yeah, toast!

it is noon thirty-nine in st. louis, MO, and i just changed out of my scrubs into pajama pants. no, i did not just get off work...i just woke up after sleeping about 12 hours without changing out of work clothes or even turning off the light. i had been laying there talking on the phone having a lovely conversation till about 12 something (1 something his time, whoops) and just passed out. i mean, that's not surprising for me to be able to do that, but...just goes to show how incredibly exhausted 3 days of work in a row leaves me. i also hit a new personal low last night by falling asleep on a bench outside of the hospital. chris girouard just came back from japan and we were going out to dinner so he could regale me with stories of the orient, and while i was waiting for him to pick me up, i narc-ed out on the bench. like a hobo, except sitting up and trying not to look like one.

i just finished my 7th week of my 10 week externship and that is astounding. work is still fantastic. just so draining. it's really difficult to go to bed at 9 pm in order to get my full 8 hours of sleep, so i just don't. and feel the consequences every day. dummy. yesterday i placed an NG tube on a 10-week-old! i don't get many opportunities to practice skills like that on kids but the baby's parents were gone and my preceptor walked me through it. (if you didn't know, a nasogastric tube is a feeding tube that goes through a nostril all the way to the stomach). this baby happened to need one because she refused to swallow food. 10 weeks old and only about 8.5 pounds, sad. and due to her multiple healing rib fractures, it's been decided that she's either a victim of abuse (even sadder) or she has osteogenesis imperfecta, which is incredibly interesting.

i'm very hungry and thirsty this morning and probably will be for a while because solving that problem involves going to the grocery store. all we have to drink in the house right now is spoiled milk and beer. oh, the glamorous life of college students. if you've been talking to me at all this summer you have probably heard me bitch about my pathologically messy roommates. i went home to kansas city this weekend and sunday night when i returned, found the kitchen was just disgusting because the trash had not been taken out, and thus was overflowing onto the floor. i was horrified, thinking my roommates had both lost their arms in some kind of brutal accident. alas, i found them lifting things like food, beer, and remote controls without any problems at all. so yeah, it is just that their personal maid was gone for the weekend. i will look on the bright side of this, however. these 10 weeks will serve as a lifelong lesson: never live with boys. i suppose if i want to get married i will have to violate this rule, but damn if that man will not be trained to do at least the bare minimum of household upkeep.

wicked little town

i'm sure everyone out there is dying to know what my life has been like since i moved to st. louis and became a grown-up, so...here's to all of you on the edge of your seats.

wait, before i talk about being a grown-up i guess i should say that i spent the last weekend being as juvenile as possible while attempting to entertain kyle j smith in this newly awesome city: going to the zoo, playing in the city museum, watching high school musical 3 (albeit making it a fantastic drinking game), instituting daily naps and daily ice cream...a very, very good weekend.

grown-up activities: waking up at 5 am (or pm, if for a night shift), hopping on the metro link and heading into work to heal broken children for 12 hours at a time. getting slightly lost in more than slightly sketchy neighborhoods (hopefully no more since kyle graciously lent me his GPS) buying my own groceries, attempting to learn how to cook, trying to get my money's worth of UMSL's rec facilities, and finding things to do/places to see on my days off. after what should be sufficient recovery from my first 2 night shifts, i'm off till saturday. 4 shifts till i make my first trip home to KC.

i'm loving my job. the learning curve is a little steep but i have a fantastic preceptor and the experience i'm getting is incredible, a million billion times more than i could ever learn in kirksville. i am so excited to graduate and become a pediatric staff nurse...it's wonderful experiencing what this job will really be like for me and finding out how sure i am about my future. my future is kids, absolutely.

to the publisher's whore.

she used to be my favorite author. i actually sent this in the snail mail the other day...kind of just to prove to someone that i would actually do it, but it went nevertheless.

Dear Jodi Picoult,

I’ve been a huge fan of yours since, like everyone else, reading My Sister’s Keeper. After that book I devoured everything else you had written previously and I was hooked. The plots always make for fascinating page-turners, the characters are real, and I bitterly loved the real-life problems they got themselves into, because you have an amazing gift for writing what is on every woman’s heart. We have all been there with your characters, if not in their extreme situations but always in their gut-wrenching decisions and passionate ties to each other. I hadn’t been keeping up with you for a while so when I saw Handle With Care on a shelf recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see you had written another book so soon.

