Thursday, June 30, 2005 Gothfight
In the olden days, I was able to leave the house in a reasonable amount of time, but since I've re-discovered personal grooming, I ruin everything. Last night I was tired and draggy, and I spent too long trying to decide which lip gloss goes best with a healing headwound, so Tracy's and my original plan to go to dinner, watch the clown movie, and go goth it up had to be amended to dinner and dancing alone.
Here are some highlights of the evening:
*It turns out that it takes two months of going out a few times a week in Baltimore to know every single person in town. Also, on the way to our target bar, I saw a girl I'd sold hair products to earlier in the day. Her hair looked great.
*We were the only ones dancing, and I think the DJ was being paid in beer. He kept apologizing to us personally for dead time between songs. My favorite was when he sprinted back to the booth after "Love will tear us apart" had ended. He probably wasn't familiar with the song, right, so he couldn't possibly know how long it was.
*There was a gothfight, with hitting and attempted kicking and tackling to the ground. People broke it up, and the bartender continued to serve the scrappers alcohol. One of them was the DJ.
*The bartender shut the club down at 12:30, because the gothfight flared up again. Because of the involvement of the DJ, there was dramatic silence for the fight, so that one could hear every word. Moments after the fighting ended, a woman walked in, completely unaware that she had missed everything and so puzzled as to why the lights were on and everyone was silently staring at her.
*Luckily, there is another fine bar next door.
*Unluckily, they do not sell cigarettes.
*When I walked out of the bar to buy cigarettes at the gas station up the street a guy followed me for half a block yelling, "Miss lady! Miss lady!" Finally, I admitted that I was a lady, and I turned around to see what he wanted. "I've got a brand new umbrella here!" he said.
I really love this town. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/30/2005 04:55:00 PM
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Wednesday, June 29, 2005 Ethicist: I ate a bug.
It was never my intention to eat a bug that day, but I did. I was at a barbecue in my back yard, and I was determined to have a good time, so I was sit ting in a circle of folding chairs, balancing a plate on my lap and holding a drink in a red plastic cup. I was talking to a friend from out of town, and I felt something land on my lip. Without thinking, I licked it off, and I thought I felt it kick.
Then there was a bug in my mouth, and I had to decide what to do. I decided not to pause the conversation to open my mouth and begin digging around with my fingers until I produced a spitty, doomed gnat, so I swallowed.
It wasn't until several hours had passed and I replayed the scene in my mind that I realized other people can see me, even when I'm not looking at them. If a bug had landed on my mouth, the people sitting close to me probably saw it, and then they saw me eat it without pausing the conversation. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/29/2005 08:51:00 AM
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Monday, June 27, 2005 So blunt
Yesterday I went to a rock show in my basement, and it was great, but during the last song I got hit in the forehead with a guitar. It bled all over the place, because headwounds are sooooo dramatic, but I decided that based on my own medical opinion, I didn't feel like sitting around the ER for two or three hours, so I didn't need stitches. Now I have an evil little extra eyebrow incised above one of my regular eyebrows. I decided to leave it uncovered during my work day today. I'm sure it was probably a fashion "don't", but I couldn't stand to walk around with a bandaid on my head.
People joked about what I should tell others had caused the cut. "Tell them you burned my dinner," my boyfriend said.
I thought about it, but "I got hit in the head with a guitar" and no further elaboration is probably the best explanation for a big gnarly lump and cut on my forehead that I could possibly come up with.
I look pretty tough now. It's a nice change, but I'm a little worried that I'll be scarred, and that from now on life will be reduced to a choice between long bangs and thug life. Just imagine! One day I go for a trim, and if the stylist slips a milimeter and takes off too much, suddenly people are trying to cross the street away from me or involve me in midnight basketball programs. Ouch.
Sorry. Headwound talking. I would like my maximum allotment of sympathy, please.
Again and again this weekend, I stepped up to difficult tasks. Those mojitos, for example, weren't going to drink themselves, especially after one of my housemates altered the recipe to form a mutant new cocktail called the "blu-jito". Someone had to lose those card games.
Then, too, it's been a fussin', fightin' weekend. Long talks about feelings crouched everywhere, ready to pounce. Sometimes fights went on that I didn't realize were fights at all until much too late. Ouch. Ouch ouch. Sorry. Headwound.
