Saturday, December 3, 2011
Nice day for a picture.
Guantanamo, here I come!
Have been taking advantage of this generally dreary day to wash dishes, do laundry, make another trip to the grocery store, dread the oncoming winter, catch up on the news--and made the lottery-winning discovery that, indeed, I shall be able to afford a long retirement in a warm climate!
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . . Sun, warm ocean breezes, “three hots and a cot,” free medical care, for as long as I happen to live . . .
And all because I occasionally read non-(not necessarily anti-) American newspapers, once took a college class about Islam, used to give “special privileges” in terms of scheduling to one of our pediatricians (who was Muslim), and on top of all that NEVER go to church, has never, to his knowledge, been called by God to do ANYthing, much less run for president or something equally exalted.
Who would ever have thought those relatively trivial pieces of my life could come together to fund my dreamed-of retirement? Who would ever have thought that I would owe all this to freaking REPUBLICANS (and a couple of turncoat Democrats, including at least one from my own state)???
I should send personalized thank-you notes to every one of the blessed 61 senators who voted against the Udall amendment to the defense appropriations bill. That tiresome amendment would have excluded the provision of the bill giving the executive branch and military the “right” to detain even Americans, on American soil, forever without even naming a charge, much less going through the hassle of a trial and all that noise.
Unless that Hitlerite Muslim born-somewhere-else IMPOSTOR in the White House vetoes the bill, I figure it’s only a matter of time before somebody rats me out and the U.S. Govt flies me to Cuba to while away my remaining days.
And JUST in time, too, because my current livelihood is being exported to a different warm climate halfway around the world.
Hmmm . . . Maybe if I rat on my dogs’ and cats’ disturbingly socialist tendencies (they share their food sometimes, sleep--just sleep, they’re all “fixed” except one--together, generally get along well), the government will fly them down there with me!
Probably it will be crowded in the 45 square miles of our base in Guantanamo, but I suppose I can sacrifice a little privacy in exchange for what the Grand Old Party plans for me.
I can practically smell those warm ocean breezes already!
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . . Sun, warm ocean breezes, “three hots and a cot,” free medical care, for as long as I happen to live . . .
And all because I occasionally read non-(not necessarily anti-) American newspapers, once took a college class about Islam, used to give “special privileges” in terms of scheduling to one of our pediatricians (who was Muslim), and on top of all that NEVER go to church, has never, to his knowledge, been called by God to do ANYthing, much less run for president or something equally exalted.
Who would ever have thought those relatively trivial pieces of my life could come together to fund my dreamed-of retirement? Who would ever have thought that I would owe all this to freaking REPUBLICANS (and a couple of turncoat Democrats, including at least one from my own state)???
I should send personalized thank-you notes to every one of the blessed 61 senators who voted against the Udall amendment to the defense appropriations bill. That tiresome amendment would have excluded the provision of the bill giving the executive branch and military the “right” to detain even Americans, on American soil, forever without even naming a charge, much less going through the hassle of a trial and all that noise.
Unless that Hitlerite Muslim born-somewhere-else IMPOSTOR in the White House vetoes the bill, I figure it’s only a matter of time before somebody rats me out and the U.S. Govt flies me to Cuba to while away my remaining days.
And JUST in time, too, because my current livelihood is being exported to a different warm climate halfway around the world.
Hmmm . . . Maybe if I rat on my dogs’ and cats’ disturbingly socialist tendencies (they share their food sometimes, sleep--just sleep, they’re all “fixed” except one--together, generally get along well), the government will fly them down there with me!
Probably it will be crowded in the 45 square miles of our base in Guantanamo, but I suppose I can sacrifice a little privacy in exchange for what the Grand Old Party plans for me.
I can practically smell those warm ocean breezes already!
Friday, December 2, 2011
Preambling.
A weird concatenation of Facebook and more real-life events today sent me meandering down odd paths until I wound up stumbling across this, which many may recognize as the preamble to the Constitution of the United States:
“We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Archaic language aside, and the fact that it is the only paragraph in the Constitution NOT considered law aside, it remains an impressive statement and vision of what our “founding fathers” meant for our nation to become.
Such OPTIMISTS they were!
Rereading it even from my now 21st-century vantage point, I mentally summarize it as saying, “We’re all in this together, and we’re standing together not just for ourselves, but for our children.” Pretty simple stuff--and pretty heady stuff, as well.
Now, I know (or think I remember, anyway) that only about one-third of the country’s populace supported the American Revolution, another third stood steadfastly on the side of King George III (NOT “Dubya”), and the other third was more or less neutral, being more interested in keeping themselves and their children fed and housed. We’ve only become more fragmented, socially, as the centuries have progressed since the care-free 1780’s.
(Parenthetical revelation: Maybe the Preamble is where people get the notion that this nation was founded on “Christian principles,” whatever those might be. I’ll think about that tomorrow, or maybe the next day.)
“We’re all in this together.” “One for all, all for one.” “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” “I‘ve got your back.” “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
See a trend, here?
Sad thing is, we all give lip service to all of this stuff, but when it comes to actual “action?” Not so much.
Somehow we’ve become much more about “competition,” much less about “cooperation.”
There really shouldn’t be a battle between those two concepts--they CAN coexist, maybe even peacefully, if we don’t get too wrapped up in one or the other.
There used to be another “c” word--”compromise,” I think it was. Two “sides” each give a little, and by doing so, together they “promote the general welfare.” Everybody wins, maybe not as much as they would like to, but nobody “loses.” We’ve lost that “everybody wins” idea, and I’m not talking about every kid getting an “A” so as to protect their precious self-esteem.
