Jealousy

10 Jan

Two types of veterinary technicians exist. There are the ones like me that enjoy the career as is, possibly want to do it their whole lives and bask in the freedom of much less responsibility. Then there are veterinary technicians who are earning an income and gaining experience on the road to becoming a veterinarian. I work with three of this second type of technician, and in this last week, two of them were accepted to Cornell University’s Vet School.

I SHOULD be happy for them. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and they are both hard-working and deserving girls. They’re going to make wonderful veterinarians one day, and I know that. But that wasn’t my internal reaction when I found out about their news. I was jealous, angry, spiteful. I found myself thinking that maybe they’d fail out of school eventually. And I felt disgust with myself soon after.

I carried around this ugly, jealous feeling for most of the day, ashamed of it, and trying to decide exactly what to do with it. I don’t even like to think that I’m capable of those thoughts.

I decided two things. One, I will be happy for them. I will find a way. I will smile and ask all about it and support them until I make myself believe it. Not sure if it is possible to kill those jealousy feelings in there, but succumbing to that kind of resentment is the first step on the road to bitterness. Two, I have to focus those feelings on myself and change them into something else.

I don’t want to be a veterinarian. I know that. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and the medical/science field is not for me. My creative spirit pulls me elsewhere. But the jealousy comes from their accomplishment. Those two lovely ladies worked hard, for years, and will have to work hard for years to come. And while I don’t want to follow the path they’re on, I have dreams and aspirations that require hard work, perhaps years of it, perhaps a lifetime of it. The last week I have brainstormed a good New Year’s Resolution for this brave and glorious year ahead. I tend to pick many specific commitments, but this year I have decided to pick one that is vague and noncommital.

Work Harder.

If I want things to happen for me. If I want those big accomplishments, I need to make some changes. When I think of the hours spent playing Candy Crush or the hours watching the same youtube videos over and over again or the dozens of times a day when I refresh my news feed on Facebook, such a waste of time! This isn’t to say that there won’t be any of that. I love relaxing and unwinding. There just needs to be less of it. I need to work harder, and I need to start now.

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Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

8 Jan

Because of my dependency on the public library, I don’t get to read a lot of newer books. I usually have to wait 5 months to get ahold of a copy, and I’m an impatient person.

But over the holidays I splurged and bought myself a book…at a bookstore. An extravagance in my life as a poor New Yorker. This book was in the bestseller section which makes me wary. I worry about cheesy romances or over-hyped memoirs. This memoir, though, surprised me.

The book is written by a young journalist from New York. Within a couple of weeks, she goes from being a normal, productive member of society to a paranoid, barely verbal, mental patient in NYU’s epileptic ward. I don’t want to give too much away, because the book is written with such subtle and creeping suspense. I read it in two days. But I will say that her story takes unexpected turns and is a terrifying read.

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Bandwagon

16 Dec
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You’re in Seahawks Country.

I am first and foremost, a baseball fan. I’ve spent seven baseball seasons, hopelessly devoted to the Seattle Mariners. I spend six months out of the year checking on baseball blogs, watching games, tracking team standings. But it leaves the other six months of the year lacking. I have been trying to get into football the last couple of years, but it hasn’t happened for me.

This year things have changed. I watched a couple of playoff games last year and saw that the Seattle Seahawks were becoming a viable team. Before this season started, I started dating a dashing young man who knows oodles about sports. We spend our Sundays watching football, him explaining a lot of the little nuances of the game to me. I read articles here and there about the team. And I’m enjoying it so much! The Seahawks are amazing this year. Russel Wilson is incredible. Our defense is unstoppable. Marshawn Lynch seems to fly through the air over the other team’s defensive line. It is the first time in my 27 years that I have had the pleasure of supporting a successful team.

Yesterday, that dashing young man took me to the Seahawks/Giants game at MetLife Stadium. Decked out in our Russel Wilson jerseys, we tailgated in lot J8 under a flag that deemed that area Seahawks country. We were surrounded my hundreds of other fans in Jerseys, hats, scarves, tutus, chanting “Go Hawks!”, taking Seahawks-colored Jello shots.

