i heart NY

i'm going to nyc.
can't wait.
a much needed reprieve from school and exams
my head is about to explode. there's too much stuff crammed in.

i gave my first insulin injection last week. a subQ injection which means it's going in on a 45˚ angle. tricky.
it actually wasn't so bad.

tomorrow i give a heparin injection, change a colostomy appliance and suction a trach tube.
and then exams next week.
i'm exhausted.

can't wait for nyc.
last time i was there, did all the touristy stuff.
this time i plan on hittin up roosevelt island, to check out these ruins
maybe a knicks game...i don't particularly like basketball, but how fun would the $10 nosebleed seats be against the utah jazz? i'm betting pretty fun.
and tons of art to check out. never got to the whitney or the moma last time.
and i heard that the night of the living dead (the musical!) was off broadway. but i can't find it anywhere except some old listing at the greenwich theater. that would be zombifyingly fun.
i don't even care that zombifying is not a word.
it is when there are zombies involved.
in a musical, no less.

good food + good band = good night

saw a great band tonight
slow news day

ate a great meal in the annex at mt. everest
and had a wonderful fish jalfrajee. it was delicious.
had a baskin robbins ice cream on my way home from seeing slow news day

back to candy and essays.

i'm glad money's not on my brain.

today in psychology class...

you are kind of always aware of the influence that famous psychologists' theories have on popular culture...sayings like "he's so anal" wouldn't be in existence if it weren't for Freud, right?

but today i learned something new.
my psych prof said that george lucas was such a big jungian that the whole star wars trilogy is based on jung's idea of the duality of man and embracing your dark side ("luke, i am your father")

i was so intrigued that i looked it up. and although this particular reference is missing, wikipedia does have a fairly comprehensive list of jung's influence on culture...

even though i am a fairly big TOOL fan, i never really thought of aenima as being synonymous with jung's anima/animus
i've also read robertson davies, chuck palahniuk, and ursula leguin and really didn't put 2&2 together.
even northern exposure dj chris stevens made many references to jung.
who knew?

check it out here

random ttc exchange

i love transient ttc conversations.
who was that random guy?
he told me that it must be a good book i was reading because it was thick.
he told me that che wanted to be a doctor. and he thought he would have made a great doctor.
had it not been for that revolutionary stuff.
and he knows this because he's mexican.
and then mid sentence he got off the car.
just like that.

the gizzardly joys of thanksgiving

i cooked a bird.
me, the quasi-veg-head....cooked a bird that i won't even eat.
but i cook a pretty mean bird.

this post is a little late because canadiana thanksgiving was at the beginning of october.
but i was uploading some photos from my camera to the computron and i had forgotten about these photos:













so i decided to cook a bird and trimmings for 13 family members (is that a sign of age? who knows...i just love cooking for people--always have)
to make my conscience feel better, i ordered a free run, grain fed (raised just for the occassion) bird from a local mennonite farm.
this baby, we called her chantelle, was a 20 lb beast. and she still had some pin feathers stuck to her. you see, when the birds aren't massed produced by butterball™, they actually have feathers. and hefty breasts.
the night before the big day, i decided to give chantelle a salty bath.
i was reading all about how to make my bird delicious and read about brining the bird, especially an all natural, non-frozen, non-butterball bird.
so with a mixture of salt water and herbs, i double bagged chantelle and soaked her for 12 hours. unfortunately her wing tip broke a hole in both bags and the kitchen floor was cleaned with a salt water, sage and black peppercorn cleanser
thanksgiving morning i woke up like it was christmas morning...ran to the fridge to get chantelle and prep her for her spa day.
rinsed off the brine, and made my own herb butter.
ever so gently i pulled the skin from her breast and slipped my hand between the two to rub the butter in. then i put some sage leaves under the skin.
it was beautiful.
it was masochistic.
and a bizarre practice for someone who doesn't eat turkey.
but i actually didn't mind. maybe it was the biologist in me?
and it left my hands feeling supple.

so an elephant goes into a black hole...

