Fun Monday

Robin at Pensieve is our Fun Monday hostess this week and this is what she's asking us to write about -



Regardless of what motivated me to choose this for a theme, next week please share words that inspire and motivate you--brief or bloviatory, silly or serious, from great world leaders to last night's Comedy Central...from a Hallmark greeting card to your favorite book. Choose one, choose many; let the quotes stand on their own or tell where you first read or heard them and how they affected you. There's a lot of leeway with how this topic can be handled.


Well, you really could go lots of ways with this, but here are two that really resonate with me lately...


The Pain of Discipline is Far Less Than the Pain of Regret


and


The best way to predict the future is to invent it.


Alan Kay said the second one and I have no idea who said the first one, but I love them both. And I love them for different reasons. The second one is all about taking control of your own destiny and not letting it take control of you. And the first one really speaks to me now because I think I've finally decided to take that big step and see if I have a book in me after all. I'd rather die trying than not have the guts to give it a shot.


Oh, that reminds me of another quote I really love. Actually, it's more than a quote, it's a paragraph, but I'm taking advantage of that whole leeway thing and bending the rules mercilessly. Here it is -


Vera said: "Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?"


So I told her why:


Because if I tell the story, I control the version.


Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.


Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much.


Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.


Nora Ephron
Heartburn

Sunday Slacker

I had planned on writing a new post for today, but I'm in a work run and didn't get home until pretty late. So here's a repeat of one of my very first efforts from last March. And this story has no relevance whatsoever to my day at work either. Really. Not one tiny little stinking bit.


I had a run-in with a surgeon at work recently that left me a little steamed. In a nutshell, I set equipment up for some sutures and didn’t do it exactly the way he wanted it done. Rather than just grab me and point it out, he went straight to my charge nurse, who told me. I made the change immediately, (as I had been standing there the whole time anyway asking him if he needed anything) and he started the procedure. All of this was done before he even touched the patient. When he was done he went to the ER doc and demanded an incident report since the tray was not set up to his specifications. The charge nurse, trying to keep a straight face, wrote it up and I then had to defend myself to management. Luckily, this was not difficult.


I’m completely over it by now, but it really stressed me out at the time. I’m new to this job and don’t want to make waves. This happened on the last day before several days off, so I had a lot of time to obsess about it. My boss was horrified that I had gotten myself so worked up over something like this, but that’s the kind of gal I am. I put the “A” in anal. And since my old job in a surgical intensive care unit obviously surrounded me with…surgeons, I knew that this could have gotten ugly. Happily for me it didn’t.


I don’t want to pick on just one type of doctor, but everyone knows that surgeons are at the top of the high-maintenance pile. Everyone who works in a hospital, goes to a hospital or watches a television show set in a hospital knows it anyway. Really, all you have to do is drive by a hospital to see that all the Hummers are parked outside of the OR. This is not just my opinion, either…


Q) How many doctors does it take to change a light bulb?
A) Three. One to write the order, one to do the consult and one to watch the nurse do it.


Q) How many surgeons does it take to change a light bulb?
A) One. They just hold the bulb and the whole world revolves around them.


See what I mean?


But, like I’ve said, I’m over it. I’m not the type to hold a grudge anyway. Especially against someone in a useful field like cosmetic plastic surgery. Now a trauma surgeon or a cardiac surgeon or even an all-around general surgeon – those people are indispensable, no argument from me. But plastics??


Q) How does a surgeon commit suicide?
A) They climb to the top of their ego and jump off.


Anyway, like I’ve said, I’m over it. I feel much better now. On the (mercifully) few occasions I see this guy at work I just remind myself of this well known medical fact…


The difference between god and a surgeon is that god doesn’t think he’s a surgeon.


But like I said, I’m over it.


Really.

men and boys

Everything I know about men I've learned from my boys.


All the good and bad and confusing and touching and ridiculous things that men do...start young. Very young. When they're itty bitty boys, as a matter of fact. And from my ringside seat I'm going to look at this phenomena from time to time and let you all have the benefit of my years in Testosterone Town. Because if I can't laugh at it in some way, I may as well put my mommy card on eBay. The trick is to (somehow) keep laughing.


Today, let's talk about competition. God knows everyone else in my house does.


Surfer Dude and Gumby have both been sneaking into my bed in the middle of the night lately, so that when I wake up, clinging to the edge for dear life, they've taken over the entire California King bed. The other morning, when this happened, I woke up before either one of them, pinned between two boys and three dogs. I looked at my clock and realized that Sasquatch should have already gotten up, so I called out to him to make sure that he was out of bed. Of course he wasn't, so I yelled (louder) that he was late and he needed to get a move on. (And the verdict is...rub a lamp and write yet another Friday detention on the calendar).


My yelling woke up the other two and without missing a beat Gumby said to SD


I've been awake since 7. What about you?


and SD smugly said


I've been awake since 6:45. I win.


