Here be monsters

Tomorrow I am going to Amsterdam for the weekend (well for one sleep anyway), and during the 1.7 days that I will be away from my computer I will be unable to communicate with you because I still don’t own any of that newfangled technology that lets you access the Internet on the road. Unless of course you count paper and pen. I’ll have those things. So I suppose I could write you all letters. But I don’t have all your addresses (or, in most cases even your names). That would make it hard for the post office I guess. But still, I could write you all letters and then scan them next week when I get back, and then I could post them on the blog for you all to read. But then I don’t want to have to scan 57 documents and post them as pdf files to my blog because that’s boring and also I wouldn’t have any system in place to control who sees which letters, so Anonymous #1 would be able to read letters I’ve written to Anonymous #2. And that would be awkward because I really feel I’ve grown close to Anonymous #2. But I suppose I could come up with some kind of code or secret handshake or whatever (only not, because this is the Internet, so it wouldn’t really be a handshake but more like a secret series of key strokes) to allow everyone to access the right letter. But now I’m getting kinda tired thinking about how I can keep in touch with you all while I’m away, which is good because I used to think I might one day like to be famous but if reaching out to my fans is this hard when I don’t really have any I think maybe I’ve changed my mind. So thanks for that. Thanks for making me feel tiny and insignificant and totally non-famous. It will save on stationary, but not necessarily on therapist's bills.

Speaking of the medical profession, I saw my doctor yesterday and I didn’t even have to “climb on up on the table.” So that was a relief. But she did want me to get some blood taken, so I had to go the lab today and do that. But it was fine because at least this time I didn’t tell the nurse that I wanted to take my own blood, which is what happened last time (but luckily she must have known what I meant anyway because she didn’t just pass me the needle and say “go ahead”). Anyway, today the nurse came over to the blood-letting chair carrying five plastic vials in her hand, and I just thought she was being a super efficient nurse taking extra vials with her so she wouldn’t have to remember to carry them over the next time. But when she started taking my blood I started to suspect that all the vials were for me because I kept hearing this popping sound like you get from opening the lid on a tube of Pringles, and I worried that maybe my doctor had made a terrible mistake and instead of writing on her lab-note-thingy “patient reports feeling drained” had written “patient should be drained” and now the nurse was calmly taking all of my blood (which I could not verify with my eyes because even though I am 34 I am still mildly afraid of watching as someone stabs me with a giant needle), and I also noticed that my arm was going all tingly and sort of dead. I wanted to shout “Damn you woman, leave some for me,” but then the nurse told me to stop making a fist, and I thought this was because she could see the look on my face and was afraid I would hit her with my balled-up bloodless hand, which, given its limpness would have been about as painful for her as being hit in the face with a dead trout, but really she just said it because she was done.

(The other thing that I love about my life is that I’m a linguist, because that means that I can write long sentences full of “ands” like the ones above and I totally don’t give a damn because I’m a linguist so I can do whatever I want with language, cuz it’s MINE!)

Anyway, the blood. The other cool thing is that in Dutch the word for “sample” is monster. So today the nurse basically took five monsters from my blood. Then she stuck a big piece of cotton and two pieces of tape over the hole to stop any more monsters getting in. So she wasn’t trying to kill me. She was just getting the monsters out.

My bloodless trout arm, with its monster-hole covered.

I realize that this is less a blog post and more a look into the inside of my mind, and for that I am sorry, but I promise that next week I’ll be good.