two fascinating articles and a whole lotta dung

i have never seen so much s**t in my life. honestly.
to spare the gory details, i cared for a client yesterday--progressive ms, quadriplegia, aphasic (doesn't speak)--who had been given a suppository the night before. need i say more?
made me wonder if this is what i got into nursing for.
the RN said "this is nothing".
good lord.

what interested me this week was the idea that you can't have everything.
where dung beetles get compensated, in terms of growth (in this case big horns), other parts suffer (in this case, testicles):

horniest male beetles have tiniest testicles

and this is just sounds like oodles of fun:

working invisibility cloak created at last

cauliflower and avocado

after leaving my pathophysiology class on wednesdays, my brain is starving. plus it's well after lunch time.
today i stopped at my favourite falafel place on the way home, an egyptian eatery on the danforth called the prince of egypt. although similar to lebanese cuisine, they make their falafels with lima beans instead of chick peas. they are the best! and cheap, cheap, cheap.
today i stopped in and was trying to decide on something different. the young guy who runs the place with his father suggested i try his favourite breakfast wrap: battered cauliflower with avocado. sure, why not?
although his father gave me a weird look of inquiry when he relayed the order, i went ahead with it.
while i was waiting, i had a wonderful talk with the son.
right now, muslims are in the midst of ramadan.
adam was telling me how it was hard being in the restaurant business when fasting because he's serving food all the time, smelling the food, and talking with customers, which makes his mouth very dry and parched.
but he really believes in god, and believes that fasting is a very humbling experience. through fasting, muslims can feel the effects of starvation and feel the effects of poverty.
in the many years he has fasted during ramadan, he has never once broken his fast. i found this so impressive because he's a young guy and only human. i can't imagine how hard it would be to refrain from food, drink, tobacco, and unpure thoughts from dawn until sundown.
many hours are spent reading the qur'an and reaffirming your faith in islam.
it was a wonderful conversation and i learned so much.
i was so intrigued i even forgot my wallet, which i didn't realize until a half hour later, when i was trying to purchase some fruit at the market.
i ran back, and as soon as i opened the door, adam smiled and extracted my wallet from his back pocket, while his dad and his friend made jokes that it had taken me so long to come back they had used my amex to make calls to egypt.
and you know, even when i realized my wallet was missing and i remembered how much cash i had in there (i'm a server...i always have cash on me), i wasn't even concerned about it. i knew it was in good and honest hands.
and it was.
and that cauliflower and avocado pita was damn good.

i don't know anything

many people believe wisdom comes with age.

Meacham (a psychologist) believes that wisdom is characteristic of young people because they have more of an open mind; older people know too much and are too stuck in their ways
he thinks that when you can admit that you don't know anything, is when you have attained a certain wisdom, and that this is a completely young perspective...fresh, new thinking.

Eastern thoughts think that knowing you don't know anything does pertain to wisdom, but this transpersonal wisdom can only happen with age. it is only when you are older can you transcend your ego and see the "big picture". this is enlightenment.

i guess it depends how you define wisdom.

(*photo: my friend beebs, transcending his ego and attracting leeches at a hidden waterfall on manitoulin island)

conservatives and counterculture

after a lengthy pause from a great book, The Rebel Sell: why the culture can't be jammed, i've picked it up again for my long subway ride to and from my clinical placement.
just as i'm reading about the difference between dissent and deviance and what's acceptable in public by society's standards, a girl gets on the streetcar, headphones on, singing at the top of her lungs.
which was fine, except she's singing rap lyrics...which would also be fine, except instead of a rhythmic flow she's singing only the ends of sentences that are emphasized.
and emphasized by serious profanity.
it was a funny situation because aside from myself and another adult, there was nobody else on the car. but how funny would it have been if there were children? would she have stopped singing? or did she even notice she was only rapping the emphasized disses and cusses?

