It's not that I don't love you, it's not that I don't care.

Something something something,
But we have! to! start! somewheeeeeeeeeereee!

[Incidentally, Rachel, I finally got around to googling Jay Clifford, and lo, he is exactly your type. Win!]

Hello, friends.

No, I did not die. Nor am I (yet) buried in work. (That starts tomorrow. And continues through, um, Tuesday. HA HA HA ohhhhh.)

After my last post:

- Halloween happened. Well, the day before Halloween happened, and Halloween happened, and I worked both of those days. And then, you know, Halloween itself, which was a fiesta to end all previous Halloween fiestas, or at least, it was pretty good.

- Then I had a week of vacation. Karen flew into town the day after Halloween, specifically that very morning, and off we went.

- Then I drove back to New Orleans from Atlanta, where the week of vacation had deposited me. It took seven hours, and I only stopped once, to stretch my legs and put gas in the car. I didn't even pee! I am so disciplined.

- And then I worked for one day, oh my god it was yesterday, and it was SO LONG. So long. Also, I was late, and I could not page the correct consultant once, ever, and did I mention how long the day was? It was long.

- Today I went to lunch with my program to meet interviewees who were all from NOLA and therefore did not need to hear things about NOLA, though I did bad-mouth(e) some of the other programs I interviewed at, or maybe just Healthyman's program. Which is not kosher, maybe, the bad-mouthing, and yet the kids asked, and I didn't say anything about the docs. (Shrug.) Anyway.

Oh! And then! Then I had coffee with this lady who got my contact information from some lady who got my contact information from my mom, ha ha ha no seriously. The coffee lady is the official Jewish community outreach coordinator for newcomers, or something. As I understand it, I am being offered a free JCC membership and a free synagogue membership and a free JDate membership and possibly moving and rental grants for simply (1) being Jewish and (2) moving to New Orleans. I am certain that the "free" part of that label comes with restrictions and obligations and general annoyances, but whatevs, I am not one to look cash in the mouth, because cash has no mouth and also I am a Jew. Also, I would mock this whole experience relentlessly, but I feel kind of bad, because the woman was really very nice. (That is how they get you, you know. Like the Mormons.) Mid-thirties, a one-year-old at home, properly wistful when I said, Oh, I really like my neighborhood bar, it's got a great beer list.

(Incidentally, between this woman and her wistful and the woman she -- the woman, not the wistful -- knew at the coffee shop, who walked in with her six-month-old in a giant stroller and started talking about how she's going back to work full-time in a few weeks, and how she'd forgotten, between her first and second child, about diapers, and not sleeping, and letting the child cry it out versus soothing said child, especially since the child needs to be able to sleep through the night when she goes back to work, annnnnyway, between all of that, I have concluded that I am not ready for child-rearing, and quite possibly will never be ready. Because that sounds like a lot of stress for very little in the way of rewards for me, personally.)

So. I am going to try to write my vacation post now, because it is a good story and I'm sure you'd like to hear it, and if you wouldn't, well, this is my blog, so haaaa. But it's late, and I have to work tomorrow (and the five days after tomorrow, hooray!), though at least I start the day (that is tomorrow) with conference, which means free lousy coffee and a smattering of fruit. Hooray!

Incidentally I have gained four pounds and my clothes do not fit anymore. (If any of you have done those "Shred: It will hurt and then you will have muscles!" DVDs and don't hate them, you should tell me.) Let us blame, in order: (1) my inactivity of late, like today, for example; (2) free food, like today's lunch, and Thursday's journal club, and whatever happens to be in the snack cabinet in the resident lounge, mainly rice krispies treats; (3) Louisiana, where no one eats vegetables, and everyone eats pork, including the Jews, mostly; (4) vacation, where I certainly didn't eat any vegetables, and I sought out as much pork as possible; (5) my inability to resist hunger in its mildest forms, which was never a problem in college; (6) the sky.

Clearly, the computer sends out a standard eval, no matter the scheduled block.

But damn, someone needs to add some exclusion criteria already.

just bees that way sometimes

I'm going through my notes from the last month, logging procedures on my residency's web server. It's less un-intuitive than the e-logging I had to do for MedSkool, which is a plus. It's also irritating and slow-going and makes me wish that I'd just kept up with it throughout the month, like a person with any sense.

But when was I ever one of those?

Anyway.

In the margins of one of my wrinkled crib sheets -- stolen from the fax machine, every last one -- I wrote, "just bees that way sometimes."

And so.

What the hell was I talking about?

Every choice unchooses another.

And that syntax looks ridiculous. That *sentence* looks ridiculous.

Alternate title: My doppelgänger, no seriously.

Karen is a new friend, in the grand scheme of things. We met at Syd's wedding, or maybe her bachelorette party. You'd get along, Sydney said, and we did.

Anyway. So Karen lost her job recently, and also was on her way to Detroit for a wedding, and by airplane magic it was almost as cheap to fly from New York to New Orleans (via Atlanta) and from Atlanta to Detroit and from Detroit back to New York (via Atlanta, again) as it was to do just the New York to Detroit (via Atlanta) round-trip. So she did.

The details, I'll write about later. The short version is, we spent a few days in New Orleans, and then on the road from NOLA to the big ATL, and then in the big ATL itself, and then she flew away, and I had a very little bit of time -- a very little bit of time -- with my parents and friends here, and tomorrow I'm driving back to NOLA and the next day I return to my ER for a twelve-hour shift.

At least I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving (assuming my schedule works).

Anyway. Karen is a new friend, but we understand each other. Weirdly, we understand each other. We've read the same books, or at least, I intended to read the same books (they're sitting on my shelves). We grew up in the suburbs of weirdly similar, hollow cities. And she found herself in a career she's good at, a career she likes, after accidentally or intentionally walling off options, but then she wonders...

And she's scared of the same things I'm scared of: Going home and getting stuck. (Once you go home again, you can't leave.) Or having a baby and getting stuck. Or just moving to the suburbs and getting stuck, or having the wrong job and getting stuck, and it's so easy to get stuck.

It's interesting, is all.

Why does four days feel like forever?

So.

Monday I snuck off-shift and out of the hospital for fifteen minutes to run down the street and get my swine flu vaccine, because while I would love -- love -- to lose ten pounds effortlessly, by which I mean "through vomiting and diarrhea," I cannot really justify it when there is a viable alternative, like *not* spreading death and disease to my immunocompromised patients.

(Plus, I might still get Guillain-Barre! Which would probably also entail weight loss?)

Monday night, I had drinks with DrSheilaBrovlovsky, who is my assigned mentor, and also Lakch's, because we are the two idiots who did not reply to the classwide email asking us to select mentors from the list, and everyone else chose wisely. That said, it was really a very nice conversation, and she's big into translational research, and *also*, also I need to be a little stronger-willed when it comes to saying no to that second drink, because if one beer turns me into a loudmouth, a beer and a wine turns me into a loudmouth who gets all pseudo-philosophical and asks questions about What It All Means, like Why All The Bad New I Have Given Lately Has Been To People Around My Age.

