Who knows? I don't even know, yet.
On the way to the dentist, I stumbled upon a typical summer brouhaha at Rockefeller Center. I paused to see what was going on, and it turned out they were announcing the United States Olympic men’s basketball team. I came in just at the end of the introduction of the members, and the announcer was trying to get the crowd fired up.
I just love it when dunderheaded nationalism fizzles.
Took a nap, a walk outside, saw the first crocuses poking up and had a good AC session. And I'm actually a little excited about going to classes tomorrow!Until the next mood swing...
Why do we make life hard on ourselves? I've reviewed my issues and the childhood experiences I've had countless times. I've gotten better at taking care of myself, but it still does not come easily, naturally. Is it the personality I was born with, or how I was raised? Do you do the same things, too?
I know that most people do. Remembering that makes me feel less faulty and alone. Too bad my memory is so bad... especially when I don't get enough sleep!
The main thing I want to tell people is, look over your pets! This means running your eyes and hands over them from stem to stern, if not every day, then at least a couple times a week. Get to know how they look and act normally, and if that changes, make sure they aren't sick! We had the sweetest kitty ever in the other day. She was 15 years old and had never been fixed. Somehow, her people claimed not to have noticed the chain of mammary tumours, some a good deal larger than golf balls and oozing, running down her tummy. How did they not notice this?! What's more, if she'd been fixed, this probably would not have happened! This poor elderly feline ended up having major surgery - excavating growths from the entire front of her torso, plus the removal of two rotten teeth. Afterwards, she was still as sweet as ever - purring and stumbling over to be scratched. But she would have been far less traumatized and in pain had this been caught earlier.
Another thing I need to advocate is crates for puppies. Many people think they are unnecessary and maybe even cruel. They think of them as dog prisons that their pets see as punishment. But crates are only punishment if you make them so. In truth, they can be safe spaces for your pet where he or she can feel cozy, take breaks and stay out of trouble. All you have to do is make them an inviting place to stay and train the dog to think of the crate as his or her special space. In the case of puppies, if you are not able to watch or have them watched 24 hours a day, this is extremely important. Just the other day we had two adorable puppies in. One had been in a couple weeks before for eating an entire pack of cigarettes! After some emergency care and nursing, he was released in a few days, only to come back in a few days later after eating a package of allergy medicine! Apperently, the first episode was not enough for the owners to puppy-proof their house. I wonder if anyone told them about crates.
The second puppy is an even sadder story. The owners reported that they came home to find he had somehow knocked the television over on his head and lain unconscious and convulsing for some time. What a horrifying homecoming! The dog had irreparable brain damage, and had to be euthanized. My heart aches for both the puppy and its people, knowing that if he had been crated while alone in the house, this would not have happened.
I'm not telling these horror stories to make anyone feel bad. As I noted, I, like everyone else, am ignorant of some things and make mistakes with my pets. I just want people to know that there are a few simple things they can do to help insure their animals' health. And if we love them like they love us, isn't that the least we can do?
Anyway, not having much time (or anything of interest to say), I'm finally getting to the 123 Book Meme Corn Dog tagged me for a little while ago. Here are the rules:
1. Grab the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the first 5 sentences and write them down.
4. Then invite 5 friends to do the same.
And here goes:
"Everything comes and goes
Pleasure moves on too early
And trouble leaves too slow
Just when you're thinking
You've finally got it made..."
Kind of leaves ya hangin', doesn't it? And do those count as sentences? Anyway, that's from Joni Mitchell: The Complete Poems and Lyrics, which I suppose isn't so complete anymore, since it came out in 1997.
Actually, my quote in my senior year high school yearbook was from Joni Mitchell. It was from the song "Black Crow" on the album Hejira, and went thusly:
"In search of love and music
My whole life has been
Illumination
Corruption
And diving, diving, diving, diving
Diving down to pick up on every shiny thing
I'm like that black crow flying
In a blue sky"
No, I wasn't no damn hippie. Just pretentious and full of passion hormones.
