I use the word dude a lot. Dude is one of those words that can mean absolutely anything in my vocabulary. I use dude in so many ways that it often frightens me. I use the term to express gratitude, disappointment, frustration, anger, happiness, exasperation. It is both a noun, an adjective and an adverb but I have yet been able to find a way to use it as a verb. How the hell did the word dude become such a staple in my life? Recent history would point to my time spent on Kauai as a surf bum eternally looking for the ultimate wave but I suspect my infatuation with the term goes far beyond that. I find myself using it a work at most where I try to use it as a replacement for more colorful language though I find limited success in that endeavor. Do you suppose that my coworkers and friends notice how often I say dude? Do you suppose that they think I'm weird (I most certainly am)? I like to think of myself as an articulate human being yet I spend so much time employing the term dude that it would seem that I am the exact opposite of dude. DUUUDDDE! Or is it DOOOOOOD?
I may spend an inordinant amount of time saying dude but it falls well short of two other words that I speak far more frequenlty. Those words would be the names of my two terrierists. Terriers make excellent vanquishers of all things evil and nefarious. This is especially true of Jack. Jack thinks that anything that makes noise or walks by the apartment that doesn't have to do with me or himself is evil and must therefore must be fought and vanquished. Jack is a premier evil fighter and also has a Phd in making mischief. As a result, I spend a great deal of time uttering his name in the futile struggle to get him to shutup or quit poking his nose into things that he shouldn't. I have so many inflections for uttering his name and each one literally conveys entire conversations worth of information. Jack hears his name so much that I'm not even sure he knows how it even pertains to him. Carter is a different story thoug. Carter lives for about three things, his ball, his dog food and licking his Dad. When I let Jack and Carter out of their crate after a long day of work Jack jumps all over me while Carter goes straight for his ball followed by making sure that the dog dish has plenty of food in it. It's almost like I don't exist other than to facilitate a neverending game of fetch the ball. It's ball time when I'm eating, sleeping, taking a shower, taking a crap, getting ready for work, enjoying quiet time.....etc. The only times when it isn't ball time is when it's food time or lick Dad time. Carter isn't happy unless he gets a solid hour of licking Dad's face and ears each day. He is absoluletly relentless in this endeavor and it drives me absolutely crazy. Whereas I call Jack's name in all sorts of manners and inflections, Carter's name is always used in exasperation. Am I neurotic dog owner or am I just the father of two very eccentric terrierist? Both I suspect.
So there you have it, my vocabulary is dominated by the words dude, Jack and Carter. Just another entry into the whole eccentric versus crazy arguement that I'm sure scholars around the world debate about me everyday........dude.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
I'm in love......with a down winter coat.
I was blessed with the opportunity to live on Kauai for two years and I can earnestly say that Jack and I thoroughly enjoyed the tropical climate and weather associated with it. The problem is that it made us both absolutely intolerant of Winter upon returning to the mainland. Jack hates Winter so much that he secretly has never forgiven me for moving home. He went from the tropical paradise where he got to chase crabs on the beaches, numerous frogs on the trail that we hiked daily, geckos inside and outside the house and the random wild chicken that was unfortunate to cross his path. Jack has very short hair and a pink, speckled, nearly bare tummy to go with it. To say he hates snow is a severe understatement. I think he would much rather experience the thermometer in the but treatment every time he goes to the vet than stick one paw outside the door during the Winter months. There are days during the Winter time that the only time that he bothers to poke his head out from the covers of the bed is when he absolutely cannot ignore the urge to urinate any further. Winter is not Jack's thing.
The interesting things is, I have almost the same feelings about Winter as he does. I'm a Montana native and in my life before Kauai, I was used to the 5-6 month time period known as a Montana Winter. Wearing board shorts, t-shirts and flip flops everyday for a 2 year period seems to completely robbed of any sort of enthusiasm for the short days and long, cold nights associated with this time of year. I used to be an avid skier who would brave any day of extreme cold in the pursuit of powder. Now i can think of when it comes to skiing is how cold I am going to get when riding up the chairlift. I hate Winter so much that I find myself counting down the days until the official first day of Spring (which really doesn't signal the end of Winter here). Like Jack, Winter is not my thing anymore either.
