Overly Verbal

Remember a while back when I mentioned that some people (those who spent their formative years in Iowa, in particular) did not have the benefit of PBS when they were young?

Turns out that some of those same people have never even heard of Joy Division. Not never heard Joy Division, but never were before aware that they existed, until just now, when I was talking about the other song I have stuck in my head recently: this one. (Even though it won’t go away, it still makes me happy.)

How did I end up dating someone who had never even heard of Joy Division? I tell you what - it’s a sign of the apocalypse. Stock up on canned goods.

You know what song’s really fun to have stuck in your head for an hour or two, but will eventually make you really sad when it just won’t go away?

This one.

(Today I went to the dentist. I think my dentist kind of looks like Bob Mould, if Bob Mould was a dentist.)

That is all.

So people keep asking me why I haven’t written here in a while. Among other reasons, it turns out the shopping carts are now trying to get into my house.

Okay, so it’s not a great picture, but it gets the point across. You try taking a photograph of a shopping cart through your window screen! (Yes, I know you don’t have to, and you should consider yourself lucky.)

Otherwise, there’s no news. Well, okay, there is news, but Molly’s laying on it.

Really, though, there is no news. I’ll try to come up with something interesting to write about soon, but please don’t hold your breath.

So last week someone at work said to me, “Hey, we’re working on this big thing. We may need a little help. It’s due Monday, so it might require some work over the weekend.” I, being helpful, and believing the tasks at hand to be well within my abilities, said, “Sure, no problem.”

Thing is, I’ve got this crazy summer compressed workweek schedule. I always work 9 hours Monday through Friday, and then I work 8 hours one Friday and have the next Friday off. So this last Friday was to have been my Friday off, but it was not – instead, I worked. And this last weekend was supposed to be, well, a weekend, during which I should not have had to work, oh, 16 hours. But it was not. Sure, I’m looking forward to having three additional days off in the future, but I believe it to be true of most humans, myself included, that we would rather have an immediate benefit of less value than a future benefit of more. (You know, I’d rather have $50 now instead of the promise of $100 in two months.) I think it’s because we don’t hold out much hope for the future – it’s all fine and good to say, “You can take the time you worked over the last three days off later,” but looking back, I think it would have been smarter for me to have said, “Um, yeah, Friday’s my day off, and I’m busy this weekend.” Sure, I would have lost some helpfulness points, but I’ve got plenty of those in the bank already, and I could have done any of the other things I meant to do this weekend, like vacuum, go to the grocery store, brush the cats, figure out how to backlight my framed X-rays without spending exorbitant sums on LED rope, you know, my regular weekend stuff, which seems all boring in the abstract, but in real-time it’s a hell of a lot better than working.

So what did I learn? Three things, all of which are really obvious:

a) I am too helpful.

b) Work is fine. It keeps you busy; my work, at least, is toward a greater good; they give you money when you do it. But you should not do work every day for 12 days in a row, because that might make you grouchy.

c) Everyone, and I mean everyone, from the lowliest of interns to the most exalted of CEOs, should learn how to use the most basic features of Excel, because I am tired of being the only person who knows how to do such fancy things as centering text in a cell, writing a formula that actually calculates what you’re trying to calculate, and changing the frickin’ font size on more than one cell at a time. It pains me to watch someone take 2 minutes to do something I could do in 1.3 seconds. (I know I’m too sensitive, but it pains me. Deeply. Excel is not hard - they have classes on it, even.)

Also, my neck hurts still, but not as much as it did before, and there’s a giant entry in my head about the bad service I received from a doctor however many days ago it was that I went to a doctor,* my need for a second opinion when the opinion of the doctor I’ve already visited did not explain my actual symptoms, and some other ranting about the medical establishment at large. But not right now, because I’m grouchy, and looking at a monitor hurts me.

(Oh. But that reminds me of . . .

d) My 22 inch monitor at home cost less than $300. While I have a monitor at work that is 19 inches, which is bigger than many other people are allowed (because I am special), that extra 3 inches makes a huge difference when you are looking at an Excel file that includes enough information to kill a horse. I need a bigger monitor at work – the last two hours of work today, which I did from the comfort of my own home, were at least 10% more productive than the hours I worked in the office. Sure, productivity comes at a price, but when that price is less than $300 . . .)

That is all. I hope to return to something like normal frequency of super-interesting entries here before, say, Thanksgiving, but please don’t hold your breath.
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* I have lost all track of time - I do know it’s Sunday, though, because I didn’t have a chance to read the Sunday Times today.

We’re trying to sleep here.

Together.

Because we’re friends!

So I’ve been reading about neck pain on the Internet, when my neck doesn’t hurt so much that looking at a computer screen makes me want to cry, and while I’m not sure I have a herniated disc, I really do believe that the concept of pain being a “complex personal experience” can be applied to neck pain in general.

