Place of Birth

I haven't been able to read Precious Bane or any other book right now due to my class & also being on overload right now.

I don't know if anyone else out there ever gets to book burn out, but I've been in it for about a week now. I can't read anything. This happens to me about 4 times a year, & then it goes away as mysteriously as it came.

So until I get out of it, I thought I'd try something new.

I thought of some of the questions we have to answer all the time, like when we go to a new doctor for the first time, filling out a job application, things like that.

And then I thought I'd answer it in a way that they didn't intend to hear--completely.

So my first question is the title of this entry.

And the answer is:

The place I work.

Oddly enough, I work at the same hospital in St. Louis, MO where I was born. It sounds pretty cool, until you realize that St. John's is literally a baby factory. They had a billboard up a couple years ago on I-270 listing the thousands of babies born there that year. I guess that was supposed to make you want to have your baby there, but I would think it turned off about as many people as it turned on. I mean, everyone wants to think that their baby & their experience is utterly unique & incomparable to someone else's. The thought that 15 minutes after they swab down the delivery room they're going to have some other poor, screaming wretch in there doing the same thing you just did doesn't fit in with the *magic* that is your own birthing experience.

But all that aside, it is kind of neat to walk the hallways there & think about traveling back in time to when I was born. I'd like to sidle up to my parents & tell them that their newborn baby girl was going to be working at that very hospital in 27 years. Of course, they'd assume I was going to at least be a doctor there, if not director of the whole shebang. But there are great benefits to being a lowly pharmacy tech. Like learning all the secret passageways & staircases that seem to abound in every nook & cranny. For example, I was overjoyed (really!) to have found a new way to get out of the building the other day. Out the back door, up a poorly marked stairwell for 2 floors, take the door on the left & presto! you're in the courtyard by the fountain! I didn't even know a door was there! I felt like Marco Polo walking into the Forbidden City (except, was he forbidden there?). It was like a re birthing process--OK OK, that's going too far.

But it is interesting to see that no matter how far I think I've come, I'm still at the same place I started.