Responsibility

For the first time I'm going into a field where it really actually matters how badly I mess up at my job. In the grand scheme of things the likelihood that my forgetting you said no lettuce on your taco will have serious ramifications are pretty small. But missing something when I'm doing an examination on someone before we get them to the hospital or giving them too many doses of a medication, that's serious. This time it's literally a matter of life and death that I do things right. Thankfully I'm able to forget that most of the time and just focus on what I need to do. See problem, fix problem, simple. If you concentrate hard enough on what you're doing you can forget all the things that can possibly go wrong on your watch and you always have the "do no further harm" thing floating over your head all the time. All the things I have to learn reach far beyond just remembering them for the next test like I can with every other class I've taken. After all, by and large the things I had to learn in school never had any practical application whatsoever. Ever. I do not use trigonometry in my daily life. Never will. But all these things I'm learning in school, it's actually relevant! Important even! This is a new and fascinating concept and totally awesome. I actually love what I'm doing and love the job I can have when I'm done. I look forward to going to school and not only that but I'm actually doing well in school. This is totally foreign territory here. Even when I was studying English I liked it a lot, but it didn't excite me like being an EMT does. Plus editors don't get to ride in fire trucks and how many people can say that doesn't fulfill every childhood dream? Plus no matter how long my shift is and how tired I am and how many awful things happened I can know I did something really important for someone. I can directly see that I made a difference and that's pretty cool. Of course I'm still a little worried that I won't know enough or I'll completely freeze one day in the field and my partner will have to save me, but hopefully I'll be all right. I've got the lights and sirens to make me happy if nothing else. 

Awesome nerdom

I bought myself a nice new flash drive last week since the one I already had is almost seven years old and is so old school it only holds 128 MB. So I set out to find a nice new one and settled on a 2 gig that can pretty much hold the world. Naturally, I couldn't just buy some boring, plain black one that so many people have, I had to get a special one. So I found a R2-D2 flash drive that is totally awesome. Does it look awesome? Ohhhh, yes it does. Is it practical? Not really. Doesn't fit into the USB ports on the PC, but does just fine with the laptop. But if I cared about things like that I wouldn't own about half of my possessions. It's just fun to look at him sitting there on my desk. I nearly lost his head once, that's the downside, but I found it again sitting on my blue bed sheet. See the problem? Still, I love the thing and I'd love it more if I could figure out how to get rid of the infernal PDF files that came with it full of coupons I don't want for idiotic Star Wars Clone Wars merchandise that I will NEVER buy under any circumstances. George Lucas is busy puking all over the franchise, I don't want to get that on me.

You'll Thank me Later

I've noticed something interesting in the course of my EMT training. Saving people involves a great deal of discomfort and awkwardness for both parties. Putting a K.E.D. spinal immobilization device on someone, for instance, isn't on right unless the person feels like they're wearing the most horrible corset ever invented and the straps around the legs are so tight that they can't stand up. Naturally, we do this for your good. Same goes for the collar. If it feels uncomfortable, it's on right. Basically, most everything is designed to keep you from moving and unfortunately that usually involves very tight straps and things jammed where you'd rather they wouldn't be, but since your leg is broken you have more important things to worry about. In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't matter that all the things are uncomfortable since that's what's keeping your spine, broken bones, or whatever from getting even more messed up than they already are. I just find it funny that everything that is designed to keep us safe, from seatbelts to spine boards, is uncomfortable.

Cumulation

Lately I've been thinking that my body holds a grudge against me. It's either that or it's lazy and wants to get everything over with at the same time. I only get sick about once a year, sometimes twice, and always around the same time. Last year it went for broke and I had a cold for three weeks and a small dose of pink eye that went away in roughly 24 hours. This year though, my body decided that just wasn't good enough. This time not only do I have congestion as per usual, I'm not sure if it's allergies or a cold yet, but I'm leaning towards cold, there's a cough too. But in addition to this I got a raging case of pink eye from who knows where, it's not like I hang around people with pink eye, I hate it, and some nice throbbing pain all along my left jawline up to my temple that gets poignantly worse when I blow my nose or dare to bend over. My mom suspects this is an infection of some sort, so I get to to to the doctor tomorrow. I'm sure it'll be really fun too.
Me: "Hello, Doctor, nice to see you again so soon. You know how last time I came it was for a physical and I was in perfect health?"
Doctor: "Yeah..."
Me: "Not so much this time. What do you have for throbbing pain in my face and nasty goo pouring out of my nose and eye?"
Doctor: "There's an app for that."

We are not amused. Just for once, can I get sick like a normal person? Or even just one illness at a time, that would be nice. I do not need a side order of pink eye every time I get sick, thanks. And keep your rotten whatever-it-is infection. The upside to this is that my dad still had some medication from the last time he had pink eye, so I used that and it made my eye stop covering itself with goo and generally throwing a tantrum. The medicine mixed with some rinsing my eye with salt water really made it a lot better. Now can I have something to fix everything else? Please and thank you.

