License to Hoard

The great promise of Netflix when it was introduced, waaaaaaay back when it was snail-mail Blockbuster, was that they would eventually have every movie ever made available to rent. This was AMAZING for film nerds. I got to show Jose a cool black and white Yugoslavian movie from the 60s that I had seen in film school that I never would have been able to find at my local Blockbuster or even one of the hip indie movie rental places in Berkeley. (For those interested, it was Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, directed by Dusan Makavejev.)

Flash forward twenty-odd years, and now instead, Netflix and other streamers are producing movies that they never intend to make available even once because it is more financially advantageous to avoid paying taxes by writing off the production expense than to make it available to be...watched as if it were art on which thousands of skilled, creative people collaborated and which customers might love. Streamers are also regularly removing older movies from their services while then adding commercials to streaming because DON'T WE ALL JUST MISS "FREE" BROADCAST TV SO FUCKING MUCH AND WANT TO NOW PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE?

On the micro scale of that corrupt tax avoidance scheme are a handful of indie knitting pattern designers who have decided to take their creations offline, but I doubt they have taken their intellectual property bat and ball and gone home in order to avoid taxes. Whatever their reasons, I do find it very annoying that I cannot get patterns that I see on Ravelry because a designer inexplicably decided a trickle of residual income was...what? Too much of a hassle?

And worse, I can't buy or trade the pattern from someone who already has it because it turns out that the "purchase" of a digital knitting pattern is not a purchase. As with the terms of use that we click blissfully past as we install software, we are paying for a license to use a digital file that we do not actually own. So I cannot sell or even GIVE AWAY a digital file of a pattern, even if I delete it afterward so that only one person has it because that would violate the license agreement, which—because I didn't read the TOU—I was unaware I had entered into by "buying" the pattern. End lesson: I need to save and/or print out a hard copy of EVERY DIGITAL PATTERN I'VE "PURCHASED" before Ravelry, Apple, and/or Dropbox change their terms of use.

I love artists of all sorts and I believe they should be compensated for their work. I believe they should have control over their creations while they are alive. I have some minor reservations about how much control and profit their "estates" should have because I'm not a huge fan of generational wealth, but off the cuff, I would say that an artist's spouse/partner and children, who knew and supported or were supported by the artist, should be in control of the work until THEY die, but after that, not so much. Then things should enter the public domain. 

I know I do not have a right to anyone's work. But damn if I'm not disappointed that people are hoarding creative work where the world can't enjoy it, even when we are willing to pay, or are ALREADY PAYING—looking at you, Netflix.

On the Roller Coaster

I auditioned for another community theater play. The first night was Tuesday and the second was last night. There are three roles for women and three for men. If community theater is anything like school theater, it was a very unusual audition in that the men far outnumbered the women. There were perhaps five men who are age-appropriate to play the male lead, and two of them were PHENOMENAL. I got to read with one of them, and it was amazing. I felt almost like a real actor just standing next to him from the energy pouring off him. There were several candidates for the younger male characters, but only two were especially memorable in a good way. I know which one I would choose were I the director, and particularly if I were somehow cast.

Between the two nights of auditions, there were only seven women auditioning for three roles. One of the women was only age-appropriate for one role—she had been in Matilda with Maggie!—and in a pinch, most of the rest of the women could also play the younger-ish character. (35-55 years vs. 20-40 years) The first night, I was asked to read all of the women, and there was only one side that I felt like I stumbled through a little because I hadn't realized it had a character for which I was auditioning, so I hadn't read it beforehand.

Last night, when I walked in, the director remembered my name. (Maybe not a big feat considering there had been six women, and two were named Jessica, but still. He remembered!) I was asked to read (I think) more times than any of the other women and only for the lead role. The other woman who seemed to be in the running based on what she was asked to read is well-known to everyone in the theater and most of the actors, and she had a far more mature, confident interpretation of the character. I played it a lot more insecure and frightened than weary and exasperated, and I hope they recognized that it was a (possibly bad) acting choice and not just newbie nerves—which I did have, but not like that.  

If I'm right and it's between me and her, I'm sure she'll get it.

But like Schrödinger's cat, until I hear back, it's theoretically possible that I might be cast or I might not. Some people DO win the lottery, so many things are possible. But hearing back is like waiting for college application responses, except instead of big envelope/little envelope, it's either an offer phone call or a sorry email. 

I will know by Monday, but I'm going to be on the edge of my seat until then. 😬

UPDATE:

Not cast. Shocker.

Ghost Story

I was scrolling through LinkedIn and I saw the automatic post about my brother's work anniversary. I had seen it last year too, two months after he died. It brings you up short. You're tooling along, thinking about other things, and then you're crying at the reminder of the loss. 

