Barbequeer

Tonight I went to an indoor barbeque with some people from work.  It was hosted by Johnathan, who is referred to as JJ by his girlfriend Christa.  Both of them are really cool people.  She sang a capella in college and was in a movie and appreciated my love of cats, and he played string bass in an orchestra and was into politics and discussing health care financing.  Tony, Krishna, and one of their friends stopped by for a little bit.  Matt was there, as were Chuck and his wife Carla, and a friend of Christa's named Brad was there too.

Mostly we played Apples to Apples, but we talked about plenty of things other than the game.  I shared some math jokes with Chuck, who was sort of interested, but not in particular.  I touched JJ's string bass and he told me very nicely that I should touch higher on the string or the oil on my finger would mess up the string.  I felt dumb because I'm a musician too and I know how much I hate it when people touch my instruments incorrectly.

Anyway, mostly I'm writing this because I realized I didn't take any pictures at all and now I feel stupid about that too.  I'm sorry to bore you with this entry, I realize it was pretty weak.

Peace out.

WHYYnot?

Today - if all went right with the credit card - I became a member of WHYY.

Today, I became a man.

Hopefully the first notice my parents will get is an "I heard it on NPR" mug in the mail with my name on it.  I thought about putting their names and phone numbers in the comments section to have WHYY call them and beg them for money, like Ira Glass does sometimes on This American Life, but decided against it for some reason.

Peace out.

What's your body worth?

Peace out.

Headfauxnes

Headphones are not allowed at work.

I can listen to the radio and whatnot without headphones, but it's sort of just not the same.

I was excited to get my paycheck and my PNC banking card yesterday because I wanted to donate to WHYY because I feel guilty about never having done so thus far. Apparently the PIN I was supposed to use to register my account came in the mail in 2005, so I couldn't sign up. I was really upset. Hopefully Thursday everything will be in order.

Peace out.

Wire Snap

Today when I was playing piano (I was playing Turbulent a.k.a. Clouds), I thought I heard something happen inside the back of the box.  It was very unfamiliar.  I was convinced right away for some reason that a wire had snapped.  After looking around for a few seconds, I saw that there was, as I expected, a wire from one of the keys laying on the floor.  I tested out all the notes on the piano and they sounded fine, but I could tell from looking that it belonged to one of the As in the bass clef.

I should say that I've been afraid of this happening for a while.  Piano strings snap, it just happens, and with enough bad luck you end up blind in an eye or both eyes.  Lucky for me, I had the front of the piano's mechanisms covered with the music stand, so the cord went out the back.  With a little less luck, though, I would be out of work for another good while.

Peace out.

Mistakes on the Wall

Probably everyone reading this knows that I always cover my walls with things I make myself. The year-poster, the nine pictures of songs, all of my friends' pictures, etc.

When I was listening to Mr. Perlswig's speech today at Baccalaureate, I had an idea for next year that I might try out. I might just take a big white piece of posterboard and get something printed on it - like I always do - and then write down all the things in my life that I feel like were mistakes or things that I've done wrong. Not all at once, but as they come to me. Not mistakes like "I wasted my time trying to be friends with John Smith" or whatever that are just ways to blame other people, but things that were seriously my fault, or I seriously feel regret about. Things that it would be good to see every day.

I suppose the thinking behind this is something along these lines: There's nothing wrong or even stupid about making mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. What starts to become wrong/stupid/annoying is when you keep making the same mistake over and over and over again and never learn anything from it. I don't know how often I do that, but I figure this can't hurt, and it'll help me learn how often I do. At the absolute best, I will stop making a given mistake more than once. At the absolute worst, I will be more honest with the people who come into my room.

Peace out.

Codeine

When I was in 8th grade, I had an operation done to break the growth plates in my right knee so that my legs would end up being equal length. I can write more about that whole part of my life some other time. In either case, the operation caused me some pretty extreme pain. I remember waking up the first night after the surgery and begging the nurse to let the morphine drip in a little bit faster because I was in such agony. I never thought that I would actually ask for morphine - certainly not when I was in 8th grade - but there I was! It actually did help a lot, too. I went to sleep again that night.

