Friday, 06 August, 1999 00:03
So far, an interesting night... interesting in that I'm not busy. I like that, but the night is still very young.
I think that I got enough sleep yesterday, about 10.5 hours. I'm feeling pretty rested, anyway.
"Behind the Green Door", the old song that I mentioned yesterday... my first memory of the song is hearing it in a store near the grade school that I attended in the late fifties in Enid. I think that it was the first song that ever affected me emotionally in any way.
I don't have the lyrics available, but the gist of them was that this kid was being excluded from the activity that was taking place behind the Green Door and, not only was he excluded, but he was denied any hint of what was actually going on.
This is how I've felt most of my life. And then I figgered it out... there was nothing going on behind those doors... in many allegorical senses. Nothing of importance, anyway. Exclusionary doors are put up by people who don't want you to know how really pathetic their exclusionary clubs really are.
I didn't really feel excluded until I moved to Albuquerque when I was in the seventh grade. The school that I went to was about 75% Mexican-American, and nobody wanted to have anything to do with me, it seemed. This was especially true after I had four of the Mexican kids beat me up after school one day... the next day at school I had to name names, and nobody spoke to me for the next week.
Cliques are really good examples of exclusionary groups. I don't think that I've even been associated with a clique and I probably never will be. I've always been on the outside, and that's where I want to be. Because there's nothing on the inside.
On the other hand, this could be entirely a case of sour grapes.
Gee, I really hope not.
And I've found the the most interesting people, the ones that I like to associate with, are anti-clique also. This, however, is one of those chicken-egg questions... are they interesting because they were excluded from the cliques, or did they exclude themselves because the cliques were uninteresting?
It's been a strange night... not busy at all. It's 04:30, and I've only had two patients from the ED since midnight.
But I'll pay some other night. Well, actually, I'm probably already paid up for the next century, but my accounting makes no difference to anyone but myself...
But just because I'm not doing much doesn't mean that I'm not getting tired and sleepy, unfortunately. I'm having a hard time not nodding off here... I've even had an extra cuppa coffee past my 04:00 cutoff point, just to try to stay alert. I can't go to sleep, generally, for about four hours after my last cup for the night.
Ahhh... home for the day. Shoes off, feet are breathing. And it's going to be a rainy day and night, according to the weatherman... sorry, weatherperson.
I did get the computer running righter, messing with the BIOS, but that damned phantom E:drive is back again. I think that I'm going to leave it alone (and not use it, of course...) because I think that's when the machine went south last time... I was trying to get rid of the E:drive. O'well...
I spent some time hanging around the ED last night, and I came late into a conversation about the movie, The Blair Witch Project. One of the nurses was absolutely convinced that it was a true story... she'd seen a documentary on TV about it!
And, although I'll never see it, I do pick up a lot of useless information about stuff through other people's journals and the mailing lists... evidently there are a lot of people who think that it's real.
Not nearly as many as think god is real, though... more's the pity.
Anyway, we managed to convince her that it wasn't real, and she got really embarrassed when she realized that she'd been conned. And she still wasn't entirely convinced...
I hung around agter work some, just goofing off, 'cause I had to go to the bank and they don't open until 07:30. Gee, I'm glad that I don't work first shift there...
The "diet" seems to be going pretty good. I'm missing my candy, but it's not really that bad. And I'm looking forward to being slimmer, I think... I'm sure that I'll feel better not carrying around extra weight.
OK... more tomorrow...