as seen on the MARTA during my afternoon commute





No words can appropriately communicate the sheer wrongness of these shoes.

60 posts in 60 non-consecutive days: the stink of failure

So...I failed my road test. But it wasn't totally my fault.

Wait, let me rephrase that. It was my fault. Nobody failed my road test for me. But the nature of the failure wasn't (in my opinion) related to skill or disobeying traffic rules or running over granny or anything like that. Well, let me get to that part.

First of all, yesterday (the day I took my road test) was maybe one of the rainiest days I've seen since moving to Atlanta. This was not rain as you or I understand it, this was monsoon season on the Ganges. This was, "I can barely see out of my front windshield with the wipers going at full speed, giant lakes of water on either side, can't hear what anyone is saying because of the volume of water beating down on the roof" typhoon level rain. It was also the first time I had ever driven in the rain. Ever. Not making excuses, just saying. There was a note on the DMV website that said that driving tests would be cancelled under unsafe weather conditions, but I guess they were talking about, I don't know, tornadoes or something. I know I'm going to have to learn to drive in the rain at some point, since, you know, it does rain sometimes, but probably trying to do it for the first time the day of the road test would not be the way I would want to break into the practice of inclement weather driving. Anyway, again, not an excuse, but non-ideal conditions they were.

We waited at the DMV for about two hours. It was a little annoying since we actually made a 9:00am appointment for the test (in the end, it turns out there was some sort of problem with the light-up board that calls your number, hence us waiting an hour past the appointment time for our ticket to get called), but at least it allowed us to play sociologist in the fascinating and occasionally grim world of the DMV. Like, for example, noting this conversation next to me, between a a mom and a teenage girl filling out an application for her learner's permit.


TEENAGE GIRL
(going through checkboxes on form)
"Do you want to be listed as an organ donor on your license?" What does that mean?

MOM
It means if you're in an accident and they have the choice between saving you or saving your organs, which one should they save? If you say you're an organ donor, they'll just take your organs and let you die.

TEENAGE GIRL
Oh. I don't want that.
(Checks "NO" on the form)

MICHELLE
Sigh.


When it finally came time for the test, we had to run out from the rear doors of the DMV to this tin metal shed, where "the licensed driver" (Joe) was instructed to pull up the car. The rain on the tin roof was deafening. The road test instructor was kind of a small lady, clad in a full-length (and I mean full-length, down to her ankles) yellow rain slicker with a gigantic hood. With the hood up, she looked like that killer with a hook for a hand in "I Know What You Did Last Summer," except, you know, yellow. I know that instructors aren't supposed to give a lot of feedback or show emotion or whatever, but she was also rather sphinxlike. Meaning that she was unusually stoic and stony-faced, not that she had the body of a lion or anything. (Though, under that rain slicker, who knows?)

"Get in the car and (blum blur blar) so I can check your (inaudible)," she mumbled grimly.

"Excuse me?" I moved closer to her so that I could hear. "Sorry, I didn't catch that, the rain is really loud."

She looked at me about a beat too long. "I need to check your TURN SIGNALS and your BRAKELIGHTS," she said, as though to someone of questionable intelligence.

"Oh. Yes. Right away." I duly fired the signals, and she neither conformed nor denied that everything was OK, just got into the car.

"Cool raincoat," I noted. I wasn't trying to kiss up, though the second those words were out of my mouth, I wish I hadn't said them, because--complimenting your road test instructor's attire? How could that not be perceived as kissing up? In any event, she didn't respond, just telling me to pull out into the driving course in the back lot.

The driving course part went OK, I think (again, I didn't get any feedback, so who knows. It was fairly hard to see out of any of the windows despite the windshield wipers going full blast and the defrosters going front and back, but I think I parallel parked OK, and I think I managed to do what she was telling me. ("Yes ma'am." Southern people seem to have this innate ability to say "Yes sir" or "Yes ma'am" sounding totally sincere, but for some reason, when I say it, it sounds sarcastic, even if I mean it. But no matter.)

The real trouble came when we had to start the "road" portion of the road test. Now, let me just say this first: I had been told by several people (including one of our OR techs, whose daughter just took her road test at this same DMV location a few months ago) that this would consist of "driving around the block." I also heard from one of the other parents standing under the tin shed (I guess they were there for a repeat road test too) that the instructor would take us "in a circle." So I was all geared up for that. We pulled out of the parking lot, turned right, and started going down this long, straight road which ran parallel along a larger street.

