a happy camper i will be

yep, you heard it right. i am gonna go ahead and give myself a break before summer ends. never mind that i still haven't found somebody willing to work for me on my "saturday on" at the hospital, or that i am running out of PTOs (paid time offs)... i am going to boston to indulge in some outdoor activities that i am so badly missing. and to prove to you that i am most determined to go on a vacation, let me tell you that i have already booked my tickets, ergo my credit card has been charged, meaning there is no turning back now.

so any suggestions on a good excuse for calling out sick? i will definitely need one.

if mt. mayon can spew out lava, why can't i?

if there is one thing people should learn when they're trying to mess with me is to not do it when:

number 1: you are not my favorite person at the moment.
number 2: i am trying my best not to say something bad about you out of my really, really straightforward mouth.
number 3: you are hitching a ride and your precious life is at the mercy of my driving skills.

good thing i love cuervo so much that i would rather see "pseudofriends" unscathed than give him multiple dents on his macho body.

it used to be that "makulit" is a cute thing to be. well it has lost it's novelty for me. word of advice: do not mess with me when you're not ready for the consequences because the bitch in me might just be a little too keen to resurface.

operation: reminisce

TOP TEN SIGNS A SURGERY IS TAKING WAY TOO LONG

10. you start making crank calls from the phone in the operating room.

9. you figure out how to reprogram the new ekg monitor and set a new world record score for pong.

8. using discarded glove wrappers and saline bottles, you have created a mixed media replica of the eiffel tower.

7. you page a medical student intern to the OR STAT and tell her you need her to get a hamburger and fries for each member of the surgical team.

6. you vow that you will smash the cd player with a traction weight if you have to listen to the surgeon's favorite cd one more time.

5. you have a paper airplane war with anesthesia, using parts of the old chart.

4. suddenly, anesthesia's jokes are actually funny.

3. you turn the thermostat up to 80 degrees just to see if it will get the surgeon to operate any faster.

2. you invent a new game called "specimen, specimen, who's got the specimen?"

1. you come up with a humor list called "Top Ten Signs That This Surgery is Taking Too Long..."

Lynn Milam

god, i miss the OR!

• i miss my post board volunteer days with 6 strangers that i eventually ended up to be good friends up until now.

• i miss those times we (the girls) fought over who gets to scrub in on dr. angala's cases, just because dr. angala is so good looking behind those green consultant's mask.

• i miss the smell of burnt flesh everytime the surgeon is cauterizing bleeders and tissues.
  

• i miss seeing internal body parts, the peristaltic movements of the stomach and the intestines, the beating of a heart inside a rib cage, mangled omentums, amputated limbs, broken bones being put together again, kidneys, spleens, uterus, name it. now i am officially a gross person.

• i miss playing the game "i've got the better cautery machine than the bitchy nurse!" because i work in a government hospital, we have to make do with hospital equipment that suck and most of the time nurses try to compete on who gets to have first dibs on the better working equipment, but it's fun anyway.

• i miss the hemostats, the allises, the babcocks, mixters, scalpels, army navys, deavers, richardsons, rib spreaders, heanys, bulldogs, metz and mayo, t and ts, periosteal elevators, burrs and a partridge in a pear tree.
  

• i miss those days when we would request for anesthesia not to schedule a case every 5 o'clock or was it 5:30 pm because we wanted to catch meteor garden on tv. dao ming su!!!!

• i miss bossing the anesthesiologists to get their sleepy butts up because a stat gsw is being wheeled in.

• i miss counting the sponges, instruments and needles.

• i miss folding those damn operating sponges during downtimes.

• i miss the effects of inhaling too much nitrous...ha ha ha adik!

• i miss setting up my cd player before scrubbing in for a really long case.

• i miss the feeling at the end of a case where the surgeon is suturing up and i'm thinking "i can finally have lunch at 3 pm."

