No rest for the wicked

No, no, I haven't fallen off the bloggy wagon. I've just had a very full few days. Claudia came down to visit this weekend and we had a blast. She got to hang out with a lot of my local friends. We had a very good time.

The highlights of our weekend (as I see them, in no particular order):
- good company and catching up
- fabulous dining out, and a lot of it, including trying several new-to-me places
- losing at 3-on-1 pool
- gluten free brownies made of awesomeness
- coffee
- Claud Meets the Village
- a new - and fabulous - vacuum to replace the one that died in the Unfortunate Catnip Mouse Incident of 2011
- breakfast with one of my favorite four year olds
- Cabaret. Or should I say, "cabaret."
- drunken Waffle House with the boys at 2am on a Tuesday.
- Claudia Learns Crochet
- so many moments of "now you see what I've been talking about, right?"

Fan-freaking-tastic.

I dropped her off at the airport tonight and then went to say goodbye to my aunt and uncle, the ones that moved here nine months before I did. They've been such an incredible source of support, and they're moving back to Chicago on Thursday. It's tough for me, to be honest, and all of that saying goodbye in such a short period of time while running on three hours' sleep is even a bit rougher. So, my bed is in my near future, even though I have SO many more things to say.

But I will share this piece of completely awesome news -

I PASSED MY BOARDS.

I am officially a fully-licensed, board-certified, ready-to-roll General Psychiatrist. Cannot beat that.

Blah, blah, blah

It was a big day for some reasons I can't yet divulge (don't you love it when I do that?) but also because I started on the child unit today. Whew. I forgot how exhausting the little ones can be, especially when they suddenly have to be discharged.

My day actually started much earlier than that. My adolescent therapy patient who comes at 7am (voluntarily. Of her own choosing)....um...well, she came at 7am. We're doing some transition work now, so she only comes every other week. We had a good session today, about some pretty heavy stuff. And then, later, after the whirlwind discharge and while I was on my way to supervision (handy), she sent me a text telling me that what we had talked about this morning ended poorly.

Can I be totally honest with you? It broke my heart a little.

I know we're all trained to come off as being somewhat aloof and all "blank slate" and whatnot, but here's a dirty little secret of psychotherapy: we get emotionally invested. At least, the good ones do. And this is a kid I've been seeing for three years now, which is not an insignificant chunk of her life (or mine, for that matter). I've seen her grow in a lot of really profound ways. And even if my response was something close to the cliche "that must be so hard for you," I really hurt for her. To really get the emotional content, blank slate or not, you have to make an emotional connection. That's why this work is so exhausting. I see it in my colleagues' exuberance about college acceptance or dismay at an abrupt and clumsy termination. We may sometimes give the impression that you may only exist to us for a fifty minute hour, but in truth, as much as we hope our patients internalize us, we internalize them to some degree too.

It's kind of cool, when you get right down to it.

Oh - and, I went to the gym after work and supervision and therapy and the, um, whatnot, and I did my little proscribed treadmill workout at 1.8 miles per hour in the middle of the crowded, post-work-rush gym. Yeah, I was still self-conscious about it (especially because that 7% grade was kicking my ass today), but I did it.

Baby steps, you know?

BEEP! BEEP!! BEEEEEEP!

It's the most irritating part of my job.

That noise my pager makes. During hours I'm not supposed to be working.

I'm wishing right now that I'd gone into one of those specialties that boasts a "pager-free lifestyle" (although I don't think any of them ever really do, especially not as a resident).

That's alls I'm going to say about it. Except this: I REALLY AM NOT INCOMPETENT! And this is not an emergency!! And I really don't want to talk to Patient Relations at 8:30pm.

I should really start leaving the damn thing in my car. Except I'm too hypervigilant about my patients...

At least I have Maxine to keep things in perspective....

Procrastination

I didn't get nearly enough done today.

Ah well.

Tomorrow I leave for NYC for a child psychiatry conference (don't rob my house. People have keys, and I'm underpaid, so there's nothing there worth taking, anyway). I'm pretty excited. The conference should be really good. AND I've never been to New York City before, except for a two hour layover at JFK. AND I'm staying with my good friend Buie, whom I haven't seen in like a million billion years. AND I get to see my friend Barb, whom I've never even met in person! AND Maggie gets to come to NY with me. AND...um...did I mention I'm really excited?