Our forefathers had a fascinating vision. They weren’t always good at promoting it (anybody remember the “Alien and Sedition Act”?, or, um, the “peculiar institution,” slavery?), but their hearts and minds were in the right place. Somehow they managed to see beyond what we/they were, and imagine what “could” be.
Heady stuff.
So how have we, as a nation and a people, managed to drift so far from the ideals with which they prefaced, or preambled, the Constitution that holds us together?
How has “welfare”--as in, you know, “promote the general welfare”--become a swear word, or at least a pejorative?
When did we learn to start hating each other so much?
I think it was Dubya’s fault. Or maybe Obama’s, I get ‘em mixed up. Or maybe it was the Tea Party (I HATE tea) or the “Occupiers” or maybe even Sarah Palin’s (she does have a lot to answer for).
Remind me to burn my voter registration card.
“We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Archaic language aside, and the fact that it is the only paragraph in the Constitution NOT considered law aside, it remains an impressive statement and vision of what our “founding fathers” meant for our nation to become.
Such OPTIMISTS they were!
Rereading it even from my now 21st-century vantage point, I mentally summarize it as saying, “We’re all in this together, and we’re standing together not just for ourselves, but for our children.” Pretty simple stuff--and pretty heady stuff, as well.
Now, I know (or think I remember, anyway) that only about one-third of the country’s populace supported the American Revolution, another third stood steadfastly on the side of King George III (NOT “Dubya”), and the other third was more or less neutral, being more interested in keeping themselves and their children fed and housed. We’ve only become more fragmented, socially, as the centuries have progressed since the care-free 1780’s.
(Parenthetical revelation: Maybe the Preamble is where people get the notion that this nation was founded on “Christian principles,” whatever those might be. I’ll think about that tomorrow, or maybe the next day.)
“We’re all in this together.” “One for all, all for one.” “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” “I‘ve got your back.” “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
See a trend, here?
Sad thing is, we all give lip service to all of this stuff, but when it comes to actual “action?” Not so much.
Somehow we’ve become much more about “competition,” much less about “cooperation.”
There really shouldn’t be a battle between those two concepts--they CAN coexist, maybe even peacefully, if we don’t get too wrapped up in one or the other.
There used to be another “c” word--”compromise,” I think it was. Two “sides” each give a little, and by doing so, together they “promote the general welfare.” Everybody wins, maybe not as much as they would like to, but nobody “loses.” We’ve lost that “everybody wins” idea, and I’m not talking about every kid getting an “A” so as to protect their precious self-esteem.
Our forefathers had a fascinating vision. They weren’t always good at promoting it (anybody remember the “Alien and Sedition Act”?, or, um, the “peculiar institution,” slavery?), but their hearts and minds were in the right place. Somehow they managed to see beyond what we/they were, and imagine what “could” be.
Heady stuff.
So how have we, as a nation and a people, managed to drift so far from the ideals with which they prefaced, or preambled, the Constitution that holds us together?
How has “welfare”--as in, you know, “promote the general welfare”--become a swear word, or at least a pejorative?
When did we learn to start hating each other so much?
I think it was Dubya’s fault. Or maybe Obama’s, I get ‘em mixed up. Or maybe it was the Tea Party (I HATE tea) or the “Occupiers” or maybe even Sarah Palin’s (she does have a lot to answer for).
Remind me to burn my voter registration card.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Any twit can handle a crisis.
Spending eight hours a day, five days a week listening to and transcribing dictated medical reports can twist your brain in odd ways.
For instance, we’ve probably all heard horror stories about catastrophic events in other people’s lives--car crashes, cancer diagnoses, disappearing children, stock market downturns, election of a black guy to the presidency, etc.--and said to ourselves, “there, but for the grace of God,” and so on.
But in the immortal words of Flo Capp, “Any twit can handle a crisis, it’s the day-to-day living that whacks you.” (Or something like that--tried to Google it, came up with a lot of variations on the same theme.)
My own day-to-day living hasn’t particularly whacked me lately--I’ve been lucky in that regard--but still every day I hear stories of people surviving day-to-day stuff that WOULD whack me, if I had to endure it.
It’s not the crises that get my attention. Instead, it is the “little stuff.”
I transcribe mostly acute care reports, hospital stuff--admissions and operations, etc. Many, if not most people admitted to hospitals these days are in pretty bad straits, health-wise, already, or their care would have been handled on an outpatient basis, and damned near anything can be handled on an outpatient basis, these days. That means every day I hear the “worst,” not the “everyday.”
Sometimes it seems, though, that the "everyday" has become the "worst."
Even if the health problems, the diseases or acute events or whatever brought the people to the hospital didn’t get my attention, the details of their everyday lives would. Seems like every patient, every PERSON, is on a dozen or more medications and supplements. Imaginative guy that I am, I envision these poor people imprisoned in a daily routine of taking their heart medicines and cholesterol medicines and diabetes medicines and hypertension medicines and on and on and on, at a dizzying array of intervals, when looked at all together. I cannot imagine even what it would be like having that many medicine bottles in my medicine cabinet, much less remembering to take every one of them at the appropriate time, much less remembering to get them refilled, MUCH less managing to pay for them all.
For an awful lot of people, just keeping themselves medicated strikes me as equivalent to a full-time job (with mandatory overtime).
