the laws have changed

title: song by the new pornographers.

this summer has been nothing but transitions. transitions and suitcases. i've soaked up the in-between as much as possible but i am so ready to settle somewhere for a long while. kirksville and all of its horrors, oddities, and delights are beckoning me.

i've learned a lot this summer. experience, in many senses of the word. i'm looking forward to switching off this Life's Little Lessons channel i've been tuned into and hit the books. and the bars.

to read and to be read

(the things my mind invents when on vacation/shouldn't have waited till i was sober to write)

a few hours ago, i thought it COULD be not only plausible but worthwhile to go back to school after graduation for a BA in english. oh god, i just heard avenue q in my head (what do you do with a BA in english?) we're in south carolina. i'm sitting on our deck drinking with my mom, my aunt patty, and our friend teresa dorsey and i have a book in my hand (ok, a play...red light winter by adam rapp) and teresa notices that i'm rarely without one and says, "why didn't you become an editor or something?" honestly, it's never even crossed my mind. i've always been strictly science as far as school goes, though the arts have oozed out of my every pore whenever i give them the chance.

does every person with a steady, normal person job also have talents on the back burner that do not lend themselves to steady, normal incomes? it's easier to think people just give up on these and that is the thing to do. i know that music is not something i want to study...music is something i can always do and i long ago decided doing music academically would kill it for me. and theatre, that is a love that isn't worth pursuing because i haven't got the natural talent. but literature. why haven't i ever given it a thought? i've been the biggest bookworm i know my entire life. i devour literary works in my free time, ranging from trash to classics (who takes a summer to consume as much drama as possible)? i have an unnatural love for grammar. i know i can write a hell of a paper, and i can fool around with fiction. i love to write almost as much as i love to read, i just make less of a habit of it.

the (sober) pragmatist in me is struggling with this because in all likelihood i wouldn't use the degree. i could tell myself that it's a door to alternate careers should i ever want to change directions in life: editor, critic, even a writer of some kind. but really what i want it for is...just to be educated. to be a little better rounded and cultured. i feel like nursing has filed me down to bare bones critical thinking (my department loves to stamp out all creativity) and i am in danger of developing tunnel vision. what i see when i look at people and things has been quite narrowed. to study great writing would be so different and so good for me...developing the right side of my brain, which is probably weak and pathetic compared to the truman nursing steroid-enhanced left side.

due to tipsy spontaneity (we did tequila shots tonight), i actually looked up truman's requirements for this degree and found that i can complete it in exactly one year. if, of course, i can get all the classes i need in 2 semesters. and yes, it would be truman. it would make the most sense because i have the entire LSP completed. and a nerdy admission: i can partially credit truman's liberal arts philosophy for inspiring this desire to be well rounded. truman, teresa, and tequila...hmm, catchy. in the end...it's only one year. but what i need to find out is if delaying entering the workforce for a year would hurt my chances of getting hired as a pediatric nurse...or if it would make me more interesting and marketable. this is a crazy whim, and i rarely have whims, let alone act on them.

this whim has to do with a question i have posed for myself: is a life worth living without contributing artistically to the world? and a quite different question, is nursing enough for me?

it's for people like you that keep it turned on.

because it so rarely happens to me, i love waking up too early because my only job in the world is to go back to sleep. or to do enjoyable things that might help me get sleepy. now, you are probably thinking that noon is far too late to be considered early. however, starting wednesday i work night shifts and have been trying to stay up late and get up late to get into night schedule. last night i went to bed after 4 and woke up around 10:30, which is just not ok.

this is The Summer of People Going Places and Doing Things. because of facebook, i am getting to see just enough of people's travels to get super, super jealous. i've done my fair share of traveling: most regions of the US, mexico, canada, france, spain, ireland, and the UK. but i can't help wishing my Summer of Doing Things was taking place somewhere more exotic than st. louis. oh well. i am still very grateful for the experience i am getting here, and as long as i make it back to ireland someday i'll be satisfied. plus, in 22 days i'm leaving to be on the east coast for the first time! savannah, GA and hilton head island, SC. 6 days of resorting, beaching and tanning, relaxing, seeing stuff, shopping, drinking, seeing dolphins, and who knows what else...yeah, i can't wait.

we decided to go for a place closer to the city than the beach, because while we intend to enjoy the beach, it's not like priority numero uno, we'd rather be within walking distance of shops and restaurants and bars (you know, menowns are all about safety). i just looked up the description for the place we rented and it's a short drive or bicycle ride from the beach! i am ridiculously excited by the thought of taking bikes to the beach.

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.