got love/ got shellfish

okay, well, i’ve calmed a bit. over the past few days i went for some long runs, spent some time thinking, drank some cold alcohol (okay, a lot of alcohol), and had a long talk with my boss. for the time being i think i’ve come to a decision about how to proceed with my life, but who knows how i will feel a week or so from now.

thinking about the future can be so frustrating.

today at work i got to see a shard of metal in a patient’s eye (as well as a piece of plastic), and helped with the subsequent removal of these foreign bodies. later i would sit with a 13 year old girl while she cried and cried because she couldn’t get out her very first pair of contacts. we place the contacts for patients on the first attempt, but they are not allowed to take the lenses home with them unless they prove to us they can take them out on their own. poor girl just couldn’t do it. i sat there and reasoned with her for over an hour, but eventually she cried so much that the tears made it near impossible to take the lenses out anyhow.

at least today was a fairly interesting and productive work day.

looking for some interesting music? find “something in the way” by “best coast”. it’s a great summer tune.

debate exposes doubt

Beginning to doubt my life decisions. Should I actually be an optometrist? Maybe I’ve been talking to my boss too much…

Ugh.

hoping these cigarettes will save us

another day another dollar. it was a long day at work, beginning by waking up around 5:30 am after a night of little sleep, and then just getting back home around 5:45 pm. working for an optometrist is draining. while i do enjoy it somewhat, i’m also reminded each day why i decided not to become an optometrist.

today i saw a 12 year old patient with glaucoma. i saw a 16 year old girl who suddenly lost the ability to use her legs about 3 weeks ago and has constantly dilated pupils and pain in her eyes. no one really can say what’s wrong with her.

it wears me out.

last night there were tornados. i spent the evening in the closet of my basement, with a baseball helmet on, reading “the trial” by kafka. hopefully tonight the weather won’t be so tumultuous, and hopefully i’ll be able to find some sleep.

in some backyard, in some plastic chairs

fantastic weekend in kville. just swung back into my hometown to have a father's day dinner with my family, and tomorrow i actually have to get up and go to work. i managed to land my old job for the summer, although with more sporadic hours. at least it is money. i need money.

the weekend was a great escape. things had become stifling in the hometown, in my parents' house, and it was critical that i get out and have some real fun. it's weird to return to kville and feel more at home there than in the town where i grew up. the people in kville are great- many goods times, awesome adventures, lazy days, and copious amounts of alcohol. and i actually was able to get some sleep. that always makes things better.

but being in kville also made me more nervous about my decision to move to brno. i am beginning to take note of all the things i will be leaving behind. good friends...familiarity...american comforts...eavesdropping...mostly, i am afraid of the language barrier. it makes it really hard to make friends when you can't fully express yourself in the language. i should really start studying harder, i suppose.

soon i will have to buy a plane ticket. things are starting to feel a little more real, but i still have this almost dream-like overlay that keeps me from fully realizing that come september i will be saying goodbye to america. and i don't know when i will return.

dinosaur with a toy gun

back in a routine (although its just one art class and soccer pick-up games in the evening) and it is feeling good. i still have trouble sleeping, but whenever i find myself struggling i just put on some album on a low volume. usually i fall asleep before i get through all the tracks.

i've been cooking a lot again. whenever i come home, my parents encourage me to make them dinner. take tonight, for example: vegetable casserole with feta cheese, a salad, some watermelon, and cookies for dessert. my parents were relatively pleased, but the happiness was short-lived. when they discovered that the anticipated new episode of NCIS would not be shown tonight due to a presidential address, they had a fit. my parents can be so fussy sometimes when it comes to their television programming.

going to kville this week. very excited.

getting it wrong

i have a friend named tanner. we went to high school together, and then he went off to college in some other region of the united states, but we still keep in touch. he's a pretty talented guy, especially when it comes to design. below i've posted the link to a sparklehorse song that he did the video for.

if you want to see something cool, then check it out.
if you don't want to see something cool, go look in the mirror.
sorry...that was probably unnecessarily harsh. just check it out, whydontchaaa?

http://vimeo.com/2354870

i don't want for you to take pills

too much enthusiasm too soon.

last night i went out with some old guy friends from high school and had a fairly good time, but when it came time for bed, my head hit the pillow but no slumber came. even with all the depressant action of alcohol coursing through my body, i still struggled with insomnia. then i had to get up early this morning for class.

that's right: summer class. i'm taking a basic art class at the college...should be pretty easy, possibly entertaining. so far i've already cast a good deal of judgments over some of my fellow classmates...but then again i was the girl who showed up with wet hair, neon green framed sunglasses, jorts, and a mug of coffee reading "you're the greatest dad". starting off the summer semester well.

i'm sure i'll probably have some decent complaints or stories about my classmates to come later, but for the moment i'm just coasting. jawesome.

