I WOULD RATHER DIE

I received an envelope from my health insurance company's pharmacy benefit manager. The outside of the envelope said I needed to act or my prescription costs would go up. The envelope contained three sheets of blank paper. I am not exaggerating. There was nothing but three entirely blank sheets of paper.

My husband had received a similar envelope, but at least his envelope contained instructions. He had to call and have his prescriptions switched to their mail order pharmacy rather than the local pharmacy where we've been getting our prescriptions filled for over a decade. Someone had to maintain the system that sent out the letters. Someone had to answer his phone call. Someone had to contact the prescribing physician to have the prescription transferred to the mail order pharmacy. The prescription needs to be individually shipped directly to our house rather than delivered, along with a cartload of other drugs, to the local pharmacy. That seems like a lot of overhead, but what do I know?

Presuming that this was their intention with my three blank pages, I looked online at the account they made me set up for administering my prescriptions. It said I had to call them. I called the phone number they listed. I had to give my date of birth and zip code to a machine and explain in a few words why I was calling. Not shockingly, it didn't understand when I asked why they had mailed me three blank pieces of paper, so I was handed off to a person.

Then again I had to give my date of birth and zip code to a customer service person whose first language was definitely not English. (I have nothing against people who speak English as a second language—my husband's first language is not English. But I do have something against outsourcing customer service lines to other countries where companies can underpay people.) 

She told me I had no prescriptions on file. Weird since I had gotten a different letter from them saying that I had recently filled a prescription, including what it was, and that it was super important for me to take it as prescribed.

She put me on hold then came back and told me she was transferring me to United Healthcare. 

I am not insured by United Healthcare. I hung up.

So my husband dug up the letter he had gotten and gave me the phone number he had called. I got WORD FOR WORD the same computer script but with a different AI voice.

After I again told the machine my birthdate and zip code and that I wanted to know why they had sent me three blank pieces of paper, I got a person, this one at least US-based. I explained. She put me on hold. She came back and said she hadn't forgotten me and put me back on hold. And again. 

Finally, she asked for my local pharmacy zip code, my prescriber's name, and for the list of medications. There is ONE. And they are going to...contact my doctor and get the prescription transferred and mailed individually directly to me.

TO BE CLEAR, this prescription costs $9.14 plus $5 shipping for a 90-day supply through Cost Plus Drugs. This cost includes the cost of manufacturing, a 15% markup, and $5 in pharmacy labor.

Can someone with a Nobel Prize in economics explain to me how OptumRx's paying for half an hour of a customer service representative's time, plus all the other IT infrastructure, in order to transfer the prescription to their internal mail order pharmacy rather than my local pharmacy could possibly result in any institutional savings on a prescription that costs $1.20/mo to manufacture?

I finally got an appointment to see my primary care provider, who was utterly unhelpful. I'm getting semaglutide from the internet. She won't write me a prescription so that my insurance will cover it, despite the fact that I fit the prescribing guidelines. She won't write a prescription for anti-anxiety meds unless I make quarterly visits. She insists I need blood work, a mammogram, and a visit to a gynecologist. No. I'm not doing it. 

This is the last straw for me. 

I would honestly rather die than "be a smart healthcare consumer," make another phone call, look at another website, read another explanation of benefits, make another appointment that won't be for four to six months in the future, choose another health plan and cross my fingers that it will be the "cheapest" option.

I'm out. I will die when god calls me home rather than participate in this corrupt, stupid system for one day longer. No more meds, no more tests, no more visits, no more. I don't care if a mammogram or a PAP test would detect cancer. I'm not getting chemotherapy or surgery. I'm not taking any more blood pressure meds. If I have a stroke or a heart attack, nobody call 911. Just let me die. IDGAF.

6-7 and the Death of Meaning

At 21 and 23, my kids are securely Gen Z, and I will defend so much about them and their generation until I run out of breath. Their commitment to social justice, to inclusion, to combating toxic masculinity and rape culture, their embrace of democratic socialism are all proof that Gen Z is the best thing Gen X has done. All those participation trophies and filling buckets with kindness and zero tolerance for bullying created a wonderful group of young people who are more engaged politically and more compassionate than any cohort in history. I am incredibly proud of them.

That said, their "humor" is just unbearably stupid. And Gen Alpha is so much worse.

