the year of the rat has not been kind to my health

shame is an important cause of death by colon cancer.

i do not have colon cancer that i know of, but i noticed this week when i was having a partial bowel obstruction that it is generally not ok to tell people about your bowel health until you're geriatric and among peers. i found myself wanting to explain to my coworkers that i was in some distress and would appreciate a few breaks but i couldn't fully explain why, and i felt like it warranted at least some detail. i was not trying to tell everyone exactly what was or was not flowing out of my butt, but i felt like telling people that i was in the midst of an uncomfortable bowel event.

anyway... everyone poops.. and it's time to let go of the taboos about talking about colon's circumstances. until we do i think people will continue to not catch serious intestinal issues (like colon cancer) because they can't talk about it. or worse, they're so ashamed of the fact that they defecated they completely ignore any details about it like mucous or blood in the stool, or other early warning signs of various problems.

anyway... good times.

i sick

i hate getting sick. this one was bad.. it's been going around my team at work.. 18 hours of fever (that's way long for me) and another day of sinus crap.. and as that is easing now i'm just weak and sweaty. i hate being sweaty. it's just a sign of how depleted i am from fighting that thing, but i would like it to go away. i pretty much haven't moved more than to get more water and to go to the urinatorium since friday.. and worst of all, it completely obliterated any chance i had of a relaxing weekend.. being sick was more stressful than work for a week.. at least i'll be better tomorrow.. blerwour.

And another thing...

so i got mad again about something again when something awesome came to my email box from a Lean production list to which i subscribe. I will share it with you here and then i'll add some thoughts below.

The notion that waste is good for the economy is strange indeed, even if
it is supported by such measures of economic activity as the GDP. If you
pollute the environment, what is spent to clean up your mess contributes
to the GDP, which, as a consequence is bigger than if you didn't pollute.
If you eat at a restaurant, what you pay for food preparation goes into the
GDP, but if the same meal is cooked at home, it doesn't.

The truth is that eliminating waste is good for society as a whole. It
directly improves the quality of life and frees up resources to address
genuine unmet needs.

So this is just one part of it, it's followed by a quote from the economist who developed GDP and also some inspiring words from RFK. But the point i wanted to make was this: Supply side (trickle down) economics are complete and utter bullshit and here is why....

i should probably ask if anyone disagrees with me here? and assuming someone gives me a counter argument i will refute it directly. ...but really though.. it just doesn't make any sense that intentionally wasting resources because of the potential source of revenue it provides is a reasonable way to either do business or govern. how is it that a group of grotesquely greedy people have convinced a large portion (anyone at all for that matter) of the population that this makes good sense? did anyone see that delightful and entertaining supply side jesus cartoon from that al franken book? i loved that cartoon. it summed up the thing nicely you can find it if you search. how many years did we go on thinking this would encourage the economy? is this a big part of our digging of our environmental grave? because if it is i might be relieved that it's this easy to fix.

ironically, my job is created by this attitude perhaps.. i clean up waste after all, but i don't just mop up a puddle that will be back tomorrow, i fix the leak that causes the puddle day after day. but i always seem to have more waste to fix... and i wonder if that doesn't arise from the very industry itself. we spend a lot of time talking about the health care transaction, a patient and a provider who for some reason can't exchange currency directly. as one of those providers i know i didn't care for asking people to pay... i still don't. i would pay for someone else to do it.. but it's waste. it delays the exchange, and takes some of the money i need away. if insurance wasn't in the picture how much cheaper would a visit to a doctor be? i don't know.... i would be interested to know if a doctor could work exclusively on medicare patients and still pay for the overhead (especially malpractice)... someone should look that up for me.... maybe i can ask an actuary.

rantin' time again

wooo! it's been awhile since i was coherent enough AND interested in ranting about something i heard. i suppose that's a good sign that i'm feeling pretty good... back from my cold.

ok so today i heard a little half-cliche on the radio and it got me really angry. sometimes i think people should think before they say (except me. ... i'd never say anything awesome if i had time to think twice).

so this was some sort of campaign message from someone-or-other and they said the words: "Everyone has the right to [good] health."

take a second and think about that....

WTF?????? who precisely dispenses a right like that? your government? your god? your parents? your elementary school bus driver? what does it even mean? what can that mean?

no government guarantees good health, nor religion (maybe scientology does), and no parents have ultimate control over the health of their child - if they did, logically, no child would ever die of illness. neither would a believer, nor a patriot, but those ideas are absurd.

i think they meant health care... that we have a right to health care ... big difference. health care doesn't equal health. health care can but may not lead to good health, lack of health care does not deny health.. the relationship between the two is not concrete or predictable. actually people who have good health frequently avoid health care because it's unnecessary to them.

