Hamilton

The post is dedicated to Matt Waugh and Teri Wicker :)

After months of falling in and out of love with houses after the highs and lows of denials and counter offers, I have settled on a cute little house on the South side of Lansing. It's perfect and very reminiscent of my parents house, which they have lived in for about twenty years now.

I now wonder if subconsciously that is why I picked the place, if only I can create as good of memories and grow a family there as they have. From the Spartan green shutters to the big front window, to the old wood floors, it takes me back to my childhood and shows me a glimpse of the future.
I met the inspector at the house yesterday to give it a good thorough once over before the offer became final. We met under the pine tree near the driveway as April snowflakes fell from the branches onto the papers in his hand, the described the inspection process, ensuring detail and integrity in his work, we proceeded to walk around the outside of the home.

He pointed at cracks in the walkway and around the porch steps, instructed me on the need to fill them due to potential safety risks, he pointed up at a leaking eaves dropping onto a rotted portion of wood over the door and said it would possibly lead to water damage.
I begin to see dollar signs, anxiety, frustration and scenes from the Tom Hanks movie Money Pit, I nod my head as he explains things in words from another language "grade, beam joists, S-traps..". I am fully overwhelmed as my mental capacity to keep a list of these maintenance issues has now exhausted itself.
All in all, he says, the house is in good shape. Good electricity, the plumbing is good, insulation fantastic, but the furnace is old and may not last too much longer. I am overwhelmed, but relieved. How nice it is to know the condition of something before you commit. To know what may break, what needs immediate repair, what can be done to improve structures, what to expect from the home in years down the road.

To know the condition.

How nice it would be to do a routine inspection of ourselves, not like getting a physical once a year, or reflecting on New Years and making resolutions that never stick. But to kneel in our crawlspaces, climb into our attics amidst the cobwebs and dust, inspect the foundation, check for leaks and potential safety hazards. To be completely honest with ourselves and exposing the condition we are truly in. To put it into a report and to show those who are making their investment in us, possibly to the one we are spending our life with.
You can't always foresee things, actually you rarely can foresee things happening, but I hope we all can somehow prepare for maintenance, repairs, improvements in ourselves, others and the place we call home.

Oil spills and Ego Boundaries..

I'm spending my days watching endless gallons of oil spill into the sea of blue, creating a marble swirl of thick brown encapsulating parts of untouched waters. They merge together in a meeting iconic of greed and beauty, of simple and complex. Sad looking Pelicans wonder onto the shore, and I'm beginning to think that I never want to drive my car again. It's been happening for weeks, but slowly, even though the gasoline geyser isn't fixed, news have shifted into other directions. Obama doesn't want any more blame for the actions of how the situation is being handled, Joran Van der Sloot killed another innocent woman, and Lindsey Lohan's alcohol monitoring ankle bracelet alarmed yesterday. The world continues to turn, as does the pages of our newspapers.

I have my NCLEX study book open, recalling lab values and answering questions like:
"The nurse knows that the physician is most likely to order which of the following laboratory tests to evaluate a client for hypoxia?"
1) Hematocrit
2) Sputum analysis
3) Arterial Blood gas (ABG) analysis
4) Total hemoglobin.
(the answer is 3, in case you were wondering!)

But instead of being interested as I should be in these matters, I have been ready a book called "The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth" by M. Scott Peck M.D. "New" is relative, being that the book was written in 1978. I'm not usually a fan of self help type literature, but maybe it's just the new stuff that is all marshmallow-y. This guy tells it straight up.
He defines love as "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth". He incorporates dependency, cathexis, self-sacrifice and the giving of attention in attributing to love. But he got me with the "falling in love" chapter: It starts with such a good opener, "No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough", the honeymoon always ends, the bloom of romance always fades..
To understand the phenomenon of falling in love and the inevitability of its ending, it is necessary to examine the nature of what psychiatrists call ego boundaries. From what we can ascertain by indirect evidence, it appears that newborn infants during the first few months of its life does not distinguish between itself and the rest of the universe. As the infant recognizes its will to be on its own and not that of the universe, it begins to make other distinctions between itself and the world.
The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us is ecstatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness no more!
But then..
"they begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved, that the beloved has and will continue to have their own desires, tastes, prejudices, and timing different than the other's. One by one, gradually, or suddenly, the ego boundaries snap back into place, gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love".
It's not to say that you can't still love that person, but that feeling of being in love for the first time, fades. It's easy to pretend, given what the media perpetuates of love, that it is easy, romantic and free-flowing and will stand by us until death. To those who have lost love, been trampled on by someone that "loved" us, been cheated on, etc. The feeling of falling in love might have been there, but true love was not, or if it was the elements to make it last were not. Love takes dedication, extension of one's self, sacrifice. It's a choice.

Check out M.Scott Peck's other books, "A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered" and "The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace"

When I was in 5th Grade I wanted to be Clara Barton. Look at me now!

Two years ago I had no idea what it really meant to be a nurse, I just thought it would be a noble thing to do, as Kurt Vonnegut said about Mary in Slaughter-House Five, "Mary O'Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be".
I also think it's a lovely thing to be.

So this is the story of a young woman who thought it would be lovely to be a nurse.

