This Makes 14 Posts for the Month of July (Day 70 of 101)

Entering the last week of July, the hottest I can remember (but I probably say/write/think that every year), and I was really hoping to look back at this point in my summer from scholastic responsibility with a broader sense of accomplishment than what I've got to feel pride toward. What's more, my blog is filled with regret and lament. I read some of this stuff and really think that I sound like a tragically morose individual.

I'm not. Not really. Well, not especially. I mean, I've not kept up with my blog like I promised myself I would before the weather got really hot. I've not been penning entries in my journal. I've not been going to meetings or working steps with Juli. I've accumulated more titles on my list of "to-read"s than I have in my stacks of "completed"s. I haven't written much, and everything that I've written I've second guessed or put to the side. I have more outlines and pages filled with streams-of-consciousness than actual, cohesive work. I haven't lost that last twenty-seven pounds that I was hoping to remove before sweater weather arrives. I've lost a little bit more faith in the idea of love and romance (seems that's the one area I really ought not to put any focus into... it only serves to see you let down in the long run). I planned to end the summer free from complaining of lower lumbar, flank, and posterior leg-to-knee pain (but all the surgery really did was take every possible adjective I could use to describe the hurt on the left side and placed it firmly on the equal-opposite side). A lot of plans that haven't exactly planned out.

But I have the course work prepped and registered for the upcoming fall semester (the final fall semester I'll ever have to take), and it's a schedule filled with psych and addiction studies and a few other core classes that I need to be sure I'll be graduating on time this coming May. Of course, I've yet to complete the imperative financial aid paperwork that NSU sent me months ago when I was chosen for verification (an unfortunate process that's randomly selected and can unnecessarily hold things up for dispersal of funds) - I really need to get on top of that.

I have also completed compiling my final issue as editor of the LASN paper, Horizons, a task to which I stuck despite no longer being a member of the nursing program at a school in the state of Louisiana; however, I still have the full expose to complete that I'm hoping to finely tune and perhaps publish at some point in the next several months. Have I mentioned that? My desire to write a narrative of what happened with my application and scrutiny by the board (with absolute antithesis of bending-over-backwards of any of those wonderful professionals at the NSU CON who were only too ready to accept my help with anything and everything I was asked).

I finished Tess for book club. I formed enduring relationships with the men and women who accompanied me to Gulf Shores. I discovered my worth in applying for and being more selectively scrutinized (this time, I'm using the word with a hopefully positive connotation) to accept a postion that, if I get it, will reward me for my actual worth and potential. In making changes and plans and looking more maturely at my future, I've figured out what I definitely don't want...even if I'm still not entirely sure about where I'm specifically headed.

I guess I have as many pros as I might list cons for things I can cross off my lists. I only wish there was more... that there were more.

I need to finish The Swarm and War and Remembrance and The Funhouse. I need to get my sneakers back on my feet and the soles of my shoes back on the pavement to get the physique to where I want it. I need to be sure I'm updating this, my baby, regularly instead of weekly (if not daily), and I need to put a little (no, a lot) more energy into calibrating the meat of these stories for which I've only so far gotten outlines and ideas.

It's nearly 0430, and I have to stay up for a few more hours if I'm going to sleep for most of the day and be alert and oriented and ready to roll in time for work at 2230. Maybe I can get some of this stuff knocked out... the financial aid paperwork at least.

S/P Lower Lumbar (L-4/L-5) Microdiscectomy Left Side V/S Bilateral (Part 1: Monday, 20 June, 2011)

"You just had surgery, Mr. Oliver! You need to lay back down!" The voice was masculine, firm, authoritative, and I was wondering if it was the CRNA that gave me the good shit a second before, which was really more like an hour before, but when you're coming to from a surgical procedure, time -and your perspective on its passage- becomes oddly skewed and basically unintelligible. One minute, you're flat on your back, bouncing your foot criss-crossed over your knee as an extremely friendly surgical nurse in a skull cap wheels you down a weird set of twists to an ice cold room filled with all the sounds of machines that keep you alive and monitor just how alive you are. The nurse (who reminds me of a slightly older [but equally sweet natured and gifted with the ability to instantly put someone at ease with her innate charm] Erin Spurlock) has probably gotten the job for the combined genius brain that one needs to properly assimilate nursing information to succeed and excel and this awesome bedside manner that some people can spend their entire professional lives striving to dispense and never make it: people such as this woman who led me into the sea of tranquil sensory deprivation (and Erin Spurlock) just have that natural bedside manner already. There's nothing you can teach them, and there's nothing more they need to know. That's an amazing thing. And thank Good Orderly Direction it's not something that was handed out the day I was passing through the additional personality characteristics line before making my way down the birth canal. Had I received it, then I may be forced to use it and subsequently be stuck with nursing in lieu of merely having had it as a temporary, but very necessary experience on my path toward true fulfillment.

