Let's Pretend We Don't Exsist, Let's Pretend We're in Antarctica

Have I mentioned having the flu despite getting my annual flu shot? This is the world I live in, where I am inoculated for the wrong strain of the flu and get a bonus never ending cough as a parting gift. I also bruised my thigh on my file cabinet. Yep, it's self-pity at its finest.
Looking up, it's Friday and we are scheduled to have storms tomorrow morning. There is nothing I love quite as much as a thunderstorm.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how often as adults we have to edit ourselves. People have opinions, sharp black and white opinions that they hide away like secrets lest they offend others. Even people without political or religious leanings have, somewhere, issues they believe strongly in.
I am highly opinionated, too highly sometimes. I find it torturous to hold my tongue sometimes. Yet on my blog I am careful to steer clear of my more controversial beliefs. I wonder if this is because I fear the feedback they would inspire or because I'm afraid of scaring off the few readers I have. Maybe both.
Maybe the idea thing to do is to write about the issues I believe in but give equal time and thought into both sides. Play the devil's advocate with myself. I wonder if I could write evenly, open-mindedly enough that it would prove hard for other's to pick my stand. Maybe I'm that ambitious. Maybe not.

A New Name For Everything!

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
-Lewis Carroll

I had the flu for the last six days but I'm better now.
It has become, suddenly, warm and breezy...like false hope of spring.
I have officially worked at UAMS 5 years this week.
I bought a bathing suit this weekend that is two sizes too small, it's either optimism or wistful thinking.
Nutrigrain yogert bars and Sam's Choice flavored sparkling water are tasty treats for those of us hoping to get into bathing suits two sizes too small.
The Hogs made a step forward, but there are two more to go.
The Diamond Hogs are the one shining light in that program, out scoring their opponent this weekend 44-6.
I'm thinking about opening the windows when I get home tonight, see how fresh air smells.
I am NOT cooking tonight. My family can starve.
I have a skirt to wear over above mentioned bathing suit should more of me hang out of is socially acceptable.
I have to have three cavities filled next Monday.
Filling cavities is definately preferable to another root canal.

Chicago Seemed Wired Last Night

I went to Wal-Mart early Saturday morning to grocery shop. I try and go as early as possible to avoid other people. Around eight, as I was leaving the store I stepped outside and was met by viciously cold and fierce winds. Another shopper, leaving the store behind me looked over and said:
"When I woke up this morning I had no idea that I'd moved to Chicago."
She had something there.

We Were Having a Ball...

"I felt the worst for the little kids, their eyes filled with innocent wonder as they waited happily in line for autographs and photo ops with their favorite players. You wanted to pull them aside and gently explain that there are less painful hobbies than following the Cubs, such as plunging knitting needles into your inner ear canal."
-ESPN columnist Gene Wojciechowski

February is a wasteland. College and NFL football are over, March Madness hasn't begun, the opening of the baseball season is two long cold months away. All is not dark and dreary, there are small points of life, the beginning of the college baseball season in which the Hogs have been ranked in pre-season polls as high as #8 in the country. There's also college basketball, but for Hog fans this seems to be more a study in the inability to maintain consistency than an enjoyable sporting event.

What stated this post was the article from which the above quote originates. I love baseball, every tiny intricacy of it is fascinating and exciting to me. I have learned to recognize that a triple is infinitely more exciting than a home run, that a 3-2 count sets off an infinite number of reactions that a 1-2 count never can. I love how a baseball field looks at night when lit up so the green surface and crisp white lines juxtapose with the fathomless darkness beyond the lights. This being said, baseball season is agonizing.

Cubs fans are the butt of jokes, the perpetual underdogs, the luckless losers from the Friendly Confines. Next year will mark 100 years without a World Series win. We, as Cubs fans, set ourselves up every year for what seems to be an inevitable fall. Oh, we tell ourselves "this year will be different" or "if Boston could do it maybe it's our turn" and by the All-Star break we're counting down the days until the football season starts.