Now I tag First Nations, oneofhismoms, Qenny, Chaucer's Bitch (whenever she gets back from Sith Efrica)and Warrior Two. I imagine they will have disparate and interesting reading at hand. Now, do the meme and send it on to five friends or little Jimmy will die!
Had me low, had me down...But I'm not really low so much as tired, and the weather is a good excuse to hole in for a couple hours and contemplate my first day at the new job.
I was lucky that my first day turned out to be oddly quiet, as there was a lot to take in. The vet assistant I was shadowing was a big ol' dyke, also entering the vet tech program at LaGuardia. She showed me everything from where the cleaning supplies were located to how to read charts, from how to prepare ER stations to how to handle bodies. When I took a recently deceased cat in my arms, stiff with rigor mortis and looking disturbingly like my beloved Maya, to make a final pawprint in Sculpey as a keepsake for her person, we got misty together. When a small dog suddenly crashed and had to be given CPR, foaming blood pouring out of her mouth onto the floor, she suggested I watch to see what the ER team did. When one of the tiny puppies mistook my nose for a nipple (happens all the time) and tried to suckle, we laughed.
And laughter goes on a lot, there. Most of the team communicates with the easy, mildy insulting humour that people who like each other and have gone through important work do. Several times during the day, while I was learning how to run bloods, put together surgical packs, or just discussing the finer points of reptiles with the classmate who recommended me to the job and is now my co-worker, people told me unbidden that they love the place and stay there because it feels like a family. "You can always ask questions, and people are happy to teach you," I was told. And it was true. Several times, I didn't even have to ask. Someone who had noticed me watching or answered a few questions earlier would fill me in further. My head was swimming with new information, but it felt good.
Tomorrow is my second day. I bought some new scrubs, and I'm nervous and excited. I'll be working with a different team, and have new things to learn, accomplish, or maybe mess up. I'm hoping I do a good job. I've discovered that I like doing this kind of work, so far, and I want to do it well.
Granted, it is a low-paying job.
A very low-paying job.
But! It is a veterinary assistant job at a sparkly, new, state-of-the-art facility with lots of knowledgeable staff, specialist vets, a top surgeon, and lots of fascinating gew-gaws like an MRI machine, digital x-ray system, sonography machine &c.
What does this mean, Natorettes? Well, one hopes it means I will be learning a lot at this job, which is just what I want to do.
So, I'm a little nervous (and wondering when my other pairs of scrub pants are going to arrive in the mail), but excited for tomorrow. All in all, this calls for a round of the Happy Happy Joy Joy Song! Commence... singing!
How was yours?
Here's the clip, if you want to see it.
She looked gobsmacked when she won the award. I hope it's good for her. Who knows if getting out and performing helps keep her alive or just exacerbates her problems? Being an artist is so much about high emotion and energy. It's no wonder so many artists end up strung out.
The sad thing is, talented as she is, she will always be tied to the song "Rehab" because of just how damn catchy it is and the irony of her situation. One only hopes that she will live long enough to release a song called "I Got Tired of Being Fucked Up and Killing Myself So I Learned How to Channel My Talent Sober."
That might just need a catchier chorus, though.
So many commentators have been talking about Eli "growing up," "coming into his own," or "becoming a man" in the last few weeks. They're referring to his frustrating string of mistakes and poor judgment over the last couple seasons, and his sudden turn to playing well and having almost no interceptions from the end part of this past season and right on through the Super Bowl. Fans and talking heads alike marveled at his sudden confidence and competency. He not only started making plays, but smiling and laughing, a welcome change from his usual gape-mouthed mope.
Now, a while back, I had a theory that Tiki Barber's infamous comments on how Eli trying to speak in front of the other players was "almost comical" actually helped Eli, in that it spurred him to step up. But now, I have a new idea. That idea is: sometime in the last few months, Eli Manning lost his virginity.
Think about it: a quiet-spoken guy, southern baptist and fond of his mother, sadly unattractive despite his tall build and athletic skills, Eli has been dating his college girlfriend (now fiancée) for five years, now. I believe that at some point in the mid-to-late 2007, that girlfriend - or someone, anyway - finally put out. I mean, did you see how drastically his demeanor changed? How his panicked, flapping runs and fumbles turned into dodges and completed passes? Something must have given him the confidence and relaxation he'd been lacking.
