Some people build their own houses

So, I thought it would be a good idea. I sold my old house in the city. It had nice features and good cabinets to hold my sweet nutrients, but I thought it was very old. I mean, one day I was walking around upstairs and when I went downstairs to put my socks on, their was dust on my feet. I looked at a cobweb and said that this was enough. Piles of dead flies, geez.
I held an auction in the fall. There were four people and a sheriff in attendance. The whole house with a crapload of old posessions and portraits of my ancestors went for like a hundred thousand bucks. My neighbors were there. I hated my neighbors. They were all very old. They mowed their lawns in jogging suits and hearing aids. They loved each other, too. I think they were all jealous of my house.
It rained on my neighbors, my old house, and all of those freaks who wanted it. It rained on me too, but I think it got the dust off of me.

So, I went out in the dead of winter to a hill in the woods. I'm not sure who owned the property, but they probably lived far away. I looked around at the huge trees and moss and animals. It was nice since they were all dead or cold. It would be easier that way.
I took the hundred thousand dollars and bought a saw, some nails, and a hammer. It was really hard to cut the trees since their insides were frozen, but if I waited until about six in the evening, they would be soft enough to make some progress.
The very first thing I did was to clear every old thing off of my hill. I cut down every tree and pulled up the stumps with my bare fingers. I used the claw end of my hammer to scrape up ever piece of grass and every stretch of moss. I killed all of the bugs and animals that came through.
One time in kids' school, they told me that the stars we see are actually very old. I almost threw up. I know that teacher was a liar. She was young, but I still think she lived with her great-grandma or something.
I think I almost died that winter. I coughed blood from December until February. One time, I slipped on a patch of ice and fell off my roof. I don't know how long I was knocked out because no one keeps track of me. My hands bled every day and I still have no feeling in the soles of my feet. It was all worth it. In the first week of March, I decided that I could go into my house. I had built the outside of my house first, so that the inside would be as new as possible.
I think that this was the best time of my life. I hung every wall with ingenuity and precision. The corners stuck in my mind and the edges were confrontational. I cherished every nail and could feel each blow of the hammer. The sound of the pounding was the sound of my heart and I think I cried more than I spoke during that time. I held each piece of board close to me and laid up against it when it was pressed to the studs. From March to the middle of April, I was in love. For the first time in my life, I realized that this new home was the place I was built to inhabit.
The second half of Spring found me making forays into the nearby town. I opened a small practice and was seeing patients for the first time in years. I could stand looking at their rashes and old faces because I knew my happiness was waiting in the blackness of the forest. I even made some friends.
I met you on June first. You were kind and could speak more than anyone I had ever met. I listened and you spoke. Your face was the only one that God ever made by hand. I knew it because it was the only new one I had ever seen.
The day after I met you was the day that I hung the las wall of my new house. I was in such a good mood that I decided to play a little joke that I had read on a comic. I put construction clothes on a new skeleton and lay it to rest behind my wall. I smiled when I nailed the wall to the studs.
When I went to bed I wondered whose skeleton I bought. I had dreams about it too. I dreamt you were old and stained and living inside my walls. I hated you. Why had you aged? You were the only good one ever made. Didn't God care about the good things? But, you were in my house. My house could not age. Neither God nor weather could touch the inviolate youth of my dwelling. It stood bulwark strong against disease, time, Einstein, Nietzsche, Darwin, and St. John. They would surely break upon it like wind on it's facade. I woke with the surety of my own ceiling above me.
I saw you the next day and asked you to come to my house. You said okay.
We got there and quickly ate dinner. We spoke.
"I like your house."
"Thank you."
"The walls look new. I wish I could live in a place like this."
"You can stay here if you like it."
"I would like that. I would like most of all to grow old with you."
Little white explosions dotted my field of vision. I thought I might fall over. I probably vomited. I wish my mind could throw up things that made it sick. I'm not sure what happened after that, but I know you left in a hurry and I slept in the attic that night.
I woke up the next two days, but I could not move. I tried, but each time my brain sent a signal to my arms, my arms sent a message back in a language that my brain could not understand. My conscious mind tried to mediate for me, but I mostly just cried. I cried and called it a liar. I didn't want to ever hear my conscious mind again, which is sort of a funny thing to think. If we are one unit, how can we tell ourselves things. When I realized that I realized that part of me was old. I saw that my conscious mind was the part of me that I had got from old people who decided things about our sound pictures and thought rules and I was furious that it had snuck by me for so long.
I did what I had to do. I called my mind out. My id, ego, and superego. They appeared before me in stark contrast. My psychology professors were all liars. My id was not some idiot baby. It was a man with a beard and tangled hair with broken glasses and a dirty coat. My Superego was not some sunday school teacher or judge, she was holding the id's hand and stroking his shoulder, she wore a kind dress and had nice hair. My ego was the true horror. It was a gross caricature and amalgam of my parents, my school, and my country. It drooled and bled and smelled like death. I raised up off of my floor. I raised my hammer and began to beat the beast. I drove nails into the thing and pulled the decaying flesh off of it with the claw of my hammer. The distrubed result of a child's attempt to reconcile conflicting desires, my ego was the one pinning me to the floor. Rationalizing and ignoring, pleading and hiding it strangled me. I tore and tore at the animal until I had torn every piece of flesh from its body. Inside was the prank I had hidden between the walls.
"Joke's on you," it muttered and smiled.
"Uncle Leon?" I embraced the empty frame, cracking a few ribs.
"You little freak. Don't you know you're acting retarded?"
"Uncle, I told you. We don't talk like that anymore."
"Sorry, bud. Hey, what's with all this new stuff?"
"I built it because I hated you."
"Ha! Well, you're certainly a poor carpenter."
"Well screw you, Leon."
So, basically Leon and I moved to Greenwich Village. He's a poet and I opened a free clinic. I guess I still think about you once and a while. I throw up a little sometimes. We go to protests and stuff, but he's really into anime, so we're always watching some weird cartoon with subtitles. He says the dubbed stuff is gay. I tell him he's a freaking plastic skeleton. Then, he turns to me. Opens his bony jaws, and in a raspy voice with dog's breath says:

"Happy Halloween, you butt-munch."


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I think I just spent an hour writing that. I feel better. At first, I just thought it would be funny to write a tell-tale heart story about a guy who builds a skeleton into his walls. Then I think I just started to throw in some half metaphors. It might be about my first two years of college, but I wouldn't look for too much meaning in it. It wasn't meant to mean anything. Then, It was getting really old, so I made it into a halloween thing. I might be retarded.

Nursing v. Medicine

Nursing is not independent of medicine. It is a limited application of it. That's not what my teachers say, but that's what I find @ work. A Doctor can do a nurse's job, but not vice versa. Am I missing something?

I'm a one stop answer shop, a bus stop, i stop busses

So, I don't think we evolved from monkeys, but I'll be honest : ...(I wasn't there) ! I know, be calm. I still don't think we did. Even if we did: it doesn't change what we are. It doesn't even rule out Adam and Eve or the Garden of Eden. Plus, we could live under a California Communist regime, and I still may be able to lead a happy life. On that note, if gay people could get married, I wouldn't care.

I CAN'T separate my religion from my politics. That's okay because my religion says for me not to make laws that force you to feign righteousness. Laws don't reign inside my religion, so why would I manufacture laws to force on others? In America, laws are just rules we all agree on to make it possible to live in the same place.

I'll try to separate my feelings about myself and my life from my feelings about you and yours. I promise that I'll try to think. I think that'll help us live closer together.

I just spouted emotional rubbish. That's not very constructive is it? It might be. To make up for that, here is something completely opposite:
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I chose to analyze the descriptive statistics of a study done in Southeastern Europe, published in 2005, examining relationships between nosocomial bloodstream infections and the medical interventions that had been performed upon the patient.

The authors of this study effectively used descriptive statistics to clarify and point out patterns in their data. They frequently used arithmetic mean +/- the standard deviant and grouped frequency distributions. They used these methods to quickly show relationships between data that were rather obvious without further analysis (i.e. average patient age, percentage of patient with nasogastric tubes, etc.). The writers also employed multivariate logistic regression analysis to find correlations between their dependant variable and their various independent variables (i.e. nasogastric tubes, aggressive procedures, etc.). The report also included a few simple tables which were effective in highlighting relationships without becoming distracting.

