I Never Said WHEN They'd Follow...
The new year has already dealt me a rather important but familiar lesson: no matter how much we claim that new years represent new starts -- as evidenced by our absurd societal dependence on resolutions to manufacture change (mostly unsuccessfully, I should add) -- some things simply don't change because we turn the calendar. Case in point: my inability to punctually maintain this blog, which took a hit near the end of last semester and, as we can clearly see, hasn't improved much in 2008.
Fortunately for me, there's eleven-and-a-half months to go, so all hope is not lost.
But continuing the trend of having a perfectly reasonable excuse for my abandonment of my trusty escritorial friend, and perhaps even amplifying it, I have a number of good excuses this time! For one thing, the rush of getting back to school with minimal hiccups was enough to keep me occupied for the last few days of my precious but restless winter break. True, it's mostly my own fault, what with the not-getting-my-papers-done-before-their-original-due-dates and what not, but working damn-near-full time hours at the hospital -- which necessitated waking up at 6:15am five days a week, something I haven't done since high school -- didn't help.
Nor did the scheduling of multiple appointments with multiple doctors in the scant four weeks I was home. I saw four doctors -- an allergist, a cardiologist, a dentist, and an endocrinologist -- while I was in New Jersey, most of which gave me a relatively clean bill of health or, at the very least, told me things I didn't already suspect (such as, for instance, the shocking revelation that I'm allergic to dogs and cats; D's bid for a fuzzy companion in the future took a staggering blow at the news). But the endocrinologist required of me a significant gamut of lab work and other such tests, including one test that easily ranks among the most awkward medical-related endeavors I've ever had to venture upon.
Okay, full disclosure. The test I'm about describe wasn't the most awkward of the tests I needed to do this time around, but there's no way I'm describing that particular honor in a public blog, so we settle for the runner up.
To those who are uninitiated, a 24-hour urine collection test is not especially fun, particularly when you have to do it while at work. It basically entails carrying a big jug around with you for 24 hours and making sure that everything you pee ends up in that jug before returning it to the laboratory. Which is especially difficult when you're at work during said 24 hour time period.
Now, I know what you're thinking and you're actually close to right: I work at a hospital, and my life's a fairly open book anyway, so it shouldn't be that big a deal, particularly since I'm surrounded by people who are used to that kind of thing. All fair points. But in my own defense, picture this, if you will: would you want to be carrying a jug of your own piss around the office all day? Yeah, me neither. I don't really care much that anyone knows I need to do it, I just don't think I need to make a public spectacle of my piss jug.
So I did what any mildly-unbalanced young man would do in this situation: I held it. All day. Oh sweet merciful mother did that last hour suck.
Except for that brief bout of borderline bladder bursting, the rest of the test went off without a hitch, except of course for the part where I had to, you know, pee in a jug. It could be that the preservative in the bottle was what made it worse, because the risk of splashing (and subsequent burning OWOWOWOWOW) necessitated peeing into a separate vessel and then pouring those contents slowly into the jug. And since I simply could not rationalize using any vessel in my house that might have, might ever, or might have thought about, even if in a past life, containing food or drink, it meant first filling a specimen cup. You know, those tiny little ones. That don't hold much. Yeah, those.
Can you see why this was awkward as hell?
Fortunately, that's now in the past, something I can just as thankfully apply to the event referred to in my previous post. Charles hit the nail right on the head: having succeeded at the Blazin' Challenge in the Blacksburg Buffalo Wild Wings scarcely a year ago, but failing to redeem the t-shirts that I justly deserved, I felt the need to take on the challenge again -- at the recently-opened location at nearby Palisades Center -- and truly earn my threads.
That, and I had indulged my competitive streak and challenged first Caitlin then John to take me on. Sometimes my natural douchiness has truly regrettable consequences.
But since I've spent a large portion of this post already describing in more-than-casually-acceptable detail scatalogical processes, I'll spare the goriness this time. Except to just say OH GOD THE BURNING WHY OH WHY DID I FUCKING DO THAT OWOWOWOWOWOW.
Which, painfully and awkwardly, brings me back to State College, where the first week of classes has gone off relatively without a hitch. My ENGL 015 class is at a far less ungodly hour this semester (10:10am, as opposed to the abysmal 8:00am of the fall) and my students have already shown me a great deal of personality and enthusiasm, which I pray doesn't peter out in the coming weeks. My seminars are also quite wonderful, if not particularly focused: Chaucer, Modernism, and Alfred Hitchcock are my topics of inquiry, and all are winners thus far. And they're even more enjoyable since the work load is pretty fairly distributed throughout. Methinks this may be the semester I really get a handle on this grad school thing.
And if I can get that straightened out, maybe I'll be able to get this whole regular-updating thing down too!
...
Yeah. Don't get your hopes up.
------------------------
Next Time: Dave the Sissy addresses the phenomenon of the intriguing-but-too-scary-for-me-to-see-without-risking-weeks-of-nightmares film Cloverfield and wonders why entertainment can't live up to the intrigue and complication of its marketing campaigns, in what may end up being a thinly-veiled attempt at reconciling the thesis of his sci-fi paper with something other than just Coheed and Cambria. Stay tuned!
