tattoo unveiling (finally!)

“I prithee send me back my heart,
Since I cannot have thine;
For if from yours you will not part,
Why, then, shouldst thou have mine?”
~John Suckling

*sigh* yeah, still there.

anyway… i’d be a dull person indeed if all i talked about was sad, mopey shit.  moving on!  so, i got this tattoo (my first and only) in april and never posted it because i could not for the life of me get my camera to connect to my laptop.  it’s been bugging me and tonight i decided to eff around with it some more.  i tried putting the memory card into a little drive and, voila!  what’s weird is that i know i tried that before and nothing happened, so i don’t know why it suddenly worked.  so, yeah, here it is, a bit anti-climactic… oh well.  thoughts?

cute, right?

mes etoiles dans noir et blanc…

juste comme ma vie.

if that makes any sense to anybody but me…

well, look at that– i can do poetry (er, sort of), too.

europeans do it better

so i’ve become a bit addicted to youtube and tmz.com.  and as you may have seen a couple posts ago in the link to paul potts, the opera singer who won britain’s got talent in 2007, his audition for the show was one of the most beautiful pieces of music i’ve ever heard- and i don’t like opera.  the closest thing to opera i’ve ever been able to enjoy is the soundtrack to les miserables, a book i still have only pushed half way through (dude, that shit’s like 1200 pages!).  but, having watched american idol every few years (yes, i like kelly clarkson and yes, i voted for david cook last season, ok, i confess) i’ve gotten to know simon cowell’s sour demeanor and how few compliments he doles out.  but when paul potts walked onstage, a chubby, nervous guy with very “british” teeth (to be kind) who had been selling cell phones, and told the judges of bgt that he had come to sing opera they all answered with a collective eye roll.  then the music starts and you see that smug look fall right off cowell’s face and transform into something i have to say i have never witnessed on american idol.  i don’t know if cowell just prefers brits and thinks they’re more talented (although one other finalist was a michael jackson and bubbles the monkey ventriloquist, so, yeah, not that much more talented than americans), but he glowed and smiled in a way i’ve never seen during like 8 seasons of idol.  i’m not trying to sound like one of those lame entertainment bloggers, it’s just that i feel like europeans must have something we americans just don’t possess: sophistication.  do you think an opera singer would stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning an american idol type contest?

no effing way.

so, since i loved that audition so much, i followed all potts’ performances on the show up through the final and then when he got to sing for the queen (which was like the big prize of the show, uh, do the brits really love the queen so much?).  ok, so all of this happened like two years ago, but i only just heard this guy and i still wanted to share how much he impressed me.  and how impressed i am with the people of britain for actually voting for someone with talent that isn’t mainstream, that isn’t pop-ie.  i mean that dude can really sing.  so, again i say: holy crap.

and since i spent most of the morning yesterday poisoning my mind with little 1-2 minutes video clips from tmz.com (including a 4 minute masterpiece that consisted of watching paris hilton enter an airport bathroom, 4 minutes pass, then *gasp* she emerges to whispers that she probably just took a dump, great stuff right?) i’m listening to the 10th anniversary performance of les mis on youtube and loving it.

les mis is based on a book by french author victor hugo.  told you europeans do it better.

this is my favorite…

and this is my second favorite…

love the international cast- so awesome.  and i think i’ve seen the japanese dude on iron chef.

ok, and i’ve always had a soft spot for this one…

i gotta say, eponine really gets fucked in this book.  her and fantine (she sells her teeth!) are just such so damn pathetic.

last one…

i gotta say, cosette: she’s kind of a bitch.

c’est la vie.

just a little reminiscing dans la 11

15 rue pasteur paris, france 75011

i lived here from april through june 2005.  located at 15 rue pasteur in the 11th arrodissement, residence hotel du monde hated me because i was loud and rowdy, but i loved that place with all my heart.