I hate being cold, I loathe being cold. Once I get chilled, it takes forever for me to warm up and frequently requires a long hot shower. The last few years I wore a North Face softshell jacket that did nothing but promote a profound sense of misery anytime I had to venture outside. This year I decided to change all of that. This year I went to our local REI and explained somewhat too animatedly to a staff member that I was tired of being cold outside and that I needed a Winter coat that would keep me toasty warm in the worst of Winter conditions. "What you need is a good down coat", is the answer that I got. A down coat? Who still wears down coats anymore? Apparently people who like to stay warm do. So I bought a nice 800 fill blue Marmot jacket and wandered my way outside expecting to be miserable for the next 6 months.....and was hugely surprised. I absolutley cannot believe the world of difference this super light coat has made in my life during these Winter months. I actually enjoy being outdoors during freezing weather and my daily walks with the dogs are actually enjoyable since I'm not freezing my ass off. So I can proudly say that I'm in love with a Winter down coat. It's too bad that I can't get one for poor JackJack, I'm sure he would hate Winter far less and would stop punishing me for moving home from the island by puking in the apartment every week.
The interesting things is, I have almost the same feelings about Winter as he does. I'm a Montana native and in my life before Kauai, I was used to the 5-6 month time period known as a Montana Winter. Wearing board shorts, t-shirts and flip flops everyday for a 2 year period seems to completely robbed of any sort of enthusiasm for the short days and long, cold nights associated with this time of year. I used to be an avid skier who would brave any day of extreme cold in the pursuit of powder. Now i can think of when it comes to skiing is how cold I am going to get when riding up the chairlift. I hate Winter so much that I find myself counting down the days until the official first day of Spring (which really doesn't signal the end of Winter here). Like Jack, Winter is not my thing anymore either.
I hate being cold, I loathe being cold. Once I get chilled, it takes forever for me to warm up and frequently requires a long hot shower. The last few years I wore a North Face softshell jacket that did nothing but promote a profound sense of misery anytime I had to venture outside. This year I decided to change all of that. This year I went to our local REI and explained somewhat too animatedly to a staff member that I was tired of being cold outside and that I needed a Winter coat that would keep me toasty warm in the worst of Winter conditions. "What you need is a good down coat", is the answer that I got. A down coat? Who still wears down coats anymore? Apparently people who like to stay warm do. So I bought a nice 800 fill blue Marmot jacket and wandered my way outside expecting to be miserable for the next 6 months.....and was hugely surprised. I absolutley cannot believe the world of difference this super light coat has made in my life during these Winter months. I actually enjoy being outdoors during freezing weather and my daily walks with the dogs are actually enjoyable since I'm not freezing my ass off. So I can proudly say that I'm in love with a Winter down coat. It's too bad that I can't get one for poor JackJack, I'm sure he would hate Winter far less and would stop punishing me for moving home from the island by puking in the apartment every week.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
January is national laugh like a smug Frenchman month.
There is a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail that makes me wish so hard this was how life is in the lab that it isn't funny it isn't funny.
