Monthly Archives: June 2009

The Story of Another Cut

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Yesterday I was helping Jennifer, the future sister in law, cut mat board for the genius center pieces she designed for her wedding when I lopped off the end of my finger with an X-acto knife.  ”Tip” might be a better word to describe the bit of my finger that’s missing than “end.” It’s just the very, very last bit of my left index finger.  

Because I often accidentally cut myself, and because I have an overt need to act like a badass all the time, I tried not to say much about it.  I simply plucked the bit of skin that was left on the X-acto knife and lamented my stupidness aloud as I got myself some band-aids.  It really didn’t hurt too badly.  I thought it was, you know, merely a flesh wound.  If you saw it yourself, you’d agree, this non-complaining response is the appropriate response relative to the nature of the wound itself.  It’s not that bad.

Three hours later, I was on my way home and I noticed that my finger was tingling under the band-aid.  That tingling was annoying.  That tingling eventually went away.

Two hours after that, I was laying in bed, trying my hardest to go to sleep after a long day, and a long stretch of going to bed late and getting up early.  I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep.  There was nothing in the world I wanted more.  But I couldn’t.  Because my stupid finger was hurting too bad.  It was throbbing.  It was throbbing like Wiley E. Coyote’s hand throbs after he smashes it with his own ACME Anvil. I couldn’t believe it.  As Zack crawled into the bed with me I felt ridiculous for saying it, but I had to finally tell someone.  I said, “MY FINGER REALLY HURTS.” Just like that, verbal caps-lock and everything.  He grunted his understanding in my direction; the grunting did not make my finger feel better.  I was frantically wondering where the end of this upward spike in pain would be.  At first it didn’t hurt, then it hurt a little bit, and how it hurts like the damn dickens — so what’s next?  Going to the hospital because I sliced off the tip of my finger?  Taking pain relieving medicines because I nicked myself with a craft supply?  The pain trajectory had been backwards, so where would it stop!? CRIPPLING DEATH BY LOPPING? ONLY TIME WILL TELL. 

Luckily, I was really, really tired.  I fell asleep soon after that, despite the ACME throbbing and the limitless pain trajectory.  I’d never been so glad for sleep deprivation. My finger feels much better this morning, thank you.

The Lifting Fog

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I feel like I’m starting to come out of the fog.  Finally*.

Yesterday I spent all day with two old friends of mine, and those two friends introduced me to something that I was previously unaware of.  Sonic has a happy hour.  HALF PRICE.  Seriously.  You can secure yourself 44 ounces of delicious limeade for the small prices of One American Dollar.  How did I never know about this before?  Do you have any idea how potent Sonic Limeade’s sadness obliteration abilities are?  Very potent!  All it takes is some sugar, styrofoam and a straw and I am well on my way to being my old self again.  Happiness for $1.00.  You can’t beat that with a stick. You know what else you can get for $1.00?  A movie.  Between Sonic’s Limeades and The Red Box’s rentals, I have been a dollar-loving fool for the past two weeks.  That’s for sure. 

Seriously, though, after 2 weeks of sending out resumes and applying for jobs like it’s going out of style, I have real-live job interviews lined up for Thursday.  Plural, even! Interviews with an ‘s’ on the end!  If that’s not cause for an exclamation point, I don’t know what is.  I was starting to feel like some sort of creepy monster that nobody wanted around.  Applying for over 40 jobs (literal number!) and hearing nothing back for half-a-month will make any sane person start to question their value.  I felt like I could have jumped to the Moon when someone called me yesterday to schedule my first interview.  If I’ve learned nothing else throughout this whole ordeal it’s that SarahThe is a better person when she has a long list o’things-to-do, and a reason to get out of the house each day.

*I realize that 2 weeks isn’t a very long time to give myself to recover from the life-blows that I’ve been dealing with over here, but come on.  The best way to deal with things is to trudge forward, right? I’m not suppressing, I promise.

Lucyfur

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Boo, my younger brother, left today to go to our old stomping grounds, Camp Eagle, for three weeks of hard work at one of the coolest places on Earth.  Guess who got to move in with us for 3 weeks while he’s gone?

His dog, Lucy.  

Aw, yes. She’s helping cure my severe puppy fever (in the best way possible).  I can’t even tell you how fun it is to have her here–but while I am excited, my excitement is NOTHING compared to how pumped Scout is to have a little-sister-dog she can hang out with and talk to about her period & stuff. 

Training the Dog

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For months and months, I’ve been making Scout sit down and wait for my permission before she’s allowed to go outside. 

I don’t even remember why I’ve been doing this. I vaguely remember reading on The Daily Coyote that she makes Charlie follow behind her through the door, because The Alpha always goes first.  Making him follow her is one of (the many, many) ways that she maintains her dominance in the relationship.  And you all KNOW that I’m always looking for ways to assert my dominance in relationships. 

