A slightly paraphrased conversation with my auto insurance company:

Corey: Moving to Piscataway, la la la la, tell me my new premium, la la la la, love the cheaper premium, la la la la!

Rep: Happy to help! Let me crunch some numbers. ....Ah! Your premium is $68 dollars cheaper! ( Congratulations! )

I worked acute care the other day; one of the orders was for a speech evaluation of a 97 year old lady. I put this off for a while because my experience with nonagenarians (and octagenarians and even a slew of septagenarians) is that they want many things -- to sleep, to go home, to put their teeth in, to take their teeth out, to complain about their bunions -- and nowhere on their list of wants does "spend half an hour answering questions like 'Do you get coffee from a cow?'" appear.

I sure as hell don't blame the 90 year olds for giving me a hard time. The most senior of senior citizens have more than earned that right. But that doesn't mean I look forward to their evaluations.

However, on Tuesday I met the cutest 97 year old woman in the world. She seriously wins the prize. Whatever prize a 97 year old woman is interested in... Worthers candies? Pictures of her great-grandchildren? She deserves it in spades. Whatever she did (or didn't do) in life to make her as sharp as she is at 97 needs to be written down for the sake of mankind. She was great, passed her evaluation in flying colors... with maybe one or two minor snafus.

I told her that she needed to point to the body parts I named.
"Your nose." Her finger went to her nose.
"Your stomach." She patted her stomach.
"Your left shoulder." She hesitated a split second and reached up to tap the correct shoulder.
"Your right wrist." Without hesitation, she grabbed her right BREAST.

I blinked. "No, no. Wrist."

"What?" She squinted at me, still clutching her right breast with her left hand.

"WRIST," I said in earnest. "WRRRRIST."

"OH!!" She let go of herself and laughed, and I couldn't help but laugh myself. "Oh my. That gave me a giggle." And with a smile, she pointed to her right wrist.

I told her it the best response to a body part identification task I'd ever received. When I left, she said she hoped we'd meet again someday. I told her I did too, but not again on the stroke unit at the hospital. Sweetest nonagenarian I've ever met.

I'm proud to be an American today.

I wish the President well.

How moving is it to see 2 million people pressed into the National Mall from end to end and squeezing out the sides? Just amazing.

I left Rich's apartment at 9:00 last night after six hours of watching football and playing Wii, and I found a freshly created winter wonderland outside. Naturally, the only course of action was to make a snowball, open his apartment door, and peg Laura in the head.

Of course, me being me, the snowball was so far off target that Laura couldn't even tell what I'd thrown... until I smashed the broken pieces on top of her head. She was drunk and shell-shocked. "BUDDY! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"

"It's perfect snowball snow!" I tugged her off of the couch and made a break for the door. "COME PLAY!"

"BUDDY. You are in TROUBLE." She shook the snow from her hair and glared daggers at me. Allison went running for her coat and gloves, and I took off down the stairs and across the street. I had about ten seconds before Matt and Rich showed up, sans winter coats or gloves (and in Rich's case, a shirt with sleeves), another 30 seconds before Allison and Laura made their way outside. There was shrieking and yelling and sliding and hiding and near vomiting from the exertion of sprinting outside in the frigid air after eating steak and chips and salsa and bread, oh so much bread. My favorite memory is of Laura walking up the center of the street with determination and carrying a small pyramid of snowballs as ammunition.

It was so much fun! Pure fun, sheer silliness, with memories of other snowball fights echoing through the night... so much changes and so much stays the same, eh? The way the snowfall lends the air a muted quality, how words give way to gasping and laughing and the occasional scream, the helpful warning "CAR!"...

It was fun to be kids for twenty minutes in the cold Kearny snow.

I've finally compiled 3 blogs worth of entries that I'd like to hang onto into one brand shiny new livejournal. Hurrah! It only took me three straight nights.

Ellen, you may rest easy that your friends page will no longer be spammed by entries dating back to 2006. :) And I can finally post in real time!

