Sleeeeeeep: The Night Shift

I believe that there are aliens that roam the earth. I also believe that I have been mistaken for one of them. "Why?" you might ask.
"Because," I would say. "It is simply not human to be awake and productive any later than 3 in the morning."
But I do it for the money.
Shift Differential is a beautiful thing
Oh the sacrifices.

I was so excited to be 20 years old working the same position that my mother had left not too long ago. From what I knew I was 20 years old with a career! I loved what I was doing and how I influenced my coworkers (and vice versa). I loved the people and how new everything was to me. I was working in a hospital with people who had kids, grand kids, and Medicare! I was way ahead of the game.

Within a month of working as an on-call employee I was offered a FULL TIME POSITION. The 7:30 PM to the 6:00 AM shift. With my adrenalin constantly at an all time HIGH I said calmly with a pleasant smile, "Yes I would love to take this position," as the inner me bounced around my inner abdominal walls. I was too grown. #independentwomanrighthereson #getlikeme #boybyenotwiththemshoeson #etcetera...

People were amazed by the way I could stay energized all ten hours, especially the hours between 1 and 6 in the morning (you know, the whole latter half of the shift). I looked around and saw co-workers barely making it to the end chanting monotonously "sleeeeeeeep..... sleeeeeeeeeeep........." They looked as if they were trying to climb out of hell, and they never made it even when they left for the day because in 13 and a half hours they would be right back here to die a bit more inside all over again. 13 hours? That's plenty of time to sleep! Why not do that?

Probably because they have lives. Then I got one too.

And by life I mean... a second job. I bet you could guess what comes next! I have a day job and a night job and I finally see what all the dying is about. Nope!

I left every shift just as unscathed as I would leave before I was working 18 hour days sometimes for 3 days straight (that's 5 shifts) and people looked at me like I was NUTS!!

A little over a month after I got the second job, I started developing health complications. I don't know what it was exactly but one day I just started vomiting every liquid I had in my digestive system. It got so bad that after my intestines were clear, I started to vomit bile I guess because that was all that was left. I got sick on my shift at the hospital so I easily got admitted there. After running some tests, the Doc told me that it was Colitis, but I learned later never to trust this hospital's diagnoses...

I was out for a couple days and I came back with a vengeance, even stronger than before! In your FACE, Sick, eat my grits. And it did. I got more crazy looks and I'm sure at least 5 people dragging themselves about the linoleum struggling to make it to the end of their 10-hour shifts strained to lift their heads and look up at me asked "What are you?" I'm pretty sure that now they KNEW I was an alien. I was not from this sane place called Earth. There's no way I could be functioning right now. That's when I looked at the zombie that they had become... looked up and off into the distance... pulled my Locs (these are Locs, the glasses)

out of the black leather jacket that I wasn't wearing before which was by now blowing in the wind that also wasn't there before (blowing from where? I'm not entirely sure)... slid the glasses onto my face as the music intensified... nodded my head as the music climaxed to a halt and said "I'm Acacia, of course," then came the guitar solo as I stepped on the zombie's back and out and out the automatic ambulance bay door toward my car in slow motion.

About a month after that epicness, I got sick again! Once again at work. So once again I got admitted. Once again they ran tests and once again I got a diagnosis. "Hmm.. According to your CT scan... It looks like you have an inflamed gallbladder."
"Ok..." I said.
"You may want to have it removed. There definitely are no gallstones in it, but it is unusually large. Here's a good surgeon, just call that guy and, yeh know. Take it out."
"O_o Nah." I took my prescription and went on my merry little way.

Let's fast forward through this next part to get to the point of this story.

Couple days after my diagnosis I started having more pain, I went to my regular hospital's ER, they tell me I have a TY Beanie Baby where my gallbladder should be, I get the operation there to have it taken out, I recover in 4 days, doc tells me "No, you can't go back to work until two weeks after the surgery date," I return to my second job the Monday after my check up anyway, and THEN I go back to my initial job two weeks after the surgery date. 

At the hospital (my initial job) I have to push my workstation around and that is absolutely FORBIDDEN after getting a gallbladder taken out. You can't do strength workouts or anything of the sort (can't lift, push, pull, or move an object weighing more than 20 lbs) so when I went back to work... I had to stay at front desk. For ten hours.

First day back, I'm excited to see everybody. They're excited to see me. I get to the front desk and I knock EVERYTHING out! LIKE A BAWSS!! Until... 

Midnight struck. 

I could feel 

My posture sink...

My skin rotting off of my bones... 

My teeth falling out of my mouth...

My eyes pop out of my head...

I started to nod involuntarily

Hallucinate

Talk about my hallucinations with the nurse tech...

