Undertaken

I am sitting here feeling a little inspired. Inspired... with air, that is. Because isn't that really what inspiration is? Taking in oxygen? Well I'm inspired. Every second of every day, I'm being inspired. I'm sitting here on my couch. Every 2-3 minutes, I feel something crawling on me, and I look down, and there it is. A little itty bitty ant, lurking around on my skin. So I smash him in a fit of rage, and then repeat the process in a couple minutes, as some other little ant decides to go traipsing around on me. We've sprayed inside and outside for bugs. I've vacuumed up hordes of them in our bathroom. I've drowned them with RAID and HOT SHOT and all those fun things. They just don't know when to stop. What are they doing? What are they looking for? What is on my skin that they want, whether I'm sitting on the couch enjoying the tubeflix, or laying in my bed peacefully asleep? What do you want, little ants? Is it food you desire? Would you like me to put a little food bowl outside next to Juno's bowl? I will even label it "ANTS" so you know which one to eat out of. I'll put all the tasty things in there you love. The beef jerky. The jelly bellies. It can be all yours. We don't have to keep fighting like this. Or do you enjoy the fighting? Do you enjoy being vacuumed up? Do you enjoy being doused in chemicals that fry your nervous systems? Do you enjoy being smashed by my fist? Do you enjoy being washed down the shower drain? Do you feel somehow victorious in death, like some sort of ant martyrs, perishing in the valiant cause of ant jihad? Is that what this is? Have you declared ant jihad against my family? Do you serve Ant Allah? I just smashed another one. This one was on my ankle. That's a pretty popular place to go, I've noticed.

School is a delight these days. Genetics seems to be giving me the most problems, as I recently did poorly on an exam. College is weird. Everyone looks at me like they want to hurt me. But I look forward to going each day. I don't look forward to working. I have never looked forward to going to work at this job. In the beginning, I thought the day would come sometime... sometime... the day when I would enjoy working, would look forward to another day of interacting with injured and sick old people and getting them to exercise to help them heal from their maladies. But the day has never come. There is one exception, and that is when, very occasionally, I know I am going to be scheduled and working with patients who I have already worked with and who I don't stress out about having to lift their dead body weight out of their bed due to severe muscle weakness and/or obesity. But a day where I don't have any idea who I'm going to be working with, just a plethora of old people, several of which may be very grumpy, several of which may require significant assistance to get them to move, and probably resulting in my own strained back muscles... these are days I do not enjoy. Some people I've talked to have disapproved of my decision to go back to school. And I don't blame them. I'm giving up (well, working PRN) a pretty stable income, a job that probably has a lot of opportunity if I had any desire to get better and make more money. But I'm not happy. Is that an important thing to have in a job? Or is it just about stability and making money? I don't know. I want to be happy working. I want to look forward to going to work. I want to not hate Sundays anymore (they are hated by the simple reason that I dread going into work the next day). Most of all, I want to do something I'm passionate about. I think everyone does, probably. And there's a whole host of reasons why they don't, many of which are probably pretty logical.

Beau and I hiked out by Leeds the other day. What a beautiful area. We searched high and low for the Babylon Arch, which was supposed to be out in the desert wilderness somewhere, but we failed. Also, we saw a sign indicating that HISTORIC BABYLON was directly to the south of us. Can you believe that? This whole time, we thought Babylon was somewhere in Iraq. Nope. It's right here in Washington County. We didn't go see it though. We were too tired after fruitlessly hunting for the Arch of Babylon. Someday, we will go to Historic Babylon and join in the wickedness and debauchery.