The First...

Don't know where I was going with this one, but I just found it among my other writtings and decided to post it here for anyone bored enough. It's not as bad as I remembered it, but I still have no clue where I was going with this one.

The first thing I remember was the sky, dark and clear. The moon was nowhere to be seen which meant it had already set or we were in the new moon phase. I couldn't really tell, but that somehow seemed important. To my right I could here the ocean swelling and receding, but the sand beneath me was dry and cool. I had no fear of the tide reaching this far up on the beach. The lids of my eyes scrapped up and down feeling like sandpaper until my eyes began to tear for moisture. How long had I been out here? I wiggled fingers and toes which were all bare and sand coated. Pain shot from all extremities inward pulling a gasp from deep in my chest. I clenched my fists and curled my toes until the pain finally subsided. Everything else was still aching, but at least I was able to move. When I was able to sit up and breathe normally I looked around to see if I could recognize my location. I couldn't, of course, but I did notice the boardwalk several feet to my left. I couldn't have been out here too long without someone noticing me. That was somewhat a relief.
The clothes I was wearing were unfamiliar and shredded. It looked like I had been mauled by a bear or some other wild animal, but there was no blood and I had no wounds bleeding or healing anywhere on my body. Whatever had destroyed my clothes apparently had no effect on me. I reached up to brush my hair back from my forehead and noticed for the first time that it was long, blonde and tangled to hell. Why did it shock me that I had blonde hair? That was the moment that the fear crept in. The more I tried to think about it the less I could actually recall about myself. I was sitting on some random beach in the middle of god knows what city or town and I had no idea who I was. There was nothing here that was going to give me any kind of a hint either. I didn't see a discarded purse that I could rifle through to gain more information about myself. What does one do? Where does one go when they have no idea....
I pushed the thoughts firmly to the back of my mind. I would just have to work with the knowledge I did have. It may be very little, but I wasn't completely helpless.

Rilo Kiley Concert

It was pretty damn fantastic. Me, Hutch and Liz went down to the Slowdown around 7 o'clock because the ticket said 8:00. Well that meant the doors opened at 8 which meant we had plenty of time to sit around and watch Hutch get wasted. Liz and I were pretty sure that Hutch wasted a good $80 on alcohol that night (alcoholic). It's a nice bar so no one minded that we were there so early. My only problem with that slip up was that I hadn't had time to eat before I left. You see, this was the day before my brother's birthday and I was somehow required to stop by his house (by my mother) to celebrate. Unfortunately it was one of those times where I just dropped a card off and hoped for the best. He wasn't getting home until after seven and I couldn't wait that long. This was when my mother decided to drop the cancer bomb on me which made me feel worse because I couldn't talk to her about it. I had a 20 minute drive home to change and get to Hutch's. So, this random tangent that I went off on had no point other than what I previously stated: I didn't eat and was starved for the rest of the evening.

There were two start up bands. The first was meh. Not bad, but not memorable and not what I was there for. The second band was much better and Hutch actually bought their CD because he liked them so much. Which brings me to my second tangent. The price of the merchandise was reasonable at this concert. A first in history (for me anyway)! A hoddie for $30? Unheard of! Not that I bought anything, but I'm just sticking my tongue out (figuratively) and the person who felt the need to comment on my last concert blog about how the band earns their money by selling merchandise and that's why its so expensive, mer. Well, it seems not all of them are quite as desperate to make money. I was actually tempted to purchase one of their awesome t-shirts, but at the end of the day I didn't want to carry it around with me all night or wait in line at the end of the night. Remember, I'm exceedingly lazy.

Then, finally, the reason we were at the Slowdown got on stage! As, I'm sure you all know by now, I did not take this or any other picture that night. I found these on Flickr because photobucket was shocking lacking in photos from the omaha concert. These pictures were from the show the previous night, but close enough. Every time they played a song I was pretty sure they had played all my favorites and I was satisfied.... and then they would play another song and that would be another one of my favorites. It was pretty fantastic except (and yes this will be the third tangent of the evening) the fact that I wore heals. Now, I had a reason for torturing my feet, I promise. I've been to concerts before and there's always some asshole that's 12 feet tall standing right in front of me and this time I was going to be prepared, damnit! So, it turned out to be entirely unnecessary because I took them off so the people behind me could see over my head and I just looked between bouncing heads in front of me to see the stage. I guess that's about all there is to say. With so little to complain about when it comes to the show and the venue I guess this will be a shorter than normal blog. Rock on, Rilo Kiley! You guys were awesome live.

