Sonicrusk Blog

Yesterday, I got off of work at 0700, farted around for a few hours, took a shower, and fell asleep around 9 or 10 in the morning. I took a Tylenol PM to help me get to sleep. Actually, it was to ensure that I got to sleep. I then slept until 11PM. I got up, went to my couch to watch some TV, and ended up falling asleep again until 0430.

I’ve been having these periods recently of being depressed as hell. Sometimes I feel isolated. All I do is work and sleep. I am waking up at odd hours when no one else is awake. Even if I wanted to do something, everything is closed. Plus, no one is awake. I wonder if this has to do with working the night shift.

The actual night shift itself is not so bad. Day shift people make it seem like we just sit around on our fat asses all night. There are some good points to both shifts. At night, there are less people around. The patients often do sleep. They also seem to ask for more: food, pain meds, and any other nursing type thing you can think of. I look at the Medication Administration Record (MAR), and sometimes see that a patient hasn’t asked for any pain meds all day. At night, they ask for it multiple times. During the day shift, there are more people around getting in your way. You also have patients leave for hours at a time to get procedures done. The pharmacy is also open and that makes a nurse’s life easier.

Enjoyment of a particular shift depends on your co-workers and list of patients. Sometimes, I get socked with all confused, or needy, or bossy, cranky patients. Alzheimer’s patients are a handful. They babble incoherently whenever you talk to them, often need restraints, can’t follow commands, and are uncooperative when you need to give them medications or start an IV. If you have more than one confused patient, your night is dreary. Patients themselves can often add charm and enjoyment to work.

Another thing is the particular set of co-workers you work with on a particular night. To be honest, I work with a lot of foreign type co-workers. I don’t know why they gravitate to the night shift. They are Punjabi and a shitload of Filipinos. Filipinos are nice folks, but they group together and speak Tagalog, even when you are in the room with them. Punjabis do the same thing. I chuckle because there are some nights when the group of Punjabis gathers in the break room to eat and speak their language. They clear out, and the group of Filipinos goes in for their turn to eat. You can walk around the nursing ward and find the particular ethnic groups sitting or standing around each other. This includes the white nurses and staff. I imagine a prison yard is the same.

I find that I am often in a haze, and feeling isolated. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it. There are times when the only people I talk to for days at a time are my co-workers or my patients. I hardly talk to my friends or family. They all work the day shift. All of my single friends from school have dropped out of sight. I have my core group of friends: Hoat, Kosar, Yomama, Chuck. Sometimes I don’t talk to them for weeks. Same goes for my family.

Another strange thing is that sometimes my shift ends at work. I had such interaction with my co-workers, got so jazzed up, that I am depressed to be coming home. This is not saying much as often I talk to co-workers I have nothing in common with.

Everyone gets down sometimes, and I am no different, but I wonder if I have depression. There are times that I do not feel like reading my favorite blogs, or watching my favorite TV shows. I need more hobbies, more interaction with people around my own age. I’ve thought about learning a martial art, if it means that my class won’t be at some odd time or filled with ten-year-old kids. I’ve also thought about getting out of the house on some nights regardless, just getting the fuck out of my house, but this would probably involve going to some bar, drinking alone, and listening to some drunken blowhard.

I try to solve my problems instead of thinking “woe is me.” I’ve thought if going to day shift at my same job site would improve my mood, but it just doesn’t sound appealing. I’ve thought about different jobs, but they might want me to work night shift as well. I’ve even wondered whether or not it is night shift at all, or just a passing phase. Maybe I’ll go buy something to knock me out of my funk.

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Since my last post, the most exciting thing to occur to me is a visit to my buddy Kosar in San Francisco (not to be confused with this Kozar unfortunately).

To regular readers of this blog, it might seem like I am out of town quite often. In reality, I haven’t been out of Bakersfield since the end of the baseball season in early October. Four long months in this town without relief gave me a kind of cabin fever, as much as that can be applied to a city of 300,000.

I won’t give you every juicy detail. Kosar is set to be moving from SF in less than two months, so this might have been a kind of farewell to the city, at least for a while. I finally understand the mass transit system too. Anyway, here are some pictures that I took with some small bits of commentary.

Here is a cop standing on the street.

