/rant mode: ON/

Item:  Would somebody please tell me why the hell Jeb Bush would "disagree" with the Pope about the existence of climate change?  I can see why Jeb doesn't want anything done to fight climate change--he might make less money, which of course would be a tragedy--but why would anyone "disagree" that climate change is happening?  Maybe Jeb should check in with some real scientists.  Like, say, the Pope, who has a degree in chemistry and worked as a chemist before becoming a priest.

Item:  Global warming aside, can anybody offer some suggestions about how in the bloody hell we're going to feed, clothe, house, educate and employ 11 billion people using just this planet?

Item: I'm 46 years old and I do hereby promise you that I will never, ever wax nostalgic (at least, not in public) about how great things were in the "good old days" or when I was a kid.  People who do that seem not to realize that the "good old days" weren't good for everybody.  They were good for rich white people.  Nobody else had civil rights, access to good education, high-paying jobs or the ability to get ahead. Go on, ask an elderly black man about how great things were in the 1950s when he was legally prevented from using the same water fountain as you in most of the Southern states.  Go on.  I dare you.

Item: This high school in Idaho has officially banned its cheerleaders from wearing their uniforms without leggings or sweat pants, allegedly because the short skirts exposed their butts on stairs and while sitting.  I, personally, have never before seen a cheerleader skirt that didn't also have some kind of bloomer stitched into it, but that aside, has it maybe occurred to the school that the cheerleaders' skirts ought to be a little bit longer?!  You know, a couple of inches more fabric between her butt and the outside world?  Seems like this one can be blamed on the school, not the students.

Item: John Boehner is resigning from Congress.  So the next time you want to laugh at some guy with an orange face who just can't seem to stop embarrassing himself in public, you'll just have to find yourself a puppet or something.

Item: A flight was delayed because a pet tarantula escaped from its enclosure in the cargo bay.  Look, I'm all for exotic pets, but in a world where an eighteen-month-old baby can be removed from an airplane for being on the no-fly list, I just don't think anything that has a number of legs divisible by eight should get a pass.  And while it may be true that not all terrorists are spiders, it is also true that the vast majority of spiders are terrorists.  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Item: Presidential candidate and general asshole Mike Huckabee apparently has it in for rainbow-colored Doritos.  Evidently your choice of snack is now a political statement.  So if you're a Republican, you might want to stick to Cheetos.  Not only are they crunchier, they will turn your fingers orange.  You know, like John Boehner's.

That's about it for today.  I started a new job this week, and one of the things I'm going to have to do, a lot, is speak a little Spanish.  Luckily, I already speak that language, but I'm a little rusty.  I forget stupid words like "building" and "boat."  But looky here what just came in the mail:

 
I think these will help.  It's awesome to live with a librarian.

/rant mode: OFF/

Pregnant Or Else

So let's say you think you're pregnant (or you know it for a fact, but of course you're not "really" pregnant until your doctor "says" you're pregnant, so just humor me for a second here) and you go see your doctor. He/she congratulates you all over the place and hands you a packet of literature, probably paid for by a diaper manufacturer.  Among the brochures about morning sickness and nutrition and whether or not you should drink coffee, I think there should be a flyer that says this in bold caps:  "ATTENTION LADIES: NOW THAT YOU ARE PREGNANT, IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO TIMELY PRODUCE A PERFECT LITTLE HUMAN BEING.  DO NOT HAVE A MISCARRIAGE.  DO NOT HAVE AN ECTOPIC PREGNANCY.  FURTHER, DO NOT TAKE ANY DRUGS WHATSOEVER AT ALL.  DO NOT DRINK.  DO NOT SMOKE.  DO NOT BREATHE POLLUTED AIR.  DO NOT DRIVE TOO FAST OR GO SKIING.  DO NOT GO SKYDIVING OR ROCKY MOUNTAIN CLIMBING OR 2.7 SECONDS ON A BULL NAMED FU MANCHU.  UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS STATE, YOU CAN AND WILL BE PROSECUTED AND POSSIBLY JAILED FOR LIFE IF YOU FAIL TO PRODUCE A PERFECT LITTLE HUMAN BEING NINE MONTHS FROM TODAY, AND/OR IF THERE'S ANYTHING AT ALL WRONG WITH THE LITTLE HUMAN BEING YOU DO PRODUCE, INCLUDING A BAD ATTITUDE.  IF YOU CANNOT AGREE TO ALL OF THE FOREGOING YOU ARE ADVISED TO HAVE AN ABORTION IMMEDIATELY, EXCEPT YOU CAN'T IN THIS STATE BECAUSE WE SHUT ALL THE CLINICS DOWN.  HAVE A NICE DAY."

For the life of me, I don't get where we got this idea that pregnancy terminates a woman's civil rights.  But apparently some people think it does, including the twelve people on the jury.  I'm talking, of course, about the case of Ms. Purvi Patel, who was just simultaneously convicted of fetal homicide (killing a child in the womb) and neglect of a dependent (neglecting an alive child) in Indiana.  There's some pretty good coverage here, and also here. The first of the many, many things wrong with this case is the fact that you cannot logically both kill a child in utero and then neglect it once it's born alive.  One or the other would work, but both are impossible.  So Ms. Patel was convicted of crimes that can't exist. You'd think the prosecutors would be able to pick one, but apparently they were too busy designing the flyer to read the case facts.

I mean I could go on and on about how the medical examiner couldn't prove that the child was born alive and that Ms. Patel had no drugs in her system and how it's pretty obvious that she had a miscarriage at 28 weeks, which does happen, but as usual, That's Not The Point.  The point is that women, mainly women with brown skin with no money, are being held legally and now criminally responsible for the results of their pregnancies when there's no precedent whatever in law or in fact that we can even constitutionally do that.  And when I say women with brown skin and no money, I mean I haven't once come across a news story about a well-to-do pregnant white woman with an OxyContin or cocaine habit getting arrested or losing custody of her newborn.  Maybe it's happened, but I sure don't know about it.  And, um, I know about this stuff.  Mainly because people tweet it at me on Twitter and I Can't. Not. Read It.  It would be like driving past a car wreck without looking.  Yes, I'm sure some people do that.  I am not one of them.

So check out this story here.  A well-to-do pregnant white woman attempted suicide at seven months. She had been complaining of depression, had been vomiting several times a day, and just generally not having a good time.  In fact she had a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum, an occasional complication of pregnancy, but her doctors never got around to figuring that out. They just told her to buck up and get over it.  Instead she took a huge overdose of pills.  She and her baby both survived, but the baby was born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (basically getting addicted to Mom's antidepressants in utero) and needed medical treatment. She was treated in a hospital, as the sick woman she obviously was, 

Contrast that with the story of Bei Bei Shuai, an unrich unwhite unwed Chinese immigrant who attempted suicide at eight months.  She and her baby both survived, but the baby died four days later of undetermined causes.  Bei Bei spent over a year in jail and was prosecuted for fetal homicide.  For a suicide attempt. People, if you are attempting suicide while pregnant, something is seriously wrong with you.  Did this woman ever get any treatment?  Yes.  Four days as an inpatient in the psych ward of the hospital.  From which she was arrested and taken to jail.  

 For more fun and excitement, check out the state of Tennessee, which has arrested about 130 mostly poor, mostly minority pregnant women with drug addictions on the grounds that they have "harmed" their infants (neonatal abstinence syndrome again--which, by the way, is very treatable).  Besides going to jail, most of these women have lost custody of their infants to CPS.  Now, one could point out that the Supreme Court decided (in 1962, brothers and sisters) that being addicted to drugs is not in itself a crime.  And yet, that's what these women are being arrested for.  

Look.  I want every pregnant woman everywhere to have a healthy pregnancy and a cute, wiggly healthy infant at the end of it.  I want kids not to be born addicted to drugs or harmed by substances the woman took while pregnant. I want pregnant women not to kill themselves, their fetuses or anybody else for that matter. I'm sure we all want those things, but these policies that lock up pregnant women are not the way to accomplish it.  For one thing, the policies themselves are illegal under various permutations of the right to privacy (see, e.g., 410 U.S. 113, 381 U.S. 479, 370 U.S. 660.)  For another thing, you can't be dividing people up and saying that certain behaviors are legal (or at least not jailworthy) for one class of people but illegal for another class of people. That pesky Fourteenth Amendment.  And you can't be calling CPS because a mother tests positive for a controlled substance at the time she delivers the baby.  HIPPA.  In short, you just can't do this shit.  And sooner or later a court is going to say so, therefore giving rise to a whole bunch of very expensive judgments against, say, the state of Tennessee, which last time I checked didn't have a whole lot of money to be issuing I'm-sorry payments to pregnant women. 

