How to Keep Sane During Phone Calls Related to "The Systems of Care"

 A dear online friend mentioned my "fuck you stare" yesterday, which I was completely unaware that I possess. Another dear online friend private messaged me that I did not possess a "fuck you stare" but had "beautiful black eyes" and "the weight of the world." She also told me that I had plenty of "fuck you" writing. I sent the former the photo above and the latter a message saying that the former meant no harm and that lately a "fuck you" stare at men in general was very much in order. I'm talking about YOU, John McCain and that clot behind your eye that you're dealing with by using the "best healthcare system in the world" that we provide for you, and YOU, Mitch McConnell and your bullshit healthcare bill that you've deferred yet again. The weight I carry, though, is far less than others' in this world, and I'm not talking poundage. I'm thinking we should all join together, find a good ambulance-chaser attorney and file suit for emotional distress related to the healthcare shenanigans in our congress.

This morning, I spent the better part of two hours on the phone using my tiny little mother mind™ to navigate the various Systems of Care. That's a euphemistic phrase for The Neurologist's Office, The MediCal, The Blue Shield, the Social Security Administration, and the Wheelchair Company. With the exception of a successful refill for The Drug That Doesn't Work But That Sophie Is Horribly Addicted To, the rest of the calls were unproductive fools' errands. I've been throwing around the term fool's errand a lot lately. It captures quite perfectly what dealing with the Systems of Care is like on some days. Most days. I won't regale you with details because I'd feel responsible if you felt violent as a result, and I don't have a way to dispense Tootsie Roll pops to mitigate any damages.

Anyhoo.

Today, I found myself unwrapping a Tootsie Roll pop and sucking it furiously while on hold. About when the insurance company's Automaton/human came on, I'd gotten to the sticky tootsie roll part and enthusiastically crunched the candy into the chocolate while dictating social security numbers and case numbers and weight and marital status and my feelings about John McCain's eye clot.* Just kidding on the last three. See below for thoughts on the last. Where I ended up after said conversations was Brazil,** where I was given a list of different numbers to call for seemingly intractable problems and issues. I placed those numbers in a little pile on the hot pink plastic file bin on the top of my desk, right under the Shrine of Doodads and Tchotchkes.

The Tootsie Roll pop helped which probably means I have some kind of oral fixation issues.

Actually, it helps to curb invective so I can work on my "fuck you stare."

What also helps is to surrender and call it a day even though it's before noon.

What are ya'll doing today?












* I know I'm not alone in remarking on the irony of the estimable Senator McCain who suffers from a clot above his eye and who is currently getting excellent (The Greatest Healthcare System on the Planet) healthcare, gratis (thanks to his bosses, US), which has pushed the "healthcare" vote off yet again (because his vote is said to be a resounding YES). Imagine my "fuck you stare" here.

** I can still conjure the feeling I had after seeing the movie Brazil, not only because my tiny little mother mind™ has a memory like a steel trap, but because the events of my life mimic them nearly every day.

Inclusion, Disability, Iraq, and THCa

There's so much to ponder these days, don't you think? There's that Tumbler going around written by a young woman who cares for her disabled 31 year old sister because her parents died. They live in California and are facing the alarming lack of services and obstacles to getting those services that those of us who already live here are aware of to a nauseating degree. I and some other folks are "on it," though. Stay tuned. Then there's an interesting discussion on my own Facebook page, centered around this article, about the segregation of children with physical disabilities from the elite private schools in Washington, D.C. Some of the commenting got a little testy, including my own, but it's discouraging to think that in 2014, we're still having to not just fight for equal access and inclusion for all children but continue to bring awareness to these issues -- even in the biggest most progressive states in the country.

Sigh.

On another note, our more than a decade long war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost, thousands of those Americans, trillions of dollars spent and country bankrupted both financially and morally, seems to be imploding again.  That foreign policy "initiative" might have been the worst one our country made in history. And if I have to see or hear that crazy John McCain say anything else about it, I might scream. Honestly, the man should just retire to his hometown in Arizona and play golf. What do you think? Should we just continue to bury our heads in the proverbial sand or protest in some concrete way?