I expected their birthdays to be bad, and of course, the anniversaries of my mom's and brother's deaths. (Last year suuuuuuuuuucked.) But to have the internet just reach out and punch me in the chest on a random day in October is unfair. 

In 2009 or 2010, I found out on FaceBook that a high school classmate whom I barely remember, some friend of a friend, had killed himself, leaving his FaceBook page frozen in time. It was the first time I thought about the digital loose ends left behind. A decade later, a social media friend was dying of cancer, and he gave a friend his FB login info so that they could announce when he passed for all the far-flung people who cared about him. I heard that FaceBook implemented some feature to convert people's pages to memorials after they die. 

When G died suddenly, Lucy needed a couple of days before she could write and post the announcement of his death. I don't know if she converted his account, if he still had one, since I'm not on FaceBook any more. I kinda doubt they post death anniversary reminders, but maybe. Maybe that's a choice the survivors can make? 

I have abandoned social media accounts of my own. FaceBook, my original (The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as) Twitter account. I have others I've deleted completely. There might be people who wonder or care.

I feel like there's a novel, or at least a short story, in there somewhere about digital ghosts, but I need to go cry so maybe it will come to me later.

Back In MY Day....

I have these old person moments of sticker shock and then subsequent hatred of capitalism. (Yeah, I know. Something different for me.)

I dropped my car off to have its bumper replaced after I was gently rear ended at a light. The shop couldn't tell me how long it would take to fix until they had taken the car apart to check for more possible damage than the visible scars in the plastic. I dropped it off the day *they* requested, so I don't think I'm being excessively impatient to have expected a repair time estimate by end of business. But that's only part of what's bothering me.

They did, however, provide an estimate of the cost: $1520. For a new rear bumper. The parts are only $253, which was surprisingly low considering that, purchased piece by piece, I think my car must be worth half a million dollars. Plus $187 in paint supplies. I'm genuinely stunned that the plastic bumper evidently needs painting? Like, wtf? If it's plastic, make it in all the VW colors, pop that sucker on, and let me drive off. This was definitely not manufactured for serviceability, which has broadly been true of every Volkswagen I've ever owned. (I had a Jetta whose antenna died and the entire interior roof lining had to be removed...with all the labor time that requires...to change the...antenna. Instead, I lived without radio for the rest of the time that I owned that car.)

But what really shocks me is that they are estimating nearly $1000 in labor. I really, really, really doubt that the technician who is doing the labor is going to make anywhere near $1000 from it. Salary.com says the average auto mechanic pay is about $27/hour. I guess the remaining $48/hour goes to maintaining the shop and its equipment, paying the receptionist to NOT call me with a time estimate, the billing person to argue with insurance about their doubled cost estimate, (one hopes) health insurance for everyone, and most crucially, profit for the owner.

And still no estimate of when it will be ready because "just in time" parts inventory translates to "don't even bother hoping we'll have the parts any time soon."

I'm thinking that, like the busted radio in my Jetta, I should have just lived with the battle scars.

Welp.

That was short-lived. 

The second night of auditions was evidently the night all the real actors showed up. Lit-er-al-ly, the lead from the show that Maggie was just in came to audition. Half the women knew each other and the ACT staff from other shows. Many had their pictures on the walls.

If I'm honest, last night was what I expected from the first night: twenty or so people who were way more experienced and obviously better than I am, who were all part of the local theater scene. The fake-out was a small pool of decent, but not outstanding, amateur actors that first night, not people who studied theater in college, have acted for decades, and fell just short of their Broadway dreams, so now they do community theater Upstate as an unpaid vocation.

Last night, I was clearly one of the worst actors, though I probably shouldn't presume to call myself that. To my surprise and contrary to their stated plan for what was going to happen, I did get to read twice even though I had been at the first night and should have only gone once toward the end, you know, if there was time. So that was either very kind of them, or possibly cruel, in case they just wanted to silently laugh at me and my zero experience, then gossip about it afterward, my not having even realized the first night that I should make sure to stand in the light. Doh. 

Jose and Maggie say I'm being too hard on myself, assuming that they were being pityingly generous. But when the director literally said to the first night of small, evidently modestly talented turnout, "you're all so good, you're making my job hard"? And the disclaimer that if you were asked to leave after the first round, it did not mean the director didn't like you, but only that she had seen what she needed to see? And saying they were pleased to see new faces in addition to welcoming back old hands? Except that as we, the dismissed, all scattered out into the night, it was clear the big kids were taking the ball back into the theater to play for real. So it's hard to believe that they aren't just being nice—which, don't get me wrong, is lovely. It just leaves me wondering whether I should give up the whole stupid idea—admittedly as I have nearly every other thing that I wasn't instantly good at. But even if I took acting classes for the next five years before auditioning again, I would still fall short of their individual and collective experience. 

And I don't think I would have felt quite so bad about it if not for that first night that gave me such hope that I had even a sliver of a chance of actually getting a role, rather than my initial expectation of learning how auditions go.

