T Minus 4 Days and Counting....

I probably cannot organize thoughts this morning into any kind of coherent blog post, but let's try.




Start here: We were in the ER all day Tuesday as Tyson missed his second day of school with not-pneumonia and not-meningitis but something equally awful-feeling. Everything is going a little better now, thanks for asking, and he hasn't run a fever since Tuesday afternoon, but he'll post something on his blog about it, I'm sure. Especially the part where the nurse who didn't speak English tried to wheel him up to surgery.




But that's just the backstory. His real nurse, the one who coordinated the blood work and lumbar puncture and chest x-ray and put everything in the computer and got us out when we were ready to go, he was wonderful. The results are simply astounding when you see someone doing a job they really love. The best part was listening through the open door as he greeted new patients, joked with them about their conditions, and generally made people feel about as good as they could, considering their presence in an overcrowded ER. I remember feeling kind of jealous that he had found himself working a job that seemed to suit him so well.




Part 2: My work year officially started yesterday, even though I've been in about 30 times over the summer and have probably put in a few hundred hours of work since June, and what I realized at about 5:30 this morning on the treadmill at the gym was that I don't need to be jealous of the ER nurse because I am that guy. Everything seems to be just clicking into place at work, and I realized that was happening because of me. I made things work out. I've never really had a ton of confidence in my own expertise, assuming that I was just pretty average or OK, and I'm still not going to sit here and wax poetic about how brilliant I am, but for the first time I feel.....solid. Like it's not just by some miracle I'm not currently fucking everything up right now.




Example (included partially so I will remember when I get to campus today): My school banker convinced me yesterday there was a niche for spirit wear, and she happened to have a woman's number who could get me literally thousands of different items with custom logos embroidered on them--and on a pre-order basis, no less, so I don't have to worry about an inventory! This I was very excited about, and I started turning over in my head how best to get the word out. I was imagining posters and commercial spots on the morning news the school broadcast team puts out, but then I thought WAIT!!




I'm supposed to be asking myself "What would Steve Jobs do?" every time I go to put something else on my to-do list. My Company classes will have managers to take care of anything that comes up that is below my pay grade, so to speak, and Steve Jobs would never deign to get a sheet of posterboard and some markers and make ads for his new iPhone, and then I thought WAIT!!




As part of my English curriculum, I have to teach advertising strategies--bandwagon, appeal to emotion, false dilemma, and so on--and






[drumroll, please]





WHY DON'T I JUST MAKE STUDENTS WRITE COMMERCIALS OR DESIGN PRINT ADS?











Did I mention I think I am working the right job for me?

Update: For some reason, Blogger sucks today for line breaks showing up on "preview" but not on the internets. If for you that diminishes the impact of my post (it certainly does for me), I apologize, but Steve Jobs would probably brush his teeth and go to work rather than mess around any more on his blog this morning.

I guess I'll just go to bed early, then.

The two most compelling programs on all my 800 channels of digital cable during the 10 p.m. PDT time slot this evening are:

1. EL INFIERNO: LLAMAS SOBRE BERLIN, which I think translates to "Hell: The Sober Llamas of Berlin," on Telemundo.  I imagine it's the gripping tale of teetotaling camelids in 1920s Berlin who become ensnared in the ever-tightening noose of fascist persecution.  Which sounds exciting, but really, my Spanish is pretty bad.

2. A documentary on the History Channel discussing the seven most likely scenarios for the annihilation of the human race that has the balls to place "black holes" and "artificial intelligence" among the more probable (and more solveable) "nuclear war" and "climate change."

Fuck the History Channel.  There are so many more likely world-ending scenarios out there than black holes and AI:

1. Republicans.

2. The ideology of the nation-state.

3. Giant multinational corporations that dehumanize workers by making them robot slaves.

4. Free-market capitalism.

And so on.

Anyway, I'm almost 28 now, and I guess I'm too old to be thinking about staying up much past ten on a Saturday, anyways.

The Birthday Fairy visits early this year!

The best gifts (besides love and all that intangible crap that works great for Mothers' Day but doesn't cut it for birthdays or Christmas) are the ones you want, but for whatever reason won't buy for yourself. Ever stop to think about why twenty-dollar candles and baskets of bath stuff make such great last-minute, no-brainer gifts? 'Cause we walk by and want them, but sigh and buy that dollar bottle of Suave body wash instead.

I've been doing a lot of baking in the past few weeks--two kinds of pie, biscuits, blueberry muffins, blueberry pancakes, and so on--and after watching me cut 2 tablespoons of butter into a half-cup of flour SIX TIMES in my teensy one-cup food processor for things like biscuits and pie crusts, and turning out three lenticular pancakes at a time in my biggest pan on the stove, and not only flipping but rearranging roasted potatoes on the baking sheet so some would be on the light part and some on the dark part (P.S. that's the baking sheet I caught on fire a few weeks ago on the grill, and I still haven't scrubbed off all the carbon-powder stuff yet), Tyson visited our brand new neighborhood Target and bought me a food processor, a Calphalon baking set, and an electric griddle.

Maybe he's just gunning for more pancakes?

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