But besides all that, these prosecutions do one thing without exception: They keep women from getting prenatal care.  If you think your doctor is going to rat you out to law enforcement or CPS, are you going to tell him or her that you have a drug problem?  That you might be suicidal?  No.  You just won't go to the doctor.  Or if you do, you'll lie a lot.  This article talks about women having babies at home unassisted and leaving the state to give birth.  I can't imagine that's anything we want to encourage.  

Incidentally, most inpatient drug treatment programs won't take pregnant women because of the liability (stopping or tapering off drugs can be very dangerous for pregnant women; withdrawal sickness can sometimes cause miscarriage, among other things.  See above re: the consequences of miscarrying.)  The state of Tennessee has 159 inpatient drug treatment centers.  All of 15 of them accept pregnant women.  In light of the obvious "babies born addicted epidemic" that lawmakers are so certain is happening, I'm sure that's plenty.

Stomach This

In case y'all missed it, the FDA recently approved a medical device that, like previous devices (the ear staple, the copper bracelet, the lap band) is supposed to help you lose weight. This sucker is by Entero and it's called the VBLOC or vagal blocking device.  The idea, as I understand it, is that you have this thing installed inside of your abdomen and it then emits a signal that is supposed to confuse your vagus nerve.  (Hence the term vagal.  That sounded mildly dirty when I read it the first time.)  The electric signal will then temporarily disrupt the nerve conductions from the stomach to the brain and vice versa, which will then make you not hungry.  Supposedly, if you are not hungry, you will not eat, and therefore will lose weight.

HA HA HA HA HA HA--Sorry, just trying to stop laughing over here.  Where in the everloving fuck did these scientists get the idea that fat people eat because they are hungry?  I mean, I realize I can't speak for all fat people, but me, and the ones I know, eat because we're anxious.  Because we're sad.  Because we're happy (glass of champagne and some chocolates).  We eat pretty much for any reason at all, or no reason at all, and we eat more than we should.  Being hungry has nothing to do with it.

Now, before you jump all over me about personal responsibility and willpower and blah blah blah, I'd like to suggest that it's not only fat people who eat when they're not hungry.  Most of us do.  We are a country, and perhaps a species, of celebratory and emotional eaters.  In fact, when was the last time you were hungry?  Not just feeling like it was time for a meal but stomach-growly, headache-pending, ready-to-eat-a-live-chicken hungry?  I'd venture to say never.  Or at least not since you were a teenager (kids inhale food between twelve and nineteen so they can fuel those growth spurts and the sudden development of gonads).  In fact, I'd venture to say most of us are never hungry.  Why should we be?  Most of us eat three times a day, or at least every three or four hours.  That's really not enough time to get very hungry.

Which is why I predict that this new VBLOC is dead in the water.  We're used to eating on a regular schedule, not when we're hungry.  It's also not going to help that the device is only "recommended" for patients over 18 who have a BMI of 35 to 45 and an obesity-related illness (though, as fat people can tell you, if you're overweight, your doctor will tell you that any illness is a weight-related illness.  Sore throat?  It's because you're fat.  Bad knees?  It's because you're fat.  Terminal cancer?  It's because you're fat, but don't worry, you'll lose lots of weight on your way out the door.)  It also doesn't help that you have to have two surgeries to install this thing; one to put the "pulse generator" in your chest and another to stick the business end up against the vagus nerve near your stomach.

But here's the kicker; it doesn't actually work.  The manufacturer had a double-blind study (what if they threw a double-blind study and nobody showed up?) in which all the participants lost weight.  Everybody had the device implanted, but in about half, it wasn't turned on.  The people with the devices turned on lost a whopping 8.5% more weight than the people who didn't have the devices turned on.  Sounds impressive, right?  Sure, except we're talking an average of 16 pounds lost for the people with the device turned off, and 24 pounds lost for people with the devices turned on. That's a difference of eight pounds.  Eight pounds for two major surgeries, risk of infection, a hospital stay and a weird foreign object permanently lodged in your chest and stomach.  Eight pounds isn't even statistically significant, folks.  And here's the thing, the participants in the survey all lost weight because they were staying at a hospital and doing a diet and exercise program.  Eat less food and exercise more and you are guaranteed to lose weight.  However, only about 4% keep it off for more than a year.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, 1 in 6 Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from.  In Texas, the ratio's more like one in 5.  They're calling it "food insecurity" now, which I guess sounds better than "hunger."  It means there aren't enough groceries to last the month.  That the last few days before the paycheck, you might be having dinner with the homeless or not having it at all.  The technical definition of "food insecurity" is "the condition of being unable to provide adequate food for a healthy life for all members of a household due to lack of money or other resources," but what it basically amounts to is hunger.  And let's not forget that around the world every day, 21,000 people die of hunger or hunger-related illnesses every day.  Every day. That's one every four seconds.  That's one town the size of Minot, North Dakota, per day.  Almost eight million people a year.  But hey, the Pope still thinks that people shouldn't use birth control.

Anybody want to invent a medical device that can cure food insecurity?  Like maybe taking the money this stupid thing must have cost to develop and market and, I dunno, feeding India for a year or something?  Just asking.  Y'all have a nice day, now.

When Just Saying No Isn't Enough

When I was about eleven, I started to have the symptoms of what eventually became hardcore sinus problems.  At the time, though, it was just a constant runny nose and getting every cold and flu that came around.  After missing more than the usual amount of school, I got taken to a specialist.  The specialist decided, using the best in late 1970s medicine, that what I needed was cortisone injections in my nose.  You know what cortisone is, right?  That white creamy stuff that you rub on your skin and it stops itching? Yeah.  They took a giant syringe of the stuff and injected it into the blood vessels of my nostrils.

Have you ever had a shot of novocaine at the dentist's office?  That's kind of what it felt like. Only with liquid fire.  When you go to the emergency room, they ask you what your pain is like on a one to ten scale.  This was, oh, about eleven.  But I'd had it pounded into my head for years by then that One Does Not Make A Fuss Unless It's An Emergency (which it wasn't; pain is not an emergency.  A severed artery--now, that's an emergency).  So I didn't make a fuss.  I had three injections over three weeks, I think, and my head didn't explode, even though I felt like it would.  And remarkably, the stuff did work.  I didn't get sick as many times that year.

The next year, when it came time to have another round of liquid fire injections up the schnoz, something was different.  I'd turned twelve, for one thing.  I'd evidently grown a pair, for another.  Anyway, I announced I didn't want to have the shots again.  My mother was surprised, but not upset; she just called the doctor and told him I didn't want to have them.  The doctor said (this was back when doctors actually talked to you on the phone) that I'd get every cold and flu that went around.  My mom covered the receiver with her hand (this was also before hold buttons) and said, "He says you'll get every cold and flu that comes around."  I said that was fine.  So I didn't have the shots, and I got every cold and flu that went around.  Maybe not the choice everybody would make, but no liquid fire in my nose made me very happy.

The next year we'd moved and I saw a different allergist.  This one told me that I'd actually been very lucky; plenty of people got those sinus injections in the wrong artery and went blind for life. And incidentally, I was getting every cold and flu that went around because I had malformed sinuses, not because I didn't have cortisone injections.Then about 25 years later, I had sinus surgery and now I only get sick once or twice a year.   So happy ending, kind of.

Good thing I didn't live in the grand old state of Connecticut, whose Supreme Court ruled today that there's nothing wrong with forcing a 17-year old girl to have chemotherapy against her will (sedated and strapped down, according to some articles).  And that a parent can lose custody of a child for failing to follow doctor's orders.  Now, a lot's been written about this case, so I'm not gonna get into a big discussion about whether or not this girl should have chemo.  Of course she should.  She's sick. Chemo will probably help her.  No argument about that.  But just because you should do something doesn't mean you have to do something.  Plenty of adults, when offered chemo, turn it down.  Sometimes they try other treatments and sometimes they don't.  Sometimes they die of cancer, but sometimes people die of cancer anyway.  The point here is that the state is literally and physically forcing this girl into chemo, nine months before her 18th birthday, at which point she could walk out of any hospital in the United States AMA and flip her oncologist the bird on the way out the door.  And there are a lot of unanswered questions here.  Ferexample, what's the difference between eighteen and, say, 17 and 3 months?  Why should a 17-year-old, who can get birth control and have an abortion without a parent so much as being notified, not be allowed to say "no" to a certain medical treatment? And most important as far as the subject of this blog post, when can a parent legally refuse medical treatment on behalf of a child?

