The Real Problem with the Health Care System

I hate hospitals, seriously. And not just because they're cold, smell faintly of vomit and more often than not I'm there to do something decidedly un-fun (like get strapped to a board and shoved in a tunnel for an hour).

I hate them because they MAKE NO SENSE. I think the layout of hospitals are designed specifically to baffle and annoy those of us not wearing scrubs. This morning after my scan I still needed to get bloodwork done, and the woman at the lab informed me I needed to walk to Siberia to register (again) before doing so.

She did her best to give me directions. (Left, Right, Elevators, whatever). I don't blame her, it's not her fault she works in the bermuda fucking triangle. It's not her fault that all the hallways look the same and are filled with windowless doors and unhelpful little signs with unhelpful little arrows pointing me towards words that mean nothing to me.

Observation Unit --->

<---Endoscopy

Decontamination --->

<---Hall of Mirrors

Once I finally found the place I was looking for I regretted not dropping bread crumbs so I could find my way back. I sat in another waiting room for another 25 minutes and thought that by the time I got out of there it would be time to start all over again next year.

Luckily though, another stranger mispronounced my name, copied my insurance card and directed my sore ass to the next waiting room, which was, by some miracle, directly across the hall.

One Hell of an Ass

This morning, as my doctor crouched behind me, jiggling my bare ass fat with his fingers, I was thinking about small talk--as in, I couldn't think of any.

It's time again for my yearly cancer scans which means a few days of injections, a dash of radioactivity and an hour of relaxing in a narrow tunnel whose top is inches from my face. Sounds fun right? Not as fun as trying to make conversation when there's a man behind you staring intently at your crack.

I mean, what do you say when a man is mere inches from your twin moons, concentrating intently on the syringe he's about to stick in it?

A wise person would say nothing and let him concentrate on the task at hand. Me on the other hand, hoping to direct the attention away from my butt cheeks, said, "So, seen any good movies lately?"

He didn't take the bait. I contmeplated whether or not to go on anyway, telling him about the movies I've seen lately, since those movies don't include a needle plunging into my ass. But, in a rare moment of discretion, I stopped myself.

The most recent movie I've seen is Hellboy. And when I think about commenting on it, the thing that comes immediately to mind is that I found the bad guy incredibly hot and for the entire movie was considering this: If the evil prince asked me to come down to his sewer lair and spend all of eternity with him, would I go? I'll have to think about it.

I did not think this was appropriate conversation to have with my doctor while he plunged potent chemicals into my glutes. But it's true, the bad guy in Hellboy was hot, in a pale, evil way.

He wasn't all bad really either. I felt he did TRY to convince the tree people to see things his way before killing them. And he had a good point about the giant plant that was destroying a cityblock, it was very beautiful and the last of it's kind. He wasn't totally unreasonable.

And even the super creepy Tooth Fairy critters he unleashed to eat a roomful of well-off New Yorkers, were cute in their own destructive way.

My reverie was broken by my doctor saying I could pull my pants back up and to remember which cheek we did so we can do the other side tomorrow.

I'm going to think of some really good small talk before then.

Any ideas, shoot em my way.

You had me at felt tip pen...

What is it about buying office supplies and paper products that makes me weak in the knees? I'm giddy just thinking about peeling the cardboard backing off a shiny new set of pens, neatly stacking crisp thank you cards in a drawer, or fanning my fingers over pages and pages of paper filled only with the promise of what's to come.

The thing is though, the magic has a short shelf life. No matter how hard I try, I simply cannot get excited about the office supplies I already have, even my good ones (like pink spiral shaped paperclips).

It's a problem. Yesterday, while making copies for work at Office Depot, I saw a display for new Sharpie pens. "Won't bleed through paper!" Good enough for me. The pens could have been twenty five dollars, it wouldn't have mattered, I would not have been able to leave the store without them.

I can't stop. I have more journals than I could fill in five lifetimes. I have enough thank you notes to send one to everyone who has ever blessed me after a sneeze or passed me the salt. Yet I still want more. More. More. MORE!

Today, while shopping with Alisa for wedding decorations, we found ourselves trapped inside Wal-Mart due to a monsoon style downpour. Of course, we soon found ourselves strolling the school supply aisle.

I controlled myself, I really really did. But there were a few must have items I could not be expected to pass up.

1. adorable neon mini post-its

2. mechanical pencils decorated with skulls.

3. comically colassal push pins

4. a sparkly red hologram folder

There's no end in sight really. I'd say I'll try to quit, but I know that won't happen. So I won't bother, I'll just put these things away next to their counterparts, multi-colored paperclips, unused mini index cards and gel pens that made my heart race mere days ago.

The Girl with the Amber Necklace

So I’m driving around town with my boss on a Monday afternoon, looking for a place to buy gin, and contemplating the meaning of my existence on this planet.

We’d spent the afternoon in the nursing home where her friend, the great Marxist feminist writer Marlene Dixon, had just died. We collected her possessions into boxes and carried them through the rain to the car. En route to my boss’s house, where we’d sort through everything, she wanted to get some gin, and have a drink before we got started. I can’t say I blame her.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been pegged for the task of going through all the stuff someone leaves behind. When my grandfather died, I cleaned out his trailer with my grandmother. Piles of clothes and little trinkets that may or may not have held value to him, were now being tossed in a bag headed for the nearest thrift store. Every once in awhile, you come across something that reveals meaning about the person, like his bedside drawer, empty except for a picture of each of us grandkids and a prayer asking the lord to accept him into heaven when his time came.