Why do we do this to ourselves, you ask. I really don't know. I try to hold myself back, to keep from being swept up in the surges of optimism that accompany every off-season trade. I tell myself, "I'll get excited in June if they've earned my excitement" but in reality the long days of cold and dreary February work their way into my head every year. This morning, driving to work in freezing rain before the sun began to even consider rising I felt the beginnings of it. The little pang of longing for symmetrically placed perfectly white bases and knee socks. Slowly over the next month my stoic "wait and see" attitude with turn to cautious optimism. In March I'll be caught up in the excitement of the NCAA basketball playoffs and the caution will begin to waver. By April I'll be sitting at the edge of my seat, chewing my fingernails muttering the Cubs fan mantra...

This is the year.
This is the year.
This is the year....

Dry skin and cheesburgers...

I work in a physicians office doing work too boring to possibly explain without falling asleep in the midst of posting. The one thing that working in a hospital/doctor's office has taught me is that it is vitally important to wash your hands with the regularity of an obsessive/compulsive on crack. It turns out the number one way we spread germs is by not washing our hands, say three hundred times per day.
Here at UAMS we are encouraged to wash our hands with a soap that is something like 30% alcohol based and then, when we aren't around running water and the hideously skin-drying soap, to use an alcohol hand rub. The hand rub has the magical ability to point out every tiny paper cut you have ever had on your hands with stinging pain and much eye-watering.
Needless to say, I use a ton of lotion. Right now I'm using slightly old-lady smelling jasmine tuberose lotion that I absolutely adore because it even works on my crackly elbow skin. Sure it smells slightly loud, but that fades and my elbows don't bleed when I bend them.
I can remember when I was younger I never used lotion. I'm assuming it's an ageing process thing, but now I could bathe in bear grease and still have dry skin. To top it off, my skin LOOKS older if I don't moisturize now. That's right, I have several grey hairs and my skin is becoming more like my Nana's everyday. Next I'll be buying Depends and a Medic-Alert bracelet.
I've also begun walking in the VA bridge on my lunch hour with all the old ladies who need exercise but don't want to go outside. This is probably similar to those mall walkers you always see at Park Plaza only these old ladies happen to volunteer at the hospital. For the record, however, the walking is actually going well and it's incredibly easy to make it a part of my daily schedule since I rarely ever take a lunch anyway. So, does it ruin the exercise if I go eat a cheeseburger for lunch?

How a Resurrection Really Feels

"She crashed into the Easter Mass with her hair done up in broken glass. She was limping left on broken heels. When she said, Father can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?"
-The Hold Steady, "Separation Sunday"

Megan (my youngest sister) saved my ipod. In what I can only call a miracle, she revived it from the dead and has it working good as new. She is, without a doubt, my favorite person in the universe right now.

I know, you are thinking to yourself "it's just an ipod". In my head I understand this, it's an electronic device, a toy really. This being said, however, I can no more live without an ipod than I could live without water or air. Terrible to be so attached and dependant upon a possession, but at least I'm willing to admit it.

For those of you, like myself, with ipods you have babied and protected from any bump or fall or jostle let me explain the exact magic Megan performed on my ipod to bring it back from the dead. She hit it. Yep, smacked it twice with the heel of her hand. Just like that, the "sad ipod" face disappeared and I had the joy of seeing the menu screen reappear. I guess we'll refer to it as tough love.

I'm pretty sure that I will need to begin planning to buy a new ipod anyway. Once the hard drive begins to have issues it's pretty much just a sign of the end to come, but at least I've bought a few more months to save and plan which new ipod I want.

And so, after it's miraculous rebirth "ipod named virtue" will now be renamed "how a resurrection really feels", thank you Craig Finn for the lyrics I'm stealing.

Dead, Drunk, and Naked...

My ipod is dead.

There should be a national day of mourning or something.