excerpts from the Lay of Healthcare

And lo, there arose from the depths the great monster, Boondoggleous Takeover Bill, or the great Reformicus Rex--depending on who's shouting at you--and with him, Skullduggerous Nancy, she of Cackle and Gavel, or Pelosi Handmaiden of Justice-for-All, depending on which blogs you read. Together they bestrode The Bought and Paid for Representatives of the Marxist-Socialist America-Hating Special Interests OR the Democratically Elected Representatives of the Will of (Especially) the (Under-rich) People, and either Micturated from a Great Height on the Bent-But-Not-Broken remnant of True Patriots and also the elderly, OR delivered the Stroke of Equal Access and Amelioration of All Woes in a wonderful sweet rain of justice and non-ideological pragmatic its all for the good statesmanship.

Whereupon the heavens turned to blood (or lollipops) and opened, and, depending on where you're sitting, rained down either a deluge of Burning Constitutions and the Sulfurous Tears of Those-Waiting-in-Lines, or Affordable Prescriptions and the Laughter of Those With Preexisting Conditions Whose Lives Will be Spared (or Covered) Just Long Enough Not to Have to Pay for All of This.

And behold! the Catastrophic/Historic Monster/King was met with such a firestorm of Vituperative Tweeting and/or Encomium-ing Facebookery that, verily, The Internet nearly exploded. "It is Meet and Good that our Great Leader Shouldst Betake Himself to teh Reforming of Healthcare! FTW! LOLZ" said one. "Lament! Lament with An Angry Voice 4 Our Citadel is Betrayed and Our Country is Toast & Kansas Has Lost & My Bracket is Ruined! :-( twote another.

Meanwhile, the Unemployment Rate was Still Nearly 10%. Fear not gentle reader! For ever and anon do the Wheels of What We're Paying Attention To turn, and soon The Mighty Warriors of Right and Left (or Wrong, depending on who's SHOUTING AT YOU) will Begirdle their Loins and begin again the Sacred Dance of Name Calling Demagoguery, each from The High Ground whilst they Lament the Unseemly Dissembling and Hate Speech of those Nasty Republidemocransicats.

Lessons

I've always assumed my ever-burgeoning man bosoms are the result of my indifference towards regular exercise coupled with my intractable penchant for pizza, but recent events have led me to believe that a more sinister cause, a less pepperoni flavored cause, may be the real culprit. I am beginning to believe that I may be turning, without consent or knowing participation, into a woman.

I know what you're thinking: "but that wouldn't explain your matching thighs and rapidly-moving-out-of-the-sub-compact-range spare tire." True. But not important. What is important is that one of my beginning students cried in a lesson today, and my first (devastated) instinct was to console this poor kid with a big maternal hug and maybe some cookies (see: penchant, pizza et. al.). I mean, it was heart-rending. Not the appropriate response for the crustily cynical manly man I am occasionally successful in believing myself to be (at least emotionally. In other respects, manly might be a stretch. see: penchant, pizza et. al.).

This kid, Brian, is a polite, cheerful, respectful, and generally happy kid. I have him for a half hour saxophone lesson on Tuesdays, but I occasionally also see him on Mondays, the other night I teach at the music academy. If he sees me he will stick his head in my room (assuming I'm not in a lesson) and say hi. We get along pretty well, is what I'm saying. Brian is also at the academy on Monday, but thats for his guitar lesson. On Tuesday he has saxophone...and piano, and violin.

The problem for Brian is that he's taking two hours worth of private music instruction every week in four different areas, and he's expected to practice outside his lesson for each of those four lessons. Brian is in fourth grade, making him all of 10 or 11 (right? I can never remember what age goes with what grade).

So the past few lessons, Brian has been moving backwards saxophonically. He's a smart kid who can read music well, but I think the notion of one more unique set of fingerings to correspond to each note, plus having to breathe and articulate is just too much. So we're going over a pretty basic tune, one that introduces us to the F# at the top line of the staff. Brian already knows this note, but there are some useful articulation things in this little piece in the Essential Elements book, so we're looking at it.

