Ye gods, two weeks without a blog post. You'd think I'd run out of things to say. But hey, with Teddy Cruz running for President and various state legislatures trying to pass the usual batch of wacky stuff, there's no chance of that. Here in Texas, for example, first-time legislator Molly White introduced a bill that said if the Supreme Court decided that same-sex marriage had to be allowed, it just wouldn't apply in Texas. Yes, she really did that. I'm not sure how anybody who didn't pass high-school civics got elected to public office, but hey, this is Texas. Remember Molly Brown? As in "the unsinkable" Molly Brown? Well, some of us on Facebook have decided that anybody named Molly should have a nautical nickname. So she's "Shipwreck" Molly White from here on out. And Ted? Maybe we should call him "Cruz the Canuck." O Canada, our home and native land...
No, the real reason there hasn't been a blog post in two weeks is that I'm just tired. For the first time in my life, I managed to come down with a simple cold (it usually morphs into a sinus infection, or sometimes bronchitis, and once pneumonia, just for variety). So far this cold is staying a cold. The other thing it's doing, though, is staying around. I've had it for almost three weeks now, and yes, I do feel better every day, mostly, but it ain't gone yet and I am more than ready for it to go. Couple that with some of the most stressful days I've ever had at work in my life (besides the Trial from Hell; there's some small comfort in knowing that it'll never be that bad again) and I'm ready to crawl under a rock and never blog again.
Of course my screaming fans, both of them, wouldn't stand for that. So here I am. And I need to spew about something, so tonight I'm going to spew about prescription drug prices. Yep, prescription drug prices. No, I promise, this isn't on C-Span. I take, let me see here, seven prescription drugs every day. There are also two I take occasionally. It's a very good thing I have insurance, because one of these suckers runs $981 a month without it. Some of the others clock in at $385, $425, and one (this one I can't figure out) is only $2.42. But what I'm saying is, they're pricey. In fact, without insurance, if I were to add all the prices together, the total would be more than my take home pay.
More than my take home pay. I kid you not. Without insurance, I could not afford to live. Even with insurance, it tops out around $250 a month, which is more than my gas bill, my water bill, my electric bill and a week's worth of groceries combined. It used to be even more than that, but I finally had The Talk with my doctor where I told him, "I can afford two of the three of these. Pick two and I'll take those two." And it's not like what I've got is ever going to go away. Yep, I'm one of those Americans with a Chronic Condition. Two of them, actually. And if I were straight, I'd probably need birth control pills, on top of all of that.
People, chronic conditions are expensive. Besides the cost of the drugs, which is by far the largest share of my health care expenses, I gotta see my doctor every month (at $50.00 a pop) and sometimes another doctor ($90.00 a session, but not every week anymore, thank God). My wife, on the other hand, is taking five drugs that together run about $100 a month--after she meets her $750 deductible. So hers are a little cheaper. But we still add up the whole big ugly total at tax time to see if any of it comes back to us. Guess what. This year we made too much money.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Some cancer drugs run $100,000 a month. When a new drug comes out it's gotta pay back its development costs. If prescription drugs weren't so expensive, the entire U.S. economy would fall down a well. But I get tired of hearing that. Nobody asks to have a condition like this. It's just fate, DNA, the dancing radiation in the air. You're not a bad person if you come down with cancer, have a stroke or a heart attack, You healthy people out there, beware. You're one car accident away from monthly trips to the pill mill. So have good insurance. And don't vote for Ted. Who, ironically, signed up for Obamacare today. No, it's true. I saw it on CNN.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Whiplash, Part II: Is This Any Way To Run A Music School?
Spoiler Alert: I will be talking about the outcome of Whiplash somewhere in this post. Where, I can't really say, but I'm sure it'll come up.
In the last two weeks, I've missed three days of work due to inclement weather. Namely ice storms, which is the Texas term for when the heavens open and dump tons of snow and sleet on the city, and then the temperature rattles down to way below freezing so that everything for miles around is evenly covered with a solid sheet of ice and it's basically impossible to leave your house without falling on the steps. Now, I spent a goodly chunk of my formative years in Salt Lake City, where the whole valley fills up with clouds around about November 1 and just pretty much stays solidly socked in until March. That's bad, too, but these Texas winters are just amazing. The whole thing may sound like not so much if you live in Buffalo, New York or North Dakota or something, when you get seven feet of snow every time the governor sneezes, but when an ice storm like this hits, everything just grinds to a halt. It has to. You literally can't leave your house.
