Thx to Rendy, cooks, busboy, cashiers and ownership at Gibson’s BBQ.
Thx to Denise, Dr. Carter, David, Roxy and more at GFMA.
Tag Archives: health
The happiness purse suit
Today’s read in the doctor’s office: The Happiness of Pursuit in TIME magazine, 15th July 2013.
Is every touch electrifying?
Lee looked down at his smartphone — 100% charged. Not used much that evening.
He swiped the screen to unlock.
Checking his multiple email inboxes, he paused his thoughts, holding a memory of a single touch, the person out of view behind him.
His thoughts restarted, rewinded, recalling high-heeled dancing shoes — the shoes merely straps, the wearer’s toenails painted blue, the calves brown, muscular, tight. The wearer’s face unpainted, brown, Filipina, smooth, thin lines hiding on her forehead until emotions displayed with an instructor’s tone of professional voice.
“Toe, toe, toe, heel, Karen. Head turned left, not tilted. Heel! Don’t be afraid or timid to step forward, Lee. Elbow up!”
A hand reached from behind and pushed Lee’s right elbow up, holding it in place for his dance partner’s arm to rest upon. Another hand smacked the back of his leg.
Bai laughed. “That was fun. I liked that!” She smacked Lee’s leg again until he got his step right.
Lee’s dance partner, his wife, Karen, smiled. “‘Heel.’ Like a dog. Like the way they pronounce Hill around here.”
Lee concentrated on his waltz steps while also trying to let go and enjoy the music.
Bai nodded at Guinevere nearby, as if to say, “See, they are trainable. You just have to know how to train them.”
To Lee, the reward for getting the dance steps right or getting them wrong was a corrective dance with Bai, or just the slightest hint of a promise of the chance to dance with Guin.
Karen stood and watched while Bai made Lee trace the same waltz steps she made, forward, then turned slightly left or right but still forward, tracing an imaginary straight line on the dance floor, less than the zig-zag of a grapevine move.
Lee looked at Bai’s legs, wishing they were his, remembering his marathon training days and his almost-sinewy legs of a runner.
Standing in a clubhouse lobby checking email was not going to get him those legs.
Wishing was not going to make him have athletic legs like Bai’s.
Still, Lee wished his wife desired athleticism over sleep and looked forward to them getting closer medical attention come October when their family practice physicians moved to a concierge system. Perhaps Karen would finally get the diagnosis of sleep apnea that Lee believed she had.
Solve her sleep problems and Karen might have more energy to exercise. More exercise, more dancing, lower weight and more like the lithe figures with whom Lee enjoyed spinning around the dance floor like angels.
Lithe did not mean size zero clothing.
Lee had danced with a woman whose size matched his wife’s but who had mastered the art of spinning a larger body size, thanks to her years of ballet training.
Training means practice.
In two days, Lee and Karen would start renting a dance studio on a monthly basis, dedicating themselves to their new hobby, the art of dance — waltz, rumba and West Coast Swing — their goal to be better students than Bai expected.
Lee lived from moment to moment, enjoying the sensation of change. How much more he valued the change of holding the hand of a different dance partner as songs ended and began?
Warm hands, cold hands, perspiring hands, dry hands, single fingers, two or three fingers held at once, fingers covered with rings, bare fingers, painted nails, chipped nails, chewed nails, filed nails.
Strong grip, weak grip, shaky grip, light grip.
The electrifying first touch of hands told a lot.
The dance unrolled the plot.
The dancers’ bodies and the way they matched their steps leader to follower revealed the storyline, sweeping move by sweeping move.
What messages do static charges send?
What about preconceptions and assumptions?
Expectations and dreams?
Are thoughts conveyed at the impact point of two fingers about to touch?
Lee dropped the smartphone in his shirt pocket and poured himself a quarter cup of coffee, filling the rest of the cup with half-and-half cream, hoping to dilute the caffeine effect so late at night.
Else his memories would drag him to a keyboard and away from bed with his wife and cats.
Looking for a good sales position? CCP may have you in mind!
Jumping into my pants with both boots on
We all make choices.
Tonight, my wife and I had the choice of :
- taking West Coast Swing dance lessons and dance late at Club Rush or
- we could go to the Ledges Country Club Manor House and listen to a presentation by our physicians at Gleneagles Family Medicine Associates (GFMA).
We chose the latter.
