So I was cruising around the local antique mall a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't help but notice the "oldies" music that was playing: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," "Get a Job," and others of that sort. Engaged in conversation by one of the regular workers there, I noted how quickly I thought I'd find the music selection irritating, but then (perhaps putting my foot a bit in my mouth), I observed that the songs that were playing were oldies when I was growing up, while for many of my students, music of the 1980s now has the status of "oldies."
It got me thinking about just when I really remember first paying real attention to music, which I think must have been around 1978 or 1979: Blondie's "Heart of Glass"; Heart's "Crazy on You," and The Police's "Roxanne." I remember asking my older brother once, just what kind of music was it that they were calling "Heavy Metal," and he said "Nazareth," but whether he meant "Hair of the Dog," or "Love Hurts," or both, I was still a little unsure.
Then, just a couple of weeks ago, teaching the Science Fiction and Fantasy class, I had a similar experience: one week I was teaching Joe Haldeman's classic The Forever War, and the next we were viewing Ridley Scott's Alien. For me, one of these was, essentially, an "oldie": Haldeman's novel, even though it was published in 1974, is one of those things that was already a classic when I started really paying attention, and even though I didn't actually watch Alien until the late 1980s, I remember when it came out in 1979 very clearly: In space, no one can hear you scream (though, as I pointed out to my students, apparently you can hear ships exploding).
But anyway, that's my argument in this post: for me, history begins in about 1979.
Oddly, it seems to be true whichever direction I think about it. From my perspective now, stuff between 1979 and 2010 is mine: I lived it and I know it, and the artifacts and texts from these years take their place in my own personal chronology in more or less straightforward ways. Stuff before about 1979, I can only place through a much more active effort of historical understanding and imagination. History, the real past (as opposed to the present), starts in 1979 and extends right on back.
At the same time, I feel like my internal sense of chronology for things from about 1979 to now gives me an intuitive feel for this era that I feel compelled to label as historical. In contrast, things from before 1979 exist in a kind of undifferentiated mass of oldies: I have no idea if "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" came before or after "Get a Job," and I'll never know unless I look it up. Only the stuff that fits in my chronology has a real history for me, in the sense of having a context that gives it meaning, and everything else has just always been there, lurking in the background of my history, a history of the imagination.
It's a strange way of looking at things, I suppose, for someone whose professional work often focuses on things more than a thousand years old. But that moment when I first started paying attention to things, that moment when I guess I stopped seeing the world as a kid, really seems to have been a kind of watershed moment, and 1979 is when history begins for me.
I recently posted here about the eye inflammation I've been experiencing in conjunction with my Behcet's Syndrome. As I mentioned, I'd been seeing a very kind, if wacky Groucho-Marx lookalike opthamologist for treatment. Well, on a followup visit in late August, he discovered the inflammation was back, and admitted to being stymied. He suggested I go see another opthamologist at the Eye Institute, a guy who's allegedly an expert in autoimmune and inflammatory eye problems.
As soon as Doctor #2 (an apt name, as you'll see) walked in the room, I recognized him as the first opthamologist I'd seen there three years ago, when my rheumatologist wanted me to get a baseline checkup. In the words of my great-grandfather, the man's an idiot--one of those pompous doctors who talks past you, to his resident, the entire time he's in the room with you.
As he'd done the first time I saw him, he immediately started spouting about how much experience he'd had with Behcet's, and how I wasn't the typical patient. He asked if I'd ever had a genetic test for HLA-B51, a genetic abnormality that some people with Behcet's have that indicates a predisposition to the disease. I had, and it was negative.
Dr. #2 sneered. "How about HLA-B27? Did they test for that?"
I wasn't sure, I replied.
"I don't think you have Behcet's at all. I think you've been misdiagnosed, and what you really have is Reiter's Syndrome. I'm going to have you get tested for HLA-B27, because that would indicate Reiter's instead."*
(Bear in mind that he's really addressing all of this to his resident, who's clearly supposed to be impressed by Dr. #2's brilliance.)
So, he has the resident fill out the order for the bloodwork, and tells him to add a couple of other tests that he tells the resident (not me) are "standard."
Here's where I made mistake #1: I should have asked exactly what those tests were. I did ask if he would call me with the results, and he said he would if they turned out to be positive; otherwise, I wouldn't hear from him.
Had the bloodwork done. Ten days or so went by and I hadn't heard anything, so I figured everything turned out fine.