I said


I just woke both of you up and you know it. Why does everything have to be a competition?


And do you know what the answer I got was?


Oh, mom. (Underlying meaning? You're such a girl).



I had just dozed off again, when there was a loud noise underneath the blankets that sounded suspiciously fart like.


SD chuckled proudly.


Almost immediately there was another, considerably louder and far more pungent noise erupting from their vicinity. I threw back the covers and jumped out of bed, as my intestinally challenged dog looked on in professional envy, and Gumby said


Ha. I win.

and on the 368th day...

...she rested.

(because her internet went out for no reason the night before).

The Thursday Three

Suggested by pixelpi and Jo, today the topic is


My Very Own ER Experiences


I've actually had more ER visits than these, but they weren't terribly exciting. I missed a big chunk of my ninth grade year because of a temperamental appendix that turned out to be something completely different, I've had more than one serious dog bite, I pulled a sliding closet door off of the track and onto my poor little foot...the list goes on. I'm sure my mother will remember things I've totally forgotten. I don't think I was terribly accident prone as a kid, but I guess I was accident prone enough.


But in the interest of keeping things lively, the three I'm picking are a good cross section of my life. One embarrassing, one stupid and one having to do with a kid. Ladies and gentlemen...this is my life.


#1. The embarrassing one. When I was in college the first time, I was a waitress. I was working full time and going to school full time and my social life was...full. I was exhausted most of the time, but was too stupid to cut back on anything. When I caught the really nasty viral bug that was going around, it never occurred to me to call in sick for my ten hour Friday night shift, since that's where the tips were. And it certainly never occurred to me to turn down the coffee cup full of kamikaze the lecherous bartender gave me to "help me feel better".


I was about three hours into the shift when I keeled over and bought myself the only ambulance ride of my entire life. I made quite a sight being taken out of a full cocktail lounge on a gurney, maroon dirndl uniform all askew. And while I can't absolutely prove it, I'm pretty sure that in an old hospital chart in Pasadena, California I have the words Alcohol On Breath on file. And the fact that the virus laid me out for over three weeks didn't make me any less humiliated.



#2. The stupid one. I had been married two months, and one of the wedding gifts was a wonderful set of carbon steel knives. One morning, in my usual start of the day fog, I was feeding my Amazon parrot before I raced off to work. I was in a hurry to fill his fruit dish and I somehow managed to cut through a jicama toward myself and through my left hand. The knife went into the fleshy area between my thumb and index finger all the way to the bone, where it stopped, leaving my thumb pretty much blowing in the breeze.



This episode really is a blog post all its own, but it can be summed up this way: four hours of microsurgery, almost two hundred stitches, two days in the hospital and the inability of my entire family to keep a straight face whenever they hear the word "jicama". Or "carbon steel knives" for that matter. In ER terms, this was the first (and only) time the triage nurse has ever jumped up as I walked through the door and taken me back immediately, leaving a trail of blood in my wake.


(I still get a lot of mileage out of this story at work. My hand never hurt until after the surgery, not even the tiniest bit. The surgeon explained to me that hands usually don't hurt after massive trauma because there are so many nerve endings that the endorphins fly out of the gate pronto. I always ask people who have hurt their hands and the answer is almost always the same: no pain at all. It's really interesting).



#3. The one having to do with a kid. I was in my last semester of nursing school and one of our final assignments was, of all the ridiculous things, to observe for a day at a day care center. My best bud and I had signed up for the same day and I ended up driving in with her since my car was in the shop. It had been drilled into our heads that this was not something that could be rescheduled or not completed. (Nursing school is all about mental games that leave you slightly traumatized and not a little feeble minded).


While we were having our lunch halfway through the day, I checked my phone and found a message from the school nurse. This is how NOT to leave a message for a parent: RC, this is the nurse at Surfer Dude's school. He's had an accident. CALL ME. My next message was from the FG whom she had called next, saying they were on the way to the hospital but that Surfer Dude was (mostly) okay. And the third message (also from the FG) was that he had a broken clavicle from showing off and turning somersaults on concrete during reading circle.


And I couldn't get there. I was stuck in a stupid day care center, without a car, while nursing students from another school took care of my baby in the ER where I would eventually work. By the time I got home, he was already in bed, knocked out from the percocet. It absolutely and totally sucked and I hated every minute of it.


Well, there you have it. Now it's your turn. We want to hear your ER stories. Pretty please?

wow. a whole year

When I tried to solicit people to give me some questions to answer, Susan (aka My Two Cents) asked me to list the reasons why I'm glad I started blogging. Maggie May wanted to know why I started blogging, if I kept a diary in my pre-blog days and if this project has met all of my blogging needs. Irene asked how long it took to build up readers. And both Iota and Eileen suggested (gulp) that I simply ask people what they like best about the blog. So now, with varying degrees of comfort, I'm going to tackle all of them.