"Up ahead," the instructor droned, "there's a left turn coming up. Go left, straight."

"Left, got it." I approached the turn and saw a couple of signs indicating that I could make a left turn to double back at this point. Figuring that this was the part of the circle where we turned around, I signaled, pulled up to the intersection, and turned left, heading straight down the road back the way we came. Only as I was completing my turn (visibility not so good, remember), did I see a small, side street a little off to the right from the left turn, across another lane of traffic, which went straight down into kind of a warehouse-y type neighborhood. And I probably wouldn't have thought much about that, except that for the first time, the road test instructor showed a human emotion, a barely perceptible moue of annoyance and displeasure.

"Oh wait," I said, trying to salvage the situation. "Did you want me to go into that side street? When you said 'left, straight,' I thought you wanted me to turn left and head straight down this road. Sorry, I didn't understand what you meant. Do you want me to go back?"

"Pull back into the center," she said. And that's when I knew that I'd failed.

Anyway, after I made the Drive of Shame back to the shed, she told me that I "didn't make it today" and that I "needed to learn to follow instructions." I remembered that not following instructions was one of the automatic fail criteria of the road test, lumped in with trying to bribe the instructor or driving on the wrong side of the street into oncoming traffic. I would argue (not that I did, NEVER ARGUE WITH THE DMV) that "not following instructions" is different than "not understanding instructions" (for example, if she had said, "turn left here, across the lane of traffic slightly off to the right is another road, I want you to go straight down there" we might not have had this issue), and I exhibited no unsafe driving or violation of traffic laws...but whatever. You can't semantically debate your way out of a DMV fail. I will make another appointment for as soon as I can and hopefully, it won't be hurricane conditions that day.

(And I definitely didn't say this part, but saying that a former medical resident needs to learn to follow instructions? Until last year, following instructions was all I ever did. Medical training is like the army, but with worse food.)

60 posts in 60 days, day 12: this old house




So we stopped by the new house today to finalize some last minute details before assuming the lease, including signing some papers and asking the landlord stuff like "what do we do with our trashbags?" and "what do all these light switches turn on?" Oh, also, we had to pay them the money. Our lease starts this Tuesday, at which point we can start our staged operation of moving select items in before the big move date on October 4th.

And for those security-minded who are going to e-mail me that I shouldn't put a picture of our house on the internet because that's how They find you and kill you in your sleep, maybe it will make you feel better to know that every single house in this entire neighborhood looks exactly like this. I guess Tudor architecture was all the rage in the 1920's, when the majority of this housing stock was built, but it makes the area look like some kind of Hobbit village.

60 posts in 60 days: I never specified that they were consecutive days

(First of all, let me say that there would have been a post up yesterday afternoon, had Blogger not decided to ingest it. RIP, post that never was. Someday it will turn up tucked into the archive, all dessicated and mutated looking, like when one twin absorbs the other in utero. Yes, well...)

First off, more pictorial evidence of why we are moving in a few weeks:




(Fortunately, not our car.)

I wish I could tell you I had to look and look and look for a car with a broken window, but the fact of it is that a few cars get broken into every week around here. Also, the assaults and the stabbings and the fact that when we left the house last weekend there was a police squad slapping cuffs on some guy right outside our door. Nice. So long, wrong side of the tracks. Three more weeks to go.

(Here is the part where I try to regenerate the post that got vaporized.)

I love having kids and I would not trade the two I have for all the tea in India, because what would I do with all that tea? No, but seriously, sometimes I envy my friends who don't have kids, not so much for their disposable income (well, a little) or their fancy travels (again, a little) but the very fact of how much time they have for themselves. I don't make a real effort to have "me time," (that started to sound hopelessly indulgent right around the time that I started my intern year) but I do get the feeling between work and home that my whole life consists of careening from the service of one set of needs to the other. Imagine what people do when they don't have kids! I can barely even remember. This is all somehow sounding very pathetic but you have to understand that I wake up for work at 5:00am and spend the few hours after getting home from work packing lunchboxes and giving baths and putting people to bed, until it's finally time for my own bedtime, usually around 8:30pm.

