going to be a steel uphill one.

On the other hand, I must’ve picked up new vocabulary from somewhere, because I was typing the diagnostic (I usually write my essays straight onto my computer, without any outlines, which is a pretty bad process) and out popped the word “unbeknownst.”  It was weird.  I don’t think I’ve ever used that word in a sentence, spoken or written.  I was quite baffled by its presence on the white pseudo-paper on the screen.  Where did it come from?  Do I even know what it means?  Did I use it correctly in the sentence?  I quickly looked it up in dictionary.com and it turns out, I did use it correctly, and I do know what it means.  It was a strange phenomenon indeed, but I liked it and kept it in the paper.  It felt very renaissance English, but then again, I usually write like a person who should’ve lived and died centuries ago anyway.

Other than that, life has been pretty mundane.  I was squeezing in a lot of overtime at the hospital, hoping to create a little financial cushion, but my immigration attorney’s office e-mailed me a notice saying that I need to renew my work permit and that it would cost in the neighborhood of $850.  I also found out that two weeks after I purchased my Macbook, Apple started to give away a free iPod with the purchase of a Macbook.  So I was doubly bummed, as expected.

I’ve decided to stop doing overtime at the hospital.  I love money, but I just signed up for 14 units for the fall semester and I’m going to need all the rest I can get.  Also, I’ve gained a stalker — a former patient has been stalking me.  It has not been fun filing reports and whatnot to take care of the situation.  Long story short, it seems one cannot file a restraining order unless the perpetrator says or does something to you.  My coworkers and boss have been very supportive in the matter, but with the extra work and all, it’s really been stressful.  More reasons why I need to work less.

New word I heard today: Uncomfort.  Apparently, some people think that much like “unrelevant,” uncomfort is a valid word.

Uncomfort describes how I feel right now, however.  I am typing on my new Macbook, which arrived yesterday.  I am excited, but a little befuddled.  I realized that going from a two button mouse to a one button system would be confusing, but the whole Mac system is bewildering.  Irregardlessly, it is a new gadget and I am having fun figuring out the ins and outs of this thing.

The most bothersome thing of all is that the keyboard is stark white and I am deathly afraid of dirtying it with my filthy hands.  Nurses are prone to being severe germaphobes.  I often feel as though no amount of hand-washing with antibacterial soap is capable of completely cleansing the filth and germs off my hands.  Another current issue is that I do not have MS Office yet.  A good friend is donating a copy to me but that will be next Thursday.  

It was weird.  I thought I’d be overjoyed when the laptop finally arrived.  It took me almost two years to finally decide on the brand, the model, and muster up the courage to make the actual purchase.  But when I got the machine and powered it on, I was like…. “so now what?”  And really, now what?  What spectacular thing on this computer was I going to do anyway?  I opened up Garage Band, took a look at Safari, and … “eh.”  It’s not that I hate Macs.  But in all honesty, I have to acknowledge the fact that the only real reason I had for purchasing a Mac is because it’s beautiful on the outside.  It definitely is much more streamlined and prettier and lighter than most of the PC laptops out there.  But what else?  Did I pay several hundred dollars more for something pretty when something cheaper would’ve easily sufficed?  

I hear it all the time.  Hard core PC users convert to Macs and they are sold.  They love Macs.  They hate PCs now that they’ve converted.  I consider myself a very hardcore PC user indeed.  So far, I still remain skeptical of the alluring powers of the Mac.  I’ve heard that it’s faster, but I don’t really think it’s necessarily faster than my PC.  I can see my PC over on my desk, fuming with fury.  I’ve betrayed it.  I am cheating on my PC; the pain’s gotta be worth it.

There’s a learning curve with the Mac.  I expected it.  I did plenty of research before plunging in — I am nothing, if not careful and calculating.  I did decide that even if this laptop was nothing but a pretty face, it would be okay, because it weighs only 5 lbs and its portability will make up for anything else.  I can do the bulk of the work on my beloved PC.  Bulky, yes.  But my PC has been a reliable companion on the road of life.  

I will have to do an updated review of the Macbook in a while, of course.  I say it may just be nothing more than a pretty face, but I wouldn’t judge it by its covers.  I’ll give it a chance to grow on me.  And as my friend Mario always tells me, “now you can write your next book.” (I did tell him numerous times that “next” book is misleading; I’ve never written a book, per se, although I have written enough words to fill numerous volumes.)

Today I’ve re-potted my plants.  Moved them to larger pots, so they can grow.  I am doing well so far — none of my plants have died yet.  I am notorious for being a plant killer.  For some reason, they become deathly ill in my presence.  I am growing a cactus (low maintenance) and an English lavender (fairly low maintenance).  I’ve planted some basil and daisies.  They’ve just sprouted, but we’ll see if they’d thrive.  

I’ve killed so many plants.  But right now, I am doing all that I can.  Raising plants, apparently, is just not my forte.  But sometimes we need to place ourselves in situations of “uncomfort” so that we can challenge ourselves and grow in ways we never could’ve.  

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Speaking of comfort… funny story.

I had a Spanish-only patient the other day, and she spoke no English.  She looked so tired of lying in bed all day, I decided to get her up and sitting in a chair next to the bed.  She was obese so it was no easy feat for either of us.  It’s hard for a person to balance their massive weight on their feet when they’ve been bedbound for weeks.  

After I get her in the chair, I ask her in my best Spanish, “Estas comida?”

Comoda is comfortable.  Comida is food.  

I had asked the patient if she was food.  

The patient and the patient’s daughter laughed, because they knew I wasn’t exactly fluent in Spanish.  Rather than be embarrassed, I was glad, because it made them laugh and I think they needed a good laugh.  So maybe I shouldn’t be so judgmental on the girl who said that she was in “uncomfort” — at least she didn’t say she was food!