Flutending

The double entendre (when not Freudian, when MW definition #1 and not 2) is my favorite.

No, I am not tending to anyone with influenza, but I am contemplating pretending I've been virus-ridden for the past four days.

Too much evidence in the e-world and real world exists to the contrary, though, so I'm left with no real reasons for why I have not been able to come out and play, or work, or stay in and work, or barely do anything but bathe, eat too much and misbehave.

I made a meeting Monday and I made an opening Tuesday. I went to work Tuesday. School Monday was cancelled but I worked on school anyway. I have kept up with dishes and pets. I am going to a baby shower and will fix food for that tomorrow.

**************
A bit of time has gone by … the inbox is down to 126, with about 100 of them flagged to transmit/enter … another six or so in process of replying … coffee did not help (but to create a freaky ovarian-ish cramp for an hour); I am still tired and bored at heart and discouraged.

Glad I don't have to go "cover" the American Royal parade in the morning.

Sad I missed a personal deadline … when it's every Wed/Thurs/Fri, it's tiresome, and obviously, I'm not that sad about it / since when does sadness serve as a motivator … You would think that I'd even have jumped at the opportunity to create invoices so as to receive (portional) money "for" the past 14 weeks, wouldn't you? In my head, I know that tomorrow is soon enough, that it's not the end of anyone's world, that I'm human and can pretend I can use that for an excuse just this once.

Once?

Funny.

Grocery store is a great place for the anti-social and spacey, but it's dangerous b/c weekly calorie-count is way up and stomach is not working correctly, despite adding lots of vegetables and avoiding rice.

Allons-y.

Salem Mailbox

Considering the fact that the USPS "decided" without warning or notes (unlike UPS) to stop delivering the mail "because no one is ever here" (with the caveats exposed during inquiries that: we don't know where your mail is; you should call the next day before 8 a.m. — but be sure to let it ring and ring and ring and ring, because "he" does not answer the phone; when you do call AND go down to the PO, there will still be zero answers), I present this excellent use of USPS property.

Two weddings and a road-trip

goal pile fall '09

not get swine flu

do term paper*
*(get "enrolled" after being in class weeks and weeks … )

have dad at home for several days without exploding

make magazine grow in artists' usefulness

do other job

see if someone wants to fix a roof and eaves and much much more! for under $10k in january

not explode in general

not think about "transforming second half of my life" while also not having (had) babies

(republished from Facebook notes, 9-4-09)

You'll just end up doing it with someone else

"they" are all leaving facebook:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html?_r=1

i don't really agree with those issues. don't do ratings and quizzes, don't say anything you don't want the whole stupid world to know, and just share events without necessarily saying whether you are going or where you have been. i never feel like we're co-stalking or co-ignoring.

the people who are lurking never really posted much in the first place. we've found no one has the time or energy to write to people directly, to all the people they wish to care about. honestly, we meet so many people in real life that it's overwhelming to know who(m) to maintain ties with, which kind, at what intervals.

that's how i feel anyway.

as for over-marketing, unlike the sexy "girls" who try to hook up with one on myspace all the time, the predatory marketing here seems fairly tame and infrequent. sure, i have nearly 300 "friends" at the moment, but many of us have career interests in common and live or are connected to the same accessible geography. we even see each other in person unless we live too far apart.

i appreciate hearing about web sites my cousin finds about advertising trends. i like hearing about healthy lifestyle choices people are making. peer pressure can be electronic and positive. some of us are stuck at computer screens wrecking our eyes and tendons for some cause that is really all for the effect of making some money to stay alive well enough to enjoy each others' company.

so we might as well "see" each other online during the computer-hours of life and get a head start.

the way the article plugged for twitter and ignored myspace was interesting, wasn't it? the way it undermined most of its own arguments for why people are leaving facebook was a little dull. the way i'm on linkedin but never go there because it's so ugly makes me guilty of being a lurker too.

show me a social networking tool that requires no maintenance (ie: no need to be profitable in order to compensate someone to spend time working on it), and then we'll have something to discuss. people want to keep in touch. if they want it without advertising, they should get together and build that. is twitter like that?