While waiting in line for the Porta-Potty, the man standing behind me asked if I was from Seattle. I told him I was.

“But you live in New York, and still follow the Seahawks?” he asked.
“I’m more of a Mariner fan, but this season, I’ve gotten more into…”
“Oh, so you’re a bandwagon fan?”
“She’s more of a Seattle fan,” my boyfriend said, defending me.

But I had nothing to say back. I’ve been called a bandwagon fan before, but I have always laughed it off as ridiculous. I’ve been following the Mariners through six painful, losing seasons after all. But this man had a point. I only became a Seahawks fan during their winning season. Was I bandwagon?

I brooded on this. And it comes down to what makes up fan loyalty? The Mariners I fell in love with in 2007 are not the same team they are now. Felix Hernandez is about all that’s left from back then, and it’s only six years ago. It has a lot to do with the city. I dream of Seattle and feel pride of anything good that comes from there. But being a fan is a unique kind of loyalty. For one reason or another, a fan picks a team and sticks with them. They believe in them, follow them. Every fan has a unique story as to why that team is theirs.

I hate when Bandwagon is a term that fans throw around in exasperation. It reminds me of a child on a playground retorting, “Oh yeah, well your stupid!” It’s the easy thing to say. Your a fan of a team that’s better than mine? Well, then you must be bandwagon. To me bandwagon is a fan who lacks that loyalty, who doesn’t dedicate themself to a team, who chooses their team superficially due to popularity or style. I met a Yankee fan at a Seattle Mariner’s game who asked me if Joe DiMaggio was on the team or not. THAT’S bandwagon.

I have dedicated my loyalty to an amazing team, from the greatest city in this country. The fact that they happen to be on their way to a Super Bowl championship, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

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28 Before 28: Visit a New State

11 Dec

1471751_10101126037224447_256169690_nIn my 28th year of life, I’m attempting to do 28 new things. Full list here.

I went to Virginia!

My small family has begun a new tradition. Over the past decade, we have scattered all over the country. My sister has lived in Alaska and now resides in Boston. I was in Washington, and now I reside in New York. My parents hold down the fort in Nevada. So gathering for the holidays can be difficult to arrange. So this is our second annual Christmas-in-a-different-place-and-on-a-different-date. We’re still working on the name.

Last year, we met up in the Central Coast of California the second week of January and this year, we met up in Williamsburg, Virginia for the second week of December. And this was the first vacation I’ve experienced where it rained the entire time. I’ve had plenty of vacations where there is a day or two where it is best to find indoor activities, but my trip to Virginia was all rain, all the time.

Gate towards a Revolutionary War Cemetary

Gate towards a Revolutionary War Cemetary

We went to a couple of museums that had artifacts from the colonial period, and we went to a Christmas boat parade where Revolutionary War soldiers marched by with their drums and flutes. But I wanted more! I wanted to see people dressed in every day garb. The last day we were there, we sucked it up and went into the heart of Williamsburg and toured the Governor’s mansion. History makes me weak in the knees, especially when it is all done up like Williamsburg is. Our tour guide was dressed as a colonial servant, and she gave us the tour as if we were invited to attend the ball that evening. I loved the hokeyness of it all. I had grand dreams of becoming a re-enactor in my old age.

I desperately wanted to wear the colonial garb. It was only $25 for a full day’s rental. Before the trip, I had imagined my whole family wearing the costumes with me. Instead they stared at me in disbelief. “Are you serious? Do you really want to do this?” My mom asked of me. I did! I did! But the pouring rain and the frigid temperatures led me to put that dream away for another day. I settled for wearing a bonnet and straw hat in the gift shop.

The wig room of the Governor's mansion.

The wig room of the Governor’s mansion.

I wish I had more time there. I wish I had more good weather time there. I’d love to go back and immerse myself in the history. It’s like an amusement park for nerds.

My dream comes true...kinda.

My dream comes true…kinda.

