Where do athletic shoes go?
Where odd socks go, no doubt.
Karen’s best friend from high school and college, Kira, came to visit with her two young boys. We haven’t seen her in 13 years. At the time, Jake was a fetus and Kira’s boys were metaphysical glimmers . . . and you know, it really does seem like 13 years. A lot has happened since then: Jake’s now a fetus with a wicked sense of humor, Karen and I are going gray; there was a year on faculty at USC, two years in Texas, ten years in the Pacific Northwest, another year bouncing around between Santa Rosa and Walnut Creek. Yes, I realize that adds up to 14. Trust me, it works somehow.
Anyway, we got back from dinner in time for me to make it to the gym for my training session, but I could not find my shoes. In our little 1000 square foot apartment, they were nowhere to be seen. I checked both cars — nothing. They’ve vanished. The only place I haven’t searched is my office at work, but I really don’t recall changing my shoes there. By the process of elimination, they can be nowhere else.
I need new shoes. These are falling apart. It seems like I’ve had them for years, and that’s about right, since I bought them two visits to Vegas ago. Two years? Three? I’ve walked them into shreds.
Maybe they finally disintegrated?
D.
I miss Bioshock
The disks are buried in a box. Somewhere in Santa Rosa.
What a game.
And now it’s a movie . . .
D.
In what universe is it possible to medicate a cat?
Work must be too easy, so life’s throwing curves; today, for example, I had to race home, pick up Mist, and take her to the vet. I managed to get Mist back home and get myself back into work only 20 minutes behind schedule. Whew.
She’s had a herpetic conjunctivitis since we got her, and I gather this isn’t something she’ll ever be fully rid of, but which will bother her from time to time. Recently, she became even more squinty-eyed than usual, so I made an appointment for the vet. The vet and her assistant rather effortlessly restrained and medicated Mist (vet tech holding, vet doing the deed). The medication part was pretty slick shit: with one hand, the vet pushed back on the upper lid, while with the other she pushed down on the lower lid and squirted a ribbon of ointment into her eye.
“Just do that three times a day until she sees me again,” she said, and to my dropped jaw she added, “Well, at least twice a day.”
I figured that with three of us here at home, perhaps we could get the job done. Wrong.
I’m reminded of the ad . . .
So we need a companion video where some dude says, “Medicatin’ a cat. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy.”
Is there anything more slippery than a cat? Anything more elusive? I tried to hold her just as I’d seen the vet hold her earlier today, but it was a total flail. Jake couldn’t hold her, either, and we were concerned that too much of this would destroy the tenuous trust she has for him (and he’s the only one she trusts). Finally, he decided to try to sneak some into her eye on a Kleenex, since she does permit him to wipe her eye. This might have worked.
Medicating cats is hard. Don’t even get me started on that old stuff-the-pill-down-her-throat business — we’ve flailed on that, too, believe me. Once, we even boarded her for a few days just so we wouldn’t have to be the ones to medicate her.
Sweet Jesus, it’s easier cleaning ear wax from a two-year-old.
D.
Best of the Worst
If Mirsky were still around doing his “Worst of the Web,” I bet he’d have to start a whole ‘nother website for Craigslist.
Oh, wait. Someone did.
From that page, I snipped:
Woman who eagerly adopts Marxist-Leninist ways and sees light in superiority of returning means of production to worker will receive reward of deep massage and comradely snuggling. Those insisting upon adherence to exploitive bourgeois ways spanked will be in various positions until attitude is adjusted in keeping with good Bolshevist goals.
Need large woman to keep me warm in dacha on cold Kamchatkan night!
I thought for two moments about starting a “Worst of Craigslist Personals” blog, but it seems Craigslist takes a dim view of such proceedings. Kill-joys.
D.
Still steamed . . .
over what folks in my profession are calling “Obama’s slander.” At his presser, he accused us ENTs of doing tonsillectomies for profit:
Responding to a question, President Obama said, “Part of what we want to do is to make sure that those decisions are being made by doctors and medical experts based on evidence, based on what works…. Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. … the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out … I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out, or whether … something else would make a difference…. So part of what we want to do is to free doctors, patients, hospitals to make decisions based on what’s best for patient care.â€
Idiocy.
This was so preposterous on its face (if anything, we lose money on that operation), it didn’t even register with me that he was accusing us of malpractice and unethical behavior. That’s what should have galled me — not the sheer dumbassery of the comment, but the insult.
You can read my Academy’s response to Obama on the link above. As Karen says, they don’t want to make an enemy of the President, so they’re walking on eggshells. But the AAO-HNS (my Academy) did something worse, which was to anger its members.
On our professional billboard, one of the other docs said it best:
The slander was about money being decision-maker of choice for operating. The concept of evidence based medicine is obscure to the general public. The response should have been that most patients who have tonsillectomy are referred from other doctors such as pediatricians and family medicine who have failed, for a variety of reasons, in controlling sore throats. Also, that the recurrent infections have disrupted the patient’s work or educational or growth process. As for the income, the surgical fee is less than the cost of 3 mid level office visits. Surgical decision-making in tonsillectomy is based on what best serves the patient’s needs, almost always after failure of medical therapy.