I stayed in the hospital for two or three days. On the last day that I was there, they let me try to stand up and walk around a little bit, and they wanted to get me into physical therapy so I could bend my knee properly and whatnot. They took me off of morphine, which is super tightly controlled, and gave me a tablet of codeine instead. I remember taking just one tiny pill of it - maybe even half a pill - a light orange color, very small, with some water, while sitting on my hospital bed.

So I went downstairs with my dad after that to try to get some early physical therapy in. I think he wheeled me downstairs in a chair, and then when I got down there, we basically just tried to have me walk with some crutches and stuff like that. I had a soft cast on for a while, so there was basically no way I could do much more... hardly even could bend my knee.

After a little bit of being down there, I started to feel sick. Very, very nauseas. At some point I just knew that I wouldn't be able to hold it back anymore, and I made my dad rush me to the nearest bathroom. I remember making it to the bathroom, and just throwing up more violently that I ever had in my entire life, and probably more intensely than I ever have since. It felt like somebody was punching me in the stomach so hard that everything in my torso was coming right out of me, or like someone was reaching their fist down my throat and seriously tearing my insides right out of my mouth. I made a total mess, and I remember that I got it all over the floor, the toilet, the sink, and even all over myself. We decided no more codeine after that.

I think it may have given me a really messed up dream while I was in the hospital too, but that may have just been a story my dad told me about codeine. I can't remember.

//

I just got my wisdom teeth out on Friday morning. I was pretty afraid of the pain that I would be in, but I knew that I would get prescribed some way-cool drugs that day, and I was itching to take them so I wouldn't feel the holes in my jaw bone closing up, or whatever the hell it is that causes the pain exactly. My mom suggested maybe taking Tylenol first - so did the surgeon - but I insisted on just taking Percocet. So as the novacaine was wearing off, I took a half-tablet of Percocet. About a half hour later, after we agreed that it was doing okay with my stomach, I took another half-tablet of it because I felt like my jaw was starting to hurt a little bit.

I did pretty okay with the pain that day, and I remember at one point sort of feeling a hit of relief in my jaw and thinking, "Wow, Percocet. Okay, cool." Throughout the rest of the evening, I took another whole pill - another half pill four hours after my first, and another half pill four hours after that. The pain wasn't too bad so we decided not to push it.

Viv was supposed to come over that night, but ended up backing out because family had come over. Dana had considered coming to see me as well, but didn't believe me when I said I was doing perfectly fine, and had other reasons to see me the next day anyway.

At about 11:30, I was still laying on the couch in the family room. I had felt a little funny in my stomach earlier, so I asked for something to eat. I had my mom or dad get me pancakes, because I knew they were very light and easy in your mouth but they would fill up in your stomach. For some reason, I felt like the strange feeling was because I had had nothing to eat all day, and all the medicine in there without any food was going to be too harsh. So I thought eating would fix it.

So I ate most of a pancake. But even after that, I felt pretty funny. I'm actually not sure I finished the whole thing. Then I told my parents I felt like I was going to throw up. "Well then get to the bathroom!" they shouted at me. I asked them for a bucket but they said no, get the hell into a bathroom. So I got up and went to the bathroom, which yeah, was probably the right idea.

I leaned over the toilet and I started to cough pretty forcefully, and my mom said to chill out because it might mess up the stitches in my mouth, and we definitely didn't want to deal with that. My dad told me to do what I could to hold it back because this would be a terrible time to throw up, and to just take long deep breaths and try to keep it in. I kept coughing more forcefully though, and I just knew that I had to throw up to get it out of me. I was starting to sweat a whole lot, so I took my shirt off. I hit my hand on the sink as I was taking it off.

So yeah, I proceeded to violently throw up probably four or five times very shortly after I had taken my shirt off. I'm pretty sure that everything I had put in me the entire day came right back up. It was a very calorie-negative day, and it left me feeling very hungry for a long time afterwards. It reminded me very strongly of the time that I had thrown up in the physical therapy place with my dad, though. And right after I was done, I stopped sweating, my stomach felt fine, and I didn't feel nauseas at all anymore.

I found out later - because I am an idiot - that Percocet is just artificially synthesized codeine. If I had known that, I probably would have stayed away from it at pretty much all costs.

In either case, I think I will make sure that I never take anything that is essentially codeine ever again.

Peace out.