SallyMoe.com

Pssst! Yes, you!

You know who you are.

You’re the one who closes off your connections list to others you connect with on LinkedIn.

Okay. Apparently you didn’t get the “we’re all in this together” memo.

Sorry if this sounds scoldy, but I think you need reminding: the benefit of being on LinkedIn is designed to be mutual. By connecting with people you know and/or have worked with, you have a potential connection to everyone they know and/or have worked with. But for the system to reach its fullest potential, it must work in both directions. Equal advantage, equal opportunities, for all.

Once connected, members can view the contact lists of their connections to see who they have second- and third-degree connections to. Perhaps you see this as a kind of intrusion. If so, you are missing the point: not a single one of us gets anywhere professionally without help from others. And to meet people in fields or companies of interest, arranging introductions via those already connected to those people adds a measure of comfort to the process. It’s a built-in set of references and recommendations.

And here’s the plain truth of it: If you deny your connections access to your other connections, you are taking benefit without giving back … and the embodiment of a professional cul de sac.

If privacy is your issue, eschew social media and stick with your Rolodex … or your mattress, if you prefer.

There’s nothing like a baby brother on a ventilator … to make you think about things like health insurance.

Armed with a new sense of urgency, and thinking it would be just a matter of determination and “due diligence,” I went online to BCBS Florida and searched through their catalog of insurance products.

Whoa. Quite a list. After locating their version of catastrophic coverage, I started filling it out online.

Forty-five minutes later…

Overwhelmed with decades of minutiae and constrained by the conventions of the form — and only into the second of five sections — I thought screw it, I’ll do this in person.

Next day, a follow-up call from their sales staff. We spend at least another 30 minutes on the phone, answering questions that start with “In the last 10 years, have you ever,” explaining gaps in knowledge, naming doctors and imaging facilities and hospitals and tests and medications taken or applied, and then I mentioned I have psoriasis. Cue sound of a screeching stop. After she goes off the line for five minutes, she comes back and tells me I’m denied. What the crap?

Now I was ready to hang up. She hurriedly suggested “alternatives,” a word that, used the way they use it, is an oxymoron. I could get their not-medically underwritten plan, which is inexpensive, but doesn’t cover anything catastrophic — the very stuff I want to protect myself against. Or I could get temporary insurance (up to six months max per 12-month period). If I get it month to month, the titanic deductible resets to zero every month. If I get six months’ worth at once, I have to pay all charges up front. Meaning, I could shell out $1,200 for six months of “protection” that I don’t even use. That sounds no different from gambling to me, and there’s one thing I know about gambling — the house always wins.

It’s gotten to the point that being able to afford decent health insurance that covers what you need it to cover is equivalent to winning the lottery … and there we are with the gambling metaphors again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being a lover of all things procrastinatory, I am a devoted watcher of House Hunters. Last night it was about this sixty-something powerhouse of energy, a trauma surgeon, who decided she wanted to move from her current home in Indiana back to her home town of Fargo, ND.

Ya gotta love someone with the spunk to choose to move to Fargo. And I certainly respect and appreciate people who are not afraid of cold weather. I’m growing more like them with every Florida summer (and every hot flash suffered therein).

As the narrator skimmed over an abbreviated portrait of the woman, she mentioned how this trauma surgeon’s way to destress was to give dinner parties for 24.

Uh-huh … waitWHAT?  [That's ME choking on my popcorn.]  Having 24 people in your house expecting to be fed and entertained is a stress RELIEVER?

This boggled my mind. My husband and I invite one couple to dinner and I’m a twitching knot of stress. And then there’s that business of the having 24 friends. She has 24 friends?

I can just see her leaving after a long day at her stressful job of emergency tracheotomies, attempted suicides and traumatic brain injuries and saying to herself, “I am absolutely done in. I need to relax. What shall I do? I think I’ll go to the supermarket, pick up a 30-pound turkey and make a dinner so big it deserves its own ZIP code and invite 20 or 30 of my closest friends over to eat it with me! Perfect! I’m feeling zen already.”

Maybe this has you wondering: what’s my recipe for stress? Not being a fan of leaving anything to chance, I am an inveterate list-keeper — so of course I have a list for destressing!

1. Put on sweats.

There’s really no step 2; that’s it. Yeah, my smart-aleck husband says “drink a bottle of wine,” but really. Everything after step 1 is gravy.

But you can be sure that having a dinner party for 24 is nowhere in there.

Maybe you remember that saying from the sixties: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”

Borrowing from that, what if they gave a New Year’s party and nobody came?

What if indeed.