Then last Tuesday I got home from work and saw that there was a voice-mail message. When I retrieved it, the first message was from someone (not Dr. #2--maybe his resident) at the Eye Institute telling me to call him immediately, and giving me his pager number, but giving me no indication about what the issue was. That call came in at 8:30 a.m.
The second message, which had come in around 4:30 p.m., was from my primary-care physician, who left an even more mysterious and alarming message, saying, "I'm sure you're concerned about this and have lots of questions, so please feel free to call me at home this evening."
Now I'm worried. I called her home number and got the machine, so I left a message saying I don't know what she's referring to because nobody's told me why they're trying to contact me, and that I'm freaking out a little.
Around 8:30, she called me back, and as I sat there on the couch next to Tom, she lobbed a bomb right into the center of my life: apparently, one of the tests Dr. #2 had ordered came back showing that I'd tested positive for syphilis.
"They want you to be admitted to the hospital right away, and you'll probably have to be there for two weeks, because the treatment is an IV antibiotic drip that needs to be administered every four hours. I also think you should know that the county health department is probably going to come around to ask you a lot of very personal questions."
My head is reeling. Is this some kind of sick joke? I was looking to the left in case a car came around the corner, and meanwhile a semi-truck blasted in from the right and flattened me.
"What? What? Are you kidding?" I don't think I've ever been less articulate in my life. "Two weeks? How?"
She says she can call and have them get a bed ready for me right now, and talks me through the lumbar puncture procedure that she says they'll probably do first. It's like she's talking to me from the other end of a long, echo-y tunnel. The impression I get is that if I don't voluntarily go to the hospital, the county health officials will come and drag me there.
Here's where I did one of the only sensible things I did: I told her that I needed some time to make arrangements, and would check into the hospital the following morning.
Then I have to get off the phone and turn to my husband of thirteen years and tell him I've tested positive for syphilis. And that by the way, I'll be in the hospital for the next two weeks. And of course, he'll have to be treated, too.
Let me just say that Tom was, as always, a rock, and thank god, because other relationships might have been (and have been) destroyed by this news.
But I didn't get any sleep that night.
Sensible things #2 and #3: I called my sister, who talked me off the ledge, told me about a friend of hers who'd had a false-positive syphilis test, looked up stuff online and found out that false positives are pretty common for folks with autoimmune disease, and even got me to laugh by telling me what a great excuse it would be for any crazy behavior: "Sorry I got all syphilitic on you!"
I also e-mailed my former rheumatologist in Denver and asked her if I'd ever had the test under her care, figuring that if there was an older, negative result on record, that might help out.
The next morning, the hospital called me bright and early, saying they had a bed ready for me, so come on down. In the meantime, I'd put in a call to my rheumatologist here, and when I explained to the nurse who answered that I'd been told I had to be admitted to the hospital that morning, I was relieved when she said she'd pass the message on right away.
Within about ten minutes, the phone rang, and it was my rheumatologist. She's a no-nonsense kind of person, and talking to her felt strangely like I imagine it feels to talk to your lawyer when you've been arrested. Finally, someone who wasn't panicking (and making me panic). She was 99.9% sure it was a false positive, and didn't understand why the additional testing needed to be done in the hospital. I'd still need to check in, but she said, "Just pack as if you were going to a hotel for a couple of days. Bring your own pillow. I'll see you over there."
The relief was tremendous. Not complete, for sure, but why hadn't she been the one to give me the news in the first place? What was all the overreacting about? Hadn't any of these people talked to each other?
Around 10 a.m. I checked in to the hospital and went up to the 8th floor, where they put me in a private room and told me to have a seat. And there I sat, for 45 minutes, before anyone came by.
Finally, the nurse came in. At that very moment, my cell phone rang.
It was my rheumatologist: "OK, I talked to the head of infectious disease, and he's sure this is a false positive. So you don't have to check into the hotel."
"Well, I'm already in the hotel room."
"Hmm. Well, let me talk to him again and see what he wants to do. But for the moment, let's just assume that we're going to do the confirmatory tests on an outpatient basis. I'll call you back."
I hung up and explained this to the nurse, just as her pager went off and she got a message to the same effect. So she left the room to go make a call from the nursing station to find out what's going on.
A couple minutes later, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum--aka the floor resident and his med-student flunkie--walk in. "Ms. Hathaway, we're here to take some information from you and to get your vitals and everything. So, what's going on?"