That's what I find myself saying ad nauseum lately in a frantic attempt to fill a Super Bowl pool at work. We started ridiculously late because someone dropped the ball on setting it up. I won't point fingers, certainly not at Jim Anderson, but the fact of the matter is that Monday came around and there was no pool.

So I'm running it. And I'll give those of you who truly know me time to pull yourselves together before I continue. Laugh it up.

Truly - I am not the person to run a football pool. A) I lose things. All the time. ALL. THE. TIME. People hand me money throughout the day, I shove it in the lone pocket on my scrubs and hope that it manages to stay there until lunch. I've already had thirty seconds of heart pounding fear when I thought I'd lost $150 bucks, but I'd just forgotten which compartment of my ginormous purse I'd hidden the cash in. B) I hate harassing people, and running a pool requires harassment on a grand scope. First there's peer pressuring reluctant buyers into a box ("No really, you don't need to know anything about football!") and then there's pressuring people to hand over the money that they didn't have on them at the time.

Despite all that, I'm running the pool - with help from Allison, who's great at convincing people to pony up the five bucks. My friend who successfully hooked me on football this year is proud of us football newbies. So keep your fingers crossed that TOMORROW I can sweet talk enough people into the grid to finish it off, so that everyone has an opportunity to get a copy of it and there will be no complaints.

Go Giants!

That's what someone on the subway asked me last night after about 30 seconds worth of conversation. I thought he was joking, but no, he said my accent sounded Australian. He was blown away when I said I was from Jersey.

That's a first.

Granted - he was from Jordan. But he spoke fluent English and had lived in the city for 3 years... you'd think he'd have a little better ear by now.

He was one of the most unique individuals I've ever met. Talkative and effeminate, so I pegged him as gay - and then he started talking about various and sundry girlfriends, so I pegged him as gay and in denial. I don't know what the social climate's like in Jordan, but if you can't come out in NYC, where can you? Then he told me how his sister once called him from Jordan and said "'The first gay community has opened! ...You can come home!' Haha, what a funny jokester my sister is!"

It was the strangest subway ride I ever had, and while I would have preferred to be listening to the Hairspray soundtrack on my iPod, I couldn't help paying attention to this very animated Jordanian man. He was perfectly happy to chatter away non-stop with the occasional pause for breath. People from Jordan must have good lungs.

It so happened that we were getting off at the same stop in a part of the city that I was unfamiliar with, and he kindly walked me to the correct intersection before we went our separate ways. But not before I listened to a speech about how sometimes it's cool just to be friends with girls and not want to go out with them because you know they're just really cool and wouldn't you know that *I* was pretty cool and I should totally put my number in his iPhone! So I did. He was a tornado of friendly gay non-threatening weirdness, and I was helpless in its path.

I went to one last night. I wasn't planning on it. I was planning on being a loser and sitting on my couch watching TV, because it had been another rough week in a series of rough weeks and I felt I deserved to be a couch potato and let my mind rot a bit.

My roommate, however, convinced me that going to a cheesy Christmas sweater party would be more entertaining. Plus, she promised me lots and lots of free booze. So I dragged myself off the couch, put on a hideous sweater that she had borrowed from her mother, and off we went.

This sweater. Ah. I don't think words can do it justice, so just take a look at my profile picture. Santa and his sleigh, flying across a golden moon set in a blood red sky. Kind of ominous, when I think about it now.

Anyway, we felt like morons, but whatever - we were going to a theme party. Everyone was going to feel like morons.

NOT TRUE.

We were one of the first people there, and every time the door opened I looked up hopefully, expecting to see other people wearing pure embarrassment. It was not to be. Girls kept walking in wearing cute going-out clothing and not hideous knitted creations from the eighties. "Oh, we TRIED to find one," they all said earnestly, "We checked Kohl's and Marshall's and Dress Barn and everything, and there WERE none! We WISH we were wearing cheesy sweaters! You guys look awesome!"

Bitches.