Not necessarily the road less traveled (cue poem here, of course)…
| Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920. |
| 1. The Road Not Taken |
…but interesting nonetheless/all the same.
I don’t have my notes from the meeting with me at this moment but I have in my thoughts the major details.
Basically, our physicians have decided to start a concierge-style medical practice, accepting 150 patients at $1800 per annum for each patient who will receive preferred physician attention, detailed annual executive-level physical exam, the physician’s personal cell phone number, an email-style chat system, and a medical profile on a USB stick, to name but a few of the perks of a monetarily-tiered medical services program.
We heard the managing partner, Wayne Lipton, give a smooth talk about the program to a room full of a few hundred GFMA patients. Jim Gottlieb, senior VP was there as well as an assistant, Robin, who gets to input all the information gathered in cards handed out tonight and tomorrow morning to gauge further interest in case all 150 slots per physician are not immediately filled up after this week’s set of three presentations to about 1000 of the 6000+ GFMA active patients.
GFMA has three physicians, one of whom will retire in a few months.
The concierge program will rearrange the remaining two physicians’ schedules such that they spend 25% of their day with concierge patients, spending 30 minutes to an hour (or plus for physical exams) per patient, leaving the remaining 75% of their time for the regular, non-concierge, “traditional” patient visits (i.e., a few minutes per patient, 6+ per hour).
The practice will probably add another nurse practitioner.
I don’t know much about Concierge Choice Physicians (CCP), but a quick Internet search reveals not only who they say they are but also what the news media has reported about them.
My first reaction was to tell myself, “Hey, you know what. I’ve seen the nurse practitioners more often than I’ve seen my new MD (who took over when my family practice MD retired a year or so ago). I’m in pretty good shape. What will I gain with concierge service?”
My wife agreed but pointed out the fact we are “haves,” not “have-nots.” Isn’t it in our best interest to buy our way into a system where we get more personal attention now before the family practice medical services industry moves completely to a concierge-only system to see an MD or an outpatient clinic system for non-MD attention?
The question I have to ask myself: what does an MD know that a nurse practitioner doesn’t? What does the MD do for me that a nurse practitioner, surgeon’s/physician’s assistant, nurse or medical technician can’t?
We humans have the gift of multicompartmentalising ourselves. We can separate theory from fact.
I can believe wholeheartedly in the value of community, marriage, church and a system of government/capitalism while at the same time arguing wholeheartedly against its existence in order to strengthen its core values, forcing members of the community to more strongly defend their positions to both theirs and my advantage.
It’s like they say: What’s the point of having a heaven if there’s not a hell as a wickedly evil alternative to keep the stray sheep in line?
Oh, to be sure, the cynic in me questions the added value of the management/services team that CCP claims to be, much the way I question the value of any one charity and its administrative cost/fees.
But by golly, I love a good story and even more so when it’s tied to free market forces at work.
Let’s hold a modern-day tent revival and scream those ugly words to the unitiated and insecure. “Medicare! Medicaid! Obamacare!” We can’t scare people directly so we use data and statistics about the decline of the family practice physician and the fact that the general population is aging, falling apart at the seams, especially if we don’t get personal attention of a person approved by the American Medical Association to hang up a shingle and start voodoo dances to perform miraculous healings, handing out prescriptions for magic beans blessed and issued by Big Pharma.
Seriously, though, when I want the attention of an MD at 2 in the morning, I’m going to have him/her on my speed dial list. If it costs $1800/year to keep that number handy, then so be it.
Five bucks a day! It’s the latte effect.
Now, will five dollars a day make me healthier?
Not necessarily, but it will make me think twice about my health. After all, if I take my health more seriously by spending $150 per month for better/longer medical attention, don’t I want to take care of myself, pay more attention to me?
So, despite my misgivings, my cynicism, my longterm view of what is or is not important to me, when I go to GFMA tomorrow to get some places on my ears removed, my wife and I are going to drop about four large ones to move us up in the medical queue.
I’m sure it won’t be long before we go to a cash-only family physician system, leaving the Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare patients with the outpatient clinics served admirably and honourably by non-MD staff.
In that case, statistics will bear out who’s healthier and who wants to be.
At the end of my life, only I can say for sure whether paying extra for personalised MD care added to my quality of life.
Affordable medical care — giving me more time and money to spend on the hobbies and [a]vocations that make me happy.
Here’s hoping that our physicians can get back to their pre-EMR number of traditional patients per hour.
There’s time for a dance lesson tomorrow!