I'm also not really packed yet...

I'm a little anxious, and it's been getting in the way, frankly. I've never been to NYC before. I haven't been to a child psych conference before. I don't know what to do with all those child psychiatrists! There's going to be like a bazillion people I don't know. Not to mention, the last time I went to a national conference was right before my life fell apart in NH. Which....okay....this is a whole different time. And a whole different life. And, okay, I'm pretty good at dealing with people I don't know.

I'm just wishing I was feeling a little better about myself these days.

One thing I did manage to accomplish today (after spending like three hours at the coffee shop) was procuring motorcycle gloves. My riding and safety course is the weekend after I get back, so today Larry and I went shopping for the last item required for the course (he needed winter riding gloves, too). We spent way too much time trying on the same four pairs of gloves. I decided faster than he did, though, and wandered over to look at armored jackets (which were surprisingly more reasonably priced than I thought). I promptly got stuck in one when the zipper malfunctioned. He couldn't get me out of it. I finally got it off over my head. It was really comical. And I was hesitant to try on any others, but I think I found one I like. I took a picture of the tag and tucked that away for later. But in the midst of all this, I'm being all neurotic and anxious, and I keep pointing out my anxiety and neurosis. And Larry finally tells me, "You know you're no different from anyone else, right?"

It was, perhaps, a little bit of the pot calling the kettle neurotic. But it was a nice reminder, too, how we all have a little bit of crazy.

One of these days I'll really be able to own mine. I think that's the goal, you know? Not to eliminate it, of course - it's what makes us who we are - but to work with it. To reduce distress.  It's what I do professionally, and it's what I'm trying to do personally.

It's kinda tough....

Sated

Psychiatry Book Club tonight. Had a WONDERFUL time. Did lots of arguing with Scott. Pulled Sonia into it. Great contributions from the underclass residents. It was very much a success. Also? There was good Indian food involved. Can't go wrong there, unless their buffet is both expensive and expansive and you all end up eating too much and have to drive home with your (new, stiff) jeans unbuttoned.

Just sayin'.

But now it's 11pm and I'm a sleepy Kate...

Who knew?

It's National Depression Screening Day.

Which, frankly, is every day in my world.

(Click here or here for a link)

Mind your mental health, people.

Crisis of...something

So, I apologize for the fact that the blog, of late, has sucked. No, no, it really has lacked my typical enthusiasm and investment. And I can pinpoint where this fell off, because I stopped blogging every day. And I recognize that as a symptom, not a causative factor. But even when I go back and read what I have written, it's not my usual level of attention to detail. For example, I've been misusing May and June's names for a month - May is a year ahead of me and older than June, which is why she's May. June is my classmate that just got married. You'll notice that I just married off May, which I'm suspecting neither May's wife nor June's husband would support. And Olga has had like seven different names.

The truth of it is, there's something not right with me. And to be perfectly frank, I'm not sure what it is.

Jen suggested this morning that I'm burned out. Which, yes, definitely a part of it. I don't know how I could be running a family care home and being a chief-ish resident and functioning as a very busy first year child fellow and trying to maintain some sort of social connections and working twice a week on a very difficult insight-oriented journey without burning the candle at both ends. I'm very overwhelmed by my life right now, which makes sense, because any single component could easily by itself be overwhelming. The family care home is sucking up a lot of my time and energy, but it ways that are sometimes reasonable. I don't know how to say "here's how you can help me" without it coming out as "stop sucking the life out of me." And sometimes it just has to be what it is, like Thursday, when I was cranky and restless and all I wanted to do was go home and sit in the quiet and make frozen pizza and watch NCIS and then go to bed at 8:00. But I got to my parents' and my dad was bleeding internally. Very reasonably, we changed direction and went to the ER. All the while, though, I felt like I was sitting there looking at the end of my rope.

But I used to be able to handle that a lot better. It would not have bothered me three months ago to anywhere near the extent that it did that my minimal plans for the evening were voided. So, yes, while I feel like there's a very significant chunk of caregiver fatigue in the mix here...that ain't all it is.

There's also probably a seasonal component - I'm VERY light responsive (some would say seasonal affective), and you might have noticed, the light is dying. I have a hard time getting up in the morning. I have a hard time staying up at night. I always, always get a little more depressed when the season changes, but it's much earlier this year. Typically that doesn't kick in until November or December. So something is sensitizing me this year.

