Category: NoJoMo

Free Write

I figured that this prompt would be an opportunity to describe a few things that have happened over the past few days.

Thanksgiving was okay. Looks like things are moving along what what I went down to do at the beginning of the month.

Football was good, even if I didn’t like some of the results. Food was good. Checked work stuff for a minute this morning and will log on a little more formally tomorrow to look, but I really just don’t have impetus to do anything today.

This Microsoft automatic spelling and grammar is annoying as hell.

Leave my extra, Oxford(?), commas alone, okay?

I guess I could shop some, look at the “Black Friday” deals, but I really don’t know a lot of things that other people I’m buying for want.

Just have this sense that things are kind of at a completed point.

News….the President wants to ban semiautomatic weapons. To me, this seems like the same sort of thing — keep trying to repeat something that had a modicum of success in the past, thinking it’ll work the same way in the future.

So do that, I suppose. I’m not going to snitch on anyone who in violating the whim, and will push for the government to get rid of theirs first.

That’s not going to happen, of course, but it should.

(Apologies to myself, and future readers for the hyperlink that’ll probably be dead a couple of years from now….)

Off and check HN. This.

Yeah, nothing is really fitting, and I’m on my second cup of coffee.

So off to try to relax some. Maybe.

Thanksgiving

I suppose I should detail the things I’m thankful for, my plans for the day, etc..

That said, at this point, I’m not sure I feel like doing that. Late night of work last night, combined with still exhaustion from all that happened over the last few weeks, I’m not really focused-in on other things. Like the nasty bruise on my right hip that I caught a glimpse of this morning.

Strange-ass dream last night. Probably inspired by the shooting in Chesapeake

That sorty has really dropped the fuck off the top of the headlines this morning after more details have come to light. The things I pointed out yesterday were pretty much correct. There won’t be pictures of Lt. Gov. Sears holding a rifle. (She’s a Marine. She does what Marines do. And you shouldn’t be worried about that unless you’re their physical enemy. Or are impeding progress….)

Also things about COVID for the day. China’s Zero-COVID policy isn’t working, and people are starting to get pissed about it. Or this one. Yes, I’d imagine COVID isn’t fun. Am I really worried about catching it? No. I’m certainly not worried about dying from it.

I could say the same of climate change, Greta.

Maybe my attitude will be a little brighter after some coffee. Who knows?

My wife roasted some things for the meal today this afternoon. My f’d-up senses had me smelling tobacco smoke.

Literally can’t even.

*Glances over at news*

Bing thinks i’m in Ballimore. Interesting.

We don’t have dessert for today. I have an idea that I’m going to pitch to my wife she gets back from taking a walk with the dog.

Radio Reminiscence (From September 23, 2004 about Air America)

Ah, yes, this is somewhat apropro, as I’ve been listening to Fly On The Wall. (Al Franken, before he was on the tranwreck that was Air America was on SNL…)

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The entry is up on the blog, but some of the links no longer work. I also talk about being in Orkut jail…..

I decided to look a bit more at Air America’s ratings now, since they’ve managed to be on the air six months now…..
Minneapolis/St. Paul
Air America is on KSMM/WMIN. KSTP and WCCO are the big talkers in the market.
Al Franken and his Public Radio gigglebitch are both from Minnesota.
KSTP and WCCO have a combined 12.8. KSMM and WMIN have a combined 0.8.
In New York City, WLIB is back to where it was before AA made it the flagship station (it was broadcasting in like Korean, I think), and WABC still has over three times as many listeners.
Yep, this is a successful operation.
And once again, it proves not that liberals can’t do talk radio — that’s not what it proves at all. It proves that radio amateurs can’t do talk radio.
Alan Colmes is a good talk show host. I much prefer him to some of the right-wing idiots (hello, mister weiner!). Al Franken is a shitty talk show host, saddled with a public radio leech who whispers into her tinny low-budget microphone.
Randi Rhodes is barely adequate. She’s maybe good enough to handle an afternoon show in a mid-sized market.
Don’t get me started on the other hosts, it’s just not worth the effort to type….

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Franken lost his polemical career for pretending he grouped a sleeping woman on a USO tour plane.

I disagree with his politics, and thought Air America was shit, but his comedy is funny.

RIP, too, to Alan Colmes who I met sometime after I wrote that….along with Sean Hannity. Radio people were hit-or-miss in-person. The ones who were real misses, well, one is also dead, one has gone on to big cable TV success, another I have no idea about, and don’t care to look.

But it’s such a different world almost twenty years later. I went and looked at the cumulative numbers for the stations where I used to work a few months ago; if the stations had pulled numbers that small when I was there, everybody would have been firedlaid off.

Speaking of Tidewater, Chesapeake made big news for a shooting at a Walmart where I’ve shopped many times.

The shooter was a Walmart employee.
No assault weapons weren’t used.
Doesn’t seem to be motivated by bias of any sort…
And, since I started plunking away at this, the perpetrator has been identified. Kinda doubt he’s a supremacist of any sort. (Doesn’t managing a Walmart kinda exclude you from that….?)