Overall, the authors effectively used descriptive statistics to clarify the raw data, and point out relationships between variables. Their statistical analysis was thoroughly explained in the text, and all of the analyses were relevant. I would also point out that these researchers employed SPSS software in their analyses.

Suljagic, V., Cobeljic, M., Jankovic, S., Mirovic, V., Markovic-Denic, L., Romic, P., Dragan, M.
(2005). Nosocomial Bloodstream Infections in ICU and non-ICU Patients American
Journal of Infection Control, 33(6) 333-340.

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Take that! You don't to find the Pearson Correlation Coefficient of me and awesome to know that we have a steep slope indeed. = humility

Sometimes I'm Jealous of Artists and the Upper Class

Buisness man in your Italian 3 piece. You laugh at a young man doing women's work. You have built your reputation on deals, plans, and stocks. Your gray hair is re-dyed black. People see you and respect you or hate you because the cloth on your body cost you what we pay to keep our homes each month. Your vehicle is new and your liquor cabinet is full. But, I have seen you. I have seen you when the cancer might be back. I have seen that even though you run marathons and build empires, that glioblastoma multiforme doesn't care about contracts or mortgages. A clot is not dissolved by stock options. I have seen your three piece traded in for a hospital gown. I have seen your work ethic and pride dissolve into humble kindness and frustrated anger. I was there to bring you into the world that you would buy. I gave you the vaccines that enabled you to live through childhood and make it into the Ivy league. I was in the ER when you had that car wreck and at the psychiatrist's clinic when it all got too heavy. Now, when you are fighting for your every breath, I will try to make you as comfortable as possible and honor your wishes, and tell you that your life was lived to the fullest.

Artist in your militant jacket, your convictions lined in metal discs on your sleeve. You carry a guitar and paints. You confront, you explore, and you examine. You write and expound about the mysteries that surround you. You see the sheep in polo shirts, wal-mart slacks, and white shoes and think that perhaps they don't see the same world that you do. You subject practical concerns to metaphysical ones. Your long hair, strange face, and fringe politics make you an uncomfortable figure for many. You prefer it that way. You live to confront expectations. You also age. The war that you lived to end in college, will come to an end. The president you despise will grow old and die. Your music will either fade out completely or be re engineered into a popular blasphemy of its former self. You may continue on with your convictions into old age, or the wearing of gravity and necessity may mold you into a more convenient form. I have seen it go either way. I have seen your adolescence in with intractable headaches, seizures, or some other young brain problem. You make a Michael Jackson glove out of the mesh we use to cover your IV site by cutting a thumb hole, we do that all the time, but I compliment your ingenuity anyway. I have seen you old and disabled. Your paintings hang on your wall. Every night you tell me that you were a great artist and a teacher. You tell me about Paris. I have actually seen your painting in someone's home. I have seen you come in to us with no intentions of leaving. You do not wish to be resuscitated. You want peace, quiet, and solitude. You didn't cry when you had your shots as a child, either. I will bring your morphine on schedule and try not to wake you.

Christian, in plain clothes, happy with your family, but working hard. You seem poor and somewhat ineloquent. You put all of your eggs in one basket. Sometimes you carry the knowledge of your faith like the sky hold is blueness. Sometimes you carry your faith like a heavy, splintery, cross. Sometimes you try to hide your faith in the bushes while you engage in some indiscretion. You go to your Church to meet your friends, you go to your knees to meet your God. You have many facets. You are supposed to support guns, wars, and the free market, but you're not sure why. You are pulled toward pluralism, but you hold on to the Scriptures as your anchor. You call the businessman greedy and the artist immoral, although you know that you are both of these. Others see your dim exterior, but cannot guess what lies inside you. I have seen you also. You lie in bed quietly. Your Bible is on your bedside table. I don't think I've actually seen you reading it, but it is there. You take your meds and trust your doctors. Sometimes you blame things on God that are not his fault. Your locus of control fluctuates from internal to external and back again. If you are in a coma, your family invariably leaves Christian pop music on 24/7, which I suspect may annoy you, but they think that 88.3 heals. Your family cries much harder than you do. They want treatment options, home health care, and second opinions. You don't mind. Your faith grows stronger as you breathing becomes more difficult. Sometimes you have visions of celestial beings.

