You can play from the rough with your regulation thyroid

I want to write something happy and really funny here. I want to write something happy and funny but I’m a little stuck in that realm known as pro-fess-shee-unal-ism.

Here’s the problem: A while back I threw all these stories into a book for my mom via an online site. I made the reference public so that a family friend could order one too (yes, I did tell her it was also available for FREE online). Helpfully, Google picked up the reference and NOW when my name is Googled, the book shows up…with a link to this otherwise semi-anonymous site. It is my fault and a stupid mistake. I’ve tried and tried to erase the reference, but it won’t go away.

So here’s me, moved on to Philadelphia and a Postdoctoral Fellow (can I just say that I can never figure out if post doc is one word or two? Anyone?). Having survived graduate school with most of my organs in tact I now find myself facing the semi-real, although still unlikely, possibility of future employment in some sort of scientific/academic field. Even more troubling, I am currently supported by a fantastic teaching and research training grant.

How can it be both ‘troubling’ and ‘fantastic’ you ask? Well the folks who run this grant have provided me with a really awesome set-up: three years of support, lots of money for meetings and supplies, rigorous teacher training and free hoagies about once a month when we have an organizational meeting. So obviously that’s the ‘fantastic’ part. The hoagies are especially fantastic because the veggie hoagies on the platter are essentially raw broccoli and lettuce sandwiches which is both icky and genius. I think about those sandwiches a lot, but I digress.

Anyway, the ‘troubling’ part? They are pretty serious about this program and would probably prefer that I not undermine their efforts by discussing a time when I might or might not have had to suppress my gag reflex while cheerfully encouraging students to dissect cats with gangrenous livers. NOT. That did NOT happen, but if it had, what a great story that would have made for this sad, neglected blog.

So that’s where this stands. Me, stuck with the choice: entertain the two people who stop by here once every two months (yeah, I get a count on the hits) or retain the ability to make almost enough money to pay for a one bedroom apartment and health care in any major city. It’s a tough choice and I do love entertaining you but also, I really need the health care.

Which brings me to another point. The damn lump in my thyroid is now the size of a ping-pong ball. I’m not exaggerating, I put the largest diameter of the thing into Google and I got all these hits about the size of a regulation ping-pong ball. I’m glad it’s not bigger than a ‘regulation’ ball because that would just make me feel so rouge. Still, I’m a little scared and a little overwhelmed. I am not worried about cancer, that’s basically been ruled out although another biopsy will be done this week. Even if the biopsy comes back malignant the survival rate for most thyroid cancer 20 years out is something reassuring like 95%. Nope, I’m scared that I’ll have to wait another six months while this stupid lump gets bigger and then just be put off again:

“Come see me in six months.”

“I’m not too worried. Come see me in six months.”

“I tell you what, let’s check in on this again in six months? Sound good?”

No, it doesn’t sound good. It sounds stupid. Every time they check, the damn thing is bigger and bigger. This last ultrasound it was almost 50% bigger than it was a year ago. I feel it always now and it’s starting to make me feel strangely self-conscious about how I look. This is particularly crazy of me because I’m pretty sure that from a distance my ass (which is slightly larger than a golf ball) is more noticeable than a lump in my neck. But I USE my ass for sitting and the bigger it gets, the nicer it is to sit. The lump, on the other hand, seems to only serve the purpose of making me feel claustrophobic when I wear turtlenecks or drink too fast.

I also believe that Lumpolina (yeah, that’s what I’m calling it as of right now, Lumpolina. I named it. Gross!) is wreaking havoc on my energy levels. I sleep all the time. I’m not exaggerating that either. I average 12 hours a night. That means that sometimes I only sleep 10 hours but other nights/days I sleep more like 15. This was happening to me in Birmingham too but everyone, including me, just assumed that I was depressed or lazy and trying to avoid finishing my Ph.D. Well I’m nearly as happy as a clam here in Philly…a sleepy, tired, washed-out, moderately happy clam, and now I really believe I can say that something just isn’t working. I am also gaining weight at a steady clip, which is weird since I’m too busy sleeping to eat. It must be Lumpolina’s way of compensating for me. Like maybe if my ass gets to be big enough, no one will notice whether I retain “regulation” standards for ping-pong or have to move on to golf-neck. Just 0.26 cm more to reach that goal. Come see me in another six months.

So that’s the update. I’m good. I have a lump in my neck. There was absolutely no gangrenous cat dissection (but can you imagine if there was? No, don’t try. It would have been a terrible smell, had it happened.). I like it here but I’m struggling with growing up. I want to tell you all about it but can’t in case they decide to listen in and don’t like what they hear. Is that what we get for moving on and moving up? More secrets? Maybe that’s why I waited so long to get going. I must have known.

Oh, and I miss you. Yeah. You. Just know that I’m here. Even though I would like to; I just can’t tell you all about it any more, or at least not about the cats, because that didn’t happen anyway. I swear.

