A day with Nurse Jackie

I opened a Bad Boys II DVD a few days ago while internally debating whether to take a shower or to hose myself off in the kitchen sink. I remember wondering why the fuck I put Bad Boys II on my Netflix queue, but figured, if I have the thing, I might as well review it. Unfortunately, it appears that I dreamt receiving Bad Boys II. Not only is it not in my shit mail pile. Netflix is telling me I never ordered it.

I did, however, order Nurse Jackie, a TV show about a saintly and flawed nurse whose interests include organ donation, child-rearing, and pharmacology. Each episode is a single day in Nurse Jackie's world. The title role is played by Edie Falco, best known as a wheelchair saleswoman in Jenifer (2001). I know I'm way late on the Nurse Jackie party wagon, but your mom won't pay for Showtime so it's not like you've ever seen it.
 
 
·       The pilot starts with Nurse Jackie reciting that TS Eliot line about the patient etherized upon a table. Eliot wrote that when he was 22. Did you know that? At 22, Eliot had both written a masterpiece and cultivated a nice British accent, like Madonna. At 22, I was trying really hard to quit sucking my thumb. Minus one point for making me feel bad about myself.
 
·       From the opening montage, it is clear that Nurse Jackie loves her pain pills. I like this about her, especially because Falco is sober in real life, which means we'll never get loaded and breakdance in an impromptu street musical. At least now I can daydream about popping pills with Nurse Jackie, although even when she's high, she's still kind of grumpy. Speaking of high, composing an above medium movie review requires several accessories, one of which is marijuana and another of which is a vessel for smoking it.
 
·       Nurse Jackie's first casualty of the day is a bike messenger who was hit by a car and dies of a subdural hematoma, which means that your brain swells up so fast that your gray matter leaks out of your ears and you have to get hearing aids.
 
·       A racist joke! Nurse Jackie called a brown nurse Mohammad. Mohammad is one fine gay with a method technique lisp and the perfect floppy wrist. His real name is Tom.
 
·       Impressions thus far: Nurse Jackie is a smart marshmallow. Besides knowing how to recognize a subdural hematoma, she tells her new intern—who wears a scrunchy and pink scrubs with puppies on them—that nice ain't shit, which I agree with, mostly because I'm not nice. I'm fun, which is more important than being nice, unless you are my ex-girlfriend, who thought it was neither fun nor nice to take her Republican father to a gay club when he said he wanted to spend some time getting to know me.
 
·       Nurse Jackie is on the same network as Dexter, a Showtime hit about a serial killer starring Michael C. Hall. I think my friend Harvey played darts with him once. You know the girl who plays Dexter's annoying and mildly brain-damaged but sexy sister? She and Michael C. Hall are married in real life, which still seems like incest.
 
·       This is a hospital drama without hospital drama. No one is covered in blood or missing a limb or even hollering in the corridors. When people die, it's not even dramatic. There are no kids bleeding out and mothers flat-lining and masked nurses passing scalpels to handsome doctors. There is no running through corridors. Turns out hospital scenes without music are just kind of sad.
 
·       Oooh. It's 4:20! Literally.
 
·       Nurse Jackie goes home after her shift and it turns out she has a husband and kids. This is important because Nurse Jackie is doing the pharmacist at the hospital, although their sex scene looked so cold and dry it made my vagina shrivel up. I wonder if the pharmacist knows that she's married. She takes her ring off at work. She could just be doing him for the Percoset, but they seem to love each other in an I love you sort of way. Besides, her husband looks like a fag.
 
·       Her voice-over at the end is a kind of prayer: Make me good, God, but not yet, which I completely understand because I want a job and a house and an Asian baby and a Prius, but first I want to pop pills and abuse interns and fuck the pharmacist.
 
Episode Two: Sweet 'n All
 
·       Episode two starts with Nurse Jackie making chair love to her faggy husband after cutting his hair in the family kitchen. He's topless; she's in scrubs. I wonder if she ever boned the pharmacist and her faggy husband on the same day. This is fine as long as you shower in between.
 
·       Nurse Jackie's making lunch for her kids—peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Banana. That is an extremely difficult word to spell. So is extremely. Now I'm hungry. Back soon.
 
·       I forgot to pause the DVD when I went to the kitchen so I'm just gonna start from here. Nurse Jackie and her faggy husband are having a moment. Not sure what it's about but they look happy. I wonder if she ever forgets whom she's having a moment with.
 
·       When I watch Weeds, I want to smoke pot, and when I watch the L Word, I want to have gay sex, and when I watch Nurse Jackie, I want to snort pills. Good work, Showtime.
 
·       Nurse Jackie has a hot British doctor friend who is twice Edie's size and, perhaps because her voice isn't both lispy and nasal, is twice as hot. She's like an Amazonian from the Home Counties. They meet outside the hospital before work and the friend says, "Ring check," and Nurse Jackie looks sheepish and takes her wedding ring off. I guess the pharmacist doesn't know about the faggy husband after all.
 
·       The chubby intern with the scrunchy brought cupcakes to soften Nurse Jackie up. I wish an intern would bring my cupcakes right now. Not an intern with a scrunchy, though.
 
·       Another fag nurse. Fag count: Fag nurse Mohammad, other fag nurse, Nurse Jackie's fag husband, and Edie Falco (proof: short hair, adopted children, cancer).
 
·       Nurse Jackie's boss just took her packet of Sweet&Low, which is really a packet of crushed up Percoset, and put it in her coffee.
 
·       The lighting kind of looks like soap opera lighting. I failed ballroom dancing my first year of college because Passions was on during class. Seems like Nurse Jackie's hair was a lot shorter in the pilot.
 
·       I really want cupcakes. I should have picked up cupcake mix at Food Lion. People who shop at the co-op are way more attractive than people who shop at Food Lion. Nurse Jackie's boss is back and she is fucked up on Sweet&Low.
 
·       I have to get my pap smeared tomorrow. I hope the doctor has dainty hands.
 
·       Work is over and Nurse Jackie says goodbye to her pharmacist and goes home to the fam. One of her kids looks like my twin sister. I mean, looks like my twin sister did when we were kids. She's cuter than me but I have more friends.
 
·       Show's over. Cupcakes.
 
One hour later
 
·       I got brownie mix instead of cupcakes, the kind without corn syrup that are less likely to give you a mom ass but also aren't that good. While I was at Food Lion, I saw this girl I made out with a while ago. I was so drunk that I left her house and lay down in a neighbor's yard and hoped anyone walking by thought I was stargazing. I put my sunglasses on in the cereal aisle and a played a game I like to call I’m too blind to see you but not blind enough for a guide dog. The brownies aren't too bad.