in that terribly nihilistic, post-modern sense
where there is no God
no Hell, no Heaven
just what I make of this life
and so I lay
eyes on the ceiling
falling all over my own thoughts

am I in love
am I in trouble
am I alone
am I okay.

Let there be a God
a light, a dream, a hope, a spark
so that all this may not be in vain.

Praise God.

I have shitty days. I hate the days when you’re woken up by either mariachi music or the smell of acetate. Those days when the day is cloudy, it’s too warm to wear a sweatshirt and too cold to wear a T, and everything you’re trying to do keeps ending in failure.

I’d just finished the first batch of homebrew, the beer I’ve been allowing to ferment in a huge 6.5 gallon glass jug in the kitchen. The next step of the process was to sanitize everything (about 30 min) and to bottle the mixture once mixing in some sugar water to cause carbonation. Once I got everything ready and clean, I found that my hose had grown a bacterial infection on the inside, and thus could not be used. I had to then run to the hardware store in traffic, and then come back to the house, resanatize everything, and start over with the bottling. This would have been fine, except all the sinks in the house are being refinished today, and the stupid goddamn guys doing parked their huge van right in the middle of the driveway.

Right in the middle.

So: I come home, and Bryce is pulling out. I figure I’ll park in his spot, go inside and ask the finishing dudes to move their van, then come out and move my car again before Bryce gets back.

Ha.

As I’m waiting for him and Amanda to pull out, he starts making gestures out the back window of the truck. Perplexed, I reach out the window and motion for him to back out. I figure he doesn’t think he has enough room to make the 180 out of the driveway to turn out of our cul-de-sac and I start backing my car up. As I’m pulling backwards, he backs up next to me yelling:

“Faggot, FAGGOT! Don’t park in my spot!”

Are you kidding me.

Key notes:
Where did he learn to act like this?
Why does Amanda find this attractive?
Why is my father so entirely pacifistic about this behavior?

Oh well. UC in a few months, and then I get to move out. Both Mom and Dad have promised to visit regularly, and hopefully things with Bryce will get better once I’m out of the house. Mom and Dad are moving to Boston eventually, so he’ll have to move out and will need some help in the long run any way.

Allow this to gently, if not utterly serenely, vibrate through your skull with the power of satan in a high pitched, overly-modulated girly voice: “OMGGG ITS SOOOO CUTTEEEEE”. Yeah. The contraction was SPOKEN improperly.

After I freed the poor creature from the hands of my mistress (read: locked the damn thing outside) we made one eyed jacks and then drove to my house for study. We’ve been going to about nine hours.

My type of headache, although very rare, is not unheard of. It’s supposedly common in young men and subsides over time, occurring less and less frequently for up a year until it’s totally gone. Thus far, it hasn’t returned. I’m hoping for the best.

Unfortunately, the untimely missing of two weeks of school and work makes for a rather interesting month. I have a sumly car payment, credit card payment, and a two weeks worth of living expenses coming out of an itty-bitty paycheck (two days wages, to be precise). Ugh. And this is nothing compared to

SCHOOL:
This week, I have FIVE tests. FIVE. And I haven’t been able to prepare much for any of them. Luckily, chem lest me drop a test (read: the exam tomorrow morning), and bio lets you retake a test at the end of the semester (read:t the exam tomorrow night). My two psych tests are online and open book and never too bad, and my biology lab exam on thursday is almost prepared for. I’m making flash cards of all the organisms. Good times.

I picked up an external hard drive (1TB, WOOT!) and have been playing Call of Duty 4 for the last few days with Rob. Oh my God. What a game.

This blog now feels pseudo-caught up. I can now post normally. Sorry for the super-disjointed style of this post, I just need to get raw info out of my head.

The next morning, the pain was greatly diminished, although still ebbing. It came back on Wednesday afternoon while I was at work, although the headache diminished quickly. My coworkers expressed concern, and I promised several people that if the headache didn’t subside by the following day, I would admit myself to the ER for diagnostics.

It didn’t go away.

The next night I went to the Scripps clinic, a small walk-in attached to a major hospital nearby. The doctor there, upon a quick evaluation, told me that he suspected a sub-Arachnoid hemorrhage, an extremely serious brain bleed with a 50% mortality rate. He demanded that I be transported via 911-ambulance to Palomar hospital, the largest medical center in the area. I was taken there upon which a head CT and lumbar puncture were immediately performed, both coming back negative for a brain bleed. The doctor did note however that on the CT my sinuses were extremely swollen, and after a swab it was determined that my headache was likely from a bad case of sinusitis, an infection and infalammation of the sinuses. Very painful, but treatable with antibiotics.

