My Youth, My Innocence, My Phone

All goddamn vicitms of this neighborhood...
But the cellphone was easily replaced. (But not the numbers. If you have mine, I need yours.)

I'm still in disbelief that I'm actually moving away. Talking to a friend on Sunday, it all of a sudden hit me that I wouldn't be here in a few months. Everyone keeps asking me where I'm going to be working when I get out to California. I've been putting it off for long enough, when I get back from Miami/Key West next week, I really need to get serious about that. Somedays I think that it would just be easier to say that it's time to have babies. Make an easy transition from workaholic to prenant lady, and just treat that like my career... But who am I kidding? I am so not ready to have kids yet. I have a million places I still want to go, and a whole bunch of purses I want to spend my money on.

Somehow, I think that it might make me realize that I actually am an adult if I just had a baby. Lends a sort of authenticity to the whole thing. After all, I can't just keep on going with this Peter Pan shit forever, can I?

Help me out, sane friends! I need a helping hand to figure out my disaster of a life...

LCD-WTF?

Ain't nothin' like seeing a 61" flat screen being delived to the projects.

Gotta love NYC.

I guess.

Everything to Everyone

Sometimes, despite all my best intentions, I over-promise, and under-deliver.

Ice Dancing

husband and i were thinking that we would do a much better job of ice dancing than all these lame idiots skating away to les miz medlies with nude chest-paneled, rhinestone-encrusted costumes.

we figured we'd do it with class. bring it up to date. a nice mix of hall 'n oates. maneater. i can't go for that. a mix of tempos, sweet and sensative, yet rockin'. we'd show 'em all. and to cover for our less than stellar skating ability, we'd have gabriel set off some fireworks stage-left (rink left?) when we were "doing a lift" rink-right. i figure we'd bring 'em to their knees, bolero-style.

kami, you in as costume stylist?

2010, you read it here first.

The Good Wife

i've said it before, and i'll keep saying it again until he finally gets it, i love my husband. i love him so much that my heart breaks when he seems to doubt me. i'm working really hard to keep both me and him happy, which is made even harder lately because we're moving away from the city i've called home for the past five years, to retun to his hometown. (not that moving to the san fransisco area is a bad thing at all... i'm just going to miss my friends and manhattan more than he seems able to understand.)

You see, the problem is that the husband doesn't seem to get the fact that my friends are still my friends even if i haven't known them since childhood. some of the people i've met over the past five years, or even the past year, mean a great deal to me, and i depend on them to help me get through everyday life, lift my spirits and keep me sane. they share in my joy when i'm happy, and let me cry on their shoulders when i'm sad. in his eyes, if you havn't known someone for ten years, they can't possibly be anything other than an acquaintance. (which i guess puts me in an awkward category in his mind...)

I'm just scared that in six months i'll be living somewhere i don't know anyone, other than my husband, his family and his friends. which puts me in my least favorite roll--that of marc's-wife. it really becomes all one word, as if it were actually my name.
at least in new york i still have my own identity.

For now...

I Still See Dead People

So dead body number two yesterday was this 49 year old guy the ER had done a number on. he was picked up by the police, and had a 'panic attack' while in custody, so they brought him to the hospital. it was really a heart attack, but i guess that makes little difference to the NYPD.
so this big boy was lying around, naked-naked in the ER. penis hanging out, rolls of fat exposed, feces galore, lying dead, ribs broken, with idodine covering large swaths of his torso.
if he had family coming in, or waiting i'd be franically spinning my wheels trying to get the body ready for viewing. but as that was not the case, all i could think was--he's got a huge dick.

And then i really wished someone had put a sheet over him because he'd been dead for a good hour at that point.

Oh, The Humanity

My friends often wonder how i do my job. i work in a big hospital, and my day job is working with death and dying (i'm a social worker.) my moonlighting gig is on-call work for the ER and the rest of the hospital. if some child is abused, anyone gets raped, or some osrt of domestic violence, i'm awakened from my slumber to tend to matters. the day-to-day stuff doesn't get to me. but yesterday, the hospital did.

I've been to the morgue many times. i've handled a dead baby before. i've seen a million dead people. dead people don't scare me. and i really do see them, but not in a walking and talking kind of way. i have all kinds of concerns, like how long they've been lingering in a hospital room dead, because we (the nurses, not me) need to get 'em cleaned before rigor sets in. or before they start to smell like rotting death. i'm often the one who has to escort crying family away so that the corpse can be tended to. i also have to take people down to the morgue to see their loved ones. this is always something i discourage. the morgue is not a fun place. but no matter how many times i explain to people that they really should wait until the funeral home to see their dead mother looking like herself, they still want to go down there.

Yesterday, a 74 year old died suddenly in the ER. the family wanted to go see her. the 'body' (really only her little head peeking out of the gross white plastic bag all bodies get stored in in the meat-locker-esque slots in the morgue) was ready, but the family walked really slowly, and a funeral home director beat us to claim another body. so i had to wait in the hall with the sobbing family. something i hadn't realized before is that bodies get hauled around with big chains in the morgue, to lift them off the slabs, onto the funeral directors' gurneys. this makes a whole lot of disturbing, torture-chamber noise.

But after ten minutes that was all over, and i took the family in for a view of the dead woman's head. (i lovingly picked off all the stray hospital-sheet white threads from her chin and brow, prior to the viewing...) imagine lots of crying, beating on the walls, yelling... and all this before 11am.

My day was bound to get better, right? well, little did i know, it was only just beginning.

The Katie Show

I am generally a loner. i like to have people around, but not necessarily interacting with them. i like to be alone in a crowd. or else out with one or two people i know really well.
which i probably surprises a lot of people i know.

I blame this on a phenomenon my husband calls the katie show. i've traced the roots of this little charade back much longer than the time i've known him, though.
but first let me tell you what it is: often when i go out, i make myself the center of attention. i dominate the conversation, i tell funny stories, i keep everyone amused. and people keep coming back for more, so i'm assuming i don't do it in an obnoxious way. people like me in general. i present myself as a happy-go-lucky devil-may-care kind of gal. sad and depressed katie puts on a excellent katie show, and my poor, darling husband always has to deal with the vitriol when i get home, because i can't keep it up forever. it's as if for every funny, witty thing i say, something nasty, snarky and hateful has to come out later. i do love the katie show while it's happening, but the come down is brutal. (see why i've never done coke?)

So, where did this entertainer-like behaviour begin? why can't i just be happy with someone else being in charge? because i grew up in a house where no one else would say a word if i didn't provide the comedy routine! my sister and my dad were always too wrapped up in their own heads. they are the academics in the immediate family, and it shows. my sister often gets lost in her thoughts to the point of total oblivion. and my father is currently obsessed with some long irrelevant economic theory. he seems to think it'll be earth shattering when he disproves it. in my bid to please everyone, i learned at a young age how to spin my day into a web of humerous situations that would provide a seamless backdrop for the family dinner (6:30 exactly!) so the meal would be tollerable, and we'd all be off the hook.

See? nobody's family is normal.

Thirteen-Year-Old Boys

There is something about adolescent boys that scares the shit out of me still. i may be a full grown woman at this point, but a 13 year old boy still has a way of turning me into a quivering pubescent girl--fat, ugly, awkward, unwanted. just plain wrong.

So when hanging out in a bar, i don't expect to encounter anyone under the age of 21 (or at least 18) so it's especially jarring to be taunted by a gaggle of teen boys. and even worse when they show up again the next night to taunt me again, from outside the bar, follow me up the street screaming "you fucking white bitch."

Always nice to feel safe in the neighborhood.