My Cracked Shell
Life is weird. And sometimes, we're forced to take a closer look at just that life, and in particular, ourselves. Our personalities are certainly complex, and the factors that make up this personality even more so. "If something's not broken, don't fix it," is the ever sounding proverb of our day, and throughout my life I seem to have added to this, making it something like "If you manage to ignore something that's broken, you don't have to fix it."
I am an egg. Well, a complex egg, but it works well for my analogy. I surround myself with the always thicker shell, protecting the vulnerable soft core of my existence. People can be cruel, people don't always consider your feelings, and this especially counts for people whom you've never met. New people, thus, don't get the same Christian everyone that knows me get, they get the ridiculously shielded and guarded Christian, and this one is not a very personable character. I avoid new people's eye contact, avoid their questions by answering in short, amputated sentences to not give away anything that might have them attack or make fun of my self or appearance, and due to this Christian is an arrogant a**hole the first time they meet me. People who by nature don't give people second chances or fair shakes at a second impression then end up sticking to this feeling of CK as a bastard, a bloated idiot who thinks he's too good to even talk to them. If they just knew that just inside that hard outer shell, a scared, fluffy, considerate and friendly Christian is hidden, just waiting for that added security of a second meeting to bloom, to shed some insecurities and reveal the second layer of myself.
My egg white. My egg white's white, yes, but not in the exact angelical sense. I am in no way perfect, even though the people who brush me off after getting rejected by my hard shell might think that I think so. I know I need people around me, after all people are flock animals and thus need closeness and socialization, but I have always been highly selective when it comes to my friends. Quality over quantity, so to speak, has been my motto, and considering the fairly small number of people who choose to give me a new chance after an encounter with my arrogant casing, I'd say the people who have gathered to make up my friend circle testify to the effectiveness of this filter. It's sad though, that I reject people based on my own insecurities, and this is certainly something I'll have to work on, seeing as it also makes the number of people that dislike me bigger than the ones that like me. And that is no way to be happy. I was told today, and this is probably why I thought I'd do a post on my inner workings, that I am somewhat of a needy, pushy and intrusive person, which actually blew me away. I happen to think my good qualities outweigh my bad ones, so hearing that people I call my friends can only handle a low daily dose of Christian isn't easy to take. But I guess it makes some sense, too much of anything is bad, after all, and I realize that I can be a bit much when exposed to me for longer periods of time. The fact that my hand-picked network of good friends is small results in more time I will spend with each one, and thus a higher chance of being taken in larger, harder to swallow doses.
If my outward personality, the real outward personality, is the egg white, then what could the yolk be? Well, my soul I guess. The base of me being good or evil, or the intricate balanced gradient inbetween the two. My hopes, wishes and aspirations, my deeply rooted insecurities and the ever present history of my mess of a family, all things that will always be at the center of me together with whatever degree of selflessness, love and other good things I possess. And the many memories I have, good and bad, the memory of my grandmother and my cat King Farouk I, the memory of being bullied for being fat in school and then rising up against it one day when I chased down my oppressor and pounded him to the ground, the many times I have been ignored or looked down upon as a person just for being fat, or even the memory of my parents' happy marriage before everything was blown to pieces, are all stored in my own, deeply rooted yolk.
It's not easy being anyone, and we certainly have a million things that decide just what we think, feel or act like in any given moment, all a combination of so many factors. In order for people to understand me, which I feel is happening less and less, I felt I had to write this to have them understand what the "me" is really comprised of. And seeing as I don't even understand it, and other people obviously think they do and that what they are looking at is broken, I felt I would give my side of "me" without being told that what I think I am is incorrect. I certainly have things to work out, as do people who think they don't (and they probably more than the rest of us), but in the end all that matters is how we feel about ourselves. I might be broken, by so many standards, but inside of me I also know that there are so many things that are complete and beautiful, and I will not let a few cracks in my armor tear me apart.
Brought to you by the life philosophy part of
Everwood, which I have recently come to appreciate. "Moving away isn't going to fix the things that are wrong inside." A quote that I felt hit the spot.