Here is a cafe not too much further away from the cop where I eat breakfast pretty much every day while in SF. That is, if there is room to sit. People like to camp out in SF, reading the newspaper and taking it easy.

There is a real dive bar in downtown SF called The High Tide. Last time I went there was with Hoat and Kosar in December, 2004. While there, we met a foxy young Korean bartender. A little more than two years later and a return to the Tide, we met the same bartender. During this period, she had spent some time trying to be an artist in San Diego. It didn’t pan out and she returned to SF. Here she is in 2004 , and a few days ago.

The High Tide Bar in San Francisco.

I took this picture because I wanted to show the bustle of the big city. Note the anorexic blonde on the left with her boyfriend. I didn’t realize they ended up in the pic. Forever memorialized.

That’s also why I took this pic.

Fun times.

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The other day, I was taking a shower after work, listening to NPR while Barack Obama announced that he was indeed going all out and running for president. Of course, the commentators started talking about all of the other candidates also running, and it made me think, where the hell were these folks three years ago?

I’ll be honest, and I hope it doesn’t affect your opinion of my blog or my character, but I have never been a fan of George W. Bush. In 2000, I didn’t follow politics too much as I spent much of it stationed in Germany watching AFN. I remember thinking that Dubya didn’t have much of a shot. I really thought that John McCain was a much better candidate and that he would easily win the GOP nomination. History tells us that I was quite wrong.

In 2004, I again thought that George Bush had no chance of winning. I talked with a number of people, and nobody had that great of an opinion of him. I talked with lifelong Republicans that stated that they had had enough of his policies and would probably not vote for him. I thought that John Kerry was a solid guy with honorable service to his country opposed to Bush, who had spent his life just breezing by.

Kerry was trounced badly, and I was mystified. It took me about a year to realize that he wasn’t the best of candidates, and did nothing to defend himself against ridiculous attacks on his integrity. He was ho hum to a lot of people, lacking dynamism. Upon further discussion with a lot of Republicans, it turns out that they voted for Bush anyway, despite his faults.

For 2008, the Democrats have some intriguing candidates: Clinton, Obama, Bill Richardson from New Mexico. I’ve heard them all speak, and I like them. Even Chris Dodd and Joe Biden have good intentions, although I do not think they have a chance at winning the nomination. Polls say that John Edwards is right behind Hillary Clinton in popularity. However, I wonder whether or not I am living in 2004 Fantasyland Redux.

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A lot of the blogs on my, as Al Swearingen calls it, daily hitlist are abuzz with Anna Nicole Smith’s sudden death. Was it overdose? Foul play? The lady was the center for tragedy and controversy with the death of her son a few months back, the court cases involving her old dead husband, and now the paternity of her newborn.

Smith was only 39. A few months ago, I told you about how I went to my first funeral of an old family friend. She dropped dead in her kitchen while cooking soup at age 46. I never found out for sure her cause of death, but the thinking was electrolyte imbalance related to drinking beer and prescription medicine.

When I was in nursing school, my class took a quiz. The last question was “How would you like to die?” It sounds like a horror movie villain slogan. Anyway, most of the girls in my class answered “in my sleep.” I answered “massive heart attack.” They looked at me funny. I answered that way because of James Coburn. Coburn was a good actor, and seemed like a pretty cool dude. He died in his living room at age 76 while listening to jazz music with his much younger sexy wife. Now that’s the way to go!

Sudden cardiac death is always freaky, because there is no rhyme or reason to it. There always seems to be a reason to death, even if it is just shit luck. I don’t know what killed Smith, but SCD sure the hell sounds like a possibility. Sometimes people just drop dead and there is nothing you can do about it. No warning, no lifestyle factors. Some people destroy their health for decades and they still keep chugging away. Go figure.

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I noticed that Jagular Ken got himself a new blog format. He ditched the green and white of his old Blogger page and now has a darker, foreboding Wordpress site.

I’ve never worked with Blogger, but I do know that I like Wordpress much better than Simpleblog. I have never met another soul that uses it. WP looks neater, and things are formatted nicely.

I have noticed that a lot of Wordpress blogs, including my own, use a “recent comments” plugin. Nothing works better to revive old posts at least in theory. I have found myself reading old posts, liking them, but not commenting since I figured the author wouldn’t see my words anyway. As I said, it is all in theory for the most part. Very few times has a recent comment not written by me revived an old post.
 

