Hi! How're you doing? Remember me?

Anyway, having a bit of a panic here at the café. I'm going to a movie later on. Hope that will calm me down.

Otherwise, working a lot. Been on Facebook more than here. And not a whole lot else going on.

Sorry to be gone so long...

Chumley's cruise was very much fun — even though I didn't go off of the ship. The main activities to do off ship were: snorkeling and/or scuba diving, sitting on a beach, or visiting the town to view the crushing poverty and marvel at how paradise itself is filled with pain. The one major complaint I had was that the food was rather bland, even at the good restaurants.

I met a lot of great guys on the trip. Most of which I've already "friended" on Facebook. I became obsessed with one guy, but gave up on him quickly so that it didn't destroy my vacation. I met a couple, John & Mark, from Dallas. They were amazing guys.

An innocent question right before I got on my plane has kept me thinking — probably too much (as is my wont). Clark, a very nice guy who always had a nice thing to say to me, asked, in what was supposed to be a flattering way, "Why is a handsome guy like you not taken yet?" I gave some half-assed answer about not leaving my house, blah blah blah. But the truth is that I don't know. I've talked about this with my doctor and a relation isn't the most important thing for me. But I do miss having someone in my life. And it's been a bunch of years now. Almost all of my friends have partners now. I don't leave my house much. The guys I meet that I'm interested in are either partnered or not interested in me. It's the same old story; I really don't know how best to meet anyone. It's one of the reasons why I announced earlier that I've given up looking for someone.

And now I'm in the doldrums that occur after a great vacation.

So, ya know...

This is odd...

I was driving home last night from Concord, and pulled up alongside a truck at the stoplight. I look over and see the driver. He's kind of cute, but nothing pings. The next light, he leans over and says, "Nice night we're having!" I respond, "Yes! Much nicer after the heat of the day." The light has changed so we drive off. We're coming up to the next light and will again be next to each other, so he speeds up and runs the red light rather than face that awkwardness.

I didn't know I was so scary.

"Huh...that finger sure is turning into a sausage. And boy howdy, does it hurt to move." Being my thoughts on Saturday, as I hung out at Ritual Café not having coffee with a guy I chatted with online. "I think I'll go to the urgent care people now." The nearest urgent care was at San Francisco General Hospital.

SFGH has few signs to help you understand things like where does one park? Where is the urgent care place? How do I not get shivved? So after asking an information human, I find a rather dank building with poor lighting and the urgent care within. The triage nurse is chatty, and we strike up a conversation about cats and their bitiness. The waiting room is full, and the TV is showing one of the Harry Potter movies with spanish subtitles. I read about Capote's shitty childhood.

I'm eventually shuffled back to a room to await the nurse practitioner. She tries to shoo me off with some simple antibiotics. I would be happy with that, but danged if it doesn't look like there are red marks going up my arm. "Hmm, this might involve you going to the ER." Um... Yeah, she calls them and they're all, "Send his ass over here!"

Anyone who doesn't think that our healthcare system in this country is in crisis should visit the ER of a major hospital. It's kind of a nightmare. Packed with people, most of them have had to let their ailments get so far along because they lack health insurance that they're in serious trouble now. Tonight, we're being serenaded by a schizophrenic guy in a wheelchair, who has one foot, no teeth, and keeps screaming and hitting himself. Another guy, who seems to have rolled around in dirt before coming to the hospital. Several children, with frightened parents (and some with parents who don't really care about them). There's also a guy who sits next to me, and starts muttering under his breath about god knows what, but it's apparent that it's directed at me. I play a ruse where I get up, wait for him to move, and then sit back down and place my bag in the seat next to me.

A few short hours later, I'm whisked to the room where doctors hide out from the public. My doctor is the improbably-named Dr. Salmon. In a hospital comedy-drama, she would be the smart, capable female doctor, who is very knowledgable but doesn't have a great bedside manner, and thus is shunned by the rest of the doctors, until they realize that she has a rich inner life. I'm to be given intravenous antibiotics to fight this infection...

...eventually...

Things at the hospital happen at a glacial pace. It's midnight before I get the IV. They're keeping me overnight, because they may have to operate in the morning to drain the infection. See, the worry is that the infection might get into the "sheath" that contains the ligament, thus rendering my finger useless. I'm double plus unhappy about this. They take me to my temporary lodgings: room 518A. If I go outside of the doors of 5A, I'll be declared AWOL and "discharged" from the hospital. So, those big doors? Avoid!

My roommate is an older man, who is having real troubles with his bowels. He has apparently had cancer before. This may be related. I read about Capote's adolescence.

Sleeping in a hospital turns out to be a cruel joke. Every time I would get near sleep, Nurse Delia would materialize next to me bed to give me more antibiotics, or to take my vital signs ("Only if you give them back!" is the witty quip from Mr. Wendling), or to remove some of my precious blood. The other times, I would hear my roommate's TV (which was on low volume, but enough to wake me up). I give up around 5:30AM, and just read more about Capote's adolescence.

Oh, and because I'm scheduled for surgery, I'm not given any food or water. I haven't eaten since noon on Saturday. The good news, though, is that the swelling has gone way down. Dr. Seib, the finger expert from the night crew at ER, looks at it and says that maybe they won't need to operate. PLEASE LET THIS BE SO! She wants her boss to check it out. And he thankfully agrees that the meds are working! The bad news is that he wants me there for at least another day. Because I have insurance, (a rarity, it would seem) he would then move me to a new hospital for more IV antibiotics. We're talking three or four days more in the hospital. A fate that I'm not exactly happy to be committed to.

I doze, and am woken up by Ninja-Nurse R.J. I swear some transporter beam phased him into the room. He appears by my bed more silent than a mouse. To top it off, his scrubs are black with a black japanese cap. Because of the non-surgeriness of my day, he can get me food. Food, glorious food! Even hospital food is good after a full day of not eating.