From my so-far unmedicated vantage point, I cannot help but wonder if a life that has been relegated mostly to a medical regimen is really all that worth living?
At some point, don’t a lot of these folks just want to say, “fuck it, I’ve had a good life, I’ve enjoyed flowers, kittens, exuberant beagles, sunrises and sunsets, grandparents and kids and people, and I cannot even really see any of them anymore, don‘t really even remember them anymore--time to catch the “last train for the coast, today life’s music died,” or something like that?
Sitting here transcribing endless lists of medications and idly envisioning a daily life devoted mostly to taking those medications, and realizing that, unless I step unaware in front of a bus or get tackled from an unfortunate angle by a wannabe-linebacker beagle on one of my morning perambulations, or some other calamity befalls me, such a daily life is inevitably in my future. The medical profession has pretty much ensured that.
I’ve had this conversation with my near-octogenarian dad a few times. “You know who wants most to live to be 100?” he asked me once. I shook my head. “The 99-year-old,” he said.
As I say, my perspective is skewed by what I do for a living. I never hear about happy, healthy people of any age--happy, healthy people don’t check into hospitals and generate “medical records,” after all, so how WOULD I hear about them?
For instance, we’ve probably all heard horror stories about catastrophic events in other people’s lives--car crashes, cancer diagnoses, disappearing children, stock market downturns, election of a black guy to the presidency, etc.--and said to ourselves, “there, but for the grace of God,” and so on.
But in the immortal words of Flo Capp, “Any twit can handle a crisis, it’s the day-to-day living that whacks you.” (Or something like that--tried to Google it, came up with a lot of variations on the same theme.)
My own day-to-day living hasn’t particularly whacked me lately--I’ve been lucky in that regard--but still every day I hear stories of people surviving day-to-day stuff that WOULD whack me, if I had to endure it.
It’s not the crises that get my attention. Instead, it is the “little stuff.”
I transcribe mostly acute care reports, hospital stuff--admissions and operations, etc. Many, if not most people admitted to hospitals these days are in pretty bad straits, health-wise, already, or their care would have been handled on an outpatient basis, and damned near anything can be handled on an outpatient basis, these days. That means every day I hear the “worst,” not the “everyday.”
Sometimes it seems, though, that the "everyday" has become the "worst."
Even if the health problems, the diseases or acute events or whatever brought the people to the hospital didn’t get my attention, the details of their everyday lives would. Seems like every patient, every PERSON, is on a dozen or more medications and supplements. Imaginative guy that I am, I envision these poor people imprisoned in a daily routine of taking their heart medicines and cholesterol medicines and diabetes medicines and hypertension medicines and on and on and on, at a dizzying array of intervals, when looked at all together. I cannot imagine even what it would be like having that many medicine bottles in my medicine cabinet, much less remembering to take every one of them at the appropriate time, much less remembering to get them refilled, MUCH less managing to pay for them all.
For an awful lot of people, just keeping themselves medicated strikes me as equivalent to a full-time job (with mandatory overtime).
From my so-far unmedicated vantage point, I cannot help but wonder if a life that has been relegated mostly to a medical regimen is really all that worth living?
At some point, don’t a lot of these folks just want to say, “fuck it, I’ve had a good life, I’ve enjoyed flowers, kittens, exuberant beagles, sunrises and sunsets, grandparents and kids and people, and I cannot even really see any of them anymore, don‘t really even remember them anymore--time to catch the “last train for the coast, today life’s music died,” or something like that?
Sitting here transcribing endless lists of medications and idly envisioning a daily life devoted mostly to taking those medications, and realizing that, unless I step unaware in front of a bus or get tackled from an unfortunate angle by a wannabe-linebacker beagle on one of my morning perambulations, or some other calamity befalls me, such a daily life is inevitably in my future. The medical profession has pretty much ensured that.
I’ve had this conversation with my near-octogenarian dad a few times. “You know who wants most to live to be 100?” he asked me once. I shook my head. “The 99-year-old,” he said.
As I say, my perspective is skewed by what I do for a living. I never hear about happy, healthy people of any age--happy, healthy people don’t check into hospitals and generate “medical records,” after all, so how WOULD I hear about them?
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Ashes and Dust.
One of the last reports I transcribed last night was a “death summary.” The patient (whyinhell are they called “patients,” anyway?) was elderly, though not particularly old at 81, had a fairly nondescript past medical history, wasn’t taking the customary 28 medications and supplements that most people her age (and much younger) seem to consume every day, had several family members in attendance for her grand, albeit unexpected, finale. She had just caught a pneumonia a couple of weeks ago, was apparently recovering from that, but then developed a pulmonary embolism from having been flat on her back in a hospital for a few days.
Nothing about her “story,” as I heard it, dictated in slow, measured tones by a doctor who seemed genuinely to care about the lady and her family, was particularly noteworthy, I suppose. As I do with all death summaries, though, I was as careful as I could be to get every dictated detail accurately--death, after all, is not the same thing as a sore throat or a fractured tibia. A death summary is the permanent “permanent record,” so you want to get it as right as you can. Yes, yes, I know--it’s just the final few hours or even moments of a real person’s life, does not begin to capture what the person was, who s/he was, how much s/he might have mattered to the grandkids or the coworkers or even in her role as “crazy cat lady” in some flyover Midwestern neighborhood. Still, it was her last moments, and deserved to be recorded accurately and, more importantly, with respect.
So I made sure the “i’s” got dotted and the “t’s” got crossed and all the commas got put in the right place. It was the least I could do.