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I’d have never thought that I’d have two consecutive movie chumps for posts, but that’s the way it rolls sometimes. I could buffer it with a cheap post on the Colts Super Bowl win. It would be empty to me; I missed virtually the entire game and heard about the outcome from a patient of mine sporting gigantic frames.

The topic of this post is workplace romance. Romantic disasters are usually concealed and kept behind closed doors, akin to alcoholism in the family. Everyone has these skeletons, but they are never discussed. I have heard about the romantic disasters of all of the real life people who visit this blog. Unless you get married at 18, and stay married until you croak, you will have an opportunity to make a complete and vulnerable ass out of yourself, usually with an asshole of the opposite sex. So nobody ever talks about how dumb they were made to feel. I will.

Workplace romance has never failed to be a monumental catastrophe for me, regardless of age, occupation, or status in life. I mean, it has been such a disaster, I don’t know what to compare it to. It started with my very first girlfriend at age 16. I’ll call her Linda.

My first job was at a fast food joint in Oildale, a northern portion of the city with a spectacular rate of bicycle riding adults. This job offered crap for hours, but during the holidays, they would truck us out to Interstate 5 to work at a joint out there owned by the same people. It was busy as hell and the available wage hours were plentiful.

I met Linda while working there. She was from Shafter, a kind of suburb about thirty miles north of Bakersfield. Looking back, I think what I liked about Linda was her softness. She was kind of lushly built, but had sweet pink lips, thick light brown hair, and green eyes.

At that young age, I became quite enamored with Linda. We would make out on every date. We would have simple dates: I would see her at a band recital she played in, or take her to eat somewhere with my measly fast food check, or a movie. I wasn’t Linda’s first boyfriend. She had dated an older bad boy named Sam. He was from a rich family, but as I remember correctly a real asshole. He smoked.

So as Linda saw that I liked her, she backed away. I probably came on too strong. Hell, I was 16-years-old. She had a slutty friend that lived across the street from her. They would smoke cigarettes and try to get me to smoke. I did, although believe me, I didn’t smoke them correctly because I never coughed. I went with them to the mall once where they shoplifted trinkets. I tried to show my girlfriend how to drive my stick-shift truck in the mostly vacant Auto Mall. She kept jerking it to a halt and laughing her ass off.

We broke up, and I think she went back to Sam. I’m pretty sure she had still been seeing the dude. Her slutty friend called me up and told me not to call anymore. Heh, I didn’t think I was calling too much as it was. I visited Linda about a year-and-a-half later, at her house for some reason. Maybe I made an errant phone call. I honestly don’t remember. I do remember that she tried calling me after that, with a girlish, “Hi, whacha doin’?” I could imagine her toeing the dirt. I was very abrupt with her during that conversation, and never heard from her again.

My second foray into workplace dating was around this same time. I worked at a local buffet for a couple of years and it was the most fun job that I ever had. There was a pretty blonde girl who also worked there as a cashier. For about a year, we worked side by side without any fanfare. I didn’t try to pick her up; maybe I had the bad taste of workplace dating in my mouth already. More than likely, I was probably playing it cool. I don’t quite remember how, but about a year after working together this girl started flirting with me. I started flirting back. She asked me out. I knew that she had broken up with her long-term boyfriend recently, but I didn’t care. Out first date was at Cindy’s for dinner, and then An Interview with a vampire. We fooled around a lot. I stayed the night with her when she housesat for a teacher of hers. I spent New Year’s Eve with her. After that, it fell apart. I had seen her at the mall with the long-term ex during the Christmas season. I made full eye contact with her. She denied it was her. HA! I found out that she had a boyfriend in between me and him. He was at Cindy’s that night. It turns out that was a place he liked to hang out with his crew. She had suggested we eat there to make him jealous. Then she started dating another guy we worked with and I eventually quit. I don’t know if I was more heartbroken or feeling stupid.

I swore off dating at the workplace. I had a very hot latina girl named Carol that wanted to go out with me when I worked at a convenience store. I sidestepped that opportunity, but hadn’t quite learned my lesson.