And then the boredom. A whole day of sitting in my room, or shuffling down the hall to another room with a better view, and doing nothing. Fun you say? No. Intensely boring. Even while reading about Capote's early career and rise to fame (but not fortune).

It's by this time that I notice I smell really bad. I haven't had a shower. My hair is greasy. My skin is oily. I feel intensely gross. And even I notice the smell. I can only imagine what others think...

My roommate gets to leave that day. Good for him! He's a nice guy and wishes me well. I do the same. He's replaced later in the day with a guy who's retching the entire time he's awake. He's in a very, very bad way. They are giving him Dilaudid for his pain, and several different drugs for his nausea. They don't work very well, since he's in constant pain, and constantly nauseous when he's awake.

I think I actually get a couple of hours of sleep during the night. At least there is a time when I blacked out before Nurse Delia came to draw more blood. Noticing that my IV is swollen, she preps me for another IV. And also a blood draw. Oh! how I hate needles! I'm sweating from the nervousness. I notice that my stench increases. It's this sickening sweet smell. Maybe some kind of defense mechanism? My evolution must be completely fucked up.

The next morning — July 4th —, I find out that I get to go home! Yay! Seemingly the whole hand surgery team comes in to look at my finger. The boss of the team, who is so obviously the alpha male of the four, does a very macho viewing of my hand (he even touches me without gloves, he's so macho). I can move it without intense pain, and the swelling is almost entirely gone.

Five hours later, I'm checked out of the hospital with meds in hand.

My doctor put me on Abilify™, thus making me a character in a commercial. But it's working. I have more energy than I know what to do with. This helps tremendously when I'm trying to get out of a depression.

So I've been putting it to good use. I have my exception handling rewrite coming along enough now so that it compilers a non-trivial program correctly! This is great news, because tomorrow I'm presenting this to the team to convince the managers that I should be given time to do this.

Wish me luck!

Oh and I've been coughing like stupid lately. It's annoying. Probably allergies?

You are better than me, with your striped shirt and curly wig. Though I won't leave in my guitar or car for the next day, I shall not be as good as you.

Inconsequential
Moribund beside the road
Festering there still

The Sarah Palin "Please Keep Me In The Media For Another Cycle" Tour is hilarious to me for at least one reason. She shows up at a motorcycle rally decked out in her most retarded I-just-bought-this-yesterday leathers and motorcycle to a crowd of mostly adoring middle aged types. The hilarious thing is that these middle aged men and women are all riding around on Harleys, wearing leather, jeans, and bandanas, and pretending they're the most bad-assed asses since asses went bad, because they are trying to relive the glory days of their youth, when they rode around on motorcycles, wore leather, jeans, and bandanas, and pretended to be the most bad-assed kids around. They were the rebels. They identified with James Dean. They weren't their parents, who were square, man! They're free! And they're not going to be like their stodgy parents.

Here they are worshiping a woman, who shamelessly promotes herself as one of the most conservative faces of a shameless party, which is the establishment that they are token-rebelling against. Yet there are no explosions of the mind.

I'm being reductive, I know. It's a trait I see in all of the middle aged men in my family. Riding around on Harleys — a truly shitty motorcycle —, wearing the full tribal uniform, and some of the most conservative people you would ever want to meet.

I've been spending way too much time lately concerned with what's happening in politics right now. And it's driving me a wee bit insane thinking about it. It's amazing to me that the Republicans have shown their true colors and are systematically, and rather quickly, dismantling all of the social Safety Nets™ put in place over the years to keep the most desperate among us from living in abject poverty with no support system at all available to them. And those on the far-right, having taken over and set the tone of the political debate, eagerly egging them on. And convincing the public, even those who will be adversely affected by these changes, to heartily endorse — even to demand — these changes. And it's really sickening.

And then I think about how this started. And not to make this into a conspiratorial rant (of which I'm wont to do), but the current political climate and policies were nascent in the Nixon era and got a major jolt forward in the Reagan era. And one can see that Reaganomics is a complete failure and that experiment should be ended. That the rich have gotten far far richer. And the poor and middle classes have gotten either poorer or have not seen their salaries rise.

And I could point the finger at this politician or that politician and say, "They're doing it wrong!" But what's the point? A majority of people no longer vote with their personal interests in mind. They vote on ideological grounds.

"Unions are corrupt! Because they have all of the power! And I know this because I heard of a story where a business had to keep a guy at the job because he was union even though the guy didn't do any work. That's not good!" No, that's not good. But those are the exceptions. Unions actually help a lot of working-class people get better wages and better" working. One shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And healthcare...Oh god! the healthcare. Why is this even a question? What is wrong with people?! Have they no morals? Yes, it would be nice if all Americans could afford insurance. But because corporations have the government in their pockets, and have spent the last 100+ years vilifying unions and undermining the rights of their workers, insurance isn't a viable option for many people — even for those who work 40 or more hours a week (being part-time or some other class of worker that frees their employer from offering them health insurance). And why? WHY is it that if you don't work, then you and your family are somehow not worthy of being healthy? What twisted sense of morality do people have that this is acceptable? And even if you do work and you do have insurance, the insurance companies are businesses and care only about their bottom line. And so they deny claims because it's a so-called pre-existing condition, or it's not something that they want to cover, or your hair is red and a red head dumped their CEO in high school so it sucks to be you.

It's like watching a group of people driving a car on a mountain road, with lots of twists and turns, and they're going really fast, and you are trying to tell them to slow the fuck down and not take the corners too tightly, but they ignore you and continue driving fast and they don't notice the oncoming traffic and there is nothing to be done anymore.