Labels: Personal Issues, Philosophy, Ponderings
ER Ups and Downs
So, what's working in the ER like, Christian? What's the use of working there if you're not getting any good experiences? Well, just so you know, there has been a number of fascinating stories unfolding in the emergency room with me as an assistant and observer, and you are now getting the front row seats to the action (as long as you are able to picture what I'm telling you, seeing as you probably don't have a hospital security card).
Today was the culmination of bittersweet shifts. The first 2 hours or so were pretty quiet, mostly people coming in with finger cuts, head aches, abdominal pain, or a sudden onset of a heavy period. But, then the traumas (not walk-ins, but ambulance cases) began to arrive. This is the cool stuff, so I had my gloves on before the paramedics pulled into the ER garage, moving swiftly to foresee any obstacles or needs of the EMTs. The first case was a woman in her 70s, diabetic and with hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Her BP (blood pressure) was shooting through the roof, many times over 195/95 (normal is 120/80). No matter what the nurses did, they could not get her to either become alert or respond vocally to questions. The family was there, and told us everything we needed to know, and they ordered a battery of blood tests and
CT scans. Eerily for her, the nurses could not get the BP down to an acceptable level. This was still the case when I left 4 hours later.
The second trauma, a male in is late 70s, confused and scared, apparently senile, was placed in the neighboring room. He was complaining of back pains, and had previously received pretty intrusive surgery. He was a fragile, thin and small man, with round, questioning eyes, and every time the doctors or nurses spoke about him, by his bedside, they talked directly to the family and not him. This caused the elderly man to look even more confused, and I remember thinking to myself that he probably would have liked to be included in his own plans for care. The doctor, in a serious manner, asked the family if they wanted to have anything done to examine the origin of the back pain, like a
CT scan or to figure out if the same medical problem as before might have returned, hinting at that he didn't think it worth while. The family, after hearing the doctors reasons why not, and including the cost of the procedure in their decision, decided to decline the explorative treatment. I will never know how much of this the man understood, but as they were talking he kept looking confused back on forth on the doctor and family, and looked at all lost and bewildered. I got pretty sad, thinking of the fact that so many people end their lives not knowing their own names, and left the room to see if other traumas were interesting.
This is the jackpot of my day, this trauma. In through the double doors came a naked man on a gurney, lying face down, accompanied by paramedics and police officers. The placed him in on of the rooms, and covered him with a blanket after he turned around. Just past 20, much like me, and truly one for the psychiatry books. All we knew was that this man had set fire to his own house, and that he was in the ER for a checkup and treatment of possible smoke inhalation. Oh, fascinating case. He started out proclaiming to the room that "Jesus Christ will come in three years". Okay, fascinating, but not something you wouldn't hear from just any weird Christian. But it gets better. "I have complete records of what I've done from the moment of my birth until now, and it has all been thoughtfully planned out. I have progressed off the charts intellectually the past weeks, and have developed complete audio and visual photographic memories, as well as memorizing 99% of the Bible." He went on to telling the officers and us how he set fire to the house, apparently just to check the response time of the emergency services in the area, and how he sat down after lighting the fire, inside the house, carefully recounting every incident in his life, including the time he threw his cat into the wall as hard as he could. He broke two windows, to fuel the fire, and got out of there on the exact 30 minutes after lighting it, just to not pass out (and yes, he was naked when walking around lighting the fire). They called a psych consult, officially arrested him, and after a while sent him up to the 4th floor, where he apparently flooded his room and was sent to prison.
Last time a man in his fifties arrived from a car wreck, and he was in a pretty bad shape. Blood everywhere, legs broken so badly they were protruding the skin and poking out, and a very low BP. The surgeon took out a scalpel and made an incision right on his rib cage, and then shoved his fingers hard and quick into the wound to the lungs to make sure the passage was clear. Then they placed a tube in there, to drain off any blood in the lungs, before they intubated him and sent him off to the brand
new 64-slice CT-scanner, that I also got to witness. After this I assisted in the cleanup, mainly mopping pools of blood and removing all the stuff the people had thrown everywhere in the moment, and then the ER was ready for whatever fate had to throw at it.
Next weekend I'll be back there, and the ER never disappoints.
Labels: Episode Accounts, Medical, Pictures
College Conundrum
[This post has been recorded as audio. To listen to the post being read, click here.]