🎵God, I Hope I Get It!🎵

 Adding to the list of things I never expected in my life, I auditioned for a role in a community theater play last night.

EEEEEK!!!!

I'll admit I have had fantasies of being an actor. I've seen bad acting and thought, "I can do better than that." I've imagined myself on a set and rehearsed my Oscars speech in the shower. One of my favorite short stories is Kurt Vonnegut's "Who Am I This Time?" about a small town community theater. But it was never a real plan. I would have DIED before doing anything toward that goal and life when I was young.  

Well...

Maggie has been doing theater for over a decade, and I've been doing costuming for those plays for over a decade. I've also been running lines with her, reading all of the characters other than hers. And I'm pretty good at it. Now that she is no longer in compulsory school, I'm no longer involved in the productions she's doing, though we are still running lines. And I thought, what the hell? It would be fun to act. 

There are several local community theaters that hold open auditions. I did my research and talked to Maggie about how they are usually run. I might need headshots, which Jose would be more than ecstatic to provide. And I (thought I) needed an acting resume. That is something of a challenge, seeing as how I haven't been in a show since playing the Queen of England in a kindergarten Thanksgiving skit. (Or at least so I've been told. I've seen the pictures of myself in a construction paper crown, but I have no memory of the experience.) A Google search found lots of hits for "resume for beginning actor," though ironically, one of the examples included mention of the actor's Tony award. Not precisely a beginner.

BUT!!! I have seven credits as a costume assistant in Maggie's school shows! I still have the programs with my name in them to prove it! And I have two film studies degrees, which isn't acting, but certainly shows a deep interest in analytically watching actors. And, again, during my overactive speechifying in the shower, I thought about how I could describe my strange hippie childhood, in which we had no TV, but we would read aloud to each other, complete with expression and voices and often gestures. With my own children, we did have a TV, but I still spent years reading aloud to them. Before She Who Must Not Be Named was cancelled for being a bigot, I read all seven Harry Potter books to them. I can still recite the first few pages of "Horton Hatches the Egg" from memory, including distinct voices for Maisie and Horton. It's a kind of performing. 

So armed with a padded resume and zero real experience, I looked up when theaters were having auditions. I found that the first upcoming play had roles for which I was suitable. I listened to the play and determined to go. I told the four people closest to me in my life, and they unanimously said some version of "omg, you'll be great!" 

It's possible I might be a tad...dramatic...in my everyday behavior and presentation? 😳

I was perfectly calm and confident up until the day before the audition. It was a play with only two characters, and I thought that, unlikely as it might be, even if I knocked it out of the park in my very first audition, there was NO WAY anyone in their right mind would cast me, an unknown person with no experience who might not show up to rehearsals, might not be able to memorize the substantial quantity of lines, might just panic and freeze in front of an audience when it came to showtime. So the audition would be entirely an exercise in...auditioning, to the point that I didn't pay much attention to when the shows would be because I assumed the whole venture would begin and end with the first night. 

The day before the audition, however, I had a huge crisis of confidence with the realization that I will never get another proper professional job. No one will hire me to be a technical writer ever again. No one will ever so much as interview me for a technical writing job, given my two decade break from a career that was only three years long to begin with. I'm also wholly unsuited for the corporate world. (See previous post.) It was a bad day and I was ready to hide in my house until I died.

But the morning of the audition, when Maggie left for school, she wished me good luck and told me I'd be great, and the expression of hope and pride and delight on her face put to rest any thoughts of skipping the audition and abandoning the project. 

So I psyched myself up. What's the absolute worst that could happen? I'd look ridiculous in front of a room full of strangers? Maggie said that even if I bombed, no one would laugh. I would get what she thinks is worse: a pity clap. For me, that is actually better because it shows the people aren't total assholes. And what's more, I am so insignificant that nobody would pay much notice since most people are tied up in their own experiences anyway.

So I went. 

I arrived on time, and...theater people are lovely. Broadly smiling gentlemen asked if I'd auditioned there before and didn't stop smiling when I said no. They invited me to fill out my forms, took my picture, showed me the sides (snippets from the play, for the uninitiated *raises hand*) from which we would read. Almost 60 people had RSVPed to the FaceBook announcement, but to my shock, there were a total of seven women, including me, there to audition on the first of two nights. I began to dare to hope. Just a little.

The play is The Half-Life of Marie Curie, about the famous scientist and her best friend, a fellow scientist and a sarcastic, passionate suffragette. Curie is, of course, a legend, but Hertha Ayerton was a turn-of-the-century badass. Though the website said "age will not be a major factor" in casting, if it really is, three of the seven women were honestly a bit too young for the roles, leaving four grown-ass women.