Back in MY day™️, there was a certain genre of SNL skit where the writers just repeated the same thing over and over and somehow we were supposed to laugh. It was a lot of why I stopped watching SNL. Part of the basis, I guess, was making fun of dumb people, which I don't find clever. Don't get me wrong; I'm a terrible person and I sometimes find the things dumb people do funny, but I would never want to then go further and actively mock them for it. It's too mean-spirited for even my black heart, and it's not funny.

Flash forward twenty years, and as Gen Z began to create their own content and memes, to use the modern terms for youth culture, Antonio especially would show me things he found hysterical and I literally did not understand why he was laughing. It wasn't just, "I think that's offensive" or "I personally don't think slapstick or pranks are entertaining," but just...how is it supposed to be funny? I seriously just did not get it. Is it ironic? Does it highlight an absurdity about the human condition? Is it a clever play on words? Is there something utterly unexpected going on? No?

Maybe the first version of the internet version of this bullshit that I remember was the "I can has cheezburger" cat meme. Like, ok. Cats want fast food, and they speak English but poorly. Ha ha? And it got worse from there. I remember staring blankly at an Instagram post that Antonio showed me and searching for any way in which it might have been entertaining, and I could come up with nothing—not even something to roll my eyes at.

When I discovered that the George Michael song "Careless Whisper," had become weirdly popular with Gen Z and I was a little flummoxed as to why THAT song. An older Gen Z, or maybe she's a millennial, explained it away as "it's a meme." What does that even mean? It's funny because...it gets sent around? It's not even like Rick Rolling, which is less about Rick Astley than the surprise of expecting one thing and getting a nineties one-hit wonder instead. That it's "Never Gonna Give You Up" hardly matters. At least I understand THAT.

This week after hearing in grown up media about these damn kids on my lawn and their 6-7, I ended up looking it up and it has NO MEANING. Some kids just repeat it, meaning...nothing. Is it just to annoy adults with senselessness? Is it "you don't get it cuz you're an Old"? Back in MY day™️, we had lots of "you don't get it because you're an Old," but it was "you don't get the combination of anger and ennui expressed in grunge," not "you don't get it...because there is nothing to get." 

And being the over thinker that I am, and wanting to defend young people because us Olds have historically been shitty to young people, I want it to be something profound. I want it to be a critique of Late Stage Capitalism or a statement about the existentialist shallowness of modern corporate media or an example of cognitive semantics.

But in the end, yeah, I guess it's probably just not that deep, bro.

Acting for Dummies

You know what would be awesome? (And not at all because I most definitely need it, preferably by Wednesday.) A remedial acting class. Not Stanislavski telling you to remain in character from casting through to the final performance, not Meisner using sexual battery as a fun teaching tool, not how to research and invent a historically accurate backstory that fleshes out your character's motivation.

Rather: This is a stage. Stage right, stage left, up/downstage (and why it's called that). This is how the lights work and how to "find your light." This is the "fourth wall" and what that means. This is how rehearsals work. These are the technical aspects that you can expect. These are the conventions about sets and costuming. And above all, these are the illusions about which audiences are expected to suspend their disbelief.

Because I have spent my whole life thinking that if you understand and empathize with your character, if you think about how they would speak and move through the world, how their voice and body would be affected by their situation and state of mind, you should be able to act.

And I have discovered, on the eve of tech week—also a term to be discussed in my imagined remedial class— for my show, that my idea is WRONG and there is NOTHING natural about acting. You are NOT supposed to act like your character would. You are supposed to act like an actor on stage. And now I can't unsee it.

To whit: people on stage are terribly RUDE to their fellow characters. They spend 90% of their time, even while having the most intense, heart-wrenching conversations, looking at that invisible fourth wall rather than their scene partner. Their bodies are nearly always facing one direction in this diegetic world. They should not be moving (or not moving) like normal people because that is apparently boring to watch. (This never would have occurred to me personally because I genuinely enjoyed all 3.5 hours of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. In fact, I think it could have been longer. Yes, I am, in fact, also boring.)

But here I am, my lines all memorized, thinking about how my character would behave in this space were it real, how she would speak to the other characters. And IT'S ALL WRONG.

We open in five days.

Shit.

Panic! On the Sofa

 I'm not depressed. At least not yet. 

But I have this pulling-in sensation that seems like it is a prelude to depression. I have gone through this before, when it seemed like the thing to do was just to stop talking to anyone, stop looking at social media, prepare to disappear. The thought of interacting with anyone to pursue publishing books is just too much. 

I am struggling to find things to say to even the few people I (sort of) want to interact with. The kids call and I have nothing to say. Lucy calls and I have nothing to say. I spend part of my afternoon thinking of things to talk to Jose about when he gets home from work so that he doesn't worry about me.

