Regression is a Circle

It's actually kinda funny how life seems to move in a circle. I mean, they talk about it in pretty much every single new age-y book there is. The Lion King gets all the animals in the Serengeti to sing about it. Working in the hospice everyone is constantly talking about "the circle of life and death." But, as a general rule, they are talking about the fact that you are born, you live and then you have the potential to be turned into compost and grow plants to feed people but will, in actual fact, be buried in a big box or burnt and pollute the air just a little bit.

OK, so that's the big circle. I get it. Cicular. Awesome. But I wasn't aware until just recently that there's a lot of little tiny circles in that big circle, too. For example: my housing situation. I seem to be regressing in the housing world and doing it in a very,very circular manner (see visual aid 1). Or possibly a sideways bell curve. Or a straight line and now I'm just going backwards. I'm not sure, but for the sake of my first paragraph lets just go with circle. It's actually weird. Let me explain.

Step one forwards: I started out living in my parents house. That's normal, the average person lives in their parent's house when they are growing up.

Step 2 forwards: I moved to my cousin's house, then to the ranch, then after a series of short term things (Thailand, ranch one again, ranch 2)

Step 3 forwards: I moved into the dorms.

Step 4 forwards: After two years in the dorms I moved in with roommates.

The top of the circle?: I took off and spent a long time living in a random collection of hostels, Tim Horton's, Costco parking lots, TV rooms at Cambodian bars, kitchens and bus stations. Just for argument lets call that the top, the point of the circle where I start turning around. I know in the regular definition of living spaces (4 walls, you pay for it, it's generally safe and you have the ability to wash your hair) these might not have been what most people would define as the high point.....but it was fun.

And now it all starts to go backwards.

Step one backwards- I get a roommate again. But the second half of the circle is apparently not as much fun as the first half. This time, instead of a roommates that I can buy wooden "simple" signs for, who dress up like superheroes with me and bake tater tot casseroles, this time I get a girl who acts like she's 15, lets her dog shit on the floor and has loud sex that forces me to leave the house.

Step two backwards- I move back into the dorms. This time it isn't free. B does not live across the hall. Instead, across the hall lives a girl who spends equal amounts of time screaming at her boyfriend (SHUT UP! No, YOU shut up! I'm not doing that! YOU do it!) and laughing like a hysterical jack in the box. It's like living across the hall from a mental health case study and really I feel like there should be a PowerPoint on the wall asking me what medications I expect to be prescribed for this cut and dry case of bipolar disorder.

Step three backwards- I actually expect this one to be a good step. I think I may have maxed out the negative in 2009. So I'm going to move in with my uncle, aunt and cousins and look forward to it. I have nothing to rant about here.


THE FINAL STEP- I move back home. Actually another one I'm looking forward to ....but there's something anticlimactic about moving back home. I'm going to be an RN and my parents are still going to have to drive me to work.


Isn't that weird? I'm actually retracing my steps through time. It's like Father Time read my Dear John 2009 blog and decided to take me seriously, but accidently just set the dial on reverse and left it there.

Copycat

I love reading over other people's blogs and seeing them laugh about all their analytic stuff. So I decided to try it out. It took me about a month to finally get around to figuring out how to add tags or whatever they are. I still don't quite understand what I did, but it worked. So now my site is being tracked by internet things......I'm not exactly computer literate. I've only been signed up for a little while. I have one search query that directs people to my blog. Somehow 3 people have typed in EXACTLY

"How wearing sunglasses can be positive reinforcement."

Hmmm.

Dear 2009: 2008 wins

Dear 2009

We haven't had that much time to get to know each other yet. I know that we've only been together for two months, and one of those months was a short one. I just feel like if I let this go on for any longer it won't be fair to either of us.

2009, in the time we've spent together I've been almost homeless twice, been told that I am a horrible nurse and lived through personal financial crises that were resolved only by borrowing a lot of money, sorta the same effect you have had on the world in general.

I know this is hard to hear, but I just think my relationship with 2008 was much healthier. We were adventurous, '08 and I. At this exact time in '08 I was happily hungover and sleeping through a bus ride from Siem Riep to Bangkok, about to fly to India. '08 and I hitchhiked across Canada, we slept in Costco parking lots and befriended other parking lot hobos. We drank formadehyde based Thai beer, ate poutine from pie plates and got free muffins from the Tim Horton's night guy in Winnipeg. We expanded our horizons, learned new things and let the world come at us as it wanted to.

