Life Now

Sunday:

I slept in very late this morning after getting to bed very late last night.

I had strange dreams. In one, I cut up a pineapple and a cantaloupe to add to a fruit plate. I was in a very small kitchen in a very small apartment in a building that seemed somewhat threatening but wasn't really. I woke up from that dream thinking about Seychelle nuts or coco de mer, the largest seeds in the world (30 to 60-plus pounds), which I had been reading about before I fell asleep.

Dave and I had plans to meet my mother and brother for lunch at the Chinese restaurant we like, so I finally got up and showered and got dressed. On the way there, I picked up a prescription (my antihypertensive has doubled since it's only sort-of working at its current dose) and then we picked up my brother and went to meet my mom. We had a very large, very tasty lunch and came home.

I had plenty of homework to finish up today. I like my instructor, but he has a bad busywork habit that he takes out on us. In addition to our five chapters of reading, we also had to look at two Power Point presentations, read two online reports, familiarize ourselves with five websites, watch four TED talks and a ninety-minute documentary and write up a care plan based on the documentary as well as a behavioral health assessment from last week's clinicals. All of that was in addition to studying for our weekly exam. I'm over it. This is week three. Two more weeks of this nonsense to go.

The documentary we watched was called The Bridge. I found it on youtube and set it to run at 1.5x its normal speed (which I increased to 2x its normal speed during the long, drawn out, moody shots of the bridge--the Golden Gate Bridge--itself). The film was kind of brilliant in a horrible way. The filmmaker got permission to film the Golden Gate Bridge for a year, and then he and his camera crew filmed over 10,000 hours of footage, including capturing the final moments of 23 of the 24 people who committed suicide by jumping from the bridge that year as well as the people who tried to commit suicide and who were either pulled back up onto the bridge by passersby or who were talked back up by the police. Then the filmmakers found people who had witnessed the suicides and/or the family and friends of some of the people who had died and interviewed them and cut the whole thing into this ninety minute documentary. So first you watch the family and friends talk about the person who died and then you watch the person climb over the railing and jump from the bridge.

See? Brilliantly horrible.

That's this class in a nutshell.

As I was putting off doing my homework this morning, I was tooling around on the internet and I surfed onto this page about elephant caves. Do you know about these things? They are caves, dug in part by elephants, in a mountain in Kenya. The elephants go down into the cave and use their tusks to break off pieces of the walls to eat so that they can get salt. How amazing is this world?

Monday:

I was up at 4:45 after about four hours of sleep. It's not enough. I zombied my way through getting ready for lecture and actually made it there on time.

I happened to meet up with a couple of students who I've been with, more or less, from day one. One is from Kenya. One is from the Philippines.  We sat and chatted for a bit about how their clinicals are going. (We're all in different clinical groups.) By the time lecture rolled around, I was sufficiently caffeinated.

We did a few exercises during class, all uniformly depressing. We're in the middle of a suicide/domestic violence/abuse module, which sucks. It sucks to study it day in and day out.

After class, I went to the library and got a coffee (the coffee guys asked where I had been, said they've been keeping decaf coffee on order just for me) and sat and studied for about an hour. Then I had to go take an exam. I got a very low A on my exam, which keeps my grade in the high B range, which I'm fine with. I'm not doing nearly as much studying as I'd need to to earn an A. (In fact, I'm not doing nearly enough to earn a B, but I know how to work the system and I could take any multiple choice exam on any subject and probably pass without studying or knowing a thing. It's a skill. And after being a student for so long, tests don't scare me. Like, at all.)

I came home, changed into my pajamas, and managed a 40 minute nap before I went to meet my brother. We hit the grocery store and stopped for giant fizzy drinks, then I came home.

Dave had reminded me of something I had forgotten about completely, namely a dinner date we made with friends who we see about once a term. I like them, but there's no time for honest-to-goodness socializing anymore. When I'm out, I feel guilty because I should be home studying. When I'm studying, I feel guilty because I'm ignoring social obligations. That is my life now.