...at some point, this post was tremendously lengthier. I somehow deleted its bulk at one of the points that it was saved. It was a pretty decent ramble about the days immediately following my surgery. I kept coming back to it intermittently to add updates.

I'm back to work tomorrow, and I hurt. And I'm off any and all narcotizing opiates, back on an opiod, which is not the same thing. And I hurt. I hurt like I never even had the surgery.

This isn't post-surgical recovery pain. This is pre-surgical pain, the same pain I had prior to the grand event that was supposed to have taken place on Monday, 20 June.

I'm back to work tomorrow, well - tonight, and I am already waiting for the next MRI (June 29th, with and without contrast -reminds me, they left me a message today, I need to call them back) and the reading of its results the following Tuesday to see what my next step will be. Do I really want to go through another surgery? Can I?

I have classes to consider. My advisor emailed me today to tell me that I'm right on track to graduate in a little more than ten months. Hard to believe.

I have too many other fish to fry rather than worry over some ridiculous back pain. I do see how people can become overly distracted by this, though. And depressed.

Maybe more later.

64/101

...nothing.

Just Finished...

Not that it is either a terribly long or terribly slow read. In fact, I'd now like to research the Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddik fiasco.

On 63 of 101

Every day I've opened my dashboard to post.

Day 60. Day 61. Day 62.

Every day I've had the intention of sitting to post something, but I haven't found the energy or the wherewithal to sit here to write anything that I could sit back and deem it either worthwhile or not worthwhile to post.

Instead, I've been reading and generally feeling frustrated and sorry for myself, debating levels of disability and the idea of living the rest of my life, from age 32 to 40 or 50 or 62 or beyond, with some degree of pain.

Do people really deal with such situations as this on a daily basis?

For the rest of their lives?

Seriously?

I wonder how we could ever be expected to cure the big-lettered diseases and disorders, the capital ("big") C or AIDS (or HIV) or COPD or some other XYZLMNOP that has yet to take on life through any combined mnemonic or acronym, when the doctors and professionals can't even cure something as simple and basic as pain.

I mean, yeah, they can give you a pill to reduce inflammation and block the actions of the prostaglandins or something that you have to show your license to fill because it doesn't really work to get rid of the pain, it just makes it so that you don't notice it so much, but they can't give you something that you could really call a "painkiller."

I'm not despondent, not by any means, but I can't help thinking that the idea of "chronic pain," and the idea of living by a label like that one, is really ridiculous.

So, I've been filling my journal, especially yesterday when I celebrated entering the year six (I haven't found it worthwhile to imbibe a mind-altering or mood-altering chemical since the night of Friday, July 15, 2005) without attending a meeting or picking up a new medallion to commemorate an event that is tantamount to a wedding or a graduation in the recovery community. Not that I don't plan to do so, and not that I probably don't really need to hit a meeting sometime in the next forty-eight hours, if for no other reason than that I've not been to one in two weeks now, I just felt some semblance of content with merely staying home, watching episode five ("Of Love and War") of The Winds of War (still refreshing my memory of having read the book many years ago, during the long, hot summer of 1999), using a heavily exfoliating scrub on my dry and calloused toes and heels, slathering on a cucumber-melon-combo across my cheeks, forehead, nose, and chin (the "T-zone" area prone to all the crap that you think you're done acquiring once you enter college, but quickly find you're never too old to accept whether willingly or combatting-ly), filing my fingernails, and reading Joyce Carol Oates's Black Water after having finished Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles yesterday afternoon.

I need to get back to work, and the doctor's left the ball in my court to decide for myself ("...well, you know what you do and you know whether or not you can do it, so I think that I'm gonna leave this open, and when you're ready..."). My plan is to call tomorrow, throw caution to the wind, and request a release that will allow me to return as the week concludes (to the shock and chagrin of several I'm sure as I'm strongly contemplating an offer from my DON to return to a different shift, possibly one not even during the week at all as I wonder if I wouldn't be happier, more helpful, and better equipped to work the back-to-back sixteen-hour weekend doubles) so that I can see whether or not my body and my back can hold out and handle a return to real life.