i used to live on the 7th floor.  i only took the rickety elevator when i first got there and needed to send my luggage up to my room, when my mother visited and didn’t want to walk up so many flights, and the day i left when i was running late and threw my suitcase in the lift while i raced down the stairs in an attempt to catch my stuff before someone else did.

everyday i ran down past that mirror and skipped the last couple steps on my way out into the city i loved so much.

i loved everything about the hotel du monde, but the landlord guy didn’t love me so much.  parties tended to end up in my apartment, people had a habit of throwing their cigarette butts from my high window, and y and his friends did once steal a dryer from the lobby.  but they brought it right back!  no harm, no foul.

i threw open my window to reveal this view-- eiffel tower and all.

when i first entered my room at the hotel du monde, i thought i had been kissed by the gods, or hit with lucky lightning, or had a guardian angel because this view was exactly what i had dreamed of.  at night i could sit for hours and stare at the light show on the eiffel tower.  so many of my fellow students had views of rue pasteur or were on too low a floor to see over the surrounding buildings and got to stare at clotheslines or boxes of geraniums instead.  i never felt luckier than when i took this picture.  it was quite a disappointment to return to san jose and see only my neighbor’s fence from my bedroom window.  it was like dreaming while being awake.

yes, i loved paris.  i still do.  i can’t wait for the day i get to go back and re-visit places like room 167 at 15 rue pasteur and try to re-capture those feelings once more.

au revoir, paris.

it may not be french… p.s. we loved lucy

my new baby, only silver--mine's kinda bronzy colored, but still purty!

***yea!! got a new laptop, no longer typing away on antique dell!! now have pretty new hp w/ 17 inch screen–love love love!! plus i paid for about 1/2 so it feels more like mine, you know?***

i’m a drug dealer and i’m bilingual.  well, i sell prescriptions to the depressed housewives and stressed out businessmen who can’t get it up in lg.  and, ok, so i’m not exactly bilingual, but i can understand a second language that most people can’t.  that language is part of my job and everyday i get better and better at reading, writing, and speaking it.

the language of pharmacy is based largely on latin and also involves a lot of abbreviations. for example, os means left eye, the “s” stands for sinister, which in latin means left– i think that’s why left-handedness was discouraged so much in the past.  in my favorite novel, a tree grows in brooklyn, francie nolan is said to eat and draw with her left hand as a child, but her mother is always switching the sandwich or chalk into her right hand.  this was the early-1900’s so the whole left-hand equals the devil and evil and sinister stuff goes back at least that far, probably back to when people actually spoke latin.  anyway, that also applies to the ears: as = left ear, aural means ear-related and s means left.  so, if i get a script that is for, say, ciprodex ear drops, it may look like so:  ciprodex 7.5ml  i-ii gtts as prn (translation: ciprodex, 7.5ml=size of bottle (1 ml=1 milliliter, 1 cc= 1 ml; 1 to 2 drops in the left ear as needed).  i’m not sure how gtts means drops or how prn means as needed, it just does, again it can probably be traced back to latin.

as an rx tech for the past nearly eight years, i’ve become very accustomed to reading prescriptions as written by doctors who spent $100k for medical school and yet can barely write out a drug order legibly.  customers often are surprised i can read chicken-scratch, but it’s like becoming familiar with another language– you can spot words you know no matter how badly it’s written out.  most people could do the same if the script were written completely in plain english and if they were used to reading names of drugs, also a skill that takes time to master.  figure there are over a thousand drug names, plus their chemical (or generic) names.   i will be giving a little abbreviation lesson at the end of this entry…say it together now… yea!!

