December 2007 Archives

Ok..did some detective work and figured out the commenting. Now everyone not associated with Movabletype or Typepad can comment without having to register.

Anyone still out there? I need some attention. I'm a whore.

12/30 Update: Of course anyone can comment now but as these things happen, now the comments are showing when you click on them. I've employed the help of the Movabletype elves to help me figure it out (something about the mapping of the archives...blahbiddy, blah, blah, blah). Stay tuned. Almost there.

Past experiences have supported the idea that me being left home alone for any amount of time, but certainly after three days, will always lead to something. This morning, fed up with spending a whole day cleaning out the attic to make room for my Martha Stewart Living magazine collection (don't judge!), I needed to take measures. If I was a 14-year old girl, I bet I would have been a cutter. As it stands, at 37, I grab the trimmers and buzz my hair.

Friday I ended my 12-year run at a large academic medical center in New York City. I started out as a nurse in the ER after moving into the city to live with Jeff and continued through the hospital as a nurse in the cath lab then a research coordinator and then slowly falling into more managerial and administrative jobs. I finished with three years of a directorship under my belt, an MBA, and some great experiences. The thought of leaving made me sick to my stomach...the idea of a sense of belonging, of knowing my environment, of the safety of where I was and what I knew.

But I need more and I need to see what is on the other side of the grassy hill. In my quest for being better this year, I've tried to embrace risk both personally and professionally and so I decided it was time to seek other adventures.

I'm taking two weeks off then jumping head-first into a corporate consulting gig that will have me whirling around the US most of the time. Something so completely different and foreign to anything I've know before but I'm not only thrilled and excited but strangely less anxious and panicked. I take this as a good sign that I'm on the right path.

"Do you want a free condom? They're boysenberry flavored. My boyfriend uses one every time we have sex and it makes his junk smell like pie."
-Disenfranchised chicklet working the front desk of the abortion clinic

Juno is hilarious in the best way possible. When it goes into wide release, go see it.

Not exactly sure what I tinkered with under the hood around here but for some reason, I can't get the authorized signing in for the comments to disappear. I'm still trying to figure out and tweak stuff in the guts to get it back. Sorry.

They cut the cast off today and while there were no maggots, there was a lot of grossness that a good couple days of exfoliating needs to work over. I'm also, for lack of a better term, limp-wristed as I'm simultaneously without any strength in my wrist as well as having frozen tendons from the non-use. I can mince around but I can't let my wrist dangle ever so elegantly before me. It's imposed butchness, I suspect.

What I just realized is that on my wrist now I have my very own lightening bolt scar, ala Harry Potter. Just not on my forehead (which is where my inverted 'V' resides denoting not so much a Muggle but neither a wizarding wizard of wizards.

The physical therapist cautioned me against using my right hand for any kind of activity when I left him this afternoon. "Any kind of activity," I inquired. "Any kind," he said with a knowing look. Sigh..Looks like Jeff isn't off the hook yet, if you get what I'm sayin'.

The fading black cast I've been wearing on my right arm for the last three weeks is finally coming off today. I can admit as a health care professional that I VASTLY underestimated the impact this little surgery to repair some damaged cartilage in my hand would have on me and my day to day life. It was a much more painful recovery then I expected and the having a cast on for four weeks inhibiting simple things like typing, taking a shower, and other more intimate personal time really just annoyed the hell out of me.

Not one to let an opportunity for self-inflicted drama to go by, the impending removal of my cast unburied some old ER nursing days for me way back in the day when I was working at the city hospital in St. Louis. We had a homeless man come in who was wearing about seven pairs of thick cotton socks which probably had not been removed for months if not a year. They'd hardened into a close proximity of a plaster cast which forced us into using the cast saw to cut them off. The whole time the guy kept repeating "don't take 'em off, don't take 'em off" which is what I'd now term a red-flag and worth listening to.