I know there's some biological stuff going on as well. My thyroid hormone replacement is still clearly inadequate. My new - if tiny - medicine to address the stress-related borderline high blood pressure I've been having might be contributing. And there may be something more systemic going on, if my stiff, sore joints are any indication. Plus, I still haven't had that sleep study I need. Maybe I have sleep apnea, who knows, but more likely I think I have some sort of REM sleep disorder. I have these ridiculously detailed, highly affectively charged, absolutely EPIC dreams that go on and on and on and on, for literally hours. I have massive sleep inertia when I wake up in the middle of one of those epic voyages (seriously, Homer had nothing on me, and it definitely interferes with my quality of sleep. So I probably need to get that looked at.

In a psychoanalytic sense, it also occurs to me that I've doubly lost my holding environment. I had one here, in NC, away from my childhood and my old life and the painful things about that, a place where I could grow and individuate that authentic self, a distance at which I could appreciate the things I loved about my family and my life back home. But at the same time, I had a safe place to go back to if there was too much trouble here. Like, when the bottom fell out of my life at the Emerald Palace, what did I do? I ran home. Now, I have neither of those places.

But then there's this deeply existential piece. I feel like I've lost my sense of my identity over the last few months. Who am I? What am I doing? What am I becoming? All of those questions suddenly have tenuous and very nebulous answers all of a sudden. My self-concept has always been ruled by outside influences, and I think in becoming more aware of that, of trying to locate that which is more authentic, I've become aware of just how diaphanous is that by which I've defined myself. Winnicott talked about the false self, the ideal persona created which we present to the outside world. Trouble is, the harder I look, the less I feel confident that I can locate an authentic self-object in my internal world. It's somewhere in my shadow, which I cannot access readily, if at all right now. That's the point of therapy, indeed, but that doesn't make me feel any more whole right now. And I think the bigger issue is, there's a lot of affect that's been split off for a long time which is now trying to reintegrate itself as my self-awareness journey proceeds. And there are reasons it left - namely, like any split off affect, it was too painful to tolerate at the time. Now, though, I'm suddenly wading in it until my fingers are pruney. Which sucks.

(Psychobabble, psychobabble, psychobabble. Sorry, it's what I do.)

The point of all of this, I think, is that it just is. There's no quick fix, no magic pill, no right answer. So I just keep going along, keep my head in the game, keep telling the story as it needs to be told (I've been reading a lot about narrative psychiatry lately). I have to identify what my needs really are before I can meet them. And I can hope that my friends' patience with me is a model and reminder of how I need to be patient and kind with myself.

Uncomfortable though it may be, this too will pass. But the only way out is through.

A good baker could put me out of business...

Check this out (click to make it big and readable...)

If only cupcakes were the antidote to suicidality. Maybe they're lithium cupcakes?

Saddle up

So I survived my first day back on the Child Psychiatry inpatient service. Rounds lasted for-ev-er (over half our service was new from the weekend), but aside from that, it was decent. I'm glad to be back on the inpatient psychiatry horse.

Peng and I did this focus group this evening, which was a new and different experience. It was us, six oncologists, and one rehab doc talking about how the state medical society could be useful to us. It really underscored the difference between the specialties and sets up a bit how the split of "us" and "them" arises. They complained about faltering NIH funding (a very valid concern); we were moaning about already dwindling state monies being allocated away from those who need it (we were all bitching about access to care). One of them spends four days a week researching leukemia in dogs. Which, if I - or for that matter, my dog - ever get leukemia, I would absolutely go to her. Her research has the potential to save lives. Meanwhile, though, I'm talking one of my adults off a ledge and trying to manage a kid who's been completely overmedicated by his community provider. Which, when you get down to the impact each of us makes, is equally important; my "life saving" efforts are on a more individualized scale, but they're relevant nonetheless. I totally felt like they - who work literally yards away from us - were way up in the ivory tower, while we were down digging in the trenches. It was an interesting perspective. And, I'm quite certain, not at all the point of the focus group.

Of course, by that analogy...the hospital Starbucks must be the entrance to the castle.

I'd always suspected as much......

And then there's the very short chairs

Ten ways you know you're a child psychiatrist:

1. Whatever it is, you don't prescribe it unless you know if it comes in a liquid.

2. There's a dollhouse in your office.

3. You're standing in the Barnes and Noble, and realize that the blood-curdling wails of the child melting down in the Kids' section for the last ten minutes didn't even make a ding on your radar (this might have happened to me yesterday).

