Is anyone paying attention?

Am I screaming into the internet abyss? Does anyone care about this thing anymore? Maybe the occasional internet wanderer will come into this lonely blog-type corner and see something interesting. I'm gonna keep up the blog, then, and catalogue my life and thoughts, both of which have become drastically less exciting ever since coming back from Europe.

The most exciting bit of news: I am officially the president-elect of the Ad-Liberal Artists. Now this isn't the first time that's happened: when Jamie was suspended first semester Sophomore year I was the makeshift president of the group, in that I got all the e-mails and attended all the meetings. However, thrown into the thing as I was, I didn't really take the reigns as a leader. Now that I'm older and have some experience actually being the president, I'm really excited about it. It's gonna be challenging, certainly. I'd like the group to get a much wider audience than it has now; right now we're kind of "Rocky Horror Picture Show" in that everyone has seen us at least once, but only a devoted few come back again and again. I'd like us to be a little more "Star Wars" in that you see us once in a giant, crowded theater, then see us again seven times after that, then buy the action figures, the comic book adaptations, the video games, and then buy the ludicrously priced special-edition DVD package so you can watch us again and again and again. Not to mention the fact that the group is about two thousand dollars in debt after comedy fest, due to a lot of unfortunate mis-management and one big unlucky snow storm. Next year's gonna take a lot of pimpin' and hustlin' to get the group back out of the hole. But I have faith that it's going to happen, and that we'll get out of debt fast, or at least fast enough.

I have a temp job for the in-between period from right now to when I have to go back to Saratoga. I work as a medical transcriptionist for a hospital in even-northerner-westchester. Here's the breakdown: the Laboratory in the hospital gets biopsies and tissue samples from the operating rooms upstairs. The doctors and technicians examine those samples for various infections, inflammations and cancers. Since these doctors have better things to do than type out their own reports (that's not an ironic statement, they're really quite busy doing far more important things), they have hired me, at a very generous $14/hr, to listen to their recorded, spoken diagnoses, and try to figure out how to spell "Helicobacter" when it sounds like "hello batter". I'm learning a lot of really interesting words in the process. My favorite so far has been blastocyst. It sounds like a word that should be spliced into Batman's fight sequences as he punches out the bad guys. OOF! POW! BLASTOCYST!

The unfortunate part of learning funny-sounding medical terminology is that once you look up these words, you realize the terrible implications each one has. Look up blastocyst, for example, and imagine why one would be swilling around in alcohol to be examined by a lab technician. Sadness ensues.