I started blogging as a way to keep in touch with people I loved. Staying connected has always been a huge problem for me. I have really good intentions and really crappy follow through, and the more I feel it slipping away from me the worse I get. It's not one of my better qualities and I'm not proud of it, but I did get really tired of it. I was ready to change my evil ways.



So that's how it started out - intended to be a kind of daily diary of our lives for those who weren't here to share in it. But it started changing on me right away, because I found myself taking small little pieces of those daily diaries and putting them under a microscope. It was the small, absurd moments that I really enjoyed, the episodes that read like a bad '80s sitcom. And in spite of myself, that was where I gravitated. It was almost like the posts were writing themselves and I was just this hapless (and frequently horrified) bystander.




I've rarely kept a diary or a journal, even though I've always wanted to. There have been times in my life though where, inexplicably, I did, and I love going back and reading them. I reread a lot of the posts, too, and am always amazed at what I've forgotten. It really is like a snapshot of our lives - for better or worse.



And to my astonishment, people started reading it. Several of us have tried to figure out how we all found each other and it's really fun to try and trace it back. Jen was my first real blog buddy and it all grew from there. For some reason June was a big month in terms of new people hooking up. So was September. And as we all know, when you link and are linked, wonderful things happen and terrific people join in. In a really cool timing coincidence RC got its 30,000th hit Tuesday afternoon, which makes me happier than should be legal.



Am I glad I started blogging? Yes. Does this blog meet all of my blogging needs? Yes. Has it - literally - changed my life? Absolutely yes. I'm not the same person I was a year ago. This was a big personal risk for me, mostly because of the way I set it up for myself. I really can be my own worst enemy. Because underneath the worthy cause of staying in touch with people was a more selfish reason. I love to write. I've always loved to write. But I'd lost it. Years of school and work and kids and grown-up responsibilities had me believing that I'd hit my peak writing my editor's column in the college newspaper. (I've reread those columns. It wasn't a peak to write home about).



But when I would go about my days anticipating the time I could sit in front of the computer and write, when I found myself reworking something over and over in my head as I went about my normal routine, when I remembered the sheer joy of writing...I was hooked. I'm not sure I could ever go back. I may need to google Blog exorcisms just to get it out of my system.



I'm glad I started blogging because it worked as far as staying close to people. I'm glad I started blogging because I have met so many incredible people through it - people I'm proud to call my friends. I'm glad I started blogging because (as I said once quite a while ago) it's mine, mine, all mine. As any mother knows, it's almost impossible to have anything in the house that is truly yours and yours alone. This is mine. I'm glad I started blogging because it's refired up a passion I had never in my heart totally given up on.



And in a really sappy way to end this up...I'm glad I started blogging because you have all been a huge source of support to me in some really crappy times. There have - honest to god - been times lately where blog comments were the only positive things that got said to (or about) me in the course of a day. I follow your lives so closely that your blogs provide an escape for me too. We come from different places and different mindsets and different lives, but we've found a common ground on all of our blogs. I wouldn't trade that for anything.



I'm sorry. I know I've missed the tongue in cheek mark this post. I know I've been schmaltzy and a big goober. Aren't I allowed one sappy post a year? Can this be the one?



This leads me to the point I've been trying to avoid - the suggestion that you comment on why you like it here. If you feel like it - great. No pressure. You might find this hard to believe, but in spite of my big mouth I really do like to keep a low profile and fly under the radar. This smacks suspiciously of tooting my own horn, but it wasn't my idea. Honest. Blame Iota and Eileen.


Actually you're all at fault for encouraging me. What were you thinking?

on your mark...

Alright, Carolyn, here you go. Five weird and wacky lines pulled out of the archives. Just for you. (And anyone else crazy enough to want to play).




If you feel like playing, email me at rottencorrespondent@gmail.com by Midnight Friday and let me know where you found these. In a perfect world I'd have a fab prize for the winner. In reality I know I'll mess it up somehow - just ask Ciara. So this is all for the pure glory of the hunt. (I suck. I know. I'm sorry). I'll write the winner's name in big huge letters. Does that help?


Ready?


1. "Michael," ten year old Surfer Dude said dismissively to his sleeping over best friend, "You don't even know what a hooker is."


2. Must be available at 3 am to move the foosball table from the Beverly Hills house to the Malibu house, by way of a drug pickup in Santa Monica.


3. As I was racing around like a crazy woman looking for the key, he casually suggested that I might want to check the watermelon.


4. My mother leaned into my lap to look at the gauge and say Not THAT high and then she might have cussed just a little bit.


5. "Are you trying to tell me that you can buy a five gallon bucket of lard but you can't buy a bottle of sparkling water?"


Get set...GO!!