"Well, technically, I'm not actually a patient," I say, explaining that it looks like I'm going to be discharged. And frankly, I just don't want to tell this story again to these guys.
But the resident persists. "Well, until we know for sure, let me just take some information from you."
Mistake #2: I should have just told him to f#@k off. I mean, he was perfectly nice and all, but really--he didn't need to know, at least not right then. But I went ahead and explained the whole story, which was actually beginning to seem a little funny, and when I got to the point where I said, "And so they think I have syphilis," he turned to the med student and in a pseudo-sympathetic stage whisper, says, "I think you'd better shut the door."
Fast forward through about half a dozen more cell phone calls, pager alerts, and mixed messages, and they finally give me a lab order and send me off to have blood taken for the second round of tests. And I'm out of the hospital two hours after I was admitted, twelve hours after being told I'd be there for two weeks.
WTF?
I mean really: W. T. F.?
The two additional tests they ran both came back negative, as my rheumatologist expected they would. I got an e-mail back from my former rhuematologist in Denver expressing shock that anyone's first reaction was to admit me to the hospital before consulting with an infectious-disease specialist and running further tests. The most basic Google search instantly turns up information explaining the prevalence of false-positive syphilis tests not only in people with autoimmune disorders, but with lots of other conditions, as well.
Why on earth had everyone jumped to the worst possible conclusions, and immediately proposed the most dramatic and extreme treatment? I mean, the one upside of managed care is that it usually insists on starting with the cheapest, most basic intervention possible before hauling out the big guns. Here we went straight from border skirmish to nuclear winter.
The Health Sciences Campus here at WVU has come under a lot of fire for its lack of coordination and communication, and its incessant territory wars. I guess it all seemed like the usual petty academic squabbling until I got caught in the middle of it.
And I know that this situation isn't unique to WVU, either: this was my first experience with the scary machine that is health care these days. Once you get caught in its gears, you feel pretty much powerless to extract yourself. I remember my bitter sense of betrayal after my dad's brain surgery last fall, when we didn't learn until afterward that he wouldn't be allowed to go home once he'd recovered, but would have to be admitted to a rehab center. And once there, being told that if he couldn't meet certain benchmarks, he'd have to go into a nursing home.
It's amazing how quickly one's body becomes public property in these situations...and my situation was certainly far, far less dire. But it still felt like I'd been sentenced to prison without a trial.
I've learned the hard way that even when you're panicking and the voice of Medical Authority is booming orders at you, you still need to advocate for yourself. I should've done it the day I saw Dr. #2. But at least I had another doctor who was willing to go to bat for me when it mattered most.
Still, I lay it all at the feet of Dr. #2. Why didn't he call me to deliver the news himself? And in the eight hours between his resident's message and the one from my primary-care physician, why didn't anyone think to include my rheumatologist in the conversation? Or do some basic research to find out what the real liklihood of the test results being accurate was?
I'm glad that it now seems mostly like a funny story, if a maddening one. For sure, I'll never go back to Dr. #2's office again, and if I ever see him around town, look out: I might go all syphilitic on him.
*Turns out that Reiter's Syndrome isn't even considered accurate terminology for that disorder anymore. More evidence of Dr. #2's so-called "expertise."
Last weekend Tom and I traveled to his parents' house near Newark, Ohio, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. In honor of the occasion, Tom's dad wanted to drive his restored 1953 Studebaker to the Granville Inn, where the celebratory dinner was being held, since it was the car that he drove to his wedding in 1960. Or, at least, parts of it are the same car. He also has a 1955 Studebaker he's been working on, so Tom's older brother George volunteered to drive it, too, especially since it was International Drive Your Studebaker Day. A nice bit of karma, that.
Just the weekend before, Tom and his Dad drove the '53 and '55 cars to the 18th Annual Studebaker/Packard Show in Tallmadge, Ohio, and George drove his '63 Studebaker Lark down from Michigan. It was a hot weekend, and needless to say, none of these cars have air-conditioning...or power steering...or a radio or comfortable seats. When Tom got home on Sunday, the first thing he said when he walked in the door was that our 1997 Honda Accord drives like a dream compared to the '55 Studebaker.
