Juxtapose

My yearly thankfulness post, a tad late. This year, in particular, I'm thankful for:

+ Family

+ No more morning sickness

+ My warm, cozy living room

+ The three jobs that Mark and I have between us, all of which pay for more than what we need

+ Long weekends without work

+ A clean house

+ Pepperminty, warm fall drinks and mittens

+ My awesomely discounted new pair of Danskos that I've been holding out for since nursing school

+ Emails from Heidi and Kate

+ Chinese food and The Office with Sar

+ Hannaford frozen pizzas

+ Seeing Weezer, live and in concert, seeming like the greatest thing in the world at the time... singing along to every single song like I'm thirteen again

+ Teddy's gift of thirty cents to the cause of helping us buy a house nearby so we can live close to him

+ Mark's quiet, calm love for a neurotic, Attention Deficit Disorder wife (aka - me)

+ Antibiotics

+ Seeing people get better, live, after dancing a waltz with death and dying and hoping they have some appreciation for that after it all

+ Warm quilts on chilly mornings

+ Hulu and Redbox

+ Cars that run almost all of the time

+ Quiet living in my quiet life with my quiet husband in my quiet home

+ That Peace.. the one that passes all understanding.

Happy Thanksgiving.

When I am sad, these days, or weary in spirit, I try to just go to Abbey's Flickr and look at pictures of their totally cute, totally sad-eyeball dog, Pete, because it just seems like he would have some sage advice for me such as: "Relax. Good things come to those who wait." Or, "Be still, my child, be still."

I feel like he'd have a lot to say if he could talk, he looks that interesting.

One week later, I'm still at home sick with some dreaded bug that has migrated to everywhere possible in my face - my left ear throbs, my sinuses scream in horror, my voice is a becoming squeak, and my eyeballs look as if I could have easily have spent a week smoking the ganja. Sadly, I'm starting a second job on Monday, and so far I've called out of work sick twice this week. Having never called out of work sick before since I started working at age 16, I've finally caved and made myself an appointment with the doctor to see if I'm doomed to suffer out the last throes of a virus, or if all these "extras" (the earache, the sinusitis, the gunky eyeballs) are secondary stuff that I can get treated for. This is a grave "give in" for me, as I usually wait out my ailments and they usually go away, but this is getting unbearable and I'd rather not get drug-tested on my first day of work.

Completely unrelated, I've been reading up on blogs with all this spare time, and I read a funny little post by my dear friend Pham on life before Web 2.0. I really do feel as if I've grown up in the internet age, moreso than most people I know. My parents have always been very progressive in terms of technology and internet connectivity, and in a way it's been very integral in my life and a lot of the circumstances that have occurred in it over time.

Looking back, I've been posting weblog entries since before they were called that. Back in 1997-98 I had a little net zine that was a pet project (mostly to give voice to the trials and tribulations of being thirteen, Christian, and homeschooled all at once), and that immediately transitioned into a weblog in 1998, as well as a web presence on a thread-based bulletin board where I met many of my close friends who I still keep in contact with today, and many of whom I've visited and vacationed with multiple times, despite separate time zones and states in between. I have, in fact, shared many of my life's best moments with them, and it was they who introduced me to the person who is now my husband.

I get very shocked when I think about these things because life now seems so mundane, in a sense. I am very married, very settled in a small town with my best friend and half of my family, and go about my life very normally. Sometimes I forget to think of myself as nerdy as I probably truly am. I forget until I have to explain to unsuspecting Small Talkers the multiple convoluted twists and turns of the story when they ask that old, boring question, "How did you guys meet?" They never expect that I'll have to go back to middle school to explain that we didn't meet on Match.com and we weren't "online dating" and that nine months of official dating and nine months of engagement were enough to produce a solid marriage. I have to frequently reduce myself to the half-truth, "We were like.. sorta.. pen pals... for a long time." This answer always garners a, "How! Sweet! Is That! You two are adoooooraable!" My real explanation - "We met in middle school on an online bulletin board and I didn't like him but then we started talking when we were older and we visited each other for months' worth of time and then started dating and then he moved up here to be near me and lived in my parents' porch for six months and we got engaged and got married and we are soooo happppy!" - this one, all people hear is, "ONLINE!!! THEY MET OOOONLINE!!" So they ask, "WHAT?!! Did you meet on that MySpaces??" And nothing else registers after that.

So it's funny where life takes us. Pham's been a friend of mine for years now as well, and over time he's been out to the East coast a few times where he and Christine and I have gotten together to visit. His post took me back to that question, "How *did* this all happen?"

Mark's going away soon on a business trip out to the Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco for almost a week and I've been getting bummed about him being gone because I do just love having him around. I always liked being my own person and doing my own thing before we got married, even when we were dating it was long distance so we pretty much did our own separate thing anyhow.. But now, I guess after having a ready-made buddy around all the time, it gets me bummed out to think he'll be gone for a while. I forget all those years we were apart, I forget all that time that our whole hope was just to spend a weekend visiting after six months of time apart. I forget all the things that happened and twists and turns and missing that happened over all that time that leads me up to where I am now. Thank you, Lord.

