Tonight was the big Meet-n-Greet, an assemblage of bright young and not so young leaders, administrators in their sharp suits, and physician-leaders beaming at us like mother hens. We met in I-shit-you-not The Petroleum Club, which is like J. R. Ewing’s Cattleman’s Club only in Bakersfield — a members-only place we get to use on special occasions. They interviewed me here, for example. Twelve stories up, which makes it the highest point in Bako (I suspect), with a great view of, well, Bako.
The around-the-room tell-us-a-little-bit-about-yourself was the whole point of the evening, I suspect. There were about 20 of us in the room, and we were tasked with revealing something about ourselves that no one else in the room knew. (It occurs to me that I would be hard pressed to do something like that on my blog, or at least I couldn’t do it without getting in Dutch with my wife.) The fellow to my left, nice guy, chief exec of something or another, began by telling a story about how he has realized that he is too trusting. His wife regularly sets out his meds in the evening for him to take. The other night, he was about to take the meds when his wife cried out, “NO!” Turns out they were her meds.
Never one to turn down a straight line, I said, “So THAT’S why your breasts have been so tender lately.” Which proves yet again that either (A) I can really judge a room* or (B) I don’t know how to keep my mouth shut. Perhaps even now my name is being penciled off a List of Future Leaders.
When the talk came round to me, I told them the story of the stupidest thing I had ever done, which was to wash my drapes in college. With the hooks still in. Then I had to talk about the dart frogs and the tarantulas and my three-part SF novel and my sleazy romance. The child psychiatrist sitting across from me no doubt made a mental note to refer me to her adult psych colleagues. The big boss sitting at the end of the table must be thinking, Thank God his chief status is probationary.
But really, how often do I get to do stand-up in front of a room full of (mostly) strangers (who could make or break my career)? Not often enough, I say!
D.
*Because they laughed. Jake and Karen pointed out that my joke might have been met with an exquisite silence, which would have been, you know, awkward.
Found out today that I will be obliged to attend twelve “Leadership Training” meetings over the next year. Currently, I have Wednesday afternoons off for, ahem, educational leave. The first Wednesday each month is our big interdepartmental administrative meeting, but the other three Wednesday afternoons are useful for working out shoppinggoofing off continuing my medical education. Now, I’m going to lose one of those afternoons each month to “Leadership Training” — I and a few other suckers. Um, leaders.
What might this entail? Will I be taught the special knock, the evil eye, the secret handshake? Will I come to learn that drilling down on the numbers is neither bookie’s argot nor pimpish patois? Will it dawn on me that benchmarks are something more than the dents my ass leaves on the chair, and that a dashboard is something other than the thing I bang my head against when I realize I could have been working out shoppinggoofing off continuing my medical education?
Will I become a leader?
Mind you, I belong to an organization in which most if not all leaders are drawn from the pool of physicians. Someone has to bust their ass keeping it all running smoothly. Several someones. And now I’m one of the someones.
D.
I’m the DEPARTMENTAL CHAIRMAN!
Pretty fast rise to the top, eh? I mean, I’ve only been here 18 months, and I’ve not even made partner yet, and they named me, ME, chairman.
Never mind that there’s only two of us in our department. I refuse to not feel honored. (And my partner refuses to not feel relieved.)
This means that I’m the one who gets to drive down to LA four times a year (at least) and I’m the one who gets the blame if our stats start sucking and I’m the one who has to decipher all the administratorese that gets emailed to me. But hey, that’s what the stipend is for.
So that makes two chairs in our family (my sister chairs her high school’s English Dept). Pretty soon we’ll have a dinette set.
D.
There were a scant few open spaces in the parking lot tonight — much worse than usual. And a lot of new faces inside.
“When does the New Years resolution crowd disappear?” I asked the gal at the front desk, the one who scans my tag.
“April,” she said, and to my surprised expression, she added, “They stop showing up right after tax time.”
And I realized, I’ve been doing this almost continuously since 2004 or 2005. That’s when I decided to stop making jokes like, “No one ever got injured sitting on their couch.” I used to make it to the gym maybe twice a week, and at best I’d spend an hour there. Now I’m there anywhere from three to five times a week, and when I have the time I’ll be there 90 minutes, sometimes two hours. I’m still fat but that has a lot more to do with how I eat, not how much I exercise.
It’s mean-spirited of me, but I’ll be glad when the resolution crowd dissipates.
D.
Trying to think here if any of my readers work out. My Sis does, but I don’t think she’s ever made a study of it, nor worked with a trainer. Kris Starr, but does Kris still visit? I think I lost her along with Kate and most of the other Romance crowd when I got old and dull and boring. If I’m not writing tarantula porn, they simply don’t love me as much.
Anyway, I am trying to figure out why I can work like a horse on the elliptical trainer and not feel at all tired afterward, yet I can’t do shit on the treadmill. According to the heart monitor on the elliptical, I’m getting my heart rate up into the 140s and keeping it there for a good 40 to 50 minutes or more. But on the treadmill, if I run hard enough to get my heart rate into the 140s, I’m lucky if I can keep that up for three minutes.
So I ask you, what gives? Why can’t I run? Why does even power walking (which for me means anything over 3 miles per hour!) tire the crap out of me and give me shin splints? And yet I can set the elliptical to a resistance of 10 or 11 and go at it for an hour.
Another question: is it a good aerobic exercise if I’m not suffering? Running (or even fast walking) feels like work. So I’m going along at a heart rate of 125 thinking This is kicking my ass, but if I hop on the elliptical and get my heart rate up to 145, I’m hunky-dorey. (More dorey lately than hunky, but we’re working on it.)
