verushka70: Kowalski puts his hands to his head (absinthe)
[personal profile] verushka70
Okay. I finished Maternal-Child nursing Monday and got a C on my final. I have no idea why that happened. I got 85, 89, 90, 91, and 93 on my five exams. Then I got an 80 on the final. Pissed me off, but it could be worse, so I'll just accept it I guess: a B for the course. Oh well. I'm getting so used to lowering & accepting my standards. I used to be an A student (during all my prereqs), but, thanks to nursing school & RL, I'm a B student now...!


Then Tuesday & Wednesday it was 8am-4:30pm lab skills blitz: how to start an IV, reviewing suctioning and trach care, how to read ECGs, focused neuro assessment, etc. Very exhausting. Both nights I just came home and fell asleep. My brain hurt; it was too full. Yesterday we had a care plan workshop for the 1st year students; they seemed to really appreciate it. I think it helped. Felt like we did something good, like the 2nd year students did for us last year, when we were freaked out 1st year students!

Next week I start my clinicals on a critical care unit. I'm excited but scared. I'm also RELIEVED that I took the lectures & exam portions in the summer, in the experimental online class. Now I only have to go to clinicals -- no classes, no other reason to show up at school (except to help with another care plan workshop, & some fundraising). I'm scheduled to take the NCLEX-PN (practical nursing) exam Nov. 4. Yikes. I'm worried, but not as worried as I was before. All my classmates who've taken it have passed it... even the ones I consider not exactly the brightest bulb on the tree. And now that all I have to do is the clinicals 2 days a week (and the clinical assignments, which will take another day or so), I will have time to study for the NCLEX-PN exam.


Just found out 2 more people failed out this semester (they were not in the class I just finished, they were in the other class; then we all switched this week). That's exactly why I wanted the LPN course and exam as a backup: in case anything else screwed up my 2nd year and prevented me from completing the RN. In the case of (I'll call him Jose), he has spent the last two years on prereqs and the first year of nursing school, struggling and triumphing and surviving... until now. And what does he have to show for it? Nothing. At least if he'd taken the LPN course in June, he would have that to fall back on. And he's married. And he's the only breadwinner (his wife is a stay at home mom who home schools their kids). And he works as a handyman. Even having an LPN would have helped his income level far more than nothing at all. But I am not going to tell him that. There is no point in that kind of "I told you," because it would not help anything. He'd just feel worse. But I wish, wish, WISH Jose had listened to me and done the LPN course. Fuck. Another one gone.

Also, I went to the first opera of our season last night with my sister: Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride. It was pretty good, considering it was a Gluck opera (typically staged in the "stand-and-sing" recitative style: beautiful music, boring staging). But this production wasn't boring at ALL. It was modern and really well done. It should have been filmed!

There are some cool photos here, here, and here. Susan Graham was amazing. So were baritone Lucas Meachem as Oreste, tenor Paul Groves as Pylade, and baritone Mark Delavan as King Thoas. Meachem, Groves, and especially Graham got standing ovations.


This opera was also very slashy. (I found myself wondering how Iphigenie/Tauride would have been (years ago) if Oreste had been played by Sherrill Milnes and Pylade by Placido Domingo, when they were young. Mmmmmmyeah! Way slashy. A slash & opera fan's wet dream! I still can't get Domingo out of my head as Don Jose in Carmen in the 1990s Lyric Opera production. That soldier uniform...! the shiny, knee high, black leather boots...! supersqueee...)
I don't quite remember an opera as gay as this, unless you count the f/f angle inDer Rosenkavalier (where a male role is sung by a mezzo; but back when it was written, I suppose it would've been sung by a castrati. Of course, it IS based on the classical Greek play. But damn, Oreste and Pylade's arias together were so slashy! If I were a teenager again watching the operas without subtitles like we had to back then, I could've had an even slashier time not knowing exactly what they were saying; it probably would have seemed more romantic/impassioned than mere friendship, which is ostensibly "all" it is. When I read the opera program, I realized it really is a slashier production, I didn't just see slash where there was none: this is a co-production with the San Francisco and Covent Garden opera houses! Yay, slashy opera!

There's a slashy picture of Meachem/Oreste and Groves/Pylade
here (scroll down a bit), from the article at Playbill, which also has a lot of other cool photos from the opera. One photo captures the modern stage design & direction's "graffiti" chalked by the other priestesses on black walls of Iphigenie's and her parents' (Agamemnon and Clytemnestra) and brother's (Oreste's) names on the walls and floor of the stage. Everything was BLACK -- black walls, costumes, etc. -- until the last act. Stark lighting from the side created very expressionistic and moody shadows of the main characters.

I found an online libretto at Karadar's classical music site. Sadly, I do not read French. But with Altavista's Babelfish, I can determine that that in act II Pylade tells Oreste (among other things) "What overpowering language for a friend who loves you! ....I am not so miserable, Since I'll finally die close to you. Linked as of most tender childhood, we had only one same desire. Ah! my heart applauds in advance the blow which will join us together!"

OMG -- angst, too?! squeeeee!