i’ve learned over the years how to talk to people, how to tell them shit they don’t want to hear without me getting yelled at… most of the time.  every now and then you get a customer who maybe feels like shit or is in a lot of pain or just really wants to vent at you, those people refuse any explanation to any problem.  like this one lady i had the other day, she came up to my drop off window and wanted us to order her an item we don’t typically stock.  from what i got from her bitching, she had already asked for this item and why the hell isn’t it here and what is the problem?  why is this so hard? she kept asking.  then the best part: she kept repeating, “i don’t mean to be rude,” as she continued being extremely rude and extremely annoying.  how many times do you have to tell someone, gee, i’m sorry about that, let me go ahead and take care of it now? when i run into trouble at a store, i allow myself to be satisfied that this person will handle my situation because they don’t want to deal with me a second time.  but this bitch just kept going on and on about how someone had screwed up– it wasn’t even an important item–it was some kind of bandage.  i told her if it was that important to have today then she should go to a medical supply store, a place much more likely to have that kind bandage than our little drug store.  but noooooo. that wasn’t what she wanted and that’s all there was to it.  she bitched and moaned until two of us had assured her the item would arrive the next a.m. and one of us would call her when it arrived.  it took like 10 minutes, she blocked up my drop off window the whole time, never apologized for being hella rude (so rude the customers waiting behind her were rolling their eyes and sighing and giving me sympathetic looks), then after she got her shit the next day as promised she transfered all her family’s rxs to the pharmacy across the street.  let me just say: boo freakin hoo.  fyi: if you’re an asshole/bitch to me i’m not gonna cry when you promise to stop coming to my store!  those rude-ass people think they’re breaking my heart by leaving, but i’m just glad to be rid of you!

ugh, i could rant all day, so i’ll spare you and just go right ahead with the language lesson…

typical rx (although it looks to me like someone tampered with the quantity & refills...)

ok, so here’s a pretty normal looking rx for lipitor 10mg (it helps to know what strengths drugs come in so if someone gives you a prescription either missing a strength or with an incorrect one, you can get it fixed as quickly as the law and the prescriber will allow) that reads i po qd #200– so the md wants 1 tablet taken orally every day, but most likely the script will only get filled for #30 or #90, depending on the insurance limitations.  here are some more abbreviations and their english translations:

numbers for daily doses (ie 1-2 tablets per day) are typically written in roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, v… etc.) ud= as directed // sid= once daily // bid= twice daily // tid= three times daily // qid=  four times a day // q hs= every night at bedtime //q pm= every evening // q am= every morning // sx= symptoms (can also mean surgery) // tx= treatment // sl= sublingually, under the tongue// wc= with meals // wf= with food // prn= as needed // prn pain, pp= as needed for pain // sp= spray // nos= nostril // pv= vaginally, per vagina // rec= rectally // supp= suppository // tb= tablet // cp= capsule // d= daily // sob= shortness of breath // q _ hrs= every x hours // aa= affected area(s) // top=topically // app= apply or application // uat= until all taken, until gone // diss= dissolve // tsp= teaspoonful // tbl= tablespoonful // gtt(s)= drop(s) // ins= instill (for eye drops) or insert // cwr: call when ready // mg= milligram // mcg= microgram //g= gram (=1,000 milligrams)  conversion: there are about 20 drops in each milliliter (ml, cc) // conversion:  there are about 5 ml in a teaspoonful, 15 ml in a tablespoonful, so 10 ml or cc is the equivalent of 2 teaspoonfuls, etc. // cII= class 2, schedule 2 drugs– these include drugs like methadone, morphine, percocet, oxycontin, ritalin, etc.  and require special, controlled script blanks like these:

controlled rx blank-- for the good shit 🙂

this is a typical controlled blank for the state of california (other states are probably less rigid) and have special security features.  they can have watermarks, like money, some have the word “void” hidden in the background so if the script is copied it will say void all over it, and some have little spots that if you rub or breathe on the spot will change color or disappear.  very fancy.  cIII’s like vicodin, norco, xanax, etc. also have to be on these blanks in order to be filled, but those ones are also allowed to be called in over the phone or faxed in to the pharmacy, whereas the other class, cII, must be handwritten, signed and dated and if any of those 3 are missing than the script is worthless.  this poses quite a few problems each week since not all mds remember or know to do these things.  it can be a bit of a hassle. to be considered valid the handwritten perfect rx must be brought in in person.  very strict.  the only way to get around those rules is if you’re literally dying and on hospice care, then the hospice nurse can call in something like morphine for you using an override code that the pharmacist has to write on the rx so the dea (drug enforcement agency) don’t get their panties in a twist.

isn’t my job super interesting?  well, now i’ve imparted some of my valuable knowledge to the public so next time you get a new prescription you can look at it first and make sure your md didn’t f-up and maybe make sense of the chemical you’re about to put in or on your body.  have fun!