In theory, having a medical leave sounds like a dream, but you can only watch so much coverage of the Casey Anthony debacle or the budget reconciliation arguments or re-runs of any one of the million versions of Law and Order that are on at any given hour on any given channel on every possible day of the week.

Besides, it's not as if I'm being overly productive with my writing and posting here.

An Admission of Breaking Promises of Day 58 on Day 59 of 101

...and I was really so well...

When I was a little kid, the biggest threat that my mother could ever waylay in my direction (and, come to think of it, she'd normally have a screwdriver in her hand when she'd say it) was that if I didn't stop whatever it was that I was doing, she would unscrew my belly button and all my arms and legs would fall off. It wasn't until sometime during my fall 2009 semester at the NSU College of Nursing and Allied Health, Angela Miller's Human Anatomy class, that I realized that I'd never really thought about the fact that the threat was actually physiologically impossible. I was fairly gullible growing up. Plus, I had a big imagination. Couple those factors with the fact that I have a rather colorful past when it comes to medical ailments, and you'll see why I was only too ready to believe pretty much any threat that an adult could wield toward me.

More on my status as a veritable medical anomaly later...

Promises on Day 58 of 101

I haven't allowed this much time to lapse between posts since beginning this redemptive endeavor. Although I've not the time (or the will) to create an extended post at the moment, my promise is to have something a little more in-depth a little later today (more likely tonight).

On the Post I've Just Written for Day 52 of 101, Which Was Reviewed on Day 53 of 101, Here's the Follow-Up

I'm pretty wiped out, and I'm gonna have to let a solid (hopefully, cross your fingers and I'll cross mine) night's sleep come between me and the long post I just typed out. I want to wait to review it in the morning to be sure it's fit for possible public consumption. After having lunch with someone I admire and respect today, I realize that, in backing away from actually publishing something that I've not had an opportunity to review (and, in all fairness, possibly edit), I am, once again, totally censoring myself and leaving out the best bits (and proving true his idea that I'm deliberately keeping any readers at a very comfortable arm's length from any of the real truths I could be including).

I'm okay with that for now.

I see the outcome of this decision as going in one of two ways. Either I'll get up in the morning, review my post over my first or second (probably second) cup of coffee and hurriedly hit "publish post" while I wonder why I was such a chicken shit and didn't just go ahead and post my circumstantial, tangential river-of-rambling; or, in the second scenario, I'll lean forward and squint my eyes while I re-read my own words, hit the "edit posts" button and shake my head the whole time I'm wondering why the hell I'd write shit like that while I'm so googly-moogly and tired and really have no business still being up let alone compiling some


...and upon today's review, I'm not at all concerned, so I'll likely go ahead and publish this as well. The problem is that I tend to have a very colorful vocabulary, riddled with a ton of four-letter combos, and I always try to go through my stuff and excise any of that once I've got something typed out. I was too tired to follow through on all that last night, so I waited to look things over today.

I'll likely have very good news to note when I return to compile something more this evening.

Ho-Hums and Doldrums 52 Days Into 101 - Reviewed for Posting on Day 53 of 101

I came to my desk to create an update much earlier this evening and the title was all that I could muster to type out initially. Ho-hum and down-in-the-dumps was the generalized feeling that I had persuant to something of a sticky ending to what had otherwise been a fairly remarkable day. There! I said it: today was a good day. The notion has been something of a rarity lately so I feel it's best that I comment correctly and let the readership know that not every moment of my most recent days and nights has been bleak and bored and basking in a resonating self-deprecation. As has become my custom lately, I rose early, downed my coffee while I checked emails and Facebook statuses, reviewed my daily list of necessaries and must-do's, visualized a fairly clear plan of attack, then broke out my Just for Today and Twenty-Four Hours a Day to read what my forefathers had in store for me decades ago when the words were first written in anticipation that one day, some day, early in the overheated July of 2011, a still-pretty-idealistic guy with just shy of six years sober would open his eyes and require a little wisdom that could be pushed in his direction.