Having been in this business for a while, I’ve transcribed a lot of death summaries. The one I remember forever is the first one I ever transcribed, concerning a 4-year-old boy who one day started walking funny--”my little crooked man,” his mother called him. His name was Drew (I even remember his last name, but won’t repeat it here--it’s a privacy thing, you know?). The doctor dictating the report was the general pediatric section chief I worked for, and who had hosted just hours earlier a retirement party for another doctor in our section.
It was late January, snowed a ton that day. I had fortunately just put new all-weather tires on the car, so had little trouble making it over to section chief’s house, where I shoveled snow off her sidewalk and front porch, helped greet people (including another of our pediatricians, who was about 8 months pregnant and took a fall, stumbling over the curb). Good night, at least to that point and even to the end of the party.
Monday morning I came in to find a micro-cassette on my desk, awaiting transcription. I plugged it in, then listened to my boss relate the story of Drew and his final moments, which came to pass about two hours after the retirement party ended. “His eyes rolled back in his head,” my boss dictated--and the 4-year-old was gone.
Two years after that, not long before said boss was getting ready to move to Minnesota, I was at my desk one morning and got a call from an inpatient floor, about one of our longstanding patients with a longstanding “idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis.” The patient, a girl named Pam who was born on Valentine’s Day 1972 and who doggedly worked towards a degree in allied health professions even while lugging around an oxygen tank, had been admitted a day or two earlier. “Pam’s gone,” the caller told me. And for the first time in four years of working with her, I tracked my boss down in a patient room and interrupted her examination of a patient. “It’s Pam,” she said, the instant I poked my head in the door.
On Monday, just a couple of days later, I was transcribing Pam’s death summary.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is all fine and everything, when the ashes and ashes or the dust and dust have at least a little something--you know, a “life”--separating them.
(And how I got off on this particular tangent, I will never know.)
Nothing about her “story,” as I heard it, dictated in slow, measured tones by a doctor who seemed genuinely to care about the lady and her family, was particularly noteworthy, I suppose. As I do with all death summaries, though, I was as careful as I could be to get every dictated detail accurately--death, after all, is not the same thing as a sore throat or a fractured tibia. A death summary is the permanent “permanent record,” so you want to get it as right as you can. Yes, yes, I know--it’s just the final few hours or even moments of a real person’s life, does not begin to capture what the person was, who s/he was, how much s/he might have mattered to the grandkids or the coworkers or even in her role as “crazy cat lady” in some flyover Midwestern neighborhood. Still, it was her last moments, and deserved to be recorded accurately and, more importantly, with respect.
So I made sure the “i’s” got dotted and the “t’s” got crossed and all the commas got put in the right place. It was the least I could do.
Having been in this business for a while, I’ve transcribed a lot of death summaries. The one I remember forever is the first one I ever transcribed, concerning a 4-year-old boy who one day started walking funny--”my little crooked man,” his mother called him. His name was Drew (I even remember his last name, but won’t repeat it here--it’s a privacy thing, you know?). The doctor dictating the report was the general pediatric section chief I worked for, and who had hosted just hours earlier a retirement party for another doctor in our section.
It was late January, snowed a ton that day. I had fortunately just put new all-weather tires on the car, so had little trouble making it over to section chief’s house, where I shoveled snow off her sidewalk and front porch, helped greet people (including another of our pediatricians, who was about 8 months pregnant and took a fall, stumbling over the curb). Good night, at least to that point and even to the end of the party.
Monday morning I came in to find a micro-cassette on my desk, awaiting transcription. I plugged it in, then listened to my boss relate the story of Drew and his final moments, which came to pass about two hours after the retirement party ended. “His eyes rolled back in his head,” my boss dictated--and the 4-year-old was gone.
Two years after that, not long before said boss was getting ready to move to Minnesota, I was at my desk one morning and got a call from an inpatient floor, about one of our longstanding patients with a longstanding “idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis.” The patient, a girl named Pam who was born on Valentine’s Day 1972 and who doggedly worked towards a degree in allied health professions even while lugging around an oxygen tank, had been admitted a day or two earlier. “Pam’s gone,” the caller told me. And for the first time in four years of working with her, I tracked my boss down in a patient room and interrupted her examination of a patient. “It’s Pam,” she said, the instant I poked my head in the door.
On Monday, just a couple of days later, I was transcribing Pam’s death summary.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is all fine and everything, when the ashes and ashes or the dust and dust have at least a little something--you know, a “life”--separating them.
(And how I got off on this particular tangent, I will never know.)
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
If familiarity breeds contempt, why does absence make the heart grow fonder?
About halfway through an out-loud polysyllabic characterization of a dictator (physician dictating medical report, that is) a while ago, it occurred to me that the dictator may not in fact indulge in the activity to which that compound term specifically referred (think “suck-start a Harley,” you’ll get the drift), and that I was probably being unfair calling the guy a “blank-blanker,” despite the fact that he seemed to be talking with his mouth full and his teeth tightly clenched (ouch!).
One of the joys of working at home, in this particular profession, is that we never have to meet the people whose voices reverberate continuously in our heads, any given day. While generally I am neither surly nor dismissive enough to call some of these folks to their faces what I call them out loud, in the privacy of my own home office every day, after working at home for nearly 10 years, I’m not sure I could re-learn the necessary skill of keeping one’s mouth shut--discretion being the better part of valor--in a more public workplace again.
