As anyone who has been a careful reader of this blog (or anyone who is a friend of mine and listens to a damn thing I say) is probably aware, Mr Polanski is the director of my favorite movie of all time. And I was sorta vaguely aware that he had had sex with a very young teenage girl and that was why he couldn't come back into the US. But, really, I wasn't all that up to speed on the details: I figured it was "statutory rape", not "rape." Not that I'm excusing anyone for having sex with a thirteen year old, mind, but I guess my (again vague) thoughts about the matter were more along the lines of "oh, those wacky Europeans and their dissolute ways" and "oh, the 70s, such a weird and different time."
[I think it's very hard for people significantly younger than me, people who weren't teenagers in the mid to late 70s, to understand how much more adult we were allowed to be. I lost my virginity when I was 15 and, at the time, I felt like, yeah, I was a young adult, not a child. I had a job. I'd been basically getting myself anywhere I needed to go the vast majority of time, alone or with friends, on foot or by public transportation since I was 13. With both my parents working, I took myself to my dental and medical appointments. When my grandmother was ill and recuperating from surgery, I was expected to help take care of her, and I did. When I was fifteen, I was treated like I was smart and responsible enough to be...smart and responsible. And so I was. (For the most part.) And with the being expected to act like a young adult, came the perks of being treated like a young adult, both societally (easily able to obtain birth control without parental permission, frex) and personally (like my future in/ex-laws, without a second thought, buying me mixed drinks when I was 16 and we all went out for dinner.) None of that was unusual. It really was a different time with different attitudes. So, what I'm saying is, my vague impression of the Polanski situation was, well, if she was 13 but he thought she was 15, no one in 1976 was denying that 15 year olds had sexual feelings, and while I personally would have thought the idea of having sex with a 40 year old guy was absolutely vomitous when I was fifteen, that doesn't mean everyone felt that way...]
Except! Except now, in reading the facts, I realize that my understanding of the case was totally wrong. It doesn't matter how old she was or how old he thought she was. He drugged her. He forced her, even though she repeatedly told him no and asked him to stop. It doesn't matter if she was 13 or 16 or 25 or 45. He raped her. He's a rapist. Case closed. No excuse for that. Throw him in jail.
Except! Except I find myself deeply conflicted on what I feel about putting these old men in jail proves or solves or accomplishes. I feel the same way about the FBI and Whitey Bulger...I mean, I *know* he's murderous scum, but really? Really? We still want to expend all that time and effort and money to catch him and put him away, knowing if we do, he'll die, sooner rather than later? I dunno. I guess I don't feel the need to exact revenge and punish people as much as I feel the need to protect society by putting away people who are still actually a threat. Do I think Roman or Whitey is gonna do anything anyone needs to be worried about at this point in life? No, not really.
But in any case? The fact that the guy made good movies doesn't enter into it. That he shouldn't go to prison because he's an important artist? WTF?
Okay. That's all I've got to say about that. for now.
xoxo
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
today's misc
1.) Listen. I remember when I was, y'know, 20 and sometimes had to ransack the house for loose change before I left just to have enough money to get where I was going. Really, I empathize. I do. But when you get on a bus in the morning, a bus chock full o' people going to work and school and appointments and so forth, and you are trying to add three dollars to your Charlie card in *dimes*, and the bus driver will not resume driving until you have finished paying, I might just give you the evil eye. Just sayin'.
2.) Oh, Andrea, where were you going in such a damn hurry on your day off? Glad you asked. I was going to visit M2 and give her a massage. It has been so long since I saw M2 in person that she had not yet seen my Carla Bruni hair. Can you imagine? Anyway, I got a thumbs up on the hair and a thumbs up on the massage (even though, to my shame, we gabbed through the whole thing--unavoidable, I guess, since we did not have the time to go out to lunch afterwards, M2 having another engagement).
3.) But we did have time to take the dog out for a quick walk afterwards to rap up our conversation and we ended up at my second favorite Whole Foods in the world, which may have leapfrogged back into first place when I realized, omg, they sell alcohol! So not only did I get olives and fruit salad and macaroons, I got talked into a new red wine by the Wine Guy. (I asked him about the Five Rivers I'm still looking for--though I was blanking on the name--but he had nothing from Paso Robles at all. But he assured me I'll like this. We'll see, Whole Foods Wine Guy, we'll see.)
4.) I also bought wasabi peas. I was trying to eat some on the T home, because I was hungry (see above: no lunch!) and it occurred to me that they are the perfect diet food, if you are looking for such a thing. I could only eat a few at time despite being starving because they were so freaking hot. Sinus-clearing-out, nose-running hot. Very yummy, but no big handfuls, lemme tell you. Then I was reading the label to see the nutritional values: yes, not many calories! But. "Product of China." Are you serious? I gotta check my snack foods for that, too? Really?
xoxo
Addendum!
5.) Oh, yeah, M2 said she and Mr M2 used 1-800-gotjunk prior to one of their moves and it was wonderful and well, well worth the expense. I'm gonna do it. Go, Andrea!
2.) Oh, Andrea, where were you going in such a damn hurry on your day off? Glad you asked. I was going to visit M2 and give her a massage. It has been so long since I saw M2 in person that she had not yet seen my Carla Bruni hair. Can you imagine? Anyway, I got a thumbs up on the hair and a thumbs up on the massage (even though, to my shame, we gabbed through the whole thing--unavoidable, I guess, since we did not have the time to go out to lunch afterwards, M2 having another engagement).
3.) But we did have time to take the dog out for a quick walk afterwards to rap up our conversation and we ended up at my second favorite Whole Foods in the world, which may have leapfrogged back into first place when I realized, omg, they sell alcohol! So not only did I get olives and fruit salad and macaroons, I got talked into a new red wine by the Wine Guy. (I asked him about the Five Rivers I'm still looking for--though I was blanking on the name--but he had nothing from Paso Robles at all. But he assured me I'll like this. We'll see, Whole Foods Wine Guy, we'll see.)
4.) I also bought wasabi peas. I was trying to eat some on the T home, because I was hungry (see above: no lunch!) and it occurred to me that they are the perfect diet food, if you are looking for such a thing. I could only eat a few at time despite being starving because they were so freaking hot. Sinus-clearing-out, nose-running hot. Very yummy, but no big handfuls, lemme tell you. Then I was reading the label to see the nutritional values: yes, not many calories! But. "Product of China." Are you serious? I gotta check my snack foods for that, too? Really?
xoxo
Addendum!
5.) Oh, yeah, M2 said she and Mr M2 used 1-800-gotjunk prior to one of their moves and it was wonderful and well, well worth the expense. I'm gonna do it. Go, Andrea!
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
updates and news items
1.) So I think I forgot to mention this, but the day of my surgery coincedentally was also the day of my dad's annual physical, booked the year before. Go figure. Since my dad had already cancelled the "extra" appointment they'd made for him in August because of his weight loss they were worried about (more about that later), he didn't want to reschedule it. I thought, when we realized that both these things were happening on the same day, he was going to ask my uncle to take him. But as the date got closer, I could tell he wasn't feeling comfortable about that. He wants someone to go in the room with him, and chances are, my uncle wouldn't do that. So since the Benevolent L had already asked me if I was going to need any help the day of, or after my surgery, and I had declined, I asked her, instead, if she'd take my dad to his appointment.
Now, that, that, is a friend. It's one thing to ask someone for a ride home from the hospital or to see that you make it into your bed post surgery, and it's another to ask them to accompany my dad anywhere. Nevertheless, she stepped up to the plate for me. And she actually got a kick out of my dad's doc, who is a very chatty sort. They discussed how wonderful I am, and they discussed the doctor's old college roommate who went into the same line of work as L, and oh, I guess several other topics. And my dad was pronounced fine. In fact, he not only put back on the weight he'd lost, he'd gained more. I knew this, even though we'd stopped with the home weighing. How did I know? Because he had a pair of pants that I'd bought him in the spring, a pair of pants with the tags still on, that he'd been saving for a special occasion, like, y'know, his physical. He did not try them on again until, yes, the night before his appointment at 10 pm or so. At which point they didn't button. Head->desk, as they say. So L had to take him to his appointment in old, crappy pants. (He does not like me to buy him clothes because, and I quote, "I'm going to die soon.") But with the weighing, they also measured him. And he has lost three inches in height from what he was as a young man, strengthening my resolve to buy some gravity boots and start hanging upside down 15 minutes a day. I cannot afford to lose three inches in height. I can't reach my top cabinets *now*.
2.) One of the things I'd been recently freaking out about, especially in panic attack mode, is that starting some time in August, probably during that long stretch of hot and humid weather we had, I noticed my basement was smelling particularly musty and disgusting, and on occasion, especially in the evenings, I could smell it through the door in the corner of my kitchen. Well, naturally, being me, I catastrophised this into "OMG, my cellar must be full of toxic mold and the EPA will condemn my house" or something. Of course there was no mold visible anywhere, there was no visible dampness anywhere (it's been ages, like years, since we got any water down there at all, not even in the torrential nonstop rains of June; my pump's been working soopah), and I made my dad clean some of his junk out, because I was afraid he had wet rags mildewing down there. I also cleaned the carpet on the stairs going down into the basement one day in an anxiety freak out, hitting myself in the head with the vacuum cleaner in the process (but we don't need to talk about that), because I was afraid it was the carpet that smelled bad.
And then, I did some research and found out you can buy portable basement dehumidifiers, read the reviews and testimonials about them (including fucking tons of people who said "my basement smelled disgustingly musty and then I started using this and now the stench is gone! woohoo!", and then ordered one that had good reviews and a nice sale price and free supersaver shipping from Amazon. It came this past Wednesday. Well, at that point I wasn't supposed to be lifting anything over ten pounds, so it stayed in its box. But last night I was up to taking it out of the box and hooking it up. When I started, the humidity level down there was 65% (according to the humidifier) and after running it for just the first hour, it was down to 60%, and I swear, it smelled fresher already. D confirmed this for me. It stayed at 60% for a long time--I can't help it, I kept running down to look, it was fascinating--but first thing this morning, after running all night it was 55%. From what I can glean on the internet, optimal humidity indoors is about 40%, so that's what I'm going to shoot for.