Now, that's saying a lot, since the Honda is teetering on the brink of officially being a beater. I'm not enough of a motorhead to describe the precise distinction between a "clunker," a "junker," and a "beater," but I'm fairly sure that of the three categories, what we have is a beater: it's still in pretty good shape, both mechanically and cosmetically, but it's not the kind of car you want to put a whole lot of money into anymore. It works, it makes some unhappy noises--though none that are alarming or that wake the neighbors--and no one is ever going to steal it. Beater.
As the above photo of the dash indicates, it's got a lot of miles on it. 165, 295 to be exact. When we bought it used in 1999 (a story in itself, which I'll save for another time), it only had about 20,000 miles on it. So we've racked up a lot in the eleven years we've owned it.
And as you can see, the check engine light is on. The check engine light has probably been on more than off in the history of this car. In fact, the '97 Accord was recalled a number of years ago for its problems with false "check engine" alerts, but whatever they did to it at the dealership didn't solve the problem.
As with the boy who cried wolf one too many times, we no longer pay the slightest attention to the check engine light. Maybe it'll go out on its own eventually, maybe we'll take it to an auto parts store and have them reset it, maybe we'll just ignore it until one day we end up on the side of a lonely road as a plume of steam shoots heavenward from under the hood. Like the aches and pains of middle age, the check engine light may mean nothing or everything. Either way, it's not worth shelling out $80 to the local Honda dealership to get a diagnosis.
Tough love: that's what you give a beater. My brother Phillip, a Honda mechanic, is of the firm belief that you don't need to fix stuff until it's really broken. (But he does preach the importance of routine maintenance, like oil changes, tire rotation, and belt replacements.)
Phillip also says that the greenest car is the one you keep on the road--that junking a perfectly serviceable, low-emission car for a brand-new hybrid is a zero-sum game in terms of the environment. Sure, you may have taken a less fuel-efficient car off the road, but you've also just added to the landfill and acquired a new vehicle that presumably took a lot of energy to manufacture.
These were among my many thoughts as Tom and I drove behind the two Studebakers on Saturday afternoon. Especially as we struggled to keep up with them. Let me tell you, those two nearly sixty-year old cars, with their V8 engines, kicked our Honda's sad little @$$.
The poor Honda really struggles with steep hills these days, which is a hazard when you live in West Virginia. Every time I'm chugging uphill with some giant SUV barreling up behind me, I'm torn between wanting to apologize and wishing I had one of those "Don't laugh--it's paid for!" bumper stickers.
And there's the sad proof that you're driving a beater: when you actually understand why people put those bumper stickers on their cars.
But: we haven't had a car payment in seven or eight years, and I don't relish the idea of having one and being out that three- or four-hundred dollars a month. And we don't have a garage, so the idea of buying a brand-new car just to park it on the street full time seems a little ridiculous.
Nevertheless, I do feel a pang every time I see one of these babies tooling around town. Someday the Honda will pass from "beater" to "junker," and when that day comes, Ms. Mini: you will be mine, all mine.
With thanks to Jane for reminding me of those lyrics.
This morning I had another one of those moments that makes me feel middle aged...and glad of it.
I took the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) over to the Evansdale campus for a meeting. For those unfamiliar with the PRT, it's a sort of monorail system with unmanned cars that shuttle to and from five different stations around Morgantown. They hold about 12 people total, and are usually populated by undergrads going back and forth from classes on the downtown campus and the dorms on the Evansdale campus.
It's always interesting to ride the PRT early in fall semester, since the vast majority of dorm-dwellers at WVU are freshmen, and thus most of the PRT riders are freshmen as well.
One of the many things WVU freshmen have to get acculturated to is the etiquette of the PRT: sit or stand? Are you allowed to interject into someone else's conversation, since you're standing six inches away from them, or are you supposed to pretend you're not listening? And can you talk on your cell phone or not? Even students who might have had some kind of big-city subway experience aren't sure whether the standard subway-rider etiquette applies, since your fellow riders aren't necessarily complete strangers, even if they are at the moment.
This morning, as the lone non-student in the car**, I noted that most of my very young-looking fellow riders still seemed a little uncomfortable. It was a quiet ride, though in a few weeks I'll undoubtedly be overhearing the usual conversations about annoying roommates and neighbors, amusing drunken exploits, and football football football.
What I really noticed, though, was that to a person, every student had a cell phone clutched in one hand, except for the lone guy who was eating a snow cone. At 9:30 in the morning. I love that guy.