We were invited into the theater and assigned sides from which to cold read. Two were monologues and the rest were with partners. We each had two turns, and I did well, I think. I should have moved more, but I was concentrating more on reading the lines correctly and with expression than physically acting. Two of the actors were...ok. Not at all terrible, but not great. Three were good. One was excellent. (She also had on a great dress. I told her so, and she was pleased because it was new!👏)

We were asked to return to the lobby while the director and her compatriots discussed. The assistant came out and asked if we had any requests for the second round, and I asked to read Hertha since I had read Marie both times. I think she confused me with one of the other ladies because when we went back, I was assigned Marie's monologue and the woman who had done Hertha's once before was asked to do it again. I saw the assistant whisper to the director's husband that she had already done it, as if it was a surprise. 

And with that, we were done in just about an hour, but we were asked to return for night two of auditions if we could. And that is where we are at this moment. Tonight I will go back, and we will see who else shows up. In the unlikely even that no one does, I think there are four possible contenders, and I am maybe just barely one of them. Eeek. 

Cue A Chorus Line.

The Flaw in "Mom's World"

My mom used to talk about "Mom's World." There was the world outside our apartment, and there was "Mom's World" inside it. In Mom's World, you could have three parents and it was fine. In Mom's World, you could say curse words that you were never allowed to use in school. In Mom's World, you could occasionally make yourself sick on pink elephant shaped cake. In Mom's World, even as a child, you could speak your mind and have your thoughts and feelings respected, even if she had to point out when you were done that you were factually wrong. In Mom's World, you were the master of your own body and sexuality and nobody would judge you for that as long as no one got hurt or pregnant or diseased. In Mom's World, you could lambast the adults who were not deserving of respect. In Mom's World, you could rail against all of the ways that the world was imperfect and idiotic and disappointing. In Mom's World, Mom was deserving of respect. Mom's World was an act of will by this amazing person whom I love so dearly.

But the trouble is that the world outside exists. And it crushed Mom's World. 

I still deal with the bureaucratic repercussions of having three parents. We three whom she raised got in trouble when we slipped up and cursed at school. We got fat from pink elephant cake. No one wants to hear what we think. We are slut shamed. We must perform respectfulness for people in authority over us, regardless of their unworthiness. The world continues to be stupid and imperfect and wrong. And mothers get no respect. 

I feel very close to my mother right now, which is especially painful now that she's gone. 

She "quit working" when I was ten, when my father got a professional job for the first time after college. She never went back to "working." Don't get me wrong. She was busy literally until the day she died. She took care of me, my brother, my father, and eventually my sister-in-law and my nephew. She went out of her way to do absolutely everything she could to make everyone else's lives easier and happier, even as her body was failing her. 

And it counts for nothing but a fond memory in the minds of the five people who benefited from her ceaseless toil. You see, she didn't have a job, or at least not one that came with humanity validating paycheck. 

Seemingly incapable of learning from other's mistakes, I "quit working" when my first child was born. I spent seventeen years "not working," and now, it will be impossible to pick up my career. I could do the work, but no one will believe that. At the very least, whichever "Human Resources"—a truly vile, ironically dehumanizing phrase—flak responsible for sorting through way too many resumes will look at mine for a few seconds and discard it...because I "didn't work" or because it doesn't fit the soulless AI generated idea of what it "should" say.

But more than that, I feel close to my mom for sharing the utter delusion that my own values, my own convictions that drove my actions could carry me through a world to which they are not suited. I am no more fit to exist in the world than she was. She thought that she could enforce her little corner of the world, and so did I. 

But I can't. 

The world is a stupid, fucked up, irrational place run by the worst people imaginable, and my choices are to try to adjust, or to drown. And I don't think I can adjust.

RIP Twitter

 I used to love Twitter. Genuinely, I used to LOVE Twitter. I had a wonderful, rollicking good time with a stilly crew of "Social Thursday" buddies from around the world. Things went sour eventually, but I look on the Twitter era with the fondness that most people have for high school or their fraternity. Probably wasn't really good for me, and it was often immature and stupid, but I loved it.

And the narcissistic idiot who owns it has now, fully and entirely, killed it for me. 

If I ever get obscenely wealthy, I swear that I will hire someone whose entire job is to tell me I am full of shit. Regularly. 

Even apart from the really unforgivable embrace of Nazis and other dudebro racists, who, with even half a brain, renames something "X"? 

I've been saddened and frustrated that the only truly important skill in the world has become marketing. Donald Trump, another immature, insecure sociopath, marketed himself as a business genius and managed to become president, FFS. And Elon Musk branded and marketed himself relentlessly as a genius, even though he's evidently a total moron. He convinced people that he is a technological genius when his only undergraduate degree is in economics. He's not a physicist. He may have bought a physics degree from UPenn. And without anyone to tell him that he has drunk his own Kool-Ade, he has run completely amok, destroying one of the most recognizable brands in social media in a matter of months in order to suck his own dick and promote alt-right accounts. 