What Brian will do, and has been doing for the past couple of lessons, is give me thirty seconds of concentrated attention to whatever we're doing, and make it most of the way through his piece. Then, we're supposed to go back and make corrections, and play the piece again. What happens is that Brian zones out. He'll play completely random notes, stare off into space, and just generally give up. He'll still answer all of my questions (politely), but there is a major disconnect happening between the things he knows about music (what note is that?) and what he knows about the saxophone (how do we finger that note?). So today, the same thing was happening, and I'm trying to bring Brian around. We're going note by note at this point: "What note is that? How do you finger it? How many beats does it get?" etc. We've been doing this for about ten minutes, when Brian finally just quits. He's been quiet and polite this whole time, not acting out or being disrespectful, just not entirely there. What follows is excruciating to watch, at least for me.

Brian does not make any kind of scene. Brian, at 10 years old, is at least twice the man I am, based on his handling himself in this situation. He puts the saxophone in his lap, and just quietly begins rubbing his eyes. When this lasts longer than a normal eye rubbing should, I begin to fear the worst: "are you ok there, Buddy?" Quiet eye rubbing, just the tiniest hint of a quiver. "Hey, hey, its alright, you're doing ok Brian..." Now Brian is crying, but its amazing: none of your histrionic sobbing or convulsing. Just a sort of efficient, workmanlike drip, but with almost no sound. Fortunately, his mom comes to his lessons, so she swooped in to the rescue, gave him what amounts to a leaning-over standing hug/arm pat and tells him he's only got a couple minutes left of his lesson, it'll be ok. So Brian composes himself, neither abashed nor angry, wipes his eyes with maybe a whisper of a sniff and looks at me, as if to say: 'ok, lets keep going.' We basically ended the lesson there, and I gave him some easy review stuff to work on for next week. He put away his saxophone with the same deliberate care as he always does: swabbing, drying, etc., and then said goodbye as he left.

This kid has more gravitas and dignity at ten years old than I will ever hope to be able to feign. He's got four different instruments to learn, on all of which he's a beginner. Its obvious that he's a bright dude, and also that he wants to do well, that he's serious about learning. But at this point, he's so loaded down with obligations (esp. in piano and violin, from what I gathered. Snobby classical killjoys.) that it must feel like he's working a full time job plus overtime just to keep from drowning. It seems unfair that a kid that young should have to think of music as a burden, a deadline to be met, rather than a fun activity with a cool instrument.

In any case, he came off far better in the exchange than I did. While I didn't cry, I did feel pretty awful. I can handle making a kid cry when they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, and they don't have any good reason for not doing it other than being a snot. But I never once raised my voice or got annoyed with Brian, I was just asking him to do the millionth thing he'd been asked to do that week, and that was one over his limit for this particular day.

So, to conclude: I suspect that my feelings of soul-melting bless-his-little-heart sympathy and lament are unseemly in someone who purports to be a man, and may in fact be symptoms of late-developing hermaphroditism, thus, to bring it full circle, explaining my hairy b-cups. And while this is not to suggest that men are incapable of such advanced and complicated emotions, it does make me feel better to think that it might explain my doughy physique. Although nothing can explain away the thighs. (Not even Denise Austin, am I right girls? I mean, you eat one bag of Dove bars when you're 13 and it stays with you for life, eh? eh? ladies?)

Facebook

So Facebook has finally learned its lesson. Instead of making a huge change all at once for everybody, they've made a huge change in waves. Brilliant. By slowly introducing the radically new homepage to groups of users at a time instead of all at once, they've successfully diluted and diffused all the apoplectic rage and just general honked-off annoyance they inevitably generate with each new change. Now by the time everyone is switched over, most people will have made their peace with the new iteration and there won't be as many "We hate the new FB, change it back" groups.

They've successfully managed to saw off at the knees any sense of unified, populist sentiment against the changes they've made to an already popular product by controlling when we get to complain about it, and knowing that our attention spans are so short that we'll eventually cope with it and move on before everyone can be pissed off together.

I don't really care too much about what Facebook looks like or how it works. I'll figure it out. But imagine what our country would look like if Congress figured out how to do this.