It being week two, no one was using their cell phone during the trip. But despite the fact that they all had backpacks or pockets where they could stow said phones, they held on to them as if letting go would somehow disconnect them from the life force itself. It reminded me of the way my nephew clings to the TV remote: try to wrest it from him when he's asleep and he'll wake up instantly and look at you as if he'd caught you preparing to murder him.
As I looked on this scene, I wondered where my own cell phone was. In the outside pocket of my bookbag, where it sometimes lives? No, I thought: it's at home, in my purse, turned off. And my iPod Touch is on the nightstand, recharging.
I was unplugged, and not only was I OK with that, I prefer being unreachable much of the time.
Of course, I'm not accustomed to being plugged in 24/7 like this generation of students is. I've often thought that my own freshman year might have been a lot less traumatic if e-mail, the web, and cell phones were available then.
After my experience with the helicopter dad last week, a number of friends on Facebook shared their experiences detaching from their parents when they left for college, most of which fell along the lines of Lynn and Heather's experiences:
"My parents said goodbye, hugged me, and then I got on the plane."
"I left for college on a train with a suitcase, a small trunk, and an airline carry-on containing a small terrarium with a lizard. I did not suffer unduly."
For me, the scariest thing when my parents left me at college was knowing that I had no way of getting ahold of them for days: they were driving back to Ohio, and of course they didn't have a cell phone, or phone numbers for places they'd be staying. And aside from the pay phone in the dorm, I didn't have a phone, either. I suppose if I did, I'd probably have been clutching it like my life depended on it, too.
I don't have kids. I won't presume to understand what it must be like when they leave the nest. But I will say that I do wonder whether that acculturation process would be quicker, and healthier, if students were a little more unplugged from their past, and a little more plugged into the present.
But then again, one of the great personal challenges of college is figuring out how to link your past with your present, and eventually with your future. It takes a long time to discover, as my friend Becky wrote in a song lyric once, that "who you are now will depend on the people you've been."
In the end, though, I guess I'm glad I went to college during the technological stone age. Yeah, all those tools might have made things easier at the time, but then I would never have all the letters from that time, all the evidence of the person I was then. After all, I still depend on her now. No cell-phone call record could capture her essence so well.
* If you know the song whose lyrics inspired the title of this post, then you went to college during the stone age, too.
** Which is pretty typical: faculty and staff seem to be even less willing to rely on public transportation than the students.
There's a family story among the Hathaways about my Dad's grandfather, a physician who also owned and ran a pharmacy in Grantsville, West Virginia. As a kid, my dad used to hang out there after school sometimes, and one day some old timer came into the store and started yammering on about psoriasis. "It comes from the bones, y'know!" he insisted, suggesting that the disease somehow leaked out of the bones and rose up through the skin, where it manifested itself.
"Dr. Dye" (as my great-grandfather is invariably called) just nodded and grunted in a neutral way, neither agreeing or disagreeing, but allowing the guy to have his say. Eventually, the old-timer exhausted his theory and left.
My dad immediately said, "Grandpa, you know that's not what causes psoriasis! Why'd you let that guy go on and on like that when you knew he was wrong?'
Dr. Dye replied, "The man's an idiot."
Now, that phrase gets bantered around with some frequency in my family--it is, in fact, one of several examples I'll often use to explain the concept of the kernel story to my folklore students: the "punch line" of a story that's so well known in a small group that they almost never retell the whole story--they just use the phrase.
"The man's an idiot" functions in more or less the same way as the proverbial saying "Never argue with a pig. It just frustrates you and annoys the pig." Only, I guess, it's a little more harsh. But that, apparently, was Dr. Dye.
I've always found the story, and the phrase, both funny and perplexing. It reflects my family's tendency to avoid conflict whenever possible, though it contradicts another less-than-charming drive that most of us share: the need to be right.
The phrase came to mind last week when I had an advising appointment with an incoming transfer student...and her helicopter parents. Her father, in particular, was in a complete dither, going on and on about which of her credits counted in which ways, and badgering me about getting her two English courses to count so that she could have more elective hours available, because he wanted her to take education classes on the side.
Meanwhile, it was the end of the first day of classes and this young woman hadn't yet registered for a single class, or paid her tuition. It seemed to me there were other, more urgent things to deal with--the transfer credit issue could wait, and certainly the question of taking education classes could, especially since every time he brought it up, the student rolled her eyes and yelled, "But Dad, I don't want to be a teacher!"
