tiens-moi serré.

i have that feeling i'm messing everything up. i cross too many bridges before i reach them.

i love st. vincent.

also, go find annie covering "dig a pony."

yesterday, two days after he had five seizures in quick succession, jen was told her 19 month old baby has a neurodegenerative disorder; progressive destruction of the myelin? something like that. it's hard to say exactly because she was hysterical when she called. but she did say it is progressing rapidly.

four weeks ago, she found out she was carrying twins. she was rubbing her belly unconsciously while she told me about it and i couldn't help but feel excited with her. she said she and her husband were very scared and glad, and her myspace page is still covered with happy, flashing graphics, and hope.

three weeks ago, at a routine ultrasound to determine due date, one of the twins in her womb was discovered to be dead. this week, she'll undergo genetic testing to see if the surviving twin also suffers from congenital problems since doctors don't yet know why her born son is dying. she will probably lose three children in one year at her age of 25.


i can't think of anything to say. sending flowers or a note seems completely pointless. like spitting at a house fire.

the woman who previously managed the histology department in my hospital just sent an email to the career related email ring thing. although i've never met her, i think she seems extremely stupid. also, she seems to have no problem tossing it around.

tossing it around?

jackie will probably put in her notice tomorrow. as god is my witness, dan will pay.


i shouldn't take sleeping pills. too late.

dream

johnny depp and his girl vanessa had a house next door. they'd come and open it up whenever they wanted to lay low and just let their kids be kids. johnny never showered while he was in town. he said it was to keep the water bill on the low side because vanessa took "a lot of baths."

one morning- it seemed like august - johnny came walking up the driveway swinging a golf club in one hand. he was wearing obscenely brief purple and pink striped silk shorts with no shirt, a black bathrobe, black knee socks and brown pirate boots. i figured he'd stolen them from the set and it struck me as pretty tacky.

soon, he and my brothers were digging through our art books, looking for pictures to copy and color. we were all in the family room and the television was playing a new sit-com starring andy dick as a wayward college student who was always trying to come up with new ways to cheat on tests. in the running episode, he'd written all the answers to his upcoming finals on the ceiling above his desk, but found himself in a funny pickle when the school ordered the bulldozers to knock down the old chem building saying it was a fire hazard.

johnny started tearing pages out of a big coffee table book on gauguin, saying he liked the women in the tropical pictures. just then, my mom walked in and snatched the book out of his hands. she didn't say a word, but she fixed him with her death look. he turned to my brother john and said, "can't slip nothing past that woman."

i was thinking he was wrong.

i rode a school bus with band kids yesterday. i sat with a girl who had an allergy to lactose and played the trombone. there was a boy with extremely short red hair to my left and two boys with very long brown hair in front of me. they knew i was listening.

red-haired boy (to shorter brown-haired boy) is your mom coming tonight?
shorter brown yeah.
red to tall brown his mom is hot. she's really hot.
tall brown to red what. you into old chicks?
red (ticked) she's not old! she's like...
short brown she's mom-age.


sixth graders.


today i went to the obama rally. i was one of the few white people in my section. the crowd did the wave to pass the time while we waited, although i feel really silly doing the wave and i just can't. instead, i smiled and nodded as if the whole thing were okay by me. they played the wil.i.am "yes we can" video on the big hanging thing. there was a lot of chanting and singing.

at times it reminded me of a prayer meeting.


since i went in the middle of my work day and had to go back once he was gone, i was dressed in my scrubs and had my i.d. badge clipped to my pocket. in that setting, it felt like a costume. i felt like i was playing the part of the hospital worker at a political rally in a scene in a movie.


although i've not seen "no country for old men" and probably will not, i had a nightmare this morning starring javier bardem. he was made of paper mache and scared the hell out of me. in fact, i'm not going to write about this dream at all.

my head is pounding front and back. someone removed my skull while i was asleep and returned it to the top of my spine, but screwed it back all botched and the threads are off and it's all crunched up and fucked. it'll fall off if the wind blows hard.

now i have to spend six hours with middle school band students, telling them no screaming and sit down and don't anything else etc. ugh.

today i received an email from a work-related email group which said:


Is there a gerbil expert out there?? I need to know if gerbils
have clitoral and prepucial glands.

