Department Of A Blast From The Past
From 1-12-2018, to be precise. Moiself was searching through past blog posts, looking for a certain reference, when I came upon this:
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Department Of I Have Her Permission To Post About This
The joys of listening to your children babble in a post-surgical, [1] pain-medicated, happy voice are not to be underestimated. How MH and I wish we’d thought to record son K on his ride home from the oral surgeon’s office, those many years ago. We remembered to do so when it came Belle’s turn to have her wisdom teeth removed, and although she had some random non sequiturs of note, at least (to our knowledge) she did not propose to her nurse:
We’ve discovered that opportunities for the gathering of anesthesia-induced babbling memories do not fade with age, and are perhaps even more enjoyable when your children are young adults. Last Friday afternoon, Belle underwent a procedure which required general anesthesia. After MH and I were allowed to see her in the post-op recovery room, I did not record her ramblings (Belle was with it enough to object to that), but did manage to take a few notes. There are some gems I know I missed, mostly because, I just wanted to be present to enjoy the stream of conscious moments caused by her brain only partially connecting with her mouth.
* “Is there boob PT? (After MH and I told Belle that the upper floors of the building she was in were dominated by orthopedic surgeons and PTs – psychical therapists.)
* “It stays on for THREE DAYS.” Belle pointed to the anti-nausea patch the anesthesiologist had placed on the side of her neck, then lowered her voice to a solemn whisper. “That’s a lotta days!”
* Belle said the nurses told her she was talking about bear heads
( “Let me tell you about the grizzly bear head…” ),
and that they don’t get many people who talk about bear heads. [2]
* “Do you remember when people were, like, in the future,
everything will be chrome?
It didn’t happen. I think they meant stainless steel.”
“I’d like to be Spider-Man.”
Moiself:
“But you don’t like spiders.”
“No sir, I do not. But, I appreciate spiders.”
* “Seth Meyers is like a marshmallow, with good hair.” [3]
While waiting for the nurse to remove her IV, Belle began to describe to MH and I, with great seriousness, how the cycle of banana mitosis and meiosis indicates that bananas can tell time. The morning after her surgery, I asked Belle if she remembered doing that. She said she didn’t, but that it’s no surprise because,
“Actually, I talk about that a lot.” [4]
Why carry a watch when you can just ask the banana on your head what time it is?
( blog excerpt from The Bullet List I’m Not Embracing, 1-12-2018 )
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Department Of The Rituals Of Autumn
Raking leaves; pressing cider; going to the U-pick pumpkin farm and then a corn maze; hiking through Hoyt Arboretum trails to see the brilliant red-orange-golden fall foliage; attending an Oktoberfest or Harvest celebration; watching “When Harry Met Sally“; finding a coven of witches to cast spells on GOP vice presidential candidates….
These are all beautiful and beloved) traditions in their own way, but somewhat pedestrian compared to the I-bet-you-that-moiself-is-the-only-person-with-this-particular-ritual:
The Getting Out Of The The Clear/Strengthening Nail Polish From Last Year
(Hoping It Hasn’t Congealed), And Beginning Weekly Applications Of Polish
To My Right Hand’s Pinkie Fingernail ® .
This particular finger of mine even has its own Facebook page [5] Please remember: I’m showing you my finger, not giving you the finger.
Hard to tell in the light, even with the profile and “headshot,” but the tip of my right pinkie finger is angled right about 20 degrees to the left, and the fingernail is split vertically about two centimeters left of center. How did that happen, inquiring minds want to know?
My older sister NL and I were playing a game of chase inside our Santa Ana house. NL was almost twice as tall as me, and was twice as old (three years to my 18 months); nevertheless, I was the chaser. NL fled down the hallway and into the bathroom. She slammed the bathroom door and locked it, failing to realize,that I had reached out to try and grab her at the last minute, and when she slammed the door shut she’d inadvertently crushed my right little finger, from the top joint to the tip, between the door and the door jamb.
My ensuing, bone-chilling shrieks [6] attracted the attention of our parents, who convinced NL to unlock the door. They rushed me to the doctor, who examined the pulverized pinkie and pronounced, “It’ll need to be amputated….hmm. Well, maybe….” In a Nobel-Prize worthy moment of inspiration, the doctor reached for his miracle salve (Vaseline), [7] dabbed it on the top of moiself’s smooshed finger, and wrapped the damaged digit with gauze. Doc advised my parents to keep the bandaged finger dry – no peeking! – and return in two weeks, or sooner if the finger started to smell like last year’s ham sandwich.
Two weeks later the unveiling revealed that the tip of my finger had partially re-formed itself, and thus was spared its date with the guillotine.