(Actually, I'm going to abort this post regeneration. Reading it again makes me realize how utterly boring it is to read about the minutiae of the ostensibly SO BUSY! SO HECTIC! life of the working mother. Wah wah, tell it to Joy Behar. Followed by some canned banter and Whoopi Goldberg drawling something borderline off-color.)

All of us have been a little sick this week, except for Joe, unless you count the myocarditis. Cal had some sort of flu (whether swine or otherwise I know not, nor does it really matter I guess, it's not like we would have been rubbing him on babies and the immunocompromised regardless) and Mack had one of those mysterious baby illnesses that manifests purely as a high fever with no other symptoms whatsoever. Is there anything worse than waking up in the middle of the night with a glowing hot baby beside you? His little hands and feet felt like mini grill pans, and his head felt like a giant light bulb.

I used to feel guilty every time Cal got sick as a baby, so certain that he was sick because I had brought something unsavory home from the hospital, clinging to my clothes or my hair like some miasma of infection. But now that Cal is in school I think that he can claim his share of the blame for bringing things home. As for me, I haven't had a fever or any specific symptoms, but I've just been feeling a little punky (Pediatricians would have you know that this is a clinical term) and have one giant lymph node blown up on the side of my neck. Nothing else. I'm not even sure if the three of us had the same thing or if we just happened to all catch three separate illnesses at the same time. Oh epidemiology, you mystify and intrigue me. Maybe we need a blackboard so we can draw lots of circles connected by dashes and lines. TV tells me that this is how medical mysteries are solved.

OK, have to put the kids to bed. Alcohol-based hand sanitizer, people. Buy yourself a bottle today.

60 posts in 60 days, day 10: the heart, el corazon



A Post-it note I found on the sidewalk out in front of the hospital.

60 posts in 60 days, day 9: road test

September 19th, I'm going to take my road test for my Georgia driver's license. I've been able to hold off for more than a year (a fact that defies credulity), since we live near a subway station at present and I don't go anywhere during the week except between home and work. However, once we move, I won't be able to take the train to work anymore, and if I can't drive I won't be able to get to work, which basically means that, as the primary breadwinner of this family, our entire livelihood is resting on the fact that I will pass this road test and get my driver's license.

(No pressure, though.)

Not wanting to shell out any more money for Driver's Ed, I'm relying on Joe to get me up to speed (as it were) for this test. Luckily, he is already on beta blockers. Since driving is such a reflexive, intuitive thing for most people by adulthood, it's proving harder to teach in a constructive manner than one would think. Though he is overall a fairly calm, patient person, I think there's something about teaching your spouse to drive that reduces all your constructive instruction to: quit driving so crappy. Yesterday, we were practicing parallel parking.


JOE
Now back in straight. Straight. Now cut it hard. Are you cutting it all the way?

MICHELLE
Yes, I'm doing it. God.

JOE
You're never going to make it in now.

MICHELLE
Thanks, fatalist. Well, once I get in the spot, I can try to get in closer to the curb.

JOE
Just start again. Cut it hard when you clear the cone.

(Reattempt)

JOE
Now you're going in too steep!

MICHELLE
You told me to!

JOE
But look at you, you're going in sideways!

MICHELLE
Well, if you'd just let me do it the way I was doing it, I'd be fine!

JOE
You're not getting close enough to the curb! The manual says you have to be 18 inches from the curb.

MICHELLE
Well, but those cones are in the way. Do you think you can get 18 inches from the curb with those cones there?

JOE
Oh, easily.

MICHELLE
OK, show me then.

(JOE parallel parks. Opens the door to check. Car is two feet from the curb.)

MICHELLE
"Oh, easily."

JOE
Shut up.


It's not so much the road test that I'm worried about, though, it's the actual driving myself to work. It shouldn't be that bad in the morning, since I'll be on the road before 6:00am, but it's the commute back home during rush hour. When I started my anesthesia residency, it took me a good month of being in my own room to feel at least slightly more comfortable at the helm, so I expect it will be the same thing with the car. The difference is, the anesthesia machine isn't moving at 60 miles an hour on the highway. Hold me.

60 posts in 60 days, day 8: teeth!