I hate words. The guitar to the head (purely accidental, purely rock and roll) made me laugh, because it was such a dumb way to get hurt, and probably because of endorphin surges, too. We don't train the endorphins so much as we adapt their natural behaviors into the dazzling water show you see today. You should have seen the other guy. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/27/2005 09:17:00 PM
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Sunday, June 26, 2005 The end of the world
Today is already so pleasant that I'm overwhelmed. I woke up for the market, even though I was up late last night debating the merits of vegetarianism and watching downloaded episodes of 24 on Tracy's computer. Now I have a chance to sleep, and I tried, but I just can't do it.
The people at the market who sell Thai spring rolls and sticky rice said that they don't have a restaurant, but they said they would deliver food from their house to mine, free of charge. They don't know what they've unleashed.
This may be longer than it should be. I've been thinking and thinking for the last few days, but I haven't had more than a few minutes that I've wanted to devote to writing until now.
I've been thinking about the end of the world since I read Sweetney's post about the feeling that the country or the culture or the oil-dependant world or whoever is heading for a collapse.
I'm no stranger to the end of the world: it's how I was raised. My parents are impressionable people, and in the 1970s, as best I can tell, they picked up book after book that skewed the way they perceived things. Evidently, these were heady times, even for a couple of non-drug-using computer programmers. My mother told me that when the last Whole Earth catologue came out, it seemed like a prophecy: this is the Last Whole Earth. I don't know what came first in the procession of chickens and eggs of hysteria, but as they were reading up on seeds and tractors and growing more dissatisfied with their lives, some asshole sold my parents a book about gold and the world economy that convinced them that within the next few years, the currencies of the world would be worthless, and chaos would descend.
My family has a knack for sober common sense and practicality. Once they'd made the giant initial step of deciding that the coming crisis was real, they attacked the problem the way they would any other. They shopped for land, read more and more about homesteading, tried to warn their own families, and hoarded gold.
If the one assumption they were running off of had proven to be correct, right now I would be a post-apocalyptic princess of an empire rich in knowledge of vegetable canning and hoarded cigarettes. The foolish neighbors would be paying my parents tributes of animal hides and double-A batteries, and they would be sorry that they hadn't predicted the end the way their king and queen had.
I am being unfair. I am playing this for a laugh, and it's a bitter laugh, because as they age, my parents are less able or less willing to explain themselves, and I am more and more curious. They left their jobs and bought a few acres of land in rural Virginia. The WestVaCo logging company had clearcut it a few years back, and my mother told me that for about the first three years they lived there, they didn't hear any birds. It was cheap, though, and so was the trailer they bought to live in.
They improved the land the best they could. They planted seeds and rooted out brush. They built a root cellar, a rickety garage-like structure that I grew up calling the cat roof, and all kinds of things like that. They tried raising hippie-touted "solution to man's problems" crops like amaranth (according to my mother, the difficuly of collecting the tiny, unpredictably bursting seeds made this grain a disappointment) and regular old food that doesn't solve anything, like cantaloupes.
When my sister and I came, they built a room onto the trailer. They got an aboveground pool. They designated trees in the yard as beloning personally to my sister and I. My sister got a sycamore, and I don't remember which one was mine. I was very little. We moved when I was just about to turn five.
We moved. My parents had done nothing to produce any income for ten years, and still the world economy had stubbornly failed to collapse. They hadn't bothered to get going making artisinal cheeses or selling produce or weaving baby carriers or any of the other things that like-minded couples do when they drop out of society. It didn't seem weird to me for years, but now that I know that a lot of people have jobs, it strikes me that they were really banking on this idea of collapse.
My mother, when I corner her and ask her questions, gives me anecdotes about a woman she read about somewhere who tried to sell goat cheese and got in a lot of trouble for not adhering to local regulations, and how she had to relabel her product and market it differently. My mother has the capacity to believe that an anecdote of this nature can serve as an explanation for anything, ever. What she's getting at is that if she and my dad had come up with some kind of income generating scheme, something would've fucked it up, so why bother?
I don't know: my parents are determined people, as most total crackpots tend to be, and I bet that if they'd let themselves realize that the world might not end at all, they could have found a way to make their lunatic back-to-the-land fantasy work just fine.