I managed to spend almost the entire day away from the stifled and compressed interior of my house, something that may seem like nothing to most, but is actually something of an accomplished feat for someone who is still obviously in the midst of recovery -finally, neither on the upper or lower side of the halfway mark, but still somewhere in that general area- and is unable to withstand any significant period of time in a seated position behind the wheel of a car or snuggled into the booth of a restaurant or merely sitting in what is otherwise a comfortable and familiar postion propped at a well-worn desk with a second-hand laptop feeling a writer's fingers dancing across his or her keys.

For the first time in several weeks, I enjoyed a lunch that wasn't microwaved from a pouch or re-heated on Pyrex or scarfed down from a paper towel while standing at the granite kitchen countertops in the fully homo-erect-ed position while it hasn't lost any novelty or given way to pain necessitating a change of venue. At lunch, I had the pleasure of company -as well as treatment to the meal- from someone who actually took the time to hear me out and let me talk a little and didn't manage to turn my responses to his questions into the perfect opportunity to about-face and re-invade the conversation with the perception of a world that revolves entirely around him. In other words, someone who is interesting and interested in getting to know anything and everything that makes me interesting and interested in being interested in by him. Did you follow that? Nah! Me neither. My eyes are drooping and I'm pretty thoroughly exhausted, and I really haven't made it very far through the description of my day that I had planned to load into today's post if, for no other reason than that I've been sparse and lazy in content for the past two days.

Maybe a quick cigarette break'll help organize my thoughts and point me in the direction toward which I ought to be thinking and typing tonight.

I didn't go smoke. Instead, I pulled out my print journal, which is, as I pointed out to my lunch companion today, the place where my writing always begins or ends. Unexpectedly and remarkably, my lunch date offered insight into his perceptions of the ebb and flow of energy and ideas in my blog, and while he described the way the one gets a sense of pattern and rhythm present in my endeavors, the words he opted and the gestures he used made perfect sense. For the first time in a long time, I saw, literally visually saw, exactly what he was meaning through the well received constructive criticisms he was offering: just when I'm arriving at an important plot point or detail or conclusion to one of my more richly conceived and copiously constructed stream-of-consciousness conglomerations, I stop. David told me that it seems as if I am hiding some of the best bits, keeping some of the better details at bay, or at least away from the eyes of babes. Perhaps that is the case. Maybe I do deliberately excise some of the juicier pieces of fat because they contain some of the most revealing DNA of my work. As I mentioned, nearly every blog post either begins or ends in my journal. Believe me, that's for the best for now.

After leaving lunch, I was in an intensely contemplative mood for much of the remaining afternoon. I briefly came back home to collect some essentials and to head up to the library to work there for a while. I found a more controlled and less conspicuos locale where I could pop in my ear buds and open my notebooks and click open my pens to fill in forms and complete the most crucial bits and pieces that made up the torso of my to-do list for the day. Productive. I was productive. Of course, I started feeling the pain seeping back into my right hip and nestle an unpleasant wedge somewhere deep down in the joint, sort of hinged and hurried into that little nook just beyond my groin where my thigh meets my hip which meets the underside of my ass which connects to the lower portions of my torso, but not at the surface: down deep. Standing or moving my leg or althering my position in any way doesn't seem to matter or make any difference at all. Once the pain, which only departs for some period (either for as little as an hour or extended into three to four [or not departing at all but merely slowing down to a faint trickle that pulsates manageably, but is never truly gone] hours) of time, begins to make its way back to fully alert and well-oriented to let its presence be known, I can usually throw in the towel on anything getting anywhere near the way I may have previously intended. Once the pain has walked into my party, it's best to turn the music off and start giving signals that it's time for everyone to go: I'm probably going to spend the remainder of my day dealing with getting it under control. Sometimes it works and I can come back to my desk to resume for a while. Sometimes, nothing works and I'm forced to close off and remit myself to a quiet and comfortable and off-the-beaten-path place where I can get lost in my thoughts and try to mentally wil myself back to where I was earlier when I initially found that happy place from which I could work.

I left the library and came home and began to develop an ache in my belly that was somewhere between depressed and frustration and any one of either of their angry and irritating cousins. I kept reviewing my to-do list and looked over my blog and played around here and/or there online, thinking and worrying and wondering and never really finding any one thing to totally focus on...oh, no! To find only one thing on which I could focus my attention may make that one detail all the more important and force me to find some means to eliminate it to the point that it's no longer a detail with which I ought to concern myself. I started feeling better, just before sitting down to compile this blog (and well after originally creating the title to describe my mood at the time) when I pushed my list of everything that absolutely requires immediate and satisfactory solution to the side. There's really no way I'll be able to knock all the rest of it out right here and right now: tonight; therefore, I'm gonna sit back and allow my posture to collapse and look unhealthy and lazy so that I can relax. And just let things be.