health education is a right we all should have, and since health is part of our public education system we have access to it, but what we choose to do with it is where i tie this back to health care and rights. we don't actually have a right to have health care solve our problems. We have a right to seek out health care, but health care may not be able to help us so what are we entitled to then? - i am speaking now as a health care professional (and an opinionated bastard) - we have the choice to live as we like. we can choose to seek out health knowledge we have the responsibility to be informed about our health, but all of us have to work for good health, no one just opens a box or bottle and eats good health. we have to be responsible for our health and the choices that impact our health... and when our choices' consequence is something that health care can do nothing about you are entitled to feel about it however you choose, but i can't be held responsible for making your "right" a reality. and neither can anyone else.

so remember... your local health professional is there as a guide.. .they teach you how to live to improve your situation (the word doctor after all comes from the original docere - to teach).... it is ultimately your responsibility to make the most of your health and if that isn't your priority then that's fine. but no one can guarantee your health will be someone else's priority or responsibility.

so that's my rant tonight. now it's time for sleep.

news and whatnot

nothing big really.. this weekend i made Indian food. i made Saag with lamb, saffron basmati, naan, and two other things i won't take credit for. it was really surprising how... possible it was. i've always just assumed that Indian food was outside the realm of possiblity.. that it was just too much to ask. anyway, it turns out that it's not too hard to make. the saag took about 2 hours, but it was so good. the lamb chunks melted in your mouth inside, and the spinach didn't make Cat's teeth all funky. so i considered it a success. the dishes are still almost done, but not quite. and on friday a bird shat on my shirt, so i've been trying to get the stain out all weekend. from now on i'll most likely think twice about walking under a tree full of birds.

i also think i bit the inside of my cheek. or perhaps it's just turned into hamburger magically.

woob

i'm in kenturkey.. i mean kentucky. our t-giving dinner was awesome and started at 9:30 pm. it was totally awesome. we went bowling, and checked several stores for the first two seasons of it's always sunny in philadelphia. we never found it. however, we did discover the british version of gordon ramsay's kitchen nightmares. it's rad and awesome. other than that i'm enjoying my week off. tremendously enjoying it. there's nothing like making no plans to unwind. anyway. i'm not interested in writing .. so i'll go now.

rock rock on

or something like that. i got a(n) ukulele for myself because i have had a rough month and decided it was an appropriate thing to do. it was very inexpensive which was cool, except it had two significant problems. one was a dead fret, which sucks. the other was a re-entrant G string. that sounds funny. anyway, that's when the low-toned strings are raised up an octave, which was weird. at first i though it could get past that re-entrant string, but i decided it wasn't cool. so i got a lower string at the music store and tried to put it on, with Tony's help. we discovered that it wouldn't fit, but tried to file it. Tony gave up after a long while trying to get it to work, and said i should take it back. the dead fret was reason enough, and that it wasn't really what i wanted (because of the re-entrant string). everything else about it i did like though, a whole lot. so i spent a few more minutes filing down the notch that holds the bottom of the string and a few more minutes on that fret and got the string in. the fret hasn't been a problem for me all day either, so i think i got it to a reasonable height. it wasn't much work today, and now i have exactly the uke i wanted. so i'm happy. it's good. then i made gumbo, and it's one of the best batches ever. i have enough for lunches for several days. mmmm.. gumbo. except Cat looked up gumbo on wikipedia or something and it said you weren't supposed to thicken with file, roux, and okra... i use all three. what's so wrong with using all three? it's not like pudding... i don't get it.

more or less exactly

i listened to the hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy book on cd recently. a couple of times in the book the phrase "more or less exactly" appears. one of them is right at the beginning, the phrase appears in the sentence "the house more or less exactly fails to please the eye." i think this sentence sums up the reason i like Douglas Adams writing. when you use 11 words to say 'the house is ugly' with 4 of those words adding absolutely nothing to the meaning it can't be bad. i just had to share that with the group.

zlub.

procrastinating

i must really not feel like going to sleep if i'm to the point where i'll write something for my blog. i took a whole bunch of surveys about cars. it was actually kind of funny the way they write questions. one of the surveys was clearly about saturn, the car company, not the planet. they spent several questions asking what i knew about who was the parent company of all kinds of different makes of car.. i don't think i did well.. i had some ideas on those questions but i mostly checked the box that said "i don't know".. didn't realize jaguar was owned by ford, or infinity was owned by nissan, or GM owned saab... i mean, i thought saabs were still from sweden.. maybe they still are, but GM owns the factory... i don't know. anyway.. that was interesting. i should really get to sleep though. alright.. goodnight.

'm. si.

