Day Sixtyone

Haha, I wanted to see what my oldest post was, and found this:

“Jez is Gay

No, really. For the following reasons I can prove that my boyfriend has higher homosexual tendencies than the average man.

1. He once dreamt about being part of an all-male threesome
2. Last night he dreamt about Eugene and Jason, although he and Eugene have never met
3. He plucks “under”
4. He had a crush on his cute gay hairdresser
5. He often makes suggestive comments about his male friends, especially Felix
6. And how did I manage to forget the fact that he spent one particular night in the distant past making out with Yoza when I was right there

I’m not worried. I’m sexier than Felix. I’m hot. I’m spicy. I’m not your girl next door. I’m the girl on the next block in your hood, nigger.

Edit: As for Yoza. Well, I can’t live up to that.”

Now what with Ken and Clementdryhump, all of that looks kinda tame. But Ken is no longer competition because he prefers my nipples over Jez’s. I know it bothers you deep deep inside.

I feel unpleasantly nostalgic reading back. I feel as if our relationship has been divided into two portions, and it always makes me uneasy thinking of that portion. The dividing line is whenever “Day One” started. When we broke up and were serious about it. When we spent many nights on the phone even when we said we wouldn’t, chewing over why it didn’t work why it can’t work why it doesn’t work now why it might work later why it could actually work now after all. When I thought fuck it I’m going to get a tattoo and slut it out and illegally distribute pseudoephedrine and now I’m glad I didn’t. Stupid awful times.

It’s funny how, with any given popular song, I’d start to like it when the radio tires of playing it and other people’s ears have crusted over from listening to it. Like I Kissed A Girl and like Freestyler. And now I’m looping Mraz and Colby Caillat’s Lucky after having ignored it for the past few months or however long it has been since Yoz sent it to me.

Today was the last Sunday I worked with Sally. Well maybe not the very last one ever, but Eugene is back next week and we’ll be returning to our monotonous Mario Karting and endless gastronomical debates. I wonder whether he’ll be interested in Cooking Mama or Drawn to Life (I had given up on the latter after having played the same stage about 5 times because the idiot game doesn’t automatically save and I never seem to have enough battery to last me through it).

Not that working with Sally means actually having to do work. Unless Janet gets lazy and leaves me a shitfuckingcrapfuckingfuckfuckload of stock to be put away – and I use such vehement descriptors because last week it was literally a MOUNTAIN. It was as if they had accumulated a month’s worth of deliveries and saved it for me. Me and my measly four hours which was far from enough to finish the job at hand.

Today, however, no mountain awaited my arrival. So we had the lunch discussion. I ordered som tum which I could really spend the rest of my life eating. Sally ordered massaman beef.

I’ve always wondered why Sally wasn’t married or engaged or even dating. She’s in her thirties, and is extremely pretty not just for her age, but for everyone else’s ages too. She has to show ID at pubs. She’s absolutely the nicest person I’ve ever worked with, and she’s a pharmacist which in itself is enough reason to be loved right right right? Mirjana always said she was the reason Jim spends most of his Tuesdays at Kirribilli and dumps all of their unsold-and-near-expired stock in Greenwood.

We were talking about Jez this morning. Sally thought Jez was cute for bringing her a donut last week. I told her I wanted to go to the beach today but he was reluctant because he insisted his body was still a “work in progress”. She thought that was cute too. I mentioned that his name was Jeremy. No surprises she thought that was cute. I told Jez all of this and he was grinning like the Cheshire cat.

Since we were talking about it anyway, I inquired about her love life. She told me about a guy she had known since primary school. They hadn’t been close friends, but have been to the same parties and weddings and whatever throughout all these years. Recently he called her and asked her to dinner and drinks. She thought it was casual until he took her to The Boathouse on Blackwattle Bay, where an entrée would cost me two hours of work. Since their dinner, he had been calling and asking her to more dinners. She wasn’t attracted to him, but didn’t know how to communicate her disinterest. She sounded like she was glad to get it off her chest.

So you’d probably be all “why don’t you just tell him you’re not interested” but it’s hard it’s really really hard. There are no openings for this kind of thing. Especially when your rejectee is a friend. Although I’ve never really had that dilemma because no friend of mine had ever wanted to be anything more.

Being the optimist, I wore my swimmers under my clothes even though Jez and I had decided earlier that we were opting for Warhammer instead of beach. We ended up going to the beach anyway, which turned out to be a horrible idea because by the time we arrived the warm weather had completely vanished. We shivered for a few hours and left.

I still smell like salt and sand, which is sort of pleasant and sort of dirty at the same time.

Day Sixty

I’m tired and I have blisters, but it was very worth it because the COMSOC ball was awesome. I’ve made the happy discovery that I like champagne. More importantly I can reap its central depressant benefits.