[NOTE: this blog entry is written with the subcultural tone set in tonight’s presentation]
Stacks of bound wood fibre
[notes to self stored here for posterity]
If nothing is guaranteed, when even death and taxes are illusions, then what’s next for me?
I use seven billion data points for references as to the types of behaviour I am capable of emulating.
What I don’t always have is the set of previous behaviours and environmental changes which led to the current behaviour that every one of the seven billion is exhibiting in this moment.
Am I or am I not a caged beast?
As a caged beast receiving food, clothing and shelter, what am I getting now that I wouldn’t get if uncaged?
And the opposite, what am I not getting now that I would get if uncaged?
All the objects in this room contribute to me and my set of memories, the result of previous behaviours and environmental changes which led to the current behaviour, writing here in this blog instead of something else like finishing a fence, sealing the crawlspace, going out for lunch with coworkers or reading a book bought at full retail price.
I use police/military/government/authority references as a form of self-flagellation, punishing myself for thoughts of actions I have not taken.
I do know who am I, sometimes in forethought, sometimes in hindsight, often as I am in the moment.
How many of us treat our lives like a Disneyland ride, pretending to be alive, teasing ourselves with the idea of dangerous adventure, looking at photos of ourselves pretending, and are completely satisfied?
I have the fortune of a good, working body, unfamiliar with the different levels of “caged beast” feelings like a quadriplegic, extreme schizophrenic or locked-in syndrome person would describe.
I, I, I. When it’s not about me, it is about me. Altruism is a guilt complex, not necessarily always a default position to take.
These words fall on the deaf ears of history, repeating the works of both the great and the famous, the insecure and the infamous.
Either I am going to break the stitches of bound stacks of wood fibre and get outside the books within which I hide myself or I am not.
It is not so much the risks I fear as it is overcoming the lazy habits of a caged beast that would require working more constantly to secure my uncaged state that keeps me here.
What is happiness and does it have anything to do with what I’ve written so far?
What about these musings from Lady J?: [How much am I like her husband? I need not ask my wife. I already know I am.]
We talked. Yet again. This time, however, we chatted casually in the kitchen. It wasn’t intense. This conversation needed to happen though, and I didn’t know how to have it without sounding like a nagging harpy. I really want to believe the best about people, and I make a point to look for what is good in others. That was my starting point.
I don’t know how the conversation got started, but I do remember this:
“I have two choices. I need your help in telling me what is true. From where I’m standing it either looks like you don’t care, or it looks like you are forgetting to do what you said you would do. I want to believe that you care, but I also want the truth. So, I need you to be honest with me.”
He looked shocked. “Of course I care! I love you!”
“Okay…So, you care. Then, I want you to explain to me why you don’t keep your promises. Are you forgetting?” I asked him this question very calmly in an almost friendly manner. I had to feel almost as if I wasn’t invested in his answers so that he wouldn’t feel accused or cornered because I had a theory regarding his forgetfulness.
“What promises?”
“Well, have you read Dr. Amen’s book? Have you called your internist for a referral to a psychiatrist so that your medication could be changed? You said you would do that last December. It’s July.” He blanched. “Have you taken care of the backyard?” I gently asked him.
“Well, I went to Home Depot today to look at some products…” he explained.
“We went to Home Depot almost three weeks ago and already bought something for the backyard. Do you remember that? It’s out back.” He looked mystified. “It sat on the kitchen floor in the Home Depot plastic bag for a few days. The cat started sniffing around it. She got her head caught in the bag. It scared her. She thought the weed killer was chasing her so she ran around the house with the bag around her neck and hid under the couch. Does any of this ring a bell?” He looked up in an effort to jog his memory.
“God, why can’t I remember these things?!” he exclaimed with frustration.
“Do you really want to know? I have an idea.” I asked him. He nodded.
“Well, I think you have a working memory problem much like three of our daughters do. It’s often inherited. I’ve watched you struggle for years when it comes to planning things. I think your executive planning is impaired a bit. I don’t think it’s anywhere near where Grace’s is, but I do think it’s a problem for you. People with ADHD have executive planning problems. You will function much better in your relationships if you acknowledge that this is an issue for you and make allowances for it. You have more technology than you can shake a stick at. Start using it. Put reminders in your laptop or phone to remind you when you have something to do. Don’t count on your memory to remind you. It won’t. If you really care about me, then you need to start putting an action plan together that will help you keep your promises. As it stands, you are not able to do that. It’s affecting your credibility.”