***this entry is dedicated to my friend and co-worker,  lucy p.  she died on monday from metastatic lung cancer.  she was the most outgoing, most friendly, and all around nicest person i’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.  i know all who knew you will miss you (that’s a lot of people!), but i just wanted you to know how much i cared for you and how much i will miss you– you were gone so fast i never had a chance to tell you.  may you walk with the angels, and your beloved husband who passed before you.  i hope there are “i love lucy” re-runs in heaven for you.  goodbye, lucy.***

j’adore les jeudis (i love thursdays)

jeudi– my favorite day of the week (besides sunday when i could literally sleep all day and not miss anything).  thursday is the last day of classes for the week, i only have to work six hours in the fluorescent tomb (aka the pharmacy), the boyfriend usually comes home from bezerkley (he’s smarter than me, so he goes to uc berk), it’s payday (well, not anymore–effing cee-vee-ess changing my payday to friday- hurumphh), and my precious tivo records all my favorite tv shows for me so i don’t have to miss a single second of  “the office,” “30 rock,” “kath & kim,” or “csi.”

some people get embarrassed or ashamed of watching too much tv, but that’s crazy talk!  you can never watch too much tv.  it’s not physically possible.  you can watch too many commercials, that’s why i would give my tivo chocolates on valentine’s day if i didn’t know my dad would end up eating them.  even my mom suffers without tivo when she sojourns to the homeland (that’s north texas) to visit my tootie who hasn’t converted to tivo worship.

oui, there is such a place.

hmm, now tootie may be someone who does watch too much tv.  she still gets a frickin tv guide, like the kind made out of paper and resembles a little book you may remember them from your childhood, or from a glass case in the smithsonian.  walking into tootie’s climate controlled house (i don’t think it ever gets above 65 degrees in there) is like walking into a time warp– there’s green shag carpeting as far as the eye can see, her toilet seats have cushions on them, she still has an ashtray next to her armchair even though she quit smoking over 25 years ago, and papa’s armchair hasn’t moved a millimeter since his death exactly six years ago today.  she may be single handedly responsible for global warming by keeping her air conditioner on full blast 24/7 from april to october.  my papa used to say it was like a morgue and would take breaks from the cold by standing outside in the texas summer heat to “warm up.”  now i don’t know how many of you have visited north texas in summertime, but it’s not just hot.  it’s fucking hot… and fucking humid.  it’s what i imagine purgatory to be like, if mormons believed in that sort of thing.  so for anyone to want to go out into that palpable, wet wall of heat that hums with cicadas and horseflies and mosquitoes (my sister ash and i once had a contest to see who had the most mosquito bites by the end of our visit to tootie and papa’s house–ash won with i think 27 bites…) blows my mind.  it’s the reason i used to want to visit in fall or winter… until papa died in february and i realized that there was no good time to live in texas.  my mom is so lucky she got out of there before a tornado took off with her house or she got struck by lightning.

