It's been awhile/since I've gone...

It has, indeed, been awhile since anything appeared from me. I could argue wedding (since I married a few months ago), I could argue illness (since I fell ill in early February), I could argue sheer laziness (since I am), but none of those would be entirely true.
I tend to go through phases where I don't particularly feel a need or even a desire to share my thoughts, feelings, or experiences with the world, or even to commit them to any sort of pseudo-permanent form. I don't believe that my thoughts, feelings, or experiences are particularly world-changing, and therefore see little point.
But then my inherent vanity (because, come on, isn't that the point of these things) once again rushes to the fore and demands its tribute. So once again I put fingers to keyboard, so to speak, and type out whatever I feel like sharing at that moment.

Today, I feel like ranting a bit, and also asking a question. There are several people I know, who have recently gone through awkward and/or difficult situations that they don't want the general population to know. (Honestly, I think we all have those at times)
With me so far?
Why, then, do they post links, comments, rambling page-long quasi-diatribes on their own webpages, blogs, social networking sites that refer to what they went through? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of requesting secrecy?
I've read numerous articles and reports that on the internet, it is more likely for people to post personal information, because somewhere along the way the knowledge that SOMEONE ELSE COULD SEE IT (most likely someone you don't want to have know) gets lost. The internet comes across as wonderfully anonymous; "no one could ever figure anything out about me from the seventeen pictures I've just posted, complete with names, dates, and locations" seems to be the common prevailing thought.
I often bemoan (usually to my husband, bless is patient soul) the lack of sheer common sense that seems to prevail in the world today; it makes me want to bang my head against a wall because honestly, how can people really be THAT STUPID and still have learned to walk, talk, and share personal information with the world?
Yes, I confess, I am guilty of it too--to a degree. I put up as many filters as possible on who can see just about anything that I may not want the whole world knowing. I'm bipolar, I'm borderline personality, I'm not ashamed of those things. But there also aren't any awkward-to-humiliating photos of me floating around in cyberspace, either.
If you post something personal, and others find out, what right do you have to get upset about it? If it spreads like wildfire that "so-and-so did X with what'shisface," and so-and-so gets mad about it because, "like, come on! my MySpace is, like, personal and stuff!" they have only themselves to blame.

Sometimes I despair for the future of the human race.

I just can't resist the urge/To stand here in the light

There's actually going to be a day about me. That's weird. I mean, yeah, ok, I know that there won't be that many people there, maybe 30 if everyone who says they're gonna come actually comes, but that's about it. But it's still weird. I've always been that one. If I didn't want to be noticed, and you tried to pick me out of a crowd, you'd be wrong. I'd be the other one. And I'm not huge on attention. But...
I have a day. In 9 days, I will have a day. It's frightening, yet wonderful. And then I'll be able to be with Andrew--my family. He IS my family. The people who raised me are just...the people who raised me. But Andrew showed me what family can mean. I only wish that more of my friends--the rest of the people who matter to me--could come. So I could share this with them. Share my day, with the people who mean the most.
I have a day.

Dum, dum, dee-dum, dum, dum, dee-dum...

Sorry it's been so long. In my defense, things have been a bit chaotic.
So...the wedding is coming up in a little over two months now, and I'm starting to panic JUST A LITTLE BIT.
Which may have contributed to my development of asthma, but then again, knowing my disease-prone history, probably not. On that front, it's not going so well, and I will probably have to begin routine (i.e. daily) nebulizer treatments as the handful of inhalers I currently use aren't working.
But back to the wedding. I'm excited--I just got the wedding party favors in from Costa Rica (yes, Thellie and Michelle, you're getting nifty Costa Rica stuff) and the regular wedding favors in from (insert company name here), so the rest of you who read this who are coming will also be getting something nifty and a bit out of the ordinary. Very little left to do, actually, except for find a nifty car to leave the reception with. And have it out with the photographer over who is in what picture and how many and where and such. Other than that, things are pretty much set. Which is terribly exciting, because I always thought that weddings were horribly nightmarish in the putting-together bits and all one could do afterwards was collapse into the nearest convenient chair and mumble "so glad it's over!" to the nearest conscious body. Not to say that that won't happen, but thus far things have been running relatively smoothly. Which means I have pretty much jinxed everything now.
Oh, yes, and apparently I've been missing work not for my rather (read: extremely) dramatic and sudden onset of asthma, but because of gastric bypass surgery. Must have gone wrong or something, for me to miss so much work. If anyone feels like telling me about how I decided to get the surgery done, or what went wrong, please tell me, because I'm totally blanking. Must be the inhalers. Or the ativan, but that's a different story.

