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For once, I’m not the one in the hospital!

14 Jul

I’ve spent a decent amount of time familiarizing myself with the Emergency Room in DC over the last two years, between getting hit by a car, having my leg do some random swelling thing, and thinking I had appendicitis. Based on my experience there, I assumed all hospitals were a flurry of activity, with nurses racing around, EMTs wheeling people in on stretchers and Code Blues being called over the PA.

So this morning, when Alan, my friend Kelly and I went to the VA Hospital in Ann Arbor to visit a classmate who wasn’t able to attend our reunion last night, I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone. The hospital was practically empty, with gates stretched over corridors and a closed sign hanging over the window of the gift shop. We walked the entire length of the building and got up to the fifth floor with only encountering ONE person.

It very much felt like we were in that television show The Walking Dead, where only zombies and a handful of humans populate the Earth.

Adding to the creep factor? The one person we saw standing behind the information desk when we entered the building. I approached him and asked, “How would we find out where our friend is and if she can receive visitors?”

He glanced up from whatever he was doing but made no move to the computer. “What the last name?”

“Allen,” I said. Without breaking eye contact, he said, “She’s up on 5 North.”

“SHUSH!” I exclaimed, causing him to stop speaking. (I didn’t remember this but Alan pointed it out after the fact because it was rude but the guy DID shush.) “How were you able to do that, without looking at a computer or anything?”

“I’m the chaplain,” he explained. “I’ve been up a few times to visit her, but she’s had doctors in there every time I go by.”

At the time it seemed like magic, but that was before we walked through the abandoned building and realized it was like a card trick where there’s really only ever one card that can be pulled. With seemingly no other patients, of course he knew who she was and where her room was. In retrospect, I’m a bit disappointed that he didn’t head us off at the pass by greeting us with, “Your friend is on Five North,” before we even asked. I mean, I’m pretty sure she’s the ONLY patient in the place.

After we found her, we asked if she needed anything to make her stay better. Candy? Books? Magazines? She shook her head, then relented, “Actually, some kind of mindless gossip magazine like People would be great.” Alan seized on the opportunity to go scout for one, leaving Kelly and me to chat with her in private.

Some ten minutes later, Alan reappeared, holding a book and a magazine. “Looks like you were successful,” I commented, before seeing what he’d actually retrieved.

At least it wasn’t this…

“Actually, the gift store was closed,” he said. Sheepishly, he held out his bounty. A Smithsonian Magazine and a Ken Follet novel. “But I found these in the waiting room so I thought they might work.”

Well, so much for reading about TomCat’s divorce. More like the fall of Rome. Which, I suppose, is probably better reading for someone in a VA hospital anyway. Good thing we didn’t go looking for games – probably would’ve only located Battleship and Stratego.

Now I’m wondering what the cafeteria serves. MREs?

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Proof that men are born that way.

15 May

Last week Alan almost kicked a ten year old’s ass.

We were checking out a beer garden with live Irish music in Arlington. Sitting on bench with our backs to the building, we toasted each other and began scanning the crowd. A woman sat eating dinner with her two sons at a nearby table. She had her nose in her iPhone, and one of the boys stared at us.

I don’t mean our eyes occasionally met and we both awkwardly looked away. He STARED at us. Constantly. And they didn’t appear to be sweet little boys… we’d seen them before they were seated, raising holy hell with their soccer ball and climbing all over every available bench. They ran the joint like spoiled rich kids – which – given where we were – they probably were.

I noticed  him staring and continued scanning the rest of the crowd. When my eyes got back to Alan, I saw that he was fully engaged with the kid, having a stare-down.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“That kid won’t stop staring,” he said.

“I know,” I responded. “But do you have to stare back at him?”

“Actually,” he explained, “I do. It’s not just a staring contest, it’s a male dominance thing.”

“Really? Because it LOOKS like a staring contest,” I challenged.

“No,” he informed me, “That little shit knows exactly what he’s doing.”

I looked back at the kid and – sure enough – he was brazenly staring at Alan, not blinking, not  flinching, with a bored/cocky look of entitlement on his face, shoving french fries into his mouth without even glancing at his plate. I could kind of see Alan’s point.

Alan continued to stare at him and I could tell he was actually getting irritated.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “I’m not buying the dominance thing. Besides – he’s a kid. You’re an adult. Why are you even engaging him?”