Instead, they picked up on this idea of a coming crisis, and they used it to coast on. Why bother improving the world or making your own chosen lifetsyle sustainable? The sky is falling. Might as well spend our savings. Might as well live nearest to a town with awful nowheresville schools and not much to redeem it, once the pizza parlor and the feed store have worn thin.
I wish they'd tell me how they woke up, and what that was like. I wonder, too, if they're still expecting everything to fall apart around them, or if the smart money's on old age these days.
The world ends all the time, for a lot of people. Somebody bombs you, your kid gets sick, there's a natural disaster. Your dumb little country that isn't even America gets into some kind of crazy crap about politics and coups, your crops fail, you're laid off. The end of the world doesn't have to affect anyone else but you, and you will still know when it's arrived. It's not the kind of thing you can count on, and it's not the kind of thing to panic about.
Even if it is: world's ending! Get it while it's hot. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/26/2005 01:01:00 PM
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Friday, June 24, 2005 With the thoughts that I'd be thinkin'
The dryer at work broke today, spelling disaster for all salon employees. Luckily, although I remain an employee, this ceased to be my problem when my shift ended this afternoon. Moments ago, I did the wrong thing on all counts, and said I didn't want to work all day receptioning tomorrow as the previously scheduled receptionists carried loads of wet towels to the laundromat a block away. I, who have lately complained of lack of funds and who secretly loves working Saturday mornings at the beauty parlor with all the screaming kids and chaos and sleepy clients who don't realize they are in public as they yawn and grimace and pick the crusties out of their eyes. What's gotten into me?
It might be the malaise, or it might be the terrible knowledge of how little money I would make for a whole day of pink-collar drudgery when I'd planned to have fun instead. Odds are, it's just laziness and a flaw in my character. My poor character. It never asked to be born.
The weather remains beautiful here. I have plans for the weekend, and it is time to get ready, because these plans, like all my good ones, are epic. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/24/2005 02:25:00 PM
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Tuesday, June 21, 2005 Truncated
Yesterday morning I rode the bus for free, because the computerized change box was broken. More accurately, it was in the process of being broken by the man in front of me, who joyfully shoved things in the slot and then kept shrugging at the driver when the sensitive new machine reacted badly. Finally, the driver just waved me to my seat.
It was a pleasant weekend, although yesterday could have been nicer. Yesterday was a big day for strangers becoming upset with aspects of their beauty parlor experience and yelling at me. Also, it was Drunk as You Are! day, one of the wacky theme days we have, where we encourage clients to come as drunk as they think it's reasonable to be at eleven in the morning.
I was hoping to write more today, but it seems I can't tell time. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/21/2005 08:55:00 AM
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Saturday, June 18, 2005 How we roll
My one friend knows how to party. It is because of her that I spent my New Year's Eve on an alpaca farm. She works for a film festival, and if tonight had gone a little differently, right now, I'd be on the way to the DC area. There I would watch a filthy, filthy movie about comedians and what all they get up to when there's no one else but other comedians around.
My friend took pains. She pulled strings. My name, internet, my own humble name is on The List. There are lists, and there are lists. The list that bears my name controls access to a nearby moose lodge, where, if life were not a vale of tears, I would be attending an afterparty with all the moose in their fezes, all the film snobs who want to get married to the concept of the documentary, and a bunch of drunken commedians, including Gilbert Gottfried.
It is so sad. My friend can work miracles of show business, but she could not provide overnight accomodations, and since to get from Baltimore to Silver Spring on the weekend, I'd have to take three kinds of public transit, several of which stop running fairly early.
I have friends in the DC area, but the sad part about being part of an affair where one is on the list is that one cannot just bring others there, and the sad part about that is that one cannot call up one's friends and ask to crash at their place for the night with Gilbert Gottfried braying away in the background and the drunken mooses all trying to show you the secret handshake, and be like, "I'll be there right after this awesome party. You can't come." Then you come back there reeking of highballs and cigar smoke in the middle of the night, with a lampshade on your head, and a fez on your head, also (under the lampshade), crashing into the furniture. And you say, "I brought my new friend Gilbert Gottfried. Can he use your shower?"
