Category Archives: Memoirist BS


Thirteen things I miss from my youth

Home } Memoirist BS } Thirteen things I miss from my youth

Shaina’s angsty Thirteen made me think about all the things that were great about being young. This is no easy feat, by the way. I could write several Thirteens on what sucked about youth (Shaina, it ends eventually. I guarantee it) but thirteen good things, that’s a different story.

Let’s see how far I get.

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, April 10, 2008. Category: Memoirist BS, Thirteen Candles.

Thirteen jobs

Home } Memoirist BS } Thirteen jobs

I think Dean did this one a while ago. But that’s okay, my jobs are different than Dean’s.

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, April 3, 2008. Category: Memoirist BS, Thirteen Candles.

Reflections on a bowel full of stool

Home } Memoirist BS } Reflections on a bowel full of stool

Somewhere in this land, an owl-eyed pre-med sits in an undergrad auditorium, considers the doctors she has known and thinks, “Wow. Isn’t that the life.” Another one daydreams, “Think of all the respect I’ll get!” A third has dollar signs in his eyes.

They need to come out here and hang with me for a while. I’ll tell ’em stories.

***

I was the floor intern on call that Saturday. No admitting duties, but the floor could keep you hopping with one idiot request after another. County had one professional phlebotomy draw per day, so if someone needed a test that wouldn’t wait until morning, I was the phlebotomist. If a patient’s IV needed changing, I got it done. (The nurse would set out supplies for me — on a good day.) I was the one they called for fever workups and rule-out MIs and whatever else the nurses didn’t feel like doing.

Like, for example, disimpacting a constipated woman.

***

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, April 1, 2008. Category: Memoirist BS, The Barbarous Craft.

Quick self-pimpage (with update)

Home } Memoirist BS } Quick self-pimpage (with update)

I put up an old story of mine over at Daily Kos:

Not your typical political diary.

Only the oldest of old-timers here (like Pat) will remember this one — it’s from May ’05. And even then, I updated the story with a new revelation.

Enjoy.

D.

HOT DAMN! I made Diary Rescue! 

, March 9, 2008. Category: Memoirist BS.

The spooky rerun

Home } Favorites } The spooky rerun

The first day back at work is always a bitch, and today was no exception. It could have been an easy day, but I had to take one of my patients back for post-op bleeding, so everything ended well past 5 when it should have ended around 2:30. No trip to the gym for me, only a hurried visit to the supermarket to scrounge some heat-uppable food for my family. Oh, and toilet paper. Gotta have toilet paper.

And there you have it, my excuse to rerun an old favorite of mine: fatigue! I’m always griping about fatigue, I know, I know. Maybe if I weren’t so damned tired, I wouldn’t gripe about it so much.

Anyway, this memory got jostled today. The old gf and I write one another, as some of you know, and she was creeping out over the fact a friend of hers was following the advice of a psychic. That reminded me of how negative she was about my tarot-reading shtick back in the old days. I think she even made me swear never to touch them again, but we broke up soon after, so you can guess how well I honored that promise.

In my email today, I finally (after 25 years) told her the story below. Of course, I told y’all the story nearly two years ago, which means she could have read it two years ago if she would read my blog, which she doesn’t. Go figure.

But before story time, I want ALL of my Iowa readers to make it to the caucus tomorrow.

And now: Wheel of Fortune, originally posted here, in case you want to read the comment thread. It was a good one.

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, January 2, 2008. Category: Favorites, Memoirist BS, Mishpucha (mi familia).

Man vs. Shuffle

Home } eConfusion } Man vs. Shuffle

Now that a certain former roommate of Karen’s is hanging around my blog, I thought I would indulge in a bit of memoirist BS.

When Karen and I were first dating, I knew she had had a previous boyfriend, but I didn’t know a thing about him. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable asking, either, because what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me, right?

But there was one guy who kept appearing, both in conversation and in person, so I figured he had to be the guy. Karen’s roomie, Kira, once went so far as to compare me to him. “Ah, a Renaissance man,” she said. “Remind you of anyone, Karen?”

So who was this guy? Turns out Bill was an old classmate of Karen’s and Kira’s, not an old love interest. (I think Karen was a bit shocked when my misunderstanding came to light.) Just as I made a nice life for myself at Berkeley melding the hard sciences with the humanities, Bill had found a way to meld computer science with linguistics. And now he’s some sort of Linux guru.