But the typical politicians are still pushing hard for more gun laws.

What can you say? (When you think government is the solution to everything, you wind with a lot more people in prison than lives saved. Hello, Mr. President, Madam Vice President….)

Thanksgiving is tomorrow. I’m hoping it goes well.

Kinda craving fruitcake. I guess the podcast who’d been selling them as a fundraiser quit that after I’d stopped listening. I tried listening again a few weeks ago, and there just wasn’t anything to keep me around.

I try to forgive. It normally doesn’t work out. Maybe that makes me the bad person. But I don’t care. If I turned it off, most likely it’s because I was bored. But there are some that it was because of something egregious. This was the latter.

Seven more days.

But I think I’ve pretty much done what I was intending to do with this one.

Dates that will live in Infamy

I think if you’re at all familiar with US history, you get where I’m going with this.

This did come up recently on a podcast that Justin Campbell did Fact Check This.

When I was doing research into this as an undergrad, there was an interesting split among the demographers. I consider myself Generation X. The US Census Bureau agrees. Some of the academics, however, don’t. My parents were (typing that is a bit strange, seeing as how my mother is still alive…) early Baby Boomers. I was born before the kickoff of the 1980 campaign. I remember bits and pieces of the Reagan reelection campaign. The teachers were in the smokingteachers’ lounge watching Christa McAuliffe on 1/28/1986.

How much cultural relevance would startup.com have to anyone born after 1980? How about Office Space?

I apologize that this is kind of scatterbrained. I’m tired. But I did get my recharge this morning, so maybe I can enjoy Thanksgiving.

What do I do for Small Business Saturday? How many of those are left after so many were destroyed to save people from the scourge of COVID?

What is the shared moment for the generation born from 1995 – 2010? Why doesn’t that generation also run twenty years like the Boomers?

I really don’t know. I wonder if my Flooz are on a backup somewhere.

Thanksgiving plan

To put it very simply — nothing.

Of course, that’s not entirely true. Sarah and I are going to stay home, have a less-elaborate meal for just the two of us.

I’m not terribly upset about that.

Bills at the Lions
Giants at the Cowboys
Pats at the Vikings

Actually could be some good football. Disappointed that there’s no weather, but that’s kind of to be expected with Dallas now playing in an indoor stadium.

I am not planning to work Friday, but that’s always up-in-the-air with what I do. I’m okay with this.

I guess I could sort of miss the family gathering some, but I’m really not sure how much I could enjoy it at this poing.

Maybe I shouldn’t say that with the progress I’ve made over the past couple of years, but it’s where I am, attitude-wise.

I want a break. Is that because of the weather? Is it end-of-dose blahs? Who know.

MRI later this afternoon.  Some work tonight.  Infusion tomorrow morning.  Party.

What opportunities that you’ve passed up do you regret passing? (Flashback to 2015)

I thought that this was a free-write day, but this is what I had in my drafts category, so I’ll go with it.

The answer? Nothing. Are there things I would have done differently? Sure. Is there anything I really regret? No.

I don’t regret not doing anything in particular.

With what I know about my health condition, I wonder what things would look like had I taken a different path. At the same time, I don’t think I’d be in as good a situation now.

How the fuck it worked is beyond me.

Maybe I should reflect a bit more, but I’m in a place where I’m sorta kinda comfortable.

What more can I say?

Tube Cruise

This was really to write about the MRIs I had on Wednesday. I had three, and wasn’t on the sleepy pills because I had to get myself there; the people who’d I’d normally call to ferry me around weren’t available.

I need to send the DVD to my neurologist, but I’m going to see if the imaging center can mail it….because I have to go back and get the fourth scan that somehow got omitted from the order. So something to do Monday night.

For a long time, the only diagnostic tool for MS was a spinal tap. I was diagnosed in 2010, and have had many MRIs.

I drove myself to the first MRI in Norfolk, didn’t have any “downers” then. The old school MRI that was used when I was diagnosed was strange. I went early in the morning, then, and was able to sort of go half-asleep through it. I came out just drenched in sweat.

After I was diagnosed, the neuro who diagnosed me passed me off to one of the other docs in her practice who specialized in MS. He had me start getting my MRIs at a hospital with a newer machine. He also put me on medication to stop some of the spasms that might have messed up my original scans.

I got into a bit of a routine with it. Schedule the earliest appointment available, pretty much stay awake the night before, get to the clinic, take the pills, dip into the tube, wake up an hour later without much memory of the thing. This was more important back then with my negative reactions to getting the reflective agents injected into my veins. As I said recently, I was kinda okay getting a shot, but if you were hitting a vein, I was going to puke, pass out, or both.

Things got knocked askew with my various health insurance issues, moves, etc..

I did have one that was on morphine when I had an infection courtesy the Tysabri and an infection-promoting procedure that landed me in the hospital for my first overnight stays.