With the sock cut, we literally cracked it open to reveal a foot that had been halfway eaten away by a writhing, slimy ball of maggots. From what we could piece together, the guy must have gotten some kind of wound and had flys on land and lay eggs on it. As bad as it sounds, he's actually pretty lucky because the maggots did exactly what they were suppose to do which eat rotting meat so instead of him developing a deadly case of sepsis and gangrene, the maggots kept his wound cleaned and cleared of debris. There is even a controlled therapeutic intervention for similar problems used in hospitals using maggots.

This is not to say that several of us didn't have to leave the room to puke on the ER floor. I'm just saying nature takes care of itself in strange and unusual ways. Of course he did loose his foot, tool, so that wasn't really great.

So when my cast comes off, I'm hoping I don't have any maggots in there. That is all I'm saying.

My main complaint about everything related to myself is that I'm always 3-5 years behind everyone else. Fashion-wise, professionally, emotionally, financially, and usually pop-culturally. Flickr's 365 Day Project where each member takes one self-portrait of themselves and posts it each day for a year has been going on for years on the 'net and Blog but I've only just discovered the greatness of Flickr and these kinds of group projects that much smarter people have not only done but grown so tired of, they've moved on to bigger and better things.

With the impending new job that promises 4-5 days of traveling around the US each week, I'd been thinking that I had a great opportunity to re-infuse this blog's horrifically lagging boredom as well as give me some focus and direction. I think pairing my travelogue with the 365 Day Project makes great sense. I just didn't want to wait until January to start so I'm starting today, inspired by some really great photography on Flickr. Let me be the first to say that I'm under no illusions that I'm a photographer, have any sense of style or composition, or understand the essentials of photography tools to be able to be anything but be another blade of grass in a really big yard. That's my cop-out.

Still, here we go:

My first day on the 365 Day Project

We caught Kathy Griffin's "Straight to Hell" special on Bravo last week. Not a secret that we fucking LOVE Kathy Griffin and this show is EXACTLY why. She is brilliant from start to finish.

The NYPost's Page Six Magazine had a facinating article yesterday (though there is no damn online link to it that I can find which sucks) on desktop junkies or what kind of drugs, prescription and otherwise, are being popped by the 'average New Yorker'. Now given that this is Page Six, I'd expect it to be a bit...sensationalized, and even though they presented the eight people as randomly selected, I'm sure it was probably a group of people who all knew and referred one another so the scientific merits of true randomness are completely debatable. That being said, I was struck by the narrative that went along with each bio.

The thrust of the story was each person keeping a one week record of every pill they took, whether over the counter, prescription (theirs), prescription (someone elses), or non-legal. There was an equal distribution of men and women, all between 26 and 33 years old, with a variety of jobs such as lawyer, model, graphic designer, writer, etc.

In each case, every person was on at least one anti-anxiety/depression med, usually Lexapro, with 3/4 of the people on a second or third and had been for years. Several of the people were taking additional prescription meds almost daily for migraines, one for a UTI, or other medical conditions. A few were taking really strong meds or had scored some pain meds from friends or associates and were taking them with their evening cocktails or in the case of the chick with the UTI who couldn't drink while on her antibiotics, took some SOMA when she went to a party to get high. There were additionally, an assortment of over the counter supplements, vitamins, etc. I especially liked the guy who was taking a three-day anti-cold/flu prevention remedy because he'd "been on a coke binge all weekend".

I was just kind of dumb-founded at the roster of things everyone was taking and even living here, it was hard for me to step back and think it wasn't actually a good sampling and had tons of error built in. But the non-scientific part of me just sat back and thought...WTF? Is this the young go-getters of NYC? It almost seemed to creep up on me how backwards and middle-America I felt reading it, because I just didn't connect to it at all. It's just not me. So I did a quick mental calculation of my drug use in the past week and came up with 1600mg of Ibuprofen on Sunday through Wednesday which dropped to 800mg on Thursday and Friday, and then nothing over the weekend (I'm still in my cast after my surgery last month). We were out for dinner both on Friday and Saturday but no one was sharing prescription narcotics with each other over wine and appetizers. So again I come back to "who are these people?" in a way that is not so much judgmental but rather just curious as if I'm missing out on something that I should know? When did this all start happening?

I'm still kind of bewildered, honestly.