Flipside of that is, sometimes even antisocial “I” miss the social contact, the ability actually to ask a dictator what he thought he was saying, or even just say “good morning” to the guy without wanting to reach out and strangle the life out of him so that he can no longer fuck up my production (and paycheck) with his clenched-teeth, mouth-full, incoherent mumbles that I‘m sure he thinks make him sound cool and professional.
Sometimes I miss simple eye contact--and no, stare-downs with cats don’t count.
I was in my forties before I took a work-at-home job, and that was probably good. I’m not sure I could have handled it when I was younger, before I had amassed a solid quarter-century of working “out in the world,” with a variety of people, and had in fact worn my generally introverted self OUT working with said variety.
First thing I learned was that, even from a thousand miles away, our first instinct is to “connect” somehow with the people whose voices are relentlessly invading our heads. Even though we will never meet the owners of those voices, we want almost desperately to care about them and what they do, and by extension, the patients they care for every day of the world--when we care, we become better, more efficient, more productive. We become “value added,” we feel that, and it matters to us.
A long time ago one of the people I transcribed for in an RL environment--that is, we shared the same suite of offices at the same Kansas City address, actually breathed the same air, endured the same weather, took the same elevators, walked the same streets, etc.--was a wonderful pediatrician, about 5 feet 2, blonde, smart and warm and funny as hell but never sarcastic or even accidentally mean, who would retreat into her office with the mini-cassette recorder after seeing a kid referred in from somewhere, spend an hour slaving over a report, with much pausing and rewinding and fast-forwarding and so forth, and finally emerge, hand me the cassette and say, “work your magic!” That my “magic” amounted mostly to punctuating, getting the grammar right (not that she ever had any problem with that), spelling everything correctly, etc., didn’t matter--she truly thought, and made me feel, that I “added value” in the process. And so I probably did.
I cared about her, and wanted to help make her “look” as good as I possibly could.
Working “remotely,” I try to recapture that same kind of “bond,” but it’s tough.
Familiarity may breed contempt, but absence of familiarity can do the same, and either way, it sucks.
One of the joys of working at home, in this particular profession, is that we never have to meet the people whose voices reverberate continuously in our heads, any given day. While generally I am neither surly nor dismissive enough to call some of these folks to their faces what I call them out loud, in the privacy of my own home office every day, after working at home for nearly 10 years, I’m not sure I could re-learn the necessary skill of keeping one’s mouth shut--discretion being the better part of valor--in a more public workplace again.
Flipside of that is, sometimes even antisocial “I” miss the social contact, the ability actually to ask a dictator what he thought he was saying, or even just say “good morning” to the guy without wanting to reach out and strangle the life out of him so that he can no longer fuck up my production (and paycheck) with his clenched-teeth, mouth-full, incoherent mumbles that I‘m sure he thinks make him sound cool and professional.
Sometimes I miss simple eye contact--and no, stare-downs with cats don’t count.
I was in my forties before I took a work-at-home job, and that was probably good. I’m not sure I could have handled it when I was younger, before I had amassed a solid quarter-century of working “out in the world,” with a variety of people, and had in fact worn my generally introverted self OUT working with said variety.
First thing I learned was that, even from a thousand miles away, our first instinct is to “connect” somehow with the people whose voices are relentlessly invading our heads. Even though we will never meet the owners of those voices, we want almost desperately to care about them and what they do, and by extension, the patients they care for every day of the world--when we care, we become better, more efficient, more productive. We become “value added,” we feel that, and it matters to us.
A long time ago one of the people I transcribed for in an RL environment--that is, we shared the same suite of offices at the same Kansas City address, actually breathed the same air, endured the same weather, took the same elevators, walked the same streets, etc.--was a wonderful pediatrician, about 5 feet 2, blonde, smart and warm and funny as hell but never sarcastic or even accidentally mean, who would retreat into her office with the mini-cassette recorder after seeing a kid referred in from somewhere, spend an hour slaving over a report, with much pausing and rewinding and fast-forwarding and so forth, and finally emerge, hand me the cassette and say, “work your magic!” That my “magic” amounted mostly to punctuating, getting the grammar right (not that she ever had any problem with that), spelling everything correctly, etc., didn’t matter--she truly thought, and made me feel, that I “added value” in the process. And so I probably did.
I cared about her, and wanted to help make her “look” as good as I possibly could.
Working “remotely,” I try to recapture that same kind of “bond,” but it’s tough.
Familiarity may breed contempt, but absence of familiarity can do the same, and either way, it sucks.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Tebow-Mania Part 2
Asked if, when he was praying during a San Diego field goal attempt in overtime of last night’s game, he had asked for a miss, Denver quarterback Tim Tebow, widely maligned for both his throwing motion and his open Christianity, laughed. "I might have said that. Or maybe a block. Maybe all of it."
The kick missed, Tebow and the Denver offense got another chance, and he marched them down the field, the Broncos scored a field goal and won the game.
Personally, I doubt there was any kind of “divine intervention” in San Diego’s missed field goal attempt, which was a longish one anyway--I suspect God has more on his mind than the outcome of a particular professional football game, at any given moment. I also doubt that Tim Tebow truly believes God cares which team wins in any given game. Times like that, I suspect that Tebow, and probably most Christians--and anyone else in the habit of praying to a “higher power”--in a similar situation, use prayer more as a way to focus and achieve some kind of inner calm than to try to influence God to influence the outcome.
That’s only a guess, though.
