My 3s
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You’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with the 3’s of YOU. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you!

Actually, the truth is I don’t give a crap. I probably know all of this stuff about you guys anyway. This is an attempt at ‘fitting in’ with the ‘cool kids’ because I’m tired of missing out on all of these wonderful little growing-closer romps that you all seem to have. I’M A PERSON TOO, DAMMIT. I have feelings, and needs, and I need to feel that feeling of need fulfilled. And the need to fulfill the feeling of need to post my own personal information is VERY INTENSE at times. VERY intense. I can tell you all feel it too. It’s amazing, isn’t it? I’m sending my words out on the internet… into the privacy of your own home. I’ll bet one of you is picking his or her nose right now. HA. You see? It’s like communication, only I can make up any shit I want until I get your reply. ANYWAY, I can tell that you’re all waiting with bated breath for my answers– wipe the drool off your chin, jesus, you look like a moron like that.

Anyway.

Here are my answers. I’ll bet you won’t learn anything useful, but if the science experiment– I mean, err, attempt to fit in– works properly, you should all feel slightly more enamored of me than you already are. Ideally one can carry on an entire relationship this way without ever leaving the safety and comfort of their computer desk. Also ideally, one can send multiples of these to raise up their relationship-meter by one or two points each time one is sent. Then we enter the cheat code to get a million dollars, remodel the house, and buy the expansion with house pets so we can starve hamsters and goldfish to death as well as building doorless houses lined with fireplaces and rugs. Don’t forget to count down on that one– my best time until total annihilation was three minutes.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 3’s, tag people (in the right hand corner of the app), then click publish. <–instructions on how to get a million dollars

These are my answers. They are categorically better than yours.

Three names I go by:
1. Eleanor
2. Len
3. Bitch

Three Jobs I have had in my life:
1. Supervillain
2. Criminal mastermind
3. Egg counterfeiter (detection is a lot harder than you would expect– the only way is to taste your piss. If it’s salty, the eggs you ate last were counterfeit)

Three Places I have lived
1. The Moon
2. Lake of Tortured Souls. Fresh-cooked soul in a dill and lemon cream sauce over rice– delicious. And my condo catches the hellbreezes just right. Salad on the side, and a big fat blood orange mojito. Wonderful.
3. INSIDE YOUR BRAIN. No, really. It’s wet and dark, and kind of viscous. The brain tastes great when you’re drinking anything strongly-flavored, though.

Three Favorite drinks:

I’ve taken to pureeing all of my food, so I’ll just list everything I had last:

1. Potato, poached egg, thyme bechamel, back bacon, and homemade ketchup puree
2. Small child drumsticks and ribs in homemade barbecue sauce puree with pureed salad on the side
3. Broccoli, beef, garlic, onion, rice, ginger, and some chinese brown sauce puree

Three TV shows that I watch
1. My room
2. The downstairs neighbors’ master bedroom
3. The mall bathroom– homeless people and crackheads, yeeeeah! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Three Places I Have Been:
1. The Moon
2. San Francisco
3. A point exactly halfway between Hell and Omaha, also known as 2 am in the Omaha Greyhound station

3 people who e-mail me regularly:
1. human-trafficking.com
2. The FBI
3. villainess.net

Three of my favorite foods:

See Favorite drinks

Three friends I think will respond:
1. I don’t care if any of you respond. I’m just bored.
2. Please don’t ask me to justify my actions or you will be sorry.
3. Don’t make me press that button.

Three things I miss:
1. Baseballs. I never hit the fuckers.
2. Children– at least the first time.
3. My last victim. She was so sweet, I missed three or four times. My heart just wasn’t in it ;_;

Three things I’m looking forward to:
1. Manson concert
2. Kris is coming for a visit :hugs:
3. My next victim. :)

I HOPE YOU ARE NOW SATISFIED.

If the sweetness of this message has given you a cavity you can contact my lawyer. If you have an intense desire to be my lackey please reply to this message with exclamations of adoration.