Goodbye, Twitter. It was a thing while it lasted.

College Advisement Fails

I've seen many versions of memes of Gen Z just giving no fucks. Young people are shown basically refusing to be exploited, and often the meme creator can't quite seem to decide whether to feel scorn or awe.

Well, they have a lot of reason to be pissed and rejecting bullshit. 

Antonio had a meeting with an advisor at Berklee College of Music the summer after he was accepted, before he enrolled. He asked whether it's possible to graduate in two years as a transfer student. He was told it is. He learned in the middle of his first year that he was more or less lied to. They accept only 24 units of transfer credit, about a semester and a half, and NO other school's music classes. You can test out of some of the core music curriculum, but that's it. So he's going to need a full third year to graduate. At nearly $50K a year, even after his scholarships, that is fairly painful.

After applying to and being accepted at a bunch of STEM universities, Maggie decided that she did not want to study STEM. So she enrolled at community college to study theater, intending to transfer to a four year university. Unfortunately, her community college THEATER PROGRAM advisor waited until after Maggie's first year to tell her that NONE of her theater classes are transferable, so she would need to start as a freshman elsewhere, and maybe she's better off just taking business administration and marketing classes.

via GIPHY

I do wonder what fantastically "useful" degree is required to end up as an incompetent community college advisor. 

Young people have been infantilized under continual supervision, then demeaned for being immature. They went through a global pandemic that cancelled a significant portion of their lives, leaving them trapped for a year with Google Classroom, while they were shamed for spending all day looking at their screens. They're told that they need to go to college to get a good job, while reading about Millennials drowning in student debt they will never be able to pay off. They were told that STEM jobs are the only hope for a stable career, but now we're told that AI is going to make all human intellectual activities like engineering and art obsolete, so the only things we need people to do are menial jobs and gig "side hustles." Or be one of the lucky few at the top with business degrees to whom all the profit is funneling—but let's not mention that you needed to start out with a shit-ton of money to begin with to be one of the oligarchs exploiting everyone else.

(Gen X went through most of this too, though the AIDS epidemic never paralyzed the entire country, before we revolutionized the world with the internet, but nobody ever remembers us, so whatever, never mind.)

So as usual, in summary, #MedicareForAll and #UBI. Because fuck capitalism. And guidance counselors.

Health Insurance Is a Scam

Billing Nightmares 

My daughter Maggie has type 1 diabetes. She's had it for nearly a decade. Her treatment has been substantially the same for the past six years. She has an insulin pump and a continuous glucose monitor that, at some point, were linked to provide her with "hybrid closed loop" insulin delivery, which is fancy way to say that the glucose monitor feeds her blood sugar data to her pump so that it can automatically adjust her insulin dosages to correct for high or low blood sugar. The technology is pretty nifty. 

It's also very expensive, and we have had Platinum-level health care plans in order to pay for this. They are also not cheap. Last year, after double digit annual increases for, like, forever, our annual premiums were nearly $30,000. 

For this staggering amount of money, more than the totality of a full-time minimum wage job, you would think we would not have a problem with getting coverage for a well-understood and well-controlled chronic disease that Maggie has had for literally the majority of her life. 

You would be wrong.

I have been calling a medical supply company (Edgepark) and my insurance company (Highmark, formerly Blue Shield of Northeastern New York) about bills beginning LAST MARCH, trying to get them to agree to charge me the correct co-payment for her CGM supplies: a transmitter and glucose sensors that she needs replaced four times a year. They have billed and process the claims correctly two of the four times. The other two of the four times, they have counted them as "durable medical equipment," which requires a 50% copayment, instead of "diabetes supplies," which is a $15 co-pay. This is a difference of THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. 

I called Edgepark in perhaps May(?) and explained that they had billed the CGM sensors incorrectly as durable medical equipment instead of diabetes supplies. They told me to call the insurance company because they couldn't do anything without an updated explanation of benefits. I called the insurance company and they agreed that, yes, I am correct. It is diabetes supplies and $15/item. They called Edgepark and supposedly fixed it. Nothing happened. 

Pretty sure I called every couple of months, but finally in August, I started taking notes on my calls. August 18 call, nothing fixed. September 9 call, nothing fixed. October 10, the insurance rep called Edgepark, sent all the claims back for adjustment, and Edgepark was supposedly going to be refund my $466.25 overpayment in "hopefully fewer than 30 days.  

December 8 call, same Highmark rep, but nothing fixed. She recommended I check Jose's member portal—I'm the one who deals with all this shit, but since it's through Jose's job, he is the "policy owner" so I can't see anything—to see whether the claims were re-billed. 

I got two corrected EOBs, and another that is wrong, also from LAST MARCH but with a different Date of Service than the one I overpaid in the first place.