He made his thinking face. “I’m sorry. I got distracted by work, and I was working last weekend, you know.”
I planned for this response. “You worked while we went to the movies on Saturday, but then you were done. Am I correct?” He nodded. ”You remained on your laptop for hours after that. You were reading Gizmodo and other sites. This tells me that you had time to read Dr. Amen’s book. You had time to close your laptop and engage your family. You had time to close your laptop and do something else. This is about choices, and this is about a habit or a lifestyle. You need to hear me when I say this to you. You are a husband, a father of four, and a homeowner. Technically, there is never a time when you have nothing to do. If you sit down in your room with your laptop to kill time, then it’s because you are deliberately choosing to ignore your parental responsibilities, spousal responsibilities, and homeowner’s responsibilities. When you say ‘yes’ to your laptop and killing time with that machine, you are saying ‘no’ to everyone and everything else, and you are placing your responsibilities on me in addition to my responsibilities. That is, in fact, the lifestyle that you have chosen to pursue for the majority of our marriage. You cannot continue to live like that if you want your daughters to respect you because they are beginning to figure some things out about gender roles. It’s simply not morally right for you to take your happiness at my expense. Have you ever seen me sit around and do nothing? Think about that before you answer. Have you? Why do you think it’s so hard for me to read the books for book club? When do I have time to even sit down and read a book? Where do you think that Fibromyalgia diagnosis came from?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re right. I…” he sighed. I swept the floor while he processed my words. It was a lot to take in, but I’ve said all those words before. There was nothing new in what I said, but sometimes you have to continually speak to a person’s identity repeatedly before the truth sticks. I don’t know how my husband sees himself. I can only tell him how I see him. He is my husband. He is the father of our children. He is my partner in life, and yet he lives as a bachelor who occasionally shows up to help. This is an identity problem. I’m not suggesting that we don’t need to take a break and recharge. We do, but he tends to take a break from his individualism to participate rather than taking a break from fatherhood and being my husband.
I have to stop here and explain something about expectations in marriage or even in relationships. We all have expectations–hidden expectations. If two people married, rented an apartment, maintained their own jobs and separate checking accounts, socialized in their own circle of friends, and only maintained relationships with their respective families, then what would they be? Roommates and fuck buddies. They don’t own a home together so the expectations on how to split home maintenance responsibilities don’t exist. There are no children so the stress and responsibilities that come with raising children not to mention the expectations for dividing those responsibilities and what mutual collaboration might look like aren’t on the table. At some point, there comes a time when we either invest ourselves in our relationships or we don’t. We are either people that can be counted upon or we are not. Some things have to be constant in relationships, and I am beginning to wonder if the masculine idea of “father” and “husband” is distinctly different from what women imagine and expect.
I spent some time with a friend recently, and we shared our marital experiences. There was a lot of pain in both of us. Disappointment. She told me that all of her girlfriends were in the same boat. She didn’t know one woman who wasn’t struggling with the same issues. Then she went on to tell me something that caused my heart to ache. An older woman in her life shared that her husband told her that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. This older woman quietly smiled and said, “I wish I could say the same thing about him.” I didn’t want to understand that. I really didn’t, but I did. My friend explained, “He just refused to grow up and mature. He wouldn’t deal with his issues. He would never be a real partner to her.” A forty year marriage…
I don’t want to feel like that in twenty years, but I don’t have control over my husband. What is his idea of masculinity? What does he imagine when he thinks of the word ‘husband’ or ‘father’ or ‘partner’ or even ‘man’? I often imagine that men imagine Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders when I think of American men–the rugged individualist. The character of Don Draper from “Mad Men” has certainly made an impact on men. Women revile him, but I’ve heard more than a few men speak of him with great admiration–“Oh, to be Don Draper..” What is the definition of 21st. century masculinity? Most of the women I know are working more than ever, but their husbands appear to be clinging to a warped view of the role of the female. They accept that their wives are working and leading full lives. They even encourage it, but they don’t pick up the slack. This is where expectations and communication come in. What do we really expect from our partners even down to grocery shopping and preparing meals? What do we really expect when it comes to cleaning a house and taking care of a yard? What about pulling weeds? Who’s going to do that? Who is going to take out the trash and recycling? Who is going to do laundry? Who is going to fold it? What are the expectations around HOW to fold towels? Does it matter? What about the expectations around making a bed and changing sheets? Do the sheets get changed after sex and, if so, who will be doing that since sex is usually a shared activity? Who will wash the sheets? Believe it or not, these expectations matter because these tasks are what make up daily life–cooking, cleaning, and errands. This defines the quotidian moments. The quotidian matters far more than those milestone moments because we live our lives out in the mundane. It’s in the mundane that life happens. You share your life while you’re changing sheets and doing dishes, and if you’re doing all these things alone while your partner is making little to no contribution then you’ve invested your entire self for two people while your other half has invested nothing. It’s really a form of thievery, and it can’t last.
