Movember in Shanghai

Well hi everyone, it's been a gazillion trillion months since my last post and I hope that the month that we like to call Movember will change that at least a little bit. For the slower ones amongst us, I'll inform you that tomorrow night I will be leaving for Shanghai, China for a month, a MONTH! Too late to turn back now, the plane is ready to take off pretty much! I, after a few tries *think* I figured out how to set this thing to post to facebook automatically (guess we'll see in a bit) so my English friends might have a little something to look forward to as well depending on how motivated I am.
Hopefully this thing will also work in China, if not, sucks!

For those unaware, this is going to be an educational trip, organised by our trusty school, we'll be learning about our Chinese colleagues and all kinds of other fun stuff that belongs to the regular touristy things one does when in China.

My loyal companion, other than my 9 follow students, will be Mini George.

You all know George from my Twilight Disaster post a.k.a. It all started with a panda... 

But this is his tinier counterpart, suitably named: Mini George. thus his introduction. He's small enough to travel along easily so he shall be joining me and George will be staying at the homebase to keep the grandfolk company. Solid plan, no?


Anyhooooo, cheers!

Xx

No Romance For Me

Ok, so let me introduce you to the most oblivious girl on the planet. That would be me. I am awful in romantic situations that aren’t (immediately) mutual. For example, a guy got a rose from a political party once and then when he saw me he gave it to me. Pretty obvious right? Nope, not for me. Not sure if I’m looking for the innocence in people or if I’m really just that stupid but I’m aiming for the latter.
Anyway, I’m going to tell you about an entirely different situation which actually happened a while ago. Which makes me look and feel like a total jerk sometimes, when I’m not laughing about how dumb I was.

So I was coming home from goodness knows where and was riding in a tram. Minding my own business, listening to my iPod. Suddenly this guy walks by me and looks out of the window looking a bit confused, though really I didn’t care much and I went on with my musicy business. But then, he turns to me and asks me if the tram will go left or right at the next intersection, I tell him the answer (of course not until after looking at him confused, pulling out my earphones and going ‘excuse me?’ ) and he sits down next to me. See now I didn’t find any of this peculiar but feel free to tell me how dense I am and that this is a normal phase of the human courting regime whenever. Maybe then next time I will be prepared!

What I do whenever someone’s sitting next to me is pull out the earphone closest to them in an attempt to be polite in case they’re the chatty kind of person. Who knew, this guy was one of those! Only the conversation went from ‘So you take this tram often?’ (ok fine, I’m dense, this one was pretty obvious) to ‘I have to say I really like you!!!’ etc etc. Which is nice, only I had no interest in this guy whatsoever, not even an interest in seeing if I might get interested at some point. He was pretty creepy and far too eager in my opinion. But all is well and I just smile and nod at his compliments thinking I only have two stops left of this nonsense and I would be able to flee home.

But no, he asks me for my phone number. Of course this was met by a blank stare of panic because what now?! How about ‘no’? Well that would be so rude of course since he’d been really trying and all that and I’m not completely heartless. If I’d seen this coming and had more guts I would have cut him off or pretended to have some form of a lover waiting for me at home earlier, but this didn’t happen so so be it.

Then something brilliant pops into my head, one of those things that you of course see on tv constantly. Give him a wrong number! It seemed so brilliant at the time, I give him a wrong number and then I leave the tram and it’s all good, right? Wrong (sidenote: as I’m typing this out I am facepalming myself for my sheer stupidity that day). Of course the thing these days when someone gives you their number is you call them right then and there so that the other person has your number as well! I wanted so badly to claim I had left my phone at home or something, but that’s pretty damn difficult to do when your phone is in your damn hands. People, I’d like to think that I’m pretty well educated for my age, but obviously something went wrong here.

So the poor dude calls and gets someone else’s voicemail. I try to chalk it up to the fact that I own a Nokia (though I love the brand so shut up about it) and bring up all the stereotypes around it. He nods and then my stop comes! Hurrah! I get out and assure him that at some point the number will work and get the heck out. Only he follows me out. No seriously, he follows me out. I was ready to cry some epic tears right then and there, but I had to power through this set back. He tries to call again, this time, guess what. The person that the fake number belongs to picks up. You know if I had been gone by now, this wouldn’t even be too bad because the person in question was also a girl! Her genuine confusion would have given me the out I was asking for. But instead of giving up, the guy (who is still following me around even though I’m detouring to my house) gives me his number. Fine then! He finally lets it (or me) go and grabs my hand to lube it up with his nasty saliva before I can pull it away and then tries to give me a goodbye hug/feel up. Which I quickly stopped with a firm but probably weird sounding ‘I don’t really hug.’