Well, if you're in Connecticut, the answer is essentially "never."  If a doctor recommends treatment and you (or you and your kid) decide that you don't want to do it, you can lose custody of your kid and the treatment can be applied by force.  We've seen this before in the Justina Pelletier case (Justina was also from Connecticut, though she was incarcerated in Massachusetts).  And all the places that this can go are absolutely guaranteed to keep you awake at night, if you're a parent.  Or even if you're not.  I'm not, and this stuff drives me absolutely ballistic.

Ponder this: Your kid's been diagnosed with a mental illness.  Your doctor has prescribed a drug that, I don't know, among other things makes him projectile vomit, or get dizzy and fall down.  He doesn't want to take the drug because of the side effects, and you don't want him to either (cleaning up vomit does get old occasionally; trust me on this, I have three cats).  So when you tell the doctor you're refusing the drug, are you now a criminal?  A bad parent?  Does it make a difference if there are other drugs that might work just as well, but the doctor's giving you the one where he gets the kickbacks from the pharmaceutical company? And how would you even know that? I don't imagine a whole lot of parents have read up on psychopharmaceuticals, though frankly, more of them should.

Okay, well, maybe it's not the same in every circumstance.  Maybe the state can only force your kid into treatment in life-threatening circumstances.  But let's just say that your teenage son is overweight.  Your doctor thinks he should have bariatric surgery (which is a risky proposition for an adult, never mind a kid, and which requires all kinds of aftercare essentially for life).  Now, can you say no and suggest the kid instead try a better diet and more exercise?  Or, because obesity can kill you (just like life, which is unfortunately terminal), are you now required by law to say yes?

This is particularly galling because of a thing called the "mature minor doctrine".  Some states have determined that if you think like an adult, talk like an adult, and make decisions like an adult, you can choose your own medical treatments in limited circumstances.  Usually you see this kind of thing when a kid has, say, a facial deformity, and wants to have it surgically corrected.  Sometimes the parents say no, either because of cost or because of some misguided religious thing about the deformity being a "mark of sin".  Anyway, courts have been known to step in and say that the kid can consent to his own surgery.  It's the same logic used when an underage woman wants to have an abortion. Some states view pregnancy itself as an emancipating condition that puts the decision in her hands. (Others, like Texas, say she has to have consent from her parents--or prove to a judge that she's "mature" enough.  Because if she's not mature enough, you know, she should become a mom and fulltime caretaker of a tiny helpless human being.)

The Connecticut court considered the "mature minor" argument and rejected it wholesale.  Among other things, they said no mature minor would promise under oath to get chemo and then run away from home to avoid it.  (Conveniently absent from this argument was the part where, while she was under oath and being asked to make this promise, the minor in question was also told she'd be allowed to go home if she said yes--and she was incarcerated in a hospital room at the time.  I think that's called "consent under coercion", which renders it essentially meaningless.) But even if she was a mature minor, Connecticut law didn't recognize such a thing, so she had to have the chemo anyway.

Which, I think, amounts to, "You aren't doing what we want, so we're going to force you to do what we want, because we can do that."  Look, most people in this kid's situation would opt to have the chemo.  If she has it, she has an 85% chance of surviving at least five years (which isn't the same as being "cured", but is pretty good odds).  But this kid is not most people and she said no. What was more, she discussed with her mother and her mother agreed that it was her call.  However, the opinion of the court seems to be that it was the mother's job to force her to have the chemo, and since she didn't do it, she had to be punished by losing custody of her daughter.  It seems like the overriding theme here is, "Do what most people would do, and we'll leave you alone; do something different, and boy are you in trouble."

So why is this such a big deal, you may ask. So a court can force a kid to have chemo.  Well, there are plenty of situations where medical care is inflicted on adults because they are seen as not being competent enough to refuse it.  DNRs are ignored; people are placed on ventilators even though it says clearly in their living wills that they don't want one; brain-dead pregnant women are kept on life support on the small and dwindling chances that their fourteen-week-old fetuses might make it to viability (update: it didn't). Women are told by their states that they must submit to a medically unnecessary vaginal ultrasound before they can have an abortion (state sanctioned rape, in other words).  I could go on, but you get the idea.  It's rapidly becoming more acceptable and legally permissible not just to have access to medical care, but to require it of some people. Usually poor, dark-skinned people. And children. And women. Which seems to be a theme.

In closing, civil rights need to begin at the skin.  I want an amendment to the Constitution stating that the right of persons to be not-messed-with shall not be abridged.  And I think seventeen is plenty old enough to accept or reject chemotherapy.  Because, seriously, they let you drive when you're sixteen, and then you're not taking just your own life into your hands but the lives of every other driver around you. And driving is a lot more dangerous than chemotherapy.  I'm just sayin'.

What Happens in Phoenix...

...doesn't exist, evidently.

Lemme splain. No, is too much. Lemme som opp.  Joan and I flew to Phoenix to see my mom and dad for Thanksgiving. Or at least we tried to fly to Phoenix.  Things started going wrong the second the Super Shuttle showed up. It never would have occurred to me that now, in the Common Era 2014, they might not be disabled accessible. But the guy showed up, and he had a van that could only be reached by climbing up into it. Fine for me but not for Joan, who's been hobbling around with a cane for the last couple of weeks. Bad knee. And bad foot. And sometimes both a bad knee and a bad foot. Anyway, after three failed attempts, we finally put her in the front seat, with both me and the Super Shuttle guy giving her a mighty push from the rear.  Mission accomplished, but I had no idea how I was going to get her back out again.

Matters did not improve once we got to the airport, either. Yes, we got Joan back out of the van (gravity is your friend), but the ticket agent had a problem with us.  See, we had three tickts and only two human beings. This was beause we were flying on Mas Barato Airlines. Mas Barato is a fine airline, but if you look like you're too large to fit into one of their 16" seats (which covers a lot of tall people, as well as fat people), they've been known to pull you out of line and make you buy another seat on the spot. Especially if you're a woman (there was a lawsuit about this).  We buy three seats together, which means we get a row to ourselves. It's a whole lot easier to just buy the extra seat when you book the flight, but we never, and I do mean never, get through the airport without a lot of hassle when we do this.

In this instance, the ticket agent couldn't get her machine to print us a boarding pass for the third seat. She had to call her supervisor. 25 minutes later she was still on the phone, saying things like "The what screen?" and "What's that? I've never heard of that." Joan, meanwhile, had asked for a wheelchair, but none had ever shown up. She headed off to the ladies' room right around the time the boarding pass had finally printed. By now, we had about 15 minutes to make the plane.

I took the boarding passes and sprinted for the ladies' room, where I caught up with Joan and where, by some miracle, the wheelchair finally caught up with us. The TSA let us go through the wheelchair line, which was a lot shorter, and the wheelchair took off running on the other side while I was still putting my shoes back on. I ran like the hounds of Pink Floyd were at my heels, but I didn't catch up until I got to the actual gate. By then they were wheeling Joan down the jetway, and we collapsed into our private row just before the doors shut and the engines roared to life. Whew.

Okay, we're on the right plane and it's going the right direction and all should be well from here on out, right? Um, no. After we got to Phoenix, we got an email from the airline that since we'd failed to show up for our flight out, they were cancelling our flight back. Now, I like Phoenix, but I had no intention of staying there, so I called Mas Barato Airlines to find out what was going on. After i'd told my story to successively higher-placed supervisors, I finally got one that seemed to know what was going on. At least until she asked me, "Are you sure you're in Phoenix?"

Am I sure I'm in Phoenix. Ponder that for a moment. Existential questions aside (how, for example, does anyone know they're really in Phoenix?) that was something I'd never considered before. I mean, maybe I was in Hawaii. Lots of sun, lots of sand. Maybe I was in Aruba. Jamaica. Bermuda? Bahama? Anyway; I said the first thing that came to mind, which was "I beg your pardon?" And she repeated it. "Are you sure you're in Phoenix?" Honestly, don't they teach you to listen to your own questions in customer service school?

Well, I finally admitted to being sure I was in Phoenix, since, uh, I actually was in Phoenix (or Chandler, if you want to get picky).  And another long silence followed, after which she told me that the originating airport had blah blah blah something technical, which had caused blah blah blah something else technical,and in other words they were blaming the computer. But, no harm no fowl, we still had reservations to fly back to Dallas. Which was all I really cared about, so I let the rest slide. But I wonder what's gonna happen when we get to the airport to fly home. Maybe they'll ask if I'm sure I'm at Sky Harbor. Or worse, Albuquerque.