Miss Manners would not approve. Some days, I wish I had a car. A nice lady did give me her bus pass this morning, though. It's just sad that's the sum of my special priveleges for today. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/18/2005 08:25:00 PM
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Thursday, June 16, 2005 I long, you long
A few years ago, when I started my e-mail account with Yahoo, I didn't want Big E-mail to know who I was, so I gave my gender as male, my occupation as "rancher", and my zip code as 90210. You'd think I'd get some interesting targeted ads, but it's all "Better first dates. More second dates." I guess they figure Beverly Hills is a lonely place to ranch.
I think I gave them my correct age, though, more or less, because I do get ads that are a little on the X-treme side. Today as I was writing my mom a long, rambling e-mail about the bank (because that is what she does to me), an ad for Tonik, Blue Cross' totally, totally bitchin' insurance for irresponsible, minimally employed youngsters like myself came up. It said something about, "Sometimes beats aren't the only thing that are infectious."
The ad is like a charming little nesting doll of things to upset me. They seem to be charging a lot for weird, shitty insurance. If you're the kind of insolent barista who needs Tonik, you probably can't afford a $5000 deductible when you incur a moshing-it-up-related injury or catch the chlamydhia. There's the (not your grandmother's!) colors, the way the ad appears to wiggle and quake to show me that they are an insurance company that's serious about partying. Most of all, though, seriously, is this how you people, you cool hunters and demographic profilers think the children talk? "What do you think of these beats, Taelynn?" "Well, Ashlee, I think the beats are infectious." "I agree. That is the best way to describe these beats. They are infectious." Assholes. This kind of shit doesn't fly at my ranch. That is not how we discuss the beats.
It's upsetting, too, because I think about the insurance men and the ad men, sitting together in a conference room and hatching this, because they can. They know they have my number, and they have a lot of other people's numbers, too. These scumbags are hitting people who are already kind of fucked. Nuts to them. I'll just stay healthy forever. Maybe I'll begin to unleash the healing power of crystals or health food store bark teas. As the girls in the hip dance clubs say, eat it, Blue Cross.
we all long
I am drinking tea right now. I'm stuck with oolong, because my housemates and I drink tea like it's our job, and, like I said, very literally to cure what ails us(Ask me how I know about dirt-n-bugs-tasting health teas.), but we've been healthy lately, so we drank up all the Earl Grey and Constant Comment.
Today I am hoping to cure my rock and roll lifestyle, or rather, to enable it. I come not to bury fun, but to praise it. Fun rules.
I had a good time at the Blogger Happy Hour. One of my housemates asked me where I was going before I left, and I told her, and she said, "Come on, you don't have to lie to me. What are you really doing? You don't have to lie to make yourself sound more dorky." Klan rally, I told her. NAMBLA meeting. She accepted it.
Nah. No reason to be that way. Some people just don't get the internet, and how grateful I am to it for all it's done for me. Trying to explain the blog community to others is weird and hard, too. I wish I were a better mingler. I can't do it very well, and last night I squandered the window between "drunk enough to mingle" and "too drunk to be fun to talk to" on a couple of games of pool. That social-A is a bitch. Pool, though: who knew that would be something I'd enjoy? My stylish companion and I have a little mantra we repeat to one another, about how we are going to win and what we think of our opponents. It feels mean when our opponents are also our friends, though, so I don't think we gave it a hundred and ten percent. In the end, we won a game, and another blog couple(Mmm-hmm. What we've got here is a close knit commmunity.) won one. Rematch: has to happen.
We had to run out after that. There was a function that was supposed to take place a few blocks away. It was to have been a trivia contest. It didn't happen. We figure we talked about going too much to the wrong people, and they cancelled it. Good thing for them, too. We would've wiped the floor with those assholes. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/16/2005 09:17:00 AM
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Monday, June 13, 2005 I don't like the new change boxes, either, Mr. Mayor
Today was bus hearing day for Baltimore City, and I didn't even go. What would I have to contribute, other than, "Please, please don't fuck me over. Please don't fuck anybody over. When you're cutting lines altogether and reducing service, do it magically, so as not to ruin anyone's life." I'm being melodramatic, maybe.
