What to do when you don't know what to do.

I just turned 24—another year and I can’t help but wonder, really? With everything going on in the world, with nature and it catastrophes, political regimes shifting and plummeting, it's easy to get fuzzy-eyed and confused. So every year at my birthday I try to make a concrete list of dreams, ambitions, goals for that year of life. 24 this year to attempt, to put out there on the line. This helps me see where the heck I’m at and intentionally reminds myself that my moments make up my days and my days make up my life. And life, I hear it’s a pretty stella thang these days…. So other than providing a KILLER list this year—I hope to make a true dedication nevertheless. And they're not really profound, life-altering attempts. They're simple, small (often sometimes stupid) small things. But if small things don't matter, what's all the fuss about atoms and quantum physics jargon? I mean isn't it through these microscopic small particles that flaunt the idea of parallel universes existing through them?

I just finished up a truly mesmerizing piece of narrative art, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Roy intertwines that if the human heart’s nature is extreme brutality, then it is also of extreme love. It is a story told in the simple, every day thoughts of children and their observation of adults’ conflicted emotional and tyrannizing lives. She is inspiring in her words, actions, HER LIFE. She puts words to what speaks my heart’s desire for this year, maybe all years—in what shines beauty and truth into every single day:

“To love. To be loved. To never forget my own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around me. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."

You know love must be love when it comes trickling in the rains, daintily soft, but always, always flooding the river.

The world needs to know the truth. If you are a nurse, WANT to be a nurse or all the like, brace yourself. Your wits, your sanity, it's all out there-- pending, swinging out on a limb awaiting for it to be snatched by some swooping eagle that then soars to the end of the Earth to give it to some dainty kid on the beach. Not so cool.

So if I was a recruiter for nursing, this would be my honest draw-in: "What do you want in life? Do you want a rewarding and satisfying job to make all the difference in a person's life? Do you want to care for people in a way that's life-changing, life-giving? Well, what the HELL are you thinking getting yourself into nursing? GIRL, please." I would then show them the poster in the break room of the patient and nurse holding hands with the slogan--"Nursing: Where hearts and hands meet." I would next hold up a poster that is a TRUE depiction of real life nursing: A nurse held up against a wall with a fork in hand about to attack while the patient just sits on his/her bed smashing the call light over and over and over again. The slogan would read: "Nursing: Where saving lives really becomes questionable."

The irony of IV pumps exists in that when they beep, or malfunction, they do so in an attempt to make a hell of a choir out of their sounds. They must pre-arrange who is alto, soprano, etc. I find it even more lovely when I am in the room with a patient, fixing the pump and he decides to ring the call light again to let then know it's still beeping. I want to prize him with a badge of honor, thank him, I will now willingly admit myself to the Psych ward. These sort of days are when mimosas are the sweetest things on Earth.

I mean is it too much to say I imagine myself out in the meadow with 50 IV pumps, all of them singing, DINGING the hell along, and I hear the cued rap music, "Let's GO (let's Go)....If you wanna you can get it, let me know (let me know). I'm about to break this thing up. LET'S GO..." Next I pretend to be in that scene of Office Space with Michael and Peter where they beat the fax machine with the baseball bat.... playing Fight Club until the little piss pumps can pump and ding forever no more.

So how's that a depiction of real-life nursing? The irony is ever-so incredibly tormenting in that, i still want to do this. You realize that you have to give them yourself along with the lack of patience and the anger. You learn to shake your head, scream in the break room as you fling yourself from wall to wall and somehow, love them like your own family. (And anyone could be your family here in West Virginia). Because really, they are my family. I'm just like them, they're just like me, and here we are, truckin' our own little puny selves mightily along.

Conscience was once the chamber of justice.

This is what my own two eyes bellied themselves into this morning: "His demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity," said Obama. "Tonight we can say to all those who lost loved ones to al-Qaeda terror, 'Justice has been done.'" Bush called the operation a "momentous achievement" that "marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001."

My own contorted gut trembled, twisted and terrifyingly, after attempting to process the words of the forerunners of our political system.

I must question the validity of a just system that promotes murdering of murderers, despoiling the innocent by taking loot as we then parade in our prowess around in our own means of power-- regulating lands, continuing to keep the Southern Hemisphere in debt and impoverished to pay for our Northern ways of life expenditures. Half of our every tax dollar in the past 10 years has been secured to militarism defense-- all the while people have no access to equitable health care and our schools crumble in education.

We only killed 5 million people in the last 10 years, but we got the one! Yep, justice has been done. Why, America, why? You are stealing from our hungry children, wasting the ideas created from education and inevitably vanishing hope for future generations. You are staining the very sense of any sort of humanity.

We are destroying ourselves as a mean to protect ourselves.

The exploitation, the in cognizant ignorance. I am afraid your unjustifiable means of justice are rotting my soul. And I will be dead soon, rotted, and all those who feed on the ideas that at the core, life is sacred.

We must reclaim our lives America. No one is going to do this thing for us.