Yesh.

Also, we went to Delachaise, which was adorable, and also ran into LukeSkywalker and his girlfriend, because New Orleans is like Philadelphia is actually a small town.

Tuesday was just utterly ridiculous, start to finish, because it started out with the goddamned alarm fiasco, and then turned into probably the hardest shift I have worked in the ER thus far, and all I had was beds 1 to 6, which somehow translated into eight patients. No, but seriously, why is there a pregnant asthmatic in the trauma bay and how soon can I get rid of her?

Ugh.

Wednesday -- yesterday -- I was very glad to work the short --where "short" means eight hours -- shift after conference, that is, conference runs 7 A to 11 A, and so I only had to do 11 A to 7 P, which was so, so nice. And quiet! I can say the Q word now that I am not there anymore, and have to be back in less than eight hours: It was quiet! On Wednesday. Bizarre.

Which brings us to today, where I honestly cannot remember what I did, other than eat continuously -- no, seriously, I need to stop that -- and surf the internet. Also, I think I took a nap. I certainly did not leave the house, or accomplish any of the things I needed to accomplish today, like (a) not eating everything not nailed down, seriously, self, this is how girls gain the intern fifteen, well, this and scrub pants, (b) logging my procedures from the last four-ish weeks, no, seriously, it is important, and the longer I don't do it the more I forget, (c) deciding on a Halloween costume, or (d) unloading the clean clothes from the dryer, where they have been since last night.

And, of course, only now am I getting around to the unlisted, "Update the blog, stupid."

I don't want to go to work tomorrow.

And then I had the most stressful workday ever, thanks.

[Scribbled out on a freebie notepad from one of those places I interviewed, early this morning, like, very early, shh.]

So let's say it's raining.

Let's say it's raining, and it's dark, and you wake up sweating and faceplanted on your bed and you just want to go running but there is all this shit you have to do before you go running, like setting up the coffee pot and paying your electric bill and finally you get out to the porch and set the alarm by remote and lock the door and then the back falls off your alarm key fob.

And now it is dark, and your key fob is in pieces, and so you gather them up to try to put them back together inside, where it is light.

Only you set the alarm off.

And you don't remember the fucking code.

Because you have three or four four-digit numbers memorized.

And it is none of those.

And the alarm starts to shriek after the third wrong entry.

And you can't hear the tired-sounding woman who calls your cell to ask for your password, and who can't shut the system off anyway, and it keeps shrieking and the neighbors hate you and *finally* you get the batteries back in the fucking remote key chain and shut the system and tape the back onto the remote but you still don't know the code.

And you dig out the instruction manual even though you know you never wrote the code down, because you have have it in your head! This code! In your head!

When you finally figure out the code it is too late to go running.

And it is still dark.

And it is still raining.

And it is only Tuesday.

Parades and football and the LGD.

It hasn't all been drama around here lately, despite my morning angst. Today I got up and sat around in my pajamas, and then DonnaNoble called, and she and Shel and I went to Cooter Brown's to watch football and drink beer.

I was more into the fried lunch + alcohol side of things; the football came up later. Whatever, I said, sure I'll football. And lo, it did not suck utterly, in that by the end of the game -- when it had turned dark outside, when we had consumed three pitchers of beer between us, and also wings and fries and chili fries and chicken quesadilla and whatever else -- the bar was on its feet, and yelling, and the Saints won.

So that was nice.

-----

Last night, as I believe I mentioned, I went to see Krewe of Boo, New Orleans' new annual Halloween parade, recently moved from the weekend of Halloween to the weekend before, in order to conflict less with Voodoo Fest and also to turn New Orleans into some kind of destination for Halloween *week*, instead of just Halloween *weekend*. Whatever, NOLA, whatever, but you are welcome to try.

One of the amazing things about this town is that a parade, one filled with floats and bead-throwing and, you know, it's *Halloween*, okay? So there are children all over the damn place in costume, excited out of their wee kiddie brains for the grown-ups in skeleton costumes on motorcycles. And yet, in this town, a parade that is, at least in audience, family-oriented? Will still contain strippers and girls in... well, I can't call it drag. Girls with fake facial hair, let's say, reaching down to pick up dropped items from the sidewalk and lifting their hips high, high, high, as the three-year-olds gawk.

I love this town.

Do you know what's even creepier than showing up alone at a family parade, occasionally glancing at other people's children? Showing up alone at a family parade and taking half a dozen pictures of a dead bird on the sidewalk.

The parade coincided with the LSU game, so this man showed up in full-on LSU regalia, and I mean *full-on*: Shirt, hat (you can't see), LSU mug, LSU folding chair, and those headphones with the antenna sticking out, so he could listen. It was precious, and also scary.

Lucy's (which I always want to call Lucy's Hat Shop, but it isn't) dealt with the LSU-vs-parade conflict by broadcasting the game on the side of the building across the street. As one does.

One of the first vehicles in the parade was this city police van. The city has a collection of special vehicles I have never seen anywhere else; my favorite are those police observation boxes that actually lift fifty feet into the air, like what your school custodian might use to change light bulbs in the gym. Oh, New Orleans.

A lot of the parade was individuals on motorcycles, just doin' their thing.

Then we have this lady, walking her miniature horse down the street.

And this lady, *riding* a horse.

And in the midst of everything, strippers!

And Towelie.

The larger floats threw beads and cups into the crowd.

Personally, though? This is my favorite... thing of the entire night.

See? Awesome.

The German tourist to my left loved the twirlers.

More people on horseback!

This man closely followed the largest clump of horses. I liked him.

Aftermath.

Apropos of nothing, this blue dog was spray-painted on the sidewalk near my bike.

-----

In other news, I'm pretty sure that's it. On the bike ride home from the parade, though, I wound up on Annunciation -- I always wind up on Annunciation; I never seek it out -- and cut up Melpomene past the abandoned grocery store, and lo, out of nowhere -- or, more correctly, Annunciation from Uptown, that is, not in the direction of the parade -- ten costumed riders on horses trotted up. I had just happened upon their staging ground, in the parking lot of the empty supermarket. I whooped at them, probably not to their or their horses' amusement (though I gotta say, those horses were *amazingly* calm during the parade; beta-blockers? valium?), and sped off home.

-----

Anyway. Today after the bar I went running, though first I stopped off across the street at Fireman's stoop, only Fireman was absent, and his roommate, Barkeep, was holding court. (Why do I always run into the attractive neighbors when I am in my gym clothes?) (Why do I care, given that both of them -- and, apparently, all of their friends -- are happily attached?) (Anyway.)

Anyway, Barkeep had a couple of people over, drinking on the stoop, and one of them, he started talking about how he'd been trying to come up with a rap in the style of "Gin and Juice" for our little neck of the woods, the Lower Garden District, which actually had a house tour today, which I only learned about when I was climbing into Shel's car, and Barkeep yelled at the crowd of people pouring into the house next to mine, Hey, what's with the balloons? And this older woman on the end of the bunch started yelling about how we are all members of the Coliseum Square Association, and they were just walking around, trying to see why anyone would be crazy enough to live here.