Post Grad

This movie came out a while ago, I know, but I just saw it. My verdict?

BULL.

At first it was doing just fine following the whole "I graduated but now I can't get a job, so now what?" thread but then it kind of careened off a cliff. She works for so long to get a job period, never mind getting the one she wanted and then the writers totally toss it out of the nearest window. Maybe if it weren't for the fact that the main character has MY DEGREE and MY DREAM JOB, but I think it was just ridiculous. Hey, guess what chick, you've got a job. Not just any job either. THE JOB. Your dream job, my dream job, the job you went to school for and worked to get, remember? And you take off to go chasing after some guy you just decided you liked five minutes ago? I don't even know what the point of the movie was at all. It sure wasn't "work for your dreams" or something like that since she throws away her career and her future thirty seconds after getting everything. Might have been something about family, but they were ridiculous and last I checked having an income and a place to live is important, not deciding to drop everything and fly to New York on a whim and throw all your work down the toilet and salute it as it circles the drain. If they wanted to create a sympathetic character they suck at their job. Perhaps they wished to convey the message that success means nothing when you're alone and lonely and sitting on an inflatable couch in a pool, but if that was the case there was a lot lost in translation. I had no reason to care whether or not she ended up with the nice guy/guy next door/childhood friend who's been in love with her for years, whichever cliche we wish him to be guy because there was so little chemistry between them to work with. He obviously likes her, but she's too busy trying to decide what the plotline is to figure out she's supposed to like him back until nearly the very end of the movie. It would have had far greater emotional impact if they had managed that at least.

So my verdict still remains: BULL. Get back to me when you've figured out what it's really like to graduate and have all your hard work flushed down the toilet because no one will hire you. No number of Eskimo Pies, or whatever the crap that ice cream bar was she kept going on about, will fix that.

Back from the Dead

Lately DC Comics has been bringing everybody back from the dead, usually after killing them off a short time before, though lately they've gotten into this irritating habit of bringing back people who have been gone for years and no one was upset about it. Take Jason Todd for instance. He was killed of in the 90's after readers voted for him to die. Why bring back someone like that? Granted, now he's older, but that doesn't mean he's any better. Same goes for Stephanie Brown, A.K.A Spoiler A.K.A. Robin, who died during a giant gang war that she started. I didn't like her then and I don't really like her now as Batgirl. Who said I wanted that annoying girl to come back from the dead? Bringing Batman back, fine, I'm more than OK with that, but Stephanie? No. We didn't need that boomerang dude back either, send him back. Maybe they' just got too excited with the whole black rings thing they've got going on and now they just want to bring back every dead hero they can think of. Not OK, DC, not OK.

You didn't tell me you could write like that

I'm a fan of Dave Barry and an almost fan of John Connolly. It's safe to say I'm a fan of Dave Barry, because I've been reading his work since middle school and I really like it. He's one of the funniest writers I've ever found and his stuff is great and I've read tons of it. John Connolly I can't say I'm a true fan of, I think, because I've only read one and a half of his books and I don't think that counts when he's written six or seven of them or something. See? I don't even know how many books he's written. What kind of a fan does that make me? Anyway, what I've read I've really liked so I'm likely to read more and become a real fan, not the one and a half book "I'm casually interested" fan. But the thing that I found interesting today while I was busy reading John Connolly's book, The Gates, is that it really isn't much like his other book I read, The Book of Lost Things. They're both really good and I really like them both, but while The Gates is funny the majority of the time and is intended to be, The Book of Lost Things was largely serious and made you think deep thoughts in a great way. I loved that about it. Now, Dave Barry writes hilarious things all the time and that's why I've always loved his work. But after September 11 he wrote an article about it that was very serious and was some of his best work I've ever read. So both authors have proved they can write both very good serious material and very good humorous material. So I was wondering to myself as I was laughing at Connolly's book describing the demon of stale biscuits and crackers, which is better: to read something serious by an author that's very good and then read something equally good by them that's very funny and be pleasantly surprised at how good they are at being funny when you didn't know they could be or the other way around. Maybe one isn't better than the other, but I wonder. Which is more fun or more satisfying as a reader? Either one has an impact on you because you weren't expecting it, but it's an interesting thought because other authors I've read, Tolkien for instance, only wrote one particular kind of thing so you have no idea just how funny Tolkien could really be or if C.S. Lewis could write science fiction. Maybe they couldn't and that's why they didn't, I don't know. But there's something about an author giving you that happy surprise with their work that I really like. Obviously both Barry and Connolly have proved they're capable of writing whatever they like but naturally chose one or the other for certain reasons. Dave Barry happens to like writing humor, so he does. I have no idea why Connolly writes what he does because I haven't actually joined the "I'm a fan" club yet, but when the bandwagon drives by again I'll jump on. So, I'll just leave this fun thought to be chewed on for now, since I'm not too worried about finding an answer. I just like contemplating it. Good to be pleasantly surprised, whatever the case.