It’s nine-thirty in the morning on a Football Sunday.

Crap. Snow is falling and the sidewalk looks slick, so we struggle into long underwear and hiking boots. It’s finally time to help my boyfriend’s brother move his stuff out of my boyfriend’s house and into his new place. We are not happy to be pressed into service on a slushy, cold, Football Sunday, but at least he’s leaving. We had told him in advance that we’d help until the noon kickoff.

By the time we get to E’s place, Brother has started piling random crap in the back of the U-Haul in no practical fashion. There is slush all over E’s floors, clothes on hangers are strewn around the living room, half-packed boxes lay open in the dining room, and Brother is flinging things haphazardly into a laundry basket.

“You said you were packed,” I say accusingly. “You didn’t use any of the good boxes I brought you.”

“I am packed. And I had these boxes,” he said, gesturing to a pile. “Those can go, by the way.”

I already want to curse him because seriously? He’s had months to pack. He’s had the key to his new place for over a week and hasn’t moved a damn thing. He waits for a snowy weekend when he knows everyone would rather be at the bar for the games. He ASKED for good boxes and I brought him some, the nice ones with handles and lids.

And now I am carrying a Crock-Pot box held together with duct tape, with a block of knives poking dangerously out the top.

I lug it out to the truck and hop into the back, pushing things around to make space for the couch, the chairs, the big television, and all the other stuff he’s been storing in the basement since he got kicked out of his old place and had to move in with E five months ago. It will be so good to have him gone, I tell myself as I shuffle and stack, just deal with this for one more day, one more day…

“Everything’s out of the upstairs,” Brother says when the truck is about three-quarters full. “Let’s go.”

“You still have a bunch of boxes in your room,” E points out.

“Yeah, well, I haven’t decided about those. I might give that stuff to the Salvation Army, I dunno. But why move them twice?”

“Because they are taking up space in MY HOUSE,” E says flatly.

“Whatever.”

“We’re not making a trip till this truck is full,” I announce, so we troop down to the basement. I start grabbing things and Brother stops me on every other item – not sure about this, might give that away. It’s classic Brother, never making decisions, waiting till the last minute for everything and still blithering, expecting everyone to sympathize with poor him.* Five months of tension finally snap, and out comes The Crazy.

“What do you mean you haven’t DECIDED?”

“I just need to think for a day or two if I should keep that – ”

“You have had MANY days. You had Saturday. And Friday. And all last week while you had your new place. And all the last five months while you kept talking about moving out, to pack properly and make these decisions. Do not call people to get up early on a Sunday and help you when you haven’t done your part! You are wasting our time, so get your shit together!”

I storm off with a box, not caring if it was meant to go or not. It was going.

I felt bad for a little bit. But good GOD, he was on my last nerve, after everything he’s done to E, his own little brother who took him in, and after everything he’s done to take advantage of both of us – up to and including opening MY Christmas presents and eating MY food while he gambled away his paychecks and borrowed money because he was broke  – E and I used to practically live at his place, and lately we haven’t even slept there because Brother has made it so miserable. It was that bad.

We finish loading the truck and drive to the new place. I carry an armload of his on-hanger shirts upstairs and lay them on his bed.

“You can hang those up,” he calls

“No, I’m making that your ‘deal with it’ pile,” I say, stomping out to the truck to get more. I could have brought them all in one load if they’d been in a box.

E and I schlepped back and forth angrily for another hour. We were late for kickoff, we were wet and hungry (who asks for moving help and doesn’t have pizza or beer?!), and when we left, Brother asked when we’d be back.

I told E later that I felt a bit bad for yelling. “Don’t,” he laughed. “He deserved it, and it was pretty funny. He kept looking at me like I could somehow shut you up, and I just smiled and said ’she’s right, dude.’”