Anyway, I love my new toy and I can't wait to get home from work and see what it says the humidity is now!
3.) And just a quick question. Have any of you used 1-800-gotjunk? I've got a bunch of stuff that I really need to get rid of in the basement and the garage that can't go out on the curb, can't be donated to charity, is not really worth the hassle of freecycling, and that I have absolutely no way of getting to the dump (and that would need to be paid for to be dumped anyway). It seems fairly expensive, but also very convenient and easy (you can schedule it online as soon as next day, they give you a two hour window of time, you don't need to pack anything up or haul it out of the basement, etc, just point at it and say, "yeah, take that..." They seem to have a very good reputation (other than "oh, yeah, a little pricey"). I'm thinking that to suck it up and just pay them would take a big weight off my shoulders, capice? But if anyone's had personal experience, I'd love to know.
I think that's it for now.
xoxo
Now, that, that, is a friend. It's one thing to ask someone for a ride home from the hospital or to see that you make it into your bed post surgery, and it's another to ask them to accompany my dad anywhere. Nevertheless, she stepped up to the plate for me. And she actually got a kick out of my dad's doc, who is a very chatty sort. They discussed how wonderful I am, and they discussed the doctor's old college roommate who went into the same line of work as L, and oh, I guess several other topics. And my dad was pronounced fine. In fact, he not only put back on the weight he'd lost, he'd gained more. I knew this, even though we'd stopped with the home weighing. How did I know? Because he had a pair of pants that I'd bought him in the spring, a pair of pants with the tags still on, that he'd been saving for a special occasion, like, y'know, his physical. He did not try them on again until, yes, the night before his appointment at 10 pm or so. At which point they didn't button. Head->desk, as they say. So L had to take him to his appointment in old, crappy pants. (He does not like me to buy him clothes because, and I quote, "I'm going to die soon.") But with the weighing, they also measured him. And he has lost three inches in height from what he was as a young man, strengthening my resolve to buy some gravity boots and start hanging upside down 15 minutes a day. I cannot afford to lose three inches in height. I can't reach my top cabinets *now*.
2.) One of the things I'd been recently freaking out about, especially in panic attack mode, is that starting some time in August, probably during that long stretch of hot and humid weather we had, I noticed my basement was smelling particularly musty and disgusting, and on occasion, especially in the evenings, I could smell it through the door in the corner of my kitchen. Well, naturally, being me, I catastrophised this into "OMG, my cellar must be full of toxic mold and the EPA will condemn my house" or something. Of course there was no mold visible anywhere, there was no visible dampness anywhere (it's been ages, like years, since we got any water down there at all, not even in the torrential nonstop rains of June; my pump's been working soopah), and I made my dad clean some of his junk out, because I was afraid he had wet rags mildewing down there. I also cleaned the carpet on the stairs going down into the basement one day in an anxiety freak out, hitting myself in the head with the vacuum cleaner in the process (but we don't need to talk about that), because I was afraid it was the carpet that smelled bad.
And then, I did some research and found out you can buy portable basement dehumidifiers, read the reviews and testimonials about them (including fucking tons of people who said "my basement smelled disgustingly musty and then I started using this and now the stench is gone! woohoo!", and then ordered one that had good reviews and a nice sale price and free supersaver shipping from Amazon. It came this past Wednesday. Well, at that point I wasn't supposed to be lifting anything over ten pounds, so it stayed in its box. But last night I was up to taking it out of the box and hooking it up. When I started, the humidity level down there was 65% (according to the humidifier) and after running it for just the first hour, it was down to 60%, and I swear, it smelled fresher already. D confirmed this for me. It stayed at 60% for a long time--I can't help it, I kept running down to look, it was fascinating--but first thing this morning, after running all night it was 55%. From what I can glean on the internet, optimal humidity indoors is about 40%, so that's what I'm going to shoot for.
Anyway, I love my new toy and I can't wait to get home from work and see what it says the humidity is now!
3.) And just a quick question. Have any of you used 1-800-gotjunk? I've got a bunch of stuff that I really need to get rid of in the basement and the garage that can't go out on the curb, can't be donated to charity, is not really worth the hassle of freecycling, and that I have absolutely no way of getting to the dump (and that would need to be paid for to be dumped anyway). It seems fairly expensive, but also very convenient and easy (you can schedule it online as soon as next day, they give you a two hour window of time, you don't need to pack anything up or haul it out of the basement, etc, just point at it and say, "yeah, take that..." They seem to have a very good reputation (other than "oh, yeah, a little pricey"). I'm thinking that to suck it up and just pay them would take a big weight off my shoulders, capice? But if anyone's had personal experience, I'd love to know.
I think that's it for now.
xoxo
Friday, September 25, 2009
it's official
The anesthesia is *still* kicking my ass.
Yesterday I went to work for four hours, feeling relatively chipper. After 12 hours sleep one night and nine the next, I figured I'd slept all the drugs out of my system. But damn if after the first three hours I wasn't starting to feel like I got hit by a truck again. And this was after having the easy workday that our lil MILF had provided for me. (I know for some/most/all of you, sitting at your computer all day *is* work, but for me, I never feel like it counts if I haven't had to actually put my hands on some screaming babies or surly teenagers.)
I went home and made dinner and after eating and sitting awhile, I started to get my second wind. So I cleaned up the kitchen and did some laundry and baked brownies. Went to bed feeling okay, slept six or seven hours, and woke up feeling like, "Alrighty! *Now* I've slept off all the drugs." Four or five hours later? Ready for another nap, thanks!
M1 assures me this is how she has always felt after general anesthesia (and she's had a bunch of surgeries) to the point where she bargains for a spinal now any time she can get one. Maybe us short bosomy Polish ladies are especially slow to metabolize narcotics? I dunno.
Someone do the research and get back to me. I'm snoozing.
xoxo
Yesterday I went to work for four hours, feeling relatively chipper. After 12 hours sleep one night and nine the next, I figured I'd slept all the drugs out of my system. But damn if after the first three hours I wasn't starting to feel like I got hit by a truck again. And this was after having the easy workday that our lil MILF had provided for me. (I know for some/most/all of you, sitting at your computer all day *is* work, but for me, I never feel like it counts if I haven't had to actually put my hands on some screaming babies or surly teenagers.)
I went home and made dinner and after eating and sitting awhile, I started to get my second wind. So I cleaned up the kitchen and did some laundry and baked brownies. Went to bed feeling okay, slept six or seven hours, and woke up feeling like, "Alrighty! *Now* I've slept off all the drugs." Four or five hours later? Ready for another nap, thanks!
M1 assures me this is how she has always felt after general anesthesia (and she's had a bunch of surgeries) to the point where she bargains for a spinal now any time she can get one. Maybe us short bosomy Polish ladies are especially slow to metabolize narcotics? I dunno.
Someone do the research and get back to me. I'm snoozing.
xoxo
sorry, so sorrryyyy
About a year and a half or two years after we separated, my ex-husband became involved with a woman whom he would go on to live with for seven years or so. She (and her husband) and kids were neighbors of his, and she and S were "friends" at first. Whether or not they were the kind of friends that were in each other's pants before she actually left her husband, I dunno for sure. My sense was always "yes" even though S denied it. But we know what a big lying liar he was/is anyway, right, kids? Right!
In any case, her husband was purportedly an alcoholic, and at some point--probably when she realized she had S hooked enough that she wasn't going to be alone with three kids if she made her move--she kicked him out. Or tried to kick him out. There ended up being lots of drama and threats and maybe some actual physical violence. But in any case, she ended up, fearful, having S take her and the kids out of her marital abode and to a motel one night. I remember this clearly because she and I were about the same size and S borrowed some of my clothes for her because she'd left her house with basically none of her belongings.
Eventually her husband came to the realization that he was better off without her and the kids and stopped contesting any legal proceedings, etc, and as I said, she and S were a couple for a fairly long time. But during the initial battling, S looked at me one day in the midst of telling me all about it and asked--I swear, literally quizzically--"Was I that much of an asshole to you?" And when I confirmed that he indeed had been, he apologized. It was as if a fucking lightbulb had gone on over his head. Ohhhhh...
I think it was the beginning of his being a fairly decent human being for a few years. Note the "fairly." Note also that when this woman eventually hurt him, betrayed him, and left him, that was the end of that, and he became the kind of completely selfish person who didn't visit his own son in the hospital for 2 1/2 months that he is today. Not that I'm, like, bitter or anything.
But I was reminded of this recently when a friend divulged to me a fairly horrific bit of abuse she was subjected to in a previous relationship. My reaction was "Well, thank god you got rid of him." My friend said that, yeah, her ex didn't understand why they "couldn't at least be friends." So I asked her if he had ever apologized to her or at least acknowledged that what he'd done was wrong. And she said, no, he maintained that she drove him to it. "Well, fuck him, then," I said. And it occurred to me then, and now, that while talk is cheap, I do not underestimate the power of the honest admission of culpability.
I've got nothing to apologize for yet today. That could change!
xoxo
In any case, her husband was purportedly an alcoholic, and at some point--probably when she realized she had S hooked enough that she wasn't going to be alone with three kids if she made her move--she kicked him out. Or tried to kick him out. There ended up being lots of drama and threats and maybe some actual physical violence. But in any case, she ended up, fearful, having S take her and the kids out of her marital abode and to a motel one night. I remember this clearly because she and I were about the same size and S borrowed some of my clothes for her because she'd left her house with basically none of her belongings.
Eventually her husband came to the realization that he was better off without her and the kids and stopped contesting any legal proceedings, etc, and as I said, she and S were a couple for a fairly long time. But during the initial battling, S looked at me one day in the midst of telling me all about it and asked--I swear, literally quizzically--"Was I that much of an asshole to you?" And when I confirmed that he indeed had been, he apologized. It was as if a fucking lightbulb had gone on over his head. Ohhhhh...
I think it was the beginning of his being a fairly decent human being for a few years. Note the "fairly." Note also that when this woman eventually hurt him, betrayed him, and left him, that was the end of that, and he became the kind of completely selfish person who didn't visit his own son in the hospital for 2 1/2 months that he is today. Not that I'm, like, bitter or anything.