(Original French from the libretto at Karadar's Classical Music World online libretto for Iphigenie en Tauride after the cut.

Quel langage accablant pour un ami qui t'aime!
Reviens à toi; mourons dignes de nous:
Cesse, dans ta fi reur extrême,
D'outrager et les dieux, et Pylade, et toi ­même.
Si le trépas nous est inévitable,
Quelle vaine terteur te fait pâlir pour moi ?
Je ne suis pas si misérable,
Puisqu'enfin je meurs près de toi.
Unis dès la plus tendre enfance,
Nous n'avions qu'un même désir;
Ah! mon coeur applaudit d'avance
Au coup qui va nous réunir;
Le sort nous fait pénr ensemble,
N'en accuse point la ngueur:
La mort méme est une faveur,
Puisque le tombeau nous rassemble.

Translated incompletely and imperfectly (but still better than nothing!) from French to English (by Altavista's Babelfish translator) to:

What a language overpowering for a friend who loves you! Return to you; pimpernels worthy of us: Cease, in your fi extreme ror, Of outrager and the gods, and Pylade, and you ­même. If the demise is inevitable for us, Which vain tertor makes you fade for me? I am not so miserable, Since finally I die close to you. Linked as of most tender childhood, We had only one same desire; Ah! my heart applauds in advance the blow which will join together us; The fate makes us pénr together, does not show the nguor of it: Méme death is a favour, Since the tomb gathers us.



Saw the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica last night at 11pm, after I got home from the opera. However lame it may be that I live upstairs from my mom & step-dad, I am truly grateful for their satellite TV, because I haven't had cable/satellite for 2 years. I only started watching BSG for CKR. I try to rent or see almost everything he does, unless it's a really tiny part or impossible to find. (Good luck trying to see Unnatural & Accidental... or even Trailer Park Boys with Hugh Dillon, dammit!) But once I rented seasons 1 & 2 of BSG, I was hooked! This season, starting with the premiere, has TOTALLY sucked me in. Now all I watch on TV is Veronica Mars & BSG!

OMFG Leoben & Kara/Starbuck! Those kisses were killer! Her not wanting them. Him so, so wanting them! And talk about ECU (extreme close up). (Almost) all you ever wanted to know about how an ardent CKR would kiss a coerced partner in a manner to try to convince her (or him...). I won't give spoilers about what happened next, but damn, it was hot watching Leoben's mouth try to convince Starbuck.

I have to get my boyfriend into this show; he loves mind-fucky movies, and BSG is nothing if not mind-fucky. I love BSG. It's a fascinating show that gets more intriguing and topical with every episode.

(Yes, my ex-bf & I are back together. And he has renewed his proposal. And... I'm thinking about it. There are two things that are very, very true, aside from the fact that I love him despite the emotional exhaustion of the last few years: my job loss, my dad's death, my mom's & stepdad's cancer, & nursing school: (1) he has been truer through the toughest time of my life than any other man I've ever known ever was to me during much easier times, and (2) I know it's because he loves me. He's certainly not the main I ever imagined myself with, but then again, half the time I never imagined myself with anyone... and I'd rather marry a short, chubby man who loves me inside & out and takes me for who I am, right now, than marry my much taller, slimmer, more conventionally attractive ex-bf who fucked with my head & kept telling me how everything was my fault because I was the one with all the problems. The latter has made a rather disturbingly prominent return in my dreams since M renewed his proposal. But my 6-yrs-married younger sister told me she still dreamt of her pre-fiancee ex-bf for the 2 years she was cohabitating & then engaged to her hubby-to-be, and even into the first couple years of her marriage... & I found out from my bf that he has been dreaming about his very first gf, too. So it seems to be normal for people considering the developmental step of getting married.

Fortunately I'm on no time limit to give an answer... but the less he pressures me, the more I soften inside. And he has made changes for the better... without me. And they showed, even before we hooked back up last month. So... I'm leaning towards saying "Yes." I have to shake that commitment-phobic "What if someone better comes along later?" feeling. What more could I ask for than someone who's gone to hospitals, nursing homes, wakes and funerals with me (and, finally, for the 1st time a few weeks ago, a wedding, where we danced and had a great time!), and who supported me through all of that, and nursing school too?

It's strange; so many of my classmates are married & discovering that they'll be divorced by the time they finish nursing school because their husbands are so unsupportive... whereas I'm waking up to the fact that my bf has been more supportive & less high maintenance than all previous LT bfs I've had. I don't have to worry about him; he worries about me.

It's so... odd. He's got a veneer of bad-boy, but not the internal head-case, high-maintenance core... whereas so many of my past boyfriends were either headcases or bad boys from surface to core, or had the veneer of nice, well-brought up, college-educated, middle-class white boys from good families over their true underlying psycho-head-case personalities. The fact that this feels so trouble-free is so... oddly worrisome. The fact that I'm not catering to him, and he's catering to me... is so weird. But it feels good. And the good outweighs the odd. What a sweetie. I love him bunches, even if he does like to tease me with his deadpan sarcasm & wit periodically. If my amusing gullibility about some things is the worst he does, I think we could be pretty happy. Yay.

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