Displaced

With a little tweaking of my resume, I could be Secretary of the Interior! The opportunities just keep falling into my lap. This is fantastic.

I got my first shot of steroids today. It was kind of a letdown because it was not paired with a Major League Baseball recruitment letter or a yellow jersey, but I can still report that the experience was a pleasant one for the fractured rib.

Dr. Luke, my excellent Canadian sports medicine doctor, had offered a steroid shot into my sternum as a last resort if the pain got to be too much but the shot itself sounded so painful – needle to bone?? – that I didn’t jump on it. Today’s injection wasn’t quite that brutal. The cheerful assistant physical therapist taped two pads to my body, one with an internal pouch filled with steroids on the fractured rib, the other flat one on my abdomen. Both patches were hooked up to an electrical current. The vibration and heat force the skin to osmose the steroids into the wounded area and the flat pad acts as a ground. How cool is that?

I wish I could think of another application for the technology. If we could liquify common sense, perhaps we could send the patches out to minimum wage workers and they’d all vote Democratic?

I am looking for work. I am submitting resumes and cover letters over the web. This makes recruiters’ lives easier because then they can search the uploaded resumes instead of having to sift through paperwork trying to find qualified candidates. Williams-Sonoma has taken it one step further. First, they ask you to upload your resume. Then, they scan through the resume automatically, pulling out standard application form information which is then loaded into an application form for your verification.

On my resume, the first few lines of my employment history read

Brocade Communications
World leader in storage area networking
Business Systems Analyst / Process Analyst

The Williams-Sonoma form reads

Organization Name
Brocade Communications

Position Title
World Leader

On her new design blog for The New York Times, former Dwell editor Allison Arieff writes about her design peeves and pleasures. This is one of her high points this week:

“Wandering through one of the city’s bountiful farmers’ markets, we came upon this fellow sharpening knives for customers on a stone-sharpening wheel powered by his moped engine (above right). His ingenuity is inspirational: he simultaneously performs a service, earns a living, exercises and socializes. And at the end of the day, he packs up his sharpener, stand and bag and scoots home…”

I want that job. I always imagine that people who work with their hands and produce something tangible – carpenters, landscapers, knife sharpeners on mopeds – live more satisfying, less neurotic lives. The bucolic fantasy or some such. I’ve always remembered an interview with Daniel Day Lewis, (back when we he wasn’t quite so frightening looking) where he said he wanted to be a cabinetmaker. It can’t be all it’s cracked up to be. Being stuck in your own head and being stuck out in a field probably aren’t that different when it comes right down to it. Same preoccupation, different topic. But I have always wanted a moped, so this guy’s definitely one up on me there.

But then, I don’t really watch news shows. Of course, that’s because they so rarely seem to include any education or journalism or a resulting point of view. Check out Keith Olbermann going to town on Rumsefeld though. You go boy.

The birthday party I attended on Thursday was for a friend I met at a wedding. In the bridal twilight over Long Island Sound, she and her husband had stood out from the mass of blazers and rep ties. He wore a lip stud, a purple shirt and shaded glasses. She wore a head scarf. She’s a professor and author and theater producer who writes and works for the rights of South Asian women. He motors around the art world in various capacities. The next time I went to New York, I called her up, we all had dinner and we’ve been fast friends ever since. That’s Story #1.

The closing party I attended on Sunday followed the final Broadway performance of Sweeney Todd (in which R’s brother starred). I’ve met one of the actresses at least half a dozen times, including at my birthday party. She squeeled when she saw us, ran over, said several things I’ve completely forgotten and squeeled away. I spied one of the producers about six feet away. He and I and R had talked at length on the opening night of the show and at the post-Tony party when all of us were somewhat drunk. He didn’t acknowledge either of us. That’s Story #2.

I have one question: what is wrong with people in the theater that they cannot be human beings unless what you can do for them is stamped on your forehead and preferrably also your T-shirt and your business card?

I would like to say, for the record, that I have repeatedly and with an extremely positive attitude, tried the donuts at Tim Hortons, the Canadian donut competition to Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts, and I am sorry to report that they completely suck. I love Canada but, yes I’ll say it, I love donuts more and theirs are terrible. I have been to Tim Hortons several times over the years but I tend to always eat the same donuts – raised or chocolate – so this time I went Bill Nye on them. To make sure I wasn’t generalizing, I bought a box of donut holes – or “Timbits” as they call them – two each of sour cream, glazed sour cream, cake, raised glazed and chocolate glazed. They were all equally awful. This is because they all taste exactly the same even though they’re all different textures. (I hate tofu for the same reason.) I couldn’t tell you what this flavor is specifically, but I’m betting it’s a blend of hazelnuts and Dawn.