But I was reminded of this recently when a friend divulged to me a fairly horrific bit of abuse she was subjected to in a previous relationship. My reaction was "Well, thank god you got rid of him." My friend said that, yeah, her ex didn't understand why they "couldn't at least be friends." So I asked her if he had ever apologized to her or at least acknowledged that what he'd done was wrong. And she said, no, he maintained that she drove him to it. "Well, fuck him, then," I said. And it occurred to me then, and now, that while talk is cheap, I do not underestimate the power of the honest admission of culpability.
I've got nothing to apologize for yet today. That could change!
xoxo
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
hoarders a&e, and related thoughts
So, there's this show on A&E called "Hoarders" which I've watched a couple of episodes of online. It's a spinoff, I think, of some other A&E show...Intervention, perhaps?...and the title says it all. Now, how people come to be on this reality show is that they are facing serious, serious consequences for their squalor and clutter (about to be evicted, children being taken away by social services, spouse leaving, etc) and they agree to be filmed in return for professional help. And it is skeery, because most of them--at least in the episodes I've seen--who are actual hoarders seem to be beyond help.
You've had your children taken away, you have a professional cleaning/junk removal crew plus a therapist plus an organizer (for free!) at your disposal, and you *still* cannot decide whether you should throw away a Big Gulp cup from your pile o' trash? That level of mental illness combined with lack of awareness of same? It makes your mouth drop open, it does.
The one true "success" story I saw was a gentleman who lived in a little apartment for formerly homeless people who was facing eviction if he didn't clean it out. They never came out and said it, but there were plentiful clues that he most probably has schizophrenia, and it was easy for me to understand what his story was: he'd probably had a significant psychotic or depressive episode from either being off meds or on meds that weren't working, his living situation went to hell, then once he was better (and he was obviously better: clear, lucid, and with appropriate affect) he still didn't have the initiative, self-help skills, or wherewithal to get everything back to clean and orderly. [There's a post way back in the beginning of this blog called "shame" that details what happened in *my* house when D was very very ill. Psychosis does not generally equal cleanliness.] But once the gentleman got the A&E crew in, he was just so grateful and cooperative and psyched, and he pitched right in, cleaning and purging, no excuses and whining about why he *couldn't* throw away the fifty 2-liter Diet Pepsi bottles surrounding his bed or a magazine from 2002. You could tell the organizer lady just loved him, too: she surprised him with a new little desk/office area in his tiny apartment to put his computer on, so he could write. It was very touching.
So, yeah, this guy was probably the most clinically "crazy" of the people profiled, but he was way, way more sane than the ones who are true hoarders. One of the people on the show I watched tonight was a local fellow, from Beverly. (Shout out!) He hoards hardware and construction supplies and books and magazines. His live-in girlfriend of 25 years *broke her arm* falling down the stairs nine months before filming because he had so much stuff piled up on them that he wouldn't let anyone move, and he still hadn't moved any of the shit. Now, I dunno, but when you are more concerned about your piles o' crap than your life partner, that's pretty crazy. And hard, frankly, to be sympathetic about.
And, lemme tell you, the reactions to this show on the interwebs ain't showing much sympathy for most of the participants. The commentary on TWoP, for example, is pretty vicious. I try hard to remind myself that these people are, indeed, mentally ill, as much as I am, as much as D is, and if I would like people to have some compassion for people like me and D, I should likewise extend my compassion towards these Hoarders participants. It's just that putting *things* ahead of your partner's safety or your ability to care for your children seems so counter to any normal standards of human decency. It's so hard not to judge that.
But I know people judge depression the same way. I've seen people say what a selfish and narcissistic disease it is, and seen people get really, really angry and frustrated with depressed people. And like I know from experience that depressed people can't just snap out of it, I intellectually know that hoarder lady can't just throw away that fucking big gulp cup without trauma.
So, whatever. I dunno. It's just a very fascinating pathology to me. The show's a trainwreck you can't look away from.
xoxo
You've had your children taken away, you have a professional cleaning/junk removal crew plus a therapist plus an organizer (for free!) at your disposal, and you *still* cannot decide whether you should throw away a Big Gulp cup from your pile o' trash? That level of mental illness combined with lack of awareness of same? It makes your mouth drop open, it does.
The one true "success" story I saw was a gentleman who lived in a little apartment for formerly homeless people who was facing eviction if he didn't clean it out. They never came out and said it, but there were plentiful clues that he most probably has schizophrenia, and it was easy for me to understand what his story was: he'd probably had a significant psychotic or depressive episode from either being off meds or on meds that weren't working, his living situation went to hell, then once he was better (and he was obviously better: clear, lucid, and with appropriate affect) he still didn't have the initiative, self-help skills, or wherewithal to get everything back to clean and orderly. [There's a post way back in the beginning of this blog called "shame" that details what happened in *my* house when D was very very ill. Psychosis does not generally equal cleanliness.] But once the gentleman got the A&E crew in, he was just so grateful and cooperative and psyched, and he pitched right in, cleaning and purging, no excuses and whining about why he *couldn't* throw away the fifty 2-liter Diet Pepsi bottles surrounding his bed or a magazine from 2002. You could tell the organizer lady just loved him, too: she surprised him with a new little desk/office area in his tiny apartment to put his computer on, so he could write. It was very touching.
So, yeah, this guy was probably the most clinically "crazy" of the people profiled, but he was way, way more sane than the ones who are true hoarders. One of the people on the show I watched tonight was a local fellow, from Beverly. (Shout out!) He hoards hardware and construction supplies and books and magazines. His live-in girlfriend of 25 years *broke her arm* falling down the stairs nine months before filming because he had so much stuff piled up on them that he wouldn't let anyone move, and he still hadn't moved any of the shit. Now, I dunno, but when you are more concerned about your piles o' crap than your life partner, that's pretty crazy. And hard, frankly, to be sympathetic about.
And, lemme tell you, the reactions to this show on the interwebs ain't showing much sympathy for most of the participants. The commentary on TWoP, for example, is pretty vicious. I try hard to remind myself that these people are, indeed, mentally ill, as much as I am, as much as D is, and if I would like people to have some compassion for people like me and D, I should likewise extend my compassion towards these Hoarders participants. It's just that putting *things* ahead of your partner's safety or your ability to care for your children seems so counter to any normal standards of human decency. It's so hard not to judge that.
But I know people judge depression the same way. I've seen people say what a selfish and narcissistic disease it is, and seen people get really, really angry and frustrated with depressed people. And like I know from experience that depressed people can't just snap out of it, I intellectually know that hoarder lady can't just throw away that fucking big gulp cup without trauma.
So, whatever. I dunno. It's just a very fascinating pathology to me. The show's a trainwreck you can't look away from.
xoxo
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
goddammit
Jim Carroll died eleven days ago and no one told me.
I might need to go back to reading the Globe, despite my objections to same. I'm obviously missing shit.
It's too late
To fall in love
with Sharon Tate
But it's too soon
To ask me for the words
I want carved on my tomb
Aw, Jim. RIP, man. Freshman year in college would have been a whole different mental experience for me without your book.
xoxo
I might need to go back to reading the Globe, despite my objections to same. I'm obviously missing shit.
It's too late
To fall in love
with Sharon Tate
But it's too soon
To ask me for the words
I want carved on my tomb
Aw, Jim. RIP, man. Freshman year in college would have been a whole different mental experience for me without your book.
xoxo
i have to tell this story
I already related this to Mr Barma, but I figure I need to share with the class. Because I know you all live to hear my little anecdotes. Ha!
So, this morning was War Against My Uterus, the Final Showdown (we hope). By which I mean to say, this morning was my "procedure", which is supposed to fix me. I was in preop, having various people come in and do things to me or for me, or to introduce themselves, or having me sign stuff. You know the drill. In comes my anesthesiologist, a middle-aged Chinese gentleman with quite the heavy accent, whom I learn is Dr Wong. Close behind him is the rest of the anesthesia team. Dr Wong apparently missed his true calling as a stand-up comedian when he decided, instead, to put people out for a living.
He says, as the three of them crowd into my little cubicle, "Do you think you're going to have enough people taking care of you? You know, you pay for me, these two come free. It used to be, you pay for me you get him ::points to other guy:: free, now you get both. How's this hospital making any money?" As I said to Mr Barma, he was pretty hilarious, and that was *before* I got any drugs.
I also predicted that when Mr Barma has his upcoming "procedure" (which has nothing to do with his uterus!), his anesthesia team probably won't be as entertaining. But who knows? Maybe they're all like that. Anesthesiologists are well known to have access to all the good drugs. Maybe you want to invite them to all your parties. Maybe they're guaranteed to regale your dinner guests with funny stories and witty repartee over cocktails.
But if any of those funny stories have anything to do with what they do to, or say about, the patients after they're out, I don't wanna know. As I was telling the Benevolent L, I went into the OR wearing only a johnny, and when I woke up, I was wearing a johnny and a pair of funky mesh underwear. Which, y'know, on reflection, is the *opposite* of what often happens when a woman is unconscious. Just sayin'.
Peace out!
xoxo
So, this morning was War Against My Uterus, the Final Showdown (we hope). By which I mean to say, this morning was my "procedure", which is supposed to fix me. I was in preop, having various people come in and do things to me or for me, or to introduce themselves, or having me sign stuff. You know the drill. In comes my anesthesiologist, a middle-aged Chinese gentleman with quite the heavy accent, whom I learn is Dr Wong. Close behind him is the rest of the anesthesia team. Dr Wong apparently missed his true calling as a stand-up comedian when he decided, instead, to put people out for a living.
He says, as the three of them crowd into my little cubicle, "Do you think you're going to have enough people taking care of you? You know, you pay for me, these two come free. It used to be, you pay for me you get him ::points to other guy:: free, now you get both. How's this hospital making any money?" As I said to Mr Barma, he was pretty hilarious, and that was *before* I got any drugs.