TIA


i assume the last part means thanks in advance, although it made me think of tampa international airport. plus, i think prepucial is a spelling error but i'm not going to tell him.

some asshole will. some smegma will.



susan gave me more details on the thora dream, saying thora was very, very, very tall and her legs and arms were more like sticks or stalks or stilts or something. i thought of that marilyn manson video which makes it even more of a nightmare. in life, thora is tall and reminds me a of a giraffe, but the idea of extra long limbs are an image i have always had problems with.

she also said that when thora rinsed the placenta in the bowl of water, she could see a slow swirl of red blood spread. i could see it when she said it.


also, she cut the placenta with a white plastic fork and a white plastic knife. i love these details. i should draw this dream.


p.s. today really sucked.

p.p.s. thora is from iceland.

p.p.p.s. sleeping pill and a half.

another post i've edited 78 trillion times

and for what?

even the title. holy crap. i need to get away from this machine.

tomorrow could really suck. friday did, and i promised one of the docs i would not allow the same problems to happen again.


i would not allow. ha.


one of the great things about michele as a boss is the way she just takes care of issues, or says she will. i feel like i can tell her, michele this is wrong, and she always says, okay i'll take care of it. when she's gone, i have to troubleshoot all by myself because no one else seems too terribly concerned about whatever is going wrong and something always is, so i feel like i end up assuming responsibility for things i wouldn't normally be responsible over, or for.

okay, i exaggerate little bit, but only a little bit and wow that paragraph seems screwed up. let me read it quick.

no. i think i meant to say it that way, or it doesn't matter anyway.


the new person, sandra, might be an exception. she stared a long time at the stainer and ran through a list of possible reasons for our situation. it was sort of exhilarating because she's been working in the field since the early '70s and that's a hell of a long time. knowledge seems to have stuck to her in exactly the same way it seems to have been deflected from dan; which is to say perfectly.


DAN! GAH!


so i texted michele friday on my way home to thank her for hiring sandra. tomorrow, i'm going to tell sandra i'm starting her a fan club, because she actually helped me manage the mess and was very gracious and kind and humble. i want her to stay.


anyway, i'll have to keep one eye constantly on the automatic stainer because it's not working properly. plus, i already know evita overloaded us with blocks because jackie called me to say she filled two machines, which is ridiculous for a monday.

i really wish someone would talk to evita. i'm gonna need to take a sleeping pill tonight or i'll worry for the hours i should be asleep.


(i think evita mistakes herself for some sort of royalty. probably that god-complex thing is part of their training, but with her it's more of a bored goddess, too fabulous to learn to do things efficiently)


(bla bla bla bla bla)

i'm wearing my pink plaid rocket dog shoes. wooo.

susan texted me her dream from last night: she and i and thora, the pediatric fellow and inspiration for the fake band thora and the dead babies, were at work when thora went to break and started to eat a placenta. she first dipped it in some water to rinse away some of the formalin and told us it was her best source of protein for the week. susan and i were trying to hide how sick she was making us.

in my own dream from last night, i was working in a desert country, saudi arabia i think, at an oil refinery, although i was secretly working, along with two thugs, for a "big boss" who would send us messages to carry out his secret will. if you didn't do the job just right, you were killed by one of his goons, and although i'd never been told to kill anyone as a duty, i knew it was coming and i wanted to quit. so i took some baby and put it in a stroller to pretend to take it for a walk, but the baby was really a rolled up towel with a bonnet, and i got a call as i was walking out into the sand that i should have already gotten my plane tickets out of the country because the "big boss" knew i was running away and the killer was headed to find me even as i spoke on the phone. i pushed the baby stroller down a steep hill of sand, a dune i guess, only to find the line to the airport was miles and miles long. i saw someone i knew about a mile ahead of my spot, so i called and called his name to cut into line and maybe avoid being found by the killer.


i know.


i just read this:


"or if someone loves something with all his strength, so that nothing else pleases him except the beloved object, and if he yearns after this object and nothing else, then it is certain that wherever such a man may be, or in whatever company, or whatever he undertakes or performs, that which is beloved is never extinguished in him, and in everything he finds the image of the beloved object; and as his love grows stronger and stronger, so is the beloved more strongly existent for him. such a man does not search for rest because no unrest troubles him.