My husband and I are not exactly social butterflies. (Blame it on scars sustained in high school.) But we have a small circle of friends, good friends we thought, and we wanted to bring them all together to celebrate another year’s passing. Lavish them with wine, Champagne, and various yummy homemade appetizers, with our lovingly decorated Christmas tree glittering in the background, scented candles all aglow and soft jazz playing on the stereo.

We asked them a few weeks before Christmas, thinking that was enough advance notice to get a commitment.

Almost everyone said yes, saving one man, who thought his wife might have to work that night.

We got busy with the preparations. Buying wine (would three bottles be enough?), Champagne, ingredients for hors d’oeuvres, as well as holiday decorations and serveware. Plus furious list-making, vacuuming, dusting, cleaning the guest bath, washing linens, de-cluttering and last-minute grocery shopping. My husband spent several hours on our kitchen’s tile floor the night before, scrubbing the grout with a noxious chemical cocktail that burned off his fingerprints and made his fingertips smart for the next day and a half.

And then it began. The beg-offs started trickling in. One person had fallen on his tile floor and injured his elbow so he and his wife were going to stay home. The wife who thought she might have to work was correct, so despite her urgings to her husband to come anyway, he stayed home. The next couple’s daughter was visiting with her husband and new baby; they were going to stay home. A neighbor couple and their two teen daughters had family visiting nearby. They were going to spend the evening with them.

WOW. In one three-hour period, the party we had planned for weeks, looked forward to and spent ridiculous amounts of money on to make just so, disintegrated.

We were left with dozens of homemade rumballs and cheese-olive hors d’oeuvres in the freezer; four bottles of wine and Champagne, and two giant bottles of soda in the fridge; at least $100 worth of Christmas cookies, hors d’oeuvre ingredients and holiday serveware we no longer needed; a vast echo in our checking account and that old familiar feeling from high school. You know the one (if you don’t, lucky you). The one when you never get picked for the team.

I really, really hate that feeling.

But hey, the kitchen floor looks fabulous.

Okay, do you watch Curiosity?

I just finished watching the most recent episode, narrated by the go-to man of silken-voiced narrators, Morgan Freeman. I love and trust Morgan Freeman.

But this episode explored the question of whether there are parallel universes, and what string theory is, with discussion about black holes, what they are, where they go, where they come from, etc.

I am drawn to these programs, in spite of the fact that typically, they force me to confront the concept of infinity.

And that is where I always get into trouble.

I have trouble understanding infinity. After all, I’m accustomed to a reality of borders and containment. Of starting and finishing, outsides and insides.

After this program forces me to contemplate infinity, i.e. try to visualize it, it goes on to say that our universe is constantly expanding, and at a greater speed the farther one goes.

Wait just a damn minute.

That suggests edges to me. How can something be expanding if it is already infinite in size? If there is no space not occupied by our universe — which I would think sums up the definition of infinite — then there is no space for it to expand into, right?

If there is space for it to expand into, then that means there was unoccupied, or at least available, space prior to the expansion, doesn’t it?

If there was unoccupied space prior to the expanding, then our universe wasn’t infinite. Scientists, please, make a commitment. Either it’s infinite or it’s not. What’s it gonna be?

I remember how lustily I used to complain about periods. As any woman will tell you: it was with good reason.

From that first day “Aunt Flo” arrived — and Dad unwittingly walked in on 13-year-old me in the bathroom while I waited for Mom to return from the store with the bulky “underpinnings” — it was an embarrassing inconvenience and an underwear destroyer.

All the cramps, headaches, backaches, emotional outbursts, constipation, water retention and insatiable chocolate cravings meant that Now I Was A Woman.

Well, woo-bloody-hoo.

Every time I was blessed a day earlier than expected — another pair of underwear ruined (and maybe some sheets to boot) — I could picture myself at the end of life, standing before the Lord, asking Him: Seriously? Was this necessary?

Well, that time is behind me, and you’d think I’d be thankful. But you’d be wrong. I am now firmly entrenched in the time of hot flashes. No more ruined underwear! Hurrah!

Now, every outfit has to do double duty as a towel. And in addition to suits and sweaters, turtlenecks — at an age when their crepe-masking capabilities would be more appreciated than ever — are out of the question, even in the coldest weather. The final insult: I must *never* be more than three feet from a fan at any given moment.

I’m telling you: I want the periods back.

Yes, they suck. But at least there’s a day or more of warning and three weeks of relief. Hot flashes strike with no warning anywhere, anytime, and gleefully pick the most inopportune times to show up.

Like job interviews…

Way to announce your youthful vitality! Try explaining that one to your twenty-something interviewer in a way that won’t make you seem old.

Like office meetings…

Who cares a whit about your pithy comments when your face turns a shade of magenta not normally seen in nature, and sweat pops out on your skin, even your forearms, and dribbles from your scalp?