I also predicted that when Mr Barma has his upcoming "procedure" (which has nothing to do with his uterus!), his anesthesia team probably won't be as entertaining. But who knows? Maybe they're all like that. Anesthesiologists are well known to have access to all the good drugs. Maybe you want to invite them to all your parties. Maybe they're guaranteed to regale your dinner guests with funny stories and witty repartee over cocktails.
But if any of those funny stories have anything to do with what they do to, or say about, the patients after they're out, I don't wanna know. As I was telling the Benevolent L, I went into the OR wearing only a johnny, and when I woke up, I was wearing a johnny and a pair of funky mesh underwear. Which, y'know, on reflection, is the *opposite* of what often happens when a woman is unconscious. Just sayin'.
Peace out!
xoxo
Monday, September 21, 2009
the women, the remake
Oh, god, Sex and the City has a lot to answer for.
I'm not sure I can sit through another movie or TV show about female friendship and grrrl power in which the "girls" are over-privileged middle-aged, or almost middle-aged, women obsessed with designer clothes*** who have conveniently non-taxing, glamorous careers in which they angst about their jobs but apparently never actually do more than two hours of work a week. Yeah, I know, I know, it's a fairy tale. But instead of believing if we're virtuous and beautiful, we get Prince Charming, we're supposed to believe if we're shallow and self-obsessed, it's all okay as long as we love ourselves, our girlfriends, and our Laboutins. (Which I really don't think is any less harmful, but whatevs.)
Oh, Andrea, you know that, having rejected most of the values and morals of the dominant culture, these movies are just going to annoy you, and yet you watch. Do you *enjoy* seeing "empowering" scenes like the one in which Meg Ryan, her fashion collection having been bankrolled by her rich mommy, rejects the offer from the buyer at Saks, an offer which anyone actually *really* starting a business would sell their soul or firstborn child for, because "she doesn't want it to get that big"? Oh, yes, rich women playing at being dilettante artistes, that's feminism for you. Or the heartwarming scene in which Bette Midler (oh, Bette) in her little cameo role as the Wise Pot-Smoking Woman advises Meg that the solution to her problems is to be more selfish. Yup, yup, *that's* a message Americans in 2008/2009 need to hear because none of us ever thought of that, omg!!!!
And the clothes in this movie aren't even that good. And Meg? When you straighten your hair as you change your life? You look like Jennifer Anniston on a bad day. This movie doesn't even cut it as eye candy.
***speaking of designer clothes? I was at Marshalls this weekend and they had these little BCBG tunics/shifts in a variety of different colors/prints and they were about $30. And they were quite cute and the kind of thing I could wear to work on a day I wanted to look nice. The original tags were still on them, saying manufacturers' suggested price was $280. Wow, I thought. These are almost 90% off.. That's a good deal! Except, you know what? They were polyester and made ::shock!:: in China. In other words, they were cheap crap and if you paid $280 for one because it was BCBG, you should have your head examined. So I didn't buy one. Instead, I went to Bed Bath and Beyond, where I also didn't buy an $8 OXO hair strainer thingy for my tub, even though it looked all high-tech and awesome, because it was also made in China and, seriously, how ergonomic does a drain plugger thingy need to be? Another ripoff.
All right. I'm done.
xoxo
I'm not sure I can sit through another movie or TV show about female friendship and grrrl power in which the "girls" are over-privileged middle-aged, or almost middle-aged, women obsessed with designer clothes*** who have conveniently non-taxing, glamorous careers in which they angst about their jobs but apparently never actually do more than two hours of work a week. Yeah, I know, I know, it's a fairy tale. But instead of believing if we're virtuous and beautiful, we get Prince Charming, we're supposed to believe if we're shallow and self-obsessed, it's all okay as long as we love ourselves, our girlfriends, and our Laboutins. (Which I really don't think is any less harmful, but whatevs.)
Oh, Andrea, you know that, having rejected most of the values and morals of the dominant culture, these movies are just going to annoy you, and yet you watch. Do you *enjoy* seeing "empowering" scenes like the one in which Meg Ryan, her fashion collection having been bankrolled by her rich mommy, rejects the offer from the buyer at Saks, an offer which anyone actually *really* starting a business would sell their soul or firstborn child for, because "she doesn't want it to get that big"? Oh, yes, rich women playing at being dilettante artistes, that's feminism for you. Or the heartwarming scene in which Bette Midler (oh, Bette) in her little cameo role as the Wise Pot-Smoking Woman advises Meg that the solution to her problems is to be more selfish. Yup, yup, *that's* a message Americans in 2008/2009 need to hear because none of us ever thought of that, omg!!!!
And the clothes in this movie aren't even that good. And Meg? When you straighten your hair as you change your life? You look like Jennifer Anniston on a bad day. This movie doesn't even cut it as eye candy.
***speaking of designer clothes? I was at Marshalls this weekend and they had these little BCBG tunics/shifts in a variety of different colors/prints and they were about $30. And they were quite cute and the kind of thing I could wear to work on a day I wanted to look nice. The original tags were still on them, saying manufacturers' suggested price was $280. Wow, I thought. These are almost 90% off.. That's a good deal! Except, you know what? They were polyester and made ::shock!:: in China. In other words, they were cheap crap and if you paid $280 for one because it was BCBG, you should have your head examined. So I didn't buy one. Instead, I went to Bed Bath and Beyond, where I also didn't buy an $8 OXO hair strainer thingy for my tub, even though it looked all high-tech and awesome, because it was also made in China and, seriously, how ergonomic does a drain plugger thingy need to be? Another ripoff.
All right. I'm done.
xoxo
Saturday, September 19, 2009
and now for something completely different
I was lying in bed this morning, trying to motivate myself to get up and go to work, and I started thinking about why I am so blase about the Red Sox this year. They're obviously going to make the playoffs. And I am "meh." What's that all about?
And it came to me. The reason I am less than excited about them is that they've had so many guys coming and going. How many shortstops have we had? What's the starting rotation again? Who's that in the bullpen? Utility infielders, what what? There's been no cohesion, and thus no team identity. I just can't bring myself to care about Alex Gonzalez or Victor Martinez or What's-His-Face who's angling for Papelbon's job, no matter how good they are or how well they play. They just got here. We haven't had time to bond, man.
I root for the Sox because they're my team, and I root for the individual players that I like, like my Official Favorite Canadian, Mr Jason Bay, but when they get knocked off early in the playoffs this year, I'm not going to be crushed. And I'm not saying all these moves and trades and so forth don't give you a better baseball team, but a better baseball team and a baseball team your fans are really, really excited about aren't necessarily the same thing.
xoxo
And it came to me. The reason I am less than excited about them is that they've had so many guys coming and going. How many shortstops have we had? What's the starting rotation again? Who's that in the bullpen? Utility infielders, what what? There's been no cohesion, and thus no team identity. I just can't bring myself to care about Alex Gonzalez or Victor Martinez or What's-His-Face who's angling for Papelbon's job, no matter how good they are or how well they play. They just got here. We haven't had time to bond, man.
I root for the Sox because they're my team, and I root for the individual players that I like, like my Official Favorite Canadian, Mr Jason Bay, but when they get knocked off early in the playoffs this year, I'm not going to be crushed. And I'm not saying all these moves and trades and so forth don't give you a better baseball team, but a better baseball team and a baseball team your fans are really, really excited about aren't necessarily the same thing.
xoxo
Friday, September 18, 2009
walk this way
As a follow up to last night's post, you're gonna get more pointless stories of my youth. That'll teach you.
I went to Catholic elementary school, grades one to eight, in a very small school attached to the Polish church that my parents belonged to and my father actually attended. Being a very small and poor school, we did not have much in the way of actual amenities. Which was fine. They managed to teach me things like reading and grammar without amenities. (I know it's not immediately apparent in this blog, but I *can* write a perfectly grammatical sentence when I put my mind to it. Really.) But one of the amenities we did not have was a gym. We had a tiny schoolyard that they let us out to run around on at recess and lunch, and in bad weather, we just stayed in, got restless, and drove our teachers insane.
But at some point in my school career--I want to say around fourth grade, because I really don't remember it happening before then--someone in authority made the executive decision that we would take a stab at occasionally having "gym." What this worked out to was that on nice days, if our teachers were in the mood, they'd walk us to one of the two huge parks/fields about ten or fifteen minutes (of kid-speed walking) from the school. One of these was a city field; the other was owned by the local Big Corporation. (They actually connected, though they were in opposite directions. Imagine a giant square with my school at the lower right corner, the entrance of one park being at the upper right corner and the entrance of the other at the lower left corner, and the two parks connecting in an L shape. Got that?)
I don't remember much of any actual organized activity once we got to the park. The city park had a small playground with monkeybars and swings and a merry-go-round, so when we were still of an age to use that, we would. The boys would do whatever it is boys do when you let them go free-range. And definitely by seventh grade, the girls would mostly sit on the bleachers and talk about which boys were cute. But even so, even when our coolness dictated that we would sit in the bleachers and gossip and act bored rather than run about the field, we still got in that 20 or 30 minutes of walking during the school day, plus all the walking we did otherwise.
My point being, we loved it. We loved getting out of the school building during the middle of the day, getting some air, not feeling cooped up and having to just sit at our stupid desks. And kids don't mind walking as transportation. Kids generally like moving their bodies when they're given the chance. And frankly, our teachers liked it too. It gave them the opportunity not to teach when they didn't feel like it, they liked the fresh air on a nice day too, and it tired us the hell out and made us more docile when we went back. Win-win.
So I totally think that my 40-minute-walk during schooltime for elementary school kids is a viable tool in the War Against Fat America. Someone ought to put me in charge of running something. I'd straighten this country right out.
xoxo
I went to Catholic elementary school, grades one to eight, in a very small school attached to the Polish church that my parents belonged to and my father actually attended. Being a very small and poor school, we did not have much in the way of actual amenities. Which was fine. They managed to teach me things like reading and grammar without amenities. (I know it's not immediately apparent in this blog, but I *can* write a perfectly grammatical sentence when I put my mind to it. Really.) But one of the amenities we did not have was a gym. We had a tiny schoolyard that they let us out to run around on at recess and lunch, and in bad weather, we just stayed in, got restless, and drove our teachers insane.