I think I secretly hoped that he would change, that maybe if he heard from someone other than his dad or his little brother – who has fought with him all his life and told him this a thousand times – that he’s a rude and irresponsible bum, maybe it would make something click. You know, confirmation from a third party. But I realize now that I may as well have been yelling in Welsh, for all it was worth. E explained to me that his brother is like a dog: he hears loud noises and sees angry looks from humans, but he cannot associate them with his actions.

“How was moving?” E’s best friend asks when we get to the bar. Said friend is familiar with the horrible living situation, of course.

E tells my story.

And I get a slow clap.

———————-

* There were actually several other instances where he treated E and me like total crap that day, but they make the story too long. Trust me. He deserved this.

It’s my anniversary!

I’ve been with The Hospital for seven years this week! In honor of this momentous (to me) occasion, I bring you a reprint of something you’ve probably never read in the first place. This is from long ago when this was just a baby blog called “My Red Stapler” and I was a wee tot of 21 when the story took place. It’s about a weird thing that happened to me not long after I started working at The Hospital.

And it was an eye-opening experience….

Originally posted as:

Um, there’s a body by the elevator… anyone?

June 2006

I was only a few weeks out of orientation, working as a unit secretary. Not a lot of people actually died on the unit I worked in; if they are terminal, they know they’re terminal and they go home so they can die in peace, without us jabbing them with needles and force-feeding them green jello. Usually, the people who actually die on that floor are the ones who surprise us.

Mr. Patient wasn’t a surprise – we knew he was going, he knew he was going, and the plans were in place to discharge him the next morning with hospice. He just jumped the gun a bit. When his son came up to the desk an hour after my shift started and asked if he could see the doctor, I told him the doctors would be in soon on rounds. I had been taught from Day One that one does not interrupt the doctors in a discussion (as they were at that very moment, right behind me where Mr. Patient’s son could see them but thankfully not hear them, since they were talking about golf). He said again that he really needed the doctor to come to the room, and I explained again that the doctors would be in very soon, it was almost time for rounds, and could I get the nurse to bring him anything in the meantime?

He leaned across the desk and scowled at me. “Well,” he said loudly, “my dad just DIED and I think I need the DOCTOR to come in and pronounce him.”

Guuuhhhhh…..

The golf conversation screeched to a halt and I sat down, speechless as the doctors clamored around and looked at papers and asked questions and finally went to see the patient’s family. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing… ah yes, there, in the back of my orientation manual was the checklist. Okay…notify physician, that’s done, call spiritual care, will do, call expiration tech…

“What’s an expiration tech?” I wondered aloud.

“He’s the dude with the body bags,” said the CNA, passing by my desk. “Bags and tags.”

What a job, I thought. I called spiritual care, the expiration tech, the nursing office, the clinical manager, everyone on the list – check, check, check. Spiritual care came and consoled the family, a social worker appeared to suggest funeral arrangements – it all went on around me in a blur as I went back to the daily grind of answering the phones, processing orders and scheduling exams.

About half an hour later, admitting called. “We have a patient for room 25,” the girl said.

“Um, 25 is still…occupied.”

“You discharged Mr. Patient thirty minutes ago.”

“He died so I have to take him out of the system. But he’s still in there. The family needed some time and the expiration tech–”

“Well, I’ve got a patient in the Emergency Department who needs a bed on your unit now, and that’s the only one open. You guys need to move that guy out of there, NOW.”

Click.

I told the charge nurse, and miraculously, the family cleared out and went into a meeting room with the chaplain and the social worker while the expiration tech bagged and tagged. Or so we thought.

The orderlies rolled Mr. Patient by my desk on a stretcher with a sheet pulled over the raised rails so the outline of his body was obscured from view. Away they went on the service elevator, just as a housekeeper showed up to clean the room. The expiration tech filled out some forms for the chart, handed them to me and left as the patient from Emergency rolled past my desk and into room 25. It was perfect timing.

A few minutes later, the service elevator opened and a confused-looking orderly pushed the stretcher-with-a-sheet-over-it back in front of my desk. Mr. Patient had returned.

“Why are you here?” I asked him. “Why is HE here?”