And I'm gonna contemplate lunch a little more. Along with that ebbing and flowing and rhythm that I feel certain is totally lacking from this post (seeing as I've been up since six-thirty this morning, and that was after only two-and-a-half to three hours of REM-style sleep), I'm gonna think a little more on being a little more personal and allowing some of those juicier fat bits in instead of putting them in spots where no one can see or read or judge. And I'm gonna see about incorporating a little more honesty and straigh-forward frankness rather than editing my language to the point of it possibly receiving a PG-13 rating from the MPAA.

Just gonna save this tonight. I am gonna have to review in the morning. My guess is that nothing I've written makes any damn sense at all because nothing I'm thinking does. That's an effect of taking medication at night when you're already tired.

Day 51 of 101

Another cop-out. Not publishing anything today because nothing's ready to be posted. Instead, here's what I'm currently watching. Getting my memory of the book refreshed via Herman Wouk's teleplay (an ABC novel-for-television) before I read the sequel.



Lately, This Is What I Do Every Night - Early Morning Hours on Day 50 of 101

You'll never order seafood the same way again...

Late Night Post on Day 49 of 101

I detest reading back through my posts and seeing any that are void of any true content or length, but I really don't have anything worthwhile to post tonight. What's more, the lengthier and more substantial stuff that I'm working to compile and edit and have ready to post are nowhere near ready. At present, the main thing that I'm hoping to have finished is the one thing that seems to be taking me the longest to really get to the spot where I think it will be ready to hit "Publish Post" and get out there into the wonderful world of my readership: it's all about chronic pain, my surgery, the days and nights that followed. Most of it is filled with thoughts and feelings and questions that I was having as I had them, and my intent was to have it all pop up on a daily basis as everything occured. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I'm not always pleased with some of my stream-of-consciousness stuff once I go back through and read the lines that I swiftly stamped out and sent up to be read by who-knows-who.

If I have the energy and the wherewithall tomorrow, I think that I'll just go through it all and probably send it through. Earlier, when I took a bit of a break from the extremely uncomfortable (no, it's painful; the position is painful) spot sitting in the black leather executive-style chair that I bought a few years ago and put together myself from the box branded with the words "some assembly required," I wrote a bit in my journal, something that I've also been doing much more of lately (along with reading a bit more religiously in my underlined and highlighted and notated fourth edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, my Just For Today NA daily meditation and the Twenty-Four Hours a Day copy that my aunt gave me for my birthday a few numbers ago [it belonged to my great uncle Felton, Mimi's brother, and it still holds his name and address as it did when he flipped through the pages during his own time of one day at a time a long, long time ago, before I ever thought of putting the first mind- or mood-altering substance past my lips]), about how non-productive I feel while playing this game of waiting for the geniuses to clear me to return to work. I have no doubt that I'd never make it past the first hour of the first shift right now, but that doesn't lower my level of frustration any.

My plan for tomorrow, other than coming to my desk and making the requisite entries on paper and laptop, of cours, is to try to find a happy and pleasant place to just curl up in and relax to read and maybe watch the second and third discs from The Winds of War miniseries that Netflix sent me just before the long weekend. I'm sure that I've got a solid five or six hours of televised entertainment to get through, and that should keep me busy. Not only that, but I still have close to six hundred pages left in The Swarm, and I'm hoping to be totally finished with it at the same time that I'm finished watching this series from Netflix so that I can begin reading Herman Wouk's sequel, War and Remembrance (and the Thomas Tryon, Joyce Carol Oates, and -oh, shit... for the Special People Club: Tess of the D'urbervilles: I probably need to get S squared (if I knew how to make a superscript here, I would, but S squared knows who she is, or if the reference is kind of different, then they know who they are) to light a fire under my feet - no reason that I'm not done with a lot more other than the fact that I'm so easily and regularly distracted by the fact that I just can't seem to get a handle on my pain).