Come tomorrow, I predict that 98% of sportswriters, and closer to 100% of commenters on stories about the Denver-San Diego game, will be dismissing Tebow’s efforts (and, in fairness, he had a solid, but definitely not spectacular game), talking up the Denver defense (which deserves it), and probably dissecting the San Diego coach’s many failures (probably also deserved).
However Tebow’s career eventually plays out, I predict the same post-game outcome every week throughout every regular season and every postseason game in which he plays.
I’m also going to go out on a limb, here, and predict that he will have a longer and much more successful career than most “experts” are forecasting for him. Beyond the fact that he works at it, he apparently is a “born leader”--he makes the people around him better, and they believe in him. Never discount the “confidence factor,” both when it comes to self-confidence--not arrogance--and the confidence someone inspires in those around him/her.
As a lot of people who know more about Tebow than I do, which actually isn’t much, have said since his Florida college days, “he just wins.”
Wouldn’t it be SOOOO cool to get somebody with that quality in a position of national leadership? (One caveat: He/she had better NOT say “God told him/her to run;” count my vote immediately for the other guy/gal in that case.)
But “born leaders” no longer run for president or even congressperson or senator. Only “born followers,” people who will go where the “money” tells them to go, throw their hats in the ring (because that’s where the money is), in a tradeoff for the “power” they crave. They don’t even seem to recognize their essential powerlessness when they sell themselves to whomever lines their pockets most luxuriously.
In a time when we desperately need leaders with what sportswriters call “intangibles,” the kind of natural leadership ability that someone like Tim Tebow virtually exudes, instead we get people like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain and that nut from Texas and Baseball Glove from Massachusetts and on and on and on. Huntsman has potential, but he is a Mormon (Christians will never vote for him. There goes the GOP “base”). Salamander guy, Newt, would look a whole lot better if he didn’t want 9-year-olds cleaning school toilets, and if he did have any kind of “moral” leg to stand on, and if he hadn’t gone to grade school with God‘s grandmother. Have I forgotten anyone? Oh yeah, the older-than-dirt guy, Ron Paul. Pass. (This is not “age-ism;” even my staunchly conservative 79-year-old father thinks we need younger blood in the presidency, as long as it isn’t, um, you know, what we have now. It‘s a tough job that requires a lot of strength and energy that a septuagenarian, or whatever Paul is, may simply lack) Sarah Pales-in-Comparison-to-virtually-anyone is still hanging in the wings, waiting for the GOP to draft her--which it sounds like they might be thinking about.
On the other side we have Mr. Obama, whom I actually like in a lot of ways, but who also seems to lack “traditional” leadership qualities. He is not the “my-way-or-the-highway” kind of guy that, say, Shrub (thank you, Molly Ivins, and may you rest in peace) Bush was, which is not a bad thing--except when it comes to inspiring the majority of the electorate (middle-aged and older folks, more accustomed to and comfortable with the Shrub style, are neither accustomed to nor willing to be comfortable with a more conciliatory, more inclusive approach to governance).
But hell, Obama takes flak for continuing a tradition, started by a Republican, Bush-wayyy-senior I think, of pardoning a pair of turkeys on Thanksgiving--just a lighthearted, fun Republican tradition, and he gets hammered for it. He, his wife and daughters serve up food to homeless people on Thanksgiving day, and it is derided as a “mere photo op”--never mind that everything they DO is a photo op, it’s the nature of the beast, but they were STILL standing there on that serving line, helping other people when they could have been home watching football games or something.
And I’ve wandered far afield of wherever I meant to go, here.
The kick missed, Tebow and the Denver offense got another chance, and he marched them down the field, the Broncos scored a field goal and won the game.
Personally, I doubt there was any kind of “divine intervention” in San Diego’s missed field goal attempt, which was a longish one anyway--I suspect God has more on his mind than the outcome of a particular professional football game, at any given moment. I also doubt that Tim Tebow truly believes God cares which team wins in any given game. Times like that, I suspect that Tebow, and probably most Christians--and anyone else in the habit of praying to a “higher power”--in a similar situation, use prayer more as a way to focus and achieve some kind of inner calm than to try to influence God to influence the outcome.
That’s only a guess, though.
Come tomorrow, I predict that 98% of sportswriters, and closer to 100% of commenters on stories about the Denver-San Diego game, will be dismissing Tebow’s efforts (and, in fairness, he had a solid, but definitely not spectacular game), talking up the Denver defense (which deserves it), and probably dissecting the San Diego coach’s many failures (probably also deserved).
However Tebow’s career eventually plays out, I predict the same post-game outcome every week throughout every regular season and every postseason game in which he plays.
I’m also going to go out on a limb, here, and predict that he will have a longer and much more successful career than most “experts” are forecasting for him. Beyond the fact that he works at it, he apparently is a “born leader”--he makes the people around him better, and they believe in him. Never discount the “confidence factor,” both when it comes to self-confidence--not arrogance--and the confidence someone inspires in those around him/her.
As a lot of people who know more about Tebow than I do, which actually isn’t much, have said since his Florida college days, “he just wins.”
Wouldn’t it be SOOOO cool to get somebody with that quality in a position of national leadership? (One caveat: He/she had better NOT say “God told him/her to run;” count my vote immediately for the other guy/gal in that case.)
But “born leaders” no longer run for president or even congressperson or senator. Only “born followers,” people who will go where the “money” tells them to go, throw their hats in the ring (because that’s where the money is), in a tradeoff for the “power” they crave. They don’t even seem to recognize their essential powerlessness when they sell themselves to whomever lines their pockets most luxuriously.