so back to this book...
there's this regular at the bar where i work, whom i do like, even though he's admittedly (and proudly) a conservative. he's a very intelligent guy, very sweet too, but we don't have much in common--which inevitably leads to some heated debates which are always abruptly ended.
i think he's given up trying to change my young mind about the evils of the left, and instead our conversations are now only about karate...which is fun, but getting tiresome.
it seems he's simply refused to try and get through to me. which is unfortunate, because i always enjoyed our arguments.
the other night he nonchalantly mentioned how much he likes george w. and everything he stands for.
and in my tiredness, all i could muster was "what?! warmonger." not very intelligent convo, i know. but sometimes i forget just how conservative he really is, and i am rendered speechless.
what i really wanted to say was something along the lines of this:

"...to this day, Republicans in the United States go to almost comical lengths to denounce the enemies of America as "evil." In their minds, they are striking a rhetorical blow against the counterculture, which they believe denies the reality of evil. (As usual, American politics is dominated by the compulsion to refight the battles of the '60s.) What conservatives fail to observe is that this rhetoric directly feeds the countercultural idea that they are so desperate to oppose. "We need to get tough," the conservatives claim. "We need to use force, because our enemies are evil." What they tacitly admit, thereby, is that if their enemies weren't evil, then there would be no need for the use of force. This sets things up for the argument that the enemies in question are not actually evil, they're just misunderstood. And so there is no need for coercion! Thus the conservative backlash feeds the countercultural ideas whose conclusions it tries so hard to oppose." ~ Heath & Potter, 2004, p. 74

time to rest.
my brain is chock full of g-tube feedings, colostomy bags and catheters.

In reality: this is just awesome because i now know all about what this guy discovered.

more school = less blogging

my first real day of clinical practice at toronto rehab consisted of another member of my clinical team swinging the door to the locker rooms open and smacking me in the head.
6:45 am, 15 mins before i'm due on the floor in my unit, i'm bleeding profusely, seeing stars and wondering how the hell this could have happened to me.
after freaking out my new clinical instructor with the amount of blood on my hand and saturated paper towel, i'm left with a 2" vertical laceration above my left eyebrow and a massive goose egg (not correct terminology, i know) which is every shade of blue/purple/yellow, combined.
looks lovely.
but it did initiate conversations with patients and nurses alike.
i am now known on the floor as "the girl with the big bandage above her eye". atleast i'm known on the floor, right?

my clients are a mix of lovely and interesting.
i'm drawn to 2 in particular, one being lovely, and one being interesting...and difficult.

i have a woman, whom i thought was only about my age, but discovered later is actually 41, who, as a result of cerebral palsy, has very limited movement & function, and has kyphoscoliosis (kyphosis=hunchback, scoliosis=an s-curvature of the spine).

i also helped care for a woman who has a history of drug/alcohol abuse with ODs relating to suicide attempts and withdrawal seizures but was admitted after a domestic dispute with her then common-law spouse left her with severe brain damage, resulting in left-sided hemiplegia (paralysis). when she came into rehab she had a trach tube and had staples holding the skin on her skull. she's been on a slow road to recovery, although it'll never be complete. she has learned to read and write at a about a grade 2 level. she yells at me and she likes to throw her shit on the wall.

speaking of trach tubes, i got to clean the mucus spewing out of someone's whole in their neck and see the stoma created to attach a colostomy bag. i saw intestines. amazing.
what's not so amazing is the smell from the bag.
i figure, when your waste goes through the intestines, it's reabsorbing water to dilute the concentration before it exits your anus. if you're catching the waste before it's been through the intestines, it is pure, undiluted, concentrated waste, mixed with bile and acid. it's enough to make anyone vomit.

while visions of marshmallows danced in my head

i woke myself up the other night making this noise, like "ahhhh", but in a sexual kinda way...and you know when you're so noisy in your sleep, you wake yourself up, startled?
so it seemed kinda like a sexual thing when i woke up, but in fact it was a laughing type "ahhhh", kinda like "ahhh, don't!" because i realized i had been dreaming about being pelted with marshmallows.
a fun, harmless, marshmallow fight.
not sure why, with who, or how that came to be, but it wasn't sexual.
although, i suppose it could be...if you think in that perverted sort of way.

