Illustration Friday - Flawed

Triskaidekaphobia!

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They were going to celebrate her birthday. Everything was planned perfectly. Their director was out of town attending a conference and Sirhan will be in New York for the disaster recovery drill. There will be twelve of them. Then she came but instead of going into the room, she peeked inside. She was in shock! "Drats! Reza Sirhan! Why is he here? He is supposed to be in New York for the disaster recovery drill." I can't go in there." So she missed her birthday party. Everyone wondered what happened. They paged her, phoned her, emailed her. Everything was perfect, except for one little flaw, she has triskaidekaphobia, but she has no fear of heights or fear of falling!

5:00 O'Clock P.M.

Female, Fair, Fertile, Fecund, Forty.

Clockwork

A Visit To The Doctor

"Yes, I have seen you stand by the oak tree every evening."

"5 PM. I see you walk by from the College of Medicine."

Blog Awards

To all my blog friends and visitors!!!

Here are some awards that I have been given recently but have not had the time to pass along. I am happy to share these awards to my favorite bloggers. I have not yet installed the links but feel free to scroll though my sidebar since most of the blog recipients are on my favourite blog list.

I forgot the rules related to these awards so feel free to pass them along to others without the required meme post.

My friend Diana Evans created this award and I am so proud to be one of her first recipients. This ward was also given to me by sweet Bella Sinclair. These two women are creative and gifted artists and multifaceted women. I am passing this award to Arija, Maria, Valerie Walsh, Lavender, Baino, Bimbimbie Miladysa and Melissa, Merlin Princesse, Atomic Velvet Sigh, BT, Chris, Willow Manor, Bella Sinclair, Aimee and Pam

I am passing on this Perfect Blend of Friendship Awardto Baino, Arija, Bimbimbie, Bella Sinclair, Valerie Walsh, Diana Evans, Melissa, Sandy, Mildysa, Maria, Christopher, Becky, Lavender, Pam and G3t Films

I am passing on this award given to me by Willow of Willow Manor to Baino, Arija, Pam, Lavender, Bimbimbie, Mildysa, Melissa, Bella Sinclair, Maria, Pieterbie, Sidney, BT the Crafty Gardener, Aimee of Artsyville, Diana Evans, Rich of G3t Films, Louise, Becky of Deco Lady, Valerie Walsh, Christopher, Merlin Princesse, Chris, Sandy , Winterwood, CAP 2009 , Sandy

I am passing on these different versions of similar blog awards I received from Willow Manor and Bella Sinclair to Aimee, Diana Evans, Bella Sinclair, Mildysa, Rich (G3t Films), Valerie Walsh, Maria, Merlin Princesse, Winterwood, Indegene, Atomic Velvet Sigh, Froggie, Indegene, Soulbrush, CAP 2009, Baino , Chris and Pam

I received this award from Atomic Velvet Sigh and proudly pass this award to Merlin Princesse, Aimee, Bella Sinclair, Diana Evans, Froggie, Rich, Pam, Maria, Arija, Froggie, Valerie Walsh, Emily, Winterwood, Indegene, CAP 2009

I would like to pass this award given to me by Bella Sinclair back to Bella and to Baino, Maria, Lavender, Bimbimbie, Diana Evans, Valerie Walsh, Pam, Melissa, Miladysa and last but not the least Arija.

This award was given by Pam of Textilosphy for the appreciation of merits, culturally, literary and individual of every blogger who expresses him/herself on his/her blog. So I am passing this award to Baino, Arija, Melissa, Miladysa, BT, Bella Sinclair, Aimee, Bimbimbie and Winterwood and Willow Manor

Now BT the Crafty Gardener, (she is really a serious gardener!) tagged me for this meme to list 25 things about me:

1. I had a very happy childhood.
   
2. My first best friend was my Mother. I miss her terribly.


3. I loved my fifth grade teacher and was so proud to be seen with her. I had a crush on her. She was beautiful, smart, intelligent and spoke English with a beautiful diction. She also happened to be my sister!


4. Once my moth...
   
5. I refused to marry the ...
   
6. I dated a handsome ...
   
7. I da ....
   
8. When I was a ...
   
9. I knew I was going to marry my husband before we first talked to each other. When I saw him, the first thing that came to my mind was "Oh my God, I just met my husband." He was the only one who did not propose directly to me. After seven years I told him either to marry me or stop talking about marriage and children with me.


10. I packed my things, quit my job and moved ...


11. So we got married ...
    
12. In nursing school, a resident was interested ...One day we were resuscitating a patient and he finally declared the patient dead. He wrote on the chart "Prounced dead at (time). I told him that the patient still had a pulse and had Cheyne-Stokes respirations. He modified his charting and wrote "postpone pronounced dead." I immediately stopped paying attention to him.
    