Which I ignored, because: Oh, a house tour! I wish I'd known, because I'd love to see into the house of my next-door neighbor, absolutely. But Barkeep was bothered, and later he and his friend started ranting about, You know, just because we're not as lily-white as the regular Garden District doesn't mean you have to be crazy to live here.

But my point, initially, was the song: "With so much drama in LGD..." and then we're stuck. What the hell rhymes with "LGD"?

You tell me.

-----

So. I went running, and really I ought to have gone to bed hours ago, because I have to be at the hospital at 7 AM tomorrow, and also Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. And then Karen shows up Sunday.

I am tired.

New Orleans kids

I'm standing at the parade and the crowd is cheering on the band marching by, twirlers in skirts and the brass with their plumed hats, and all I can think is, Oh, god, kids, stay safe.

A few days ago a girl -- a junior in high school, she looked much younger -- told me they never used condoms, and went silent when I asked her, "Do you want to get pregnant?"

Oh, god, honey, please listen to me.

A few shifts ago a boy came in in handcuffs and a bullet through his leg. Or was it two bullets? I washed him out, left the wound open -- bullet wounds stay open, usually -- and he asked, Where will I go after this? He kept asking, Where will I go? And I said, It's up to the police. And he looked scared.

Fifteen years old, and big enough to be in a gunfight, and small enough to be scared of the cops. And me.

And it happens every goddamn night. Every night there are boys in their teens or early twenties who were in fights with bullets and lost. Finally I think they hit thirty and after that it's just the junkies and the rare men actually in the wrong place at the wrong time -- as opposed to the ones walking home from church, at 2 AM, who got jumped by "some guy" -- who come in shot, or with the crap beat out of them.

"The patient in bed 8, what's going on there?"
"Um, hit in the face with a shovel, I think."
"Did we order a CT on him-her- Actually, you know what? 'Hit in the face with a shovel' means male until proven otherwise. (And god, I'm an asshole.) Did we order a CT yet?"
(There's a reason they said at breakfast that I'm the one who thinks aloud.)

And the girls. The girls are the ones caught in the crossfire. They've got bullets in their feet or babies in their wombs and at home, and everyone, to her credit, has had a tubal by the age of thirty. Which is fine, right? Two kids and a tubal? That's what we want, we doctors and social scientists and goddamn know-it-alls.

But oh, you 19-year-old G2P2. Did you dance in front of the band before you dropped out?

Where is my 17-year-old with fresh sutures on his face?

And so I see these marching kids and I look at their faces and wonder, Do I know you?

Breakfast with biscuits / going to bed.

Two of the attendings bought us breakfast today (Ruby Slipper, Midcity: yummy, though JF's bloody mary was salted all to hell.) (Also: biscuits! again.) (I'd totally forgotten that biscuits! were a novelty until LukeSkywalker's girlfriend, who is down here on some kind of vet school rotation, said, Hey, biscuits! and I was like, BISCUITS! These were not sweet, again, like a scone. I think that not-sweet biscuits are the standard, and you're supposed to sweeten them with jam and also shit-tons of butter. Which is not sweet, but if you're me, is totally necessary.).

Anyway, breakfast! Was unexpected, and also kind: The attendings just stood up to go, leaving the eight of us sitting, bullshitting, finishing our eggs and grits, and when the waitress came over to clear the table twenty minutes later she said, Oh, they already paid.

I want to have residents to buy breakfast for.

I want to be able to treat eight people to breakfast.

(By the way, post-night-shift breakfast is the greatest idea ever. Because you get breakfast food, and also alcohol! But not in that brunchy way.)

(Or, as Rachel said later, "It is like condensing the drinking and the hangover the morning after.")

And now, to bed. Work at 7P.

Incidentally, ooooh, burrrrrrrrrrrrrn.

Vacation plans! And help from the internet.

So Karen of Manhattan -- you remember Karen, my friendship fix-up from Sydney's wedding, and why can't my fix-ups with boys be this successful? -- is coming to New Orleans! On November 1! Which is perfect, because that is my vacation week, and so Karen and I are hanging in NOLA, and then road-tripping to Atlanta, because she likes road-trips and I like being in Atlanta sometimes. So we will road-trip to Atlanta, and then she will fly out of ATL late on November 5 for this wedding she has to attend at home in Detroit, and I will spend two days chilling with my parents, and then I will get on the road again and drive the eight hours back to New Orleans to be at work at 7 AM on November 9.

(Then I have November 10 off, and *then* I work six days in a row. But whatever.)

The point is! The point is, what destinations are road-trip-worthy between NOLA and the ATL? I realize we don't have all that much time; we'll probably depart NOLA at some point on the 3rd, and like I said we have to be in the ATL on the 5th, maybe soon enough to eat dinner with my parents (but that's sort of depending on what we find, and also whether or not one of us has to bail the other out of prison). Anyway, dear internet: What would you stop to see in Mississippi and Alabama? The weirder, the better, and all that.

The Egyptians had their scarabs, sure.

Dear New Orleans,

There are already enough roaches in this city; you don't have to go festooning shit with them.

Love,

G

Life as we know it.

You know, I'd paste the whole IM conversation here, but I'm too tired to edit and cut it down, so I'll just say:

It's good to know that I have friends who are just as disenchanted as I am. With, in this case:
- men
- religion
- the prospect of child-bearing
and most especially,
- this feeling that all of our people are scattered, and we will never be together again.

But it's okay. It only comes out late at night, anyway.

I don't know what you want, internet.

I have no idea what this bird is -- some emu relation, I guess -- but holy crap it had the most expressive face. Something about the blue eyes, and the eyelid, and the lashes. Holy crap, it looked almost animatronic. (Yes, it was SO REAL it looked LIKE A ROBOT. Y'all, modern life is amazing.)

Really, I don't. How did the damn fruit post get so many comments?

Slightly the worse for the wear, after a week on my table at room temperature.

At any rate. No, it is not a fig. I finally cut it open to reveal a soft, dry outer husk, with an inner husk covered in bumps and with little... seedlings, like dandelion seedlings, down at the... caudal end.


And then I put the whole mess down the garbage disposal. Not that it smelled bad (yet) -- a sort of pine-y, woodsy smell to the whole thing -- but even though no spiders crawled out of the wreckage, I could see those seeds hatching into something dark and terrible.

(Yes, every time I undertake any kind of unknown-plant dissection, I fear that my first cut will release something insectile and poisonous, or perhaps a swarm of them. I know.)

SO HOW HAS YOUR WEEK BEEN?

After last we spoke -- Wednesday, it was -- I went to the zoo. I've been meaning to go to the zoo for a while; my landlords left me a number of passes, since Mrs. CondoOrthopod worked there until the move. And so Rachelle and Aero and I went one Wednesday afternoon after conference. It was an excellent idea, minus the unseasonable heat (which has since finally ended, hallelujah): Weekday afternoons are probably the loneliest time for zoos, and this early in the school year, especially. It's a nice zoo, too: Not too small, and not so large as to be unmanageable.