Fortunately for me, there's eleven-and-a-half months to go, so all hope is not lost.
But continuing the trend of having a perfectly reasonable excuse for my abandonment of my trusty escritorial friend, and perhaps even amplifying it, I have a number of good excuses this time! For one thing, the rush of getting back to school with minimal hiccups was enough to keep me occupied for the last few days of my precious but restless winter break. True, it's mostly my own fault, what with the not-getting-my-papers-done-before-their-original-due-dates and what not, but working damn-near-full time hours at the hospital -- which necessitated waking up at 6:15am five days a week, something I haven't done since high school -- didn't help.
Nor did the scheduling of multiple appointments with multiple doctors in the scant four weeks I was home. I saw four doctors -- an allergist, a cardiologist, a dentist, and an endocrinologist -- while I was in New Jersey, most of which gave me a relatively clean bill of health or, at the very least, told me things I didn't already suspect (such as, for instance, the shocking revelation that I'm allergic to dogs and cats; D's bid for a fuzzy companion in the future took a staggering blow at the news). But the endocrinologist required of me a significant gamut of lab work and other such tests, including one test that easily ranks among the most awkward medical-related endeavors I've ever had to venture upon.
Okay, full disclosure. The test I'm about describe wasn't the most awkward of the tests I needed to do this time around, but there's no way I'm describing that particular honor in a public blog, so we settle for the runner up.
To those who are uninitiated, a 24-hour urine collection test is not especially fun, particularly when you have to do it while at work. It basically entails carrying a big jug around with you for 24 hours and making sure that everything you pee ends up in that jug before returning it to the laboratory. Which is especially difficult when you're at work during said 24 hour time period.
Now, I know what you're thinking and you're actually close to right: I work at a hospital, and my life's a fairly open book anyway, so it shouldn't be that big a deal, particularly since I'm surrounded by people who are used to that kind of thing. All fair points. But in my own defense, picture this, if you will: would you want to be carrying a jug of your own piss around the office all day? Yeah, me neither. I don't really care much that anyone knows I need to do it, I just don't think I need to make a public spectacle of my piss jug.
So I did what any mildly-unbalanced young man would do in this situation: I held it. All day. Oh sweet merciful mother did that last hour suck.
Except for that brief bout of borderline bladder bursting, the rest of the test went off without a hitch, except of course for the part where I had to, you know, pee in a jug. It could be that the preservative in the bottle was what made it worse, because the risk of splashing (and subsequent burning OWOWOWOWOW) necessitated peeing into a separate vessel and then pouring those contents slowly into the jug. And since I simply could not rationalize using any vessel in my house that might have, might ever, or might have thought about, even if in a past life, containing food or drink, it meant first filling a specimen cup. You know, those tiny little ones. That don't hold much. Yeah, those.
Can you see why this was awkward as hell?
Fortunately, that's now in the past, something I can just as thankfully apply to the event referred to in my previous post. Charles hit the nail right on the head: having succeeded at the Blazin' Challenge in the Blacksburg Buffalo Wild Wings scarcely a year ago, but failing to redeem the t-shirts that I justly deserved, I felt the need to take on the challenge again -- at the recently-opened location at nearby Palisades Center -- and truly earn my threads.
That, and I had indulged my competitive streak and challenged first Caitlin then John to take me on. Sometimes my natural douchiness has truly regrettable consequences.
But since I've spent a large portion of this post already describing in more-than-casually-acceptable detail scatalogical processes, I'll spare the goriness this time. Except to just say OH GOD THE BURNING WHY OH WHY DID I FUCKING DO THAT OWOWOWOWOWOW.
Which, painfully and awkwardly, brings me back to State College, where the first week of classes has gone off relatively without a hitch. My ENGL 015 class is at a far less ungodly hour this semester (10:10am, as opposed to the abysmal 8:00am of the fall) and my students have already shown me a great deal of personality and enthusiasm, which I pray doesn't peter out in the coming weeks. My seminars are also quite wonderful, if not particularly focused: Chaucer, Modernism, and Alfred Hitchcock are my topics of inquiry, and all are winners thus far. And they're even more enjoyable since the work load is pretty fairly distributed throughout. Methinks this may be the semester I really get a handle on this grad school thing.
And if I can get that straightened out, maybe I'll be able to get this whole regular-updating thing down too!
...
Yeah. Don't get your hopes up.
------------------------
Next Time: Dave the Sissy addresses the phenomenon of the intriguing-but-too-scary-for-me-to-see-without-risking-weeks-of-nightmares film Cloverfield and wonders why entertainment can't live up to the intrigue and complication of its marketing campaigns, in what may end up being a thinly-veiled attempt at reconciling the thesis of his sci-fi paper with something other than just Coheed and Cambria. Stay tuned!
posted by Dave at 1/17/2008 11:18:00 PM
1 Comments:
Try doing a 24-hour urine collection as a female... in the dorms. It ain't any easier... 8-O
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