I Pity The Fool

Growing up is rough.  Today I got home from work earlier than I expected…and used the time to go to the supermarket, and load myself down with ingredients for a pot luck meal (for work).  I went home and had enough time to soak in the tub a bit before dinner…this sounds luxurious, but I mainly did it because I had a rash (other than the general discomfort caused by NYC humidity ).  After dinner, I got to spend an hour or so making the afore-mentioned pot luck meal (a cold pasta salad, to be specific), THEN do the ironing that’s been lurking in my room for the past week or so.  Now I have a few precious moments to try catching up on internet-related stuff (since I don’t have access at work), with a perhaps unrealistic hope of getting to bed early.
Sigh.
So anyway, the title of this post is related to a thought I had yesterday: I am now officially older than dirt.  By this I do not mean the folksy saying you’ll find on aging boomers’ birthday paraphernalia, or the idiom in general…No, in fact I am referring to a person who once called herself "dirt" in an online chat room.
Back when I was in high school, I befriended a woman whom I’ll refer to as V.  I’d always had an easy time talking to adults, and as a teen, I’d made a couple of friendships with people much older than myself, who had varying degrees of influence (both positive and negative) in my development.  Some of these, such as the married 27-year-old I asked to accompany me to the prom (as a friend!!!), are too complicated to discuss here, it’ll only sidetrack me.  V. was a woman I met at the U.U. church when I was 15, and she was 25.  She had a five-year-old daughter in the Sunday school class I co-taught, with another daughter on the way.  At some point we got to know each other, and by the time I was 16, I thought of her as a close friend, without any regard that it might be unusual.  I am all for friendships across generations and everything, but now that I myself am in my late 20s, I can’t even imagine spending much time with young 20-somethings, let alone teenagers (other than in some kind of mentoring capacity).  I know I was not the typical 16-year-old, but it’s still a little odd from an objective viewpoint.  Anyway, there was one time when I was over at her house, and she was still one of the only people I knew who had a home connection to this mysterious Thing Called the Internet of Which People Spoke.  Specifically, she introduced me to the world of online chat, and we signed onto some random chatroom with the screenname "dirtbag" (her choice).  Some other person began IM’ing us, and of course wanted to know my/our age, gender, etc.  V. thought for a second, and typed: "dirt 26 bag 16."  This is really actually a pretty unremarkable story, except that last night it occurred to me that I’m now older than she was at the time, and she seemed so grown up.
Of course, our lives have gone in different directions.  For starters, I have a graduate degree and no kids.  Still, the older I get, the harder it is to believe (alternately, the more wryling amusing it is) how I once thought adults had magical answers or understanding.
I guess I’m rambling, and I had some grander point to make that summed everything up quite nicely.  However, it’s gone now.  If it comes back to me, I’ll let you know.  My old brain is going soft on me.

I got new glasses.  See them here.
I’ve been getting lots of compliments on them, especially at work (not surprising, since I spend much of my time there).  On the other hand, I have also gotten some fairly weird compliments at work…they range from the well-meaning but mildly discomforting remarks on my weight loss (real or imagined- seriously folks, it has only been about 5 to 7 pounds), to the covertly sinister comments made by people I know I can’t trust…  Oh, and let’s not forget the constant adoration from certain teachers who are a) way too old b) way too religious and c) way too married.  It’s the story of my life: I never get attention from the ones I’d actually want.
Weird compliments make me think of Andy Milonakis, when he would go up to people on the street and say things like, "Your smile is what’s going to save America!"  I tried to find a video clip of this online, but was unsuccessful.
Anyway, last week, one of the well-meaning but slightly discomforting teachers told asked me if my ears were burning (i.e., because they were talking about me)…then told me that he and another coworker like me for FOUR REASONS.  He then proceeded to enumerate them: because I’m smart, because I’m beautiful (?!?), because I’m…actually I forget the third one but I think it was either polite or professional, and because I’m humble.  Sheesh.  At least that last one seemed to permit me to lower my eyes and flee the conversation before much longer.
I know I often complain about not feeling appreciated enough, but the epic tribute was a little ridiculous…not to mention awkward.  Anyway, why can’t these compliments ever come from a cute young (straight single) guy?  Oh yeah, because they don’t walk around talking to coworkers like that.
Still, if I’m doing so well, I guess that’s something to be proud of.  I hope everyone at my high school reunion next week is equally impressed by my accomplishments…

This post got extremely long, since I was saving up the story about my procedure since last week, but then also had some other little tidbits that I wanted to share.  Hope someone bothers to read all this!  It’s ever-so-conveniently divided up into sections.