• i miss working with our surgeons back then.

in short.....i miss being in my element.

off to the movies

i was on some sort of a mini international film festival in front of the tv these past week. i went inside the blockbuster which was just within walking distance from my gym and grabbed me some foreign dvds. what i love about these foreign films is that it really grabs your attention. when you decide to watch it, you have to give it your undivided attention. meaning, no clipping of the toe nails or sorting the laundry should be done while the movie is on otherwise you wouldn't get to read the subtitles.

the first movie i watched was sex and lucia (lucia y el sexo) and oh my freakin god! paz vega was hot! hot! hot! it was a movie about a waitress (lucia) who got involved with a writer (lorenzo) who had a one night stand with a woman (belen) in an island on his birthday which resulted to a cute girl named luna (hingal!). of course there are more characters and most of them are connected to each other in some weird way and the hard part of watching this movie was not knowing if what's happening is part of lorenzo's novel or in fact a reality but that's what makes this film appealing.

now let's go korean with the film il mare. everybody knows that this is the film where they based the just released movie the lake house which stars sandra bullock and keanu reeves. i haven't really seen the lake house yet and i'm not sure if it still on the theaters as i type, but i sure hope to god that they didn't ruin the movie. i loved the fact that ji-hyun jun was not her usual my sassy girl self, it was so refreshing to see her in a sensitive non-astig role. speaking of my sassy girl, let me just post the "ten rules" which was my favorite part of the movie.

The 10 Rules:

1. Don't ask her to be feminine

2. Don't let her drink over three glasses

3. Drink coffee instead of Coke/Juice

4. If she hits you, act like it hurts. If it hurts, act like it doesn't

5. On your 100th day together, give her a rose during her class

6. Make sure you learn fencing and squash

7. Be prepared to go to prison sometimes

8. If she says she'll kill you, don't take it lightly

9. If her feet hurt, exchange shoes with her

10. She likes to write. Encourage her

the last movie that i watched in between tending to my laundry and tidying up my room was ang lee's eat drink man woman. now this is one movie that you don't wanna watch when you're hungry, because it will just make you grab the hunan wok menu by the fridge and start ordering chinese food. i tell you, if you wanna torture someone who is on a strict diet, let her watch this movie. (not that i wanna torture you joyce... he he he... i just wanna share a really good foreign movie with you.) enough of the food, this film is all about a father, his 3 daughters and the bond that goes on between them. it is touching in a sense that the father (who's failing taste buds were paralleled with his loss for the zest for life) was communicating his love to his daughters through food. it made me cry (oh yes it did!) because it kinda reminded me of my own father whose pancit lomi and caldereta recipes i'm missing right now. damn those millions of miles that separates the US and pinas!

anyway here's what ang lee has to say about his film:

"Everything is much different in Eat Drink Man Woman than the other films I've made. It has a bigger cast and a lot more complex story line... I started thinking about families and how they communicate. Sometimes the things children need to hear most are often the things that parents find hardest to say, and vice versa. When that happens, we resort to ritual. For the Chu family, the ritual is the Sunday dinner... At each dinner the family comes together and then something happens that pushes them farther apart."

here's hoping that he makes more movies, especially after his infamous and well acclaimed brokeback mountain.

how do you hold on to someone you've never met?

quotes from the movie il mare:


"There are three things a person can't hide... coughing, poverty and love. The harder one tries to hide them, the more they rise to the surface."


"We're tormented because love goes on... not because it goes away.



waaaaaah! i wanna bawl my eyes over these quotes. tell me, why did i have to watch that movie again?

can you tell me how to get... how to get to sesame street?

another lazy sunday that never was lazy in my opinion. i woke up at 9 in the morning after only 4 hours of sleep. i never really had any concrete plans for this day except for hannie and i to hear mass on a church we've never been to before which is a 45 minute drive from home. the 45 minutes became an hour and a half no thanks to my penchant for being lost on the interstate. needless to say we never arrived in time for the mass. but we had fun anyway.

after the whole getting lost on the way to church thing, we decided to go to sesame place where some of the guys we know are spending their weekend. so off to sesame place we go.

sunny day sweepin' the clouds away

on my way to where the air is sweet

can you tell me how to get

how to get to sesame street ?

come and play, everything's a-okay

friendly neighbors there, that's where we meet

can you tell me how to get

how to get to sesame street?

going to this place made me reminisce on my sesame street watching days. although i'm more of a batibot kid when i was in grade one, i also had my dose of sesame street on some mornings. although most kids are a fan of elmo nowadays, i still like the more vintage characters like grover, the count, the fat blue guy, big bird (how phallic!), oscar the grouch (who is only 10% grouchier than me), guy smiley and of course ernie and bert (who were rumored to be homosexuals...gasp!).

it was all good. i never did a lot of driving than i did on this entire day. now i'm all exhausted and ready to drift off to la la land. i wouldn't be surprised if someone hears me sing "c is for cookie...that's good enough for me..." in my sleep. until the next post.

>>> o <<<

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