“Uhhh,” he mumbled. “They said the tags was wrong and to bring ‘im up, so I brung him.”

He shoved a crumpled transport log in my face. I ignored it. “Who said the tags were wrong?” I demanded, looking around desperately for a charge nurse, any nurse, anyone who had been here more than three months and was better-equipped than I to deal with a body in the hallway.

“The guy in the morgue. Could you sign this? I got another trip to do.”

“You can’t just leave him here!” I wailed.

“I’ll put ‘im back in the room,” the orderly said, kicking the brake off and starting toward room 25.

“There’s a patient in there now.”

“Where’s your empty rooms?”

“We don’t have any. Please, just wait while I call the morgue and straighten this out and then you can take him–”

“I’ll put ‘im here,” he said, pushing the stretcher into an alcove by the elevators. He grabbed the transport log from me, not caring that I hadn’t signed it, and disappeared.

Breathe, I told myself. Call the morgue and tell them that the idiot orderly just left a dead man by the elevator.

“His tag was wrong,” the man in the morgue said when I called.

“What tag?”

“His toe tag. He has the wrong tag on his toe. That one goes on the bag and there’s no tag on the bag so you have to do them over before we can take him. Identification purposes. Go look at it.”

“I am NOT looking at it.”

“Better call the expiration tech.”

Click.

So I called the expiration tech. I explained the situation frantically. “You’ll come up and fix it right away?” I pleaded. “He’s in the hallway, we have no rooms–”

“Those tags are right, it’s that guy in the morgue who’s all backwards,” the tech grumbled. “Go look at the body, there’s a white tag on the toe and blue tag on the bag, right?”

“I AM NOT LOOKING AT IT!” I said again. I couldn’t, physically could not go look at Mr. Patient’s toe. I’m the newbie, the secretary for chrissake, why should I have to go look at the toe? I looked again for a nurse – WHERE were my nurses?

“Call the guy in the morgue back, tell him–”

I mustered all my meager courage. “No, YOU come up here, YOU look at the tags, and YOU call the morgue back since YOU are the expiration tech and there is a body in MY hallway.”

I slammed down the phone and a nurse finally appeared. “I need to take Mrs. Brown to CT. Is anyone using that stretcher?” she asked, pointing to the corner by the elevators.

“Mr. Patient is,” I said wearily.

“But he–”

“Came back,” I finished. “The morgue sent him back and said his tags were wrong and there was no empty room to put him in and he’s there and I called the guy and he wanted me to look at the toe but I couldn’t go look, I really couldn’t and so I told him–” I was gasping for breath and trying hard not to cry. “And Mr. Patient’s family is still in the meeting room and if they come out they’re gonna see him and I told the guy and he wanted me to look at the toe, but I couldn’t because I’ve never seen a dead body before and I couldn’t go look at the toe and–”

The nurse was wide-eyed and furious, but as she opened her mouth to curse the expiration tech to the seventh circle of hell, the elevator pinged and he reappeared. Blind to our hysteria, the tech trotted over to the stretcher, unzipped the bag and placed a white tag on the toe and a blue tag on the bag. We watched, mouths agape, as he silently pushed the stretcher onto the elevator and he and Mr. Patient disappeared just as the red-eyed family emerged from the meeting room.

Once again, it was perfect timing.

The nurse and I could do nothing but shut our mouths and tend to the living.

E’s job at The Very Nice Restaurant affords him a certain number of perks, including free nights and major discounts on food and services at several Very Nice Hotel chains, including the Ritz-Carlton, the Four Seasons, and some others all over the world.

On the advice of several of his coworkers, we went here:

Let’s get something out in the open right now. My family grew up going on camping trips for vacations. I’m totally good in a tent with a sleeping bag and eating food that’s been cooked over a fire or on a little camp stove. So, try and imagine my eyeballs when I saw that we got to stay here:

Here’s our hotel, smack in the middle of this beachside lineup.