13. I cry every time I hear "O mio babino caro" and Madama Butterfly. I love Christmas carols.
    
14. I am a clothes horse. My clothes get wrinkles just from hanging in the closet. Once, the closet bars broke and I was buried in clothes and had to be pulled from the clothes pile by my husband.
    
15. I have a penchant for wearing my husband's silk ties and vests.
    
16. I like to wear men's clothes sometimes. My daughter thinks I am weird when I do this. She claps her hands when I wear skirts.
    
17. I keep the scarf industry in business.
    
18. The best way to drive me away is to be needy and demanding.
    
19. I hated floor nursing because I was bored with taking care of the same patients everyday, that is why I moved to the ER where I was able to multitask and care for different patients every hour.
    
20. I am very intense but I do not like psycho babble.
    
21. When I love a song or cd, I play it over and over until I am sick of it.


22. I love to cook.


23. I love dishes and beautiful table settings.


24. I love sharp knives.
    
25. My mother was my first teacher. She taught me how to speak Spanish and told me about the great art masters. She loved reading the National Geographic. She was a very intelligent woman and all the neighborhood women looked up to her. When I was sick she played with my hair and whispered a prayer on top of my head. She knew all the herbal treatments. She was also kind, egalitarian and altruistic. A few years ago, we were sitting in the back of the car waiting for my sister. There was a beggar in front of the store. I told my mother that some people refuse to lift themselves up from poverty. My mother hastened to tell me that no one wants a life of misery, even the beggars. They have lost all hope so she told me either to give him alms or ignore him but don't criticize him for he did not ask anything from me. I got out of the car and gave the man fifty pesos. He was so shocked. My mother just smiled. However, she refused to give the aetas or negritos money. They were the aboriginal people of the islands who were stoned when they came down to the city. My mother gave them refuge at our house. They stayed in the garden. Mother told them that she will give them food, clothes and money but they had to bring something to barter like plants so they would be equal partners. She learned how to speak their language. My mother was a polyglot.

Illustration Friday - Climbing

The Manangete. Ballpoint pen on Moleskine notebook.

This is a repost. Everyone in my house is/was sick with the flu and now I think I am getting it. I am still working so I don't have the energy to draw a climbing thing. I think this one is perfect and it has a story.

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The managete (pronounced Ma-nang- gete) is a man who makes his living by making "tuba" which is an alcoholic beverage derived from fermenting coconut juice. The juices are collected in bamboo tube containers hung up high in the tree. The manangete then collects the fermented juices.
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Coconut trees are very tall. It's obvious the manangetes have no fear of heights. They are very slender men and have very dark skin because they live mostly by the seashore. They climb the coconut trees with ease and with no protective devices. They may use a rope to tie to around the tree if they stay up the tree for a while. They create a melodic noise with their tapping of the coconut fruits and the bamboo tube.
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These are all memories to me now, in sepia tone, of a time and age when the world was full of awe and mystery. As children we saw manangetes but we never spoke to them. They seemed to love their solitude. They are unmistakably identifiable with that slender build, folded pants, bare feet, the bamboo tube slung over their shoulder and that sickle on their waist!
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The tuba was another story. Mother bought them in vast quantities and stored them in beautiful vats to further ferment and distill into vinegar. I loved the way the tuba was delivered. Everything they used then came from the coconut tree and were natural including the basket lined with tightly woven and sealed palm leaves. There was no plastic! Sometimes the manangete came with palm fronds which we used for wrapping ibus, made of sweet sticky rice. Sometimes we just played with them. They are beautiful leaves.
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I drank tuba when I was a child, when Mother was busy negotiating with the manangete. Okay, it was just a taste. It is a very intoxicating drink and men could be seen drinking tuba in front of sari-sari stores in the evening.

Ang Sumsuman. Two Men Drinking Tuba. Oil on canvas. 36x48 inches.

Unsolved

She was a beautiful young woman. She was so pale as if the blood had been drained from her body. Pigment ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board.

An open thoracotomy is the last recourse in a salvo of life-saving measures in the emergency trauma trauma room. For starters, no one wants to crack a chest in an unsterile environment. This procedure is very rare and most emergency nurses go through their careers without ever assisting in one nor seeing one performed. In the eighties, trauma nurses and doctors called our county the drive-by shooting capital of the state. Only Cook County in Illinois and Washington D.C. had worse gunshot wound statistics. I worked in the county emergency center where I assisted in the first of four open thoracotomy procedures of my career. Most gunshot-wound patients were taken to the county hospital while major motor vehicular accident patients were taken to the private Level I trauma center next door where I later worked.