Fortunately, the power has stayed on the whole time (knock on Formica) and I have software that will let me load into my work computer, so I can get a few things done while I'm sitting in my kitchen. Unfortunately, a lot of things I need to do my job are on my desk, or in the file room, or otherwise inaccessible. So I end up working on stuff I need to do, but have been trying to avoid, like populating this table in Excel that lists and catalogs about 30,000 pages worth of documents generated by a certain business. Or reading hundreds of pages of somebody's medical records and breaking them down into three talking points for a lawyer who's writing a complaint, Fun stuff like that. All good, all important, all gotta be done, but not really the sort of thing I feel most proud of when somebody asks me why I do what I do. Or whether or not a college degree really does any good in the long-term prospects for a job and a career.
Which brings us back to Whiplash (told you we'd get there), and the whole reason anybody goes to music school, vs. medical school or law school or guitar building school or any other old school, in the first place. (Like what I did there?) About 2/3 of the way through Whiplash, after he's been thrown out of music school and Fletcher, the instructor, has been fired by the same music school, our protagonist meets up with Fletcher once again at a little jazz club where Fletcher is playing the piano. Fletcher sees him, waves him over, buys him a drink, and there's some actual conversation, during which Fletcher explains himself, somewhat. And what he has to say is actually very interesting. He tells a few stories about legendary jazz artists and road blocks they hit along the way. About how they screwed something up, made mistakes, were otherwise not at their best at this thing they were best at. About how each one swore that whatever just happened would never happen again, and because of that, they became legendary jazz artists. Fletcher says something like, "Do you know how Miles Davis got to be Miles Davis? Because he never again let his horn be flat when he was playing with Dizzy Gillespie," or something like that (and yes, I know I just mixed up two eras, not to mention two instruments, but hey, jazz is not something I know a lot about, okay?) Fletcher saw his role as a music teacher to be the obstacle, the guy everybody's afraid of, the guy who yells at you when you screw up so that you solemnly swear to yourself that it will never, ever happen again (and thus, later on, you achieve greatness). He finishes his soliloquy by adding that the most ruinous words any music teacher ever speaks to a student are, "Good job."
And really, being on the receiving end of this speech, it sort of makes sense. Does his classroom behavior discourage students? Maybe, Fletcher says, "but Miles Davis wouldn't have been discouraged." Maybe not, but we can't all be Miles Davis. Still, as I mentioned in my last post on Whiplash, if you're not going to be Miles Davis, there's really no point in going to music school. It's the non-Miles Davises among us who get kicked out of music school for failing piano. Only the Miles Davises of the world are going to graduate, go into the performance world and get good jobs. The rest of us are going to become music teachers. Or lawyers or engineers or construction workers or whatever else pays the bills, and maybe play a little music on the side. Is that fair? No. But lots of things aren't fair, and music school is just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, we hear this speech, and sort of come to understand Fletcher a little, before we find out he's completely sociopathic and probably a little bit crazy. The next thing we know, Fletcher's entered a major music contest with a new ensemble and then proceeds to throw the entire ensemble under the bus to get even with one guy. Let me explain to you how often that Just. Doesn't. Happen. Music teachers live and die by the results of these contests and what Fletcher does here is, well, just crazy. Yet the whole thing ends in a way nobody saw coming. Well, I didn't see it coming, anyway, and I quit reading murder mysteries quite a few years ago when I realized I usually knew murderer, motive and method before anyone had even died yet.
So we're left with this question: Is being an asshole ever justified? Buddhist-y speaking, the answer is no. Good behavior toward others is basically required as a condition of being human. But, if being an asshole is what's required to fix a given situation, or to save a few lives we do it, and then we tell everybody we're sorry after the fact. If, for example, the only way to get proper medical attention for your significant sweetie, after the pre-surgery unit has already screwed up three times and is about to do it for a fourth, is to raise your fist and yell about the standard of care and how they're not meeting it, then you do it. (Not that that's ever happened to me, or anything.) And you come back afterward with a box of chocolates for the staff and explain you were "under duress" at the time and you're really a nice person and they're all just fine, fine doctors and nurses who were evidently having a very bad day. And maybe they believe you. Or maybe they call security. Anyway, it's a good way to avoid eating a box of chocolates by yourself.
In any case, I think most of us are nice people and are trying to do the right thing most of the time, But then, some of us are Fletcher. Maybe the important thing is to be able to tell the Fletchers of the planet for what they are, and if we can't beat them, find a way around them. At least before you're part of the ensemble that gets thrown under the bus.
By the way, in case anybody missed my "adults only" post last week, here's a picture of a big, throbbing cock.
Cheers, all.
In the last two weeks, I've missed three days of work due to inclement weather. Namely ice storms, which is the Texas term for when the heavens open and dump tons of snow and sleet on the city, and then the temperature rattles down to way below freezing so that everything for miles around is evenly covered with a solid sheet of ice and it's basically impossible to leave your house without falling on the steps. Now, I spent a goodly chunk of my formative years in Salt Lake City, where the whole valley fills up with clouds around about November 1 and just pretty much stays solidly socked in until March. That's bad, too, but these Texas winters are just amazing. The whole thing may sound like not so much if you live in Buffalo, New York or North Dakota or something, when you get seven feet of snow every time the governor sneezes, but when an ice storm like this hits, everything just grinds to a halt. It has to. You literally can't leave your house.