As per the popular show 30 Rock

Tracy: And I have no reason to hug her other than my love of having boobs pressed against me. 

Lemon: If I hugged you, I would angle it so that you got no boob! 

Tracy: And I would anticipate your angling, and I would get there! I would get there.

Moral of this story is, get a bit less dense, put your phone in your purse and nip things in the bud before they turn into this huge embarrassing mess that you can’t get out. And if you don’t at least share it so the rest of the world can mock you.

Imma Let You Finish

So... I was spending my precious homework hours watching Buffy the Vampire Slayers' Once More With Feeling and something came to me. It's not original and has probably been done before, but it cracked me up and only took me about five minutes to make. So enjoy. :)

What on earth are you people doing?

Yup, yup, I’ve been slacking massively posting here, I’ve been busy, or at least that’s what my excuse is going to be, haha! Started a new period of placement, this time not in a nursing home but in a hospital! I know rightttt fancy business up in here.

But despite my lack of posting, I have been looking, I’m quite obsessed with that cute little feed thing at the side of my blog that keeps track of where y’all readers come from and how the heck you find me.

This is usually pretty informative and/or funny to me except for that one time back in April where about half of England visited my blog at an ungodly hour (for both them an me!) and not just anywhere, on a blog post I made over a year ago, that was just scary… Actually I’m still a little bit afraid of the UK in general now. Anyway, the things that this things says you guys look up to find me are so strange and hilarious sometimes that I highly doubt it’s real. Is this thing just making it all up? I sure as hell hope so. If not, what the heck is up with you people?!

One of the best searched terms I get is
“Zooey Deschanel eyes” which leads to my post about big eyes found here I’m really not too surprised, I’m sure Zooey’s eyes get a bunch of hits, she has big flashy ones after all. Though I know for a fact that my blog is not on page one of this search, or page five, so how many pages are you people flipping through to get to my blog? Same goes for “Emily Watson, Nora-Jane Noone, Zooey Deschanel brown eyes(they’re really not, you guys), Amanda Seyfried big eyes and other variations.

Another one that caught my eye is
“Emily Watson pees” which leads to the same post as the first one. First of all. WHAT? Does Emily Watson have a scene in a movie somewhere where she displays her proper use of a toilet? Why would you even search that? Why? And aside from that, I didn’t even mention peeing in that blog post, why is my blog being linked to that search term?

Also “Crazy eyes woman” this one is getting the same as the first two, I can only imagine how many pages this one gets you and then I don’t even want to think what page my blog would be on. Sheesh…

“Nora Jane Noone looks like Angelina Jolie” uhm, no she doesn’t. That’s actually all I wanted to say about that.

And then
“BULL TERRIER SMILE” - leads to this post nothing weird about that, I used all of those words in that post. But why the hell are you yelling this at me? Why? Are you so excited about the idea of a smiling bull terrier that you have to shout it into google?

“hyperboleandahalf baby penis” Which leads to this. What the hell is wrong with you people? Seriously? People search this? I hope that this is a mistake because this is a disturbing combination on words, I surely hope the author of Hyperbole and a Half doesn't think I'm weird now, haha!

“drawing of man with head up the ass.” WHAT? What? What? First of all, no drawings of heads going up anything in my blog, at least not until I get more skilled at this whole paint thing. ;) It worries me what you people search or what the feed pretends that you’re searching.

“a surprised Pygmy Marmoset” it’s not such a surprise that this came up, I’m sure I used both terms in this blog post, I want to know what kind of pictures show up with this term though because it sounds hilarious!

“johnnynomnom” now this is one I REALLY cannot believe. It leads to this lovely post I made back in Feb of 2010. The term Johnny: Nomnom really does exist in the post, but who searches this? Nobody’s that nuts, right? I can only imagine what a person that would search this would expect to come out of this search.

Everybody, thank you so much for the laughs, I hope that the feed is messing with my head at least a little bit because some of these things are insane.

Fishy Business.

So, let me tell you this, I'm not a fish person, I’m just not. I’m not particularly into owning fish, handling fish or touching fish. I like to eat fish though…Though maybe that’s irrelevant for what I´ll be telling you.