Long story short: what was scheduled to be a fifteen-minute appointment took over an hour. And I let it happen. Why?
Well, my therapist would (and did) say that I needed to recognize how their emotions overwhelmed me sooner, so I could step into my authority and exercise "empathic assertiveness," acknowledging everyone's stress and then getting down to brass tacks. And of course, she's right.
She was also right, though, when she suggested that part of what happened was that the situation engaged my curiosity: What's up with these people? Just how freaked out are they? Is this guy as much of a psycho helicopter parent as he seems to be?
I suspect that's what was going on with Dr. Dye, too: Just how nutty is this idiot's theory? How long will he go on spouting it before he runs out of steam?
And sure, it can be perversely entertaining to let people spin themselves out. But it's a real problem when they actually need your help, and you've lost complete control of the situation. And then there's always the nagging worry about not wanting to be a doormat, or to have people think that you suffer fools gladly.
But you have to pick your battles, too.
For me, the family story is a better clue to the real problem, and the possible solution. Yeah, thinking guys like the psoriasis expert or the helicopter dad are idiots makes it easy to dismiss them, but it doesn't get anyone anywhere. I need an addendum to the phrase--something like, "The man's an idiot, and I need to figure out whether he's the kind of idiot I need to A) Humor; B) Confront; or C) Get the hell away from as quickly as possible."
In the meantime, there's always Dr. Dye's other famous saying to fall back on: "Grandson, if you don't amount to a hill of beans in your life, have a kind word for every man and always tip your hat to the ladies."
Photo of Dr. Dye on the front porch of his home in Grantsville, taken by my Dad circa 1941.
So I was standing in line at the Morgantown post office today (where you always have to stand in line, because that's the way it is). Anyway, while I was waiting, one of the postal clerks behind the desk is having a chat with the old geezer standing in front of him. Suddenly, the clerk gets this gleam in his eye.
"Did you hear that FedEx and UPS are going to merge?" he asked.
"No, I didn't," said the geezer.
"Yeah, they're going to call the company FedUp!"
Smiles all around, if not outright laughter.
Anyway, as you might imagine, first thing I did when I got home was to wait around for my opportunity to work this joke into the casual conversation at the old homestead. Which I did. And Rose responded with "At least they're not shooting each other down there!" Which makes it two postal worker jokes in one day. Or at least one and a half.
Back to work on Monday.
Which reminds me of another old joke: So, once upon a time, a guy was sentenced to an eternity in Hell, and he was being given a tour of the place by Satan himself, who showed him from one room to another, and told him he could take his pick of places to stay and punishments to endure for the rest of time. In the first room, he saw a bunch of people standing on their heads on a solid wood floor, while a host of devil's crafty minions stood around making sure no one was slacking off. It looked painful and uncomfortable both.
So the devil showed him to the next room, where an even larger number of people (and a corresponding number of minions) were standing on their heads on a solid concrete floor. Even worse.
So, finally, the devil took him into the next room, where an even greater number of people were standing around, knee-deep in manure, sipping coffee out of china cups and chatting with the minions. "This is the room for me," says the guy, and the devil says, "All right, follow me: we just need to clear up some paperwork." And as they walk out the door, the guy hears the chief of the devil's minions shout out "All right, coffee break's over! Back on your heads!"
And so that's probably what I'll be thinking about when I go back to work.
I'm stealing this meme from YA author, friend, and fellow blogger Erin McCahan:
My Week in 7 Words:
Pool
Read
Write
Write
Write
Wine
Sleep
--repeat until SFD* of article is completed.
Success! 7,000-some words of academic writing, another 4,500 of personal writing (which were easier to churn out than the academic stuff...hmmm). Either way, lots of words for one week, so, short post. More soon, though, chiefly about my reignited hatred of Jimmy Buffett.
After three years in the house, we finally decided to do something about the upstairs bath, which had been remodeled on the cheap by a previous owner, and was a weird mashup of 50s-era tile and 80s fixtures.
We had a pretty complete plan: install new lighting, a new vanity, and new low-flow toilet; pull the old tile off the walls and put up put up bead-board wainscoting; pull two strata of linoleum off the floor and put down new tile.
I really liked the look of some tile we'd seen at Lowe's: long, rectangular porcelain tiles designed to look like hardwood. Since we'd never installed a tile floor before, though, we figured we'd better hire a professional to do that part of the work.