Bad day for 21st and Walnut

I walked home from work early today. I was tired from my new job, which so far entails reading and jockeying for position with another employee. I think I will be happy there, but today the effort of continual adjustment sort of wore me out.

By the way, I live in Philadelphia now.

I walked home from work, enjoying the fall colors, cold air (fall! It’s been so long since I’ve seen one!) and deciding if I would stop for a glass of wine or head straight home. I was so lost in my own head that I was almost on top of the disaster in the street before I realized that the crowds of people were not normal for 21st and Walnut.

A crane had fallen. 125 feet, according to the newscasters, who were severely reporting into their cameras. It wasn’t really a crane so much as a huge cherry picker/man lift. Repairs were being made to the spires of a church on the corner. I’d been watching the progress for a few weeks. The machine operator was dead. A woman injured from falling debris. Street signs were lying in the street, the awnings of the local florist shredded. A workers truck sat with a smashed windshield near what remained of the bucket. High above it all, a large hole had been carved out of the roof and wall of the apartment building over the florist shop.

None of this had occurred when I walked by the same corner seven hours earlier.

I watched for a while, called my mom, and then backtracked to reach my street. I walked into my local bar and ordered a glass of wine. I was the only patron and the bartender and I start to talk about the accident. She tells me that when she was a little girl her father worked construction. One day the platform he was working on collapsed and he fell five stories, landing on his feet.

“Was he okay?” I asked.

I know he’s alive, she had mentioned him before. But she tells me that her father was and wasn’t okay.

“He contracted Hepatitis C from the blood transfusions, he was never the same after that. Tired a lot. I didn’t realize how massive the event was at the time. I was only five or six.”

And then she apologized to me for making someone else’s tragedy about herself, which I found completely sincere and endearing.

“But you do think about yourself when you see a situation like that.” I told her.

I certainly had thought about myself back on that corner. When I called my mom from the accident site she answered, but was crabby from working on her taxes.

“It’s right at the bus stop I use every morning mom, the bus stop is a little smushed.”

“Uh-huh. Okay. Well good thing you weren’t there then.”

“MOM! I’m serious.” I tell her.

“Yes, okay well I’m working on my taxes so I’ll read about it later okay?” and with that my mom said good-bye and disconnected.

I was irritated and then embarrassed that I was worrying about me. I wasn’t at the bus stop. It happened in the middle of the day so I wouldn’t have been at the bus stop. Really, I was selfishly thinking about how two weeks into a new town I didn’t know anyone who I could call if I had to go to the emergency room. I was too embarrassed to tell the bartender what had gone through my head when I saw the accident, so I changed the subject and ordered some bread.

We chatted a bit more while we waited for my order and then she turned to help two more customers who had managed to find their way into the bar, despite the street being blocked off. I finished my glass of wine and suddenly felt so tired that I wasn’t sure I would even make it across the street to my apartment without a nap first.

I stumbled up my stairs and then wandered through the maze of packing cardboard that leads to my couch. I was barely able to register when I laid down, shoes still on, pulling the couch throw over my shoulders and up to my ears. I fell into the mental twilight that sometimes lingers before the deep midnight of a big sleep. I wandered through the afternoon again, changing the scenario at the corner several times over.

In the first instance I imagine that I come down Walnut and find a crowd, TV crews, emergency response teams. A crane is down, the building and street damaged. The crane operator is badly hurt and he will require many surgeries. The first surgery is already underway, it will be a tough road but he will likely survive.

Then the same picture but he’s not as badly hurt. He will definitely survive.

Then I see the crane fall only this time a freak miracle accompanies the freak accident. He’s able to jump free of the basket, or maybe he was thrown. But instead of falling all the way to the sidewalk he lands on the roof of the building, hurt, but not too much, a few broken bones.

Then the same picture only this time he lands inside the apartment where the crane makes a hole in the roof. This time he falls right onto a couch under the hole and is a little bruised and has some scratches but no broken bones. “If it weren’t so serious it would be slapstick.” is how the incident is reported on the local news.

Then, right before my conscious completely faded:

I come down Walnut and…nothing. Nothing happened. The crane, it drove over the manhole cover and wobbled, but it held. No one knows about it. Traffic is the same. There are no news crews. No one dies.

My shoes were still on and my new living room was strangely quiet with all of the cars diverted to other streets and finally, I slept.

The cherry picker the week before. Mom happened to take a random picture of it when she was visiting.

Introduction -or- why bother?

My favorite part about having a blog is definitely the "log". I like looking back over my own words and seeing the comments left by my friends and family. It's like having the faint essence of a conversation frozen in time. I think our ancestors had something like it that they called "letters". My first blog was on The Myspace and sadly, when I moved it over to The Blogspot, I lost a lot of the comments that were left on the earlier stories. I also like how the public venue makes me feel like I should work harder to entertain. Having that constraint really helps me boil down my stories to a manageable few pages. More importantly, the desire to entertain allows me to find the humor in situations that otherwise might only be stressful or dreary.