Clearly the hey-day of cheesy Christmas sweaters is over and the easiest way of finding one is by talking to your mom or grandma. Marshall's ain't gonna help.

Anyway, so I was pretty grumpy with my roommate for the rest of the party, considering that only three of us (me, Tara and the hostess) actually played by the rules.




ESPECIALLY when we went out to the bar, where there were even more people looking like fashion plates who didn't know that we had been at a themed party and must have assumed we were idiots. Which, technically, I think we were.

Luckily, a girl who had too much wine kept telling me how I was her "cheesy sweater idol" until I was like "Then you wear it!" -- and so she did. And I got to wear her cute top in exchange.

So, lesson of the story: Bring a change of clothes with you to any party involving costumes of any sort.

I got to see Bon Jovi for the third time in concert. Life is sweet. He played his entire new album from beginning to end, which they've never done before, followed by a whole lot of 80s awesomeness. The set list:

LOST HIGHWAY
SUMMERTIME
LAST NIGHT
WHOLE LOT OF LEAVIN'
MEMORY
EVERYBODY'S BROKEN
WE GOT IT GOIN' ON
ANY OTHER DAY
TILL WE AIN'T STRANGERS ANYMORE
I LOVE THIS TOWN
SEAT NEXT TO YOU
ONE STEP CLOSER
LIVIN' ON A PRAYER
YOU GIVE LOVE A BAD NAME
RAISE YOUR HANDS
RUNAWAY
IT'S MY LIFE
BORN TO BE MY BABY
HAVE A NICE DAY
LAY YOUR HANDS ON ME
SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD
BAD MEDICINE (that broke into "SHOUT" halfway through)
WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T GO HOME

ENCORE:
I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU
SOMEDAY I'LL BE SATURDAY NIGHT
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE
KEEP THE FAITH


...I'm pretty sure there's a couple songs missing, but I can't figure out what they are.

Today at work, I went in to see a woman in her eighties for a swallowing evaluation. This wasn't on my brain injury floor. This is on one of the various regular sick people floors. The conversation went like this:

Corey: Hi, my name's Corey, I'm a speech therapist and the doctor would like me to take a look at how you're doing with eating and drinking.
Patient: No.
Corey: ...No?
Patient: (petulantly) I don't want to.
Corey: (sensing this is going to be a looooong evaluation) Mind if I sit down? So how are you feeling today?
Patient: Well, I think I'm still alive and breathing.
Corey: Ha ha, yes, you are very much alive.
Patient: Are you sure? Because this morning they threw me in one of those giant tubs and sloshed me all around with embalming fluid and I just happened to wake up again and start breathing.
Corey: ... ... ... ... ... You're really not dead. I promise.
Patient: But they have a bag right there full of embalming fluid. (Pt. points to urine bag attached to bed.) Am I dead?
Corey: No, you're alive. I know it can be very confusing in a hospital, so let me try and help you out, okay? You're in the hospital. It's August 23rd, 2007. You've been here X amount of time. You are not dead. The bag on the bed is how the nurses collect your urine so that they can make sure your kidneys are working well.
Patient: Are you sure?
Corey: Yes. Now. Have some applesauce!

That was a first. Meeting someone who honestly wasn't sure whether or not she was dead. She had this really elaborate dream about being dead and being embalmed that was way too detailed for me to remember in entirety. Very creepy.

I'm going to a bar in the city tonight that has skee-ball machines. Skee-ball is one of those things that is inextricably linked to my childhood. I can close my eyes and picture the wooden balls and hear the sound they make rolling up the ramp. The memory is of an arcade in Point Pleasant, and the sounds of video games and tickets being dispensed are everywhere and really, that's probably why I love casinos so much. They're just arcades for grown-ups.

Last night I went to the movies and had another one of those nostalgic moments while sucking down a cherry icee - except when I was a kid, they were "Slurpees" and my mom would buy one for me at the mall on our way out, as a reward for being patient and good.