I haven't been posting much. I've been a little too busy. not that i've got too much to do, but when i'm a certain amount of busy i get really selfish with my time. I find that i'm unwilling to play scrabble moves, unwilling to post, unwilling to call people back, and so on. It's kind of like the way people behave when there isn't enough food to eat. they get pissed off. desperate. with time, it's a little less desperate, since i have plenty left (knocking on wood for some reason) and food just seems more basic than time. after all, we don't really spend our lives under the shadow of impending doom, do we? wait, i think that should be a period, not a question mark. We just watched 'Stranger than Fiction' tonight. It was charming. Entertaining. got me a little choked up. I liked it. I was putting off watching it, because i wasn't in the mood for a story that ends. I like to watch serial shows because i have a comfort that they won't end any time soon, not without ample time to get to know everyone. Perhaps it's my unconscious avoidance of that shadow of knowledge of my eventual end that makes me want to see serial installments rather than a story end to end on work nights. Or perhaps it's my anxiety about watching movies i've never seen before. they always make me a little nervous - did i explain this ever? here's the short of it: i have a long history of horrible experiences at movie theaters. I don't think i consciously knew i didn't like going to a darkened theater to see a movie i didn't know until i was about 6 or 7 when i saw adventures in babysitting. maybe i was 8, it doesn't matter. I was terrified to see that movie. it turned out harmless, but my experience with other movies had built an expectation of a horrible twist or shock keeping me up at night.. ET, Cocoon, V, (alien trend?) Project X, return of the Jedi, and eventually Beetlejuice scared me.. and i didn't sleep much between the ages of 5 and 9. eventually i discovered inane tv could relax me and i'd pass out, but not until i was 9.. it sucked. so it continued all through my life, certain movies had stuff that just freaked me out. and reinforced the (less and less) irrational fear that the movie would betray me and i resorted increasingly to watching things i'd seen before over and over. I wonder if this is a common characteristic among anxious people... anyway.

whichever the reason is, i don't usually like to watch things on work nights.. or other nights.. but especially nights when i have to go to sleep. and the real point is, this movie, stranger than fiction, didn't mess me up.

now i'm going to go to sleep.

delinquent post

I'd just like to tell everyone who doesn't already know, that online scrabble game is totally addictive and consuming. but it's awesome. It got me thinking today about online board games. there should be a clue game. if there was, i'd like to know if it's as fun to play with a group when you can't see the people playing. so maybe someone already developed it and it flopped? What makes scrabble so successful? are there other games that would be so popular? i don't know, but someday facebook will have figured it out.

traffic

I would love to do research on traffic flows. every day i think about the time of day and volume of cars on the road attempting to make sense out of the phenomena i see as i go to work and on my way home. I'd love to put numbers to the impacts large factories in certain places, and the locations of bridges and start times have on traffic. and retarded rain. damn that's annoying. even when it's been awhile and the rage of the 15mph drizzle commute has subsided.. i've seen a couple of people sitting atop the exit ramps where buses go to park-and-rides that seem to be watching traffic, i imagine that they're counting cars .. trying to predict future needs if they add a bazillion houses to the neighborhood at 128th or 164th or 220th. how many lanes will they have to add to the freeway for that? 7? when will someone realize extra lanes don't reduce congestion unless you actually balance the flow of oncoming volume to exiting volume... that's a rhetorical question because i think they know that already and occasionally they recognize it. there are three places on my 23 mile drive on the freeway to work where cars get on but none get off. without releasing that pressure somehow, i don't see how we're going to do anything but slow down to let them in. they need some kind of car slingshot that flings cars from stationary entrances over the tops of traffic to someplace up the road in a middle lane. it would probably kill thousands of people, but i think it's be rad to see cars sailing overhead and landing with a thump in the midst of flowing freeway traffic.

Plantatoes

I made up a word today. well, i think i did. it could have been anyone i guess, but i'm not doing any research to find out if someone else may have come up with it at some point. anyway. i tried plantains again for the second time in my life. the first time was in far away, in rhode island. at a mall. so i remember them being ok.. kinda dry, but ok. well tonight i had planned to get some vegetables (two of them ended up being fruits, but whatever) and cook them and eat them for dinner. so i got baby bok choi (which you can't make wrong), crookneck yellow squash, and a plantain... the kind that's not really ripe, so it was mostly green with a little yellow. i steamed the bok choi with garlic and a little Worcestershire sauce. and i cubed the plantain and cooked it in a little oil with a tiny bit of salt. and then the squash in that same oil with some pepper and salt.. anyway. it turned out a great dinner and i found that plantains taste so much like potatoes that i have a substitute now. if i can cook them in other potato ways then i'm good to go. tonight we'll see if they make me sick though. no signs yet. i'm happy about it. ok. goodnight.

rather

This afternoon i was advised by Juan Pepe that i was delinquent on my blog updates. I found the criticism fair, and now i'm bothering to post. I wasn't feeling that well last week, but i'm much better after a very stress-free three-day weekend. I'll be looking forward to the next three-day weekend coming next week though too. I was thinking about how i think a lot about how old i am and how old other people are. i suppose it's one of my preoccupations. The thing is I'm trying to figure out if it's close to being a prejudice. I don't really make an assumption of how a person should behave based upon their age. But i think that how often i'm surprised at peoples' age indicates that i am to some extent labeling people with ages and it's some kind of stereotype if i'm classifying them. So how do i let go of the assumption of age? or is it that i should stop associating certain characteristics with people of a particular age? is that the real problem? is it that i think people should be wild and idealistic when young and responsible and pragmatic once they've seasoned a bit? i suppose most true idealists remain so regardless of their age. or do they? is it bad to assume one way or another? how do you escape assumptions? is it just learned by a series of surprises? what do you think?