But at some point in my school career--I want to say around fourth grade, because I really don't remember it happening before then--someone in authority made the executive decision that we would take a stab at occasionally having "gym." What this worked out to was that on nice days, if our teachers were in the mood, they'd walk us to one of the two huge parks/fields about ten or fifteen minutes (of kid-speed walking) from the school. One of these was a city field; the other was owned by the local Big Corporation. (They actually connected, though they were in opposite directions. Imagine a giant square with my school at the lower right corner, the entrance of one park being at the upper right corner and the entrance of the other at the lower left corner, and the two parks connecting in an L shape. Got that?)
I don't remember much of any actual organized activity once we got to the park. The city park had a small playground with monkeybars and swings and a merry-go-round, so when we were still of an age to use that, we would. The boys would do whatever it is boys do when you let them go free-range. And definitely by seventh grade, the girls would mostly sit on the bleachers and talk about which boys were cute. But even so, even when our coolness dictated that we would sit in the bleachers and gossip and act bored rather than run about the field, we still got in that 20 or 30 minutes of walking during the school day, plus all the walking we did otherwise.
My point being, we loved it. We loved getting out of the school building during the middle of the day, getting some air, not feeling cooped up and having to just sit at our stupid desks. And kids don't mind walking as transportation. Kids generally like moving their bodies when they're given the chance. And frankly, our teachers liked it too. It gave them the opportunity not to teach when they didn't feel like it, they liked the fresh air on a nice day too, and it tired us the hell out and made us more docile when we went back. Win-win.
So I totally think that my 40-minute-walk during schooltime for elementary school kids is a viable tool in the War Against Fat America. Someone ought to put me in charge of running something. I'd straighten this country right out.
xoxo
Thursday, September 17, 2009
*more* well-meaning, but...
Though I'm not really sure this is all that well-meaning, frankly. As I was cooking dinner tonight, I heard, from the other room, the local news telling me that schools in Massachusetts will now be required to give out BMI report cards to their students. (You can imagine me getting rageful already, right?)
First of all, the BMI is meaningless bullshit. For many reasons. But let's just take me, for one example. I was sitting in one of the many medical visits I've had recently, waiting, and I was perusing a BMI chart. And I was sorta surprised to see that I am about three pounds away from a BMI of 25 and that 25 is "overweight." (I'd thought that anything over 25 was classified overweight, meaning 26 and up, when actually it's anything 25 and up.) Well, I'm very sorry, but despite my bitching about my bulgy Polish catcher's thighs and my middle-aged no-longer-flat belly, I am only cosmetically fat. There is no way in fucking hell that I am three pounds away from omg! obesity epidemic! health-problem! fat. And I am a woman, and small-boned--if pretty muscular and as you all know big-boobed--so that a man or a larger-boned woman my height could be considered hovering on the cusp of OVERWEIGHT! FAT AMERICAN! is even more ridiculous. But it points up yet another point in how ridiculous using the BMI is: in 1998, they changed it, lowering the criteria for "overweight" from 27 to 25, and overnight, 25 million Americans (I looked it up)became officially overweight overnight. That's some crazy shit right there.
Second of all, even if they were using a measure of overweight for these poor schoolchildren that *was* valid, how exactly is giving them a report card about it supposed to change their weight in any way? How is it supposed to be anything but humiliating for the kids who "fail"? And how is it the business of the schools to "mark" children on anything other than their schoolwork and their effort towards their schoolwork? (Okay, I'll admit I personally am still traumatized by the fact that *I* got a bad grade on my report card in second grade for having a messy desk. Talk about humiliating. That messy desk did not impede my ability to get my work done, thankyouverymuch. Fuckers! Ha!) And do we think any of the little fat kids' parents can't look at them and *see* that they're overweight? And do we think that these children do not have PCPs who weigh and measure them at every visit and keep those handy-dandy growth charts in their files, and discuss what percentiles they are in with their parents? This is some more crazy shit right there.
How about instead of worrying about these kids' weights, we instead worry about their fitness? How about this? How about we mandate that they take 45 minutes out of every school day that it isn't pouring rain or snowing--they can give up 45 minutes of MCAS prep, because frankly the children of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ain't gonna end up smarter than those little Chinese kids across the globe, no matter how much standardized testing we torture them with, so we may as well give it up--and take those elementary school kids out of the school building for a nice forty minute walk. Rope 'em together, like the lil daycare kids, if you're worried about them wandering off or getting abducted.
Oh, that won't fly. Why? Well, for one reason, it would require the teachers and teaching assistants to take a daily 40 minute walk. Some of them would be happy to, yeah, of course. But the lazy-ass others? On the phone to the union, baby!
The other day Mr Indemnity forwarded the following link to me:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html
thinking it might be something I'd like to blog about. Well, can I tell you the thing about it that horrified me the most? The little story at the end about the woman who allowed her child to walk five houses down the street to visit a friend, and then was nonplussed and kind of worried about her own perceived parenting judgment when the playmate's parent drove her kid back, worrying about the child's safety walking for those five house lengths. No, nothing to do with the actual point of the article: the fact that the other mother *drove* five fucking houses. Are you serious? What.the.fuck.is.wrong.with.people? Who is so very lazy they need to drive the length of a block? A BMI report card ain't gonna help in a society where anyone thinks that's a reasonable thing to do, I'll tell you what.
xoxo
First of all, the BMI is meaningless bullshit. For many reasons. But let's just take me, for one example. I was sitting in one of the many medical visits I've had recently, waiting, and I was perusing a BMI chart. And I was sorta surprised to see that I am about three pounds away from a BMI of 25 and that 25 is "overweight." (I'd thought that anything over 25 was classified overweight, meaning 26 and up, when actually it's anything 25 and up.) Well, I'm very sorry, but despite my bitching about my bulgy Polish catcher's thighs and my middle-aged no-longer-flat belly, I am only cosmetically fat. There is no way in fucking hell that I am three pounds away from omg! obesity epidemic! health-problem! fat. And I am a woman, and small-boned--if pretty muscular and as you all know big-boobed--so that a man or a larger-boned woman my height could be considered hovering on the cusp of OVERWEIGHT! FAT AMERICAN! is even more ridiculous. But it points up yet another point in how ridiculous using the BMI is: in 1998, they changed it, lowering the criteria for "overweight" from 27 to 25, and overnight, 25 million Americans (I looked it up)became officially overweight overnight. That's some crazy shit right there.
Second of all, even if they were using a measure of overweight for these poor schoolchildren that *was* valid, how exactly is giving them a report card about it supposed to change their weight in any way? How is it supposed to be anything but humiliating for the kids who "fail"? And how is it the business of the schools to "mark" children on anything other than their schoolwork and their effort towards their schoolwork? (Okay, I'll admit I personally am still traumatized by the fact that *I* got a bad grade on my report card in second grade for having a messy desk. Talk about humiliating. That messy desk did not impede my ability to get my work done, thankyouverymuch. Fuckers! Ha!) And do we think any of the little fat kids' parents can't look at them and *see* that they're overweight? And do we think that these children do not have PCPs who weigh and measure them at every visit and keep those handy-dandy growth charts in their files, and discuss what percentiles they are in with their parents? This is some more crazy shit right there.
How about instead of worrying about these kids' weights, we instead worry about their fitness? How about this? How about we mandate that they take 45 minutes out of every school day that it isn't pouring rain or snowing--they can give up 45 minutes of MCAS prep, because frankly the children of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ain't gonna end up smarter than those little Chinese kids across the globe, no matter how much standardized testing we torture them with, so we may as well give it up--and take those elementary school kids out of the school building for a nice forty minute walk. Rope 'em together, like the lil daycare kids, if you're worried about them wandering off or getting abducted.
Oh, that won't fly. Why? Well, for one reason, it would require the teachers and teaching assistants to take a daily 40 minute walk. Some of them would be happy to, yeah, of course. But the lazy-ass others? On the phone to the union, baby!
The other day Mr Indemnity forwarded the following link to me:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html
thinking it might be something I'd like to blog about. Well, can I tell you the thing about it that horrified me the most? The little story at the end about the woman who allowed her child to walk five houses down the street to visit a friend, and then was nonplussed and kind of worried about her own perceived parenting judgment when the playmate's parent drove her kid back, worrying about the child's safety walking for those five house lengths. No, nothing to do with the actual point of the article: the fact that the other mother *drove* five fucking houses. Are you serious? What.the.fuck.is.wrong.with.people? Who is so very lazy they need to drive the length of a block? A BMI report card ain't gonna help in a society where anyone thinks that's a reasonable thing to do, I'll tell you what.
xoxo
well-meaning, but...
So, yesterday I had my pre-surgical phone screen wherein a nice nurse from the hospital calls you and confirms all the stuff you've previously spent twenty minutes filling in online. Oh, it's not as if it's totally a waste of time. The nice nurse also gives you instructions about prep (some of which were slightly different from that which were on the paper I'd gotten in the mail) and where to go and what to do, etc. And I suppose some people have complicated medical histories which need clarification. But in my case it was mostly her running through the questions I'd already answered and confirming my responses.
There was this one question though. "Do you feel safe at home?" After I'd answered in the affirmative, she kind of laughed apologetically and said, "That's just a domestic violence/partner abuse screening question we have to ask." Well, I know. They asked me the same question when I was registering at the ER a couple weeks ago. That at least held the potential for comedy. "No! My partner sprayed me in the face with cleaning fluid!" or, even better, "No! My partner forces me to do housework, and see what happens? See?"
But all joking aside, this strikes me as the kind of well-meaning and totally useless bureaucracy that, frankly, is all I have come to expect in any solutions to social problems. I would like to see the statistics on the number of women going in for semi-elective surgery or non-beating-related emergency room visits who decide on hearing this question to suddenly unburden themselves of the secret they've been keeping for weeks, months, or years. My guess is that the number probably hovers around zero. But whoever legislated this into existence can pat themselves on the back for doing something about the horrible problem of DV.