Thank you, and good night.

I don’t know where else to put this. I don’t have time to blog, and I almost never look at the forum (for god’s sake, the forum I begged for…) but I need to get it out.

It’s been seven years. Gio and I have known each other, visited each other, made stupid jokes, been there for each other, kept each other’s secrets, worked with each other, gotten massively drunk and stupid with each other, and freaked out when we had to go even a day without talking to each other. Seven years of that… and for what feels like the billionth time, I drove her to the airport today to send her back a continent away.

I don’t know how much longer I can handle it. I don’t often trust people. I certainly don’t let myself need them. And for the billionth time, I gritted my teeth and let her go where I can’t reach her. It’s different, you know, when the person you have to let go of is the only person in the world that you know is in your corner forever and always, the one person who’s always got your back. If she needed a liver transplant, I’d happily tell her to take half of mine. Fuck that thing, I’ve got more than I need. It’ll grow back, take it. Having her leave, especially so far away, is the hardest thing I’ve ever done… and I do it over and over, and over and over, and over and over and over.

It doesn’t get easier. It gets harder. And I’m way too macho to admit that in real life. Grit your teeth and pretend you weren’t crying a second ago. It doesn’t matter if people see it– if you pretend convincingly enough, they think they were mistaken anyway. Going back to the way things usually are isn’t that bad… except I can’t even give my best friend a hug when she’s having a bad day. And what if something bad happened? What if she was hurt? I’m so powerless… and so vulnerable. I hate it.

I’m actually in very much the end stretch of the complete overhaul of the multimedia section. It’s coded and I’m currently encorporating the content into the new layout style. After that, it’s installing the blog software and beating it into submission, and simply posting each donation as a blog post. It’s my hope to have that, as well as new donations in media and fanstuff, as well as three very pretty new pieces of artwork put up in the gallery. That’s I think quite a big update, although I know it’s been almost a year since the last one, but frankly, I needed the break. The gallery was an absolutely enormous undertaking.

In the meantime, I totally got to hang out in nuclear medicine today. Stuff is just way cooler when it has to be held inside a tower of lead bricks.

Today my clinical professor randomly chose me and another student to go with a nurse practitioner to watch staples get removed from a patient. So we’re standing there in the room with the surgeon who’s poking away at an iPhone and finally he’s like ‘If she takes any longer, you two are doing it.’ And naturally, I was like ‘OKAY!’

He’d been kinda sorta joking but I dove right the fuck into that. After a few staples I felt guilty and let the other girl try. And she does it, she’s fine…he tells her…pull the incision apart. Poor thing turns green as a fountain of pus comes out, and he’s telling her to jam her fingers in and work it all out. She looked like she was going to die–I think he thought it was funny, but then it was my turn and he let me pull the drainage tube and dress the wound. He said I oughta be a surgeon for how fast I dug into huge gaping infected wounds, and we started flirting/talking about Italian women/eating in NYC.

The awesome part is removal of surgical staples and drainage tubes is outside the scope of nursing practice period. Even when I get my RN I’m not allowed to do that without a surgeon watching.

Like when you get to watch open heart surgery with a direct line of sight from about two feet away. I watched a man’s heart beat inside his split open chest cavity. I watched a surgeon suture together arteries and drill through bone. It was amazing, both for the FUCKING AWESOME factor and that truly, we can do such things. I’m supposed to go give Nexium to AMS patients now?

Many of the nurses I’ve run into in the hospital don’t know what goes on in other sections of the place, unless they’ve worked there. My professor doesn’t much approve of that, so she’s been sending us on rounds to the CVL, Endoscopy, and OR. My partner and I were by personal protest the first students to get into the OR. Ironically many of the others got far luckier, seeing multiple surgeries, or getting to work with the surgeon that’s also a very yappy professor. I got to yap with implant salesman while watching a reverse shoulder replacement, and I think I can safely say I’ve found the only role in nursing that doesn’t seem hideously burdensome to me. And actually, I didn’t get to see it.

