California Love

I remember reading in the bathroom reader that 90% of the time, the first stall in a public restroom (meaning the one closest to the door) is the stall that is least often used (they also state that 80% of statistics are made up on the spot, so make of that what you will), and therefore usually the cleanest.  I’ve used a lot of public bathrooms in a lot of different states and cities, and I’ve found this little tid-bit of information to be mostly true.  Yes, from time to time the first stall is the bearer of a turd left behind or a dribble of urine on the seat, but for the most part there are very few surprises, and the first stall is almost always open.  

So Simon and I have decided to put a ring on it.  On both of us, actually.  And no, we’re not engaged and there’s no wedding in sight.  Marriage to us is two people making a serious commitment to each other, and we don’t really feel the need to declare that commitment before the government and/or the church.  So there you go.  People have thrown out the term “promise rings” for individuals who wear rings on their left ring fingers who are not “officially” married, as if it’s something negative and reserved only for lovesick teenagers.  Isn’t a wedding ring basically a promise ring?  A token of a promise to love, honor, cherish, etc, all the days of his/her life?  And perhaps it’s more than that...it’s a declaration of tolerance for one’s shopping habits, acceptance of hoodie obsessions and spider fascinations.  It’s the embracing of gassy dogs and bearded, gun-toting, overall clad, right wing in-laws.  It’s the attempts at spending holidays with two different families who live 5 hours apart, and the car rides to get there.  It’s traveling across the country together with 3 dogs and a trailer, and never turning the radio on because there’s always something to talk about.  It’s the knowledge of a favorite movie, a favorite song, and a favorite food.  It’s sitting next to each other for hours at a time to watch 6 episodes Modern Family.  It’s about being a good sport about winter activities, and exercising against one’s will just so the other won’t have to do it alone.  It’s a promise to stick together during good times and bad, long car rides and short ones, garlic breath and bad gas.  I guess that’s what marriage is to us.  And just to be clear, we don’t begrudge people who get married in churches or in front of a judge, it’s just not important for us.  We don’t have the rings yet, but we have them picked out.  Call us hippies if you must, but the rings are made from recycled silver and fair-traded gemstones.  That’s something that was important to both of us as a couple.  We got our ring fingers measured yesterday, and it was kind of surreal.  As we were leaving the jewelry department (we got measured at Macy’s rather than Tiffany & Co so we wouldn’t feel obligated to make an effort to look interested in anything they had to offer), I grabbed Simon’s hand and giggled and said (rather loudly, of course, since I only have one volume most of the time), “We’re getting married!!” 

Being in California where it’s sunny 99% of the time, there are a lot of motorcyclists here...all kinds, from sport bikes to crotch rockets to cruisers.  And you know, I usually reserve a decent amount of disdain for people who ride crotch rockets, but not here.  Crotch rocket riders out here just blend in with everyone else...they’re not tearing around corners as fast they can go, they don’t pop wheelies and they don’t gun their engines to see how quickly they can make it from one red light to the next.  I barely even notice them.  Like everyone else in Palo Alto, they just do their thing and don’t draw attention to themselves.  I will have to say though, when we’re sitting in traffic and a motorcycle flies by whilst riding the white lines (that’s legal here...or maybe it’s not enforced to not do it), it always catches me by surprise.  There are enough bad drivers out here that I wouldn’t trust them enough to scoot between them while going 60 miles an hour.