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Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe

19 Nov

My favorite Marilyn Monroe movie is “Some Like it Hot.” If you haven’t seen it, she plays Sugar Kane, the lead singer of an all-girl jazz band who has a weakness for falling in love with saxophone players. In the movie, she’s adorable and funny and heartbreaking as the girl who “always gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop.” It’s the epitome of the characters she was known for playing. Beautiful, helpless, not so smart.

Unfortunately, that has become not just the roles she played, but her legend. But did you know that MM often insisted on having her photograph taken whilst reading books? Did you also know that she took night classes in literature at UCLA in her spare time? She also scribbled poems and little notes to herself in a variety of notebooks. This wonderful book collects many of those.

This book, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, places side-by-side her actual writing and transcriptions of them. Often her stream-of-consciousness writing jumps all over the page and only gives a small insight to what was really going on inside her mind. They have also collected a variety of pictures of MM with authors and artists whom she admired.

To me, this book is vital in understanding her. It is also vital in understanding that people are not always the image they present. We never know what’s stirring in someone’s mind. Marilyn Monroe was no exception. It makes me so happy that we can finally put a little of this “dumb blonde” nonsense away and respect her for the complete human being she was.

“Not a scared lonely little girl anymore Remember you’re sitting on top of the world (it doesn’t feel like it).”

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Kissing Puppies

17 Nov

2013-10-15 18.50.55This little puppy came in at 12 weeks old with pneumonia. It had aspirated its own vomit. It was touch and go for a while, but she made a full recovery and went home after a week of hospitalization. Everyone at the hospital fell in love with her, because, well, look at that face! Her owner was notorious for driving the doctors crazy with odd demands and overdramatics. I hadn’t experienced any of that though.

She brought the puppy in for a recheck exam about a week ago. Dr. S always meets with clients in an exam room and afterwards has a technician go to the room, retrieve the animal, and bring it to the larger treatment area for their full physical. After meeting with this woman, Dr. S came to treatment to tell me to get the dog.

“She might be a little difficult about it,” he warned me. “But don’t fight with her, just bring it back here. I’ve told her a million times that’s what we do here.”

So I head over to the room. The woman is sitting in the corner with the puppy on her lap, her cheeks shiny from an abundance of tears. I know I need to tread carefully.

“Oh, our girl has gotten so big! Still so cute though,” I say.
She clutches the dog closer to her.
“So, I’m going to take her to the back now for Dr. S to examine her,” I tell her, reaching for the dog. She places the dog in my arms, looking at me with suspicion.
“Do you *sniffle*…do you *sniffle*…do you kiss her when she’s back there?” she asks through her tears, in a quiet timid voice.

A word about this. No, I almost never kiss the animals that come to the back. I’ve seen too many dogs dance in their own shit, roll around in it, really get it in their fur. Because of this, my mouth does not touch them. The idea makes me cringe a little. I only kiss the patients I know very well. I only kiss my top 5. But this woman seemed distraught, and I wanted to reassure her.

“Oh course! We all love her. She’s such a good girl,” I say petting the puppy.
“Well, DON’T! I kiss my puppy. Not you. I do. I’ve been getting colds the last couple of weeks, and it’s from YOU PEOPLE kissing MY dog. You get your germs all over her.”

I’d already been given strict instructions not to fight with her. So I nod my head and make my way to leave the room.

“And tell everyone else to not kiss my puppy! Make sure to tell everyone!” she yells after me as I head down the hall.

I sigh. Just another day in the Upper East Side.

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28 Before 28: Read Slaughterhouse-Five

12 Nov

In my 28th year of life, I’m attempting to do 28 new things. Full list here.

One thing you can say about me and my bucket list is that despite never completing my birthday bucket list, I always manage to accomplish the book portion. So, yes, I might be dilly-dallying about visiting a new country. And, no, I don’t know of any gun ranges in the tri-state area. But, dammit, I put this book on hold at the library the day after I formulated the list.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” was a book I knew little about going into it. I knew it had something to do with war, but I didn’t even know which one. It’s about WWII.

