Goings On and On and on

On Religion

God is like my grandpa in Cleveland. I know he's out there, and even though I never hear from him, I am pretty sure he still loves me.

If the God of the Bible is real, he sure doesn't seem to understand people very well. I mean, ok so he sacrificed his perfect son for all of man kind -- two thousand years ago. And I'm supposed to feel the same about it, that the people who actually witnessed this happening did? That's like saying, "Your great great grandpa loved you so much, that he gave his son a car long before you were ever born. Of course you don't get to see the car, or drive it or anything, but I wrote a book all about it. So you should totally understand how much great great grandpa loves you."

I understand the Bible is written by story tellers. Some of them were better than others. But I still have a problem with so many of the stories not making a lick of sense. For instance in Genesis, Jacob is in the middle of this trip, sort of a redemption story, and it's pretty good. But there is one part that throws me. One night when Jacob is walking along the river, he meets an angel and then he wrestles with the angel all night long, and in the morning, the angel pokes his hip and turns it, basically giving Jacob a painful hip and a limp for the rest of his life. I've read this story a bunch of times and I always hope that somehow later on in the story this will all be explained, but it never happens. They even bring it up later in the Bible in Hosea, but they basically just clarify that the crazy wrestling angel was Michael.
So I don't know about you, but let's say I meet an angel when I'm out walking around. I don't think my first instinct would be to tackle him and try to wrestle him into submission. And there are many reasons for this, first of all, I'm pretty sure that most, if not all celestial beings could kick my ass. Second, I think angels probably have a lot of cool stories, and I'd want to hear those stories, which are hard to listen to when you're trying to put a cherub in an arm-bar.
Ok, and they wrestled all night? All night? Really? Because I've wrestled for five minutes before and I was exhausted for the rest of the day, and I think I'm in pretty good shape. And here's the kicker; I was wrestling a person, not one of the heavenly host.
And the coup de grace here is that after the angel gets bored of rolling around in the dirt with Jacob he just pokes him in the hip with his finger "turning it," which I guess means he dislocated it. I've never dislocated my hip before, but I've had patients who have, and that looks painful as hell. What was the angel trying to prove here? Is it like when I used to arm wrestle my dad and he would pretend to struggle for a little while and then just as my confidence was beginning to build, he would slam my arm down? The angel sounds like kind of a dick here.
In the grand scheme of story telling, this seems pretty far fetched and worthless info. Because as near as I can tell, none of this had any real impact on Jacob. After this passage he pretty much goes back to what he was doing. I'm sure he had to limp there though.

Don't even get me started on Moses.

On Medicine

People like to think Doctor's know everything. Doctors do know a lot, but all that schooling is pretty much just to make them better at guessing. Did you know that modern medicine still doesn't know why we need to sleep? They know a lot about what happens when we do sleep, but there isn't a good explanation why those things don't just naturally happen as we go through our day. Right now the way that we explain how muscles work is till considered a "theory," we're not even sure about that! It wasn't that long ago that people actually figured out what germs were. All I'm saying is that the learning curve is pretty steep when it comes to our bodies and doctors are still figuring out things all the time. But try not to be so shocked when you go to the hospital and the doctor gives you a long list of things that might be wrong with you, instead of just telling you what you have. He's just guessing.

On Pets

Pets to me are like homeless people. I'm not mean to them or anything, but I just don't want them in my house touching my stuff.

On Book Titles

The other day I noticed a book Crazy for the Storm. I read the insert and it is indeed a story about a guy was involved in a storm. The book title really bothered me though. Couldn't they have called it Storm Crazy, or Trapped on Storm Mountain, or Crazy because of the Storm? I haven't read this book yet, so maybe it gets clarified somewhere in there, but I doubt it.
I read this other book not that long ago called White Teeth. It was a good book, but nevertheless it had nothing to do with white teeth. In fact I don't think teeth were ever even mentioned in it. It was a story about two families in wartime London. No teeth talk, at all.
So I came up with this theory that maybe all the good book titles have been taken, and since you can't really write a book and call it War and Peace, or Gone with the Wind and hope nobody notices that you've ripped off a classic, authors have been reduced to what horse trainers do with race horses. Since horse's names are registered, and you can't register the same name twice, all the normal names like Jared, and Snowball got used up in like five minutes, so now horse people come up with crazy names like Captain Sunshine of the Forgotten Ape People. Which would be both an awesome book and an awesome horse name.

A Look-How-Funny-I-am Story for My Sister

I had to study until 2:30 in the morning tonight because we had case reviews that wasted our whole evening. Case reviews are these meetings we have with our sister department where we talk about certain calls we've had over the past month or so. These might be cases where we did something very well, and often they are cases where we've done something very wrong. Tonight's meeting was more or less benign.
But near the end of our meeting our Medical Director, a crazy physician that only wears kilts and army boots (not making this up) started talking about the new rules that say Paramedics are going to be allowed to give vaccines. This is all built around the big push to get everyone vaccinated against the H1N1 Flu virus (more commonly known as "Swine Flu") He gave us some good info and background into the politics behind the vaccine, the company that produces it and the PR around getting everyone dosed up. I won't go into it here, but it's all shady, and I won't be taking the vaccine.
The point here, is that near the end, our Medical Director a very serious man (despite the kilt and army boots) asked if there were any questions. There were some comments from the peanut gallery about who is and isn't going to take the vaccine and finally I raised my hand. When the doctor called on me I said, "As a Physician, what do you believe the chances are that this vaccination will eventually lead us into the zombie apocalypse?" Everyone laughed, and to that I said "You can't tell me you all weren't thinking the exact same thing!"
The end.