One would think that if I had a herniated disc, it would have shown up on an X-ray. However, I learned Wednesday that my neck X-rays were “normal”. First I wanted to tell the doctor who phoned me, “Actually, X-rays aren’t normal at all. They’ve only existed since the 1890s, and they show us what our bones look like without our having to dismantle our bodies. That’s freaking cool, but it’s not normal.” But I didn’t, because I thought he would think that was weird. Then I wanted to tell him, “Thank you,” and so I did. Then I had to call and make an appointment with a doctor for next week, so she can determine that my chest is still numb (I hope without poking me) and give me a referral for an MRI.

So that’s something to look forward to. I guess tonight I’ll take a muscle relaxant and see whether it helps, or whether it gives me hallucinations, which I guess wouldn’t be so bad, as long as I was hallucinating that my neck doesn’t hurt.

But good god does pain cause me problems. I’m getting stupider by the minute (a couple weeks ago, for example, I paid my phone bill for May, after having already paid my phone bill for May, and bounced a check in the process. I’m considering calling the bank and crying to see whether they’ll reverse the insufficient funds fee, but I might just chalk it up to pain being a complex financial experience as well). And I have reached never before seen heights of bitchiness.

So there was a big storm last week, and some trees fell over. And because the management company has their heads up their asses, two big trees fell down on the property where I live. The one closest to my house was easily four feet around, at least four stories tall, and largely (and visibly) rotten, but it was not removed or treated for disease prior to this storm, even though it was obviously ill. (That’s probably expensive or something, actually maintaining the property.) When the big one fell down I wasn’t here to hear it, and the cats weren’t even disturbed when I did get home, but I imagine it made a pretty big noise. And I don’t think it injured anyone, but take a look at this lamppost it took out:

That’s not exactly a good picture, but I didn’t want to stand around outside too long snapping photos. In any event, that’s the sidewalk I use to carry my trash to the Dumpster on my way to work in the morning there (unless I cut through the grass, which requires walking under a similarly large tree, a path I will no longer be taking) and while I wouldn’t have been using that sidewalk during a storm which included lightning and thunder and gale force winds, some squirrel or bunny might have been. I hope no animals were squooshed.

And this afternoon there’s some guys right outside my windows, feeding the branches into a wood chipper. They’re wearing jeans and t-shirts and baseball caps, and no protective eyewear at all, plus it’s 95 degrees outside, but feels like 103 degrees because of the humidity.* So I visited the OSHA website, as one does, to make sure I wasn’t being hypercritical, and I’m not. These guys operating the wood chipper are supposed to be wearing “non-gauntlet” gloves (i.e., gloves without cuffs), and goggles, and freaking helmets. So I went outside, copied down the number from the truck, and had to leave a message with the company, since no one was there. All I said was the date and time, the street I’m on, and the fact that there are four or five guys operating a wood chipper without protective gear, and I thought they might just like to know. I have a feeling that if I was to get closer to their truck I would find a pile of helmets and gloves and goggles inside, because I like to believe that most companies are honest and well-meaning and all, and it’s just a couple of guys who think it’s too hot to wear all the safety gear, but maybe I’m wrong.

Obviously I’m totally losing it, but if everyone was more like me, and reported problems as they observed them, there would be fewer problems, and I would seem normal.

And that’s all I’ve got at the moment, except that Purina products are on sale at PetSmart this month, making them actually cheaper than at the ghetto grocery store, and I’m sure your cats would appreciate it if you would therefore stock up. I know mine will.

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* Which is awesome, because my air conditioning is going to die sometime this summer, and it’s only June and there are already heat advisories.

Dear Weather,

Kindly fuck off.

Thx!

Jen

So a couple of weeks ago my neck started hurting. I had lifted a heavy box, nearly lost my footing, and didn’t think it was that big a deal. Then last week I did lots and lots of reaching above my head, followed closely by getting caught in the doors of a subway train, and now my neck really, really hurts. Here are some things that do not make my neck hurt any less:

• Tylenol
• whining
• wine
• Motrin
• watching stupid shows on TV
• Aleve
• knitting
• Aspercreme
• reading magazines
• Ben-Gay
• fewer than four beers
• talking to a nurse on the phone on Sunday morning - while I did learn that I do not have any symptoms suggesting that I have suffered any type of neurological damage, and therefore did not need to immediately phone 911, I also learned that because I do not have a physician assigned to me on my new health insurance, my only choices if I wanted to see a medical professional were to wait approximately until I’ve died of a condition unrelated to my painful neck, or visit an emergency room or urgent care center

I didn’t want to go to an emergency room. In fact, I’ve never had to visit an emergency room, except to meet other people there after they’ve injured themselves, because I’m a careful person. I didn’t even want to visit an urgent care center, but I went to an urgent care center yesterday, because I think I have a pinched nerve, and even if I am in no imminent danger, the people around me are, because my neck hurts so much that I have lost the ability to be a pleasant person, and am instead barking at those nearest and dearest to me, even when they’re being nice. (Particularly when they’re being nice, actually.)

