Category — Uncategorized

I needed two business-y outfits (like nice enough to wear to an event but not over the line into wearable-for-a-daytime-wedding), so I grabbed ChickieNob, promising that it would take maybe an hour.  Tops.

I don’t go shopping.  I don’t enjoy shopping.  I don’t enjoy clothes unless they are a t-shirt, jeans, and my boots.  I especially don’t like dresses or skirts.  I dislike every part of the shopping experience, from picking out things to trying it on to deciding whether to purchase.

ChickieNob knows this and tried to make the outing efficient and fun.  She gathered up stuff for me to try on and then gave helpful commentary like, “Do you want to look as if you’re wearing a hospital gown?  No?  Then I probably would take off that top.”  She even took some photos of me while I was trying on outfits so she could test their “selfie-ability” (how they show up in selfie form) just in case I ever feel moved to take a selfie.  The girl is prepared.

At one point, I told her that I would release her to read a book and attempt to continue on my own because I felt awful about how I was using up her afternoon.  But she stuck with me because she told me (1) she doesn’t trust me to make good decisions, (2) she pities me and knows that I need more help than the average person to hold it together while shopping for an outfit, and (3) she is a good person.

She didn’t even laugh at me when I got a shirt on and then couldn’t get it off.

I love that girl.

I walked out with an awesome dress and matching cardigan plus a pair of dress pants and two tops.  And it only took us a little over four hours.  Like I said, four hours.  Tops.

Now I don’t need to go shopping for another five to eight years.  I like to wear the same thing every single time I have to dress up.  It makes things easy.

I owe that girl the Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Once More With Feeling” soundtrack for her extreme patience.

After losing our original tickets to the snowstorm, we tried again and were able to score 4 tickets to see Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibit at the Hirshhorn yesterday.  I’ll admit that our earlier experience with the exhibit probably coloured how I felt about the exhibit.  But that’s art: you carry your baggage with you into every piece.

Was it worth it?  Yes.  I think.  Josh compared it to eating at a molecular gastronomy restaurant, which is more an experience than satiating your hunger.  This was definitely more an experience than a consumption of art.  There’s not a lot you can absorb in 20 seconds.  (Yes, you only get 20 seconds per room AND someone is outside with a stopwatch to make it fair.)  You’re thrown into the piece and then yanked out.

The kids LOVED it and were happy to stand patiently in each line.  There’s a lot to see while you’re in line, and we ended up chatting sometimes with the people around us.  (We spoke to a group of three that had gotten there at 7 am for 10 am stand-by tickets!)  And we definitely had a good time together; though how much of that was just hanging out with one another and how much of that was the art exhibit I have no clue.

Okay, I liked it.  I liked it very very much.

I took 281 images at the exhibit, but here are a few to give you a taste.

New York Magazine had an article about “prestigious” diseases, or the hierarchy of disease.  The author explains,

Physicians were asked to rate 38 categories of diseases on a prestige scale from 1 to 9, based on how they felt health professionals viewed the disease-category in question. In all three surveys, there was stability at the top: Leukemia, brain tumors, and myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) were the top three in all three surveys, though the order switched around. At the bottom were fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, and cirrhosis of the liver.

I’m not sure where infertility falls on the actual prestige list, but I’m going to guess that it falls close to the bottom.  The article goes on to summarize what gives a disease high prestige (at least, in Norway):

• “Non-self-inflicted, acute and lethal diseases with clear diagnostic signs, located in the upper part of the body, preferably the brain or the heart.”
• Diseases “associated with active, risky and high technology treatment leading to a speedy and effective recovery.”
• Diseases “associated with young patients, patients who accept the physician’s understanding of the disease, and whose treatment results do not involve disfigurement, helplessness or other heavy burdens.”

Infertility is not lethal and it involves organs in the lower half of the body.  It definitely can be treated with what I would consider high technology, though perhaps IVF is not as cool as robotic surgery.  And while infertility involves young patients in the sense that it is not a geriatric disease, I get a sense — based on my own experience — that people find family building a burden, whether that’s covering for them at work so they can get treatments or accommodating time off for maternity leave on the other end.