With you I'm starting to feel stifled. The adventures I had with 'o8 are something that never seems to happen with you, 2009. All we do is go to class and clinical. Your financial demands and extreme need for time commitment mean that I can't do fun things like go to Montreal for the weekend whenever I want to. You've turned me into someone that gets upset over the idea of sleeping on a floor rather than rejoicing over the thought of reduced rent.

I don't want to be harsh. I'm sure for someone with a need for stability you will be the perfect year. In this world there is someone that will love you and all your scheduled activites. I just think that you should be free to find that person and let me be free to go back to '08. I hope we can still be friends. Maybe we can hang out next week? '08 and I will be on the beach in Malaysia.

Love

Millie

Imitating a Washing Machine and Other Fun Things To Do When Your Roommate is a Shithead.

So my roommate moved out. After all the initial drama caused by her surprise announcement that she was doing so I'm pretty glad she's out of my hair. Her family came and moved her out at 8 am on Saturday, a time when I am not exactly known to be at my very most chipper. At first the fact that she left me with absolutely no dishes, furniture or storage space (she took most of the cupboards) made me angry and the way the eerily empty apartment echoed whenever I walked freaked me out a bit. But then I realized that not having any dishes means I won't have to wash HER dishes and a completely empty livingroom translates into a brand-new, hardwood floored yoga studio, complete with candles (she took the lamp). So yesterday I bought a frying pan, a plate and a fork and today I turned Mates of State way up and danced around the gloriously dog shit free kitchen.

Then I decided to do some laundry. When Tian moved out she took the nice, new washing machine with her and replaced with some old funky looking thing that is probably from the same era as Claire's old stove, just less of a cheerful harvest gold and more of a depressing cold porridge brown in color. Tian, her mother and her sister (who all look disturbingly like the same person) assured me it worked. I'm naive. I fell for it.

So I took all my clothes and threw them in and poured in a generous cup of expensive-ish yummy smelly laundry soap. And then I tried to turn it on.

I've never heard an appliance sound constipated before. I makes this weird, low pitched, "I'm going to blow up soon" type buzzing when set at the "wash" part of any setting. At the rinse and spin cycle it rattles like an unmedicated Parkinson's patient but remains mysteriously free of water. In short, it is not a functional washing machine. And now I'm really angry.

I washed my clothes tonight by dumping them all in the tub and walking back and forth on them like I was making wine. I am now reduced to backpacking-through-Asia standards of hygiene, except there, if I shelled out the 50 cents, someone else would walk on my clothes for me. Since I don't usually get angry I no longer have appropriate ways of dealing with my anger in my repertoire of social interactions. Would someone with more experience being upset please tell me what to do?

Time for a New Coping Mechanism

Apparently, somewhere in the world, there are people who have mastered the art of coping with stressful situations. These people have come up with some actual productive thing to do that helps them handle badness. I've talked to people who claim to be this type of person. They don't drink copious amounts of gin from a bucket or purposely make happy people miserable when shit goes down, like a normal person would do. Instead they do things like go to the gym, write poetry or bake apple pies.

I have not mastered any of these useful and mature ways of dealing. Instead, when things get rough, I assess the situation, decide how bad things are and then, calmly and collectedly, run as far away as possible.

Yes, it's true, I am an escapist. The only thing that cures my stress is getting as far away from what causes it as possible. When actual physical distance is not possible I like to destroy my brain function to the point that I can't think, and therefore can't stress, any longer. When credit card bills come, I go to the movies. When school works piles up and I suddenly come to the realization that if I want to pass this year I will have to pull 5 straight all nighters, I drink a bottle of wine with a friend and go to school hungover, smelling like a brewery and absolutely unable to string together a coherent sentence, let alone focus on the lecture. I'm pretty sure I've always been this way. I have a vivid childhood memory of packing my piggybank and teddybear into a plastic suitcase to run away from home at age 8 because I couldn't understand my math homework. And the worse a situation is, the farther from it I want to get.

Up until this year this strategy has worked very well for me. Running away from shitty roommates has led to better living situations. Running away from immediate financial crises has led to jobs which allowed me to correct said crises. Running to Asia to cure a nursing-school-boredom induced coma was a definite success.

I'm starting to think, however, that this method of coping needs reevaluation. Apparently as you grow up your problems do too and if increasing stress equals increasing distance needed.....I may have to start spending all my time in Fiji. But then what if Fiji gets stressful?

Still Not Convinced?

Today I got written up, made to cry at least three times and told I needed to have an emergency meeting with my instructor all because one client said I didn't smile enough and was short with them.