Suffice to say, I felt a little country-come-to-town wandering around that place. I was constantly asking E who I was supposed to tip (anyone who arranges things for you or gives you something you asked for) and who I was not to worry about tipping (anyone who brings you something you didn’t ask for, or anyone who assists you while you are in a bathing suit and obviously do not have money).

I took advantage of the free steam room and the seven-headed shower in the spa, enjoyed the complimentary L’Occitane bath goodies every day, and got an amazing pedicure. We had one meal at the restaurant and one meal with room service just because we were feeling lazy. But beyond that, we really skipped out on all of the fuss and were just our normal, beer-and-burger kind of selves.

Except the Bud Light was $7 per bottle and the burger was made of grass-fed, free-range, pilates-doing, inner-peace-having cow, and cost $18. Plus tips.

Seriously? We actually stopped at the grocery store before we got to the hotel and loaded up on bread, cheese, lunchmeat, hot dogs, yogurt, fruit, beer, soda, and chips. We even brought the mini George Foreman grill down there with us so we could make hot sandwiches in the room. Even at the Four Seasons, and even with 50% off at their restaurant, we’re still cheap.

There were red flags on the beach much of the time, but we had some beautiful sunshine, enough for good walks and a 20-mile bike ride down the island.

This pier was about a ten-minute walk down the beach from our hotel, and it goes out to where the water is about 40 or 50 feet deep. We saw  a school flying fish being chased by barracudas – tricky to photograph, but so gorgeous. Here’s my attempted shot of the flying fish – look in the lower left of the picture.

The Four Seasons is on an island between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intercoastal Waterway. We had to go over a drawbridge to get pretty much anywhere, and for some sort of growing-up-landlocked reason, this totally thrilled me.

The ocean side was full of hotels, and the waterway side was lined with huge homes – some probably bigger than the hotel – where the supa-rich docked their supa-expensive boats.

It can be an expensive town. Even the taxis are Lincolns and Cadillacs. No, not just the Four Seasons club car. I mean the TAXI you wave down on the street. And even it has complimentary candies and bottled water.

We took a day to go deep-sea fishing, and although it started out kind of gray-ish, it ended up sunny and perfect (minus the first hour, in which I was uncomfortably – but not barfy – seasick). Here’s our little boat:

And here is E reeling in a freaking 7-foot sailfish.

Flickr Video

That was completely amazing. We ended up letting the fish go (as you can see) because we weren’t going to eat it, sell it, or mount it. That pinkish thing in its mouth is actually the fish’s stomach! Sailfish, I kid you not, will spit up their own stomachs to rid themselves of a hook if they can, and then gulp it back down once freed.

There’s your trivia for the day.

(And no, I didn’t catch anything.)

Aside from the bike ride and the fishing, we really spent most of the time just wandering the shore searching for coral and shells, laying around by the pool if it was nice or in our room if it was not. We only did one night out on the town and it was okay, but we chose to spend our last night in Palm Beach eating a delivery pizza  and watching movies instead of going back across the drawbridge.

It was just better that way.

Neither one of us could get more than two bars of cell service while we were on the island. I didn’t even get to read my guest bloggers’ posts until Saturday because we chose not to pay extra for wifi in the room. Although it was pretty frustrating to feel so disconnected at first, I have to admit that it was kind of sad to look down at my phone at the airport and see all the bars lit up again.

And, in keeping with the frugal nature of our swanky trip, I didn’t buy a single souvenir.

But I think I’ve got the best one right here anyway:

And that was our vacation.

2000

• Was happily ensconced in a small-town university, pledging Sigma Alpha Iota.
• Was probably the most “popular” I’ve ever been, albeit in a shallow, “squeee!” sorority girl kind of way.

2001

• Met a boy and fell in love in the spring.
• Had a very difficult living situation upon returning to school in the fall.
• Got myself a little “unpopular” because people were driving me in-freaking-sane and I told them so.
• After changing my major three times in two and a half years, decided to leave school and move back home for awhile. Conveniently closer to the boy.

