weekend, take n

Wow, my last 20 or so entries have been almost entirely a recitation of recent personal events. Want to get into more interesting ponderances. Though I think this is a reflection of my recent life more than a trend unique to my livejournal. This one will be no exception. But soon, slowing my life down soon. (yeah right)

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So, after the late night park picnic, I had phlebotomy training the following day. Mostly theory and a dry run (no stick). No uncapping of needles. It was good and important, but it built up alot of tension around the blood drawing process. There are important do’s and don’t’s involved, certainly. But I tend to have my emotions bouncing around on the inside, and that makes such processes all the more intense.

I got to research the history of phlebotomy (didn’t turn up much in 15 minutes, but hey, so it goes). After class was over, I deliberately stuck around to hang out with John, one of the longer running clinic people, and the trainer. We watched this show on PBS about the native american occupation of alcatraz. I thought it was pretty damn cool, though I was sad (if so very very far from surprised) about how the tale progressed. Afterwards I went home, fooled around for a bit.

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called looking for . I regrettably had to disappoint, but he came over and played me in a game of Go anyway. It was interesting, and challenging, and a very close game, without handicapping (applying the ‘second person get’s 5.5 stones’ rule, I won by .5 points, otherwise, I lost by 5, which is an amazingly close game. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game before where the introduction of that rule made a difference). I also found it educational. Did some dishes.

Patrick brought another generous hospitality offering. I did dishes, He called the Joshes and . We ended up heading over to the gaming party had invited me to, which I had passed on due to transportation and training issues. We dragged Josh off to some fairly tasty mexican where we talked loudly and vigorously on many topics. Went back to party. Played strange hoity-toity art auction/stealing board game. It was silly, and I didn’t really get into it, but I won, so that was cool. But the people there were of my subculture. There was a little 1-1.5 foot statue of Kingdoc above the fireplace (or whatever his name is. Big rat creature from Bone, I was impressed that I correctly remembered his name). Someone was reading Sandman. They had a Galactic game that I was introduced to at ‘s place. No titan (thanks to for introducing me to that one), but we certainly wouldn’t have had time for it. Talked about Gaiman, and Transmetropolitan, and other comics and games and stuff. Also played scrabble. I had two blanks, and could at one point early on have spelled “areolas” with them, for a bingo, but I thought only the latinate pluralization of “areolae” was valid, at some point, I passed and traded in my redundant vowels for different redundant vowels. Sad was I over those mistakes. Still, overall, it was neat. I want to do again. Got to bed around 3am.

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Woke up around 9:48 for my class at 10. I wallowed in self-pity until about 9:55, got up, decided I was late anyway, shaved & got my ass to the clinic. Made it in around 10:15ish. Didn’t miss too much. More info, this time on butterfly needles. Then demo draws using needles, and a dry run for me. Lunch. More drawing after lunch. On my first practice draw, I accidentally uncovered the needle before I was ready to use it, though I did manage to immediately shield the needle & drop it in the sharps container. After that I completed drawing the tubes smoothly. Until I withdrew the needle while taking the final container out. Prior to taking off the tourniquet. My model (the instructor) noticed I was keeping my eyes on the tube and not the needle. I then got drawn by a fellow trainee. Next was practice with butterflies. I missed on the first vein, probed for a bit, then gave up and tried again on the same guy, other wrist. It was attributed to bad anchoring of the vein. Second time I also took some probing, but I got it. I was complimented on my calmness. It’s good to have a professional and reassuring poker face, but I assure you that it’s a jungle in here. Then one of my fellow trainees got to do his second practice on me, and I tried on him with two sticks, and no successful blood draw. I’m kinda antsy about this, but I’ve been assured it will come with practice and that I will have many opportunities for that.

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Again with the shift. I so did not feel like shadowing anyone, so I joined chris in the lab checking people’s urine for white blood cells, and discharge for bacteria. I’m getting pretty handy at it, and I feel much more comfortable doing that than actually handling people. But Chris and I sat around, he’s a recent graduate of the berkeley linguistics program, and chatted. I claimed with a fair degree of confidence that I could explain computers from electrons to operating systems to anyone who cared to listen. He asked me to do it. We made it from the general structure of crystal silicon and the effects of doping to logic gates before I lost coherency. I did introduce him to base 2 representation of numbers. It was actually alot of fun. He really enjoyed it. I made noises about having him help me with spanish. As if I remember enough of it to not have to basically start from scratch. We had more than enough medics, so we had people to do food & drink runs, nobody sat anywhere by themselves, and things got done pretty smoothly. Still ran late. Towards the end the chatty friendly Hepatitis group lady came by, and I rounded out her vials so that she was spinning 6, to test my vaccinations. Yay.