So the Prez decides to pit patients against their doctors, gets them wondering whether their docs are making decisions based on sound medical evidence or their financial bottom line. Slick.
That whole business got buried, thanks to Obama’s gaffe over Professor Gates’s arrest. As press conferences go, that one was a real balls-up, don’t you think? And then there was his non-answer on the question of transparency (why he’s been secretive about meetings with folks in the health insurance industry). To put it bluntly, Karen and I think Obama’s effing it all up*.
And if he does, what comes next? If the economy keeps tanking, will we end up with President Worse-than-Bush?
D.
*No, not just because of one presser. But this ain’t a political blog and I’ve blathered long enough as it is.
I gotta get into some of this overdubbing action!
Because a show which exists solely to market a trading card game deserves all the ridicule it can get.
D.
Enough with Michael Jackson.
The back-breaking straw: yesterday, MSNBC preempted their usual nightly news programming to air yet another celebration-of-the-life/tribute/post-mortem. Enough. Is this really what people want? Is this what jacks up your ratings?
And I can’t get through a grocery store without seeing a half dozen or more images of the man. I am impressed with magazines’ and tabloids’ ability to find countless different photos of Jackson looking sad, lonely, soul-searching, pensive, or wistful. It’s as if they want us to say to ourselves and to each other, “That poor misunderstood man, how horribly the world treated him!” Or, “He was warped by fame — fame he didn’t ask for.”
When it comes to fame and its warped minions, I think of Cintra Wilson, whose book A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, dealt with the Jackson Phenomenon, as well as the Jaggers and Chers of the world. Her obit for Jackson? She reprinted the relevant chapter on her blog. Here’s a snip:
Michael loved women, too, but in a strange, slavering, idolatrous way that made it impossible for them to love him back : Liz Taylor, Diana Ross, and later Lisa Marie Presley and Debbie Rowe, the Mother of His Children, all seemed to care very deeply for Jackson while staying at least a six-hour plane trip away from him at all times. He looked wrong with anyone too near his body. When he and Madonna were each other’s dates to an awards ceremony, they looked as uncomfortable sitting next to each other as two morbidly obese people on the bus. There are some auras whose size and radiance requires miles of solitude, like a nuclear accident, and Michael’s seemed to be one of them.
Her take on things might seem mean-spirited, particularly if you’re one of his mourning fans; but I doubt anyone will disagree with Cintra’s prescription, sadly not followed: “Run away, Michael. Go to an island and live out your days in the sunshine. Disappear before we, the world’s mean-spirited publications, kill you with our obsessive, smothering need to know you better.”
D.
P.E.
I told my trainer* this evening that I would say I feel like an old man, except I’m quite sure that as a kid, I would have felt just as winded if not worse. Teenager me had nothing but disdain for physical fitness; I saw no percentage in it, since I couldn’t use my body to earn a living (hey, no wisecracks!) I was a creature of mind. If anything, I resented the time it took away from my studies.
Team sports were particularly humiliating, so from the moment I first had the option (10th grade), I took the weight training classes. I’d do a circuit or two around the machines, but mostly I’d hang with my tribe, the Hispanic gangsters who liked me because they liked my sis, who taught English at the same school. And we all avoided the SJs, the Asian toughs who really did know how to use the machines and could have kicked all our asses in a heartbeat if we weren’t so far beneath their contempt.
I was never as bad as the guy on the left, nor as buff as the guy on the right. I believe in the Golden Mean.
I don’t recall building up much muscle back then. Is it possible for a body to change so fundamentally? Or was my problem a lack of weight? Nowadays, I see myself as a rather hairy philosopher’s stone, readily turning fat into muscle provided I give it the necessary investment of pain and sweat. Sadly, this body is a catalytic converter that can run the reaction in both directions, quite capable of converting gold into base metal, better known as pudge. So perhaps in high school I couldn’t put on the muscle because I didn’t possess the necessary lard. I weighed 135-140 pounds back then, which is damn near impossible for me to believe. But yeah, I did. There’s a photo of me and the old gf at the beach, and I’m wearing nothing but a pair of cutoff jeans. Not exactly washboard abs, but nothing flopping over my waist band, either.
It took lower back pain to get me to exercise. That, and an abiding disgust for my pudge-ridden body. I’m happy to say that even after 6 months of no exercise at all (thanks to that horrid commute), my old fat pants would fall off me — so I didn’t back-slide that much. On the other hand, I’ve been working out for nearly six weeks, and I suspect I still can’t fit into my super skinny pants.
We had to run laps for our high school weight training class. Was it a mile a day, or a mile once a week? Maybe a mile a day. You’d think that would have given me the habit of running, if not an actual love for it, and in fact I did run on occasion while at Berkeley. But running is boring (and ultimately destructive, I suspect). I’d much rather hop on the elliptical and read a book or watch TV while I’m shvitzing away.