I went to the Edgepark website and listed all the orders and cross-referenced that with my credit card charges. The dates don't match up very well because, in one of those brilliant moves of "economic efficiency," Edgepark has an outside billing service. Last year I paid Edgepark $706.95, including two small, odd mystery charges just to keep getting supplies—every single order should have been a multiple of $15. (I suspect that there were small late fees charged because they would sometimes charge my credit card at time of order then also send a bill for the charge, which I would ignore for a while then have to call and have fixed.) According to their website, I ordered 14 items, which should have been a total of $210. They owe me almost $500. 

Instead, I'm getting hounding emails and calls from the medical supply company, telling me I have a balance of $668.25, and would I like to set up a payment plan? I DO have in hand a corrected EOB for one of those bills. But even more EOBs that say I owe the OTHER 50% co-pays.

It's maddening that Highmark blames Edgepark, and Edgepark blames Highmark. Highmark says Edgepark is using the wrong "pointer code," while the snippy woman from Edgepark billing insisted that Highmark changed everyone's policies nationwide "without notifying them" to cover CGM supplies as a pharmacy benefit rather than a medical benefit and that is what is causing the billing/claims problems. 

I don't know, and I find it insane that sometimes they get it right. Like, who is fucking up and when?

That is problem ONE. 

It's Easier NOT to Use Insurance

Problem two is this: It's easier to get healthcare from sketchy websites than to use my freaky-expensive insurance.

Even with freaky expensive health insurance, it takes four to five months, or, in the case of my doctor, eleven months, to get an appointment with a provider. I'd say doctor, but Maggie's "endocrinologist" is actually not a doctor, but some other sort of (admittedly highly trained and knowledgeable) professional, and the person who sees me at the dermatologist's office is a physician's assistant. Right now, I actually can't get an appointment with my doctor, who is on medical leave and, judging by the way he looked last time I saw him, is probably somewhere in the world dying, may his cranky, arrogant, self-important self Rest In Peace. But my doctor's office hasn't told me that I need to find a new provider. I guess they're still hoping he'll come back? However, they also will not renew my prescriptions...because...I haven't been to the doctor. Catch-22, anyone?

So for my rosacea and depression, it's actually easier and faster to skip my expensive-ass insurance and my unavailable providers, and get prescriptions for creams and Wellbutrin from sketchy sites on the Internet to whom broke doctors with exorbitant medical school debt lend their names and medical license numbers. Evidently, I could also get hair loss creams and pills for erectile dysfunction while I'm there. Huzzah!

My insurance premiums are nearly $30,000 because, rather than providing health care for humans, the American health insurance industry exists to create chaos, paperwork, billing errors, and above all, executive pay and shareholder value. 

American Health Care /sarcasmFont

When my brother died prematurely in July of last year at 50, three months after my mother died prematurely at 69, I made a doctor's appointment. It seemed I just *might* have something to worry about.

When I called in August, the soonest appointment my established primary care doctor had was in...November. Awesome. 

In October, his office called to reschedule because he was going to be on medical leave. Gulp. (Yeah, in all honestly, when I'd seen him in February, I had wanted to get off the exam table to help HIM. He was not looking well.)

I rescheduled for...May. 

Evidently, he wasn't doing much better because they called again in February to reschedule for...July. That's right. At this point we were nearly a YEAR after I'd originally requested an appointment. 

And likely in part due to his absence, the office is oversubscribed for the providers they have on staff because when Jose called to request an appointment, the soonest availability for HIS doctor is...February of next year. 

I decided it was time to find a new practice and went to my insurer's Find A Doc tool. 

Jose's AND my doctor are listed as "accepting new patients."

Like, WTF?

When liberals were making noise in my youth—30 years ago!—about implementing "socialized medicine," opponents screamed that we'd have healthcare rationing and you wouldn't be able to see a doctor when you needed to.

Well...

We still don't have universal, single payer healthcare that is independent of employment status. AND, even if you have insurance, it takes more than half year to see a doctor.

Good job, free market capitalists. We're free to die of preventable disease while we wait to get a prescription for cheap, generic blood pressure meds.

Mother's Day without My Mother

On Mother's Day, my lilac bushes are blooming with flowers. My mother had baby lilac bushes sent to me because she love the smell of the flowers wafting into the apartment they rented while my dad was in basic training at Keesler Air Force Base in Buloxi, MS when I was a baby.

My mom died in April 2022. And her lilac bushes still bloom for me on Mother's Day. That was her intention.

I really miss my mom.

Failing the Long Term Thought Experiment

I've been watching Robert Reich's lectures for his final class on Wealth and Poverty at UC Berkeley. In his first lecture, he presented his class with an economic/psychological experiment I had seen before:

Someone offers you $1,000 to split with another person. If the person accepts, you both keep the money. If the person rejects the split, nobody gets any money. 