...But No One's Home

Back in the far wastelands of 2010, when the Affordable Care Act hadn't been signed yet and so we had all these different and exciting things to fight about, an ice storm blew into Dallas and knocked out our power for four days.  This was four days in the coldest part of winter, I might add.  I think a couple of nights it got below zero, or very close to zero, and I smuggled in neighborhood cat Orange Guy so that he could sleep somewhere warm. (He was a perfect gentleman, too.)  We kept the house sort of warmish with our gas fireplace, and everybody slept on the living room floor in a pile of cushions close to the fire.  It was dark and cold and altogether not fun.  So you'll pardon me if, every time the power's gone out since, my anxiety skyrockets and I start pacing the floor.  On some level I'm just absolutely convinced it's going to happen again.

And as it turned out, I was right. Last Thursday, a storm blew through Dallas.  It wasn't really that much to write home about; just some rain and a lot of wind.  Fierce wind, but not unusual for around here.  I mean, we do get storms here, people.  We're at the very south end of Tornado Alley, and just because Dallas County's never been hit with a tornado higher than an EF-2 doesn't mean that it couldn't someday happen.  Anyway, 300,000 people across five counties lost power.  Including yours truly and Joan, of course.

I will say, losing power in the summer beats the hell out of losing it in the winter.  No gas fireplace required, for one thing.  We just braced open a couple of windows and got a cross-breeze going.  We still had the gas stove upon which to cook, the hot water in the tank stayed relatively hot (seeing as it wasn't cold out), we packed the refrigerator and freezer full of ice to preserve the food, and apart from a total lack of TV, radio, Internet and Words with Friends, it was a lot more survivable.  But, again, not exactly what you'd call fun.

This time the power stayed off for three days.  I would just like to say, what is up with that?  Once again, we get these storms.  They happen. Trees get knocked down. Power poles lose their moorings.  Why in hell do 300,000 people have to lose power for three days in a situation like this?  I mean, I'd suggest we've learned absolutely nothing from past experience, but I personally had all our trees cut back that came anywhere near our power lines (and had one tree removed altogether).  And people frequently write outraged letters to the editor when the electric delivery company around here, Oncor, comes around and chops off the tops of their trees.  They can do that.  It's their job.  To gauge from these letters, though, you'd think that Oncor stomped onto their lawns, shotguns drawn, whacked the trees in half, spit on the porch steps and mooned the homeowners on the way out.  Honestly.  If it were me I'd be thanking them. The last time our tree service came over and did some major work, the bill was well over a thousand dollars.

(And I could point out that if you take care of your own trees and don't let them get tall enough to mess with the power lines, Oncor's never going to bother you, but I get continually reminded about the utter uselessness of attacking a problem like this with logic and reasoning.)

I'm beginning to suspect that we in this town might have what is known as a hopelessly antiquated electrical delivery system.  Newer cities do things like bury their electrical lines underground, where they're basically immune to falling trees.  (Though I suppose you might find the occasional deep-fried gopher.)  I'm wondering what it would take to get our power lines buried here in Dallas. A miracle?  An act of Congress?  An act of the City Council, anyway, and since that would require spending some money, I'd be tempted to write if off as totally impossible.

I'd also be tempted to get a bunch of my neighbors together, form a special district, apply for grants and see if we can get it done for a fairly reasonable amount of money per homeowner.  Which is something else that might be written off as totally impossible.

Except for one small thing.  I've done it before.

Or something similar, anyway.  Granted, I was the de facto president of a homeowner's association at the time, but I managed to get a heavily Hispanic population of homeowners to pack up all their living beings and move out for termite tenting over EASTER WEEKEND.  You know, the biggest religious festival of the year.  That thing where everybody has relatives over and throws lots of parties.  And no, I didn't pick the weekend.  I just got stuck with having to implement it.  And implement it I did.  Some of them even still spoke to me after it was all over.

Do I miss being the de facto president of a homeowner's association?  No, I do not.  I'd rather be dragged naked through flaming walls of rabid rattlesnakes.  So don't worry, I'm not going to start signing up homeowners tomorrow or anything.  But this is an ongoing problem and I don't see it getting any better.  What's worse, it's a big problem. The kind you need other people to help solve. I do not want to go through another three-day blackout, no matter what time of year it is.  Besides the niceties of existing in the 21st century when you're powered for the 19th, there's the joy of driving to work through traffic caused by flashing red traffic signals. It took me an hour and a half to get to work Friday morning.  And it's only a frick'n 20 minute drive.

Somebody Find Toto

Well, ya cain't say I didn't warn ya.  It was on this spot right here, only a few short months ago, that I told you what would be happening after pregnant women were banned from all the big cities.  Being caught in a metropolis with a bun in the oven will lead to an immediate charge of felonious breathing, as I think Margaret Atwood would call it.  Or reckless endangerment through inhalation of toxic gases.  Imagine, having the nerve, the unremitting gall to walk through New York or Boston or San Francisco, while pregnant, and knowingly inhale air known to be toxic to fetuses.  No different than Utah's skiing-while-pregnant ban or Florida's preborn human sun exposure law.  Nope.  We're having no more of these scandals.  I'm sorry, but that's it.  We're just gonna send them all to Kansas.

Why?  Because pregnant women are irresponsible and only take their own selfish feelings and demands for liberty into consideration.  Because in spite of all the scientific evidence that says women only exist as containers for preborn babies, there's always one or two that have to hop up and down and squawk about their "personhood" and their "rights."  Because Kansas is the only place that's safe.  Sorry, everybody in Wichita and Topeka and Olathe, but you're going to have company.  A lot of it.  For the  next nine months.

Think of it.  Millions of women packed onto Greyhound buses without a nay-say or maybe as soon as that little stick turns blue.  Shipped from around the country to the safest state in the Union (unless there's a tornado).  No skiing, no surfing, no sunbathing, no sex or drugs or alcohol.  (Well, there is that little crystal meth problem, but we'll get rid of that; we'll just jack up the sentences for possession and manufacturing and everybody'll be scared and, you know, just stop making and selling the stuff.) Nine months of perfect safety for the fetuses and their containers and then all the babies will be born healthy!  And that's what we want, isn't it?

Ah, perhaps you think I exaggerate. Or perhaps you think I'm off my proverbial rocker.  Well, you could be right about that second thing, but I'm afraid I am not exaggerating.  Take a look at this lawsuit, recently filed in Federal Court by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (and ponder, for a moment, why we even need such an advocacy.  Get back to me on that, will you?) Go down to the first orange link on the page.  Then read that sucker.  Yes, I know it's fifty-odd pages long. Read it anyway.  If you're anything like me, you won't be able to put it down.

Brief recap of the facts:  Alicia Beltran, a woman and, by definition, a human being, sought prenatal care at a local clinic in Milwaukee.  She confidentially told the doctor that she had been treated for prescription drug abuse and had been taking Suboxone, a pain medication.  She'd stopped taking it because she found out she was pregnant.  A few days later, five policemen came to her house and arrested her.  She was handcuffed, shackled and taken to a court hearing that she knew nothing about. An attorney had been appointed to represent the interests of her 14-week-old fetus.  (I am not making this up.  It's all in the lawsuit.  Go back and read it again.)  There was, however, no attorney appointed to represent Alicia Beltran, the living, breathing, already born woman.  With no testimony from any medical experts whatsoever and with Ms. Beltran not allowed to speak, the judge ordered her involuntarily committed to an inpatient drug treatment program two hours away from her family.  She has been a prisoner there since July 13, 2013.

Now, let's consider this for a second.

It is not illegal to take a prescription drug.

It is not illegal to refuse medical treatment.

It is not illegal to seek another medical opinion.

It is illegal for a doctor to release information about a patient without that patient's consent to a third party.  The law that governs that kind of conduct is called HIPPA.  It is also highly unethical for a doctor to release information given to him or her under the doctor-patient privilege, which is what happened here.

It is illegal to use intimidation or threats under color of authority, such as sending a social worker to someone's house and threatening that someone with losing custody of her children, to get that person to do something that you want. It was illegal for the doctor to send the social worker out there and it was illegal of the social worker to go.

It is very very illegal to kidnap a woman from her house, haul her away in chains, and lock her up someplace.  Yet somehow, Alicia Beltran needs a Federal lawsuit to get her out of a situation that never should have happened in the first place.

I can hear some of you thinking.  (Psychic powers.  I has 'em.)  And what I can hear some of you thinking is along the lines of "But what if she relapses and goes back on the drugs?  That would be bad for her baby, so it's better if she stays locked up until she gives birth."