I've discovered that it is lovely, and it's frightening, and it can make you cry, and make you laugh, and it is exhausting, and often very disgusting, it's demanding, it's rewarding.
It requires total dedication, enthusiasm, wanting to possess understanding and knowledge of the human body, of the human spirit, the mind, the body, the connection of mind and body. It demands of you compassion, a gentle touch, a warm smile. You must stand up for what you belief is right, maintain your voice, because you are your patient's voice as well.
I've cried with a mother as her baby was entering into the world.
I've been in the operating room, watching pieces of a brain tumor being suctioned out of a middle-aged woman's head, knowing that this is someone's daughter, sister, mother, and hearing the surgeon say that her odds for surviving are minimal.
Days when you feel like there is nothing more you could do to help, and those days when the simplest thing brings the biggest smile to someone's face.
Two years of the hardest work of my life, endless nights of staying up late, poured over stacks of books, the coffee pot continuously on. The moments that have surrounded the academia; my nephew being born, and now he can say my name. The friends I have gained and the ones I have lost. My summer abroad and how that changed me forever. The truest things I have learned about myself, things that have been there all along, but through this, I can now see clearly and distinctively.
I am walking and looking back. I started with uncertainty but with passion, and prevailed. There were stumbling blocks along the way, and times when I wanted to walk back, but I followed the trail that I had envisioned. Now I stand at the end of the bridge, and there is a whole world to discover.

This great evil - where's it come from?

How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from?

Who's doing this?

Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light?

Mocking us with the sight of what we might of known?

Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine?

Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?

-Explosions in the Sky "Have you passed through the Night?"

"Because life isn't fair" the distressed mom whispered into the ear of the boy sitting next to me at the dinner as she breaks off another piece of Matzos. A second before the six year old was asking why his sister got a bigger piece. Somewhat of an appropriate statement for a festive dinner that celebrates the release of bondage and slavery of the Jews. We put our fingers into the grape Manischewitz wine and flick off a drop onto the Seder plate for each of the Makot Mitzrayim ,a representation that with the freedom came horrible destruction and death. You can't have a celebration without remembering the hardships that brought you there. Death of the firstborn, totally not fair. Slavery, really not fair. Swarms of locusts, flies, infliction of boils and lice, that sucks. I hear people say that with religion there is always guilt. You're a sinner and you can never be good enough, every wayward step you take riddles you with fear from the all-mighty. What can't be changed gets put on God. What we don't like about ourselves we also blame on God. When a beautiful thing happens, the birth of a child or a sunset painted so perfectly in the sky only the majestic could have mastered, we thank "him". If you win a Grammy you should thank him also.
Do we feel so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of this Universe, to place it all on God?
I'm getting to a point here. During the Seder as we dropped our wine from the cups, we then proceeded to drop out wine for these plagues:
1) Plague of burdened health care systems: Malaria infection significantly burdens health care systems. In some countries, the disease may account for as much as 40% of public health expenditures
2) Plague of over $12 billion in lost workforce productivity: Malaria debilitates those infected, preventing them from going to work. In Africa, this incapacitation nearly costs $12 billion in lost productivity a year, hindering the economic development of third world countries.
3) Plague of familial burden: Malaria causes human pain and suffering, hampers children's schooling and social development, causes permanent neurological damages and impacts families financial stability.
4) Plague of child death: Malaria is the leading cause of under-five mortality in Africa. Every 30 seconds, a child dies from malarial infection.
5) Plague of indifference to a preventable disease. Malaria is both preventable and treatable. When brought under control, death, heath care burdens and lost productivity can drastically decrease.
What I like about Judaism is that it's viewed as our duty to help those with Malaria, to fight for justices- economic justice, human rights issues, to stop hunger and the effects of disease, to help those in need. Because of not now, when and if not I, then who?
It's not because of religious guilt, but because like our ancestors struggled for freedom, it's our opportunity to help those who struggle.

Because life isn't fair, but we want to make it fair.

www.urj.org/nets

Fighting fires.

He sleeps with a 457 under his companion pillow, well he told me he didn't anymore but I saw him showing it off with the rest of his guns. He still has the line of old telephones lining the wall against where the couch sits. When I was little I didn't realize they were only for show and thought my grandpa must be a very important person to have so many phones and I bet he got so many calls. Not only was he important for the many phones he had but he was a firefighter. I pictured him busting down doors and saving children as flames engulfed him, coming home smelling of smoke, taking off his boots and waiting for one of the lines to ring, to be a hero for another day. The knowledge of him that I severely lacked, I compensated with make believe stories. The one I do remember, and tell often, is when I was 6 or 7, going for a Fire Truck ride in an old vintage engine around the streets of Madison. The bells ringing, riding in the open summer air, like we were the only ones in a special day parade. He was always special to me growing up, but later in life I began to think less of him a hero and more just a retired grandfather.
This past summer I found out he had cancer and I prayed the hero would return. He was going through treatment and didn't want visitors. I was overseas and didn't know what was going on. The updates showed his progress and eventually he began to feel better. I never knew the extent of his sickness until a few days ago, when I finally got the chance to cross state lines to see him. He said he was in the hospital for four weeks. He had a PICC line. A colostomy. Radiation. Weeks and weeks of nausea, vomiting. Extreme weight loss. As a nurse, I can picture all of this, I know how sick he means when he says sick. At one point, he was almost sure he was going to die. But he said he came to terms at that point that he had lived a good life. He has done what he wanted to do. Had good memories. He did his best to overcome.
He is telling me this over coffee at a Greek diner down the street from my hotel. I look at him and see the hero, emerging from the fire.

Lately.

I read about the Gulabi gang in Bust Magazine the other day. They are a group of women in India who consider themselves vigilantes who take direct action against violence and injustices not just against women but the disadvantaged citizens of local towns and villages in India. Read about them..http://www.gulabigang.org/index.html

Just watched "Wristcutters: A Love Story"after a classmate mentioned that Tom Waits is in it. To add to my delight I find out that it is based on a book (Knellers Happy Campers) by one of my favorite Israeli authors, Etgar Keret. It was amazing and I would really recommend watching it.

http://shemspeed.com/store.php : Nice tunes
http://www.brooklynindustries.com : Nice shirts

XO