unpurposed

one day at the pharmacy.

female presents to pharmacy with pain, anxiety, and discharge forms from the emergency room. diagnosis: narcotic withdrawl. prescription: norco (hydrocodone/acetominophen 10/325 mg) [a narcotic], and ativan (lorazepam) [for anxiety]. patient is on a budget and is only carrying $15. norco will cost $13 and the ativan will cost $18. she wants/"needs" the norco. cannot fill a prescription from discharge forms. need a fax of the actual prescription from the hospital. call emergency room to get the fax. they say they will fax. they don't send fax. woman doesn't have enough gas to drive back and forth. she is complaining. she is waiting. past medications indicate. she was spending $100+/month on oxycodone prescriptions before. methadone too. and vicodin, obviously. i guess that is why she is on a budget now. still waiting. fax never arrives. thank you doctor for writing a prescription that will definitely solve all her problems of narcotic addiction and then just dumping an anxious, detoxing, hurting woman in the pharmacy.

man presents to pharmacy with a 12 pack of beer and pickup for "a big bottle" of lovaza (a bunch of fish oil at prescription doses; manufacturing of this drug is actually causing overfishing problems). he states the big bottle is for his cholesterol. and the beer is to "counter that shit."

female presents to pharmacy with prescription for abortion medication. past medical history indicates she was recently on fertility medication. and abortion medication. and fertility meds. and abortion meds. i wish people could make up their minds.

so i went swimming. and i showered. now i just rehydrated myself by eating two tomatoes. i only have 1 left now. poor lonely tomato. maybe i should just eat it up. tomorrow. i guess.

there is a time when everything has been said and nothing more can be said. i wonder if that is happening to this blog. i hope that isn't the case. maybe i am just too busy to even think of things. but it really doesn't matter what mechanism is causing the lack of updates. there are no updates. and that is the phenotype that we can all observe. well, maybe if i know the cause, then i can find a cure. drug discovery. stuff like that.

well, here's some news. so far this month, i've had 700 gigabytes of internet activity. it's a personal best. i'm actually only allowed 250 gb, but oh well. they aren't calling me to tell me to stop so i'm happy. on an unrelated note, i need to get a new computer that is capable of playing bluray video. on another unrelated note, i need money. i am working around 2 days a week. spending time in class, then the rest of the time is in research. biology research is really slow. have to wait for cells to grow. i wish they would just grow faster. but i'm working with cancerous mutated cells, so i guess they already do grow pretty fast. oh well. i think i am going to go swimming today. the weather is hot. but i want to go around 6 or 7, when the sun is not so bright. well, i guess the sun is always around the same brightness, just the angles and stuff changes the directness of the beams.

the drugs to get rid of intestinal worms are funny. some make the worms contract until they blow up (at high doses). and some make them so flaccid they just fall off. i have to go to the hospital to do free hours this sunday. this sunday is also july 4th. we have monday off, but i can't go home this weekend. i should have chose a better day for this hospital thing. oh well. 3 more times left. but then it is the end of the semester. and finals! i'm listening to some 1980s taiwanese music. is it quite old. it is enjoyable though. i ate a tomato a few minutes ago. it was very enjoyable. i enjoy tomatoes. they are red and chewy and have lots of fluids. it's like eating raw meat. except with less protein.

last night i watched black snow. by xie fei. it's a mainland china movie. it's about a prisoner that finished his time and was released (how shocking, people actually get released from prison in china!?) and is now trying to readjust to life. of course chinese people are all the same, so he can never really be accepted again, since he broke the law. [his friend who got a longer sentence (life sentence) is now completely rejected by the family.] so now the guy is stuck selling cheap clothes on the street and his only friends are the type of people that got him into trouble originally. he's trying to clean up his life, but it just doesn't work. it has a tragic ending. the beijing accent is really hard to understand. everything-er sounds-er like-er this-er.

it's really weird swimming laps in a pool that is probably less than 10 meters long. by the time i need to breathe from a flip turn, it's time to flip turn again. just flip turn all day. flip flip. i'm so dizzy. the pool doesn't have lines on the bottom either. and i don't wear any glasses or anything, so i can't see. i'm just swimming blindly towards walls. everywhere is white. give me directions please.

i watched edward yang's "yi yi" again yesterday. it's the 3 hour long movie about a taiwanese family and their life. i think i appreciated the "art" of it more watching it the second time. the story is split into three people's lives. the man who isn't happy with his life and suddenly meets his ex-girlfriend from 30 years ago. his daughter, who is dealing with a high school love triangle. and his son, who is really interested in letting people see a perspective of themselves they cant see (eg. the back of their head). the wife's mother went into a coma early in the movie and this made the wife realize her life is so dull and the same everyday, so she ditched her life and family to go to some buddhist retreat. so everyone has some issues and yea. the ending kind of gives a somewhat optimistic message that we should let go of the past regrets and keep going for the future. but from what i read, apparently the taiwanese people that watch this movie usually have the feeling that this whole movie is sad. (the movie's not released in taiwan either, because director yang didn't feel like dealing with the business in taiwan.) the director lived in both taiwan and america later in his life, so i guess we'll never know what his meaning of the ending is. i guess that's art. well, the shots are kind of cool. he uses a lot of shots through windows to show two things at once. it will have the character interaction and also show the taipei lights.

so artistic.

i was surprised the streets aren't busy at all. this is taipei! how can it not be busy!?

rainy taiwan.

a classmate is going to phoenix, arizona this weekend. she is going to eat at this place called pizzeria bianco. apparently there is a 3 hour wait there. that's ridiculous. 3 hour wait for pizza?! it must be really amazing pizza. i like how when restaurants take 30 minutes, it is bad service. but when some place takes 3 hours, it suddenly becomes really high class. i wonder what makes it so good.