After basic training, I was sent to Defense Language Institute to study Russian. There was a crew of us there, all with the same amount of service just about, all striving toward the same goal. There was an older gal there who I will call Tiffany. Tiffany was six years older than me. She had already established herself in life, had graduated college, and had even been married and divorced. For some reason, I ended up in her sights.

I ended up hanging out with this woman a lot and having sex with her numerous times. She had the same friends as I do, some of whom still read this blog. Tiffany was a monstrous game-player and manipulator. She had several boyfriends on the side. I was quite dumb. I fell for this chick quite badly. She would avoid calls, and then call me out of the blue. Sometimes I would get a booty call. She was playing guys like a xylophone.

It turns out that Tiffany was looking for a babymaker. She found some chump virgin to marry her and get her pregnant so she could get out of the army just in time to complete her Russian training. I had to spend several months living with these two as they walked past me holding hands. Finally, six months later, I was transferred to another base. A couple of years later, I found out that she fucked one of my best friends. I had a round of nasty emails with her via AOL and Hotmail followed.

Years and years passed. I didn’t work much in nursing school, and what chintzy jobs I had never availed themselves of eligible single women. I didn’t dabble with my classmates because it just never came up. Women I did fool around with are for discussion in another post when I have time.

I became an RN and got a job at a hospital. I get a lot of attention. I am a single RN, young, relatively handsome and clean-cut, funny and with no fucking big-time baggage like massive debt or evil ex-wife.

I mostly focus on work because like a lot of men, work makes me feel good. I have a good reputation at my job, as far as I can tell. I do notice who is good-looking, single, my type. I was looking for chemistry because I knew I’d get few opportunities to date like a mad man. Workplace gossip.

A new lady started working there. I noticed her one day as she is orienting on the day shift. She is pretty enough. She made strong eye contact. This chick is a widgeteer (fake job title). I’ll call her Sally, although she is Latina. Sally is destined to work nights with me.

On nights, there are a few single women who I notice. One is a young Filipina RN I went to school with. There are some women that come in here and there for other services. I don’t chat them up like a smarmy asshole. I like to play it cool. Maybe that’s my downfall.

Sally makes it to the night shift, and I really don’t notice her. She develops a friendship with another of the widgeteers although I do notice that they spend a lot of time talking with certain male government personnel not associated with the hospital.

I never talked to Sally as I never had any real reason to. She never worked with me in my group of patients. Then one day, right before Thanksgiving, I did start talking to her more often. We started flirting more. I was still flirting with the pretty Filipina RN. Sally and I really start to flirt more heavily, little flirtatious games. I still thought I’d jive better with the Filipina, but then I found out that she had a newly acquired boyfriend. That possibility fell by the wayside. Finally, it felt like it was going to happen no matter what I did. During one of our flirtatious games, I asked Sally for coffee.

I went out with Sally for coffee. A few nights later, I took her to dinner. We made out at my place for a couple of hours. I thought we had good chemistry. She told me that she had dated a mookuman (fake job title) prior to me. A mookuman works at a hospital. I was a little disconcerted that this chick had already dated a guy from work less than one month into a job.

The next day, I worked with Sally. She was in kind of a bad mood. Her moods were sometimes good, and sometimes bad. I asked her if I could make her dinner, since she had told me she wasn’t much of a cook, although as a single mother, I figured she damn well should be better than me. She suggested a chicken dish. We set up a time and she no-showed on me. Ouch! That’s the first time that happened to me. It wouldn’t quite be the last. I couldn’t reach her on her cell phone all weekend. I eventually just figured she was a rude asshole. Then, the next time I worked with her, she immediately apologized at the beginning of the shift and suggested that she help me out with the dish next time. I forgave her. I asked her if she was still interested in dating me. She replied yes. I was just looking for some honesty. Sometimes even that is asking too much.

I talked to her on the phone. Sometimes she would reply, sometimes she would not. She was always very friendly at work. Some folks had a suspicion that we had gone on a few dates. I never confirmed nor denied. She said the same thing, but who knows?

Eventually, we got back to our flirting ways. I thought that the making dinner bit was too much, so I again suggested coffee at a joint by her house, just like our first date. I didn’t know how busy she got with her kid. I wanted something easygoing so she could get away for an hour or so. No big deal.

I worked with her the night before the new date. I drank coffee with her at work and we arranged for a time for out coffee date.

I said, “4 PM.”