We talked to some folks at a local kitchen and bath place, who were very nice, but didn't know anything about the tile we'd picked out, and who gave us an estimate for materials and installation that neared the four-digit mark.
I've done a tiny bit of tile installation before, and the bathroom is only about 6 x 7 feet. How hard could it be? And my old grad school pal Jim Brown encouraged us to do it ourselves: his suggestion was to read a book about how to do it, which sounded like advice only an English professor would give. So, we special-ordered the original tile we'd liked from Lowe's.
We ordered the tile about a month ago, and were told it would take about ten days for delivery. Sure enough, ten days later, we got a phone call from Lowe's: the tile had arrived, but it was all "busted up" and Lowe's had refused delivery. They reordered. In the meantime, Rose had gotten online and ordered us a new light fixture for the ceiling, a new faucet, and a new toilet. We also special-ordered a couple other things from Lowe's--a vanity and a medicine cabinet.
Well, several weeks after I knocked the tile off the wall, almost all of those things have arrived, and are now sitting in various places in the house: the new toilet is up in Rose's office; the new vanity is in the garage. The ceiling light is already installed.
Part two of the Lowe's saga began with a call yesterday, saying that our special order had arrived. We didn't know if it was the tile or the medicine cabinet, since we were waiting on that, too, so I called them up to ask. Here's what the conversation sounded like from my end:
Me: So I got a call yesterday that a special order had come in. Could you tell me what it is?
Clerk: Is it tall?
Me: Tall? I'm not sure.
Clerk: Tall, you know: T-I-L-E.
Oh, yeah, we're in West Virginia, already.
So, we drove over today to pick up the tile, excited that the real remodeling work could begin, since the floor will have to go in before anything else can.
We waited about fifteen minutes for them to bring the tile out for us to load in the car...four little boxes that hardly looked like enough to cover the floor. So I pulled a piece out of one of the boxes, looked at it for a moment, and then said to Rosemary, "Hey, didn't we order the tile that was six inches wide? This is only four inches."
Sure enough, what we ordered was not what had turned up at our store. Since we'd already had to sign for it, we then had to take it back into the store, return it, and re-order the right stuff. At least the tile guy gave us a ten percent discount for our trouble.
But on the upside, twenty minutes after we got home, Lowe's called us again to tell us the medicine cabinet was in.
And we thought we'd get it all done before school started up.
In a previous post, I mentioned how much I loathed Jackson Pearce's Sisters Red, a contemporary retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, featuring two sisters who become werewolf hunters after their grandmother is attacked and killed by one.
I suggested I might blog about it eventually, but I couldn't really say it any better than the Book Smugglers did in their recent review.
I wanted to like this novel. Really, I did. It had some clever twists: the address of the apartment building the characters live in is "333," a reference to LRRH's tale-type number (AT 333), and the werewolves are called the fenris, from the Old Norse word for wolf. Plus, I get that LRRH has always been either implicitly or explicitly sexual. Just do a Google search for LRRH images to see how adult and tarty LRRH often appears, or read this version of the tale.
But does that mean the LRRH figure actually has to dress up like a hooker and go out deliberately trying to draw wolves to her?
Thanks, but I prefer my "girl power" a little less girly. And a whole lot less creepy.
Sisters Red is book I almost put down (nay, almost threw across the room) several times. I haven't had that feeling about a book in a long time.
Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who sort of feels compelled to finish a book once I've gotten through a significant chunk of it. I'm curious: do you all share that feeling, or are you perfectly OK with never finishing a book that you've decided you don't like...even if you've gotten more than halfway through it?
About six or seven years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune syndrome called Behcet's disease. I'll spare you the gory details, but it was pretty debilitating the first few times it flared up, and prompted a couple of comments I hope never to hear again at the doctor's office: "Holy cow, I've never seen anything like that!" followed by "Do we have a camera around here?" (Thankfully, they did not.)
In the intervening years, I've been incredibly lucky: lucky, first of all, to have a great doctor in Greeley, Michelle Stoltz, who diagnosed it as Behcet's almost right away, since I've since read horror stories about people who went years before being properly diagnosed. Lucky, too, when my first rheumatologist left the medical profession altogether and shipped me off to another rheumatologist in Denver.
