...then a patient will try to hit me in the head before the night is over.
This is getting really old, really quickly. Luckily, due to my cat-like reflexes, superior coordination, and all around manly physique, he didn't land any, and we assisted him to his room without injury to anyone.
Ok, actually, what happened was Jean, the night shift attendant who always shows up about 15 minutes early for her shift, came into the hall and dragged him back to his room, while I held my arms up and yelled, "I NEED SOME HELP!" while absorbing punches. Absolutely no cat-like reflexes or manly physiques were involved, so I suppose I'll have to rest my laurels on my superior coordination, due to the fact that I didn't manage to trip over myself while retreating down the hall and screaming in fear while absorbing punches before I could get saved by a middle-aged woman. Who doesn't listen to Neil Diamond or drink Diet Coke.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Monday, March 5, 2007
Another softball over the plate...
BerryBird in comments:
My unit's evening shift employees went out for drinks and pizza after work on Friday night in honor of Jerry's last night on the shift. Here's a fun snippet of conversation:
Waitress: Can I get you anything?
Andy: Yes, I'd like a Bavarian Chocolate Cake and a Diet whatever you have... Coke it looks like.
Everyone else: (laughing)
Andy: What?
Jerry: Watching your figure there, Andy?
Claudia: Really. If you're getting a big chocolate cake, why go halfway with the Coke?
Andy: Look, my dentist told me to never drink sugared soda again. He said nothing about not eating chocolate cake.
My college roommate D loved Neil Diamond. We ragged him pretty good about that, believe me. He also drank diet sodas, which also seemed unlikely for a scrawny male undergraduate. We lumped both traits together into his suite of middle-aged secretary behaviors. But who knows if secretaries really listen to Neil Diamond? D is the only person I've ever met who would admit to it.
My unit's evening shift employees went out for drinks and pizza after work on Friday night in honor of Jerry's last night on the shift. Here's a fun snippet of conversation:
Waitress: Can I get you anything?
Andy: Yes, I'd like a Bavarian Chocolate Cake and a Diet whatever you have... Coke it looks like.
Everyone else: (laughing)
Andy: What?
Jerry: Watching your figure there, Andy?
Claudia: Really. If you're getting a big chocolate cake, why go halfway with the Coke?
Andy: Look, my dentist told me to never drink sugared soda again. He said nothing about not eating chocolate cake.
Don't Ask Me Why
Today I went to Wal-Mart so that I could finally spend that $10 gift card the nurses on my unit got me for Christmas. The Essential Billy Joel was on sale for $15, so I bought it. After a very, very, very long internal struggle.
You see, I don't know what to make of Billy Joel. I never get the urge to listen to him. I never think, "You know, I'd very much like to listen to 'Movin' Out' right now, but I simply don't have the necessary CD. Pity." On the other hand, I might know the words to every Billy Joel song that has gotten any play on the radio in my lifetime outside of "We Didn't Start the Fire," so I'm obviously not indifferent to his music. I like it enough to remember it, but I've never listed Billy Joel among my favorites. He's in Music Limbo.
Or at least he was. Lately I've discovered that I can pick up 103.5, an oldies station from Cincinnati on my way to work, and for about a two week stretch, I could count on hearing Billy Joel at least once on my way to or from work. On a couple occasions I heard him on the way to and from both. For reasons that are utterly unclear to me, two out of three times the song they played was "Only the Good Die Young". This doesn't make sense to me because I imagine oldies radio's target audience is very old and thus wouldn't react well to a song that mocks the Catholic Church and by extension organized religion in general. But I digress. Billy Joel comes on the radio, and I instantly begin singing along and get in a better mood. I even began joking with myself that the station had better not deny me my Billy Joel fix if it looked like I was getting close without hearing one. I make jokes to myself while I drive quite frequently, by the way, and I might add that I find myself most hilarious.
But then, one day, I heard the screen door slam, and a big yellow taxi took away the old man. And don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Or, more directly, I haven't heard a Billy Joel song in over a week, and Eddie Freaking Money seems to be following me everywhere I go. And now, I've got Billy Joel stuck in my head at least once a day. And if I hear "Baby Hold On" one more time, I'm going to be curt and snippy with a patient. Yes, both curt AND snippy. No foolin.
So now I have a Billy Joel CD, and I really don't know what to think of myself. I've heard people a generation ahead of me talk about how much of a hack Billy Joel is, but I don't see it. Michael Berube, for example, named him in his "What artist should've been a one-hit wonder?" game. (For those not clicking through, "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" was the hit Joel should've kept, and the correct answer to that question remains Alanis Morrisette and "Uninvited". Thank you.) I've also heard people of my generation compare him to Elton John, but I don't see that either. Elton John has nothing like "You May Be Right" and Billy Joel never comes close to "Rocketman".