I want my trainer back. But she jumped ship when my health club changed management, and she’s off at some Other Gym training other guys, and I’m all alone with the yutzes at my current club who sometimes try to trick me into signing a contract for training. The most recent guy demonstrated such ignorance of the subject, though, that I pegged him as someone who had been sent away to the Three Day Trainers’ Camp rather than someone who had studied this shit in college (like my trainer).
Ugh. Maybe I need to bite the bullet and pay day rates at the other gym to use my old trainer. Meanwhile, I’m trying to work from Eric Heiden’s fitness book in order to do it myself. But it’s a long hard road.
D.
Jake came down with some sort of weird flu bug — fever, fatigue, vomiting, but no upper respiratory symptoms. We decided to cancel everything (and the damn airlines have upped the fees to $180 per person . . . wasn’t that long ago I remember it being $50 per person) which was for the best. Yesterday afternoon he wasn’t on the computer. He was sleeping. That’s how I know my son is sick.
Not much to do this weekend; I’m thinking of seeing True Grit, which got a whopping 95 over at Rotten Tomatoes. I’m poking around in the books I bought to research my writing project, plotting, plotting, thinking. And I’m roasting a boneless leg of lamb for dinner tonight — this recipe, or something quite like it. (I did look at the turkeys today, which are appealing only because they’re so cheap. But then I remembered that no one in this family, and I do mean no one, likes turkey.)
So to all my goyische friends, Merry Christmas! And the rest of you can enjoy your godless holidays too.
D.
The plane leaves tomorrow at four and goes to Vegas by way of Phoenix. What’s the chance it will take off on time and not be glitched by weather at any of the three cities? Will I regret the decision not to drive?
We drove for Thanksgiving last year. The trip home was grueling: stop and go most of the way. It took something like eight hours to make a four hour trip.
Not sure what to do in Las Vegas this time around. Too cold and rainy to go to Red Rock Canyon, so who knows, maybe we should just go watch a bunch of movies. Unlike most Americans, I find Vegas to be very, very boring.
Almost makes me wish I liked to gamble.
D.
I am continually appalled by the failure of desert communities to plan for rain.
When I grew up in the LA suburbs, street flooding was commonplace. Auto brakes were as water-resistant as the Wicked Witch, so heaven help you if you happened to stray into the deep water. Forget about driving under overpasses.
And here I am in flooded Bako. (No, really — Karen saw a news clip showing some guy paddling a canoe down his street.) Thing is, this is not a storm. It’s more of a sustained sprinkle. I found myself thinking, “Gee, I hope this keeps up. That way my raised bed will get nice and wet for planting,” and before I knew it we had great nasty puddles in our backyard.
Driving home today was a trip. Something must have happened on the freeway . . . this was some of the worst traffic I’d seen since moving here. I took surface streets instead, and it only added 20 minutes or so to my drive time. It’s even worse on the first day of the season’s first storm. On the oil-slicked roads, cars careen like air hockey pucks, and the 99 is a parking lot.
I’m on call and hoping I don’t GET called. I’d hate to get anywhere in a hurry.
D.
I should know better. I really should.
And if, after my death, someone disrespects my wishes and sticks me in a grave with gravestone and all that tripe, the gravestone should read, “He really should have known better,” since I’ve foreseen my death, albeit hazily, and it has DIY written all over it.
I’m the guy who shouldn’t touch a tool unless it has the word garden behind it. This morning, I spread one big fat bag of compost and then another big fat bag of mulch all over my 4 by 6 raised bed “garden,” in the hopes that next Spring, I’ll be able to lose those air quotes. (Bakersfield soil is only marginally more fertile than the caliche wastes of South Texas.) All that heavy lifting, all that spreading using a cultivator with about 20 sharp ankle-destroying steel blades, and I did just fine, thank you.
Emboldened by my success, I tried to install a grab bar next to the toilet. I’d bought two. And if the first one went well, I would buy a ceramic drill and install the second one in the shower! And if that went well, who knows what I might try next.
The stud-finder worked well. Drilling the tap-holes (or whatever they’re called), that went well too. Screwing in the screws, that’s what did me in. Our drills weren’t long enough to tap the full length of the screw, so the last inch or so of screwing was hell on earth. I managed to get one screw in. One. And my arm was sore and my palm callused, threatening blisters, and yet I had at least three more screws to go.
That’s when I had the brilliant idea of using a nail to tap the hole. Even though we don’t have a long enough drill, we have a nail that’s long enough and has the right diameter. “Just be sure you can get it out again,” Karen said, and I scoffed. When have I not been able to remove a nail? Just leave enough room for the claw, maybe use a washcloth to cushion the wall as I lever the bastard out —
The nail made it about 1.5 inches into the wall and stopped. Wouldn’t go further no matter how much I whaled on it. Wouldn’t pull out, either. Karen, reasonably, suggested I hammer it the rest of the way in (the nail head was large enough to hold the flange in place) so I whaled on it with renewed effort.
The fucker bent.
By now I’m wondering what my studs are made out of. Teak? Ironwood? Whoever heard of wood that couldn’t be nailed?
We’ll be getting someone else to put in that shower grab bar. And while he’s at it, he can do something about my nail with Peyronie’s disease*.
D.
*Those of you who have commented in the past, “I should know better than to follow your links,” would do well to learn from past experiences. But I know your curiosity will get the better of you.