It was AWEFUL

I was... 

One of them.

"Sleeeeeeeeeeep....." at first it was a whisper. 
"sleeeeeeeeeeeep." then it was a statement.
"SLEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!!" Then a declarative command!
"Sleeheeheeheeheeeeep....!!!" Then finally a sobbing longing.

I now knew what it was like to be... a zombie. 
"What have I DONE?!" I asked myself internally "Who would DO such a thing to themselves?!"
but really I had found myself on the linoleum with the rest of them, only saying
"SLEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!!"

Letter to my Doppelganger

Hello Doppelganger,

It has come to my attention that you happen to look a lot like me. It has been stirring my closest peers up with confusion and excitement. And by closest peers I mean my clique, really, whom I still do claim. Yes, even from 2,758 miles away.

Let's get straight to the point. I feel that you have, without effort at all, inherited all of my fame in my home turf. I do not have the experiences that I had there where I am now. I'm sort of living my nonexistent college life through the contact of the people I was closest to there and you have filled shoes that were meant to be unfilled. Not only unfilled, but mourned over due to the loss of a great presence. But now, you've got them on and you're walking all up and down campus in them. :/

I do not appreciate it. This is unacceptable.

I would, however, appreciate if you looked like me some place else because I'm not one to be replaced, plus you've got a lot of shoe to fill so you would be doing yourself a favor as well. How bout it? Win-Win. Or, you could continue to look like me and just not be good at anything I am good at. If you happen to know how to sing, dance, play piano, ukulele, and guitar, write poetry/song lyrics, or happen to get along with any of the three young men whom I share very close friendships with, I am sorry, but I am coming for you. I must protect the impression I had in that environment. You would definitely have to go.

If you choose to comply with my request, good for you. Thank you.
If not, prepare to be annihilated.

Much love, girl!
-Acacia C.

Eros: I Like the High

Eros, for those of you who don’t know, is one of four types of love, the others being Agape, an unconditional love, Phileo, a friendship like love, and Storge, a family like love. Eros, I feel, is the most exciting. Eros is the young, fiery, emotional, epic, lustful, stupid, exhilarating love. I’ve been there many, many, times. It’s like my favorite emotional vacation spot or something, I don’t know.

I didn’t know Eros was a drug until I experience the crash of my lifetime. Extremely long story bland and short; I fell in love with a boy who cheated on me. That statement is a logical one. If I can only put into words how much in love I was with this man. I would do… Did do anything for him. I put him before all. Ruined relationships that could have helped me be stress free and happy in the long run. I would have been his cash cow. If I would have had the opportunity to make it in the music business, I would have said “Take him first! I can’t go without him. I know he’d get me a way in anyhow.” It was so serious, on my end, that is. Meanwhile, he was harboring the guilt of infidelity and he didn't say a word about it for a year and a half which is a substantial amount of time in my short little life. It was my longest relationship… and it was a lie.


I didn't want to love again, in any form. I didn't want to feel that crash ever. Again. The crash was a prolonged state of depression. It was easy to perform this task since, after he left me with the apartment with someone I didn't even really like (my roommate), I could easily just be a hermit in my bedroom only leaving to get another 5 frozen bottles of water and a bowl of ramen. I didn't go to class. I didn’t talk to people. I forgot what the sun was. All I wanted was the dark. The light was a lie. I hated him. The love was a lie. I wanted to die. The life I had envisioned to have with him… was a lie. Nothing he said was true to me anymore. Anything he said to me, I would believe the opposite. “I’m sorry” was “I meant it.” “You don’t deserve this” was “You walked into this.” “I still love you” was “I never loved you.” We were both writers, poets, lyricists, what have you, and all I could do besides cry was write. I wrote depressing poems, diss poems, bashing poems, put yo ass on blast poems, and a whole music album. 12 tracks. And he… he wrote nothing. Which made me even more depressed because, after all this time together, you NEVER think of me?

Time was the only thing that healed that emotional wound. There was nothing I could do about it but bide and let it all ride.

After healing a bit, the addict in me used to want to go back. Do it all again. Just to feel that high! The way it was before I knew anything was wrong. The cuddling, and the random trips to random places, the laughs, the moments I could never ever forget, the kisses that brought biological fireworks… All of that.

And today, now that I am able to, I just get as much of Eros as I can get. The problem is, it’s never as satisfying as the first hit I had. That first Eros is pure and new and after the hurt of the crash, I kind of go into every match session anticipating the pain in the end. But today, I accept my fate. To risk loving though it may break my bones. To risk loving though I may become a hermit again, may not want to see the sun. To risk loving because of how it drips of our lips and tingles the tongue. To risk loving for the euphoric feeling in my abdomen that crescendos whenever I even see his name. The Eros overdose that causes me to regurgitate “I love you”s raining through my mind, my heart, and my mouth. But I have felt the crash, and I am anticipating it.


