yeah, you know, you blink and there's another entry... I am restraining myself as much as is safe (we wouldn't want me to explode, right?), but I'll just have to accept the babbling fool I am and how this style is not condusive to long and winding comment conversations because there's always something new on my mind and we have no patience (you?... me?... who is we?... the royal?... the collective?... the conglomerate?... the universe?... more?)...

you may have been tagged (yes, several new people were added today... scary, huh?), but you can ignore it if you don't like those kind of things... I won't hate you, really... I don't know how...

and if you're rich, or just slightly generous, any help you might send would be appreciated...

and if anybody knows what blogmad is about, feel free to let me know (curiosity is itching like crazy)... I signed up or joined or registered or something, if we all do, we can all go crazy together... who's with me?...

and here's something we didn't find in previous entries, but just because we didn't find it does not mean it's not there, so if this is a rerun for you, oh well, skip ahead...

my phone rang tonight (that would be 12:08am on 9/20/05)... I did not recognize the number, nor can I guess off the top of my head from the location and since I do not get a signal in this hospital, I do not know if the caller left a message... hopefully I'll find one later (I didn't, alas, so it remains a mystery)... if you're out there, dear caller, it may help to know I am usually unavailable from 10pm through 8am because I am one of those great pretenders that Jackson Browne made famous... whether I am actually a happy idiot is debatable, since I am torn between loving the work and doing my best to tolerate the management styles since they undermine the work.... but I do struggle for the legal tender these days... I'd be a happier idiot if I was in love, but then, that's me...

if I know you, dear caller, then remind me to enter your number into my phone with a name so I'll recognize you next time... and if I do not know you, well, who are you?... random callers are very welcome, so I hope you call back...

so I get excited when the phone rings, call me strange...

somehow the happy idiot reference rings as familiar, so maybe it is a do-over... the same number didn't call again though, so my curiosity remains and this helps quell it...

and this is a new entry...

and just to test your metal, we start with some work crap... I haven't slept more than a few hours in several days (I think I had a brief nap yesterday), so pardon the incoherences...

ok, starting a bit earlier than usual, and yet almost two hours later than I might have started had I chose to take no break tonight... but since they decided to pull a staff from the unit, leaving just two (2.5 technically, since they count the LPN as half on this unit, though she does none of the workload that we do), I decided it was time for a break... I went home to pick up the order form for cookie dough that I forgot, then stopped at a few fast food places for various people who wanted food... it's my own brand of in-your-face to administration because they try to tell people that there is a rule about not allowing leaving the facility at night (they actually tried to write it in policy once)...

the one time they formally brought it up at a meeting with me present I listened and when everyone was done talking and seemed to have come to a consensus that we can not leave the facility at night, I looked at the head administrator and said "I understand you would like to strongly encourage people to stay in the building at night for their own safety and because we work with a skeleton crew at night, but federal labor laws state you can not tell us what we can do with the thirty minutes we are allowed for a non-paid lunch, so unless that law has changed, there can be no actual rule or policy that restricts our leaving the grounds during that thirty minute unpaid lunch break."... the head man admitted this was a true statement, answered "no" when I asked if they were going to start paying us for lunch breaks, and the issue has not formally come up again while I've been around...

I do keep hearing newbies questioning why I am allowed to sometimes leave the facility at night, so the initial orientation seems to include the "no leaving" unwritten rule, but there's no actual rule so I point that out by taking a drive out every now and then... the night supervisor often takes that as a personal affront, because that's how she is, but I don't bring up her sleep breaks (which ,are against the written rules and grounds for termination) that she and most staff take each night and so far, aside from grumbling and attempts at back-stabbing about any little thing, she's fairly easy to ignore... even when she comes over to stare at me while I am eating what is obviously freshly bought food from some nearby restaurant... I try not to laugh in her direction, especially not with my mouth full, unless, of course, she asks for it...

ever the professional...

