"Fully Integrated and sealed drug test cup with built in 5 panel drug test for Cannabis, Cocaine, Opiates, Amphetamine and Methamphetamine Each drug testing unit also incorporates a temperature strip(checks urine is "body temperature")"I've also given regular breathalyser tests and, although I know I have not drank, I am always somehow relieved when the reading beeps up ZERO.
Perhaps I have been assimilated into AA's cult of 'gratitude' but I am feeling quite lucky to be where I am. I have the time and space for six more weeks to be selfish: to really find things out about myself and create a stable foundation for the future. I am not paying to be on this programme, and outside of myself I have few pressures and responsibilities. I intend to make the most of it.
And, apart the pain of giving up alcohol and examining all the horrible things it has done to me, I'm having some fun. I am lucky to be having a go at (/indulging in) 'treatment' and meeting all these new people. I would not have joined such a loopy and unpredictable group anywhere else. It is opening my eyes and making me reconfigure my priorities. For example, working with people who can barely read and write - but who often express themselves with eloquence that hurts my heart - makes my pedantic concerns over stuff like grammar seem petty and obscure. Hearing about life in prisons, in hospitals, in travelling communities, in large families, in Russia and in Stepney Green shows me spheres of experience orbiting far away from media-saturated graduates bitching on twitter.
I don't know. Something. I don't know. Nothing.
INFINITE JEST: Pages 580-614 (much read in the waiting room for the walk-in doctors surgery).
- Enjoyed the (typically) detailed account of the routine and bureaucracy of Don Gately's staff job at the Recovery House: "Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener. They just like materialize."
- And Mario's view of adult life: "It's like some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy".
- And when Hal is sad: "This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important".
- This is great writing, I think; when DFW puts into words something I have often felt but never even known that I've felt, until I read it here and go crazy with the biro underlining. Wow.
I spent a lot of last year peeing into a cup last year (prenatal checkups, every 2 weeks. It felt like a lot of cups...). It was less technological than this - you peed into a normal plastic cup and then dunked a strip into it, which checked that you weren't incubating a succubus or whatever. General liver and kidneys details, I imagine, and checking we weren't all getting diabetic.
ReplyDeleteI always felt like I was about to get caught out, in the very yoga-and-macrobiotics midwife's office that I went to. I always thought the strip would scorch or turn blue and a klaxon would go off shouting "SHE HAD SOME BRIE AND SOME SUSHI AND A COFFEE AND FOUR DONUTS LAST WEEK!" and then armed nurses would rush in to rescue the foetus from an unfit pre-mother.
Maybe peeing in a cup just makes you feel guilty?