yesterday as i mad dashed to the mall to find some new white shoes for my clinical tomorrow, i realized that in the 8 years i've lived here in the city, this is the first month that i've ever purchased a Metropass™.
it's a liberating feeling, really. not that i hadn't already started to feel like a part of the city a few years back, but now it's official: i am a Torontonian.
i like how i can just scan my way through the turnstiles. a little beep and i'm through.
no more fumbling with tickets or change.
i guess moving east means using more transit. but it also means carrying my bike down two long flights of stairs. so i guess it boils down to laziness.
dammit. my liberating Metropass™ has gone from the height of my status quo, to reaffirming the fact that i've gotten lazier. and perhaps a part of the blue collar masses that use the subway on a daily basis.
dammit.

school: week 2

Levinson did a research study in the '70s and found that peoples' lives are like seasons. all stages have their place and no one is better than another.

he said that every lifetime has 3 eras (after childhood): early adulthood, middle adulthood & late adulthood.
within each of these eras were periods and transitions. the transitions between eras were big "cross-era" transitions, lasting ~5 yrs, and a source of turmoil and confusion. the transitions between periods were small.

just before early adulthood comes a cross-era transition when you're half child/half adult (~17-22 yrs) where you're trying to gain independence.

as you enter early adulthood there's a calm period, the novice period (~22-28 yrs) where you develop dreams and have mentors. then there's a small transition (~28-33 yrs) where you question if you're heading in the right direction, which is followed by another calm period he called "calmination".

before you enter the second era of middle adulthood, there's another cross-era transition which causes the mid-life crisis (~40-45 yrs).

this pattern continues into late adulthood, where there are periods of self-reflection and coming to terms with dying.

alhtough this is just one man's theory and has many criticisms, as do many theories, i can honestly say that i've been through the first periods of early adulthood. i had that novice period, where i formed my dreams, and then the small transition where i questioned whether i was headed in the right direction. and i answered it. and did something about it.

if this psychologist is on the right track, i am still in that small transition, and just as i graduate, i'll be headed into my period of calmination.

interesting.

Music to my ears: tool - lateralus

In reality: Neanderthals and humans lived side by side

trying to focus when everything is new

back to school. and orientation always just serves to disorient me.
i'm overwhelmed and having trouble focusing.
getting distracted and not getting back to reality in a reasonable hour.
summer is over but the feeling won't stick.
new place, new people, new toys.
a desk with an uncomfortable chair.

==
my placement is at toronto rehab this year. could be cool.

Food for thought: still reading Into Thin Air (which is fantastic, by the way) but now i'm also reading Adult Development and Aging, Canadian Essentials of Nursing Research, Pharmacology and the Nursing Process and Medical-Surgical Nursing in Canada. ahhhh.

In reality: i can't believe that in the UK you could get away with taking someone's DNA and getting it tested without their knowledge...until now.

a brief descent into the land of poutine & pepsi (and apparently hotdogs)

i love montreal.
i've decided. and it only took the 2 hours we spent there to come to that decision.
i don't care if there is only pepsi.
the real cheese curds on the poutine make up for that.
and i don't care if the waitress snickers while you try to order in your broken and basic conversational french, but refuses to speak english even though she can.
sometimes there's no other way to learn than to be laughed at.
i love the houses and the low-rises and the lack of high-rise condo complexes.
it's all very european. and, like europe, smartly designed.

somewhere between hwys 20 est & 720 sud-est (which is essentially the same road, save for some merging in the tunnel) bob says:
"the bridges here are crazy. look at that! it's so bladerunner."
later, over a pint of rickard's at a pub nearby the station centre-ville, waiting for the overnight bus to take us back to t.o., we both decided to live in montreal for a while, sometime in the future.

food for thought: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
(found a copy in a used bookshop in kingston, on the way to quebec. having already read Into the Wild--actually, devoured in one night--i was happy Bob pointed this one out to me. it's based on his deadly adventure to the summit of Everest as a journalist for Outside mag...here's the original story: http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/199609/199609_into_thin_air_1.html
it's already addicting...i guess since school starts again tomorrow i'll just have to finish it today...before working at 5...heh)

