This is my favorite “fake smile” picture of me. SMS and I were in Maastricht, a small city in the Netherlands that has a bookstore church, delicious fries, and a beautiful riverfront. But how pissed do I look eating these fries?!?! I’m a real delight sometimes! For some reason, I was mad about the order in which we were going to eat fries, drink a welcome glass of sparkling wine, and take a walk. I think I wanted to do fries, walk, drink. Ridiculous.
But this is not what I want to talk about today! Today, I spent most of the day at the hospital. I’m on call so I rounded and then had two cases. During one of the cases, we had a long wait for pathology to review the tissue before knowing if we were going to proceed with a big surgery vs. stop. We got good news and didn’t have to do a much larger excision, so that’s nice. Real smiles all around.
During the break, I read part of Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I had a slightly hard time getting into it, but I think I’m better now. I really love the character Ivan. I’m a little less fond of the dense paragraph blocks of conversation with no quotation marks, but I’m getting used to it.
I also sat down to write a blog post about something amazing and I have simply forgot what I was going to write. The positive side of this sort of thing is that when I am older, I will not worry about episodes like this indicating incipient dementia since I do this all.the.time. I also do not think this is early onset dementia since I’ve done this for years.
Oh, wait! I remember! Does anyone do any social media work for their organization or workplace? I do a lot for the website and Instagram account for my department. Especially in terms of IG, I hesitate to highlight myself since I don’t want to seem like I’m taking advantage of a department platform for personal branding. But I think I’m overthinking this since I feature the residents all the time and no one says anything about that.
I also do a little bit of professional branding social media for myself, but I could do a better job. More consistency. But then, I’ve had this blog since 2007 and never really made it big. And I know I post infrequently but even in the past with more posts, I never broke into the larger blogosphere. I sense great things from this month of daily posts though, hahaha.
OK, so you being annoyed by your not perfect experience is SO RELATABLE. I will tell you here that last summer we went to Juneau, Alaska, and I had in my mind that I wanted to recreate a day I had back in 1999, where we took the tram up the side of the local mountain and had lunch and a hike at the top. So we bought tickets, and the line was really long to go up the tram, and my husband suggested that we have lunch down at the bottom, then go up and do the hike. I was SO ANGRY. I really wanted to do what I wanted to do, I didn’t want other people to get in the way of it, and my last memory was with my mom, whom I really missed. Also, I can’t tell you how many times I have wanted to do something and my husband’s hungry stomach messes up the timing, and I ignore it and pretend it doesn’t bother me, which is passive aggressive I know. It was not an isolated incident. It turns out that the wait for the tram was well over an hour, so we went and had lunch, which was absolutely the right decision, and at this point I’m ashamed at how angry I had been. Then we took the tram, had our hike, and ended up sitting down for a drink in the area where we had had lunch all of those years before. The day as it was was so much better than the day we would have had, and I was angry with myself for being to pissy about it. And so was my husband. Bah. Why are some days like that? ALSO, I am sure your day was not this way, that your not having things exactly the way you wanted them didn’t include so many emotional land mines. I’m sorry to have therapy on your blog.
Let it out! If this starts a comment thread of “Pissy while traveling,” I would be so delighted. I think the stories are kind of funny. Yeah, I was pissed, but in such a grumpy cat kind of way. So, maybe it was cute? (It was not.) I felt a lot better after fries and I thought the sparkling wine was delicious so happy ending.
My husband gets hungry but it cannot be ignored. It’s usually a food emergency. There’s an In & Out just north of SF that we call the emergency In & Out since we’ve gone 2-3 times when we thought we could get through the city and over the bridge in a reasonable amount of time and the weekend traffic says, “No.” So, it’s served as our emergency lunch stop rather than the place we may have been planning on.
#pissywhiletraveling Been there! Actually usually it is ME that is Hangry and other people who want to go shopping for hours (I hate shopping and browsing!) and it always takes longer than they say (“it will just take a minute”, “I am just going to pop into this store for a sec”) and then I am stuck waiting for them and chewing over nothing but my annoyance. I have started bringing snacks everywhere so at the very least I can have a Kind bar and not be so bitchy while I am waiting for them!
Having the right order and getting mad … I have been there. The husband has been there. We are a delight too.
As for the social media I say when every one else gets a feature you can do a post on yourself too. It should be in balance and not one person in the forefront when talking about a whole department.
I am currently doing social media for a hospital and it’s fun but every department needs to be presented. It’s all about team work.
Oh, when I saw the picture, I was going to say… I want fries… and those look like Dutch fries (hahah, because they are! :))
They are excellent!