But anyway, the nursing home I had my placement at (and where I now work, thank you, thank you.) has fish. They have this huge aquarium with a bunch of carps. They call them ‘cuddle carps’ because they’re tame (you know, in contrary to those vicious wild carps. ;) ). No they really are ‘cuddly’ as far as a fish goes, if you sit at the edge, they’ll come to you, if you put your finger in the water they’ll… suck your finger or something (I’ve never done this but I have seen it happen). Actually the entire nursing home kind of has a ‘cuddle carp’ theme. Either way, that’s not the point, once again. These fish, I have to say, I worry about them, I really do. The thing is… they seem kind of stupid, well, not ‘they’ more like a handful of them. I have no idea what the average mental ability of the standard sized carp is, but this select group of fish seem to be on the low end of things.

If my observations are correct (I’m not exactly a pro at knowing one fish from the other) there are two big fish and two little tiny baby fish that have an interesting hobby.

They like to stare into lights. I know, maybe it’s a petty thing to talk about, but come on, they stare into lights. They swim to the lamp and put their nose right up to it and just sit there. I have better things to do when I’m there than to watch fish all day but I’m sure it’s something that lasts quite a while.
Why are they staring at the lights?

My friends and I have all come to different conclusions.
1. They’re cold.
2. They’re stupid and are simply stuck in front of the lamp.
3. They think it’s the sun.
4. They think it’s God.
5. They are ninja fish on a secret mission.

I think options #2, #4 and to a lesser extent #5 are most plausible in this situation. Maybe because I don’t have the most encouraging opinion on the brain capacity of fish but so be it, I think they might just be dumb. And I like #4 because it’s funny. Can you imagine the fish thinking it’s ‘seeing the light’? Hilarious. My theory is that if they really do think that, it doesn’t help for us humans to see it and out loud go ‘What the heck is it doing?’ They’re probably hearing it and it only proves their initial ‘God is hiding in this lamp’ thought. If #5 is right we will never know because true ninjas will never reveal their real identities.

Well, make your own conclusions, I sure did. I promised a less dramatic blog post a gazillion years ago so here it is. The reason it took so long is because I couldn’t find the cord of my camera to provide you all with proof.

So here's your proof.




Cuddly Carps!


Ps. In other news, the nursing home now also has chicks in a plastic box. The poultry kind, not the Dixie Chicks, not females, just baby chickens. I sadly do not have pictures of those. They seem marginally more intelligent than the fish.

Reflection

So, working at a nursing home. Did it affect me? Hell yes.

As I come to the end of my placement at a local nursing home I’m starting to think about how things will be after I leave. I’m also trying to reflect on my experiences throughout the weeks.

Well, honestly, I’m still wondering how to put all of my thoughts in order. It’s really not the work that gets to you but the people that you work with and the people that you care for.

I know that in my first week or two I was so in shock by the fact that I could just walk into these people’s homes and after just a short introduction that they were likely to forget by the time I’d see them again, I was allowed to watch as they were cared for.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this to think that while it was all a great learning experience for me, how sad it is for the people that they have gotten to the state that they don’t even seem flustered by the fact that this stranger who they just met five minutes ago is watching them get undressed, washed, fed, and all that goes with the daily care. I can imagine some of these people starting out their lives like me, with the thought of someone other than yourself caring for you being heartbreaking.
Actually a lot of them have told me that they did start out thinking like that. But when you’re unable to do these things for yourself someone needs to. And when you’re in a home, that someone can change every day.

And then the interns, those damn interns who just come in without a proper warning and demand to watch because they do need to learn these things and who knows, in a few years they might be back to care for you all over again. Does that make it any more pleasant? Nope, pretty sure it doesn’t.

I keep thinking about my grandparents and parents and even myself. What if at one point we’d end up in a place like that? As great as some of the people are cared for, I wouldn’t wish it on my biggest enemy.

Oy, settled in for 8 weeks already and it took me this long to get to this point.
I was there weeks ago, really, but very willing to ignore it all, now it’s getting harder to ignore it. Why? Because I’m leaving and unless I come back I won’t have any idea how these people are doing or living their lives. Do they know person A. likes to get dressed sitting on the bed? No. Do they know person B. likes to go for walks when you have the time? No. And you can’t help but wonder how the hell this place will run without you. You know it will; but man, will it go as smoothly? The answer, of course is yes. These people may love you and confide in you but it’s oh so likely that the people that have worked there for YEARS as opposed to WEEKS know these things as well, but you still wonder. Can’t help it, right?
Either way, it was a great experience to have, I do like it there, I love most of the people I got to work with, they have been a great help and great teachers to me and I’ll make sure that every single one of them knows that by the time I have to leave.

