Who Wants To Be A Crack 'Ho?

Alright, so I've been a depressed, whiney bitch lately.

What's new?

Lately, as detailed elsewhere in depth (read: every single fucking post) my job has made me feel like the most incompetent, stupidest bitch on the planet.

And when I say bitch, I mean like the way they use it in uh, prison.

I'm encouraged by family members and nurses with many, many years of experience, whose talents and competency I admire, that it is not me that's the problem, it's the shitty hospital I work for.

And as we all know, shit rolls down hill.

Any way, as a complete non-sequitar, I've been living off of diet coke and peanut butter sandwiches lately. I'm regressing into childhood as a defense mechanism, you see.

I'm also dealing with daily sinus headaches that make me wish someone would put me on a morphine drip and let me out of my misery.

A panacea for all this crap is realizing:

a) all life is crap, but this at least this crap is at least temporary crap
b) at least I can make fun of it and years later, when I'm a crazy demented nursing home resident, I'll know exactly which buttons to push when it comes to my caregivers. I'm going to be the evil, needy ex-nurse bitch every nurse hates to take care of. And my subversive dream of going around and pushing every single code button in as many rooms as I can will come true. It shall. And then I will say, "Ah, my nefarious plans have come to fruition at long last!"

That is, if I still remember words like "nefarious" and "fruition," not to mention my own name, and what year it is. I had a pleasantly confused patient the other week who insisted it was 1939 and he was in a church. I say, good for him. I had another patient a few years back (when I was a student) who insisted she would "wait for Joe" her husband before she ate her supper, worried about what she was going to cook for him, and then attempted to feed his 8"x 11" framed Air Force picture (which looked like it was taken in 1942) which she insisted be kept by her bedside at all times. It made her happy, even though attempting to feed the real Joe would have required some kind of Lazarus-like resurrection, as Joe had been dead for about ten years. Still, it made her happy to feed that damn picture, so we let her, even though it was kind of messy and a pain in the ass to clean up.

One of the first things you learn ppretty quickly as a nurse about demented people is reorienting them to our time-space continuum is useless. So when patients say to me, "Can you please bring that furniture order up? I've got a schedule you know!" I simply say, "I'll check on it as soon as I can." Sometimes they buy my bluff, sometimes they don't, but usually by the time I come back into the room they've forgotten about whatever it was they were talking about in the first place, kind of like me. I'm already flighty and forgetful, I can't imagine what I'm going to be like when early-onset dementia hits.

Any way, so another non sequitar. We've already discussed in this blog how much I a) hate housecleaning and therefore b) suck at it. The problem is, it has to be done like, every day. What's up with that? I mean, you wipe the kitchen counters down at night, and then in the morning you go to eat breakfast, and goddamn it you have to wipe the damn kitchen counter again. What in the fuck kind of stupid waste of time is this any way?

And I suck at housecleaning, because I'm forever doing a half assed job, and my idea of housecleaning is stuffing things randomly into closets and drawers, wiping down visible surfaces with some kind of cleaning surfactant, and then running the vacuum cleaner, but not in spaces that would actually require me to move furniture to do a thorough job. Actual organization of spaces would require time, thought, and patience, large quantities of which I am very deficient.

This is why I can't be a mom, because I'd be one of those sucky moms who'd feed her kids microwave t.v. diners because I never learned how to cook, and absent-mindedly hand them Hauerwas when they would inevitably whine, "Mom, I'm bored. There's nothing to do." There might be some bargaining though, as in "You can either read Hauerwas, or clean the house and do the laundry and the cooking. How's that sound?" Personally, I'd chose cleaning the house.

I'd also be one of those shitty parents who like, hand their kids unwrapped socks and underwear for Christmas and forget their birthdays, so I give them a package of twinkies in lieu of a cake, and when they whine about going to the zoo or some shit like that, I'd take them to a nature reserve and leave them there.

I know myself. I would be a sucky, sucky parent, because I wouldn't want to go to Disney World or take them to stupid carnivals or watch their lame schools plays where they dress up as singing vegetables or whatever, and I don't want to have to help them with stupid school projects involving glue, noodles and construction paper. And I definetely couldn't sit through stupid kid movies or watch those godawful cartoons/kids shows (I hated Sesame Street when I was a kid. I didn't know what "gay" meant back then, but if I did, I would definetely have called Big Bird gay. And Burt and Ernie were "roommates". Yeah, right. Actually, Ernie bugged the shit out of me, but I really liked Burt with his unibrow and continually sexually frustrated anger.) Instead, I'd end up taking them to movies like Berlin and scaring the shit out of them.

And what if I ended up with a kid stupider than myself? Oh my god. I couldn't handle it. I'd freak out.

That's why I recommend dogs/pets. No late night feedings, diaper changes, no listening to the inevitable teenage whining about when they can have a car, the overttime in a shitty job so as to save for college funds, obsessing over SAT scores, worrying about teen pregnancy, drugs, gun control at school, and all that other shit. Plus, if they piss you off too much, you can give them away (the dog I mean, not the kid).

Bottom line: I'm much too selfish to raise children. I like to sleep, I like to sit on my ass uninterrupted for long periods of time, and I like solitude. What I really want is to be Virgina Woolfe, except without the drowning-myself-in-the-Ouse or whatever. And maybe not so much mental illness. I always wondered how those people got by financially, though? I mean, did family members take them in or something? There seem to be a lot of financial and social obstacles to becoming a recluse nowadays. I'll have to work on figuring out a way to do it. Maybe get a clinical diagnosis of agoraphobia and refuse to leave the house, and then I can go on Title 19 or something. There's got to be a way to get out of nursing and perserve my sanity, even if it means pretended to be crazy (ironically enough).

(No, I swear, I'm not on drugs, even though this post sounds like I am.)

I think it's the headache. It hurts man. And nothing helps, not decongestants, not NSAIDs, not ibuprofen, not Tylenol.