I can't sleep. Well, I don't want to sleep, either, yet, but I've actually spent the past 20 minutes trying to take an interesting picture of myself, accidentally dropping the memory card into a crack between the keyboard stand and the desk, almost tearing out the keyboard stand from the same desk in order to get my memory card back, and finally managing to get it out of there with worryingly many scratches on it. If you think that's truly a waste of precious time, I don't think you know what I've been spending my past few hours on, namely getting some kind of script for a photo album or photoblog for the vast amount of pics I want to take every day but can't store or publish anywhere, yielding nothing more than a stupid Wordpress account and a lot of worthless downloaded "free trial" programs. I finished my one single diet cherry coke hours ago, and now I've suddenly gotten the incredibly farfetched idea that I want to write a novel. Of course, what else, right? Psychological deterioration is what I call that kind of rambling, and it can't be due to anything else than the sheer lack of sleep today. Now I will move on to the real matter at hand, the reason why I wrote this post at all; my college conundrum.
Who would have known searching for good colleges would be this hard? I mean, I have a basic idea of the kind of college I want to go to this fall, and its description isn't very limiting. It can't be Augustana. It's got have more than 5,000 students, and be in an intersting area. It needs to have a good pre-med program, and it needs to be well renowned in the research and biological fields. Its students should like both their fellow students and faculty, and it shouldn't be too cold there. Nothing else. So far, by the help of princetonreview.com and various education fairs in Oslo I've gotten down to the two best ones: University of Kansas and Hawai'i Pacific University. After some encouragement from Julie I decided to research the two further, deeper if you will, and I even made a nifty Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my findings, including a nice point ranking system. The research hinted at a few negative circumstances regarding the University of Kansas, including a clique-ish and frat dominated social life, isolated city and a feeling of being 'lost' in the enormous crowd of students at the institution. HPU thus emerged as the winner of my little college test, by almost 20%, which actually to some degree surprised me. I made some calls last night to the Hawai'i university, and re-started my application process there (I had halfway applied once before), just to ensure that this apparent catch doesn't become impossible on me.
Hawai'i. Hmmm.. I've been there, and loved it, mind you, but there must be something.. fishy about it. Hawai'i is the world's paradise, the world's favorite post card and fantasy, and now I'm actually thinking of going to college there. Where are the drawbacks? Where? Is everything actually as good as it seems, and will I enjoy it? Will it gain my career? I think so. It has an actual pre-med major, which very, very few schools actually have, and small classes with nice, approachable professors. The only real concern I have is the cost of it all. For a lifetime experience like this my monetary ceiling's pretty high, but I need to make sure I can afford it all. My next step will be to contact the school regarding the real costs, and then we'll see from there. Maybe I'll have to start the search all over again... Cross thine fingers. Do it, just do it.
Labels: College Stuff, Pictures
Life is weird. And sometimes, we're forced to take a closer look at just that life, and in particular, ourselves. Our personalities are certainly complex, and the factors that make up this personality even more so. "If something's not broken, don't fix it," is the ever sounding proverb of our day, and throughout my life I seem to have added to this, making it something like "If you manage to ignore something that's broken, you don't have to fix it."
My egg white. My egg white's white, yes, but not in the exact angelical sense. I am in no way perfect, even though the people who brush me off after getting rejected by my hard shell might think that I think so. I know I need people around me, after all people are flock animals and thus need closeness and socialization, but I have always been highly selective when it comes to my friends. Quality over quantity, so to speak, has been my motto, and considering the fairly small number of people who choose to give me a new chance after an encounter with my arrogant casing, I'd say the people who have gathered to make up my friend circle testify to the effectiveness of this filter. It's sad though, that I reject people based on my own insecurities, and this is certainly something I'll have to work on, seeing as it also makes the number of people that dislike me bigger than the ones that like me. And that is no way to be happy. I was told today, and this is probably why I thought I'd do a post on my inner workings, that I am somewhat of a needy, pushy and intrusive person, which actually blew me away. I happen to think my good qualities outweigh my bad ones, so hearing that people I call my friends can only handle a low daily dose of Christian isn't easy to take. But I guess it makes some sense, too much of anything is bad, after all, and I realize that I can be a bit much when exposed to me for longer periods of time. The fact that my hand-picked network of good friends is small results in more time I will spend with each one, and thus a higher chance of being taken in larger, harder to swallow doses.