4. You've spent an entire therapy session playing chess, and gathered a lot of data from that.

5. You realize that half the notes you've taken lately are in crayon.

6. You frequently have to stop yourself from turning to strangers' children and saying "1.....2....."

7. You often resist the urge to do the same to your colleagues.

8. You think the whole world can be explained by attachment theory.

9. You can speak for a good five minutes entirely using acronyms.

10. Your patients repeatedly use nonsense words, Twilight references, and text speak in therapy sessions (ZOMG!).

I so love my job.

Wordful Wednesday

So today was my first day at the State Hospital outpatient clinic.

It was unceremonious and overwhelming.

But none of my patients showed up, which is a little weird for that setting.

We spend all day there on Wednesdays and the afternoons there on Thursdays. So I have a meeting tomorrow, then a lecture, then supervision, then two therapy patients. BUT! The morning County clinic is canceled, so I have to morning to myself. I'm going to go to coffee, then maybe the gym, then I'm going to get to SH a little early and continue setting up my office.

I have a private office all to myself. Where I will do therapy. And I LOVE it. 

There's a little short table with little short chairs. There's a chalkboard and a bookshelf with toys. I have a dollhouse and a deck of cards and a plastic dinosaur. And I hit up the "toy room" today for crayons, markers, and colored pencils (since most of my patients are teenagers). I'd like a little different furniture, but I fully intend to make that place all mine for the next two years. Today after clinic I went to Staples and bought some...well, you know.

No clinic. Fresh office supplies. Tomorrow morning is going to be just like Christmas. Only warmer, and will feature me trying to clean the mildew out of the air conditioner vents...

Speaks for itself.

(From Bent Objects)

Narrative thread

So my friend walks into my office today with a book I loaned him four months ago.

Wait, let me back this story up a little bit.

Sometime in March, Scott loaned me a book. Not a super-unusual occurrence. And then the next day we had a conversation about something, which I'm thinking was an esoteric discussion of sex and the underestimated ways it alters relationships and the way Freud and Jung and all them deal with the energetics and more mystical ideas about sex. Again, not an uncommon occurrence. Scott and I have had this very conversation in varying degrees of depth before, and, let's face it, Scott and I are big into discussing esoterica. And because of the recent book loaning, I was like, "Ooh!! You have GOT to read this book I have. You'll love it."

And so the next day, I come into work with Paulo Coelho's Eleven Minutes, which I'd stumbled across in a bookstore in Maui and had led to this flurry of new-favorite-author endearment and reading of multiple Coelho books. I love this book, and pretty much everything else of his that I've read. So Scott comes into my office at the end of the day and I, all excited, present him with this book.

He looks at it for a moment. And then he hands it back to me and says, "Yeah, I don't read fiction."

I was taken a little bit aback. "You.....you what now?"

"I don't read fiction."

"You read every piece of mythology and mysticism you can get you hands on," I say slowly, "but you categorically deny FICTION?"

"Right," he says. "I don't read fiction."

I, of course, said, right, okay, whatever, but in truth, I did not take this well. And so he leaves my office and I'm sitting there thinking, doesn't read fiction. What the hell is that? Who doesn't read an entire category like "fiction"? What the hell is wrong with Scott?! Jeebus... And, of course, somehow decided this was a personal affront and that was the world's LAMEST EXCUSE for not wanting to read my contemporarily favorite book.

And I stewed a little more, and then I realized how bloody well pissed off I was. And so I marched down to his office, threw the book at him, and said something to the effect of, "Who the hell doesn't read fiction? READ THE DAMN BOOK." He argued, but he took the book.

Then, this past Monday night, I get a text message from him that he's 100 pages into the book and befuddled about something. 

So today, he brings the book back to me, and we're talking briefly about it, and he says, "you know, I wish Coelho had just talked about his philosophies and skipped the story."

I looked at him and realized, this made my heart a little sad.

Because to me, all of life is about the narrative. It's about the stories we create, the ebb and flow of events, the cascading of life's nuances. So much is connected to the narrative, and it's fascinating to me to watch how people's narratives crash into one another, tangle and tussle and are forever altered. We spin our threads and then weave our lives together in ways that must even awe the Fates (who were, of course, the women at the cosmic spinning wheels in Greek mythology). It's remarkable, it's infinite in its reach, and it's never, ever simple.