It’s always been in the back of my mind that I’d probably like the OR best, which is what inclined me to the nurse anesthetist thing. But frankly they don’t do surgery, not real surgery (some do nothing but epidurals in OB), and scrub and circulating nurses don’t even do the surgical scrub–meaning, they’re nowhere near the action. But there’s something called RN First Assistant, which is a certification you get after you have experience, like oncology nursing and such. This isn’t the person that passes the doctor the scalpel, OR techs do that. This is the person the clamps blood vessels, sutures, and holds an arm stationary while the surgeon drills the bone marrow from the sucker’s humerus to stick what looks like a garden pick into it.

This is a position RNs have to fight PAs over. PAs are cheaper and some surgeons prefer them, while others prefer the more trained RNs. So it’s not something I can really be sure I’ll get to do until I see the employment climate later on, but I feel cautiously optimistic. I’m tired of viewing nursing as a shitty miserable thing I have to do for money, and the thought that I might not have to bum rush out of the thing for my sanity or spend my life in agony is nice. Maybe, someday, I won’t totally hate my job. It’s at the moment contigent on how often bone marrow and bits of deltoid muscle get thrown at me. By the by, if this seems to conflict with my last needle phobia post, well figure that one out yourself. Blood pooling on the floor, gore, and drilling? Doesn’t bother me a wink.

I freaked today watching someone trying to find a vein by fishing around with the needle. By freak I mean get pale, cold sweat, can’t hear and almost fainted heading for the chair. This happened to me once while donating blood, but never while watching a needle, and not in several years.

I’m embarrassed, angry, and fucking scared. Embarrassed because I spent the whole morning yapping about becoming a first assist in the OR only to be shot down by a fucking needle, angry because I’d like to think I’m not a god damn pussy, and fucking scared because I simply can’t have a crippling needle phobia in this career and it’s a little late to switch gears. I’m really hoping this was an outlier, and I think it was. Even so I’m considering contacting my clinical instructor and asking if she might allow me to shadow a phlebotomist or hang out in OR prep or something for a couple hours where I can get absolutely drowned in needlesticks. I’ve seen plenty before so I don’t think this is the norm, but it did shake my confidence and that needs correcting.

This was, admittedly, the first time I’ve seen someone fish around with a needle like that. Except for when I was in kindergarten. That’s where my fear of needles comes from, I had an infected chicken pox and five people in the hospital attempted to start my IV before my pediatrician came (all the way from north Miami) to get it in one shot. I’m not a wuss when it comes to pain, and wasn’t then, but I was screaming by the third one from their digging and my sites were blue. My father had to stand outside because he was crying and freaking out. So I do think I have a fair claim to needle fear. But it’s only ever been a fear of them pointed at me. I definitely need to squash this asap.

I’ve neglected the blog, my website, and even my forum, in varying degrees. Today, I did actually work on the website, I’ve had an overhaul of the multimedia section pending for ages, but I’m actually beginning to code the design now, which is a huge task given it’s a complicated layout and I mean to make it templating to wordpress. But I haven’t been on the forum much at all, I shadow it, reading here and there, but I never feel like I ought to post anything, because it’s just one lonely post and part of me feels like if I post so rarely, why should one post be important enough to make? I’ve also cancelled the next RoseCon. Basically I’ve cut off my entirely internet life in bits and pieces, though I occasionally flail about trying to bring it back, more and more I’m realizing that it’s not that I don’t care anymore, but that my life is simply that busy. I have an Everquest 2 account I spend a few hours a week on to relax, and I’ve actually been reading books lately, but really I don’t do much anymore but go to school and go to work. I assure you this was hardly my idea, but I frankly just don’t have a choice. When I do find myself with time to work on the site, or post on the forums, I also find I utterly lack the energy. It makes me feel bad to think I’ve distanced so from the site, because it’s not from a waning interest in the series. I keep hoping that as I get more used to this whole nursing business, I’ll find more time for these things, but so far that’s slow coming.

