Driving me nuts

My mom, for some reason, is always on those car dealers' mailing lists. Whenever there's a promotion, she gets plenty of junk mail telling her about it. Like this week, when a dealer down in Norman sent her a coupon for a free digital camera just for stopping by.

So she planned to go there Saturday to get a free camera. I told my sister that it was a good thing my mom has lousy credit -- there's no way any car dealer in his or her right mind would finance a car for her. She's more or less on a fixed income, living off my dad's retirement, her social security and working as a substitute teacher a few times a week.

Well, she got the camera; a Largan Chameleon XP, which sells for about $40 online. No digital display, no expandable memory and no zoom capabilities. It's not much of a camera -- 350,000 pixel resolution, while my cell phone has a resolution of 1.3 megapixels.

But I did use it to take a picture of the other thing she brought home:



A 2003 Lexus ES 300 with 54,000 miles, leather interior with wood trim, moon roof, power everything and probably plenty of other features I don't even know exist. And she paid more than twice as much for it than she did for her '98 Honda Civic, which she even admits is the most dependable car she has ever had. But she says she was embarrassed to be seen in it -- it was too small and too cheap. So now she'll be paying more for insurance, gas and maintenance to go along with the big car payment.

I asked her whether they had anything more practical there; an Accord or a Camry. But it's her dream to have a Lexus. I admit, I think she should have a Lexus. At her age she's earned it, even though she doesn't need it. But she does need to pay her mortgage, her insurance and everything else.

Though my half-sister who lives in Austin, Texas, (and retired early off her tech stocks) did offer a solution for her: dip into my savings account with what little money I was able to squirrel away while in Tulsa -- which of course is what is paying for nursing school. At least my mom understood that it's not a possibility.

She says she'll wait a few years before I get to take over the payments for her.

I haven't earned any salary as a nurse and already my first paycheck has been spent, and not by me. But I guess I do get something out of the deal.

My mom let me keep the digital camera.

The M word

For those of you waiting for me to get a nursing job to start with the murse jokes, you get a head start: I have a new job as a nurse tech at St. Anthony Hospital in OKC.

The hospital's namesake is also known as the Evangelical Doctor, and it's part of one of the largest Catholic health networks in the country, so I think it really impressed them when they called kc for a reference and she told them I could walk on water. I owe you another one, kc.

I guess it also helped that the floor manager knows three of the nursing instructors at my school, with one currently working on her med/surg floor, another being one of her former oncology nurses and the third being a former patient. The last instructor is a five-year cancer survivor -- the job is in the oncology unit and fits my career goals, plus is flexible in that I more or less choose my shift.

I know it'll be a tough job, which is why I'm starting to rethink what my mom said about nursing being "women's work." Although it's not what she intended, but it's a pretty big compliment to the ladies, because while I knew this new field was going to be demanding, I didn't appreciate the full scope of just how challenging -- physically, intellectually and emotionally -- it was going to be, and I'm sure I still don't. (It's also why I haven't been blogging much lately; and because the school's network filters don't allow access to blog sites.)

But after a week from Monday I'll start to have a better idea of what it's going to take to be a good murse -- whoops! -- I mean nurse.

My talented friends

Probably all of you have heard how I've had about 15 different majors during my college career. And since I've been collecting college transcripts while going back to school, I've got a more accurate list of the majors I've declared:

Chemical Engineering
Classics
Letters
Professional writing
English writing
University College (no major)
Biology
Biochemistry
Microbiology
Cell and molecular biology
Computer science
Film and Video Studies
Zoology
English literature
Journalism

So after earning 243 credit hours (thanks to a few W's I actually attempted 252) you can say I know a little bit about everything -- though I've always said it also means I don't know much about anything.

And nothing drives this home as much as seeing how talented my friends are, and how untalented I am in comparison.



This past weekend I heard Ben and his barbershop quartet sing. Ben being an ex-attorney reminds me of my friend Austin in that both are musically talented. And I like that Austin is working on being an ex-attorney as well -- even though he's in law school he still has goals of making it as a writer, filmmaker and musician.

And speaking of ex-attorneys, there's kc, who has a long list of things she's better at than me, but I'm really jealous of how her drawing is coming along. (for those of you wondering, yes, her sandal really does look just like that). I've also bought books on drawing and writing for comics; kc's almost done with her first comic.