Petsmart

the 'lets-face-it-a-little-bit-frumpy-middle-aged-women' to 'putatively red-blooded american male' ratio in the cat section at Petsmart today was approximately 74.5 to 1, the half being a woman who may have been lost, and looking for ferret food instead. The unspoken camaraderie we were all feeling in the pursuit of just the most darling little nibblies and num-nums for our respective mr. snuggles-es and whiskers-es and socks-es (and Finnegans!) began to manifest in me as a sort of atavistic nausea, as my (undoubtedly) fierce warrior/hunter ancestors announced a genetic protest at this shameful loss of manliness. Indeed it was a harrowing look into my future: a future to be characterized by stringy gray ponytails, raised-texture t-shirts, and an unmistakable feline funk. Best to adapt now though, as later it may be more difficult to adjust to a life of hungry-man frozen dinners and early-evening network television. Still, at least Finnegan now has something other than my box spring to scratch. And he IS just the scratchiest little booger, darn his cute little paws.

Live dispatch from Barnes and Noble

What follows is the exciting word-for-word transcription of an encounter with a just distractingly good-looking young woman (JDGLYW) seated directly across from me at the Barnes and Noble cafe here in Fayetteville.

Me: "..."

JDGLYW: "..."

fifteen minutes of respective book-perusal

Me: "..."

JDGLYW: "..."

exit JDGLYW.

I am going to die grumpy and alone, buried under a pile of unread books and peanut butter jars.

Cleanliness is next to: washboard abs, gainful employment, and meaningful relationships on the list of things not attributable to me.

Since I am not a gainfully employed laborer, in the fullest sense of the word, I spent Labor Day cleaning my room. 

Those who are regular knowers of what is going on in my life will recall that prior to moving to Fayetteville, NC, I was a gainfully employed laborer. These knowers of my life will also recall that the job in which I was employed was as a fabricator of custom light fixtures (fabricator = teller of lies about building lights, because really I mostly did the simple repetitive things that were 1. most boring AND/OR 2. least likely to result in complete disaster. I was ok with this arrangement). 

Now the shop is a dangerous place. Filled with peril, maybe even fraught. Mostly its dangerous to people who are: uncoordinated AND/OR clueless in the presence of power tools. I happen to be both of those things. Mercifully, I was surrounded by people who, while not above shameless belittling of other peoples' misfortunes, did a pretty good job of making sure I didn't do anything stupid enough to be life threatening. I survived that job with no major injuries except for a picturesque but fairly inconsequential thumb-scraping captured vividly in my facebook profile picture. 

Having thus earned my stripes as a mighty people's hero of the proletariat, I fled to NC where my limbs would not need to keep as constant a vigil against band-saw encounters or wayward hammers. Which brings me to room cleaning.

You have to understand that room cleaning happens only under certain circumstances: I can no longer reach the door without stepping in old saltine wrappers, the laundry pile starts glowing and giving off a fetid funk, it takes ten minutes to move everything onto my bed in the morning so I can reach the door (vice versa in the evening), or when I am overcome with such a deeply profound existential ennui that I feel my only options are room cleaning or dishes.

So it was room cleaning. Cleaning my room for me is a chance to assert dominance, to remake my immediate surroundings in a glorious sunburst of creative destruction from which there will emerge, naked as the newly reconstituted phoenix: the carpet. It is a process and a chore, but more importantly, a trial. It is to be taken in deadly earnest, not to be trifled with. And so, like some latter day Zeus with douchebaggy scruff in lieu of awesome beard, god of hearth and bookshelves (a paraphrase, admittedly), I set about my room cleaning from the Olympian heights of my bed, the only open real estate left in the room. Room cleaning, as I said, is a chance to assert dominance. And I asserted. I sternly admonished the nightstand, delivered several blistering barbs to the recalcitrant CDs, put a lamp in an arm-bar etc. And then, in what would prove to be my Waterloo, I attempted a downward-kicking-stumble-thrust on my rolling office chair. Not deigning to administer the full weight of my Zeussian power, I had chosen instead to lead with the "Wee-wee-wee" piggy of my left foot. The office chair was unimpressed, and so I followed up my martial maneuver with some rocking back and forth on one foot and some loud inhaling. Still nothing. So I gave up, defeated (de-FEET-ed! ha-HA!).