I have read plenty of books about war. The heroism, the death, the senselessness, the evil necessity. This book, however, I didn’t find overly emotional. The plot jumps back and forth through time as the main character is unable to live his life chronologically. So we see him in Dresden, but a moment later we see him in optometry school, sometimes we even see him abducted my aliens flying miles away from Earth.

What I loved about the humor of Vonnegut’s writing was that everything was presented as fact, as simple detail. He left it to us to string it all together. Every time death is mentioned in the book, he sums it up with the phrase “So it goes.” That might seem cold, but it’s a beautiful thing in a sense.

I did some brief Internet research into Vonnegut and any relation to Buddhism, and I couldn’t find a link. But this idea of “So it goes” and the frequent jumping back and forth through time reminded me of some of the basic principles of Buddhism. Mainly the idea of impermanence. Nothing in our lives is permanent. Moments of suffering, moments of happiness, times of success, times of failure. Everything comes to an end, as do we. It’s a peaceful way to look at things. It also leads into the idea that nothing is real except this moment. The images we have of the past and the future are illusions. The only truth is now, in this moment. It is the only thing that is real.

For me, taking a main character and making him “unstuck” in time, flying through eras of his life, jumping from year to year, plays with this idea of what is real, what is past, and what is future. It was fascinating and a curious concept to think about.

Whoa, didn’t mean to get so Bodhisattva there. I couldn’t help it though. Vonnegut got me thinking with this one.

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

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On Listening to Advice

5 Nov

I have a younger co-worker who got into an argument with one of the veterinarians. She is 23 and engaged to her boyfriend of two years. The veterinarian had lectured her about getting married too young, how it’s a huge mistake, and she will end up divorced one day. Needless to say, this was not his place to tell her that.

I was infuriated and stewed over the situation for a while. It didn’t take me long to remember when I met her over a year ago when her and boyfriend had just moved to the city. At the time, I thought she was making a huge mistake. I was sure that her boyfriend was going to smash her heart, and this city would eat that little Arizona girl alive. I thought that if I could have prevented her from moving to New York, I would have.

And I would have been wrong.

The thing about advice is that there are few things in life that are universal for everyone. When I moved to New York for a boyfriend, I barely survived. In retrospect, moving here with him was not the wisest decision nor was it the right one for me. But that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong one for someone else.

I survived a dark couple of years in my life, and I spent most of that time desperate for a way out, a simple solution to fix my problem. I read endless amounts of inspirational blogs/books/magazines. Every time I met someone who seemed to have their life together, I would mull over in my brain what was their secret, how did they have it together. I ended up learning a lot of things that did help me, and a lot of things that didn’t. I’m still embarrassed that I used to attach my photo to my resume, simply because a girl I worked with as a barista got a job that way. How weird.

The main thing I learned is that while people tend to give you advice from the bottom of their heart, what worked in their situation won’t always work in yours. Everyone who gives advice is pulling it from what worked for them. That doctor who warned my co-worker against getting married too young has been through three divorces. So, yeah, I bet he thinks getting married young is a huge mistake. On the other hand, my grandparents weren’t much older than my co-worker when they got married, and they were very much in love for over 50 years of marriage. All of my friends who swear by online dating honestly have a blast skimming through profiles and meeting up with new people every week. It only convinced me that I was going to die alone.

Advice is great. People giving advice is even greater. It means they give a shit and want you to learn from their experiences. And maybe what they tell you will make all the difference. But we still have to carve it all out for ourselves at the end of the day.

Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten has been the simplest.

Work Hard. Be Honest. Smile and Laugh as much as possible.

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For the Love of Books

22 Oct

By the always amazing Maria Papova at http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/03/book-spine-poetry-the-spark-of-love/

I can’t deal with my Kindle.

I don’t think it’s fair to call me an old-fashioned reader. I believe myself to just be a reader. Part of that love of books is the books themselves. Nothing fills me with more optimism than browsing a bookstore: all those stories, all those new things to learn, new characters to meet. In a tiny bookstore, one can find whole new worlds, universes! The covers (soft and hard), flipping through the chapters, using a special postcard to hold my place. I just love books.