Despite the performance of amylase and lipase assays for acute pancreatitis, the sensitivity and specificity of these tests are often regarded as unsatisfactory, and in many patients pancreatitis is only diagnosed on autopsy.

that sucks. don't get pancreatitis. they'll diagnose you. but after you're dead.

for the last 31 or 30 days, i've been doing this draw a profile picture for facebook thing everyday. on may 25th (i guess 30 days), i saw a video of the news reporting about crazy high schoolers dressing up as werewolves and having a little werewolf cult. and a guy was quoted saying, "i dont believe everyone is just human. everyone has just got something else in them." then i told person x that i was an apple inside. i had the brilliant idea to draw an apple and write "nrhrhrhhrhrhrhr" next to it. and i made it my profile picture.

the next day, person y said, "i hate apples." whine whine whine whine whine. "but i like apple juice." so i had no choice but to change my profile picture to apple juice.

soon after, person x responded with "wowowowowowowowowwowowowow" maybe not like that, but i had to change it again. then i had a brilliant idea to draw something everyday in a way that connects all the pictures. i was originally going to post the next day, but thats at 12 am, and i'm lazy and might forget, so it became 11:30 pm same day. so number 3 was on the same day.

so i had a new picture everyday at 11:30. eventually i got to 31. why 31? it's like a month. but a month is usually 30 days. but 31 is a prime number. so life is good.

here they are.

01. apple [2010.05.25]

02. apple juice [2010.05.26]

03. death [2010.05.26]

04. biodegrade [2010.05.27]

05. discovery [2010.05.28]

06. science [2010.05.29]

07. boo radley [2010.05.30]

08. chipotle [2010.05.31]

09. heavy [2010.06.01]

10. evolve [2010.06.02]

11. differences [2010.06.03]

12. similarities [2010.06.04]

13. smoothie (yea!) [2010.06.05]

14. overslept [2010.06.06]

15. internet [2010.06.07]

16. debug [2010.06.08]

17. nomnom [2010.06.09]

18. away [2010.06.10]

19. bye bye butterfree! [2010.06.11]

20. distraction [2010.06.12]

21. tears [2010.06.13]

22. prey [2010.06.14]

23. king [2010.06.15]

24. raw [2010.06.16]

25. (i'm addicted to you, don't you know you're) toxic [2010.06.17]

26. heavy metal [2010.06.18]

27. ringo [2010.06.19]

28. fuji [2010.06.20]

29. La tristesse durera toujours [2010.06.21]

30. son of man [2010.06.22]

31. finished [2010.06.23]

now some of them might be hard to see the relationship. so since i'm so nice, i'll save all the art history people some time and prevent any multiple interpretations of the artist's intention and all that fun stuff. so there it is.

01. apple. good.
02. apple is pasteurized and processed. good.
03. it was drunk
04. it was biodegradable
05. it grew into a tree. newton sat under it. gravity was discovered
06. science developed. missiles were invented. it's all for progress.
07. nuclear winter. people are affected by radioactivity
08. insanity and people are like americans
09. people are lazy and want easy stuff. genetically modified foods. the structures are phentermine and other similar weight loss drugs.
10. drugs affect mutations. evolution happens. apple to (pine)apple
11. change is displeasing. differences cause problems.
12. but we are all the same.
13. sipping on a blended fruit smoothie. another is sleeping.
14. guy overslept. sunset dreams.
15. at night, people are stuck to their computers.
16. debugging programs on the screen.
17. a bug is in your apple.
18. change and metamorphosis.
19. it flew too low and hit a car.
20. distracted and crashed into a fire hydrant
21. the water falls, mushroom umbrella...
22. ... is not enough. drowning.
23. the new kings are fish
24. but we eat too much fish
25. fish have mercury
26. mercury is a heavy metal
27. heavy metal is music. shiina ringo is the goddess of music. (ringo = apple)
28. shiina ringo is from japan. hokusai's woodcut of mount fuji (fuji is an apple)
29. hokusai is an artist. van gogh is an artist.
30. van gogh is an artist. magritte is an artist.
31. yum.

don't forget me. that's a really selfish request huh? the weather is hot. the sun is strong. don't crush me with your strength. i am weak. tiny. unnoticeable. it's not even meaningful destruction. accident. to who? what happened to you? halcyon. beautiful days. end