ii

word came through. i'm transcriptionist ii. i should probably be thrilled but actually i feel rather blech today.

not sleeping so well; last night i had another night-long nightmare of being stalked, the sense of the imminent infliction of pain. one of those when i wake up periodically during the night and each time i fall asleep again i find the same dream waiting for me, ready to continue the horror.

oh anyways. quit moping. monday night kara and i are going to seattle to see david tell a few jokes or something. we were going to spend the night but the dogs haven't had their shots so the kennel won't take them. so it'll be up and back on monday, which is of course fine. we'll probably leave here in the late morning and enjoy the city for the afternoon, have some dinner, and then head to the paramount.

but that's a week away! why am i talking about it now?!

not much of an obit

well! muriel spark has died.





















go on and read something of hers.
she wrote lots.

me yelling at me; join in?

quit distracting me! i'm trying to write here! not here, on this blog, but there, on my novel. everyone else is publishing a novel, why not me? well, maybe because i haven't finished one yet? so get to it, boy! get off the net! or out of it; sometimes i feel positively ensnared.

hit me 65 times

something kind of funny. on monday 4/10/2006 i got more hits on my blog, way way way more hits on my blog than i ever have before. this site is visited maybe six or ten times a day, on a good day, i assume by people who know me personally. and that's okay.

but monday, two days ago, after i referenced "the west wing," john spencer, and leo mcgarry, some 65 people visited this blog! what a thrill. of course, very very few folks stayed longer than one second, once they learned i was just some dork talking about my cat.

i guess it's all about the keywords. let this be a lesson to me, in my struggle for the heights of popularity.

claw

sclerodactyly is a localized thickening and tightness of the fingers or toes. it's a form of a fairly rare disease called scleroderma. and though the website of the scleroderma foundation does have a store, you can't just order things online. you have to call in an order or print out the order form and mail it in.

late vice president elect

meet leopold mcgarry. perhaps i have previously introduced you to him as "yellow," but times have changed. names too. poor leo.

my precious manchild yellow was trying to exit our house via the window by our bed last evening during "the west wing." there's about a foot between the bed and the wall, and the window was open about four inches. yellow, standing on the bed, bobbed his head several times, gauging distance, wind speed, etc, and made his heroic attempt. unfortunately the entire endeavor was ill-advised. his feet lit on the sill but his head struck the frame and down he went.

when he came to, he was leo mcgarry. he certainly has the dignity of an alcoholic labor secretary, chief of staff to the president of the united states, and vice presidential candidate, do you not think? my little boy.

john spencer is dead. long live leo mcgarry.

gettin shot in my sleep

this is clancy brown. he was in "buckaroo banzai" and "highlander" and a bunch of other stuff, including my dream last night. he was my next-door neighbor (and he wasn't "clancy brown," he was just some meany who looked a whole lot like clancy brown) and he'd recently murdered a young neighborhood woman. shot her to death. he was bold enough to show me a newspaper article of the murder (without copping to it), though i quickly figured out he was the doer. i remember the newspaper photo of the vic very clearly. and then things got scary. he had a posse of thugs and they roamed the streets at night. one evening he came to my house, alone, to retrieve the article. on him he had the revolver he'd used to kill the woman and he essentially dared me to accuse him of being the killer.

it was that sensation (with which i'm sure you're all familiar, and which i've had more than once [in dreams] in the last week or so) in which i absolutely knew i was going to be shot at, and hit, and probably fatally. time was spent on the depth of the experience of bullets hitting me, punching through me, me falling to the floor, etc. the last time the shooter was this fellow vincent. it's a strange, complicated, fatalistic sort of sensation. passive and horrifying.

what the meaning of these dreams is i know not. they're quite vivid, though.

aspiration pneumonia (hold the pneumonia)

think i jinxed it. dumb blue. my line count's been lowish the last couple days. i might not get the bump. but oh well! i mean, i'll keep trying for it, keep striving for excellence. i dig this gig and want to be the best they've ever seen.

there are transcriptionists who just do radiology reports. x-rays, ct scans, mris. i think that would be boring as heck. someone finally came up with the great idea of training the radiology transcriptionists to the regular hospital transcription, because we're always behind and they often have little to do.

and i realized something. something i already knew, but i realized it anew. i found i was excited about the prospect of these people trying this new job, while i more or less know the job - maybe they would ask me questions and i could help them!

i realized i like the idea of training people. teaching. just on this small scale, though. i don't want to stand in front of a classroom - heck no. but the idea of teaching a person or a small group of people something seems kind of thrilling.

i don't know how many of the radiology transcriptionists will ask me questions, because i'm relatively new and thus not an authority. even though i know a heck of a lot! but i find myself hoping one or two of them will turn to me from time to time.

so is this something to aspire to? maybe one day i'll be a trainer for this transcription department. of course that means i have to be totally kick-ass at this job, though. so i'm working on that.