If you are dead or still alive/I don't care

So it's been six weeks, or so, since I last posted. Things have been hard, and easy, and good, and awful. I had to go back to therapy for a short while to recover from the client's death (see last post) because every time I closed my eyes I saw his already-cold and stiffening body and his eyes, his horrible horrible eyes, open and blank and staring right at me, saying, "why didn't you save me?" For the most part I'm better now, but once in a while I still see him and start to hyperventilate.
I got engaged, which is absolutely wonderful. At some point I'm going to post a picture of the ring, etc, but I haven't actually gotten round to it yet although we've been engaged for like 3 weeks. For those of you who read this who I haven't contacted directly for addresses and minor notifications, I'm really sorry but that means you're most likely not invited because we're having an absolutely tiny wedding because of a myriad reasons not the least of which being my problem with crowds in general, a dislike of most of the people we'd have to invite because our coworkers are creepy, and cost. It doesn't mean we don't like you or anything, it's just that we have to keep it down to an absolute minimum of people.
As for the story of how it happened, we had made plans to go to this street dance thing (though it's more a stand-around-in-the-street thing) for a few hours before I headed into work for my weekend on shift, so I dressed up a little bit. He had talked to my dad earlier in the day, which I knew about, but I figured the question itself wouldn't pop up until the next weekend because I was working this weekend. Anyway, he took me to the one and only nice restaurant in town, saying basically "what the hell, we're dressed nice anyway, might as well do this right." I wanted to know how things went with Dad, but he told me that he wasn't really up for talking about it until after we finished eating. I was, of course, very worried because it sounded like Dad had said no. We finish eating, I go to the bathroom, and get back to the table and he says, "before you sit down, this is how it went with your dad." He had a ring in his hand and got down on one knee and I started just bawling while he's talking, and I'm so overwhelmed that I'm not actually paying attention to the details of what he was saying (but he doesn't know that yet) and then.
A little old lady walks up and starts talking at us, "oh, isn't that sweet, oh it's so pretty" etc etc etc and ANDREW WASN'T EVEN DONE ASKING YET!! I did, of course, say yes and it was terribly exciting and I fulfilled my promise to Michelle to call her first. I'm excited.
And now I'm in Chicago with him, for a group reunion of sorts, with a lot of the people I hung out with in college the first couple of years, and I haven't seen any of them in at least two years and I did some nasty things before we started hanging out and so I was very nervous that it would go badly but it's been going quite well thus far except for when they all called my ex boyfriend and wanted to talk to him and I felt terribly terribly awkward.
And I'm sure there's more to talk about, like how my brother is back home for the summer because he couldn't find a teaching job down in Texas and the job in Korea fell through because of the whole scary maybe-war thing. And how I hate my job more and more and more every day but I really don't want to get into detail because I'm very sure you don't want to hear about my alcoholic slutty coworkers or the antics of my clients or the more disgusting aspects of my job that primarily involve body fluids. My elementary-school sense of humor (you know, the one where you laugh when someone says Winnie the Pooh because, OMG, they said "poo") has come back into play because being able to laugh at the whole body-fluids thing is the only way to get through it. So I find poo funny again. And how old am I?


I'll try to get back to actually writing in this thing, as it's fun and cathartic and it keeps my typing semi up to par. Kind of. And it's a lot easier than having to repeat my story over and over again to various people when it's much easier to just write it down once. Granted only two or three people are even interested in my stories, but you get the point. I think. Maybe.

Raise their souls up to the sky/Why must helpless creatures die?

There was another death at work. This one on Thursday night/Friday morning, my shift. Since I can't call him his real name, we'll call him Gerald. He just...died, in the middle of the night. My coworker, Natasha, found him first and screamed for me and I saw it and called 911 and the boss and the nurses and everything else is a fog. For several reasons. Reason number one: that apartment was my responsibility to check every hour. Room one, check that she's not on her stomach and that her body pillow is in the right place; Room two, that he hasn't wet himself; Room 3 that he hasn't fallen out of bed; and Room 4 to drain the catheter bag and rotate him to prevent bedsores. Gerald was in room 3. So all night I peeked in, ok, he's still on the bed, good. That was all. That's all bed checks are. He hadn't been sick or degrading medically so breathing checks weren't necessary. He'd been dead for four hours when we found him. After my spurt of efficiency. I sat down and just...left. My mind went totally blank. People are still wondering if I'm ok and I think they were rather worried about it; looking back, I wasn't too far from having to be taken to the hospital myself for shock.

the funeral was yesterday.


I feel horrible about this. I just...yeah.