One Blood-Filled Afternoon

So, I decided that I'm getting older and with age comes the need for certain tests. (Yes, like prostate, thanks for bringing that up.) Anyway, I was thinking that it is about time that I took a cholesterol test. Problem is that whenever I get to the doctor, I've always had coffee and you need to be fasting. Solution?



Why not? It's cheap and kind of fun to do such a test at home. The test has all kinds of time restrictions: Hold hand down at side for 5 minutes, hold hand down for 30 seconds after sticking, put blood in hole within 3 minutes, wait three minutes but not more than 4, pull tab wait for 15 minutes. It's crazy.

So, I stick my finger and to my surprise...no pain whatsoever. I felt nothing and I was bleeding. So I go to put blood in the circle of the test and I just have a tiny drop. Barely enough to even wet the surface. So, I squeeze and squeeze for another drop. Unfortunately, the "circle" is concaved, when I touch it with my finger I just spread it around. I get blood everywhere but in the damn circle. It's on the table, my shirt, and my hands look like I just killed someone and chopped them into bits. The damn little circle though is rather pristinely clean, mocking me.


I eventually get it all in and wait the appropriate amount of time and the results are kind of low, 136. So, they are highly suspect.

I recommend this test for an unusual time, but not for accurate results.

I just got a scrapbook on live journal.

I just got a scrapbook on livejournal.

So, ha ha, the joke is on you.

I'm taking up space on your friends page quite rudely with pictures I took with a crappy $10 digital camera.

When I took the pictures, it was quite random what would come out. Sometimes the camera would take the picture and sometimes it would just act like it and there was no view finder. I loved it, but alas grew tired of its antics.

Sophistication?

So, I don't really do the LJ things like the interests or really much of anything. Hey, I barely post, but I looked at my interests recently. Here they are:

blackjack, cheese, dvds, eating, food, recipes, sophistication, thinking, writing

OK, things I imagine I did put in there are blackjack, cheese, eating, thinking and maybe writing (although I'm not sure about writing even).

Where the hell did recipes, food, dvds and sophistication come from? Sophistication? That blows my mind. I would have never put that in there. There are so many things that can mean for one. Do I like to use fallacious arguments or am I uppity snob?

Does LJ have some sort of automatic entry thing, that puts it in there?

Or did I really put that there? What was I thinking?

By the way, whenever I think of the word "sophistication", I always think of a woman drinking a glass of wine from the proper glass. Oh, and there is always a cheese plate near by. What do you think of?

The Miserable Plight of My Big Toe

I seem to have injured my big toe. I don't know how, but it hurts and can I can't really bend it. It feels like it is just poking up and immobile. I've never really appreciated my big toe, but now that it is in pain, I do.

So, I went up to Greg and said, "Look," I held my two big toes together for comparison, "my big toe is swollen."
He looked down and asked, "which one?"
"Are you serious?" I was so hurt. I feel like my one big toe is freakishly bigger. I personally can never tell when someone has a swollen finger or foot or whatever, so I was quite proud that I could see the swelling. (Oh yeah, I'll make a great nurse).
So Greg says, "Sometimes one side is bigger than the other." He then begins to flip me off with both fingers. "See, one of my fingers is bigger than the other."
I cursorily studied them, then dismissed it with a "well, not really".
"No really," he said almost angrily, then flipping me off harder. "This one is bigger," he moved his right birdie closer.
Actually, I could tell quite easily. One finger was insanely bigger than the other one. I just didn't want the focus to be on how freakish Greg was, but rather on my big toe's miserable plight.

Existential ennui

"If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be". - Sartre

Well, I'm making nothing. That's what I feel like, at least right now. I've feel like I've wasted my life, making bad decision after bad decision ending up a shell of a person barely useful as even a statistic.

I relive my past too much, playing the mistakes over and over in my head, wishing to go in the past and start over from a multiple of points. I can't let go of that desire to time travel even though I know it is impossible.

So, my current goal of working in a medical field just seems so meaningless. Help people fulfill their worthless lives as well? Education occupies my mind like a hobby, my own personal opiate.

I think that even if I found a cure for cancer, I would feel my life meaningless. Feeling the oppression of time, life seems too fleeting to make an impact and feel it.

My latest fantasy is organizing a grassroots organization to start a statewide initiative requiring a mandatory amount of vacation time. I'm sick of dealing to Germans with their 20 days off, when I only got 5 days after working for a year. Of course I never had time to ponder the meaning of existence, I need a vacation. Of course, I'm always too poor to do anything when I do get vacation time.

Advice, anyone?

One thing I know for sure. I need sleeping pills. This always hits me when I'm trying to go to sleep.

Oh god, what did I do.

I'm taking a Political Science class online. My teacher is a complete Limbaugh head and thinks the United States will be destroyed by 2050 because of political correctness. I was very polite in the post and asked what exactly he meant by political correctness. I explained that I thought it meant using non-offensive language. He responded bring up Don Imus (of course). In my next reply, I went all over the place as you will see and used the word, "nigger". I figured it was a debate on free speech and that to use "the N word" would be hypocritical of me. Now that I think about it, they kick people out of school for things like that. I'm really worried about it, even though, in the long run, I don't care. Probably at worse it is just a suspension. Anyway here is my response:


Thank you, that's a good example. For some reason, when I originally
was asking, I could only think of Harvard University President Lawrence
Summers.

I have an example that might get your goat. At my work, a person got
written up for telling blond jokes. The person, who heard the joke,
wasn't blond, but thought it was offensive to blonds.

I do feel that our liberties are someone on hold while at work. Free
speech is gone. Privacy is invaded with drug testing (for jobs that do
not involve others' safety). There are also cases where people are
fired for actions while not at work as well. The free market is
becoming the new government with the help of our current government as
well. It was ultimately the free market that fired Imus, not the
government.

I do believe that people should say what they want at work as long as
the person offended is able to respond as they want as well. However, I
must admit, a restriction of offensiveness at work has been nice.

An extreme example at my work (as a dealer) again is when a co-worker
was dealing to a high limit player that was losing. The player
repeatedly called her a "nigger". If she responded "appropriately", she
would have probably suffered a "write-up" or been fired. Also, an
employee saying this word would surely be fired. In this case, they
simply took the dealer off the game and gave him a new, white dealer.