Alice in Regularland |

When is it going to be me time!

I would love it if for one whole people thought about me all day. People just waited on me hand and foot, always asked for my opinion and genuinely cared about what I thought, felt and wanted. And actually followed through with what they said they were going to do.

My coworker just shared some of his blueberry muffin with me. Delish btw.

Thats it. Just care about Allison. For one whole day.

This is the story of super oscar fish D-Style Jr. Aptly named after an ex coworker David, who went by D-Style back when he was a DJ in a past life.



To put thinks frankly D-style Jr is a super fish. He has survived not 1 but 2 near death experiences. He was originally put in a tank with one other Oscar, Twinkletoes, but he quickly out ate him during feeding times and grew to be twice his size, about the size of a adult palm, within 3 months.



The first near death experience started when the office staff left for the weekend and everyone forgot to feed poor Twinkletoes and D-Style Jr. So, D-Style Jr being the super fish that he was decided to become resourceful and found food elsewhere. Unfortunatly it was in the form of a Plekko fish. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Plekko it is the sucker fish that people get to suck all the algae off the tanks. The unfortunate part of this event is that the Plekko fish has several sets of large barbs on the front of it to prevent predators from eating it, like D-Style Jr.



So, on Monday morning my coworkers and I showed up for work and went to the fish tank to see if there had been any new changes. Imagine our surprise when we found our beloved D-Style Jr, laying at the bottom of the tank with half of a plekko fish sticking out of his mouth. D-Style Jr's poor gills had been stretched open so wide that they were starting to rip away from his face and his mouth had been open so long that it was ripping apart at the corners.



His prognosis did not look good. His eyes were starting to glaze over and he had stopped flapping his fins. When the afternoon started to roll around so did D-Style Jr. He was losing the ability to hold him self up and was starting to fall over onto his side.



It was at this point that I decided to take action. Now mind you I know absolutly nothing about fish .



to be continued.....

Everything I'm about to say is nothing new regarding long distance relationships and online dating. But I'm going to say it nonetheless.

In a nutshell, it sucks.

Here is a general play by play of the online dating process:

There is the whole weeding out process. Which is slow, tedious, repetitive and can at times feel very, fake. Mostly becuase when you find someone who piques your interest you will send them a message. And since we are human there is bound to be more than one person who piques your interest. Which means you are bound to be sending the same message over and over again.

Then, if you should happen to make a connection with a person after sending a few icebreaker messages, you ineviteably decide to talk on the phone.

The first phone conversation can either be viewed as:

a)extremly awkward during which you cant wait until its over so you can get to the next one where you will ultimatly 100 times more comfortable

or

b) entertainingly awkward becuase you kind of know this person but have never connected on any other level than email.

I chose b.

After talking on the phone for the mutually appropriate amount of time you will either agree that a) this is not going to work

or

b) you want to meet.

In the case of choice b, you are now faced with an entirly new problem. When, where, how and how long (often a factor when traveling long distances).

And then, you meet.

Its really the strangest thing to meet a person whom you know what they look like, you know what they sound like, you have a pretty firm base of who this person is and what they are like and yet have never actually met them in person. There is a feeling of awkardness unlike any other situation you could be in. Do you talk about things that you already know about them? Do you act like its no big deal and try to pic up where you left off?...

Or do you inevitably end up acting as if your meeting someone you have known your entire life for the very first time?

And then there is the ultimate suck. What happens if, (and we are talking long distance now) things work out. Becuase, lets face it, the idea is just as bad as if things don't work out. Then you are now faced with being in a long distance relationship. Where your relationship grows through interaction on the phone. Lets say the person lives far away and you are lucky enough that one or the other of you can can only see eachother once a month. If you date for six months you will have only spent time together 6 times. 6!

So then the question you have to pose to yourself and your partner now is, are you worth it? Are you worth the headache, the money, the time, the lack of physical interaction? Are you willing to go out on a limb and try to date someone that you will hardly see in person based on the idea that there is "something" there?

I dont know.

I am beyond tired right now. I worked evening shift last
night which means that I got off of work at
11:30 pm and, because they were short, I offered
to work day shift today instead of evening shift. The problem is that in doing this it only gives me exactly 8.5 hours between shifts with which I can use to get home, wind down, get ready for bed, fall asleep, wake up, get ready for work and get to work. And there were all kinds of factors that kept me from utilizing my full 8 hours for sleep like my roommates being awake and watching a movie, pets running amok all night long etc. So I'm running on about 2.5 hours right now and I feel like crap. I'm not a 4 hour a night kinda girl. I need my 8 hours. I always have. A friend was talking to me once about how he read that if you could just force you self to stay awake for 18 hours a day that your body would get used to it because the human adult doesn't need more than 6 hours.

Well if that's the case I am either:

a)not human
or
b) not an adult.

Because it didn't work. I thought I was going to die of sleep deprivation and was very close to calling out of work just to catch up on my sleep. I always meet/hear about these moms who can go on like 2-3 hours of sleep a day so that they can get all of their work done, and the housework and take care of the kids. They are like wonder woman. That is not me and I can tell you right now when I become a mom it still won't be.

So until energy drinks actually start working I'm doomed to a lifetime of either oversleeping or being tired all the time.

This entire day has been one piece of crap after another. First, I went to bed early last night to avoid feeling tired and groggy all day cause I wanted to have enough energy when I got off of work to go to my 4th of July party. So I wake up at 5:30 am and pull myself out of bed. My sister whom I currently live with, is not home because she's house sitting for my parents right now while they are in Dollywood which means I need to feed the pets early in the morning. I shuffle around getting ready and let Duke out before I have to leave and notice that its drizzling. Great. So I go and grab an umbrella since I walk to work and head out the door at about 6:30. When I get to work I look at the assignment sheet to see what floor I'm on and don't see my name. What? I know I don't have off. Then my eyes scan the evening shift column and there I am. Are you serious? So now not only do I have to go home and come back later but the plans that I made for celebrating the 4th of July are no longer going to happen because I will be spending my 4th working.

So I get home and go back to bed. I wake up around 11ish and realize that I've got about 3 hours to study for my anatomy exam on Monday. I go through my note cards, which I have typed up online, and my results are 21 right out of 166. Not good. I need to know this stuff by Monday. Failure is not an option. It will literally ruin my life if I fail this test because of the sequence of events that would follow.

I finally leave for work around 2:30 and when I get there I find out that we are short handed and I am going to be assigned to a different floor halfway through the night. I begrudgingly go in and get my assignment but luckily its pretty quite and so I have some time to go back to my note cards. After my dinner break my charge nurse calls and asks if I'd be willing to sit overnight for tomorrow off. Sure I say. That would be easy I can just sit there in the dark and watch this patient and run through my note cards all night. It would be my first 16 but I figure other people do it all the time it can't be that bad. One of my coworkers comes up to me and gives me some tips about not getting your schedule all thrown off after working all night. Then another coworker comes up and says "Allison, just want you to know that that the first time you do a 16 you inevitably get diarrhea the next day"

Fortunately they changed there mind and I got to go home.