I'm not sad. I'm a little panicky. But I'm having a hard time looking forward to anything. I just want to sit here and knit down my stash until I die, which, admittedly, will take a while. 

But I am being PROACTIVE. *eyeroll* I am going to theater auditions for roles I will never get and acting classes where I can pay to make people watch me perform, and more importantly, I go to places where people smile and hug me when they see me. Even if it's acting, I'll take it.

Crushed and Shaken to My Core

The American people were given a choice of a black woman who promised to restore women's bodily autonomy and to tax the ultra-wealthy in order to help the elderly stay in their homes, invest in infrastructure and green technology, which creates jobs while mitigating climate change, and pass common sense gun restrictions. Or they could choose a proven fraud, rapist, and liar who promised the impossible task of throwing out all the fucking Mexicans, Muslims, and trans people, to murder his opposition, to raise everyone's taxes, thereby crashing the economy, and to put a vaccine denier in charge of public health and a failing businessman in charge of slashing a third of the federal budget, causing "temporary hardship."

And by affirmative choice or indifference, the American people went with the grotesque, vulgar carnival barker.

We deserve the suffering that is coming, and it is a tragedy that we will drag millions of people in the rest of the world down with us.

For the first time in my 50 years of life, I no longer want to be an American citizen because we are truly the stupidest, cruelest people in the world.

Healthcare in America: the Joke That Refuses to Keep on Giving

We finally got Cigna to approve the type 1 diabetes treatment that Maggie had been getting for four years before we switched insurers. So, yay? I still have a two billing problems to deal with, but at least she is going to live long enough for to see that get straighten out.

But for myself and my non-life threatening problems...

Skin Care

Just before my mom died in 2022, my skin rebelled against me. I had a rosacea flare, pityriasis rosea, and eczema all gang up on me at once. I made an appointment with a dermatologist...for four months later, by which time, two of the three had resolved by themselves.

In the mean time, to treat my rosacea, I went online and got a prescription for low dose doxycycline and a cream that I was amused to see contained, among other things, (not covid-killing) ivermectin from a compounding pharmacy that does not bother with insurance. I had to upload a couple of the worst selfies I've ever taken and within a few days, I had my meds. Within a couple of weeks, the disfiguring bumpiness of the rosacea was under control. Some redness, evidently, I'm stuck with for life. It cost $50/mo out-of-pocket that insurance wouldn't cover, but it was at least being treated nearly immediately.

When I finally got in for my dermatology appointment, I saw a physician's assistant, not the dermatologist, who also prescribed the low dose doxycycline plus prescription strength azelaic acid. Insurance declined coverage on Oracea—40mg/day doxycycline retailing at $700/mo—but was willing to pay for generic 50mg/day caplets at less than $20/mo retail. Can someone please explain to me why it costs 35 times as much for 20% LESS of the drug. (Yes, yes, they are *slightly* different formulations, but FFS.) Similarly, they declined coverage on $450/mo Finacea foam, but paid for a generic $50 gel formulation of 15% azelaic acid. It's hard to blame the insurance for "suggesting an alternative."

When insurance changed, I stopped refilling my prescriptions for a couple of years. I use most of my energy for arguing with healthcare on taking care of Maggie. But I had a terrible breakout starting last month, and I knew exactly what I needed. I called the dermatologist. Another four month wait for an appointment. So I went online to my insurance website which referred me to a Telehealth visit—it says skin care right there on the website! I paid, made the appointment, and within 10 minutes I was talking to a doctor. Except it turns out that the harried doctor seems to have wholly misunderstand my need. He sent a prescription to the pharmacy for a 7 day course of doxycycline rather than ongoing low dose doxycycline. That is NOT what I needed. 

Soooo... I went online, uploaded more bad selfies, and for less than the cost of the Telehealth visit, I am getting enough low dose doxycycline to get me through to my dermatology appointment. Again, insurance won't cover this. 

General Health

After my mom and my brother died in quick succession, I figured I'd better go at least get a physical to see if my heart was about to give out too. It took—I shit you not—a year and a half to finally see my doctor. When I initially called, the "first available appointment" was—you guessed it—four months out. Then he went on medical leave and the office kept postponing every couple of months. After a YEAR of this, I explained that I really needed an appointment to get my blood pressure meds renewed, and I finally saw someone else in the office to get a quickie blood pressure check and routine blood work. 