We want people to have babies, we just don’t want their babies to impact us in any way.  It goes hand-in-hand with the societal message of children are precious angels and disruptive brats at the very same time.  Infertility follows that duality of everyone should want a baby but no one’s attempt to have a baby should impact anyone else around them.

The most interesting thought in the article is that this idea of disease prestige impacts how doctors practice medicine.  How they may subconsciously make decisions on your treatment.  It’s not just what area of medicine draws the most people but how much energy doctors expend on what they perceive to be a simple case vs. a difficult case or a known fertility issue vs. an unknown fertility issue.

What do you think?  The article gave me a lot to chew on, especially the role the patient could (would? should?) play when suspecting this sort of prestige bias.

How much money do you think Planned Parenthood gets each year from the federal budget?

Write that number down because I think you’re going to be surprised by the actual answer.  The answer will probably either be higher or lower than your expectations.  I think your expectations say something about how you feel about Planned Parenthood; what you think its worth.

So… have your number written down?  Scroll a little bit for the answer.

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The answer is zero.  Planned Parenthood receives zero dollars from the federal budget.  You cannot “defund” Planned Parenthood because it is not funded in the first place.  It is not a line item in the budget.  It is not like the NEA which was appropriated almost $148 million in the 2016 budget.  It is not like Homeland Security which received about $41.2 billion in the 2016 budget.  Planned Parenthood is not in the budget.

Planned Parenthood is a clinic.  It takes a lot lower income patients because it was set up as a safety net in underserved or rural communities.  But it’s just that — a clinic.  No different from any other medical provider EXCEPT that unlike your private doctor or your local hospital, it has a reputation for providing abortions.  Your private doctor and your local hospital also likely provide abortions, but that is not how you think about your private doctor or local hospital.

Sit with that a minute: If you believe your doctor is “good” and Planned Parenthood is “bad” but both provide abortions, then this is really about economics and class.

When I heard that Planned Parenthood was going to be defunded, I assumed that meant that Planned Parenthood would have their funding removed from the budget.  So colour me surprised when I found out that Planned Parenthood gets zero dollars in the budget.  Yes, my initial number was not the actual zero.

How is Planned Parenthood connected to taxpayer dollars?  The same way every private doctor or local hospital is connected to taxpayer dollars: Patients on Medicaid instead of private insurance.  In other words, a patient goes to Planned Parenthood OR a private doctor for a Pap smear.  In both cases, the office (Planned Parenthood or your private doctor) submits for reimbursement.  If the patient has Medicaid, the office submits to Medicaid.  If the patient has private insurance, the office submits to private insurance.  Medicaid or private insurance reimburses the doctor for payment not covered by the patient.  This is the way all insurance works, simplified.

(We don’t need to get into the fact that doctors ask for X amount and insurance companies give them Y amount.  Or fight the charge.  Or… you get the picture because you’ve dealt with insurance at some point.)

So Planned Parenthood gets reimbursed through Medicaid because a large percentage of their patients use Medicaid.  The government knows this.  They cannot tell a clinic or private doctor or hospital that is following the law that they can’t practice medicine but they can make laws that make it impossible for them to be reimbursed for services.

The CBO points out that there is really only one entity in the United States that fits the criteria for this part of the law, and that is Planned Parenthood:

For a one-year period following enactment, the legislation would prevent federal funds from being made available to an entity (including its affiliates, subsidiaries, successors, and clinics) if it is:

• A nonprofit organization described in section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and exempt from tax under section 501(a) of the code;
• An essential community provider that is primarily engaged in providing family planning and reproductive health services and related medical care;
• An entity that provides abortions—except in instances in which the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest or the woman’s life is in danger; and
• An entity that had expenditures under the Medicaid program that exceeded $350 million in fiscal year 2014.

CBO expects that, according to those criteria, only Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates and clinics would be affected. Most federal funds received by such entities come from payments for services provided to enrollees in states’ Medicaid programs.

Do you get it now?  The new health care bill states that if you are a nonprofit that provides reproductive health services AND provides abortions AND was reimbursed over $350 million in 2014 through Medicaid then you won’t be able to get reimbursed through Medicaid for the new budget year.