If all the buses in Baltimore stopped running tomorrow (no one would notice til the next day, because since when are the busses ever reliable? Everyone would think it was his or her bus alone that had disappeared.), I would be OK. I can walk to work, even though in the summer months the 20 blocks leaves me too disgusting to set foot in the beauty parlor, let alone greet patrons pleasantly in a way that makes them want to cut or color their hair. I could bike, maybe, if I could get my bike down to the shop somehow, and if I didn't pop its fragile tires instantly again like I did last time I took it out.
I have legs, and I'm pretty strong, and I can breathe OK. I can make it. This is not true for everyone. I worry about bus hearing day.
My hair changed again, because today was Monday as well, and it was too hot to move, so fewer people had the urge to go and update their looks for Summer. It's subtle. Like a bonsai tree.
A lady came into the beauty parlor today who reminded me of my Aunt P., whose main method of non-face-to-face communication has evolved from joyful, raucous phone calls to mass e-mail forwards. L@@K!!! HERE IS AN ANGEL FOR TODAY!!!, she'll say. If I'd only followed the procedures she'd outlined and forwarded enough of these out to five or ten friends, I might've avoided years of past unpleasantness. I'm going to write her soon, and she won't write back, because that is not her way, and possibly because at my sister's wedding, she kept making increasingly pointed comments about what was wrong with my life (she was close in some cases, but in others, whoa, seriously, left field!), and I answered these less politely than I could have. I felt bad later, because several times I have called my Aunt P. and told her that some kind of socially unacceptable companion who behaved abrasively and I were going to come and stay in her home, and each time, she welcomed me and my albatross.
HELLO HOW ARE YOU YOU WILL RECEIVE GOOD LUCK STARTING TOMORROW, I'll say in my message.
Not really. Maybe I'll talk about my hair, because that's what it's relevant to mention. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/13/2005 07:10:00 PM
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Sunday, June 12, 2005 The right side of my brain
My housemates and I pool our books on shelves in the living room, and someone added a new batch. I didn't notice for weeks, but now I have options. It's great. I would just read the same four or five books I always do, if not for her.
I picked up one called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, because I'd heard of it before. My first high school, my weird hippie school where we called all the teachers by their first name offered a Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain course, and I will remember that they did forever, because one time a boy I had a secret crush on wrote it on a class schedule as "Drawing on the Right Side of My Balls."
The premise of the book is that it will teach one to draw by teaching one to see. It came out in the late 70s, I think, and I'm a little afraid that it's going to try and empower me. That's never pleasant. It's supposed to be good, though. If one believes what it says about itself in the introduction, it will tap into powers I never knew I had and change my life.
I can't draw. I wish I could, because it seems like a lot of fun. I'm skeptical that the author's techniques will work on me, though.
For one thing, the book is supposed to teach me to send tasks to my under-utilized right brain, which will do them for me by magic. It seems so reasonable, but my right brain is the one that, according to the book, is supposed to have been recoginizing faces for me all these years.
Right brain's been dropping the ball. I often can't recognize people unless they're in exactly the same context I first met them, and they haven't changed their appearance in any way, including changing clothes. That's one reason it was so easy to be a socialite of the Key West bum scene when I used to hang around down there: I was able to tell who everyone was. That was the guy painted silver. That was the guy painted gold and wearing a wizard's cape. That was the pregnant girl who kept trying to sell me drugs. Right away, I recognized them.
Certain customers at the beauty parlor are beginning to act hurt, because I know they've been coming in every couple weeks for the ten months I've working there, and they know that I know, but I can't remember their names. "I know I'm no Brad Pitt," one regular customer said, "but, come on!" I was puzzled, but later on, I used all the brain I could and worked it out. He assumed that if he was Brad Pitt, I would not have asked if he had an appointment. People attend Hopkins because they are very intelligent. Anyway, I should have told poor chagrined Brad that it was my right brain's doing and left it at that.
My other problem with unleashing the power of my right brain is more dire, I'm afraid. The book tells me that I'm not to read ahead. Instead, I'm to do each excercise as it comes, and I'm supposed to use white paper and a pencil.
I don't have a pencil. I've looked all through the house, and there are no pencils here that I've found. We have pens and markers and eye makeup, and that's it. My one housemate goes to art school, but I keep forgetting to ask her, and I would feel bad wasting real art supplies on what will probably prove to be kind of a flash in the pan (Know thyself). I write names in a large appointment book with a number two pencil all workday long, and no one from work is going to care if I borrow one, but it never occurs to me until I'm home already.