I think I’m going to try to post on the blog more now, since I really don’t have the time to thoroughly comb the forum as I used to. I do still read it, and I do keep up with what everyone’s up to. It’s just hard to choose one post over another to make. I feel like the weird kid in the group that’s utterly silent until they open their mouths and out spills a massive social gaffe.

At this point in my life it’s not that I lack the time. I lack the energy. I sleep about 3-4 hours a night during the week, and that’s often split into two naps. I need that much time to get shit done and have a couple hours to unwind. Those couple hours are absolutely necessary, and unfortunately I can’t spend them on much more complicated than staring off into the wall or sitting under the shower. They say a true introvert is someone who finds social activity, even among people they enjoy the company of, exhausting. I guess that’s me, but I really miss you guys.

I have pretty much moved into Starbucks lately, in an attempt to study and avoid my family. I just don’t feel like that place is my home when everyone’s awake. It’s all loud music and yelling and screaming and being told to eat when I’m trying to lose weight, and I get the distinct impression mom’s boyfriend doesn’t like me much anymore. It’s just not a pleasant place to be, and I find myself studying at Starbucks in the evenings, and now carting my laptop there (two hours free internets a day), in an effort to avoid them. I used to nap in the evenings, but they’re so loud I never fall asleep, so why bother? I feel bad, I told my mother it’s not her I avoid, just the atmosphere which isn’t very helpful in studying. And isn’t very helpful for anything else, either. When I was able to work on the site all day it was easier, because I’d pop my headphones on and ignore everyone, but I can’t study that way.

I feel homeless, and it’s hard to accept I’m going to spend the next two years like this. But…yay Starbucks.

The bad news is I got a 90 on my Nursing Skills exam, and I need a 93 in the class to maintain my 4.0. (90 is an A-) The comforting news is apparently no one in my class scored higher than a 90 anyway.

For Client Assessment I got a 94, which is in the safe zone, though a higher mark would have been welcome. Pharm is next, and apparently the hardest of the classes. We shall see. I never did claim I’d maintain my 4.0 in the nursing program. I’d certainly try, but it’s not something I’m 100% sure I’ll manage. That said, I’m full of shit when I say ‘I’ll be fine with a 3.9′…nope, the day I lose my 4.0 I’ll curse, drink, and possibly kill someone.

It turns out I’m not considered full time this term, by one stinking fucking credit that’s denying me a rather considerable chunk of my financial aid. I’m watching my money just burn away on stupid shit like PDAs and bloodwork. I’m not even sure at this point whether or not I’ll be able to finish school without using credit cards, even with the stafford loans I’m quickly piling up. I’m already almost 8k in debt, and that will more than double before the end even if I don’t use the credit cards. I’m so thoroughly exhausted with money, and that I haven’t got enough of it. The debt I’m building up while trying to get this miserable stupid degree is seeming less and less worth what it’s paying for. At this point, I’m not even sure I’ll be able to pay for next summer’s term, nevermind the forum convention planned for right after it. I really, really need a fucking drink right now.

Hurricane Ike. My dear friend Frosty had to run away from Gustav, only for it to turn out to be a dud. Now it’s my turn, because I’m not stressed out enough with school falling on me like a ton of bricks. Nursing is easy. But they drown you in lots of tedious reading, which more often than not, is identical to your other classes. I’ve read three different chapters, in three different classes, on cultural sensitivity this week. Amusing more is that we had, as a pre-req, a whole god damn course on cultural sensitivity. Can I please learn how to work in a sterile field now? Oh wait, I was shown that, for about 10 seconds, while having to look over everyone else because there aren’t enough gloves for us all to work with. Seriously, what am I paying for?

