Nothing is better than a random mid-week trip to Walmart for cheap binders and trash bags that ends with a side jaunt to Carl’s Jr, Jack in the Box, and Denny’s to spend time with good friends and send off a buddy to grad school.
‘Nuff said.
It never ceases to amaze me how time flies. It’s already been a month and a half since my last post, and I already want to say, “Man, I hope I don’t post too much on my blog, otherwise my readers might get tired of my ramblings.”
But the second half of November and all of December have rolled on by, taking with it my 24th birthday, the conclusion of my first semester of graduate school, Christmas, and the beginning of the New Year. And while God has been faithful, I’m not sure how I feel looking forward into 2012. I feel neither hopeful nor excited about what lies ahead. I’m not anxious, but I don’t feel at peace.
Perhaps the best word is unsettled.
But I shouldn’t be.
I got an A and 3 B+’s in my first semester, way higher than undergrad. Yet, as I start my Med-Surg rotation, I feel like I don’t know anything at all.
I have a wonderful girlfriend, great friends, and a fantastic family, all of whom I know love me for who I am. Yet, oddly, I can’t help but feel disjointed, conspicuous, and out of place.
I got everything I needed for Christmas, including new jeans, two new cardigans, and a brand-new computer monitor. Yet I am left desiring more, wanting more, desperate for more.
Full of “yet”‘s and nowhere good to put them.
2012, here I come.
“…as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.” Philippians 1:20
COLD BATHROOMS
I don’t see myself as a nitpicky person, but I definitely think there should be a standardized way to take care of a bathroom, and one of the central pillars of this ground-breaking set of regulations would be to keep public bathrooms COLD. I don’t know about you, but if I walk into a bathroom, I want it to feel clean (even if I know its not). And when a bathroom is HEATED and WARM, I cannot help but think of a germ-infested hotbed full of germs. That’s right, people, I used germ twice; my fury knows no bounds. But doesn’t everybody feel this way?
Bathrooms should be cool and utilitarian. I don’t need to be comfortable inside the stall; I just gotta do my business and go. I just gotta “go” and go.
COFFEEHOUSE NAPKINS
In the far, distant future when I have enormous amounts of money that I don’t need (please note that I’m being entirely sarcastic), I want to open a coffeehouse. And in that coffeehouse, everything – every cup, every table, every artwork – needs to be just right. And as I’ve been thinking about this off and on, one of these particular nuances needs to be the quality of the napkins. I have established two rules regarding coffeehouse napkins:
RULE#1: Coffeehouse napkins need to be soft. There are so many different uses for the typical napkin: wiping up spills, blowing your nose (b/c you’re not gonna want to purchase separate tissues for your customers), etc. And within the last week, due to my persistent cold, I have blown a tissue box and a half’s worth of tissues and I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to Mission Coffee for supplying its customers with fantastic napkins for all their quirky needs.
HOWEVER, there’s an exception to every rule.
RULE#2: If you are going to disobey RULE#1, then your napkins need to be made of recycled material. Case in point: Starbucks. Their napkins are printed with messages that congratulate themselves on their “Green”-ness. If I needed to blow my nose and my nose wasn’t going to be comfortable, the coffeehouse needs to AT LEAST tell me that I am helping the environment (however misguided that may actually be) by doing so. And even then, the napkins still need to be slightly soft.
QT
And so, to quickly end this extended post (because I gotta do my take-home exam), I’ll just say this: Never discount the power of quality time with the Lord. 15 minutes sitting there peacefully in His presence is worth more than anything.
orange u wondering what i'm gonna write about?
heh heh heh.
I met a nice lady today. A little frazzled-looking, older African American lady. I sat next to her on the bus and wanted to offer her a slice of orange that I’d brought from home. But we never made eye contact.
Later, I was sitting on the platform bench waiting for my train when, again, she sat down next to me on the bench. I thought, Here’s my chance. So I offered her one of my three remaining slices of orange.
She took all three. Thanks, she said.
She asked me how my day was. 5 minutes until my train comes.
Not bad, I replied. I inquired about hers.
Her answer was a long one. She’d sat for three hours at a dialysis machine, something she had to do at least three days a week. She’d suffered kidney failure two and a half years ago due to problems with her high blood pressure.
4 minutes until my train comes.
She continued. Never smoked, never drank, never did drugs. She has a 17-year-old daughter who gives her headache, but no brothers or sisters to help out. Her mother died years ago. Her father died five months before her kidney failure, and she had him cremated. Then came the kidney failure, the financial burden, and the stress. Now, she can’t bend down, she can’t get down on the ground, she can’t climb too many stairs, and because she comes to the hospital 3 days a week for dialysis, she can’t hold down a job.
3 minutes.
But I’m lucky to be alive, she says. I’ve survived and come this far. Just gotta take it one day at a time. So I can’t complain. Everybody was real nice about helping out when my dad died. And my daughter’s gonna move out soon, and so maybe I won’t have to worry so much about her.
Is she going to college? I ask this, but I already know the answer.
2 minutes.
She replies, I don’t know what she’s gonna do. Hopefully. Maybe. Probably not.
I ask if she lives nearby? Yeah…West Oakland. How bout you? Union City? Nah, I’m all the way down in Fremont. Oh it’s nice down there. Much better than here. At least it’s sunny sometimes. Warmer, too. Yeah, it gets really rainy up here. Oh yeah, it’s always so cloudy. Depressing, y’know?
