It needs a name...

Its last name was Carla, as per the commandeering of my mom, but I consider that to be too spicy of a name for a car so... beige. I want something that fits, but that simultaneously doesn't sound gay.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. Suggestions NOW!

More loving family matters

I'm awake, checking my email and reading some of the articles on C|NET and IGN. Madden '09 looks pretty cool, and apparently there's an Internet security application being offered for free by ZoneAlarm for today only. The ZoneAlarm product has an ad attached to it that looks oddly familiar. Suddenly, I realize that I'm freakishly hungry, and so I close Safari and head downstairs to get some Cookie Crisp.

Unbeknownst to me, there was about to be a convergence of three unrelated events: My dad was heading up to the family computer, I was heading down to the kitchen, and some guy was coming up to our front door. My dad and I reached the foot of the stairs at the same time random guy got to the door.

Coincidence? My dad thinks not! As the dogs bark like idiots, my dad stands in my way, stares at me, and throws, "Expecting somebody?" at me.

What I should have said as I walked into the kitchen: "Yeah. Could you check and see if that's my meth and porn shipment?"
What I actually said as I walked into the kitchen: "No."

I poured myself a bowl of Cookie Crisp, and got myself a spoon. When my dad gets back downstairs, I ask him, "How would I have known that anybody was at the door?" He responds with, "I don't know. Called?" "Nope. I just came down to get some cereal."

Just four more days, just four more days, just four more days...

Why I'd still use Creative products if I were on Windows

You can't deny it. This thing is beautiful in a way that completely defies the current trend of so-called one-piece construction. It's instantly eye-popping and has features that take it beyond the iPod Nano, including a built-in speaker, built-in microphone and built-in radio. The 4 GB model will run you $79.99, which is just a little over half of what a 4 GB Nano would run you.

More features and a boldly different design for half the price. Creative Labs clearly wants to shake things up.

Dreams

Any interpretations on this one would be appreciated.

Two nights ago, I dreamt that I was with my mom's relatives, and we were getting ready to go to this safari park. It was morning, so I hadn't showered by this point, so I go toward the bathroom and the door is open. Unfortunately for me, that doesn't mean that my cousin Paul isn't in there. He apparently didn't feel like closing the door before he got on the toilet. After deciding not to shower after all, I walk into the kitchen to find the world's smallest hamster, able to fit on a single finger. As it turns out, the incredibly tiny fluff ball is also great at climbing. When I set it down it began to vertically scale linoleum tile.

Then we go to the safari, which happens to also be an archery range. Most of the archers seem to be terrible at the sport, as arrows are flying and landing everywhere. We walk through the park (it's a lot more like a park than a jungle or savannah) and finally come to a point where across a lake and through a thicket, we can see this pack of giant moose. They're each at least two stories tall, and they're just grazing. Suddenly, from our right, an even bigger muskrat - no smaller than three stories tall - runs up and starts barking at the giant moose. I start feeling my pockets for my camera, then realize that I don't have it and I turn to the people behind me and ask them if they have it. Turns out somebody does, and they hand it back to me, upset about the fact that their own camera got lost. I promise the guy that I'll email him all the photos, and then another guy says that that won't be necessary and hands the both of us 6 GB compact flash cards. I have no clue what to do with this, since my camera takes SD cards. Then we continue to walk into a more science lab setting, and everyone begins to sing a patriotic song I've never heard before (this happens to me in dreams sometimes. I'll hear music I've never heard before) and at one point in the song everyone stops walking and just hugs the nearest person. I reach out for somebody, but everyone's already hugging somebody else.

Then the bell rings and it's time for me to go to my biochem class. The professor is at the board writing down everyone's name for the first day of class, and he tells us that if at any time we find the course too daunting, we can get up, walk to our name, cross it off, and write the time at which we left the class. He launches questions at us, and puts regulations on where we can sit based on how likely we are to help others figure out the answers to things in class. I need this class, because I only have 15 credit hours and dropping it would put my full-time student status in jeopardy, so I resolve to do well in it. At the end of the class, we start watching a video of people bowling in their swimming suits, which is somehow supposed to illustrate the differences in genetic disposition toward body types.

Suggestions as to what this might mean?

Recent Weeks

I went to bed before midnight on the 13th because I knew that it would be easier to avoid eating that way. That didn't make sleeping that night any easier, though; maybe it was the idea that I was having surgery the next day, maybe it was simple insomnia (I seem to be having a lot of that this summer) or maybe it was secret government radio waves beaming directly into my head the best hits of the '60s, '70s and '80s, I'll never know. The point is that I didn't sleep too well that night.