She and Christy also are great at cooking; I like to think that I could cook if I didn't avoid it so much because I'm too lazy to want to clean up afterward.

Through kc I met Rick, who's really into rock climbing; he has the most buff hands I've ever seen. But what really makes me shake my head is how he knows as much or probably more than film about me, and his cinema studies he did on his own. Sure I've got an actual degree to show for it (still stuffed in the back seat of my car), but he's not saddled with more than $30,000 in student loan payments.

And I've never really wanted to be a filmmaker, but any thoughts of that would have been dashed anyway after seeing this clip my friend Wes sent me.



He makes me think I was holding him back on our senior capstone project.

I've always conceded that Ruben is the better dancer, but he's another amateur film buff like Rick; Wes and I took all the classes, but Ruben is just at good at analyzing a film.

There's also Randy and Chris, who have both flourished during the dot-com bust as programmers, something I tried but couldn't get the hang of past my first Java class. (I believe I can make a better cup of java than them, though).

I took my first photography class in ninth grade, and had a passive interest in it since. I even took a lot of photos for the OU paper. And everyone who's seen her blog knows how good Jill is at taking photos.

And the ones who really make me feel inadequate are Wendy and Erin because they can write circles around me, Erin particularly because she was a better writer than me when she was 14. Good grief.

But maybe I'm fixing that. For example, this week in nursing school we're learning to insert catheters. So just take my word for it that I'm good at my nursing skills, that way I won't have to demonstrate them on you.

Q&A

There are two nursing classes at my school; Friday we both took our test over patient environment, and I was the first one finished in my class, so I left the room to do some reading in the break area. After a few minutes, a girl in the other class appeared, having finished her test.

"Did you find that last question confusing?" she asked me.

"Umm, not really. I just put that an open bed was ready for a new patient." I replied.

"Open bed?" she asked. "You mean 'open bedpan,' right?"

Part of me hoped to have read the question correctly, but really I hoped that I got it wrong and she was right, because my answer still was sort of right if I had read it wrong. If she read it wrong, which she did, meant she put that an open bed was ready to be pooped on.

In her defense, she had gotten even less sleep than I had.

And I felt for her, because I have had my share of bad answers. Like my freshman year at OU, when on my zoology test I drew a blank on "cysteine," which I will never forget is an amino acid that is an essential part of proteins, but for the test I wrote that it was a chapel that had a ceiling painted my Michaelangelo since I couldn't think of anything else to put down.

But the all time worst answer I ever gave was for my Women in Film class. The film "Go Fish" had a scene were two girls are on a date, and at one point one is clipping the fingernails of the other. The quiz over the movie asked the significance of this act.

Well, I really didn't have a clue. But I figured it was logical that if two girls are going to be intimate, and might be putting certain digits within certain orifices, they don't want sharp fingernails. So the problem was trying to word this without using the terms "fingerfucking" or even "fingerbanging."

I finally settled on writing "Having sex with fingers" as my answer.

The instructer's response when grading my quiz:

"???"

Beat the meat

One goal I set for myself during my 11 months in nursing school is to eat healthier. It's something I've tried in the past with limited success -- as in I did it for a limited time only.

So this time around I'm trying it in stages. For the first two months I've cut beef and pork out of the diet -- it's just poultry and fish. I've pretty much gotten used to it, and I'm trying to eat a salad a day, which isn't going as well, but getting better.

But as far as limiting the meat I eat, I find it odd that I have to explain it so much.

Such as one of my classmates, who didn't understand what the benefit was of avoiding the cafeteria sausage. "Oh, sausage is made of pork?"


Or when I went to Taco Bueno, and asked if the Chicken Club Burrito didn't have any meat in it other than chicken, and made me feel like a dork as he scoffed at me.

"It is a CHICKEN club."

And he didn't understand why I was mad because it had bacon in it.

"I think it's a chicken bacon," he said.

The worst might have been at 7-Eleven; all the stores in OKC are selling odd items and foods to raise money for MDA. Yesterday was a guy selling barbecue beef brisket sandwiches, and was giving me the hard sell as two clerks and some other dude were standing around chatting.

"I don't eat red meat," I declined.

The one of the clerks tried to help the guy out. "Well what about brown meat?" she said.

Everyone laughed at her apparent joke -- until she asked them why they were laughing and one of them had to explain it to her.

Is it any wonder this country's getting fatter?