If there is a Heaven, I like to think that when I go there I'll find that it's an amalgamation of my favorite things and moments and places and people. It's so many things - my parents' backyard, the summer after my freshman year of high school, the view from an apartment window overlooking the Mediterranean, watching thunderstorms with my grandfather. And somewhere in the middle, close to the other important pieces of my childhood, you can bet that there are Slurpees and skee-ball.

Every so often, something happens that catapults my emotional register back to its five year old framework when I experienced life in a happy/sad dichotomy. There was little room for neutral in kindergarten. I didn't walk, I skipped; I didn't read, I acted out whole chapters with voices for each character; I didn't feel disappointment, I felt crushed - extremes were the order of the day.

Time and experience have forged me a broader range of emotion and more discerning criteria (I don't shed tears over a stained t-shirt, and I don't make fierce friendships after an exchange of string bracelets), but yet. Sometimes, for brief moments, I remember what it means to be five years old and absolutely enamored of the world.

I love the Fourth of July for several reasons, but my favorite one is this:

There are few things that appeal more deeply to my inner child than driving down a road as the night sky bursts unexpectedly into sparkling colors. (I'd much rather experience fireworks from the passenger seat of a moving car than sitting in a field with a crick in my neck and C-sharp ringing in my ears.) Something about random fireworks from a distance, without the noise and pomp and crowds, makes me giddy for the length of time it takes to gasp once with unadulterated delight.

At that point, my adult emotional barometer kicks back into gear, and I appreciate the display with a more subdued pleasure. Ten minutes and a few towns later, the sky explodes with magic again, and I gasp again, and the whole process repeats until I've finished my drive. It's nice to have an annual reminder that no matter how many years have passed since kindergarten, I haven't entirely forgotten how to feel life with a five year old's abandon.

I curse a lot... Every once in a while, like today, I think about how there's no good reason for the majority of it and I could substitute "Shoot" for "Shit" pretty simply.

For most people, the workplace isn't the kind of environment you can throw the F-bomb around without thought. My workplace is no exception, although I do manage to get by without having to think too much about censoring myself. I'm a pro at under my breath cursing.

Today, however, my entire unit was treated to swearing of an entirely different caliber - because while the employees need to keep their vocabulary in check, there's not a lot you can do about agitated patients. All I had to do was walk past a patient who does not know me or talk to me or deal with me in any way, shape, or form and I was hit with "There's the fucking cunt now."

It made me laugh, although I was careful to wait until I was out of sight, and you can't take offense when the population you treat can be so very out of it, but man oh man. Show of hands of how many people get called the c-word at their job. (And if your hand is raised and you're not on a brain injury unit - find a new freaking job!)

I get lost very, very easily. So easily, in fact, that long ago I made myself accept that being lost was "an adventure" and not something to get angry or frustrated about. I stole the concept from my mother - I remember sitting in the front seat of our green Ford Explorer as a kid, watching white smoke billow out from underneath the hood as we drove down a small highway very far from home. In a moment of rare serenity, my mom laughed and shrugged her shoulders and said "Well honey, it'll be an adventure. Let's just see how this goes."

It was one of the best lessons I've ever learned, and it stands out even more in my memory because it's possibly the *only* time I've ever seen my mother follow this particular philosophy. But that's another topic for another blog.

I once got lost playing Manhunt in the woods with a huge group of friends. I ran around in the pitch black for forty-five minutes or so, falling into mud and flailing desperately at thorn bushes that I couldn't see until I plowed straight into them. I alternated with manic indecision between huddling at the base of large trees, employing the "stay where you are" strategy that every parent teaches their four-year old, and running in various directions in a panic over the thought of being eaten by bears. I should have been more concerned about being eaten by thorn bushes.

( Point being, I have little to NO sense of direction. )

I am not afraid of mice.

I don't want them in my apartment - but they don't freak me out. Spiders, on the other hand, give me a heart attack.

My roommate Tara doesn't care about spiders but has a phobia of mice.