I’m telling the one I’m sharing this Eros with to be patient with me, as I attempt let go of the fear of the oh so apparent crash that awaits me and love you with all that I have.




See you soon.

Some Type of Way: One of Many Phrases I Let Ruin My Vocabulary

Well here it goes everybody. I'm about to blame a simple phrase for ruining a good part of my life.
I used to always know exactly how I felt, until... I moved to Georgia for college and undid most of my vocabularic conditioning.
See? Vocabularic isn't even a word.

When I first arrived to my college campus, I felt as though I had landed in Japan. I took two years of Japanese in High School and knew basic phrases and said "desu" after every statement and "desuka" after every question. Straight FOB is exactly how I felt.
My "own" language became foreign.

"Aye shawt-- Whetchyonaimeeuh?"
"Excuse me, sir?"

I couldn't understand 98% of the population. My best friend. Would not, under comfortable circumstances, even pronounce the name of Georgia's state capital "Uhlahnuh." That same friend helped me adapt to the town's lingo since his southern accent was SO strong. (And real talk, I truly appreciate him for it. I never would have thought that I would be able to speak with even a hint of southern drawl) But one of the phrases he used most was, " That made me feel some type of way"

I'll tell you later in this blog the evolution of my use of this phrase, but for now I'll just let you know that I began using it and could not stop! It became so comfortable, so easy. So easy that now I just expect for people to know what I feel without saying it, to know what I mean without expressing it in words. And I will tell you. It's not getting me far in my environment now at all [I work at an insurance company and a hospital. I get sideways looks when I try to explain myself with words all the time because, frankly... I forgot how to, and I'm failing at faking it... miserably]. I don't know names of objects anymore, I don't explain processes well, I can't recall exactly what happened in a series. I'm not blaming "Feel some type of way" for all of that directly, but I can tell you it started the path of limiting my verbal expression. And now I look like an idiot.

At first after hearing the phrase, I would say in a frustrated tone,
"WELL WHAT TYPE OF WAY DO YOU FEEL?!"
But after a while, somehow, some MIRACULOUS way.... After a while, I knew EXACTLY what type of way... he felt, as well as anybody else who used the phrase. And then I started using the phrase.
Language became a feeling. Even less spoken, yet more felt than body language, it was like we were speaking sounds out of our mouths that were completely irrelevant but we communicated through the hormones our body perspired. I have got to admit; it felt excellent knowing that I was understood without saying anything. Our lack of vocabulary created a bond in our community that... people outside  of it couldn't understand. I didn't. Couldn't feel. I didn't.

And though it is comfortable, a pro, it could either be detrimental in the fact that this could probably be the reason we in that community could stay buried in the comfort of our culture's cave, failing to move forward or a bond, an understanding such as this could prove to be a righteous feature in that we can come together as a community and move forward as one. That's different conversation though.

I like stupid things... "What" Edition.

As of... I want to say four days ago I have a new found "gotta have a dose of this, at least a little every day." It makes me realize that speech is really intriguing to me. For example the way there are at least 20 dialects of the English language; I'm just so fascinated by the way people say things. I think travelling the world had something to do with that.

My point today, my purpose, my intention today is to write about how crazy I am about the way California rapper, Problem, says the word... "What."
What?
Yes. 
"What"

I can't even say that I don't know what it is about it (which is what I would usually say about something of this sort...) because I know EXACTLY what it is about this "What" that makes me lose my mind. 

You see, I say "What" like "Wuht." Problem says "What" like "Whaaaaaahht?!" And there's always a question mark exclamation point combination at the end. It's a little like the Aflac duck's quack with a bit of a roundess to it...

It's how extremely spread out his A vowel sound is. And it's the short A sound but he says it sooooo long and wiiiiide!! ... ;] (See what I did there?)

I'm surprised it doesn't annoy my face off because being a professionally trained vocalist, a spread vowel sound is an unforgivable sin. Whenever I heard such a horrifying sound, I would sign the name of the one or many that committed the crime in my mental death note and imagine them just drop. Dead. But this guy? This guy made it sound similar the sound of Sam Smith as an angel. That's a double whammy!

Maybe another reason is because I absolutely LOVE the African American California accent. The way Problem says "You know where I'm from. You know what I represent..." E-40? I wanted to make love to his lips for making such beautiful influctions. Problem sounds like he's from the same area? Heck, I honestly didn't even do my research. I just assumed since he sounded like he was from the Bay... 

Anyway. Yes. 
That "What" though...