The "C" Word

Hey, dirty mind!

Cancer.

Oh, that "C" word. Yes, just as dirty, just as disgusting and tearing through our world and our lives. Yuck, what a piece of shit of a disease. Not that any disease is buckets of fun, but cancer just seems to be the crappiest because it goes anywhere and everywhere and they can't do much about it.... yet. This time its my mom dealing with it (along with millions of others, but I don't know them so I can't write about them).

It started with an ugly-ass mole on a forehead and ended up in the neck with thyroid cancer. Gee, those two things don't seem to be related? They're not, but that's how it was found. My mom had a mole quickly making itself known by growing out of her forehead like a unicorn's horn. She went to a dermatologist to have it removed and low and behold it had those little nasty cancer cells swimming around and screwing things up. So the doctor's decided some more testing was necessary and they were going to do that by taking a larger chunk of skin from her head. At the same time they were going to take a node out of her neck and her thyroid. I'm not sure how that decision was reached, but I'm assuming they did some test (an ultrasound or MRI or something along those lines) and saw a growth on her thyroid.

All did not go according to plan during surgery. The growth they had seen on her thyroid had wrapped itself around her trachea and when they were cutting it away they nicked her trachea. Damn. That sucks. So, a procedure that was supposed to be in and out turning into an ICU visit. They kept her sedated through the night and she was completely baffled the next day when she discovered most of a day had passed without her knowledge. They also still had the tube down her throat when I showed up at one o'clock in the afternoon. She was awake, choking and the doctor was no where to be found. The ridiculously understanding and nice nurse Jesse informed me that normal a tech could take it out, but since they had nicked the trachea during surgery they were being overly cautious and they wanted an anesthesiologist, a cardiologist and her surgeon present just in case anything went wrong and they had to put the tube back it. I understood that, but what I didn't understand was why the doctor wasn't coming now that she was awake. Shockingly the anesthesiologist was the first to show up (way to go guy) and the cardiologist was quick to follow. Then, forty-five minutes later, her doctor finally decides to amble his way up to the ICU (and no he didn't have a good excuse like surgery for why it took him forty-five minutes). They finally got the tube out of her throat and nothing happened, which is, of course, a good thing.

Final results finally came back and we discovered that the skin from her forehead was fine. The cancer hadn't gone into her lymph nodes and it seems all the cancer had been removed. Now, she has a "L" shaped scar right on her forehead, which she joked about in the hospital claiming that she was now officially a "Loser". The thyroid, however, had more cancer. Completely different and separate from the cancer that had been on her forehead. The whole thyroid had been removed, but they are going to be doing radiation therapy on her anyway. She has to completely change her diet. Apparently with thyroid cancer she cannot have any iodine in her diet for them to do the therapy. That translates into no iodized salt and no dairy. Holy crap, how much does that suck? Do you realize that damn near everything has salt in it? and in most cases that's the plain old iodized salt that she can't have?

Needless to say we are all still in the freak out stage of this mess, but we are figuring it all out and keeping everyone calm, especially my mom. I'm going to get her a bread maker so she can make her own salt-free bread and the online cookbooks have so many salt-less recipes that I have assured my mom that cooking foods won't be a problem. She is preparing for the fact that she will no longer be on her thyroid meds and therefore will be exhausted all the time and the fact that the radiation is going to leave a nice burn to go along with her choke scar from surgery. I'm trying to keep it light for her so she doesn't get depressed on top of all the other crap she's dealing with. I've already decided that she is going to be just fine and that I won't let her or anyone else say any different. It's three months of hell, but its not a lifetime and that's what matters, right?

More Patient Tales

I thought this tale was best told via e-mail communications between my friend and I explaining what new annoyance I had at work today.

ME: So, I had a patient sitting out in the waiting room who was humming along (really loud) with the manwich jingle and then another commercial for Countryside Village came on and she started humming along with that one too. It was really obnoxious! I mean humming along at home or singing in your car is one thing, but that was bordering on me asking her to stop. This isn't karaoke or your living room. Stop being annoying please.

FRIEND: Manwich really? Wow! I would not blame you for saying something to her. More importantly though who actually knows the Manwich theme song!

ME: It's actually someone saying “Manwhich, Manwhich, I want Manwich” over and over again to a classical music tune. It's actually a pretty common tune. You'd probably know it if you heard it. But it was still annoying. Yeah, I can’t be that rude without getting fired, but I could see how it would get on someone's nerves to the point where they would blow up.

FRIEND: I guess if it was classical music it would make it that much harder to bare.