As I mentioned earlier, I'm not exactly Barishnikov reincarnate, so toe-stubbing is something with which I'm familiar. I didn't think too much of it, other than that it kind of hurt to wiggle it. Eight hours later, after getting home from practicing, I remove my sock to discover that my pinky toe has swelled horribly, grotesquely, to almost definitely 2/3's the size of my fourth toe! Outrageous, I know. Also, there's a nasty red/purple welt running down the length of the inside of the toe. At this point I know what you're thinking: "Ohmygoodness you don't have health insurance!" and, "Its too bad you're too late for dramatic first-cycle news coverage of angry town-hall meetings about health care reform!" I know. Those were my first thoughts too. I could just imagine: hobbling angrily to a town-hall meeting to vent my spleen, and maybe aerate my colon, complete with tearful story and then the dramatic unsocking of The Toe. But alas, it is not to be. 

Still, having survived almost a year at the shop unscathed amid saws and lacquer thinner and who knows what all, it seems poetically unjust to have probably fractured a toe attempting to clean my room. This is a dangerous dangerous world. Fraught right up to the gills with peril. And now, years from now when my grandchildren are asking me why I limp, I won't be able to say: "Well, it may have cost me a toe, but we got the chandeliers out on time," instead I will urge them to be careful about how they treat office furniture. You laugh, but thats only because you know that I don't even have a girlfriend, let alone a wife and children, and am in fact so far from any flavor of progeny that I might as well just cut off the toe and wait for them to perfect cloning if I want offspring. But at least my room is clean(er). I need a job.

 

making friends at the gym.

"How long did you run, an hour?"

me (confused by unwonted gym-attention. being genial): "no, but it sure felt like it! only about forty minutes" (this is a stupid thing to say. I suppose, 40 minutes being two-thirds of 60, it kind of works, but usually the 'it sure felt like it' thing begins working only at 2x or greater differences between perceived and real)

"Well, you looked strong!"

"::polite chuckle:: well, hopefully four miles more fit than when I got here!" (also a stupid thing to say)

::end of conversation::

Now, pop quiz, hot shot:

Was my interlocutor in the above dialogue: 

A) Young, cute dedicated gym-going girl, appraising me with a sort of 'hey, you're kind of cute and you work out and I bet you tell funny jokes and are musical and read a lot' look and striking up some post-treadmill conversation around the ol' water cooler. OR

B) Paunchy, brown-toothed middle aged guy in white hanes t-shirt that is, at this point, more transparent than is comfortable to look at, accosting me from his car while I walk to mine in the parking lot.

If you guessed A, you, like me, are apparently waiting to wake up one morning in the middle of a romantic comedy. If you guessed B, you have been paying attention.

I have long maintained, with characteristically glib self-deprecation, that the demographics with whom I am most popular are small children and middle-aged women. Let me right now say that I am horrified, and completely disavow and repudiate this alarming gender-leap in my market appeal. This is awful. 

The worst part about this is that I think it was actually borne out of some sort of 'hail fellow, well met' comradely feeling, wherein this guy had identified me as someone like him, a flabby looking misfit at the gym silently (as possible) waiting for physical fitness to descend from the rafters and bless him, on that one last crunch, with a radically transmuted physique. As if to say: "You're just like me! We sure do work hard, but it never seems to help! heh heh heh! Do you get the chafing too? heheh." 

Actually the worst part is probably that I kind of wanted to high-five this complete stranger for the weird, possibly creepy, pep-talk.

With that being said, I've decided to at least seriously consider contemplating a new fitness-achieving technique: tanning. This is the thing about tan people: tan people, regardless of what size/shape they are, almost always look like they are that size/shape on purpose. Something about conscientiously roasting yourself to a carefully cultivated bronze suggests that it may be cellulite, but its there on purpose, and is actually the secret to your charm and attraction. This is appealing to me, because its much easier. I can picture myself strolling along the beach, blebobbling as I go. When confronted (hopefully not by creepy Hanes Guy again) with the tacitly judging looks of other beach patrons, I will be able to explain:

"Yeah. mhmmm. Take a look. Thats what I call the "Higher Education Flab-Fanny Pack." (HEFFP, for short. Also the respiratory sound required to move it from place to place). Nice huh? Really a rich creamy mocha. Took me six years, maybe in the hundreds of jars of peanut butter. Wanna make out? (Again, assuming not-Hanes Guy)"

In closing, I'd like to point out that this post-run tete-a-tete completely and terrifyingly confirms my initial claustrophobic, voyeured-upon fears of the gym. I told you.