2002

• February 23: Got engaged!
• Set a date: August 9, 2003
• Wedding plan, plan, plan.
• Got a halfway decent job in retail and had a vague notion of starting back to school in radiation therapy.

2003

• Started at The Hospital as a secretary.
• Have to see a dead person for the first time. As in, the body bag thing.
• April: Best friend got married and I started to get the shakes.
• More in April: Argue, cry, make up, argue, cry, make up.
• May: Just before my first bridal shower and just before the invites go out in the mail, we break up.
• June: We get back together briefly, though decide not to worry about a wedding anytime soon. We break up again a month later.
• I start dating again and am told I have baggage.

2004

• Move into the city with a notion of becoming hip Urban Girl.
• Run up ridiculous credit card debt
• Travel alone for the first time – see England, Scotland and a little nubbin of France
• Start back part-time to finish my bachelor’s degree in English at Wash U.

2005

• The credit card debt catches up with me. That didn’t take long.
• Date a nice boy for awhile, my first real relationship of significant length since the fiance and I split.
• We break up and stay friends.
• I get a promotion at work.
• My blog “My Red Stapler” is born.
  

2006

• I graduate from college with a BS in English.
• I meet Tim.
• I don’t blog too much.
• I get an even better promotion at work and clear all credit card debt.
• I deal with being an Air Force WAG during a deployment.
• I buy a house and fix it up.

2007

• Winter: Tim and I break up in horrific fashion
• In emotional crisis mode, I buy a Jeep.
• Spring: I have a nervous breakdown of sorts.
• I briefly write a blog called “Therapy, Schmerapy.”
• In the fall, I meet and start dating E.
• I resolve to start blogging again on a more regular basis.

2008

• I get another promotion at work.
• I get a foster dog and have to send her back because she made my cat sick.
• Spring: E and I break up in horrific fashion.
• I have my first Blog Crush.
• I rename the blog “She’s Got Baggage.” It seems right at the time.
• I have a wild and crazy summer of dating inappropriate people. (Just read all of July and August 2008 for this.)
• I meet my first blog friends.
• Fall: E and I get back together
• I move to self-hosting my blog.
• I complete my first NaNoWriMo.

2009

• The economy begins to take its toll and I sell my beloved Jeep.
• E and I build a much stronger relationship than we ever had before. We think about the future.
• I have an awesome Girlfriend’s Guide to Gaming party sponsored by Nintendo and Brand About Town, and meet some more lovely bloggers.
• I attend BlogHer for the first time.
• More on the economy – I put my house on the market in early summer and sell it in early fall.
• I decide to ditch the baggage and rename the blog again.
• I password-protect a TON of old posts.
• I complete my 2nd NaNoWriMo with a much better product.
• I apply to and am accepted into a master’s program for Communications Management.

And what do I know for 2010?

• I start school next Wednesday.
• E and I are taking our first real, alone, not-visiting-family, proper vacation together in a week.

That’s all I’ve got so far.

All the lunch-table chatter about 20SB reminded me last night – I graduated from high school in 1999. I should have had a reunion by now.

WTF?! Who didn’t invite me to my own freaking  high school reunion?

I scrounged around Facebook this morning and realized that plans had never materialized for the reunion, so the class president is going to make us oh-so-cutting-edge and have an 11 year reunion for us sometime in 2010. We are SO the wave of the future.

Then, inevitably, I got back to thinking about lunch tables.

Ten and a half years ago, I was going to a pretty good-sized high school. There were about 450 people in my graduating class, and seriously – you never ate alone unless you chose to. Everyone had a lunch table. There were groups in that school, TONS of groups because there were so many of us. Everyone couldn’t be everywhere and do everything, so our natural alignments were driven by our priorities.