My grandfather I felt some connection to, but Marlene I’d only met on my few recent visits to the nursing home to fill her bird feeder and bring her chocolate shakes. My boss and I sat under a carport sorting through boxes that represented everything Marlene possessed at the end of her life. Among the stack of family photo albums was a book of poems by high school kids.

“She probably has one published in there,” my boss said.

I searched for it. And found a poem about a piece of brocade that once belonged to a Chinese princess, and then to a French pompadour, and now to a young girl writing a poem who wonders, who will have it when I am gone?

And now I wonder about the myriad things lying around my own house. It occurred to me that at the end we’re all reduced to a big pile of stuff that someone has to go through and figure out to do with.

In my case, a person would have to sort through items such as: a pink wig, a Disney Princess collection CD, a plastic Jesus pencil topper, a mini newsletter about a feisty goat that I got in a carton of eggs once, ungodly amounts of wrapping paper and drawers full of bows and trimmings, silver elephant earrings my grandma bought me that I can’t get rid of or bring myself to wear for fear people will think I’m a republican, a Groucho Marx disguise kit, skull and cross bones band-aids and Antiques Roadshow: The Board Game.

Even the things that have real meaning to me, would they mean something to anyone else? The pearl flowers I wore in my hair to get married, that are carefully wrapped in plastic and in a box with the cards we received on our wedding. The black and white picture of my mom when she was in second grade or my grandparents on their wedding day. My kindergarten artwork and Care Bears carefully preserved by my grandmother. The tiny hospital bracelet I wore when I was born.

Eventually, whether it’s tomorrow, or 100 years from now, all of it will be thrown away. (Unless it’s in a museum somewhere because I accidentally made some great scientific discovery or made first contact with aliens.)

I’m sitting here typing wearing a big beautiful amber necklace that belonged to Marlene and thinking that the best we can hope for is that our family and friends keep some of the trinkets, either to remember us by, or because, like the amber necklace, they simply find them beautiful and so they will filter out into the world, bring happiness to others and add to someone else’s pile.

Mr. Slug

So I'm sitting in the library wearing a pink wig and a hat from the 1920s. The thing is, wearing a ridiculous costume on an ordinary Wednesday is not the weirdest situation to find myself in in the last 24 hours.

Last week I read a newspaper article about Neil Hamburger coming to town. He is supposedly "America's Funnyman." So not knowing Mr. Hamburger's body of work, what he does or if he is even funny, I decided to check the show out last night.

The website said doors open at nine. And being the square that I am I imagined that meant the show would start shortly thereafter, 9:30 at the latest.

Danny and I showed up to an almost empty Common Grounds, grabbed a table towards the back and waited. When 9:45 rolled around I figured the show really started at 10 and that I was a huge dork. At 10:15 the place started filling up, people were rubbing elbows with us and using the ashtray stationed at the end of our table, but still no show.

At this point I was yawning and seriously contemplating leaving before the show even started. At 10:30, I tell Danny I am leaving. Let's give it 15 more minutes, he says. We dragged ourselves all the way out for this.

Fine. At 10:43, the show starts. The opening for Neil Hamburger is The Tom Miller Show. He's something of a local celebrity. A performance artist. He runs on stage in a yellow blazer and goes right into an acapella rap about blow jobs which is totally worth the wait if only to see a 40-something man in a cheesy blazer rap about blow jobs.

He reads a few poems (dicks, vaginas, more blow jobs)and sing a song whose chorus I can't get out of my head no matter how hard I try....666, the number of the beast, fuck me with a nun, fuck me with a priest (It's quite good really).

The best part of the show is a suspender clad drunk man who paces in front of the stage raising his arms in admiration for Tom Miller. Trying to encourage the audience to cheer by repeatedly lifting his extra tall can of Michelob Light.

Then, just as I am wondering how long this opening act is, Tom Miller introduces "Mr. Slug."

Mr. Slug is a large man wearing a mask, pink headdress and a white graduation gown. He speaks reverberated gibberish into the microphone before stripping to nothing but a cloth diaper and masturbating on stage.

Yeah. We ended up leaving after the opening act since it was already well past our bedtime and the main event hadn't even started. I'll just look Neil Hamburger up on you tube to see what I missed.

But as I sit here in the library sporting hair you'd only see on Halloween or in a strip club, I keep thinking about Mr. Slug. My friend Alisa, who I meet here once a week to write, had the idea to dress up, as an experiment really.

How would people react to a costume in a mundane setting on a not-so-special Wednesday? I've actually been surprised at the response I'm NOT getting. People go out of their way to act as though there is nothing out of the ordinary about the woman with pink hair and a green hat that just walked in or is sitting next to them at the stop light.

I can feel them all NOT looking.

Are we so inundated with Mr. Slugs that we don't even notice strange anymore? I guess in a town where a man can wear a diaper and stroke his pole on stage, my behavior is not as outlandish as I previously thought. I may not even be as lame as I thought.