I never expected to hear Joel on an oldies radio station, but it doesn't seem like he belongs on a classic rock station either, and he appears just off of the playlist of the "80s, 90s, Now!" format. I can't seem to make fun of him, but I can't find much praise for him. I feel like I should be indifferent to him, but I'm not. He strikes me as a guy who just wrote some catchy, inoffensive pop songs, but he seems to instill wrath or love in too many people for that to be an accurate depiction.
So really, what is it that makes Billy Joel so polarizing? I can see getting into an argument that the endless airtime reserved for "My Life" and "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me" would be better off given to "The Entertainer" and "She's Always a Woman", two songs that I've inexplicably never heard on the radio in my life, but at the end of the day, he remains an artist who has had some catchy hits, and a regular share of forgettable songs, which ranks him well below Tom Petty or Elton John but significantly above, say, Avril Lavigne, who Yahoo!'s front page described as a 'punk princess', implementing a phraseology that irked and troubled me enough that I used Google instead. That oughta show them. I think I should end this post now.
You see, I don't know what to make of Billy Joel. I never get the urge to listen to him. I never think, "You know, I'd very much like to listen to 'Movin' Out' right now, but I simply don't have the necessary CD. Pity." On the other hand, I might know the words to every Billy Joel song that has gotten any play on the radio in my lifetime outside of "We Didn't Start the Fire," so I'm obviously not indifferent to his music. I like it enough to remember it, but I've never listed Billy Joel among my favorites. He's in Music Limbo.
Or at least he was. Lately I've discovered that I can pick up 103.5, an oldies station from Cincinnati on my way to work, and for about a two week stretch, I could count on hearing Billy Joel at least once on my way to or from work. On a couple occasions I heard him on the way to and from both. For reasons that are utterly unclear to me, two out of three times the song they played was "Only the Good Die Young". This doesn't make sense to me because I imagine oldies radio's target audience is very old and thus wouldn't react well to a song that mocks the Catholic Church and by extension organized religion in general. But I digress. Billy Joel comes on the radio, and I instantly begin singing along and get in a better mood. I even began joking with myself that the station had better not deny me my Billy Joel fix if it looked like I was getting close without hearing one. I make jokes to myself while I drive quite frequently, by the way, and I might add that I find myself most hilarious.
But then, one day, I heard the screen door slam, and a big yellow taxi took away the old man. And don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Or, more directly, I haven't heard a Billy Joel song in over a week, and Eddie Freaking Money seems to be following me everywhere I go. And now, I've got Billy Joel stuck in my head at least once a day. And if I hear "Baby Hold On" one more time, I'm going to be curt and snippy with a patient. Yes, both curt AND snippy. No foolin.
So now I have a Billy Joel CD, and I really don't know what to think of myself. I've heard people a generation ahead of me talk about how much of a hack Billy Joel is, but I don't see it. Michael Berube, for example, named him in his "What artist should've been a one-hit wonder?" game. (For those not clicking through, "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" was the hit Joel should've kept, and the correct answer to that question remains Alanis Morrisette and "Uninvited". Thank you.) I've also heard people of my generation compare him to Elton John, but I don't see that either. Elton John has nothing like "You May Be Right" and Billy Joel never comes close to "Rocketman".
I never expected to hear Joel on an oldies radio station, but it doesn't seem like he belongs on a classic rock station either, and he appears just off of the playlist of the "80s, 90s, Now!" format. I can't seem to make fun of him, but I can't find much praise for him. I feel like I should be indifferent to him, but I'm not. He strikes me as a guy who just wrote some catchy, inoffensive pop songs, but he seems to instill wrath or love in too many people for that to be an accurate depiction.
So really, what is it that makes Billy Joel so polarizing? I can see getting into an argument that the endless airtime reserved for "My Life" and "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me" would be better off given to "The Entertainer" and "She's Always a Woman", two songs that I've inexplicably never heard on the radio in my life, but at the end of the day, he remains an artist who has had some catchy hits, and a regular share of forgettable songs, which ranks him well below Tom Petty or Elton John but significantly above, say, Avril Lavigne, who Yahoo!'s front page described as a 'punk princess', implementing a phraseology that irked and troubled me enough that I used Google instead. That oughta show them. I think I should end this post now.
Saturday, March 3, 2007
I Don't Like the Drugs; the Drugs, They Like Me
Take a body highly reactive to medication and add a slight head injury with a regular ibuprofen regimen and what do you get? Bizarre dreams, of course.