Fortunately, the power has stayed on the whole time (knock on Formica) and I have software that will let me load into my work computer, so I can get a few things done while I'm sitting in my kitchen. Unfortunately, a lot of things I need to do my job are on my desk, or in the file room, or otherwise inaccessible. So I end up working on stuff I need to do, but have been trying to avoid, like populating this table in Excel that lists and catalogs about 30,000 pages worth of documents generated by a certain business. Or reading hundreds of pages of somebody's medical records and breaking them down into three talking points for a lawyer who's writing a complaint, Fun stuff like that. All good, all important, all gotta be done, but not really the sort of thing I feel most proud of when somebody asks me why I do what I do. Or whether or not a college degree really does any good in the long-term prospects for a job and a career.
Which brings us back to Whiplash (told you we'd get there), and the whole reason anybody goes to music school, vs. medical school or law school or guitar building school or any other old school, in the first place. (Like what I did there?) About 2/3 of the way through Whiplash, after he's been thrown out of music school and Fletcher, the instructor, has been fired by the same music school, our protagonist meets up with Fletcher once again at a little jazz club where Fletcher is playing the piano. Fletcher sees him, waves him over, buys him a drink, and there's some actual conversation, during which Fletcher explains himself, somewhat. And what he has to say is actually very interesting. He tells a few stories about legendary jazz artists and road blocks they hit along the way. About how they screwed something up, made mistakes, were otherwise not at their best at this thing they were best at. About how each one swore that whatever just happened would never happen again, and because of that, they became legendary jazz artists. Fletcher says something like, "Do you know how Miles Davis got to be Miles Davis? Because he never again let his horn be flat when he was playing with Dizzy Gillespie," or something like that (and yes, I know I just mixed up two eras, not to mention two instruments, but hey, jazz is not something I know a lot about, okay?) Fletcher saw his role as a music teacher to be the obstacle, the guy everybody's afraid of, the guy who yells at you when you screw up so that you solemnly swear to yourself that it will never, ever happen again (and thus, later on, you achieve greatness). He finishes his soliloquy by adding that the most ruinous words any music teacher ever speaks to a student are, "Good job."
And really, being on the receiving end of this speech, it sort of makes sense. Does his classroom behavior discourage students? Maybe, Fletcher says, "but Miles Davis wouldn't have been discouraged." Maybe not, but we can't all be Miles Davis. Still, as I mentioned in my last post on Whiplash, if you're not going to be Miles Davis, there's really no point in going to music school. It's the non-Miles Davises among us who get kicked out of music school for failing piano. Only the Miles Davises of the world are going to graduate, go into the performance world and get good jobs. The rest of us are going to become music teachers. Or lawyers or engineers or construction workers or whatever else pays the bills, and maybe play a little music on the side. Is that fair? No. But lots of things aren't fair, and music school is just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, we hear this speech, and sort of come to understand Fletcher a little, before we find out he's completely sociopathic and probably a little bit crazy. The next thing we know, Fletcher's entered a major music contest with a new ensemble and then proceeds to throw the entire ensemble under the bus to get even with one guy. Let me explain to you how often that Just. Doesn't. Happen. Music teachers live and die by the results of these contests and what Fletcher does here is, well, just crazy. Yet the whole thing ends in a way nobody saw coming. Well, I didn't see it coming, anyway, and I quit reading murder mysteries quite a few years ago when I realized I usually knew murderer, motive and method before anyone had even died yet.
So we're left with this question: Is being an asshole ever justified? Buddhist-y speaking, the answer is no. Good behavior toward others is basically required as a condition of being human. But, if being an asshole is what's required to fix a given situation, or to save a few lives we do it, and then we tell everybody we're sorry after the fact. If, for example, the only way to get proper medical attention for your significant sweetie, after the pre-surgery unit has already screwed up three times and is about to do it for a fourth, is to raise your fist and yell about the standard of care and how they're not meeting it, then you do it. (Not that that's ever happened to me, or anything.) And you come back afterward with a box of chocolates for the staff and explain you were "under duress" at the time and you're really a nice person and they're all just fine, fine doctors and nurses who were evidently having a very bad day. And maybe they believe you. Or maybe they call security. Anyway, it's a good way to avoid eating a box of chocolates by yourself.
In any case, I think most of us are nice people and are trying to do the right thing most of the time, But then, some of us are Fletcher. Maybe the important thing is to be able to tell the Fletchers of the planet for what they are, and if we can't beat them, find a way around them. At least before you're part of the ensemble that gets thrown under the bus.
By the way, in case anybody missed my "adults only" post last week, here's a picture of a big, throbbing cock.Cheers, all.
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