“Because it is RUDE. Someone needs to set him straight – he’s way too cocky. I’m tempted to walk over there and ask the mom if they know me, then – when she says no – then ask why her kid has been staring at me non-stop. At least she’ll understand he’s being rude.”

We then spent a few minutes laughing as we imagined how that conversation would go:

“Your kid has been staring at me.”

She ignores us.

“Lady, get your nose out of that phone and look at your rude kid!” 

When we finished laughing, we looked back over and the kid was STILL boring holes into us. Alan, frustrated, ran his hand through his hair. And in turning his head ever so slightly, he happened to notice the flatscreen television screwed to the wall behind him, broadcasting a hockey game.

As it turned out, I saw it at the same time. We both looked at each other with sudden awareness, eyebrows lifted.

Mystery solved.

“So,” I asked him. “When I write this for my blog, should I title it, ‘Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of Mistaken Dominance?’ Or should it be ‘The Case of the Rude Child?’

Apparently he thought BOTH were fantastic ideas, because he didn’t respond. Or maybe we’re having a Silence Contest. I’m really not clear on these things. Must be a guy thing.

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Pesky? I prefer “clever.”

27 Apr

I don’t own a television. I’m not saying that in a superior way, the way vegetarians inform you that they won’t eat flesh. I don’t have a television because a) I prefer to read, b) I think they detract from a room’s design, and c) I’m too cheap to pay for cable.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t watch television. Admittedly, it’s probably amounts to only two hyper-calculated hours per week, but still – I’m not living in a total cultural void. Alan serves as my enabler. HE believes in television, so he records Mad Men shows we both enjoy, and I venture his way once a week to watch them.

And when the shows we watch are off-season, we check out a new series (most recently Breaking Bad) using his Netflix account. Kindly, he has lent me his password so that I can occasionally access something without him. I rarely do it (did I mention: I like to READ), but periodically I do hop in there and make his queue a bit more, um, interesting. I think he appreciates it.

Here is what I added last night:

  • Reach for Me: When his new hospice roommate — 25-year-old Kevin — moves in, the quiet life of senior citizen Alvin turns upside down. (Don’t you think Alan will LOVE that?)
  • Politics of Love: Politics makes strange bedfellows, but never stranger than when a sexy, savvy, African-American Republican reluctantly falls for his counterpart: a beautiful Indian-American Democratic campaign volunteer. (Timely. It IS election season, after all. And before you try to claim this must be sci-fi because there are no African American Republicans, let me remind you: Michael Steele.)
  • Don’t Go Breaking My Heart: Recently widowed mother of two Suzanne catches the eye of her dentist, who secretly hypnotizes her during an appointment to make her fall for him. (Because nothing says SEXY like a medical professional taking advantage of you while you’re in the chair for a procedure. THAT is the stuff dreams – and lawsuits – are made of.)
  • The Human Centipede 2:A disturbed loner is so obsessed with the shocking horror film The Human Centipede that he decides to replicate the movie’s grisly experiment. In this metasequel, the stakes are raised as 12 unlucky souls endure surgical hell. (Actually, I think Alan might have added this one himself. Nevermind.)
  • The Minis: Worried he can’t afford his son’s tuition, Roger — a little person — tries to get his friends to enter a basketball tournament with a big prize. (I would like to meet the screenwriter who thought, “Ah ha! Little person, big prize!” And then punch him in the face.)

The best part of meddling with Alan’s queue isn’t even watching him sift through the items that populate it. It’s seeing the “intelligent” recommendations at populate as a result. The formula I just created with these movies looks something this:

Hospice + racial/political switcheroo + widowed date-rape + human centipedes + Dennis Rodman =

Netflix's "Recommended for Alan" pick.

Actually, that sounds about right. I guess technology IS smarter than we are.

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Finally: I escaped the flossing lecture!

24 Apr

If you’ve read Pithy for more than six months, you know that I don’t floss regulary (gasp!) and have devised a complex series of lies to help me escape The Lecture from my hygienist. So complex, in fact, that I couldn’t even keep track of them during one of my recent visits. I think you’ve officially reached a new low when you forget your own flossing lies.

Last week, I decided to take a different tact and boldly own it. “Floss?” I imagined myself asking, incredulously. “Hell no, I don’t floss! Flossing is for suckers.” And then I’d laugh like Nelson from the Simpsons until the hygienist became so confused she changed the topic.