In the battle for title of "Most Relevant Roommate Fear," I'm happy to say that Tara's phobia is decidedly winning. It seems we may have a mouse. Amy saw something out of the corner of her eye last night, and in a stroke of true genius decided to mention to Tara that *maybe* it was a mouse.

There is no room for gray at 112 Park. There either IS or IS NOT a mouse. Tara chooses to err on the side of paranoid caution. (I shouldn't mock. If spiders the size of mice were running around the apartment, I would probably take my chances on the mean streets of Hoboken where the worst that might happen to me would be death by stampede of small dogs.)

Tara found an old sticky trap and set it up strategically in the suspected mouse corner. This sticky trap had heretofore only succeeded in catching an old poptart box and a pen, but we have high hopes that it may now fulfill its tacky destiny. Please note that if a mouse does appear on the sticky trap, none of the girls at 112 Park will remove it. Tara and Amy are too scared, and I'm too nauseated by the idea of killing it or leaving it to die in the trash can -- but at the same time don't want it escaping and finding its way back inside. This is why we have Tara's boyfriend on call.

We also have bags of mouse poison along the outer edge of our kitchen. The idea is that the mice eat through the bag to get at the ... yummy? poison and then drop dead 4-5 days later. I'm not so sure I like this idea any better than the sticky trap, especially when it means there will be little mouse corpses lying around, but I agree that something must be done. I have to leave the light in the kitchen on so that Tara can make her way to the bathroom during the night without hyperventilating. She jumps at small noises and breezes. This is certainly no way to live.

In other news - there's apparently a sewage leak in the crawlspace below our apartment building. It kind of stinks all the time in the stairwell, but thankfully not in the actual apartment. ...So all around happy times at 112 Park!!!

I have a bad habit of leaving my stuff all over the speech office at work. It's a very small room - probably about 7 feet by 6 feet, and it has room enough for a bookcase, a filing cabinet, and a table with two computers on it. So when I leave my sweatshirt, a half-empty soda and a bag of chips lying around, it's easy to notice. Except to me, because I let it sit there for a day or so before realizing that I'm the asshole who's cluttering up the office. I'm trying to better about this lately, because nobody likes that asshole.

Anyway, a few days ago I walked into the office and was mortified to see that I'd left my banana on top of the filing cabinet. It was fairly brown and when I picked it up it felt soft and mushy - far too over-ripe. I apologized profusely to the other two speech therapists in the room and dropped the banana in the garbage can. Problem solved.

About forty-five minutes later, my boss was walking in and out of the office looking very perturbed. I asked her what was wrong.

"It's the strangest thing," she said with a confused glance at the filing cabinet, "I could have sworn that I left my banana right there."

........

I wish I could have taken a picture of myself at that moment, because my expression must have been the strangest mixture of horror and hilarity, both warring for control. I made eye contact with the other speech therapist and she bit down on her lip and stared at the corner of the room while our boss rummaged quickly through the garbage can and MISSED seeing her disgusting banana.

As soon as she left the office, I fished the banana out of the wastebasket and high-tailed it to the bathroom to dispose of her breakfast in a different, more disgusting and less searchable garbage can.

For the rest of the morning - and I kid you not, folks, for the rest of the mother effing morning - my boss couldn't focus on her work for want of that banana. I would walk down the hallway and hear her saying to anyone who would listen "I just don't get it! It's the case of the missing banana!"

You know, I would never have the balls to actually throw out her breakfast on purpose... but it was a hell of a lot of fun to do by accident.

Question: If you could have any one superpower, what would it be?

Answer: Flight.

I'm pretty sure I'd be a crappy superhero. I usually came to a swift and ugly end in every Choose Your Own Adventure book – mostly because I chose the most boring and risk-free option, which always seemed to result in a totally unrelated manner of death. "You decide to ignore the ominous knock at the front door and pull the bedcovers over your head. Suddenly, the ceiling fan falls from above, crushing you at the waist."