**sidenote to Bob: you're mildly suspicious (but i hope still trusting) at the secrecy of my online adventures. but just so you know, this is it. there is no rich old man from tallahassee on the other end, begging me to come bear his children. nope. the secrets lie in this. something i said i'd never do: have a blog. and i never made it completely public. but i never lied about it either...well, not really. and truth be told, i KNOW you're the only one who reads it, even though you pretend it doesn't exist. you can find just about anything by googling it. it's amazing, n'est pas?

the late great Bill Hicks

to add to yesterday's post, a quote from one of my heroes, Mr. Bill Hicks:

"i don't care what you believe but you gotta admit: beliefs are odd...a lot of christians wear crosses around their necks. you think when jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fucking cross? that's like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on..."

a chance for redemption

a Mormon stopped me on the street the other day.
"do you believe in God?" he asked.
"i think so." i replied. "but as a different manifestation than you, i'd imagine."
(he was a young chap, and i don't think he was expecting me to actually talk to him, let alone possibly believe in a higher being.)
"do you believe in Jesus as the Messiah?" he wanted to know.
"i'm not sure about that one. i believe Jesus was a great prophet, a wonderful storyteller, but i'm not sure if i even think there needs to be a messiah."
"but don't you want to get into heaven?"
"we may already be in heaven."
"or it may be hell."
"either way, it's what you make it. why bother living for that future of what happens when you die? you can be a good christian and have faith while living today."

truth be told, i absolutely love talking to any religious type folk. my beliefs change on a daily basis. i refuse to be an agnostic or an atheist, because i think it's a bit of a cop out.
some days i believe in a god, other days i don't. i'd say most days i'm just concerned with getting through the day while enjoying it, and i wish i could have that persistent faith that keeps christians going each day. there is a beauty in it, for sure.

just then the streetcar came and my young Mormon friend had to run.
"dang!" he said. (seriously)
"here, please go to the website if you want to be saved."
he handed me a card, with a photo of the massive temple in Salt Lake City, Utah. the original Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. a beautiful night time shot. a gorgeous building. a nice place to worship, i'm sure.
i use it as a bookmark.

the ant that bit my poon

in our kayaks at bon echo, we stopped for a swim.
sitting on a rock in the sun to dry off i noticed a big carpenter ant with a red bum in bob's shoe. i said "there's a big ant in your shoe" and shook it out.
next thing i know, i'm standing up and holy crap, ow! i'm getting bitten on the right lip of my heynaninani (as cash money likes to refer to it)...it felt like a horse fly bite, so i went down to shoo it away, all the while yelling "you little bastard, that hurt" and what do i find, but a big ol' ant in my bikini bottom. and apparently an angry one.
i must have pissed him off throwing him out of bob's shandal.
yuck. i think that's worse than a horse fly. i think i thought that right away because i nearly fell off the rock.

hippo kisses

have you ever seen hippos kiss? it is quite bizarre, with those massive mouths.
this photo doesn't really do it justice...to witness this in person is quite something.
i did feel a tad embarrassed to be watching at first, maybe a little weird, but they didn't seem to mind the crowd.

a change in space as we know it: plutons or planemos

this is incredible
so, without wanting to get rid of poor Pluto, who barely fits the definition of a planet, we're just going to let more rocks into the planet club. and now Pluto has a partner, Charon. it's a double planet. a super planet.
they're even letting asteroids in.
the fact that there is even a planet definition committee is just amazing. a committee to decipher the definition of a planet, in order to be selective about what constitutes entry into our solar system.
talk about confusing the minds of our future young scientists. it's like philosophy of the milky way.
"is it a planet or is it not a planet?" "and what makes up a planet?"
although a name like 2003UB313 (aka Xena) is sure to spark the flames of memory during exams, much more than, say, Neptune. i think so, anyways.

Food for thought: The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders (speaking of planets, this story about the residents of Inner and Outer Horner is hilarious)
Music to my ears: The Arcade Fire (particularly the song Neighbourhood #2 (Laika) from Funeral)