In a time when we desperately need leaders with what sportswriters call “intangibles,” the kind of natural leadership ability that someone like Tim Tebow virtually exudes, instead we get people like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain and that nut from Texas and Baseball Glove from Massachusetts and on and on and on. Huntsman has potential, but he is a Mormon (Christians will never vote for him. There goes the GOP “base”). Salamander guy, Newt, would look a whole lot better if he didn’t want 9-year-olds cleaning school toilets, and if he did have any kind of “moral” leg to stand on, and if he hadn’t gone to grade school with God‘s grandmother. Have I forgotten anyone? Oh yeah, the older-than-dirt guy, Ron Paul. Pass. (This is not “age-ism;” even my staunchly conservative 79-year-old father thinks we need younger blood in the presidency, as long as it isn’t, um, you know, what we have now. It‘s a tough job that requires a lot of strength and energy that a septuagenarian, or whatever Paul is, may simply lack) Sarah Pales-in-Comparison-to-virtually-anyone is still hanging in the wings, waiting for the GOP to draft her--which it sounds like they might be thinking about.
On the other side we have Mr. Obama, whom I actually like in a lot of ways, but who also seems to lack “traditional” leadership qualities. He is not the “my-way-or-the-highway” kind of guy that, say, Shrub (thank you, Molly Ivins, and may you rest in peace) Bush was, which is not a bad thing--except when it comes to inspiring the majority of the electorate (middle-aged and older folks, more accustomed to and comfortable with the Shrub style, are neither accustomed to nor willing to be comfortable with a more conciliatory, more inclusive approach to governance).
But hell, Obama takes flak for continuing a tradition, started by a Republican, Bush-wayyy-senior I think, of pardoning a pair of turkeys on Thanksgiving--just a lighthearted, fun Republican tradition, and he gets hammered for it. He, his wife and daughters serve up food to homeless people on Thanksgiving day, and it is derided as a “mere photo op”--never mind that everything they DO is a photo op, it’s the nature of the beast, but they were STILL standing there on that serving line, helping other people when they could have been home watching football games or something.
And I’ve wandered far afield of wherever I meant to go, here.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Babel-ing.
It was quieter here, much more peaceful, when Cecil the puppy, if he can still be called a puppy, was asleep on the floor, his hind leg and nose occasionally twitching as he dreamed (and yes, dogs DO dream--I googled it, plus Stephen King described it in at least two of his 587 novels). Now that he’s awake, he first made sure that everybody else--Xena, Wendy, Muffins, Chewie, Evi and Sabrina, not to mention ME--was awake as well. At the moment he has one of my old shoes and is bashing it against my computer stand. No, this is not annoying. Well, not TOO annoying.
I would take him outside if it weren’t 30-something degrees with a wind gusting out of hell, or maybe Nebraska.
Just another (mostly) house-bound day. Winter, or oncoming winter, or almost winter, or warning-shots-over-the-bow of winter tend to make us hunker down inside until we get acclimated and go about our more-or-less normal business.
Those of us who are housebound AND without television tend to wander about online, flit more or less mindlessly from Sports Illustrated (and the Iron Bowl, the Alabama-Auburn football game) to Salon to somewhere that something on Salon sent us, to sometimes really bizarre places where we find “alternate universes,” in a way--whole worlds outside the world we normally inhabit. People, or whatever the inhabitants call themselves in those worlds, are looking at us from the outside, scrutinizing and theorizing and hypothesizing and mostly just guessing, based on their own alien experiences . . . Us. Much in the same way that we scrutinize and theorize and hypothesize and mostly just guess about “them,” those from other worlds.
I watch Cecil on the floor, his hindleg jerking and his nose twitching, and imagine that he is dreaming (he IS), then free-associate, try to imagine what he is dreaming about, envision him dreaming of chasing thrown sticks or wrestling with Nina, one of the other dogs, or terrorizing (in a playful way, of course) the cats, and then it hits me that I have NO way of seeing his dreams--Cecil is not me, he is not even human. He sees his everyday wakeful life in ways I cannot really even imagine, and thus his dreams likely are very different from any I could imagine.
Then I go back to web-wandering and learn that an American aircraft carrier group may or may not have been stationed offshore of Syria (many “news” reports say it is; the Navy web site says the carrier group is currently ported in the south of France, Marseille, and all the sailors are having a great time there).
One site or another or a few say that “Barry” Obama is about to pick a fight with Syria, for some reason or other.
Another site or two or three claims Turkey is fixing to invade Syria.
Still another one says that Ukraine is being set up by the “great powers” (U.S. and Britain, specifically) to become the new “Libya,” that we--the great powers--are laying the foundation to take over Ukraine and its oil on some humanitarian pretext or another.
What is unnerving is that I cannot muster enough documentation, online, to prove ANY of them wrong, even in my own mind.
From my perspective as a photographer, somebody who is accustomed to looking at subjects from different angles, different . . . perspectives, and from my perspective as a human being who grew up in a large family, I know that opinions--perspectives--have a tendency to vary from one person to another.
I’m beginning to understand where “the tower of Babel” came from, and even that God was made nervous by the fact that all the people of the world of the day shared a common language, could communicate meaningfully with each other, and so decided to jumble things up a bit by inflicting a multiplicity of languages upon “His people.”
So many different languages, so little communication. For some divine reason, God (well, God of the Christians and Jews; I don’t know about Allah or the assorted gods of the Hindu religion, or any of the myriad others currently ruling the myriad separate earths we all simultaneously inhabit) didn’t want us to be able to communicate with each other. Somehow He perceived human communication with each other to be a threat to His own power, or so I gather. So He decided to splinter us by splintering our once-common language. “Divide and conquer.”