Which brings me to the drivers.  Oy.  There are some terrible drivers here.  Simon penned it perfectly when he said that drivers out here can’t just drive.  They have to be doing something else while driving.  9 times out of 10 (statistic made up on the spot) when someone is driving like an idiot, they’re either on their phone (illegal in California) or they are looking down at something in their laps, most likely a phone.  We passed a guy the other day who was holding onto the steering wheel with his left hand, holding his phone like a platter in the right hand (weird) and was reaching across his body with his left hand to shift gears.  Yes, he was driving a manual with one hand, and not with the hand closest to the stick.  Now, I had a one-armed teacher in high school that drove a stick shift...why, I have no idea, but he at least had an excuse to be driving with one hand (he also used to balance a cup of coffee on his stump, but those are stories for another time).  These idiots out here?  No excuse.  Just tonight we saw a guy driving with a paperback novel in one hand, and he would open the book to read at each red light.  Really?  How much of the story can one really absorb while looking up every 2 seconds to check to see if the light has changed?  And then not put the book down when he began driving again.  I can’t think of any book that would be that good of a read to rationalize that sort of behavior.  And I almost have to wonder...do bad drivers know that they're bad drivers?  I think I'm a decent driver, but do the people with whom I share the road think I'm a good driver?  A good buddy of mine has an elderly grandmother who maintains that she is a good driver because she never gets in accidents.  He says the only reason she feels this way is because she never looks in her rearview mirror to observe the mayhem left in her wake.  This is a woman who will swerve into oncoming traffic after getting the car washed to avoid a puddle.  I don’t know if it was being in Minnesota recently or what, but I’ve been much more honky than usual since returning from my trip home.  I honked twice yesterday and once today, and that was with restraint.  I could probably honk at idiot drivers every time I leave the house if I wanted to, and that includes while on foot.  Perhaps I should take some lessons from the one-handed drivers out here and drive with one hand on the wheel, and one hand firmly on the horn.

So there’s this photo website that I’ve been using in the last few months, and it’s a site with the intention of having pictures of every place on earth posted by people that have actually been there.  Being a newcomer to the vast world of photography, I was really intimidated by some of the photos on this site.  Obviously, all photographers start out somewhere, and even professional level photographers have pictures in the archives that are a little under exposed and a little out of focus.  What I liked about this site is that it posts the details of the photo itself...the shutter speed used, the aperture settings, the light sensitivity, even the type of camera that the images where shot with.  So I posted a few pictures on there, mostly from my travels from the last couple years.  What’s a little confusing to me about this site is that there’s a rating system for the photos, and users can look at other people’s pictures and give the photo either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  I get the thumbs up.  I don’t get the thumbs down.  Well, that’s not true...I get that there are photos out there that people aren’t going to like for whatever reason, but I feel that on a site that has some sort of artistic feel to it, a thumbs down is counter-productive to creativity.  If the person giving the thumbs down had to give a reason why they were giving the thumbs down, then that would at least be constructive.  Case in point, I posted a picture that I took while on the beach when I was in the Bahamas.  The photo is of a Bahamian beer sitting in the sand, with a few beach bodies and the light blue ocean fading away into the background.  At last check this photo had a rating of -10.  Why, I can’t tell you, since users aren’t required to document their disdain.  Oh, and the rating only gives a cumulative score, which means that I probably had more than 10 thumbs down, because the photo itself initially had a positive rating, but there’s no way to see how many positives it had before taking a nose drive into the red zone.  Was the composition of the photo bad?  Was the subject matter offensive?  Were there some “landscape purists” out there that took offense to me including a beer can in my photo?  Did people feel that it was an unfair portrait of Bahamian culture?  I may never know.  Another photo that I posted was of a sailboat marina in San Francisco, also with a -10 rating.  Honestly, what is so offensive about sailboats?  After  these negative ratings on my own photos, I took to the site to see if there were any other photos that had negative ratings, because surely, mine couldn’t be the only ones.  I found one other photo with a negative rating.  One.  Granted, I didn’t sift through the thousands of photos on the site, but talk about discouraging.

You know, I was thinking the other day about how much I hate poop.  And I know, I talk about poop all the time and I have a vast library of poop stories, but in reality, I really don’t like it.  I loathe it, in fact.  Every day when I take the dogs out and I have to pick up their turds, I’m disgusted.  Simon is still perplexed how after over 10 years of dog ownership, I can still exclaim “this poop stinks!” every time I clean up after them.  As if I was expecting a different result or something.  My pugs literally just got done with a diarrhea episode that lated for 3 weeks.  I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered euthanasia as an end to the problem.  And I hate pooping.  Sure, nothing feels better than an extended sitting session when you’re uncomfortable, but the whole process from beginning to end is just gross.  And I would like to take issue with the obvious design flaw that placed our most intimate body parts right in the thick of our most disgusting ones.  Seriously.  Did it all have to go right there?  It’s as if all the orifices had to be grouped together or something.  When I’m at work and have to clean up someone’s poo, it’s not as big of a deal.  It’s part of the job, much like a waitress refilling your water glass at a restaurant.  It’s expected of me, I deal with it, and I move on (granted, some blow-outs are way more gross than others).  But poop in my personal space, I just don’t like that at all.

