GLAMOROUS...OR NOT?

     Life can be blatantly un-glamorous.  Not that my life is that glamorous on a daily basis (I went to college to get a degree in poop-wiping and FUPA holding), but sometimes I stop and realize how un-glamorous a situation is, and I hope and pray that the experience is character-building if nothing else, otherwise I might just break down in tears...or laughter.  I just had one of those moments.  One of those moments when you stop and think "this is pathetic".  It happened when I realized I had chocolate pudding on my face.  Here is how that came about.  When you are sick you don't really care about one thing or another, and if a food item sounds good, you eat it.  Well, I was in one of my really hot-sweating-can't-get-cool-my-clothes-are-sticking to-me-and-my-hair-is-wet-with-perspiration hot phases when I got out of bed and took all of my clothes off.  Then I went into the kitchen to see if anything sounded appetizing.  I decided chilled chocolate pudding might do the trick, so I pulled a container out of the fridge and went to find a spoon.  Of course since it is just me here I only run the dishwasher once a week or so, and I had no clean spoons.  I briefly contemplated using a fork, but then decided a soup ladle might work better.  I proceeded to eat my pudding.  It was then that I realized I was standing naked, in my kitchen, eating chocolate pudding out of the container with a soup ladle, and had chocolate pudding all over my face, that I realized just how pathetic the situation was.  Unfortunately, this wasn't the first pathetic situation I have been in, and I am sure many more are to come.
     Lately I have been realizing how much Hollywood and the media glamorize EVERYTHING.  A recent revelation of that was when I was at work the other night, frustrated with decisions being made that would eventually unknowingly assist in the demise of my patient.  It was life or death.  It was stressful.  I was holding back tears.  After the patient was flown out in the helicopter, I was in the bathroom staring at myself in the mirror, and I remember thinking, no song in the background a la Grey's Anatomy could make this situation seem better.  You know, when there is some kind of big event or turning point, and the sad music plays and it shows the doctor or nurse sitting alone in the stairwell or the bathroom and you think, "gee, that is so dramatic and epic"?  Yeah, life isn't really like that.  Life is standing naked eating chocolate pudding in your kitchen when you are sick.  Life is sitting with your turtle at 5am before work listening to Phil Collins on the radio.  Life is cleaning up messes and putting destroyed bodies in body bags after you have tried every humanly possible thing to keep someone alive.  Life is having to drive to school with your head out the window in a sleet storm because your windshield wipers stop working, and no matter what kind of music is playing along, life goes on.
     I sure hope life has more glamorous experiences in store for me, and maybe all these un-glamorous experiences make the glamorous that much more exciting.  I can think of a few experiences when I have felt truly glamorous.  Probably the most recent being dressed up in short dresses and high heels, looking fantastic in Las Vegas heading out to the nightclubs with my girlfriends and getting to the club and having the security guards say "Of course you are on The list, right this way ladies" and having the velvet ropes unhooked for us while jealous people still in the waiting line give us dirty looks.  Or when I was in NYC with one of my best friends and we went to a movie set that was setup in her office building and during the break the lead actor made it a point to come over and flirt with us and only went back to filming after the director yelled at him to get back to work 10 minutes later. Life is all about balance, but somehow the un-glamorous seems to out number the glamorous.  I guess one way to remedy that is to look for the glamour in the every-day.