Here's a link to the scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V7zbWNznbs&feature=youtube_gdata_player
As you can see, Arthur and his English K-nig-its, are trying to garner some help from some Frenchman in a castle and all they get is a fierce bout of taunting. To understand what I'm talking about, you have to understand what it's like working in the laboratory in the basement of a hospital. We are literally cooped up in a room with noisy machines fielding angry phone calls all day from Doctors and Nurses that have absolutely no idea what or how it is that we produce the results that they need on a daily basis. The general lack of understanding and sheer sheer stupidity of requests and demands naturally generates a sense of shit rolling downhill with us being at the very bottom. Of course this generates a distinct amount of disdain for the rest of the hospital since no one ever calls us to tell us how much of a good job we are doing. Some requests or demands are frequently because of the offending caller forgetting to even send us a specimen on a patiient in question that it's so not hard to be smug. In my case, the temptation is so great that I just can't control my self at times. My colleagues are normal Clinical Laboratory Scientists and have far more patience than I do because I am a certified "Evil" Clinical Laboratory Scientist who happens to be a bit above average on the intelligence scale (at least I think so and that's all that counts in this game) who really does not enjoy being pestered by Doctors and Nurses with inane demands and requests. My biggest flaws are that I absolutely cannot stand being treated like I'm stupid, don't know what I am doing, or that I don't care about how long it takes for me to get the results that said Doctors and Nurses need. Anytime one of the aforementioned circumstances take place, I immediately turn into a smug Frenchman and have to exert every force of my formidable will to keep from taunting the hell out of the offending party. Most of the time I can hold my tongue and the laboratory staff is used to me spouting off numerous, colorful taunts and slanders immediately upon getting off the phone with said offending party. Two other parts of being a certified "Evil" Clinical Laboratory Scientist are that you have to be an extreme "Knowitall" and very, very bold when provoked. Bold enough to tell Doctors where to stick it when they are being more obnoxious and abusive than normal. This occurred not once, but twice in the last 2 weeks and of course it lands me in our Laboratory Director's office explaining why she has gotten two angry emails from physicians who don't enjoy being told they are being unreasonalbe from some "Knowitall" puke who works in a cave at the bottom of the hospital and has nothing better to do than refuse to bow down to whatever inanae and unreasonalbe request he or she has made.
Naturally all of these are character flaws that I have and I do my best to keep them in check but sometimes things just get the better of me. It's hard working in a place where people who have no idea how processes work in a lab call down to berate you because they don't know you are doing your best to provide them with the quickest and most accurate results you possibly can. I work very hard to be very good at what I do, I hate it when people question my abilities or expediency when I take so much pride in my job. The work that we do in laboratory as professionals is both exceptional and very important. We have to bring our "A" game everyday because physicians make medical decisions on the information that we provide on what's going on with every patient. I think that we should be allowed to be as smug as humaly possible and that we should also be able to taunt whining, and complaining offenders as harshly as our imaginations will allow. We are frequently at odds from the nursese from our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). This is where all of the very premature, less than one pound, tiny infants go after a premature delivery. These are very fragile little human beings and naturally they require a fair amount of bloodwork to be done to ensure their survival. Problems arise when nurses send down suboptimal specimens that we are unable to give results on because they are not accurate due to the quality of the specimen they provided. Everytime I have to call the NICU to tell them they have to recollect a specimen, I have to brace myself for the inevitable ass chewing and insinuations that I hate babies and secretly love it when nurses have to torture, delicate and sick infants. Starting next week, things are going to change greatly next week when the NICU gets a new point of care instrument that will allow them to perform certain testing in the NICU itself instead of sending it to the lab proper. At this point the nurses our going to enter our world of hurt, they are going to experience for themselves what happens when you run a suboptimal specimen and the analyzer won't report out results. I am literally going to be doing back flips when they call down to ask for help because their specimens suck. The ammount of smug is going to be so thick, you will be able to cut it with a knife and enjoy it's sweet, sweet nectar of divine righteousness. There will be absolutely no doubt that I am a certified "Evil" Clinical Laboratory Scientist and I'm sure I will be in our Laboratory Director explaining away my numerous, colorful escapades next week. This is why I have made January national "Laugh Like A Smug Frenchman" month in honor of the hard working men and women who slave in laboratories everyday to help sick people and save lives. We will have our revenge next week and it's going to be so grand that I bet I'm going to pronounce it as one of the best weeks of my entire life.
"I fart in your general direction you silly, so called physician!"