(republished from Facebook notes, 9-2-09)

Centipede, Millipede, 8/21/09

PS: they are all dead now, despite the fact that when we came home after a week of having the windows shut that the place was a mold factory … damp and gross and prompting even the most A/C-hating individual to crank it to 70º … black mold starting its path on places on the toilets no one expects … white floury clouds of spore powder flying into the air when morning glory vines are pulled …
******************

C: Loved loved loved the arcade game,
Until that roller ball would pinch my palms …

Feeling compelled to clarify on the alleged centipede-harboring-issue, lest everyone think I live in some kind of crawling pit of filth (and starting with how I sweep a lot but, as you know, can't deliberately kill non-lethal spiders and actually contemplated getting an owl somehow to deal with those mice that one time):

Centipedes are nightmarish and terrible things. The fact of their Jurassic past and tropical present keeps me from going to certain countries or geologic ages (sure, I can time-travel, why not).

I crushed a one at Mildred's a few weeks ago.

"My" "centipede" colony is contained in a flower pot where a baby jade plant is growing. They seem to be in various stages of life, and after I looked up both C and M, I find that there is a reason that a few seem to have more legs than the rest and the kind of fast-acting, wanna-hide gumption one comes to fear in centipedes: they are millipedes.

They all are kind-of tiny 1/2" by, oh, maybe 2 mm in diameter (like the mixed measurements?) … being "kept" only because I like to look at them and try to pretend I can get over my disgust. I am fascinated by the life of soil. Remember the little grey silverfish-companion bugs that lived in there? Now they have herbivore friends.

These friends will continue to grow, the Internet photos and data indicate, and apparently they migrate a lot, live "quite a long time," whatever that means, and can create 50-300 eggs, which hatch over a period of days. One site claimed they were incapable of reproducing indoors. I'd rather not experiment on this one; they might have adapted to new environments by now. If they are "greenhouse millipedes," they are an invasive species from Japan or elsewhere in Asia that are now ubiquitous on our continent. None of the photos really look like my creatures. They are still too small.

I don't see them trying to escape … except for a pile of dead juvenile ones I saw curled up outside the pot all in a cluster, which is how I noticed them and whose corpses I attributed to a spider hanging out around nearby around the bend (with no scientific proof, of course, and s/he's does not seem to be eating them anymore that I can tell; I can't find the arachnid).

It is not smart to think my will power and that very cottony and wide spider web encircling the base of the flower pot will stop them. The web seems especially well-designed to catch things that move and have wiggly mass like millipedes. But that would mean attributing both scouting and decision-making to a spider. That's some spider.

What's really stopping me is the fact that I am going to have to carry the thing outside (it's a 12-incher, full and heavy and crusty and full of spider webs and probably a spider besides — and who KNOWS what's on the bottom between the pot and tray???), remove the plant (hoping for the best) and dump it out.

All gross and tactile and worse than mere harboring. And, when my husband agreed to do it (easily), I couldn't let him take them away when we walked over to get it / them. Yes, insane. I wish I could tweeze them out without freaking out so that my Java finches might eat them. Only I don't know if they will. Mealy worms, sure (no, I don't buy those to feed them; are you kidding).

New lesson is an old lesson: you have no idea where that dirt has been.

Eggs are everywhere, and I've always liked science and am more pro-life than a lot of my actions would indicate.

But there is no way I'm having 'pedes running around my personal living space. There could be dozens.

So, relocation day is nigh.

Land Sea Monkeys could be the next million-dollar idea.

**************************
I am sad they have died.

(republished from Facebook notes 8-21-09)

You know it has been too long

When you can't remember which version of which password is going to work.

Thank Googleness for forgiveness and multiple tries.

Just like a carnival game.

Sodium underload

And then there was vomit

j.k.

No one is ill.

Just like the word /

Concept!

Purgation, when did that

Go out of style …

Parasite week continues

Now, there is a bat in the belfry (sic; third floor) of the house.

We are too tired to battle.

We have no idea where/how it came in.

All equals one giant SIGH.