Mental Health

In the mean time, I was, not shockingly, depressed. I went to find a therapist, and the few who were accepting my insurance and accepting new patients had—you guessed it—a four month wait. So I went online again and got a prescription for an antidepressant from a company that does not accept insurance, but will provide prescription meds through the mail within a couple of days rather than waiting months to see a doctor. Another $49/mo out-of-pocket for generic Wellbutrin XL, which would be entirely covered by the insurance if I could just get in to see my own doctor. *sigh*

Weight Loss

In the interim, I got a lovely letter from my insurance saying they would subsidize weight loss programs, including Noom. So I signed up for Noom, and, what with my aforementioned high blood pressure and tragically demonstrated family history of heart disease, I fit the diagnostic criteria for weight loss drugs. They shunted me into their new Noom Med program, and for $400 (partially paid for by my insurance!), I got an appointment with a nurse practitioner, orders for some blood work, and then a prescription for Wegovy. To my utter astonishment, my insurance approved it!!! Only...there was none to be had because of the shortage of injectors. I waited six months with the pharmacy saying every two weeks that they had placed a special order. Then my insurance changed again, and the new one was not paying for any part of Noom Med, and there was no guarantee they would pay for the Wegovy when Noom requested pre-authorization. Oh well... Guess I get to stay fat.

Except that if you care to, and can afford it, you can pay $200-500/mo out-of-pocket for compounded semaglutide, the same drug as Ozempic/Wegovy but without the nifty injector, through any number of dodgy websites with minimal medical supervision. 

Erectile Dysfunction

All of the above applies to erectile dysfunction meds, though this is clearly not a problem I have. 

Summary

It is easier and faster to pay out-of-pocket, without seeing a doctor, for prescription drugs that SHOULD BE COVERED THE INSURANCE, WHICH I DO HAVE AND AM PAYING A FORTUNE FOR!!!

Best healthcare in the world, eh?

I Am a Professional Actór! 🤣

Because I'm an idiot, I did end up trying out for another community theater play with Maggie. Somehow, probably because Maggie was cast as the lead and because not enough people auditioned, I actually got a small part!!!

It was directed by the same man who directed August: Osage County a couple of months ago, for which Maggie and I tried out, and in which she was cast until it turned out her conflicts for rehearsal were exactly opposite that of her scene partner. 

Unlike the three previous plays for which I auditioned, I had not read the script beforehand because it is still a work-in-progress originally written by the director's son when he was in college twenty years ago. I may not have auditioned if I had read it. The play is...something. The playwright took Charlotte's Web and presented it as a sort of psychotic fever dream of a woman on trial for murdering her infant. It is clever. Possibly too clever by half. It needed a couple of trigger warnings: dead babies and child sexual abuse. The ending just does not make sense given the content of the play. It's three hours long. And nearly all of the actors double as farm animals. Without any change to costuming. Like I said, it's...something.

But the experience was well worth it. I got to do a show with Maggie before she goes off to college. I got to do a show at all! And if and when I find something else for which to audition, I have a credit and I know some people in the local theater scene! 

I went into the show (foolishly) confident that I could "act." It turns out I did not know what acting entails. I can memorize lines. I can pretend a wide range of emotions. But other aspects surprised me. I didn't think about what it means to be physically on stage with a bunch of other people. Blocking was new. Figuring out what to do with myself when I am not the one speaking was unexpected. I found it challenging to ignore the distraction of people, especially the director, talking while we were supposed to continue rehearsing. I had not fully considered that when you do scenes over and over again, you need to act like you don't know what other people's lines are about to be! Or worse, that you may need to figure out what to do when THEY don't know their lines. 

I have a lot to learn. 

But I got paid a (tiny) stipend—seriously, toddlers in Thailand make more per hour. 

So by the most literal definition, I am a professional actor. LOLZ.

Motherfucking Medical Insurance

We had no choice of insurers when my husband started his new job. It was Cigna or go pound sand. So we have Cigna with a high deductible plan. 

I spent $2,180 for insulin pump supplies and CGMs for Maggie's continuing care (eleven years and counting) in February assuming that it was more than halfway to the deductible. I now doubt whether the supply company checked with Cigna for prior authorization before shipping the supplies, but I know I DID provide the insurance information. Cigna still hasn't finished processing the claim. I don't know whether they are ultimately going to cover it and will apply the $2,180 toward the $4,000 deductible. I'm about to need to order more, still not knowing whether they will cover it. If they do, this would put us over the deductible and mean that we would be done spending money on Maggie's T1D care for the year. Or maybe we are just on the hook for it because they just don't consider that the gold standard of type 1 diabetes care that she has been getting for over a decade through two different insurers and multiple policies is "medically necessary." Every trial done shows the very DUH result that "sensor-augmented pump therapy" is the best way to control blood sugar in type 1 diabetes and to minimize both short and long term complications. That sounds pretty fucking medically necessary to me, but what do I know? I'm not a claims specialist at an insurance company. 