tonight I sit here with an Elpien, who only get out of her chair when absolutely necessary... if you're anywhere around, she'll ask you to bring her what she needs rather than wheel herslf over to get it herself... she's obese, but not at all handicapped (and bites the hand of anyone who suggests she's lazy or incapable of doing something, even if she asked that hand to do something for her... she leaves the confines of the nurses station when she absolutely has to, which is usually twice a night, once to heat up her lunch and once to go next door to do fifteen minutes work she's required to do on the unit next door... tonight she had her lunch delivered hot by me, so she'll rise only once... she will get out of her chair and leave the plexiglass enclosed and locked RN station to enter the patients area only when there's a doctor's order saying she must... she usually plays a gameboy, reads, or nods off when there's no one around to gossip...

the other person I work with tonight is someone who's known for sleeping and seldom works over here because we do not sleep on this unit... she's already slept about an hour and woke to tell me she's taking a sleep break in the day room... middle and upper administration is well aware of this common practice on the night shift because they are, by written guidelines, supposed to review the tapes of the cameras at least weekly...

and she leaves just as we're supposed to be waking the kids due to some special schedule and sure enough, they'll ignore the fact that they scheduled dangerously short...

so that leaves me alone in the hallways with twenty mostly sleeping teenage girls who's biggest fear and recurring nightmare is some man will attack them in their sleep... needless to say I do my best to stay on camera...

it does not help that I only got about an hour and a half sleep today because I was not sleepy when I got home this morning and knew I had to be alert to get the cookie dough (and should have double checked the order at the school, even though it would have been embarrassing to Precious to have me double check her right there in front of all her friends... I just hope it does not cost me more money to fill the orders she missed when she inventories the stuff)... and then it was stop at work and distribute half the orders (day shift) and then over to Berry's place because she has a big freezer and lives right across the road from this place and that's where the rest of the order was stored and then we just had to stop for Pepsi and sugar drinks and then dinner was ice cream and cookies (I passed this time, being still too close to my weight wall)...

and here I am semi-bouncing off the walls while everyone around me sleeps...

I did decide to employ the assistance of my old friend, Code Red, tonight, since the usual Monday catch-up on sleep did not happen, at all... and tomorrow I must make it to the library (or it'll be $15 a day starting tomorrow night) and somehow I must get the orders Precious missed today... but first I must find a way to keep my eyes open alone in the dark hallway for four more hours tonight... maybe i should have bought a two liter Code Red...

day dreaming sometimes helps, but this tired I just might day dream myself asleep... or somewhere else...

last week or so, when I was doing yet another all-dayer into another night at work, I was feeling the fatigue even more than I did tonight and I wrote this next prt entry that now becomes the next part of this entry (oh for joy, almost like it was planned or something)...

and there is (counting on mental fingers) three hours to go... time, I think, to give in to caffeine... each day I wake and feel bloated and hung over and hear myself thinking that today should really oughta be maybe best the day I stop the decadent diet of overindulgence and overeating and bring myself back to a healthy life and all the accoutrements that come with it... and then I get here to a point in time, a circumstance like this one... the eyes scream to close... the head bobbles and wants to tip over... the body wobbles and wants to fall down... and yet I am at work and have three hours to go before I can leave...

I look down at my belly... you've met my belly, haven't you?... it is sometimes unnoticeable either because it is flat or I wear baggy shirts... it is sometimes protruding a bit as it does at this moment and has for a few weeks, at least... pushing the envelope, burning the candle at both and the middle, living without sleep...