So, I grew up with a Funny Finger ® . While admittedly un-decorative in appearance, it is largely functional, with a few exceptions (it isn’t as mobile as the other fingers, and sometimes goes into spasms or freezes up when I tightly grip something with my right hand). Besides the misshapen profile, my Six Funny Finger Facts include the following, all of which five out of six of which are true:
* Teensy, sub-dermal bone fragments are palpable on the underside of the finger
* The fingernail grows cleft from the nail bed to the edge, with the split running bottom to top in the left side of the nail, and curving down at the edge.
The fingernail’s growth is self-limiting; it tends to disintegrate (for lack of a better term) at a certain length and split on the left side.
* The tip of the finger, from the second joint up, has reduced sensation
(as compared to that of other fingers) and is prone to bouts of numbness
* During one such numbness bout, a junior high school-aged moiself discovered
that she could stick a pin in the top of that finger, sans pain. Besides giving her that certain, je ne sais quoi cachet among eighth graders. This ability
proved to be a helpful form of pest control. Waving my impaled pinkie was an effective gross-out/shoo-away to a certain cheerleader-type
who’d attempted to make me feel self-conscious by loudly broadcasting,
“Ew, what’s wrong with your finger?! That is SO DISGUSTING!”
in the classroom and at the lunch table.
* The tip of the finger is an effective dowser device: it pulses and emits
a series of high frequency beeps when in the proximity of an underground water supply.
* Come the dryness of the Fall and Winter seasons, the funny finger’s nail cracks,
at the top and along the split, sometimes painfully. Moiself found this solution:
I apply a couple of layers of clear polish to the nail on a weekly basis,
which seems to minimize the cracking and splitting.
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Department of Anomalous Accolades
What is the most curious strangest compliment y’all have ever received?
This question comes from my having recently overheard someone in a public place tell a friend about the backhanded compliment [8] her in-law had given her. This brought to mind two compliments moiself has received – accolades which were truly meant, by the giver, to be positive, but which nevertheless had a rather odd, weeellllllll….oooookkkkaaay, you-don’t-hear-that-every-day quality to them:
(1) “You have a poster-quality cervix!”
( Context: spoken by a nurse practitioner, in aSo Cal Planned Parenthood clinic where I
was a volunteer. I’d offered to help with staff training and evaluation; [9]
upon completing the pelvic exam she’d performed upon moiself the NP pushed her chair back from the exam table,
pointed to the female reproductive anatomy poster on the exam room wall, and exclaimed that
my cervix looked *exactly* like the one in the picture. )
(2): “You’re really good at filling your bladder!”
( Context: spoken by the ultrasound technician at the beginning of my fourth ultrasoun
in three weeks, during the ninth month of my Belle pregnancy. A full bladder, while torture to a pregnant woman
in her third trimester, helps elevate the uterus in the abdominal cavity,
which provides better ultrasound imaging. [10] )
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Oh, but speaking of accolades….
Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself . Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [11]
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [12]
“The religion/ politics dichotomy is a false one. It isn’t that politics has no role; it’s that politics is simply inseparable from the Abrahamic religions.
Religion is politics. That was the case during the Barbary confrontation in 1786, and it’s the case with the Israel-Palestine conflict now. Throughout history,
religion has simply been an excuse looking for a conflict.”
( Ali A. Rizvi, The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason )
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May you remember to have a notepad ready when picking up someone
who is still under the effects of anesthesia;
May you delight in your own autumn rituals;
May you never have a reason for to be praised for
your skill at filling your bladder ;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] This is contingent upon having surgery for something relatively minor, ala wisdom teeth removal.
[2] This one makes sense to me, and probably was not the non sequitur the nurses thought it to be: Belle has prepped, stuffed, and mounted a grizzly bear head in her work as a docent for her college’s natural history museum.
[3] I likely sparked that comment by mentioning that Seth Meyers was hosting the Golden Globe Awards show.
[4] She’s a Biology major.
[5] Or used to. It was deactivated; now, it lives again.
[6] The great thing about this story, besides being a great story, is that I was so young I have no memory of it, and thus no memory of the pain.
[7] If he’d been Greek, I wonder if he would have used Windex?
[8] As in, a compliment which is not really a compliment at all (e.g. your boss telling you that the memo you wrote was “surprisingly coherent.”)
[9] “The new doctor is friendly, forthright, and competent, but she needs to trim her fingernails….”
[10] I had pneumonia during my 9th month of pregnancy, and my belly’s fundal height – a measurement of the distance from the top of the uterus to the pubic bone, which is used to assess fetal development and estimate gestational age – had remained static for three weeks.
[11] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
