A Good Exhaustion Friday Random Ten

I've just finished my second week of training as a dialysis nurse. The dialysis machines, which looked impossibly complicated two weeks ago are beginning to make sense. I'm starting to understand the medical difficulties of dialysis (more on that another time) and the management difficulties.

I'm working the last few weeks of the waitering job I worked through school. I was supposed to work tonight. I was not looking forward to it; I'm exhausted from my nursing job this week. It would be merely tiring as it were, but the huge amount of stuff to learn is making it even more exhausting-- but a good exhausting. Fortunately for me-- unfortunately for my co-workers who don't have another full-time job like I do-- it was dead. Not a good sign in a restaurant that was packed to the rafters on Friday nights before the change in ownership. I was glad to turn around, run home and take care of things that I didn't have a chance to do this week-- like laundry, post to my blog and relax over a glass of red wine.

I did make time this week to do something fun-- a parent always makes time for what's important for their kids. There was a revival of the musical "Grease" in it's original incarnation-- it was originally about "greasers" in the late fifties in Chicago's Norwood Park neighborhood. This was a resurrection of the original down and dirty non-Hollywood-sanitized stage version that played at the Kingston Mines, which is normally a Blues club, in the early seventies. I knew my daughter, who loves theater (she's entering high school in a drama program in a couple of weeks) would love it; it was a once-in-a lifetime experience. She did.

1. Cruisin'- Smokey Robinson
2. Then Came You- The Spinners (with Dionne Warwick)
3. Up On The Roof- The Drifters
4. Living In Hard Times- Wendy Waldman
5. 3/4" Drill Bit- Killdozer
6. (Cross the) Heartland- Pat Metheny Group
7. The Message- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
8. Our Love Is Drifting- The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
9. Find Somebody- The Young Rascals
10. In the Flat Field- Bauhaus


Notes:
1. I somehow never heard this 1979 gem until the mid eighties when my friend Eddie played it at a party. I admit, I stole the record a few months later, but returned it to him as a wedding present a year later.
2. Might be a top ten song for me.
3. One of many, many incredibly good songs Carole King and Gerry Coffin wrote for many singers and groups.
4. Ms. Waldman's wrote a lot of songs for others, but this one, a favorite from the mid-eighties, is all hers.
5. Saw these guys live in a long-gone club, Crosscurrents, in 1986 with Scratch Acid and Big Black. We were hanging with our buddies Jeff Pezzoti, John Haggerty, and Pierre Kezcy (also known as Naked Raygun). I remember that the guitar player for Killdozer was wearing a Motorhead t-shirt. For pants.
6. I'm not a big jazz fan, but I love Pat Metheny's American Garage album.
7. I'm not a big rap fan, but I love this song.
8. Mike Bloomfield was busy in 1965, playing lead guitar on two iconic albums, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's self-titled debut album
9. The Young Rascals taking a slightly psychedlic turn.
10. My friend Ron was already one of my best friends, but turning me on to Bauhaus was a bonus.