The doctor I saw there, Kathryn Hobbs, immediately nixed my original rheumatologist's treatment option: basically, a steady diet of prednisone that had caused me to gain a good fifteen pounds and barely kept a lid on the symptoms (and often didn't work at all). I could have wept for joy, I hated the prednisone so much.
I was also very lucky that Dr. Hobbs was willing to battle my health insurance company to get me on Humira, an anti-TNF drug formulated for people with rheumatoid arthritis...but she said it showed a lot of promise for people with Behcet's, and eventually she convinced the insurer to pony up. And almost immediately, the symptoms were gone. Totally under control. Lucky, indeed.
I was also lucky that when I moved and switched insurance plans, the new insurer agreed to cover the Humira without much of a fight. The complete lack of symptoms for years on end almost had me thinking that maybe the disease had gone away--maybe it had never been real?
And then, about six weeks ago, my right eye started to feel weird--sore, and achy, and red...and I started having trouble seeing.
Several students I knew had pink eye during spring semester, so I figured that might be the problem. But since Behcet's can involve eye inflammation (which--luckily--I'd never had), I figured I'd better get it checked out. And sure enough, I had uveitis, inflammation of the uvea that's a very typical symptom of Behcet's.
Fortunately, it responded well to the prednisone eye drops prescribed by my oddball opthomologist, who's a dead ringer for Groucho Marx, both in looks and demeanor. Did the drops for several weeks, tapered off of them, eye felt fine.
Went in last Friday for a follow-up appointment, only to have Groucho tell me that the inflammation is back, and in both eyes this time. Back to the prednisone eyedrops.
Autoimmune diseases are very strange; I think if I'd ever had the slightest interest in/talent for medicine, it would be a fascinating specialty. You sort of have to befriend your disease--get to know its rhythms and its perverse sense of humor, its fondness for irony and the long con. My frenemy Behcet's doesn't like to be locked out. Bar a door, and it finds a cracked window. Seal the window, and it slides through a crack in the siding. Deterred on one front, it mounts a campaign from the opposite direction.
I'm not writing this to seek pity or even sympathy; as I've said, I've been incredibly lucky at every turn of this journey.
There's a quote from writer Janet Burroway that I have stuck on a mirror in my bedroom:
Why, I say, should I ever have bitterly blamed [my body] for such trifles as I have blamed it for: for having too much flesh in this spot, too little muscle in that, for producing this wrinkle, that sag, that gray hair, or this texture? Dear body! My dear body! It has gone about its incessant business with very little thanks.
For me, it's a useful reminder that for every small, visible thing that our bodies do wrong, they're doing countless invisible things right, and continually. I marvel at both the stability and the capriciousness of the human body.
But the capriciousness--that's the issue. Of course, autoimmune disease mirrors life in that way: our sense of control is purely imaginary, a ruse to suppress the unsettling reality that at any moment something could happen to blow everything sky-high.
And occasionally (very occasionally, the older you get, I'm discovering), the body surprises us by doing something extraordinarily good that we didn't know it was capable of doing, too: in my pathetic case, running a couple of miles on the treadmill.
I'm trying to avoid using the rhetoric of betrayal around the Behcet's, and I hope to avoid using it around aging in general. But our bodies do fail us in one profound way: like the portrait of Dorian Gray, they evince all the decrepitude while the selves they contain go on feeling like they're twenty-eight. At least, that's the age I feel like I still am in my head. How about you?
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N. B.: My friend Jane has written far more eloquently about the strange dichotomies of the self and the body here and here.
So I was cruising around the local antique mall a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't help but notice the "oldies" music that was playing: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," "Get a Job," and others of that sort. Engaged in conversation by one of the regular workers there, I noted how quickly I thought I'd find the music selection irritating, but then (perhaps putting my foot a bit in my mouth), I observed that the songs that were playing were oldies when I was growing up, while for many of my students, music of the 1980s now has the status of "oldies.".jpg)
ust a couple of weeks ago, teaching the Science Fiction and Fantasy class, I had a similar experience: one week I was teaching Joe Haldeman's classic The Forever War, and the next we were viewing Ridley Scott's Alien. For me, one of these was, essentially, an "oldie": Haldeman's novel, even though it was published in 1974, is one of those things that was already a classic when I started really paying attention, and even though I didn't actually watch Alien until the late 1980s, I remember when it came out in 1979 very clearly: In space, no one can hear you scream (though, as I pointed out to my students, apparently you can hear ships exploding).