Really?

Really?

Okay. Let's try this.  Somebody grabs you off the street, shackles you, throws you into a car, drives you to what's obviously a prison and surrounds you with police officers.  After several hours you finally get into what looks like a courtroom and there's a judge and you think, "Oh thank God, now we can clear up this mix-up," because obviously there's been one, right?  And then the judge winks at the guys who kidnapped you and says, "It's okay, boys.  She's pregnant."

Guess what.  Illegal behavior is illegal behavior whether the victim is pregnant or not.  Kidnapping is illegal,  Being addicted to a substance is not illegal.  Trying to quit the addictive substance on your own, without some nice rehab counselor holding your hand every step of the way, is not illegal.

No one ever offered any evidence that Alicia Beltran was using drugs.  No one tested her for drug use.  No one, as far as I can tell, even bothered to ask her, "Hey.  Pop any Suboxone today?"  Even if they had, though, that wouldn't justify anything that happened.  Again, being a drug addict is not illegal.

In fact, the law treats pregnant people and nonpregnant people almost exactly the same way.  There are a few exceptions for pregnant people who are under 18, but not many.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to drink.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to go skiing.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to go skydiving, go Rocky Mountain climbing, go 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu.  And it is illegal for a pregnant woman to do drugs, only insofar as it's illegal for anyone else to use drugs.

Believe me, if we could outlaw stupid behavior, we'd need enough prisons to fill the entire state of Texas.

It burns me up that more news agencies aren't following this story.  Why CNN and NBC aren't pounding on the doors of Casa Clare, demanding to speak to Alicia Beltran.  Why isn'lt Amnesty International protesting outside on the sidewalk? Where's the ACLU, when you really need them? Why aren't sixteen helicopters circling that rehab facility 24/7, demanding to know what the hell is going on? Because the last time I Googled it - 30 seconds ago - I found one story on Reuters and it was under a headline about Democrats and the shutdown.

Well, I intend to make some noise.  Do what I can to get some attention.  Send this blog post to people I know who will give a damn and might even write about it.  I may be a Buddhist with a Nook at a table at Afrah, but by God, you don't want to piss me off. I type mean when I'm mad.
 

Buddhist Terror

I am so embarrassed.

Okay, maybe that's not the best reaction to a bunch of people getting killed in the name of religion.  But still.  I am so embarrassed.  My teeny tiny religion based on kindness, nonviolence, compassion for all beings and just in general being nice to everybody finally makes the cover of Time, and what's the headline?  "The Face Of Buddhist Terror."  Great.  This has to be the best thing to happen to the international Buddhist image since the sarin gas attack in Tokyo.

Not, by the way, that you're actually going to see this cover.  This is the international edition cover.  We in the United States got a cutesy cover of veterans painting a wall, which is of course the cover itself, with a dripping wet-paint headline about national service and how it might save the world.  I'd paste it in here, but one stolen cover image per post is probably plenty.  Still, international-edition readers get the real news.  We get some cleaned-up version that's meant not to disturb us too much, I guess, lest we all jump up in a group and demand that the corrupt bag of bastards running our country fucking do something instead of just sit there.  For real news, try some of these Web sites: Alternet, Huffington Post, Common Cause, RH Reality Check.  And for fake news, there's always Fox.

Back to Myanmar, though.  If you don't know where Myanmar is, it's in the Far East and it used to be Burma, east of Bangladesh and a little bit north of Laos.  If that doesn't help, it's near India someplace.  Anyway: For the last several months, gangs of Buddhists armed with machetes (Gangs of Buddhists.  That is just the most antithetical phrase.) have been going into Muslim areas, beating up Muslims, burning their houses down and in some cases killing them.  And if you're a Buddhist and your head isn't spinning around at this piece of news, what kind of a Buddhist are you?

Obviously this is completely out of character for Buddhists anywhere, even Myanmar.  It's not Right Thinking and it certainly isn't Right Action.  It violates the First Precept and the Second Precept (I'd argue that burning somebody's house down is the same as stealing; you've certainly taken from them their use of that house, and anything in it).  Why on God's green earth would Buddhists behave this way?  Well, apparently because of the guy on the cover, Wirathu, who calls himself the Buddhist Bin Laden.  (Yes, he said that.  He said that.)  Wirathu says that the Buddhists are only defending themselves from Muslim corruption.  The Muslims come into an area, he claims, and they marry all the Buddhist daughters, spread their religion and take over.  Myanmar needs to remain Buddhist by any means necessary, and apparently the means necessary (as determined by him) is, uh, anything goes.

I'm blown away that so many people are listening to this guy and are willing to go along with what he says.  Rather than listen to the values they've lived by all these years, they'd rather listen to somebody who validates their fears and tells them to do what they want to do anyway.  I guess that's no different than people listening to Christian megapreachers on late night TV, going in to work the next morning and firing the gay guy who works in the mail room, but I just thought Buddhists were above this stuff.  Part of being human is being endlessly disappointed in your fellow humans.  Or, as my receptionist keeps telling me, "People are strange. People are strange. People are strange."

This is killing me, personally, because I love Muslims.  I am fascinated by Islam, though always from the outside because they'd never take me. (The whole lesbian thing, you know.)  I love their art, I love their music, I love their culture, and I love their food.  I love to go to Afrah on a Thursday night and hear Arabic spoken.  If Muslims and Buddhists become enemies again, they might not let me back in, and sales of pita bread in Richardson would plummet and create a miniature black hole that would spread and suck down the entire U.S. economy.  I mean it could be chaos.

Unfortunately, Muslims and Buddhists have a history with each other.  From the 9th century battles with Sunni Turks  to the destruction of the Buddhas at Bimayan in 2001, a lot of blood has been spilled, even if it had less to do with religion and more to do with living space.  And usually, the Buddhists came out on the losing side of these conflicts.  One thing about Muslims, historically speaking:  You don't want to piss them off.

Anyway, Myanmar isn't the only country to experience this kind of conflict.  Buddhist/Muslim riots have been reported in Indonesia, southern Thailand and Sri Lanka just in the last year.  The Dalai Lama has condemned the violence. Thich Nhat Hanh sounded off in Tricycle Magazine with a list of co-authors that read like a Buddhist Who's Who.  And both of them said what I suspected all along: This isn't about religion.  This is about two groups of people who are deciding not to get along, and using religion as a handy excuse to fight with each other.

Well.

I just want you all to know that there are 448 million Buddhists in the world, and most of us are NOT LIKE THAT.  Oh, sure, we get pissed off.  Myself I get angry about injustice and rape and lack of ethics in government and men trying to control women's bodies and bad drivers and $7,000 sewer pipes and bad faxes from opposing counsel and workplace pettiness and large companies that are "too big to fail" so they get away with anything and cats howling in the middle of the night and waking me up and people who won't look at the big picture and my idiot neighbor (who is an idiot) and so-called Christians who picket soldiers' funerals and the people who work on the 12th floor of my building who dress like it's Saturday and they're going to spend the day shooting up.  But I've never taken a machete to any of them and I never will.  When I took refuge and accepted the Five Precepts it meant something.  A religion is not a cafeteria, people.  If you're going to live by a set of values, live by them.  Full time.  Not only when it's easy but especially when it's hard.

We're Not In Kansas Anymore.

"Women do not lose their rights to medical decision making, bodily integrity and physical liberty upon becoming pregnant or at any stage of pregnancy, labor or delivery."

--Farah Diaz-Tello, attorney and advocate for pregnant women

" HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!"

--every male Republican politician in the United States

It was only a matter of time.  History will record that on April 11, 2028, it officially became illegal to be in New York City while pregnant. New York City posted a PAH ratio (that's polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, for you science types) of 4.0 - almost double the 2.26 nanograms per cubic meter that's considered safe for human breathing.  That's a measure of air pollution, and New York City's is one of the highest in the country. Since it's been proven that air pollution can negatively affect a child's IQ, and since pregnant women are criminally liable if they do anything during their pregnancies that might harm their babies, New York City is off limits to anyone who's more than two weeks late. 

But New York wasn't the only city that closed its doors to pregnant women.  Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano--pretty much the entire Metroplex and the quad-county area was off limits.  San Francisco and San Diego were out.  So was most of the Eastern seaboard.  In fact, as the oil began to run out and more and more coal was trucked in to take its place, more and more cities went over the PAH ratio and more and more pregnant women were shipped to homes for expectant mothers in the Midwest. Kansas was a particular favorite  And why not?  It was a lot safer there.  No ski resorts, no mountain climbing, no surfing, nothing dangerous to do during leisure time. Cigarettes were banned, alcohol consumption during pregnancy was already a class III misdemeanor, and though abortion was still technically legal, there were no providers in the state since the last clinic was run out of business by new regulations.  