And in the telling of the story - the language, the arrangement, the allegory - there is often so much more to be learned about the author than about the sequence of events themselves. This is part of what I love about doing psychotherapy. I have an awareness about how my brain works, that it often thinks in analogy and metaphor, but the fact is - that's not particularly special. Everyone does this, whether they're aware of it or not. We all construct our stories in ways that relate to those things we know; we tie things together, we make connections. The depth and complexity of those analogies vary, and often, it's not the conscious mind that's making these connections so generally only a small portion of these analogies sees the light of conscious awareness. But the removed (i.e., non-defended) and trained ear can hear the soft bubbling of the subconscious beneath the torrent of details. It can see the significance of the order of events in the retelling, know the influence of the past and future, recognize the cacophony of defenses trying to drown out the siren song of the shadow self. It acquaints itself with the ambivalence of life, the veracity in every lie and the perjury of truth.

So often, though, this requires listening with one's own subconscious, and that is a tricky proposition, because we're trained to cling to our words as mere words and not as symbols and analogies. So it comes out as affect, or imagery; it stirs the listener's own metaphors and associations. Which creates, then, its own, new, narrative.

And the web expands.

Seriously. It does not get cooler than that.

Wicked cool

Today was another cranky day. Good crew at coffee today ("a flurry of friends," was one description) AND I got my second baby hat finished. But I kept looking at my watch and swearing...

I had a difficult consult this morning (well, the psychiatry wasn't so difficult, but it was rather emotionally wrenching...). I discharged two of my favorite patients from my clinic today. And then I stopped at the PetSmart on the way home and promptly locked my keys in the car. Which turned a 15-minute errand into a 90-minute ordeal in 92-degree heat. Frickin' awesome.

But.

I did have a nice lunch with two of my friends who just graduated. And I came back from lunch, and there was a homemade donut on my desk, courtesy of the same medical student who brought me roving a couple of weeks ago. It's such a shame that we can't convince him to go into psychiatry. That was one tasty donut.

Also in good news today - check this out. Our clinic ROCKS.

Sybil

Interesting

In the NYT today (click here). News from the world of psychiatry.

I don't think this is going to catch on.

I have got to get back to work....

Mom's out of the ICU, back into a regular room. Going to rehab tomorrow. Then to NC in a week or so. Excellent.

What *is* the proper container for this?

Blah blah blah

Today turned into a really long day. One of my coworkers is having some pretty rotten family stuff going on, so we all have sort of scrambled to take on what of his we each could. Which translated only into a couple of things for me, but one of them was going to the pre-interview dinner tonight. Which turned out to be quite lovely, actually. I met one candidate in particular with whom I definitely vibed well. She's also a knitter, and we spent a good deal of time swapping stories about leaving jobs we couldn't tolerate. It was very nice. They were fun. We laughed a lot.

But it also, as I said, extended my day by about three hours. And I'm on walk-ins again tomorrow, so I need to go to bed. But here are five random things, just to make your stopping by worthwhile. Ready? Go:

1. Apparently, high heels began as a men's fashion, related to their shoes not falling out of the stirrups when they rode. I learned this at dinner tonight. I find it hilarious, because I can't imagine most of my male cohorts doing well at all in heels (cowboy boots notwithstanding).

2. I spent a while in L&D with Eva yesterday watching her babies on the monitor (she's fine, just a little puffy). I really miss obstetrics.

3. I had a patient today who claimed to have had "just one glass" of wine yesterday, who turned out to have a BAL of 0.45 (remember, legally intoxicated is 0.08). When sober, I reminded the patient that that blood alcohol would kill me. And I'm thinkin' that was a very big glass.

4. I had another patient, a cute little old lady who's been hearing this buzzing noise, which presented like an auditory hallucination (which it may well be). And I'm asking her about it, and she's like, nope, I never hear it outside the apartment, but it's almost constant there. And I was like, has anyone else listened for it? And her boyfriend says, "NO. I'VE NEVER HEARD IT." And I giggled a little bit - inwardly, of course - and thought, turn your hearing aids up, grampa.