One beautiful day, an unidentified black man was seen by motorists in the freeway hurling a rock from the overpass. It hit the windshield of the car of a young woman on her way to work. Her car swerved and slammed againts the concrete wall. She was on full-blown resuscitation on arrival but the paramedics were never able to revive her from asystole.

I was the major trauma nurse. The patient was a beautiful young woman in her early twenties. She had no blemishes except for a little abrasion on her forehead. It was around seven o'clock in the morning and I could smell the scent of a fresh shower as I cut her Burberry coat and clothes. She was pale as if all the blood was drained from her body. Anne, who was the chief surgery resident decided to perform an open thoracotomy. This is usually done so we can manually massage the heart. Her heart was not beating and when I massaged it, the effort failed to elicit a heart rhythm. Anne, took over and continued massaging the young woman's heart seemingly frustrated and astonished that there was no change on the cardiac monitor. Then to our horror she lifted the heart from the young woman's chest cavity! The major arteries and veins were totally severed. The impact of the accident was so severe that the young woman's heart was detached! Everyone was numb. We were quietly suppressing tears. Anne walked away as she handed me the young woman's heart. I gently returned it in her chest cavity.

Everyone but me and a surgery resident stayed behind to care for her body. As I searched for identification, I opened the wallet from her elegant purse. She was only 24 years old. I gathered my composure as I called her home phone. I identified myself and before I could finish her mother asked me if her daughter was alive. She told me that day should have been her first day on her first job. They never caught the man who threw the rock.

The Illustrated Abecedarian

Herewith is my Illustrated Abecedarian Series. A curious collection of illustrations created at a time of equilibrium, punctuated by a torrid and tantalizing tryst that terminated in torture, finally resolved. The ebbs and tide of emotions are not meant for one who prefers mental connections and reads a dictionary at lunchtime. What the heck is she saying? Who knows? Meaningless mumbo-jumbo, give it your own interpretation. Go read a dictionary. Have a great week!

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Alexandra Ambulating Along The Avenue And Admiring The Adscititious Atmosphere

Bedecked and Bedizened Baxters Badinaging On The Boulevard On A Brisk Day

Calumet the Cheerful, The Cordelleran Caretaker In The Cantankerous City of Calatrava

Dr. Daniels, The Dendrologist Dangled Daringly From The Dogwood At Dawn

Eleanor Easley's Equilibrium Punctuated By An Eerie Echo

Fair, Fertile, Fecund And Fascinating Forest

Gabriela And Ghalan In The Grove Of The Gentle Giant

A Happy Ending For The Hapless Heir And A Helpful Hound

Isolde, The Indifferent and Isolated Insomniac

Jack And The Jujube

Knowledgeable Kaye Kant Was Killed At Kota Kinabalu

Ludmila Ludlow The Lunatic Who Loved Life

The Metaphorical Life Of Margaret McMullen, The Mercurial Melancholic Mistress
Of Montessori Academy

The Never-Ending Nightmare With The Negro

Over

Polymorphous-Perverse

Quitting Quietly Under The Quercus

Ruminating Resolute

Scarlet

A Torrid And Tantalizing Tryst That Terminated In Torment

Un-Unemployed

The Vaticinating Moon

Wendy Wellesley Went Wandering Westward On A Windy Weather

Mr. Xerxes Xavier, The Xanthocroid

Younglings Yearning To Yank A Yank

Zen At The Zenith

Clean Slate

Okay, here we go. I am starting with a clean slate for the new year. even though I have been drawing images in line with the new title I thought:

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True Tales From Triage To Trauma

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I started with the first image and wrote the story accompanying it. At first I thought it would be acceptable, I am not mentioning any names, specific dates and places, besides I was focusing on my thought and emotional process during the episodes, but as I went on, I felt uncomfortable and that I should keep to myself what I experienced in the trauma rooms during my emergency nursing career. I can't do it. I won't make it public. I'll create the art and words journal for myself and someday, perhaps give it to my daughter. Sorry. I can't do it. Maybe I'll change the topic to:

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Burnout or How I used to come home from work, physically and emotionally exhausted, crashed in the sofa in my scrub uniform, complete with shoes and wake up just in time to get ready for another work day.

Illustration Friday - Pale: The Xanthocroid Man

The Illustrated Abecedarian: The Xanthocroid Man. Pigment ink on 9"x12" Bristol board.