maybe it's the dirt, maybe it's the heat

what a difference a few hours of sleep can make.

i was going on night 4 with still no sleep, and it was during the dark, weepy morning hours cruising on the coat tails of midnight that i decided this was absolutely ridiculous. a body needs sleep, and whatever anxiety that is keeping me so worked up that i can't feel the sweet relief of slumber isn't worth this insomnia hell. i drank a couple of beers to fortify my decision, then promptly tucked myself into bed and turned off the lights.

a couple of hours later i finally fell asleep, but i got at least a good 4-5 hours of solid sleep, and that truly makes quite a difference. i feel attentive and more alert than yesterday, and my hands are no longer quite so numb. hopefully tonight the sleeping trend will continue and maybe i'll log a commendable 6 hour shift. here's to dreaming big.

today i have no real plans. going to make a vegetable lasagna for dinner. i was pretty sure my parents had come to terms with my decision to be vegetarian (my mother came home with an armful of vegetarian cookbooks from the public library the other day), but then this morning they wanted me to eat some breakfast sausages. granted, i had helped stuff and prepare the sausages, but that still didn't mean i wanted to eat them.

it was kind-of fun to make them, however. at first it was like something a la "i love lucy" or a "three stooges" skit, but towards the end i was starting to feel like alton brown.

i will always be nicer to the cat than i am to you

i miss sleep.

over the past three nights, i haven't enjoyed more than 2 straight hours of sleep. new bed, new location: none of it is working. i'm not exactly sure what is to blame, but it might lie in the fact that without some sort of shadow of a schedule or routine my body goes haywire. insomnia isn't that romantic image that some people keep in their mind, of the tragically tormented artist or writer sitting up late at night and working on his masterpiece, toiling deep into the night in a frenzied, idealized and passionate trance. it's not really like that at all. i stay up late with absolutely nothing to do. i want to sleep. i feel tired. but it never comes. it is incredibly frustrating.

i guess the only real positive is that i'm getting a lot of reading done with all the extra hours i'm not spending on sleep. i finished "the gambler" by dostoyevsky. now i've moved on to "dead souls" by gogol. i'm already a third of the way through it, and the night is still young.

due to the insomnia i've also become fairly introverted during the light hours. tonight i decided to try to go for a long walk in order to both get out of the house and also in hopes of tiring myself out so i could finally get some sleep. so far, i'm as awake as ever. however, the walk did help calm down some of the anxiety that had built up during the day. i saw a cantaloupe sitting in someone's driveway. i saw a horse living in a house (not a barn, mind you...an actual house). i trespassed and wandered for a good 3 hours or so, coming back well after the sun had set.

richard dunn died today.

no blood no foul

today was slightly more productive.

got up around 7 am to go to an auction out in the country. i spent the day hanging out with the townies and watching people buy boxes of junk for a couple of dollars each, and i was called "hun" or "sweetie" more times than i'd like to recall. it was an adventure, at least.

pick-up soccer games have started up again, and although i have never actually played soccer on any team and i don't really possess any of the necessary skills, the guys still let me come and play. i enjoy the exercise, and they usually need to extra body to make even teams. basically, all i've got going for me is that i have a lot more endurance than most of them, and i'm relatively persistent on defense.

bought person pitch on vinyl today. love that album...but hate the fact my record player suddenly decided to go on the fritz.

also, i guess i decided this would be the summer of russian literature. i finished "fathers and sons" the other day, read a chekov play today while waiting around the auction, and i just started "the gambler" by dostoyevsky. we'll see how long this streak will last.

i heard your call but i was spitting up blood

pictured above is the fine meal i constructed with kevin and matt last week. a homemade pesto on pasta with a fresh salad and some baked bread. many of the vegetables were fresh from the farmer's market. but before you start complementing me on a healthy diet, please note the whiskey and coke offsetting the meal. both things were delicious. those guys are good to cook with, and maybe sometime before the summer is over we'll get another opportunity to combine our culinary talents.

but for now i've left kirksville and it feels relatively strange to be back in my hometown. i've moved into a different room of my old house, mostly because i find it impossible to sleep in my old room. after finally getting everything situated as i desired, i'm actually pretty content there and i haven't left much. i finished reading "fathers and sons" by turgenev in two days, and i've been taking most of my meals up there in solitude. i've been listening to a lot of music. animal collective just blows my mind.

speaking of my music tastes, apparently i've become an "indie-hipster kid" over the past 4 years. i ran into some friends from high school, and they let me in on this fact. when the fuck did this happen? and why was i so oblivious? i guess the vegetarianism, obscure music tastes, and ironic wearing of jorts should have at least raised some flags in my mind. god damn it. oh well, too late to do anything about it now.

it's lonely here.