-

From Barium to Barnes & Noble:
Thus have I cleverly titled the following tale of gastrointestinal trials and tribulations.  I give you fair warning that if you have no wish to read about bodily functions, skip ahead to the orange section…but consider yourself deprived of potentially valuable (or amusingly esoteric) medical knowledge!
So as some of you may be aware, I went for medical testing last week: specifically, I had an appointment with the Contrast Imaging subdivision of the Methodist Hospital Department of Radiology…and with my destiny!  I was told to avoid consuming any food or liquids past midnight, and show up for registration slightly prior to my 8 AM time slot.  Check.  I’ll skip forward to the part where I finally got upstairs to the radiology area for my UGI with SBFT (upper gastrointestinal with small bowel follow-through), as the prescription stated.  What followed was a sequence of events best expressed in a list (in which I liberally switch back and forth between first- and second-person narrative, with little or no apology).

• Remove all clothes except for underwear, socks, and shoes, then put on a hospital gown or two and chill out while you wait to be fetched.  If you are me, you’ve chosen comfortable slip-ons and no socks, since they’d probably get dirty anyway.  If you are the other, more noticeable lady, you’ve chosen gold high heels, and your hair is down to your butt even though you look about 40 years old.  Who DOES that?  I mean, wears gold high heels to get x-rayed…very David LaChappelle, and I couldn’t quite decide if I felt it was retarded, or kinda awesome.
• Go into a dark, chilly room and lie on a large metal table for some baseline x-rays, then some upright baseline x-rays.  Someone will verify that you are neither pregnant, nor wearing underwear containing metal (huh?) or any midriff-area body jewelry.  Check.
• While standing for the upright x-rays, you will need to toss back a small cupful of pop-rocks-esque crunchy things, then a tiny amount of water to wash it down and start the chemical process that blows up your stomach like a balloon.  Multiple technicians will firmly instruct you: "You will feel like belching, but DON’T….Are you burping?!"
• Next, you will be handed your first bottle of barium solution.  It doesn’t taste quite as bad as you were expecting, but it certainly doesn’t taste good.  You have to hold the bottle at an awkward angle by your shoulder, so it doesn’t get in the way of the x-ray machine, and actually take some long, difficult gulps of the thick, chalky stuff while they shoot some x-rays.
• You continue standing in the same spot, but the platform slowly tilts backward farther and farther until you are actually lying down.  They adjust imaging cameras, etc., as necessary (commenting on your shortness at some point!), and instruct you to lie on your left side…now on your stomach…right side…your back again.  Why?  So the barium can coat all the surfaces inside your stomach.  What’s even weirder is that you can actually watch it sloshing around on the computer imaging screen.  Who knew it could go down so fast?  Also, I had no idea that the internal organs can bounce around- it makes sense for there to be leeway, rather than too much tension, but I guess I always pictured my innards to be rather neatly packed in and filling every available space, sort of like a lunchbox.
• You must take further sips of the thick barium while actually lying on your stomach.  This is not easy.  They take some more x-rays, then tell you to wait about half an hour for the next set.  Furthermore, you are to walk around, to expedite the process whereby the barium crawls along furtively through your small intestine. 
• You pace around the confines of the x-ray room for 5 or 10 minutes, until the technicians urge you to stretch your legs in the hallway instead.  Someone asks you if you’d like to wash your lips, and you say, "Uh…okay…" and think, wow, that’s a weird question.  The woman with the gold high heels stares at you and you wander into the bathroom, to discover you have barium solution smeared around your mouth, and would otherwise have been traipsing the hallway with it like that, reading your book, and trying not to bump into any gurneys or old people.
• Eventually, it’s time to go back and continue the radiation; I think it’s at this point that a thinner (but no less gag-inducing) barium solution is proffered.  You have to drink the whole thing, which is probably about a coffee mug-full (in a taller, thinner bottle, but I’m estimating).  More x-rays. 
• More pacing the hallway.  They bring in another patient during your next half-hour stroll, and at some point the imaging equipment goes bust, so your half-hour becomes an hour or so.  You wind up sitting back in the waiting area of the changing room, where you see the woman in gold high heels has evidently finished her own test and changed back into her "regular" clothes.  I must admit, the outfit does go with gold high heels (as much as any outfit does, I suppose), and I decide she’s a little awesome, even if in a retarded way.  Also, I wonder if her hair is a wig.
• Finally, you go in again, as the equipment appears to be functioning.  More x-rays, but you can’t leave yet because the barium has not quite reached your colon…you are slightly admonished for your slow digestive process, and made to wait another 20 minutes for the final imaging.
• Before sending you on your way, they tell you to drink lots of water (this will be relevant later, I promise).  You fill out a patient survey, stating that those nurses who came into the x-ray room and rummaged around looking for something, without acknowledging your existence, should have at least smiled at you.
• You manage to eat a healthy lunch, and even go to work the next day, despite feeling tired, bloated (from all the pop rocks and barium I suppose), and disappointed that you didn’t get bitten by a spider and gain super-powers.*  You don’t even glow in the dark- what a letdown.