ME: Honestly, if this woman would have stopped when the commercial did I probably wouldn't have been so irritated with it, but she just kept humming through the next commercial until another one she knew came on :\

FRIEND: Was she senile?

ME: No. But she did get really excited when i took her back to her room. I said "we're going to have you here in room three" and she shoots her hands in the air and yells out "woo hoo! room three!" so she might just be on mass amounts of drugs.

FRIEND: Yes! Drugs! That is the only explanation for this! I never remember getting excited over which room the doctor put me in. I am going to do that next appointment!

ME: when they are walking you down the hall you should start muttering things like "come on room four, do i have a room four?" like Vegas roulette crazies.

FRIEND: I will do that while humming the Manwich theme song!

ME: have fun with that

FRIEND: You are my emergency contact so expect a phone call from my doctor committing me.

Okay, so is it just me or was this really an amusing tale?

A Year Later

It's almost a year since I began this blog. Go me.

That out of the way, now, what's the most obnoxious song you've ever had stuck in your head? I've pretty much always got something stuck in my head and I get a kick out of getting songs stuck in other people's heads. Unfortunately, only songs that people know usually get stuck in their head so my little game doesn't always work. Today my song is "Joanna" from Sweeny Todd. I have the CD on my iPod and that song played on Monday morning. It's been in my head since then. By far this is not the worst thing to happen to me. Since its the version from the movie its Johnny Depp's voice in my head and who would really complain about that?

So, what I've determined from this terrible game is that the worst song to torture people with is the Menard's jingle. "You save big money... you save big money.... when you shop Menard's!" If you're singing it now, plan to be singing it for the rest of the evening. A close second would have to be The Carpenters..... well all of their music is pretty terrible for getting stuck in your head, but specifically "Close to You" was in my head for about two weeks shortly after seeing Mirrormask (a Neil Gaiman movie). And for anyone who has seen "Cannibal the Musical" I'm sure you already have the tune of "It's a Schpedoinkle Day" running through your brain.

And surprisingly none of these songs were "the worst" song for me. When I was about fourteen years old I was introduced to the my favorite musical of all time, The Phantom of the Opera. After that I determined that Andrew Lloyd Webber's music must all be as great at the Phantom (this is not true, by the way, but I was 14. What can you do?) So I bought up all these musicals that had Andrew Lloyd Webber's name plastered somewhere on it. I asked my mother "So, what's Cats about?" and she told me that it didn't really have a story line. It was just a bunch of random songs. I, of course, scoffed at her and told her that it was impossible for a musical not to have a story line and walked away from her. I quickly found out that my mother wasn't lying. Cats is T.S. Elliot's poems put to music and there really is no point to the whole damn thing. But I was paid back for being mean to my mother about not knowing anything about musicals. The worst song I've ever had stuck in my head was "Jellical Cats" for almost an entire month. I now hate Cats with a passion and sometimes wish for the death of a certain composer who wrote that crappy catchy music.

I fully accept that this blog had no point except to hopefully get some crappy song stuck in my readers' heads. I just wanted to write about something since its been a year and I'm not posting my story up here anymore. I don't know where this blog will go in the next year, but feel free to try to get a craptastic song stuck in my head at some point.

Feeling Schizophrenic

I actually spelled that right on the first try which means I'm awesome and failing spelling in second grade didn't actually hold me back.

I am a monkey in the middle. Something entirely of my own doing, unfortunately. I got close to two people who no longer want to be close to each other. There I am between the two. For the most part they aren't making me choose a side, which is good because I don't intend to (Sorry guys, I love you both). There are obvious downfalls to not picking a side like being lied to and having to lie myself -- or withhold information if you want to pretty up the words. There are upsides to being in the middle too. I get to hear two sides of the story where most other people form their opinions based entirely on only half of a story. They enjoy their ignorance and pretend like the other party is 100% evil and their side is 100% perfect. The problem is there's no way that could ever be true. It's just easier to believe. Everyone has problems and everyone has relationship issues and everyone has their own version of "what really happened." What's making me feel so insane at this point is that the stories don't seem to match up very well. One person tells me events that happened that seem vital to the story and the other person tells me other things that person number one never mentioned. Then the parts that are about the same event seem vastly different depending on who you hear it from. Both sound perfectly rational when I talk to them and they sound like they are being honest, but obviously there is something missing otherwise the two stories would sound a little more similar.

