Day . Month . 2002 . Time |
closing ceremonies Interesting day at work today. A baby I admitted on Wednesday with a long medical history of some mysterious lung disease of unknown origin just got diagnosed with a whopping heart defect and is now scheduled for surgery. Mystery solved, I guess. The parents upon admission said that they had been to so many hospitals over the past few months and had gotten so few answers that they were willing to do anything for a definitive diagnosis, no matter how dire. Still, I guess no one is ever ready to hear that their baby needs heart surgery. Yesterday, Joe and I met up with Dave and Eric downtown at the Comfort Diner, which specializes in serving--yes--comfort food. I got meatloaf with mashed potatoes, Eric got a tuna melt, Joe got some big-ass burger, and Dave got a whole mess of pancakes. I was post-call and ravenous, having slept the whole day, and basically ate everything in sight. I've had a really good appetite lately, but since I've lost about three pounds since I've started my Sub-I, I can only assume that I'm either working it all off or sweating out three pounds of water per day in this revolting heat. Or possibly, I have a tapeworm. Either way, it's a great excuse to eat like a lumberjack. Fireworks downtown last night were fairly standard, despite talks of terrorism threats and the lingering patriotic fervor that still spasmodically surfaces now and again. But honestly, it was much too hot of a night to spend outdoors, over 92 degrees at 10pm. And it certainly doesn't help to deliberately cram yourself up in the middle of a gigantic horde of sweating New Yorkers, all of us collectively producing the heat-equivalent of the magma core of Mount Vesuvius. Because we're a bunch of quick-thinking whiz kids, though, we left the festivities 10 minutes early to beat the crowds, and managed to walk back to the West Side through empty streets at a decent clip, as opposed to the herd-migration-moving-roughly-at-the- rate-of-molasses-dripping-down-the-side-of-a-jar- outdoors-in-January pattern we would have had to assume had we waited for the fireworks to end like everyone else. Fireworks are fireworks, but getting back to air-conditioning was a matter of survival. The summer outside is hotter than ever, but thankfully, the Summer Funk Festival of 2002 has ended. And closing ceremonies were spectacular. It didn't end before it culminated in a fairly showy display of pyrotechnics--further freaking out, compensatory distancing and the resulting whiplash--but it's over. And ahead of schedule too, since last year, the festival lasted for a good three months plus. I do have to credit a little of the early finale to my own, justified anger. Since this is the third year that something like this has happened, I basically told him that I'd be a moron to stick around if this threatened to happen again, and as I didn't look like a diaper, I wasn't going to continue taking any more shit. This approach appears to have brought him back to Earth. Now, we're working on a good, healthy plan to prophylax against there being a fourth annual funk festival. It's a professional plan. A very New Yorker type plan. And yes, I'm aware how abstruse I'm being in talking about this, but the outcome is this: he's willing to work on changing certain destructive behavior patterns, and I'm more than ready to work with him. I love him, you know? And freaking aside (perhaps related to an almost genetically pre-programmed annual instinct to flee), he loves me too. And believe me, in this day and age, that's really pretty good. xo Michelle |
