The happy fun of going to the  Cubs-Cards game yesterday (7-3,go Cubs go!) was tempered by a migraine and a very drunk boyfriend that I was about to punch in the head. It drives me nuts sometimes – he is normally such a sweet and considerate guy. He worries about me and takes care of me when I’m sick. But yesterday, good lord. Some sort of E-replacing, beer-based demon ate his brain, and that was NOT what I wanted to deal with when I was stuck at his house, unable to drive myself home or even sleep because I was in so much pain.

I woke up this morning, still woozy from the supa-strength narcotic pain meds, in a snuggly cuddle with a snoring boyfriend whose first slurry words were “I love you so much” when I rolled over and woke him.

Anyway, on to a different thing that might put you off your appetite instead.

I was reviewing some OR instrumentation today. Some of these names make about as much sense as the names on OPI nail polish. Maybe less. You could guess that “In the Navy” is dark blue and “Canta-berry Tales” is probably some shade of dark red, but put your imagination to use on these…

Brain Spoon?

Big Ugly?

BEAVER RETRACTOR???

Dear Adobe Illustrator CS4 30-Day Trial Version.

I heart you. <3

Unlike almost every single other software trial version in the whole World Wide Web, you don’t put icky watermarks all over my files. Thank you for that. Since I don’t work for Creative Services or Marketing, I don’t get any good design software without a fight/extensive groveling. And even though my sloooow PC was basically asleep for half an hour while you installed everything, you saved me so much time today. I needed to edit that EPS file. I needed to convert things to paths. You were there when I needed you. And you humbly refrained from writing “Unregistered” on my finished files. Watermarks would have made them completely unusable for the factory, and all would have been lost.

I’m off to fight the IS Department and/or grovel extensively for a licensed version of you now.

xoxo

Rebekah

UPDATE: I WIN! INSTALLATION OF LICENSED VERSION HAS BEEN APPROVED.

My former pastor was shot and killed last Sunday during church.

Fred Winters was the pastor of First Baptist Church of Maryville (IL), where I went to youth group in high school. And he was gunned down by one of my high school classmates.

I haven’t been to FBC Maryville for years now, but the first text message from my sister last Sunday morning hit way too close to home – literally, about 5 miles from the house where I lived. The shooter was in the hospital (not mine) this week about 5 miles from where I live right now. And now he’s in jail, about 5 miles from our old high school.

It’s freaking SICK.

My sister was in the church she attends with my parents when the news broke. The mayor of the town is a member of her church and the head of the volunteer fire/EMS crew that was first to respond, so he was keeping all of the churches in town updated as they prayed in their Sunday services. We were texting back and forth all morning – her with news from the town and me with whatever I could find on CNN and other news sites. At first the news was just that there had been a shooting and people were hurt. Then it was that one person had died, but they got the bad guy. Then it was all over CNN that Pastor Fred was shot in the chest and killed in his own sanctuary while finishing up a sermon about finding happiness in the workplace.

Two members of the congregation attacked the shooter, who had stabbed himself with a knife after his gun jammed only four bullets into his 30 rounds. They were wounded by the knife but are both all right now.

I only knew him for a little while, but Pastor Fred made a big impression on me in the short time I went to his church. He told our youth group that it was okay to have questions about God. That it was okay to not have answers to those questions. Pastor Fred was always firm in his own convictions but they weren’t closed convictions. He had an open mind and an open heart. He didn’t just want to share his knowledge, he wanted to take in what other people knew and thought and felt. He was young and energetic and got excited about everything. I bet that even the most convinced atheist out there couldn’t know Fred as a man – not as a pastor – and not think he was a wonderful human being.

Why why why WHY?

Now that he’s out of the coma, out of the hospital and in jail, everyone wants Terry Joe Sedlacek, the shooter, to start talking. When I first heard what happened, I thought I just wanted that scumbag to die on the spot. But now I want to know why he targeted Fred Winters, of all people. I want to know what drove him to plan this crime so callously that he marked last Sunday as “Death Day” in his planner.

Not that it’s going to make any difference though. A good man is dead and he left behind a wonderful wife and two beautiful daughters. But we all want to know, as if it will make sense from the senseless.

Cindy Winters, Fred’s widow, gave her husband’s eulogy (click for link to video) yesterday and said “I’m not going to hate.” Can you even imagine saying that about the person who killed the father of your children? Can you imagine what it took for her to stand up there less than a week after her husband of over twenty years died so close to where she was standing yesterday?

I wish I had that sort of strength and faith. I believe in God and in being good and living a good life, but I don’t know if I could ever have what Cindy Winters has in her heart. Maybe that would make a difference, more than any story Terry Joe Sedlacek can tell us. Because no matter what he says, we won’t say “Oh, well THAT explains it perfectly.”

I work at a hospital and people die there all the time. Two of my favorite early blog posts (“Thoughts on a Sheeted Stretcher” and “Um, There’s a Body by the Elevator”) are about death and dying in the hospital. It happens in ambulances, in the ER, on our operating room tables, in the inpatient ICUs, on the regular units. It’s not just sick or old people. Some come in as victims of traumas and they die senseless deaths, like Pastor Fred with a bullet right through his heart. And in a professional way, we get used to it. We have to.

But it doesn’t make it any easier.

I totally told myself that I’d do NaBloPoMo in November. I blogged a lot in October and I thought “Self, this is the month you can do it!” But I pretty much just slept for the last two days. Today I did talk myself out of bed to go to work, only to find out that my big-ass project that’s set to run all of next week may or may not have been canceled by The Powers That Be, but no one can give me an answer. Don’t mind me, I’m just the team lead. I did write a cover letter and send a resume in for a job posting that looked appealing, so the day wasn’t a total wash.

Still.

November is also National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), you know… that’s where NaBloPoMo came from, actually. Very few people actually signed on to write a whole novel in a month, so the everyday blog was born. Maybe I could still write a novel. I have 17 pages already. That’s two chapters. One of them sucks, really, so it’s more like I have 1 chapter and 9 pages, and 8 coasters.

Everything I haven’t done is annoying me and making me want to go to bed.

In real news, I saw the doc today and got myself some antidepressants. This month it’s Cymbalta. I haven’t been on an A-D for about half a year now – usually it’s just my trusty mood stabilizers – but Doc is beginning to think I might have some sort of mild Seasonal Affective Disorder, and I am inclined to agree. This tends to happen in the winter. And really, aside from my job suckage situation, things are going pretty well and I have very little to be depressed about. If you have never been clinically depressed, then you do not know this and let me tell you – the most depressing thing about being depressed is the fact that you often have little or nothing to be depressed about.

And when you go hypomanic like I do sometimes, you have EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD to be manic about. Whee! And you can write and write and read and play and work and do everything for a million hours and not sleep because your brain is on on on and you barely even eat because there is so much to do and think about and you write AWFUL long and conjunction-packed sentences like this one!

That, in a nutshell, is a Type 2 Bipolar Disorder.