Also, they’re missing an apostrophe. Even Dunkin’ Donuts has an apostrophe.

My dad is not coping well today. He likes to be a part of things and to talk with people who will listen to him. Everyone wants this, but especially my father. It has to do with being an ex-professor because R’s dad is the same way and he used to teach too. There’s something about having a captive audience for ten or twenty years that builds in a need for an audience. Or amps up the one they already had that brought them to teaching in the first place.

Let me give you an example.

My dad: [Random comment on Topic X.]
Me: I read an article in the New York Times about Topic X last week. I’ll mail it to you.
My dad: Thomas Friedman said in the Times last week that [two minutes of details on the article to which I have just referred him.]

I stop him pretty quickly. I used to just wait it out and fume because he wasn’t listening to me. It’s not that he’s not listening. It’s just that the need to tell me about it trumps irritating details like the fact that I already know about it. I think this is particularly true when he – or anyone – feels marginalized. For instance, when you’re in the hospital and helpless.

R and I have a theory that the same rule applies to those homeless guys who wheel their precariously overloaded grocery carts out into heavy traffic just as the “Don’t Walk” sign starts to count down to zero. If people look through you all day long, you’ve got to make yourself seen somehow and holding up traffic does the trick.

Anyway, last night’s shift of nurses was apparently unresponsive to my father’s questions, so he refused his pain medication because he thought it was making him sicker. He’s on so many different prescriptions that they’re not sure what’s interacting with what and causing which symptoms, so he might be right. Either way, a nurses’s job is to make the patient comfortable – and that includes psychologically. I know they’ve got a tough job and the night shift has got to be the worst, but if hospitals are going to hire underqualified assistants instead of the RNs they need, they could at least higher cheerful underqualified assistants.

My father is in the hospital for unknown reasons. Correction: the reason is that he is sick. The cause is what is unknown. They think it’s an infection. Or something else. But most likely an infection. He has a Dr. Bolt – or is it Brazen? Or Blank. No, it’s Bond. Something with a “b.” The Unnamed is an infectious disease specialist who wanders the halls late at night, stopping by occasionally to ask increasingly obscure questions which seem unconnected to each other. “Have you traveled at all recently? Have you had colitis? Do your heels hurt?” His hair is pure white and his jacket doesn’t so much hang awkwardly as not fit at all. When asked for directions, he tells a group of dawdling interns a story about losing his pager in wet cement. He looks like an albino Christopher Walken and talks like a cross between House and Milton Berle, saying things like, “Sometimes you have to wait the body out and see what it does,” and, “When you hit the wall, give us a call.”

Since I had to pick up my stepsibilings from the airport at 11PM and I was still vaguely on PST, staying up until midnight to collect my luggage was no big deal. Naturally, given how the trip’s been going so far, I got lost for half an hour after leaving the hospital. On the up side, I was lost in a straight line. Oh, and there was a Dunkin’ Donuts along the route, so I pretended it was on purpose and moved on to the airport. (I honestly didn’t think Dunkin’ Donuts could get any more perfect, but this one had a flatscreen TV, wifi – which the French pronounce “weefee” by the way – and a lounge area. Come to mama!)

One of the kids returned from holiday with a set of golf clubs which is almost bigger than he is and definitely too big for The Speck. With all due respect to Papa Tiger, who gives a thirteen-year-old golf clubs for his birthday? We wedged the clubs in with the three teenagers, I dropped them off, turned around, went back to the airport, collected my bag off its (overdue) flight and, in a fit of organizational insanity, decided to drive the two and a half hours to my grandmother’s at 1AM instead of wasting daylight hours on the road that I could otherwise spend at the hospital on Monday.

For reasons only known to the Transportation Department, two very long sections of the highway headed south are under construction simultaneously. These sections are so long – fourteen miles each – that there is no way that the states of New York and Pennsylvania could possibly have enough employees to work on them continuously. It’s like going into a university classroom and saving all the seats just in case everyone you’ve ever met shows up for the lecture. One stretch has walls on both sides which is unnerving for someone who is exhausted, claustrophobic and rapidly losing her visual grip on anything smaller than a semi. That merged right into the six-mile gauntlet that is the back road to my grandmother’s house. I narrowly avoided two deer in the fog and made up for it by driving over a felled tree in the road with my Speck. I arrived at 3AM, wrote for an hour and collapsed.

I get up, my grandmother feeds me breakfast, then coffee. I make rosettes, a deceptively simple Swedish cookie which involves a lot of hot oil and a special iron, while she makes more coffee. Halfway through the hot oil part, she starts making lunch. We have cookies. We have lunch. She gives me twenty dollars “for the rental car,” and I hit the road for the drive back to the hospital.

Five hours, two meals, three coffee breaks. I don’t see how we didn’t all grow up fat and diabetic.