Nothing makes you realize how ganked up our health care system is like looking at a bill for something like a heart attack: $70,278.94. That was JUST the heart attack. If I added in the ER visits after that, it would be more than $80,000. Add in follow-up visits with doctors, EKGs, X-rays, bloodwork and other tests, medications, follow-up cardiac echo, and cardiac rehab, and it would easily top $100,000.
Now imagine if I didn’t have insurance.
But hey, ‘Murica needs more bombs and jets to drop ’em!
P.S. Care for the final five months of my mother’s life cost roughly $3 million–in 2000.
Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t give Inigo enough of a chance to heal from his leg injury before I took him to say goodbye. But he was in pain, his quality of life took a deep turn for the worse because he couldn’t walk or climb, and I sensed he wouldn’t come back from it. As one friend said, freeing him from pain was a final act of love that I could offer him.
2. Do you still have your wisdom teeth?
No, and that’s actually a Christmas story, as I had them taken out over a winter recess while I was in college. That was also the year my father cut a gash in his hand sawing the trunk of the Christmas tree. We made quite a pair sitting on the couch. My mother said she was running an infirmary.
3. Peanut Butter – creamy or crunchy?
I like both but usually get creamy.
4. Get up off your butt. Take 5 steps. Which leg did you start out on?
Right.
5. What color is your favorite kitchen utensil?
Wood.
6. Did you watch the Michael Jackson memorial/funeral?
No.
7. Do you know anyone who graduated from high school this year? Were you invited to their graduation party? Did you go?
Nope.
8. White with black stripes or black with white stripes?
9. If we were to call your 6th grade teacher, what would they say about you?
“She’s very bright and a joy to have in the classroom. She enjoys science and English.”
10. Can you draw a perfect circle?
Nope, but I can listen to them. LOVE this song. A friend once cracked a joke that this song might be the first time Maynard James Keenan wrote something in a major key. The sound is ridiculously happy considering the subject matter, which is the stupid ways humans spend their time and money when we could all die tomorrow. I love the hat-tip to Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (TW: There is one scene of suicide, and the whole thing is about nuclear annihilation. If you’re easily triggered, watch the second one, which is just dolphins swimming.) Bravissimo hip hip hooray!
11. What was your favorite scratch & sniff sticker scent?
As a child, root beer. As an adult, gardenia. I found these Filter Fresh sheets that you can attach to your air filters and the “Scratch for Scent” sticker on the gardenia one smells just like the perfume my mother wore in the ’70s.
12. How many light switches and electrical outlets are in the room that you are in right now?
One light switch, three electrical outlets, and one defunct cable/landline phone outlet.
13. Do you know sign language?
Just how to spell my name and how to tell someone to eat shit and die. No joke. Back in college two of the girls at the end of the hall were legally deaf and they taught me that.
You know what I want for Christmas? A Shut-Me-Up Elmo. Instead of tickling him, when he runs his mouth, you tell him to shut up and he apologizes for being an ignorant asshat and then never again speaks about things he knows nothing about.
Seriously. Eleven kids with three different women, and Elon Musk wants to talk about morality? So tired of these sexist jackdonkeys who think women’s highest achievement is to reproduce. Ya know, for the majority of women, it’s not rocket science. Lie on your back and let a dude ride raw and finish.
As for the rest, it is patently offensive and cruel to deem people who don’t have kids as “genetic dead ends.” Has that fool never heard of infertility? Not everyone who does want kids can have them or afford expensive fertility treatments.
He has also passed comments about how he thinks people who don’t have kids shouldn’t be allowed to vote because he thinks they have no stake in the future. I never wanted kids, but believe me, I have a stake in the future. I shudder to think of a world where egomaniacs like him get to dictate another human being’s life purpose, so one of the ways I seek to leave the world a better place than I found it is to counter ignorant commentary by his ilk.
Regardless, Elmo can run his yap about his OWN experience when he not only actively takes part in parenting on the level a woman does—there is a joke among kid-free feminists where women say “I’d make a great father”—AND he has raised kids into adults who actually want anything to do with him, because trust me, when your own daughter won’t speak to you, you’ve done something heinous as a parent.
Furthermore…
1. Eleven kids is a helluva lot of environmental destruction for one man’s ego. Ya wanna talk about morality? How about ethics?
2. Yes, other people’s kids will take care of me when I am old and ailing. They’re called nurses and home care aides. Having kids as some kind of insurance for adult daycare is both selfish and delusional. One visit to a nursing home should cure him of that notion. See also, “daughter who won’t speak to you,” above.
3. If you need to have kids to teach you how to love, be selfless, and have fulfillment, you’re entitled, privileged, selfish, and tedious to begin with. Having kids won’t change that. You’ll just raise them to be entitled, privileged, selfish, and tedious, too. Or, again, they won’t talk to you when they’re adults.
4. As for all these misogynists going on about Taylor Swift’s cover on Time, whining about her being an example of how feminism has “ruined women,” and nattering on about how she’s an “aging, promiscuous cat lady,” don’t threaten women with a good time, boys. If women would rather share their lives with creatures who crap in a box (or in my case, on newspapers or my sweatshirts) than you, you need to do some introspection on what kind of person you are and what it is you think you offer a woman because we don’t need either the money or the extra housework, and we can buy batteries.
A typical rebuttal from a misogynist is that “you need us to have children.” Well, no. We don’t really need men to have or raise children, either. I know several women who went to sperm banks in their late 30s and did IVF. These women have great careers and can provide for a child, and also have a great family and social network—the proverbial village in which to raise a child, including brothers and male friends who can offer a male’s perspective or be a father figure but whom they know will not indoctrinate their children in the ways of toxic masculinity. But again, if a woman is fertile and has all the social support that’s necessary for healthy parenting, all she needs to do is lie on her back (although I wouldn’t recommend that route, as it’s better to know a male’s genetic carriage like you would with a sperm bank). If that ticks off these fragile males, oh well. Be the kind of equal life partner and co-parent women would want to have a family with and you won’t have any problems living your dream of being a family man.
Another misogynistic rebuttal is “You need us to protect you.” From what? Oh, right, other men, both on an individual level with intimate partner violence, sexual assault, predation, and other crimes, and on a macro level with the wars that by and large are waged by men who fail to see a way to peace.
Yeah, no. Sell all of that somewhere else. Healthy, strong men who are comfortable in their skins live and let live.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce my Song of the Year, “Labour,” by Paris Paloma. It’s an ode to the unfair distribution of work in a heterosexual couple’s household and the realization that no man is ever a woman’s savior. Turn on captions to follow the lyrics.
zenzalei 