Thank the gods that you don’t experience the disabling, horrific pains of the barium’s exit until Saturday.  At this point, you’re at home, with access to more than one clean bathroom…instead of at the jail where you work in a trailer, with a bathroom that smells like dead hamsters more often than not.
I promise not to get too graphic, but I have one final and important thought/piece of advice.  If you ever need to undergo a gastrointestinal procedure with restroom ramifications like these, try to leave home…that is, avoid destruction of your own bathroom if possible, particularly if you have only one.  If you can afford it, check into a decent hotel for a day or two…barring that, if you are like me and can’t afford it, go somewhere else with bathroom access, such as a hotel lobby, or in fact, a Barnes & Noble.  It occurred to me this evening that hanging out at the famously tolerant bookstore could have been an elegant (well, not exactly elegant, but practical) solution to the problem.  Not to be indelicate, but if you happen to need quick access to a working toilet with alarming frequency, yet with brief intervals of respite, B&N could provide a true haven for you (if not for the staff or other patrons).  Peruse the travel section, then drop that book on Guatemala to run back in to the amenities: stall #1 out of order (due to you or someone else)?  Not a problem- use stall #2, or #3, etc.  You get the picture. 
Go back home when you feel it’s safe.  Your own personal space will be relatively pristine for your period of convalescence, and you have no need to consider the purchase of a snake.  You’ve made it this far, Reader, so let’s just get the gory details finished: there is little if any digestible matter in a barium smoothie, and thus it exits your digestive tract in much the same form as its entry…then wreaks equal or greater havoc on your plumbing apparatus.  So once again, consider the benefits of restroom facilities that are managed and maintained by someone other than yourself.
Finis.
Thanks for bearing with me and my semi-lurid (though sadly, not phosphorescent) tale of woe.  I can laugh about it in retrospect (mind you, I’m the same person who , in between spasms of pain, asked an ER doctor last year if he found my keys), and hopefully, so did you.
Incidentally, I got my test results today.  All normal.  My GI suggested it could just have been a case of enteritis (small intestine infection/inflammation), and I thought maybe it was exacerbated by eating heavily that week.  Either way, I’m glad I don’t have anything chronic or permanent, and can slowly ease back into eating normally.  I lost 5 to 7 pounds in the first week alone (thank goodness this crap was useful for SOMETHING), but I’d rather be able to eat fruit and cheese.  Soon, my friends.  Soon.
Onward and upward!

-

News Clues:
I scored a 6 out of 9 on the Pew Research’s "Test Your News IQ" quiz.*  This puts me at the 60th percentile, which (for you non-psychologists) means I scored as well as, or better, than 60% of the sample (i.e., the "general public" or subset of Americans over age 18, who own a phone and were willing to answer the questions).  Interestingly, the average man scored at the 57th percentile, while the average woman scored at only the 41st percentile.  Well, interestingly to me: why were the women more ignorant?  Embarassingly, I appear** to have scored lower than the average college graduate (who ranked slightly above me, at the 67th percentile), but higher than those with some college (51st percentile), and much higher than whose education tapped out at high school or lower (38th percentile).  However, I scored above the average for all three age groups, especially the under-35 crowd, who ranked at the 39th percentile (the other two groups were 36-59, and 60+, which both scored at the 54th percentile)…shame on you, dumbasses! You have grown up in a time with thegreatest access to media of multiple varieties, yet you are far too busy watching American Idol to tune in to any topical political matter.  On the other hand, I admit that I haven’t watched any of the presidential debates and loathe all pundits other than Colbert, Stewart, and occasionally Bill Maher.  And as it turns out, according to the breakdown by what type of news consumer you are, I scored at:

• exactly the same percentile as other viewers of the Daily Show/Colbert Report…and Rush Limbaugh fans (blech)
• one percentile above my fellow NPR-listeners (59th percentile)
• three below fans of "major newspaper websites" (63rd percentile)
• and a whopping 31 points above "non-consumers of news" (29th percentile; incidentally, are your parents blood-relatives?)

