the dishes' fault

The Friday before last, Michael sighed and asked if I could even remember the last time I did dishes. I could not remember, so of course the next day I was standing at the sink doing dishes, feeling all virtuous. And... not feeling my left thumb, so much.

For the next two weeks I went around rubbing my hand, noticing which fingers I could feel (by the end of two weeks, none of them), that my palm was numb, and that it was getting worse. During that time I found out all about deductibles and coinsurance and tried to find a way to avoid going to the principal's office.

See, I was diagnosed with MS when I was 15. My doctor told me to give myself injections three times a week, and I did. And then college happened and interferons weren't exactly the kind of shots I could get excited about anymore, and eventually I stopped doing them. Then two weeks before my wedding I started having weird symptoms and my neurologist hauled me in for a come to Jesus meeting about my meds. He told me my symptoms had nothing to do with MS, but shamed me into going back on the meds. Only this time I'd have to do without the only medication that blunted that flu-like side effects, because my blood pressure was elevated. Two weeks before my wedding. In a neurologist's office. See also: duh.

So anyway, I started taking the meds again after I came back from my honeymoon. But the side effects were pure hell without the Naproxen, so then I'd procrastinate doing the shots and get violent chills and muscle spasms when I finally did one again. All this to ward of the boogey man, MS, which in nine years had never done more than make me tingle. The cure honestly felt worse than the disease, even though intellectually I know that the meds aren't about how I'm feeling now, but about how much worse I could be feeling years from now without them.

So I stopped again, and was honestly feeling great, until I did some dishes. I was doing a great job of ignoring my symptoms until I woke up in the middle of the night, felt my hand, and the thought occurred to me: you could regret this for the rest of your life.

So I made an appointment with a new neurologist, one who hopefully wouldn't push the meds so hard, only to find that he was out of network and I'd have to pay out of pocket (but just until I reached my $4,000 deductible! Then it'll only be 30%!) So I found an in-network doctor and got an appointment... for November. I felt, or rather failed to feel my hand again and admitted defeat. I'd call my old neurologist, but only to check to see if this was really something I needed to be seen about.

And of course I needed to be seen, and of course it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. And a lucky thing it was that I had an appointment today, considering I woke up with numb arms, legs, stomach and back, as well as soreness and weakness in my left arm. No one yelled at me. And yes, I'm taking meds again. But I'm really not thinking it would be wise to tempt fate by doing dishes again any time soon.

my totally lame dilemma

So, I have a bad habit that I've been trying to break. I think I picked it up while I was in middle school, and I became aware that it was a problem in high school. My bad habit is calling things "gay."

Please don't get me wrong. I am not the PC Nazi. I'm actually pretty fed up with people automatically getting fired for one foolish statement. My own vocabulary is far from antiseptically clean and unoffensive. I'm pretty compelled by arguments for "re-claiming" words like "bitch" and even the "n-word."

So, why am I worried about calling things "gay?" For me, it all goes back to Hurricane Katrina. After Katrina happened it was, of course, all anyone was talking about. How terrible and destructive Katrina was. How long it would take the beautiful city of New Orleans to recover from Katrina's wrath. How Katrina ruined everything.

And people named Katrina became perturbed, if not downright depressed. All they heard, day in and day out, was how terrible Katrina was. They knew what people were referring to, but it still started to wear on them. Obviously no one blamed them or wished them ill, sharing a name with a hurricane was completely coincidental. And yet it hurt.

No one was passing judgment on people named Katrina, and yet having their name associated with so much negativity hurt a lot of people. Now, imagine how much more it would hurt if some of the people saying these things really did hate people named Katrina. If with each random, casual mention, you had to wonder whether the person really did wish you ill. I consider myself a GLBT ally, and I don't want to hurt people out of intellectual laziness. So, I set out in search of another word to use.

I thought I had hit pay dirt with "lame." "That's so gay" and "that's so lame" seemed pretty much interchangeable, and I thought I had my replacement. I could stop calling things gay while still getting my point across. Until, years after I initially thought of this replacement, it finally occurred to me what "lame" meant:

lame

¹   [leym] Show IPA adjective,lam·er, lam·est,verb,lamed, lam·ing, noun

–adjective

1.

crippled or physically disabled, esp. in the foot or leg so as to limp or walk with difficulty.

2.

impaired or disabled through defect or injury: a lame arm.

3.

weak; inadequate; unsatisfactory; clumsy: a lame excuse.

4.

Slang. out of touch with modern fads or trends; unsophisticated.

Wow, duh. Now, I'm pretty sure that the American Disability Association hasn't taken a stand on the word "lame" the same way GLAAD has taken a stand on the word "gay," but this got me wondering. What exactly am I trying to express when I call something "lame" or "gay?" Does the fact that I can't seem to find a suitable replacement that doesn't put anyone down mean that putting someone down is essential to what I'm saying? Somehow "that's totally mediocre" doesn't pack the same punch as "that's totally gay," but of what essence is the punch that I'm looking for? And is it essentially mean-spirited?