I think my least favorite part of having a blog is the feeling that I occasionally have to deeply censor what I write to protect the privacy of myself and my friends. Because of this I still have never written about a few of the bigger events in my life over the last few years. I also have to be very careful when I talk about "Froggie". There are four stories in this blog (so far) that are wholly or in part about my "Little Sister". It is a sad commentary on the progress of AIDS awareness that in 2008 we are still unable to speak about HIV/AIDS in a more open and accepting format. This lack of progress has had a huge and negative impact on her quality of life. As her one of her caregivers it has also made it difficult for me to find the support that I need to replenish my own stores of strength.

Initially, I started "Days like this since 1974" as a way to express my feelings about being an older graduate student. I have found that very little of that has crept into my stories even though it completely dominates my life. Perhaps I needed a place to feel like a human with value outside of my last experiment. Maybe I'm just deeply in denial. Either way, it's been nice to write some and laugh some and bitch lots (and lots!). I haven't written much in the last month. I have a few good stories to get down. One is about quitting (almost? really?) graduate school. Another one is about driving over my mom's foot and then there was the time I sat in a dirty room full of nerf-covered couches and dust bunnies while doctors tried to decide if I should be committed to the psych ward.

Well, maybe I'll just wait for something more eventful.

Apparently you have a time machine

So I'm sitting at the Bottletree with Meg, Wen, and T. We get angry with the early reporting and send the following snarky e-mail cause we are HILARIOUS. Also, we are PISSED off AND ourah nurves is toe-up!* They are calling the election seconds after the polls have closed in only a handful of states.
__________________

Dear Dedicated Reporters and Staff at Reuters,

It is Tuesday night in Birmingham, Alabama. While we are often accused of being behind the times we have recently recieved a shipment of calendars into our Walmarts. In this way we are able to determine that it is November 4th...which is a ding-dang-dawg Tuesday.
Imagine our surprise when we read (just having learned that too) that you are already calling states for Obama not to mention that these results were collected on Wednesday, November 5th.
We sure hope you send that technology down here soon.
Sincerely,
Olabama Lovahs in Bama

(Seriously, how can you justify calling results so soon? It has only been minutes since the polls closed.)

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(Ha ha, jokes on us...turns out it IS Wednesday in Reutersville which is obviously around the world somewheres.... he he he....blush)

* Yankee translation: Our nerves are some what frayed

Don't forget to breath

I woke up this morning and was already on pins and needles. I cried. Not because of school, or the break up, but because today I wish that my grandfather, and grandmother, and my cousin Mgn, and all of my black relatives who died could be here today. I'm scared. I'm hopeful. I'm scared.

Rr called me this morning and we went down to the Fire Station together. We voted. My friend KD sent me text messages about hope, and history. She told me that he would be the first black president of the USA four years ago. I voted for Hillary in the primary. KD and I had fought about it. She called me a chicken then. She might have been right.

I'm a hopeful chicken right now. I'm also sort of frantic. I miss CNK like crazy. I want to talk to him. I want to know what he's thinking about all of this.

My mom sent me the best e-mail and she gave me permission to paraphrase and then post it here. She's been calling people in Indiana on behalf of Barack Obama. Mostly just leaving messages about where the message recipient can go to vote. Here is her story:


"So I called people in Indiana again today. Didn't get too many -- in
fact got lots of disconnected numbers. Must be dragging the bottom of
the barrel. Of the people who did answer here is the best conversation I had...

Woman on phone in Indiana: Well I voted already

Mom [in her head]: [she sounds so friendly I assume she means for Obama]

Woman: I gotta tell you... I don't go with that Obama

Mom [in her head]: [Oh no! I'm chatting up a McCain voter... my heart is breaking]

Woman : No... I don't usually go with that. And he really doesn't have any
experience.

Mom [ihh]: [Why argue with her... she's already voted.]

Woman: People say that and it's true. But you know what. You aren't born
with experience. No one is born with president tattooed on their
forehead. No, he'll get it. I had to go for him.

Mom [ihh]: [What IS she saying? She DIDN'T go for him, she DID go for him? Put me out of my
misery!]

Woman: I did. I voted for him. Usually I don't go for those kind of people. Well I never have. But you know. We can change. We can learn. NOW I'M STILL NOT FOR MIXING 'EM UP. NO NO NO, I DON'T GO FOR THAT. But I had to vote for him. I had to do it. We're in big trouble here. Well things aren't going to change overnight. But at least he'll get us going in the right direction. And you know what?! My neighbor voted for him too! We all did.
None of us had ever gone for one of them before... but we all voted for him."

My mom told me that is made her cry a little when she got off the phone.

We can change. We can learn.

I'm completely terrified. It's 6:45pm CST and so far McCain is up...I'm hopeful anyway.

We can change. We can learn. Just a few hours now. Don't forget to breath.