Clickin'

Wow, I've been lazy lately! I've been spending far too much time making those bead designs that require ironing. It's completely addictive and has consumed just about my every waking moment for the past 3 weeks. I sit there like an idiot or a trained chimp picking out tiny beads and putting them on a peg board. It's about as mentally stimulating as watching static on the tv, but I just can't take my hands off those tiny beads.

When I was in Pennsylvania, my 10 year old niece and I went to Michael's to buy more of these beads and it was though we had landed in wonderland. It was almost too much to bear; aisles and aisles of crafts that needed to be purchased and completed. We filled our cart up to the rim and then I came to my senses as I approached the cash register, realizing that there was absolutely no justification in spending 3 digits on shit that I was just going to throw away or that would sit in my spare bedroom (like my scrapbooking stuff, knitting yarn/needles and pictures to be framed). I'm becoming frighteningly similar to my grandmother and her nursing home posse and I'm skirting dangerously close to applying jewels and rhinestones to my jeans and putting angels on sweatshirts and sending them to everyone I know as Christmas presents.

Today my 4 year old daughter told me that she just couldn't control herself and that she needed to be trained. This was in reference to our new puppy. Puppies are small and cute and she wants to rub their cold, wet noses. I think she might be right. The dog needs to be trained, but so does she. We hired a dog trainer to come over to the house and show us the correct way to get the dog house-trained but we might need to hire a girl-trainer that can show us how to manage our daughter.

My husband and his sister are watching the movie Hostel. I think the basic premise of the movie is college graduates get murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They love to watch slasher flicks. I don't have the stomach for it and I'm a huge chicken. I can hear them complaining because no one has gotten dismembered and they are already 10 minutes into the movie. "This movie sucks! Didn't people get killed right away in Saw?" They opted for this over the Olympics. Lee is in a bad mood and nothing makes him feel better than watching people suffer, especially if it is particularly violent and people are being tortured.

He (Lee) has been working in the ER this month. Working there can make you a sadistic person. When you are taking care of the dregs of society you start to view everyone with disdain; the grocery store clerk, the person who won't let you merge into traffic, your wife and children. Sleep deprivation intensifies your emotions so something that might seem mildly irritating on a normal day, on a sleep deprived day might push you to become justifiably homicidal. The other nite, while the rest of us slumbered, he took care of 29 acutely ill patients in a 12 hour period. We are talking about heart attacks, strokes, altered mental status. It was him, one 3rd year medical resident and a first year medical resident. You leave there, the hospital, at 7 am (or more realistically, at 7:30-8 am) and you are supposed to immediately mainstream yourself. You might have just finished intubating (putting a breathing tube into) someone with pneumonia so bad that he can't breath for himself, sent someone with a possible stroke to the CT scanner, or taken care of the same drunken bum for the 118th time, but you have to walk out of there and act like the world is a balanced place. Last Wednesday nite he had a patient that would only talk to him and agree to medical treatment after conferring with the Holy Spirit. "Holy Spirit, is it okay if I get an IV?" "The Holy Spirit said no, you can't draw my blood or put an IV in my arm." "Sir if you don't let me put an IV in your arm, we are going to have to call security and they will tie you down so we can put an IV in your arm, so you might want to check with the Holy Spirit again." "Alright, I checked again and this time the Holy Spirit said it was okay."

Last month, Lee was taking care of the patients on the in-patient service in the hospital. These are the patients who have been hospitalized for various and sundry reasons. He was making rounds by himself one day and he asked a guy with AIDS why he stopped taking his HIV medications. "Well, I was at work and these people kept messing with me and then I started clickin' and theys started clickin' and then they was clickin' and I was clickin' and we was all clickin'. Click, click, click, clickin'. You know what I mean? We was clickin'." I wonder if he wrote in the patient's chart. Diagnosis: clickin'. And I wonder what the treatment might be.

I've been having a hard time the past couple of days because I don't know how to handle disapproval. Judgment is damaging. We all do it, judge. "How can she let her kids watch that movie, play that video game, listen to that music, etc..." It is so much easier to condemn someone elses actions/intentions than to analyze our own lives. It gives us this weird sense of superiority. By devaluing someone else, we somehow feel validated. "If they are wrong, then I must be right." I think we are the harshest with our own families, our siblings & parents or our spouse's siblings and parents. Then we feel like we have to rally our cause and talk to other family members to get them onto "our side." "Can you believe what so and so is doing (or can you believe what they did)? What are they thinking?" When you become the one who is being judged then all of the sudden you realize that it is a bad idea. Suddenly you want them to walk in your shoes, to see the world from your perspective. I have to admit that when someone I love judges me, I don't know what to do. It has taken me a while to go to God about this one, to finally realize that the only thing that really matters is His judgment of me. And as sad as I might feel about someone's disapproval of me or my actions, I still need to choose to love them and realize that God will take care of the rest. And if I go to Him first, if I honor Him, then nothing else really matters. It all goes back to keeping my eyes on Him. If my eyes are on Him, then the waves won't overpower me and drown me. But the minute I take my eyes off of Him, then I start to drown. If I keep my eyes on Him then there is no reason for me to keep 'clickin' with everyone around me.