The Kansas homes were known for their fine security.  Since that woman in Indiana ate rat poison to try to kill herself in her eighth month of pregnancy, many of the homes offer 24-hour "supervision" of all residents (they didn't like it if you called it "suicide watch"). Husband visits were encouraged, but only with a chaperon-no sex, of course; it might hurt the baby.  By 2028, the biggest problem for the homes was keeping up with demand.  With most forms of birth control banned on the theory that they "might" cause an abortion, and abortion still legal but for the most part unavailable, the average heterosexual female was having between five and six children, at least three of them unplanned.  Some liberal feminists still complained that the new laws treated women like "walking wombs," but few paid attention.  Most of the population agreed that if you were going to conceive a child, it was your duty to take care of it from the moment of conception to the moment of birth.  What happened after that, of course, was somebody else's problem.  

Okay, that's enough narrative.  Now I'll tell you what in hell I'm talking about.  I'm talking about this survey, which reviewed so-called "pro-life" laws in all 50 states and came up with 413 incidents in 44 states in which the laws were used not to help babies but to hurt women.  Women have been on the receiving end of court orders, prosecutions, lawsuits and civil commitments that demand they put aside their own personal autonomy, their civil rights, their dignity and their personhood for the sake of the baby they're carrying. 

Yeah. Personhood.  Maybe you've heard that term before. You'll hear it again.

Think I'm hysterical?  Thank you for that anti-woman sentiment (you did know that "hysterical" meant "a state of distress brought about by having a womb," didn't you?).  Ponder these cases:  A woman threatened with arrest because she wanted to have a c-section on Friday instead of Tuesday. A woman  charged with attempted feticide for falling down a flight of stairs on the assumption she did it on purpose to kill her fetus. A woman in Idaho who was arrested for inducing her own abortion with RU-486, on the logic that somebody else can give you an abortion in Idaho, but you can't bring about your own.   A woman in Indiana who, while severely mentally ill, tried to kill herself by eating rat poison.  (Sorry, but this one just kills me.)  She was eight months pregnant.  She let some friends take her to a hospital, where she had an emergency C-section to get the baby out of harm's way.  The baby died anyway.  She was charged with murder and attempted feticide.  The murder charge didn't stick but the attempted feticide charge did.  You can follow the case here.  It's unbelievable.  Suicide is not against the law in Indiana.  And if none of those make you think something's terribly wrong here, check this one out: A woman in Tennessee was arrested for child endangerment and driving while intoxicated, with no children in the car and with a blood alcohol level that was 0.04 - well below the legal limit of 0.08.  Why?  She admitted to having had a glass of wine and being pregnant.

I mean, I could go on.  I have laws pending in Alabama and Tennessee that would make a fetus a "child" for reasons of "child abuse" once a fetal heartbeat is detected. I have a judge in Ohio that kept a woman in jail past her release date because he didn't want her to have an abortion.  I have a woman in Oregon who was civilly committed to a psychiatric hospital because she refused to be tested for gestational diabetes.  (Refusing a test, people.  She was locked in a mental ward for refusing a test. In 2005.)  But you get the idea.  The idea is that somehow, legally, pregnant women form this whole underclass (like slaves, or gays, or 19th-century women) that has laws specifically applying to them that can apply to no one else.  

[N]or shall any person . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

--United States Constitution, 5th Amendment

 No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.


--United States Constitution, 14th Amendment

So.

At what stage in pregnancy does a woman lose her civil rights? 

More to the point, at what stage in pregnancy does a woman cease to be a person?

Horror Of The Rice Bowl

 This week saw the premiere of not one, but two new horror shows -- er, that is, TV shows with a decidedly horrific thematic element.  Season Three of The Walking Dead (Sundays, AMC) covers new ground; the characters, instead of squabbling with each other and hanging around the farm like they did most of Season Two, are actually running from zombies and breaking into (rather than out of) a prison. Much fighting, splattering and brains going everywhere ensued, apparently in a quest to find out how much they could get away with on basic cable.  Answer: Quite a bit.  Well, that is to say, nobody's complained too much yet.  And the first episode ended on a monstrous (er, so to speak) cliffhanger that had me doing the long slow blink not once but a couple of times.

Then on Wednesday on FX we have American Horror Story: Asylum.  In case you missed it, last year's AHS was all about teen angst, cheating husbands, scary household help and Jessica Lange.  This year's AHS seems to be all about institutionalized homophobia, serial killers, Nazi doctors and Jessica Lange. Because too much Jessica is never enough, and Jessica as a frustrated nun with a cane and a set of keys is, well, pretty scary.  But during AHS, I started having the same horrible thought that plagued me during The Walking Dead.  The thought was: "Why am I watching this?"

Because, honestly, I wasn't enjoying it.  Them.  Whatever.  I liked them last year.  Did all the stuffing leach out of them between last year and this year?  Or are scary TV shows I used to like falling victim to the same strange syndrome as horror novels I used to like?  Surely not.  Surely we can blame Joe Hill for that last one; I got three-quarters of the way through his truly terrifying Horns before I came uponst the scene that did it, that carved a bright red wound into my brain.  Something about a guy being mean to a little old lady and about that I'll say no more, but I haven't been able to pick up a horror novel and look at it the same way since.  Maybe, having spent six or so years helping take care of my mother-in-law at the end of her life and dealing with people who maybe weren't as nice to her as they should have been, it just all became too real for me.  Or maybe it tapped into one of my big ol' Primal Fears, one I've had since early childhood and is probably past-life related because in this life it just doesn't make any darn sense.

But, anyway, I'm not enjoying these shows anymore.  Joan would probably say my disbelief suspenders have snapped again, just like they did during Lost, Season Three Episode Two, and The X-Files, Season Four, the episode styled after Forrest Gump.  I swear, whatever this is it better not happen to horror movies, because I frick'n love horror movies (of the supernatural bent; no slasher films, please) and it would suck to lose those too.  Besides, I'm three behind.  I haven't even seen The Possession yet and Paranormal Activity 4 and Sinister just hit the big screen. 

Speaking of scary stuff, a couple of weeks ago I was called uponst to go with all of my co-workers to a particular restaurant where they cook the food right there at your table and do flashy stuff with the knives.  The restaurant bills itself as being "...of Tokyo" but I sort of have a feeling it was of Racine, Wisconsin originally, and worked itself up to Tokyo the old-fashioned way.  I'd never been to this place, but some of my cow-orkers go there often.  There seem to be two kinds of chefs; the ones that can do flashy, impressive things with the knives, and the ones who can't.  The ones who can't have some running schtick that they use to engage the table, thus preventing conversation and, I dunno, making themselves feel important, I guess.  There were too many of us for one table, so we were seated at two of them.  The other table got the flashy knives guy and we got--yeah.

This particular chef's ongoing monologue was about the different types of people at the table.  The tall guy (one of our guys is 6'5"), the tiny girl (4'10"), the bald guy, the lady with the top that was pulled down so far that a person could lose things.  He kind of went around the table.  If he couldn't find a particular characteristic for somebody, he made one up.  And when he got to me, he--

Oh hell.  You know where this is going, right?  I'm the fat chick.  Inevitably, even if there's a fat guy sitting right next to me (and there was), it's like open season.  But it was subtle.  First he went around filling rice bowls with the fried rice he'd just made.  Er, except for mine, which got about a teaspoon of rice and "You ordered the diet plate, right?"

The truth is, I don't much care for rice.  Never have.  When I have Asian food I usually leave the rice.  I commented to my boss (who was on the other side of me from the fat guy), "Hey, somebody finally gave me the right amount of rice."  But my boss was frowning.  He knew there was something wrong.  He just didn't know what.

Anyway, the chef came back around and said, "Oh, my mistake.  You didn't order the diet plate.  You ordered the special."  He proceeded to cram my bowl with rice.  Probably twice as much as anyone else got.  Rice was falling out of the bowl and onto the table.  Now, the crack about the diet plate I could have just ignored, but this coming back around thing?  Uh, no.

Now it was war.

Thus began one of the weirdest meals I'd ever eaten.  I'd ordered the calamari with vegetables, which was delicious.  I ate the calamari.  I ate the vegetables.  I left the rice.  The chef came back around again and said, "Something wrong with your rice?" "No."  "You should eat it before it gets cold."  "Thanks for the tip." We had this same discussion at least twice, and some variations on the theme.