However, I was un-pleasantly surprised with the book itself. I found the motivations of the characters false. I found it very hard to believe Charlotte would really destroy her best friend and their relationship in one fell, greedy, swoop. The illicit kiss between Piper and Sean was awkward, baseless, and served no purpose except making me nervous for the last few chapters. And the ending plainly sucked. You violated an unspoken rule: when a beloved character dies, his or her death has to mean something. Unless the point of the story is that nothing means anything, and that’s never the point of your stories. Willow’s death rendered the entire book meaningless and I felt robbed of the time I spent reading. It seemed like a cheap, cop-out way to end the story without really ending it at all.

In the past I have always enjoyed your impossible ethical clusterfucks and your ability to play devil’s advocate, getting the readers completely turned upside down from what they thought they believed. But a wrongful birth suit? This time you failed to sell me on both sides of the issue. I am a nursing student and medical malpractice is something I understand, but what I can’t buy into is the idea of a doctor failing to do her job because she allowed someone to live. It’s completely backwards. And I hated that the plaintiffs in the suit didn’t even embrace what they were fighting for. I love your courtroom dramas but what makes them so exciting is the raw passion behind each side of the case. This time the lawsuit, which was supposedly the driving force in the story, fell flat. You only weakly defended the school of thought that handicapped people have the same rights to life as others but personally, I hope and pray that when it comes down to it, most people believe that. Otherwise, we’re really no better than Nazis.

The superhuman rate at which you produce novels makes me wonder who you are writing for anymore. I’ve loved all of your books but I have noticed an evolution over time, a shift from the simple problems between people (e.g., Harvesting the Heart) to these layer cakes of hot-button issues and pop culture. Stylistically, you have created a niche that sells but I think you are dangerously close to becoming your own cliché. You’re overusing the devices that once made your writing unique, such as explaining the protagonists’ conflict through the metaphoric lens of their vocation or passion. I used to love that. This time, with Charlotte’s recipes, it felt forced. Most of this book felt forced, really. Like you were imprisoned by Annie Wilkes and you had to type the manuscript on a broken typewriter with only nine fingers so that she would give you your Novril. Or maybe just imprisoned by your publisher.

Sincerely,

Jamie Menown

role(s) of a lifetime

because i ooze cheesiness, my last few entry titles have been songs from musicals. actually, that just kind of happened but i'll be cheesy now and do it again. i saw bare at the unicorn last night with brie and it was very, very good.

i might only be writing this because i've been told, rather unexpectedly, by a couple people recently that they read my blog. i really thought nobody did. shit, now i'm going to overanalyze this even more than i already do...oh well. it's summer, i've got time for that.

tomorrow i am moving to st. louis to start my nursing externship on the general medicine floor at st. louis children's hospital. i'm living in a house with a friend and his roommate and it's weird to think that after 3 years of campus living, i'm finally going to have a kitchen and multiple floors and other novelties. there are 2 cannisters of pepper spray to my immediate left: one for my purse and one for my glovebox. thanks, dad. i want to be in 3 places right now and i have a feeling that will last all summer. in st. louis, living my adult-ish life wearing scrubs and working 12-hour shifts and getting fantastic experience; in kansas city, with my family and home friends being the most relaxed person ever; and in kirksville, having adventures that only my theatre friends can dream up.

but for now, i have sleep and a couple more hours of packing and cleaning between me and I-70.

the tide turning endlessly

i might see someone die tomorrow.

my assigned patient has a "grim prognosis," according to his doctor, and his nurse doubts he'll make it through the night, because he was unresponsive today and had no urine output. he's from a nearby nursing home and his wife is usually with him during the day, but leaves at night. tonight i was copying information from his chart and was struck with a wave of sadness as i contemplated the possibility of him dying alone tonight.