Then there is the third party. The truly evil one. The one who instigates and makes a troubled relationship even worse. Granted, I haven't had the pleasure of hearing this person's version of events, but honestly if I were to tell the story from my stand point you wouldn't want to here The Evil One's version of events anyway. It would only be accurate and worthwhile if this person said "I'm a complete f*ck up and I should have stayed a million miles away." And even if those words had been uttered I would still want to slit this person's throat. There is no version that this person could portray that would put them in a good light. Yikes.

So I have all these conflicting stories and my own skewed opinions on the whole event. I have people calling me to find out details when they haven't been part of this story from the beginning and just now (now that its falling apart) want to jump in a attempt to be useful. In then end my head seems to be stretched to the furthest points and on the verge of cracking open. I want to cry for some, scream at others, kill one, and tell the other f*ck off. I'm feeling a range of emotions to go along with all those wants and at the end of the day I just want to pretend like this isn't happening. And its not even happening to me! I'm just a bystander! Innocent -- well kind of in this story.

I hope my head stays the way it is (ie not cracked or exploding) and I hope I didn't hurt any one else's head with this rant (that probably makes no sense to people on the outside).

One More for the Road

"It wasn't until later, when I was washing the blood off my hands, I even knew they were dead."

That quote has been stuck in my head and its a good quote and may it now get stuck in your head. I have two blogs for you today and they will both go in one entry because I don't like posting two separate blogs in the same day. Nothing against those of you who do, I just find it easier to keep it in one blog. The first one is: Why I Hate Dogs and the second one is: Farewell, My Friend. Neither are fictional storied created by me so if you are one of the people skipping my blogs when they are stories you can keep on reading.

Why I Hate Dogs

Okay, so I don't hate dogs. Maybe I should re-title it to: Why Cat's are still better, but it's too late so we're sticking with Why I Hate Dogs.

This weekend I was forced (by major guilt trip) into house-sitting for my mother despite the fact that I think she has the most obnoxious pets on earth. That may be an exaggeration, but they are the most annoying pets I've ever had to deal with (with the exception of Tiffany, but that's totally Hutch's fault not the dog's). Back to my story.... so I'm house-sitting this weekend and my mother has two cats and a very annoying dog that I have to take care of. Because dogs are too stupid to be trained to go in a litter box I have to be over at my mother's house a minimum of three times a day to let the beast out to do its duty. This also means that I have to sit outside and watch the beast because otherwise it will run out into the yard and come right back to the door without peeing.... yes this dog is that stupid. On top of having to escort the dog to the grass to pee I noticed that she wasn't eating anything for the first day. I'm assuming she was partly depressed over the fact that the people who actually like her had left her care up to me. Eventually she did eat.... Half of the bowl in one sitting after starving herself for a day.... and promptly threw up in the living room. That included half of the rawhide which she had apparently swallowed in one piece. So, yum, who doesn't like cleaning up puke at 10 pm? Finally, on my last night of dog watch I spent the night. I had to be to work at 8 am and I was not going to get up an hour earlier just to escort the dog to her pee location again so I just stayed there. Unfortunately this meant I had a dog trying to spoon me all night. Not only did the beast take up half the bed she took to barking and growling in her sleep. I considered kicking her to make her stop, but I'm pretty sure that would have resulted in me being bitten in the ass so I suffered with a maximum of two hours sleep and smelling like dog in the morning.

And what annoying things did the cats do while I was there? One meowed a lot, the other hide the entire time and they got litter on the bathroom floor next to their litter box. Gee, which one sounds like the better pet to you?

Farewell, My Friend

My camera is gone. Forever. I didn't have it for very long and its sad to see it go, but it did its job well while it was around.

On the up note, I will be purchasing a new camera shortly after my birthday this year. For interested parties I will be taking birthday donations to the camera fund. Sweet. I will be getting a digital SLR this time. Even sweeeeeter. I figure if I'm not getting my bad boy back I might as well upgrade to something way cooler. Look at how cool this camera is! So, even though it would have been far more convenient to have my old Sony back in a couple of months I will be more than happy to upgrade. I know I probably don't need something so extensive since most of my photo taking is stuff that could easily be taken with the Kodak I helped purchase for my roommate (that she never uses I might add) for her birthday, but hey, I like taking good pictures and now that I've had one good camera I can't seem to go back to mediocre. So, even though I don't think anyone who reads my blog are people who actually get me birthday gifts, know that I only want gift cards to Best Buy (it's just easier that way). So anyone interested in the full tale of where my Sony went head on over to my Myspace blog where I can freely unravel the whole tale because that one is slightly more private :)

Two short blogs in one fabulous entry. I hope my stream of consciousness didn't hurt any one's brains.