isn’t funny how you can start out rambling on about something as mundane as thursday night “must see tv” and end up talking about the anniversary of your grandfather’s death?  his funeral was weird because for some godforsaken reason someone thought it might be fun to videotape this particular moment of my family’s life, so i have a vhs copy of my grandparent’s little baptist church’s chapel with my papa’s flower covered coffin displayed up front and rows of church pews filled with stetsons and big hairdos.  most of my family got to sit quietly passing around a box of tissues, but oh no, not caitlin.  no, caitlin had to get up and talk to that stupid video camera and read the private letter i had written to papa before he died.  since he died before my mom could give him the letter, i guess everybody decided it was public property and they read it.  by the time i arrived a couple days later, the letter had not only been read by half my family and dozens of texan baptists, but it had been printed onto the programs for the service.  yea.  i don’t remember who told me that i going to be reading that letter out loud in front of people (please note aforementioned fear of public speaking).  oh, and if i didn’t want to do it myself, the pastor would read it for me.  oh double yea.  i didn’t want that pepsi-drinking d-bag (we later found out that the man who had been at my papa’s deathbed was a liar and cheated on his wife and basically just was not the guy papa thought he was… plus he drank pepsi in my grandfather’s presence.  how rude.)  to read the heartfelt words i had meant only for papa to know.  even now, six years later, i’m getting all choked up about it.  because in the end i did read the letter out loud– caught on video.  so, to this day i have a copy of the one of the top 5 most horrible moments of my life on tape!  we’re not a tape-every-precious-moment type of family, so it trips me out to even know there’s a videotape of me.  but i have gotten really drunk and shown the video to some of my friends.  even though i hate that tape, i can’t bring myself to dispose of it.  it’s one of those things.  i told you i have a lot of things.

i talk too much.  is it blog too much?  i need to pace myself– this could have been, like, a week’s worth of entries.  oh well, c’est ma vie.

bon jeudi…

sur ma liste aujourd’hui

he may have been lost, but all i could think was: "i want your hat."

i’ve decided to make lists.  i love writing out lists of endless amounts of crap i need to do, but i rarely actually do anything from my lists.  but i enjoy them all the same.

i’ve never really explained why i love paris so much.  since i was maybe eight or nine i dreamed of seeing the eiffel tower in person.  i must have seen its daunting beauty on tv or in a newspaper or something, but whatever it was, it lit a fire under me and for the next 10 years my dream lived on.  i went in high school as a 16 year old french student and took the typical tourist trip.  we hit all the important eglise, cathedrals, museums, monuments, castles, and quaint country towns.  the south of france was nice, but paris remains my true love.  so, while attending de asia, i signed up for a study abroad program that would set me up in an apartment (avec a roommate) and i would attend classes at a little extension school.  since i couldn’t legally drink back home yet, i basically stayed at least half drunk for two months straight.  i also started smoking a pack a day of marlboro reds to help me assimilate.  it worked.  i met some amazing people that i still think about, wondering what’s going on in their lives now that nearly four years has passed since i walked the cobblestoned streets, licking nutella from my chin and trying to absorb as much culture as possible.  it was so wonderful, i didn’t have to work for the first time in six years, and i could devote my energy to school and blending into the french crowd of which i so wanted to be a part of.  but april turned into may and may became june and i had to board a plane back to california.  while i still have so many memories from my time there, i’m no longer in contact with any of the people from the memories.  i miss ross and vered who proved to be awesome friends, with whom i shared so many bouts of laughter and with whom i sobbed tearful goodbyes into their shoulders, and they into mine.  i tried to keep in touch, but the circumstances just wouldn’t allow it.  vered moved to hollywood to be an actress and ross left for san fran to live with his girlfriend.  and sometimes i allow my thoughts to drift to one more person who left such a great impact on my soul.  but, like i said, i left paris to return to my home in san jose (northern california is a fantastic place to live, too, so i have been exceedingly lucky) and he stayed behind in his home.  i used to hope he would show up on my doorstep announcing plans to stay and live here, but that childish desire flitted away like a delicate butterfly.  i came home and shawn (aka the boyfriend) presented himself and for the first time in my life i found myself able to accept kindness and affection from a boy.  the boy i left behind did this for me without ever knowing it; he made it possible for me to love again.