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Mr. Xerxes Xavier was a xanthocroid whose complexion turned more xanthus through the years. His Xanthippe-like wife ran off with another man. Mr. Xerxes Xavier plunged into major depression and became a xenophobe. He neglected his health and hygiene until he developed xeroderma and xeropthalmia. He sought the help of one Dr. Xenia Xeno who prescribed a regimen of anti-psychotic medications like Seroquel and Lithium, skin lotions and opthalmic solutions. Mr. Xerxes Xavier became well, sold his house and liquidated his assets then sailed on a xebec in the Xingu river where he settled in the rain forest and became a millionaire from cultivating and extracting xanthan gum which he supplied to commercial food processors throughout the world.

Skywatch: Potty Break

Not, the clearest of images. I had to take our new puppy out for a bathroom break at 2AM when I looked up and saw the most amazing cloud formation. It was full moon a few nights ago but I could not find my glasses and had to scramble to take this photograph while Daisy (our puppy) whined to get back inside the house. For more Skywatchers (not as crazy as I am) check out this site.

Mis-Take

I always pride myself for being a good judge of character, but lately I have neither been proud nor comfortable with my choices. I have been reckless and foolish and made mistakes. I try to be open and daring and end up being disappointed. I start relationships for the wrong reasons, reasons that I later consider far removed from who I am or what I truly want.

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Lately I have several friends who advised me to detach myself from certain relationships. One of them told me that as she aged, she tries to stay away as much as possible from "toxic" people. Another told me that if ever I became weak and gave in to urges, that I should call her instead. Today a friend of mine, a gentleman gave me similar advice. What these caring and well meaning friends refer to are relationships which I have started to personally consider as mistakes or were borne out of my recklessness. They all hastened to tell me to be gentle and not be so hard with myself but warned just the same that when a relationship causes more turbulence than harmony, it is time to step back.
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Easier said than done. Emotions are no simple matter that can be easily folded and neatly tucked away in a drawer. It is ultimately my decision, but I must say that it is good to have friends who know my history and have the courage to say difficult things with honesty but with tenderness. My other choice is to pay someone to listen to me.

Just The Dishes

Nothing in my mind and heart, so just the dishes.

Illustrated Abecedarian - An Open-ended Story

Pigment ink drawing on Bristol Board. Part of the Illustrated Abecedarian Series.

I showed the above drawing to my daughter while it was still on the stage shown on the left. All she said was "My deranged mother!" Then I showed it to my son and he said "Oh cool!" Then he looked some more and exclaimed "What the!"

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Oh well. This is a part of the Illustrated Abecedarian series and I have not completed the whole story in my mind yet. I think I will leave it like this for now. There are, of course, many possibilities ranging from the macabre to the humorous.

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The immediate interpretation, however, is a pretty sensitive subject.

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With this image I leave you and wish everyone a very good week. If I finish my current drawing soon, I may be back tomorrow, otherwise, I have to think of what to post because I ran out of drawings. It takes longer for me to draw or do anything now because of a certain lovable puppy distracting my attention. She is a fabulous distraction indeed.

Illustration Friday - Un-Contained

The Illustrated Abecedarian. Piment ink on 9"x12" Bristol board. Some of the worst experiences in my emergency trauma nursing career were suicide cases. The ones we labeled "attempted" were those who were calling for help but there were those who even in their most desperate moments, were determined. One afternoon I was staffing one of the major trauma rooms. The paramedics brought in an attempted suicide patient. She was hardly breathing. We wasted no time and within a couple of minutes we have established an airway by entubating her and inserted major IV lines for medications. She had gavage and lavage tubes inserted and we were pumping her stomach and pushing intravenous antidotes and narcotic antagonists. There was something peculiar with the patient and despite the swelling of her face, she looked familiar. I surveyed her body and extremities and my heart jumped when I saw the Swatch watch on her wrist. In the eighties, nurses wore Swatch watches because we could get them in colors that matched our scrubs and we did not have to take them off to wash our hands. It was the previous day where in the hall just outside the very same trauma room, I was comparing Swatch watches with my fellow nurse. She was young, cheerful, funny and intelligent. She drove a sports car and walked with a confident gait. I told her I liked her watch with vibrant colors more than mine which was black. Now even more so, the colors stood out against her clammy and pale wrist. I remember I handed the narcotics keys to her before I left for lunch.

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The Suicide Academy

Un-contained.

Nothing left to contain her.

Every move she makes, she errs.

Her mind clutters.

Her dreams shatter.

What does it matter?

Everything's in the gutter.

The light loses its luster.

Her remaining strength she musters,

And from the ledge she falters.

As she falls she utters:

"Oh shit!"

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BTW: There are 13 witnesses to the above "flying" attempt.

She still hasn't figured it out yet that she can't fly.