A Plea For Innocence

Lately it seems that every second person wants to be a nurse. They want the good money, the long stretches of time off, the guaranteed job, the ability to travel. They want all the perks that come from having a job that has one of the most powerful unions out there and uses it's power to get nice big pay raises. And, let's be honest, they want to wear scrubs and run around the hospital giving CPR and yelling things like "I need another round of Epi, STAT!"

Now, I want to make this very clear. I'm not judging. I am in nursing school for all the reasons listed above. And I'm honest about it. When they asked us all in first year why we were in nursing our whole class sounded like a Miss America pageant with "helping people" replacing "world peace". When I said "for the money" people looked at me like I'd just flushed their goldfish down the toilet while smoking a cigar made out of the last panda bear.

So, I'm not judging. I just want people to make informed decisions. That's part of being a nurse. It's too late for me. I'm 3 1/2 years in. At this point I've written 300 pages of self reflection, 100 papers on topics as enthralling as "Uncle T's Chronic Ulcer" and "How My Personal Trauma, Explained in Depth in This Paper, Makes Me a Better Nurse". I have spent what feels like 9000 days in clinical, worked two summers as an undergrad (read: low level labourer) and worked as a care aid to support my scrub buying habit. I owe like $30,000 to the government and still haven't managed to find a way to make it go away. Basically, if I don't finish the last 6 months of the program now I will hate myself forever. But it's not too late for everyone else.

As a public service I have decided to put together a list of reasons that you, and everyone around you, really, really shouldn't become a nurse. I mean, there's the obvious. There aren't enough nurses. There are too many patients. There aren't enough beds. Still too many patients. Doctors are mean and NOT hot like on Grey's Anatomy. You will, most likely, ruin your back. Blah, blah, blah. There's also the other reasons. Here they are. Read, contemplate, run in the other direction.

1. Shit.
Literally, shit. As a nurse you will get shit on. And I don't mean you will accidentally get some on your hands when changing an oldies bottoms. That happens pretty much every 5 minutes. I mean that sometime in your career, for most people several times, someone will find a way to actually expel shit directly from their body onto yours. I personally have been sprayed by a patient while I was standing 5 feet from her bed. My friend had a client poo ON HER HEAD and spent the rest of the year being called Capt. Bowel Movement by her instructor. The same goes for vomit, sputum and blood.

2. People call you names.
Sure most of them have dementia, so really it doesn't mean much. But after a whole day of being called things that I'm pretty sure even sailors don't call cheap hookers anymore it becomes VERY difficult to remember that all the nastiness being sent your way is really the result of the twisty bits in old people's brains. The forty-eighth time someone calls you a rancid donkey carcass with maggots where your brain should be Alzheimer's starts to sound a lot like an excuse. The lady that came up with that gem couldn't remember what cheese is called for christ's sake.

3. Other nurses.
Remember my two blogs about my class? Get a good mental picture of the stupid girl. Now, give her a massive sense of entitlement, an inferiority complex and 10 years of experience, just enough to forget what it was like ever being new and lose all the knowledge she gained in school and replace it with bad habits and antiquated techniques. Multiply by twenty, add some mean spirited gossip and backstabbing and you have a nursing floor. Worst of all the second a nurse turns 40 she gets the nursing haircut (the one that looks like someone was cutting hair with a weedwacker) so they all look alike. A bunch of scary, mean twins. It's like a Steven King movie.

4. Patients.
When my little sister was three she got her ears operated on. She went to the hospital, got to eat some popsicles and had to take medicine that made her all dizzy. She weighed a whopping 40 ish pounds (I think) and I'll bet you she was as nice as pie. That is what patients in hospitals USED to be like. Patients now are only in the hospital if they are siiiiiiiiiiick. Apendectomy? You can go home the same day. Bowel resection? A couple days. But a 54 year old smoker that weighs 650 pounds, doesn't have enough upper body strength to turn themselves over in bed and has laid in one place for so long they have a bedsore the size of Texas? Welcome! Our hospital is your home. For the record, trying to turn a patient that size over is like going cow tipping, except you aren't allowed to be drunk.

5. Monotony.
You don't get to yell "STAT!!" Doctors yell. You hand them shit. And hang IVs. And change dressings. Anytime you switch areas it's cool for awhile, and then its the same old same old. Work is usually either boring or soul crushingly terrifying and they don't let you take home samples of the good drugs. While its a big step above the old days, when nurses scrubbed floors on their hands and knees.....sometimes I still want to yell things and cut.

So, I don't think that any of you that read this actually want to be nurses. But if you know anyone that does, please, for their own sake, save their innocent souls. No one deserves to be shit on.