It is now been a full two months since our pharmacist told me that Cigna will not cover the brand of insulin that the previous TWO insurers approved without hesitation. I asked the endo office if Maggie would really have to switch to less effective insulin, and they said they would request prior authorization. I'm still waiting TWO MONTHS LATER, and we are down to the last of the kind of insulin that both CDPHP and BCBS paid for without question or fuss. 

It is INSANE that an insurer can decide that they will not pay for PERFECTLY FUCKING STANDARD treatment that has been working brilliantly for a decade. 

I have been pinging the endo every week or so and the latest was that Cigna says have no record of Maggie being insured. Weird because she has an online account with claims that are being processed, and the pharmacy told me that Cigna would pay for Humalog rather than Fiasp, so THEY know she's insured.

We happened to have a lot of insulin backed up, but it's been two fucking months. We have about three weeks before she runs out of insulin and becomes gravely ill. There is URGENCY here, folks. You'd think healthcare people, both doctor's office and insurer, would know that.

I'm sure that a hospital will view it as medically necessary to admit her when she goes into DKA. Maybe Cigna won't. Who knows?

Fucking Medical Insurance

The good news is that I am finally down to only ONE medical claim from 2022 that is in dispute! For...reasons, Edgepark Medical Supply submitted claims for some, but not all, of Maggie's CGM supplies to our insurance company as durable medical equipment with a 50% copay instead of diabetes supplies with a $15 copay. I've spent the last two years trying to get them to fix this. Edgepark blames BCBS, BCBS blames Edgepark, and I keep getting bills I shouldn't have to pay. And I keep calling to explain, yet again, what happened and why it needs to be fixed, only to be told that it will all be resolved in 45 business days. Rinse, repeat. 

But like I said, down to just ONE claim left and then maybe they can stop calling me. And emailing me.

On the other hand, I am utterly flummoxed by our new health insurance. With Jose's new job, we did not have a choice of insurers, but we had a choice of plans, all with Cigna. We made our best guess about how much each plan would cost us, given our particular medical needs. The cheapest seemed to be a high deductible plan where the employer reimburses us for the majority of the deductible. 

I've never had a plan with a deductible, so this was gonna be new. I thought I understood it. We pay the first $8,000 in expenses, of which the employer reimburses us for the first $6,500, and insurance covers whatever exceeds the total deductible.

The first test was picking up prescriptions for me and Jose, our cheap-ass generic blood pressure meds. There was no copay at all. OK, cool? I knew some insurers were not charging copays for (cheap) preventative drugs to encourage people to manage chronic conditions, so maybe this was that.

Jose went to two cardiology appointments that had been set up the year before under the old insurance. They said they would bill him. I'm still waiting for those bills...two months later. 

Then I went for a checkup. I paid the office's estimate before the appointment because there was a discount for prepayment. At the pharmacy afterward, I was charged $3.25 for a clonazepam prescription, necessary for those days when I have to spend hours on the phone calling about health insurance. The $3.25 appeared quickly on the insurance webpage as counting toward the deductible. 

Both Jose and I got MRIs for calcium scores, which are recommended by doctors, but NOT covered by insurance because why would they? Fuckers. But they're relatively cheap by American medical care standards, so $85 to know my heart isn't ossifying was a tolerable price.

I waited some more.

Finally, a claim for my checkup appeared in my benefits portal, and it showed $176.32 paid to the doctor and nothing owed by me and nothing counted toward the deductible. Is it because it was preventative care and therefore the ACA required it be covered 100% without copays? Dunno? If so, why did the doctor's office charge me, knowing I had insurance? And if Cigna paid them $176, where is my $250 prepayment?

More critically, I ordered infusion sets, CGMs, and insulin pump cartridges for Maggie. The CGM sensors should retail for less than $100 each; the sets for about $80/box of ten; the cartridges for another $50/box of 10. We have always gotten all of it from Edgepark for a small copay for three months' worth of supplies at a time. However, trying to meet the deductible, one might expect that I would have had to pay about $900 for sensors, $320 for sets, and $200 for cartridges, for a total of around $1400. The retail prices listed on Edgepark's paperwork are INSANELY higher than those average figures from a quick google search. But WTF? We are going to hit the deductible one way or another, and those internet sites don't take insurance, soooo.... I paid the $2180 and quickly got reimbursed. 