My brain may not have any sides to help me. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/12/2005 05:25:00 PM
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Saturday, June 11, 2005 I h8 U
Someone put up a permanent chainlink barrier on each side of the staircase between Mt. Royal and the Howard St. bridge. It is exciting to find that out for the first time when it's a hot day and one is carrying groceries.
Some local hero has printed a sticker and put it on the bus stop near my work. It has the MTA logo and coloration down, and it says, "We don't really care." I'd like to be friends with the person who did it.
I still can't stay mad at summer, though, even though it is the grossest season of them all. It makes so much sense for me to be lazy as hell in the summer. I barely move, and nobody holds it against me.
I've been an e-stranger lately. Have I already said, "No time 4 U, internet," in a previous post? Seems like I did. I know what kinds of things I say. I'm too busy climbing fences and getting sunburned and leaving my bank cards in amusing locations.
I should probably save my strength. I'm going to the Baltimore Blogger Happy Hour on Wednesday, even though somebody decided to start it at 5:30. Y'all people are animals. I don't know what's happening exactly that day, but my date and I are not getting there that soon. I should probably link the word "date" to his blog, and I should continue this policy whenever I mention him (See? That, too, would be a link, if I had the courage to act on the evil with my heart.) I have the idea that it's going to be a good time. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/11/2005 07:29:00 PM
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Wednesday, June 08, 2005 She threw several things, including a pencil
Today a lady at work screamed and threw things, because there was some confusion about the day of her appointment. If I hadn't gone out last night, knowing that I wouldn't be on top of my reception game today and not really caring at all, I might have become upset. As it was, I was all empathy, like, "Oh, wow. She must be really frustrated. I am a total chump. Here, lady, throw shit around some more." The woman was deaf. She yelled and threw. I wrote notes on tiny scraps of paper.
I took a sign language class in highschool, but I don't remember much. Right now, I only reliably know one sign language gesture, other than certain gestures that are fairly widespread.
There was a sign language interpreter at my college graduation, and because I went to college when I did, the student speaker's talk wouldn't have been complete without recurring mentions of terrorism and related topics. I zoned out, for that is what I do. I listened to my classmates pass around liquor bottles and drop them on the floor before we'd even walked, because I went to the University of Partying Down. I watched this interpreter, and tried to see if she was using any signs I recognized. She wasn't, really. I did notice one unusal set of motions that seemed to keep coming up.
She raised the first two fingers of her left hand together, and then made her right hand into a surf's up kind of shape, with the thumb and pinky extended, and the rest of the fingers balled towards the palm. She held up the hand with two fingers and struck them with her right hand.
In an instant, I realized what she was trying to say, and then my drunk-ass fellow almost grads gave me dirty looks as I tried to choke back laughter that seemed to be prompted by the student speaker saying, "The Tragic Events of September 11th."
I hate it when you think of the perfect thing to say to someone, hours after the fact. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/08/2005 10:04:00 PM
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Sunday, June 05, 2005 I'm just plain lazy.
OK, I was going to come on and post here, right, but first I had to check on what's been going on with the internet during my last couple days' absence.
Licketysplit left me a comment on my last post that said: "How much does one get paid for this wire business? I want IN!"
I was getting ready to respond, in the comments section, but it was getting long. Read it and weep.
Licketysplit: Not much! I told you, this study is severely underpaying, especially when one considers how upsetting the idea of the neck wires is going to be to most reasonable people. It's at a hospital, for one thing, rather than a drug company, and it's also in Baltimore. People are poor enough here that studies can recruit them for less than they can in other towns. If I complete this, which is four nights (I don't have to stay there in the day, either, I just have to sleep there), I will get $500.
I'm doing it anyway. The tubes and wires and all will be uncomfortable, but!
-I'll get my own room.
-There are no blood draws.
-The only medicine required is a sleeping pill on one of the nights.
-I will be dealing with doctors and research assistants who are friendly and pleasant.
-Shit, I'll take $500. To sleep? Suckers.
Like, I could make $500 at this other place that's always running studies, and technically, it pays better, because they generally do two overnights with a week between them. On the other hand, there are no private rooms, although there's a men's section and a women's section, for what that's worth.