The Insanity Begins

So I fizzled out on Body for Life...again. I was doing good, and then school ended, and I realized that I wanted to cram as much fun and debauchery into the four weeks I had for vacation before starting Paramedic school.
That mission was accomplished. I managed to go on a few cool dates (more on that later), went camping, hung out at the river, drank A LOT of beer, played some videogames and saved some babies and kittens. All this summer fun crammed into four weeks.
So now that school has started, I've decided I needed a change up on my workouts. One night me and Brett were sitting up in the Fire Station talking about working out and in the background there was an infomercial playing about some fitness videos that we kept getting distracted by. It's called Insanity, and it's like the next P90x or whatever. Brett was like "I would do that,"
"really?"
"well, yeah. But I am not paying $105 for the DVDs"
"If I get them, will you do this program with me?"
"...uh, yeah I guess"
So yeah, I made some internetting happen and I got us some perfectly legitimate copies of the workout series. On Sunday we had to do the Physical Fitness test. So we all gathered down in the fire engine bays and set up my little laptop with speakers and we went to work. It wasn't long before we were all laying sweat-soaked, groaning and panting on the cold concrete floor. It was brutal.
Anyways, it's late and I am doing this because I promised my sister I would start keeping up with this again, and I think it's important. I love you sis (and the rest of my family and friends who read this)

4 Weeks Progress

Here are the pictures from last Friday. They don't show a whole lot of difference to me, but I know that my clothes fit better, and that I've lost about eleven pounds. They say the biggest changes take place after the first month, so I'm looking forward to that.

Reading from the Good Book

Today just to get myself motivated I started reading my Body for Life book again. It's amazing how inspirational some of the stories are, even though I've already read them at least ten times already. I also find myself thinking about the people in my life, and how I think some of those stories would really speak to them. I've learned by now that people need to find the will on their own to really make a change, and I am hoping that by accepting and ultimately completing this challenge that I will be able to lead by example. Once I have completed this first challenge, I am going to really start "preaching the gospel," to some of the people I care about that I think could really benefit from the Body for Life program.
I have four week pictures that I was going to upload today, but the batteries in my camera are dead, and so I have to charge them up. They should be posted tomorrow.

Back In Action

I had a great birthday. I ended up taking basically two days off from training and dieting, and I could totally feel it today when I was running. It felt like I started over from scratch. Like my body was saying "Whew, I'm glad we're done with all that exercising nonsense, back to slug land," and then I just shocked it back to life by running my balls off on the treadmill.

I got a new tattoo for my birthday. And I was looking at some of the pictures of me while I was getting it. Some of them were actually kind of encouraging but the ones of me with my shirt off definitely showed me that I have a lot of work left to do. My abdominal section is still flabby as all get out, but my arms have definitely showed improvement. Hopefully the tattoo will give me another good reason to hit the gym hard.

Adventures
I made a pledge to myself that while I was going to get through the 12 weeks of Body for Life, I wasn't going to let it totally dominate my time and ruin my summer. I knew I was going to have to be careful and plan my diet around some of the activities I wanted to do. I have had a really eventful and fun summer so far, even with all my responsibilities.

A Day in the Life...

Here is a quick summary of my day today.
Got up way too early this morning to go to rescue class, but I was psyched because I knew we were going to cut up cars.
Got to rescue class and had to scrounge through piles and piles of old turnouts (firefighter gear) because nobody told us we should bring our own. So I ended up wearing mismatched and ill-fitting gear all morning long.
Cut up a bunch of cars with cool tools like the jaws of life and the sawzall, even got to cut up an old ambulance. Learned a lot about auto-extrication. Sweated a lot in my jacked up gear in the blazing sun. Grabbed a quick lunch after class.
Went to ridiculous Intro to Computers class where I found out I did the wrong assignment. Had a talk with my hippy teacher after class and played the birthday card so she'd forgive me for missing homework and doing the wrong homework. Totally worked.
Headed out to work because I was on shift today. As soon as I walked in the door we all got called out to a field fire. Had to jump into my wildland gear even though I was still sweaty from Rescue Class. Jumped into the truck with Wes and buzzed out to the fire.
Me and Wes were some of the first to arrive in the Squad (small truck with a pump and hose set up) so we drove out into the field that was on fire and I jumped out grabbed the hose and hustled along side the truck putting out the fire. My first real fire!
Got back to the station and had to clean up everything. Then I was told that I was going out to the local fair/rodeo to work as an EMT in the first aid booth. Got dressed up in my new pants and boots and headed out to the rodeo.
Watched an awesome rodeo full of minor accidents that really didn't need too much attention from me. Put a band-aid on a pretty girl who got a rope-burn. Talked a lot of shit with my fellow EMTs working the rodeo.
After the rodeo there was a concert, some minor Country star that I can't remember. Did a lot of people watching (checking out girls) Drove around a lot in the Gator (golf-cart like thing) for no reason other than it was fun.
Went on the Zipper with Moon, the biggest guy in the department. We definitely did not meet the weight and size standards for that ride, but the carny didn't care, he just rammed us in there and we were off. Pretty sure I went from "this is a terrible idea" to "that was the best idea I ever had" in a few short moments. Screamed and laughed a lot.
Concert and fair over. Headed back to the station. Beat. Awesome day.