I still am inside the tube, but it’s kind of one of those whatever things at this point. /GenX

I guess I’ll find out later whether there’s been anything going on. The immediacy that normally comes with getting it done in a hospital is gone, but the cost difference getting it done at this clinic is incredible.

I’m relatively comfortable with the staff, the procedures, etc..

They did still want face diapers in the office, however.

Had I been on the sedatives, I probably wouldn’t have been as able to work on Thursday morning.

Tradeoffs.

I think I still need to figure out how to burn some leave, unfortunately.

Callback to prompts from 11/18/2012

(And I didn’t paste in what I was planning on writing to, but I dug up the entry from that day….)

1. Are you a risk-taker?Do you weigh the pros and cons or jump right in?
Short answers: “No. Depends.” Longer answers: “I’m actually pretty risk-averse when you get right down to it. Living with my physical limitations kind of demands that. Have I done things that might get me hurt, fired, arrested? Sure. Are there a lot that come immediately to mind? No.”
Those said, considering what you see on TV this time of year, the Internets all year long, etc., I marvel at the paranoia I see. People don’t understand probabilities at all, jump to conclusions. With medical issues, it gets worse. Next on The Doctors, “Is my hangnail due to the chicken I ate in 1987?”

This one is actually pretty interesting a decade later.

My risks are kind of minimized due to the negative experiences I’ve had, but, really on many things, I just don’t give a shit, anymore.

And this is one of the reasons I’m getting mental health care.

Yes, I know that doing something is risky. In too many cases, I just don’t care.

I’ve done the work to get me, and my wife, into position that if something goes awry, it’s really not a big deal.

Maybe teetering so close to oblivion previously affected that, but I think I’ve learned from mistakes, and won’t make the same choices again.

The lack of worry about colossal failure really has ignited odd desires to do things that aren’t terribly dangerous, but are risky.

Can I eat that raw oyster? Is it okay that I don’t put on a seatbelt in the backseat of this taxi? Can I just go and take a trip to..?

So that’s there, mentally, but at the same time, I don’t derive any real pleasure from doing the risky thing. Nothing is thrilling. Few things are really even satisfying at this point.

I guess most people would be bummed out about that, but I really just can’t muster the depression about it. To use a phrase that particularly irks a close relative, “it is what it is.”

And getting upset about that accomplishes absolutely nothing, so why bother?

Write about an experience that changed a long held belief you had (Flashback to 2013)

Hmm. What I wrote in 2015 is here.

I guess, maybe, I’ve come back to some long-held beliefs after entertaining arguments to the contrary; my initial impression maybe wasn’t wrong?

Some of these things I’d rejected when I was younger, but had come back around on, but am now realizing that, no, maybe I was right in the first place. Or, maybe, my initial impressions of the people making the arguments was actually correct.

It’s difficult, however One of the things I’ve taken in lately is the FOX5 DC podcast on the DC Snipers. Generally, I think that people should not be imprisoned indefinitely for crimes they committed as minors. Listening to that, especially the final episode about Lee Malvo, really made me reconsider some things.

But I do think it’s important to change your conclusions if new evidence is presented.

This one is probably too heavy for me today, honestly. I’m definitely feeling end-of-dose lethargy.

Health Update (After l0oking at my entry from 11/16/2016)

This one is somewhat appropriate, as I’m fumbling around trying to burn some time waiting to go get four MRIs.

Things were really going awry while I was on travel recently. Some of it might have been the result of the fall off of the bench at the train station, but it there’s also a chance it could be unknown MS progression.

The prescribing information from my disease-modifying therapy used to recommend MRIs every six months with and without contrast. When I was diagnosed, and for several years after, I really did not deal well with venous puncture. I’m okay, for the most part, with an injection. Hit a vein, I’m gonna puke, pass out, or both.

Obviously, with the switch to Tysabri, and the much more-frequent blood tests, the venous puncture doesn’t bother much.

I started on the Tysabri in the middle of 2015. While the dosing is now dosing is now down to every six weeks.

I do have some mild jitters going into the MRI tube. Ostensibly, the reason my neurologist started putting me on Valium for the MRIs was the bad reaction I’d have to the contrast injection.

Today, it’ll be four scans without sleepy pills.

I’m hoping that the MRIs don’t show any MS-related damage/disease progression.

But if I do, I don’t care. That’s part of the mental health work I’ve been doing.

I really can’t explain how much better in whole I am.

Moving everything into one medical group has really positively-affected my condition. Even earlier today, after getting probably the fourth use-this-new-patient-portal in five years from another specialist, I asked my PCP whether I should go ahead and move that treatment to Georgetown, too.

But back to the topic, in many areas I’m much better than I have been. But there’s things where I can’t perform. Some of that might be aging, but probably most of it is due to the MS.

Thankfully, maybe most importantly, I did get a clean bill of health in May for the condition that saw my dad during surgery to treat.

But I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, professionally, until it goes away, or I physically can’t do it anymore.

The pandemic has actually been a positive in showing that remote work isn’t just screwing off. I don’t miss being in a cube farm.

Cubicles are bad for your health.