Pre-ball wasn’t so awesome. I made an appointment at Planet to have my hair styled. I was sure of what I wanted down to the very last strand, and it was something like this. It turned out like this. Like a black poodle perched itself on my head. The hairdressers were very firm on what they believed looked best, and very determined to ignore my increasingly persistent protests. I ran to the nearest bathroom as soon as I was out of the salon and took out all 20 bobby pins securing poodle in place. In some sort of rage and mental debate over whether I had sufficient time and funds for Pierre Haddad I pulled the fringe loosely back and stabbed bobby pins in random places to hold my hair up. The result was surprisingly good, as it usually is when I don’t know what I’m doing.

We arrived hours early and Jez was busy bustling around poking candles into candelabra and sprinkling rose petals over tables. I tried making myself helpful but it turned out I wasn’t really of much use. So I followed Jez around and felt stupid for my lack of purpose. I decided to stroll around the harbour to kill time when I ran into Ken and jumped at the chance of fetching him the hair product Jez brought for him. I helped an elderly Chinese couple withdraw $800 from an ATM, and was a bit too happy to help when Jacinta needed make-up but didn’t have any. A manicure and green tea frappucino later Jez noticed my pointed absence and sat with me at the table holding my hand comfortingly like I was a little kid and I felt even more stupid.

It was probably the champagne, but people were amazingly easy to talk to. Which was great, because my previous social pinnacle involving the boyfriend’s friends was standing very still and politely smiling. Last night made a new record. I smacked Clement in the face (scriptedly). Except I slapped too hard and was quite intensely worried for awhile that he didn’t like me anymore and I feel really childish for putting it this way but I don’t see how else I could have put it and at my drunkest I insisted that I find him and apologise and I did and he said it was okay.

In fact Jez and I did a lot of things at our drunkest. Like dance, of which neither of us is really capable. Like Jez serenading me in front of everybody with Katrina except replacing “Katrina” with my name. Like having sex in the disabled toilet, after which I leaned against the door with my dress at my waist trying to put my underwear back on only to fall through it into the hallway because it wasn’t locked. Jez didn’t get enough and tried to dry-hump Clement five minutes later.

At the end of the night we just about died. So we went home instead of the afters. I left Jez’s in the morning and we met up again in the afternoon to go to the gym. I thought we had postponed it about enough. I wanted to spend half an hour running, but as soon as I started to jog I was pwned hard by a stitch.

We had the rest of the evening to ourselves, and Jez had this absolutely brilliant plan of buying me Warhammer and going to a PC room. We made new characters, both dark witch elves, called Yoshi and Bowser. They were both pretty much naked and I felt a little bit lesbian. It was unbelievably fun, except in RvR (which Jez tells me is the same as PvP but what the fuck does “R” stand for) I became increasingly tired of respawning. Jez kept telling me I have to move around while fighting, but I. Just. Can’t. Do. It.

Day Fiftyseven

Make-up is good for a very limited number of things. I can think of only one, and that is to even out skin tone. And maybe to provide texture – like some make-up have a powdery matte finish and some dewy. Dewy make-up was completely wrong for me. I just looked sweaty.

I realised over time that make-up looks good only on perfect, smooth, hydrated skin. Bumps are visible under 99% of light angles regardless of presence of make-up. Dry skin flakes horribly under make-up, and I don’t know which awful person used the name of a delicious dessert to describe the flaky clumpy stuff. If pores are too big, make-up emphasises them.

So then you have your primers and powders and mousses to try to overcome all of this but I’m never comfortable with piling too many consecutive things on my face. They make my pores sad.

Since I stopped wearing make-up a week ago, my skin has cleared up significantly. I’ve stopped wearing eyeliner too, which is a big big thing for me. A few days ago I didn’t have time to apply it before seeing Jez. The way he told me my eyes were pretty without make-up kept my MAC Powerpoint at the bottom of my cosmetics bag.

Jez was sick today and stayed home. I came over in the morning and played Warhammer on his account. I left in the middle of the day for dispensing exam, for which I thought I was moderately prepared. Except there was one important thing I didn’t check.

The formulation went like this:

Paracetamol – 400 mg
Compound tragacanth powder – QS
Red syrup – 1 mL
Concentrated hydroxybenzoate solution – 0.1 mL
Purified water – to 10 mL

The instruction was to make 70 mL of the suspension. The amount of tragacanth to be used was “QS”, which meant we had to look it up in the manual and calculate it according to the volume of our suspension. I flipped through the manual and found “compound tragacanth powder: 2-3%”. I panicked. Tragacanth was a suspending agent, which meant it was mixed with the paracetamol to help it with suspension in the vehicle. 2-3% of what then, the paracetamol alone or the whole thing? I wrote numbers and crossed them out, and wrote new ones and crossed those out too. Romano yelled out “half an hour to go” and I still hadn’t weight out my tragacanth or figured out how much tragacanth to weigh out. And if you were wondering, weighing tragacanth was the second of my 16 steps.