- meister eckhart, by franz pfeiffer, translated by c.de b. evans

the object could a person, i feel. can be.

the irish are hunting ghost nets.

my candidate will be in tampa on wednesday for a rally.

i've never called anyone "my candidate" before in my life.

i have a ticket because i've given him money. he'll be at the forum, which is maybe five or less minutes from the hospital. actually, it's so close i could walk. the doors open at 10:30 and the rally starts at noon. i've never been to such a thing before and i don't actually know for a fact that i'll be able to attend this one, because it would mean i'd have to leave work. i'll need permission for that and i can't ask for it till tuesday when michele comes back from the state meeting in fort lauderdale.

but...i want to go. almost desperately. maybe because i don't hold onto much anymore, and i confess he does make me feel a kind of hope. it's such a new feeling that i get really sort of breathlessly excited. but it's all a secret because i don't really believe in what i feel. i've seen too much to blatantly hope for good change.

and, frankly, i'm deeply afraid something is going to happen to him. not here; i don't mean that. i just mean i don't know how safe he will ever be in this country of racists. we've heard really very little of it over official news channels, but i'm painfully aware it's out there. just yesterday, work susan, my good friend, forwarded a picture message one of her god damned racist cousins in south or north or whichever carolina had sent out to everyone they knew, because they thought it was so funny. she said it was why she moved so far away from them and their thinking and i'm very unable to post it here because i find it so horribly offensive. o, i could, but the shame i would feel at being white and thus associated with the kind of person who would put those kinds of words on a public sign as if it were okay with everyone driving by...i can't do it. and there is a story in the st pete paper today, talking about the sort of anger volunteers for his campaign have faced. it's very frightening. and it's made me decide to do more than give money. i told them i'd work for them. doing what, i don't know. maybe just making calls. not that i'd enjoy that at all, but maybe i have to do things i don't enjoy because i almost believe in him. if nothing else, i do believe i want him to have a chance to try.

my summer issue of PARABOLA was in the box yesterday, with a banner on one edge singing NOW IN COLOR exactly like that. the issue is called "GOD."

honestly, i'm so confused on god and i'm secretly terrified to be confused because i was raised to believe hard that i'll go to hell if i question or doubt or, worse, don't believe. well duh on that last one, but it's very hard to shake the fears they wove into my heart. part of me thinks i'm headed there anyway - if the place is real my hell-chair has more legs than my heaven-chair - but part of me thinks everything i was taught (or lots of it) is so insane it can't be true.

i don't know why i'm bothering to talk about this. i'll have coffee instead. i don't see a sun outside, but there is light.

"everybody thinks everyone else is a hipster. nobody thinks that they could be that douche. but we are all that douche at one time or another."

- anon

i'm on-call with dr xie. so far, there has been a heart biopsy and she had me stay late last night to do a special stain for fungus and deeper cuts on some skin, although that was certainly not an on-call thing. i couldn't say no because her will is too strong and because she is one of my bosses.




"he was always enjoying things in advance; it was the make of him. he never could wait for the event, but he must build it out of dream-stuff and enjoy it beforehand--consequently sometimes when the event happened he saw that it was not as good as the one he invented in his imagination and so he had lost profit by not keeping the imaginary one and letting the reality go."

from the autobiography of mark twain which was edited by charles neider. the author is talking about his older brother, orion.

what i learned: reality schmeality


the quoted page had been marked with a note, which tells:

Dear friend

I send your a natural crystal hand chain in the

package

Represent my sincerity
Hope we have a long cooperation
You are a good friend
I thank you very much
Hope the product that you usually take a look at

me

Hope to bring me more buyers again
Sincere of
Bless you
Thanks

...from the clock seller in china, although i threw the natural crystal hand chain away. it was really heavy and i pretty much can't function with something on my wrist - they are retardedly sensitive - unless it's very, very light and delicate.


clearly i was held in bondage in the previous life.


(a natural crystal hand chain is actually round translucent plastic balls strung on an elastic band)


the nsh conference is in middle september this year, in pittsburgh. i'm thinking maybe i should go. i'd get a discount on air tickets and a discount on ridiculously expensive hotel rooms. possibly i'd be reimbursed for some (all?) of it by the hospital. i'm looking into the thing, even though the website says i'd have to dress in "business casual" and i'm not really sure what that is. i don't get why they care what i'm wearing. shitheads.


i'm all achy today; my neck my back my left hip. the sheets are screwed up off the bed and pillows are all over the floor.


savants are speaking in monotone on the teevee. amazing savant abilities may be lying dormant in all of us. see your doctor.

italic font hurts my eyes.


this is the haiku from my cat on mother's day:

Nice lady pets me.
Scoops the poop out of my box.
I call her mommy.

half-sun in the sky today. i hate the shirt i'm wearing.


for the horde.

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has- who knows so well as I?-
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

- robert graves

capital letters courtesy of the poet.

not a website of crime*

i have to stop being so hard on my fingers. i vow. i vow.

next weekend is jackie's belly dancing show. i have this suspicion that i'd damned well better show up or she'll hex me.

did i form that thought correctly? it doesn't seem to sound right, but i'm really too tired to give it a lot of thought. to think about the thought.

crap. being awake just now sucks.

*this one