A side effect of the current low census at my hospital is that I have had many, many days off the past month. On average, I've worked a shift a week, sometimes less, so I have a lot of time off these days. This is no good on the paycheck/savings side of things, but considering my busy schedule the past year and a half that I've worked there, I figure that it all is just part of the ebb and flow and that it'll all balance out by the end of the year.

This is all to say that another side effect of the low census and my days at home is the opportunity to see, for the first time in my life, really, the wonder that is daytime television. It's true what they say - there is almost absolutely nothing on television during the day. We don't have cable - a waste of money, really - and our little bunny ears only pick up about four and a half channels of moderately-fuzzy fare. The days I am home, I have a hard time sitting still long enough to even watch the news, but if I'm not in the mood for music on the stereo, I'll put on the teevee for background noise while I'm reading. This yields some interesting results, at times.

These days, I've come to appreciate the hilarity of daytime television advertising, which is an amusing admixture of useless household implement infomercials, Send in Your Gold for Cash schemes, and "You can train with ITT Technical College to earn an exciting living in medical assisting!!!" This is all sandwiched endearingly between Court TV, the Tyra Show (worth a watch at least once in your life for a look at, truly, the dumbest and most awkward television personality to date), and my newest favorite trash talk show - The Drs.

Yes, "The Drs" is the name of a talk show. Not, "The Doctors," no... The Drs. Though I had never heard of this show before today, I have to say that the only thing worse than some of the embarrassing/awkward/disgusting courses of MD study - proctology, urology, podiatry come to mind at the moment - nothing could quite compare with the loss of decorum and dignity it must take to lower yourself to become a teevee doctor answering incessant questions from 45 year old housewives about yeast infections. The worst thing about it is the hilarity of the outfits. Sitting behind a little island decorated with a sad-looking EKG lead readout (which, if it were real, would have me running for the code cart posthaste), the four Drs are each in varying outfits that look more like the Halloween representation of a doctor than anything else. Dr Babe, OB/GYN has the giant 90's fan-bang thing going on and wears saucy heels and jewelery with a lab coat over it all while she suggests come cranberry juice for that UTI. Hot Young Surgeon, MD, wears a strange teal-colored set of scrubs and Danskos while looking through the television and right into your soul. Dr Middle-Aged Hospitalist wears a nice turtleneck under his lab coat and is suckered with trying out, live on the air, the brunt of all the alternative therapy ideas that are brought up by callers to the show. And, last but not least, Friendly Family Physician, MD, in his houndstooth suit and monochrome tie, wears nothing indicative of his doctoral status other than a stethoscope, draped limply and uselessly around his neck.

The only thing sillier than this show, I feel, is that, unfortunately, the last five minutes of today's show has been cut off by NBC News Special Report on Obama's speech. Okay, I mean, I know this is important, but now I will never know whether or not vinegar helps to fade age spots or not.

I would just like to put it out there that I think it's really lame how people just roll over and die after an election. Like, if I hear one more quotation of "The King's heart is in the hand of the Lord" I think I'm going to cry.

From either side, Demo, Repub, or the other sides that are out there, everyone from any losing side seems to just lose all their vigor and whither up like a grandma and starts getting all righteous about how we have to respect authority and let's never say a contrary thing about the newly-elect. Obviously, nobody cares what I have to say - this is all my own opinion, as we all know - but I don't know how suddenly all the issues everyone was all excited about suddenly diminish in importance. If you're into Obama, and you know his plans for the country and his ideals and morals and ethics and all of that floats your boat, being fully aware and educated on these things, then I imagine you, right now, are very happy, and you have every right to be, because this is the beauty of democracy, to vote for someone who you think will be best for your idea of what's best for the country.

However, all through the Bush years, there was a lot of turmoil. I certainly didn't agree with plenty of this administration's doings, and I'd be happy to tell you about them. As a Christian and not as a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or COnstitutionalist, I have heard many, many friends tell me, with vigor and passion, the things they disagreed with about this administration, and, again, that's okay and that's part of a nation being made up of many different people, plenty of whom will never agree with me on plenty of things. I appreciate free speech and a passion that causes people to care about what happens to their country. I, personally, care because I know, despite the many things that go on here in this country, we still are free to do and be many things that are not possible in the majority of the world, and I'm not under the impression that God has any particular interest in America over any other country and that we should just be sooooo heavenly minded that we think that if we roll over and pretend like politics don't matter, that things could never be different than they are now, for the better or for the worse.

Get your head out of heaven, live your life here on earth with some passion, some convictions about what you think is right and wrong, and stop being a pansy about it. I plan on praying for the president, supporting the president, and being active, but you won't hear me shut up and be some sheep, unimpassioned about life in general, wasting away in rays of otherworldy sunshine with no consideration for the future, for my kids's future, that they might be able to speak freely, be educated on the world and everything in it, to worship freely, to live and choose as freely as God gives free will. Don't roll over like a dead dog because you're afraid to be passionate about something - these things don't exist by chance.