Public Hospital x2/~3

They will ask you your weight, at least 3 times in 2 visits, and you shall self-report it, only once noting out loud that they have not taken your weight, that you do not have a scale and that no one has weighed you in a long time.

Truman Medical Center intake staff are ex-circus performers.

I met a Somalian man (young man) in a wheelchair because I was no longer, after one visit to the ER, fascinated enough with the coral reef / tropical fish tank there that divides General Waiting from (something like) Expedited Care. He looked as familiar as all my former students, and he described his situation as an accident, and he lives on Garfield Avenue, near a school where I once taught. Also, people from other countries, religions and cultures etc. are more interesting and less socially threatening to talk to in a place where I stand out a bit from the crowd. And most other people in the waiting rooms are pissed off or wrangling children. No one reads anything. I don't know how they can stand it.

The RN/LPN of today wished an x-ray (Madeline from Radiology was nice, and it was sad to overhear her dealing with some tedious phone-line transferring issue while I was waiting — the little cracks in the technology become evident, along with all the other cracks that make working in a place stressful, that make you wish that systems did not have such systemic problems and that people could just do their jobs outright and to the best of their ability).

The two doctors who actually saw me Sunday (neither of whose name was listed on my paperwork as the doctors who were there) had decided against an x-ray. When an infection seems mostly improved … why dig into the bone level? Foreign matter was the goal; but I was pretty sure the only thing keeping one of my hands puffy (look, Ma, no tendons!) is the deep punctured hole sitting on top of it.

Having a second arm bracelet exclusively for the fun of displaying your insurance status is quite ____. Wednesday, when I go back for my second follow-up, I shall look about at others' bracelets. White is for private insurance, and I have a feeling there are other colors.

There was a woman (which I kindly thought was a dummy / teaching tool the third time I saw her) curled up on a bench inside the spot where one becomes admitted.

My insurance cut me off from St. Luke's … but the public hospital is excruciatingly convenient anyway, and I am most used to declassé situations. Mind, that is a misuse of the word, but the waiting room is rather like a giant, non-moving bus. After making a decision to move from the section of chairs reserved (says sign) for people waiting to check in to a spot deeper in the waiting room between two male humans, there was a smell as I read my PETA propaganda picked up from the yoga studio in the office building where I work. Nothing traceable to anyone in particular, so what's the point of moving again? It's a lottery …

It was my second visit, and I keep laughing but it shouldn't be funny that I have had to declare the last date of my last period at least seven times to seven different people (always having to look it up and probably at least once or twice mis-reading my calendar, dyslexing a 3 for a 6 or vice-versa) … and no one (one did ask) actually took any samples to check; shouldn't it be funny that I answered "no" at least 5 times about prescription medication or medication in general but I still received the "may decrease the effectiveness of birth control pills" speech two or three times?

And I got an x-ray without any lead vest? And am taking giant doses of antibiotics?

The part about restating your name and DOB every time they hand you something new is fine; I get that, and so the round-about ways of asking whether someone is pregnant, making sure again and again, must be some legal issue, too. But, unlike Dr. House, they trust your answers.

I have spent eight hours and an unknown amount of medical expenses on the consequences of my trying to get my ("my") stupid and psychotic cat indoors Saturday night. I only had the sense to hold the 17-pound beast away from my face. You think you have a grasp of something, and then you realize it's thrashing beyond your control. It happens quickly. Cats have instincts, and my human ones were suppressed by the goal. I guess I should have let him fight the other cat and then let him be the one to go to the vet. Which outcome would make me a better cat-owner? Ha ha.

The person today had no more information than I had about the IV cocktail of antibiotics I was given on Sunday (even less, because I had to inform her twice that I had taken them the day before; I guess she was distracted? I had overheard her talking about how she would have taken this library job — her favorite job ever — were it not for the fact that she had been about to go into the Navy and "everything was in motion" to the loud RN man who sounded every bit as arrogant as a doctor until I met him: short, wedding ring, balding, glasses, trim, literary, "knows every animal shelter," and whose cat "does not bite…").