Also, shit. Hurricane. :(

Spend an hour and a half in the car in bumper to bumper traffic to get to the college! Spend $200 on the textbook for ONE CLASS. Hear a teacher blabber on mindlessly about the importance of making friends! Learn that your graduation ceremony is ‘a lesson in teamwork accomplished by making it a fundraised event by the graduating class’! See your monitor flickering in that ‘hey you’re replacing me in a couple months, buddy’ sort of way! Oh BTW, it’s disgustingly hot and muggy out.

Seriously, Florida sucks balls. The saving grace of any of this is that…I’m getting it over with now.

Once again I’m amazed by my seemingly inescapable talent for ending up in long conversations with old men. Because our apartment lacks air conditioning, my interest in the occasional cup of coffee as an excuse to sit in Starbucks and read for two hours is greater than usual. A couple days ago I decide to do this on Whyte Avenue, which is where the funky people go. I’m there not twenty minutes before my reading is interrupted by someone asking for a nearby internet cafe. I couldn’t answer, but the two old men next to me certainly could, and they ended up yanking me into their conversation. Being regulars, they were later joined by another friend of theirs, making it Gio + three men above 60 with at least one massive health problem each to discuss at dizzying length. Of course, American politics was thoroughly covered, as well as more American politics. I enjoyed myself and I like actually yapping with people once in a while, but I have to laugh in that my track record of conversations where I talk at length to strangers is almost 100% for men 60 years old or above. What is this? Do I give off some kind of scent hormone only they recognize? Do I give off a ‘tell me your life story’ vibe? Really, I’m not complaining, I’m just wondering where this trend comes from.

Well okay maybe I’m complaining a bit. I feel like this is a karmic punishment for every time I’ve said I’m attracted to older men. It’s true, but I do have limits, people.

The good news is today I found out I’m getting a $1,000 scholarship from Tylenol for this school year. It’ll at least cover gas, and it proves that Fastweb is actually good for something, which I’d been starting to wonder about. The bad news is I was supposed to register for my classes today for the fall. That went over like Miles Davis at a Klan rally dance. It wouldn’t let me sign up for two of them at all and the third is apparently already full, which isn’t possible since the nursing program is limited enrollment already. What confuses me about this is that FIU made my classes available for enrollment on a fucking Saturday. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have this on a weekday so I can like…call…should shit not go according to plan? Looking at the schedule though, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to cover two of my classes in the same trip to the campus on the same day, but one of those classes is already almost full, so I guess it’s gonna be a matter of luck now. Oh, and apparently they’re also going to let me enroll in my classes for the spring term now. That’s actually kinda cool, since it lets me let potential employers know my schedule pretty far down the line. I’m hoping I might actually get to pick up the job I had before I left. Still, I wish something with FIU would just go the way it’s supposed to. It’s like a lemon college.

After months of stressing and wondering and worrying, RoseCon in NYC turned out by all accounts to be quite a hit. Such that instead of labelling it RoseConNYC or something, it’s been given a year date. RoseCon08. Which means I have to throw a RoseCon09! San Francisco, here we come!

It’s scary, flattering, and awesome all at once to think of just how successful it turned out to be that everyone’s counting on it happening again next year. On one hand, a challenge, because I can scarcely afford it, on the other…I kinda like the idea of dragging a bunch of people about the country, maybe later around the world, because of this one thing we have in common. Some of us have been regulars on forums before, but I like to think something like RoseCon makes IRG special, more real. People are going places and doing things they might never have done on their own because the opportunity presented itself in this way, and that’s inspiring.

Still, organizing such an event is hard work. ^^

On Thursday I went to Yasha’s mothers house to clear up my FIU bullshit, since the phone still hasn’t been hooked up here. The reason I called was concerning the background checks and drug tests, which I was worried I would have to come back early to complete. As it turns out, no, they’re not due until well into the semester.