So think about whether there is anyone else out there that is a nonprofit (a community health clinic, let’s say) that also provides reproductive health services (okay, still with you) and also provides abortions (okay, they’re legal so that could happen, too) and also got back over $350 million in reimbursements in 2014.  Oh… wait… it won’t affect that community clinic because it’s small and only serves a few thousand people.

This health care bill is like looking at the person you don’t like and describing them, making sure to make your description super specific so no one else could possibly fit the same description.

It is completely reasonable if you want to vote with your wallet and not patron Planned Parenthood.  You do not have to go there in the same way that I do not have to shop at certain stores or eat at certain restaurants.  It’s a decision I make due to the policies of that business.  It is completely unreasonable to say that no one can patron Planned Parenthood (or a store or restaurant) because you do not like it.  As long as abortion is legal in the US, abortions will be performed.

Unless you are willing to also shut down all private doctors or hospitals that perform abortions, protesting Planned Parenthood is a protest against a clinic, not a service.  I don’t think lawmakers are willing to lose their private doctor or not have hospitals to go to in an emergency.  But they totally are willing to go against people who need Medicaid in order to make their point about abortion.

Because 79% of people who use Planned Parenthood have “incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level.”  So make no mistake: this is using the most vulnerable in society to make a point about abortion.

If you feel okay with that, keep on keeping on in making America great again.  But if you look down at that slip of paper where you wrote that initial number and feel confused because the media led you to believe that Planned Parenthood is getting beaucoup bucks from the federal government and using it to give abortions (which they can’t due to the Hyde amendment), it may be time for you to get involved.

Call your representative. THE VOTE IS TODAY, but even if this bill doesn’t pass, we all know that lawmakers will try this again and again. So please let me know if you want to help Planned Parenthood, and I’ll add you to a listserve where you can learn how you can make a difference.

I read a great piece about the AOL chat rooms, which are technically still up and running though barely used these days.  It made me nostalgic, not for AOL chat rooms because I never had AOL, but chat rooms in general.

I used to do my homework in college while hanging out in a chat room and talking to other students around the world.  I had a standing date for many months with another student in Ballarat, but other people would join in the conversation; random strangers who dropped in and out.

Everyone was polite in my experience with chat rooms, but that could have just been because the Internet was so new and shiny.  It was so mind-blowing back then that no one wanted to crap on it.

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I liked the article because it’s nice to think about little gardening grannies getting together online to talk about azaleas.  I still have a bunch of message boards I frequent around specific topics though it’s different to leave and read messages vs. talk back and forth with someone in real time.

The article made me sad, too, because it felt like walking through the crumbling remains of a once great empire:

There’s a post apocalyptic sense about AOL chatrooms. The abandoned entertainment rooms are about outdated TV shows, celebrities, and movies (think Desperate Housewives, Brangelina, and Twilight). Frequent, longtime users — it seems to mostly be the elderly — who log on to chat about gardening have increasingly been met with trolls who start arguments about President Donald Trump. And yes, there are people — unsure about Tinder — looking for love.

I guess Twitter is the equivalent of today’s chat room.  Or Facebook.  But it’s different because we can curate those feeds vs. expose ourselves to anyone and everyone who stumbles into the same space.  Sure, that is preferred considering how people treat others online, but we’ve lost something, too.

We used to meet new people all the time, and now we’re conversing in echo chambers, culling our friend lists so we don’t have to be annoyed by obnoxious statements.  We can silence people so they continue talking, thinking they’re engaging listeners without knowing that their words aren’t reaching an audience.

And then there are instant messaging apps, which give us conversation in real time with a few drawbacks.  Instead of getting to choose the hours when communication will take place — visiting the room and seeing whose schedule lines up with your own — you’re having people communicate with you when they want to communicate, dropping messages into Slack that pop up on your phone unless you turn off notifications.  In that way, it feels like the phone ringing in my house, letting me know someone else wants to talk, but it’s not necessarily when I have time to talk.

When I first entered the Internet, it made my world feel infinitely larger.  When I think about the Internet now, it feels a lot smaller.  I still meet new people all the time, but I mostly converse with the same people, day after day.  I can’t remember the last time I entered a virtual room, chatted with a bunch of people, and went our separate ways without the strings of a friend request or a follower notification.

Do you still frequent chat rooms?  Do you miss them, too?