And now, 31 years later, it’s weights I keep coming back to. Except, now my trainer tells me I have to build up my core strength and my flexibility before I can use the machines. She’s put me on a strict diet: no more than two machines per workout. You know what? I can handle an hour or more on the elliptical at high resistance and I’m okay with that. I can even do an hour of weights, and I’m okay with that too.
But this core stuff? Oh. My. God. Ten minutes, and I’m about ready to die. And yet I keep coming back for more. She says I’m one of her two favorite clients*****, I think because of the amount of punishment I’m willing to suck up.
Sometimes, masochism pays.
D.
*Yes, I’ve become one of those rich yuppie** bastards who has a personal trainer: two sessions a week for four weeks, after which I should be able to figure out for myself how best to keep in shape. Any guilt I might have over this, any self-accusations of egocentrism, any worries that I have become a stereotype, tend to evaporate ten minutes into the session, when the sweat’s pouring off me in rivers. She works me far harder than I can ever manage to work myself.
**Hmm. The Y in yuppie no longer applies, does it? So what am I, a muppie***?
***M for middle-aged****.
****Which is such a delightfully optimistic term, don’t you think? Because by calling one’s 40s and 50s “middle-aged,” it assumes a life span of 80 to 100 years. Which wouldn’t be a bad deal, assuming I can keep busting my ass at the gym like this. Hey, stranger things have happened. Look at Jack LaLanne, still going strong at 94.
*****The other is a woman with one leg.
LOLPREZ
Did you catch Bama’s presser tonight? I found out something interesting. Absolutely laugh-out-fricking-loud fascinating.
Turns out we’ve been making tons of money on tonsillectomies. I must be a millionaire many times over by now, and the money is, oh, I don’t know . . . Hey, Karen, what did you do with all the millions I made on tonsillectomies?
“Squirreled away in overseas accounts,” she says.
No, no, it's way too easy.
I was hanging out in B-field Memorial’s doctor’s lounge waiting for their Medical Executive Committee to call for me. I’m applying for privileges, along with three other new docs, and the MEC here likes to meet and greet each new doc individually. We hung out together watching Bama’s presser, making cat-calls at the TV. Now, folks, you know I voted for Obama, but when it comes to health care this guy is laughable. His example of cutting out waste from the system? All those instances where docs order the same test on a patient because each doesn’t know what the other has ordered.
Oh, that’s going to save us a ton of money.
But it was his crack about doctors choosing to perform tonsillectomies because they reimbursed so well that made me laugh out loud.
Yes, there was a time when “general practitioners” took out tonsils and made lots of money doing so. Perhaps $100, perhaps less, but that was in the day when someone like my dad could fill the cart with a weeks’ worth of groceries for less than $20. But that was then, and while we may make a bit more on a tonsillectomy than we did in the 1960s, that money doesn’t stretch nearly as far. Given the time spent on doing pre-ops and post-ops (which are not reimbursed, but rather, are considered part of the ‘global package’) and time on the phone counseling the parents or patients, tonsillectomy simply doesn’t pay. From a purely greed-centric point of view, we would make better use of our time seeing patients than removing tonsils.
We do it, nowadays, because it’s medically indicated, i.e., the right thing to do. The idea that some docs might do it with dollar signs in their eyes is, well, LOLZ.
An interesting bit I discovered while feeding my rage over Obama’s tonsillectomy crack:
The Health Insurance Institute estimates that “getting sick and getting well†will cost the average American $105 in 1960. This sum will be distributed about as follows: $34 for the hospital, $26 for the doctor, $28 for medicines, $11.50 for the dentist, and $5.50 for other costs. The average United States family in 1957-1958 spent a little over $300 for medical care.
From The Atlantic, September 1960
D.
Whatever happened to . . .
Listening to t.A.T.u.’s cover of Morrissey’s How Soon Is Now? on my drive home from the gym tonight, and for some reason I remember this old Lance Kerwin TV show from 1977, James at 15, and how much it enraged me back then. How Soon Is Now? is such an angst-filled song . . . perhaps that’s what triggered the memory. James at 15 tried and failed to capture the angst of a difficult adolescence, mainly because James — white, solidly middle class, and challenged by little more than a recent move from Oregon to Boston — really had nothing to kvetch about.
I, who was also 15 in 1977, had plenty to kvetch about. I remember thinking: I’m a sensitive 15-year-old, intelligent, creative, perceptive of my surroundings. They should create a show about ME! (Would have been a lot more interesting than James at 15, eh Sis? I would cast Liz Taylor and Richard Burton as our parents, the actors revisiting their roles from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, minus the alcoholic charm.)
It was the first of many shows I shunned because it was too close to home: material I knew well enough to improve upon. Add to James at 15 just about any medical drama produced since 1990.
So, what happened to Lance Kerwin? Turns out the real life Kerwin was far more interesting than sensitive young James. Kerwin had drug and alcohol problems. In the 90s, he got religion, left Hollywood. Now he’s a minister and lives on Kauai with his wife and kids.
I don’t know why Hollywood always has to soft pedal adolescence. But wouldn’t it be cool if Kerwin wrote a TV series about what his life was really like at 15?
D.