Perhaps because he did not present it quite as clearly as I had seen before, only saying that you "split the money," it honestly, genuinely, simply did not occur to me until he polled the class that one could choose to split the money unequally. If I were the person proposing the split, I would, without pausing to consider, offer the other person exactly half. But the idea behind the experiment is that any smart "rational economic actor" would attempt to maximize the amount that he keeps, making a calculated gamble on how little the other person would accept. The truly rational choice for the second person is to take ANY amount of the split because in ANY case, he would be better off with even as little as $1.00 more than he had before the experiment. In reality, people are NOT rational economic actors.

I know. Shocking. 

Someone actually won the Nobel Prize in Economics for coming up with that revelation in economic modeling. 

In related news, economists are often morons.

But I digress.

Prof. Reich hinted that the "problem" with the "Pareto improvement" in question, a situation where at least one person benefits and no one loses out, is that when the benefits are extremely one-sided, it violates an innate sense of fairness that most people have. And the decidedly NOT rational economic actor, when offered a pittance in the face of someone else benefitting greatly, says fuck that noise, and lets both parties lose out.

My own failure to grasp the gist of the economic thought experiment from the beginning leads me to a question that would have me raising my hand every time Prof. Reich mentions the representatives of capital. WHY is it treated as so perfectly, stupidly evident that the overriding goal will always be to maximize profit? And in reality, not strictly profit, or even "earnings beyond interest, taxation, depreciation, and amortization," but shareholder value? That is the bedrock of all economic assumptions in our supposed "free market" system, and it is so foreign to me. 

If I owned a company, I cannot imagine a situation in which the goal would be to make the most money possibly at any cost to my employees, my competitors, the environment, the very social fabric of our city, state, country, world. I would feel positively evil if my company were polluting the water and air, if I were ruthlessly running my competitors out of business to create a monopoly in which I could jack up prices, if I could afford several yachts while the people doing the work that made the business run could barely afford their rent, if I were helping to create a world of Gilded Age-level inequality of wealth and the inevitable social and political instability that must follow. 

And there are at least a handful of business leaders who have come to the conclusion that maximizing profit is not the be-all and end-all of corporation governance. Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drug Company's mission is to make a REASONABLE profit on generic drugs, a markup of some moderate fixed percentage above the cost of manufacturing and distributing the medications, rather than charging as much as the market will bear for something with a relatively (or entirely in the case of insulin) inelastic demand. 

But it is a terrible tragedy and the cause of much suffering that so many of the people in charge of the world are willing to burn it down in order to maximize shareholder value. 

*screaming incoherently*

Three and a half years ago, I acquired a "temporary" job when the nepo baby at Jose's company quit in a huff. For one reason after another, including a fucking global pandemic, I kept staying put. After a while, I both tried to quit and kinda tried to get fired, and it never quite stuck. Then a sort of friend of ours "parted ways" with his job, and since Jose is now the president, he thought that it would be a good opportunity to give Brandon a job so he could continue to pay his rent and finally allow me to quit for real and go back home to write.

The thing is....

I am not young any more. I used to be optimistic and mentally and emotionally flexible, and the idea of change was always exciting and I could meet it with enthusiasm. Not any more. I am terrified of uncertainty and change now. 

Jose is, in all honesty, clinically depressed and hates his job. He's been there for over ten years, and while it pays very well, there is no joy, no intellectual challenge, and no satisfaction. The company keeps lurching along, from small contract to small contract, always threatening to go under, and he is fed up with caring more about its continuation than the actual owners, who are in a childish, spiteful battle amongst themselves. The future of the company will be determined in the next couple of months, and Jose will either be out of a job or will need to decide whether he wants to continue on with a job he hates. As ever, I cannot tell someone else how much he is suffering and how much more he should have to suffer, so I support whatever choice he makes. 

But I'm scared. 

I'm scared because, no matter what, Maggie needs health insurance. I'm scared because we have two (adult) children who need to finish college, and I just surrendered the additional income that was not necessary, but was making life pretty cushy. I'm scared that they are both studying art, and the conventional wisdom is that they will not be able to find jobs to support themselves. And even if they successfully launch into adulthood and no longer need us, that also terrifies me. They will move away, or we will, and I will not see them anymore. And I have an awful, sinking feeling at the thought that when Jose and I downsize our house, I will no longer have rooms for my children to come home to. It breaks my heart. 

I did not expect that I would end up having so much trouble letting go of things. My job, my house, my children. 

In addition to the ugly decay of my body, I also hate what is happening to my personality as I age. I was promised that I would come into myself in my forties. I would feel more sure of myself and who I am and what I want. That could not be farther from the truth. I am wrong about who I thought I was, I don't know what I want, and I have no self-confidence that I could figure out how to get it if I did. 