My splenectomy was scheduled for 10:30 on Monday, which meant that we had to arrive at the hospital around 8:30. Thanks to the aforementioned uneasy sleep, it wasn't a problem waking up early enough to make this happen. The waiting room was agonizing thanks in large part to the incredibly loud TV blasting The Early Show into every corner of the room. There was a competition to see who could best sing the Star-Spangled Banner and everyone who was competing (at least when we got there) made me wish I could leap out of my skin and just lay on the floor in a heap of organ, tissue and bone.

When we were finally taken into the pre-op area, I stripped out of my clothes and into a gown that felt suspiciously like paper. I didn't really want the TV on, but my dad insisted to watch something, so instead of ESPN I opted for MADtv. I would have honestly rather watched nothing, but it wasn't that kind of deal. Various nurses, specialists, and needles came in to prod me with questions, thermometers, names, blood pressure thingies and blood samples, but I saw the surgeon at noon sharp. I don't remember being wheeled to the OR, or even being in the OR at all except for the anesthesia mask they put on me. The next hazy memory I have was drowsily speaking to somebody as they inserted my catheter, and then I was in my recovery room.

The basic timeline escapes me, but the important things went like this: Monday was the most uncomfortable day for me because I still had a lot of gas in my torso from the surgery. I was given a morphine drip, but the amount I could administer for myself was generally too small to make an impact on the pain in my stomach. Late that night, I finally couldn't stand the pain any longer and I asked a nurse to let me up so that I could walk around my bed for a bit. Either that or the pain pill she gave me helped a lot. Recovery was basically that same run-around over and over: pain pills, getting up to walk around from time to time, and struggling to eat. I would have left the hospital on Tuesday or Wednesday, but the doctors were concerned about how low my hemoglobin count was, and up until I was released it was looking more and more likely that I'd need a transfusion. Fortunately, that didn't happen.

While I was in the hospital, my parents visited every day. That wasn't really too comforting or helpful to me, since they would simply do their own thing and I would either sleep or watch TV. I guess we didn't really have anything to say. My brother was a different story, though. He came to visit me on the first night along with Melissa, then again on the second night which is when they brought me Batman: Gotham Knight on DVD (a collection of animé shorts which I highly recommend to any fans of Batman or of animé), but Melissa was getting a migraine that night, so my brother came back a couple nights later and we watched the DVD together then.

I had vowed not to miss an episode of Avatar that week, because it was Nickelodeon's big push to the end of the series. Every night at 7:00, I had my TV on, and when I got out of the hospital on Friday I still watched it. By the end of the series on Saturday, I felt so amazed at the shape the TV show had taken: from being another action show three years ago to developing a strong, complicated plot where everybody had ambition and purpose behind what they were doing. Every time something like that happens, I go back in my mind to how things were when it began. I was a senior in high school... even in the pain of that year, things seemed a lot simpler back then.

The following week was painful. I still wasn't able to eat very well, and sleep only came to me in bursts when I took a hydrocodone, which I ran out of before the 25th. My dad informed me that I still had oxycodone from when I had my gall bladder out last year, but given the strength of that drug and the number of pills I had left of it, I decided that I wouldn't use it during the day, and that I'd only take one after trying to get to sleep and being unable to from pain. I had a few of those nights afterward, but the pain kept coming later in the night until it would hit at 5:00 AM. That abated too, but I still wake up every day at five in the morning before going back to sleep for a few more hours. I have no clue when to expect my first uninterrupted night of sleep, but with any luck it'll come soon. I've been slowly losing sleep for nearly three weeks now.

I decided early on while I was home that I should try to sing again. My reasoning, beyond obviously liking to sing, was that the doctors gave me a special tool to exercise my lungs by encouraging me to take deep breaths; I figured that since singing is one of the most demanding non-aerobic things your lungs can do, it would help get my lung capacity back to normal more quickly. This was how I discovered arguably the weirdest thing about this recovery: I cry when I sing anything that's even slightly sad. I haven't tried singing "Hallelujah" by John Cale yet. If "Dizzy" and "Cautioners" by Jimmy Eat World and "That's What You Get" by Paramore make me sob, I don't think I could even get through one verse of "Hallelujah." A friend of mine said that in some part of the world, the spleen is associated with melancholy. I'd say it's probably the lack thereof that's associated with it.