Eventually I guessed that 2-3% of 70 mL would be the more logical answer. I peeked at Hatice’s paper while pretending to fetch a fresh pair of gloves which were conveniently stored on the top of the bench directly above her workspace. Her calculations corresponded with mine. I started making my suspension at killer speed, sure that I was being sloppy but surprised when my suspension poured through the gauze, perfectly fluid and pink and leaving not a single trace of clump. Of course, even if I had made a Nobel-worthy suspension of paracetamol, I’d still fail if I forgot to tick the little box at the bottom of my dispensing record that said “check bottle for leaking”.

Day Fiftyfive

I walk with Jez to Starbucks. We buy a Venti green tea frappacino. We walk to the bus stop. We still debate over whether or not we should buy a new laptop tonight. We’re fickle. Last night we said yes. This morning we said no. We bump into Felix and Jez blurts out a “maybe”. Then we say yes again. Then we feel uneasy. I think it’s a horrible idea and at the same time I think it’s an excellent idea.

Jez gets on the bus. I forget about it temporarily and go to work. I entertain the thought of what would happen to Kirribilli and Greenwood if I suddenly quit. I suppose it’s sort of flattering that I’m always needed in two places at once.

Renata’s away today. Sally arranged for me to work at Kirribilli from 12:00 to 6:30. I call Mirjana to let her know I won’t be in North Sydney. She panics and makes me call Sally to ask whether I could help her with scripts during lunch time and go down to Kirribilli in the afternoon. Sally says okay. I stay on the train and go to Greenwood.

Before I make it to the shop I bump into Eric, who as usual is delighted by this happy coincidence. He tells me he wants to buy a jacket and would like me to help him choose. I have 20 minutes to spare. Why not, I say. He looks so excited that I laugh. He sticks out his arm and I hold it. Bay Swiss guy passes by and turns his head around 180 degrees. I want to laugh again. This guy cranes his neck to stare at me every time I pass the deli, and whispers “looking good, Miss” whenever I’m within earshot, and I’ve never as much as looked at him. Now he’s must be figuring out that I’m into tall, blond, brain-damaged Frenchmen.

Eric takes me to a men’s clothing store on the second level, where he tries on three hideous blazers. One of them is an orangey sort of brown, which makes him look like a giant carrot. I recommend the one I detest the least with phony enthusiasm.

I arrive to find Mirjana swimming in used labels, repeat forms and unpacked stock. Everyone is irritable because it’s Monday. Before I get much done I have to leave.

Kirribilli has a different atmosphere. Sally is either never stressed or very good at hiding it, and as a result we could have ten people lined up with their hands out demanding their pills and feel no pressure at all.

Serving Kirribilli customers is always amusing for me. They consist mainly of elderly regular customers who are on first-name basis with everyone in the store except me, who most of them have never met. Despite this, they often expect me to know their names anyway. Logic fail.

“Hi, I need my Tritace and Lipitor.”

“Yes, and your name is?”

…

“I want Efexor, Xalatan and Avapro.”

“Sorry, what was your last name?”

…

“I need my pills.”

” … Who ARE you?!?”

I don’t think my future customers are going to love me the way Sally and Mirjana’s customers love them. I’m terrible with names. I forget a name sooner than I hear it. Unless I’m happy (like, manic-state happy) I’m not big on small-talk (ha! Oh that was clever). And if you forget to mention you wanted a specific brand after I finish dispensing your medication in its default label, I will yell at you. And discreetly replace your tablets with sennoside.

In the afternoon I develop the mother of all cramps. I suspect my ovaries have sprouted thorns. I nibble on a bit of dark chocolate, and for once it doesn’t help at all. I SMS Jez and ask him to bring me something hot and chocolatey. A couple of hours later he brings me hot chocolate. The clever boy. My eyes light up when I spot a Krispy Kreme bag in his other hand, but before I make a snatch for it he announces that it’s for Sally. I’m surprised for a second, and then I fight against giggles. Poor Mirjana, Harsha, Ismat, Freda, Glenda and Ting, none of whom are pretty enough for Jez’s Krispy Kremes.

I pout all evening because Jez is going to play Warhammer and I’m not. To cheer me up he takes me to Prego. We eat a mediterranean mix plate made for ogres.

Day Fiftyone

I wonder what the public reaction was when the inventor of suppositories introduced this new dosage form.

So I looked it up, and it turns out that suppositories have been prescribed since over 2000 years ago. However, medicinal use of suppositories gained popularity later in 1840. So what were they used for before 1840?!