5. I really like this picture, which I stole off of Twitter. I was listed as, "Not a hot dog, but a warm dog."

Fr d ay fra ent s

Because I wasn't fragmented enough by the end of the week....
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Apparently there's a nationwide shortage of propofol. The company is blaming a manufacturing error, but personally? I had no idea Michael Jackson's habit was that bad...
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The end result of the above is that this morning in the ECT suite we had to use sevoflurane, an inhaled anesthetic. I...I can't stand that stuff. I've had it a couple of times when I was under the knife, and I had a hell of a time coming out of it, I was nauseated; it's good stuff for most people, but I'm just not a big fan. And I remember when I was in GYN, when we'd have a long day of cases, I'd occasionally be quite woozy and wacky from inhaling that stuff all day. So when I smelled that this morning, I was not super pleased to be standing at the head of the bed.

One of my inpatients, however, came back up to the floor after his morning ECT treatment all like, "wow, they used this different anesthesia today, and man, that stuff was great! I feel so much better!!" I relayed this to the team downstairs between cases, and they all cracked up. Apparently he was one of the few people that had a pretty profound activation reaction to the anesthetic, and got rather giggly and was flirting with the nurses.
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My dog is sleeping with her back feet up by her head. She is the cutest thing ever.
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Here's a funny story I'm stealing from my cousin Danielle - her daughter, who's 2, came up and told her that the dog had nipped her. Danielle asked, why did he do that? Her too-smart-for-her-own-good kid says, "Because I pissed him off."
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I'm watching this week's SVU while I write this. All the major players are bickering at each other. That kind of makes me queasy, like watching your friends' parents fight.
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I do appreciate that Alex Cabot is back - again - though. And when the hell did Dickie Stabler grow up and get adorable?
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So things get a little loose in the psychiatry department on Friday afternoons. This evening, Eva comes into my office and convinces me and Betty to accompany her down the ER for a brief little thing she had to do down there. So we're on our way down, and we were contemplating what you would call a group of psychiatrists? A herd? A gaggle? Eva says, nah, I'm pretty sure it would be a murder, like crows. A murder of psychiatrists. I said, hmm....do you think we're really a murder? Or just, like, a homicidal ideation? So we start giggling about this. And relate the story to Sparrow, who looks at us, deadpan, shakes her head and says, "Word salad." Which lead to a lot of cackling (shrink humor. Not to mention that at this point, Eva, Betty, Peng and I were sitting in an office that belonged to none of us) and Betty howling, "We're a homicidal word ideation salad!" I, of course, couldn't leave that alone, and finally caught enough breath to yelp, "We're a homicidal salad!!!"

Heh. And our patients think we're sane....

Oops.

Once upon a time, in my first year of medical school, two of my friends and I decided to go to South Carolina for spring break. It was February in Chicago, which equals cold, grey, and dismal. We were grumpy, we were tired, we were all contemplating making excuses to not go and to hole up in our respective houses for the week. But, we piled into my Jeep, and we headed for sunnier, beachier pastures.

And something really, really interesting happened.

Within two days of being there, I was feeling SO MUCH BETTER. I kind of overshot "better" a little, actually. I was up, and going, and focused. We stayed up late and I was still up way before my friends. I was sleeping like three hours a night and was just fine. Yeah, I was hypomanic. Which was mild, and productive, and actually kind of delightful. And started to wear off after a couple of days.

I don't know if what I "have" is technically Seasonal Affective Disorder. I tend to think of it more as light responsiveness. But the point is, I do way better with sunshine, less well with lack of sunshine (this is one of the many reasons I'm not a radiologist...). I've always sort of know that about myself, I often underrepresent it in the day to day.

But this morning...I woke up at three. I was up for a half hour or so. I went back to sleep. I woke up at ten to 5. None of this is all too unusual for my insomniac self, frankly. But then my alarm went off at 5:10. And after three whacks at the snooze bar...I was like...why is it so damn hard for me to get out of bed? Why has it been so hard since I got back from Hawaii? I wasn't even jet-lagged. I mean, I...um......oh.

So I rolled over and started Googling dawn simulators.

We had a lecture last week (on a grey, rainy day) about Seasonal Affective Disorder. And our attending spent a while extolling the virtue of light boxes and dawn simulators (Sparrow says to me today, what, can't you just open your blinds in the morning? Brat). And so I did a little research this morning...I did a little research later this evening...and one of the options I found on Amazon was this:

This gives a whole new meaning to "light on your feet."