The crunch

It's full system meltdown in my world these days. The end of the quarter, the finals, the stress of trying to get away for my upcoming family reunion, the dishes in the sink, the hot weather, the frustrating quizzes, the irrational clinical instructor and so on have pretty much shut down my brain. Yesterday I was certain that my brain was going to implode and/or turn into a mass of jelly that would slide down my spinal column and lodge in my coccyx.

I'm not the only person getting weird though. While I'm not so sure that's a good thing, at least I'm not the only person who's amused these day by things like the word "stopcock" coming out of my lab instructor's mouth. Classes yesterday ended with a strange conversation about providing perineal care (washing the genitals, in normal peoples parlance) to persons of the same or opposite sex. I admitted that I'm not so comfortable with the whole thing on men - light or soft touch? How do you deal with the sharpeis? What would hurt them? O turned to me afterwards and said that she also wasn't so sure, particularly with the erection mechanics. "Could he get an erection if he isn't thinking sexual thoughts? Like, could it happen unintentionally? And once he gets one, does that mean that he's horny?"

My mid-week brain break comes in the form of a standing date for pub trivia at a cool little English pub nearby. I'm not so hot with the trivia, but I can put away a beer like nobody's business, so I think it evens out. The last couple of weeks it's just been K and I at the pub, so we haven't played trivia so much as take pauses in our conversation from time to time to see if we know the answer to a question (we never do). But it's a great chance to catch up on K's dating adventures, which have really picked up since he started the quest online. He's getting out there and meeting lots of girls - I'm so proud! I'm also happy to live vicariously through his adventures since I don't seem to have a spare cell in my body for dating at the moment.

Not dating is probably a good thing at the moment. Every once in a while I find that my life has become a serial with an exposition and an arc and an overriding theme. This week starts off with condom catheters and rashy buttocks, then some not-so-innocent kissing by the lake, prosthetic penises, and finally frank talk about perineal care. I can't even begin to imagine what's going to happen next.