I also found this lovely photo of a suppository mould. It’s almost identical to the one we used yesterday, only the mould shape is slightly different.

I was watching the new Harold & Kumar movie and chatting to a friend. She sounded extremely sexually frustrated. I told her she needs to find a man. She said she has many of them hovering around, but none of them are likeable.

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by her all-men-are-shit perspective. Is she insane or are my standards frighteningly low? Or maybe it’s just a matter of never finding an apple if you keep looking for them in a crate of oranges.

She said boys are sooks, because when she refused to see them regularly they’d say annoying things like “you never have time for me anymore” and “why are you being such a snob”. And hanging up on her.

That’s my pet peeve. Boys should leave the hanging up to tantrum-throwing girls. My ex used to hang up on me when we fought. It was the most irritating thing in the world, especially when he’d cry before slamming the phone. Then I’d have to call him back. If I didn’t, I’d never hear the end of “this is what I mean when I say you don’t love me”. And the whole “you don’t care” thing. God, that gets old.

So despite the fact that Jez has blown up my heart, ground it in a mortar with a metal spiked pestle, juiced it in a blender and then fed whatever was left to his neighbour’s cat – at least he doesn’t hang up on me. It’s kind of cute. He seems to be physically incapable of hanging up without first announcing “I’m gonna go”.

Although speaking of “you don’t care”, I’m reminded of a recent study session at Jez’s house where for some reason I can’t recall we were both silent and seething. I chucked all of my fireballing energy into my lecture manual while Jez sat in front of his computer blankly and repeatedly slapped his own face. I hadn’t noticed, therefore didn’t stop him. He was so mad.

Day Fortysix

I have a headache. It feels like I’ve slept too much but I didn’t. I slept horribly. I think my room was too warm, or my bed was too rigid. Every morning when I’m draggged up against my own will the bed feels like a fluffy pink cloud. On the only morning I’m allowed to sleep in it feels like a shitty old bed.

Good news is I feel a lot less stressed. Bad news is I don’t know why. Sleep deprivation? Cortisol? Cortisol gives you tummy fat, you know.

Remember Shaun? I’ve met him once, for no longer than ten minutes. It’s been a few months, and I regret bitterly for letting him have my number because despite the fact that I’ve expressed high disinterest, he calls me this morning. I silent it. Then he sends me an awfully stupid SMS.

“My eyes are dry, I’ve got some Bion Tears, do you know what they are?”

Well, you’d find out from the USyd library home page, where you click “Electronic Databases”, and then “Pharmacy”, and then “MIMS Online”, then log in and type in the search field “Bion Tears”, and scroll down to “Use” or “Pharmacology”.

Or you could like, read the label on the bottle.

Or if that doesn’t work, feel free to message a stranger.

Day Fortysix

It’s 12:40 am and I’m still struggling to finish the ‘06 paper.

I’m not sleepy. It has been an unusually warm day so I’m not shivering like I do every other night. I’m not hungry. In fact I’m so physically content that I might be subconsciously meditating. My brain, on the other hand, is trying to escape my head. For the past 6 hours I’ve been desperately trying to ignore the panicked little voice in my ear that screams HOW THE FUCK DO I REMEMBER ALL OF THIS, I’m taking a break now so it can get itself out of my system.

A drunk and very slurred Jez called about 20 minutes ago, telling me he’ll be staying out for the night and sounding like a little boy. I suppose the fact that he was in the company of Ken would void anything he says in advance about going home early. I thought I took his plan seriously but amusingly, some deeper conscience called bullshit and I ended up back home with no recollection of making such a decision.

I’ve done everything within my power to procrastinate. I’ve eaten a whole tin of Extra mints. I’ve tried and failed to regain access into my NetBank account after realising I had changed and forgotten my password so I’ll have to pay for road trip by cash. I’ve showered and exfoliated three times. I’ve read mamamia.com entries from the beginning of the month, comments included. I’ve blogged twice. I’ve trimmed my fingernails. I’ve stripped off all of my make-up, applied it again, and washed it off. I’ve ping-ponged fifty hundred Facebook messages to I-don’t-know-who-he-is-but-he-doesn’t-do-pharmacy-so-can’t-increase-stress-levels. I’ve taken photos of my breasts.

I hate alcohol. But when I’m stressed out I crave being drunk. Except you can’t get drunk without drinking alcohol. I bet there are other people like me. They should formulate some alternative dosage forms for us. Not parenteral. I’m scared of needles. Maybe a nasal spray or inhalation that totally rapes my blood-brain barrier.

Or some sort of reversible tastebud-inhibitor. Then they can fill my glass with industrial methylated spirit and tell me it’s vodka. And I’ll believe them. To my own demise.

Just please please kill me already. I’ve run out of things to say and I don’t want to face my stupid hypothetical 36-year-old HIV-infected patient.