At least periods, in all their suckhood, stay comparatively hidden, and have an actual purpose. What purpose do hot flashes serve, exactly? To this day, the geniuses in our medical community have only theories about what causes them. And for someone with my breast-cancer-rich gene pool, the “treatments” those geniuses suggest come with unacceptable risks.

So just gimme the periods back, OK? I promise to stop bitching about them, we’ll call it a day and never speak of the matter again.

A couple of days ago, I was at the gym using the treadmill, warming up before applying my efforts on the various machines.

After said warmup, something happened that I should have seen coming…but oddly, didn’t.

I was powering the machine down, and turned—and stupidly put one foot on the still-moving belt, and voila, an acutely embarrassing accident ensued. And while it was happening I remember thinking, when will this end? It concluded with my bum on the floor and the back of my head hitting the belt with a resounding clunk. All motion around me came to a halt. Stares and gasps and “are you alright?”

I felt like an idiot.

Later, I was sitting with one of the staff at the gym while she filled out the obligatory accident report. I pressed an ice pack to the back of my head and worried about bleeding in the brain after head injuries. I wondered if I should go to the ER to be safe, all the while fully aware that I have no health insurance. While I discussed this with her, she pointed out the scrape on my forearm. Oh, it’s a doozy—about as big as an elongated silver dollar, and at that point, it was completely raw, stripped of skin. I went to the sink and ran water over it (ow-ow-ow-ow), right about the same time that my apocalypse-oriented brain kicked in with fears about the sorts of germs you’ll find on a treadmill belt, germs that got abraded into my system via that scrape.

Sometimes bad things happen that you can neither foresee nor avoid. But you can save yourself so much grief in life just by not doing stupid shit. Like stepping on a moving treadmill belt. Even a slow-moving one.

State Rep. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth (Florida), has filed House Bill 177, requiring drivers to move to the right on highways when blocking traffic from behind. The bill proposes that drivers will receive a moving violation for incessantly driving in the left lane blocking traffic.

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We Americans are an odd lot.

We’re famously bullish on law and order. A nation of rules and regulations, burglar bars, locks, jails, alarms, guns—all manner of things designed for enforcement and protection.

But with all that emphasis on law and order, we’re curiously choosy about the laws we obey and the ones we don’t.

Basically, we obey the ones we like, and only when it’s convenient.

This plays out daily on the road. Every time I drive, I can count on at least one instance of waiting at a newly green light while several cars zoom past or turn in front of me as they ignore the light that, for them, turned red several beats ago. It gets to the point where I think: green is for go, right? (Or is it red for go?)

And then there are the highways. Growing up in the north, I remember signs on NYS highways telling faster (passing) traffic to keep to the left. I haven’t seen such signs in Florida, but you’d never know they’re not there. Especially on I-4 (whose ‘I’ stands for insane, not interstate). On I-4, the left lane is the alpha prick lane.

In optimal highway traffic conditions, I typically drive 10 to 15 mph over the speed limit. But you’d think I was creeping along at 35 the way these immortal entitleds bully past me. Coming up from behind ’til they’re so close I can’t see their headlights in my rearview mirror, blinking their distance lights at me like they’re rock stars on the Autobahn. In a three-or-more lane highway, this behavior is not only obnoxious and dangerous, it’s unnecessary. If I’m going too slow for your over-caffeinated ass, pass me on the right and get over yourself.

The “faster traffic on the left” that those non-existent signs are referring to means at or close to the speed limit. No, the speed limit is NOT the starting speed and no, Uncle Sam is not giving you carte blanche to break the sound barrier as long as you do it in the left lane. If you’re going over the speed limit by one mile or fifty, you are speeding.

Rep. Clemens’ well meaning effort completely misses the point. I don’t know what highways he drives on, but I never see people driving under the speed limit on the ones I travel. Quite the opposite: they drive as if the speed limit is the minimum speed. Then act enraged by the slackers driving only 20 miles over the limit, “blocking” their way.

This bill won’t solve the problem it’s meant to solve, because that problem doesn’t exist. Now if Clemens were to come up with a bill to get alpha pricks who drive by intimidation off the roads, that would be a bill I could get behind.

Maybe I’m stepping out on a lonely limb here. But I fail to understand the purpose for the distinction of the “hate crime.”

If a crime is motivated by hate, why should it qualify for greater punishment? If a crime is motivated by hate, why should I be more offended by it?

Is the victim of a hate crime more dead, more raped, more brutalized, more humiliated?

Women and children get murdered and raped and brutalized and humiliated in the name of “love” every day. I find that monstrous and infuriating. Should I be more infuriated when the person doing the brutalizing does so because of hate? The end result, the damage that is done, is the same.

What is the point of this distinction?