i feel like i know this man just after reading his extensive charts and going into his room to introduce myself and pat his hand while he slept. i very much hope he lives through the night so i can be his student nurse tomorrow. i think patients who have student nurses receive better care than others, mostly because of the ratio...we have only one patient so we get to spend more time with them. i don't want this patient to die, but if he must i would like someone to be there with him. and tomorrow it would be me.

truman nursing students may be over-prepared in the area of death and dying because we have one professor who loves to talk about it more than anything else. i don't think i will feel at all prepared when i actually witness it but i do know that the sense of hearing is the last to go and i'd like someone to be talking to this patient, touching him, just being there with him in his last moments. tonight i prepared more than i ever have for clinical and most likely i will not need any of this information tomorrow morning. but if this patient survives, i want to be ready for him.

back to before

now that it's over i'm supposed to be all business. school stuff only, because God knows my GPA needs some attention. and what a week to kick it off...3 tests, a quiz, some huge assignments, and the biggest project of my life due. but i can't focus. well, it comes and goes. today i'm terribly sad and now that i've studied for OB, i can't get myself to move onto adult, even though it's going to be the worst test i've ever taken.

closing night i wasn't sad, just excited at how well we did. the cast party was the best thing i've been to in a while. i took erin and i hope she had a good time, because i sure did. we stayed until 4:30, at least, and kyle and jamin walked us home. apparently i got everyone to cut through mcclain as we walked through campus, which soberly looking back was the worst idea ever, but nobody got in trouble and now it's just a fun story.

for some reason it hit me during chamber choir today. i was sad enough that i went to the rec and ran 2 miles on the track. i should have known it would be like this when i went out for curtain call on opening night and felt exhilarated and wanted to do it over and over that same night. i just can't believe it's completely over and done with. all i'm left with is memories, pictures, and an eye infection. i know i'll still see people. i just had dinner last night with the family plus hank and they talked me into watching a movie afterward. this weekend is indecent proposals and the 2nd cast party. and then the banquet is the following weekend. the dvd will come out at some point, and i'm sure i'll watch it a million times. but the show is over. probably the biggest moments i'll ever have, all of them over. and looking back, i couldn't have lived in those moments more fiercely. i knew how precious they were. i've just never felt like this before. in high school i was always relieved after.

this...aches.

once upon a dream

no matter how tonight goes, this has already been a dream come true. this is all going to sound terribly cheesy, but...it is what it is. i put away theatre after i graduated high school (theatre in the park doesn't count). i was ok with never doing it again, i was closing that chapter of my life and focusing on my future career. but i kept singing (cantoria for 2 years, then voice lessons and chamber choir), and i acted to an extent (forensics and then the madrigal dinner), so i guess i couldn't ever really suppress it completely.

i heard that they were doing jekyll & hyde this spring and it didn't even cross my mind to audition. i was just planning on going to see it, and planning on feeling a twinge of nostalgia. it wasn't until i saw a midsummer night's dream and was absolutely enchanted that i made up my mind to do it, just because i wanted to be a part of an awesome production if i could. i listened to the soundtrack for ALL of christmas break (even though i knew it really well already) and started to daydream about having a lead. emma would be nice since i'm a soprano. but all i really wanted was to get in. and as a result, i've never prepared so much for an audition. i worked my butt off singing those 3 songs over and over awkwardly in front of a mirror in practice rooms and now i am so glad that i did.

so...all of this has just been unreal. i went to auditions with absolutely no expectations, so reading the cast list was just an unbelievable and indescribable feeling. i've been blown away from day 1 by the talent, professionalism, and extraordinary kindness of everyone involved. in high school i remembered feeling (and possibly acting) antagonistic towards random outsiders who auditioned for a show and got good parts, so it's been a wonderful surprise to be so welcomed and included. it's been bizarre to transition from scrubs to corsets, let me tell you, but i am so happy that i was able to do both nursing and theatre for at least these 2 months. it has been so amazing to realize how much performing is still a part of me and how fulfilling it is to let that part shine. i have learned so much about acting, theatre in general, and myself in this process and looking back on college, i know that i will cherish these memories as possibly the very best ones of my 4 years.

thank you SO much to everyone, and break a leg tonight!