Though I had scribbled the funny brand-names of all the equipment I was left with for 2 or 3 hours on Sunday, I figured (stupidly, I see), that my discharging paperwork would disclose my treatment. The healthcare practitioner today did not find it necessary to look up details; she did, though, act surprised before her ears contacted her brain when I answered her question about my pills, "I'm on Augmentin, or the generic form of it, but I have only taken two so far" (meaning that the drug probably hasn't had much chance to work yet). She got all bug-eyed: "Why only two?!?" Sigh: "Because I started it Sunday and it's a 12-hour dose and I do it at the 9's."

Oh. Can't imagine what annoyances her day serves up to lead to all that.

When you go to the doctors', you have to pay too much attention; you might as well be ordering fried chicken at a drive-through, you have to repeat yourself so much.

I will say that most people I met there are nice, considerate and fine. As good as or better than those I have encountered in so-called private sector health care. One of my fellow patients today (as I overheard; yes, doctor-types are loud-ass MFers who will talk about anything anytime and whose voices carry through the walls but who talk in the halls, referring to you as "12" or "4," anyway) apparently works at the IRS. Knowing her condition, it would not have been polite of me to peek out and see if we knew each other; having heard what RN man said to her about needing to make and appointment to get up to the OBG clinic made me think he was way-too-tuning his explanation way way down. It was insulting to all of us within earshot and with brains. No mention of cervical cancer screening. He wrote down I should read Christopher Moore's "Island of the Sequined Love Nun" (when noting that I was reading).

The fact that I have not paid a dime out of my pocket, despite the fact that my insurance card clearly says "$100" for an e-room visit and "$25" (it may be $30) for any doctor event, disturbs me. I have not had any paperwork that lists any costs. I have signed a few that, with long language, imply my consent to be treated and to pay for it. What kind of system asks you to sign a blank check? A check that you will pay after your insurance decides what things cost (for you/for them/that particular day) and what portion of that cost is their responsibility and whether or not certain caps and thresholds have been met for the calendar year and/or lifetime.

So, now I have had at least one "emergency room" visit, and I will have clocked two additional clinic events, which are in-taken through "emergency;" I can forgive (not) the Walgreen's Take Care LPN I saw on Sunday morning who was reticent about explaining anything and not at all sympathetic. I had to lead her into every clause of her sentence re: why I could not get antibiotics from here there and then. They would have helped, and I'm sure I still would have gone for more care, given the alarmist nature of Internet accounts of cat-bite infections, the amount of pain and loss of mobility due to swelling and, well, pain. But they have their rules.

The fear of the unknown expense contributes poorly to the getting well thing. I want to follow directions and am only going back for the second follow-up Wednesday morning out of fear. You know, no one wants to lose parts of their hands. But, instinct tells me that things are improving, and arrogance tells me that I would know it if things took a turn for the worse.

Everyone believed me when I said it was my cat that had bit me, not some stray, and that he was up-to-date on vaccinations. "I have the paperwork if anyone cares to see it." No. Amazing. It's all true, of course; but there is no reason for them to believe me. Except that my English is great and that I have insurance and a sense of humor.

My 140/bpm heart rate upon initial intake is what got me in ASAP, I was told. What a ticket, eh? Long live anxiety. I even explained that the last time I was at Walgreen's (for a supposed strep-throat infection that I did not have), the tech made me go back out and wait in order to get my BP and heart-rate down, that I was probably fine. Of course, things eventually stabilized Sunday and the rate was in the lower 80s after that. However, the amount of follow-ups assigned leads me to believe that it would have been bad care for them to let me go home un-antibiodied on Sunday. All a bit arbitrary, isn't it?

PS, don't ever ask me to take a lie-detector test. Disaster.

PPS, tetanus shots make it feel like you lifted 50 pounds 50 times with only one muscle group. I can barely get my arm over my head at this point. I don't like my blown vein, either. My legs are doing fine. My ankle could be better. My internal organs are not self-reporting. I do not ever want another cat/dog in my care again. They are too expensive, and I'm too selfish to pay for things I consider extraneous or akin to buying "love." I am worn out with the little furry bundle of needs that provides very little benefit in return, just noise and dirt; besides, I have birds. Avian flu, salmonella and little (predictable) beak-bites, I can handle.