Here I am, only hours short of exactly two weeks since the Swiss-trained geniuses cut into my back to relieve me of the bondage of this condition, and I really don't feel like it's gotten me anywhere. Shouldn't I be better by now? Shouldn't I be able to sleep all the way through the night without getting up to take a Flexaril or narcotic pain relievers so that I can get back to sleep? I keep reminding myself (and hearing Patti Akins's voice from Friday mornings of last fall discussing the difference between most pain and the pain of surgical healing [and when I hear her voice, I remember her tenet that "Sister Margaret says that pain is what the patient says it is,"] and I try to make myself okay with just being where I'm at right now) that everyone recovers differently and that when the geniuses mentioned a recovery that could possibly last only ten days, I must've just latched onto that and didn't hear when (well, really: "if") any of them said that it could last two weeks or three weeks or longer. I can't afford to be out of work for very much longer. If this were one of the trashy rags-to-riches novels that Bijal and Whitney and I passed aroudn in high school, this is where a previously unknown rich relative would make his or her entrance to the life of the protagonist and suddenly lay a magical finger on the situation and take away that one, very significant stressor: the great money worry.

On the other hand, I do have to remember that I did intentionally make the decision to have this done when I did because this is the best and most logical and least financially draining part of the year. As angry as I was when the procedure was cancelled Thanksgiving week, thank Good Orderly Direction that it was because I'd never have been able to return for a final week of lecture and the multiple, consecutive nights of two to three hours of barely sleep between days and nights and agonizing minutes laden with the memorization of body systems and disease processes and stressing to figure out which of the two answers are right and then which of those two answers are the best answer of the two (all otherwise known as "finals week").

Once this is all over, I will have to start worrying about school once again, but only from August until December, and then again from January until May, the month when I will finally receive that very important piece of paper that tells the world that everything I have on my resume and everything I state in an interview is actually true, and they really can hire me for a spot at more than just slightly above the nationwide minimum (which, incidentally, no human being can possibly survive on in 2011).

I'm rambling. No wonder I can't get anywhere with all these private posts that I have saved and go into to edit and then walk away from having made little progress. I get in to make an alteration and I just start running off at the mouth. Stacy and Stephen are always pushing me to read David Sedaris. Although I've read excerpts and bits, I suppose I really ought to pull his stuff out: Stacy tells me that I write along the same lines. Maybe I ought to look at putting everything down into a memoir instead of writing my short stories that pay homage to Poe and O'Henry and Madame Flannery and Shirley (Miss Jackson if you're scary). Some of those suckers that I write are really, really good. But some are bad. More are bad, in fact, because they're fiction, and many times, I'm merely speculating, guessing, trying to create a fictional world that I'm not sure I have a great understanding of. Writers are always encouraged to write what they know, and it seems that when I really write what I know, when I share the funny little anecdotes about life in the days and nights in my garden of nocturnal delights, I get a lot of feedback from some of you who read this stuff even though I really had no idea that anyone read anything I wrote at all.

Although I address a lot of this stuff to an assumed audience, I don't know that I'd continue doing it if I really assumed some composition of an audience. I just think that a couple of people who already know how crazy I am are the ones reading it, so it's fine. I started to put my blog address as my personal webpage when I was creating a resume the other day, and I had to think twice and quickly eliminate that from the page as I realized that a perspective employer might not be so keen on hiring someone who talks a bit frankly about previous drug and alcohol use and random hookups when I was auditioning for Diane Keaton's role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar....or maybe an employer who would read it and still hire me is exactly who I need to be working for... hmmm.

...nah... incredibly doubtful, but it's still a pleasant and appealing idea.

A List from My Mom for Day 48 on Day 49 of 101

1. I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.

3. I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.

4. There is great need for a sarcasm font.

5. How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?

6. Was learning cursive really necessary?

7. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on # 5. I'm pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.

8. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.

9. I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired.

10. Bad decisions make good stories.

11. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you know that you just aren't going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.

12. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray? I don't want to have to restart my collection...again.

13. I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page technical report that I swear I did not make any changes to.

14. I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

15. I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

16. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lite than Kay.

17. I wish Google Maps had an "Avoid Ghetto" routing option.

18. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

19. How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear or understand a word they said?

20. I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars team up to prevent a jerk from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers and sisters!

21. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.

22. Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.

23. Even under ideal conditions, people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, finding their cell phone, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I'd bet everyone can find and push the snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time, every time.