Who's a sleepy sun bear? You are! You are!

Some kind of Asiatic pig-creature, between the sun bear and the tigers. Guesses?



Me on facebook: "How often do you think the squirrels wander into, like, the tiger habitats, look up, and have the squirrel equivalent moment of "Oh, fawk me"? Because I think that scenario is hysterical."
Rachel on facebook: "No more than once per squirrel, you'd think."


Is a dromedary. I know you were curious.

The zookeeper assured us, and the crowd of middle-schoolers following, that this is precisely the type of lizard who -- which? that? -- starred in Up. So there you go.

Pointless anecdote: When I was a kid, one of the diners we frequented, the International Diner (or, ahem, apparently the International Delight Cafe, and according to Yelp, it even looks the same) -- it was just a diner, but I'm told the ice cream was delicious; this was back in the golden, ribby-child era when I didn't like sweets -- happened to be right next door to an old-school pet shop, with pens of rabbits and guinea pigs and then giant cages of extremely fancy birds like this one. I used to check the ground for feathers. (Incidentally, it's amazing I never got salmonella as a child. Or... psittacosis? Whatever.) Point is, you ain't so fancy, Mr. Macaw, with your ability to *talk* and your pretty colors. I KNOW WHERE YOU COME FROM.

The pretty, young thing of a zookeeper who is holding up the lizard up there happened to pass us by in bird zone and told us that the bird above is a hybrid of some kind, between the blue bird at the top (or its breed) and the red bird (maybe) that comes farther on in this set. "A hybrid that shouldn't exist, like a mule?" I said. "Is it sterile?" She said she didn't know. I... am kind of a jerk, now that I think about it. (But not as much as a jerk as I was later, when I (a) dropped the f-bomb in front of children, repeatedly -- I need to work on that -- and (b) when I insisted that we stop and try to watch four twentysomething zoo employees try to herd a mink (maybe it was a muskrat) down a hole without getting bitten and without using a net. The mink was *jussst* smart enough to follow along with the tossed fish (and carrots, and more fish), and also not to head downstairs. It was *hilarious.*)

This peacock is actually begging for salad from the people to the right of the frame. It's... weird?




All the money I have ever spent on National Geographic ever is totally worth it for that anecdote about how, in South America and for the purposes of Roman Catholicism, the world's largest rodent is actually a fish.




We settled the question of "How awesome would it be to have prehensile tails?" Totes awesome, you guys. Totes awesome.

Anteaters have no teeth! I know because the zoo told me so.

This is a nutria. The nutria is an invader from South America; much like kudzu, some guy brought it to the American south, it escaped, and lo, it wreaked havoc on the local ecosystem. Now the state is trying to figure out how to encourage nutria hunting with, I shit you not, recipes.

(To which -- since it's my facebook caption -- Rachel responded, "I would probably eat nutria jambalaya. "Stuffed Nutria Hindquarters", on the other hand, is the Tuesday entree in hell's cafeteria (incidentally, where very bad PR people spend eternity).")

I liked the cartoon of the alligator with the belly-ache. Particularly since the alligator in the pond was morbidly obese.

See? That has to be a BMI of 40.

This is a leucistic alligator, not an albino; you can see that its eyes are dark.

Great egret, and some kind of heron with red eyes.

Add a caption

2009.10.14, New Orleans, Audubon Zoo field trip. How often do you think the squirrels wander into, like, the tiger habitats, look up, and have the squirrel equivalent moment of "Oh, fawk me"? Because I think that scenario is hysterical.

The internet tells me this is a black-crowned night heron, scientific name Nycticorax. If I were still looking for a blog-name, and I were a lonely middle-schooler (or, who am I kidding? me now), that would be a pretty awesome choice. Just a suggestion! Free, from me to you.

The bobcats were, incidentally, very, very interested in the birds.



The... walrus? appeared to be recovering from some kind of recent surgery, as evidenced by a small shaved patch on its neck.

Only in New Orleans, Rachelle said, would a family attraction-- and one that *does not sell alcohol* -- have this sign in the bathroom.

Long story short: You should go to the zoo, especially if you have free passes, but even if you don't, probably. And also-especially if you have young children and it is not the weekend. The zoo! It is a great time.

-----

Thursssday night, after my last! fast! track! shift! for now! I joined Aero and one of the EM/IM PGY2s from the Saulet and PsychNeighbor, who as I mentioned is no longer PsychNeighbor because she moved to Metairie, and two additional people who are neighbors of the aforementioned EM/IM PGY2, for dinner at Drago's in Metairie. I was told that, at Drago's, one orders one thing, and one thing only, and that thing is charbroiled oysters. So I did. They were good, y'all, but... not repeatable good. The idea of charbroiled oysters is nice, but maybe as an appetizer; they were kind of drowning in butter, and when *I* start to complain about the saturated fat content of a dish (using classy lines like, "I am going to poo so hard from this"), you know you've made some kind of error. But the company was good, and it was nice to be out and about and having a beer with people on a weekday night when the fast track was over.

(Oh, and I went in scrubs, and no one died. The end.)

(Actually, that is not the end. I went in scrub bottoms and the t-shirt I'd layered under my scrub top, and you have no idea *how much angst* it causes me to do social things in scrubs. Do I look like a tool? How much of a tool? And yet I did not have time to go home and change, so... yes. Scrubs.)

-----

The rest of the week has more or less been consumed by work; I did days in the fast track on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and then switched to nights in the *main ER*, and worked Friday to Saturday, Saturday to Sunday, and Sunday to Monday. Yesterday when I got home I just crashed; I went to bed around 9:30 AM or so, got up around 3 or 4 PM, and then went back to bed at 6 PM, and unexpectedly slept until around 7 AM this morning. It was *amazing*.

The main ER is, um, different. My first day, I had four or so patients signed out to me mid-workup, and while some were, you know, meh, others were complex, and I had to see everyone, and write assumption of care notes, and half the time, even with my little list of names and numbers and checkboxes, I was forgetting to follow up on this and that, and dallying on patients when I couldn't make a damn decision, and anyway. It'll get easier, I'm sure. And it beats toothaches, no question.

(Shrug.) Aaaaaanyway.

Dear internet, what is this thing?

I picked it up during my run earlier this morning. It had fallen off a tree which appeared to be bearing/dropping quite a lot of them. Oh! And it was a large tree, deciduous-looking, but its leaves looked almost holly-ish, unless I mean linden-ish. Small, non-lobulated, shiny-ish leaves. But it was very dark.

Any ideas? I'm thinking of dissecting it later to look for *answers*.

Today was an odd day.

Just... odd.

I didn't sleep well last night. Barely at all, really; I remember staring at the ceiling for hours, and then rolling over at 3 AM, and thinking, well, it's not time to get up yet. And I waited until 4:30, and sighed, and at 4:45 I went running.

