I...um...oy.

My Facebook status reads, currently:

Kate is concomitantly over-caffeinated and deliriously tired.

I'm so bloody tired right now. And a little bedraggled. Last night was not awful, and Mike was on night float and took good care of me overnight (he didn't even make me see anybody after 1am. I wandered in to the workroom sometime around 3:30, and he was sitting at the computer, piles of paper surrounding him on the floor, each referencing a patient that somebody or another wanted to send us. I was like, "You need help?" He sort of looks around, looks back at me, and says, "Nope." Who am I to argue? I went back to bed. Well, I went back to my office. I dictated two clinic notes, checked my email, putzed and fussed, and then finally went to sleep around 5. I actually slept pretty darn well from 5-8, but from 1:30-3:30, I tossed and turned in this restless, shallow, inexplicably anxious sort of sleep, which I find is almost worse than just staying up.

There's cable in the intern lounge now. And a recliner. I should've just gone in there and dozed...

Sparrow's always reminding me that it's perfectly reasonable to be useless on your post-call day. Maybe if I would just quit fussing and lay in bed and watch House on these days, I wouldn't end up doing that on the weekends. But, nooo, I'm always trying to be "productive." Pah.

(Sparrow, by the way, so totally rocks. It was, to quote Peng, "ass-bitingly cold" this morning. So Sparrow calls me up and is like, I don't have to be at work until 10, and it's way too cold for you to walk, do you want me to give you a ride home? I almost cried. She also picked up dinner for us last night - which, apparently, Little Maxine got to come along for the trip, and thought the food was for her, and couldn't understand why Sparrow wouldn't let her eat it. Tyler - who met her downstairs - was very amused by Little Maxine. They - Maxine and Sparrow - also took good care of Ms. Mags overnight. Sparrow's so totally my hero today.)

I caught a little nap today. I tried to read. I saw my shrink and waxed philosophic about work for an hour. And I joined the gym. I liked the gym. They were very friendly. I have my complementary assessment and workout (read: sales pitch) with this large, bald, black wall of muscle named Joe on Friday night (I'm on call Saturday. Here's hoping I can still walk). There were old people working out (apparently they have three members over 90) and I got high-fived by the staff a lot. I also got a wicked (WICKED) deal because the manager was in a good mood and thought I was cute.

(One thing I've noticed about North Carolina, both today at the gym and in the context of various people I've met thusfar, is that personal trainers tend to be large black walls of muscle. Who tend to think ass-ful white girls are hot. A girl could get used to that.)

So I sign all the papers and pay - cash, since I don't want to be paying credit card interest on it and specifically took this out of my bonus money. But they had to ask the manager if they accepted cash for membership payments. I thought that was hysterical - and as she's handing me my change she says, "oh, by the way, about our cancellation policy..." And it took a good deal of restraint in my shriveled-up post-call brain to keep from laughing at her and saying, "I want to quit the gym!"

(Which, if you missed the reference, is not actually the case. Rather, it reiterates that there is a Friends analogy for every situation in life. Exhibit A:

)

So then I went to Starbucks and pretended to read for a while, and then I went to class. My first class was good, as it always is, but the second...I'm discovering I don't especially enjoy it, although I find the material interesting. And tonight, right, we get to talking about attachment, and this concept, which I think is huge giganamous gargantuan - the infantile attachment bond determines what "safety" feels like for a given individual. So if you're a baby surrounded by chaos, or inconsistent reinforcement, or a detached and unresponsive parent, this becomes your view of "normal" and "safe."

It's a simple, very reasonable statement. But the implications of that are just HUUUUUUGE.

I've really been pondering that hard. What I found disheartening, though, is that my leader/teacher/whatever I'm supposed to call him eventually pointed out that this gets strongly internalized and likely doesn't change, you know, ever.

Which, well, made me want to curl up in a corner and rock a little. Because if that's true (which, it is, to a degree, I think, but that degree, and the factors that modulate it, are important), then what I do is futile. Which is daunting, particularly for someone who wants to work with people repeatedly traumatized at an early age.

Anyhow....I have to be slept and dressed and showered and in my supervisor's office in 10 hours to learn how to practice my futile craft better, so I guess I'd better get to bed....