Laundry was accomplished. House-scraping was not.

Wireless router was accomplished. Configuration was not. (It worked until disc was applied … now I know why so many people give up on not putting passwords on their signals … we thank you, neighbors, but we curse the perpetual incompatibility of hardware — why can't it be more like putting a Porche engine into a VW bus? It's not like we're cross-breeding Apples and Dells. If Dell were a fruit, what would it be?)

There was a spider living between the wall and the spice-tray. I removed it from the jar of rub (the one with the lounging pig on it, which a former neighbor gave to us, at least two years ago) to the storage porch, where it should find plenty of yummy trash flies, perfectly sized and ready to eat. I did clear up in there, but some flies are very smart about hiding. I am so sick of maggotty things, however, that I am nearing action.

It is nothing as active as all those people doing the Tour of Kansas City today or the Komen Cancer run tomorrow, and it is not all that important, as long as the municipality continues to collect trash on a weekly basis. We do use our two-bag limit (one bag is covering the week-old one that hosts many lifeforms by Sunday evening), and I love the recycling bin because it never contains rotting food.

There are a few "dust spiders" in my room; these are the blonde things that remind me of sea crabs and usually live in joints where walls or window-moldings meet walls. I can't mind them. I do mind the cat hair, and so it's a wonder anything has a chance to settle down at all. Songs of Innocence: sweep! sweep!

9-26-01

Back when working class was

that —

Before fear, movement.

One job one life one love one

marriage

one straight line with few

regrets; Regrets come from

options.

We have far too many

options and very

little security.

If you are a woman

and if you really consider a pomegranate, you would never question why Persephone disobeyed the lord of the Underworld: if you've ever been hungry, merge that feeling with the (image of) the ruby-bright mosaic of firm, sour and wholesome seeds, and you know that it would be impossible to keep from eating them.

On the other hand, it's harder to imagine why any one (woman) would be talked into ignoring the command of the Lord of the sky, the one who created her, who, instead of imprisoning her in darkness, threw her out from a lush garden, revoked upon her eating of a mere, crunchy apple.

Admittedly, I would have a hard time avoiding either of these fruits for long.

Re: Picking up birds that are dead at night

She didn't want to do it; she could not shake visions of shiny beetles scurrying out over her wrists, scared into escaping — or the thought of phosphorescent-seeming worms, puffy larvae, squirming ever so slightly, soft under her fingers.

B. would tell her this: "Girl, the things you can't see you might not even feel, and in either case, it washes off."

19 years ago

U.S. consumer credit market report

Personal angle that bears no wider statistical value:

Got the same balance transfer offer from Commerce Bank in the mail twice in one week;

Received e-mail from AT&T Citi card* that my credit limit was increased to a hearty $8,300.

Oh, it's far too easy to get a high-interest loan, isn't it?

As if I'm going to put roofing repairs on a charge-card!

*Card had not been used in years; was used** online a few months ago at encouragement of "use or we close" letter. As this is the card that saved my ass when I was being held by Japanese federal agents at the airport in Fukuoka (having memorized the calling card number, I was able to make an international call for assistance on the green pay-phones), I had to keep it. Also it is a Mastercard, and I like to have one in addition to the Providian- Washington Mutual- Chase VISA, because contrary to commercials, there are some places that don't take the latter (like my university).

**It now has a zero balance, and I did not pay them any interest. Sadly, we do pay interest to a bank I hate more and which is meaner about sneaky penalties and seems to be inching away from the traditional grace period, Bank of America. Perhaps transferring is the way to go. The other VISA in question is not un-evil, but despite its reputation for screwing people, including my dad, has never done me wrong. The switch after this last collapse was a bit harsh, though; they made one agree to all kinds of online rules, and they cancelled some existing services. They think I am worth $15,000 in potential debt. We won't even talk about the golden '90s … I'd have to go find my debt-journal, but it was quite a journey from $18,000*** in the hole on multiple cards — using less than half of all credit available to me — to having thousands in savings. Too bad there was a house purchase and then a salary slash, or we'd be home-free (literally, but happily, I think, because then we would go travel).

***I don't know how — I really don't.