-----

In the fast track we had five med students. Five! Usually we cap at two, which, depending on my mood, is one more than ideal. Not that I don't like the med students: We joke, we shoot the shit, sometimes I supervise, like, their abscesses or eye exams, and I feel important and they feel (I hope) less scrutinized than they might in front of the attending. Wins all around! But it's hard with three, impossible with five: With five, the six of us -- six! -- who all have to present to one attending basically line up, charts in hand (sometimes double-stacked), and the patients tap their feet and wait, wait, wait hours to be seen again. It's ridiculous.

Anyway. So today there were five med students.

-----

Which leads us into anecdote number one: One of the MS4s asked me how she might refer someone to psych as an outpatient. Huh, I said. I don't know, but let's go next-next door to the psych room and ask.

Of course, running the psych room today was not any of my psych resident friends -- as I was expecting, as has happened on more than one occasion -- but the short, inappropriately-shod, overly-perfumed, nasal Yankee of an EM attending, whom I believe I once called DrSheilaBrovlovsky. So I walk over to the desk, and I ask, "How do we refer a patient to outpatient psych?" only *as* I am asking I reflexively move my forefinger to my temple to indicate "mental health," or, uh, "cuckoo."

Then -- not even mid-gesture, but before the attending has even noticed the gesture -- I catch myself and then undo it -- the catching, not the gesture -- by saying, aloud, "Oh, wow, that wasn't PC."

So she says, What?

And like an idiot, I explain that, Ha-ha, I reflexively made this gesture. This gesture which I will now make again, for your benefit, while you stare at me dead-eyed. And she gets Very Special Episode offended and starts talking about how we take mental health seriously in this institution. "Right, of course," I said with a smile, but she still had total pissed face. As they say on the net, FML.

-----

Later in the morning, or maybe I mean afternoon -- it all starts to look the same when you don't pee 'til eight hours into your shift -- when once again all the charts were picked up by the med students (what was I saying before? I love med students!), I decided to bounce on over to radiology to get the read on this ultrasound. Now, I've only worked nights at the hospital thus far, and that might also be part of the oddness of today: When you start out on nights, the days are too loud, too busy, too many people bouncing through on tours and repairs and everyone doing day-shift things.

Also, it's weird but you see more light working nights than you do working days. Because when I go jogging at 4:45 PM, it's light outside. And when I bike home at 7:30 AM, it's light outside, too. Not anymore.

Anyway. So it's day shift, and I bounce into the radiology suite, where only a few nights ago, it was just me and the weirdly flirty adorable Lebanese Christian (married, of course, to a Jewish woman, and her dad is his financial planner, and also, he loves Tel Aviv), shooting the shit. (He told me I had balls. I had to agree.)

And days in the radiology suite, there are actually two radiologists. And they're attendings. Attending radiologists! Shit! And the one I initially bother, who is instructing (sort of) two med students, directs me to the other, the one who reads ultrasounds. And neither one seems particularly bothered by the interruption.

(If you have ever worked at Healthyman, you know what a Thing It Is to bother radiology. Radiology is not to be bothered! EVER.)

And as the radiologist who is reading my ultrasound is flipping through the images, I hear, from over the barrier, phrases like, "he had a mistress, who used to be a prostitute," and also, "he was Elvis' lawyer." And while I try my best to pay attention to the dull black and white images on the screen before me, I can only be untrue to myself for so long, and so I edge the three stems down the room, and put my face around the doorway with a *look*, and I say, I am sorry, but this sounds like a very good story that I would like to hear.

-----

It seems that this radiologist, who grew up in Mississippi, made his way up to Staten Island, caddied for a while, until once he caddied for a famous woman who heard him talk and said, "Boy, where did you get that Oxford accent?" And he said, "Ma'am, you must mean Oxford, Mississippi," and thus he entered a famous Staten Island school, which was also, possibly, used to film part of the Godfather. Or it wasn't, and maybe the radiologist was talking about some other place on Staten Island. Also, he inherited some land out on Long Island, to which he has never been. Is it near where I used to live on Long Island? How should I know? Anyway, so this radiologist, at one point, lent some seed money to a group of fellows who wanted to invest in land on Beale Street, Memphis -- "I know that from a country song," I said, and he smiled -- and before he did so, he hired a lawyer, who had, incidentally -- and he found this out much later -- gone to the same school he'd gone to, with the woman who had been his Staten Island patron. Maybe, possibly, it's all unclear now, and maybe I mean that one of the group of fellows who needed seed money went to school on Staten Island. At any rate, this lawyer, whose name was D Beecher Smith II, who once wrote Elvis' will, and his wife witnessed it -- Beecher's wife, not Elvis' -- anyway, he had a mistress by the name of Judy, who once was a prostitute. She's a schoolteacher now in Mississippi. "As so often happens," I added, but you should get the idea, by this point, that I am unnecessary to the storytelling that is happening here, and while I am glancing at my watch from time to time I am unwilling, at pain of death and job loss, to leave this dark room even well after twenty minutes are up, and fetching a radiology read should only take five. And rather than doing due diligence on these fellows, Beecher just asked Judy what she thought, because, being a former prostitute, she knew all the goings-on of the gentlemen about town, and when she told Beecher, Oh, they're fine, Beecher reported it thusly back to our radiologist. This is about 1988, 1990, and I only add in that detail, which I interrogated out of our storyteller, because he had mentioned that Beecher did not even do a UCC search on these fellows in Beale Street, and it seemed so ridiculous to me that this narrative, which otherwise could be a tale out of the forties, or the eighteen-forties, should contain this side line about a UCC search. Anyway, the long and short of it is, and this part, I missed, because I was listening to the quieter attending tell me something relevant to patient care, anyway, the long and short of it is, our radiologist lost his shirt, and is no longer speaking to the man who went to his school in Staten Island -- I believe it must be him -- since a death threat came from that man, but the long way round, from a man down in Daytona by the man of Irving Fisher (and I, being a not unstrange child of cowardice crossed with opportunity, did not ask whether this Irving Fisher was one of the tribe of Israel, though I am fairly certain that he was), nor is he speaking to Beecher Smith, who, incidentally, is in prison on charges of downloading child pornography. "The thing about child pornographers is," said our radiologist, "they're so sick, they can't shut up about it. He's going to die in prison. He got five years; another guy, same case, fourteen months. Beecher must have had the worst lawyer in the whole state." He paused. "But of course the moral of the story is that, when someone comes to you asking for seed money, you tell him, I will give you my expertise, I will give you my time, but I will not give you my money, or I will give you a little bit of my money, but in exchange for a cut." I'm not really sure how it went; it wasn't so stupid as all that, because it is here that I was able to quote, misquote, mangle and still draw a smile, that line from Guys and Dolls about how one of these days the spade from a brand-new deck of cards is going to jump up and squirt cider in your ear. And our radiologist turned to the med students and said, You ought to see Guys and Dolls.