Why am I sharing this with you?  Bragging rights?  No (well, mostly no…60th percentile is above the mean but not THAT great).  The reason is to alert you to the fact that the People are Getting Dumber (sir!***), or at least, relative to the news sources available.  The news can be depressing, I grant you, or even boring, and most people I know don’t have time to luxuriously page through the NYT every day (though the jerky other psychologist at my site who tries to pawn off his caseload seems to clear his schedule for it).  But come on, people- can’t you at least listen to it in the morning while you brush your teeth?  You might learn something by accident. 
Of course, I’m not referring to the readers of the present blog…statistics show that you are far more intelligent than the average American (and we all know statistics don’t lie, right?).  Want to take the quiz and blow that Bell curve right out of the water?  Here it is.

-

Some news is more equal than others.
Here’s something funny I heard on the radio today.  Apparently the guy has fans all over the country, called Farkers, who show up to parties (actually, that sounds like fun!) and scour the web daily to vie for the honor of appearing at the top of the fark.com website.  Anyway, despite my (perhaps deceptively) high NewsIQ, it took me a li’l while to figure out how to read the amusing full stories in detail, rather than just the alluring headlines…such as "Man tries to get $5 million for eight bricks of white paper he claims was $4 million in cash dyed white" (filed under DUMBASS).
Teehee.

-

Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite.
I haven’t read any of these excerpts yet, and I don’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens, but I felt compelled to share this.  He has published a new book called God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (google that French phrase if you don’t get my joke!), and I felt the need to tell you about it because I try to spread godlessness and nihilism wherever I go.  Although of course, as we all know, nihilists are nothing to be afraid of.*****

-

Notes:
*hence, this post’s title…on a quasi-related note, Spiderman3 opened last week in what’s soon to be my ‘hood, because Peter Parker is supposed to be from Queens.  Wanted to go, but I was way too far behind on the free ticket offer.

**However, I discovered that the quiz only actually asked me 8 of
the questions: since I responded incorrectly to the first question
about raising the minimum wage, the quiz skipped the other one…which
I probably would have gotten incorrect anyway.  Not that you really
care…

***though how this is possible, I’m not sure, since results also indicate
that they got an average of 5.9 questions right, whereas I got 6…hmph.

****Simpsons reference…bonus points to anyone who can tell me the episode and context.

*****bonus points on that last one too, although if you came of age anytime around 1997 or 98, it’s a no-brainer.

Thanks to those of you who expressed your sympathy about Uncle Marty.  I attended his funeral on Sunday, along with many other people who loved and respected him.  Both of his sons (ages 19 and 21) made speeches, and I will most likely stop by the family’s home sometime this week to visit.  One cynical note- there is something rather tacky about stepping out onto the street and immediately lighting up a cigarette, after the funeral of a person who has died of cancer…
I delayed posting anything about my own recent health issues because it just seemed trivial compared to the story about my godfather.  So now, I’ll just mention that the weekend before he died, he wasn’t the only one incurring charges over at Methodist Hospital: my aunt was up in the psych ward, and I was down in the ER.  I was very sick overnight 4/21 to 4/22…admittedly, after a few days of heavy eating, including food from Coney Island.  Anyway, I went to the hospital and was put on an IV for rehydration, plus meds to counteract the nausea and severe abdominal cramping.  Did you know that meds for muscle spasms have to be injected directly into a muscle?  In this case, the gluteus maximus…haven’t had that experience since childhood.  The nurse warned me that it would burn, and after she jabbed it right in there, I involuntarily started and yelped, "OH my gosh it sure does!"  Slightly less glamorous (then again, also less dramatic) than that injection scene in Pulp Fiction.
Anyway, I was ultimately released after infection was ruled out, but have been on various other meds, plus a restricted diet ever since: no fresh fruits or raw vegetables (including salad), no dairy, alcohol, or caffeine…also avoiding acidic foods like tomato sauce.  Can I be totally egocentric for a moment and whine about how much this sucks?  Yes, I know I still live a comfortable lifestyle compared to about 99% of the world population, but after a week or so of no fresh produce, how would you feel?  Anyway, I went to the GI doctor on Friday, and have to go to a radiologist this Thursday.  I’ll need to drink barium.  I’m hoping to glow in the dark after this, at least on the inside, and have warned my parents of the possibility of three-headed grandchildren in the future.  The tests might seem like a bit of an overreaction, but my doctor just wanted to be vigilant because of what happened last year (though this time, it seems to be possibly the small intestine instead of the large one).
Anyway, I guess that’s enough complaining for now.  Thanks if you read this.