1 minute.
Hey, these oranges are pretty good. Don’t taste like the ones I usually eat.
Yeah, I think I just picked them up at the supermarket.
Well….oops, here’s my train. Have a good one then.
I hope those 3 orange slices go a long way.
I took this picture.
“I was the lion.” And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued.
“I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”
“Then it was you who wounded Aravis?”
“It was I.”
“But what for?”
“Child,” said the Voice, “I am telling you your own story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.”
“Who are you?” asked Shasta.
“Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook; and again, “Myself,” loud and clear and gay: and then the third time “Myself,” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all around you as if the leaves rustled with it.
from The Horse and His Boy
by C.S. Lewis
New blog theme. So fresh and so clean.
We’ll see how long I keep this one. Until I get my own domain and website….
I have this amazing tube of toothpaste. Aquafresh Extreme Clean: Whitening. SUPER foamy. I like it a lot.
But that’s not what makes it amazing.
This particular tube never seems to end. I am totally not kidding. I swear I have already squeezed every little bit of it out, and yet every morning and every night for the last week and a half, I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and lo and behold, there is another little bit in the tube ready to go. Yet, I know that my amazement is somewhat unfounded, because I know that it will run out sooner or later.
And so, in order to make this blog post worth your time, I’ll make that daring leap to apply this oh-so-poignant metaphor to my life right NOW. Blatantly obvious transitions!
I am that amazing tube of toothpaste.
Didn’t see that coming, huh? But it’s true. Recently, I feel like I’ve been pushing more and more of myself out, and while I remain in awe of the sheer quantities of whatever that God has been able to push out of me, I’m definitely reaching the end of my tube.
The part I’m having the biggest difficulty with is re-defining the metaphor for myself. A tube of toothpaste has only one way out; the movement of toothpaste unidirectional. Unless you cut open the other side and add more toothpaste, there’s only so much the tube can provide before you have to get another one.
Father, grab your scissors; I’m going to need some more toothpaste pretty soon.
Do you know what one of the most awkward moments is? Well, I don’t care if you know or not, because I’m going to tell you.
It is SUPER awkward when people sit next to me on BART….when there are twenty other available seats around.
This morning, this young lady choose to sit not in the open seats in front of me, behind me, across the aisle from me, or the seats in a two-row-radius around me, but the seat SMACK. DAB. RIGHT. NEXT. TO. ME. And then proceeds to fall asleep, not while leaning back, but with her head in her right hand, nodding violently and causing me to think that she might suffer a traumatic neck injury if the train stopped suddenly.
Ladies, I know I smell good (or at least I like to think so, and so my girlfriend tells me). I know I am even devilishly handsome (this is probably blatantly untrue….probably). But this is crossing a line. PERSONAL SPACE!
It is strangely ironic that perhaps the only way to know if you are getting closer to God are direct confrontations with our sins. That it is only in the presence of a holy and pure God that we are truly called out on our junk and general crap. It’s ironic, because incidentally, that’s when we are the most unwilling to seek Him, so ashamed and guilty are we to be in His presence that we shy away from the throne.
Yet it is exactly in those moments that we need to run towards Him and embrace that gift of salvation. It is precisely by directly looking at the gravity of our sins that our hearts are convicted by them. It is in their light that we truly see ourselves as the miserable and sinful beings that we are.
The question is, then: Why is it so hard for my heart to remain convicted?
I was really REALLY gonna try to make this a happy-go-lucky post. I really was. You gotta believe me.
For example, I was going tell the world that I was – for the first time, in a LONG time – a straight-A student. That nursing school seemed to agree with me. But then this week hit, and I have killed myself to study my butt off, and STILL got two B’s (which I’m perfectly fine with). So that “happy” announcement kinda fell through. But that wasn’t really that bad.
What was bad was that last Thursday, the California nurses’ union went on strike to ask hospital administrators to reconsider nurse-to-patient ratios in their respective departments and hire more nurses. Now, while I’m all for decreasing the nurse-to-patient ratios (and thereby making sure quality of care isn’t compromised), I don’t know enough about the politics of the debate to form my own opinion regarding the situation. But because of the strike, traveling nurses (or, as resident nurses like to call them, “scabs”) were brought in to replace those nurses for the duration of the strike.
And then Saturday came around, and regardless of what everybody thinks, things took a turn for the worse.
A cancer patient at Alta Bates Summit Hospital in Oakland – the exact SAME hospital that houses Samuel Merritt University, a hospital I see almost EVERY DAY – suddenly passed away on Saturday, when a traveling nurse accidentally placed a nutritional supplement into the patient’s IV instead of the feeding tube.
It was only two days prior that hospital administrators said that this whole debate over nurse-to-patient ratios wasn’t a medical issue, but an economic one.
It was only two days prior that this patient was receiving the care she needed to, hopefully one day, recover from this debilitating disease. Little. By. Little.
It was only two days prior that this 23-year-old traveling nurse was on her way to California for another couple day’s work. Same old, same old.
And then somebody suffered for it.
My Pathophysiology professor actually teared up in class. He almost cried. 23 years old, and this nurse’s career is potentially OVER.
I’m 23.
A sobering thought, isn’t it?