The best way I can think to describe how small actions have large consequences in the grand scope of life is through this 14th century proverb:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Relationships live and die by the small actions we take every day. Why? Because we do not live in a vacuum. Call it the butterfly effect if you like. A butterfly flits it wings in Argentina and somehow a taxi runs into a telephone pole in Manhattan two weeks later. Our actions affect others. More to the point, so does our inaction. When I choose to do nothing with my life and my time, I’m also communicating something. I’m also contributing something. I’m contributing to the void of empathy, kindness, and goodness in my sphere of influence. I’m making a statement about the kind of person I want to be. I’m saying clearly that I am passive and selfish. Even if I am simply forgetting to keep my promises. When I know that I have a problem with remembering important things yet I do nothing to help myself remember, my passivity is still an active contribution.
This is one of the biggest relational issues I see currently in my life and in the lives of many women I know. The women are overcompensating for the passivity of the men in their lives which results in codependency. In the end, this male passivity is rewarded through what ends up being enabling. I’ve been engaging in this relational pattern of behavior for a long time. I’m trying to put a stop to it.
It’s very uncomfortable around here for all of us, but I didn’t stand up in front of God, my husband, and the witnesses at my wedding almost 18 years ago and vow to make my husband comfortable. I vowed to love him.
Sometimes love is uncomfortable. You know what love is not? Passive.
The other 1% (of 1% of 1% of 1%)
Believe what you will, will what you believe
For a good joke, we planted this study as a false memory of planting false memories so that you’ll never ever be sure that a scientific report is what you thought it was.
The divorce diet
Bai looked at her figure in the mirror.
Little more than a size four, close to a size six.
Watching herself and her partner on video from a recent dance competition had shown her that she was not the skinny ballerina figure she used to be.
Time’ll do that to you.
That, and alcohol to a diabetic’s disposition.
She breathed. She needed water, part of her purification cleansing diet, much like the nutritional input to which she resorted during her divorce.
Her so-called divorce diet.
She wanted to go back to per post-divorce size two, or a size one in clothing store labeled terms.
More importantly, she wanted to be a great dance partner again, spinning on point effortlessly, turning faster than anyone else on the floor, the perfect follower for the perfect leader.
She was no engineer but she understood inertia better than most scientists — it doesn’t take a formula to show you that you don’t move at the same speed as you did in 1998, or even 2008, when you went from a complete stop to 120 BPM in a second, not two.
With her new job as a night club DJ, she could cue up four or five songs and dance with the club patrons as part of her exercise regime.
As a dancing instructor, she just wasn’t burning calories as fast as she’d like.
Soon, she’d be showing off her slimmer figure at Swing Fling in Washington, D.C.
After that, who knew? Maybe River City Swing in Jacksonville, Meet Me in St. Louis Swing Dance Championships or Boogie by the Bay in San Francisco.
She had goals, not all of them dance. Sure, she’d like to travel overseas for dance competitions, buy a sewing machine and turn all of her students into top competitors, but there was more.
Much more.
Lose a boyfriend, gain a girlfriend who was her best friend, then her boyfriend’s former girlfriend.
She had options. Choices. Her secret to life was her happiness and youthful exuberance.
Her life was often tiring but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
She returned to the mirror and practiced a new move.
She had been taught by the best and expected nothing less from herself.
Practice, practice, practice!
Note to self
Do I have it in me to give myself freely, free of fear of rejection, free of resorting to stereotyping, and permit myself to dance with others, let alone my wife, letting go of inhibitions without resorting to the intake of substances to remove barriers that protect my internal nervousness and general fear of the world at large ingrained in me during my formative years?
Sometimes, my fear is so great I relish the thought of eating a slug of lead rather than look in the nearly-fearless faces of live human beings.
The anonymity of an Internet connection is very safe, that’s for sure.
treetrunkdings 