Instead, I had another bomb dropped on me. When I started FIU, the nursing program was 4 semesters, a fall, spring, and then a fall, spring. The course load was 5-6 classes a term. Fine. Good. Pound it out. It was this that was part of the decision I made last year, after a lot of angsting, crying, and reflection, to give myself summers in Canada, because it mattered less that I couldn’t afford them. It mattered that they’d keep me fucking sane. I needed them. To get me out of the dump I live in, see where I’m going, and visit Yasha, who is as dear to me as life itself.

FIU has switched to a 6 term nursing track. A fall, spring, and summer, then a fall, spring, and while you get that summer off, a fucking ridiculous lonely fall term. The course load is 3 to 4 classes a term. I sleep through three class terms and stuggle more with them than I do with larger course loads. I can’t imagine why they did this, maybe because the course load was too much, or whatever else, but it means that now I can’t go to Canada next year over the summer. My break, the thing I fucking live for, I can’t have. I can have it next year, but who is to say I’ll be able to afford it then? The other gem here is that summer terms get no student aid. I’m on my own that term; I won’t even get loan money. And since I’m going to be working a full year now, I probably won’t get the Pell Grant either.

I’m going backward. I’m going to be stranded in Florida again for a far longer period than I have been in a long time, and I’m afraid it’s going to tear me apart. Another now almost three fucking years of working (possibly at the same job I had before and hated), and going to school, both with people I don’t like, in a place I hate, lonely because I’m fucking alone. I won’t even have most of my things unless I can muster the cash to ship them back down; my books and DVDs and games are all here in Edmonton, because this is home. Home I now can’t move into until 8 months later than I thought…I was supposed to graduate in the Spring of 2010, but now it won’t be until the beginning of 2011.

I’m trying to stay angry about this, but it’s starting to slip. I keep looking around me and knowing how long it’s going to be before I return, and it hurts. I feel like I have more to say but I’ll start crying if I keep this post up, and I want to go out.

Oh BTW, this also impacts RoseCon, as far as me attending it is concerned. My window for 2009 is hilariously short. April 27th to May 4th.

I spend summers in Edmonton to get away from Miami (which sucks), and visit Yasha (which rules). What’s another SKU fan doing in Edmonton though?? THERE CAN ONLY BE TWO. (No seriously, sup sup?)

Yes, another post about Canada, since today is Canada Day. I missed it last year, but this time around I took a stroll through the city and through the legislature grounds and was bombarded by Canadian flags of every shape and size, red maple leaves god damn everywhere, people shouting ‘Go Canada’ or ‘Alberta Rules!’, and just general patriotic pandemonium. What’s strange about this? I’ve lived in America all my life. We have a reputation for fanatical jingoism and flag-waving…but I’ve never seen a 4th of July with half as much enthusiasm as Canadians have for their equivalent. I spent my shower trying to figure out if I’ve ever seen so many American flags. The answer is yes…after 9/11. Tragedy and war bring out American patriotism. Canadians bring it out just to celebrate it.

Yay America.

Yes, I’ve ignored the blog and a lot has happened, including RoseCon. But I’m posting now.

Something interesting happened today. I decided to go bombing around downtown Edmonton for a bit, and purchased a book at a discount bookstore. As often happens here, I struck up a conversation with the person at the counter, in this case a man of about 60. First it was about the book I bought, which is a direct reference in title to Heinlein, the ‘There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.’ This spiraled into about four hours of conversation, where I learned he’s American, immigrating up to Canada. He’s from Kansas City, so we have Italian in common. He’s been playing the same game of Dungeons & Dragons for 30 years (2nd Ed rules). When he realized we’d yapped him damn near to closing, he offered to buy me a beer. I said no because I needed to cook, but he offered again later and I went for it. (No this wasn’t a hitting on me thing.) But something I’ve long suspected shined through. Americans that I’ve met that have moved up here are more…well…Canadian, than people who were born here. He embraced the cooler climate and the warmer people, the easier conversations and the indie scene stacked right next to Walmart. I think some Americans come here and learn they’re not American at all. They’re Canadian. It’s a little different in very big ways.