I have seen myself in all of these. I live in pretense and die in pain. I cling to the present, long for the past, and am anxious about the future. Sometimes it seems like riding a bike down a dangerously steep hill, you know you will wreck soon, but some of us just make it longer than others. The important questions are, what's at the bottom of the hill, and how can we enjoy the ride?

Indy and @ Working

Angie and I went to Indy to celebrate her birthday, "A-Fest 2007". We had a lot of fun. We went to the zoo and a Pacers game on Saturday night. After the game we went to a night club called, "Nicky Blaine's". It was pretty cool. It was a cocktail/cigar bar. Low lights, lots of smoke, loud music, big leather couches, pretty sweet. I had my first mixed drink and whiskey. I had some kind of nasty martini with lots of lime. It was too fruity. Then I had a Johnny Walker Red on the ice. It wasn't too bad. It was like beer with more alcohol. I had never had two drinks before, so I wasn't sure what it would do for me, but it didn't really do much for me, just made me a little looser. Good times.

I had to work sunday night. It was an easy night. Four patients, two strokes, one cancer, one meningitis. Easy stuff.

16 hours, drudgery, and Indianapolis

I worked my first 16 hour shift at Parkview last night. I stayed from 1500-0745. It wasn't really that bad. The only real difference for me was that I was noticeably sleepier than usual at the end of the shift. I went home and slept until like 1430. Also, I found out that I will work from 7p-7a, two days per week on the new unit. Very cool. The bad thing about night shift is that there is a lot of lame work we have to do. It's stuff that normally unit clerks would do (note: unit clerks rule!, but some of the stuff they have to do is not so awesome) like put rounding reports in the charts and enter all of our own orders. It's alright though, it's nice to get everything in order for day shift.

I love the internet, I HATE INTERNET CLASSES! It's like, I like bikes, but if I had to ride one for too long (like the amount of time I have to spend checking on these idiot classes) , I would vomit blood.

Angie and I are going to Indianapolis on Friday and staying two nights! We're going to either a dinner theater or symphony orchestra on Friday night, seeing Indy on Saturday, and going to a Pacers game on Saturday night. Plus, we're 21! We can go anywhere! It will rule.

On Personality Tests

How do I always get these abstract, feeling things on these tests? If I had talent, I might be a decent artist. I have very strong feelings and aesthetics, but I don't have the dedication to sit, compose, and revise. Maybe I have talent. I wouldn't know due to a lack of training and dedication. : - (



From the E-Medicine, Gilbert's Syndrome article:

History: At least 30% of patients are asymptomatic, although nonspecific symptoms such as abdominal cramps, fatigue, and malaise are common. Abdominal symptoms in these patients are a poorly defined entity and may be secondary to underlying anxiety. However, not all patients with Gilbert syndrome and abdominal symptoms are anxious; nevertheless, they appear to have organic-type discomfort that is hard to characterize and frequently eludes diagnosis. No relationship exists between these abdominal symptoms and plasma bilirubin levels. Abdominal symptoms apparently may be multifactorial, with underlying anxiety probably playing an important role.

Gregorc Delineator

Concrete v. Abstract and Sequential v. Random. Which two am I?
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Abstract Random! Surprised?

Actually, I scored AR=30, AS=27, CR=27, CS=16. 27-40 = dominant style, 16-26 = intermediate. I am primarily a feeler, but also an idea person and researcher. I am not a nose to the grindstone, focused, lame-o.

This is why... partly...

Music, work, and a piano

I'm probably going to take on a music minor with guitar as my instrument. It's somewhat intimidating, but I can do it! It's going to take me probably two extra semesters to get my bachelor's degree, but you know. I just worked out my scheduling for the spring semester. Community health nursing w/ a clinical, IV therapy (kind of below my paygrade at this point, but it couldn't hurt), Disaster Nursing (one weekend), Clinical Pathophysiology, Guitar Class, and Concert Attendance. 13 credit hours all together. I'll be on campus on Monday and Thursday, plus some random Friday & Saturday. The guitar class is TBA, so I hope it is in the morning, and won't conflict with work! I get to buy a new guitar. Very exciting. No more tuba, though, which makes me sad.
Work has been nice. I got to hang blood for the first time. I also got some good experience suctioning trach's. Good times.
I'm trying to get a piano moved from Albion to Fort Wayne on Saturday. I'm mustering recruits. It should be thrilling.