The next day, I was unable to sit up or stand without extreme head pain. This has been constant for almost 5 days. When the lumbar puncture was performed, my spine failed to close around the puncture site, and thus cerebral-spinal fluid has been leaking continuously, causing what is is aptly referred to as a post-epidural-puncture-headache, or PEPH for short. The fix is to put another needle into the spine, and then use my own blood (drawn from my arm) to fill the empty space in my spine in order to patch the hole. This procedure is called a blood patch. It was performed last night to no effect.

I have another appointment in the morning with my primary care physician to evaluate my options. The liklihood is that I will require another blood patch, and if that proves ineffective, possibly surgery to repair the hole in my spinal column.

—–

If anything, I’ve learned through this how wonderful my friends and family are. I love you all so dearly, thank you SO much for being with me through this. Please keep me in your thoughts over the next few days. I’ll update as soon as I know something more.

Because sometimes the dissonance of empassionment hides so well behind a wall of subtle intoxication.

Because for some reason, fools still believe in love at first sight.

Because regardless of place, moment, person, ability, reality or hope, we all still move as one.

In place, unaffected by my own inconsistencies, left to my own, I should hope to find a reason, a meaning beyond what I today understand as my reality.

I hope to be granted a bit of leeway at Heaven’s gate because I am a fool.

The environment is so chill I cannot even begin to describe. This is what I was missing at Calvin. Sitting down in a room with your best friends and knowing that everything is awesome, that I am loved, and my family is two rooms away watching an old movie.

Thank God.

Oh. My. God.

I started brainstorming about what sort of things calm me down to work.

It used to be God. I would pray for help, and then resolve that everything was in His hands, and thus I didn’t need to worry about it. He would never give me anything I couldn’t work through, right?

Now, I realized, it’s Ping. She calms me down. When I get stressed, I call her and she talks me through things in her wonderfully sweet voice that makes me all mushy and lame. I drink a cup of tea and turn on chill music (if I can take it) and then I call Ping. That’s like, standard protocol when I’m all fucked.

Mmm.

Stress can overcome like rain, suddenly soaking everything and making movement cold and slow and difficult. That’s okay though, I know that somehow I’ll make it through this mud of school and work and people. I just need a 4.0 this semester, and I’ll be fine. I’m terrified I won’t make it. We’ll see.

I got a USENET subscription the other day. I’m having a ball with that one.

Gabriel and Dresden - As the Rush Comes

The fire was literally five-hundred feet back from the rear entrance, ash was raining through the doors and the smoke was nearly unbreathable. We moved over two-hundred patients in a matter of hours. There were ambulances lined up in rows of ten or twenty outside the Ambulance bay doors. It was fucking insane.

Since the hospital was on a mandatory evacuation, most of the staff were removed as well. We ran on a skeleton crew for four days, consisting of two ER nurses, a doctor, a tech, three security guards and a maintanence guy. The rest of the hospital was empty, and we spent most of our time shooting shit and treating walk-in patients and firefighters. Nothing too bad came in, a couple lacerations, some asthma people and a few elderly folks who were having trouble breathing.

The feel of the place once it was empty was completely post-apocalyptic. The lights were off in most of the hospital, caution tape tied to the doors in a haphazard rushed way. IV’s were left running and phones off the hook. It was downright creepy to walk through Villa Pom, the convalescent home attached to the hospital. Wheelchairs were all over the place in huge groups, beds in the cafeteria where patients were loaded onto ambulance stretchers, and ash covering the floors and tables everywhere.

Everything 911 was diverted to Palomar Hospital. I got called in to work in their ER for a night. It was the most intense, awesome and exciting experience in an ER I’ve ever had. Palomar is the Trauma center in the area, and covers the largest area of any other ER in Southern California. It was incredible. In the first hour, I had a full-code trauma, a meth addict, an assaulted cop, and a mentally handicapped guy who needed a feeding tube and intubation due to some sort of massive upper-GI bleed. When he was eighteen, his father shot him in the head. I think I’m going to start picking up a lot more shifts at Palomar, maybe even apply for a position there as a Per Diem. We’ll see.

Working on staff with the nurses at Pomerado was really good. For the last eight months or so, I’ve had a lot of trouble integrating socially with the staff. But being able to actually sit down and talk with the nurses, I now feel befriended by some of the people I had been having the most trouble with. I’ve also been able to become more outgoing with my coworkers, which has improved things a great deal. I just need to keep becoming comfortable with myself. Christianity made it so easy, now I have to learn to do it on my own.

Our house didn’t burn down, we weren’t evacuated. Ping was though, she spent the week at our house. Good times.

I clocked over one-hundred hours that week. That should help with the car!