The only other explanation I can think of is that he sent away for this:
2. Skype kicks Yahoo Messenger's ass, yo. I mean, I've been trying to get this VOIP thing going for months so I could record my AC consultations for my clients, and I could not stop my calls from getting dropped. First the headset was for crap, then I was afraid it was my cable connection. Now I know I just should have been paying the extra money for Skype. It's worth it to actually be able to hear both ends of a conversation and not have malfunctions every few minutes. Now, if I can just get my recorder to register both speakers at a reasonable volume...
3. I still don't have a job. But! I had two AC clients today, a follow-up on a web job, and a referral from a classmate to an opening at the vet hospital where she works. Progress?
4. I am disturbed to inform you that now I cannot look at my cats without imagining their skeletons. Unfortunately, my first cat dissection will finally happen on Tuesday. I think I'll get through it okay; I just hate the thought of imagining slabs of dessicated meat every time I hug my critters.
5. Tomorrow night we see Kathy Griffin! Woo!
Further bulletins as events warrant, y'all.
No? Well, then.
P.S.: I had a really intriguing job interview yesterday. As in, I'm beginning to think it might be possible to have an interesting job I care about while going to school to study something else I care about. Hmmm.
Behold the lamprey: not quite an eel, not quite a fish, not even quite a vertebrate. In other words, one weird-ass mothafukkin animal, my people. Damn.What you see at its front is essentially an extended upper lip with nary a lower lip in sight. Lampreys are jawless. They sort of have heads, but you'd be hard pressed to find exactly where they end and the body begins (not to mention their brains are barely more than a cluster of cells). Their front ends are basically sensory organs with that big mouth at the end, which functions like a suction cup with teeth in it. They glom onto a hard-spined fish, stick to them and rasp away with those teeth, ingesting the fish's blood and tissues. Their tongues even have teeth on them!
Their skeletons are cartilaginous, like sharks, and they have both a nerve cord, which is similar to a spinal column, minus the vertebrae, and a notochord, an early version of the vertebral column which is much less rigid, and is now found in mainly lower forms and embryos (yes, you had one, too, early in your development). A bizarre throwback to ancient times, fossilized records show that they may not have changed in over 360 million years. Judging from the condition of our dessicated dissection specimen in lab class, it was probably among the first.
My first dissection went fairly smoothly, considering the condition of the specimen and the fact that the scalpels in those dissection kits are about as sharp as prison-issue sporks. The lamprey was actually pretty small, so it's a stretch for eyeballs over thirty years old to see all the mushy parts, especially since doing so meant getting close to that smell. However, I did it, and I made a new friend in one of my new lab partners. It turns out she is a geeky gay white girl, too. In fact, she's so gay, geeky and white, she makes me look like Snoop Dogg. Let me put it this way: we ended our conversation by talking about the origin of slash in Star Trek fiction. For further research in lab: how did the idea of Kirk, Spock and McCoy all getting it on at once not kill slash in its infancy, if not actually kill homosexuality altogether? Discuss.
After a long-ass lecture, delivered in an outrageous French accent by our professor (thank goodness I did the reading), I filled in an application at a local vet's office, and then went home to find my lab coat had arrived in the mail. Question: if you found out your animal health care professional had run around the house in his or her lab coat and underwear singing "(s)he's the one they call Doctor NOOOO PAAAANTS!", would you entrust him or her with your beloved pet? Does it help to know it was to the tune of an old Mötley Crüe song?
All in all, a very productive day. I think I'm going to enjoy this class. It makes me feel AAAAWL RIIIIGHT!
These are just a few of the things that have happened to me in the last few days.
I'm going to take a nap now.
P.S.: My cat has just decided for the first time in her life that she must watch me from atop the monitor. What is God trying to tell me?
P.P.S.: Please don't say it's "vote Romney."
P.P.P.S.: Go read Water for Elephants now. It will make you forget all of this kind of shit. Really.
