Please excuse Jimmy for being. It was his father's fault.

Here's some irony for you:

Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message "He's lying" was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing the "lie detector" was working, the suspect confessed.

It gives me the almost, but not quite, complete opposite of hope for humanity.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

So, today the axe fell on my book order. Which means that I got the bill.

Which was also the only thing approaching any sort of productivity that happened today.

Sad, is it not? But I'm no longer feeling any sort of guilt about doing nothing. I refuse. My guilt glands have suddenly and apparently permanently atrophied.

And, as a result of my wonderfully adult-ish and achieving day, I have absolutely nothing to write about.

I know, it never bothered me before. But I simply cannot seem to come up with a few hundred words to say about rain and nothingness. I only got this many, and I'm rapidly approaching the end of them.

I close with a Get Fuzzy quote: "What the... Sweet Beagle Biscuit! Can it be?!"

And Watched the Day Go Down in Fire

Francis Bacon:
One of the most influential minds of the late 16th century. A statesman, a philosopher, a writer, and a scientist, he was even rumored to have written some of Shakespeare's plays.
How he died: Stuffing snow into a chicken
One afternoon in 1625, Bacon was watching a snowstorm and was struck by the wondrous notion that maybe snow could be used to preserve meat in the same way that salt was used. Determined to find out, he purchased a chicken from a nearby village, killed it, and then, standing outside in the snow, attempted to stuff the chicken full of snow to freeze it. The chicken never froze, but Bacon did.

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Today I had two cups of chai tea - one hot and one iced. I went absolutely nowhere, and did absolutely nothing productive except a little brainstorming. I read. I nothinged. I watched flashing images on screens.

It was all quite utterly blissful.

If a little unsatisfying.

It's true. I needed a break - I enjoyed my break. But really, there's nothing soul-satisfying in doing... nothing. You need it sometimes, but not all the time. And I think I'm at peace with that.

Peace out, y'all.

-Mackenzie

When Paxton Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy

Introducing: The Most Half-Assed Day Of My Life.

Ordinarily I wouldn't use that word. You know which one. The one that made most of you wince. This is, after all, a G-rated blog, as I have reminded my rapt audience many times, but really, this is the only word capable of expressing my utter annoyance with and contempt for myself. Mom says not to dwell on it. Ha. So I get over a week and a half of being seriously depressed, not to mention biting the heads off of my entire family and PMSing, only to completely screw up biology. I won't rant about it again. I've ranted many times today and the refrain is getting old - and you'd probably all be bored. It's enough to know that I have screwed up just about everything I could possibly screw up in the past two weeks concering my biology class. I've been even stupider than that day I backed into my grandparents' car over Thanksgiving break. Yes, I've been that stupid.

At least I was able to work off some of my contempt for myself on the annoying, pushy, seriously donkey-headed patients who came in today. Honestly, what kind of person grows up thinking that an entire doctor's office is going to cater to their specific schedule and put them ahead of all other patients, although they arrived twenty minutes later?

No, don't worry. I wasn't rude. But I was firm. I'm getting quite good at misdirecting and shifting responsibility. There's a special amount of time you wait before giving in on some little thing, whatever it may be, so they feel that they've won a concession from you. Be courteous. Be apologetic. But simply say that it's not possible. Say, I know. I understand. I apologize. I've done as you asked, ma'am, I'm sorry, I'm not responsible for that. This is the chain of command and after the note leaves my hands, there's not much I can do. I can find out for you. Yes ma'am. No ma'am, I'm sorry, but there's no way we can do that. Patient confidentiality, I'm sorry. I don't make the laws.

I've also observed that patients don't really like humor. Don't blame them I guess. Who wants jokes when you're sick? All you want is to see the doctor.

Babies are a great distraction factor though. Even when he's cranky (as he was today - oy oy oy was he cranky - ) people are almost ashamed to be butt-heads when he's around. Although the particularly annoying patients don't always let that deter them.

I feel like he's the main conversation piece of the office.