So the nurse told me Sunday that urgent care centers are often less capable of caring for patients than emergency rooms are. For example, while they may be able to take an X-ray in an urgent care center, they may be unable to actually read the X-ray there, and might have to send it somewhere else, thereby delaying a diagnosis by hours, if not days. I couldn’t bring myself to visit an emergency room, though, even though part of my chest is numb. We’d already ruled out meningitis and stroke, so I figured saving $30 by visiting an urgent care center made sense.

So a doctor I had never met before talked to me for a while, but didn’t really believe me when I said my arms and hands weren’t numb. The area immediately surrounding my left collarbone is numb, but my hand and arms are not. This is apparently highly unusual, but it’s fact. However, because she didn’t believe me, she gave me some tests. First, she made me close my eyes while she lightly caressed my hands and arms with gauze, making me tell her when I could feel it. Then she did that on my collarbone. Then, she brought out the really high-tech medical tools: toothpicks. Not just one, but two, and I had to close my eyes while she poked me with one or more toothpicks, while I told her whether I felt one or two toothpicks.

Goethe always yells at me because I never want to go to a doctor. I always know what they’re going to say, I say, and as it happens, this time I was told precisely what I expected to hear. I likely have a pinched nerve, and part of my chest is numb. Then she told me I needed an X-ray. “Great,” I thought, “I’ll just go in the next room and get an X-ray!” Unfortunately, I had to instead go a mile down the road to get an X-ray, because not only is this urgent care center incapable of reading X-rays, they’re also incapable of taking them.

The X-ray center was a hoot. I got to wear a lovely gown, and have a nurse tie the top for me, since I wasn’t about to try to tie a knot behind my head with a sore neck, and then when I asked if I could have a copy, they told me I could! My bones are gorgeous, if you ask me, and just as soon as I scan them, I’ll share the pictures of them with you. (I could have received a CD, but I really did want X-ray sized X-rays of my neck, so I can build an elaborate frame and hang them in my bathroom for use as a nightlight,* and I figured whatever audience there is for pictures of my (truly beautiful) bones could wait a few days until I scan the film. I suppose I could have had both, but I didn’t want to push my luck.)

In any event, someone somewhere is reading my X-rays, perhaps right now, and I hope to soon know precisely what is wrong with me. I hope this knowledge will be accompanied by an easy, pain-free way to relieve the problem, so that feeling can be restored to those parts of my torso that are currently numb, but I’m not holding out too much hope. If the X-rays don’t reveal the problem, then I get to have an MRI, which will yield even cooler pictures of the inside of my body, but I’m hoping that can be avoided. (Seems if it’s not a pinched nerve it’s a herniated disc, but I’m pretty sure it’s neither of those, but instead something like a genetic abnormality that has never been noticed before, or a tumor the size of a grapefruit or something**. Should be fun, no matter what it is.)

In the meantime, I hope everyone can be patient with my inability to answer an e-mail within 15 minutes of having received it – looking at a computer hurts me, particularly at home, where my monitor is huge but not ergonomically correct, and the stool I sit in at my desk is lovely but not ergonomically correct, and the lighting is bad because I don’t have enough outlets,*** et cetera. I’ve been writing this entry in fits and starts since Friday, actually, so if it doesn’t make any chronological sense, you can blame the meds.****

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* And no, I haven’t figured out what I’ll do with my Scrubbing Bubbles nightlight when I instead have a super cool X-ray nightlight, and a bathroom that is really too small for one, let alone two nightlights, and besides doesn’t have but two plugs. But I can tell you this much – you can’t have it. (I might just have to move into an apartment with two bathrooms. I need to move anyway.)

** There are too parts of my body that could hide something as large as a grapefruit. (Okay, no there aren’t. A softball?)

*** Hey, Jen, why don’t you shut up and just move already?

**** Except I’m not taking the meds they gave me, because while muscle relaxants sound like a good idea, they make you tired, and I might have a bad reaction to them, not having taken any muscle relaxants for 20 some odd years (since back when I had a cyst in my jaw, details of which I am choosing not to share with you now because it hurts me to look at a computer). Molly and Mouse are generally excellent companions, but the first time I take a new medication I like to have a human companion, or at least a monkey, so someone can call 911 if I suffer any side effects. Like, well, in this case, “drowsiness, dry mouth, fatigue, dizziness, lightheadedness, constipation or blurred vision . . . mental/mood changes (e.g., confusion, hallucinations), difficulty urinating . . . fast/pounding/irregular heartbeat, fainting, yellowing of the eyes/skin, stomach/abdominal pain, persistent nausea/vomiting/lack of appetite, dark urine, seizures, loss of coordination . . . rash, itching, swelling, severe dizziness, trouble breathing. This is not a complete list of possible side effects.” (The insert also says, “Do not share this medication with others.” I’m not sure who would want to try one, given all that.)