That is not the whole story, not all of it, for I told a little tale of my own, the tale of my family's great migration down from Long Island to Georgia, and, since the radiologist seemed into such stories, our brief and negligible contacts with Men of Questionable Morals in that strange land of Long Island. But in the end I did shake his hand one more time, and walk out of the dark with a spring in my step, and I know that when I shared that last story my speech was slower, and I was weaving a tale, too, out of the details that I had, and I was a little proud that maybe, maybe I can compete with the occasional radiologist, whenever he walks -- or sits, or just drops words above office dividers in the dark -- into my life.

God bless the American South.

-----

The rest of the day was less odd, more irritation. We, the attending, bless her, and I -- and oh! it was a her! I have had so few hers as attendings, despite this program's being heavier in the XX than most -- had a patient whose last study revealed something, um, concerning enough for me to emote, "Wait, WHAT?" at the computer screen, and yet no one had called, no one had so much as mailed a damn letter, and so the patient sat in ignorance and turned up in our ER for something entirely unrelated. And so despite its not being our job, we figured, well, damn, someone ought to tell this person to follow up with these specialists, and of course the specialists were uniquely unhelpful with hints or scheduling, and meanwhile the ER clerk was just brilliant, and the radiology tech was brilliant, and, as I said, the ER attending was brilliant, and if it all turns out to be a big false alarm, fine, but at least we made the effort.

Incidentally, of course, this is why we don't order studies in the ER which won't be back by the time of the patient's discharge. This is why we are trained to be curious, but only so. How many studies would fall through the cracks? How many patients would have bombs, somewhere, hidden in their password-protected Os and 1s, and how many would have been realized too late to have been realized already?

I'm sorry, that radiologist made me purple. I'll get over it.

-----

At the end of the day it began to thunder, and when you can hear thunder inside the hospital you know it's extremely loud outside. My relief drifted in, soaked to halfway up her pants and hair all wet. "And I had an umbrella," she sighed, before she went off to find a replacement for her socks. (She settled on surgical booties.) After sign-out the ER residents went running -- literally, all of them, running -- to the ambulance ramp to hitch a ride on EMS, which was ferrying people, ten at a time in the back, to and from the parking garage.

(By wikipedia, the parking garage is a little over 700 feet from the emergency department lobby, and most of that distance can be traveled by covered pedestrian walkway. You know how, in Hong Kong, I wondered why these covered walkways existed, when the streets already have sidewalks? And at least one friend on facebook replied, Because covered walkways are extremely useful during monsoon season. Except that no! No they are not! At least not in New Orleans, where -- and I know this from experience -- the rain blows in sideways.)

I swiped a garbage bag from a nearby trashcan, smiling at the security guards as I did so ("Yes, hi, I am a highly paid professional, and I don't have a raincoat, and shut up."), and stood outside on the ramp, poking the necessary holes in the thing after the EMS schoolbus pulled away. (My fast track replacement had already told me that I would die biking home, and I didn't need more discouragement.) I felt better after an equally determined nurse -- his scrubs rolled up to his knees, plastic bags over his shoes -- strode out of the sliding doors. "Good luck," I said to him. "Eh," he said. "I'll just get wet."

So I walked over to my bike, and wiped the seat off as best I could, and as I was climbing on the MS4s passed, again. "Sure you don't want a ride?" one said. "Nah," I said. "I do stupid shit like this all the time."

Y'all. Y'all. I am pretty sure I have just written my own epitaph.

-----

And I got home, and the power went out, and by the time I was halfway up the block, hoping for the camaraderie of porch parties that happen when the lights go out, it flickered back on, though not without an impressive few sparks from one streetlight in particular. And so I walked around the block, and came back inside, and ate my dinner.

It is time for bed now. It was time for bed so, so long ago.

Dear New Orleans: Today was an odd day. And yet I should not expect anything else.

Status-post whatever.

Ugh. Once again, I have spent my not-quite-two-days off -- I was done at the hospital early on Saturday morning -- doing extremely little. Extreeeemely little. I went to watch the football game -- or, um, the last five minutes of it -- at Naka's house on Saturday night, but seriously that's it. Perhaps I'd have done more with this weekend -- maybe -- if I didn't have yet! another! head! cold! which I blame entirely on that bitch who coughed on me in the fast track. Dear bitch: I hope you develop crushing substernal chest pain, and do not come to my hospital.

Otherwise, it's been a whole lot o' nothing lately, outside of the rest of my fast track shifts. Three more to go! And then HOLY SHIT I switch to the real ER on Friday night. Am I nervous? Oh hells yes. But also excited: I finally get to talk to the other residents! During work hours! Perhaps I will even get feedback! HOORAY!

(No, seriously, I have no idea how I compare to the other interns, because I NEVER SEE THEM. At least at work. I even asked the guy on Friday how I was doing, and since he looked uncomfortable -- um, bad? -- I gave him an out and changed the subject.)

-----

In other news, this Thursday past we had journal club over at the Bridge Lounge on Magazine, where a disability insurance rep bought the residents round after round of shots of hard liquor, to which: HA HA HA I guess whoever survives the drinking to sign up for his plan is a decent enough risk. Or something. Of course, yours truly had to work that night, so I stood around and watched everyone get crunked, and then I went to the hospital. Bah, humbug.

Otherwiiiise... Dunno. A scattered few interesting patients in the fast track, but mostly the usual gastroenteritis/flu-like symptoms (You're an adult, you waited six hours to be seen after taking an am-buh-lance for vomicking, and... what?), along with UTIs, chlamydia (and gonorrhea! and trichomonas! but of course you have no risk factors! OF COURSE!), and the ever-popular chronic back pain.

Incidentally, if any of y'all medical types have a good way of dealing with yelly patients who yell at you because you are not giving them any more narcotics (despite the yelling), please let me know. Yes, I believe you have back pain (maybe), but hey! if you have already failed, um, robaxin, flexeril, naproxen, ibuprofen, mobic, and ultram, and that vicodin and lortab shit didn't do nothing for you, I am sure as shit not writing you for soma. (I wouldn't write you for soma anyway, but I'm usually good for a percocet or 20. Not for you, though.)

-----

Oh! The point about journal club. The point about journal club is that afterwards, I was standing around talking with some of the upper-years -- I think PGY3s, maybe, unless she's a PGY2 -- about, well, disability insurance, and then about the guy's financial planner.

"You... have a financial planner?" I said. "Why do you have a financial planner?"
"Why?" said the guy.
"I mean, how do you even go about acquiring one? And... yeah, why?"
"Well, I found this guy through my disability insurance company, which I did some research on last year."
"Mine is a friend's dad," volunteered the girl.
"But... how... I mean, we make no money."
"You'll make more money once you start moonlighting," said the girl.
"And I have a financial planner now," said the guy, "so that when I start making real money, I can have my savings on track, so I can retire at 42."
"42? Why 42?"
"So then I can become a chef," said the guy.
"Oh!" said the girl. "I want to open a bookstore."
"Well, and fine, I want to become a writer," I said. (Or a linguist. Or a multilinguist! If I ever get my willpower back, which is doubtful.)
"Why is it none of us want to be doctors?" sighed the girl.
"We're emergency medicine," said the guy.

