facing financial demons

i wish they were cute and fluffy like sammy. but they are more like the sharp pointy ends of his teeth. argh. why on paper does it appear that I should have 100 surplus every month? what am I doing with this extra 100? maybe I should be saving more off the top. then I would see the extra in my savings account. I think I am just pissing away $100 every friggin month.

ugh. this sucks. i hate writing out a budget. ugh

Three Way Calling

oy. i just got conferenced in with my mom and brother while they debated his impending move. which is next week. for which he has not hired movers. and for which his live-in BF is not taking the day off.

oy.

aarrrghghhhh blogger arrrrhgghghgtthhhh!!!!!!!

So I started a new blog to entertain my friends about the trials and tribulations of being pregnant with twice the bang for your buck.

I even had a clever name and URL.

and blogger hates me.

You see, the anonymous platypus had been just that. anonymous. so I could vent about people places and things that might otherwise be offended. When I started my new blog, I had two blogger accounts. One for the platypus to hide out in and the other to share my insanity with friends and family.

Friggin' blogger merged them. and now I can't seem to access my baby blog.

Frigger.

AP

Dusting off my resume...

The internet is the reason that I never get anything done. Not that my job here is so taxing, but I have a folder full of personal shit that I should be attending to. But I’m not. I’m just flipping around reading blogs and being annoyed when my phone rings and someone wants me to do actual work.

What the hell do they think this is? And I’m somewhat bitter that I have to see patients in the afternoon. I know that technically I have the time, but I feel like it’s setting a dangerous precedent.

Here’s the problem. I am understaffed. I know that’s a common problem for city hospitals, but we see almost 5x the national average number of patients. And my colleague is out on family medical leave. So in order to keep the clinic numbers up, I’ve started doubling up my appointment times.

But this means that I’m seeing twice as many patients in roughly the same amount of time. I won’t even bring up the fact that I’m twice as pregnant and twice as tired. But the main point is that if this continues for the next three months and the administration becomes aware that I am doing this volume alone, what’s to stop them from either firing my colleague and/or mandating that I continue this workload.

That will just not do. I think part of the reason that I am surfing around the ‘net looking to be entertained is that I just need to turn my brain off for a few minutes. I am working 10 hour days here and all of the other above mentioned factors, I think are finally getting to me. I just want to put my head down on my desk and take a nap.

I think it’s time to take the job hunt a little more seriously. I have to get out of here, possibly before the babies come. Part time work while hauling around a uterus full of twins is starting to look better and better.

Brrrrr

Well, at least it's cold today. After yesterdays rant, the universe must have heard my lamenting and sent me some frigid arctic air. That makes me happy in a twisted way. If I can't throw snow at the Duck, at least I can force him to wear gloves. Small victories.

I have nothing else really blog worthy to report. Yesterday we went to Fortunoff to try and scam them out of some lenox soup bowls. That was a miserable failure. I also managed to see 10 patients yesterday and not write a single chart note. Also going to be a miserable failure when I attempt to remember who has what today. And this morning when I attempted to get dressed, I realized my black dress pants, which up until the wedding were almost obscenely too big, now barely zip.

Yippie. I have already gained my allotment for the first trimester and I have 4 weeks to go. That's gonna rock, I'm sure.

We did get a treadmill from a friend and the Duck is going about trying to cancel our still-shiny-from-lack-of-use gym membership. Maybe I will be able to waddle my fat furry ass upstairs to use the treadmill in my house. Although I've had it for 2 days and I haven't made it up there yet...

Is it too early to start buying maternity muumuus?

Snow, or the lack thereof

I wish it would snow. I mean, really, this is New York. It's December 19th. There should be snow. But there's not one flake. Not even the hope of a flake. and why? because people feel the need to drive absurd SUVs and buy disposable toilet brushes.

Not clear on how disposable toilet brushes ruin christmas? Well, they're made of plastic. Making plastic toilet brushes uses petroleum by products I'm sure. and expends a whole lot of energy. which i'm sure doesn't help the whole global warming problem. But god forbid you should use an old germy toilet brush to clean your sparkling toilet with. I mean, what if your children decide to drink from it. And I'm sure you're pouring bleach on the damn thing... not that bleach will kill the germies on the toilet brush while it's poisoning the water supply...

But what the hell do you care? You have an SUV to drive around in a pour antibacterial hand sanitizer on your children when you pick them up from their myriad of resume building activities.