I dreamt I was going to the optometrist in town. I actually need to go to the eye doctor, so this is not really weird. The building I went to in my dream is actually a dentist's office. I actually need to go to the dentist, so this isn't too weird either, aside from the fact that I thought it was an optometrist.
When I went into the office, my cousin was working there as an assistant, except he had evil plans, I tell you. Evil. As a result, before he could approach my eyes with a vicious looking laser saw, I ran out of the building, and discovered I was in Los Angeles.
After trying to locate my friend Randy, and happily remembering that I'm led to believe SoCal is populated almost entirely by beautiful women, I decided I needed a job. Oh yeah, I knew I was in LA because I kept singing "I Love LA" by Randy Newman. I might actually have BEEN Randy Newman, too, because I sounded exactly like him, whereas in reality, I sound nothing like Randy Newman.
Anyway, I hopped into a subway car and started driving along the track until I reached a hospital. The supervisor there told me he needed someone to clean up a massive medicine spill. It seems that the Haldol and Geodon had spilled and were mixing together to form a hazardous material. Why did they have liquid concentrations of Haldol and Geodon? I don't know, but it was my job to clean them up. The only problem was that I'm hyper-affected by drugs, so the hazmat solution would have a worse effect on me than the people he already had. He wouldn't listen, though, so I had to get away by pointing and saying "Look at that!" and then sprinting back to my subway car before he caught me and threw me into the spill room. Fortunately, I made it just in time, and took off in my subway car very fast.
Regrettably, my subway car broke down at the foot of a gigantic, 30 story-tall hill. Since I didn't want to climb the hill, I got out of my subway car and went into the nearest building, which opened up into a boxing arena and I was coming down the aisle with a blue cape on me. I looked into the ring and my opponent was a patient from my unit, but not the one who hit me. However, after the bell rang, I spent the entirety of the match arguing with his manager and entourage about how much I owed them for dinner while the patient ran back and forth.
And then I woke up, and was very confused. And running late for work because my alarm didn't go off.
I dreamt I was going to the optometrist in town. I actually need to go to the eye doctor, so this is not really weird. The building I went to in my dream is actually a dentist's office. I actually need to go to the dentist, so this isn't too weird either, aside from the fact that I thought it was an optometrist.
When I went into the office, my cousin was working there as an assistant, except he had evil plans, I tell you. Evil. As a result, before he could approach my eyes with a vicious looking laser saw, I ran out of the building, and discovered I was in Los Angeles.
After trying to locate my friend Randy, and happily remembering that I'm led to believe SoCal is populated almost entirely by beautiful women, I decided I needed a job. Oh yeah, I knew I was in LA because I kept singing "I Love LA" by Randy Newman. I might actually have BEEN Randy Newman, too, because I sounded exactly like him, whereas in reality, I sound nothing like Randy Newman.
Anyway, I hopped into a subway car and started driving along the track until I reached a hospital. The supervisor there told me he needed someone to clean up a massive medicine spill. It seems that the Haldol and Geodon had spilled and were mixing together to form a hazardous material. Why did they have liquid concentrations of Haldol and Geodon? I don't know, but it was my job to clean them up. The only problem was that I'm hyper-affected by drugs, so the hazmat solution would have a worse effect on me than the people he already had. He wouldn't listen, though, so I had to get away by pointing and saying "Look at that!" and then sprinting back to my subway car before he caught me and threw me into the spill room. Fortunately, I made it just in time, and took off in my subway car very fast.
Regrettably, my subway car broke down at the foot of a gigantic, 30 story-tall hill. Since I didn't want to climb the hill, I got out of my subway car and went into the nearest building, which opened up into a boxing arena and I was coming down the aisle with a blue cape on me. I looked into the ring and my opponent was a patient from my unit, but not the one who hit me. However, after the bell rang, I spent the entirety of the match arguing with his manager and entourage about how much I owed them for dinner while the patient ran back and forth.
And then I woke up, and was very confused. And running late for work because my alarm didn't go off.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
I'd kick myself, but my head still hurts.
I've read Tom the Dancing Bug for almost five years now. Every time I read it on uComics, the little navigation arrows inform me that the previous cartoon is "Tiny Sepuku", and yet now, while searching for the name of a song I just heard a snippet of, I find it independently and start reading.
It's hilarious. I waste a jillion hours a year online looking at stupid crap. How did I not just click the "Previous Cartoon" button once?
It's hilarious. I waste a jillion hours a year online looking at stupid crap. How did I not just click the "Previous Cartoon" button once?
OW
Ow. Violent autistic patient. oof. Hard left hook. Ugh. Occipital lobe area. Ouch. Concentration not too good. Ack. Not concussed though. Can't get out of anything. Ick. Cold Compress leaking ooze of indeterminate substance.
So how was your day?
So how was your day?
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