Day One- Area L August 1, 2002

DAY ONE- AREA L AUGUST 1, 2002

Trigger Warning: This post contains content related to domestic violence and abuse, which may be upsetting or triggering for some readers.  

Mini Character List

Monte- is a pharmacy school comrade. Answers to Danger. Most likely to be spotted in a novelty t-shirt.

Peter- looks like a cross between Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise, but with Val Kilmer's height- young Val Kilmer. He taught my sister Megan and became part of our family. (I'm not sure exactly when it started, but for years he was my last call every single night. We would go over our daily lists (thank you Dr. Edward Hallowell). It was the best part of my day. 

     Well, it’s over. Day one in Area L. I drove a lot and saw almost nothing. Orientation gave me a good feeling but then again ignorance is bliss. There are only six of us here. The six of us got here because if you are not married and don’t have a house or kids and put Area L anywhere on your ranking of where you want to go on rotation, apparently you will get Area L. I put it dead last and here I am, still not clear at all on what the L stands for. Month one is in the double R aka Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.

     Facing time in Area L makes me regret not being like the other girls in my Chem 11 and Chem 41 classes who were there to get their Mrs. They came to class in makeup with their hair curled just right in cute tight clothes. I can’t learn anything in makeup and tight clothes but that is me missing the point. They were not there to learn. They were there to sit next to their future doctor baby daddy. Me, I ended up sitting next to Amanda, who was very smart, sarcastic, and beautiful without a full face of makeup. She made me laugh instantly and pretty quickly she invited me over to the married student housing where she lived to study with her one Sunday afternoon. She had a little girl, a husband, and like me, she was there to learn. The day after we studied together, she called me hysterically crying saying her husband was in jail. He had tried to kill her. She felt guilty she had called the cops and wanted to use my parent’s address for him to send letters to her since she wasn’t supposed to be writing to him. I of course was ready to get way too involved in her life and spend as much time as possible with her and her daughter having absolutely no idea how to actually best help my new friend. Together we didn’t know much about relationships, but we did understand that the best way to help her was for her to graduate. We spent a lot of time studying together. And I didn’t have time to think about how different my life would have been if I was even vaguely cute and able to put on makeup and do my hair before an 8 AM class.

     We were in these giant lecture halls learning chemistry with hundreds of other students where the professor would remind us that he was there to weed us out. That was part of his job and then some of the chemistry classes came with a lab. No one told me lab was going to take up most of my life and a lot of my money. The first day of lab we get a notebook that says nothing is safe, even water handled improperly can kill you. This shook me and then they tell us that if you break anything you have to buy it and within 5 minutes, I drop some glass ware lid and chip it and the TA sees, and I must go pay for it before I can continue with lab. It was 40 something dollars that I did not have so I had to charge it. Lab was stressful but no one looked cute in those big safety goggles, so it leveled the playing field a smidge.

     I had a lab partner once named Rusty. He made me laugh and was cute and we spent a lot of time together in those goggles and I thought maybe I had a crush on Rusty. He always sang while we were waiting around and I liked to think he was singing to me. One day he was singing The J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” and he was singing “my anus is the center hole” instead of my angel is the centerfold.  He was looking over at me and smiling as he normally did, and I was thinking poor Rusty is not going to be able to support me. I need to stop smiling back and focus on my lab notebook. Anyway, these are just a random sampling of the many reasons why I was not married at the end of pharmacy school.

     Back to the double R, I am not sure what else to say about the AHEC housing other than it is habitable. The roommates are not all here yet but the roommates I’ve met so far are dressed in the black power pants like they are all here to learn so we should get along just fine. Our potential roommates could be any health sciences students but that stranger danger doesn’t worry me since I know Monte will be one of my roommates and hopefully, we are sharing a room. Still, I am nervous about the future. I have eight months to decide how to spend my time as a pharmacist and to actually become a pharmacist. I guess it is too late to ask myself if this is really how I want to earn a living. I didn’t want to go to UNC since I had already suffered through four years at Chapel Hill High and it seemed like UNC would be just a continuation of that complete with a bunch of students from Chapel Hill High that I had mostly just observed from afar. As I was trying to explain this to my father, he was filling out my entrance paperwork and putting down my major as pharmacy. I am here in the double R because I never changed it. So, I ask for signs and a little guidance in this crucial time. I will take it from anyone. I am open to any and all possibilities.

     I miss my hair. I thought cutting all my hair off before rotations would make one aspect of life easier. Peter told me I was just telling the world that something drastic was going on in my life with this haircut and he made sure to tell me to never do it again. I miss my family. I miss my friends. Where is Monte? She is supposed to be here with me. I even miss Adam. We dated while I was in pharmacy school for less than a year and then he broke up with me because he said we had different energy levels. I still do not know what that is code for. Then instead of disappearing from my life completely he would invite me over to dinner or show up at my apartment complex and he always wrote me e-mails so that was confusing and made me think he was going to still be in my life but now he isn’t really present when I need him and as much as I care he really doesn’t, so, it’s time to suck it up and just move on… but I can’t. Why can’t we control who we fall in love with? We need a pill for this or maybe a floral nasal spray?