I was kind of middle-of-the-road, socially. I was in band and theater and so that’s where I had most of my friends. The “popular” girls were nice to me in class but we didn’t hang out or anything. They were the ones on homecoming court, student council, cheerleading, dance team, all that. But you know – those things were their priorities. I wanted to play piano. They wanted to flip about and scream really loudly at sporting events. I wanted to write a play. They wanted to play on the state-champion softball team.

A lot of those girls were truly nice people, and they didn’t dislike me – we just had our sights set on different things. I had my friends and they had theirs. Theirs ended up on homecoming court because their priority was to get them there. My friends were elected theater club and band officers and made choices on plays and performances.

I used to really want to be the tiger mascot that hopped around with the cheerleaders. I could have done it. I was energetic and you didn’t have to do a backflip in the silly costume. I was afraid that trying out would mean I wanted to be like them – and I didn’t, I really just thought it would be fun. I was at all the games with the band anyway, so why not? But I didn’t get it – not because I lost in tryouts, but because I didn’t try out at all. I didn’t make it enough of a priority to get over my fear of rejection.

I said as much to one of the nice cheerleaders who had honors English with me senior year and she said “Oh, you should have done it! You’d have been great! The girl they picked wasn’t that good, you should have at least tried out.”

Um. Oops. *mwaah mwaah mwaaaaaaah….*

It didn’t break my heart to think I had missed out on being friends with the popular girls, but it was a lesson in getting off my ass and at least trying a little harder for things I say I want.

I never sat at their lunch table. I sat with my music and theater friends. And together with a number of the cheerleaders, the dancers, and the sports stars, I got into National Honor Society, scooped up scholarships, graduated in the top 10% of my class, and went on with life somewhere else.

With 9,000 people in a community like 20SB, we can’t all be friends with everybody. We just don’t have the time. But the ones who are most visible in the community, our dancers and cheerleaders and sports stars, may shine the brightest because their priorities are those of the 20SB community. Online presence. Great communication. Reaching out and building bonds. Striving to be better writers, vloggers, techies.

When these things become your priorities in life, you can make your way to the top in a community like this.

Me? I’m not at the top. If I realigned my priorities I probably could be. I used to put more time into my blog, I used to be more visible and active in the blogging community both online and off. But as I’ve evaluated my life, I have determined that maybe I needed to step away from the glowing screen a little more. It works for me this way. This is my balance. I have blog friends who I adore, blogs by writers I don’t know but I still read, and a little bitty stake in a 20SB and Guidespot. I could do more. And I will, if I can make it fit in the balance I need in my life.

One of the popular cheerleaders quit the squad her senior year. She could have gotten a cheer scholarship. “It wasn’t for me,” she shrugged, and went on to run track instead.

Evaluate yourself. Think about why you write what you write, and where blogging fits in the priorities in your life. Are you committed to becoming a better writer? Are you committed to spending a lot of time developing communities and planning activities with people you may have never met? If you’re not – IT’S OKAY. For some people, that kind of life works and works awesomely. For you it may not. And if that means you don’t get an award, just realize – THAT’S OKAY TOO.

Are you committed to these things, committed to getting to the top and yet still feeling overlooked? This can take awhile. You don’t learn backflips and roundoffs with a full twist overnight. You must keep on.

You still have your lunch table. People still like you for who you are. And if they vote in someone else for homecoming queen, that doesn’t mean they like you any less. It’s just that they thought that in terms of real-time committment to excellence in the blogging world, they thought that someone else deserved it more.

My class homecoming queen was smart, pretty, fun, sweet, an athlete, a class council member, and active in her church. She was a busy girl who was committed to being awesome and to my knowledge never said a mean -spirited thing to anyone who hadn’t tried to grab her boobs or ass in the hall. Because she was involved in everything, everyone knew her and everyone was aware of all of her good qualities.

When you are visible, you are nominated. When you are visible and you demonstrate awesome, you win. Period. Everyone voted for Kristen, she won, and she deserved it.

Pour yourself a glass of flat champagne, put on your bent party hat, and think about this before you get mad or defensive about an award, a nomination or a lack thereof.