Here's a link to the scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V7zbWNznbs&feature=youtube_gdata_player
As you can see, Arthur and his English K-nig-its, are trying to garner some help from some Frenchman in a castle and all they get is a fierce bout of taunting. To understand what I'm talking about, you have to understand what it's like working in the laboratory in the basement of a hospital. We are literally cooped up in a room with noisy machines fielding angry phone calls all day from Doctors and Nurses that have absolutely no idea what or how it is that we produce the results that they need on a daily basis. The general lack of understanding and sheer sheer stupidity of requests and demands naturally generates a sense of shit rolling downhill with us being at the very bottom. Of course this generates a distinct amount of disdain for the rest of the hospital since no one ever calls us to tell us how much of a good job we are doing. Some requests or demands are frequently because of the offending caller forgetting to even send us a specimen on a patiient in question that it's so not hard to be smug. In my case, the temptation is so great that I just can't control my self at times. My colleagues are normal Clinical Laboratory Scientists and have far more patience than I do because I am a certified "Evil" Clinical Laboratory Scientist who happens to be a bit above average on the intelligence scale (at least I think so and that's all that counts in this game) who really does not enjoy being pestered by Doctors and Nurses with inane demands and requests. My biggest flaws are that I absolutely cannot stand being treated like I'm stupid, don't know what I am doing, or that I don't care about how long it takes for me to get the results that said Doctors and Nurses need. Anytime one of the aforementioned circumstances take place, I immediately turn into a smug Frenchman and have to exert every force of my formidable will to keep from taunting the hell out of the offending party. Most of the time I can hold my tongue and the laboratory staff is used to me spouting off numerous, colorful taunts and slanders immediately upon getting off the phone with said offending party. Two other parts of being a certified "Evil" Clinical Laboratory Scientist are that you have to be an extreme "Knowitall" and very, very bold when provoked. Bold enough to tell Doctors where to stick it when they are being more obnoxious and abusive than normal. This occurred not once, but twice in the last 2 weeks and of course it lands me in our Laboratory Director's office explaining why she has gotten two angry emails from physicians who don't enjoy being told they are being unreasonalbe from some "Knowitall" puke who works in a cave at the bottom of the hospital and has nothing better to do than refuse to bow down to whatever inanae and unreasonalbe request he or she has made.
Naturally all of these are character flaws that I have and I do my best to keep them in check but sometimes things just get the better of me. It's hard working in a place where people who have no idea how processes work in a lab call down to berate you because they don't know you are doing your best to provide them with the quickest and most accurate results you possibly can. I work very hard to be very good at what I do, I hate it when people question my abilities or expediency when I take so much pride in my job. The work that we do in laboratory as professionals is both exceptional and very important. We have to bring our "A" game everyday because physicians make medical decisions on the information that we provide on what's going on with every patient. I think that we should be allowed to be as smug as humaly possible and that we should also be able to taunt whining, and complaining offenders as harshly as our imaginations will allow. We are frequently at odds from the nursese from our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). This is where all of the very premature, less than one pound, tiny infants go after a premature delivery. These are very fragile little human beings and naturally they require a fair amount of bloodwork to be done to ensure their survival. Problems arise when nurses send down suboptimal specimens that we are unable to give results on because they are not accurate due to the quality of the specimen they provided. Everytime I have to call the NICU to tell them they have to recollect a specimen, I have to brace myself for the inevitable ass chewing and insinuations that I hate babies and secretly love it when nurses have to torture, delicate and sick infants. Starting next week, things are going to change greatly next week when the NICU gets a new point of care instrument that will allow them to perform certain testing in the NICU itself instead of sending it to the lab proper. At this point the nurses our going to enter our world of hurt, they are going to experience for themselves what happens when you run a suboptimal specimen and the analyzer won't report out results. I am literally going to be doing back flips when they call down to ask for help because their specimens suck. The ammount of smug is going to be so thick, you will be able to cut it with a knife and enjoy it's sweet, sweet nectar of divine righteousness. There will be absolutely no doubt that I am a certified "Evil" Clinical Laboratory Scientist and I'm sure I will be in our Laboratory Director explaining away my numerous, colorful escapades next week. This is why I have made January national "Laugh Like A Smug Frenchman" month in honor of the hard working men and women who slave in laboratories everyday to help sick people and save lives. We will have our revenge next week and it's going to be so grand that I bet I'm going to pronounce it as one of the best weeks of my entire life.