Have you ever been to a restaurant and had a staff member cajole you about eating your food?  For that matter, have you ever, since you were six, had anyone tell you to clean your plate who wasn't your mother or father?  Can you imagine a chef, the most vaulted member of the kitchen staff, getting in your face about what you had and hadn't eaten?  It was a very strange meal.  And some of the other diners began to notice that it was a very strange meal, including my boss, who asked me what was wrong with my rice.  "Nothing," I said, realizing only later I should have said something like, "I just don't like it when they serve it with so much sarcasm."

At the end of the meal, the chef--yes, the chef, people--told me he'd get me a box for the rice.  Chefs do not do this. This is waitstaff territory.  As soon as he disappeared around the corner I waved for one of the busboys and asked him, very politely, to please take this rice away.  Which he did.  And I managed to get out of the restaurant without running into the chef again.

So I won that round, I think.  But for crying out loud, I don't go to lunch--much less with my cow-orkers--with the idea of going to war over rice.  I came home and told Joan this story and she thought I should write a letter to the manager.  I thought about that, too, but I finally decided against it.  I didn't think he would get it.  I had this feeling he'd look up from the letter, very puzzled, and say, "So something was wrong with the rice?" And I didn't feel like trying to explain the whole thing, anyway.  Instead I wrote this.  And in case anybody in Dallas is wondering, Banner Drive at Merit near Coit Road south of the 635.  You're welcome.

Mini-Post: Ranting About Guns and Mental Illness

Yeah, I'm gonna go off on a rant here.  Don't worry, it won't take long.  The subject once again is guns, but this time it's about taking them away from mentally ill people, seeing as we've had an epidemic of mass shootings lately and, hey, it's easy to blame the alternately sane.  But, I gotta ask: Are you referring to me? I am, after all, bipolar I, which is the "bad" bipolar disorder, the one that gets all the attention, the research funding and the Charlie Sheen publicity.  Obviously People Like That shouldn't be allowed to own weapons. Save 'em for the warmer, fuzzier, Catherine Zeta-Jones type mentally ill people.  

(By the way, I love the way this article talks about "keep(ing) guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally ill people."  Thanks, Michael Bloomberg, for lumping us all together.  I'm sure the criminals appreciate it too.) 

Oh, but wait.  I'm "different."  I don't wanna kill scads of other people, just occasionally myself, so there can't possibly be any harm in letting me have a 9-mm Glock.  What's the worst that can happen?  I blow my brains out and save some serious Obamacare bucks?  Besides, what are you going to do, traipse around the country and stamp "Do Not Sell Guns To This Person" on the forehead of every depressed housewife who's ever taken Prozac?  

If you ask me, I'm the one that needs the handgun, and a lot more than you do, because sooner or later the frick'n villagers are gonna descend on Flamingo Lane with their torches and pitchforks to drive me out of town because I'm clearly too dangerous to remain within the community.  They better hope I'm not in my manic phase when this happens or I'll--I'll WRITE all over 'em.  

Jen has spoken. 

Practicing Medicine Without a License

I went to an OA convention this weekend. Well, part of one, anyway. I never did get my shit together enough to actually register for this thing, so I just showed up on Saturday morning and paid the day registration fee. It was pretty cool, though, all things considered. There was a great motivational speaker, a couple of nifty workshops, a decent lunch (the restaurant was completely FUBAR, but that's neither here nor there) and a lot of people I know were there, so I got to chat with everybody. Sunday was a bust, between a massage appointment (yay!) and the Oscars (boo!), and I ended up going to bed somewhat early and missing the "big awards" at the end. Nobody tell me who won Best Picture. I'm hiding under a rock until The Hunger Games comes out.

So, today I went to the Post Office at lunchtime to send yet another partial to yet another literary agent (yay!). This did not go well. It kind of never does. I get weirded out, paranoid, think that everyone is staring at me and am sure I'm going to be caught at any moment. Caught doing what, I have no idea. The whole thing is Scaley and Fang territory if I've ever been there, and Caesar, the cat who keeps dinosaurs out of my kitchen, is usually miles away and fast asleep.

But, okay, I got there, and I mailed the package, and I was on my way back to the office when my blood sugar hit the floor. In a great example of I-should-not-be-driving-in-this-condition I managed to miss my turn, get on the freeway for no apparent reason, get off one exit later and loop back to the office around the High-Five interchange, which was inefficient, but worked, I guess. I made it to the elevator without falling down and grabbed a package of Skittles out of the candy jar up front, snarfed them all down in one gulp (no chewing necessary) and kind of fell into my chair, waiting for the sugar to kick in.

I hate this part. My whole body is telling me I need to keep eating until the sugar kicks in, which takes a little time. My brain, on the other hand, knows it just had some sugar, that straight sugar is really bad for it, that a titrated dose is the only amount I'd better have, and that if I have more I'm probably going to be right back in this position in a couple of hours, only with a nice splitting headache to go along. So I sat there, as I often do, gritting my teeth and going, "Come on, come on," until the sugar kicked in, which it did in about ten minutes. Then I was able to get up, go into the kitchen, get my lunch, eat it and behave like a fairly normal human being the rest of the day.

(Annoyingly, I have a lollipop in my car for such emergencies. Completely forgot about it. The brain does not engage when the blood glucose drops below 60.)

Anyway, as I was eating, I was reading stuff from the convention. I found this flyer about things to consider when you're making your food plan. It was all good stuff, good advice and so on, until I got to No. 14: "Have I diagnosed myself as hypoglycemic so I can eat many times each day?"

Oh, yeah. Hypoglycemia doesn't exist (it's even bolded for effect) and I'm making this up.

For Buddha's sake, who wrote that flyer, and where did they get their M.D.? This has been happening to me since I was a little kid. It's worse when I eat sugar. It's better when I have meals about every three hours. I don't have to eat a lot. Just a piece of fruit and some cheese is fine. But I really don't need to burn extra energy hopping up and down trying to convince people I have a "real" disorder.

Okay, maybe I'm overpersonalizing this, but the tone these things are written in comes across to me as, well, a bunch of sanctimonious bullshit. Not that it isn't well-intended, but you remember the obnoxious kindergarten or first-grade teacher you had who used the royal "we" when she meant "you" all the time? Ie, "We don't poke other people" or "We remember our seats"? Yeah. Like that. I hated being talked to like a six-year-old when I was a six-year-old. I promise you, my temperament has not improved since then.

I'd like to hunt down the author of this flyer and see if he or she is aware of how he or she comes across. I bet he or she would be horrified to be compared to an obnoxious kindergarten teacher. But then, I know how these conversations tend to go. "There, there, dear. We didn't mean you. A real medical diagnosis is okay. It's those other people, the ones that are diagnosing themselves, that this is directed toward."

To which I say, bullshit. If you've been moping around for weeks and all you can think about is how great it would be to slash your wrists, I'm not going to wait for you to be diagnosed with clinical depression before I tell you to fucking call 911. If you have a condition, and something makes it better, why would you not do that something?! Nobody prescribed to me four days a week of swimming in chlorinated water. It just seems to help. So I do it. It's called common sense, people. Believe it or not, it's out there somewhere.

Seeing as my language is deteriorating, I'm cutting off this blog post before it gets downright un-religionish. But you see my point. Besides, Joan is wiping the foam from my mouth and taking the keyboard from my hands. Bye, now.

Rant 0, Head Pats Lots

I had a nice rant all set to go here. I was going to lead off with some kind of riff on why religion is messed up, then get to the specifics about why certain hospitals and schools, despite being owned and operated by certain religious factions, should be absolutely no different than any other institution when it came to providing birth control as part of its health insurance package, and free, for that matter. Then I was going to point out that if my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins, then your right to freedom of religion ends where women's lives begin. And I was going to wrap the whole thing up by noting that of the illustrious panel of birth control "experts" assembled to testify before Congress today, not a single one of them could get pregnant (them all being male), and not a single one of them was a medical doctor of any sort whatever. Howdya like that, ladies? The people who purportedly run this country were going to make decisions that affect only women without asking the opinion of a single woman. (Or doctor.) You'd think that the women in Congress, at least, would find this disturbing enough to stage a walkout.

Then we settled the Burns case, and the email showed up.