Mind you, I’m not a biblical scholar, and in fact have spent the last 52 years or so paying as little attention to the Bible as possible. (I tried once to read it cover-to-cover, but got bogged down in the “begats”). It’s interesting, though. As a biblical non-scholar, I’ve never tried to view today’s corporate world through a biblical lens--but as I read today about the Tower of Babel, etc., I kept remembering how many of my employers have had strict rules when it came to employees communicating with each other. We were always expressly forbidden to discuss salary with each other, for instance. I always wondered why, but didn’t worry about it overmuch. Now I see that our bosses were just trying to follow a page out of God’s “stick-it-to-’em” book.
But I digress. Of course.
In the course of all my web-wandering and maundering today, I came across a whole lot of what I can only characterize as “really interesting shit.”
But I found no reliable answers even to simple questions, for instance “Where is the USS George HW Bush” currently floating?” One source says Marseille, France; another few sources say “off Syria.”
Sad state of affairs, when you cannot trust your OWN press, much less that of any other nation, and when you cannot trust your elected representatives or virtually any one else to provide you real, “spin”-less information.
Maybe I should go back to watching dogs dream.
I would take him outside if it weren’t 30-something degrees with a wind gusting out of hell, or maybe Nebraska.
Just another (mostly) house-bound day. Winter, or oncoming winter, or almost winter, or warning-shots-over-the-bow of winter tend to make us hunker down inside until we get acclimated and go about our more-or-less normal business.
Those of us who are housebound AND without television tend to wander about online, flit more or less mindlessly from Sports Illustrated (and the Iron Bowl, the Alabama-Auburn football game) to Salon to somewhere that something on Salon sent us, to sometimes really bizarre places where we find “alternate universes,” in a way--whole worlds outside the world we normally inhabit. People, or whatever the inhabitants call themselves in those worlds, are looking at us from the outside, scrutinizing and theorizing and hypothesizing and mostly just guessing, based on their own alien experiences . . . Us. Much in the same way that we scrutinize and theorize and hypothesize and mostly just guess about “them,” those from other worlds.
I watch Cecil on the floor, his hindleg jerking and his nose twitching, and imagine that he is dreaming (he IS), then free-associate, try to imagine what he is dreaming about, envision him dreaming of chasing thrown sticks or wrestling with Nina, one of the other dogs, or terrorizing (in a playful way, of course) the cats, and then it hits me that I have NO way of seeing his dreams--Cecil is not me, he is not even human. He sees his everyday wakeful life in ways I cannot really even imagine, and thus his dreams likely are very different from any I could imagine.
Then I go back to web-wandering and learn that an American aircraft carrier group may or may not have been stationed offshore of Syria (many “news” reports say it is; the Navy web site says the carrier group is currently ported in the south of France, Marseille, and all the sailors are having a great time there).
One site or another or a few say that “Barry” Obama is about to pick a fight with Syria, for some reason or other.
Another site or two or three claims Turkey is fixing to invade Syria.
Still another one says that Ukraine is being set up by the “great powers” (U.S. and Britain, specifically) to become the new “Libya,” that we--the great powers--are laying the foundation to take over Ukraine and its oil on some humanitarian pretext or another.
What is unnerving is that I cannot muster enough documentation, online, to prove ANY of them wrong, even in my own mind.
From my perspective as a photographer, somebody who is accustomed to looking at subjects from different angles, different . . . perspectives, and from my perspective as a human being who grew up in a large family, I know that opinions--perspectives--have a tendency to vary from one person to another.
I’m beginning to understand where “the tower of Babel” came from, and even that God was made nervous by the fact that all the people of the world of the day shared a common language, could communicate meaningfully with each other, and so decided to jumble things up a bit by inflicting a multiplicity of languages upon “His people.”
So many different languages, so little communication. For some divine reason, God (well, God of the Christians and Jews; I don’t know about Allah or the assorted gods of the Hindu religion, or any of the myriad others currently ruling the myriad separate earths we all simultaneously inhabit) didn’t want us to be able to communicate with each other. Somehow He perceived human communication with each other to be a threat to His own power, or so I gather. So He decided to splinter us by splintering our once-common language. “Divide and conquer.”
Mind you, I’m not a biblical scholar, and in fact have spent the last 52 years or so paying as little attention to the Bible as possible. (I tried once to read it cover-to-cover, but got bogged down in the “begats”). It’s interesting, though. As a biblical non-scholar, I’ve never tried to view today’s corporate world through a biblical lens--but as I read today about the Tower of Babel, etc., I kept remembering how many of my employers have had strict rules when it came to employees communicating with each other. We were always expressly forbidden to discuss salary with each other, for instance. I always wondered why, but didn’t worry about it overmuch. Now I see that our bosses were just trying to follow a page out of God’s “stick-it-to-’em” book.
But I digress. Of course.
In the course of all my web-wandering and maundering today, I came across a whole lot of what I can only characterize as “really interesting shit.”
But I found no reliable answers even to simple questions, for instance “Where is the USS George HW Bush” currently floating?” One source says Marseille, France; another few sources say “off Syria.”
Sad state of affairs, when you cannot trust your OWN press, much less that of any other nation, and when you cannot trust your elected representatives or virtually any one else to provide you real, “spin”-less information.
Maybe I should go back to watching dogs dream.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)