**sigh**

life happens when you’re busy doing something else, or however the saying goes.  well, that explanation may seem cryptic, but i assure you there will be more paris stories over time– i’ve got a million of ’em.

ok, now the list of shit i will never do of things to do this week:

1. scale mount laundry and actually fold the shirts and whatnot right after so i don’t have to iron (ehh i hate ironing!)
2. purchase textbooks for this semester
3. take charlie for a walk qd
4. learn to add music to this blog
5. write in blog qd
6. drink more water and eat less without picking up smoking again
7. cut back on various vices (the boyfriend knows)
8. make valentine’s reservations at loony boon or boony loon or whatever that winery is called (merci ash & j.c. for the generous gift certificate) for wine tasting and food pairing, very chi-chi.
9. wash face q night hs (hs=at bedtime in pharmacy speak)
10. send two month late payment to capital one, transfer $$ to visa so they stop calling me
11. re-order checks from wells fargo so i can pay aforementioned bills
12. remember to save $$ q week for tuition in august (goal: $3000)
13. schedule charlie for vet visit
14. go to audiobook store all ears in saratoga for new books. (just finished all 7 harry potters, all of david sedaris they had, memoirs of a geisha, and the giver) next i want the time traveler’s wife and maybe something by christopher moore.
15. be nicer, be more gentle, and be a better listener.

voila! no capital letters allowed

ok, so this is all pretty new to me. i mean, i used to be on myspace, but that seemed so self indulgent. this blog will be, too, because i’ll be mostly blogging about myself, but somehow i feel like blogs are less tacky and more intellectual than myspace where people mostly post pictures of themselves taking bong rips and leaving lame posts for each other about how much they love themselves.

i decided this would be the opposite of that. plus, my mom, my big sis, and my sis-in-law all blog nearly qd (qd is pharmacy speak for everyday) so i’m starting to feel it pulsing through my blood. i also figured the writing practice would be good for me, although you will never catch me

my snuggle pug

using capital letters. it’s just my thing. if you devote yourself to reading my blog qd, you will quickly find that i have a lot of things.

anyway, i’m typing away on my increasingly obsolete laptop balanced on one thigh while charlie the erstwhile pug snores away on the other. he’s a good boy, but no matter how many episodes of “the dog whisperer” or “it’s me or the dog” or how many of cesar milan’s books i read, this dog is still a total a**hole to anybody who comes to our house outside me, my mom, my dad, and my boyfriend. he hates children (my nephews and nieces call him the devil dog… that actually hurts my feelings a bit, but he has tried biting all of them so it’s understandable), he hates the guy who reads the meter, he hates the mailman, he hates knocks on the door, and he really hates our neighbor’s puggle. but he really loves me so it’s hard for me to give a rat’s arse if he hates anybody else. he’s my little snuggle pug and he could eat kittens for breakfast and i’d still defend what i call his “quirkiness.”

already filed my taxes because being a journalism student i’m all up and up on the news, so i heard that since my dear state’s congressmen and the governator can’t agree on a budget (lazy, stubborn s.o.b’s) that instead of issuing refunds citizens may receive i.o.u’s. but i.o.u’s don’t exactly pay the bills do they? no, they do not. so i figured the sooner i stake my claim on my share of my tax refund, the more likely i will be to actually receive money. we’ll see how that turns out in a couple weeks. if i’m not over $1500 richer, than the irs will get a nasty phone call from me, and they don’t want that. i spend a good chunk of my work days calling insurance companies and trying to convince them to pay for services they should be paying for anyway, so i’m used to yelling and acting all snippy on the phone with douchebags who are trying to save money.

douche and douchebag are two of my favorite words. i even caught my 68 year old father calling someone a douche. it’s just so insulting, yet incredibly descriptive. it’s almost as useful as the f-word. how would i live my life without that word?

also, if you ever want to curse somebody in french- see me. i did an entire project while i was still at de asia community college on verlan (derived from the french l’envers, the reverse) and swear words. Verlan is common french slang in which you take a word, like, for example, merci, switch it up and say it like cimer. it’s really hard to understand if you don’t already speak fluent french, which i don’t, but just knowing about it will get you in with les jeunes de paris. trust moi.

cimer for now, au revoir all.