What do I know, though, about anything really? It's a full moon tonight -- the Honey Moon -- and while Sophie's seizures have picked up a bit, maybe because of it, I'm looking forward to seeing it from Calabasas where I'll be driving Henry later for his first club lacrosse practice. In the meantime, for the record, we've added THCa to Sophie's cannabis regime. I'll keep you posted.

My Syrian Grandfather

Here is my Syrian grandfather and his family, in the early part of the twentieth century. I don't know whether they had left Syria, yet. My grandfather Charles is the young man on the far left, in the back row. I have always been enamored of the woman on the right's wasp waist. I believe she might be my Aunt Hafeezah, remembered for her plastic-covered furniture, dusty hard candies and wet kisses. My grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1907. I am told that he was very handsome, then, so handsome that as a lifeguard on Coney Island, he was picked to be an extra in a Valentino film. He died when I was sixteen, so my memories of him are not clouded. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes-- a lot -- even after lung cancer and the removal of part of his lung. He had strong and often angry views, would holler about them with his children (my mother and my aunts and uncle). He was loud, cursed in Arabic (in fact, the only Arabic word I know is shit, pronounced a guttural cutta). He pushed meat through a meat grinder attached to the kitchen table, grew eggplants and string beans in a backyard garden and called me Rosalita because I looked like the other side, my father, the Italian Catholic who married his youngest daughter.

This is a picture of my Mississippi grandmother and her family. My grandmother, Ida Mae, is the little one in the front, shielding her eyes from the sun. She grew up on a cotton farm in the Delta. All of her brothers had Biblical names, and I believe the baby in her mother's arms is my Aunt Bessy Lucille who married a man named Artie when they were around fourteen years old. Aunt Bessy and Uncle Artie were married for nearly seventy years, I think, and I remember they were always holding hands. My grandmother died when I was around 38 years old and she was 92. She was tall and graceful, soft-spoken and dear, the definition of a lady. She told us stories in her soft southern accent, stories of growing up in the south, how she was bitten by a snake, how her brother cut the spot, sucked the blood out and then ran through the fields to get her father. She had pale blue eyes, suffered from macular degeneration in her old age, had a tinkly, gentle laugh.

So, this man

met this girl

when he was a traveling salesman, peddling lingerie in the south. He married my grandmother when she was eighteen years old and took her back to Brooklyn, where she lived with him and his mother, at first. Ida Mae learned how to speak Arabic, cook Arabic food and then raised five children in a tiny brownstone in Brooklyn. When I asked her many years later why she'd married Grandpa when she was so young, she told me Well, honey, he was tall, dark and foreign.

I'm telling you this story now because I can't get them out of my mind these days, particularly as I watch and listen and read about the conflagration in Syria. I am one-quarter Syrian. That quarter is from the city of Homs which has been in the news of late as one of the tinder boxes of the civil war there. My grandfather Charles was a Christian Arab who fled persecution with his family more than a century ago, and he never let us forget whose side he was on, barking his views from the Barcalounger he seemed to be reclined in for my entire childhood. Israel, Palestine, Jews, Muslims, Christians -- these were words I heard over and over on those weekends my cousins and I ran through the house and outside to the garden, or sat and colored while our grandmother shaped raw lamb into kibbeh and our aunts and uncle argued.

I don't know what to think about the whole thing other than it's a fucking (there's really no other word) tragedy of a colossal scale. Pure madness. All of it. I can't say I feel comforted to see President Obama sitting grimly next to John McCain as they collude on how to persuade our legislature to vote that we strike Syria. I can't say that I agree with them. I don't see the sense of bombing as punishment. I can't say I feel neutral, either, when I read of hundreds of thousands of people brutally murdered, citizens of one country killing one other barbarically and millions displaced, wandering.

I remember the fighting and yelling in my own extended family, though, over what seems like the same old shit.

Pure madness. All of it.

I don't know if I have any relatives in Syria, but I imagine someone whose blood and genes I share is running around there, throwing rocks or bombs or fleeing with her children to neighboring countries or even receiving the gas meant to kill from her own government.

I don't know what to think.

غائط
(Arabic for shit)