Ah well. I feel the need for my hot drink coming on. I've taken to drinking something hot in the mornings and something hot at night. A comfort thing I guess. It's probably not particularly healthy, but at this point, who gives a crap? I've already gained fifteen pounds. And i'd rather be comfortable right now than think about gaining weight, especially after the day I've had.

Night all. Here's to happiness!

{Mackenzie raises her mug in sarcastic salute}

...Someone pass me the tranquilizers.

Conclusion:

Exhaustion is not very conducive to writing. At all. Let alone writing articulately or with Style....

Did I spell that right? Is that how you spell style? Because it looks so wrong right there. On the line above. In case you didn't know what I was talking about.

And that's pretty much how my thought processes have gone for the past two days. Frenetic. But, as busy as things are, I think I'm glad to be back at work. I actually, believe it or not, get much more done in the way of creativity when I have to work at something that requires no creativity. I guess I should keep that in mind for someday when I actually have to decide what I want to do with my life. Eight hours a day. Five days a week. Until Eternity.

For the past two days I've felt like water. The water, to be precise. The only water I see at all during my days, unless you count bathwater or bottled water, and those have been so purified that they really ought to be called something besides water. Some scientific, un-germified sounding name. The water being, technically I guess, the Tennessee river. Or Wheeler Lake. I can never keep them straight. But I think it's the Tennessee river. I drive over it on my way to and from class at Calhoun. On Tuesday it was gorgeous - a deep deep ... well, frankly, I don't know what color. It defied description. It was grey, then green, then blue, with these fantastic bits of color in the furrows that disappeared or changed within fifteen seconds. Anyway, it was gorgeous. Yesterday the water was just a sullen gray, which also fit my mood quite well.

I took a 200 question test. Full and ominous stop. I did miserably. This is one of those times in my life when I'm just hoping and praying I didn't get a C.... Because if I did, I'm going to break down crying right in class. Then I went to work, which was a madhouse. Three sick people called in on top of the nine patients we already had scheduled, and I was dealing with annoyed druggie people and sick patients who showed up for their appointments an hour early and expected to be worked in earlier and annoyed pharmacist people and annoyed nurses and a stressed out doctor and two receptionists who wanted to go home but one of which stayed after hours with me because Paxton was definitely in full blown cranky/teething/sick/knocked-his-head-on-the-table-freaking-hard/
desperately-wanting-his-mommy mode. I was there until seven o'clock. Altogether, I was gone for twelve straight hours, none of them easy.

Whew. And if that paragraph sounds like it should be read all in one breath, well, it should. Because that's about how fast things kept flying at me. I went to bed at nine last night. Nine. What self-respecting college student goes to bed at nine? Apparently the really really exhausted ones do....

And tonight I'm just hoping Paxton isn't cranky. Because it's Jackie's turn to stay after with me, and she won't stay till 7 like Barb did, and we have about the same number of patients as we did yesterday. At least it's Mom working tonight. She'll help me with Paxton if she gets a couple free minutes, and she deals with cranky/druggie/whining patients quite firmly... if I do say so myself. Me? I just try to be as courteous as I can in order to calm them down and let them know we're working on whatever the crap their imagined problem is and then let someone who has actual medical knowledge shoot them down. Hopefully intercepting enough of these crazy-imagined-problem calls to actually give said medical-knowledge-people enough time to actually do something about all the imagined problems.

Ha. Who says a Dr.'s office is boring?!

Probably the same sort of person this comic refers to:
Irregular Webcomic 892.

"Never Mind What the Government Said... They're Either Lying or They've Been Misled..."

Boo for Freaking Big Test tomorrow.

Yay for babysitting cool kids tonight.

Boo for studying for two hours.

Yay for lots of food and fireworks.

Boo for needing sleep.

Yay for understanding friends who don't mind me ranting at them periodically.

Yay for no more being ridiculously depressed.

Yay for good long distance phone plans.

Yay for letters and packages.