So alas, not so much witty, a tiny bit ranty, but all of it is true and it’s a part of me and my experience. It shall shortly be joined by a funny as well. Because we all know that between grabby old men and crazy people that try to smack you, nursing homes can be fucking hilarious on a good day.

Oh wait, here's a tiny funny for the grammar geeks amongst us. I googled to see if 'affect' was indeed the correct word to use here. Please tell me I didn't just make an ass out of myself. If I did, my excuse is that daylight savings has me jet lagged. :)

Can't Touch This.

So I had an epic experience last Thursday at my placement. I was going to have my own line up on Friday (due to lack of staff they thought they'd throw us into the deep end, ha) so my supervisor decided to just observe this time and let me do all of the work. Which, to her, proved to be a lot more exhausting than she thought it would be. Probably because she was pulling her hair out worrying about little things here and there.

Our second or third person was an elderly man who needed a bit of help with washing. I have to mention that this was the first man that I had to fully wash (the only other male I've ever had to wash only needed his back done). So I was a bit antsy to begin with. Yah, touching a stranger’s ZOMGPENIS!!1! can be a pretty awkward situation. But I think that I handled myself pretty well. I didn’t even blush when my supervisor yelled at me: ‘Don’t forget the foreskin!’ from the other end of the bathroom. Ah, good times.
It all went well, I washed, he rinsed; we were comfortable (as comfortable as you can be when there’s one naked person in the room). Apparently random naked male bodies don’t scare me the way I thought it would, this is a good thing, I suppose.



So all was going well until he had to step out of the shower to get dried off. He’s not the best walker so he needs some help getting around, or at least pretends that he does. See where I’m headed with this story? I stand there with the towel, waiting for him to get out and stand on the mat so that I could start drying him off. I see his hand reaching out and grabbing my arm, no biggie right? Right. I’m not a big fan of strangers touching me in general but this is something I have to shrug off while working here. People are going to hold onto you, period.

I think I should mention that there are four people in total in this room right now. Me, the elderly man, my supervisor and the elderly man’s wife, who shall now be referred to as ‘elderly woman’ I know, I’m so creative.

So anyway, he holds onto me and together we walk over to the mat so that he can stand without slipping. I let go of him (meaning: peel his hand off my arm finger by finger) at this moment my supervisor has a slightly amused look on her face and I’m starting to wonder what kind of bear trap she got me to step in.
I start to try his back and he reached out for a bit of the large towel I was using for his back. Or so I thought! (Cue dramatic music)

When I looked at the direction his hand was going, I noticed that it was going less in the direction of the towel and more in the direction of my lady bits. Excuse you? Yes, that is what I said. The best thing about this all is that the surprise made it all happen in slow motion. So I subtly put the towel in his hand, which he not so subtly ignored, never stopping his journey towards the fanny (I’m totally going to try to sneak in as many different kinds of slang for vagina as I can without sounding vulgar). Since this didn’t work I took his hand and pretended to be very interested in drying off his armpit and it seemed like he briefly forgot that he wanted to grab the Sand Patch South of Nantucket. Phew.
But, alas, this didn’t take long. As soon as I let go, there went the journey towards the Vajayjay once again. Seriously? Does he not understand by now that the vulva space is very much private? This aint the vagina monologues! Goodness gracious.



Ah well, I managed to dodge his attempts even though he still managed to grab my arm again, but that wasn’t all too bad.
But then, oh but then.
I had to rapport what I had done in the big book of care whatever whatever and I totally forgot what I was supposed to be looking out for. And then, BAM, he totally grabbed me and would.not.let.go. Holy shit I panicked, I hate to say it but I did. Because GAHcreepyoldmantouchingme.

I peeled him off me and RAN.

Where was my supervisor during all of this, you wonder? Well let me tell you. She was in the corner LAUGHING HER ASS OFF. Some help she was, right? At least 'Elderly Woman' helped me out by yelling 'WOULD YOU LET THE POOR GIRL GO SHE DOES NOT LIKE TO BE TOUCHED BY YOU' during the entire process.