Yesterday as Simon and I were returning home from work, we parked in front of our neighbor’s apartment, and I pointed out to Simon that the man in there was not wearing a shirt.  Simon was quick to chime in, “and also no pants.”  Sure enough, there he was in only his underwear, feeding his kids breakfast.  Ah, the perils of a ground floor apartment.  And this man’s blinds are always open.  Apparently the risks of being seen in one’s skivvies do not outweigh the benefits of being free to wander around one’s apartment in one’s skivvies.

For our trip home to Minnesota over Labor Day weekend, we boarded the dogs at a private residence rather than a kennel, which is what we usually end up doing.  It was quite the process.  First I had to have a conversation with the woman running the operation so she could get a feel for me as a person.  Then we had to have a “meet-and-greet” at her house so she could get a feel for the dogs.  After passing those two things, we had to have a full day of doggie day-care so she could get a feel for how they would behave when I, their favorite person, am not around.  Against all odds, they were accepted.  I really had no worries about Lady, since she just goes with the flow and keeps to herself, but the pugs are another matter.  Brie is getting up there in years, can’t see very well, and is very defensive.  Cooper feels the need to control whatever situation he’s in and will attack any dog who gets in his way, regardless of size.  I saw him knock over a malamute at the dog park once, not necessarily by the strength of the launch, but I think mostly by the element of surprise.  There is no reason that a 100 pound dog would expect a 20 pound smash-faced borderline retarded pug to morph into torpedo mode and launch himself with all his might.  I certainly wasn’t expecting that.  So I had misgivings about how they would behave around a couple of strangers and a house full of dogs they didn’t know.  Turns out they did all right.  Until the last day when Brie was starting fights.  Apparently she had had enough of the butt sniffing and whatnot.  Really, I don’t understand how dogs can sniff butts so often and for so long.  Mine still sniff each other’s butts and they’ve been living together for years.  Isn’t there a “been there, done that” thing that should kick in after a while?  But no, there’s a daily sniffing, usually multiple times.  So where I was going with this whole train of thought...at the end of the boarding, the man who assists with the boarding said that he would be more than happy to take Lady off our hands if it were ever our intention to get rid of her.  I basically told him to get in line.  Everyone wants Lady.  I’ve had multiple people tell me that if things ever don’t work out with her, they’ll take her in a heartbeat.  She’s sweet, she’s quiet, she’s smart, and she’s extremely loyal.  No one ever wants the pugs.  I was told that they had to sleep in the kitchen while they were being boarded because they snore too much.  Welcome to my life.

I don’t know if it’s just my personality, or if I just encounter things that I feel should be changed, but I feel this intrinsic need to always be fixing things.  I use that an excuse for why I dated such messed up men for so long.  One in particular who told me after dating for a month that he wanted to marry me...I told him to 1) get a job, 2) get a checking account, and 3) get a credit card before I would even consider such a silly idea.  I didn’t feel that these were outlandish things to ask of a 24 year-old man.  Unfortunately I had to let him go after 6 months because he had accomplished exactly none of those things.  He preferred to be paid in cash from the family business whenever he felt like it, and to sit on my couch and eat all my food while I was at work, which resulted in an empty pantry and a boyfriend who was 30 pounds heavier at break-up than he was when we met.  Did I ever try to straighten him out though.  I really gave it my best shot, and in the end decided that some things just can’t be fixed, and it’s really not my place to fix them to begin with.  I couldn’t see the logic in spending not only the rest of my life, but another day with someone who just couldn’t take responsibility for himself.  So here I am at a hospital that has staffing policies that I just don’t agree with (i.e., they need to be “fixed”).  And this isn’t the first hospital...I’ve made a stink at several different hospitals...usually with little or no outcome, but a stink was at least made.  After voicing concerns early in this particular assignment, one email to the manager and a meeting with said manager, very little has changed.  I recently received a mass email from one of the assistant managers about how our unit has the highest patient fall rate in the entire hospital.  I was offended and insulted and immediately responded once again with my staffing concerns.  As if we were standing by and letting the patients fall.  As if we were ignoring them.  Honestly, I’m tired of hearing about it, and I’m tired of taking the implied blame for it.  When a hospital unit is under-staffed, what do they think is going to happen?  Good patient outcomes?  I think not.  I sometimes wonder why I even bother.  As a travel nurse, it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.  On one hand, I feel as though I can voice my concerns without fear of repercussion, mostly because I’m a temp and I don’t have to worry about long-term negative outcomes because my time in one place is limited.  The idea of getting fired doesn’t scare me; I’ll just get a job somewhere else.  And really, if I’m going to get fired for raising legit concerns about patient safety, then maybe that’s a place I don’t want to work in the first place.  In the same vein, I feel as though being a temp puts me at a disadvantage for being taken seriously.  Travel nurses who voice concerns are often branded as “difficult” or “complainers.”  I know some travel nurses have the thought that it’s best to just weather the storm, don’t make waves, you can deal with anything for 13 weeks, and move on when the contract is up.  I wish I could do that, but I just can’t.  A job isn’t just a job for me.  I care about the patients, and I care about my coworkers.  I care about my work environment, because limited time or not, I still have to work there.  I don’t like being taken advantage of any more than the permanent staff does.  Some of my nurse friends and I joke about going all Patch Adams and making our own hospital...hahaha!  And I know that there are so many factors that influence the way a hospital is staffed, factors that I’m not even aware of.  I know that medical units (which I work on most frequently) tend to actually lose money for hospitals (lack of insurance, high volume of medicare/medicaid) and therefore have smaller budgets than other units that generate revenue.  I don’t know why the other units can’t just share the wealth, we are one hospital system, after all.  I only see it from one side.  And it’s because of this limited view that I don’t have any answers for how to solve the problems, I just have the means to complain about them.