And so, after all this time, we are more or less back to where we started: No one really wants to be doing this, anyway.

-----

Humorous anecdote:

So this med student has been rotating down here from New York, that big academic program in Brooklyn where I interviewed on Obama's inauguration day. Everyone clear? Good. Anyway, so we fell to talking about what brought me down here, which is a fair question; after all, he's applying here.

"I figured, there are lots of short, loud Jewish girls in New York," I said finally. "Might as well move somewhere I'll be exotic."
"I dated a Jewish girl from New Orleans once," he said.
"Oh?" I said. "Do I know her?"

Y'all. Did I know her? Of *course* I knew her. She was my *camp leader* way back when I was a counselor at Blue Star. Turns out, she went to the same high school here that Adam (and Bernard) did. And, of course, she once upon a time long ago dated this guy in New York.

Ha.

So once again I have proven my point: There are all of two Jews in (or from) New Orleans, and I have already met both of them.

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Irrelevant pictures from Friday morning's trip to Walgreens! (Incidentally, and I should know this by now, but: Food- or anything-shopping after an overnight? Hoooooly shit, I can justify buying almost anything.)

Uh, hi, I guess I missed the part where non-essential drugs that can cause serious cardiac side effects are now available over the counter, and yet my birth control still isn't. (Also, I have to show ID to buy pseudoephedrine, because a couple of dipshits decided to use it to make an addictive street drug.) Fo' serious? Why not just make viagra over the counter, powerful drug lobbyists? Jeez.

Okay, remember when I asked y'all whether that was a regular New Orleans fleur-de-lis or a Saints fleur-de-lis on my milk? Well, lo: It was a Saints fleur de lis. Now you know.

This is not from Walgreen's, but anyway, here is a moth -- butterfly? does that wing shape imply butterfly? -- I saw when I was leaving work the other morning. It is bright yellow. Bright! Yellow! You cannot possibly appreciate from this photo. I am sorry.

I AM SO, SO SORRY.

I am writing this post instead of sleeping.

And it has already cost me about 300 calories, so appreciate!

APPRECIATION IS LIKE DEPRECIATION WHICH IS LIKE DEPRECATION BUT MORE SOUL-CRUSHING or something.

Saturday night, after I posted, I went to bed and finally got up and did nothing and skipped my run in order to make the tail end of this party hosted by the attending radiologist who hosted our madness on White Linen Night. Of course, I totally missed said festivities, or at least couldn't get ahold of the party by buzzing from the street or calling from my cell; I assume that, as last time, the assembled had taken their celebrations to the street, in a way which is totally legal in New Orleans.

Oh! The street. It was Art for Art's Sake, which is yet another street festival in the Warehouse District. This one had a very First Friday (sniff, sniff, Philly) feel to it; the galleries were open, and crowds streamed in and out, while on the street local restaurants had set up tents and tables (wine! on the street! it's legal here!) and a few performance artists had their own things going. Highlight: A long plywood catwalk, rigged up (theoretically) with sensors to match steps to tones. Like the FAO Schwartz piano in Big, but less fancy, because New Orleans doesn't do fancy, Mr. Fancy-Pants-Yankee-Pants.

As these guys were moving the balloon scupture -- or maybe it was called "inflatable art," whatever -- one of them commented that, Hey, wouldn't it be funny if people just thought we were stealing this? And I yelled something like GO FASTER but none of them heard me or reacted and so I missed my one chance at true love and happiness in this world.

Incidentally, Rachel, you know what you should do when you grow up?

Look who thinks she's an artist taking all shitty mysterious nighttime pictures.

On the other hand I liked this woman enough to swipe a (free) brochure from that particular gallery, which involved *approaching the desk* and *not making eye contact* with the *bored artsy undergrad* who was *sitting right there*. But I do not like her -- the artist; the undergrad freebie guard was male -- enough to drop $8,500. Speaking of which: Hot damn, is that what art really costs? Because: Hot damn, I think I will be hanging posters in my grown-up house. I could teach myself to draw for $8,500. Because for $8,500, I could purchase and discard an entire fucking series of canvases and oil paints ("pants," I just typed) every goddamn season until I learned something.

Unnecessarily defensive note: The paintings themselves are better than these jpegs (... doy?); these two, at least, were on thick pieces of plexiglass, with some of the paint on the back side and some on the front, so that the distance between the surfaces -- even though the glass was only a centimeter or so thick -- meant that what you saw would change, just slightly, depending on where you stood, and it was all very interesting and neat.

Hint I do not like your art: I think it looks better when framed from the street. With other people in front of it.

Speaking of people on the street: Some of them -- many of them -- were very well-dressed, and then there was this girl, who was also well-dressed, but whereas well-dressed for the females in the crowd at hand generally implied fancy sundress things, this girl was standing there, very prim in a trim WASP sweater and slacks, and also she had this fantastic bored/drunk/bitch-please look on her face, and a bike helmet on her head, and she was not really making eye contact with the dude talking at her, and I snapped the picture from the hip as I was walking past, and I desperately wanted to hear what the dude was saying.

Probably it was very boring.

So that was Saturday night, and after the festival had shuttered a little after 10, and after I'd texted all ten members of my intern class (who are not me) without response -- well, except from Lakch, eventually, bless him, because he is always willing to drink, but by then I'd set off homeward and, eh, there is only so much drinking one can do in the company of a male who is a friend, but who is not going to help you get laid at the end of the night -- I did the only thing a girl can do, when she's suffocating in her dark jeans and her boob top and that eyeliner she only wears for special occasions:

I went to Winn Dixie.

Understand, people, I did not go to Winn Dixie in the expectation that it would be open. No, I went to Winn Dixie on a hunch, because I was hungry, and I wanted cheese, and lo, Wal-Mart had closed, I knew, and Whole Foods had closed, and Breaux Mart had closed, and I wasn't sure about Rouse's, but goddamn, I thought, goddamn maybe somewhere in this town there is a supermarket that is open 'til 11 on a Saturday night, and I am going to find that supermarket.

Winn Dixie was open, and I bought me some brie.

(It was pretty lousy brie, but it did the trick.)

Also: I biked home along Annunciation, where for a stretch there in the Irish Channel the pavement is fresh and sweet, and all I can say is, one, I miss biking on streets where the pavement does not rattle your bones, in the same way I miss jogging on streets where the sidewalks do not twist your ankles, but still, still. There was this stretch of Annunciation, and it was dark but not too dark, and there was no traffic and the stars were out and here you can see the stars, really, in a way that you can't in any other city I've lived in, and it was quiet and there was a breeze and I could've gone on forever, except for the projects in the way.

EXCEPT FOR THE PROJECTS IN THE WAY IT IS A METAPHOR OR SOME SHIT.