The funny thing is that everyone here claims that they drive these monstrosities because of the weather... What weather? We don't have any anymore. Because of your stupid ass cars and rampant consumerism and lack of concern for anything that does not directly impact you in your lifetime.

but I've got news for you. It's December 19th and it's not snowing. It's not going to snow. That seems to be impacting your lifetime.

When I was a kid, I remember legendary snows. Snows so high we couldn't see the dog outside except for little puffs of snown and an occaisional black tail sticking up. Snows so bad we couldn't leave the house. On more than one occasion, we had no electricity or running water for almost a week. I'm sure it stressed my parents out, but we had food, we had heat from a wood stove and we had plenty of candles and lamp oil. And we didn't have to go to school. For a week. And I'm not talking 5 years ago here. The last big storm we had when I was living at home, I was still in highschool. Maybe it was 12 years ago. But it hasn't snowed at all yet.

And did I mention it's 60 degrees? Actually when I came in to work today it was 63 on the car wash sign. 63 degrees Fahrenheit on December friggin' 19th. I am wearing a T shirt. It's ridiculous and it's sort of ruining my Christmas.

I know you think I am just a bitchy pregnant woman, but it's seriously hard to get in the holiday spirit when you can't even wear a hat. Or throw a snowball. It totally blows.

Entitlement

The duck and I had a very long debate this morning in the car. well, we have a long car ride, so the debates are always long.... anyway, back to the topic. the whole conversation started over an article in the local paper about an art exhibit going up at the local jewish community center. It's a series of photograps taken by an area college student portraying jewish life in upstate new york. The photos that they selected to go along with the article were a ribbon cutting at an Anne Frank exhibit, a rabbi typing on her lap top, a refrigerator lined with aluminum foil for passover, a glatt kosher chinese take-out and another rabbi at a shofar making workshop with a ram's head on a picnic table. The photos themselves are not what got to me. it was the article.

The article quotes the artist (remember, upstate NY college student) citing a similar photo essay taken during the 30's in Pre-Nazi Germany as her inspiration.

Here are my issues, which I tried (unsuccessfully) to lay out for the duck (who happens to be jewish) this morning.

1. Jews are regular people. These are photos of regular people doing mostly regular things. Maybe the ram's head and tinfoiled refrigerator are not so normal, but that's part of the issue. Every culture and religion has it's peculiarities. By taking a photo-journalistic approach, this appears to come off as this girl is Jane Goodall amongst the apes. These people are different, they should be studied, in pictures even.

2. If the jewish community is hip to this, they are highlighting their differences and in not such a positive way. I mean, this is basically a one-page ad for "why jews are different from you" complete with decapitated ram.

3. I can barely deal with the pre-nazi Germany reference. Germany in the 1930's was fully Nazi-ed. This other artist's photos are meaningful because it captured a rare moment in history. The jewish community in new york is in no way in danger of being herded off into camps and exterminated.

4. However, they clearly need a PR person as this is not the way to convince your friends and neighbors that you are just like them and we should all just get along.


So of course, the duck tells me that all of my anger over this is misplaced and really stems from the fact that I hate his mother, and that she thinks she is special because she is jewish and I am not.

But I think it's more than that. I think I actually have a problem with the whole issue of being special, or entitled, whatever that entitlement is.

I will use a different example since everyone gets so snippy about the holocaust. Let's look at american culture in general. We live in a society where everyone thinks they are owed something. We have students in public schools who believe they are entitled to high grades and excellent test scores. They hire private tutors to write their college entrance essays and then expect to get into top universities.

A disproportionate number of our population is obese and yet the weight loss systems that are the most popular are the ones that allow you to eat all your old favorites for a reduced calorie count. Instead of focusing on working hard to change your behavior and dietary preferances to include more whole grains, produce, and protein, we expect to eat a chocolate bar that will make us thin. Why? Because we deserve it.

Only a very small fraction of the populous cares about the amount of fossil fuels they consume or the affects that they might have on the environment. We won't be around, why should we care? and besides, we deserve ginormous SUV's and a fully climate-controlled universe.

Here's the news flash: You are not special. You are just like everyone else. You don't deserve anything different. You are not different. If you really want to be different, just give a thought to how easy it is to turn different into scary and then into threatening. Just like my jewish in-laws who peer through their front blinds at the agfani neighbors and speculate about all the things they do, eat and think...

Someone should do a photo essay on them.

AP