She replied, “Is that the time? OK”

The next day, I was stood up again. I called her cell phone from my cell at 4:30. She probably did not recognize my cell phone number because she picked up. She was again apologetic. I stopped by the store and found a missed call and message on my phone. She apologized effusively, saying that she hadn’t gone to sleep until late and was not even sure that the date was still on since she hadn’t heard from me. What? I let her stew for a bit while I got a haircut. I called her cell phone later and left a message stating that, yes we had confirmed the date during the previous night’s coffee. How weird would it have looked to be calling just a few hours later after work and again before the date to confirm yet again and again.

I ended up talking to her the next morning. It was a pleasant conversation. She told me that she had a doctor’s appointment and errands that kept her awake until 2PM after working the night shift. She had barely got to sleep when I called the day before. She hoped that we would be able to reschedule.

I worked with her last night, and Workplace Dynasty took place. Whenever a certain male wickadocker (fake job title) works the same shift as Sally, he spends a lot of time up on our floor shooting the shit with her every waking moment. Sometimes it takes Sally away from her work it appears. Last night was no different. It sometimes seems like he is trying to finish his job elsewhere in the hospital hurriedly to return to our floor to visit Sally. I remember this guy saying that he had to kids and that the “kids’ mom worked.” No other wickadocker spends nearly as much time on our floor.

Almost none of the women really like Sally. She never sits in the nursing station to visit. She never visits with any of the ladies we work with. It is always with men: male RNs, the wickadocker, various other men that she stumbles on in the hallway. I never really gave a damn. To me, she didn’t owe me anything except honesty.

One of the other widgeteers was talking about this phenomenon of Sally’s. She told me that Sally’s wickadocker friend was indeed married with children; she had seen him and his family at the county fair recently. She remarked on the wickadocker’s constant presence when Sally worked. The widgeteer made a joke about Sally’s recent cosmetic surgery with some of the ladies in a coded phrase involving eyes that I had to have explained to me.

Sally didn’t really make any attempt to talk to me last night, and to be honest, I was really starting not to care. It is out of sight out of mind with Sally. All of her bullshit and maybe my sense of self-worth make me not care too much nowadays.

The night progressed and then all sorts of things came to a head. The wickadocker came into a patient’s room while I was in there with Sally and another co-worker, but not to help. As I was leaving, I heard him say that he’d give her a call. Wasn’t this dude married?

Shortly thereafter, the mookuman talked with one of the RNs. There was an incident a while back where Sally disappeared off the floor for a good half-hour or so. People have later inflated the duration to 90 minutes, which my memory does not reconcile. Anyway, the charge nurse finally had to page her overhead that night. I asked her where she had been. She said she was in the bathroom throwing up, a side effect of taking some antibiotics on an empty stomach.

The mookuman and RN are of the same region. There had been a rumor apparently that Sally and the M-man had fucked or screwed around in an empty stairwell. I don’t remember seeing the M-man that night, but I do remember Sally being kind of diaphoretic. I had just thought she was just sick.

The RN chided the M-man about what he supposedly did in the stairwell. He got flustered that anyone knew about that. He didn’t want anyone to find out. He told the RN that Sally was just his plaything.

This spread around in a matter of minutes between the second widgeteer and the RN. Then, yet another RN told Sally that the widgeteer had been making fun of her recent surgery. Intrigue ensued for a bit until shift ended.

My opinion of Sally melted like a snowball in sunshine. What a bunch of tawdry events. Sally has got to be the worst politician in the world. She did absolutely nothing to garner a positive reputation or foster good will with most of her fellow co-workers of the same gender. I came home and deleted all of Sally’s numbers from my phone. I can’t believe I got back into workplace dating for this bullshit. I should go with Hoat to Russia to find a lady or start perusing Match.com for one of those endless Picassoesque portraits of square-jawed women.

Last week, I had talked with Sally about some of the rumors I had heard about us. That we had went on a date and fucked. Everything always ends in fucking with romantic rumors. So you might be asking why I believe these certain rumors. Well, Sally had told me she had broken up with the mookuman. Lie. If they hadn’t fooled around in the stairwell, why had he become so flustered? Why is she letting the married wickadocker call her? Whatever the case, Ken’s right; it does feel good to write about this stuff.

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