I dunno. I suppose there's the chance that after being asked that question twenty times in twenty different medical situations *maybe* it might wake someone up who's been mired in denial. Anything is possible, right? But I kinda think it's more likely to provoke the kind of shame that makes people keep hiding their situations.
xoxo
There was this one question though. "Do you feel safe at home?" After I'd answered in the affirmative, she kind of laughed apologetically and said, "That's just a domestic violence/partner abuse screening question we have to ask." Well, I know. They asked me the same question when I was registering at the ER a couple weeks ago. That at least held the potential for comedy. "No! My partner sprayed me in the face with cleaning fluid!" or, even better, "No! My partner forces me to do housework, and see what happens? See?"
But all joking aside, this strikes me as the kind of well-meaning and totally useless bureaucracy that, frankly, is all I have come to expect in any solutions to social problems. I would like to see the statistics on the number of women going in for semi-elective surgery or non-beating-related emergency room visits who decide on hearing this question to suddenly unburden themselves of the secret they've been keeping for weeks, months, or years. My guess is that the number probably hovers around zero. But whoever legislated this into existence can pat themselves on the back for doing something about the horrible problem of DV.
I dunno. I suppose there's the chance that after being asked that question twenty times in twenty different medical situations *maybe* it might wake someone up who's been mired in denial. Anything is possible, right? But I kinda think it's more likely to provoke the kind of shame that makes people keep hiding their situations.
xoxo
Sunday, September 13, 2009
political decisions to be made
Lots o' local elections upcoming this November. For instance, my frenemy from high school is running for mayor of our fair city. I do not think she will be getting my vote. Perhaps I'll write myself in instead. Or my cat.
But the main effect all these local elections have on me is that every day there is a new flyer on my front door from some hopeful schmuck running for something. Usually complete with not only a photo of the prospective office holder, but of his or her lovely family as well. Today's was quite a surprise. Someone else I know wants my vote.
My roofer wants to be my ward counselor. This is not such an easy decision. I do not have the personal antipathy towards him that I do my former classmate. Indeed, once he finally returned my call, he was a pleasure doing business with. But do we really want to encourage him to spend less time and mental energy on roofing?
Think of all those other poor people with leaks waiting anxiously for a phone call back. Fixing the housing stock of ward 2 is probably more of a service to this city than all that blah blah blah in city hall.
xoxo
But the main effect all these local elections have on me is that every day there is a new flyer on my front door from some hopeful schmuck running for something. Usually complete with not only a photo of the prospective office holder, but of his or her lovely family as well. Today's was quite a surprise. Someone else I know wants my vote.
My roofer wants to be my ward counselor. This is not such an easy decision. I do not have the personal antipathy towards him that I do my former classmate. Indeed, once he finally returned my call, he was a pleasure doing business with. But do we really want to encourage him to spend less time and mental energy on roofing?
Think of all those other poor people with leaks waiting anxiously for a phone call back. Fixing the housing stock of ward 2 is probably more of a service to this city than all that blah blah blah in city hall.
xoxo
Saturday, September 12, 2009
hey, kids
O hai. How's everyone?
I had a huge panic attack last night, the heights of which have not been seen since last November's "mystery rash" extravaganza, and then, after that, I had the most amazingly vivid dream in which I was not only pregnant but ready to deliver. This morning I got to work to find that not only had they shampooed the carpets in the reception area, which I had been expecting, but also all the offices, which I was not. Including mine. All my equipment was unplugged, there was an oxygen tank *on top of my desk*, the stretcher/bed was in the room backwards, I had someone else's computer chair, and a giant fan was blowing frigid air and, y'know, "drying the carpet." After twenty minutes rearranging things back to how and where they were supposed to be, my first patient (an extremely sweet 10 y.o. whom I've known since he was little) came in eating a PopTart and thus ended my clean carpet. Later I had a lovely chat with the Benevolent L, who talked me in off the ledge somewhat, and though I did not do what I told her I was gonna do to forestall another panic attack tonight (I'ma do it tomorrow, I promise), she always makes me feel better. Then I came home and took a three hour nap, watched some of the second season of Clatterford, ate chips for dinner, and now am drinking wine (shut up, it's medicinal) and deciding if I care about this Red Sox game enough to stay up and watch any of it. It's been a tough week, chickens.
But in the spirit of cheering up myself and anyone else who might need a chuckle, here's a priceless quote I read today from some guy who's apparently a famous (French, as will be apparent) chef, but whom I was not aware of:
"Desserts are like mistresses. They are bad for you. So if you are having one, you might as well have two."
Argue with that. I dare you!
xoxo
I had a huge panic attack last night, the heights of which have not been seen since last November's "mystery rash" extravaganza, and then, after that, I had the most amazingly vivid dream in which I was not only pregnant but ready to deliver. This morning I got to work to find that not only had they shampooed the carpets in the reception area, which I had been expecting, but also all the offices, which I was not. Including mine. All my equipment was unplugged, there was an oxygen tank *on top of my desk*, the stretcher/bed was in the room backwards, I had someone else's computer chair, and a giant fan was blowing frigid air and, y'know, "drying the carpet." After twenty minutes rearranging things back to how and where they were supposed to be, my first patient (an extremely sweet 10 y.o. whom I've known since he was little) came in eating a PopTart and thus ended my clean carpet. Later I had a lovely chat with the Benevolent L, who talked me in off the ledge somewhat, and though I did not do what I told her I was gonna do to forestall another panic attack tonight (I'ma do it tomorrow, I promise), she always makes me feel better. Then I came home and took a three hour nap, watched some of the second season of Clatterford, ate chips for dinner, and now am drinking wine (shut up, it's medicinal) and deciding if I care about this Red Sox game enough to stay up and watch any of it. It's been a tough week, chickens.
But in the spirit of cheering up myself and anyone else who might need a chuckle, here's a priceless quote I read today from some guy who's apparently a famous (French, as will be apparent) chef, but whom I was not aware of:
"Desserts are like mistresses. They are bad for you. So if you are having one, you might as well have two."
Argue with that. I dare you!
xoxo
Friday, September 11, 2009
my money woes are solved
Without even having to cash in another big jar o' change. Imagine that.
I had my annual review today. I am getting a 92.7 cent an hour raise. Even after taxes that should probably cover one spa pedi (with a good tip, because I believe strongly in sharing the luv) per month. It might even cover both my pedi and my kalamata olive habit. You never know.
Maybe I should make up a little spreadsheet and figure how much money I spend a month on antipasto. Then I *would* know. That would probably be the fiscally responsible thing to do. Can you imagine the categories if I were to break down my expenses? It would be hilarious. I'd have to have one for salty snack foods, and one for beverages with dubious health claims, and one for beauty treatments with dubious results... You get the idea.
xoxo
I had my annual review today. I am getting a 92.7 cent an hour raise. Even after taxes that should probably cover one spa pedi (with a good tip, because I believe strongly in sharing the luv) per month. It might even cover both my pedi and my kalamata olive habit. You never know.
Maybe I should make up a little spreadsheet and figure how much money I spend a month on antipasto. Then I *would* know. That would probably be the fiscally responsible thing to do. Can you imagine the categories if I were to break down my expenses? It would be hilarious. I'd have to have one for salty snack foods, and one for beverages with dubious health claims, and one for beauty treatments with dubious results... You get the idea.
xoxo
Thursday, September 10, 2009
oh! and in the world of junk mail
So, when my dad gets mail that he doesn't know what it is, he leaves it out so I can explain it to him. Today he had a junk mail flyer. With smiling, perky old people on it. I thought, at first quick glance, it was someone trying to sell him a hearing aid. He gets one of those a week usually.
But, no. It was for a penis pump. For, y'know, "ED." I put it in the recycling.
Then, of course, he asked me about it.
"They want to fix your penis."
"No kidding!?! Really?"
I take it out of the recycling. "See?" I point out the perky old people on the cover of the brochure. "See them smiling at each other? They're happy because this product fixed his penis."
"Huh. How about that. Where'd they get my name from?"
"Oh, dad. You're just on the Old People mailing list."
Yeah.
I'm not sure this conversation is really in my job description as it were, but okay. I do, however, still refuse to explain the "Delores" punchline on Seinfeld to him, no matter how many times he asks.
xoxo
But, no. It was for a penis pump. For, y'know, "ED." I put it in the recycling.
Then, of course, he asked me about it.
"They want to fix your penis."
"No kidding!?! Really?"
I take it out of the recycling. "See?" I point out the perky old people on the cover of the brochure. "See them smiling at each other? They're happy because this product fixed his penis."
"Huh. How about that. Where'd they get my name from?"
"Oh, dad. You're just on the Old People mailing list."
Yeah.
I'm not sure this conversation is really in my job description as it were, but okay. I do, however, still refuse to explain the "Delores" punchline on Seinfeld to him, no matter how many times he asks.
xoxo
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
and in the annals of
how I fear for American literacy, let me just say that the recent onslaught of RMSers who have kitchen cabnets or, worse, cabnits (WTF kind of hick accent do you have to have anyway, in which that word doesn't have three syllables?) is just the beginning. A friend sent me a link to someone's blog last week. The blog belongs to my friend's SO's...acquaintance. Got that? My friend's SO is in a fight with this acquaintance, and the purpose of passing along the blog link was not (just) to mock, but to say see? see how annoying, self-centered, and insipid this woman is? *you'd* be in a fight with her too if you had to deal with her on a regular basis!
So, I couldn't even get through one blog entry before giving up, so boring was it. But I couldn't really mock. As I said to my friend, this woman's blog exists as the equivalent of a Facebook page (which are also excruciatingly boring): its purpose is just to post pictures of the woman's kid, family and friends, and for her to go on about the boring things she does every day. I don't really see the point, but millions of Facebook users cannot be wrong, eh?
But on the other hand, and after reflection? Do you know the shocking thing? What Ms Boring Blogger does for a living is *teach writing*. At a very expensive private university. You would think if one were being paid to teach 19 year olds to edit their prose, one would know enough not to write an essay about one's own vacation in which one enumerates that one got up and went to breakfast. I mean, if it was the most amazing or most horrid breakfast evah, yeah. If your waitress was absolutely fascinating, yeah. If a knife fight or a prison-bus-level conversation broke out at the table behind you, hell yeah. But otherwise, no. We your readers will assume you got up and at some point ate. You can edit that out.