"I fart in your general direction you silly, so called physician!"
Saturday, January 14, 2012
When the wave breaks..... A tale of survival.
People who have heard bits and pieces of the various stories of my life tell me I should write a book someday. It is very true that I have indeed lived a very strange life through my years with the last five years of my life being perhaps the strangest and most chaotic. Life experience is not something that is determined in the number of years you have lived. Every year I wonder if this is finally the year that I am grow up and act my age when in truth, I have seen and endured many experiences that has given me a view of life that far exceeds my 39 years of life. You just never know where life is going to take you next or how it is going to test your character and resolve.
Five years ago I was living what I thought was a normal life for someone who was 34. I had a career, a wife, a new car and fancy toys. I had no debt, plenty of friends and yet I was very unhappy and had no idea where I was going. Then we moved to Kauai and things really got turned upside down. Upside down really isn't and adequate term for what I experienced over the last four years of my life. I like to compare the experience to getting hit by a large wave, literally. I spent a lot of time in the surf on Kauai and I can tell you that have to keep your wits about at all times. Occasionally I would try to ride a wave that was either too big or I was late on my approach and I would end up what is termed as "going over the falls". This is when the wave reaches it's most vertical position and you end up falling down the face. This is quickly followed by the full weight of the wave crashing down on top of your head. When the wave is fifteen to twenty feet high, you just hang on for the ride and hope you don't die.You are slammed downward, often straight into the bottom (I did this head first once, into the coral reef no less), the shear force of the wave throws you about to the point that you have no idea which way is up. Eventually the wave passes and you are able to make it gasping to the surface.....and then the next wave in the set crashes on you and you go through the same experience again. This can happen in sequence as many as three to four times and there is nothing you can do but ride it out and pray it ends on your next trip to the surface. It's a very harrowing experience to say the least and you are in very real danger of being knocked out and drowning.
This is what was happenened to my life over the period of fours years. I would come up for air only long enough to take as deep a breathe as possible with the next wave towering over me. I really never knew which way was up and never knew when it was going to end. I had neighbors of which the stuff of nightmares are made of. I found myself with a hippy roommate in her late twenties who worked at a vegan juice where all they did was smoke weed all day. It wasn't her sexual preference that caused the problem for I embrace and respect diversity in it's many forms, it was the fact that she always brought home high school girls that caused the problems. I had serious financial problems, a very ugly divorce, too much strife at work, problems with intolerant locals in the the surf, and to top it all off, a very unstable girlfriend. Finally, I had to retreat back to the mainland during a mental breakdown in the hopes of some sort of return to normalcy.....which didn't happen. Naturally my financial problems followed me home, my ex-wife got married to a very close friend who was a groom's man in our wedding, my only sibling took her own life, I crashed my mountain bike so badly that I broke my right arm and three ribs and my relationship with my girlfriend continued to become more and more absurd. Take into account all the emotional baggage I am carrying from childhood and it's a miracle that I survived.
That's the point of this entry though, I am a survivor. Somehow I've found the strength to endure my troubles whether those be by unfortunate circumstances or through my own doing (of which there are plenty of examples). For the first time in many years, I have little drama in my life and am enjoying an extended period of rest of sorts and for this I am very thankful. People who I met at the treatment center (all of whom have the courage to face problems similar to mine everyday) were simply aghast at my story. One young woman in particular stated that I had "Seen it all". The thing is, I haven't seen it all, you never when the next wave is going to appear on the horizon to turn things upside down again. I am a survivor and that's something I need to take pride in, I won't give up no matter how bad things will get. That which does not kill us only makes us stronger and I firmly believe that statement. You only get ind shot at life and you need to make the most of what you have. We all have strengths and weeknesses, the key is to know your stregths and play to them. I've seen what happens when someone gives up against what seems to be insurmountable odds. Life became too much for my sister to the point where she felt the only release could have was to take her own life. I was there myself nine months ago, it sure as hell wasn't pretty. I had to make a choice, I could give in or I could find my inner strength and keep going. Having a good support group was instrumental in this decision. Where do I go from here? I honestly can't say that I know. What I do know is that I will survive, I will endure and I will triumph. Maybe I will write that book someday, my struggles have been both sad and humorous at the same time, perhaps I can use my tale to inspire someone else to keep fighting the good fight.