This sucks.

The Internet is for Porn! You know, if you want...

As the spoiled man-baby tries to destroy Twitter to prop up the ego that tech bros have inflated beyond his actual talents and intellect, I joined Spoutible, which was started by the guy behind BotSentinel as a harassment- and disinformation-free alternative to Twitter. (It turns out Christopher Bouzy is also something of a thin-skinned man-baby, and I should not be surprised. But whatever.)

Of course I didn't actually READ the terms of service, because who does? But since I've never been suspended, even temporarily, from any social media platform, I assumed that I am pretty well-behaved and wouldn't need to worry.

NO, I haven't been suspended! 

But I did end up in a Spoutible spat. (It's like a twitter argument, but with 50% less racism.)

One of the activist romance writers I follow on Twitter–yes, there is totally such an awesome thing–criticized Spoutible's policy on sexually explicit content. Spoutible's beta testers evidently voted overwhelmingly against allowing sexually explicit content at all. 🙄 I think it's prudish pearl-clutching, but since I have no intention of posting or looking there for porn, whatever. Their platform, their rules.

However, Courtney Milan publicly criticized the vagueness of the policy, with all the reasons that the sex-positive have for being wary of censorship: my "erotic" may be your "pornographic." Where is that line? Who draws it? More importantly, the right-wing is aggressively trying to use "family values" as an excuse to silence and persecute the LGBTQIA+ community. Also do policies against "sexually explicit" material effectively ban sex workers from discussing their work? There are lots of issues that a vague, hand-wavy "no sexually explicit material" does not address. 

I posted, in my own tiny little Spoutible account with 20 followers, my disapproval of the ban in general, because I don't believe sexual content should be treated the same as harassment or disinformation. I didn't even curse for once!

And a user who must have either been following me or looking for a fight told me that "unsolicited sexually explicit material IS harassment." 

Hmmmm....

I asked how posting in one's own feed counts as sending unsolicited content when we have the ability to choose whom we follow. I used the analogy of a person walking into a clearly marked sex shop and yelling about being offended. 

I was told this was a false equivalency because *I* don't understand how timelines work. Um.... Pretty sure I do. Spoutible has yet to start showing me promoted posts from anyone I don't follow, so if I see something, I signed up for it. On social media, I always read the bios and a handful of posts, including re-posts, or Echos in the Spoutible parlance, before I follow someone, and I only occasionally, somewhere down the line, get surprised or offended by them. And then there is always a handy Unfollow option rather than jumping salty with someone over what they said on their own tiny virtual soapbox.

I asked if I should be expecting to see posts from accounts I don't follow. One could call my response Socratic or choose to interpret it as genuine failure to understand. I was not rude. I did not curse. I did not flash my tits or vag at her. 

Karen...uh...Wendy then told me I was "clearly here to create chaos." She followed that with a thoroughly hypocritical "be well" and probably blocked me. I don't care enough to check.

*I* create chaos? I posted a pic of my crocheted blanket and a sex-positive opinion, and I replied to someone who came into my house, so to speak, to try to school me.

She picked an argument with a stranger, lost, and flounced. Tale as old as...the internet itself.

Perhaps I have a snowflake-level uniqueness. I have been on the internet so long that I remember before Amazon.com was even just a bookstore, and yet I have never stumbled across or been sent unsolicited porn. In the mid-90s I had heard so much about how there was porn everywhere, but I had never seen any, so I went and searched for it, probably using webcrawler or early yahoo. It was...eh hem...not hard to find when I looked. But I had to actively look.

In the late 90s I worked for a startup that was trying to organize usenet, one of the early message board systems, before the search engines made human sorting totally unnecessary. I categorized a lot of porn groups, some with content that even I found disturbing, and I am unwaveringly sex-positive and against kink shaming. 

But never any accidental porn. 

I've also never been sexually harassed. I've been called an SJW, been told to shut up, and been told nobody cares what I think more times that I can count, but I've never been threatened with rape or other violence. 

I am not discounting the stories of women who post their disturbing and threatening DM exchanges, or even just the random, tasteless, unwanted nude, and any of that is a problem, but I wonder how common it actually is. Is your aunt with the moderate drinking problem and the six cats batting away dicks every day? Maybe I've just never had a high enough profile to attract scary attention? I think I peaked at about 300 followers on my most popular account, and a good portion were probably bots whom I didn't follow back and so never saw whatever content they posted. 

I even have a twitter account specifically for selling my written erotica and THAT has never gotten so much as a single dick pic. I've had a couple of guys slide into my DMs to try to chat me up, but not a solitary, lone penis. I'm almost offended. If advertising that you write monster porn isn't an invitation to some kinky shit, I don't know what is.

So the idea that every woman on the internet is constantly swarmed by creeps sending blurry photos of their junk? I don't think so.