Yeah, I know. Why do I worry about things legal when there's so much injustice and turmoil in the world. I dunno. Maybe because it's my job or something. Besides, I thought this case would never settle. I was expecting Boss Jason and Opposing Counsel would be tearing each other to bloody little shreds in front of Judge Fairness at the courthouse in a couple of weeks. You kind of get a feeling, when you've done this as long as I have, which ones are going to settle and which ones are going to court. Something like 98% of cases settle out of court, in case you did not know that. So spotting the ones that are going all the way is not easy.

Back to the email, though. It came from Opposing Counsel to Boss Jason, and after removing all the pertinent details so that I can post it without losing my job, what it basically said was this: "Your client should know that it was only your excellent work that enabled this settlement. I think if he were in the hands of 95% of other lawyers, we would have ended up trying his case. I think you did an excellent job and have added you to the short list of lawyers to whom I refer clients."

People, opposing counsel does NOT send complimentary email about your lawyering skills. At least, not very often. They're the black hats, remember? We're the white hats. We may be civil to each other (it is CIVIL litigation, after all) but we are not friends. To get an email like this is to receive just about the highest honor one lawyer can give another. And to hear that you're on the short list for client referrals--lordy, lordy. That's so rare as to almost be unheard of.

But wait. There's more. After that email went around the office, Boss Jason sent this one:

"I have to add Jennifer should also take some credit. She helped me get extremely prepared for depos and was responsible for drafting a large portion of the letters and motions."

Wow. Just wow. Even rarer than the complimentary email from one lawyer to opposing counsel is the complimentary email from one lawyer to a staff member. Which was obvious in the metric ton of emails I got from everybody else congratulating me. I saved all of them in my little subfile titled "Head Pats", but I may have to create a sub-sub-file because there were just so many. The assistant manager even congratulated me as he walked out the door, and he is NOT prone to That Sort of Thing.

And so, my rant dies a premature death. Well, I guess that's okay. Plenty of people are ranting on this one for me. And I'm at Afrah, and I've finished my meal, and I think I'm just gonna cut this blog post short and grab a cup of coffee before my OA meeting.

Talk Thursday (on Sunday): Accountability

Tonight marks my last night of ferret-sitting, which is both interesting and sad. I've gotten kind of attached to the little weasels, though I have to admit that they, uh, stink. (Not their fault, really; like skunks, polecats and mongooses (mongeese?), they belong to the family Mustelidae, which translates from Latin as something like, "little weasel-like critters that stink.") The white one (I've forgotten their names) is trying like hell to pull the book away from underneath the door so she can go romping down the hallway, and the brown one is somewhere in the closet doing God knows what and making some strange noises. I hope I don't have to go in there after him. I mean, a man's closet is a pretty private place. Kel is a good friend but I'd still hate to get in there and find out he has, say, a selection of fine evening gowns, high heels and pantyhose or something. There are just things I'd rather not know about people.

Which brings me (however obliquely) to the subject of this week's somewhat neglected Talk Thursday topic: Accountability. That is, the condition of being liable to, answerable to. or otherwise responsible for. I'm accountable for these ferrets, for example. I need to make sure they get back into their little house and that all the doors to that house are well latched. The ferrets will tell you (in ferretspeak, which seems to consist of squeaks and chirping noises) that I'm good for that. Which is to say, I have accountability. In this grand topsy-turvy world of ours, I, a human being, can be counted on for that one thing. We haven't all tumbled into the maelstrom just yet.

Then we take a look at what's going on in Congress and dear God, are we sure about that whole maelstrom thing?

Look, I try to stay away from politics. It depresses me. Especially when we have Joe Joe the Idiot Boy and his seven dwarfs (dwarves?) running for the highest office in the land, railing about what a lousy job the current man-in-charge is doing. (To which I say: You think it's that easy? Go try it sometime.) Besides that, though, we've got all the dwarves (dwarfs?) in charge of doing stuff like deciding about taxes, utterly unable to come to a decision about one lousy tax that they've been talking about for better than a year. It is, ultimately, a complete failure of accountability with these people. As in, they've forgotten who they work for. And to whom they're accountable. And that it has nothing to do with some election that may happen a year from now. And before I get off on a rant here (too late), I'll just ask one question: Is anybody else as sick of this bullshit as I am?

Don't tell me to write my congressperson. He's like talking to a brick wall. My Senator's an even bigger problem; she's retiring and the one Democratic candidate who was going to run has changed his mind and bailed out of the race. (Again, lack of accountability. So what if he'd spend bazillions of dollars and ultimately lose?) I'm to the point where I don't know or care who to complain to about this mess. I just want it fixed, so they can go back to doing things like, I dunno, fixing the economy. Working on the ginormous national debt. Stabilizing Social Security and Medicare. Getting our troops out of Afghanistan. The little things in life. You know. Showing some accountability.

Remind me never to run for public office. I've about had my fill of chasing weasels.

Talk Thursday: Garbage

Prescient topic, especially since, according to Texas State Network News, Governor Goodhair is going to announce his candidacy for President any second now. Of course they've been saying that for two months - on a daily basis, in fact - and it would serve them right if he instead announced he was going to shave the good hair and become a Buddhist monk. Unfortunately, uh, no. Just no. Mr. Perry will join a crowded field of Bible-thumping, flag-waving, crowd-inciting, gay-bashing, woman-hating celebutantes and declare aloud again and again, at every possible opportunity, that he's a Christian who loves his country and by that and that alone, we should vote for him.

I don't get it.

See, here's the thing. I wish I could be a Republican. Way back in the 1940s, and even before, in the age of Lincoln, the Republicans had a platform I could get behind. Small government, conservative spending, keeping the official nose out of private business, letting states regulate most areas of life and only sticking the federal arm in there when absolutely necessary. That kind of thing. That's a Republican platform that's gone, baby, gone. In its place is a platform to regulate women's uteruses, let poor people die for lack of access to medical care, restrict marriage to people who are white and normal, establish Christianity as the official state religion and build minarets to issue a call to prayer five times a day. Okay, I may be wrong about that last one. Then again, maybe I'm not.

Apparently, to be a Republican candidate for high office, you have to be a Christian, and what's more, you have to be a loud Christian. You can't just be one of those guys who sits in the back on Easter and Christmas; you have to be one of those women with the big breasts and clipboards who chases other people around to form committees (you know who you are). You have to be evangelical. You have to pray out loud in public (in direct contradiction to Matthew 6:5; don't understand that, never will). You have to have big prayer dates with other evangelicals and refuse to invite people of other faiths. Unless, of course, you're Mormon. Then you sort of have to be quiet about your faith, because people aren't sure if you're a Christian or not and you don't want that to become an Issue.

Well, here's my take on that Issue. I don't care. If you call yourself a Christian, then you are one, whether you're a Mormon Christian or a Presbyterian Christian or a Flying Spaghetti Monster Christian (long live the noodle of Christ!). But why do you have to be a Christian to be President? Can't we have a Jewish President? Or, hey, maybe a Buddhist president? No, I don't want the job, but here I was just thinking that Brother ChiSing would be perfect for it. (Ducking in case he throws a Thich Nhat Hanh book at me.)

I'm gonna say it: I'm an atheist. Yes, I'm also a Buddhist, and no, that's not a contradiction. I've pondered this long and hard lately, and I've come to the conclusion that while Buddhism acts like a religion, it's really more of a philosophy. You don't need to believe in God, or any supreme being, to be a Buddhist. Buddha was a man, not a supernatural being. He found a way to be happy with ordinary things, and he taught it to his followers. If you follow Buddha's path, you, too, can be happy with ordinary things, and if you pass it on, you will be happier still. And you will not need to meditate out loud in the middle of a busy street in front of hundreds of people in order to show what a pious Buddhist you are. (I don't think it's possible to meditate out loud.) You will know what you are, and you won't need to prove it to everybody every ten minutes.

I once asked Brother ChiSing if there was a God, and he said (in a typically obscure Brother ChiSing way) that it did not matter if there was a God or not. If there was one, and He was enlightened, that was great. If there was one, and He wasn't enlightened (and to judge by the Old Testament, He wasn't, at least then) then He needed to be. Either way, that was His problem to worry about, not ours. Try running that by your local quorum of evangelicals at the latest prayer breakfast. Somehow, I don't think they'd find it at all comforting. And I have to tell you, living in a nation run by some guy (it's usually a guy) who feels the need to host prayer breakfasts for other Christians makes me very uncomfortable. I'm sure it's all about the money (Presidential campaigns can get expensive), but still, there are 300 million people in this country and only about 80 million of them are evangelical Christians. What do the other 220 million do on Saturday or Sunday mornings? And do they mind being alienated in the pursuit of the almighty campaign dollar?

I do. Just for the record. I think it's garbage. That's all.