Generally, you're not in your room at all there, because they make you sit in either the room where you eat or the TV room for most of the day. Also, those studies are testing generic drugs against name brand drugs, to see if there is any difference in the way one's body breaks them down. To do this, they take blood constantly. Each visit, there are about thirty blood draws. They're all straight sticks, administered by phlebotomists who are working on a ridiculous schedule. To keep the timing right, they have to successfully take someone's blood every two minutes, and so sometimes they are imprecise. They are also a very angry people, the phlebotomists, and your comfort is not a priority.
One's study mates there tend to be crazy, and they tend to be angry, too. People fight. Everybody wants to be your boyfriend. One of my housies described it by saying it was just like riding the subway for 48 hours straight.
I don't know: maybe I'm selling myself short here, but compared to the other place, this sleep study sounds awesome. A housie who was going to do this one but backed out thinks the doctor decorated the sleeping room himself. There's a print of Starry Night on the wall, and she said she pictured him out shopping, finding it, and saying, "Oh, this is perfect for my sleep study room. Just perfect." posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/05/2005 02:51:00 PM
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Thursday, June 02, 2005 The things I get up to
Usually, I don't take cabs, but today I was trying to go screen for a study, and I had no idea how to get to the hospital on public transit. The internet failed me, and i had to leave right then, or else I would be late for my appointment. Too much time at my beauty parlor job has made me appreciate that there is something badly wrong with people who miss appointments without calling to cancel. (I was really, really tempted to blow it off anyway, but I need a new pair of shoes.)
Also, the nice doctor had been so pleasant on the phone. It was his study, and he was so happy that someone was willing to come in and try out to do the ridiculous things he has planned.
I rode in the cab, and the driver glared backwards at me most of the ride. I didn't blame him: one of The Rules is that anyone in a service job is allowed to hate their customers. I tried to ignore it, and I kept watching the meter. I had nine dollars, and when the meter rolled over to eight, I asked how much further we had to go. He kind of grunted, so I had him stop and tell me how to walk the rest of the way. I gave him the nine dollars, and slunk out of the cab.
I followed his grudging, mumbled directions for a long time, through industrial noweheresville. I took a wrong turn once, but a man helped me find the hospital. When I got there, I was disgusting, but I figured that if somebody didn't want to be around disgusting, filthy people, they wouldn't go into medicine, and they damn sure wouldn't go for a job where they had to associate with human guinea pigs.
I apologized for being so late (half an hour! I felt really bad.), and the doctor and the research assistant just shrugged it off. I screened. They put a mask on me and then had me practice breathing while the either blew air through it at a higher than usual pressure, then sucked it out at negative pressure. I did just fine. I'm a great breather.
This nice doctor's study doesn't pay enough. Aside from having me sleep in the mask, they're going to measure how floppy my airways are (Airways not floppy! Airways like iron! Like animal!). They are also going to run little wires through my neck. I will be so x-treme.
Obviously, these dudes are effin' crazy. The thing is, I could do shorter studies for less money, but they would be in facilities that recreate the experience of riding a crowded bus for two days straight, or I could go and let these polite but crazy guys pierce my neck and watch me as I sleep, and do it in an air-conditioned private room. Whatevs.
On the way out, they gave me cab fare, but it was totally scraped together from their lunch money, because some of it was in change. They love me at that research facility. Cara-u-star.
I came up with a wacky-female-comedian-style joke about the consent form, too. You may enjoy it.
The consent form lists what-all they have planned for you, and tells you what certain terms mean, and then a page later, they go into the risks of each procedure. This was my favorite part of the consent form:
f.Anthropometrics: You will be asked to wear a patient gown for these measurements of body fat. We will measure your height, weight, waist, hip and neck circumference using a cloth measuring tape. This takes about 10 minutes.
Then later, they tell you the risks, like "placing the fine wires through the skin of the chin into the tongue may cause some discomfort."
Are you ready for the joke? That wasn't it, yet, although I agree: that was rich.
Anthropometrics: There are no risks associated with these measurements.
Here I must add: What about the very real risk of bumming me out????
(That was the joke, but it was just for humorous purposes, and I don't really mean it. That's just what I'd be required by law to say if I were a wacky female comedian. Comedienne. Gross.) posted by Frenzy Lohan | 6/02/2005 06:43:00 PM
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