I wonder how many years I am actually carving off my life?...

but I've always said, from my earliest instincts, that there's time to sleep after we die...

but I've always known that sleep feels so good, so refreshing, so rejuvenating, so right...

and in comes the noise and bustle of the housekeeper for our unit... the best housekeeper in the place by far and away, but she sometimes forgets she's walking into a sleep zone... and today she's got issues to vent about as she's been gone for almost a week because she was in a car accident and we had to hear the whole story and I tried to be tactful about not interrupting, but... shhhh, remember the kids are sleeping... I waited until she seemed good a vented before I shushed... she seemed to need the audience and recognition... she thanked me for the incentive award (Fish Award, it is called) I wrote up for her last week which now seems even more on time than ever)... and that was another half an hour...
I then waked around for another half an hour, mostly just wandering aimlessly from one place to another, checking the laundry room, the galley, the nurses station, but not leaving the hallway for more than a few seconds at a time because it is not wise to leave one person alone in the hallway for extended periods... that, of course, is not written into policy...

two hours to go....

the cleaning chemical fumes are inducing coughing now... I used to be conditioned to these smells when I was working for the building services company in Buffalo, NY... I worked so much overtime there that I had enough money saved after one year that I took the next year off... suicidal tendencies... I was escaping from torture at the hands of another into another type of torture at my own hands... luckily, I got over it and now am semi-recovered as a complete fool for love... it's lonely though, this not being a complete fool for love gig... I may relapse...

one drawback about sitting at the computer and using writing as a means of keeping myself awake at work is that the clock is all too present... and whether or not the old adage that a watched pot never boils is true or not, there is no doubt in my experience that a watched clock moves much slower than a clock ignored... don't quote me physic equations or scientific facts, I have no need for facts just now... I do my best to avoid the clock, I do, but it just keeps getting bigger and bigger, threatening to swallow the entire screen, until I glance over at it stare it down...

my eyes are now playing tricks on me...

I could probably almost hallucinate if I was not at work trying to maintain some degree of decorum and more importantly, an alert state of vigil... I know, it didn't stop me before... you may recall my emergency room electric band aid acid trip?... I must have written about it, though the clever play on a cult classic title (was that Tom Wolfe?) just came to me in a flashback of the first time it came to me and I think this is the first time I am actually writing it down... anyway, for those of you who have not experimented with drugs or sleep deprivation or running a marathon or really profound extended sex or any exercise or any other emotional physical stimulus that induces hormones and endorphins and other chemicals to flood your brain (or at least essential areas of your brain) then oh well, never mind...

maybe that was already part of a previous entry too... apparently I am doing a file-dump of all the work stuff that wasn't erased... that was not exactly the plan for today's entry, but then, there's almost never a plan for any entry... I write, I don't plan...

anyway, I arrived home a few hours ago... why I am not falling over is one of those strange phenomenons that are just part of life as I know it... I drank three twenty ounce waters since I've been home and after not falling asleep for two hours, decided to eat so I heated up some leftover eggplant rollatino pizza... yum...

the balance of power between the CD copy program and the browser is tenuous at best... the CD copier program will not allow the browser to open when it is running so I am stuck today as I started copying CDs before I opened the browser so there's intermittent internet at the moment...

I think it's the music that has my adrenaline cooking up the awakeness... I do not want to return the CDs until I copy them so I'm determined to copy as many as possible today and maybe I'll spend that $15 more and return them tomorrow... sleep is for normal people... crazy, maybe, crazy for music...

Max is giving away his baby on a rerun of Rosewell... yeah, they're teenagers... when I was a teenager I could not get into shows that were supposed to be about teenagers but were actually written by adults and acted by twenty-somethings... it didn't make sense to me (and it had nothing to do with their ages, it was the story and acting, it did not feel or look like real teenage life)... but then, I seldom went through periods of heavy TV watching (since working night shift the "TV as background noise is the most I've had it on in many years)...

I do like looking at some of the people on TV though...

I think I'll call this an entry now and start on a new one... it would be nice to have something else as satisfying to do with my hands than tapping at the keyboard, but until something like that comes along, I'll just be your friendly internet neighborhood constant writer... looking for my constant readers...

love your day as youself, and love yourself well...

. o O ( NOTES ARE THE NEW HAPPY PILL ) O o .
(just let me know you were here)