It’s more dramatic in person. Trust me.

U.S. Capitol from 3rd Street NW about 17:00 on 14 November 2011

U.S. Capitol from 3rd Street NW about 07:00 on 15 November 2011

Courtesy weatherunderground.com

Rainy and off temperature, but still mid-summer nonetheless.

Now if I can just figure out a way to get two mid-summers in one year.

Everyone has at least one role they fill in their family. One of the roles I fill is that of entertainment bitch. In this role, I’ve now got my mother watching Sons of Anarchy which is a series whose main characters are all in some way involved with an outlaw biker club of the same name.

The club, and its members, are violent, mercenary, and largely on the wrong side of the law. Despite this, the characters as written also live by a vaguely chivalric code in which loyalty, duty, and family weigh heavily. My mother allowed as how such a code might be a tad unrealistic given that the point of being in an outlaw biker gang is to do whatever the hell you want most of the time. She doubted that the members of most real MCs had gotten more civilized since Hunter S. Thompson spent almost two years living with the Hell’s Angels in the mid-1960s given that society as a whole hasn’t gotten more civilized since then. She also advanced the opinion that maybe our behavior was just evening out and that eventually we’d all get to the “let them all go to hell except cave 7” point.

It seems to me if we reach that point of self-interest in behavior that our only two choices for the future of humanity are anarchy or fascism. [Read more...]

Now that I am 40<mumble>, I’ve reached the age where my doctor wants me to start having those specialized tests. I’ve managed to put her off about the mammogram. After all, there is no history of female specific cancers in my family and she really isn’t the right doctor to prescribe the test I need to look for the type of cancer that has hit us twice now.

I'm rushing to place a sensitive body part in that. Oh yeah!

Despite the fact that screening mammograms miss 20% of breast cancers present at the time of exam this year at my annual exam I caved. I agreed to go get my boobs squashed so they could look for suspicious lumps. But because my annual exam was at the end of October last year scheduling the test, which is recommended for a particular point in the menstrual cycle, just wasn’t going to happen with the holidays and other associated responsibilities in November and December. In fact, I just got around to making the call this week and doing so convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the healthcare establishment in America not only doesn’t care if women are healthy it may even be actively trying to keep us from getting health care.

Let me say up front that I have insurance. Paying for this test will not be a problem. The prescription my ob/GYN wrote for me is dated October 28, 2010. It’s a little stale, I know, but not so stale that a general screening exam isn’t still warranted. But when I called my first choice out-patient radiology provider they wouldn’t schedule the appointment for me.

My first question about why was answered with “because it’s a prescription from last year.” I inquired about the logic of that: if I had seen my doctor on December 30, 2010 it would still be a prescription dated last year I was put on hold a perfunctory amount of time. The second response I got was equally as ridiculous: the prescription is only good for 90 days.

Ponder that for a minute. I’m 40<mumble> years old. Current thought in healthcare says that women my age should have this vital test every 1 to 2 years yet, because my prescription was 94 days old a provider was going to refuse me service.

I don’t think, though I am not positive, that insurance companies require out-patient service providers to submit the prescription when billing for these types of services. I could be wrong about this but let’s assume I’m not. If I’m not wrong, what exactly is this provider afraid I’ll do with my mammogram? It’s not like I can turn around a sell the test on the street like I could a outdated prescription for anti-anxiety medication. There is no harm in them providing me with this service and all requiring that I have a less than 90 day-old prescription does is flex their muscles by making me jump through a hoop to see my doctor again.

I am lucky: I have an easy to reach second choice for this service who was happy to book me on a 94 day old prescription but what if there wasn’t another provider? My only choice would have been to take time away from my job to get a piece of paper to satisfy some bullshit bureaucratic requirement, and it is a bullshit requirement because the need for the screening exam hasn’t changed since the prescription was written.

How is that helping women get better access to, and a better quality of, healthcare?

I’m very tempted to call the first hospital back and point out to them that their competition, because even non-profit hospitals in the U.S. are in competition for patient and insurance company dollars, which is about 15 minutes away from them by car was more than happy to book me for this test but I suspect that there is no point to that. It would only make me angry and wouldn’t teach them anything. Or maybe I’ll resort to the power of the letter. You never know; they might offer me my next mammogram free.

I was thinking about Katie Holmes Thursday morning while I was shoveling snow. Strictly speaking, that’s not actually true. I wasn’t really thinking about anything but because I’d read a blurb about Michelle Williams who starred in Dawson’s Creek with Katie Holmes my brain made one of those weird leaps it makes while I’m doing repetitive work.

Speculation about Tom Cruise’s sexuality is no great secret. A relatively benign search of the Interwebs yields a wealth of theories some of which are even vaguely supported by actual evidence. When you combine the Church of Scientology’s shaky position on homosexuality with Cruise’s high ranking position in that institution, it wouldn’t be so shocking to believe that his marriage to Katie Holmes is less about love and more about business.

And from here things got weird in my brain. [Read more...]

Courtesy Weatherunderground.com

DC is in the middle of its third winter weather “event” in as many weeks. In some ways, we’ve been lucky so far; the major storms that have hit the East Coast have missed us. In other ways, we really haven’t been lucky since what we’ve been getting has been just enough to need to be dealt with but not enough to either have fun in or to really justify closing anything.

This morning I spent 45 minutes shovelmopping the sidewalks I’m responsible for in my neighborhood. It was like shoveling a puddle with a thin skin of ice on top. To make matters even less satisfactory, it started to sleet while I was bent over the shovel trying to scrape half frozen water off uneven concrete. But then I noticed something.

My mother’s across the street neighbors have two old pine trees in their side yard. These aren’t squat, fat, Christmas tree looking evergreens; they’re the straight, tall, thin-needle variety. Once I stopped scraping the plastic blade of my snow shovel across the concrete to try to get under the slush I could hear the sleet hissing through the pine trees’ needles.

Even though I could still hear the din of traffic on the two nearby cross-town routes, that hiss sounded like peace for a minute, like nature subtly making itself known. In a world that largely doesn’t seem to pay attention unless nature does the equivalent of set her hair on fire and run through the family bar-b-que naked, this was a nice reminder to be mindful and to pause.

So while I’d rather have actual snow to shovel, having to shovel a puddle turned out to not be all bad.

Do or do not…there is no try. – Yoda

If the Star Wars movies don’t feature prominently in your cultural landscape, it’s possible that this is the first time you’ve seen this particular quote. I’m sure there are myriad variations of it attributed to speakers of varying degrees of credibility. Regardless, I have for most of my life hated this quote: it always read and felt to me like an implicit call to perfection which is not only impossible to achieve for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that there is no agreed upon definition of what constitutes “perfect,” but also because perfection something it is unreasonable to expect out of anyone just beginning anything.

Basically, it seemed to me like this idea closed out the idea of learning anything new. After all, if there’s no room for mistakes, no room for just trying something, and failing, then how the hell does anyone build new skills, step out of the role to which she has been consigned by society, or learn anything new? Recently, though, I’ve come see this quote in a slightly different light. [Read more...]