So it turns out Ol‘ Pink (my cell phone) isn’t dead after all.  It just needed a new battery.  It’s alive!!  I know I said in an earlier blog that I would make the transition to the iphone when my current phone no longer worked, and I was almost there.  I really was.  And then my cousin’s boyfriend alerted me to the fact that my phone’s issue didn’t appear to be mechanical, that it sounded as though it just needed a new battery.  Why didn’t I think of that?  I should consider myself lucky for having gotten 5 years out of the original battery, and maybe 5 years of good battery life was the reason I didn’t even think of it when things started going wonky.  For $6 and free shipping I got myself a new battery off ebay and Ol‘ Pink is up and running once again.  I do want the iphone, and I’m sure within a year I’ll have one.  I’m just putting it off as long as I possibly can.  It seems silly, kind of like how I put off getting a GPS for so long, and now I can’t imagine going to a new city without it.  I just don’t want to become one of those people who and play with the phone all the time.

Which brings me a huge beef (there’s always at least one).  Simon and I recently went to an outdoor concert in a fabulous venue in Berkeley.  I love outdoor concerts.  So we’re watching the show, and I couldn’t help but notice all the little glowing cell phone screens everywhere.  The woman seated directly in front of us was actually playing some sort of scrabble game on her phone throughout the show.  The man she was with frequently leaned over to watch.  Okay, so is someone playing scrabble on a 4 inch screen really all that interesting, and is it really more interesting than a concert being played by talented musicians?  And if this is how they spend their time at a concert, what do they do when there is really nothing to do?  Probably the same thing.  I just don’t get it.  Other people’s behavior with their smart phones has been the biggest deterrent to getting one myself, because I don’t want to turn into one of them.  I know that smart phones keep the world at your fingertips 24 hours a day, but is 24 hours a day really necessary?  And then I wonder why I even care...someone playing on their phone throughout an entire concert doesn’t affect or harm me in any way, so really, what’s my big beef?  I guess I just think it’s sad.  It’s sad that people can’t take a couple hours of their time away from their phones to sit and just listen to some good music.  And mostly, I think it’s rude.  People that play with their cell phones in the company of others are basically saying that the people on the other end of the phone are more important than their current company.  It’s like the internet is providing social ADHD.  Multi-tasking and social networking have completely ruined the idea of doing one thing at a time.  I hope none of you are reading this while driving...or while doing any other activity that might involve machinery, another person or animal, etc. 

Anyway, that’s enough nagging/ranting/complaining/announcing from me for one sitting.  Brie has gas (again) and I need to move away from her.  Ick.  If she were wearing pants, I would seriously question if she had pooped them.