Yay for random James Bond movies. And random cable. And random songs stuck in my head.

And you know what? Life is good. Quite good right now, despite the Ridiculously Big Test of Doom.

Abnormality

So today is the fourth of July. The day everyone in the U.S. celebrates our freedoms, remember those soldiers who died (or managed to kill everyone who was trying to kill them and so survived) to give us said freedoms. They fly American flags. Except the pacifists.

Oh, we do normal fourth of july-ey things like cooking tons of delicious food and family get-togethers, and now that we live in the middle of nowhere we even set off bottle rockets and firecrackers and stuff. My brothers love that. I even love that! = )

And we do also celebrate our freedom, but I always get the sense that we celebrate with a "matter-of-time" attitude. It's only a matter of time until our freedoms get taken away. It's only a matter of time until the southerners find out we're pacifists and burn us at the stake (figuratively speaking - for at least the present time, burning people at the stake is illegal). It's only a matter of time until there's a draft and half our relatives have to declare conscientous objector or end up in jail. It's only a matter of time until our government totally screws up and gets us involved in an unjust war - oh wait, haha, we done that already.

So I know that this will be a really unpopular post with most of you. A lot of my friends come from family military traditions and have a great loyalty towards the United States government and its president. But can I just ask one thing of all you people, before you start flaming me? Don't let your loyalty be blind. I saw one woman raise her hands in worship to the national anthem. Don't let loyalty to your country usurp the place reserved for Christ. Simply because we're under a certain government's authority (and we are told to submit to that authority, unless it interferes with our faith) doesn't mean you have to unequivocally approve of all its decisions and actions. Is not the greatest loyalty and love the one which sees faults and seeks to fix them, to make the nation loved greater than it currently is? Is true patriotism loyal to the people of its nation, the government of its nation, or one man - the president of its nation? I'm going to point out one more thing. And then let the flaming begin. We're not the chosen nation, sorry. We, as a body of believers, have been grafted into the nation of Israel and its salvation - but we, as a nation, have not been grafted into Israel's place as the chosen people.

Thank you, I'm done. I could, as you who know me well know, rant on for hours about governments, faith, seperation between church and state (which frankly I'm all for), unrest, agitation, national security, and politicians. But I won't. I'm stopping, because I want to have a few friends left after the fourth of july.

I'm going to make one more request - that those of you who have serious grievances/issues with this post e-mail me at mm1296@messiah.edu with them, so that I can reply in a format much more convenient than the comment section of my blog.

Happy eatings of food, hangings with family, and celebratings - whatever you choose to celebrate and however you choose to celebrate it.

When You Be Beside Me I Am Real

Today I feel like a plant.

No, I'm not going crazy - er. I'm not going crazier.

It rained, so I stood out in it. And then I saw a pretty magnolia bud, so I walked over and picked it. And then I felt bad, because magnolia blooms die really soon after they're picked, and it's one of the last ones. Magnolia season is over. So I decided to let it go out with a bang. I picked some other flowers and made an arrangement so it could have a nice funeral, appreciated and attended by my whole family and the neighbors, albeit unwittingly.

Then I stood in the rain some more.

Then I decided I felt like a plant. In actuality I decided my excuse for standing in the rain was feeling like a plant. I think standing in the rain is really some obscure coping mechanism that we lost track of when roofs were invented (roofs have not been around as long as stew).

Now I'm drinking fantastic hot chocolate (some of that extra fudge land o'lakes kind that I found in the back of our cupboard), sitting on my couch typing up insanity, and listening to Christmas music while wrapped in a blanket.

Quite frankly, I have no idea why I'm doing any of this - the hot chocolate, the blanket, the typing, the standing-in-the-rain-thinking-what-a-plant-would-feel-like, the Christmas music (especially the Christmas music). Except that it seems like something to do, and when you can't write, well, you've got extra time on your hands. I suppose they too would fall under the category of obscure coping mechanisms.

It was a little lonely standing in the rain though.