I guess "lame" is a little old-fashioned to actually be offensive, but I think the fact that I can't think of anything else that expresses what these two words express is pretty thought-provoking.

salad. ur doin it wrong.

Tonight I forced myself to eat a cucumber when I was supposed to be eating lettuce, just to see what would happen. As I did so, I began to suspect that I might be doing salad wrong.

I construct beautiful salads. Tonight I marinated halved grape tomatoes, black olives, cucumbers, roasted red peppers, and artichoke hearts in balsamic vinegar and placed them over a bed of spring mix dressed with light Italian. This masterpiece completed, I then ate every stitch of lettuce out from under the other vegetables before eating anything else, save for that one errant cucumber.

I have a thing about eating foods "in order." I don't need foods separated on my plate, and indeed I toss things together in salads or pastas pretty regularly. It's what happens next that's a little odd.

I generally eat foods I like least first, and those I like most last, but there's more to it than that. If I had a plate with potatoes, brussels sprouts and pork, for example, I would eat the foods in that order. If I have chicken and broccolli fettuccini alfredo, on the other hand, it's broccolli, then chicken, then pasta, because the logistics of eating pasta and leaving chicken don't work.

Similarly, tonight I ate artichoke hearts and black olives before eating roasted red peppers, even though I like artichokes and olives more than peppers, because the peppers were all tiny and stuck to the bottom of the plate, and it made the most sense to just scoop them up at the end.

Of course, that rule also has exceptions. Croutons always come last, and I look forward to them literally the whole time I eat any salad containing them. Even finely shredded cheese comes before croutons, because croutons are last, period.

I would love to hear other people's little rules and peculiarities when it comes to eating. Eating is so personal, and we do it so often, that I think each person has to have their own strange little "things" about it. Or maybe I'd just like to feel less weird about mine.

freaks in glass and metal pods

As the obligatory trade-off for having a new job that I actually kind of like, I now spend 2-1/2 hours each day in my car, commuting. This means I spend a lot of time sitting at red lights looking at other commuters, and I have to say, some of what I've seen has both disturbed and entertained me.

First there are the idiots with their ear buds in. I haven't seen any obvious seat-dancing on these guys, so I can't guarantee that they're not on an iphone, making super-important phone calls, but the ear buds still strike me as a really terrible idea. When I see these guys, I can barely resist honking my horn, just to see if they'll notice.

Then there was the fellow this morning with a crossword puzzle held up against his steering wheel. This guy was living for the red lights, when he would write his answers. I didn't see how he was managing to hold the crossword puzzle and the pen while he was driving, but I suspect that some knee-steering was involved.

Finally, there was the man in the white button-down, with a tie on, curling his eyelashes in the rear-view mirror. I noticed this guy in my own rear-view mirror, lifting the curler to his eye, releasing it, and then wiping his eye frantically. I knew exactly what had happened, since the first time that I myself used a curler I started to pull the curler away before releasing the lashes, which hurt like a bitch. I felt for this guy, and spent the rest of my commute wondering who he was, where he was going, and why he happened to have a curler in the car if he didn't even know how to use it.

Now when I sit at red lights, I have no shame about the other drivers seeing me singing along with the radio, since we're all freaks in these little private-feeling-public-places.

normalizing onions

About once a week, I'm typing at my computer at work when someone comes up behind me and asks, "What's that?" And each and every time, I think to myself, "what's what?," look up, and find someone pointing at... an onion.

Then I'll either laugh or sigh, depending on the day, and explain. There's a raw onion on the divider between my desk and my cubicle-mate's because one of our co-workers put it there. The onion is supposed to keep us from getting sick. Supposedly, any black spots on the skin are sickness that the onion has absorbed from us.

On one of my first days in my new office after off-site training, I heard a very strange conversation over the cubicle walls. "Bernie, can you smell the onion?" Lots of loud laughter, and then two or three more times, "Can you smell the onion?" I had no idea what was going on, and was far too shy to peer around the wall and find out.

Then, a couple of weeks later, my cube-mate and I were both having a bad allergy day. After we had each sneezed a few times, a co-worker came over with two onions, declared "You need these," and set them down on the divider between our desks. She explained, we failed to object, and there the onions sat.

One of them apparently absorbed a ton of sickness from us, because it got kind of gross and had to be thrown away. The other continues to sit on our divider, remarkably unchanged, three months later. I've taken to staring at it while I'm thinking, and my cube-mate has put up a sign: "Don't know the answer? Ask the onion!"

What's strange about the onion at this point isn't that it's sitting there, but that I don't find it strange that it's sitting there. Where I used to be embarrassed that there was an onion on my desk, now I'm embarrassed that it takes me a second to realize why someone's asking me why there's an onion there.