However, the cost hasn't shown up as counting toward the deductible. And we will need another three rounds of those supplies by the end of the year, easily exceeding both the $6,500 reimbursement allowance and the deductible that they're not seemingly counting toward. 

Fuck.

The next thing is insulin. The pharmacy tried to fill Maggie's insulin prescription, but they said that Cigna doesn't cover Fiasp, which she has been using for years. I asked the doctor whether we needed pre-authorization and if could she get it. I've been pinging her regularly, but we don't seem to be connecting on the problem. I am guessing she is assuming the pharmacy is asking for preauthorization, but they seem to think that is not a possibility so maybe they haven't even asked the insurance company? Dunno. 

So I decided I would call the employer benefits people, the customer care team whose job it is to help us navigate this mess, to ask about these two things, and while I was at it, whether Cigna covers the Omnipod insulin pump, which Maggie would like to switch to. 

That was...protracted and ultimately pointless. 

A very nice guy named Ed said he didn't know what to say about my checkup but he would get back to me about it. Then he looped the pharmacy benefit people into the call to ask about Fiasp. (I could have called them myself, but whatever.) A very not-nice woman took all my information, and Maggie's information, then told me that Fiasp isn't on the formulary, which I knew. But she simply would not tell me whether it was covered after pre-authorization because it's not for me, it's for Maggie, and she's over 18, and I would need her permission to call on her behalf. 

FFS. I didn't ask for Maggie's medical history. I asked whether the insurance policy covers XXXX. For anyone at all. Nope. She wouldn't say. She then forced me and Ed to go through their customer service survey, and let me tell you, she did not do well. Lots of 1s out of 5. No, my question was not answered with this call, and no, I would not recommend Maxor+ to other people. 

I guess I can call tomorrow while Maggie is home and get her to give them her permission to ask questions on her behalf. Or I can call again and just pretend to be her. I know more of the answers to their security questions than she does. So then maybe we will find out whether they will pay for her insulin or not. And while we're at it, whether they will pay for the Omnipod, because I now have ZERO incentive to try to save them money by stretching the life of Maggie's Tandem pump if they're gonna be shitty about my kid's life-sustaining healthcare. 

#MedicareForAll

I Miss My Mommy

On a day-to-day basis, I miss my mom. I think to text or call her, like, ALL the time. But some days, I really, REALLY miss my mom.

Today is one of those days. I want to talk to my mom about how much I have ended up needing my kids' approval. And how I will never have it from Maggie.

I will always be a disappointment to her. I will never impress her. 

It is what it is. 

And I know that it's too much to ask it of her. She's not my therapist or my mother. She's my child.

And I know my mom would understand my needing Maggie's approval anyway because I know that she spent the last half of her life desperately hoping that her children approved of her parenting choices. 

When Antonio was a toddler, she was carrying him, and she tripped on her flip-flop on the way to the car and she fell down and took him with her. He might have bonked his head, and he was quite upset. I was startled but not especially worried. My mom stood up as I was picking a crying Antonio up and the look of abject terror in her eyes when she apologized to me was heartbreaking. She was so incredibly scared that I would be angry with her for that little accident, for hurting my baby. I was not the least upset with her. Things happen. But god, the horrible fear in her frantic eyes will stay with me forever. 

My mom was a better mother than I could ever have been. And yet, she was afraid of my opinion of her. I told her she was ever so much better than me, but she didn't believe me. She somehow believed my half-assed, impatient, inadequate bullshit was somehow better than her effortless motherliness.

I never should have had children.

It Was a Stupid Idea Anyway

Just like the rest of my stupid ideas, trying acting was a stupid idea.

Maggie and I auditioned for a play together, and her tepid response tells me everything I needed to know. I really shouldn't bother doing this again.

She got her part.

I didn't get any of the three parts for which I was age-appropriate. If I had been the director, I wouldn't have cast me either.

And I'm not doing this again. 

The false kindness of encouraging everyone who comes out to audition is, in the long run, quite cruel. We are not talented. Just say so rather than wasting everyone's time. 

And now I have to be a big girl and a good mom and be excited for Maggie while I feel crushed and, even worse, stupid for ever thinking I could do this.

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.