At least, that’s how I envisioned it going. Turns out, Judy had the day off, so it was a stranger tilting me back in the chair, peering at me from behind a surgeon’s mask and magnifying glasses. After an initial inspection of my mouth she said, “Looks great! I’m guessing you’re a flosser?”

For a split second, I considered embracing that identity – giving a cocky nod and saying, “Floss? Give me a spool and I can practically weave you shoelace, I’m so skilled a threading shit between my teeth.”

Instead, I came clean. “Not so much,” I managed, right before she popped her hands in my mouth and began scratching around with a pick. It was a good thing I didn’t lie, because almost immediately she said, “I take it back. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig. Definitely not a flosser.”

But you know what was awesome? Instead of lecturing me, she said, “I hate flossing too. In fact, I didn’t do it until a few years after I even became a hygienist because it felt hypocritical to tell other people to do something I wasn’t doing.”

Mad props for being honest. And then she said, “If you’re not going to do it, at least let me show you how you can brush your teeth to kind of fake it.” AWESOME. Where has this woman been all my life?

At the end of the visit, my dentist ducked his head in for a quick peek at my mouth. For the first time in ages, he didn’t mistake me for another patient and ask how “the girls” are doing, sparing us both the awkward moment where I look at my breasts and say, “Just great!”

Instead, he zipped around my mouth with a pick and said, “Gorgeous. Really healthy teeth.”

I was about to double-check my surroundings, to make sure I hadn’t somehow turned up at Bizarro-Dentist, where everyone is awesome and complimentary, when Dr. O offered his own brand of reassurance, by offering up the same stale joke he’s cracked at every appointment in the last nine years:

Tapping my two front bunny-teeth, he quipped, “Looks good. We’ll just need to pull these the next time you’re in.”

Fine. I’ll take your bad humor any day, if it means I’m spared a lecture.

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Nice to meet you. Where’s your bathroom?

31 Mar

Last post about my trip to Atlanta, I swear.

The weather was gorgeous while I was in Atlanta, so Liz and I took a few long (five mile?) walks. Liz is in fantastic shape, so I’ve always found it hard to keep up with her when we walk. She’s an arm-pumping kind of walker. I’m more of a stroller. As a result, I’m usually winded, so my strategy is to lob questions at her so she’ll do most of the talking.

This time, when I saw her loading up Jackson in his stroller, I was excited because I thought it meant we’d be going at a leisurely pace. Silly me! She walks just as fast with a stroller – even going up hills and across rocky paths. She’s like a human tank that only weighs 100 lbs. It’s truly impressive.

So we ventured out for a long hustle, and about halfway through my stomach seized up. “Liz,” I asked nervously. “Is there a bathroom anywhere around here?” (We were on a pretty busy road lined by office buildings, but I wasn’t seeing anything that would be open on a weekend.)

“There’s a Starbucks up ahead of us, maybe a half mile,” she said. Then she looked at my face and said, “Oh. Do you think you can make it?”

“I sure as hell hope so,” I told her. “Or else this visit is going to live in infamy.”

I won’t keep you in suspense: I made it to Starbucks just in the nick of time. And I’ll no longer complain about the cost of a cup of coffee there. I now understand their cost structure: that seemingly huge profit margin actually goes toward toilet paper and janitorial services for random people who stop in to use the facilities.

Because we were a good 2.5 miles away from home, I was nervous about the return walk, so I pulled off about two feet of toilet paper and carefully folded it around my hand. Then, because I didn’t have any pockets, I tucked it into my sports bra.

Feeling very much the Boy Scout for my worst-case planning efforts, I met back up with Liz outside and we continued our walk. When we were about a mile from her home, she saw some of her friends out on their deck, so we waved and walked over.

We chatted with them for ten minutes or so, politely establishing how we all knew each other, where we work, etc.

As we walked away, I told Liz, “They seem really nice.” Then I looked down because something caught my eye. I stopped. “Liz! Look at me.” She looked and started cracking up. “Was this hanging out the entire time we were talking with them?” About eight inches of toilet paper was hanging out of the neck of my shirt, as if I were a walking dispenser.

Liz nodded. “I even noticed it,” she said, “but I just thought, ‘Oh yeah – there’s Alison’s toilet paper,’ like it was a normal thing for you to have hanging out of your shirt.” Which, given the weekend we had, probably makes sense.

Let’s agree: I certainly know how to make an impression.

Apparently, I roll like a celebrity.

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