24. The first testicular guard, the "Cup," was used in Hockey in 1874 and the first helmet was used in 1974. That means it only took 100 years for men to realize that their brain is also important.

The Final Minutes of Day 47 of 101 - There Are Other, Bigger Posts in the Works

...but here's a little something to whet whatever appetites are out there for their daily dose of Miles to the Jay.

I've been working on a lot, probably because I'm still lacking the necessary painlessness, or been unable to find a manageable level for tolerating pain, and unable to do much other than read and write and journal. When it really starts to kick in, then I kick myself for doing whatever it was that I was doing earlier, which probably wasn't much of anything, and then I have to find a happy spot from which to close my eyes and breathe and wait for my medication to kick in. I'm more than somewhat disgusted with the results -or lack thereof- I've experienced so far, and I'm fairly certain that the professionals at The Spine Institute are beyond frustrated with the frequency of my calls requesting a response on whether or not this or that is normal or okay. In fact, the major endeavor I'm batting around is all about that so I'll just save my thoughts and ideas and fears for that little nugget that I'm hoping to complete and have up and ready to be read in the next few days.

Something I've learned (and can share without running the risk of spoiling too many plot points in my upcoming, recovery-related post) from the spinal surgery recovery process is that a commonly touted adage about people like me is unquestionably true. The saying goes that doctors and nurses make the worst possible patients. Why? Because they know too much. I have no doubt that the words are the truth, but I have to take things a step or two beyond: nursing (or any other student seeking professional licensure in a medically-related field) students are a nightmare. Why? Because we think we know too much and really only know just enough to be really dangerous. What's more, our heads are filled with the myriad facts and figures and statistics and worst-case scenarios that have been drilled into our heads to teach us to practice safely and think quickly; therefore, we're only too eager to wonder about every little stab of pain and drop of unexpected blood. When it's our pain or our drop, we require instant clarification to ease our troubled brains. Without the clarification toward easement, if the subject is a regimented Type A personality who lives his life by a daily to-do list and needs a place for everything and everything in his or her place, then we're going to dwell, stress, consult Google and then really start to freak out when we realize that every slightly abnormal new development could lead to hemiparalysis, massive infection, MRSA, neuropathy, or be possible early indications of a stroke (I'm really pleased to be looking at other, more satisfying and challenging career futures, but I'll never be able to unlearn everything that I've learned in the past three years... le sigh).

In other words, my brain is constantly ticking, which I'm sure is no great surprise to anyone who may be reading this. At any given time, whether I'm reading or watching a movie or totally engrossed in an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I have at least four other directions in which my thoughts are floating, none of them has anything to do with the other; therefore, my notebooks are filling with lists and ideas and questions. My journal is filling with the same. And I have several privately saved entries on this end of blogspot on which I'm working at any given time, whether I have my laptop in front of me or not. Kind of a blessing. More of a curse.

I'm still reading the Schatzing book, The Swarm, and I'm finding several passages particularly disgusting, especially now that I'm getting into however whatever the hell is going on in Earth's oceans is beginning to affect the citizens of the world in the darnedest little ways (although I've had the meat, I've never actually sat down to order a lobster in a restaurant and after reading this book, I almost certainly never will). Once I have this gargantuan undertaking completed, I have Tess of the D'urbervilles to tackle followed by Black Water from Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Tryon's The Night of the Moonbow (I read The Other not long ago, and really enjoyed it), a re-reading of some childhood favorites that I can't totally remember (The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, and two from Roald Dahl: The Witches and The BFG), Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance (I read The Winds of War a little more than ten years ago, and I'm currently watching the miniseries [which I had to get on Netflix because I loaned out my boxed set of the piece and I've never gotten it back] to re-familiarize myself with the novel's events so I won't be totally lost with this SUBSTANTIAL addition, and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, a book that Rhonda talks about all the time, and I feel I'd be remiss if I didn't gobble it up so that I can express my thoughts on the work during one of the next opportunities I have to sit at her kitchen table with her and the rest of the brain gang.

...I just glanced back through that last paragraph and I can see what a huge load of reading I have to do. I guess I better hurry up and get this posted so I can get in bed and see what's going on with the jellyfish and crustaceans and layers of methane-devouring worms on Norway's continental shelf. I'll probably write for a while longer, but I really need to get back to Schatzing and find out what he's got next for his version of the end days.