Things I want to say

Thing #1. Working three days in a row sucks for me, but is awesome for my patients. Continuity of care really goes a long way, by the third day I practically could have taken care of them blindfolded, which meant I had more time to give backrubs and hold hands. So that part was good. But boy was I pooped! Actually it was the night after the second day that was the worst, knowing I had to come back again. The third night I was actually a little wired knowing I'd finished my first long weekend and now had four days off to look forward to.

I also had another "trouble" patient who gave me absolutely no trouble at all, except for getting caught smoking in the bathroom. But he was having a simultaneous attack of both the shingles and acute gout, so even though I made him promise me he wouldn't do it again (using the whole "there is oxygen in the room and the entire floor could explode!" line of reasoning) I still could understand him wanting to get a little relief any way he could.

Thing #2. I'm still trying to talk David into coming to work at the hospital as a tech. He came home with another big bruise, which actually doesn't bother me because he will bruise if you look at him too hard, but still I'm taking whatever ammunition I can. He still has these nasty looking scratches down his hands which make me angry everytime I see them, even though I know his kids are challenged and can't always help it. Everyday he comes home and tells me about yet another random person he barely knows in the school who comes up to him in a hallway and tells him they are hearing really good things about him. Which means that not only is everyone noticing his awesomeness, but they are talking about it amongst themselves. Yesterday someone came to his room and started handing out mysterious envelopes to all the adults. Someone got spooked and asked "What are these about?" and another girl said "Don't worry, David got one so it must be about something good!" But as much as I know he deserves the compliments (I have no doubt that if he stayed there long enough they would make him principal, he really is that awesome at what he does), I wish they would stop so he'd leave sooner. As long as they keep stoking his ego it is making my job of getting him to quit all that much harder.

Thing #3. I made the mistake of watching Leonard DiCaprio in "The Beach" on television yesterday. As much as the second half of the movie is totally lame, it still made me super nostalgic for my own days of adventuring through Thailand and Cambodia. I want to take a nice big trip so bad, and I know it is realistically going to be a while. Not only do I need to get my student loans paid off, and the intention is to do so in far less than the ten years they give you, but our next vacation is pretty much set. My little brother is doing a semester internship thing at Disneyworld, so we are going to drive down next spring and see him and his girlfriend (who also got the internship) and the parks all at the same time. With any luck more family will be able to make it too. But we aren't going home for the holidays (I don't want to end up a statistic of someone who was stranded in an airport for three days, and you know those stories are coming, even the airlines are predicting that), and while several of my family members have made it to see us here (in fact my parents are coming again this weekend) I haven't been to Idaho to see his family in, what, a year and a half now? Plus his sister just had a new baby and we are both dying to see the little tyke. (Christine, if you are reading this, isn't it about time you emailed out some pictures???) So that is a trip that is going to have to happen, probably next summer/fall sometime.

But I'm dreaming of Machu Picchu. Or even Paris. After Christmas my preceptor is leaving for South Africa to do a two week gig teaching local nurses how to care for HIV/AIDS patients, so I'm hating on her with jealousy right now. I even literally had a dream that I took her and my manager to Singapore, and in the dream was so excited that I got to share with them the smell of equatorial Asia. (There is a smell, it smells like, well, green, and even though you can only smell if for like five minutes when you first get there, it is one of the most powerful and fricking awesome smells I've ever known.) I also want to go back to Asia, I want to take David to Cambodia and, especially, Angkor Wat. I want to take cooking classes in Thailand (banana pancakes!) and go on an elephant trek and ride the Meekong through Laos and go to Halong Bay in northern Vietnam. I don't need to do the whole "find myself" tour again, that was what my last trip was for. Now I just want to have the adventure, and to share it with David. ::sigh:: For Christmas all I want is lottery tickets. Strike that. For Christmas all I want is winning lottery tickets. (It is best to be specific when you visualize.)

Thing #4. Skip this thing if you aren't a musical theatre nerd, but I'm in that in-between stage with my dreams, where slowly I'm having fewer dreams of being on stage and more and more dreams about being in the hospital. But the other day I dreamed that I'd gone back to LA and was putting on an encore performance of "Crazy For You" that I did 1996. During the show I looked out and saw Elmarie Wendell in the audience, and I got all super excited, and as soon as the show was over I ran out in the parking lot to find her, and I couldn't find her (but I did tell Tracy Lore that I'd be right back to talk to her) but finally I saw her and then I woke up as I was running up to her. I once did "Gigi" with Elmarie, and unless you are a nerd and know her from the original cast album of "Little Mary Sunshine" she played the landlady on "Third Rock From The Sun". How she found her way into my unconciousness twelve years later is a total mystery, but I think it is totally fabulous that I am having fanboy dreams about Elmarie Wendell. I'm a total nerd, and I love it.

Thing #5. How crazy is it that the Hollywood writers and NY stagehands go on strike at the same time? I'm curious about the stagehands, of all the Broadway unions they are undoubtably the strongest. But it is interesting watching public opinion. I think the stagehands have it crazy good compared to anyone else, so my sympathy isn't as strong as, say, it was for the musicians when they went on strike when I was on Broadway. But while I have more sympathy for writers, who I think should get royalties for internet usage of their work, I'm going to be very sad when they run out of episodes of "Pushing Daisies".

But can I just pick a bone here? All the sudden everyone is shouting the sky is falling and how we are just going to be overwhelmed with reality TV. And I ask, what the heck is wrong with that? If we get a lot more, of course much of it is going to be crap, but there will be some cream in there too. I have no interest in watching the lowest-common-denominator type of reality TV either, making people eat bull testes or get drunk and make out with each other. Too easy, too boring. But what isn't fantastic about watching real live people use their smarts to win a challenge, or to find the fastest way of driving from Amsterdam city to some outlying farm (yes I am watching Amazing Race and yes it is awesome as usual), or singing, or dancing, or whatever it is that they do really well. Real people are far more interesting that watching yet another person get killed in spectacularly bloody and perverted fashion and then watch Gary Sinise find the bad guy. Yawn. I don't want to watch more fake lawyers, or fake doctors, or silly sitcoms. The fact that I think "Pushing Daisies" is the best new show on TV since, well, "Wonderfalls", must tell you a little something about my tastes for the odd and the clever and the interesting. And scripted TV is rarely odd or clever or interesting. Maybe the first season of "Lost", mostly because of the whole deserted island thing, which I thought was way more awesome than the monsters and ghosts and unending conspiracies that the show has now embraced.

I have more autobiographies on my book shelf than anything else. Real people are awesome. Not "Girls Gone Wild" people maybe, but I'd rather watch a fabulous person remodel a house or cook a crab-cake hot dog or whatever then watch the latest rip-off of "LA Law" or "St. Elsewhere" or "Hill Street Blues". (And though I'm too young to know, I'm sure those were all rip-offs of something else themselves.)

Of course, I'd rather go scuba dive off of the Galpagos Islands than watch TV, but we don't always get our first choice.

Anyway, that is enough Things for today. David will be home soon and we are going to go on a nice long walk tonight, because it warmed up and we want to take advantage of the nice weather while it lasts.