Ebooks are essentially the same thing in a less attractive package.  And in my life they’ve been a life-saver. When I traveled around Japan for a week, it was a relief to only carry around my Kindle instead of four, heavy books. But recently, my Kindle and I have had a falling out from which I don’t think we’ll recover.

I had been reading a lot of hefty tomes this summer. It was also a hot, humid summer in which I got cranky when the five pound book in my bag pulled on my shoulder. So when I went to the library to pick up “The Count of Monte Cristo” and the librarian slammed that beast on the counter, I knew I couldn’t do it. I ran home and downloaded it onto my Kindle.

When I haven’t used my Kindle in a while, I’m always amazed by what a pleasure it is. So thin and light. A built in dictionary. One-handed page-turning! I was so happy in love and dreaming about all the large public domain novels I could download for free.

Then, as happens with technology, things started to go wrong. Sometimes when I would go to turn the page, it would take a couple of seconds. Not that big of a deal, but when you add up all those seconds between all those pages, that’s a lot of quality reading time down the drain. But I could forgive. I was 40% through my book, and I didn’t want to stop. Then my Kindle decided that it would randomly freeze and shut off. I would sit and wait for it to reboot, watching all that time slip through my fingers. And I began to get angry. Books don’t freeze! Books don’t need to reboot! When you pick up a book, it never tells you it needs to load first.

So my Kindle has been temporarily shelved, and I do feel that I’m getting a lot more reading in when I can turn the page as rapidly as I do.

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Roger

20 Oct

Our clinic has a client that I’ll call Mr. F. He’s a kind man who prefers to adopt Jack Russel Terriers (JRT). He became our client during a time when he owned two great dogs. The kind of JRT of myth. JRT’s tend to be hyper, aggressive, not the ideal breed. But under Mr. F’s loving care, his JRT’s were loyal, happy, and loving. After one of his JRTs passed away, he went to a shelter and adopted a new one. He named him Roger.

He has owned the dog for a year, but I hadn’t dealt with Roger until Wednesday when Mr. F brought him in for a dental and wart removal. The dog was strange. That’s the only way to describe it. A large “B.C.” was emblazoned on the record. It stands for “Be Careful” and is our clinic’s tactful way of saying the dog or cat is aggressive and for lack of a better term, bad. But Roger wasn’t your typical snarler or swipe biter or growling pet. He wouldn’t bite when placing a catheter or during restraint. The dog would stand there and turn to bite without rhyme or reason. He would do it in a slow, nonlogical way. The more I worked with the dog, the more it seemed less aggressive, more neurologically compromised. It reminded me of autism.

I’ve read a couple of books on autism and what fascinates me about the condition is how we don’t understand it. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the spectrum and figure out how the autistic brain works. Of course, if it is present in animals, we would understand it even less as the animal brain is even harder to interpret.

Last Spring, I spent some time volunteering with autistic children during horseback riding lessons. The variety of the conditions and their reactions to different occurrences and stimuli was fascinating. Something about the look some of them would get in their eyes made me so curious as to what they could be thinking and feeling. Roger would get a similar look. Staring at a corner of his cage or looking right at me without reaction. At home, he is difficult. He will bite people randomly, cries as soon as he goes outside and is fearful of certain toys and people. When I mentioned to Dr. L that the behavior reminded me of autism, she began to agree. But how are we to know for sure?

When Mr. F came to pick up Roger at the end of the day, I witnessed one of the most heart-wrenching acts of love. The dog meandered up to the front waiting room, looked at his owner and had no reaction. I have never seen that before. Not a tail wag, not a faster pace to the owner, nothing. Mr. F crouched on the floor, his arms directed toward the dog. “Roger, it’s daddy. C’mon, Roger, didn’t you miss me?” But the dog just stared at the walls. I felt his frustration, and I admired the love and attention this man could put into a dog that simply doesn’t respond, doesn’t return affection. It was fascinating.

Any vet techs out there seen anything similar?

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