Five years ago I was living what I thought was a normal life for someone who was 34. I had a career, a wife, a new car and fancy toys. I had no debt, plenty of friends and yet I was very unhappy and had no idea where I was going. Then we moved to Kauai and things really got turned upside down. Upside down really isn't and adequate term for what I experienced over the last four years of my life. I like to compare the experience to getting hit by a large wave, literally. I spent a lot of time in the surf on Kauai and I can tell you that have to keep your wits about at all times. Occasionally I would try to ride a wave that was either too big or I was late on my approach and I would end up what is termed as "going over the falls". This is when the wave reaches it's most vertical position and you end up falling down the face. This is quickly followed by the full weight of the wave crashing down on top of your head. When the wave is fifteen to twenty feet high, you just hang on for the ride and hope you don't die.You are slammed downward, often straight into the bottom (I did this head first once, into the coral reef no less), the shear force of the wave throws you about to the point that you have no idea which way is up. Eventually the wave passes and you are able to make it gasping to the surface.....and then the next wave in the set crashes on you and you go through the same experience again. This can happen in sequence as many as three to four times and there is nothing you can do but ride it out and pray it ends on your next trip to the surface. It's a very harrowing experience to say the least and you are in very real danger of being knocked out and drowning.
This is what was happenened to my life over the period of fours years. I would come up for air only long enough to take as deep a breathe as possible with the next wave towering over me. I really never knew which way was up and never knew when it was going to end. I had neighbors of which the stuff of nightmares are made of. I found myself with a hippy roommate in her late twenties who worked at a vegan juice where all they did was smoke weed all day. It wasn't her sexual preference that caused the problem for I embrace and respect diversity in it's many forms, it was the fact that she always brought home high school girls that caused the problems. I had serious financial problems, a very ugly divorce, too much strife at work, problems with intolerant locals in the the surf, and to top it all off, a very unstable girlfriend. Finally, I had to retreat back to the mainland during a mental breakdown in the hopes of some sort of return to normalcy.....which didn't happen. Naturally my financial problems followed me home, my ex-wife got married to a very close friend who was a groom's man in our wedding, my only sibling took her own life, I crashed my mountain bike so badly that I broke my right arm and three ribs and my relationship with my girlfriend continued to become more and more absurd. Take into account all the emotional baggage I am carrying from childhood and it's a miracle that I survived.
That's the point of this entry though, I am a survivor. Somehow I've found the strength to endure my troubles whether those be by unfortunate circumstances or through my own doing (of which there are plenty of examples). For the first time in many years, I have little drama in my life and am enjoying an extended period of rest of sorts and for this I am very thankful. People who I met at the treatment center (all of whom have the courage to face problems similar to mine everyday) were simply aghast at my story. One young woman in particular stated that I had "Seen it all". The thing is, I haven't seen it all, you never when the next wave is going to appear on the horizon to turn things upside down again. I am a survivor and that's something I need to take pride in, I won't give up no matter how bad things will get. That which does not kill us only makes us stronger and I firmly believe that statement. You only get ind shot at life and you need to make the most of what you have. We all have strengths and weeknesses, the key is to know your stregths and play to them. I've seen what happens when someone gives up against what seems to be insurmountable odds. Life became too much for my sister to the point where she felt the only release could have was to take her own life. I was there myself nine months ago, it sure as hell wasn't pretty. I had to make a choice, I could give in or I could find my inner strength and keep going. Having a good support group was instrumental in this decision. Where do I go from here? I honestly can't say that I know. What I do know is that I will survive, I will endure and I will triumph. Maybe I will write that book someday, my struggles have been both sad and humorous at the same time, perhaps I can use my tale to inspire someone else to keep fighting the good fight.
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