Also recognized a followup client. And stared at him. Not sure if I recognized him from a prior clinic visit or an out-of-clinic experience. Doesn’t matter. Either way, I should have maintained the polite fiction that I had no idea who he was. <sigh>

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Post shift involved yet another debate on the great scheduling ordeal. We now have an ideal of committing to one shift/month, with someone polling people by phone on the subject. I think that the debate has mostly been of the form “here, I have a complete solution which will solve this problem, if you would only comply with it” and “I don’t like that solution, and I’m not sure I see this problem the same way he does.” And very little principled negotiation on the matter. Oh well. The form of the end solution was significantly different, and perhaps preferable.

Went out to dinner at the courtyard place of crappy food. But the pasta primavera I got wasn’t so bad. 2nd meal of the day, and 2nd noodle meal of the day. By this time I had a persistent annoying, but certainly not raging, headache. Dinner was fun and involved discussion with the shift doctor over my college ambitions (about which I’m not doing as much as I should. I’m very reluctant to approach the professor types I need to talk to in order to get anywhere in this game.) Went back to the clinic and as we were re-entering someone talked about a hot tub party idea (I oooo’ed at the idea). We scatter, as per par. I got my bike, met everyone back by the door, where people were talking about going to the white horse (it was like 11:45pm at this point), and I was like “sure!” (Gay bar, generally the crowd doesn’t do much for me, but it’s a very chattable bar, and we’d be bringing the pleasant crowd.)

I get on my bike and head down. Meet up with people outside and start chatting. parking foo, collective politics, etc, etc. We go in. People meander to the bar and to seating. I see , , and Tom, Josh’s friend, sitting there chatting. Bit of a surprise for me since Tom and Josh are peninsula people, but okay. (well, actually, south bayers, but I likes my alliteration)

I was feeling a bit awkward about it, actually. I was sorta surprised when I heard that Patrick and Josh, Aaron, and Andrew [ed: corrected me, he was not, in fact, there that evening] ran into one another and hung out on a separate occasion (after I’d introduced Patrick to them at a dinner party type thing, blah, blah, blah). An unexpected crossover from social groups. Both Josh and Aaron having expressed disdain for irc’ers that was kind strange. Anyway, this felt like kinda like that, only on a different scale or something. I pointed both groups out to one another, but they maintained relative separation, which was fine. I wonder if I should have invited PAJ&T over to join us, but maybe I wasn’t ready for that blending.

One of the medics had the “he’s you’re roommate? No really, he’s you’re roommate? He’s hot.” shtick. Gee. I’ve never heard that before. Really, I swear. Now, see that line forming off to the left? Yeah, feel free to go get in it.

Someone else was shocked that I’m 26. I wonder if they thought I was older or younger. Never did explain. We also did a little survey, and it turned out that I had had the most sexual partners out of the group. I think I had had something like 2 or 3 times as many as the closest other person. Hmmm. Interesting talk about sexual dynamics, the wonders of the internet, picking people up while walking down the street. And about how a medic who got annoyed by my commenting on how I wish I had gone to the ethics training (which they’ll be making up with me later) because I had read the section of the ethical handbook about medics and trainees not getting it on and there were definitely some medics I’d like to break that rule with, had in fact slept with a trainee or two immediately prior to the beginning of training. Hmmmmmm…. Fits the letter of the guideline. And it’s just a guideline. And it does make sense. I dunno. I’m not really wanting to be having sex with anyone at this point in time anyway. I just want to do the clothed snuggling thing, and to have holding happening with my sleeping.

Oh yeah, I dropped the “sexually abused, accused of rape by first friendly sexual contact” bit of info. Not too much reaction. But someone asked the very novel question, “was his family pretty fucked up?” I can’t believe I didn’t go down that avenue before, but yeah, his family was really fucking messed up. His sister sprinkled me with holy water from the giant jar in the common area of their trailer, while yelling something about casting out the devil in me. (and this was before her brother and I fooled around, on the sly, though it was less sly than I had thought). As soon as I said the word “trailer”, some of my compatriots started laughing. It’s interesting to compare and contrast your blinders with everyone else’s.

Then home, sleep, and a boring monday. Yay back to work tomorrow.