The minor kerbobble in the line-of-thinking is that it’s not often that I go outside WITH Scout.  Mostly we just send her to the back yard to do her business, then call her back in when we assume that it’s been a suitable amount of time.  I decided that I could assert that same dominance by forcing her to sit and wait while I opened the door, not allowing her go pass through the door until she had my permission to do so.  So for 3 months now, she’s had to sit and wait. This Sitting and Waiting is especially difficult for her in the mornings, when I make her sit in the kitchen and PAINSTAKINGLY watch me get her food bowl, morsel out her breakfast, set it on the ground, and then TEASE her before I will finally give her permission to pass through the magical door frame to the lovely land of the backyard where she eats.  

Every time we walk to the door together, she gets all up in my business, stepping on my feet and darting for the door until I say, “No,” and move her back a few feet, where I tell her to sit and stay.  Then she’ll do what she’s told, a.k.a. sit there doing nothing, until I give her the go ahead.  

But today, just now, she blew my socks off.  I walked to the door in the same dazed, sad stupor that I’ve been in all week, and I just opened the door.  I didn’t tell her to sit or stay, I didn’t try to fight it today.  I just wanted to let her outside because I’m a terrible owner who has been basically neglecting her dog in the midst of all this sadness that I’m dealing with.  I opened the back door with one hand, pushing open the glass storm door with the other, my body forming a strange arc that would allow me to open both doors wide at the same time, leaving enough room for the dog to pass under me like a bridge.  I waited there for 5 seconds, staring at the ground, waiting for the blur of the dog underneath me.  Nothing.  I looked up towards the kitchen to see Scout sitting there, head tilted to the side, patiently waiting for me to tell her that it was okay for her to go outside.  Waiting for my command. 

Taking the little victories when they come.

A Slight Change of Trajectory

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Last week I sliced my ankle open on a wine glass.  It was Thursday night, and Zack and I were watching a terrible movie that I had borrowed from a friend.  

The tornado sirens started going of while we were watching the movie. I grabbed the remote and flipped over to watch the giant, hail-filled, lightening-laden storm barreling towards us with an uncommon fury.  Watching a storm like that move across a radar screen calls for action.  I didn’t really have anything that I needed to do; the cat and dog were already inside and the cars were as safe as possible–I was just getting up to wander anxious, storm-anticipating laps around the house.  I swung my legs off the couch, and crunched a wine glass with my left, outside ankle bone.  In keeping with the trajectory of the blow, my ankle then crashed down on the freshly-exposed, inordinately sharp, ankle-eating edge of the broken wine glass.

Zack called out from the office, where he had been checking the weather online, “And another wine glass bites the dust!”  I replied, “Another ankle, too.” Zack knows that I’m prone to cutting myself.  He hopped out of the office chair and rounded the corner with a make-shift first aid kit, several band-aids and a steady hand.  I’m not saying that we gawked at the gaping inch-long slice across the fleshy knob of my ankle, making the two newly formed slits in my ankle sing a little ditty before we bandaged it up–but I’m not saying that we didn’t either.  Five days later, I’m still taping up this ridiculous wound every day.  I’m astonished at how often my ankle touches things.  Perhaps I should have gotten stitches.  Perhaps I vastly underestimated the severity of the cut that day, or perhaps it was just that going out to get stitches would have been inconvenient considering the stormy circumstances and the simple fact that I had already given into the lure of pajamas for the day.  I don’t know.  All I know is that I still have a pesky wound on my ankle that is taking its sweet time healing. 

The real story here, though, is not that I cut my ankle.  The real story is that I was sitting on my couch on a Thursday night, drinking wine and watching a bad movie.  The real story is that I was not being effective with my time, I wasn’t doling out my minutes as if they were precious life-saving morsels.  The real story is the change of trajectory.  I’ve been scrambling, as evidenced by my radio silence, with how to deal with this change for exactly a week now.  After trying to figure out a way that I could talk about this, I’ve finally decided that I can’t.  I know you guys know that I have a pretty open-door policy when it comes to things in life that I’ll blog about, but it seems that I’ve found my limit. 

So here’s what you can know: I had to delay my nursing school plans by one year.  If you have any questions or concerns about this you can email me about it, and I’ll tell you what I can, but that’s about all I’m going to say about it here.  I still want to be a nurse more than anything in the world, much more than I ever imagined possible.  You all know what this dream means to me, and I’m not giving up on it, not by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s just a hiccup, a bump in the road, a slight change of trajectory.  I’m really sad, but I’m okay.  Like my ankle, my soul has a wound–the kind of gaping, attention requiring wound that I probably should go to the doctor for–but instead I just keep taping up the wound, painstakingly, every day.  I know that this time in my life, even though it’s incredibly heavy, is not going to last forever, and I have been overwhelmed by the love and support of my friends and family.  So don’t you worry about me.  Instead of RN’10, it looks like it’ll be RN’11 for me, and the truth is: this delay is SO not the end of the world. 

… I’m sure I’ll start believing it any minute now.

Can I have your number?

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After what has seemed like YEARS AND YEARS without a phone, my friend Michael has saved my ass by delivering one of his oldies-but-goodies directly to my doorstep.  Now I need all of you to send me a text message/email/facebook message with the following information:

a.) who you are,

and b.) your digits. 

Much obliged,

SarahThe Phone-Loser