It might take me a long time to figure out how NOT to get really emotionally involved in my job. I actually cried at work yesterday. I haven't cried at work since I worked at the Heartland Grill, the last day of spring break my senior year after working double shifts all week making two dollar tips and watching "Fight Club" every night out of boredom.
The basis of the problem is that my hall is understaffed and because of that we just can't give the best care to the people on the hall. If I can't give those people the best care possible, I really don't want to work there. I'm working up to telling that to the administrative staff, but they won't believe me and treat me like I'm completely incompetent and I'll just get furiously mad and want to destroy someone. I might try it anyway though.
If they deny my request for a week off in September, I'm seriously going to flip. The term "go postal" will be revived from obsoletion and be changed to "go nurse's assistant". This is the kind of joke you make when you spend all your time with old people.

Dinner Menu (by course)

Raw celery and blueberries with a Lebonese walnut chili dip and sour cream

Walnuts and pecans

Bruscetta involving cream cheese, tomato, bacon, red and green onions and fresh basil that I grew myself on kalamati olive bread

Eggplant and zucchini with basil, thyme, marjoram and red chili powder, roasted in olive oil

Ben & Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream with fresh organic plums


The eggplant got a little soggy as the oil cooled, but overall this has been entirely satisfying and, yes, bragworthy.

Falling flat

I was going to write last night. Friday night. I guess it's been one of those weeks that so much is going on that nothing gets processed and just stacks up until I feel saturated and tense with ideas and complaints and frustrations that won't dissipate. But then I thought - every minute I spend writing is one less minute I can sleep, because the events of the day were so tightly packed - squished together with no room in between, like a can of neatly packed sardines. So instead I laid there and blogged in my head until I remembered that I used to call this "thinking".

Today I drove in to the Farmer's Market at the last possible second, six-forty-five am, just as the white-bearded Mennonite man who sells sausage biscuits and bratwurst with his wife and daughter was pulling the gate shut. Most weeks I get there about ten minutes after the gate is shut, which means I have to park illegally in the street with my hazard lights blinking until I can carry all the stuff inside the lot and go park. All the other vendors watch me do this every week. Sometimes they offer to help when I'm waddling in like a pregnant elephant trying to carry in my display table, but mostly they just watch me with wondering expressions. No, it really wouldn't be that hard to get there fifteen minutes earlier. I just don't want to. This morning, however, as I was driving in, a couple of people I've never even talked to before shouted congratulatory remarks to me and everyone gave me approving looks over their coffee mugs and I felt like I had just completed some kind of rehab program.

Tonight I'm antsy and bored with the things that I do. Someone talked about what bands are playing in town tonight, and the thought of sitting in a bar drinking a beer I don't want and trying to yell a conversation over a band I don't like that's trying to make up for its deficiencies with excessive volume made me want to go slam my head in a car door. So instead we sat on the porch at a friend's going away cookout and I tried not to focus on how much my back hurts and how much I'd rather we be somewhere with no houses or streets or music at all, not saying a word over the total quiet. I'm tired of being the person who wishes she was doing something else.

In some ways this is my worst fear fulfilled. My life is completely devoid of adventure and I spend half of my time getting through something until I can get to the next thing until I end up feeling like I'm just swimming all day, fighting through whatever's happening so that I can do something better or go back to bed and get some more insufficient sleep. And who put me in this lifestyle? Well, I did.

I guess I'm just cranky.

at long last

So, the internet has been down at my house for what feels like forever. I have now fully realized my total dependence. I never would have believed it.
Will write genius, hilarious, insightful blog soon. (Or rambly, self-obsessed nonsense blog. Let's be real if nothing else.)

I remember when, I remember when I lost my mind

Sometimes just so much happens that you can't possibly get it all out, write it all down, even if anyone would have read it. Let's make it short: I feel like, for the first time in my life, I'm making real progress - as a real person - and I feel like I might have the potential to live a real life. This doesn't make any sense, but whatever. Whatever. And I know it's not really the first time, but when it's real it always feels like the first time.

I'm also looking for a tape. In all my random drawers containing pain killers and USB cords and gloves and bobby pins and whatever else I put in there hoping it would categorize itself so I didn't have to put any more thought into it... a tape someone gave me three years ago that I never actually listened to but have carried around the world with me, knowing that the day I actually do put it in a tape player will be the day I was meant to hear what the tape contained. Here's hoping I can find it, because I think it's finally the right time. I hope I can find it.

I'm in charge of my own life. This is a completely new feeling for me. I have understood independence that was very colored by self-denial, or just denial in general, but I have never truly understood meaningful independence. I've rarely known what it meant to make a decision for myself and not for what I thought someone somewhere expected or would idealize for me. It's not pitiable, it's disgusting. I've created my own austerity instead of finding my own path. I've chosen people to defer to instead of facing what's real and hacking my own way through it. This is a pattern I can identify and am in the hard, long, gut-wrenching process of swimming through. There is something so present about this time in my life.
I think India really screwed me up, but in a way that had to happen. Part of this is from that, and some of it is spun from working in the nursing home, and a lot of it is what has happened with Nate recently, which is so hard for me.

If you have any advice for me, let me know. Even if it doesn't apply.

hahaha! Bless your soul! Really think you're in control? Well, I think you're crazy. - Gnarles Barkley, "Crazy"

I wish I could give you a bite of this feeling. It would taste bittersweet.

flown

Changed my mind - I do want to write this one little bit. I didn't realize how much this thing mattered to me until I had decided to go to bed without writing about it.


I came back from Virginia an entirely new woman. This is something I'll write about later.

Did anything happen while I was gone? Allie rolled her eyes toward me as if she were exhausted. "Um, yeah." She said.

"In Memory" said the little sign, framed and sitting on the table between the doors. There is always an "in memory" sign there, in respect to our most recent resident to pass away - to keep death from feeling so sudden and permanent in everyday life. To remind everyone that we don't forget someone just because they die. Ruth's floppy red hat hung on the frame, and I felt shocked by it, as if it were actually part of her person hanging there. I had never seen the hat out of context before, and it made me wish I had had a hundred more conversations with her, listened to and cherished whatever babble she presented me with as if it were a precious river of wisdom. Mr. Wilson died too, and Avanell, but their deaths stayed within the realms of what it is that I do as a profession. I just wasn't prepared for Ruth. She was dear to me.

The end.

I know, I promised I would write tonight. I actually intended to write, but it's one in the morning and I have to wrap some scones in plastic and get up at the whip crack of dawn to get more plastic to wrap more scones and all I want out of life tonight is to sleep without thinking about getting up.
Will write within 36 hours - abandon me not.