I had a great day last week where I got to visit LeBonheur hospital downtown and browse the halls with a lady who worked there. Now, I constantly boast about my inability to exude any type of maternal ANYTHING, so what happened last week was surprising. We were in this play room with a little boy who had tubes hanging out of his nose and he was all banged up in the face, with stitches and wraps and bandages all over his eyes and cheeks. He had a big black eye and looked like he'd been in a bad wreck or something. Now, some people can't handle blood and gore that well, but I'm the first in line for the "Saw" movies or a real gory haunted house, so the blood didn't bother me.. But seeing a little kid all beat up looking bothered me. It sort of hurt me.
I guess he looked worse than he felt, because he was flying ALL OVER THE ROOM in a Spiderman outfit, bossing me around and telling me to eat a big stack of fake plastic donuts. So here I am, fake eating donuts and making pig chomping noises, and then I had to leave with the lady who was walking me around (sorry for ending a sentence with a preposition). So I'm walking out the door, putting my "donuts" on a little yellow kid-sized table, focused on completing the rest of the tour, and the kid flies up to me out of nowhere and hugged me, with his little hands around my butt. And it made me sort of want to cry. Even though I don't have that weird, maternal, "let's all sit around and tell breastfeeding stories" thing going on, I felt sort of complete or something when that little sick Spiderman kid hugged me. I wasn't thinking about the tubes in his nose or getting his spooky body fluids on me and I wasn't thinking about not having a job and wishing I'd never left LA and feeling like my life is a wreck. I didn't think about one single thing. I just received a hug from a sick kid, and I hope I hugged him back.
Other good things: I went to New Orleans with my bee eff over the weekend, and it felt like a flu shot for my quarter life crisis. It was so good to be away. It's weird that I'm not from there and have never lived there, but I always feel like I'm home there. It always feels right. I got to spend a lot of time with my family and I got to sleep in and be a big lazy pig. I also got to party with some politicians, but as to not put in myself in a position to be sued by anyone in office down there, I'll leave it at that. But I'll say that certain elected officials love to smoke cigars and do the "Thriller" dance.
What else. I wanted to write a bunch of stuff about our trip to NOLA and how my cousin scored free tickets to the Saints/Steelers game (my first NFL game!), but my brain feels sort of gray. I've been studying for this dang test so much that when people talk, I can only imagine things like, "y=mx+b" in my mind. I haven't been a very good listener recently.
Today I was so burned out from studying all of this crap that I took a couple hours out of the day to make a big pot of chicken and sausage gumbo. Nothing is better than a really homey gumbo when the weather sucks and its raining its face off.
My insomnia is back. I think it's because test day is near, and when I have pressure or stress of any kind lingering around, I usually can't sleep. So. Let me tell you about the creepy non-sleeping event of last night.
It was about 2:00 a.m. and I decided that I was sick of trying to sleep organically and thought I'd pop me a melatonin (those things work like a champ, BTW.). So. I take one, and decide I'm freezing to death, so I turn on the heat, and in about 3 minutes, I'm passed out, drooling like a beauty queen. I can smell that carcinogenic heater smell in my REM cycle. So then I start having this dream that I'm holding a Barbie doll over a fire, and I can smell her polyurethane hair curling up, and her face melting off, and it was like something from a horror movie, and I woke up, sweaty and scared. It was weird. When I was awake again, though, I was thinking about how smart humans are, in a way. What made my brain think of a melting Barbie when I smelled that heater smell? Pretty amazing associations, if you ax me.
In a fruitless attempt to avoid burnout, I've been watching classics on Netflix in small increments in between studying. I watched "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" for about three days. There was this part where Richard Burton tells this young punk kid, "There's quicksand here and you'll be dragged down before you know it." and when the kid gets all punky with him and tries to tell him to shut up, Burton says, "...but I'm trying to give you a survival kit. Do you hear me?" I thought that was so cool. The analogy of a place feeling like quicksand and then defending the analogy with calling it a survival kit. I loved it. Boy, can I relate. What a great line. The rest of the movie, though, upset me a lot. The drunken insanity and screaming fits of rage. Made me think of my old boss. I wonder if people who are crazy rage-aholics get some sort of rush out of yelling and screaming?
I feel like I'm writing a lot of half-thoughts, because I'm tired and burned out.
I'm going to make another attempt at sleeping. Hopefully no burning Barbies this time.
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