I'm just glad I'm not paying 40k a year for my spawn to be taught composition by this chick. Can you imagine?
xoxo
So, I couldn't even get through one blog entry before giving up, so boring was it. But I couldn't really mock. As I said to my friend, this woman's blog exists as the equivalent of a Facebook page (which are also excruciatingly boring): its purpose is just to post pictures of the woman's kid, family and friends, and for her to go on about the boring things she does every day. I don't really see the point, but millions of Facebook users cannot be wrong, eh?
But on the other hand, and after reflection? Do you know the shocking thing? What Ms Boring Blogger does for a living is *teach writing*. At a very expensive private university. You would think if one were being paid to teach 19 year olds to edit their prose, one would know enough not to write an essay about one's own vacation in which one enumerates that one got up and went to breakfast. I mean, if it was the most amazing or most horrid breakfast evah, yeah. If your waitress was absolutely fascinating, yeah. If a knife fight or a prison-bus-level conversation broke out at the table behind you, hell yeah. But otherwise, no. We your readers will assume you got up and at some point ate. You can edit that out.
I'm just glad I'm not paying 40k a year for my spawn to be taught composition by this chick. Can you imagine?
xoxo
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
grey gardens, 2009
I watched the actual documentary a year or two ago, and last night I watched the HBO movie with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. I really enjoyed it, much more from having seen the original and so being able to see just how well Lange and Barrymore nailed their performances, and also having the opportunity to have questions that the documentary raised answered with the backstory presented in the movie.
But this was probably not the week to view this film. My anxiety disorder is kicking in again, after having been rather quiet for the last two/two and a half months, and one of the things I am worrying and obsessing about is my certitude that everything in this house is falling apart or on the verge of falling apart and I have absolutely no idea where the hell I am supposed to find the money to fix all of it. So, you know, naturally this movie brings to mind fantasies of me and D living in our own little version of Grey Gardens, becoming crazier and crazier and poorer and poorer as our home falls to pieces around us, until we too are living with feral cats and raccoons in the living room and people have to cover their faces with their scarves when they enter. Ha! It could happen! (Except we don't have any billionaire ex-first-lady relatives to bail us out, so y'know. It'd be worse!)
And so now I'm going to say something extremely politically incorrect and maybe shocking if you know me. Part of the backstory that the movie filled in was that Big Edie, formerly a very rich woman, when divorced by her husband, was left with a tiny settlement/allowance that was barely enough to live on, never mind keep up that huge house. And certainly a formerly rich woman of her generation had absolutely *no* skills that would enable her to even try to support herself. Meanwhile Little Edie, though in her youth harboring dreams of being a dancer and actress, really had only one chance in life--to snag a rich guy of her own social class when she was young and pretty--and when she failed to realize that, she was basically doomed to poverty. It's easy to watch the movie and think, OMG, how horrible to be a woman in those not-so-long-ago days, how horrible to be unable to support yourself in any kind of comfortable manner if you didn't snag, and then keep, a man.
Except you know what? Every single woman I know my age who hasn't managed to snag and then keep a man (in matrimony) for many years is poor or on the edge of being poor, struggling with serious debt or one or two huge home repair/car repair/medical bills away from serious debt. I don't know any unmarried women in their late thirties or forties or fifties who feel in any way even a little bit financially secure. I'm talking about college educated women, bright and hardworking and responsible, who nonetheless have had periods of unemployment which, without a partner's income, absolutely guarantees debt, or who (like me) while remaining steadily employed, have done so in female-dominated professions, which usually guarantees low to middling wages, or who have had to take the main responsibility for raising kids while getting inadequate or nonexistent child support. Maybe there are plenty of single women out there who are making 100k or 150k a year, who have never lost a job and stayed unemployed for a significant amount of time, and who haven't had kids or if they have, have had their kids' fathers paying their fair share, but I just don't know any of them.
From my POV the vast majority of people in this society who are financially comfortable are in couples, couples where both people work. The other people who have a decent chance of being financially comfortable are single guys (usually childless) who work in the kind of male-dominated industry/profession that pay a crapload of money. Mostly, being a single woman means, if not poverty, then a constant low-level threat of poverty. And maybe that's our own fault. Maybe we need to be pushed into going into more lucrative professions, even if our interests don't lie in those directions. Maybe we need to be taught to manage our money better. Maybe we ought not ever get knocked up until and unless we're absolutely sure we're going to be with that baby's daddy till baby turns eighteen. I dunno. But in any case, it's depressing. We still pretty much need a man, sorry to say.
(And, oh yeah, I'm sure some of you are all saying to yourselves, "But, Andrea, you'd be a lot more secure if you didn't blow your life savings going to massage school! That's voluntary poverty!" To which I would reply, yeah, except those life savings were the money I *would* have used to help D with his college, had he been healthy enough for higher education. So, they'd have been spent anyway.)
xoxo
But this was probably not the week to view this film. My anxiety disorder is kicking in again, after having been rather quiet for the last two/two and a half months, and one of the things I am worrying and obsessing about is my certitude that everything in this house is falling apart or on the verge of falling apart and I have absolutely no idea where the hell I am supposed to find the money to fix all of it. So, you know, naturally this movie brings to mind fantasies of me and D living in our own little version of Grey Gardens, becoming crazier and crazier and poorer and poorer as our home falls to pieces around us, until we too are living with feral cats and raccoons in the living room and people have to cover their faces with their scarves when they enter. Ha! It could happen! (Except we don't have any billionaire ex-first-lady relatives to bail us out, so y'know. It'd be worse!)
And so now I'm going to say something extremely politically incorrect and maybe shocking if you know me. Part of the backstory that the movie filled in was that Big Edie, formerly a very rich woman, when divorced by her husband, was left with a tiny settlement/allowance that was barely enough to live on, never mind keep up that huge house. And certainly a formerly rich woman of her generation had absolutely *no* skills that would enable her to even try to support herself. Meanwhile Little Edie, though in her youth harboring dreams of being a dancer and actress, really had only one chance in life--to snag a rich guy of her own social class when she was young and pretty--and when she failed to realize that, she was basically doomed to poverty. It's easy to watch the movie and think, OMG, how horrible to be a woman in those not-so-long-ago days, how horrible to be unable to support yourself in any kind of comfortable manner if you didn't snag, and then keep, a man.
Except you know what? Every single woman I know my age who hasn't managed to snag and then keep a man (in matrimony) for many years is poor or on the edge of being poor, struggling with serious debt or one or two huge home repair/car repair/medical bills away from serious debt. I don't know any unmarried women in their late thirties or forties or fifties who feel in any way even a little bit financially secure. I'm talking about college educated women, bright and hardworking and responsible, who nonetheless have had periods of unemployment which, without a partner's income, absolutely guarantees debt, or who (like me) while remaining steadily employed, have done so in female-dominated professions, which usually guarantees low to middling wages, or who have had to take the main responsibility for raising kids while getting inadequate or nonexistent child support. Maybe there are plenty of single women out there who are making 100k or 150k a year, who have never lost a job and stayed unemployed for a significant amount of time, and who haven't had kids or if they have, have had their kids' fathers paying their fair share, but I just don't know any of them.
From my POV the vast majority of people in this society who are financially comfortable are in couples, couples where both people work. The other people who have a decent chance of being financially comfortable are single guys (usually childless) who work in the kind of male-dominated industry/profession that pay a crapload of money. Mostly, being a single woman means, if not poverty, then a constant low-level threat of poverty. And maybe that's our own fault. Maybe we need to be pushed into going into more lucrative professions, even if our interests don't lie in those directions. Maybe we need to be taught to manage our money better. Maybe we ought not ever get knocked up until and unless we're absolutely sure we're going to be with that baby's daddy till baby turns eighteen. I dunno. But in any case, it's depressing. We still pretty much need a man, sorry to say.
(And, oh yeah, I'm sure some of you are all saying to yourselves, "But, Andrea, you'd be a lot more secure if you didn't blow your life savings going to massage school! That's voluntary poverty!" To which I would reply, yeah, except those life savings were the money I *would* have used to help D with his college, had he been healthy enough for higher education. So, they'd have been spent anyway.)
xoxo
Monday, September 7, 2009
cash windfall
If you have a glass canister, 7 inches high and 17 inches in circumference, and it is filled to the top with random coins--pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters (and, apparently, one Bahamian 5 cent piece, what what?)--and you take it to your bank and empty it into the change-counting machine, just how much money do you think is in there?
$147.85, baby!
xoxo
$147.85, baby!
xoxo
Saturday, September 5, 2009
technical question again, kitchen style
So, I found this light for my (planned "vintage industrial") kitchen:
And I think it's the best thing I've seen, stylistically, that also throws off enough light *and* that I could afford. ($166.50 on Amazon, with free shipping, is the best price I've found so far, and I think that's reasonable.) The lights swivel, too. However, these are halogen lights. I've read various things on the interwebs bitching about how hard the bulbs are to change in these halogen track lights, or that they don't last very long, or that they use a lot of electricity. Do any of you all have any experience with similar? Would you refuse to buy a lighting fixture that was otherwise what you want because it used halogens? Or is it not a problem and the people bitching on the internet are as people bitching on the internet always are, which is to say "forever with us"?
xoxo
And I think it's the best thing I've seen, stylistically, that also throws off enough light *and* that I could afford. ($166.50 on Amazon, with free shipping, is the best price I've found so far, and I think that's reasonable.) The lights swivel, too. However, these are halogen lights. I've read various things on the interwebs bitching about how hard the bulbs are to change in these halogen track lights, or that they don't last very long, or that they use a lot of electricity. Do any of you all have any experience with similar? Would you refuse to buy a lighting fixture that was otherwise what you want because it used halogens? Or is it not a problem and the people bitching on the internet are as people bitching on the internet always are, which is to say "forever with us"?
xoxo
Friday, September 4, 2009
and in another shocking travesty
Apparently President Obama is going to address the nation's schoolchildren with a back-to-school speech, advising them to stay in school and work hard. Obviously this is some kind of left-wink pinko socialist plot to gain control of the minds of America's youth. If I had any school-aged children, I'd make them stay home that day.