What does this have to do with the iPod shuffle? Well, Bill and I might both have been Renaissance men, but our skill sets scarcely overlapped. I was, and I remain, nearly computer-illiterate. And while Bill once professed to me with near-religious fervor, “Music is very important to me,” I still can’t bring myself to such an exalted state. Nowadays, I might reply to Bill, “Yeah, there are some songs I like.”

A few weeks ago, I won an iPod shuffle at our local grocery store’s “grand re-opening.” How exciting! I took it home, plugged the ISB cable into the ISB slot, docked my shiny new iPod, and waited for it to do shit. And waited. And waited.

My iTunes files were still there, so what could be the problem? For the life of me, I couldn’t find the button to “sync” my iTunes with my iPod. The iPod didn’t come with a CD, nor did it come with much in the way of instructions, and the online help was a masterful exercise in unhelpfulness.

This morning, I decided to give it another try, and once again, it was a non-starter. Then I slid a few things around on the iPod, plugged things in, unplugged things, and plugged things backed in, undocked the iPod, re-docked the iPod, and all of a sudden the little beast wanted to sync with iTunes.

So I’m wired, kids. Man vs. Shuffle, and Man wins! Fuck technology! Hallelujah, technology! Bill would be chortling if he could see 1/10 the grief this silly thing has given me.

Playing right now: Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the Silence.”

Live-blogging tonight: sometime around 7 to 8 PM PST. See ya soon.

D.

PS: these “ear buds” suck big time. I’m using headphones.

, December 8, 2007. Category: eConfusion, Memoirist BS.

Flickr Follies: a slippery trail of because

Home } Flickr follies } Flickr Follies: a slippery trail of because

Chemistry, not astronomy, because
Mattresses are a poor reason for career choice.
Biology, not chemistry, because
Solvents reeked
Those boats looked nice
And the math was getting too tough.
Medicine, not biology, because
Mice would not cooperate.

School, not honor, because
If you had the chance, you’d take it, too
And the sky was so very blue
And I was free
And we had all the time in the world.
Honor, not comfort, because
The truth? I missed the honor.

Crappy poetry, not a post, because
Like her host
The muse has a head cold, too.

D.

, November 26, 2007. Category: Flickr follies, Memoirist BS, Poetic mishaps.

Thirteen diary quotes

Home } Memoirist BS } Thirteen diary quotes

My boy will be a teenager in one year. Guess I had better re-familiarize myself with adolescent angst . . . and how better to do accomplish that, than to pilfer my old diaries for quotes?

To be honest, this struck me as a horrible idea when I first thought of it. I was a depressed, nihilistic kid, and I tend to absorb that mood if I spend too much time futzing with the old diaries. Nevertheless, the first quote I found was so wonderful, it encouraged me to continue.

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, November 7, 2007. Category: Memoirist BS, Thirteen Candles.

Turnabout

Home } Memoirist BS } Turnabout

This Friday, I go under the knife. My umbilical hernia is back, and I thought it would be wise to get it fixed before we have to call 911. I suppose I shouldn’t be nervous about this; it’s a minor procedure, day surgery; I’ve known this surgeon since ’98, and I have confidence in him. But it seems like health care workers are magnets for mistakes, and I’m no exception.

Take that first umbilical hernia. My previous surgeon (whose technique was lacking, but who cares — she was cute) didn’t use mesh, and that’s why I’m in this predicament. If you repair a hernia using mesh, the failure rate is 1 in 1000. If you don’t, it’s 1 in 5 (I hope I’m remembering that right. It’s a BIG percentage, anyway).

Back in 2000, though, that was the real screw-up. I woke up with a headache, one of those “worst headache of my life” headaches they warn you about in med school (you’re supposed to think: bleeding aneurysm, brain tumor, etc. etc.), a headache that laughed at aspirin, ibuprofen, and whatever pain med my wife was using at the time. I called my physician and he told me to go to the ER to get a lumbar puncture. At that point, I was feeling crappy enough that if he had told me to lie down on the railroad tracks, I’d have done it. By comparison, a spinal tap seemed reasonable.

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, October 30, 2007. Category: Memoirist BS, The Barbarous Craft.

The Filial Thirteen

Home } Memoirist BS } The Filial Thirteen

My son is twelve. TWELVE! ALMOST A TEENAGER! And so I got this brilliant idea to do a Thirteen all for him. Trouble is, I did it last year, too. So much for originality. Can I come up with thirteen more memories about my son?

You betcha.

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, October 25, 2007. Category: Memoirist BS, Mishpucha (mi familia), Pix, Thirteen Candles.
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