Sunday I spent all day alone inside my house, which should shame me more than it does. Dear everyone on the internet, Sometimes on the weekends I like not showering and not leaving my apartment. Is this wrong? Because I feel I should probably get it all out of my system in case I am ever burdened with a lover or a child. Or a dog, probably. A dog would also require airing.

Oh! But on Sunday Rachel and I did watch -- and AIM along to, for the first time in months, no, seriously, I did not even have AIM on my hard drive -- the Easter (Christmas?) Doctor Who special, Planet of the Dead. Which, you guys have no reason to know or care how badly it sucked, because you are sane people who think that BBC science fiction is more or less bound to suck, and you are probably right, but some of it sucks less than others, and some of it sucks *more*. And this episode, well, this episode, even sock puppets could dis.

(I just spelled "puppets" "poppets." Hi, I am somewhat tired. This bodes ill for the remaining 3 shifts of my fast track 5-up.)

The episode left such a bad taste in my mouth, by the way, and I was so determined not to leave my house (and also I had to stay up late, like, anyway, to get on, like, a night schedule? obv?), I started watching season 1 of the Doctor Who reboot. Right from my computer, because the internet is an awesome place of nebulous copyright law, or at least enforcement. (Is that how you spell enforcement? And why... why does it look like that?) (Actually, what is wrong with my computer screen OH WAIT IT IS MY EYES carry on.) And here I get truly dork on y'all, because now I will review, very briefly, a television show which is broadcast (1) in England or (2) on SciFi, but only sometimes, and also which only one of you watches: Oh, see, I had never seen any of the Christopher Eccleston episodes, and actually I kind of dig on the Doctor's being a little bit of a jerk, because I am so very tired, at this moment, of his always being Jesus. Plus, he is so adorable when he is all sweet on Rose, because he is kind of like that dude who is a manipulative asshole, but who knows exactly when to drop a compliment and then you have to do whatever he says. He is like that guy! And I totally like watching it.

FIVE EPISODES DOWN, SEVERAL DOZEN TO GO.

So that was Sunday, and Monday I started working nights, Monday to Tuesday and Tuesday to Wednesday. Before my run (*finally*) on Monday afternoon, I ran into the middle-aged nurse who lives in the other apartment downstairs and in the front, and we talked about PsychNeighbor's moving out, and to my great relief, the nurse said, I have no idea why all these young people I work with are moving to the suburbs, and also, I have never felt unsafe here, have you? Which, she has been here as little time as I have, but yes! Yes why should we move to the suburbs we have no children to ruin our lives so let's stay where we can stumble home from the bars.

Late on Monday someone finally pulled it together and coordinated a massive Chinese food order-out. This is squid salad, and it is delicious. Also, I will never have it again, because I have no idea where we ordered from. Goodbye, squid salad of my heart! Did I mention that you were delicious?

And then on Tuesday morning I was unlocking my bike, and this dude landed on my foot, and it was time to go home and go to sleep.

Last night there was no ordering out, but the med student did show me the *other* secret resident stash room, which has coffee and food sometimes. Also, a visible ant trail all the way from one wall, into and across the sink, and into a drawer. Dear ants, Your ways frighten me. Also, the shortest distance is, yes, a straight line, but not if you have to go down and then up again.

DEAR ANTS.

And so. So now it is 10:13 AM (circa), and I have to get up again at 4:30 PM in order to run and shower and go back to the hospital, and so I leave you with my two favorite news photographs of the past... cycle, whatever, days, nights, it is all one:

This one is from the New York Times' coverage of the Belgian dairy farmers' protests. I still have no idea what is actually happening over there, but if it means fit, square-jawed men in tight-fitting blue jeans will squeeze carefully aimed jets of milk from the teats of large, lowing livestock on the front page of the electronic newspaper whose website I check multiple times a day, well, SIGN ME UP.

And this one is from the Boston Globe's coverage of China's 60th anniversary celebrations. Except that honestly I wish that my OCD didn't compel me to add this caption in here, because my WTF? reaction was pretty priceless, y'all. Dear China: Sometimes I love you and your communist ballet.

COMMUNIST BAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLET.

Oh, American South.

Early this morning, after the rack had mysteriously emptied and before yet another chart appeared, the attending -- Dr. Swat, a Texan by birth and Louisianan by training, and, it turns out, friend since residency of Dr. ShortManSyndrome and the origin of his gun fetish -- and the long-time nurses and, occasionally, the California-born MS4 and I were hypothesizing as to the provenance of the Saints cheer, "Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?"

(Which, just FYI, had to be recited and repeated to me at the beginning of said discussion.)

"'Who dat' is just classically New Orleans," says Dr. Swat. "But we had the same cheer, the same cadence and everything, at my high school. I wonder whether one of the coaches brought it from New Orleans. Hey, OG! You grew up here, right?"
OG laughs, shakes her head. "But I've been here thirty years now, so what you want?"
"When did the Saints start using the Who Dat cheer?"
"Oh, lord. Well, it was at least fifteen years ago."
"No, more than that," one of the other nurses weighs in.
"This is the sort of question for which google was invented," I say, turning to the computer.

Conversation shifted as I perused wikipedia, which is really just as well: The article cites blackface and minstrel shows all the way back to the late 19th century, and links to a song, published 1898, called, ahem, "Who dat say chicken in dis crowd?"

Y'all. Y'all.

But then, I come from a state where the baseball team's mascot is actually a red man, and the cheer is, um, a prolonged, wordless faux-Indian chant, accompanied by (vaguely) tomahawk motions, and the cheerleaders are, apparently, known as squaws.

And I come from a high school where I was relieved, and actually surprised, to discover that at least our song *didn't* originate with racial slurs. (Did I ever tell y'all the story about the Georgia state flag, and also the backup Georgia state flag? Remind me sometime.)

It is a law of the South, I think, that, given any folksy, adorable regionalism down here, there is a nine out of ten chance that its origin will be in some way despicable.

Apparently you can only be a nurse 'til you're 29.

Offensive facebook ads FTW!

Why I bike to work: Today it did not rain.

From the ambulance ramp. It's sad that the Superdome is now associated forever with the United States government's abandonment of its citizens during a government-created disaster, because, while it is ugly as shit up close, and, most of the time, ugly as shit from a distance, occasionally at sunrise and sunset it catches the light and the building just positively *glows*. It's lovely.

-----

Today it did not rain after work, and when I biked home it was cool* and quiet, that weekend morning sort of quiet, even though it was already 7:30 and fully light outside.

"It is a shame I will sleep through this," I thought.

And then I went to bed.

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* Cool, incidentally, is relative to New Orleans. In the past few days the weather has turned from 90 degrees and 90% humidity to 80-something degrees and only, oh, 60% humidity? And you can bet you I will take it.

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Also incidentally, here are some additional photos of that closed... bookshop, maybe, on Magazine Street:




Is quite nice.

(That is another thing I miss about Philly: The murals. Who knew?)