I wrote out an extremely graphic version of my sob story in my first-draft-before-the-internet notebook, but decided that it was too tedious, graphic, and whiney to post. Just know (those of you that were wondering where the hell I was) that I have spent the last threeish four days in the hospital because my tonsils were so swollen that I couldn't drink, and that if it weren't for ambulances and little plastic tubes connected to bags of saline, I would most likely be dead right now.
The hospital was fucking scary when I first got there, but okay once they got me into a room. The two hours I spent severely dehydrated waiting for an IV in the emergency room were the worst two hours of my life, but nurses are nice people, and morphine is a nice drug, and all I did for threeish four days, really, was float in and out of consciousness as nice people made sure I was still alive and tried to decrease the size of my tonsils. My parents pretty much gave up their lives for a few days (including their anniversary) to be with me as much as possible, and my father was there just as often as my mother. This simultaneously was annoying and makes me feel like I never need to/should fight with them again.
Here's the important part though. Two kind-of-related things came crashing down on my head while I was floating in and out of consciousness in the hospital.
I do not at all see the foundation for the argument "there must be a God because life forms are too organized/perfect not to have been created by a higher being." I have never seen the foundation for this argument, but now I see it even less. When I looked at myself in the hospital - even just looking at my arms - what kept slapping me in the face is that life forms are messy. I always knew it, but it really hits you: I am made of meat and blood and tendons and veins that crawl across my flesh without any particular pattern and stick out under my skin and move when you poke them. I have little red capillaries in my eyelids and lumps in my gums where the teeth didn't come out quite right. My nose is crooked and one eye is a little bigger than the other. My skin is dry and it cracks, and when there's no blood in my cheeks strange parts of my face sag and turn black and blue. I have hangnails and zits and wierd eyebrows that grow longer than eyebrows are supposed to for some reason. When I am hairy, unwashed, un-obsessed-over, under flourescent lights and covered with masking tape with a plastic tube sticking out of me, I cannot even kid myself into believing that I am an orderly, perfect life form. It is absolutely amazing - life is - but it's amazing in a, "Holy shit, look what grew in my petri dish" kind of way. It's amazing, to me, because it is so clear that it happened purely by chance. Isn't it amazing that that thing that was just a pile of dirt and chemicals at the beginning of time is now somehow capable of moving around and creating other things like it, just by chance? Amazing? Hell yes. Beautiful? That's extremely debatable. Meaningful?
...What's meaning?
Furthermore, I have realized that hospitals are not magic. They are, in fact, just very clean buildings with lots of drugs and needles. Again, I guess I knew this before, but it really hit me while I was there. What especially hit me was the nurses. Yeah, I was impressed by how good they are at being nice, and that it is their job to be nice all day. I respected them for that. But... Most of the ones I dealt with looked about twenty. And it hit me - They're just people, not too much older than I am, with ponytails and Boston accents and tired smiles and bags under their eyes. They don't have God-given powers or medical ninja skills or anything. A couple of them (I gathered from the conversations my mother struck up with them) weren't even out of college. But they didn't need to be, because they weren't doing magic - the most complex thing they did was cut into my skin and shove plastic tubes into my veins and physically pour in liquid and medicine. It was wierd to me how mechanical and simple and messy the process was. Almost archaic. Sometimes it took them several tries to find a vein in the right place. There would be blood, and now I'm starting to get green bruises all over my arms. But the nurse would always be very nice about it and wrap me up in gauze and masking tape and flash me a warm, tired smile and say she hoped I felt better.
I came home yesterday - Christmas eve. We told the family not to come over, and I ate some rice krispies and fell asleep praying that I would stay hydrated and not throw up during the night. For the first time in my life, I did not go to church. I heard they hired another flutist to play what I said I would. Christmas morning was extremely anticlimactic. I hung around with my parents. I never had time to get anything for them, really, but my father had a drawing I did framed for my mother, and my mother bought my father paperwhites and is having me pay for them. I guess that is good enough. I didn't get too much myself (you know, because of the four hundred dollar guitar they bought for me last month.) I got little things that I need like lip gloss and tights, and little things that I don't need like a tiny Mr. Potato Head and magnets to play with, and also some money to spend on iTunes and some money to spend at the music store down the street. In addition to this, Molly sent me Drumline and a CD while I was away, and my rich uncle sent me two hundred dollars in cash which I will probably put towards an amp that doesn't suck. Now I am hanging around on the internet, trying to stay sitting up and hoping to run into Tom so that I can say,
"Tom, what do atheists do on Christmas to keep from getting depressed?"
I have no idea what he would respond. That's why I need to ask him. Hm. I do believe that this is the worst day of the year to be a cynic.
Well, at least I got Paul to postpone the Tri-M performance. To be perfectly honest, it makes me feel rather good that I am important enough to Tri-M so that my absence means no performance. I mean, there were other things that went wrong, but I was the one who sent him an email saying "Look Paul, I don't think this is going to work." I was also about half the music. I am being arrogant. I will shut up.
Anyway, um... Merry whatever to all of you. I hope you are feeling jollier than I am. I also hope you have the option of making out with someone within the next six to eight months without hospitalizing them. That's right. Six to eight months. Good thing I have a crush that isn't going anywhere fast.
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