Superhero prowess aside, I would one hundred percent want to be able to fly. I can remember being obsessed with two things as a little girl: horses and horses that flew. Starlight, Rainbow Brite's horse, fell into the latter category because he could run on rainbows which might as well have been flying. She-Ra, Rainbow Brite, that little girl in the My Little Ponies movie with the locket that contained a rainbow – I wanted to be all of these fictional characters because they got to fly on horses.

I've been horseback riding – it's fun and a little exhilarating at a gallop, but you smell of horse for the entire car ride home and then there's the soreness the next day that makes you aware of far too many muscles you'd never paid attention to before.

What I've never been, obviously, is flying. Except once in a dream when I was in seventh grade. My teacher Mr. Mellon passed out a three step worksheet so my English class could practice. It read:

1. Close your eyes.
2. Concentrate.
3.

I can't remember what 3 said, but I bet if I *did* I could be the world's crappiest superhero.

Those of you who are already used to the wonders of HD TV can laugh at me. Those of you who have not had the pleasure of experiencing it can learn from me.

I hooked up my 32" TV and was initially underwhelmed. It just... wasn't impressive. When I told this to my friend Brian, he looked at me like I had told him that I wasn't really impressed with breathing and sent me home with instructions to look for the HD specific channels. "And then F-A-V FAVORITE THEM!"

I wasn't really expecting much, because I am an idiot.

Needless to say, when I discovered the magnificence, the GLORY, the freaking three-dimensionality of high def television, I nearly fell off of my couch. It's ... it's undefinable.

You know how when old people are introduced to new technology they seem all overwhelmed and way too disbelieving and you vacillate between thinking they're either cute or demented for being so in awe of, say, email? I AM THAT OLD PERSON. "Insectia" came on Discovery HD - I literally threw a hand out to block the screen from view and scrambled for the remote because I swear to you it was like there were two feet long millipedes in my living room.

I haven't been a big TV watcher since I moved to Hoboken, but now it's practically always on because I enjoy glancing up from whatever I'm doing to marvel at how clear the picture is.

It's simply beauteous.

I knew there was a reason worth going to Saint Joseph's for four years besides a stinkin' degree.

That reason is a 32" flat screen TV.

That's right folks - my alma mater called me up today to let me know that I had been chosen as the prize winner from the contest they held in November of last year. For updating my contact information on their website, I now am the proud owner of a freaking flat screen television.

I never win anything. Ever. This is awesomeness beyond awesomeness. I've gone around telling everyone I met today about how I won a freaking television. My pilates instructor, my hairdresser... I called my dad at work twice. I won a toy! WOO!!!

And I mean this is on top of having the most amazing weekend in quite some time. My coworkers are the most fun people ever. I spent all of yesterday recovering from Atlantic City and thanked myself for being a smart girl and taking the day off today to get things done... because yesterday, I was a complete waste of oxygen.

Best. Weekend. EVER.

TVVVVVVV!!

I laugh about my job, a lot. I laugh about my job a LOT with my coworkers, because they understand. I tell a few stories to friends, and sometimes people make comments about how terrible it is, and how it's not funny, and you know - I agree. The things that I see at my job are Not Funny when seen in light of how those things came to be in the first place. The other day a new employee was being told about our latest admit and what happened to him and what his current level is - very low - and she remarked that it was "so sad." I had to bite my tongue from telling her that they're ALL so sad, every single freaking person there has the saddest story she will ever hear, and if she stops to think about it more than thirty seconds she'll either burn out or throw herself off the roof. I turn to the always illuminating dialogue of one Dr. Cox of Sacred Heart Hospital to try and explain:

"Turn around. You see Dr. Wen in there? He's explaining to that family that something went wrong and that the patient died. He's gonna tell them what happened, he's gonna say he's sorry, and then he's going back to work. Do you think anybody else in that room is going back to work today? That is why we distance ourselves, that is why we make jokes. We don't do it because it's fun, we do it so we can get by... and sometimes because it's fun. But mostly it's the gettin' by thing."

Mostly it's the gettin' by thing. Because if you don't laugh, you throw yourself off a roof. And you know, I'm much more fond of laughing.