(No, really, I'm not making this shit up. This is what conservative talk radio is saying and now parents are boycotting. You really can't go wrong in assuming the stupidity and personality disorders of the American public. And it kills me, but most of them probably have much nicer houses than mine. With hoods that vent to the outside and everything. Gah. Which, of course, goes to prove Mr Obama is mistaken; working hard and staying in school generally gets you shit. That doesn't however mean you shouldn't listen to your president's address.)
xoxo
(No, really, I'm not making this shit up. This is what conservative talk radio is saying and now parents are boycotting. You really can't go wrong in assuming the stupidity and personality disorders of the American public. And it kills me, but most of them probably have much nicer houses than mine. With hoods that vent to the outside and everything. Gah. Which, of course, goes to prove Mr Obama is mistaken; working hard and staying in school generally gets you shit. That doesn't however mean you shouldn't listen to your president's address.)
xoxo
it's a shocking travesty
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8236384.stm
My bulgy Polish catcher's thighs are *5 cm* not bulgy enough. That's got to be wrong. If anyone should qualify for the health benefits of thigh fat, it should fucking be me.
Well, at least I remain convinced that I could still block the plate if I needed to.
Also? I'm gonna eat the cookie that's next to my mousepad right now, because very little bit helps.
xoxo
My bulgy Polish catcher's thighs are *5 cm* not bulgy enough. That's got to be wrong. If anyone should qualify for the health benefits of thigh fat, it should fucking be me.
Well, at least I remain convinced that I could still block the plate if I needed to.
Also? I'm gonna eat the cookie that's next to my mousepad right now, because very little bit helps.
xoxo
Thursday, September 3, 2009
andrea goes to the ER
Or...this--this!--is what you get for cleaning.
Okay. I am hereby self-nominating for a Darwin Award. Yes, I was determined to get that range hood cleaner than I had hereforto been able to, now that I had carefully examined how truly disgusting it was. So I went to the Home Depot and in the cleaning product aisle, I found me some super-powerful orange/citrus degreaser in a spray bottle, as I may have mentioned.
Tuesday evening after dinner I decided to work on this little project. I covered my stove with a thick towel, because there were all kinds of warnings on the product about what materials you shouldn't use it on, including stainless steel. I was working away, spraying and wiping and spraying and wiping, and I decided to try to get in around the fan which is the part I cannot reach (and honestly shouldn't even be able to see, but I've got a piece missing out of that hood, so I can see up there and it's gross.) So I sprayed up there and let it sit for a few minutes, and then figuring it had done as much degreasing as it was going to do and had dripped down as much as it was going to drip, I leaned myself backwards on top of the stove with my rag to try to wipe up in there. And as I was doing that, a huge drop of this toxic chemical plopped down into my left eye.
Holy fucking shit. It burned. And my kitchen sink had a full bucket of Mr Clean water in it which at that point I couldn't see to move, and my dad of course was in the downstairs bathroom, so I went tearing up the stairs to my bathroom and flushed my eye with water from the sink over and over until I could kind of see what I was doing, at which point I stuck my head into the bathtub and started flushing my eye directly with the handheld shower. After a long, long time of doing that, the burning in my eye stopped, and I could kind of see, though somewhat blurrily from that eye. It was bright red. I went downstairs to look at the bottle of degreaser, where it told me in case of eye exposure, I should flush with water for at least 15 minutes, then SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION. Oh, shit, I thought, I guess that means I ought to go to the ER before I wake up blind in my left eye tomorrow.
So I did. Whereupon they put me in "fast track" which, as I like to point out, ain't so fucking fast. And the hell with HIPAA. I can tell you what every other patient in there had wrong with them, their first and most of their last names, what they all do for a living, and what the disposition of their ailments were. I also had my eye professionally flushed by a nice, gruff, ponytailed older male nurse, who I will bet you any amount of money was a Vietnam medic. Professional eye flushing involves them putting a giant contact lenses thingy attached to an IV line under your eye lid and hanging you over a sink while torrents of sterile water flood your face. In my case, it turned into a comedy of errors when the lenses thingy would not *stay* under my eyelid and various people tried to fix it in my nurse's absence. And then, all flushed and reassured I was going to be fine and all ready to go home, I waited another hour or maybe more while they tried to find some eye antibiotics for me (and the guy a few booths over with the big pickup-basketball-game cornea scratch, who incidentally looked just like Lawrence Fishburn). It seems there's a shortage of eye antibiotics in the hospital. What me and Mr Faux Fishburne got is apparently their 6th-line choice, the top five all being out of stock.
Anyway. Moral of the story: cleaning can only lead to no good. Also, there were no TVs in fast track, so I only got to listen to the Red Sox game when they took me over to the other side of the ER for my eye flushing. If they send me a customer service form in the mail, I'ma complain about that.
xoxo
Okay. I am hereby self-nominating for a Darwin Award. Yes, I was determined to get that range hood cleaner than I had hereforto been able to, now that I had carefully examined how truly disgusting it was. So I went to the Home Depot and in the cleaning product aisle, I found me some super-powerful orange/citrus degreaser in a spray bottle, as I may have mentioned.
Tuesday evening after dinner I decided to work on this little project. I covered my stove with a thick towel, because there were all kinds of warnings on the product about what materials you shouldn't use it on, including stainless steel. I was working away, spraying and wiping and spraying and wiping, and I decided to try to get in around the fan which is the part I cannot reach (and honestly shouldn't even be able to see, but I've got a piece missing out of that hood, so I can see up there and it's gross.) So I sprayed up there and let it sit for a few minutes, and then figuring it had done as much degreasing as it was going to do and had dripped down as much as it was going to drip, I leaned myself backwards on top of the stove with my rag to try to wipe up in there. And as I was doing that, a huge drop of this toxic chemical plopped down into my left eye.
Holy fucking shit. It burned. And my kitchen sink had a full bucket of Mr Clean water in it which at that point I couldn't see to move, and my dad of course was in the downstairs bathroom, so I went tearing up the stairs to my bathroom and flushed my eye with water from the sink over and over until I could kind of see what I was doing, at which point I stuck my head into the bathtub and started flushing my eye directly with the handheld shower. After a long, long time of doing that, the burning in my eye stopped, and I could kind of see, though somewhat blurrily from that eye. It was bright red. I went downstairs to look at the bottle of degreaser, where it told me in case of eye exposure, I should flush with water for at least 15 minutes, then SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION. Oh, shit, I thought, I guess that means I ought to go to the ER before I wake up blind in my left eye tomorrow.
So I did. Whereupon they put me in "fast track" which, as I like to point out, ain't so fucking fast. And the hell with HIPAA. I can tell you what every other patient in there had wrong with them, their first and most of their last names, what they all do for a living, and what the disposition of their ailments were. I also had my eye professionally flushed by a nice, gruff, ponytailed older male nurse, who I will bet you any amount of money was a Vietnam medic. Professional eye flushing involves them putting a giant contact lenses thingy attached to an IV line under your eye lid and hanging you over a sink while torrents of sterile water flood your face. In my case, it turned into a comedy of errors when the lenses thingy would not *stay* under my eyelid and various people tried to fix it in my nurse's absence. And then, all flushed and reassured I was going to be fine and all ready to go home, I waited another hour or maybe more while they tried to find some eye antibiotics for me (and the guy a few booths over with the big pickup-basketball-game cornea scratch, who incidentally looked just like Lawrence Fishburn). It seems there's a shortage of eye antibiotics in the hospital. What me and Mr Faux Fishburne got is apparently their 6th-line choice, the top five all being out of stock.
Anyway. Moral of the story: cleaning can only lead to no good. Also, there were no TVs in fast track, so I only got to listen to the Red Sox game when they took me over to the other side of the ER for my eye flushing. If they send me a customer service form in the mail, I'ma complain about that.
xoxo
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
igs
So, I was talking to my boss about this little toddler I'd had in my office who came in with a complaint of "unusual episodes, rule out seizures" (which is, y'know, my bread and butter.) Her mother had photos on her cell phone, which she'd shown me, of the baby doing her thing. I was describing it, how she arches herself over the furniture, legs stiff, face reddening, and my boss immediately said, "She's masturbating."
I started to laugh and he was like, "No, I'm serious. They call it infantile gratification syndrome."
"Well, I'm glad they've got a name for it."
"Yeah, politically correct, too. A lot of parents are really, really happy when you tell them that's what it is, because it's not anything bad or serious. And then others..." I was shaking my head over that, and he said that on a internet group for pediatric neurologists that he belongs to, someone actually was talking about a case recently where a family came all the way to the US from Saudi Arabia to have their kid's episodes evaluated, and you can just imagine. Very conservative, old skool Muslim family--there was no way they wanted to hear or to believe that their sweet little two year old daughter was in fact just getting herself off. It led to some interesting discussion in the group about how best to try to present this to families in which social/cultural/religious factors were going to make their even considering the diagnosis difficult.
But anyway, I was thinking in retrospect about what *my* patient's mom had told me when I asked her how often the episodes were occurring and how long they usually lasted: once or twice a day for about 5 minutes.
Yup. Sounds about right to me!
xoxo
I started to laugh and he was like, "No, I'm serious. They call it infantile gratification syndrome."
"Well, I'm glad they've got a name for it."
"Yeah, politically correct, too. A lot of parents are really, really happy when you tell them that's what it is, because it's not anything bad or serious. And then others..." I was shaking my head over that, and he said that on a internet group for pediatric neurologists that he belongs to, someone actually was talking about a case recently where a family came all the way to the US from Saudi Arabia to have their kid's episodes evaluated, and you can just imagine. Very conservative, old skool Muslim family--there was no way they wanted to hear or to believe that their sweet little two year old daughter was in fact just getting herself off. It led to some interesting discussion in the group about how best to try to present this to families in which social/cultural/religious factors were going to make their even considering the diagnosis difficult.
But anyway, I was thinking in retrospect about what *my* patient's mom had told me when I asked her how often the episodes were occurring and how long they usually lasted: once or twice a day for about 5 minutes.
Yup. Sounds about right to me!
xoxo
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